Hidden Cities

by Daniel Fox

  For now there were no ships, no fleets. The biggest boat Ma Lin had seen since the invasion was a sampan on the beach below. The soldiers used that to ferry back and forth across the creek. They brought food over daily, paused to pray, went back to their tents and fires on the beach. They were building huts.

  If anyone was bold enough to sail the strait, they didn’t do it under Jin’s guard; she was here.

  If anyone tried to keep the dragon at bay, Ma Lin didn’t think that it was working. They saw her often from the headland here.

  This little boat didn’t bother her, apparently, or else the river was not hers to claim. Sometimes she seemed to pause, to hang like a fortress in the sky, to peer down in what might be curiosity, might be discontent. There was no saying what she might be looking at: the sampan, the temple. Jin.

  Ma Lin looked back, sometimes. I am a mother; I too can be a dragon. It was all bluff, of course, but that was easy with the temple at her back and her daughters in the temple. She could be ferocious, when she didn’t need to be.

  She had been ferocious actually, physically, at need—but not against a dragon. Nor against the emperor, nor the goddess, though they took her children from her. Ma Lin knew her limits, and they were men.

  THE DRAGON was up there now, drifting against the wind, an idle undulation, a livid scar in the sky.

  Ma Lin and Shola had watched for a while, but she was almost commonplace at this distance. They turned back to the nuts.

  Until there was shouting on the beach across the creek, voices thinned by distance. Other sounds too, scratching jarring sounds that would be worse if they were closer, steel on steel. Ma Lin knew.

  Men rose up from where they had been squatting on the headland or drowsing in the sun. Women clustered in the temple doorway.

  Ma Lin told Shola to take her sister in. Yes, yes, the nuts too; the rice, the bowl of water; everything, if Jin wanted it. Just, go in …

  Then she joined the guards at the cliff-edge, where they could look over the water to the beach.

  Where men were fighting, but she knew that already. The sounds were bitterly familiar.

  She couldn’t tell, they all looked alike to her; she had to ask, “Who is it, who has attacked the camp?”

  This was what the camp was for, of course, to guard the temple and its approaches, its treasures, herself and her daughters. Jin.

  The man beside her shrugged. “Rebels.”

  She might have said as much herself. Any man with a blade in his hand and not an imperial soldier, he was a rebel by definition. Those men down there might be loyal followers of Tunghai Wang, acting under orders. Or they might have no orders; they might have lost their officers and turned bandit for lack of any other way to live. They might just be hungry.

  It didn’t seem to matter. They were men; they were fighting. Ma Lin felt tired more than frightened now. Perhaps they would win, perhaps not. Either way, she thought she would trust herself and her daughters to the goddess, rather than to men. They all looked alike to her. Looked and felt and smelled alike, blood-washed and grim and monstrous. She wanted none of them anywhere near her daughters.

  She could be grim herself, if she had to be. She too had smelled of blood.

  Her eyes were good enough to pick out the bodies sprawled on sand, the men still standing. Still fighting. And falling, the emperor’s men, one by one under just too many blades.

  When the last of them had fallen, then came the aftermath: rebels went among the wounded with knives, and left none living.

  The soldier beside her grunted. His captain swore. Then started calling orders, as he saw the rebels head purposefully for the sampan. “You, you and you—down the path, delay them any way you can. Catch them in the boat, as soon as they come to land. Go!”

  It was death, surely, three men to delay a dozen. The word itself was a giveaway, delay. None the less, the three he picked went pitching down the treacherous footing of the path, blades in hand already.

  “You and you, halfway down, that place I showed you. Dig out the rocks we loosened before. Use poles, and stay above them; the path will collapse. Then you can defend the point, as the rebels try to climb. The rest of you, stand ready at the top here. Any who come this far, we are enough for them.”

  Perhaps they were. If there weren’t just as many rebels or more sneaking through the woods this side of the creek. The captain did send a couple of men to the trees, to cry a warning. They were all he could spare; that was all they could do.

