by JY Yang
It was far from an inspiring endorsement of Mother’s rule.
Mokoya reached into the fold of their robes and extracted a picture scroll. It was the same one they’d woken Akeha with in the morning, exclaiming, “I knew I’d seen him somewhere!” Rolled on its inner surface was a crisp light capture of the Gauri protesters: a row of calm, determined faces, most half bowed or eyes shut as if in prayer or meditation. The lone exception was a young man who had been looking right at the woman who had tensed the light capture into permanence. Frozen in a semifrown, he stared intensely, his mouth a disapproving, unyielding line. Their mysterious future abbot.
Mokoya scanned the crowd as they threaded through it, looking for easy targets. Most avoided their gaze, ducking their heads as they saw Mokoya, some less subtly than others. But one woman—a vendor of straw mats and slippers and other woven things—was too slow, and Mokoya caught her eye.
“Honored aunt,” they said, approaching the woman respectfully, “could you tell me if you’ve seen this man?”
They showed the picture scroll to the woman. She waved her hand and made inaudible excuses.
Unfazed, Mokoya moved on. Akeha followed quietly in their wake. A strange, glacial distance had swelled between them, a kind of false peace, the tangles of arguments to come writhing under the surface. As Mokoya accosted passerby after passerby, Akeha watched the crowd instead. Watched the way people’s movements changed in the orbit of their twin. Watched the way Mokoya deformed the world around them. Over the years, and perhaps by necessity, Akeha had learned the trick of sliding quietly into the background, drawing as little attention as possible. Very different from their twin.
So Akeha watched. And it was through watching that they noticed the old man who was watching back. He was a shoe mender, crouched on a stool under the sign advertising his services. Instead of fear or disdain, his expression was touched by something resembling hope. And that interested them.
They let space and bodies come between them and Mokoya. Casually, incrementally, Akeha walked up to the watching man.
Their eyes met, and Akeha nodded at him. The man didn’t return the gesture, but he didn’t look away either. He had the tanned skin and wide cheekbones of a southerner, the look of someone who lived farther downriver than Jixiang. And he wasn’t as old as Akeha had thought. Just weathered.
“Busy day, uncle?” Akeha asked.
“As if.” The man snorted. “If you think this is busy, you should have seen this street before all those troubles came.” He gestured in front of him with hands that were blunted by his craft. “Normal days, I get four or five customers by morning. Today, nothing. It’s been like this for a week. A man needs to eat, you know?”
“Of course. There’s been a lot of trouble in this quarter lately. Were you here during the protests, uncle?”
“Where else would I go? I live here, I work here. Of course, those people don’t care.”
“That must be difficult.” As the man huffed in agreement, Akeha said, “We’re looking for somebody connected to the protests.”
“Hah.” The man slapped a thigh. “Hah! I knew you were Protectorate. One look, I knew.”
It occurred to Akeha that recognition of the prophet child of the Protector might not be as widespread as they’d assumed. “We’re not here for trouble. We just want to talk to someone.”
“Which one of them? Hah, you know, they all look the same to me sometimes.”
The man’s laugh, Akeha decided, was markedly unpleasant. “A young man. Very tall, big beard. He sat in the front row at the protests.”
“Oh, that one.” The man muttered something inaudible, shook his head, and gestured. “Go to the circus. Behind, over there. Ask for the doctor.”
Akeha looked where the man pointed. Their mind turned this information over and over. A doctor?
“Thank you for your help, uncle.” The monastery had taught Akeha to express gratitude for favors granted, no matter what unpalatable form the favor came in.
They caught up with their twin. Mokoya had cornered a woman selling jars of pickled vegetables and was on the verge of convincing her to give them directions to the circus. But the woman looked up, saw Akeha approaching like a shark, and changed her mind, waving Mokoya off with a muttered excuse.
“Honored aunt, it’s really important,” Mokoya said. “The future of this land could depend on it.”
The woman stared blankly at them.
“Come on, Moko,” Akeha said. “I’ve found out where he is.”
