Beneath Ceaseless Skies #47

by Lee, Yoon Ha

  “The thought had crossed my mind.” I considered asking what he desired in return, then reminded myself that a goblin offered what it pleased him to offer and took what it pleased him to take, heedless of fair play on either side.

  “I have been looking for someone that I trust to carry out an experiment,” he said.

  “And you trust me?”

  “I trust anyone whose secrets have not stained my writing brush,” he said, shifting his gaze back out to the water.

  “Do you remember Liru?” he said, surprising me with the jarring change of subject. “Niam Liru.”

  “Ah... yes,” I said, blinking away the image of her drowned, bloated body. “A regular here, four or five years ago? Worked for the Canal Bureau.”

  “You are courteous not to mention her end. But I think of her every day, and others like her, dead before their time.”

  I turned to study his gaunt, strangely-made face, not certain if I should believe what I was hearing. To my knowledge, goblins were not capable of remorse.

  He either did not notice or did not mind my scrutiny. “I came here once or twice as a woman,” he went on, “to see if it would help me understand. The tea-boys I dallied with did not come to the same ends. I am not certain I understand why.”

  “Boys are raised with very different expectations,” I said.

  He looked back at me then, his eyes reflecting lamplight. “What do women expect?”

  “To matter.”

  From his silence, I might as well have been speaking a foreign tongue. In another dizzying change of subject, which I began to expect might be commonplace with him, he asked, “May I see your true form?”

  “I am not a shapechanger,” I said. “I only dress to hide my shape.”

  “I understand,” he said. “But I would like to see you as you were made.”

  “And I you,” I said, as a gentle way of refusing his request. In the untold centuries since Tuo had begun visiting Jiun-Shi, not a single person had ever seen him without his veneer of humanity.

  “It seems a ‘fair exchange,’” he replied immediately.

  I took a moment to conceal my shock. “Not here,” I said at last. “I can’t take the risk some drunken merchant or magistrate might blunder in. But I do not work tomorrow night. I could meet you at the fourth bell, at the Lunar Gate, under the wall. The taxis retire at two bells; there will be no one there.”

  “I will do my best to be punctual,” he said.

  * * *

  The wind the following night was robust enough to make me stagger; it tore snakes of black hair loose from carefully placed pins and thrashed my dress against my bones until the silk cut like broken glass.

  I followed the Lunar Canal to the westernmost edge of the city, where it flowed beneath a vine-streaked arch in the gray stone wall. There was just enough of a lip along the edge of the canal to allow a slight person such as myself to edge her way carefully beneath the archway and sidestep along it out it toward the moat. I found my way to the deepest shadows beneath the wall, flattened my back against chill stone, and waited.

  I stared down into the water, imagining for a moment I could see beneath its oily black surface, catch glimpses of the pale yellowed bones of those who had come to end their despair or to meet in secret with a betrayer. The thought crossed my mind, not for the first time, that Tuo intended me harm, but I dismissed it as vanity. Then my mind’s pendulum lurched in the other direction, and I wondered if he would forget to meet me.

  No sooner had the humiliating possibility occurred to me than I saw a disturbance in the canal, near a rotting wooden ladder so darkened with algae I had not noticed it. It was propped on the far edge of the canal on the city side of the wall. The surface of the water wrinkled and shuddered, and something moved just beneath, something invisible and preternaturally quick. A qualm seized me, and I pressed my spine harder against stone, fighting the urge to turn my face away. I forced myself to hold still, to keep my eyes on the ladder.

  The creature that slithered its way up the rungs was only roughly similar to a human in shape. It was smaller than I expected, and covered in slick, froglike skin. I could make out few details in the light of the half-moon, only that the dark hands were webbed, the head spherical and grotesquely smooth, as I had seen depicted in drawings of goblins before.

  As it climbed up onto the lip of the canal I saw that it had an articulate, wormlike tail, and that its hind legs bent in two places like an animal’s. Its locomotion was somehow disorienting; it seemed to pour across the stone like a shadow from a moving light source. As it made its way under the wall, I suddenly found myself intensely grateful for the twenty feet of water that separated us.