  It lay in the goddess’s hands to defend Ma Lin and her daughters. The soldiers could look after themselves, or die. Most likely die. She thought she would be safe, though, with her girls. She would join them in the temple, when it came necessary. In the meantime she stood with the captain, just to see.

  The rebels heaved the sampan into the river’s flow, piled aboard—and left the paddles alone, ignored the punting-poles, drew up the sail and steered with wind and current, out past the headland and into the breakers of the strait.

  “Are they … Do they think they can take that out to sea?”

  That was the captain, his voice almost querulous with shock.

  Apparently they did. Likely it had made at least one journey across the strait, from Taishu in the emperor’s fleet. Perhaps under a former master it had been back and forth like a silk-weaver’s shuttle. These little boats did that, she knew, fishermen with a catch to trade. They used to do it all the time.

  Perhaps they would again—but not under the dragon’s eye. Ma Lin would not have taken any boat to sea just now without her daughter aboard, big Jin with the voice of the goddess in her throat.

  She cast an eye upward, and there was the dragon indeed. Hanging like a banner in the air, like a long tail of bright silk that defied the wind—or controlled it, summoned it perhaps, her wind, her own—to hold her just exactly there beyond the surf, above the strait.

  Her strait, her own.

  If that wasn’t true, the dragon surely thought it was.

  She looked like a cat, Ma Lin thought, patient for the inevitability of a mouse.

  The sampan beat straight out to sea, as the men did snatch up paddles now to drive it through the awkward waters where surf and tide met current. Ma Lin spared them an occasional, incredulous glance. Mostly, she watched the dragon.

  Where she hung in the air, where she turned as though the wind had shifted, as though the wind could shift her.

  WHERE THERE was something to be seen on her neck, a lumpen strangeness that broke the smooth sleek lines of her, jutting crudely upward.

  WHERE IT looked almost—almost!—like a man, a rider on the dragon’s back.

  WHERE THE dragon was moving now, but not toward the sampan. It looked almost, almost as though she were coming to the temple.

  BEING RIDDEN to the temple, as though the man on her back meant to pray here and needed her to bring him in.

  ALMOST, SHE almost did. Not quite.

  The temple sat with its feet in a hollow. Beyond that was a rising grassy lip, and then the bare rocks of the crag thrusting through like teeth above the drop, above the crashing sea.

  The dragon settled on those teeth, right on the edge there, the claws of all four feet biting deep. Ma Lin couldn’t possibly have felt the deep rock of the headland tremble under that sudden weight, no, not possibly—but she thought she had. She thought those teeth had almost broken loose.

  Soldiers ran for the temple, which she thought was wise. Others plunged off down the cliff path. That she thought was stupid; there was nowhere to go down there. Perhaps they were swimmers, perhaps they had in mind a swift splash across the river—but she doubted it. She doubted they were thinking at all.

  She and the captain were simply standing, watching. She thought that was admirable in him, stupid in herself. She should have gone to the temple. She still could. The dragon was only sitting there, Ma Lin was out of reach and could yet make a run for it …

  Except that none of that was true, not quite.
The dragon wasn’t only sitting there; she had turned her head to look at them. And her neck, her long neck was coiled back, poised, like a snake on the verge of striking. Ma Lin wasn’t at all sure that she stood out of reach. Or that her legs could run. There was something captivating about the undersea glow of the dragon’s eyes, much that was terrifying about the mouth and claws and the simple dreadful size of her. Between the one and the other, Ma Lin wasn’t actually sure that she could move at all.

  The figure on the dragon’s back hoisted his leg across the spiky ridges of her spine and slid down over her extraordinary scaled hide. Using her leg and foot as steps, he came to ground; then staggered a little and had to stand for a moment with one hand clinging to her iron claw, catching his balance, like a sailor come to port.

  She just crouched there, monumentally impatient, moving not at all.

