by Daniel Fox
Besides, whatever the old men knew, Mei Feng clearly knew it too. She could tell the emperor herself.
For now, they could all sit here in the sun. Old bones appreciate heat; she didn’t want to move them until she must.
One man, the taller—or perhaps he was only the straighter, they were much of a height sitting down—smiled at her from somewhere, from a well of grace. “Sit,” he said, in a voice worn thin she thought by screaming. “Sit with us. We have seen … entirely too much of each other, in recent days. A fresh face is a blessing.”
“Sit and talk,” said the other. “We have talked so much together, I no longer know which is his voice and which my own. In either case, I think I prefer yours.”
She sat, then, on dry and dusty stone at their feet, and looked up and shivered at something that shrouded them: not quite a smell—they and their clothes were scrupulously clean, as though they had most carefully washed and dressed each other—but the memory of a smell, perhaps, if memories could cling. Their nostrils flared together at the sea-breeze building.
She said, “I think you two have been prisoners together.”
“We have shared the same cell, certainly.” That was the crippled one, crutch laid carefully to hand beside the bench. The other had held his elbow, to ease him down when he sat. There was a courtliness between them that she liked extremely.
“And you have not been treated kindly.” They might prefer not to speak of that, but it was in her nature to be direct.
The tall one smiled again. The other had a solemnity that suggested he would rarely smile. Perhaps that was only because she looked up from below, saw all the lines of pain and their shadows; but she was seeing them both from the same angle. And most of the people she had to deal with in palace life, sooner or later she saw them from her knees. One way or another. She was accustomed to making judgments from below.
The tall one said, “We have … shared the same suffering, also.” That odd little break in his voice was almost laughter, she thought, though it was also almost pain, as though the two instincts were somehow the same physical spasm, and needed the same little catch of breath to carry him over.
“Yes,” she said. “I am sorry for it. But the emperor has come now, and he will see you safe.”
“The emperor may not be so pleased to see us at all.”
“Not? But Mei Feng was quite determined …”
“Yes. I think she is probably quite often quite determined. And for sure he will want to know what we have told her. But whether he will want to see us afterward, if he survives it—well. Perhaps. Or perhaps only our heads, he might appreciate that more.”
“Your heads? I don’t understand.”
“Of course not. You don’t know who we are. Or who we were, perhaps. Now we are only two ruins sitting in the sun, watching a storm blow in. With the dragon, I think, riding above it. My eyes are not so good just now, but I think that was the dragon.”
She would not turn her head to look, not be distracted. “Who you were? Who are you, then?”
“Two ruins; I have said. But once I was Li Ton the pirate, and the enemy of your emperor. Before that I was General Chu Lin, a loyal servant disgraced and banished by his father.”
“And this?”
“Oh, this is Ai Guo. Tunghai Wang’s most excellent torturer. I have been … the object of his attentions for some time now. I said, we have shared the suffering: he at the eye of the needle, I at the point.”
BLESSEDLY, HERE came Gieh running back with the bottle filled and a string of dried figs glistening with water. He had found them, he said, dropped in the stable yard in someone’s hurry to be gone. He had washed the muck from them, and they were perfectly good. He thought they should be good, he amended hastily, not realizing that a streak of fig-seeds on his wet chin was giving him away; and did they think there would be a typhoon? Only the sky seemed so dark suddenly, and the wind was turning vicious …
She hadn’t realized, but he was right. With or without the dragon, a storm was on its way. Li Ton pulled himself to his feet by way of Gieh’s obedient shoulder, and leaned on the boy quite heavily as he started his slow shuffle toward shelter. Dandan held Ai Guo’s crutch for him while he drew himself up, then paced him at his crablike scuttle in the other man’s wake.
Behind her, at the courtyard gate, she heard voices.
She turned around and there was Jiao, with a string of men at her back.
“You, girl—is Mei Feng with you?”
Dandan shook her head, against the mercenary’s exasperation.
“Where’s she gone this time?”
“Down toward the harbor, I think, looking for a way across the river. Looking to find the emperor.”
“She’ll be lucky if she finds a boat. But—well, we will leave her to her luck. Someone will look after Mei Feng; someone always does. What are you doing with these two?”
“Right now, helping them indoors before the rain comes. Staying with them, until the emperor decides what to do.” If the emperor wins his battle, but that was taken for granted. “They’re my prisoners, I suppose. Can you leave me two men, just for comfort?”
“I doubt you’ll need them, but—you and you,” picked out with a flicking finger, “follow Mei Feng down to the harbor. When you don’t find her there—and you won’t, but we’d best be sure she hasn’t run into trouble on the way—double back up here and guard these for me. Understand?”
The men’s grins said they understood entirely. They would be spared the battle, and they had a whole palace to pillage. Dandan wished they wouldn’t leer quite so openly.
THEN THEY were gone, all of them, at a run; and here came the rain, a sudden squall that was really only a precursor, a scudding cloud before the storm.
From the great public courtyard of the governor’s palace, the closest doorway led of course into the great public hall where he held his audiences.