  “Tuo?” I said softly.

  I cannot speak to you aloud. I have no tongue. His words hovered in my consciousness as though they had recently been uttered.

  Stiffly, not wanting to linger on formalities, I began to disrobe. “Can you see in the dark?”

  Of course. But I had not realized there would be such wind. Won’t you be chilled?

  “You may leave your pretense of concern behind with the rest of your disguise,” I said, working irritably at the tiny buttons embedded in the dark silk. I bit my tongue, then. I needed Tuo to be kindly disposed toward me; what I needed from him no one else in the city could give.

  Even after I shrugged off the outer layer that covered me from neck to ankles, I was still not recognizable as male. The fashion was to use undergarments to create an androgynous, columnar shape. Removing the armor of these undergarments was something I had only ever done in a windowless room behind at least three sturdy locks. It had been years since I had felt wind on my skin, and as I peeled away the bindings from my chest I began to tremble.

  May I examine you more closely?

  “If you need to,” I said between chattering teeth. I realized I had nowhere to put my clothes. I held them to my now-naked belly as he dived into the water, scarcely disturbing its surface and then emerging just to my right. As I was wondering how he would climb the three feet of stone between the water and the lip of the canal, he simply flowed up the sheer surface like ink into a brush. I wondered about the ladder, before. Had he acquired human habits? Or had he been trying not to unsettle me?

  His smooth dark head reached only to my shoulder, and I was not particularly tall. He looked up at me with large, featureless, dusky eyes; if he had pupils of any kind I was unable to see them in the dim light.

  I am going to touch you, he warned me.

  I stiffened a fraction of a second before he laid a hand under each of my elbows. His skin was wet and impossibly cold as he lifted my arms and the clothes bundled in them so that he could stare unrepentantly between my legs.

  Do you find it ugly? he asked me. Distasteful?

  “I suppose. I hadn’t really thought of it,” I said. My teeth were chattering so fiercely that I could barely get the words out. “I don’t know how I would feel about it if it weren’t a death sentence.”

  Your skin is smoother than what I wear in your shape. He strokeda palm down the center of my chest. The contact was oily and frictionless, my visceral response humiliatingly visible.

  “I would prefer that you not touch me.”

  Would this make you more comfortable?

  Before my eyes, he shifted, making me feel as though I had pitched over the edge of an abyss. I had to lean back against the wall to keep my footing.

  A young woman stood before me, as unclothed as I. Her hair was a tangled mess, her mouth parted slightly, her pale skin covered with gooseflesh. The illusion was so real, so insistent to my senses, that my knees buckled in shock and I sank onto them. She knelt too, slipping her arms around me. My own arms were still full of clothing, and I told myself this was why I did not pull away. She kissed my mouth even as her small silken hands investigated me in a decidedly dispassionate manner.

  So interesting.

  My eyes opened wide at that; I had not realized that I had closed them. H
ers were open too, inches from mine, and their emptiness swallowed me. Before I even knew what I intended, I gave her a fierce shove toward the water. She had no time to simulate an emotion as she toppled backward into the canal.

  I hugged the bundle of clothing to my body and fled.

  * * *

  I slept in fitful bursts throughout the following day, haunted by oblique, mythic nightmares that did nothing to address my real terror. A sleep like a black tide fell over me in the early evening, and I woke hours later, groggy and perilously close to being late for my shift. I dressed and hurriedly scraped sparse stubble from my chin and upper lip before rushing out into the dark street and waving down a water taxi.

  When I arrived at the teahouse, no sooner had I disembarked than I felt a familiar presence in my thoughts.

  Do not come inside. Someone saw you running naked through the streets last night. Rumors abound.

  I cursed aloud, looking for Tuo but not finding him. I ducked into the alley beside the Silver Fish and hoped he would find me.

