The Empress of Salt and Fortune

by Nghi Vo

  That morning, they uncovered a carved box tucked behind a basket for laundry, and when they brought it to Rabbit, the old woman chuckled with a kind of malice.

  “Oh yes. Those are called Lucky Sticks in the capital. They are of northern origin, written in T’lin runes. Unfashionable, of course, until In-yo sat the lion throne. I do not suppose you have ever seen them before?”

  “No. When I go to record the eclipse, this will be my first time in the capital.”

  “Well, that sounds very fine. Here, let me show you how to play.”

  Chih sat down across from Rabbit on the porch and watched as the old woman capped the box and rattled the sticks packed inside. As she did so, she took on the droning cry of the market fortune-tellers.

  “Here Xao Min, goddess of luck! Here Fei-wu, god of wealth! Here Shao Mu, saint of love! Look upon our hands with kindness, and guide us towards what is right!”

  She gave the small container a little bounce in her hand while at the same time turning it over and removing the cap. The sticks themselves were too tightly packed to all come out, but three slid forward partway. With a practiced hand, Rabbit whipped them free and spread them on the ground in front of Chih.

  “I take it you do not know T’lin?”

  “They started teaching it after I served my novitiate. Those who came after me knew it, but I’ve not had the time to take it up, personally.”

  “You should find the time. It will never replace Anh as the national writing, but it will only grow more common the more traders come from the north. Ah, but let’s see what you have drawn. I see the rune for north, the rune for run, and the rune for ambergris.”

  As Chih watched, Rabbit dug two fingers into the canister, pulling out a fragile piece of paper folded into thirds. It was covered with an insectile script, and Rabbit squinted at it for a long moment before she nodded.

  “See, this combination means that you will be successful in your career, but only if you remember to take things in their own time. No one likes a prodigy, after all. Patience should be your watchword.”

  “So my teachers have always said. Thank you for reading for me.”

  “Now show me you have the trick of it. Why don’t you try reading the fortune that was tucked where you found this one?”

  Chih shrugged and rolled open the bundled sticks, some fortune drawn long ago. In another place, they might have been impatient with this, but after what they had already learned and from the way Rabbit was watching them—teaching them—there was something else to be gained here.

  The sticks were slightly darker than the ones in the canister, as if they had been turned hand to hand over a long period of time. It took Chih a few moments to parse out the blocky T’lin script, so very different from the curving syllabary employed throughout most of Anh. Then they hunted the matching ideogram on the ancient piece of paper, careful not to crumple it in their fingers.

  “I think . . . this must be the rune for wind, and this the rune for wool? And perhaps this one is the rune for water?”

  “No, they’re not. It’s not eagle-eye this time. Listen instead, and remember that the back of the north was originally broken by the empire of Anh in the days of Emperor Sho. In those days . . .”

  “They spoke the southern Anh dialect, not what we speak now.”

  Rabbit smiled. “Yes. They still teach the southern dialect to the clerics, don’t they?”

  “Yes. So in the southern dialect, let’s see. Water. Wind. Wool. Water. Wool. Water. Wind . . . Ba. Ber, kon . . .”

  “And that’s the southern dialect. Now bring it back to the northern tongue.”

  Chih concentrated. Translate the syllabary from T’lin, and from there into the southern tongue, and then use those building blocks to create words. . . .

  “Konshi . . . Erh Shi Ko. He was a general, wasn’t it? The one who led the Anh troops at Ko-anam Fords.”

  “It was. Very good. In-yo insisted on sending her fortunes at Lucky Sticks back to her home for interpretation. Of course the Minister of the Left suspected espionage. It was, after all, his job. He never let her send the sticks themselves, but he had a scribe come down and copy the markings to send along. The fool never knew that it wasn’t In-yo’s language that doomed him, but his own, brought to the north generations ago.”

