Floating World Bitten Peach

The music made Pai smile. He had heard the sweet song of Wangtao, the handsome stranger from Danyang his father had met at the Dan River ferry stand, many times before in the brief time Wangtao had been in the village, but now it was bringing tears to his eyes. He could not be sure why, but he was trembling, knowing that something momentous was happening. Or perhaps it was the drink. He hadn’t had so much wine in all of his years. The rice wine, the chiu, was bitter at first, but the more he drank, the smoother tasting it became—and the more it relieved him of his trembling and the more it heated his body. The meltingly attractive Wangtao—many years older than he was and hardened from plying a pleasure boat on Tai Hu Lake near Danyang was handsome and strong-bodied—and, to Pai’s village sensibilities, urbane. And, indeed, Wantao was not from the hard-scratch Dan River valley, beaten down alternately by flood and drought. He was here because some of the most handsome men of the kingdom came from this region.

It was hot in the room cut out of the cave high above the trickle of the Dan, in drought these past four years. The air was not moving, and the chiu was heating Pai’s body. He loosened the sash of his cotton long coat, his ta ao, the most formal and dear clothing that his teary-eyed mu chin and fu chin had insisted he take away from his home with him on this momentous day, and pulled the edges of the crinkly material from his chest.

Wangtao leaned into him and pulled the garment completely off his shoulders. It fell around Pai’s waist where he knelt before the low table just inside the shadows of the cave room entrance. Incense was burning on the table, sending wafts of smoke spiraling up the uneven rock ceiling, blackened by centuries of cooking fires.

Pai began to shake and wrapped his arms around his chest, but Wangtao smiled at him and, in a tender gesture, reached over and placed the palm of his hand on Pai’s sternum and ran it up between Pai’s trembling chest and his forearms. Pai dropped his arms and Wangtao gently ran long, strong, callused fingers across Pai’s chest, following the well-muscled folds and circling the young man’s nipples, which went erect as a chill ran down Pai’s spine. Wangtao had told him he had a beautiful body. The girls of Zigui had always told him this as well. But this was the first time an important visitor from a sophisticated city had said this to him—almost as if he was worth more than a life in Zigui.

As if to convey that everything was all right, Wangtao smiled at Pai again and pulled the sash on his own robe and shrugged it off his shoulders so that the folds descended on and mingled with the coarse cotton of Pai’s ta ao. Wangtao’s robe was of much finer material than Pai’s was, as was in keeping with Wangtao’s greater sophistication and position in the world. He was from Danyang. A pleasure barge master of the Danyang Floating World. Giving Pai a small, playful smile, Wangtao took up a handful of material of both robes and worked them together. The image was not lost on Pai, who emitted a low moan.

Pai knew the meaning of this. Wangtao’s seduction was one of several weeks, but Pai had not been misled. Pai’s mu chin and fu chin had not been misled. Some things were inevitable. The pitiful trickle of water in the Dan determined many things that just were to be.

Wangtao sang softly to Pai. His voice was rich and haunting. It served him well down in Danyang, where he sang when poling his pleasure barge on the lakes in the Floating World district while his clients were being entertained by one of Wangtao’s young men on the silken pillows in the barge’s belly.

Pai was so warm that he moved to rise and stand for a few moments in the twilight at the entrance of the cave room to take in the evening breeze, but the chiu was making him clumsy, and he slipped and would have fallen back off the matting onto the rock floor if Wangtao hadn’t quickly leaned over and encircled the youth’s shoulders in his strong arms.

He was looking down into Pai’s face with that handsome, searching, reassuring smile of his. He was humming the melody of his signature pleasure barge poleman song to the one he had chosen to return to Danyang with him—to be prepared to serve in a nanleshijia, a men’s pleasure house. Wangtao had already spoken to Pai of this, painting the Floating World of Danyang as a paradise, and Pai had believed it was a paradise compared to the life he lived here in his village. Wangtao had told him that out of a bit of pain there arose a world of pleasure. And Pai, already in love with Wangtao, believed and trusted the older man.

Wangtao spoke to Pai of young men such as Pai being peaches and of what biting into the peach meant and could lead to for the young man and for support of his family in the village. Pai was afraid but resolute. He wanted a better life for his family and for himself.

