by Sean Stewart
“I just worry that out of ignorance we may—”
Winter held up his hand. “Don’t out-subtle yourself, David. Of course this culture is complex. We can never understand it as these people do. Don’t try. I realize that the role of Intelligence is to understand the opponent. But you can’t allow the opponent to dictate the nature of the engagement. We must play to our strengths. We have enormous tactical and technological superiority on our side. Let that be our Alexander’s sword, shall we?”
Perhaps like a weary chess player Winter wanted simply to clear the board as fast as possible and get to the endgame, rather than thinking through the ornate complexities of the earlier positions. But ornate thinking was David’s job, and he was very tired of it. He had not slept in thirty-two hours, and although he was still thinking lucidly, the widening split between his feelings and actions was disturbing.
What if Raining had been killed by Ranford’s soldiers? This was the nightmare that haunted him. What if Lark’s mother was dead, and he was the cause of it? How could he face that little girl? How would he take care of her?
It was a great relief to see Winter, almost three times his age, with his city at war and his family falling apart, still strong enough to take the responsibility from David’s shoulders, and put it back on his own, where it had lain so heavily for more than seventy years. Which was why, however many times he disagreed with Winter on this policy or that decision, David Oliver would have followed him anywhere. Winter never shirked. He took responsibility, he led from the front, and if they had to send an army into Hell, he would be the first man to step through the hot black gate.
—But of course Li Mei cannot understand that about you, Floating Ant thought. You hard old man of the prairies.
It was almost six Saturday evening and Floating Ant was watching the sunset from his balcony.
She is angry and guilty and bitter, and shocked by the touch of grief. Oh, but you and I…Grief no longer sneaks through the window when she visits us. She comes to the front door now, and we have won the bitter wisdom to open it when she knocks.
A beautiful sunset. “It ended as it began—” No. Ah. How about:
The day was dying as it had lived;
In splendor.
Nice. So I fiddle, while the city burns.
Chickens clucked on the neighbor’s balcony. Floating Ant held a little cup of wine. Winter, he thought, your men would look at me, an old Chinese man, half-drunk poet and notorious coward, and think we could not be more different. That young lady in the other room, or my son with her, washing up the dishes, must see you monstered in hideous white, a hero to your half-machine men, the cold north like a raven on your shoulders. Who could be more different?
The young are aliens to you and me.
Can you remember the great Edmonton Oilers teams of the 1980’s? Gretzky, Coffey, Messier, Anderson, Grant Fuhr the best goalie in the world: a black man playing hockey, can you imagine? I never saw the old Canadians, of course, with Jean Beliveau and Maurice Richard and all the rest of them, but I still think the ’87 Oilers were probably the greatest single hockey club to ever play the game. If not the greatest, surely the most beautiful.
You will want Li Mei. You have to, I can feel it. She thinks she is the cause of your invasion, because she brought your granddaughter here. Maybe she is. She is part of the fate which has pulled your child’s child from you, the last of your line. That’s the thing that hurts, isn’t it, old man? We all try to cheat death. And you, you were smarter than I. All those years that I pursued my Muse, you already knew that way was hollow. You were nurturing your people and your family.
Now that I consider it, you will find Li Mei, won’t you? Unless we hide her well. These young ones don’t remember DNA fingerprints, protein analysis, police dogs, spy satellites. But you do. Too much of that technology has military uses for you to have lost it entirely. Maybe you have nothing more advanced than dogs, but you’ll use anything you’ve got. The end of your whole line is at stake. The great death.
I was a fool to dawdle here. I should have had the Shrouded Ones meet us somewhere else. I too have become accustomed to this latter age, I think myself invisible because I live on the north side of Hastings Street. But you don’t care, do you? This neighborhood holds no awe for you.
Where could we hide her? Where could she go that you could not follow?
Floating Ant took another sip of wine. Ideas came to him. Weak ones at first, then steadily stronger, like tea steeping. And finally the beginnings of a very deep idea indeed.