  At last, he walked away from her. Ma Lin almost thought he pushed himself away, determined but a little reluctant, still a little wanting to cling.

  Something about him puzzled Ma Lin. He’d just stepped off a dragon, but not that. Not just that. He didn’t seem big enough, somehow. To be riding a dragon.

  Not a legend, not a hero, not a god.

  Not a man, not that either, now that she could see him clearly in the sunlight.

  Just a boy. That was it: just a frail, bony boy with wild hair and ragged trousers, no shirt, no older than her Jin. He looked like he was made of paper, stretched over a frame of green bamboo.

  Then he turned to face the dragon, and now he really did look like he was made of paper, used paper, because all his back was written on, deep black characters that Ma Lin couldn’t read.

  SHE’D THOUGHT—no, she’d assumed that he was coming to one or the other of them, the priestess or the soldier. She did look like a priestess these days, she knew that. It was in her stance perhaps, the way she walked in the world, the goddess at her side.

  This boy who rode the dragon, he seemed quite uninterested in her and the captain. Neglectful of them. He faced the dragon, rather; and one arm lifted, and without seeing his face Ma Lin couldn’t tell whether that was a wave of farewell or a gesture of dismissal, go now, such as a man might make to a servant, or a mount.

  Not, surely not to a dragon.

  But the dragon rose, lifting effortlessly from the headland as though she only willed the world to fall away and so it did.

  The boy tipped his head back to watch her. She apparently tipped her head down, to look at him.

  Ma Lin couldn’t imagine how he bore it, the intensity of that stare, both eyes blazing.

  Perhaps he couldn’t turn away, perhaps he was snared entirely in the tangle of her thoughts. Crushed under the simple weight of her attention. But he seemed—well, almost easy. Hands loose at his sides, one foot poised on its toe in the grass, head cocked like a boy caught in conversation.

  He might almost have been smiling. She couldn’t see his face, but something in his body said so.

  Then the dragon rose farther, turned and was swiftly gone, out across the water.

  A great wash of air came from her whipping tail, and Ma Lin could have choked on the stink of it, all sea-mud and rot.

  THE BOY, it seemed, meant to stand where he was and watch her. Watch over her, perhaps.

  The captain moved no more than his eyes, from boy to dragon and back to boy again. For a competent man, he seemed helpless to do anything but watch.

  Someone had to move, to speak. That would be Ma Lin, then. Apparently.

  She stepped forward, a little hesitantly. The boy wasn’t the only one whose world had rocked beneath him.

  She was a short woman, but her head still came up higher than his shoulder. Not a big boy, not a strong boy; scrawny, she would have called him, accustomed as she was to heavy men.

  She wanted to say, who are you?—but questions are invidious and answers unreliable. She wasn’t even sure who her own daughter was, from one moment to the next.

  She said, “I am called Ma Lin.” That at least was a certainty.

  He glanced sideways at her, distracted. His mouth moved, and for a little while no sound came from it. He scowled; she thought, you have been too long talking to the dragon, little one. In your head. You have forgotten how real people need to speak.

  He cleared his throat, shook his head, tried again. This time he found his voice, or a thin unready scrape of it. It was good enough for her; she had heard far worse a voice from one she loved.

  He said, “My name is Han. She,” his eyes turned back to the sea, to the dragon, finding her instantly even against the glare of sunlight on water, “I don’t believe she has a name. Or none that she will share.”

  “No.” It would be beyond imagining, for a dragon to bear any name a human mouth could pronounce or a human mind encompass. Now she had seen, she understood that exactly. Perhaps it was a kindness in the dragon, not to share. Perhaps a dragon name would break a human mind entirely. “Are you her slave?”

  He said, “No. Or yes, perhaps. Sometimes, if she would let me. I have been her master too. Sometimes, when she will let me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No. Nor does she.”