Pai lay, shoulders arched back, in Wangtao’s arms. Knowing what came next, even though he had never done this before. Both welcoming and fearing it. He knew it led to Danyang, away from this impoverished village, made too small for all of the generations here by the fickleness of the river that had always been the center of his life, the Dan. By the river’s failure to support the necessary harvests. And the greatest fear—that to follow the drought would be a flood, scouring away the very life of the village, its soil.

The young man shivered as Wangtao’s fingers slowly glided down from his chest, across his belly, and unknotted his tuan ku. The ends of the loin cloth fell away, and Pai gave a little lurch as Wangtao’s fingers encircled his virgin staff.

The peach was about to be bitten. Both men were aware of this accepted it.

Wangtao’s lips came down on Pai’s, and the youth opened to him and sighed and moaned and moved from fear and trepidation to greater heat and exhilaration, as Wangtao began to slowly pump his fist on Pai’s yang chu—his member. Pai initially was restless and instinctively struggled against his heavenly tormentor. But he had known this was coming; he had wanted this. Wangtao was strong and handsome and urbane. And Wangtao had told him of all of the glories of Danyang—in terms that made it very clear to Pai where his opportunity lay in becoming a part of Danyang. And Pai desperately wanted to be in Danyang—and to be away from the shriveling Zigui.

And, Aeiiii, Pai had had no idea that it could be like this. He had, of course, pleasured himself in the darkness of his own family’s cave room corners. But now he had no control. He could not rest. He could not pace himself; this was being done by another, entirely in the control of another. The rubbing and rhythmic stroking of his yang chu was relentless. Pai groaned and tried to beg for mercy, for a slower progression, through the possessive kiss of Wangtao, whose tongue had fully invaded Pai’s mouth and was swabbing his inner cheeks and reaching along the roof of his mouth to the back of his throat. Darting and rubbing. Pulling Pai’s own tongue into his mouth and sucking it.

And Wangtao’s big, strong, callused hand pulling on Pai’s yang chu. His thumb playing in the precum-slathered slit in the yang chu’s bulging head.

Pai began to move his hips, to the extent that Wangtao’s firm grip allowed. Rising and falling. Wangtao loosening his grip on the yang chu, providing a sleeve for Pai to move in, rhythmically, insistently.

Pumping, pumping, pumping. Skin sliding against skin.

Wangtao released Pai’s mouth and moved his lips and teeth down to the erect nubs on Pai’s hard, shuddering chest, as the youth threw his head back and concentrated his gaze on the incense trails curling up to the blackened ceiling. Wangtao was bringing his signature tune to a conclusion.

With that, Wangtao bit lightly down on Pai’s nipple, and the youth cried out to the streams of upward spiraling smoke. His hips lurched, and he sprayed his youthful seed up onto his tight, quivering belly.

Preparation lesson one completed.

* * * *

When he first visited Pai’s hut, Wangtao had said it was called becoming a cut sleeve—serving another man as a male prostitute by letting him penetrate the young man’s anal channel with his shaft and release his seed inside. Mu chin and fu chin had understood service in the Floating World well enough—they had sold Pai’s sisters into that world already. But, simple as they were, they had had no idea that a comely son would have value of this kind as well. They needed the money for the family to survive the Dan’s drought, which was sure to be followed by a flood. That was for sure; it was the time-worn cycle of life along the Dan. But when they had parted with their daughters, they had done it more for the young women’s benefit, the selling of the daughters into the Floating World, a world of relative luxury and sufficiency of needs. Luckily, Pai’s family members were blessed with beauty, perfectly formed bodies, straight backs and teeth, and melodious voices. So, they were their own resource and treasure. So many families in Zigui did not have even that, even though the village was legendary for its comely folk. Many of them would not survive to the next killing flood.

The Floating World was a world of comparatively unbelievable wealth. If the daughters had stayed here, in their riverside village, they probably already would have starved. If Pai did not somehow leave, he would surely drown in the inevitable flood that would follow the drought. The parents accepted the inevitability of their fate. They were village born and bound and would remain here, accepting whatever the Dan had to give them, no matter what.