Sun Tzu wrote:
“Skillfulness in moving an opponent about comes through
Positioning the opponent is compelled to follow
And gifts the opponent is compelled to take.”
“No,” Floating Ant whispered, shocked at the thought which had come to him. “You cannot ask such a thing of me.” But an idea had come to him, a dark idea that would not leave. It remained, insistent, like a poem that had to be written. Like a baby whose birth could not be refused.
There was a knock at the door. Floating Ant did not rise. If it was a friend at his threshold, he could finish his wine. If it was an enemy, there was no point in resistance.
Jimmy Kwong’s jovial voice filled the small apartment. Floating Ant smiled and sipped his wine. Moments later Jimmy found him on the balcony. “So then, old man! How did it feel to wrap your fist around a hilt again? Is that what put that smile upon your wrinkled face?”
“Actually, I was musing on time. What a lie it is, that time makes one suffer less. In truth it merely teaches one to suffer with more poise.”
Jimmy’s smile faded. “You speak truly there.” His hand on Floating Ant’s shoulder was cold. “After the Emperor died, when the rest of us put on the white, I set aside all fear and care. For many years I thought the Shrouded Ones would be forever—like candles with their flames pinched out, never burning down. But the world is changing, the magic is wearing away, and we are wearing with it.”
“Do not say such things.”
Jimmy shook his head, smiling a little. “The Shrouded are not in the world of good luck or bad. We speak the truth we see. Our time is coming to a close. But enough of this! I bring gifts from the Lady in the Garden.” Floating Ant saw that all three of his friends had come: Jimmy in gold, Wan Lu in red, Wei Ping all in silks of black and trimmed with the white the Shrouded always wore.
“These are the men who were with you yesterday morning,” Water Spider said. “They are the Shrouded Ones?”
Jen and Li Mei were frankly staring.
Jimmy Kwong held up a flat cherrywood box, lacquered red as blood. He bowed before Jen, whose eyes lit up. “The Lady returns to you something you had lost.” He raised the box lid and took out the Lady’s gift. It was an ordinary straight razor, the folding kind that opened with a flick of the wrist.
Jen recoiled, horror working his young face. “No! Take it away!”
“Did you not realize that the gifts of the gods can be cruel?” Jimmy said. “Do you not understand they may not be refused?”
“Please,” Jen whispered. “Please. I can’t. That thing is evil.”
Jimmy held out the razor. “But is it yours?”
Tears spilled down Jen’s scarred cheeks. Finally he nodded.
“Then you must take it,” the Shrouded One said.
Jen grabbed the razor. He held it so tightly in his bunched fist that the skin above his knuckles turned white and the tendons in his wrists stood out like cables. “Never trust the fucking gods.”
Jimmy Kwong came to stand before Water Spider. “I have learned to fear these gifts,” Water Spider remarked. “Would you oblige me, and give me mine in private?” He stepped over to the balcony.
Jimmy nodded and followed. When they were away from the others he opened his white-gloved hand. In it lay a small ring with a green-gold band, the color of sunlight streaming through new leaves. The setting was of a lotus flower, made of white gold so delicately
shaped it seemed it must tremble if a breeze slid by. At the flower’s heart, a single diamond glittered like a star caught in a chip of ice; like frost burning in the winter sun.
Water Spider reached and took the precious thing. “There must be some mistake,” he said. “This is too small for me.” It was evident at once that the ring would fit on none of his fingers. “Perhaps the Lady meant this for Li Mei.”
“The Lady does not make mistakes.”
Water Spider closed his hand around the ring, and then put it in his pocket. “I shall treasure it,” he said. But inside, he was disappointed. However terrible Jen’s gift had been, it was clear he understood it. But the ring was a mystery to Water Spider. He felt curiously left out. Ever since the moment he had realized that Pearl’s great aphrodisiac was not to bear his children, he seemed to have been losing direction, losing focus. Twenty hours later he no longer had his lover, position, direction, or security. He, who had worked all his life to avenge his father’s disgrace—avenging it on his father, as well as the rest of the world—now found himself adrift.
