不露聲色
bùlùshēngsè
Don't reveal your thoughts in your voice or countenance.
To not reveal one's true thoughts, to not show or betray one's feelings.
*~*~*~*~*~*
Zakhar ran his hands over the blue silk scarf and debated whether to give it to Ao or not.
The bright morning sun made his head pound like a river was raging inside it. That blueberry wine the villagers made had been deceptively strong.
They had stopped in a small meadow to rest and let the horses graze a bit before moving on. Sanli had stretched out to sleep, not having slept the night before, and Kageyama had disappeared to scout out the land around them.
They had left Mengxiang shortly after sunrise and a quick breakfast of leftover lotus cakes from the night before, which Lao Bang's wife had generously forced on them.
That morning, before they left Mengxiang, Sanli had bought two silk gowns from Lao Bang. One was embroidered with rabbits. The other was the one Ao had worn the night before. Zakhar had watched as Sanli had casually given it to Ao, saying how it 'suited her'.
Damn play prince.
Zakhar had glared daggers at Sanli over Dunya's saddle as he tightened the girth. He had been so distracted that he had tightened the buckle too much, and earned himself a sharp nip in the shoulder from Dunya in reproof.
Now, Zakhar glanced at where Ao sat across the meadow, under a tree, reading a battered book she had pulled from her rucksack. It seemed stupid to give her a scarf, when she had just received a whole dress made of silk.
Also, she had made it very clear she wasn't interested in him, so he worried his gift might seem like an attempt to bribe her feelings. He just meant it as a friendly gift. A friendly gift between friends.
How to make that clear?
Bundling the scarf up and shoving it into his pocket, he walked across the meadow, the thick grass tugging at his boots. "Hey, I won this arm wrestling last night, and I thought it would look nice on you... Hey, I won this last night, and I don't really need it so... Hey, I won this, I really think it brings out the color of my eyes, what do you think? Oh you want it? Oh ok yeah I guess here you go."
He stopped in front of Ao and she looked up, quickly shoving her book back into her pack.
"Is that an old copy of Mountains and Seas?" Zakhar asked, catching the characters on the spine. "You should show Sanli, he loves old books." Good job Zakhar, get them to spend more time together.
"What can I do for you?" she asked, ignoring his comment.
Zakhar hesitated, but the words he had rehearsed had suddenly fled his mind, like hares fleeing a field when the farmer comes. "You never figured out what Kageyama is. You owe me three gold."
Wait what? Is that what I came here to say?
"Ch, I was hoping you'd forgotten." She pouted. "I seem to be a little short of coin... perhaps there's another way I can pay you?"
Zakhar's mind instantly went somewhere it shouldn't. He tried not to blush, but Ao caught it, laughing. "I meant cleaning Dunya's tack or something, you dirty man." Then she smiled that smile, the oh-so-sly one that Zakhar dreaded. "Though, if you had something particular in mind you wanted..."
Face burning, Zakhar pointed to the paper wrapped package that Sanli had given her that morning. It had rolled out of her bag onto the grass beside her. "I want that," he said.
Wait, I do?
Ao looked surprised. "The dress? What are you going to do with a dress?"
Zakhar shrugged, trying to regain his cool. "Wear it, sell it, give it to a pretty lady." Like you. "Wipe my nose on it, when I can't find my handkerchief."
Ao's eyes widened in disbelief. "It's worth more than three gold."
"I'll give you the change after I sell it," Zakhar said, hand out. "Pay up."
Grumbling, she handed over the paper package containing the silk dress, which Zakhar promptly tucked under one arm. "Thank you very much, pleasure doing business with you," he said, then turned and walked stiffly across the meadow.
What just happened? He thought.
"That color doesn't suit you!" Ao yelled mockingly after him.
Now he had a scarf and a dress he didn't need.
*~*~*~*~*~*
True to his word, Zakhar sold the dress at the first town they came to and saved the change for Ao.
When he went to give Ao the money, she swiped the small pouch of coin from Zakhar's hand before he could give it to her, checked the contents, and said "You could have gotten more nearer the coast." She walked off without giving him a single glance.
Zakhar was pretty sure then that she was mad at him.