  Chih played with the sticks, sounding out the name of the so-called Iron General, Erh Shi Ko. He died in the first purge, and his head was torn from his body and stuck on a stake as he had once ordered for all the men he’d captured in the northern conflict.

  The clerics of the Singing Hills were always aware of the risk of seeing too much. The burn marks on the abbey’s thick stone walls spoke of many warlords and monarchs who did not wish to be seen so clearly, and then every few years an elder neixin, rich in wisdom and experience, was traded with the sibling-abbey in Tsu, where she could teach the foreign hatchlings all she knew.

  Chih had grown up with the history of the world in the very walls of their home, fluttering above their head, cooked into the barley they ate. This was the first time they could feel such a weight of it pressing down on them, wrapping around them like a blanket of wet wool.

  * * *

  The cleric looks at Thriving Fortune and sees the history they own as a subject of the empire. As a member of their order, perhaps they own it twice over, and I do not begrudge them that. The Empress of Salt and Fortune belongs to all her subjects, and she was romantic and terrible and glamorous and sometimes all three at once. There are dozens of plays written about her, and some are good enough that they may last a little while even after she is gone. Older women wear their hair in braided crowns like she did, and because garnets were her favorite gem, they are everywhere in the capital.

  In-yo belonged to Anh, but Thriving Fortune only belonged to us.

  It was a prison at first, because it always was one, a place where emperors could banish wives who no longer pleased. It was better than the executioners’ silk garrote, at least, though the emperor’s executioners could travel as well as anyone. There are some very elegant ghosts that walk the edge of the lake, their long hems fading into the bracken. Some of them have handmaidens following along behind them, tongueless, handless, and eyeless, and I knew very well what might come of my loyalty to In-yo.

  Thriving Fortune was also a refuge, at least for me. At the palace, I scorned the countryside as much as any of the other girls, more, because I was always worried they could smell the mud on me. Now I could breathe the fresh air and eat food as it grew straight from the ground. In-yo laughed the spring day I pulled up a full basket of spring radishes, but she ate them as quickly as I did. They were so fresh and spicy and perfect that if I sit in the spring breeze, letting the wind touch my cheek, I can taste them still.

  Finally, Thriving Fortune became a war camp, and the general sat on the porch late into the night, looking north towards home and east towards vengeance. She took reports from her fortune-teller spies, sometimes under the very noses of the court ladies the Minister of the Left had assigned. In her eyes, I could see the watching spirits of her dead kin, who would rather their women died than be sent south unless they went as weapons.

  In-yo’s two attendants were napping the hot summer morning that Sukai returned with a message from her northern fortune-teller. Sukai looked, to me, rather more grown-up than he had appeared the first day I met him, fuller in the face, more cautious in the way he held himself. It made him more attractive to me, but it wasn’t as if he had started out ugly in the least.

  “You’ve brought word from Igarsk-Ino? What did he say about my luck for the coming year? I sent him three fortunes to interpret.”

  The only thing that revealed In-yo’s impatience was the Lucky Stick she twirled through her fingers. I was the only one who knew how often she played with that stick, marked with the northern rune for death, which requires no interpretation.

  Sukai passed her the first slip that had been copied down for her. The characters stood for coal,
mountain, and spear, chu, ma, and rho. Ma Chiroh was a beast of a man, one of the little generals who saw the colonies as his personal hunting ground whether he was hunting for seals, deer, or women.

  “As to the first fortune, the holy man says that it is most fortuitous. Your worries will be laid to rest, and they will never rise again.”

  He never did. He disappeared on a hunting trip, and some years after that, he was found with a woman’s spindle in his eye, his clothes blowing like banners from his bones.

  In-yo nodded with relief.

  “That is very well-done. And the second?”

  Sukai passed her the second scrap of paper, inscribed with the northern runes for hail, wheel, and south, or pah, lo, and tze. Po Lo-tsu was one of the imperial war mages who kept Anh in perpetual summer, a man of discipline and great dignity.

