Chapter 3: The Little Flower-Shaped Bronze Mirror

The woman caught sight of the dark red blood clotted at the back of Zuo Shaoyang’s head, matting his hair, and gasped.
“You’ve hurt your head! There’s so much blood. Let me look!”
Startled, Zuo Shaoyang reached behind his head. His palm came away with frozen flakes of dried blood. It looked as though the injury might be serious.
He felt around again and checked how he was feeling. No headache, no dizziness, no nausea—none of the signs of a concussion. How strange. An injury that looked this bad, yet he felt nothing at all.
The woman helped examine the back of his head. There was a wound, but it had already closed and stopped bleeding. Somewhat reassured, she brushed the snow from his back.
“How do you feel, little brother? Is anything wrong?”
He shook his head. “I’m all right. Who are you? Where am I?”
She stared. “What’s wrong with you? I’m your sister.”
“My sister? Have you mistaken me for someone else?”
Alarmed, she took him by the shoulders and gave him a gentle shake.
“Don’t frighten me. Did you hurt your head when you fell?”
“Fell?”
He remembered what he had seen while plunging downward, just before he lost consciousness.
“Where did I fall from?”
“You climbed up the cliff to gather herbs, but you lost your footing and fell onto that big rock halfway down. I thought you’d been killed—no, no! I mean, I thought you’d been badly hurt. I couldn’t climb up there myself. I was so frightened I just stood here crying. Luckily, this young lady happened to pass by. She climbed up and brought you down.”
“What?”
Zuo Shaoyang turned toward the dark-skinned girl. Her pretty face flushed, and her large eyes blinked, but she didn’t look away.
Something shifted in her pupils: his reflection.
The figure he glimpsed there was unfamiliar.
A shock ran through him. He leaned closer to look, so startled that he forgot he was staring into a girl’s eyes rather than a mirror. A blush spread across her dark cheeks. Still she didn’t turn away. Her shining black eyes remained fixed on him.
This time he saw clearly.
Zuo Shaoyang cried out and raised a hand to his head. His hair was long—long enough to be gathered into a topknot. A cloth was wrapped around it from behind, with two short ties hanging down.
Just like the headcloths in historical films.
He looked down. He too was wearing a short, coarse-cloth tunic with an overlapping front, loose trousers bound at the lower legs, and a pair of stiff cloth shoes. He looked like a man in a costume drama, though hardly a scholar. More like a rustic villager, some anonymous extra in the background.
What was happening?
“Where am I?” he asked blankly. “Who are you?”
The woman watched him with growing concern.
“The fall must have given you a fright. Don’t worry. We’ll go home. Let me help you up.”
Before she could reach for him, Zuo Shaoyang scrambled to his feet. He twisted around to inspect his clothes, looked from one woman to the other, and stared wildly about him.
Panic was taking hold.
Could this be it? That time travel everyone talks about?
“What year is it?” he demanded.
The worry on the woman’s face deepened as she stood.
“What’s happened to you…?”
“Just tell me!”
“It’s the first year of Zhenguan.”
Zhenguan? The celebrated Zhenguan reign?
He was stunned.
“This is the Tang dynasty?”
“Yes.”
“And the emperor is Li Shimin?”
“Heavens! You can’t just say His Majesty’s personal name like that! You really have knocked your wits out. Come on. We’re going home.”
It really was the Tang dynasty.
The first year of Zhenguan—the first year of Li Shimin’s reign, just after he had seized the throne in the Xuanwu Gate Incident.
He had fallen into a passage through time and emerged in the early Tang.
Seeing him standing motionless, staring into space, the woman grew frantic.
“Don’t scare me like this! Come home. Father will look at you. A dose of medicine will put you right.”
She reached for him.
“Do you have a mirror?” Zuo Shaoyang asked.
She shook her head. “What do you want a mirror for?”
The girl with the large dark eyes reached inside her jacket and drew out a small flower-shaped bronze mirror. She handed it to him.
The metal was warm, presumably from being held against her body. He caught that same faint scent of fresh grass and gave her a puzzled glance before raising the mirror.