And she continued to be mad. The next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.
Zakhar didn't know what to say or do, so he didn't say or do anything, and hoped she would forgive him in her own time.
Wait, what was there to forgive? After all, she had made the bet, and lost. Zakhar was well within his rights to demand payment.
Still, he felt a little guilty.
The world around them changed as they got closer to the sea. Although the forests and hills still filled the land between villages, the hills were lower. Canyons and gullies cut between the hills, carved by a multitude of small rivers and streams as they ran through the chalky soil of the region to the sea.
Despite the proximity to the coast, the population in this area was thin. Zakhar knew this was due to the poor quality of the soil, which prevented successful farming. Most villages they came to were small and built primarily around servicing those traveling the road from the coast to the interior, or the opposite. It gave the area an empty, lonely feel to it.
Along with the canyons and gullies carved into the hills, there were cliffs. They would suddenly appear around a bend in the road, a chalky white or sandstone brown face among the green of the trees, where the side of a hill had slid away. In the cliffs were caves. Thousands of caves. So many that even the locals didn't know how many there were.
When the men stopped for supplies in one of the villages, a store owner talked about the caves. As Zakhar waited for his purchases to be wrapped, the owner told Zakhar that sometimes, when the wind blew through the caves, you could hear its sound. Sometimes the wind hummed, sometimes it sang, and sometimes it wailed.
A wrinkled old woman who appeared to be the store owner's mother chimed in. "It's not the wind ya' hear," she corrected her son. "It's the voices of all the poor souls who died at sea and couldn't come home".
Zakhar felt his neck prickle. He hurriedly paid for his goods, thanked the store owner and left.
The fifth day after leaving Mengxiang saw the four travelers following the road through a small meadow saddled between two hills. The sky overhead was overcast, and the light filtering through the clouds washed out the colors of the landscape around them, the grey-green of the rolling hills fading into the mist and clouds that surrounded them in all directions.
It had rained the night before, and the chalky consistency of the road slowed their pace. Zakhar glanced over at Ao, who had rolled her linen pants up above her knees. Her wooden traveling sandals, raised to lift their wearer's feet above the mud of the road, were still not high enough, and her thin legs were covered with streaks of chalky mud.
She couldn't still be mad at him, could she? Zakhar had experienced his fair share of angry women. True, they had mainly been the women of Zhanghai's pleasure district. Even after a less than cordial parting, they always seemed happy to see him again after a few days, as long as he brought coin.
Zakhar pulled softly on Dunya's reins, steering the obstinate horse closer to Ao. "Do you want to ride Dunya?" He asked her. "I can walk."
She ignored him, and instead turned to Sanli, who rode to her left. "May I ask, who was the other dress you bought for, Lord Sanli? The one with the rabbits?" Yep, still mad.
Sanli was talking in a low voice with Kageyama who rode Makabe close beside Little Light. He turned at Ao's question. "My niece, Ermi. She loves rabbits," he said.
"Ah," said Ao. "A shame, I was hoping to buy it from you to replace the one you gave me."
Sanli was surprised. "What happened to the one I gave you?"
"I sold it," Zakhar said hurriedly. "To settle Ao's debt." The girl herself glared up at him. Zakhar feigned indifference and shrugged. "Don't make a bet if you can't pay the bet." Kageyama chuckled in agreement.
"What a shame," said Sanli to Ao. "You looked so nice in it." Zakhar saw their eyes meet briefly, then seperate.
"You'll like Ermi," Zakhar added, desperate to change the topic of conversation. "She's a sweet girl, about your own age. She'll be waiting for us in Zhanghai."
Ao turned to him finally, eyebrows raised. "What makes you think I'll stay that long?"
Zakhar was taken aback. "Why would you leave? Do you have anywhere better to be?"
Ao appeared to think it over. "No," she said.
As the morning continued, the clouds that had been hanging overhead all day finally began to drizzle softly down on them. Sanli and Kageyama urged their horses ahead in an attempt to find shelter.
Zakhar held Dunya back beside Ao. The horse tossed her head, eager to follow her friends.
"Do you want to use my oil skin?" Zakhar asked. Ao kept looking straight ahead, her wooden clogs making sucking sounds as she trudged through the mud.
