Hidden Cities

by Daniel Fox

  She heard the scrape of steel over stone, and stood ready. He’d be a rebel, sure. Caught out by the emperor’s sudden arrival, cut off from his friends, hiding up and hoping to sneak out of the city after dark. He wouldn’t be the only one: just an unlucky one, caught by a random stone dropped by a foolish woman feeling sorry for herself.

  Now she was all fighter, poised and eager. Here came his head, ducking up: a broad weathered face, a veteran soldier, running with blood where his scalp had been torn open by her stone. He was lucky perhaps not to have been knocked unconscious, not to have slipped down into the rising well and drowned.

  It was an odd kind of luck, that would save his life one minute and snatch it back the next. She should take it right now, hew his head from his shoulders while she had the chance, while he clung precariously to the well-wall. Why not? She meant to kill him anyway.

  But then his body would fall back into the well and rot there, tainting the water for weeks. Months.

  She waited, then, while he heaved himself mutely over the wall. A lash of rain across her eyes; she cleared them impatiently, and now he had his own tao drawn.

  Well. Here was a fight, what she most wanted: something she could do, to remind herself of who she was. Pirate, lethal, merciless …

  “So,” she said, because Yu Shan was right, perhaps, she would still be talking when they buried her, “you follow Tunghai Wang, I suppose?”

  “All the way,” the man said. “From the Hidden City, and before.”

  “All the way to this rat-hole, to hide down in a well,” and die here in the rain. “Was it worth it?”

  The man shrugged. “You follow the emperor, and hide on an island and eat fish. Is that worth it?”

  Well, she did eat fish, that much at least was true. The rest she wasn’t sure of. She wasn’t on Taishu now, and didn’t much want to go back. Did she follow the emperor? It was Yu Shan she had followed into the emperor’s service. She might have stepped up to be chief of the imperial guard, the position was there for her to seize—and she had deliberately stepped away, choosing to cross the strait in the second fleet this morning, putting together her own rough troop and leading them almost in her own separate battle, fighting because it was there to do, not for the emperor’s glory or his enemies’ defeat.

  It was Mei Feng who had brought her across the river and back to the emperor; and what she’d found in his shadow, well …

  Oddly, she found herself stepping back now, lowering her blade. Not wanting to set the seal of steel on his charge, suddenly refusing to commit herself.

  “Oh, get out of here,” she said. “If you can. There’s a watch on the river and the valley roads, but go up high and you could be lucky. Everyone’s ducking the rain, anyway.”

  He hesitated; she said, “Go on, go! Give my respects to Tunghai Wang, if you can find him. Tell him he might as well come back, no one could defend this city; but tell him there’s no point, he couldn’t defend it either. Why waste lives?”

  It was only not to waste another life, that’s what she told herself, watching the man turn and start to run. What did they have to fight about? He was a soldier, she was a pirate. He was committed, she was not. She had given no thought to the emperor before this summer, when she all but tripped over him. Except to think about stealing his jade, of course. Every pirate in the land likely thought of that a time or two, but she at least had tried it. That was something.

  Maybe she should have another try. That would be something else, a reminder, where her own roots lay.

  The cat was still on her shoulders, seeming quite settled there. She eyed him askance and said, “No point getting comfortable with me, little cat. I’m not offering anyone a home, I’m not staying. Here or there, either side of that dragon-infested sea. I may have to go back to Taishu one more time, but then I’m off. In a hurry, maybe. You wouldn’t like that so much. The road is like the rain, only it doesn’t ever stop. Maybe I’ll give you to Mei Feng, something to cuddle and fuss over till the baby comes. She’d like that. So would you, I’m guessing. Maybe I’ll do that …”

  seven

  unghai Wang was a soldier first and foremost. Before he was a general, long before he was a generalissimo with generals under him, with ambitions to rise one last little step higher: before any of that he had been a soldier. How many campaigns had he marched on, how many battles fought, how many winters waited out before spring came with its inevitable orders to march again? He couldn’t count them all. Someone might actually do that, he supposed, when he did finally achieve the throne. Some eunuch clerk would have the task of recording all the details of Tunghai’s life, numbering every battle, praising every stroke of sword and strategy …

  Let him do that. Tunghai was concerned with the thing itself, writing it in history, not on the page. Blade and blood and the march over land, not brush and ink and paper.