Wangtao, handsome and worldly, and relatively wealthy, was an answer to the family’s dream. And mu chin and fu chin didn’t even have to face the decision of sending their second son into the Floating World in whatever way they could. Wangtao had found and cultivated Pai. Wangtao was a zhaodaojen—a procurer for the nanleshijias, the male pleasure houses, of Danyang, and he wished to ply his trade on Tai Hu Lake, near the capital, as well during the resort season there. He had come to Zigui explicitly to find a new cut sleeve youth, having heard that this region up the Dan from Danyang produced likely youths. Pai had been the most comely of those Wangtao had considered and Wangtao had decided he wanted him for service on his new Tai Hu Lake pleasure barge.

For his part, Pai had been smitten by Wangtao and only briefly recoiled from what Wangtao openly and honestly offered him. Smitten won out over the fears of the biting of the peach—the loss of anal virginity to another man—and of cut sleeve service in a male brothel and was only heightened by the description of Danyang and the Floating World life. Pai had visions of his days in his rich, sophisticated, handsome lover’s arms—visions of pleasure that completely obliterated his evenings in his thoughts.

Thus, when Wangtao approached mu chin and fu chin, it was with a willing and beaming Pai at his side.

Pai’s parents welcomed the offer as now at Least Pai would survive and might even flourish—and he might, like his sisters, occasionally send something home to help undergird the family and see it through the endless cycle of drought and flood.

* * * *

Wangtao had been as gentle and careful in the initiation as he could be. But that first journey beyond the curtain—the biting of the peach—is never easy, although it is marked as a special victory for those taking the bite.

“Aeiii,” Pai moaned, as he tried to spread his legs even farther apart. Wangtao had promised pleasure following pain. And they had yet to come to the promised paradise.

Wangtao was crooning softly in his rich, baritone voice to Pai, while the youth stared down over the lip of the rocky ledge beyond the cave room entrance, down into the Dan gorge at the bare trickle of water wending down toward the desired Danyang. Pai had asked if they could drag the bamboo chair over and do it at the mouth of the cave room, so that he could look down on what this meant he could leave behind. He had told his mu chin and fu chin that he was sure this was what he wanted—and he knew that Wangtao was the one he wanted—but he found he needed this reassurance himself upon jumping that chasm. He needed to concentrate on the reality that Zigui was not a possibility while he was spanning that chasm.

Pai thought the pain was about over, but it was just starting. Wangtao’s hand was slathered in the peach butter that he was working between Pai’s nether cheeks while the youth was bent over the bamboo chair and gripping its rungs on either side under the straw seat cushion. Wangtao had two fingers working inside Pai, but Pai was already tensing up and groaning and starting to writhe under the onslaught, the aroma of peach butter forever now engrained on his soul as connected with the taking.

“Aeiii!”

“Relax, my little one,” Wangtao murmured from behind his bent-over protégé. “It will be well if you let yourself loosen up. Look down there. Look down in the chasm. This is what you are leaving.”

Once again Wangtao was singing his signature boatman song, the song he sang as he poled his pleasure barge around the Danyang Lakes, the song by which his clients identified where he was headed and where in the Floating World of Danyang they could move to meet up with what he could provide them.

Pai felt the firm grip on his hips. Holding him fast and pulling his plump cheeks apart.

“Aeiiii!” Pai screamed. It was too large; it would split him asunder. Pai tried to collapse; he tried to struggle away. But the older, stronger Wangtao had him imprisoned with his big, callused fists and was poling ever more deeply inside him with his throbbing yang chu. The master poleman—of boat and of men.

Pai writhed and whimpered and cried out under the grip of Wangtao as the pleasure boatman initiated his protégé into the cut sleeve life.

“Shih. Shih. Yes, yes, just like that. Each and every one who rides you,” Wangtao panted out and he relentlessly drove up into his tasty virgin morsel. “Cry for each one as if he is the first lover, just like that. Shih. Shih. Our fortunes will be made.”

Pai’s eyes watered, and he focused hard on the trickle of water that was the mighty Dan, muttering to himself over and over of how the river had failed his family and how he would not be defeated by it. Wangtao had bottomed his pole inside him now and was withdrawing and advancing, withdrawing and advancing. Pai’s knees like rubber, the rungs of the bamboo chair snapping under his white knuckled grip. Wangtao holding him in a strong, pinching grip of the hips.