"I have an umbrella," she answered.
"Fine," said Zakhar, more forcefully then he meant to. Fine. If she wanted to get wet, let her. He tapped his heels against Dunya's side and the horse broke into a squelching canter.
The road entered the trees, and suddenly the sound of rain was all around Zakhar. Raindrops struck the canopy above his head, the sound like a percussion of a thousand pearls on a skein of green silk stretched tight. The rain started to fall harder, and the tempo of the percussion increased.
After it reached the trees, the rain ran down from leaf to leaf, collecting into larger and larger drops. One such drop dripped onto his nose, another ran down the back of his neck. Zakhar reached into his saddle bag and pulled out his leather oil skin, then swung it around his shoulders and pulled up the hood, the musty smell of it stark in contrast to the fresh smell of the forest.
The path inclined sharply within the woods and led up around the crown of the hill, scissoring back and forth across the slope in a series of hair pin turns. Near the top, Zakhar stopped Dunya and looked down through a gap in the trees to the road below where he had been moments before.
Ao was there, a small, solitary figure. Her umbrella still hung across her back, unopened. Thinking she was alone, she had dropped the sullen look from her face, and her smile was broad, wild, ferocious, free. She spun, arms outstretched, hands raised to the sky, her sandals slipping in the mud. Her laughter was savagely ecstatic, as though the rain pouring down on her was the best thing in the world. A gift from the gods.
Zakhar felt his heart drop to his stomach. It then attempted to return to its usual place, but went too far, all the way up to his throat. He swallowed, to force it back down to his chest.
*~*~*~*~*~*
Sanli and Kageyama had made camp a short distance from the road, in a large half circle cave eroded into the base of a cliff, large enough to tether the horses in.
The walls of the cave were smooth, worn down by the passage of water over millions of years. Zakhar ran his hand over the rock, feeling the grains of sand pressed into stone. He stopped when he came to a tunnel leading off from the cave, a strange shaped crevice just big enough for a man to fit through. He looked around, his eyes picking out several more tunnels with irregularly shaped entrances leading off of the cave and into the dark earth.
Zakhar shivered. The large cave, its ceiling several lengths above his head, was his limit. He had lived most his life under the wide open sky of the northern plains. The thought of going deeper into the hill, away from the sky, set his skin to crawling.
Zakhar moved quickly away from the dark tunnel entrance to tend to Dunya.
Ao's absence meant the men could strip their wet clothes off and change without care. Zakhar had forgotten how easy it had been, traveling with just men. He had gotten used to going behind a bush to change clothes or relieve himself, watching his language, all the other things they had to do with a woman around.
After changing they managed to find a few pieces of dry wood in the shelter of the cliff, and started a small fire, stretching their wet clothes on sticks over it to dry.
When Ao appeared, an hour later, she and all her belongings were drenched.
Zakhar opened his mouth to offer her one of his shirts, then realized she would probably ignore him anyway, and closed it again.
"Do you want to borrow some clothes?" Sanli asked.
Zakhar thought for sure Ao would accept, but she shook her head. "Are you sure?" Sanli asked, "I would hate for you to catch cold."
"I don't catch cold," she replied, smiling to herself as she sat by the fire to dry. Her hair hung in wet strands around her face. She seemed to be in a good mood.
It was still early afternoon. Too early to start supper. Sanli pulled a deck of five color cards from his saddle bag.
"Anyone want to play?" he asked, removing the cards from their box and shuffling them expertly.
"Why? You always win," said Zakhar.
"Not true. Sometimes I let Sho Sensei win to make him feel good about himself."
"How do you know I'm not the one letting you win?" said Kageyama with a smile.
"Because you lose far too much money," replied Sanli.
"What rules do you play by?" asked Ao, eyes following the cards flickering back and forth in Sanli's hands.
They explained their rules to her, how each of the five color suits represented one of the gods, and how each suit had its own strengths and weaknesses. Ao soon caught on, and they played a dozen games, of which Sanli won all but two. Those two games were won by Ao, though Zakhar had a feeling her victory was not entirely her own.
