Chapter 47: Retting Love Song
"I told you to wear gloves, but you just had to touch it. Did you get stung? Does it hurt?"
Yu Qian'er nodded, her palm itching as if she'd been stung by a bee. Chen Jian grabbed her hand and pulled her to his side with a smile. "You deserve it. Who told you to take off your gloves?"
He looked at the tiny spines covering her palm, which was red and dotted with bumps. He went to the stream, gathered some wet mud, and plastered it onto Yu Qian'er's hand. After rubbing it firmly a few times, he wiped it off and applied a fresh patch.
The itching gradually subsided as the tiny spines were pulled out by the sticky mud.
As he chided her, Yu Qian'er looked at him and thought about that foolish girl, Front Ya. If only she had known to wear gloves. But then again, none of her eleven brothers had known what to do either.
Chen Jian continued rubbing the mud on her hand for a while until he was satisfied the spines were gone. "Go wash your hands," he said.
He then turned and explained the remedy to the other clansmen harvesting nettles. It was a simple folk trick—a basic skill for any farmer.
His mind wandered. This was a kind of divergent thinking, a surprisingly technical skill. He recalled stories from his previous life of nobles adding emery powder to a rival's food to secure an inheritance. Jealous wives would harm concubines by secretly stuffing their bedding with chopped hair stubble. A similar principle was used to remove the irritants: a sticky piece of raw meat, like pork tenderloin, would be used to carefully dab them out, one by one.
The clansmen easily grasped the first-aid method. After all, it was just like tying chewed sticky grass to a branch to catch cicadas. It was simple to understand.
In truth, the tribespeople weren't stupid. They were human, not apes, and their capacity to learn was quite good.
None of the technologies Chen Jian had introduced were truly beyond this era—with the possible exception of the still-distant toilet scraper. Everything else was merely an echo of what ancestors from this same period had developed in his previous life.
In fact, some ancient technologies from his past life were far superior to anything his tribe could currently manage: one-millimeter-diameter holes drilled in jade, the bronze sacred tree of Sanxingdui, the smiling goddess of the Hongshan culture, the lifelike jade dragons... His people couldn't accomplish any of that yet.
*If I hadn't brought the knowledge from my past life,* he thought, *if I had grown up in this wild era, how long would it have taken me to figure out how to drill holes? How to smelt copper? How to weave? How to plant? Without that knowledge, only one person in a million could achieve such things. How could anyone possibly think these people were apes?*
The Native Americans from his previous life had been at a comparable, if not slightly more advanced, stage of development. There were no horses in North America until the colonists brought them, and some escaped the farms. Yet, it took the indigenous peoples less than a decade to domesticate these wild horses, master riding, and learn to shoot from horseback. Some even learned to speak English, French, Spanish, and Dutch.
They learned to maintain firearms and repurposed broken gun barrels into pipe tomahawks. The great chief Tecumseh himself delivered speeches with a Western rhetorical flair, addressing his audiences as "gentlemen" and "ladies."
During the Red Cloud War, indigenous warriors annihilated an entire US cavalry detachment. In a strange parallel, a sister regiment of that cavalry was severely damaged by Chinese forces during the Battle of Yunshan—"Cloud Mountain"—in the Korean War. The name "Cloud," from Red Cloud to Yunshan, seemed to be a recurring theme in that history.
Chief Red Cloud left such a strong impression on the colonists that in a certain popular game, the birthplace of the tauren—a race symbolizing Native Americans—is named Redcloud Mesa.
Such an incredible learning ability, he mused, was far beyond that of any ape.
The difficult part wasn't knowing *that* something worked, but *why*. Could everyone who recited the digits of pi use calculus? No. But did their lack of understanding of the method of infinite series prevent them from calculating the area of a circle? Also no.
Chen Jian didn't expect his clansmen to understand the principles behind everything. For now, learning the practical application was enough. He wasn't worried. There was no reason his people couldn't accomplish what the Native Americans of his past life had. If some of them could learn English and French in three years, why couldn't his own people learn to count to a thousand in that same time, especially with someone to teach them?
It was like the pile of nettles at their feet. The clansmen didn't need to understand why retting allowed the fibers to be spun into thread; they only needed to know *how* to spin it. The underlying principles could wait for time and future generations to uncover.
Lost in these thoughts, he lowered his head and continued harvesting the wild nettles. Everyone's gloves were soaked with sweat, which mixed with the leather to produce the foul smell of decaying protein. The gloves were made using a method he'd learned from the Hezhen people of his past life, using fish bladder glue, which made them completely non-breathable. He thought how nice it would be to have a pair of gloves woven from nettle thread right about now.
By noon, they had harvested a large quantity of nettles, tying them into bundles with rattan. It took two people to carry each bundle back to the village.
The women spent the afternoon beating the nettle stalks with sticks to strip the leaves and break down the woody fibers.
Meanwhile, the men went to the river and created several simple retting ponds by using natural forks in the current. The stalks had to be retted before they could be used for weaving, a process that relied on natural microorganisms to decompose the bonds between fibers and separate them.
