While I wondered what this had to do with my current and pressing and frustrating problems, Hui-sheng took out of the bag one bean, showed it to me and placed it on box number three. Then, without looking, she reached into the bag, took out a casual handful of beans and spread them beside the square. Very rapidly, she flicked out four beans from that spread, and four more, shoving them to one side, and kept on separating out four beans at a time from that spread. When they had all, by fours, been moved apart, there remained two beans over. She pointed to those two, pointed to the empty number-two box drawn on the ground, snatched up the bean from the box numbered three, added it to the ones she still had, grinned impishly at me, and made a gesture signifying “too bad.”
“I understand,” I said. “I wagered on box number three, but number two won, so I lost my bean. I am desolated.”
She scooped all the beans back into the bag, took one out, ostentatiously put it on a number for me again—this time number four. She started to reach into the bag again, but stopped, and motioned for me to do that. I understood: the game was totally fair, the counting beans were grabbed up at random. I took a considerable handful from the bag and spread them beside her. She rapidly flicked them aside again, four at a flick, and this time they happened to be divisible by four. There were none left to one side at the finish.
“Aha,” I said. “That means my number four wins. What do I win?”
She held up four fingers, pointed to my wager, added to it three beans more, and shoved them all toward me.
“If I lose, I lose my bean. If my numbered box is the winner, I get my bean back fourfold.” I made a face of toleration. “It is a simple game, a childish game, no more complex than the old mariners’ game of venturina. But if you are suggesting that we play at it for a while—very well, my dear, let us play. I assume you are trying to convey something more than boredom.”
She gave me an ample stock of beans to wager with, and indicated that I could risk as many as I liked, and on as many boxes as I chose. So I piled ten beans in each of them, all four boxes, to see what would happen. With an impatient look at me, and without even delving into her bag to ascertain the winning number, she simply gave me forty beans from it, then scooped up the forty on the ground. I realized that, by such a system of play, I could do no more than stay even. So I began trying varieties of play—leaving one box empty, piling different numbers of beans on the other boxes, and so on. The game became a puzzle in arithmetical terms. Sometimes I would win a whole handful of beans, and Hui-sheng would retain only a few. Sometimes the favor of chance went the other way: I would heavily augment her supply and diminish my own.
I perceived that, if a man were seriously playing this game, he could, by one lucky win, come out of it much richer in beans—if he got up with his winnings, and went away, and could refuse the temptation to try again. But there was always the urge, especially when one was ahead, to try for more yet. I could also imagine, if one player were vying with three others, plus the banker with the bean bag, it could get absorbing, challenging, tantalizing. But, as well as I could gauge the probabilities, the banker would be getting richer all the time, and any winning player would be enriching himself mainly at the expense of the other three.
I gestured for Hui-sheng’s attention. She raised her eyes from the playing ground, and I pointed to myself, to the game, to my money purse, indicating: “If a man were playing for money instead of beans, this could be an expensive sport.”
She smiled, and her eyes danced, and she nodded emphatically: “That is what I was trying to convey.” And she swept an arm to indicate all of Hang-zho—or maybe all of Manzi—completing the sweep by pointing to the room in our house that I and my scribe used for our working quarters.
I stared at her eagerly glowing little face, then at the beans on the ground. “Are you suggesting this as a substitute for tax collecting?”
Emphatic nodding: “Yes.” And a spreading of hands: “Why not?”
What a ridiculous idea, was my first thought, but then I reflected. I had seen Han men risking their money on the zhi-pai cards, on the ma-jiang tiles, even on the feng-zheng flying toys—and doing it avidly, feverishly, madly. Could they possibly be enticed into a madness for this simpleminded game? And with me—or rather, the imperial treasury—holding the bank?
“Ben trovato!” I muttered. “The Khakhan said it himself: involuntary benevolence!” I sprang up and raised Hui-sheng from the flower bed and embraced her enthusiastically. “You may have provided my succor and salvation. Tell me, did you learn this game as a child?”
Yes, she had. Some years ago—after a Mongol band of marauders torched her village and slew all the adults, and took her and the other children as slaves, and she was chosen to be raised as a lon-gya of concubines, and a shaman did the cutting that made her and the whole world silent—the old woman who tended her convalescence had kindly taught her that game, because it was one that could be played without words spoken or heard. Hui-sheng thought she had been about six years old at the time.
I tightened my embrace of her.
5
WITHIN three years, I was accounted the richest man in Manzi. Of course, I really was not, because I scrupulously and punctiliously sent on all my profits to the imperial treasury in Khanbalik, by trustworthy Mongol carriers with heavily armed outriders. Over the years, they transported a fortune in paper money and coins, and, for all I know, they still are transporting more.
Hui-sheng and I between us decided on the name for the game—Hua Dou Yin-hang, which means roughly “Break the Bean Bank”—and it was a success from the very start. The Magistrate Fung, though at first incredulous, was soon enchanted with the idea, and convened a special session of his Cheng just to put the seal of legality on my venture and issue to me letters of patent and entitlement—all embossed with the Manzi chrysanthemum—so that no others could copy the idea and set up in competition to me. The Wang Agayachi, though at first dubious of the propriety of my venture—“Who ever heard of a government sponsoring a game of chance?”—soon was praising it, and me, and declaring that I had made Manzi the most lucrative of all the Khanate’s acquired lands. To every accolade, I said modestly and truthfully, “It was not my doing, but that of my intelligent and talented lady. I am only the harvester. Hui-sheng is the gardener with the golden touch.”
She and I commenced the venture with an investment so trivial and meager that it would have shamed a fishmonger outfitting a poor stall in the marketplace. Our equipment consisted of nothing but a table and a tablecloth. Hui-sheng procured a piece of brilliant vermilion red cloth—the Han color signifying good fortune—and embroidered on it in black the quartered square, and in gold the four numbers inside the boxes, and we spread that cloth over a stone table in our garden, and we sent all our servants out to cry along the streets and canals and the riverfront: “Come one, come all venturesome souls! Wager a tsien and win a liang! Come and Break the Bean Bank! Make your dreams come true and your ancestors raise their hands in wonderment! Quick fortune awaits at the establishment of Polo and Echo! Come one and all!”
They came. Perhaps some people came just to steal a close look at me, the demon-haired Ferenghi. Perhaps some came out of actual avarice to win an easy fortune, but most seemed merely curious to see what we were offering, and some simply idled in on their way to somewhere else. But they came. And, although some jested and jeered—“A game for children!”—all made at least one play at it. And, although they tossed their tsien or two onto the red cloth in front of Hui-sheng as if they were only humoring a pretty child, they waited to see if they had won or lost. And, although many then just laughed good-humoredly and left the garden, some got intrigued and stayed to play again. And again. And, because only four could play at once, there was some mild wrangling and pushing among them, and those who could not play stayed to watch enthralled. And by the end of the day, when we declared the game over, it was quite a crowd our servants ushered out of the garden. Some of the players went away with more money than they had brought, and went rejoicing that they had found “an unguarded money vault,” and vowed to keep coming back and plundering it. And some went away rather lighter in the purse than when they had come, and they went berating themselves for having been bested by “such a juvenile sport,” and vowed to come back for retaliation on the Bean Bank table.