It wasn’t very well polished. The reflection was blurred, but clear enough for him to see his face.
A completely unfamiliar face.
It looked rather dull and awkward, and the body beneath it was slight.
This wasn’t him at all.
Had his soul entered someone else’s body? Had he come back to life in a dead man’s flesh?
Normally, you could toss those phrases around with a laugh. Now that it had actually happened to him, he discovered how deeply unsettling they were.
A chill crept through him from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. It had nothing to do with the freezing weather.
This cold came from fear.
He remembered the man he had seen curled on the ledge as he fell. Had that man died in the fall? Had Zuo Shaoyang’s soul traveled through time and entered his body, bringing it back to life?
He didn’t know how it had happened. He knew only that he was no longer himself. He had become someone else: an ordinary man in the early Tang, whose family, judging by his clothes, didn’t seem well off.
Slowly recovering from the shock, he turned to the woman.
“Who are you? And who am I?”
Her heart sank.
Her brother must have damaged his brain in the fall. She remembered their father saying that a terrible ordeal could make someone forget things. She had to remind him, help him recover his memory as quickly as possible.
She forced a small smile.
“Your surname is Zuo, and your given name is Zhong. I’m your elder sister—your own sister. My childhood name is Huixiang. It means fennel. When you were little, you liked to call me Fennel Bean. Father’s name is Zuo Gui. He’s a physician. He likes to start his prescriptions with cinnamon twig, gui zhi, and he gave our medicine shop a name that sounds the same: Guizhi Hall. That’s why people who know him call him the Cinnamon Twig Physician. Mother’s maiden name is Liang. She helps Father run the shop. Business hasn’t been very… Well, never mind that. Do you remember now?”
At last, Zuo Shaoyang understood.
He really had traveled through time. He was in the early years of the Tang dynasty.
People in time-travel stories were always overjoyed. All he felt was fear and bewilderment.
The man whose body he had entered was also surnamed Zuo. Only the given name was different. That was a coincidence, at least.
He looked the woman up and down. So this was his sister in his new life?
Time travel. Something so incredible had actually happened—and he had become another person in the process.
Then again, perhaps it wasn’t entirely beyond belief. The ancients had thought Chang’e’s flight to the moon was a myth. Hadn’t people reached the moon by now? Anything was possible. Here he was, after all, in another age.
But could he get back?
Probably not.
And if he couldn’t, did that mean he would never see his parents again? His relatives, friends, classmates—any of them?
He thought of his parents, growing older with every year, now separated from him by more than a thousand years. He might never see them again for the rest of his life.
Grief tightened in his chest.
Huixiang had been watching his face closely. Now his expression turned desolate, and his eyes reddened. She didn’t know whether he was grieving over the family’s struggling medicine shop or distressed by his injury and lost memory.
Her own heart ached. She tugged at his sleeve.
“Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.”
Zuo Shaoyang blinked back the tears.
He wasn’t given to brooding. He was here now; he would have to make the best of it. His life had taken a turn he could never have imagined, and all he could do was steel himself and go on.
Then he remembered: he came from the modern world. He knew things people in the Tang wouldn’t learn for another thousand years and more. Surely that knowledge would let him rise in the world and make a name for himself.
The thought set his blood racing.
Huixiang was wiping away tears. He knew she was worried about him. And now that he thought about it, he hadn’t arrived in the Tang entirely alone. At least he had a sister who cared for him.
Warmth stirred in his chest.
Wanting to find something happier to talk about, he cast about for a moment. Then, with his heart beating a little faster, he asked:
“Sis, am I… am I married?”
Now that was an important question.
Before all this, he had devoted himself to his studies. Medical books, medical books, and more medical books. The girls had teased him for being a bookworm, and none had taken a particular interest in him. He hadn’t had time for a girlfriend or moonlit walks, anyway.
Even after he started working, he was still single. He had never so much as held a girl’s hand.
Plenty of men in time-travel stories arrived to find a young wife waiting for them.
Could there be a pretty wife waiting at home for him, too?