Read Online Everything Under the Heavens (Silk and Song) by Dana Stabenow - Free Book Online

with one hand. Deshi the Scout and a dozen other retainers materialized behind the Nippon guards, armed with swords, pry bars and belaying pins.
    “Because of your greed,” Wu Li said, courtesy giving way to contempt, “and your inability to make your case for reimbursement without threat, you will receive the salary we agreed on in Edo, and not one tael more.”
    There was the promise of an incipient riot, but Wu Li’s men were in sufficient number to quell it before the Mongol authorities were alerted and all his profit went in fines for failure to keep the peace. “My thanks, Deshi,” Wu Li said, and for the first time noticed that the scout was pale and shivering. “My friend, you are ill! Return home at once and seek out Shu Shao. She will know what to do.”
    Unfortunately, in this instance, Shu Shao, already a healer of some repute, did not.
    The next morning, Shu Ming fell ill. She complained of loose stool in the morning, and three hours later she, too, was pale and shivering, her skin clammy to the touch, her heart hammering beneath her skin at a frantic, irregular pace. She complained of thirst, when her mind wasn’t wandering, which it did more and more as the day wore on. They tried giving her clear soup and tea but she couldn’t keep anything down, and by the afternoon her sodden bedclothes had to be changed every hour.
    Before nightfall, she was dead.
    So was the maid who laundered her sheets, the stable boy, Deshi the Scout, and 3,526 other citizens of Cambaluc.
    In the horrible weeks that followed, Wu Li went about looking like a ghost. Johanna attended him white-lipped and withdrawn. Jaufre suffered the loss of his second mother with outward calm and inward agony, taking over the mews and the stables while Shu Shao took charge of the kitchen, and all went on tiptoe for fear that the master of the house would shatter like glass at one wrong word.
    One day a month later Jaufre went out to the stables and found Johanna seated on a bale of hay next to Edyk the Portuguese, deep in earnest conversation. She looked more animated than she had since the day her mother died. Edyk was holding one of Johanna’s hands in both of his own, and as Jaufre came around the corner he raised it to his lips.
    Johanna looked up and saw Jaufre. She pulled her hand free and jumped to her feet. “Edyk has come.”
    “So I see.” The two men exchanged a cool glance.
    “I am sorry for the trouble that has visited the house of the Honorable Wu Li,” Edyk said with a formal bow.
    Jaufre inclined his head a fraction. He could not rue the lightening of sorrow on Johanna’s face, even if he suspected that their recent troubles were not what had brought Edyk the Portuguese to the house of Wu Li.
    Edyk the Portuguese was in his early twenties and, like Johanna and Jaufre, the child of expatriate Westerners, with eyes too round for Cambaluc comfort. A brawny young man, thickly-muscled, again like Johanna and Jaufre he moved with the assurance of someone accustomed to an active life. He had his father’s brown eyes and his mother’s black hair and a charming smile all his own. He was a trader, as the honorable Wu Li had been a trader, and traveling the trade routes with him Johanna had watched that smile melt feminine hearts from Kinsai to Kashgar.
    He was shorter than Jaufre by a head, which was some comfort to the crusader’s son, but he made up for his lack of height with a dynamic personality and a great deal of personal charm and energy. He was an up-and-coming merchant in Cambaluc, one of the group of foreign traders resident there by permission of the Khan who accounted for the bulk of foreign goods imported into the city. Since the death of the Great Khan, raiders on the Silk Road had moved from a rarity to a steadily increasing threat. In response, the Cambaluc merchants had banded together in a cooperative association, exchanging information on road conditions and organizing communal caravans at set times during the