The entire job would take more than ten days. During the retting process, the nettles' stinging hairs would also fall off. The resulting bast fibers were similar to cotton and could be twisted into thread using a simple spindle or spinning wheel.
The principle of the spinning wheel wasn't complex: a large wheel drives a smaller one, causing the small wheel to rotate at high speed and twist the short fibers together into a continuous thread.
To put it simply, it was like tying several loose ropes to a person's body, anchoring the other ends, and having that person do forward rolls frantically. The ropes would naturally twist together into a single, stronger strand.
Chen Jian wouldn't need to build the large and small wheel mechanisms himself; Acorn and the others who worked with pottery could figure that out. The real difficulty lay in learning to spin a long, continuous thread without it breaking. That would require immense patience and deliberate practice. In time, it would become a fundamental skill for the women, a skill that would also guarantee their status within the family.
A better life, a higher status—both were created with one's own hands. In the future, these women's fingers would be covered with tiny cuts from the spun thread, and their nails might bear grooves from its constant pull. But these scars and calluses would be a woman's glory, no less than the hardened calluses on a man's palm.
For now, the women knew nothing of the pain to come. They laughed as they brought over the bundles of stripped nettle stalks, watching curiously as the men threw them into the retting ponds.
The men waded into the chest-deep water, using stones to weigh down the bundles and keep them completely submerged.
All that remained was to wait. If the stalks weren't retted properly, the outer bark would cling to the fibers, making it impossible to separate them. Any thread made from them would be brittle and weak.
The retting preparations weren't too difficult, and the clansmen finished the work cheerfully. But as Chen Jian looked at the piles of stalks submerged in the water, he felt a sense of dread.
After more than ten days of decomposition, the water in these pools would stink worse than the oldest latrine. To call the smell disgusting would be an insult to the retting pond itself. When the time came, men like him would have to jump into that foul water to fish the stalks out.
If you wanted to enjoy the rewards, you had to endure the hardship. This kind of shared labor was possible in the early stages of their society's development. Once the clan developed a concept of private property and a division between rich and poor, it would be much harder to convince certain people to jump into a stinking retting pond.
For now, however, the men and women were laughing together, evoking the spirit of a love song from the *Airs of Chen* in the *Book of Songs*: "The pond at the east gate, can be used to ret the hemp..." Couples worked side by side, singing love songs to one another during breaks and chatting freely. This was the basis for relationships between ordinary men and women for a long time to come—a partnership built on shared labor and common ground.
As twilight fell, Chen Jian sat by the river, watching the men and women of the two clans splashing and wrestling playfully in the water. He wondered when the complex emotions he was waiting for—jealousy and possessiveness—would finally emerge between them, giving him an opportunity to set a precedent for how such matters should be handled.
He thought to himself that he had the gourd and wine ready, but he didn't know when the clansmen would drink the first ceremonial wedding cup. It would likely be more than a decade from now...
"Jian, come down and play!"
Several women from the Shi clan shouted, waving at him.
"I'm too lazy to move!" Chen Jian yelled back.
"Then play your flute for us!" one called out. "Play that song about our village by the great river!"
Looking at the cheerful crowd, Chen Jian decided against playing their village song. Instead, he simply opened his mouth and began to sing, improvising a new tune at the top of his lungs.
"Oh, little girl, you are so fair!
Your fingertips are like new grass shoots,
Your skin as white as rendered fat.
Your neck is long like a beetle's horn,
Your teeth like seeds within a gourd.
Your eyebrows curve like caterpillars,
Your eyes are pools where lotus bloom...
By our village, the retting pond softens the nettle stalks,
But when, oh when, will I soften your heart?"
The women in the water had never heard such compliments. The girls from the Shi clan all blushed, staring right at him. The women from his own clan looked over at the Shi men, hoping they might sing such songs for them, too. Chen Jian hadn't even used a proper melody; he had just belted out the lines as they came to him.
The *Book of Songs* used the literary techniques of *fu*, *bi*, and *xing*. He was introducing *bi*—metaphor—and *xing*—evocation. If the clanspeople sang like this more often, their songs would naturally become more refined. Most of the poems in the *Book of Songs* were love songs and work songs, not composed by professional poets but born from the genuine feelings of the people. These ordinary mountain folk were the true creators of culture.
The clansmen playing in the water began to imitate the pattern Chen Jian had set, starting their own boisterous improvisations. They mixed in all sorts of strange metaphors, often starting with a few evocative lines about nature before getting to their main subject.
The basic form was there, but the metaphors they chose made Chen Jian blush. Words like "mushroom," "pottery bowl," and "clam" appeared one after another. Their songs were filled with such earthy phrases.
Amidst the laughter, Chen Jian half-reclined on a stone slab by the river, listening to the clansmen's raucous songs. He felt that it might be time for him to think about finding a woman for himself.
On the Grass River, a birch-bark canoe was paddling downstream from the upper reaches. Civet Cat, sitting in the boat, heard the distant singing and began to paddle faster.
There were four people in the canoe. He was uneasy because he had seen something upstream, something he had never encountered before, and he needed to tell Chen Jian about it quickly.
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