The Shifu Cloth (The Chronicles of Eirie 4)

by Prue Batten

  ‘Will it smell? I remember when you used the mens’ pisspots. Fixing the dye, you said. Aine, I was nearly fixed forever. What is it about men’s piss, as if they never drink water? As bad as fox spirits.’

  She made the sign of the horn and Isabella thought back to the beautiful white fox skins of her dreams.

  ‘Lucia, is there a white fox spirit in the Han?’

  ‘White? I’ll say. That’s Kitsune, she’s the most powerful. They can all shape-shift but she is the most dangerous, able to bewitch men at a single glance, like our veelas I suppose. Why?’

  ‘I dreamed of a white fox last night. After I’d had terrible nightmares.’

  ‘Well young madam, what do you expect? If you are going to tempt Fate and your feet by doing what you did yesterday, I’m not surprised the nightghasts got you last night.’ Lucia clucked and picked up her basket. ‘I’ll light the fire under the big vat for you before I take this to the kitchen. I should think if what you do is for Madame Koi, no one will have cause or courage to make any sort of complaint.’ She looked at Isabella, her forehead creased. ‘Are you alright? After the nightghasts and things.’

  ‘Of course I am, don’t fuss. Dreams are dreams, after all. And I really do have work to do. If you could light the fire that would be such a help.’ She glanced up from her gleaning of the lac bodies and added, ‘I’m fine. Honestly.’

  Lucia wobbled away on her pattens and Isabella ran her finger through the toffee-coloured shavings in the bowl, the sound shivery and silvered as she stirred the contents. By the time she had shaved the walls of the second nest, the pile had increased and she pondered the little lac insect. Waiting till the wasps had vacated their home, they claimed it as their own, to breed little flying babies. Having fulfilled their destiny, they died in shining clusters. Something about the lac reminded her of the abducted women in the Han who settled in their new home, to breed and then die in ignominy.

  ‘Not for me, little lac,’ she muttered. ‘Never for me.’

  As she was finishing the third nest, a dark shadow spilled over her and she looked up.

  ‘Master Koi,’ she hastily put the bowl aside and let the knife drop to the ground. ‘I didn’t hear you.’

  She jumped up and bowed over her hands.

  ‘I could see. You were deep in your work, Ibo.’ He bent from his height and slipped graceful fingers through the lac bodies. ‘So. It isn’t the wasps’ nest you use, but what’s inside. Ingenious. And this makes red?’

  Isabella nodded.

  ‘A very pure red, Master Koi. Where I am from, they call it regal red.’

  ‘And it is this colour my wife wants?’

  ‘It is. With an embroidered cherry-blossom, like the one in the Koi garden by the carp pool.’

  ‘She asks a lot of you, Ibo. I know this. It is because of you that the Mistress is noticed so much in the Imperial court. There is a rumour they lust after her embroidered gowns.’

  ‘Yes Master Koi. Thank you.’

  ‘You didn’t disillusion me yesterday and I am proud of you, you show great quality. The House of Koi took a big risk by letting you go. Here, this is for you.’

  He passed her a tiny black silk bag with a tassel wound round a little silk knot. She gazed at his hands again and saw the hands of an artist and a scholar and she wished it was another time and place and that she could talk with him about books and words and even embroideries.

  ‘For the Lantern Festival,’ he uttered and before she could thank him, he swung his bulk around and walked away along the verandah, his slippers making hardly a sound as they crossed the floor.

  He is essentially a compassionate man, she thought. The kind of man who would be a gentle grandfather.

  But Isabella, a grandfather doesn’t gift his granddaughter as a whore.

  She screwed up her eyes and rubbed at them with the heels of her hands in frustration, squashing the silk bag. Interested despite herself, she untwisted the tassel, upending the contents into her palm. A pair of perfect earrings slid out – fine aquamarines set in a filigree of dragons and below the stone on each, a tiny pearl shimmied on a fragile gold link.

  ‘Oh.’

  The word popped out involuntarily. They were the most perfect pieces of jewelry she had ever possessed in her life and would enhance the robe she was making. She slipped one into her ear and held up the broad knife blade. The jewels winked back and she was satisfied, stowing them in the bag, secreting them in her pocket as a whispered yip on the back wall had her bunching her fingers and muttering to herself, Pride goes before a fall, Isabella. Don’t forget.

