by Daniel Fox
Yu Shan had carried Siew Ren directly into the cabin. He would have kicked the door open, except that someone ducked ahead to open it for him. What was that man’s name, Biao? He had been with Tien; now he seemed to be with Yu Shan. People needed to be fluid, in these fluid times.
Yu Shan went in; very shortly afterward, the first of the generals came stumbling out. He recovered his balance first and then his dignity, pulling his dress straight in a trembling fury, exactly as though he had been manhandled. His brother-generals followed, all more or less unwillingly. She really wished she’d been inside to see what happened.
Whatever it was, the emperor didn’t want to hear it. He gave them short shrift, visible from distance: they could stay aboard unsheltered, or they could go to another boat. Some gathered in the mainsail’s shadow; some trooped down the gangplank, scowling ferociously at the stretcher-bearers, who waited with a finite patience for these grand men to get out of their way.
Stretchers were passed upward from wharf to deck, between many willing hands. One by one they went into the cabin. How so many men and women might be packed into that narrow space, Mei Feng couldn’t quite imagine. She thought they must almost be lying on top of each other, so tightly wedged that not even a storm could toss them about.
If a storm came, if the dragon came.
It was madness, to want to fight the dragon. But it was a kind of joyful madness, something else to celebrate. The emperor had looked at his new-won city of Santung, his first victory, and wanted more; he had looked at her, his first girl pregnant with his first child, and wanted more. Some women might resent that, but Mei Feng welcomed it. She wanted him to be bigger than he was, not to let war and circumstance force him back like a tortoise into the shell of Taishu, defensible and passive, going nowhere.
Before, she had wanted him to be content—with Taishu, with her—as she was with him, building a palace and learning how to be together, how to survive his mother. Now—well, now she had looked beyond herself and beyond him too. She’d seen the world, and she wanted to see him in it, making a space for their child. Their children. She wasn’t enough for him anymore, not in her own eyes.
The last of the patients came aboard, and she thought that might be all; but here, late, just as the boy Pao leaped ashore to cast off the bow-rope, here came one person more. Here came Jiao.
Mei Feng had not quite forgotten about Jiao, but put her out of her mind, yes, that. If she’d been looking for anyone more, it might have been Dandan. Who had closeted herself somewhere, according to rumor, with the old pirate and his torturer. It sounded strange; sometimes it sounded unbelievable. Mei Feng missed her friend, but apparently not enough. She hadn’t made time to ferret the woman out and learn the truth of it.
There would be other boats, back and forth. Minds could be changed; orders could be sent, if necessary. Meantime, here came Jiao. Who was no substitute, no easy friend. Nothing easy about her at all, these days.
No point the emperor looking for a bow from her. She wouldn’t even think about it. Probably, neither would he. A word or two passed between them: Mei Feng saw her glance at the closed cabin door, and turn away.
Whether she came forward with purpose or blindly or just unheedingly, Mei Feng couldn’t guess, but Jiao didn’t stop until she had to, which put her right here beside Mei Feng.
Who said, “I didn’t think you’d come.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Not on this boat. Maybe not at all.” In truth she hadn’t thought about it, but seeing the tall woman here now was a deep surprise, and Mei Feng was hurrying inside to work out why, and this was it. “With Yu Shan taking his clan-cousin back to the mountains, I thought you would stay in Santung. I thought you might prefer it.”
“Nothing to come back for, you mean?”
“Well. It wasn’t the emperor that brought you to Taishu, nor him that kept you there. It wasn’t even him that drew you to his service. It was wonderful to have you in the forest, but you weren’t there for him.”
“No. Smart girl, aren’t you?” Her voice was oddly dead, as though she half wanted to suggest that a smart girl might like to stop talking right about now, but that she really couldn’t be troubled to say it, and it really didn’t matter anyway because she couldn’t be troubled to make any trouble about it either. All of which was so unlike Jiao, who would trouble the stars if she could reach them, only to see what happened next.
“So,” Mei Feng went on anyway, relentless in pursuit of something she couldn’t quite see and wasn’t at all sure that she wanted, “it’s likely to be quite hard going to and fro, there won’t be many boats,” until the emperor can chain the dragon, anyway. “I’d have thought maybe you’d want to stay in Santung for a while …”
There may be another battle for you to fight, she thought, you might like that. For sure there’d be nothing on Taishu that she might like. Nothing but the sea like a wall all around and no going anywhere, no leaving; and the boy she loved pent up in the mountains with his hurt girl and no place for Jiao, and the emperor distracted by imminent fatherhood, no one to fight and nothing to steal and what in the world would a pirate do?
The lean woman shrugged. “I expect something will turn up that looks like work for Jiao. If not, well. So long as there are soldiers with money to lose, I won’t be lonely. Maybe I’ll enjoy doing nothing for a while. It’s a gift, and I used to have it. I could try to rediscover that.”
It was thoroughly plausible, and utterly unconvincing. Mei Feng had seen Jiao working and gambling and idling in the sun—but none of those had been what she was there for. She was there for Yu Shan, and without him there would be a hollowness at the core. Maybe she’d find herself a crew and a task that would engage her; maybe Mei Feng could find one for her.