  In a few moments, a black cat bumped against my legs. I can change you, if you like. If Tuo held any ill will toward me for the way I had treated him the night before, it did not reveal itself through his speech nor the animal’s body language.

  “Into what?”

  Female. In case they should search you.

  A shiver ran through me. So casually, he offered what I had spent weeks pondering how to ask. The cat began to purr, and I felt the scrape of a fang on my bare ankle as it rubbed its head under the hem of my skirt.

  “If you can do that,” I said tensely, “then be quick about it! I’m late.”

  It may feel unpleasant at first, he said.

  I was about to demand that he get on with it when I suddenly felt the world tilt like a boat in a storm. This time I was not staring into the abyss, I was plunging into it headfirst. I would have cried out, if I’d had any connection whatsoever to my physical form.

  And then I stood, in the same clothes and the same hair, feeling utterly reassembled. I wrapped my arms around myself, disconcerted by the fluid way my skin shifted over my muscles. As I took a step back, my hips threw me slightly off balance, and I steadied myself against the shingled wall.

  I made you as similar as could be. It will last the night, but the rays of the sun will dispel it.

  “I appreciate your skill,” I said. My voice, too, was the same. “I owe you my job, if not my life. Although I know it is not your tradition, I must repay you somehow.”

  Meet me at the Starlight Gate after sundown, on your next night off, he said. It was hard to tell if he meant that this would settle my debt.

  * * *

  It was with almost savage delight that I undressed in a back room for the canny old crone who owned the Silver Fish. Her eyes and hands were corpse-cold, but the rumors died at her word, and that was that. When I returned to my natural form in the morning I felt a new distaste for it, and the three days that intervened between that disappointing dawn and my night off were an agony of subdued anxiety.

  To the east of the city lay Starlight Lake, a manmade reservoir fed by the many small streams that cascaded down out of the mountains. From the lake, the broad Starlight Canal entered Jiun-Shi through a mosaic-encrusted tunnel—the “Gate” to which Tuo had referred—then cut a curving path roughly northwest through the city. The many shipping boats that used this artery to carry their wares out of the city would then find their meandering way west to the Weeping River and eventually to the sea.

  The Lake itself was a watery pleasure-park, populated with floating restaurants, brothels, entertainment acts and gardens that were open at all hours. In seven years, I had not once visited it; every Scale I earned was hoarded at the Fox-Lunar Bank.

  I received more than a few odd looks as I stood at the Starlight Gate watching the sky turn from red to violet, ignoring taxi after taxi and waving others ahead of me. It was a peculiar place to wait, and I wondered why Tuo had chosen it, until the lingering glow of twilight began to fade and I saw him approaching along the avenue. He was dressed for a night of revelry, trousers of blue-gray silk hugging his slender legs, his boots polished to a high sheen. As he approached, greeting me with an unabashedly florid lovers’ bow, my palms grew damp.

  “Adored mistress,” he said, adopting the submissive form of address that the tea-boys used, “I am ready to serve your whim until dawn stirs behind the mountains.”

  I did not know how to respond, particularly with crowds of people elbowing their way past me onto the latest boat, and so I simply let him approach and take a handful of my skirt. I escorted him thus onto the taxi, keenly uncomfortable. I ought to have been contented to play along, given that I had spent a third of my life as an impostor, but something about the slight tug at my skirt as we moved to the rail set my teeth on edge. I could not shake the feeling he was mocking me.

  Our stop is the last one, he said to me. A boat called The Mirror. It is mine, and tonight it is empty.

  The other passengers disembarked by the dozen at the restaurants, in pairs to the gardens, a handful of women at each brothel, until Tuo and I were alone. The taxi’s oarsman steered us then to what appeared to be an empty section of the lake, whereupon Tuo released my skirt, stepped off of the taxi, and instead of plunging into the water as I expected, disappeared into thin air.

