Ken Liu - The Grace of Kings

She kept on running until she fell down by the docks next to the Liru River from exhaustion.

That was the first man she ever killed.

Being on her own made it much harder. She had to avoid the gang of thieves, who had let it be known that they were looking for her. She hid in the basements of old temples and only came out when she had to eat.

A couple caught her trying to cut the purse of the wife in the markets one evening. But the husband, a devout follower of Rufizo, decided that rather than turning the young thief in to the constables, he would perform a good deed. They would take the young girl in and try to give her a home.

But the reality of raising a street urchin and rehabilitating a young criminal was far different from how the man had envisioned it. Gin did not trust the couple and tried to escape. They shackled her and read her sacred texts with her meals, hoping that she would open her heart and repent. But she cursed at them and spat in their eyes. So they beat her, proclaiming that it was for her own good because evil had gotten into her heart, and pain was necessary to pry open her heart to Rufizo.

Finally, the couple tired of their experiment in charity. They took her from their house, blindfolded her, and pushed her off their carriage in the countryside far away from Dimushi, far away from their home.

During her stay with them, they had shaved her head (to cure her of her vanity, they said) and dressed her in plain cotton rags that hid her young, lithe figure (to cure her of her lust, they said). Gin was mistaken at first as a boy by those she encountered, and she found that there were advantages to pretending to be a boy. By looking tough as a boy, and by prominently displaying on her belt a short sword that she stole from a hunting lodge, she could avoid a great deal of unpleasant attention.

She stole food at night from the fields, and during the day she wandered down to the Liru River to try to catch some fish.

All day long, laundresses worked next to the river, beating sheets and shirts against the rocks with a cleaning stick. Gin sat a little above the river from them and fished. She caught nothing, so after a while she gave up and just watched the washerwomen. When the women took their lunch break, she looked at them hungrily and swallowed.

An old woman saw the pair of hungry eyes peeking out from behind a tree and offered to share her lunch with the emaciated, dirty boy in rags. Gin thanked her.

The next day, Gin showed up again, and the old laundress shared her food with the boy again.

This went on for twenty days. Gin knelt down and put her forehead against the ground. “Granny, if I ever make it, I will repay your kindness a hundredfold.”

The old woman spat on the ground. “You foolish child! You think I share my food with you because I expect a reward? I do it only because I think you are a sorry sight, and Tututika said all living things have a right to food. I would do no different for a stray dog or cat.” She softened her voice. “I feed you so that you don’t have to steal. A man who steals is a man who has lost all hope, and you’re too young to have no hope.”

Gin cried for the first time that she could remember when she heard this speech, and she refused to get up from her knees for many hours, no matter how much the old woman coaxed her.

The next day, Gin did not go back to the Liru River. She made her way back to the port of Dimushi, where the docks were perpetually busy. There, she found work as an errand boy for the dockmaster and shipping companies. Her thieving days were over.

Gin treasured the freedom that a boy’s disguise brought her. She always kept her breasts tightly bound and her hair closely cropped.

She was also aggressive and quick to anger, sensitive to every slight, every perceived insult. Rumors of her skill with the sword became more exaggerated with every retelling, and so she kept herself safe without having to fight often — but when she did have to fight, she struck without warning and was often deadly.

Once, the dockmaster and a captain had trouble fitting all the captain’s cargo into a ship’s tight hold. Gin, who happened to be there, offered some suggestions that allowed all the boxes to be arranged so as to fit into the small space. From then on, the dockmaster and captains often consulted her for similar matters. She found that she had a talent for seeing the arrangement of things, for designing patterns and shapes and fitting oddly contoured bundles into tight spaces.

“You have a way of holding the bigger picture in your head,” the dockmaster said. “You might be good at games.”

He taught her to play cüpa . The game was played with formations of black and white stones on a grid, and the object was to surround the other player’s stones with one’s own and take over the board. It was a game of patterns and spaces, of seeing potentials and seizing opportunities.

Though Gin learned the rules quickly, she never could beat the dockmaster.

“You play well,” the dockmaster said, “but you’re impatient. Why do you immediately challenge me on every move, attacking before you have uncovered my real weakness? Why do you fight tenaciously for every tiny open space before you, to the neglect of the larger prize of a dominant board position?”

Gin shrugged.

“You play cüpa like you strut around the docks, as if you can’t bear to be considered weak for even a moment. You play like you have something to prove.”

Gin avoided the dockmaster’s eyes. “Because I’m small, everyone has always acted as if they can push me around.”

“And you hate that.”

“I can’t afford to appear soft—”

The dockmaster’s voice took on a stern tone. “You dream of someday standing tall before men who’re bigger than you, but you have not learned to bide your time. If you insist on fighting every fight that comes your way, you’re simply letting them push you around in a different way. You will die young and foolish.”

Gin sat still, thinking. Then she nodded.

After two weeks, Gin started winning against the dockmaster.

The dockmaster, impressed, gave her some classical books on cüpa .

“These books explain the origin of cüpa as a simulation of war. If you study them, you will also understand how the game is entwined with military history and military strategy.”

“I can’t read,” Gin said, embarrassed.

“Then it’s time to learn.” The dockmaster’s eyes and voice were gentle. “My sister never learned to read, and she didn’t understand that she had been betrayed by the man she married when he had her sign a contract that deprived her of her right to dower. You must learn to read to protect yourself. I’ll teach you.”

One day, while Gin was walking about the docks, a large man, a stranger, stopped her.

“I hate the sight of a scrawny little man like you strutting around with a sword. People here tell me you’re a fighter, but I don’t believe it. Either fight me and I’ll bleed you out like a dirty piglet, or crawl between my legs and I’ll let you live.”

For a man of Géfica, crawling between another man’s legs was a humiliation that could not be borne. Other men on the docks soon surrounded the pair, anticipating a show.

Gin looked at the man: He was tall and broad-shouldered, and he had arrogant eyes that told her he was used to bullying others to make himself feel good. But his face was smooth and his arms scarless, which mean that he hadn’t spent much time in the dark alleys of Dimushi. He didn’t know how to really fight. She could kill him before he even knew what was happening.