Wangtao panting and groaning. Pai crying and moaning, but subsiding into whimpers from exhaustion and from new sensations. The pain indeed, as promised, translating itself into new sensations. The feeling of being filled and stretched by the handsome Wangtao’s powerful member. Pai felt himself coming alive inside, caressing the hard, all-consuming yang chu, the muscles of his tender walls rippling over the shaft, accepting it, worshipping it—giving it everything it demanded.

He was being taken by his lover. He was one now with his master. Pai began to move with the rhythm of Wangtao’s pistoning pelvis. He turned his head, and Wangtao found his lips and devoured him. Not just animals taking. Lovers giving and receiving.

The bamboo chair lost its purchase on the slippery rock floor as Wangtao lowered the weight of his heaving chest on Pai’s back and reached his lips to Pai’s. The chair skittered out onto the ledge, and Pai saw it careen over the edge and crack with an echo once, twice, thrice, as it bounced down the cliffside into the Dan gorge. Pai’s life in Zigui also crashing, echoing its demise. His innocence shattered like the delicate chair smashed against the rocks.

Wangtao caught Pai under the armpits before the youth fell to the floor, kicked the mat by the table over underneath Pai, and slowly lowered him to the mat. All without losing the saddle of his long, hard yang chu poling the virgin depths. Wangtao pressed Pai’s chest down onto the matting with a big fist in the small of his back. Then he pulled the youth up on his knees, his hips encased between the master’s heavily muscled thighs; and continued fucking, fucking, fucking.

Pai closed his eyes and moaned and sighed for his urbane Danyang lover while Wangtao went back to singing his song on the pleasure barge.

The two cried out in unison in their finishing as Wangtao released deep inside Pai and Pai gave up his youthful seed inside Wangtao’s fist.

The peach had been bitten, its succulent nectar dribbling down the vanquished Pai’s inner thighs. Pai had entered the cut sleeve Floating World.

“Shih. Shih,” Wangtao whispered in Pai’s ear after kissing him on the cheek. “Hen hao. Very good. Very, very good. Each time. Give that each time with the men on the pleasure barge, and I will be very pleased.”

Preparation lesson two completed.

Pai exalted. He had pleased his lover. He could hardly hold back the tears. The pain was worth it. He would run and pack now, and . . .

“We rest for a few minutes,” Wangtao said, standing up and giving Pai a hardy slap on the rump. “Then we will go to the mat and I will show you a favorite position in Danyang, the dog in heat. Later I will bed you and teach you the holing of the snake position.”

“So soon?” Pai whimpered.

“Shih. You have a lot to learn.” And Wangtao’s yang chu was in need again already.

* * * *

Wangtao was nothing if not fully attentive and assiduous in his methodical training and preparation of Pai. He was not always this attentive of his trainees, but there had been no earlier trainee that Wangtao so much wanted to sheath his yang chu.

He was standing at the entrance of the cave, staring into the starry night over Pai’s shoulder. This was the strong man chair position, he had whispered to Pai. While Wangtao stood, with legs slightly spread to give him balance, Pai was suspended in front of him, also facing out into the night, impaled on Wangtao yang chu. His legs were spread, supported by Wangtao’s outstretched arms, and his own arms were raised, with his fists clinched behind Wangtao’s neck. Movements of Wangtao’s arms were making Pai’s channel rise and fall and move back and forth on the impaling staff. Pai moaned at the deep taking.

The blue of the night sky beyond the blackness of the cave was lightening as Pai slowly awoke to the hot breath of Wangtao on his neck. The young man was pinned to his pallet on his belly by the weight of the heavier man. Pai winced as Wangtao’s yang chu slowly worked its way into his channel. Then he gasped when Wangtao grabbed his wrists, raised up to a kneeling position between his thighs, and pulled Pai’s chest off the pallet in a taut arch. As Wangtao started to rock Pai’s body back and forth on his buried cock, he whispered, “The position of the tight bow.”

They lay, panting, both spent, as dawn crept over the lip of the cave and pushed the darkness deeper into the cavern beyond Pai’s pallet.

