Free The Courtesan by Alexandra Curry

dress in warm clothes; she has braided her hair and washed her face. She has tried to think of everything and to remember as little as possible of her own time sitting here in this same place on this same stool, fidgeting with her toes on the rickety crosspiece, waiting for the foot binder to come and make her feet small.
    â€œSmall for the men who are my customers. Small for bed business.” That is what Lao Mama said then.
    Most things are hard to remember after so much time has passed, but this thing is hard to forget.
    Lao Mama misses almost nothing now, checking this and checking that. The fire is not hot enough. Neither is the tea. The boys are clumsy because they are anxious—or anxious because they are clumsy. Suyin herself is kneeling, the curved knife in her hand, preparing the girl’s feet, trimming her toenails. There is not much to do there. Her feet have been well cared for; they are soft, pale, and clean, the feet of a child who has always worn fine shoes.
    The two houseboys are chattering in the way that boys do, baiting each other, pinching, flicking, shoving. Their grip on the basin slips as they shift it to a hotter place on the fire—they are small and it is far too heavy for them—and a dollop of pink liquid slops over the side. The boys cry out, and Suyin leaps to her feet. Embers hiss and the liquid stinks and the fire flares; all eyes dart in Lao Mama’s direction and the kitchen god is staring down from the wall, judging them all with his wild eyes.
    â€œCan’t you get anything right?” Lao Mama’s face twists. Clumsiness annoys her. The boys are quick and brothel-born. Nodding, they work to settle the basin, their five senses now alert to thedanger of Lao Mama’s mood. Suyin lends a hand and worries with them—and doesn’t want to worry. Not about them. Or anyone. The basin is large enough to stew a small pig, and it is the stink of the wafting, blood-tinged brew that Suyin remembers most of all from her time on this stool waiting for the foot binder. That and how her feet were first so cold and then so hot and filled with pain—and how the pain was even worse when the foot-binding sickness came and almost made her die.
    Now Lao Mama has a bamboo rod at hand. She was the one, then, who carved Suyin’s toenails and trimmed her flesh and pummeled her muscles until they ached. She wasn’t gentle. She didn’t try to soothe Suyin, and Suyin cried, and her toes bled, and her feet hurt, and then the foot binder came. When it was over Lao Mama made Suyin stand up. She made her walk. And walk and walk and walk some more. On her poor, raw, twisted feet.
    â€œGet the bellows. Bring more wood.
Kuai dian
—hurry. That fire is wilting like an old man’s
jiba.
” Lao Mama’s voice has turned nasty. The tiny dog is mewling sweetly from its place in her sleeve. “Where is Cook? What do I pay that useless piece of gooseflesh for? He should be here, working, helping—working.”
    â€œCook has gone to buy food for this evening’s banquet.” In spite of all she doesn’t want, Suyin does want to protect the cook. He rose early. He prepared the brew in the basin—
pig’s blood and special herbs to prevent infection in the feet.
His own recipe. It doesn’t always work, as Suyin knows too well. This morning when the brew was ready, he said, “This is no place for a man,” and he left.
    He is a good man who works in a bad place,
Suyin thinks.
    â€œIt is not nearly hot enough.” Lao Mama is peering into the basin with a crone’s hunch in her back. The hunch is worse than it used to be. Suyin has watched it grow. “She needs this concoction hot enough to sizzle the beak off a chicken,” Lao Mama says now.
    She,
they all know, is the foot binder, who is coming soon—at the Hour of the Dragon—and whom Lao Mama despises, not so secretly. It is because she charges so much money