In prior years, Tsatsi hadn't thought about him much. Banmai had been a boy, and that had been cause enough to ignore him.
Nonetheless, there were a few things she remembered. She remembered that little boy who'd been sent out for a bucket of water who had somehow managed to fall and twist his ankle. Banmai had been the first to show up, and he'd carried the boy into the house of Grandma Two-Sticks, where she could tend to the injury. When Tsatsi had arrived, one of the adults had murmured, "We still need that water." Seconds later, the wooden bucket, filled with water, had slapped down onto the ground by the house. Tsatsi distinctly remembered Banmai walking away without a word.
Tsatsi and Banmai had crossed paths again during the gentry tour, when the landlord and his family had come by on horseback to inspect their peasants. The first Tsatsi had seen of Banmai that day was his mother clenching his arm, reprimanding him over something. When the adults had finally left, Tsatsi had gotten the story from Banmai: apparently, he had been ready to throw a rock at the landlord. Months passed before Tsatsi could stop laughing about that.
Their last encounter as children had been just after a feast. Women, of course, ate first, then did men, then girls and finally the boys. One of the boys saw that his brother hadn't been allocated a meal like all the other boys had, and he wouldn't have it. That boy, of course, had been Banmai, and he wouldn't cooperate until his grandfather gathered a little from every boy's meal to give to the last boy. Then Banmai ate gladly; fairness, apparently, had been worth all the hassle.
Those three incidents were all that Tsatsi remembered of Banmai. And when she was still a child, they'd been all she cared to know about him. But now, as a girl of eighteen, she had new ideas about boys, and Banmai was her boy of choice.
Her reminiscing ended as she finished what she was doing on the ropemaking table. She straightened her back, rinsed off her hands in the water bucket and slipped out of the house.
"Tsatsi!" The snappy male voice stopped her. "Where are you going?"
Tsatsi turned around and looked up into her father's disapproving face. Tsatsi's mother had married her father the old-fashioned way, by enslaving him. Shunned though it was by the priestly and noble classes, slavery remained a legitimate and warranted practice, the ultimate expression of an everywoman's dominance over mankind. But despite all that, he was still her father, and she could not simply brush him off. "I'm going to see Banmai," she said quickly.
Her father's eyebrows rose, and she prepared herself for the floodgates to burst open. Instead, her father nodded slowly. "Be back by sundown," he said languidly.
'That's it?' she thought, but decided not to push her luck by asking.
Her father turned sadly to rejoin her mother in the workshop, where unpurchased ropes lay piled up against the wall. Suddenly, Tsatsi understood the real source of her father's anguish. Ever since the merchants had begun showing up in their flat-bottomed riverboats, their better, cheaper ropes had crippled the family business.
But Tsatsi did not think of that. She only thought of Banmai. The last several years had been good to him; although his frame remained as thin as the rice stalks he picked, his shoulders had swelled with muscle, and his black hair now reached down to the base of his neck so that it blew dreamily in the wind.
There he stood in rice fields, barefooted so he wouldn't trample the crops and bare-chested so the summer heat wouldn't scorch him. As she watched, he got up from the ankle-high water and straightened his back, showing the flat, ridged belly he had developed. He did not react to Tsatsi's coming, but she got the tantalizing sense he noticed her anyway.
"Get out!" barked a female voice, and Tsatsi's every nerve went taught. A skinny, harsh-looking woman barged out of the farmhouse and charged up to her. "You, that ropemaker's girl! Get out!"
"I..." Tsatsi's voice threatened to abandon her. "I just want to visit your son..."
"You do!" Her tone bristled with accusation. "You're a son-thief! You're a bread-duster! You're a stray bitch, and if I catch you sniffing around for my son, I'll have your head!"
Tsatsi gaped at this bony beast of a woman, her mind racing. She had not violated etiquette by coming to visit, nor had she gone behind this woman's back... she hadn't even reached the house yet! Banmai was of age—Tsatsi had painstakingly confirmed it—and she had even visited him a few times before, visits she'd assumed his mother knew about.
But now under that cruel stare, Tsatsi's didn't have the courage to say any of that. She turned and ran—indeed, like a stray bitch.
* * *
Finally, all the stars had aligned. Tsatsi had her parents' blessing. Banmai's mother, who had mellowed from vicious to merely rude in the past few years, was off with a magic-woman, being treated for some illness. Tsatsi could have Banmai all to herself.