“When you have rested a bit, I believe you may be ready for the position of the heavenly sling.”

* * * *

The cock was short but thick, and the fat merchant was bellowing his well-invested lust as Pai swallowed his yang chu whole, ingested his balls as well, and sucked them into his cheek cavities. He was humming, just as Wangtao had taught him to do with the small-membered clients, and the merchant was beside himself in the sensation of the warm, moist sheath and the vibrations from the humming. The client was flopping like a landed fish underneath Pai amid the pile of pillows in the center of the pleasure barge Wangtao was poling across the Tai Hu Lake toward the Bridge of Sighs leading into yet another lake.

The merchant lost control, tearing at Pai’s hair with one claw and wrapping his beefy legs around the youth’s head, pulling him as close into his groin as possible—loving the full engorgement of his privates into that warm, vibrating chamber. His other claw was ripping at Pai’s brocaded hanfu—robe. Wangtao broke off in his singing and poling ever so briefly as the ripping of the fabric harmonized with the merchant’s exclamations of lust against the background of the tinkling instruments and voices gliding across the shimmering water from the other floating world pleasure barges.

Then Wangtao shrugged and dug his pole into the muck of the shallow lake’s bed once more and propelled the barge toward the three arches of the gracefully upcurved Bridge of Sighs.

Overcome with desire for the impossibly winsome youth in the red brocade robe, the merchant reared up from the cushions and rolled over on top of Pai.

“Ching . . . pu. Ching . . . pu! Please, no!” Pai pled in his most pleading voice and struggled—purposely ever so weakly and ineffectively—as the merchant rolled between his spread legs, held the youth’s wrists in one beefy fist above his head, plunged his other hand under Pai’s buttocks, and dug his fingers into the youth’s hole.

“Aeiii! No, please. Hen da, hen da. Too big,” Pai moaned, further inflaming his client to prodigious power. Seemingly struggling against the merchant, Pai actually dug his heels into the cushions and raised his pelvis to just the right angle for entry. He had been taught to feign giving it up only by force, if this is what the client showed aroused him.

Feeling his power and skill and cleverness as a lover triangulate, the merchant took advantage of Pai’s “mistake” at raising his hips to lodge his yang chu at Pai’s opening. Pai writhed and groaned, pleading for mercy and yelping convincingly as the bulging head of the merchant’s yang chu breached his anal ring. And it wasn’t all for show. The merchant’s yang chu made up in thickness now what it lacked in length.

Pai cried and panted as the tool worked inside his hole, tightened to the extent he could now do through the “presenting the virgin” channel muscle exercises Wangtao had taught him in the spring.

As it turned out, Shun was more right than the captain had been. Some clients in the kingdom of Chu did want a virgin. Pai’s virginity had been paid for several times, and Shun’s “escape” fund was building nicely. This peach could be bitten again and again.

By design and excellent training, the “ravaged” youth slowly metamorphosed into the won-over lover, and Pai laid back, arched his back, and raised his hips to the pounding of the transported merchant client’s yang chu at his forbidden entrance, as he brought the merchant’s lips and teeth to his quivering breast.

Keeping one eye on the client and the jinan, Wangtao poled and sang his signature tune to the sounds of the muffled sucking at Pai’s breast and slapping of belly and thighs against belly and groin. Pai hummed along with Wangtao’s tune and raised his eyes to the underbelly of the Bridge of Sigh’s middle arch, as the pleasure barge moved under the bridge from the larger Tai Hu to the smaller Meihan Lake and the view of mud bricks opened up into the vast array of stars in the clear eastern China summer night sky.

Surely this was the last client of the night. Surely he and Wangtao could now retire to Wangtao’s small room at the nanleshijia and it would be for Wangtao that Pai would be spreading his legs and raising his buttocks to receive the unrehearsed, unfeigned deep fucking from Wangtao’s, the master poleman’s, amazing yang chu that Pai lived for—the coupling that was still being talked of as training when both men, without saying it aloud, knew they were lovers.

* * * *

The spring of Pai’s preparation by Wangtao, during which the youth fell fully under the spell of the handsome pleasure barge poleman, had turned into a cut sleeve perfection of summer on the shimmering Tai Hu Lake.