  *

  The laundry had filled with steam and she entered through a fug, pushing the door of the stone outhouse ajar to clear the air. She dragged a little porcelain bowl through the warm water and poured it into the bowl of lac bodies and began to mash the contents, stirring and scraping, then more water and more water until the scarlet mess became a pure liquid so fierce in its redness, that it looked as if Isabella had just drained the blood from a chicken. She emptied the bowl into the vat and took up a big stick and dragged it through the misty water, back and forth and round and the vat turned as red as a massacre. She thrust in a handful of powdered alum, the valuable mordant kept in locked boxes in the Master’s library. He had sent Lucia with it just before Isabella began the morning’s alchemy.

  ‘Aine it’s a strong colour.’ Lucia stared into the vat. ‘Why would a woman of her age want to wear that?’

  ‘I think it will suit her and I shall tone it down with embroideries. Then again, she is never a shrinking violet, is she?’

  ‘Hush.’ Lucia held up a warning finger and then giggled. ‘No.’

  The two laughed as Isabella took up the white silk and pushed it into the water, stirring and stirring.

  ‘There, it can soak while I fill another vat with clean water. This is going to take all day, Lucia. Rinsing and rinsing, until nothing but clean water remains. And then I must hang it along the verandah outside my room where it can drip and dry. It must not be wrung or the silk will crease and mark and this must be perfect.’

  ‘What will happen then?’

  Lucia carried a bucket of water to the other vat and tipped it in.

  ‘I shall press it smooth. Lay it out, cut it, sew it and then add the embroidery. A month’s work or more in reality, but for Madame it has to be done yesterday.’

  ‘What did she say?’ Madame Koi’s knife tones slit through the ambience in the laundry and Isabella jumped, Lucia replying quickly in the Han tongue. The Mistress shuffled to the vat in her tiny slippers and looked in.

  ‘Quick, Isabella,’ Lucia nodded to the dye vat. ‘Pull the fabric out of the water.’

  Isabella reached the stick in and looped up an end of the soaking silk and Madame peered at it. She spoke to Lucia and then stalked out.

  ‘She said it looked passing good and you’d better get on with it. She wants no delays. Or mistakes. Or else.’

  ‘Bitseach.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘It’s true.’

  The two women looked at each other and then Belle burst out laughing, her humour wafting around the compound and up into the elm where the cages of singing birds chimed back and where amber eyes watched the progressions within the House of Koi with interest.

  *

  Late that perfect winter’s afternoon, the red silk hung outside Isabella’s room like a temple flag and as she sat on the verandah watching it, her thoughts piling up in her head, the bottom edge of the fabric began to move ever so slightly as if a fibre were caught on the back of something that edged along the walkway. Then the silk began to undulate, gently billowing, and she realised the tiniest breeze had entered the compound. The bells in the elm tinkled and a stray leaf, crackled and dry, rolled across the ground and fetched up against a rapidly thawing snowdrift.

  The zephyr had warmth in it and a smell of new awakenings and Isabella found herself thinking, ‘It’s a spring wind.’

  E
xcitement bubbled as in her mind she once again walked through the town and up the lanes to the Han Gate. For some reason she didn’t doubt at all that she would find a way through. Her much larger and seemingly unsolvable problem was the chasm with the bridge that never was.

  As her needle plied away, melding pieces of the aquamarine silk together, she mused on her thread trail through the woods, along the resinous paths and to the clearing, where she imagined taking a step out into the vacant air, her needle slamming through the fabric as she began to tumble.

  No bridge, no escape.

  The blood from her pricked finger soaked through the ice-blue silk and she sighed, her breath moving the red silk outward where it met the spring zephyr coming the other way. She spat a drop of saliva on her finger and dabbed at the stain, never surprised as it vanished as if she had used glamour.

  *

  ‘Here,’ Lucia walked along the path in the rose and peach of dusk, carrying a tray with green tea and pastries on it. ‘The Master said I was to bring it to you, and some for myself as well.’