  Right now blades were like to rust, there was no blood and the march was something close to a retreat, the next worst thing. The land was all mud, broken terraces and ruined paddy.

  He had pulled his men back, back and back, out of Santung-valley altogether. There was no organizing anything in the typhoon; in its aftermath, in the spewing rain there was no land to stand on between the rising river and the hills of liquid mud.

  How many times had the weather ruined a perfectly good battle-plan, a sudden strike, an unassailable position? There was no counting that either, though someone no doubt would try. Time and again he had done this, trudging wearily against the wind, away from what he wanted. This was soldiering, the heart of it, the real thing; and it had never been more bitter, he had never been more sullenly resentful.

  Typhoons came and went, but not like this. Half a day’s march, the setting sun glimpsed through broken cloud brought them to a settlement that had barely felt a fling of wind all day. Here he could regroup, send parties out to gather all his scattered men behind him, draw his generals and commanders together in a straw-strewn barn.

  He could say the impossible thing, the thing no soldier should be obliged to face: “The dragon is against us.”

  “Sir …”

  “No, hear me. The dragon destroyed my fleet when we went to invade Taishu; twice now she has let the emperor’s boats across the strait to attack me. And this today was a dragon-storm, nothing natural. I saw her fetch it in. Just when we were poised to crush the emperor, when he had walked entirely into the trap we laid; we had him between our fists there, and the weather defeated us. The dragon defeated us. Not him.”

  They stood in silence, in acquiescence.

  “So,” he said. “The emperor is in Santung. Likely he will go back to Taishu, his people will insist; they all know now, Santung cannot be defended. We have proved it, and so has he. There will be boats, going to and fro. Perhaps they have an arrangement with the dragon; perhaps she can be reasoned with, or bribed. We need to know whether she can tell which boats are loyal to the emperor and which are not. Send men to steal a boat and try the strait. If they can cross in the emperor’s wake, let them go to Ping Wen and learn his news. If not—well, we learn by that. Send more than one boat. Send a dozen, if you can find them. We need to know if we can get through.

  “But more than that,” he said, “we need to know how we can fight a dragon. She has been chained before; she can be chained again.”

  eight

  hé, old man!”

  The cry came unexpectedly, across the creak and toss of many boats. He looked up from another captain’s deck, saw a cluster of lanterns on the wharf and was surprised how bright they seemed. He’d been splicing a snapped cable, old gnarled experienced fingers working by touch in his own shadow, and he hadn’t noticed the set of the sun.

  “What do you want?” His back ached, now that he was noticing. He was hungry and tired and wet, and would quite like to stop soon. He should find Pao and take him away in search of supper. They would sleep on his own boat, which had taken no harm in the typhoon; the bedding might be damp, but o
ld bones were used to that and young bones were learning. Pao might not know it yet but he was the boat’s next master, if he wanted it. He might never learn the ways of the goddess, he wasn’t born to her service and hadn’t grown up in her regard, but that was true of half the fleet these days. At any rate, there was no one else.

  “You,” the call came back, “the emperor wants you. He sends for you.”

  “What, now?”

  “Of course, now! Come with us, come at once …”

  Old Yen bowed in lamplight to the imperial summons, and hurried across the bridge of boats between this and the wharf. A step up here, a leap down there; a long stretch from rail to rail; a tug on one cable, to draw the next boat closer. Strewn timber and coils of rope to be stepped over or around, tricky footing in the gloom.

  And so to shore, wet and filthy and obedient. Here were his summoners, a party of soldiers. Some were women, but soldiers none the less: which made them the emperor’s personal guard, who had sailed here on Old Yen’s own boat.

  He said, “Why should the emperor want me?”—but they only shook their heads and hurried him, faster than old tired feet wanted to go over wet stones in the dark.

