When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

Author:Nghi Vo
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Chapter Eight

THE CHENG CLAN OF western Zhou was a long way from western Zhou.

They had been driven out for supporting the wrong prince, who had at the time seemed like the most righteous son of the previous Zhou emperor and a fairly good bet considering his mother was backed by the Ki clan. Unfortunately, his brother had turned out to be more righteous instead, and also a little handier with a great deal of bear gall poison.

So the Cheng clan fell into some chaos, and what was left of them fled to the hinterlands, purchased a mansion in the heart of a haunted forest, and allowed the ghosts and ghouls and monsters to defend them as righteousness, propriety, and a fully armed house guard could not.

Relying on the protection of ghouls and monsters is as poor an idea as backing the least righteous of an emperor’s sons, and eventually, the Cheng family learned that, though a little too late.

Of course, Dieu knew none of that when she came to their gates just as the sun was setting. She had been aware all day of the tiger behind her, following at what she imagined was a respectful distance and clumsy in her fascination, but the scholar paid her no mind.

Instead, she rang the iron bell at the Chengs’ sturdy door, and when she told the old doorman that she was a prospective candidate for the examinations in Ahnfi, she was ushered in and the door closed quickly behind her.

At the time, the Cheng family was the old patriarch who had served the previous emperor, his first wife, his second wife, his second son, and his baby daughter. They had been more numerous not long ago, and Dieu made it her business not to prod at the holes in their family. Instead, she came to kneel neatly at the table with them as they served her all manner of delicacies from their home, fileted pieces of pheasant fanned out and drizzled with yuzu and ginger, lucky whole fish arranged on the plate with a scatter of salt as if it were swimming, and slivers of a pig’s heart soaked in yogurt and fried in sesame oil. They set in front of her a bowl of pure white rice dusted with ruby salt and sesame seeds, and to her left was a bowl of soup so clear she could see the figure of a fox running at the bottom of the bowl, and to her right, there was a pair of jade chopsticks, bound at the crown by a delicate gold chain.

It was a feast fit to honor a princess, all rolled out for a rather tattered scholar, but Dieu was so hungry that she simply ate the food that was put in front of her. She had never eaten so well in her life, and as she ate, the Cheng patriarch nodded wisely at the head of the table as his two wives kept up a stream of witty entertaining talk, lively and clever as if they had never left court.

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