And all the while, that same disgraced father condescended to him, and charmed his subordinates, and was held in esteem by the Shrouded Ones he had betrayed. It was unfair, terribly unfair. Water Spider felt he must choke on the gall of it, but the long practice of politics kept expression from his face. And what a strange, empty triumph that was, too.
He returned to the others with a careful smile.
“Well,” said Floating Ant, with forced jollity. “Don’t these gifts always come in threes? What about me, ha? What do I get?”
Jimmy Kwong looked at him in surprise and gestured at Water Spider, Jen, and Li Mei. “Why, them, of course.”
Li Mei’s thin eyebrows rose. “Us?”
“Don’t be coy, Ant,” said the Shrouded One in red, testily. “We fought our battles. You must fight yours.”
“But I am a poet, not a soldier!”
“You were a soldier for the Emperor,” said the Shrouded One in black. Each word terse and final as stones dropping into a well. “You can never leave that service.”
“You have only been on leave,” Jimmy said. His smile was tired. “But now it is our turn to rest, my friend. Your long holiday must come to an end. You earned it: we know that. You alone among us had to go on living, and living, and living; perhaps all those years awaiting this day, though you did not know it. Do you not see? You are the Lady’s chosen champion. This struggle is your gift.”
The Shrouded Ones departed, leaving their gifts behind. They had agreed to withdraw the protection from spirits and demons that had kept the borders of Chinatown safe. (Water Spider’s Borders, whose security he had arrogantly assumed to be his own doing.) They would try to follow any demons or minotaurs who chanced into Chinatown, limiting the damage where possible.
“We should not leave Li Mei here,” Floating Ant said nervously after the Shrouded Ones had gone. “So. I have, have some friends. Both at the Hong Hsing Athletic Club, in the heart of the Dragon’s domain, and in the Lady’s Garden. I will take Li Mei to one of these places, where she will be safe from the Southsiders.”
“No one can enter the Garden and return,” Li Mei said.
“Well, now, that is a popular, but, ah, misguided belief. There are ways. I lived here before the Powers woke, you know. Few people understand Chinatown better than I.”
Li Mei looked impressed and dubious at the same time.
For his part, Water Spider felt little. “As you wish,” he said. He had a cup of his father’s wine in his hand. He was no very good drinker of wine, but he was thinking he would try to get the knack of it.
“May I ask Jen along?” Floating Ant said. “It is dark and the streets are rough this side of Hastings.”
Water Spider waved with the hand that held his wine cup. “As you wish, Father. Honored Father.” He laughed. His other hand was in his pocket, fingering the ring the Lady had bestowed on him. It yielded no secrets.
There was a brief bustle as the others prepared to leave the apartment. Then Floating Ant was beside his son. “Have you ever made a study of Tu Fu?” Even through the blur of wine, Water Spider thought his father seemed agitated.
“As you wish, Honored Father. Ha, ha.”
“You should.” Floating Ant pressed a small book into his son’s hands. It was in the old Chinese style, a long panel of bamboo rolled into a cylinder and held closed with a ribbon, with characters painted inside in Floating Ant’s matchless calligraphy. “Tu Fu was a scholar too, you know. Trained for the highest office, a brilliant student. And then, unaccountably, he failed his exams. This was to be the pattern of his life: always torn between the service he so desperately wished to give his Emperor, and his other life of family, and wine. It was a terrible time; the very end of the T’ang dynasty. Barbarians pressed always on their border as they press on ours. We have no Emperor; theirs was weak and fickle.” Floating Ant pressed Water Spider’s hands around the bamboo book. “These are some of his poems. They have meant much to me. I always wanted you to have them. I suppose I thought they might help you understand…oh, everything. My life. All lives.”
“Father,” Water Spider said, moved by Floating Ant’s strange intensity. “I will read them. The book is short.” The bamboo scroll was little more than a handspan wide. Unrolled it would be as tall as a tall man. “Perhaps we can discuss them tomorrow.”