  He might have believed this back in Taishu-port, where the emperor could sometimes mean Mei Feng. She might send for him just to see him, to be reassured about his health and safety; or to ask about the mute child and its welfare; or about the dragon, or the goddess. Or to be angry with him, about any of those or for any reason else.

  But Mei Feng was on Taishu and he was not. This city was not that city. His girl was beyond his reach.

  HERE WAS an end at last, the gate to the governor’s palace; and oh he was weary now, and still bewildered. All the more so when his escorts took him through one courtyard and through another, into a room that was too small and too private for his deserving, and here was the emperor indeed.

  Also, here was Mei Feng. Where she could not be, where she was not, here in Santung. It wasn’t possible. This was a dream.

  Except that she was scowling up at him from a luxurious heap of cushions, she was tumbling a cat out of her lap and scattering cushions and coverlets all over as she came at him like a pocket typhoon, an invasion of one, furious and irresistible.

  Small hard body, cable-tight and whippy as bamboo. Her hug threatened to squeeze all the surviving breath out of him. Then she lifted her face, still frowning. “Why are you so wet?”

  “Wet? Mei Feng, it’s raining …” Had she perhaps not noticed the typhoon, here inside palace walls? Had she been conjured here from Taishu, and never passed through open air between?

  “Still?” She glanced from one escort to another. Mute and treacherous, they shook their heads. Old Yen thought back: oh. Perhaps it had in fact stopped raining, a little while back.

  “Well, but it has been; and there was work to do …”

  “And you didn’t think to stop work, to change your wet clothes and maybe eat a meal, maybe sleep till morning? And you,” his escorts again, “you didn’t think to find him something dry to wear, before you dragged an old man up a steep hill after he’s been up and working hard all last night and all day since?”

  “Mei Feng, that’s not fair! The emperor said—”

  “Oh, the emperor, he said, did he? And that makes it all right, does it?”

  She was swiveling around now to bring her fury to bear on his imperial majesty, except that he forestalled her. He was right there, his hands were on her hips and his chin in her hair, his smile must be resonating through her bones as he said, “Of course it is all right, if the emperor says so. The emperor is a god,” with his long godly arms wrapping themselves around her now, and it was good to see them so kind with each other again. “And besides,” the emperor went on, “Old Yen would have been just as wet if we had left him undisturbed. He would have worked just as late or later, he might still have forgotten to eat supper. And now we have him here under our eyes, you have his company and can make sure that he eats a good meal and dries his beard and sleeps until you wake him in the morning.”

  “You might have sent someone down,” she growled, refusing to be placated, “to do all that without dragging his poor tired soaked self all the way up here. I would have sent Chung, if you hadn’t stolen him away to make a soldier of him.”

  “He made a soldier of himself,” the emperor crooned, rocking her gently, “or else Shen did that for him. Not me. Do you want him back?”

  “Not particularly. Not if he doesn’t want to come, if he’d rather camp out in the rain and be mysterious. Leave him to Shen. And don’t change the subject,” which was blatantly, magnificently unfair. “Look at my grandfather, see the state of him? I’m ashamed of you, all of you,” with a glower for his escorts, lumped in with the emperor, “treating an old man this way. You, go and find him some dry clothes. You, fetch food. Hot food, he needs heat. Will someone, anyone,” addressed to the room at large, “bring him a cup of tea at least? Oh, never mind. I’ll do it myself …”

  Old Yen stood quiet. This really wasn’t about him, it all lay between Mei Feng and the emperor. Who quieted her with his fingers on her lips, who spoke into her silence: “Hush, you will not. You will lie down and speak to your grandfather, tell him the news you have. I thought you might like to do that, which is really why I sent for him tonight.”

  Disarmed, she was utterly ungracious, unrelenting. “He still wants a cup of tea.”

  “And he shall have one. I will make it myself.”

  “You? Do you know how?”

  He laughed, and kissed her at last. “I do. Yu Shan has taught me.”

  Mention of Yu Shan brought another fleeting shadow to her face. But she held her hand out to Old Yen and settled him among her cushions, curled herself up beside him. News, the emperor had said, but she didn’t share it yet. She seemed to cast about rather for something else, anything else that she could say instead.

