Shuli Go Stories Vol. 4: A Week's Bliss

Part 3

Lian had not planned to return to Mei's room that night, but she had wanted to.

When the two of them woke up late into the morning, Mei warned that they would soon be kicked out, and Lian had dressed quickly and left with barely more than a few words shared between the two women. She then met with Jiang in the lobby of the expensive inn where they had taken rooms.

"There you are!" He exclaimed when she walked through the door. "I was worried sick when I couldn't find you this morning."

"I, uh," she lowered her voice a bit as she approached him, "stayed in the Golden Slumbers overnight."

Jiang laughed, then dropped his voice to match hers. "Here I was worried you wouldn't know how to properly enjoy your money."

Lian fidgeted, uncomfortable even thinking about the night before in Jiang's presence. "Yeah, well. I want to go change clothes. Are you hungry? We can eat lunch."

Once back inside her room – another three silver pieces she'd used up without even sleeping in the room – she changed and the first regrets of the night before hit her. It took her far longer to change than it should have, and when she did go out with Jiang to eat, she couldn't concentrate on anything. The food tasted bland, even though she'd been assured by Jiang that it had been prepared by one of the best chefs in the western half of the Empire. He informed her about the way the pig had been fed nothing but sorghum, mangoes, and sugar to sweeten its meat; about the travels of the peppers, which had been carted non-stop from Qi Kingdom for two days to ensure they remained fresh and crisp; about the rare spices that added a slow-burning heat to the entire dish, shipped from far past the Slave Islands to the east.

"So," he concluded his detailed story, "what do you think?"

"About what?" Lian asked, having heard every word and understood each one, but failing to muster the will to follow the path of them towards any sort of meaning.

"About the food!" Jiang bellowed.

Lian lifted a portion to her mouth, ingested a bite, chewed dutifully, and swallowed.

"It tastes like pork," she summarized.

Jiang's face fell apart for a brief moment. But then he remembered he was a merchant of the rarest type – deliriously rich. "Ok, so, food is off the table. What do you want to do the rest of the day?"

Having it posed to her that way, Lian, once again, knew exactly what she wanted. She was almost ashamed to have it be so clear and transparent. But there it was. She wanted to see Mei again.

Of course Jiang's question had been rhetorical. "There is a gallery here – all the greatest masterworks of the Zhezhun people. From before the Empire even. I've been told it's absolutely a must-see."

"I don't know if I feel like standing around in a gallery all afternoon..."

"Nonsense! How often do you get a chance to see priceless works of art?" Jiang brushed aside her attempt to back out of his plan.

So after lunch they went to the gallery – a large space that had once been a domed coliseum for the plays and spectacles of the Central Empire. Such roving shows had long since moved on to outdoor venues where more people could be squeezed in and more money generated. So the stairs had been removed, the walls cleaned, and the interior illuminated by the latest glass windows. And a gallery was born.

Jiang, like most of the other patrons visiting the gallery that day, was mostly interested in the works by the relatively recent Zhezhun artists who had come to prominence over two hundred years ago. Their paintings were of two types. The first was exclusively of the Zhezhun countryside, featuring tiny figures dwarfed by all the features of the landscapes: the hills filled with crops, the winding rivers, and the cloudy expanses of skies. Lian, whose education on art extended all the way to being able to say "yes, that's a painting", didn't have many opinions on art, but she hated landscapes. They bored her with the same things she'd seen a million times in her travels. At least paintings about people could show her something new.