  For a moment, Ma Lin thought she had fallen in with a magician. But he smiled and shrugged and shook his head—how can I possibly understand what baffles her?—and something in her warmed unscrupulously to this unscrupulous, unsettling boy.

  For want of any other question, she said, “Tell me.”

  He said, “She likes to kill. She has been a prisoner, our prisoner, chained by our magic; she says she has drowned in human voices for too long. She wants her waters back, the rule of them, but even more she wants to see men die. I can … prevent her, a little. I can prevent her killing me, and others too. Does that make me her slave? Perhaps. I don’t know. The most I ever was before was a pirate’s boy, and the most I ever stopped him doing was killing me.” He stopped and smiled, rubbed his nose, perhaps realizing that some might see that as a gift he had. Survival was a place to start, perhaps.

  His face changed as perhaps he remembered someone else, whom the pirate had killed regardless.

  She said, “Not everyone would think it was a slave’s place to keep his mistress from what she wanted most.”

  “No—but some of us, we have to. Sometimes.” He stared out to sea. “Someone else,” he said, “can stop her killing, on the water. It makes her furious, but some boats, some fleets she cannot touch.”

  Ma Lin confessed, a little. “The Li-goddess,” she said, nodding. “This is her temple.”

  “Ah. Is that why she brought me here?” It was a question without an answer; he didn’t wait. “She thinks that only some boats are protected. Someone holds her back, she says. Like I can.”

  “Yes.” Ma Lin was boastful suddenly, stupidly. “My daughter: she speaks for the goddess. I have her here now,” with a jerk of her head back toward the temple, the crowded temple steps, where soldiers and women together were staring at this priestess who dared speak to the boy who rode a dragon.

  “You do? Well, keep her close. The dragon does not love her. Nor those like her. I think there is more than one. She has been waiting for a boat that had no protection.” His eyes found it, and hers followed: the sampan, a speck now on the water. He knew where it was because the dragon knew, she thought. The dragon hung above it, pendulous, a rock in air.

  “You could protect them. You said it.”

  “Perhaps. Yes. But she has my promise. She needs to know whether she can still do this.”

  “You mean she plans to kill those men? And you will let her …?”

  “Will you argue for their lives?”

  For any lives, she meant to say, she wanted to. But her eyes moved willy-nilly to the beach across the creek, where men lay dead because those in the sampan had slaughtered them.

  “They are rebels,” she said, as if that mattered, as if it could. As if one lord’s service was different from another’s. And then, “They ar
e men too. Like your pirates, like you. Has your dragon not killed enough rebels?”

  Apparently not. He shrugged. “Your emperor would want them dead, because they killed his men. You might want them dead, because they would have killed you too if they had come up here. She wants them dead, because they are abroad on her waters; and because she really, really needs to know. Keep your daughter in the temple there, don’t let her interfere.”

  She said, “I will,” thinking Shola will; and, “Can you not …?”

  “I can,” he said, with a faraway look in his eye, “but I promised.”

  Ma Lin turned back to the glimmering strait. Without his sure gaze for guide she had to scan for the speck that was the sampan, and the darker larger speck above it that was the dragon.

  Almost, she wanted to turn around: as if she expected or dreaded to see her daughter stride forth, shrugging off little Shola and fearsome with purpose, inhabited, ridden. If the goddess stood here and watched, Ma Lin thought, in Jin’s body, she could prevent it.

  But she didn’t know, or didn’t care, or else Ma Lin was wrong. Or those men out there were not her people, or else they were beyond her reach.

  She didn’t appear, at least, here on the headland or out on the water. Surely she could have shaped herself a body of water, if she had chosen to? She could have risen up to defy the dragon and protect the sampan, these are my seas …

  But she did not, and perhaps they were not.

  Ma Lin didn’t exactly see the dragon strike. She saw her fall, spear-straight, a dark rip in the sky; but she lost her against the water, where she had already lost the boat, in the scatter of light and confusion of the waves.