  “I am sorry that you had to make that climb, Grandfather. We weren’t up here for the storm, we took shelter in the jade store and that would have been an easier walk for you, only the river wouldn’t stop rising and the emperor wouldn’t let us stay,” he wouldn’t let me stay she seemed to mean, “so we all had to troop up here where even he could be absolutely sure the water would never reach us …”

  She was hiding something. It might be how she had contrived to come here from Taishu: had she begged a ride from the dragon, perhaps? A ride on the typhoon? Or it might be why she had contrived to come, what absurdity had brought her in chase of her man. If she was so keen not to tell, Old Yen was at least as keen not to hear it; but the emperor was frowning over his kettle and his teapot, which was nothing to do with the complications of making tea, and he would preempt her if she didn’t hurry up.

  The scruffy cat had come back to her and she was fussing with his fur, unteasing mats with her fingers. “Grandfather. I’m, I’m going to have a baby.”

  Which made him a very old man indeed, he realized with a rush of delight. Very Old Yen: a great-grandfather. And part of the imperial family, great-grandfather to a dynasty …

  He was still absorbing that when the emperor brought him a cup of tea. Imperial tea, fine and extraordinary, not at all the harsh brew he drank himself; and the emperor was sitting at his feet all unexpectedly, for all the world like a son-in-law looking for advice.

  “Grandfather, you know more about the goddess than anyone except perhaps her priestesses. And you know the dragon too, you believed in the dragon when perhaps nobody else did.”

  Well, of course: the one implied the other, you couldn’t have the goddess unless you had the dragon too, her prisoner.

  Her escaped prisoner.

  The emperor said, “We need to know how to fight the dragon, how to chain her again.”

  one

  a Lin had her daughters back.

  Those two who were still living, at least, she had those. The third in a way had never left her. Little Meuti’s body might lie unmarked and overlooke
d between the paddy and the road, in some bare scrabble of soil that even Ma Lin could not find for certain; her ghost was a presence intermittently, tug-tug at Ma Lin’s trousers.

  For a while she’d been all that Ma Lin had of daughters, and welcome so.

  But now the girls were back, the living girls, Jin and Shola. Insofar as Jin ever could come back, which was not very far, perhaps, not far enough. Sometimes she was not there at all, and the goddess lived through her. Which might be Jin’s own choice, but Ma Lin didn’t think so.

  She didn’t like to think about her elder daughter’s choices, nor her life.

  Still, this life or any was better than what Meuti had, tug-tug from somewhere forgotten under earth. And Ma Lin’s own life was better with her girls. Even given the company they came with: women of the emperor’s court—only servants, they insisted, but they seemed terribly grand to Ma Lin—and soldiers too, guards to watch her daughters. Actually she thought they watched her more, to be sure she didn’t steal the girls away.

  Even given the women and the soldiers and the emperor’s own message, written on a paper that she could not read and was obliged to treasure.

  There was no need to read it. Ma Lin had understood it from the first, just from the weight of it in her hand, the self-importance of the imperial seal. It said that her girls belonged now to the throne—the Throne Victorious, a battle fought and a city won, and all thanks to her daughter—and were returned to her only as a gesture, as a kindness, for a time. She should hold herself ready, the letter said, to say goodbye again.

  The emperor’s words might be holy; she still thought they were wrong.

  He might be divine, but he was not alone in that.

  If her girls belonged to anyone, she thought it was to the Li-goddess whose temple this was.

  SOMETIMES THEY could still just be girls, no meaning else. As now, when she sat on the height of the temple steps with Shola, shelling walnuts. Making a game of it, trying to split the shells evenly so that Jin on the step below could float them like little boats in a bowl of water, fill them with dry rice and make a fleet of them, coffle them together with fine-woven ropes of her own hair and tow them like barges from one side of the bowl to the other, as a great fleet of ships might fill itself with men and sail from Taishu to the mainland and back again if it only had Jin to play goddess, to keep the dragon at a distance.