It was not a short walk, the dirt-path that connected her home to Banmai's, and she did not go unnoticed. Some of the street boys stopped and pulled open their shirts, thinking they were being subtle, while others extended their necks, inviting her to put a collar on them. Tsatsi ignored them all. Easy men had never appealed to her. 'Eager,' her mother had called them, but to Tsatsi they seemed like drooling hyenas, pathetically willing to do anything for approval. Banmai showed something more valuable, strength. No hyena, he was a reliable ox, tame but imperturbable.
But when Tsatsi arrived, backed by the setting sun, the only sound was an odd, sharp thumping noise set to a backdrop of grim silence. Tsatsi stepped carefully in, peeking around every corner. Eventually, she stepped out the back of the house and found him. In a patch of bare dirt, he circled around a tree, hopping on the balls of his feet. Every few heartbeats he'd snap his fist at the tree, denting its bark with his knuckles. His shadow, many times longer than he was tall, copied his movements.
Tsatsi shuddered to imagine how the tree bark must have felt on his bare skin, but even that wasn't what struck her the most. Banmai's broad, handsome face was stretched taught, his saber-shaped eyebrows shearing low over his eyes, his lips pursed in fierce concentration. Every time he struck the tree, the skin above his lips pulled up in a snarl.
"Banmai?" said Tsatsi timidly.
His head snapped up, black hair twitching before it fell around his face in a sad curtain.
"Banmai, what happened?"
"Nothing," he mumbled.
"It's not nothing. What is it?"
He took in a deep breath, clenching every muscle from his face down to his stomach, then slowly sighed out his tension. "The Whittler family is gone."
"Gone? They've lived here even longer than we have!"
"They were are neighbors. More than that. My father had sworn a blood-oath with their son Yondra. Our families were meant to be allies forever."
"What happened to them?"
"They moved away. It's the merchants..."
'Not this again,' thought Tsatsi, dread pooling in her stomach.
"...they drove Whittlers out. The merchants dump their goods. Practically dump them, scattering them about like trash, selling them for a pittance. Cheap brassware, cheap cloth, cheap lamps, cheap clay, you name it."
"It doesn't have to be that way. My mother made a deal with the merchants, and they buy their ropes from us now. Can't everyone do something like that?"
"No. I don't blame you for doing it, but because of them, our neighbors are gone." He smacked the wooden post a few more times. "That's why I train. There's going to be an uprising. The Poisoned Hands are taking a stand, and when they do, I want to be one of them."
"You're going to fight them? Fight the merchants and all their guards?"
"We'll fight the whole world if that's what it takes."
"Banmai, don't." She placed gentle hands on his arms, bringing them down. "It's going to be okay."
"No, it's not!" he snapped.
She grabbed the charmed amulet from her pocket, which was never far from her. "Here. Give me-"
"Don't!" He snapped to face her, his shoulders bulging with tension. "You're always barging in! You think it doesn't matter, but it doesn't! You're a selfish..." he gritted his teeth and looked like he was about to implode.
But Tsatsi had heard enough. "Am I talking to Banmai, or his mother?" Standing up carefully, she turned and walked back outside, stately and serene.
One of the town boys, she saw, had followed her partway out to the rice farm. When he gazed innocently at her, pretending not to notice that his tight pants were showing off his butt, she only glared back at him. Banmai's outburst had left her in even less of a mood to put up with their sycophantic nonsense. The boy got the message and scampered away.
"Tsatsi!" a male voice hurried up behind her. "Tsatsi, I'm sorry."
Tsatsi looked over her shoulder, ready to rebuff him, then was surprised to see real, cutting pain in him. His jaw hung open, and his thin, sharp eyebrows rode high above wet blue eyes.
"I'm sorry, Tsatsi. I didn't mean that." His fingers twitched with furious tension, and she could see him choosing words carefully. "I was angry at someone else and I... I just wasn't ready. I took it out on you. Will you forgive me?"
Tsatsi faced him. "I forgive you." She said it coldly, dusted with uncertainty. She waited for his next move.
"You... wanted to see me." He itched the back of his head. "How would you like to walk to the old blue pond?"
'Right answer!' She smiled, sidling up to him. "I like the way you think."
It was the perfect time for such a walk. As the sun faded under the horizon and revealed the stars gleaming above, the stone-still surface of the pond reflected the endless, speckled black above. Banmai lay down in a crook where the ground sloped down to meet the water, the shifted to accommodate Tsatsi as she settled beside him. She felt his warm, hard body supporting her side, and she rested her head on his shoulder. His slow, deep breathing rocked her almost to sleep.
Tsatsi had something she wanted to say. It brewed in her throat, but she held it in, afraid she'd make a fool of herself. "Banmai..." she began. Then her courage wilted. "I... you... you've always been good to me."
Banmai stroked her hair. "You've made it easy."