No matter what Pai had had to feign and endure with the evening clients on Wangtao’s Floating World pleasure barge, throughout the warm summer, Wangtao took Pai to his bed when they returned to their room in the nanleshijia and plowed him deep and long, and with the ardor that made Pai understand that all that was transpiring in their life together was so that the two could be together as lovers—and that made Pai never even think of leaving Wangtao.

It was unusual for a nanleshijia to permit a jinan—a nanleshijia prostitute—to be so coupled with a pleasure house employee, but, being convinced that Pai was so in love with Wangtao that it was only this love that kept him satisfied in the pleasure house where his services increasingly were being sought, the zhaoguzhe, Shun, tolerated the arrangement. At the same time, he often felt sad, believing that Pai’s love would someday crumble and destroy him.

Eventually, the coolness of the autumn was upon the lakes. Pai now shivered inside his torn red brocade robe when clients were fumbling within its folds to touch what they believed was a ripe peach’s flesh, and an unexpected breeze fluttered across the water. And coolness came upon Wangtao too. They didn’t make love every morning upon returning from the lake as they originally had, and the rhythm of the life they were settling into was not one of red-hot ardor, but more one of domestication, habit . . . and a bit of dullness.

And increasingly it was some other man who was plunging his yang chu inside Pai’s undulating channel, as the popularity of the sweet young jinan increased.

Wangtao was consulting with Shun about procuring his next jinan for sale to the nanleshijia, or, rather Shun was saying that another jinan need be procured and Wangtao was not showing enthusiasm. It seemed, Shun thought, that Wangtao had grown as complacent with his husbanding of Pai as Pai was of being coupled with Wangtao.

But the civilian side of the pleasure house on Tai Hu Lake was increasing in demand, and Shun would like to close out the military side when he could as he could not bear to know about the rough demands the soldiers made on the captives the captain supplied with his raids on the Kingdom of Wu.

Pai sometimes overheard bits and pieces of these discussions, but he was innocent to Wangtao’s zhaodaojen business in this regard. He did not know—or he had let himself forget—that he was only one in a succession of jinan Wangtao had procured and trained. He assumed that Wangtao loved him as he loved Wangtao.

Pai’s first thought that he was losing Wangtao came the late autumn afternoon he had been sent out to do marketing and had come right back to the nanleshijia because he had forgotten to take the money—the chi’en—that he needed.

When he drew close to the nanleshijia, he saw Wangtao out on the lake dock below the pavilions of the pleasure house. He was talking with a young man—certainly younger than Pai was. They had their heads together, and the young man was holding a length of the most beautiful scarlet brocade Pai had ever seen.

A chill raced down Pai’s spine, and he instantly remembered a conversation he had had with Wangtao shortly after they had come to Tai Hu Lake.

“You came to Tai Hu to your own pleasure barge and to acceptance in the Floating World here, master,” Pai had murmured one morning as Wangtao held him still from behind, all in stillness except for Wangtao’s masterful yang chu working in and out of Pai’s love hole.

“Shih. Shih. Yes, I did,” Wangtao said through teeth working their way across Pai’s shoulder.

“It does not seem easy to gain position in the Floating World,” Pai had whispered.

“Pu yao, No, it’s not,” Wangtao answered, as he moved his lips from Pai’s shoulder and nuzzled his face up into Pai’s arm pit, while the youth raised his arm and emitted a low moan at the effect of Wangtao’s tongue and teeth on his sensitive flesh there. “I have been a pleasure boatman for many years.”

“And you must have had many youths such as me entertaining the men’s yang chu’s then,” Pai had murmured, not believing it, but wanting to hear it denied.

“Shih, Many. But none as fine as you, of course.” Wangtao had moved his mouth to the youth’s nipple and was sucking it hard between his teeth.

“Aeiii,” Pai groaned. He was mortified that Wangtao hadn’t pledged he was the only one. And now he couldn’t fight his curiosity. “And the youth before me. How long was he with you?”

“Alas, only one full turning of the seasons,” Wangtao had said with a low growl. “But enough. I want you to practice coming together. Clients pay more for coming together.” And with that, Wangtao had fisted Pai’s yang chu and started to pump it as hard as he could while diving deep inside the youth with his yang chu. And Pai was forced to abandon his questioning at that point and concentrate on coming together as commanded.