"I swear you cheat," he said to Sanli, throwing down his cards onto the stone of the cave floor and tugging his beard in frustration
"No cheating, just good clean luck," said Sanli, holding up his hands innocently. He even rolled up his sleeves to show there was nothing in them.
"I'm with you, he's a cheat," said Ao, smiling her agreement at Zakhar. Then, remembering she was angry, she looked away.
Near evening, the rain started to let up. The water dripping down the cliff face, which had formed a sparkling glass curtain over the entrance that secluded them within their cave, thinned to a few trickling ribbons here and there. Kageyama gave up his cards and left to hunt, returning not long after with a plump rabbit, already skinned and dressed.
Their clothes, long since dried, were packed away and the rabbit was roasted. Taking the rabbit meat and wrapping it in some tangy greens Sanli had collected, they began to eat. Once most of the outer meat was eaten, they split the carcass, a leg each.
"Nobody tell Liang'yi I ate this," said Zakhar, before sinking his teeth into the rabbit's leg.
"Who?" asked Ao.
"My niece, Ermi, has a Dachuo as her guard," explained Sanli.
Ao snorted. "Why would she choose a Dachuo as a guard?" Dachuo, or members of the Great Hare clan, were usually known for the speed at which they ran away at the first sign of danger.
"Hey!" said Zakhar. "Yi is an excellent guard."
"M-hmm," replied Ao, sounding as though she didn't agree at all.
How had he thought he liked this sharp tongued girl?
"You shouldn't be so quick to judge someone you haven't met," said Zakhar, lowering the leg. Sanli and Kageyama continued eating, carefully not joining the conversation.
Ao shrugged. "True, but I also haven't met a Dachuo I would trust to stand between me and the Black Lord."
Zakhar flinched at Ao's words, and instinctively searched for wood to knock upon. A log sat near the fire drying in preparation for burning, and he leaned forward and rapped his knuckles on it.
Leaning back, he sighed with relief, only to flinch again as Ao burst out laughing.
"I thought you served the Black Lord," she said, nodding to his tattooed arms. "How can you be afraid of him?"
Zakhar felt anger, despair, and a whole whirl of other emotions spin in his stomach. "Leave it Ao," he growled, looking away from her. Sanli and Kageyama, watching the exchange, had both stilled, sensing Zakhar's mood.
Ao continued unaware. "Kind of pointless, don't you think? He'll come for you eventually, whether you're afraid of him or no-"
"I SAID LEAVE IT!" Zakhar bellowed, his deep voice echoing off the walls of the cave around them. The horses started at the sound and shuffled where they had been tethered on the opposite side of the cave.
Ao was shocked into silence, having never seen Zakhar in a mood that wasn't cheerful and benign. The fire crackled in the awkward quiet.
"Well, I'm tired, I think I'll turn," said Sanli.
"Me as well," agreed Kageyama quickly. Silence continued as they spread out their bed rolls around the fire. Ao spread hers out a little farther away from the three men then she normally did.
The fire was mixed with dirt until only glowing embers remained. Then they all lay down to sleep, except no one did.
Zakhar, still angry and tense from earlier, was painfully aware of Ao's presence a few lengths away from him, so he immediately noticed when she stood and slipped away up one of the small tunnels leading off of their cave.
He wondered where she was going. She wasn't leaving was she? He glanced at where her thin bedroll still lay beside her lute, pack, gourd and umbrella. She had left all her things behind. Why would she want to wander around a bunch of dark caves? Unless— wait, had he upset her so much earlier, she had gone to find a place to cry to herself?
Zakhar shifted uncomfortably. Though he couldn't for the life of him imagine Ao crying.
Regardless, Zakhar was worried she would get lost in the twists and turns of the tunnels. Just as he made up his mind to make a torch from the dying embers of the fire and go after her, Sanli stood and did exactly that.
As Sanli's footsteps and the light of his dim makeshift torch faded down the narrow passage, Zakhar told himself that now he could sleep. Sanli would make sure she didn't get lost. And, on the slim chance she WAS upset, Sanli was a gentlemen, he would comfort—
Oh bloody hell.
Zakhar stood and followed them as quietly as his large frame would allow.
*~*~*~*~*~*
❤️ Fanart by cupidities !