“Master!” The steward walked over with quick steps from the other side of the yard, holding a thin letter. He offered it up to him with both hands. “Master, a military official just now dropped by to pass on this letter. He said this was the Duke’s letter to home, recently brought back from the Southwest.”
Yan Xiaohan’s hand violently jolted. The hydrangea was instantly baldened by the grip, shaking off a field of white petals. His ears were inundated with the sound of his own heartbeat. “Hand it over so I can see,” he said, barely managing to look calm on the surface.
The envelope was very thin, and sealed up tight. Inside it was only one transparent sheet of letter paper. Yan Xiaohan feared using too much hand strength and tearing it while he was pulling it out.
Why was there only one sheet? Those five words of ‘how does mine wife fare’ were still heavily branded onto his heart. What had he written this time, as he was beyond the infinite landscape?
When he opened up the twice-folded paper, his whole body went completely still, maintaining its letter-holding pose.
There wasn’t a single word on it, just messy ink marks that looked like a lump of indecipherable scribbles. Only after staring at it for half the day did he depend upon his lacking imagination to follow along Fu Shen’s inventive brush strokes.
The back was the black stuff. The belly was the white. The mouth was extending from the front, and the claws were sticking out of the rear. Those several strokes sticking out of the top were… wings?That wasn’t right. What the heck had four wings?
No matter what, Fu Shen had been a Don from a rich family. Even if his art couldn’t be a family heirloom, it ought to be able to allow someone to make out what he had drawn. What was with this giant mass of black that someone could stick somewhere and ward off evil spirits with?!
Yan Xiaohan was completely unaware that his own appearance of being unsure how to react while gritting his teeth in rage was, in the eyes of others, more liable to terrify someone than the picture was. He was like a little kid that had been drawn in by some novelty plaything, focusing all his attention on looking for an answer and not at all considering the possibility that the image was a casually-drawn doodle with no meaning whatsoever.
Fu Shen wouldn’t make sport of him from thousands of li away, of course, but he really had expended all of his effort to be able to draw in this style.
Yan Xiaohan tried to identify it for a long time, looking at it rightside up and upside down, until he finally discovered that the judgments he’d had just now were off. What stuck out the front wasn’t a mouth, but two bird heads, and what came from the rear weren’t claws, either, but tails. The four traces of ink were two pairs of wings. Then, going along with the black back and white belly, the solution was eventually on the verge of coming to him.
Drawn on the paper was… a pair of geese.
The moment he came to understand, the look he had suddenly softened, as if he had been struck in the heart by something. The corners of his mouth slightly raised up, but there seemed to be the shine of water filling his eyes.
The letter had been sent back along with the military report. Because there was a risk of it being stolen and looked at, Fu Shen couldn’t bluntly state what he was thinking, so he used means like this to send him a ‘goose letter’.
What ‘swan gooses’ symbolized was a hidden meaning that only they could implicitly understand.
The goose was a loyal bird, having one partner all its life, and flying across the world with them.
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