He had memories of that, of them.īefore drinking or eating, while the tea leaves were steeping, he stood at the eastern window and spoke the prayer to his father's spirit in the direction of sunrise. There was no real reason to even tie his hair but he felt like a steppes barbarian when he left it on his shoulders. The Tagurans could deal with him unshaven. He glanced in the bronze mirror he'd been given and thought about taking a blade to his cheeks and chin, but decided against such self-abuse this morning. He dressed and built a fire, washed himself and tied back his hair while boiling water for tea. One of the results of two years alone had been his coming to think this, most of the time. His technical skills as a poet were probably above average, good enough for the verse component of the examinations, but not likely, in his own judgment, to produce something enduring. He had attempted a formal six-line poem several nights ago, their strident morning noise compared to opening hour at the two markets in Xinan, but hadn't been able to make the parallel construction hold in the final couplet. The birds woke him from the far end of the lake.
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