  I hesitated for a moment until I saw his arm reappear as though reaching to help me disembark. Only then could I see the rest of him, standing on a ramp leading to a magnificent two-story pleasure-boat whose existence my eyes had refused to acknowledge. Seeresses were known for weaving Shrouds to trick the eye, but never of this size or profundity. Wondering if this ostentatious display of power was deliberate, I allowed Tuo to take my hand and carefully stepped onto The Mirror.

  The craft’s ambiance was a testament to centuries of obsession with the human race. Nearly every available surface was painted with fashionably austere illustrations of the Empire’s history, with no particular regard to chronology. Every blank space in the scenes was littered with his poetry, like swarms of black insects. On our way to our unnamed destination aboard the boat, we passed through a ballroom dominated by a monochromatic mural that depicted in loving, almost pornographic detail the bloody sacking of Huo-Ru.

  A bamboo staircase led to the upper level, which was largely open to the chill air that moved across the moonlit lake. There was one area closed off by undulating blue curtains, and it was here that he led me, parting the silk so that I might pass through ahead of him.

  Behind the curtain was a tremendous bed. I recoiled so violently that I backed into him, only to turn and find myself face to face with the fetching young woman who had kissed me the night before, draped now in charcoal-colored silk.

  “No,” I said.

  “I need to understand,” she said, slipping her gown slowly from milky shoulders. The gown was only for effect, to tease me with the revelation of flesh, and it dissipated like smoke.

  I tried to remind myself that the body was just as ephemeral, but I could not tear my eyes away from her imperfect breasts, puckering in the cold, or the soft dark line leading down from her navel. Tuo had seen, touched, smelled enough women to make the illusion achingly real in its untidiness.

  “No,” I said again. The rest of my vocabulary seemed to have dried up.

  “Why?” Tuo asked.

  I could not conjure up, much less articulate, a logical reason, and I did not feel equal to the task of trying to explain terror and confusion to a goblin. Despite my years living as a woman, I had been raised properly as a boy whose only purpose was to produce more girls, and so I let the phantom woman begin undressing me. In some distant part of my mind I noted the irony of my very male submissiveness as my very female clothing fell to the floor piece by piece.

  “Why?” I managed to ask, when she let me up for breath between liquid kisses.

  “I need to understand,” she repeated.

  After that there were no m
ore words. She was as silent as death, her eyes fastened intently on my face as she transformed me subtly into something else, something primal, a beast who existed only to bear her weight and disappear into her. She drew back the bowstring of my frustration and solitude until I thought the flimsy composite of man and woman that made up my soul would splinter under the strain.

  But once that arrow had loosed, the world became hazy and splendored, and I had never known anything more perfect than her small form sheltering my chest and belly from the moist draft off of the lake. I held her to me, closing eyes that stung with salt.

  “What happens now?” I said when I could speak again.

  She laid her palm on the center of my chest, and the bed seemed to fold and shudder beneath me as my flesh rounded and softened on either side of her hand. I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, Tuo was as I had always seen him at the Silver Fish. His hand was gentle, almost pleading, as it cradled the breast he had made.

  “Now,” he said, “It is your turn.”

  * * *

  I became careless at work over the following days, perhaps because I was still adjusting to the transformation that now happened nightly, even in Tuo’s absence.

  The body was my own, and not my own. It was no mere trick for others’ eyes; my very joints seemed strung together more loosely, and my breasts ached under the tight bindings I had always worn. By the end of each night I had nearly adjusted, only to be wrenched back to my natural form at the first whisper of dawn.

  I broke two teacups in a single week, and at the end of the night my tallies never seemed to add up. Tuo came most nights, but he hunched over his work, waving off the women who tried to start conversation with him. I wondered if this was an attempt at loyalty, but I could never get him to meet my eye. On my nights off, without advance arrangement, we always appeared at the Starlight Gate just after sunset and boarded the same taxi.

  For two weeks, not a word was said between us. But soon my contentment in the absence of explanation began to vex me as tellingly masculine, and I made a concerted effort to ask more questions. Once I began the exercise, I found that his answers only caused my questions to multiply, and my curiosity became a very real thing.