The Calligrapher and the Widowed General novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Grip
Lanxin corrects Shuyi's grip with her scarred hand over hers, and has her read the plum-tree letter aloud twice.
By the second morning Shuyi had learned three things about General Ye Lanxin.
She ate standing up, she never sat with her back to a door, and she watched Shuyi write.
Lanxin took her chair beside the table again and said nothing for two hours.
Shuyi copied letter two, then letter three.
The room smelled of sandalwood and cold ink.
Every few lines she felt that stare on her hand, and every few lines her stroke wobbled.
"You grip too high," Lanxin said at last.
"I always have," Shuyi said.
"My father said a loose hand made a living line."
"Your father was not copying a letter from a man who had to be believed."
Lanxin stood, came around the table, and stopped behind Shuyi's chair.
Shuyi stopped breathing.
Lanxin reached over her shoulder, covered Shuyi's hand with her own, and slid it down the brush an inch.
The palm was rough as a rope.
There was a hard ridge along the base of the fingers, from years of holding a sword.
Her breath stirred the hair at Shuyi's ear.
"Here," Lanxin said.
"Press from the wrist, not the fingers."
She moved Shuyi's hand through one stroke, a long downward line, and Shuyi felt it in her stomach.
The line came out thick, even, and firm.
"There," Lanxin said.
She did not let go at once.
"Again, alone."
Shuyi wrote the stroke again, and her voice came out smaller than she meant.
"You write well yourself, General."
"I wrote a great deal at Frostgate."
"Orders, mostly."
"Of course."
Lanxin took her hand away and went back to her chair.
Shuyi's wrist felt hot where it had been covered, and she kept her eyes on the paper until it passed.
At noon a young lieutenant came in with a tray of tea and steamed buns.
He was about twenty-six, round-faced, with a sunburned nose, and he bowed to Lanxin like a boy to a favorite aunt.
"Lieutenant Tan Bao, General's staff," he said to Shuyi.
"You're the copyist!"
"You have the actual letters!"
"I have the actual letters," Shuyi said, and she could not help smiling at him.
Tan Bao set down the tray and clasped his hands together.
"I stood on the north wall at Frostgate every seventh night," he said.
"The general would read a letter aloud to the whole garrison, in the wind, with her torch in her hand."
"Commander Lu said the relief army was a month away, and then three weeks, and then ten days."
"I swear I wanted to die each night, and then she read, and I wanted to live until the next seventh night."
His eyes had gone bright.
"The men copied the words onto their sleeves in charcoal," he said.
"One sergeant sewed the line Keep them fighting inside his boot."
Shuyi glanced at Lanxin.
Lanxin sat very still, her gaze fixed on the cedar box, and a muscle moved in her jaw.
"That's enough, Tan Bao," she said.
"Yes, General."
He bowed again and went out, still smiling.
Shuyi ate a bun and finished letter three.
At dusk she asked the question.
"Did you read all sixty aloud, General?"
"Most of them."
"Then you know them by heart."
"I know them."
Lanxin lifted the cover of the cedar box and took out a single sheet from the middle.
It was letter twelve, and the paper was yellowed and soft at the creases.
She held it out.
"Read this one," she said.
"Out loud."
Shuyi took it and cleared her throat.
"Lanxin, my wife, I dreamed of the plum tree in our yard last night," she read.
"It had flowered in the snow, and you stood under it with your hair down."
"I thought, if I live, I will never let you tie it up again."
She stopped.
Her face was warm.
She had not expected a man's letter to be so tender, or so strange to read in front of the wife.
Lanxin had turned to the window.
Her shoulders were tight, and her right hand was gripping the back of the chair hard enough to whiten the knuckles.
"Go on," Lanxin said.
Shuyi read the rest, about the cold, about a captured horse named Blackhoof, about how he missed her bad singing.
When she lowered the page, Lanxin did not speak for a while.
Outside the window the wind pushed at the bare plum branches.
"Again," Lanxin said.
Her voice was rough.
"Read it again, from the beginning."
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