  Isabella took the steaming cup, observing the translucence of the porcelain. Everything in the Koi household was perfect, she thought – the hand of an aesthete ruled here.

  ‘Nice cups, aren’t they?’ Lucia sipped noisily. ‘Madame had them made before you came. It’s only her second best set.’

  Isabella had been so sure the cups sprang from the Master’s artistic eye and she experienced a faint blow to her ego.

  Perhaps my judgement isn’t so sound after all.

  ‘Isabella?’ Lucia poked her friend’s arm. ‘You have forgotten what I told you the other day, what I heard about…directions and things, haven’t you?’

  ‘When you said ‘south by southeast’?’ Isabella dragged the blue silk into a bundle on her lap. ‘Gone, don’t worry. The thing I shall really never forget is what is outside the Gate. It’s a burial ground, Lucia, filled with slaves who tried to leave a place that can’t honestly be left. One grey marker after another. Did you know of it?’ She shuddered as Lucia’s eyes grew wide. ‘If I must be honest,’ she crossed her fingers amongst the folds of the silk where they were hidden, ‘then I think I would prefer the Imperial House where I can live, than a burial ground where I am dead.’ She sat for a minute and then grabbed Lucia’s hand. ‘Lucia, if they do gift me, will you come with me? I know the Master would allow me to ask? Please?’

  Lucia looked at Isabella.

  ‘Well aren’t you a confident little miss? Thinking the Master will grant you anything.’ She placed her cup carefully on the tray. ‘The fact is I like the House of Koi, I’m happy here. I have no greater ambition. I shall miss you but it can’t be helped.’ The breeze soughed through the red silk as it billowed in and out. ‘But thank you for asking and Aine be thanked that you’ve forgotten that other thing. Sometimes my mouth speaks before I catch up and I would hate to do this House a disloyalty.’ She picked up the tray. ‘Don’t strain your eyes and come to supper. You must eat.’

  Isabella watched Lucia leave and her soul shrivelled.

  You don’t deserve a gull for a friend. But I have to make you believe I have come to my senses. Everyone must believe I am as malleable as a slip of clay. Forgive me.

  *

  A day had passed and she jumped off her knees, thrusting her needle into a stuffed satin ball after spending the hours since dawn piecing together the red robe. In need of air after such solitary occupation, she slid her door open and stepped onto the verandah.

  The compound sparkled. Washed clean by the melted snows, warmed by a latent sunbeam, plants thrust through the mounds of mossy soil at the base of rocks which had been laid to mimic the mountain ranges towering in the distance. Boulders, artfully arranged with deposits of bamboo, grotesquely twisted pines, azaleas and rhododendrons, settled in natural drifts beneath the larger trees.

  Ceramic bowls held contorted trees in miniature, the tiniest bells hanging immobile in the branches, waiting for a sniff of a breeze from the rise of a pigeon or the passing bulk of one of Madame Koi’s cats. Buds on the cherry blossom tree had swelled outrageously and were in danger of bursting forth.

  A fragrance filled the air; Belle would have said it was the smell of freedom, as if all the binds and chains in the world were about to tear asunder. She took a cautious sniff. Certainly there was a kitchen smell but that other fragrance…it was palpable. Excitement shivered on the edge of her day. There is something here, she thought.

  Something.

  She heard a faint yip as she fetched her work and settled back on the steps of the verandah, making the sign of the horns as she took up the needle to thread it. The black silk slipped through the eye and she wondered whether it would be possible to slide though the Han Gate as smoothly. She slid the needle through the silk with a rush as her heartbeat quickened – I shall not give the time of day to failure.

  She had always grumbled during embroidery lessons, preferring to be outside with Nicholas and Phelim; working with the sheep, mending holes in the hedges, weaving withies, planting willow strips for fedges in which orphaned lambs could be kept. Even better though, to be by the shore collecting purple trumpet shells and dried dulse for dyes. But despite the lack of interest in the thread and the carp and complaint during lessons, something had rubbed off, some part of the extraordinary skill of her mother had seeped into Isabella’s marrow and in this obscurely secret place called the Han, they appreciated her fine work. She laid the basket of red silk on her sleeping mat and grabbing a thicker indigo robe, shrugged it on and slid her door closed behind her, to venture to the kitchens for supper with the other women.

