There was not less than a hundred of palace guards in the procession, all of them wearing silk festive hats with wing-like flaps and purple robes and girdles with carven horn plates, all of them bearing gongs and drums. Isn't it true that one can see the real grandeur from afar? It is especially so this time: for the brilliant wang Zhou, brother of the ruling Emperor, Son of Heaven Yong Le, returns once more to the apanage granted to him!

Nevertheless, the crowded gapers were murmuring between themselves that the prince is a bit light-fingered and had been discharged of this very apanage for three times already because he used to commit "abuses" and to break openly the canons established by the Department of Works although they were adopted specially for the usage of the wangs, i.e. the closest relatives of the Emperor: he neglected insolently the fixed height of walls in his palace, he made twice more gates there than prescribed, he tolerated his western chambers to be painted with indecent colors, an so on, and so on. But all this was nothing compared with the fact that the people of Ningo could celebrate his arrival and have a bit of entertainment; holidays were not so much abundant in their monotonous everyday life!

The guards were followed by twenty courtiers transporting with utmost care a tortoise-shell casket adorned with jasper and emeralds. The casket contained precious relics of the Department of Rituals: a certificate confirming the title of wang, named "tzeh" and engraved on a finest sheet of pure gold as well as the personal stamp of prince Zhou (a square base and a figure of a jumping tiger at the top). There was also a scroll in the casket: a copy of nephrite tablets stored in the Temple of Emperor's Ancestors and bearing twenty hieroglyphs dedicated to become the first part of names of Zhou's progeny for the next twenty generations.

The order of names was to be strictly observed; watchful clerks of the Emperor's Kin Department won't forgive any discrepancies.

The next object of general interest in the procession was the carriage carrying the up-to-date favorite of prince Zhou, his beloved concubine, the pretty Xuan. It rolled slowly surrounded by eunuchs with small and large fans. Xuan (sometimes called jokingly, in her absence, of course, Xuannu the Faultless) [1] sat behind a window blind; as to Zhou-wang himself, he did not lead the procession as he should to but rode at the side of Xuannu's carriage, deliberately demonstrating not for the first time his disdain for the etiquette. Bent at the small window, he was whispering something in quite a musical manner; may be he was reciting poetry for his beloved girl, some verses of the Tang period, his favorite ones.

So everything had been going on as it should go, to the minute details of the ritual, until an elderly corpulent woman jostled her way forward from the back rows of the crowd and waddled on towards prince Zhou and the carriage of the pretty Xuan.

This woman was well known to everybody in the Pin-Erh quarter. Yes, there could be no mistake: she was Eighth Aunty, the wife of a feeble dyer Mao who had provided her dear husband with a full dozen of children, a quiet complacent simpleton with hands always wet and red because of ceaseless washing. She was the least expected person to shake the foundations of the Yellow Dust Worlds by going in such a way to meet the noble wang, the Emperor's kinsman...

– Go away, you filthy villain! – shrieked a fatty eunuch in a shrill voice and lashed the disturber with his large fan.

Eighth Aunty lifted her forearm to meet the stroke. The bamboo plates of the fan broke with a loud crack loosing the small glass beads attached to them.

At the same moment the palms of the dyer Mao's wife, put together like "a monkey handful", slapped the protruding ears of the eunuch. The unhappy one fell to the pavement swallowing his cry and opening silently his mouth like a fish put out of water.

Eighth Aunty continued her way towards the carriage.

The first who came to his senses was a long-moustached courtier clad in a black robe embroidered with curving dragons; according to his girdle he was taiwey, the chief of the bodyguards.

At his abrupt commands the riders broke the order of the procession in no time, passed by the courtiers carrying the relics and symbols of the wang's dignity and surrounded the Eighth Aunty; in the next moment the guards who occurred to be the closest to her fell down off their saddles as if casually and their steel blades shone in the sun.

The festivity was swiftly turning to a senseless slaughter: the wife of the dyer Mao was wielding diligently a small two-sided axe drawn off somebody's hands and the skilled soldiers seemed to become pugnacious kids trying in vain to reach the crazy woman with their weapons: she was turning around like a whirlwind. The taiwey's head, hewn off in a swoop, rolled right under the hooves of the wang's stallion, the beast reared to flee away from the smiling dead and pranced until his rider's mighty hand managed to restrain him.

The two bodyguards of the royal person had not yet fallen down to the pavement covered with blood (the first had his scull split, the other had hardly began to wield his big axe before the small one crushed his backbone) when Eighth Aunty stopped near the carriage and looked upwards at the prince Zhou.

Her glance did not promise anything good.

Even the deceased Hong Wu, father of the many-times disgraced wang, had never looked at him so; although in his youth he had been a great master of dadaoshu [2] and the leader of the "red kerchiefs” [3] before becoming the first Emperor of the Ming dynasty and driving the Mongolian invaders off to the northern steppes.

But as light-fingered as Zhou-wang was, he had never been weak-handed. The blade of his light jian sword whistled joyfully leaving the richly decorated scabbard. The silly eunuchs tired awkwardly to protect their lord hindering him in fact to wield skillfully his steel lightning; but just in the moment when the sword at last fell down cutting the air in a sophisticated curved line, Eighth Aunty sagged back and stroke the blade from both sides with her hands as swift as if she were a cat.

Clang, crash – the disarmed Zhou-wang makes his horse to rear, and the wife of the dyer Mao creeps just under its hooves and breaks with her fist the brittle lock of the carriage door that Xuannu the Faultless fastened but a minute earlier.

Many people have seen it: the woman kicked the door open, seized the concubine by her hair and pulled her out. Taking no heed of the piercing cries of the frightened girl and of somebody's battle ring aiming at her head the old woman snatches a tiny Hanchou dog, desperately barking, away from Xuannu's hands and kills it breaking its spine over her knee.

After that the woman threw the dead dog down on the body of the wang's concubine who lay in a swoon on the ground.

There was silence and confusion for a second. Everybody stood still: soldiers, eunuchs, gapers, prince Zhou demanding to give him any weapon... Only Eighth Aunty was shaking her head and looking at her hands as if she hadn't ever seen them before; and a shaven-headed monk clad in an orange cassock was sliding noiselessly towards the murderous woman. Keeping his place at the very end of the procession he he did not have an opportunity to take any part in the battle.

The wooden sandals of the monk touched the ground as lightly as leaves; the heaven-folk of the White Clouds may walk in such a way, for they are able to stand safely on a thin sheet of rice paper.

But even this monk didn't manage to come in time.

Eighth Aunty became suddenly as weighty and awkward as she had always been, but her hands stretched as if by themselves forward and down forcing her to sit down, and then the fingers of her right hand, like a spider hunting for the paralyzed prey seized the handle of the broken jian sword dropped by prince Zhou.