by Nghi Vo
* * *
Chih tilted their head to one side.
“Are you going to ask me if I understand? I am still not sure if I do.”
“Well, something like this, you understand or you won’t.”
Chapter Five
Broken broom with tin charms tied around the handle.
Broken makeup compact. Alabaster, grease, and carmine.
Birch bark scroll. Birch bark, black feather, lock of hair, and blue silk thread. The birch bark is rolled around the hair and the feather, and tied together with the thread.
Chih jumped when Rabbit came and took the birch bark scroll away from them, holding it in her hand as if she wanted to crush it.
“I will not ask if you understand this one, either, because if you were not born and raised in the Palace of Gleaming Light, you would not. In those days you could say a thousand things with your choice of ink and paper even before someone read a word of your poetry.”
Chih looked at the object in Rabbit’s hand, wondering why the hair and dark feather looked suddenly so grim.
“I thought it was just trash.”
“It is trash,” she said shortly, “but if you want to understand people who have gone, that’s what you look at, isn’t it? Their offal. Their leavings.”
Chih waited patiently. It was the bulk of their training, learning how to wait for a story rather than chasing after it, and soon enough, it came to them.
Rabbit sighed.
* * *
This came to her door after she gave birth to the imperial prince, who was Kau-tan, known as the prince in exile. They’d taken him against her wishes, to wash him, they said, but she cried exhausted tears, knowing well she might never see him again.
I’d washed and bathed her, and after they took the little prince from her arms, I crawled into the bed with her, holding her and comforting her as best I could. There is nothing that can comfort a mother whose child was taken so unwillingly from her arms, though, and after the first sound of grief, she never made another. Instead, she asked me to tell her stories of where I had come from, my people, and I reached into the depths of my memory to tell her about living in the inn, how my father cooked enormous pots of barley stew for the people passing by, and my mother had read the fortunes of the great and the small alike between her chores.
The ladies of the women’s quarters left us alone in the dark, and so we lay together, skin to skin, for almost two weeks as she healed and I told her about my life out of the palace. It did not matter that it was so humble; what mattered was that it was outside the palace gates, and that was what she craved most.
This came for her from the emperor’s own hand, much as you see it now. Strange how some trash survives, but precious things are lost, isn’t it?
I sat with her and showed it to her, and when she wondered why her husband would send her trash, I explained it to her, wishing that the sky would open up and swallow me.
The hair belonged to her mother. It was as long as hers was and sleek black threaded with iron, known as well to her as the smell of snow waiting in the sky and the taste of seal meat. Seeing it here and wrapped in birch bark, the empress knew her mother was dead.
The jacana feather was a sign of exile, hers. She was lucky it was not a shred of willow bark, which would have meant execution.
The emperor had his heir from the north. He no longer needed a northern wife.
When I explained it to her, she went silent and turned her face to the wall, still as the sky before a lightning strike.
* * *
Chih waited to make sure that Rabbit was done, and then they nodded.
“I think I understand this, grandmother.”
“Do you, cleric from the Singing Hills? Because I am not sure I wish to.”
Rabbit was still, almost shaking with an emotion that had lived underground for a long time.
Gently, slightly nervously, Chih rested their hand on the woman’s shoulder. They were faintly surprised to find Rabbit to be truly flesh and blood, and not the cold, misty dampness of a revenant.
“It is trash, and where I come from, we burn trash.”
Rabbit looked startled, and then she nodded.
“Yes. We do that here as well.”
That night, the smoke from their fire curled up into the wide sky, like the incense from a temple sacrifice. When they went to sleep, Chih dreamed of a woman in a beautiful tunic made of seal fur, iron threaded through her black hair. From the ice gates of the north, she looked south, unblinking, waiting for her daughter to return home.
Chapter Six
A day later, Rabbit came and laid a single vivid green leaf in Chih’s hand. For a moment, Chih was startled to see a green leaf so far out of season, but then they saw that it had been dipped in wax, preserved for a season, a year, fifty years, or more with its bright color.
“Grandmother, what is this?”
“She asked me to get it for her as she lay on the palanquin that carried her west, which her people and ours have always said was the direction of death and endings. She’d listened to my stories, and she asked me if I would go with her into exile. As she said, at least someone would be able to go home again.”
Rabbit paused.
“Of course because she was who she is, because she said that, I never wanted to go home at all. They were the people who gave me away to make up for the lack of five caskets of orange dye. I came to Thriving Fortune with her.”
“Do you remember much of that journey, grandmother?”
“She was weak. So weak after what the doctors had done to her to prevent there ever being another heir to contest the rule of the first. But when she could, she rode with the curtains of her palanquin open, her face turned not west towards death or east towards civilization, but instead to the north.”
“To home.”
“Perhaps.”
Chapter Seven
Box of cumin. Wood, copper, and spice.
Box of dried coriander. Wood, copper, and spice.
Box of black salt. Wood, copper, and spice.
“Cleric, when you were a child, did you ever play eagle-eye with your parents?”
