The Mirror

Zou Ji asks his wife, his concubine, his guest: am I handsomer than Lord Xu? All say yes. All are lying — for love, for fear, for want. Then he tells the king.

Read the want behind the yes.

The headman liked to be told he was a fair man, and the village had long since learned to tell him.

He kept the pair a night because a diviner at his gate flattered it, and over the millet he asked the room — as he plainly asked it often — whether any lord between the rivers judged a dispute more justly than he did. His wife said no one, husband. His steward said no one in living memory. A tenant who had come to beg a delay on his rent said there was no one in all of Qi, and said it twice.

Dog, who had a bowl of the headman's millet in front of him and meant to keep it, said the headman was surely the fairest man in Qi, and watched him warm to it like a hand held to a fire.

Later, in the dark of the byre, the Wu named the three of them for the boy without being asked, the way she did sometimes to keep her own hand in. "The wife, because she loves him — or is too tired to pay for the no. The steward, because the day he says it is the day he goes looking for new work. The tenant, because he wants his rent held over, and 'no one in all of Qi' is cheaper than a bribe and works better."

"And me," Dog said.

"You wanted the millet."

"I wanted the millet." He was quiet a moment. "He believed all four of us."

"He has heard yes so long he can no longer hear the want underneath it. That is the only thing a man in that chair should fear — not the few who tell him no, but the many who tell him yes, and what each of them is buying with it." She turned over in the straw. "A glass that only flatters is a wall with a face painted on it. He'll judge some case badly one day, and never know which mirror told him he couldn't."