Mokoya narrowed their eyes. “How?”
“Talked to an awful old uncle. Come on.”
Mokoya fell behind in the viscous crowd, a half dozen steps’ worth of reluctance between them. Akeha slowed until they were both abreast. “Are you all right?”
“I am.” Mokoya squeezed their hand once, quickly and tightly. “Thank you for coming here with me.”
“Why are you thanking me?” The idea of Mokoya sneaking out alone was unthinkable. “Who else is going to take care of you if you get into trouble?”
Mokoya punched them lightly in the arm. A couple of loping steps later, they said, “I thought you were still angry with me.”
“I wasn’t angry.”
Mokoya glanced sideways at them, and a small smile tweaked the corners of their lips.
Conversation lapsed into pensive silence. As the clamor of the market subsided into the burble of a busy street, Akeha said, “So how come you decided to be a woman?”
Mokoya’s puzzled frown revealed everything they thought about this question. “I didn’t decide anything. I’ve always felt like one. A girl.”
“I see.”
“Don’t you?”
“I’ve never thought much about it,” Akeha said slowly, which was only slightly skirting the truth. Ideas and feelings bubbled as though their mind were boiling over. None of it lined up into coherent, defensible thought.
“You’ll figure it out, anyway,” Mokoya said with a confidence that ended where Akeha began. They nodded to their twin, as silence took up its easy crown for the rest of the walk.
* * *
The circus nestled on the borders of the ragbone-meat and paupers’ quarters, in the courtyard of a disused tanning factory. Its rotting timbers and shingles formed a stern backdrop to the dozens of horse-drawn carts arranged in a loose semicircle. Circular tents of plain waxed cotton had sprung up in between them. Some had laundry hanging outside, others racks of drying fish. Along one side of the main clearing, rows of weathered benches sat under hand-erected awnings. Once, long ago, this had been a traveling circus, but weeds had grown amongst the wheels, and mold speckled the sides of the tents. Chickens pecked in the dirt, and a pot of curry simmered somewhere close by.
The eerie silence reminded Akeha of a plague ward, but suspicious eyes watched them from slits in the fabric of the tents. The only other signs of human life were a couple of rail-thin children who had been kicking a rattan ball around. They stopped and stared sullenly as Mokoya approached.
“We’re looking for the doctor,” Mokoya said.
The younger child—a boy—ducked behind the other one, a girl bearing an ironclad expression. She pointed wordlessly to one of the tents, never taking her large dark eyes off Mokoya.
The twins turned in the direction the girl had indicated. Behind them, the children burst into a smatter of furious whispers, a collision of words in their own language. Akeha did not blame them for being intimidated.
The tent’s roll-up door was closed. Mokoya pulled the heavy canvas aside and stepped in, Akeha right behind them. “Hello?”
A tall boy stood with his back to them, wrapped in patterned crimson cloth that left half his torso bare. He was sorting through an army of powder bottles on a cluttered, dye-stained table and didn’t look up. “The clinic only opens on water and metal days. Come back tomorrow.”
“I’m not here for treatment,” Mokoya said.
The boy turned around. His face, those eyes,
were exactly as they had been in the light capture. In person, he seemed both more normal, and more intense than in the picture. And he was much taller than Akeha had imagined.
He was beautiful.
The boy’s expression changed as his gaze swept over the twins. Here was someone, at least, who recognized who they were.
“I have something to tell you,” Mokoya said.
Chapter Seven
HIS NAME WAS Thennjay Satyaparathnam. He had just turned nineteen, and he was a healer by day and a storyteller by night. His role as a nexus of protest was mostly an accident. Mostly.
“So this was what that Tensor was doing,” Thennjay said. He had the picture scroll stretched between his curious hands and was turning it this way and that under the glare of a suspended sunball, as if the light might reveal something of its inner workings. “She showed up at the protest with this strange wooden box, and she kept pointing it at us. I thought it was a weapon.” His laugh bubbled up from the belly. “I realized it wasn’t one when nobody died. When the Protectorate wants blood, it doesn’t usually hesitate or fail.”