Chih had grown somewhat accustomed to Rabbit’s silent approaches. They were less supernatural, Chih decided, than imbued with a lifetime of habit gained of perfect service in a place where anything less could be punished by death.
“I don’t believe so, grandmother. What is that?”
“It was something they did in the servants’ quarters to teach us to see not only sharply, but well. They would fill a box full of small items, and then cover it. For one brief moment, they would unveil the items, and then cover them again. For every item you could remember, you’d get a sweet.”
“We played something similar at the abbey for much the same purpose. Why do you bring that up now, grandmother?”
Rabbit pointed to the boxes of spices Chih had found at the rear of the pantry, half-covered with a gaily dyed cloth and unremarkable in every way. Since the north had come south, black salt was almost as common as white now, and considered far more beautiful.
“Because one of these boxes is no kin to any of the others.”
* * *
Four years.
Four years we lived at Thriving Fortune with a revolving cadre of beautiful spies from the city. In-yo stayed in the empress’s chambers closest to the lake waters, and I slept in the closet off the kitchen. The ladies who were sent to us from the Palace of Gleaming Light were out of favor, I believe. Less fashionable, less lovely, perhaps simply less lucky.
They came here with smiles and vows to serve, and they were always playing eagle-eye, watching for the slightest hint of treason, the slightest hint of impropriety that they could report back to court, winning a place in a vaunted company of betrayers and murderers.
Some stayed a season, and some stayed for almost a year, but eventually, the Minister of the Left would arrive on his blood bay stallion, dressed in his favorite red and gold silk robe,
embroidered with the figure of the noble kirin. He came to collect the previous ladies and to bring the new lot.
“It is far too much of a temptation for ladies to grow overfamiliar with their empress, especially in this desolate place,” he explained in his calm and matter-of-fact voice.
“It does not do to have them grow to love me or to be too loyal to me, either,” said In-yo.
She hadn’t bothered to change out of her dressing robe to greet the Minister of the Left. He saw it as a sign of her uncouth slovenliness. I knew it to be a sign of her contempt. He smiled a smile as thin as a zither string.
“As you will, great and beautiful lady.”
The new ladies, girls, really, giggled at his compliment, and they tumbled over themselves swearing to serve the empress faithfully and well. In-yo ignored then, and I did as well. If the Minister of the Left had ever thought that the empress would lower herself to befriend a simple servant girl, he would have found me guilty of all the overfamiliarity he pretended to worry about. I’d stopped learning the ladies’ names sometime after the second year.
They were harmless, really. There was nothing for them to tease out. Sixty years of warmth and the hot winds summoned up by the imperial war mages kept the winter at bay, and without winter the mammoths of the north were dull and helpless, inclined to die of strange southern fevers and heartsickness.
Some of those girls, I think, might have come to love the empress in their own time. I do not remember love from them, however, so much as ambition. They’d ridden high once and then fallen, or perhaps they’d only seen the high places and it made them hungrier.
Kazu, I am convinced, must have been an accident. She arrived at Thriving Fortune with a slightly confused look that she never lost, and when the two other girls she came with knocked their silly heads on the ground trying to outdo each other in their obsequies to the empress, Kazu was more interested in the house, the woods around us, and the lake.
It turned out that she was one of the emperor’s less successful whims, a beautiful inn girl plucked from the low city and elevated to the rank of an accessory wife. She should have gained glamour like a pearl gained nacre, becoming more beautiful, more refined. Instead, her most august setting only made her seem cruder, a paste gem in a setting of gold filigree.
Now, you must not think that I disliked her.
The first week Kazu lived at Thriving Fortune, she lay in bed and sulked, but she quickly grew bored with that. She learned very quickly that the other two ladies held no interest for her, and that left In-yo and me.
I was just sweeping the floor outside of In-yo’s room when Kazu scared the wits out of me by catching the edge of the porch and hauling herself up from the ground.
“Don’t do that! I thought you were some kind of wood spirit.” I scolded her as if I were her big sister, speaking before I thought. She would have been well within her rights to slap me, but instead she grinned.
“It’s boring here. Come on, I’ll teach you a game, and we can play together.”
“You can do what you like, but I am not going anywhere until I’ve cleaned this floor.”
Kazu always struck me as more than a little lazy, but she could stand boredom far less well than she could stand work. She stripped out of her robes, right down to her trousers, and she came to clean next to me.
When we were finally done, she came to sit at the low table in the kitchen and taught me Lo-Ha, which was a dice game that was very popular in the capital that year. It relies more on luck than on skill, and in short order, I was nearly as good as she was.
It was addictive, however, and I ran off to play with Kazu so often that In-yo came looking for me. I scrambled to my feet, humiliated to be caught idling, and Kazu wore the hangdog look of someone caught in the wrong, but unashamed of it.
“What in the world are you doing?”
And so Kazu taught Lo-Ha to the empress, who mastered it as she did all games of chance, with both skill and a nearly astonishing amount of luck. When she had beaten both of us roundly, she gave us an impatient look.
“Is this all there is?”
Kazu looked slightly affronted.
