Wild Orchid (5 page)

For several seconds he stood just so. The wind moved the branches of the tree. I saw it ruffle the hair on Li Po’s brow so that the hair threatened to tickle his eyes. He never even blinked. Then, for a moment, the wind fell away, and the instant that it ceased to breathe, Li Po let the arrow fly.

Straight across the stream it flew, passing amid the branches of the plum tree as if they weren’t there at all. The arrow pierced the plum that was the target and then carried it to earth. I laughed and clapped my hands in appreciation as Li Po flashed a smile. Then,
before I realized what he intended, Li Po bounded down the slope of the bank, splashed across the stream, and clambered up the opposite side to retrieve both his arrow and the plum.

He wiped the tip of the arrow on the grass and then thrust it back into his quiver. Returning to the stream, he bent to hold the plum in the cool water, washing the dirt from its pierced skin before straightening up and popping the small fruit into his mouth. He chewed vigorously, purple juice running down his chin. Then he spat the pit into the water and wiped a hand across his face. The grin he was wearing still remained, I noticed.

“I’ll race you to the top of the tree,” he challenged.

“No fair!” I cried. He had only to turn and take half a dozen steps to reach the tree’s thick trunk. I was standing on the opposite bank. I still had the stream to cross.

I acted without thinking, just as Min Xian was always scolding me for doing. Taking several steps back to gather momentum before abruptly sprinting forward, I streaked toward the stream, my legs pumping as hard as they could go. As I ran, I gave what I fondly imagined was a fierce warrior’s yell. I just had time to see Li Po’s startled expression before I jumped.

Li Po’s cry of warning came as I flew through the air, my arms stretched out in front.
Oh great dragon of the water
, I prayed as I flew across the stream.
Carry me safely above you. Help me reach my goal in safety. Or, if you cannot and I must fall, please don’t let me break too many bones
.

No sooner had I finished my silent prayer than I sailed into the branches of the plum tree, hands and legs scrabbling for purchase but finding none. I slithered downward, leaves and plums showering around me, thin branches snapping against my face. Then, with a bone-jarring impact, my body finally found a branch that would hold it.

I wrapped my arms and legs around it, clinging like a monkey. I stayed that way for several moments, sucking air, feeling my heart knock against my ribs at my close call. When I had my breath back, I decided it was time to find a less precarious hold.

Carefully I levered myself onto the branch and then into a sitting position, clinging to another branch just above me for additional support. By the time Li Po clambered up to sit beside me, my heart was just beginning to settle.

“You’re out of your mind. You know that, don’t you?”

“You ought to know better than to issue a challenge,” I reminded. However, I’d come close enough to disaster to admit, at least to myself, that Li Po was absolutely right.

Thank you, mighty dragon
, I thought. Surely it had heard my prayer and helped to carry me across the stream. But I’d succeeded by no more than the reach of my fingers. Maybe I would think before I jumped next time around. There’s a first time for everything, or so they say.

“Nice shot,” I said, now that I had my breath back.

“Thank you,” Li Po replied.

“You’ll be a famous archer someday. You mark my words,” I went on. “The pride of the Son of Heaven’s army.”

Li Po gave a snort. “Not if I can help it. Besides, you’re the one who’s always pining for adventure, not me. If you had your way, you’d ride off into the sunset and never look back.”

I plucked a handful of leaves from a nearby branch and then released them, watching as they fluttered downward. They settled onto the surface of the water and were swiftly carried away.

“There’s not much chance of that happening,” I said. “I haven’t got a horse of my own.”

Li Po chuckled, but his eyes were not smiling. He was like this sometimes, in two places at once. It was one of the things I liked best about him. For Li Po the world was not always a simple place. It was filled with hills and valleys, with shadows and nuances.

“Where would you go?” he inquired.

“I don’t know,” I answered with a shrug. “I’m not even sure
where
is the point. I’d just like to be able to go. Girls don’t get out much, or go very far when they do, just in case you hadn’t noticed.”

Li Po fell silent, gazing down into the water. “They go to their husband’s homes,” he said after a moment.

“Don’t remind me,” I said glumly. “Though I’m
never going to get married. Didn’t you hear? Min Xian said your mother told her so just the other morning. According to her there’s not a family in all China who’d have me, in spite of the Hua family name. I’m far too unmanageable and wild. She said that’s the real reason my father hasn’t come home once since the day I was born.”

“The great general Hua Wei is afraid of his own daughter? That doesn’t seem very likely,” Li Po remarked.

“Not out of fear—out of embarrassment,” I replied. I yanked the closest plum from its hold and hurled it down into the water with all my might. “Your mother told Min Xian that she prays daily to her ancestors that you won’t fall in love with me.”

Li Po frowned, and I knew it meant he’d heard his mother say so too. “I’ve heard her tell my father she wishes they could send me to Chang’an,” he said. “To the home of my father’s older brother.”

“But I thought they
were
sending you,” I said. “When you turn fifteen.”

Going to the capital would help complete Li Po’s education and help turn him into the scholar his family desired. If all went well, he would pass one of the grueling tests that would make him eligible for a government position. Then both he and his family would be set for life.

“That was the plan,” Li Po agreed. “But now she wants to hurry things along.”

“It’s because of me, isn’t it?” I said. Girls married at
fifteen, but most boys waited until they were older. Twenty was considered the proper age for a young man to take a wife.

“What does she think will happen? That I’ll suddenly become an endless temptation? That I’ll distract you from your studies?”

My chest ached with the effort I was making not to shout. The thought of me as an endless temptation, to Li Po or anyone else, was so ridiculous it should have made me laugh. So why on earth did I feel like crying?

