And so… they were marching north, into the mountains. The men were singing, again. Shang tried to remember his father's advice… singing was best because… no … at least if the men were singing they weren't fighting? Or was it that they weren't afraid? No, that couldn't be it… the men had good reason to feel, if not fear, at least nervous. They didn't seem too frightened though. Much of their song seemed to involve how much they disliked marching. Perhaps these were feelings best sung, rather than voiced at their commanding officers…
Shang could barely admit it to himself, but he did have a nagging sense of unease. The original idea was that, as reserves, his troops would only act to trap the retreating Huns and relieve the regular soldiers after the initial battle. They were simply too few men to do much good at the front. If his father had ordered them to bolster the troops at the front before the main offensive, he must know himself to be outnumbered – and quite substantially, too, not to simply recruit more men from the surrounding villages. Or perhaps, more optimistically, the initial battle had gone much better than hoped, and he simply wished to relieve his men earlier, and he had no real need of reserves to guard against renegade Huns attacking in their withdrawal.
The men were singing about women now. This was a subject Shang had been studiously trying not to think about. He must, above all things, not be disappointed in his new bride because he had imagined her to be someone else. Nothing would be gained by fantasizing.
They were teasing little Ping, now, about his success with women. Shang remembered what it was like when he was a regular soldier, too young and too inexperienced to have any knowledge of women. He remembered with some distaste being dragged by the older soldiers to a house of ill repute. That sort of thing was what they believed would make him a man. On the contrary, all that Shang could remember, when he was abandoned by them and escorted by a young woman whose face was made inhuman with thick chalk and ink, was how awkward and shy he had felt as she unwound her thick coils of hair and began to display her dainty feet. Much of the time, he realised, he had spent panicking, trying to avoid intimacy. It had offended his sense of decency, of morality, to take casually for hire that which had not been legally agreed upon by the superior authority of their parents.
How about a girl whose got a brain, who always speaks her mind? The men laughed at Ping's idea of a perfect wife. It marked him out as unusual, certainly, thought Shang, but only because Ping was too young to understand the peasant's stock responses – about cooking, cleaning and silent worship - required of a man to maintain a level of privacy. Shang could understand what Ping meant.
He remembered the surprised look on the woman's face when he had asked, not only her name - Deng Fang, if he remembered rightly - but who her parents were, where she came from, what songs she liked to sing, what she wanted for the future, what she thought of him, of the army, of the chances of war. Perhaps she hoped she might make a concubine yet. But in truth a conversation with a woman was quite as exotic to Shang as any other form of affection which in the end he responded to stiffly, almost as a sense of obligation. Women were so silent, so alien, like the peasant women they passed on the road … or so present and cruel, like his father's concubines. It was customary to belittle a talkative wife, but in his obviously limited experience, romantic situations were awkward enough without some confidence that the recipient had a brain and could respond… appropriately.
Shang sighed. Love was so often belittled by scholars and poets because it clearly made men neglect their duty to honour the wishes of their ancestors. Love was dangerous. It didn't stop his secret curiosity about the emotion though. It was too much to hope, of course, that he could fall in love with his wife, or that she could fall in love with him. Indeed, any poetry he had ever encountered on the subject implied people only fell in love when their marriage was forbidden. Perhaps, after all, marriages functioned better without that sort of thing. But, on the other hand, Fa Ping was an honest, loyal little soul, affectionate and hard-working and… he would be lucky, he thought, extremely lucky, if his wife Fa Mulan took after him. Perhaps he had spoken so because - No, thought Shang grimly, that was erring too close to speculation again, and he had promised himself he would not speculate on that subject.