And Pai had forgotten what had been said . . . until now. It was already late autumn. Only the winter to go. He could not live without Wangtao. There was nothing in life without Wangtao. He certainly could not go back to Zigui after having lived near Danyang on Tai Hu Lake.

The next market day he did not forget the chi’en, but he came right back to the nanleshijia after he had walked away from it, already knowing the truth, but wanting to be proved wrong.

But he wasn’t proved wrong. The other youth was there now, standing on the dock with a beaming Wangtao. Wearing a newly tailored robe from the beautiful scarlet brocade Pai had seen the previous market day. The handsome youth was turning this way and that way, and Wangtao was looking at him with approval—and, yes, Pai was convinced, with that look of speculation and desire that he had seen in Wangtao’s eyes when they had first met in Zigui in what seemed so long ago and so far away.

* * * *

Pai stood at the highest point of the Bridge of Sighs between the Tai Hu and Meihan lakes on that first day of winter, still cool but with that touch of frost on the air promising the bleakness to come. He was staring down into the frigid lake water, holding his torn red brocade robe tightly around him, whispering not only of what had gloriously been but, in melancholy, also of what might have been—what he had dreamed would be. He had just returned from being taken roughly, cruelly by a client at the Danyang nanleshijia managed by Shun, the first time he had been given to one of the crude soldiers of Chu, who had ravished him mercilessly. Wangtao had not been there to protect or comfort him.

He was not angry—just regretful. If he had stayed in Zigui, life certainly would not have been any better. He had had his peach spring, perfectly ripe summer, and mellow autumn. He would not stand in the way of Wangtao. He had been a superb lover, and Pai loved him still. He would love Wangtao forever.

Pai looked down into the swirling water as it moved from the larger lake into the smaller one, the new water brushing the old water aside, pushing its way into the smaller lake. Life was ever thus. Pai leaned out farther over the stone railing, bending down toward the swirling, welcoming waters.

* * * *

“Pai, Pai,” Wangtao was crying out over the water in the advancing twilight as he poled the pleasure barge out onto the large Tai Hu Lake. “Anyone seen my Pai?” he cried out to the other pleasure barges casting off with their first cushioned nesting of treasured clients for the evening.

“Shih, Wangtao hsien sheng,” another poleman called out to his friend. “Just moments ago, over at the Bridge of Sighs.”

“Hsieh, hsieh—thanks,” Wangtao called back. “It’s not like him not to be ready for the first castoff. And I wanted to show him what I had made for him.”

“Gifts for a lover?” the friend bantered back, needling him gently. “I’ve heard you have an ever-stiff yang chu for that one. You know it isn’t good business to fall for your cut sleeve.”

“Fuck you,” Wangtao called back, but in a tone that obviously was given in good humor. “This one is special. I am getting too old for this business. This one I take away with me. And look, see what I had made for him. His robe is old and torn; I’ve bought him this splendid new scarlet brocade robe. Cost me a month’s taking. The tailor’s son, who is the size of Pai, wore it to ensure the fit would be perfect, and I rewarded the youth for his help. But Pai is worth that and more to me. He is worth everything to me.”

As they had bantered back and forth, they had been poling across the lake toward the Bridge of Sighs. And as Wangtao had carefully, lovingly folded his love gift and set it down on the cushions at the center of the pleasure barge, he looked across to the entry of the greater Tai Hu Lake into the lesser . . .

. . . and saw the familiar torn red brocade robe floating on the surface of the frigid Tai Hu Lake just below the Bridge of Sighs.

Shun sensed what had happened even before he looked down on Tai Hu Lake from the nanleshijia pavilion deck. He had heard the weeping of the man wafting on the breeze across the lake and had known that it was Wangtao. He stood and looked down upon the boat floating up to the dock, with Wangtao standing and embracing a dripping-wet bundle of red brocade to his chest.

Even having known where the story of Pai and Wangtao would end, Shun was overcome with sadness and turned and walked with weary steps to the strongbox in his room to contemplate whether it was time to flee from this cursed Kingdom of Chu.