  Later, she nestled down into her roll, replete with dumplings and broth, listening to a night breeze tease the bells on the elm outside. Every now and then, there would be a high-pitched descant as the smaller bells on the potted trees chimed. The water in Master Koi’s fountain bubbled, a slow simmer that barely disturbed the surface of the water. Just enough she imagined, for it to trickle over the sides of the urn into the pond, so that the bronze container was aged with verdigris. Her lids shuttered down as she endeavoured to put her plans into a sequence, an exercise she performed every night.

  A noise fiddled with the edge of her consciousness, a quiet sound, as if someone’s clothes creased and whispered as they knelt close by. Turning her head from its nest in the old indigo robes, she glimpsed a glowing white shape as something eldritch wafted in the room. She sat up and dragged her covers to her throat, a chill pervading every inch of her.

  ‘Do not have fear,’ a woman’s voice filled the space, tinged with the exotic tones of the Han but without the mangled mouthing of Master Koi. ‘I will not hurt you.’

  But Isabella’s throat constricted, a cry filling her mouth, a cry which never came because just for a moment she listened and could hear the bells, a cough from further down the verandah, footsteps and a door sliding as someone returned from the water closet. She realised she was safe, that her world was close by – she had but to move.

  Dulcet light spread over the immediate space, leaving the corners of the room in gloom, the light spreading from no apparent source apart from the female who knelt tidily on the floor, her heavy white robe folded beneath her legs, her hands smooth, one over the other on her thighs.

  A welkin wind wafted the strands of white fur that edged her clothing so that the fibre shifted like the fine stamens of cherry blossom when a spring zephyr sighed.

  ‘I speak a humble truth, Isabella, I am a friend.’

  The woman laid a tiny fragment of something in Isabella’s palm, and she felt a tingle, like when Nicholas’s fingers glanced across her own when they were working. Adelina and Ebba called it a frisson and it intimated something Other. She sat even straighter and looked down at her palm, recognising part of her subterfuge outside the Han Gate. A segment of her thready trail lay across her hand, a little frayed at either end.

  ‘Have you taken it all away?’

  Please not, it i
s my lifeline.

  She looked into the woman’s amber eyes and was reminded of a dog Phelim once had – a strange colour, unnatural.

  ‘Yes, Isabella, I have. It is not yet time for you yet to leave The Han.’

  Her voice was pleasant, her accent smooth, but Isabella’s heart folded and she slumped.

  ‘How could you? Don’t you understand? I have a home, a family…’

  ‘So do many other slaves in the Han.’

  ‘Yes, but they don’t mind being here. Ask them. They escaped a meaningless life. I haven’t escaped anything. I want to be with those I love and where I am loved.’

  ‘Did you appreciate that love Isabella? Or did you perhaps glory in it?’

  Isabella grabbed her bedroll tighter and pulled it higher.

  ‘But please,’ she tried to ignore the taint of inquisition in the woman’s words. ‘Please…my mother, I am her only child and she has been through so much in her life, she doesn’t deserve the pain of thinking I’m dead.’

  ‘She will survive, Ibo.’

  As the shock of hearing her name in the Han patois permeated, Isabella realised that the woman, this ghostly apparition in white, would profess little sympathy and she whispered, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am Kitsune, the Fox Lady, and I do understand, Ibo, that you have to go home, but not yet.’

  Isabella snorted.

  ‘And I should listen to you? When all in the Han quake at the miserable tricks the Fox Spirits play on them?’

  ‘You have learned of the Fox Spirits in your time here?’

  ‘How could I not? Everyone has fits of terror at the idea of your presence,’ She let her bedroll go and reached for a thick work-robe and shucked it on for warmth, little shivers coursing over her body.

  ‘But you do not?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Sometimes. Should I be frightened?’

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps not. There are some of us who would toy with you. You are interesting, Isabella. I think you are more equable about we spirits because in your time here you have focused most solely on getting away, of leaving, so that Han life has little meaning to you and you care even less. You have tried little to understand the Han way.’