Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [32]
It took conversations with three impatient shopkeepers to give me a name for this Oriental discipline: fungshwei, the fish-seller called it, shaking an octopus in my face, but no no, he didn't know no-one, go down to bookstore, please go now he busy. So I left him to his eels and squiggly things and went past the barber shop and around the pavement-seller of small decorated cakes, stepping into the street to avoid hitting my head on a platoon of flattened ducks, in the direction that he had indicated, only what appeared to be a bookstore turned out to be some kind of apothecary, odorous and shadowy with an entire wall of drawers marked only by characters. Further down the street, a building with curlicued roofs that I took to be a temple was revealed as a telephone exchange, so I turned back, narrowly avoiding collision with a heavily laden silver tray of fragrant covered bowls, and made a more methodical search. The bookstore, which I had passed twice, was tucked behind a pavement greengrocer's; I found it only by spotting a man coming out with a fresh newspaper in his hand.
I pushed between the crates of strange knobbly dark objects on the one side and baskets of strange smooth light objects on the other, to enter a world that was comforting in its familiarity. Books of all sizes, colours, shapes, and languages stretched from floor to ceiling, riding in neat piles on central tables, filling the hands of the half dozen patrons, all of whom glanced up as I entered and watched me unabashedly for a while before their books pulled them back in. The front of the shop displayed newspapers, mostly Chinese although I saw two San Francisco English-language dailies as well as a week-old New York Times. Nothing from England, though.
“May I help you?” asked a voice in lightly accented English, with no trace of the pidgin dialect. I hadn't noticed him before, as he had been standing behind a high desk, but now he rose up and seated himself on a stool. A Chinese man of about thirty, wearing a brown suit, flecked red tie, and wire-rimmed glasses much like those on my own nose.
“Yes, thank you,” I said. With the recent experience of harried and impatient shopkeepers in mind, I thought I had better pin the man down in a commercial transaction before asking questions about Chinese cooks and gardeners. “I understand there's something called fungshwei. I'm probably not saying it right—it has to do with balancing energies in a room, or something?” I allowed my voice to rise into a question mark, to say that I was just a harmless white woman with money to spend on oddities that took her fancy.
“Fungshwei,” he repeated, and I took note of his pronunciation. “You wish a book on it?”
“If you have one. In English,” I added with a self-deprecating grin. He responded to my silly-me attitude with a polite smile of his own, although something about it made me wonder if he wasn't aware that my act was just that. But he turned on the stool, and I was deciding to place the smile under general Oriental inscrutability when he all but vanished behind the counter. I watched the top of his head go past, realising belatedly that the man was only an inch or two more than five feet high.
As he walked towards the back of the store, I saw that his gait was slightly uneven, a twist more than a limp, as if his spine had a kink in it. He tugged a wheeled library ladder from its recesses, allowing it to run along its tracks for about fifteen feet before stopping it to clamber up into the reaches of the shelves. He pulled out two volumes, came down, returned the ladder to its place, and came back to the desk with the books, laying them in front of me on the counter.
“I do not have any English books entirely about fungshwei,” he told me. “Both of these have chapters on the science. The one in this book is longer, with more examples, but it suffers from slight inaccuracies. The other is shorter, the English barely adequate, but the author knows what he is talking about.”
I looked over the offerings, finding among other things that the discipline was