Maybe Grandfather and the emperor had found one already. Pirate could turn dragonfighter and be glad of the change. They might yet all be glad to have her.
They’d need to find the right weapon to use, though, and the ground to stand on. Fighting the dragon was a dream at the moment. Grandfather was sure to involve the goddess, but Mei Feng couldn’t see Jiao spending much time in a temple, unless she was looting it.
Come to that, Mei Feng didn’t think she’d ever seen Jiao spend any time in a temple: not even stepping in to offer a handful of moon-cakes and a stick of joss for luck. Even in the forest they’d kept a light burning on a little shrine of stones and most people would leave the last bite of their breakfast in the smoke, but not Jiao.
That might make a difficulty, in any plan to enlist Jiao as a dragonfighter. Grandfather wouldn’t expect others to match his own devotion, but he might resist someone who disparaged the gods entirely.
And the goddess, of course, she might have her own views on the matter.
Mei Feng really wasn’t sure what they were getting into; nor at all sure that they should bring the pirate in with them. Only that Jiao needed something, and this seemed to be what they had.
three
here was no going back to the tent.
There was no going back to anything.
Tien knew that; she had always known it. Life was a river, not a road. It carried you onward always, into the dark.
The tent had been her uncle’s all the time. Even when she thought to claim it, even when she found that Master Biao had done that thing already: it was still truly her uncle’s. They only inhabited it for a while, Biao and she. They stood in for him, poor shadows. It was never theirs, never either of theirs.
Which didn’t matter now, though it might have before. Before the emperor came, before the dragon.
THE EMPEROR offered an alternative; the dragon wrecked the tent.
TIEN COULDN’T blame the dragon. She was only surprised at how small, how almost human the gesture was.
How pathetic, almost.
Han had already left, running either to the dragon or away from the dragon, Tien couldn’t tell, only that he was running away from her.
By the time t
he dragon came—in Han’s wake or at his incitement or in spite of him, again she couldn’t tell—Tien had left the tent herself. She was following Biao down into the city, because she had nowhere else to go. She felt the dragon’s coming, like a temper blotting out the sun; she looked back to see her, rain-shadow made manifest, up on the ridge there tearing the tent apart.
Raging and helpless, hopeless.
Pathetic.
TIEN CAME down into the city and found Biao, found people in need, was a doctor.
Found her way at last to the jade store and the emperor, a pregnant girl and a line of wounded soldiers. Was a doctor.
Mei Feng wanted Tien to go back to Taishu with her, with all the wounded who were fit to travel. But some were not fit and some would not go, and besides, this was Tien’s practice now: here in Santung, this side of the water. She said no.
It was hard to say and hard to keep to, once said, but she stood by it. Even in the face of imperial demand. The need was here. Mei Feng did not need her, she only wanted.
Need was contingent, always. After the typhoon, Tien needed somewhere to take her patients as the river rose. In the rain she’d found a temple, ransacked and abandoned. Her practice lay now in its galleries, nursed by Mu Gao and a random, shifting population of the hungry and the lost.
Tien was there and not there, called back and forth across the city a dozen times a day. She had attended the emperor’s favorite, pronounced the imperial pregnancy, joyful news. She was suddenly famous, the only doctor anyone wanted: what could she be but lucky? And never mind the wounds of war, there was sickness in the city already, those diseases that rode on the back of hunger and fear and filth. She was busy. Even Biao had been a help, when he could be drawn away from Siew Ren for a while, when Yu Shan would let him go.
No longer. They were all gone now. The good doctor sees her departing patients to the door; of course Tien had gone down to the dockside, to watch them all away. Yu Shan carried Siew Ren in his arms; Biao followed like a servant. Tien had dosed the girl so deeply she was only half conscious, but that half was all pain. She groaned and tossed her head despite the drugs, and Yu Shan sweated as pale as the dawn; Tien thought she should have dosed him too.
The emperor was there already on the boat, with his entourage. Tien tried to persuade him that her patients needed the cabin-space more than his generals did; Yu Shan was more direct. Generals were evicted, stretchers installed. She smiled beatifically upon the emperor, bowed and turned away.
Went to turn away, at least, her mind already on where she meant to go next. He actually had to reach out a hand to touch her, to detain her.
“Majesty?”
“Mei Feng,” he said, with an anxious glance forward to where his woman sat in the bows. “Can she really carry this baby safely? She’s so small …”
That wasn’t quite what she thought he’d say, and she liked him better for it. “Majesty. Mei Feng isn’t one of your pampered delicate beauties,” the kind of court women that he didn’t actually seem to have or want, “she’s peasant stock, tough as a root.”
“She said that. Even so, she should have her doctor with her. She should have you.”
“Women have been bearing babies for a long time now, and most of them without sight of a doctor from beginning to end. You will find Taishu full of women much wiser than I am, who have helped one another give birth to half the island.”
“She wants you,” he said stubbornly, meaning I want you, I want her to have you, and he was a little baffled by the fact that she was not in fact coming with them.
Tien said, “That is flattering, majesty, but ill-advised. You have your own doctors, if a doctor be needed. Truly, I have small experience in this.”