“Well, no. This is just for fun, right? People use this game for fortune-telling in the capital. When you throw a two, a five, and a seven like this, they look it up and they can tell your future. It’s not just a game for children.”
“It’s definitely a game for children,” In-yo declared, and then she narrowed her eyes.
“Do you have friends in the capital who know how to tell what fortunes you throw? Good ones, not cheaters and fakes.”
Kazu snorted. “All fortune-tellers are cheaters, but maybe I know some good ones.”
“They’re not. Fortune-tellers have the ears of the gods. They tell us about the world we cannot see.”
I heard a shushing step in the hallway, one of the other ladies shuffling away. Doubtless she was going to laugh at the empress’s simple faith in festival fortune-tellers. The court fortune-tellers were a different breed entirely, of course, with well-fed bellies and sleek robes of cool green. It was easy to believe that they might have an eye on the doings of the gods when they had risen so far in the world. A poor barefoot fortune-teller from the market, well, that was perhaps a harder sell.
In-yo picked up one of the dice again, tumbling it between her fingertips. I knew that something was sizzling in her brain, burning away like a bonfire, but she only nodded at the table.
“Come on, play with me some more. I’m not tired of winning yet.”
Every year, the north sent her a box of white salt. It gleamed like starlight, each grain perfect and clean. They sealed the boxes with wax so that the salt arrived as perfect as the day they harvested it from the sea.
In-yo had her secrets, sealed away inside her like a box with another box inside it and another inside that. Even as well as I knew her by the end, there was no end to the depths of her or the secrets she hoarded like a miser his chains of gold coins. I have no idea how she passed more than the faintest pleasantries with the north at that point, when all of her messages were scrutinized for codes, for invisible ink and pinprick holes that could spell out a message of rebellion.
All I know is that that year, the year that Kazu came to live with us, the year that we learned Lo-Ha, and taroco, and all the others, the north finally sent their exiled princess a box of black salt instead of white.
Do you understand?
* * *
Chih set the box of black salt on the table in front of them. After a slight nod from Rabbit, they opened the box again, looking at the black granules more closely. Almost Brilliant fluttered down from the rafter to inspect the box and the contents, pecking at the grains that Chih dabbed with a fingertip.
The grains of salt, they realized, were not really black, but instead a deep and dull garnet. When they bent their head down, they could smell a faint scent of spoiled milk and something underneath, something almost bloody.
“It’s iron,” they said with faint surprise. “Iron gives black salt its color, then?”
Rabbit nodded with some satisfaction. “It is. White salt is pure and comes from the sea, utterly innocent and utterly still.”
“And red from iron, from swords and shields and the bells that hang from the mammoths’ bridles . . . I imagine that black salt stands for something else.”
“Yes. You do understand.”
Chapter Eight
Astrological chart of the constellation of the Baker. Fine rag paper and ink. Signed in the lower-right corner with the character for “lucky.”
Astrological chart of the constellation of the Crying Widow. Fine rag paper and ink. Signed in the lower-right corner with the character for “mourning.”
Astrological chart of the constellation of the Rooster. Fine rag paper and ink. Signed in the lower-right corner with the character for “open-eyed.”
Chih had thought the rear room to be a simple storage room at first. They had not expected to slide
open the door and to be confronted with stacks of star charts filed into glass-fronted cabinets, indexed with a dab of dye in one corner and kept as carefully as the great scrolls of the abbey in Singing Hills.
Above them, Almost Brilliant whistled, though whether the sound was meant to be surprised or taunting Chih could not guess.
“Well, this is certainly a mess.”
“I suppose it is.”
“Do you think you can get through all of them fast enough to get to the eclipse?”
Chih bit their lip. It would be a close thing. They worked fast, but after a certain point, speed became the enemy of precision. Precision was the watchword of the clerics who had raised them, but the tug of the capital and the eclipse over the Palace of Gleaming Light was powerful.
Finally, they shrugged, going to the topmost shelf on the right and pulling out paper, inkstone, ink, and brush again.
“This could take all month,” Almost Brilliant said, alighting on their shoulder. Chih absently brushed the hoopoe off, ignoring the soft squawk of offense.
“It could. I hope it won’t.”
It would be, not appropriate, perhaps, but understandable to move on, to list the general contents of the room and to continue with the cataloging of Thriving Fortune. Another cleric could be sent, or perhaps Chih themselves could return at some point. By then, however, looters might have moved in and, as Chih listened to Rabbit’s footsteps shushing somewhere through the compound, things might be very different.
Empress In-yo, dead precisely a year before the upcoming eclipse, was one of the most well-recorded monarchs in history. She had brought the clerics of Singing Hills back from their exile beyond the borders of Anh, and she personally gifted them a gorgeous ivory and brass aviary to nest the next generation of neixin. Then she had shut off every record of herself before her ascension, every place she had lived between her banishment from court and her return six years later.
The clerics of the Singing Hills never liked gaps in their knowledge, but in return for their lands and their restored place in Anh, they had let it go. Eventually, the historian clerics knew, things would come out, whether it took five years, fifty, or a hundred.
