In the Dali era of the Tang there was a young guardsman named Cui, whose father was a high official and friendly with the greatest minister of the age. When the minister fell ill, Cui’s father sent the boy to enquire after him.
Cui was young, and quiet, and handsome as jade, and the minister took to him at once. He had the girls of the household roll up the screens and bring him into the inner room, and when Cui had delivered his father’s message the minister said: “Come and visit me when you have time. Do not be a stranger.” And he ordered one of his concubines, a girl called Hongxiao — Red Gauze — to see him out.
At the gate she stopped. She held up three fingers. Then she turned her palm over three times. Then she touched the small mirror at her breast and said: “Remember.”
And Cui went home and remembered nothing, because he had not understood a word of it.
He sat in his room and stopped eating. His father’s household had a slave named Mo Le, a dark-skinned man from the south, and Mo Le came in and said: “Young master, tell me what the trouble is. It may be solvable.”
Cui told him.
Mo Le said: “Three fingers — she lives in the third courtyard. Three turns of the palm — fifteen, the night the moon is full. The mirror at her breast — the moon. It means: come on the fifteenth, when the moon is round, to the third courtyard.”
Cui wept for joy.
On the fifteenth, Mo Le carried him on his back and went out. There were ten walls between the street and the third courtyard. Mo Le went over them like a man walking up stairs, and the great dogs of the minister’s house tore his robe to ribbons and never woke a guard.
In the third courtyard there was a girl sitting up in the moonlight, waiting.
She told Cui what she wanted: “I was a rich man’s daughter. I was taken into this house as a concubine and I have not been out of it in years. If you can get me away, I will serve you as a maid, and I will die glad.”
Mo Le waited for no further discussion. He put Cui and the girl onto his back — one at a time, twice — went over the ten walls again, and had them both home before the third watch. The girl never learned how she got there.
She lived in Cui’s house for two years. Then, one day, she was seen in the city, and someone recognised her, and the word reached the minister.
The minister sent for Cui and asked him plainly how it had been done. Cui, who was young and frightened, told him.
“Then the slave is the whole of it,” said the minister. “One man like that is a danger to the state. I want him taken.”
Soldiers surrounded Cui’s house. Mo Le, who had been sitting quietly in the courtyard, saw them come, took his short sword, and simply went up — straight up, over the roof, into the air — and was gone before an arrow was loosed. They searched the city. Nothing.
Ten years later, someone of Cui’s family saw him in Luoyang, selling medicine in the market, and not a day older.
The story is a romance, but its heart is the slave. Hongxiao gives the riddle, Cui is handsome and useless, and the man who reads the code, crosses ten walls, defeats the dogs and outruns an army is the dark-skinned servant nobody in the story ever thinks to suspect. Tang fiction rarely makes a point that plainly; when it does, as here, it makes it by giving the servant the whole plot and letting everyone else stand around admiring him.