“You think my doctors have more?”
“I think they know more about the difficulties that surround an emperor, yes. Trust them, before you trust me. And your own mother, of course,” the only woman living who had borne a child to an emperor.
This time he let her go. She bowed and turned and balanced down the gangplank, reached the wharf and walked away: feeling eyes, perhaps more than one pair of eyes burning into the back of her neck.
Still not looking around.
Not looking up, either. Not looking for the dragon, no.
RETRACING NOT her own steps of this morning but the emperor’s: going not to her hospital but farther, up to the governor’s palace.
Tien wanted her library back.
She was anxious, but only a little, that Tunghai Wang might have taken it. If he had actually valued it, if he had understood it, he wouldn’t have given her such free rein. It should have been full of scholars and the wise; Tunghai Wang should have wanted it extremely, but she didn’t believe that he knew what it was.
She was anxious again, but again only a little, that it might have been pillaged for the simple convenience of paper. Or for no reason at all, only because these things happen in times of war. If it had survived Tunghai Wang’s occupation, though, it should have survived the emperor’s. Especially with the emperor himself actually camped out in the palace, unconsciously protecting what was as valuable to him as to his enemy. If he had only known.
She should, perhaps, have told him what he had. How she had used it, how she thought it could still be used. Military men might see the dragon as a weapon, though, they might be that bold. Someone was sure to see Han only as an instrument. She had been ruthless herself, she knew, but only in conscience. She was kinder, she would be stronger and more careful. She and the dragon would fight over him, and she intended to win. She thought she could, if only she still had the library.
Through the gate, then, and across the public courtyard, in at her familiar doorway. No lamp left burning for her today; she made her own light and carried it down to the library.
Here were all the books and scrolls, her books and scrolls, untouched. Here was the niche of polished stone where she could safely set her lamp. Because one worry would always rush in to replace another, she was already wondering how she could keep both access and privacy when the emperor appointed a new governor. With that filling her head, she needed a moment to register a movement in the gleaming mirror of the stone. That was not the lamp’s flame, neither her own self reflected. She stood still and saw it more clearly, saw him rise behind her shoulder where he must have been crouched patiently in the dark of the room, waiting. Waiting for her.
Here now, she turned; and here was Han.
Still shirtless, as she had seen him last. The better perhaps to flaunt what she had done to him, to cry it like a betrayal to the world. Or else to flaunt it at the dragon, to hurl it like a banner in her eyes, see me, I have the measure of you. I am the measure of you.
That was not true, but some control he did have, and Tien could give him more. He could be fearsome, he could matter more than emperors.
If he would allow it. He had a feral, half-mad look in his eyes, unless that was the dragon looking out of them. She was feral and half mad, and with reason.
He had a blade in his hand. Not a tao, just a knife: a short knife, long enough.
Tien said, “Doesn’t the dragon feed you?” He had always been bone-bare; now he looked starved, all gaunt ribs and glare. There was something else about him, something more startlingly new, but what she saw first was the hunger.
He was confused, momentarily. He blinked and said, “She … doesn’t think. To do that.”
“And neither do you, I suppose. Here, I have food,” cold rice and bean paste, good enough for a hollow belly. “Sit and eat, before you fall over.”
He shook his head, quite slowly. He hadn’t come for food. Nor for her, or not in the way he used to. Quickly, then, she came up with other questions. “Who let you run around loose? And how did you know where to come?” Both elements in that seemed monumentally unlikely, but Han’s life always seemed to shade from the unlikely to the impossible. With the dragon at one end of the chain, anything might happen at the other.
He shr
ugged. “There were soldiers watching me, but they got caught up at the harbor,” which meant he’d given them the slip in all the fuss, while his escort was entangled with military protocols: explaining themselves to an officer, perhaps, turning to produce their prisoner as justification, finding him suddenly not there. It sounded very Han. “After that, I just asked people where I could find you. Everybody knows Tien the doctor.”
And apparently everyone knew that if she wasn’t at her hospital, she’d be here; and demonstrably Han had no trouble inveigling himself into the palace, with the emperor leaving and everyone down at the dockside to see him away. She was willing to bet that he’d had a shirt, though, not to scare the servants with his dreadful written skin.
He was trying to scare her, or else accuse her. Maybe both. He said, “She wants to kill you, Tien. For what you did,” a flex of his shoulders to speak of it, and of course that was the new thing, the strangeness: she had never seen him before without his chains. Here he was free, body-free, and more tied to the dragon than ever, or she to him.
“I’m sure she does,” Tien said. It was almost not frightening now. The dragon wanted to kill everyone, more or less.
“I won’t let her, though. She knows that.”
Of course she did; she must know everything that was in his head. Tien had made her a gift of it. The girl almost thought the dragon should be grateful.
“And you?” she said.
“Oh, I could kill you. I could let myself do that.”
Tien had nothing to offer him but the truth. She said, “I am sorry, Han, but I did have to do it. For everyone’s sake.”
“Everyone’s sake but mine,” he said, that much self-aware at least; he did still remember why he might want to kill her.