Not a comfortable place. Not a place for hurting old men to stand, however strange, however bad they were; not a place for anyone to stand whose clothes ran with water onto the polished floor.
“Where are your quarters?” Dandan demanded.
“Mine are … in the lower levels. And insalubrious.” That was Li Ton, of course, still almost amused despite his pain.
Ai Guo only shrugged.
“Wait, then.” She didn’t know this palace, but palaces, yes, those she knew; and the minds of the men who built them. Somewhere here, behind one of these concealing doors—this one, yes—would be a robing-room. No lord of men would willingly wear his public robes longer than need dictated. Here they were, the governor’s magnificent silks …
She whistled shrilly down the hall, beckoned hugely.
Waited by the door there, watching the men’s slow progress. Growing angry.
It wasn’t either of the men she watched that she was angry with. Not Li Ton the traitor, nor Ai Guo his torturer. It might have been Tunghai Wang, for employing anyone so broken, so cruel, so calm; it might have been the emperor, for being so easy to betray. She didn’t understand it, quite, though it was a cold clear thing, a rushing mountain stream risen up from deep.
She herded them all into the robing-room, and had them strip: “Come on, quick, before wet and hurt marry into something worse, lung-fever or joint-fever, both. You too, idiot, Gieh. You may be young, but you’re not immune to anything except good sense …”
When she had them naked she rubbed them dry herself, with half a closetful of silky shifts. She felt all their individual shivers and worse, she learned the first and most obvious truths about their bodies: that Gieh had been starved and beaten but no more than was common for boys and easy to mend; that Li Ton had been cut and tattooed, tortured then and tortured now again, fresh scabs too prominent even to be hidden by the crude black characters that covered half his skin; that Ai Guo his torturer had been tortured himself but less well and long ago, so that his bones were twisted and his legs were bent, he had no way to stand unaided and eve
ry hop-step, every touch must hurt him savagely.
And by the time she was done with that intimate exploration, by the time she had left all three of her charges to dress one another in whatever they could find of comfort while she stalked through the corridors in search of somewhere fit to house them—by then she was angry in a way she could not measure. Angry like an arrow, seeking a target. Anger with clarity, that helped her focus: anger that helped her think that she had found something right to do, to be. Which was not, or not only, angry.
six
ain in her hair, rain in her eyes.
It had almost stopped now, the rain. There were still teeth in the wind, though, blowing against wet skin, wet hair, sodden clothing. The wind was warm, like a dog’s breath; it still had teeth, like a dog’s mouth biting.
Jiao didn’t care.
The wind was warm, but Jiao not. Inside she was cold the way a blade is cold, the chill of a steel edge waiting to bite.
She had done … what she always did, what lay in her nature to do.
After a hard day’s fighting, through victory and defeat and recovery, she had brought the desperate Mei Feng across the swelling river in the tail-end of the typhoon. Which was a victory in itself, and deserved more acknowledgment than it had received so far.
Jiao had seen the girl safely to the emperor—which had brought Jiao necessarily face to face with her own great loss, something worse than defeat. She had found Siew Ren her rival gravely burned, and Yu Shan palely with her. Utterly with her, seeing only her ruined face and the pain behind it, thinking only of his bare intent to take her back to the mountains that they came from.
Jiao did what she could, all that she could. After a battle, won or lost—or abandoned, as this one had been—the wounded are the first priority. She wouldn’t offer false comfort to anyone, friend or foe, rival or lover or herself; she would offer her time, her help, her company wherever it was welcome. Here, not. Not to Siew Ren, and Yu Shan didn’t know how to look at her. She said what little she had to, and came away.
Talked to the other wounded, up and down the line. Let them tell her everything they’d done, everything they’d seen, how it had been for them. She gave them what little she had: a drink, a chew, a word of praise, a hand to hold. Her attention, her time. Not enough.
After a battle, the soldiers are their own priority. Crude comforts: heat in their bellies, dry clothes, somewhere to sit or sprawl, somewhere to talk until they were ready to sleep. She did what she could. Tea, food, what plunder they could scavenge from the docks. That kept her busy for a while.
Not enough. Everyone had closer friends, every duty someone else to cover it.
The emperor and Mei Feng were absorbed entirely in each other, no time even to look about them to see what they might have missed.
Eventually, Jiao simply couldn’t be in there any longer.
She came out into the rain and the wind, ready to lie if anyone should ask her why. She might plausibly be going to check that men were keeping proper watch at the city’s edge. A fire isn’t out until the last cinder loses its glow; if she had been Tunghai Wang she would have brought her army back into the city on the very heels of the typhoon, if she still had an army she could bring.
No one did ask, but she made a point of checking anyway. Where she found troops, she talked to them; when she knew where to look, on rooftops and under sheltering archways, she sought them out. It was all hollowness, all show. She didn’t care.
Doubt was bad, self-doubt was worse. Worst was what underlay it all, her folly, her absurd attachment to Yu Shan.
She was too old to be besotted. He was too young to be of any abiding interest. She believed both those things profoundly.
In theory.