Floating Ant searched his son’s face. “Perhaps,” he said.
The sun was setting as Floating Ant left with Li Mei and Jen in tow. Water Spider refilled his cup of wine and lit a lamp and kept his promise. He read For Li Po (“Given to the wind, yet resolute—so brave, and for whom?”) and An Empty Purse:
…In fear
Of shame an empty purse brings, I hold
In mine this one coin I keep, peering in.
He lingered over Reflections in Autumn, which his father had said was the greatest poem ever written in Chinese, with its devastating last lines:
My florid brush once defied the shape of things. I watch
Now, nothing more—hair white, a grief-sung gaze sinking.
He cried when he came to the end of Meandering River:
Drift wide, O wind and light—sail together
Where we kindred in this moment will never part.
He lingered longest, though, over an early poem, New Year’s Eve At Tu Wei’s Home. Objectively he knew it was not the strongest piece, not so complex or profound or beautiful as many others. Yet he found himself reading it over and over.
The songs over pepper wine have ended.
Friends jubilant among friends, we start
A stabled racket of horses. Lanterns
Blaze, scattering crows. As dawn breaks,
The fortieth year passes in my flight toward
Evening light. Who can change it, who
Stop it for even a single embrace—this dead
Dazzling drunk in the wings of life we live?
He was murmuring these words aloud when the Southside soldiers burst through Floating Ant’s apartment door like summer lightning and caught him there, with his naked eyes still leaking tears onto the little bamboo book.
Chapter
Twenty
The Southsiders did not torture Water Spider, not right away. Instead they carried him back to Government House and put him in a deserted office under guard. It was the private office of the Chrysanthemum, the Honorable Minister for the West. Apparently Betty Hsiang, whose job it was to study the Lady in the Garden, had still not been found. Dead or in hiding, who could say?
Betty’s brush was famous. On the wall facing her desk hung a mountain scene, grey and cloudy; distant horsemen struggled through a treacherous pass. The characters of a poem hung in the high air like valley mist:
Songs say the roads of Sanso are steep,
Sheer as mountains.
The walls rise before your face,
Clouds grow out of the hill
At your horse�
�s bridle.
Fragrant trees line the stone roads of the Shin,
Their trunks bursting through the paving,
And freshets burst their ice
at the heart of Shoku, a proud city.
Men’s fates are already set,
There is no need of asking diviners.
Upon the desk, an arrangement of dried flowers, exquisite. Surely, Water Spider thought, a man could not be tortured in such a place as this. He found his hand closing around the ring the Shrouded One had given him. For the first time he could remember, he wanted to pray to the Lady, that she protect him.
The anticipation of pain, Water Spider discovered, was bad for his character.
He had always told himself that he had the kind of courage most men lacked: the steady, selfless application that saw him accepting ever more responsibility, rising ever higher in the Government, always reliable, always efficient. Physical courage was common; even fellows like Jen possessed it in abundance. After all, that was why he employed Jen, wasn’t it? To supply a certain complement of animal force and brute bravery.
But Jen wasn’t with him now. He was alone. The only stocks of courage he had to draw on were his own.
What could he know of interest to the Snows? What could they hope to force out of him that they would not have already received full willingly from Huang Ti? (Johnny must be wrong. It was impossible that the Dragon should work to put that bungler on the throne. Ridiculous!) There was no information of value the Southsiders could get from him. Except he knew that the Shrouded Ones had been withdrawn. And he knew his father planned to drive the Snows out of Chinatown with ghosts and spirits. And he knew where Li Mei was to be hidden.
“The determined scholar and the man of virtue will not seek to live at the expense of injuring their virtue. They will even sacrifice their lives to preserve their virtue complete.” Not so difficult for K’ung fu-tzu. He knew he would live on in his disciples. He knew he had descendants to burn the offerings to his spirit.
Not so easy for Floating Ant’s childless child.
