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They would line up for hours, then come back to see the changes from one day to the next.
    Even women were among them, bright blossoms in their hair. This was a time of year, and a place—Yenling during the Peony Festival—when the increasing restrictions on women’s movements were superseded, simply because they could not be enforced.
    It was springtime. There were loud, excited crowds and the heady scent of extravagantly coloured blossoms. There was flute music, singing, dancers in the streets, jugglers, storytellers, men with trained animals. Wine and food were sold in booths, throngs given over to merriment—and to undeniably immoral behaviour in courtyards and lanes and bedchambers (not only in the pleasure district) as twilight descended each day.
    Another reason for philosophers to lament the folly and the flower.
    WALKING BESIDE HER FATHER , Shan is dizzy with excitement and trying not to show it. That would be undignified, childlike.
    She is concentrating on
seeing
everything, taking it in, registering details. Songs succeed (or fail) in the details, she believes. They are more than the pairing of words and music. It is the acuteness of observation that sets a work apart, makes it worth … worth anything, really.
    She is seventeen years old this spring. Will be married by this same season next year. A distant thought still, mostly, but not a displeasing one.
    But right now she’s in Yenling with her father amid the morning crowds of the festival. Sight, sound, smell (flowers everywhere and a heavy crush of bodies; the glory and the assault, she thinks). She is hardly the only woman here, but she’s aware of people looking at her as she and her father make their way back up Long Life Temple Road from the city wall.
    People had begun looking at her about two years ago. One would have to be in love or a poet to name her beautiful, but there seems to be something about the way she walks or stands, the way her gaze moves and then settles on objects or on people, that draws the attention of others back to her. She has wide-set eyes, a long nose, long fingers. She is tall for a woman. She gets the height from her father.
    Lin Kuo is an extremely long-limbed man, but so self-effacing he has stood with a slight stoop for as long as his daughter can remember—as if denying any proud assertion of height, or endlessly ready to bow respectfully.
    He had passed the
jinshi
examinations on his third attempt (perfectly honourable) but has never received a posting, even to the provinces. There are many men like that, graduates without a position. He wears the robes and belt of a civil servant and carries the title of court gentleman, which just means he is without office. He claims the monthly salary attached to that title. He writes with perfectly acceptable calligraphy, and has just completed (and had printed) a small book on gardens in Yenling, which is why they are here.
    He has no obvious enemies—important these days—and seems to be unaware that he’s considered a figure of amusement by some. His daughter, more observant perhaps, has registered this, however.
    He is instinctively kind, a little afraid of the world. His only expression of adventurousness lies in the fact that he has educated his one living child as if she were a boy. Not a trivial decision, not without consequence, if one thinks of individual lives as important.
    Shan has read the classics and the poets, major and minor, back to the beginnings of writing in Kitai. She has a very good running hand and an even better formal one. She sings, of course, can play a
pipa
—most women from good families can do that—but she also writes songs, the new
ci
form emerging in this Twelfth Dynasty, words grafted (like peonies! she suddenly thinks) to well-known melodies of the countryside or the pleasure districts.
    Her father has even had bows made for each of them, with a supply of arrows. They’ve taken lessons together