"No rush." Su Jinli waved her hand, watching Siyan fold the flyer into a small boat. Nianli was running after the paper boat, her skirt sweeping across the salt pile, stirring up fine snow. "Let's start with our 'little opera troupe'."
At that moment, a woman's heartbreaking cries suddenly rang out from the street corner. Su Jinli looked in the direction of the sound and saw a ragged mother kneeling at the door of the salt warehouse, her hungry baby gnawing at the salt-crusted hem of her clothes. "Master Hu, please have mercy! The child hasn't tasted salt in three days..."
Hu Wanguan spat on his horse, pointed at the woman with his greasy finger and cursed: "If you don't have money to buy salt, you'll have to starve!" After that, he rode away. The horse's hooves accurately crushed Siyan's paper boat, and the flying salt grains fell into the baby's open mouth. The child cried loudly because of the saltiness.
Su Jinli clenched her sleeves tightly, her nails digging deep into her palms. In her previous life, when she was bedridden, she couldn't even drink a bowl of hot soup with salt. Now, looking at the child's chapped lips, her throat suddenly tightened, as if she could taste the bland medicine again.
"Si Yan," she squatted down, wiping the salt from the baby's mouth, her fingertips touching the child's cold skin, "help me do the math - how many people are there in Yangzhou City, how many salt permits the Hu family has hoarded, and..." She looked up at Jiang Yan, the morning light gilding his moon-white gown. "How many minutes does it take for the salt inspector's sedan chair to travel from the government office to the salt warehouse?"
Siyan immediately perked up, clacking the abacus in her little hands with a clattering sound, the beads clattering like rain hitting banana leaves: "Mother, I've calculated it! There are about 42,300 households in Yangzhou..."
"Mom!" Nian Li suddenly grabbed her sleeve, her little face full of determination that was inconsistent with her age, "I want to sing folk songs! Just like my grandfather taught me in Hangzhou!" The child's eyes were surprisingly bright, like two morning stars falling.
Jiang Yan looked at the light in his wife and daughter's eyes and suddenly chuckled softly, his voice filled with doting: "It seems that it's time for our Su family to open the stage in Yangzhou." He raised his hand to call for the guards, "Go to the market and buy some coarse cloth and old clothes, and also prepare two pounds of pot ash. Remember to pick the finer grains."
Su Jinli looked at the tightly closed black wooden door of the Hu family salt warehouse. The copper ring on the door had turned green from the salt vapor. She suddenly remembered what her grandfather had said: "When Qing'er was a child, she was best at making up rhymes to scold those bad guys who were rich but unkind." She looked down at Nianli's bright eyes, and then at Siyan's little fingers that had already started calculating on the ground. She suddenly felt that the salty morning mist that permeated the south of the Yangtze River would eventually be blown away by the lyrics of her own small opera troupe.
At that moment, Hu Wanguan sat in the second-floor accounting office of the salt warehouse, a mountain of banknotes before him. He worked furiously on his gold-plated abacus, the beads clattering louder than Siyan's. He didn't notice that, in a teahouse on the corner, Su Jinli was writing a poem on the table, using the remaining tea from her bowl. Nianli, leaning over her shoulder, followed along in her childish voice: "Salt merchant Hu Wanguan, hoards salt like charcoal, while the people eat dust, while he makes a dirty profit..." Siyan, crouched beneath the table, clacking her abacus with deafening noises, as if accompanying a nursery rhyme. The Yangzhou wind blew through the bamboo curtains of the teahouse, carrying these steamy words out into the streets, toward the people munching on bland steamed buns, toward the stage about to begin, and toward the Hu family's warehouse overflowing with white salt, and toward the storm that would plunge the price of salt in Yangzhou three days later.
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