The three of them were cross-legged on the floor of the tent. Akeha took another sip from the cup cradled in their palms. The liquid rolled in their mouth: spiced tea so laden with sugar and ginger it went down like a punch. Thennjay rolled up the picture with deft fingers and handed it back to Mokoya. “How does it work?”
“It’s slackcraft,” Mokoya said, slowly. “I’m not sure I could explain it to you if you’re not familiar with the five natures.” And then more quickly: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that—it’s just that it’s complicated.”
Akeha was not used to watching their twin speak this delicately, putting down words as if they were stacking porcelain cups.
Thennjay folded his hands in his lap. “I know a bit of the theory. You can try me.”
“Light,” Mokoya said, “has connections to metal-nature, for reasons we don’t fully understand yet. You can re-create a scene, the colors and everything, by copying the shape of metal-nature in a box and bringing it back to artisans in the Tensorate, who then paint what they see.”
“This is remarkably lifelike for a painting.” Thennjay reappropriated the scroll, put it next to his face, and imitated his own expression.
Mokoya ducked their head to hide a smile. “The artisans are very good.”
Thennjay had grown up on the margins of Chengbee, several generations removed from Antam Gaur. His father had been a fire breather and a storyteller; his mother a stilt walker and a doctor. In the circus, everyone took on multiple roles. Everybody did what they could. The line between community and family was thin and blurred here. When Thennjay was five, his father was among sixteen circus members arrested for putting on a series of farces, slapstick satire deemed to be insulting to the Protector. The charges laid were sedition, and the sixteen had been exiled south to perform hard labor, never to be heard from again. Thennjay’s mother had then raised him until she died of a fever when he was eleven. Then the task had fallen to the rest of the circus, much as it was able.
The boy leaned back against his table. “So what are we going to do about this prophecy, then?”
“Nothing at all,” Mokoya said. “There isn’t anything we can do.”
Puzzlement marred his face. Mokoya explained, “We’ve never been able to change the prophecies, no matter what we’ve tried.”
“We, meaning . . .”
“The Protectorate. Well, my mother, to be exact.”
“What, do you mean she doesn’t control fortune and the heavens, as they would have us believe?”
“Stop.” Mokoya smacked him on the knee as he laughed. They moved with a simple, alarming ease.
“Surely it can’t be that hard. You could just have me assassinated, for example. Then the prophecy doesn’t come true.”
“An assassination would fail. My mother has tried it, in the past. Not on you, but on someone she didn’t want getting a position I prophesied.”
“Of course she would.”
“It backfired. Not only did the person get the position, they had enough blackmail material to ensure it would be a hereditary position. For nine generations.”
“Quite a feat.” Thennjay laughed until a thought occurred to him: “Wait. Are you saying that until your prophecy comes true, nothing can happen to me? That I’m fireproof?”
“No, I—” Mokoya halted. As the boy continued laughing, they hissed, “That is not what I wanted you to think!”
Akeha put their empty cup of tea on the floor and watched as Mokoya twisted into a coil of anxiety. “I’m not joking!”
The deep rumble of the boy’s laugh was like a thunderstorm in the distance, which could sound comforting to some and be a warning to others. “Well, I was. I’m sorry.”
Akeha studied the way the boy looked at Mokoya, an alien and gentle expression on his face. Was this what tenderness looked like?
Mokoya, completely oblivious, had their hands in their lap, staring down at the lightly curled fingers. “It’s best if we don’t interfere with the prophecies. Nothing good has ever come of trying to change them.”
Thennjay frowned. “Then why did you come here? To warn me?”
“I . . .” Akeha could almost feel Mokoya turning the question over in their mind, slowly and carefully, like a grilled fish. “I was curious about you. Wouldn’t you do the same thing, in my position?”
“I suppose.”
Thennjay folded his hands together, mirroring Mokoya’s pose, seguing into contemplative silence. Eventually, his gaze fell on Akeha. “You don’t say much, do you?”