  “Igarsk-Ino pondered over your second fortune for a very long time, Your Majesty, and at the very last, he said that your life requires caution and hope in equal measure. We may think that the sun will never rise at midnight, but it has been known to happen.”

  Po Lo-tsu turned out to be the sun who rose at midnight after all. When the time came, he did as the north asked. That is, he did nothing, and in the chaos and bloodshed that followed, I am given to understand that he closed himself off in his quarters. They found him with the tin scent of strong poison on his breath, and a miniature portrait of his daughter in his hand. His daughter was a great beauty, and she had gone into the women’s quarters at the Palace of Gleaming Light many years ago, during the reign of the emperor’s father. She disappeared like Kazu did, like any number of women did over the years, unremarked, and their demise as unremarkable as surely they were not. One drunken evening, many years on, In-yo would say that the war was won by silenced and nameless women, and it would be hard to argue with her.

  That day, however, In-yo only nodded, leaning forward with her eyes narrowed.

  “And the third? What of the third?”

  It was shi, erh, and kon, the name of the general who had killed her brother, and when Sukai shook his head, In-yo clenched her fists so tightly that her nails cut into her palms.

  “The great fortune-teller consulted the stars and the old books, Your Majesty, and at the end, he merely said that some endeavors are too great to be attempted. Some ambitions must be left to lie until one is strong enough to conquer them.”

  In-yo nodded as if she understood, but when it came to Erh Shi Kon, she did not want to conquer. She wanted nothing less than a slaughter. Instead, she thanked Sukai for his service, and asked him to stay for a little while so she might ponder over what she had learned. In-yo was very good at waiting, but that particular fortune she craved.

  There were of course other messages to be sent and houses in the capital where Sukai could offer his services, houses where the topic of who sat the lion throne was less words written in stone than a fortune written on birch bark. However, it did not escape me that In-yo might have had another reason to keep Sukai at Thriving Fortune when she told me to take him hunting mushrooms early one morning.

  “It is strange to see a shadow without the one who casts it.”

  I scowled at him, looking up from where I was inspecting the loam.

  “What nonsense are you about now? You will scare off the mushrooms if you are not quiet.”

  He cocked his head at me curiously.

  “Are you serious, or are you trying to get me to shut up?”

  “Mostly the latter, unless you can speak some sense. Why are you speaking about shadows?”

  “Because this is the first time I think I have seen you out of arm’s reach of the empress.”

  “Because you have made a careful observation of all her movements and mine, and you know where we are at all times.”

  “Well, less hers than yours.”

  I felt a deep red blush come up on my cheeks and, unused to the sensation, I tried to rub it off.

  “You are being foolish. And here, give me the basket.”

  I came up with two wrinkled mushrooms, dark and smelling of good earth. I showed Sukai how to pull them up without disturbing the loam, ensuring they would continue to grow the next year. He looked at them dubiously.

  “These look terrible.”

  “You may give me your share if you like, though I’d guess you’d change your tune once we fry them in sesame oil.”

  “Now, I didn’t say that. I merely said they look too ugly to be as delicious as the empress was saying.”

  “Sometimes . . . sometimes the ugliest things can be the most delicious.”

  I looked at him sideways as I said it, blushing even darker, and he stared at me.

  “Did— Was that a compliment? Did you try to pay me a compliment? Have you never paid one before?”

  “No!”

  He laughed so loudly that if mushrooms could run, we never would have found another one. We filled the basket with the small wrinkled mushrooms that In-yo liked so much as well as an orange and red-lobed one that smelled impressively like chicken.

  Sukai proved to be a little hopeless at mushrooms and more than a little hopeless at directions. He came so close to wandering off down the mountain that, finally, I took his hand to lead him all the way back.

  Just because I didn’t want to lose the mushrooms, of course.

  That night, while the other two ladies slept, the three of us fried the mushrooms over a small brazier set up on the porch. It had been overly warm all month, and the lake glowed like a baleful eye, eerily beautiful.

