I’m a good guy, show me mercy
In a stone room on the King’s Stone, inside the mighty Saxon fortress, Li Bai took out his guqin, and plucked the twisted silk strings. The strange, far-away sound came slow and thoughtful. Li Bai knew all four of the Cathayan scholarly arts. Qin 琴 instrument, qi 棋 chess, shu 書 caligraphy, hua 畫 painting.
The wooden ancient qin is much smaller than the ancient zheng played by Wilhelmina Wang on the deck of the Lord of the Seven Seas, and its sound is deeper, lonelier, and more measured.
He recalled youthful days in Chang’an, learning music with Wilhelmina. But as the notes sounded under his fingers here in the stone castle, his thoughts went from those halcyon days insistently to Cinderella, do as he would to redirect them. And why should he redirect them? Is he not a man of twenty-five, and she a woman of the same blooming age? Has he not known women from all coasts of all seas, from the highest mountains to the lowest deeps when he was in Rom? There was something about Cinderella that told him to tread carefully. But he was unafraid. It was the large, man-eating tiger beside him who was afraid.
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Wilhelmina Wang ladled buckwheat noodles into a porcelain bowl, and stirred into it zhajiang 炸醬 sauce and slivered vegetables. She had used a wooden press to directly press seconds-fresh buckwheat noodles directly into the boiling pot, and the sauce she made with diced pork under a cleaver over a treestump for a cutting board. These northern Cathay noodles were proving an enormous hit with the Lost Boys, and the boys had no trouble providing her with equipment and ingredients, to her surprise, until she got accustomed to the treasures — culinary and far-ranging — a pirate-visited floating island might possess.
Emil Hering was unhappy. He had been deliriously happy. But his decision, one he thought he would never make, but here he had made willingly and freely, was exacting an internal price.
“I will take you to where the meer-maids sing, each to each,” he said to her over the steam rising from the bowl of buckwheat noodles she had placed before him.
She gave no indication of her emotion, except her hand slipped, and she had to steady the bamboo handle of the ladle against the hammered-iron wok.