In practice—well. If there were one thing almost as foolish as doting on a mountain boy, it would be denying the clear fact of it. Jiao had always dealt with the world as it was. As it came to her. Which might well be at swordspoint, but might just as well be in the tumbled covers of a bed. Either way, she reckoned her successes and her failures and moved on with whatever she’d achieved, coins or scars, experience either way. Tales to tell.
She didn’t dwell on faces left behind, she didn’t moon over lost beauties. Jealousy had no grip on her; she walked away. It was easy. She expected to keep nothing, except what she could carry or wear.
Except …
Physically, of course, he was delightful. His body was more than commonly lovely, more than commonly strong. Couple that with the charm of innocence, and she had treasured his presence in her bed, for so long as she could keep him there.
He was not so innocent now. She couldn’t lament that, when she’d been mostly the cause of it. She had loved, indeed, having him to train, to educate, to corrupt: to take the boy and make a worthwhile man of him.
Apparently she had been working for Siew Ren’s benefit and not her own, but she ought not to care so much about that. She ought not to care at all.
It was the jade, of course, in his blood and bone that made him such a pleasure, that gave him a literal charm. She did understand that. There was magic about a man of jade, that drew the eye and the heart together. How else could one man command an empire—and why else would he want to keep the stone to himself? Yu Shan should have died and died again, for his abuse of jade. More than once, it had been Jiao who saved him.
That didn’t matter. It wasn’t the kind of debt a boy had to repay. No.
She walked in the rain, and everything that did matter was a weight on her back and an ache in her breast. She had been angry for a long time now. Tonight she was mourning, but that anger was only banked up, not extinguished. No fire is out till the last cinder has ceased to glow.
Still, it was a relief to be so full of sorrow that her temper had no room to rise. It seemed more proper, somehow. Anger was a cloak she wrapped around her, but sadness welled up from within.
Sad, then—and wet, very wet—she walked the empty streets of a city fallen twice. And here was a well-wall, and no, she had no thought of jumping in; but still she could get no wetter, in the well or out of it, so there was no reason not to sit on the wall and dwell on all the losses of her day, the losses of her heart. The loss of herself, that could bring her here and to this, glooming in the rain in the hours after battle when she ought to be exultant, a survivor, drunk and gleeful with her men …
She tipped her head back: rain in her face, warm rain, it was almost like taking a bath with her clothes on. Her fighting-clothes, but the fighting was over now, for a while at least. If she went back to Taishu with the emperor, it might be over forever. Unless she fought Yu Shan. Or she could fight Siew Ren, of course, but that was the same thing now, Yu Shan would come between them and she’d have to fight him instead. Fight and lose. She wasn’t used to losing fights, but she thought this one was lost already.
There was a noise, a yowling protest that sounded even above the constant fall of rain. Jiao was already smiling before she saw the cat.
Young cat, almost still a kitten, walking out of an alley. Soaked through and through, fur spiked with water, so wet there was no reason not to walk in the rain. Though he was certainly going to complain about it.
Jiao chirruped at him. “Hullo, little cat.”
It was always a surprise when cats came to her, she was an unlikely friend. Twice a surprise today, in this city, in the rain.
“Lucky little cat,” she murmured, stroking his head with a finger, watching water squeeze out ahead of it. “Nobody’s eaten you yet. Perhaps they were waiting for you to grow?”
The cat spoke again, brief and assertive; and leaped from her lap to her shoulder, stretched himself across her neck, spoke directly into her ear.
“Oh, you think so, do you? Well, your choice. I may eat you yet. If you stay, if I get hungry. You might do better jumping down the well. Maybe you live down the well anyway, you’re that wet. Maybe you think it’s safer, smart little cat, and you’ve come to grumble at me for sitting on you
r doorstep. Are you chasing me off, or inviting me in? I wonder how deep it is, your home …”
There was a loose stone in the capping of the wall. She had been rocking it back and forth, picking away flakes of mortar, wanting vaguely to pick it up and drop it childishly down the well just to hear the splash.
Now she had an excuse. It was almost a reason.
It was a big stone, but if the well was deep she’d need a big splash just to hear it. The rain had filled her ears and soaked into her head.
Loose it might be, but she still needed both hands to wrench the stone out of its bed, where it had tried to wedge itself between its fellows.
Hoisted it high, held it poised for a moment above the mouth of the well—like a priestess at an altar, before a congregation of a cat—and let it fall.
Listened for the splash, and heard a drier, duller impact first. And then, together, a wetly disappointing sound as of water swallowing a stone that hasn’t fallen very far at all, has had its true fall broken by something else just above the waterline; and a grunt, almost a cry, however hastily it was swallowed down.
And the world was different, the rain was just a factor, the cat was a fool if he stayed where he was on her shoulder. She was on her feet already, her tao was in her hand and she was calling down into the dark. “Come out. I know you’re there and you’ll have to climb up sooner or later, so it might as well be now. I expect it’s getting rather full down there, isn’t it? And there’s sure to be more water on its way. You really might as well climb up …”
WHOEVER HE was, he heard her; more to the point, he listened. She could hear him splashing and scrabbling, muttering to himself, his voice echoing oddly in the rocky round of the well.