  “How do you live with it watching you?” asked Sukai, forgetting that he was with royalty.

  In-yo, who seemed to forget that fact whenever it was convenient for her, shrugged.

  “As you live with anything, I suspect. You bear it, or you end it. So far, we have proved equal to bearing it.”

  With my mouth stuffed full of mushroom, I didn’t say that you could also find a beauty in it, a kind of peace even in something that was at first so very unsettling. I’d cried the first time I saw the luminescence of the lake. Now most nights, I slept on the porch, bathed in its red glow. If it was a monster of some kind, it was a monster that watched over me, and, at the very least, it had not devoured me yet.

  I didn’t say it that night, but I did tell Sukai about it eventually. By then he had lost his fear of the lake entirely, and I had lost my last reservations of him.

  * * *

  Chih didn’t realize that Rabbit had actually left Thriving Fortune until they saw her return, coming up the paved path and brushing dirt off her hands. There were blots of ink all over her fingers, and her expression was oddly solemn.

  “What have you been doing, grandmother, if I might ask?”

  “You might ask, certainly. I have been burying some writing of mine.”

  Chih cocked their head to one side.

  “You must know that there’s nothing that is more anathema to Almost Brilliant and me.”

  “Which is why I waited until you and the neixin were occupied in the storage rooms, yes.”

  Chih waited, and Rabbit sighed.

  “Time is the thing. I want time to get the words right. To do proper honor to those who died. I don’t want them to be ashamed when others speak about them. But I know that there is only so much time left, and it will never be perfect.”

  Tentatively, Chih reached out their hand to Rabbit, who took it blindly.

  “The abbey at Singing Hills would say that if a record cannot be perfect, it should at least be present. Better for it to exist than for it to be perfect and only in your mind.”

  Rabbit was silent long enough that Chih thought they would not get a response, and then she nodded.

  “You are right, I suppose. Tomorrow. I will compose my thoughts tonight, and tomorrow I will tell you more.”

  Chapter Ten

  Tin shrine token, badger with one paw raised.

  Wooden shrine token, cherry inscribed with the aphorism “Submission but only to the truth.”


  Pilgrimage Itinerary. Fine rag paper and ink. The itinerary lists twenty-four shrines throughout the empire of Anh, each with a check mark next to it.

  The two dozen shrine tokens scattered across the low table where they worked made Chih think of toys or sewing notions. They were the simplest of souvenirs, sold by the clerics at each stop as minor blessings to make a little more money for a new roof or a statue. In Singing Hills, they sold a little perfumed wax figure of a perched hoopoe, and Chih noticed that there was no such token in with the rest.

  There was something almost sinister about the tokens and the itinerary, and after Chih recorded them, they put their brush down. There was a weight to the tokens that went beyond what they were. Thriving Fortune itself seemed to be a place made of stories and plots, conspiracies and fury.

  Finally, they scooped a handful of the tokens and went looking for Rabbit.

  They found her at last on the beach. As Chih watched, she bent to scoop up a rock, inspecting it closely before throwing it towards the water. She tried twice, making a face both times before shrugging.

  “Sukai could send them skipping across the surface, four, even five or six times. I have never gotten the trick of it.”

  “It helps, I think, to spin them a little and to send them out rather than up. What can you tell me about these?”

  Rabbit did not look surprised at all when Chih presented her with the tokens. She did not take them from the cleric but instead picked through them with one finger like a child sorting out her favorite nuts from a mix.

  “Well, that one came from shrine of the Dancing Girl. She’s not a goddess anymore, not enough worshipers, but back then, she did all right. It provided a place for all the little girls orphaned by the fighting to the far west to go, anyway. And this, this one came from the abbey in Bangala, where the monks and nuns claim that it was a rabbit that taught them how to fight. I’ve still never seen anything move as fast as one of the Bangala nuns showing us how she could throw six kicks in the space of one breath, each one knocking a stacked piece of wood high into the air.”