Akeha stared evenly back at him. “No.”
The moment of silence stretched. Mokoya broke in: “This news must come as a shock to you.”
Thennjay chuckled and sighed, and for the briefest moment, Akeha caught a glimpse of darkness lurking under the bright, easygoing exterior. “It is what it is. As you said, there’s nothing we can do to change it, can we?”
“In the monastery,” Mokoya said, “they taught us that fortune is both intractable and impartial. That when bad things happen, it’s the result of an incomprehensible and inhuman universe working as it does. The mountain shrugs, but thinks nothing of the houses crushed in the avalanche. That was not its purpose.”
“And that’s meant to be comforting?”
“Yes,” said Mokoya, a little too earnestly. “Because it’s not about you, or what you’ve done. There’s no bigger reason to things.”
Thennjay stared at the heavy canvas ceiling in contemplation. Then he said, “Growing up, I was taught to believe that the fortunes don’t give you more than you can handle. It was a mantra, almost. Something bad happens? Well, you can handle it, because otherwise why would it have happened? I think it was the only way people could cope with the things that went on, sometimes.”
“You don’t sound like you agree.”
He looked in the direction of the tent door. Heartbeats passed. “You saw Anjal and Kirpa,” he said. The suspicious children outside. “They’re six and four. Think about that, six and four. Their parents died in that factory fire. They don’t have surviving close relatives. No grandparents, no aunts or uncles. A cousin is looking after them, but he’s got hungry children of his own to feed. I ask you: Can you believe, really believe, that they’re supposed to have the strength to cope with that?” He shook his head. “My personal belief? I don’t care about the fortunes. I care about doing whatever you can, with whatever’s in front of you. Because it’s the only thing you can do.”
Mokoya stared at him with a mixture of joy and disbelief, like he was some sort of miracle. “That’s beautiful.”
A feeling like a fist pressed against Akeha’s sternum.
Thennjay turned to Akeha. “And you, what do you believe?”
Akeha leaned back, balancing on their tailbone and clenched hands. “Why do my beliefs matter? I’m not a prophet or a future abbot.”
Mokoya swung ar
ound with a furious glare. Keha, what?
Akeha barely blinked. We’ve been gone a long time. There’s going to be trouble.
Mokoya’s nostrils flared. But of course Akeha was right. They turned back to Thennjay, defeated. “We need to go. We sneaked out of the Great High Palace, and Mother isn’t going to be pleased.”
“Starting my career in the disfavor of the Protector? That sounds dangerous.” The boy got to his feet, and offered a hand to Mokoya. After a brief moment of hesitation, they took it.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Mokoya said. “What steps Mother is going to take, or the Grand Monastery. Once word spreads, people are going to start coming to see you. I’m sure of it.”
He would be the most unqualified candidate for Head Abbot in the history of the Grand Monastery, Akeha thought uncharitably. Could he even perform basic slackcraft?
“We’ll cross that valley when we reach its borders,” Thennjay said. He still hadn’t let go of Mokoya’s hand.
Mokoya wasn’t pulling away, either. They were staring up at Thennjay, at his face, at his broad-shouldered bulk.
“If you could stand to escape the palace again,” Thennjay said, “you should come to the circus tonight. We put on quite a show, and it’s only five brass tals per entry.”
“I . . .” Mokoya lowered their hand slowly as Thennjay released it. “I’ll try. It’s not easy to leave the Palace without being noticed.”
Thennjay smiled, an expression radiant as a firework. The two of them were standing so close to each other their bodies nearly touched. The boy said, “I have a feeling we’ll meet again soon, my dear prophet.”
* * *
Akeha’s feet kicked up dust as they cut through the rumbling guts of Chengbee. The aftertaste of ginger tea clung pungent and sticky as glue to their tongue and mouth. Mokoya might have felt the same way, all wrapped up in a thick, woolly layer of thought. Akeha watched the back of their head, the black peach fuzz emerging from it, and thought about the long years they’d spent shaving their heads like they were still acolytes, so that they could appear identical.