It’s because Li Po’s mother is right, and you know it, Mulan
, I thought.
No one is going to want you, in spite of the name of Hua. The only thing that will make it possible for you to marry is if you meet your bridegroom on your wedding day, so he doesn’t have the chance to get to know you ahead of time
.

No one would want an unruly girl like me. Unlike my parents, I would not be offered the chance to marry for love.

All of a sudden I realized I was gripping the tree branch so tightly the knuckles on both hands had turned stark white.

“You can’t really blame them for wanting what’s best for me,” Li Po said. “I’m their only son. I have to pass my examinations and marry well. It’s expected, and I owe it to them, for raising me.”

“In that case they’re not making any sense,” I snapped, completely overlooking the fact that I wasn’t making much myself. “They’ll have to look long and
hard before they find a girl with a better family name than Hua.”

“That is true,” Li Po replied. “If the family name were all there was to think about. But marriage is not as simple as that, and you know it, Mulan. For example, do you really want my mother for your
popo
, your mother-in-law?”

“Of course not,” I said at once. “No more than she wants me for a daughter-in-law. Or than I want you for a husband or you want me for a wife.” All of a sudden a terrible doubt occurred. I twisted my head to look at Li Po more closely.

“You aren’t thinking of asking me to marry you, are you?”

For the first time in our friendship I could not read Li Po’s expression. Until that moment I would have said I knew any emotion he might show. Then he exhaled one long, slow breath, and I knew what his answer would be.

“Seriously?” he said. “I suppose not, no. But I’d be lying if I said I don’t think about it sometimes. It would solve both our problems, Mulan. I’d have a wife who wouldn’t pester me to be ambitious, to become something other than what I wanted. You’d have a husband who’d do the same for you. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”

“No, it wouldn’t,” I replied.

Li Po and I had talked about many things during the course of our friendship, but we’d never really talked about the future. It had simply been there,
looming in the distance, as dark and threatening as a storm cloud. Had we been hoping to make it go away by ignoring it? Or had we hoped to outrun it?

“What do you want to be?” I asked quietly, somewhat chagrined that the question had never occurred to me before now. I’d been so busy identifying the boundaries that contained me that I hadn’t taken the time to see the ones that bound Li Po.

He gave a slightly self-conscious laugh. “I’m not sure I know. That’s the problem. And I’m not so sure it would make any difference even if I did. Boys aren’t allowed to make choices any more than girls are. I know you don’t think this is so, but it’s the truth, Mulan. If I go against the wishes of my family, if I bring them dishonor, everyone will suffer.”

“But I thought you wanted to be a poet or a scholar,” I said. “Isn’t that what your family wants too?”

“It is what they want,” Li Po agreed. “But how can I know if it’s what I want when I’ve never been allowed to consider any other options? Just once I’d like to be free to listen to the voice inside my own head, to discover something all on my own.

“That’s part of why I like being with you. You may be bossy …” He slid me a quick laughing glance to take in my reaction. “But you never boss me around. So, yes, I do wonder what it would be like to be married to you, sometimes. You’d let me be myself, and I’d do the same for you.”

“And your mother?” I asked. “How would we convince her to leave us both alone?”

Li Po gave a sigh. “I don’t have the faintest idea,” he admitted.

“It sounds as if we should ride off into the sunset together,” I said. “Very quietly, and on your horse.”

“It does sound pretty silly when you put it that way, doesn’t it?” Li Po said.

“Not silly,” I answered. “Just impossible.”

We sat quietly. The branches of the old plum tree swayed and whispered softly, almost as if they wished to console us.

“It’s getting late,” Li Po said finally. “I should probably be getting home. The last thing we want is for my mother to send out a search party.”

“Shh!” I said suddenly, clamping a hand around his wrist to silence him. “Listen! I think someone’s coming.”

Above the voice of the stream, I heard a new sound—the sound of horses. Now that I’d acknowledged it was there, I realized I’d been hearing it for quite some time. But I’d been so wrapped up in my conversation with Li Po that I hadn’t recognized all the other things my ears were trying to tell me.

I could identify the creak of leather, the faintest jingle of harness. And most of all, I could hear the sharp sound of horses picking their way carefully over stones.

They are coming up the streambed!
I thought.
And there is more than one
. They were close. In another moment the horses would pass beneath the boughs of the plum tree that extended out over the water.

“Li Po, your legs,” I whispered suddenly, for they were dangling down.

Li Po gave a frown. His head was cocked in my direction, though his eyes stayed fixed on the scene below.

“What?”

“Pull up your legs,” I said, urgently now. “Whoever is coming will be able to see them. They’re longer than mine.”

To this day I’m not quite sure how it happened. As a general rule Li Po was no more clumsy than I. Perhaps it was the fear of being caught, the astonishment that whoever was coming had chosen to ride up the streambed rather than the road. But in his haste to get his feet up out of the way, Li Po lost his balance. He reached for a branch to steady himself. Unfortunately, he found me instead.

One moment I was sitting in the tree. The next, I was hurtling down. And that is how I came to fall from the same tree twice.

F
IVE

I’d like to tell you that I fell in brave and stoic silence, but the truth is that I shrieked like an outraged cat the whole way down. I landed in the stream this time around. The impact was painful. The water wasn’t deep enough to truly cushion my fall, and the stream-bed was full of stones.

I had no time to consider my cuts and bruises, however, because I landed squarely in the path of the lead horse. Its cry of alarm and outrage echoed my own. I scrambled to get my legs back under me, scurrying backward like a crab, kneeling on all fours. I tossed my drenched braid over my back and looked up just in time to see a pair of hooves pawing the air above me.