Hidden Cities

by Daniel Fox

  “And so must I.”

  “Indeed. But you have an empire at your back, and he has nothing but the sea.”

  “And the dragon,” Tunghai Wang said gloomily. “She may not fight for him, but she does not work against him. That is almost as good. If she brings another typhoon—”

  “It will impact his men as much as yours. And if she lets his army cross the water again and again, that only helps us whittle it away.” It was no easy task to recruit new men for Tunghai Wang; Ma was stretching ever farther for ever-thinner drafts. Still, what was not easy was at least possible this side of the water. For the emperor, not.

  “Even so, we need to address the dragon. Ma, if the legends are true, the mage-smith who chained her originally came from the north. I want you to send—”

  It was a habit, apparently, to interrupt an old comrade. Perhaps it would be a good habit to break, if Tunghai Wang won through to emperor. For the while, though, he was only generalissimo, and so: “I have already sent,” Ma said. “More than one party, on more than one route.” This is what I do, in case it had been forgotten in this muddy aftermath where all Ma seemed to do was grumble to and fro on a mule.

  The north was a long way, of course, and there was a great deal of it. Who knew that better than Ma, who had measured that distance in his wheel tracks, whose task it had been to shepherd an entire army all the way? Tunghai Wang might have led it, the head of the comet, bright and demanding; Ma’s task had been to sweep up the tail, to keep myriad men fed and clothed and shod and fit to fight. And to marshal scouts and spies ahead, to marry their reports to Ai Guo’s interrogations, to track the emperor as he fled. No one knew the country better than Ma, who had mapped it and pillaged it from the Hidden City to Santung.

  Which being true, he had his own notions and his own experience to marry to the legend. The stories might speak only of a monksmith mage from the north, but Ma was not sending out his men at random. Ma did not believe in random.

  “Ah,” said Tunghai Wang, hearing perhaps the gentle reminders in Ma’s words. “Good. Well then, come in and eat with me,” for all the world as if this were his own house, as if he were emperor already and all houses were his own.

  As if Yueh were not waiting in the shadows there, with the promise of a bath, a private meal, other pleasures.

  Well. Yueh would wait. The generalissimo, he was not so good at waiting. And the more chance Ma had to speak to him, the more chance to change his mind, to take him back to Santung in force and speedily, as soon as might be. As soon as next month if it could be managed, and it would fall on Ma’s shoulders to manage it.

  seven

  h, Jiao.

  In the forest, in the dark, in all her pain and fury.

  What she most wants, honest above all, she wants to point that fury at herself: for being here, for allowing this to happen. For making herself helpless in the clumsy, unhappy hands of a boy who had no idea what to do with her.

  Too late: she cannot find herself. She is lost, somewhere between love and rage and rejection. In the forest, in the dark. Like the tiger’s roar, she seems to be everywhere and nowhere, immaterial, dissolved. Her body she is sure of, as ever: it stands just here on the valley slope, that way is east and that way back to the road, that the shortest way to the city, that to the sea. But her body is not her self, and never less like it.

  She should have known, she did know. Of course she did. None of this is Yu Shan’s fault. What else could he say? She would have said the same, only less kindly. She was … not kind. No. She could be generous, but that was another thing.

  She should never have followed him here; she should never, never have let him catch her on the path. She was better than that.

  She used to be better than that. When she was herself, before she lost herself in a pair of green eyes and a touch of the unworldly, the tingling touch of jade.

  Well. She had learned; she would not follow him again. With those eyes of his and those broader senses that the stone in him enhanced, here in his own hills too—no. She would not. Let him go. She was lost; he was lost to her. She could live with that. She could recover herself, and be content. As she used to be, self-sufficient, pirate of the road …

  LOST SHE was, but not in body, no. This was his own valley, just opening up before her: a good place to be leaving, swift as might be. Her legs took her upslope, far from the path, to where great rocks and crags thrust out among the trees.

  She wanted to be angry at herself, but couldn’t pin it down. Yu Shan was immune, invulnerable; he had done the right thing and she couldn’t fault him for it.

  She might have blamed the emperor, because that kind of anger can be as unfair as it chooses, but he was too distant and his responsibility too diffuse.

  The voice of the jade tiger sounded again, unnervingly close, except that Jiao had no nerves tonight: or else she was all nerve, a one-string instrument, resonating high and clear and hurtful.

  All of that and vicious too, the sharpest edge, cutting where it touches, wherever it is touched.

  IF SHE was not, if she could not be warrior or lover tonight, if pirate was out of her compass, well. This body could always hunt.

  She had hunted men and women in her time. Most of her life she had hunted for her food.

  One lean winter, before she made a pirate of herself—or perhaps it was that winter’s work that did it, that turned her feet to the road and her soul to the wild—she had lived by hunting, selling skins and bones and horn in a rough market. Wearing what she couldn’t sell, wearing it and sleeping on it, learning to tan and work leather and to carve. Cutting and drying and keeping, keeping above all, wasting nothing. Sewing with sinew, chewing jerky, hide boots on her feet and bone tips to her arrows.

  She’d never hunted tiger. She’d had more sense than that, but not tonight. Tonight her sense was lost with the rest of herself, or she would not be here.

  THE TIGER called, and Jiao responded. With no bow, no spear and no help, she licked her fingers to wet her nose, climbed the nearest outcrop to rise above the confusing scents of trees and undergrowth, lifted her head into the cleaner higher air and sniffed for tiger.

  It was easy to blame the tiger. It had shown itself in one night to the emperor and Mei Feng, which mattered not at all, and to Yu Shan and Siew Ren together, when she was not there. That mattered cruelly much at the time, and all the more tonight. Its every roar was a goad, if not a gloat. Whatever it meant, it had chosen them and not her. Tonight it rubbed salt into that open sore.

  Very well, then. She would be the one who made a choice. She owed nothing to the tiger, or the mountains; nothing to Taishu, nothing to the emperor. What she owed the boy, he had refused.

  Very well, then …

  THE CALL was deceptive, deliberately so: what better for a hunter than to confuse its prey past reason, so that it knows not which way to flee? The tiger’s voice echoes and swells, it hunts on its own terms, uses fear as a whip to drive its victims this way and that.

  Beyond fear, beyond caring, Jiao was too canny to believe the seductions of the tiger’s voice. Her nose had been spoiled in the years since she lived truly wild, but not ruined by joss or perfume or the sewer stinks of low-town life. Piracy had its benefits, and some came unexpected.

  There: there was the breath of it on the breeze, the dense musk of cat woven through with the dusty weight of stone. It smelled a little like a wet rock on a hot day, a little like the rain-soaked kitten-cat she had relinquished to Mei Feng, just a little like Yu Shan.

  Jiao dropped back to the forest floor, turned her face into the wind and ran upslope, light-footed and long-legged, lean and fatal and fatalistic, hunter on the trail, all else left to pool behind her in the muddy valley.

  SHE RAN, she sniffed the air, she followed game-paths and sought out pools among the rocks where the high beasts came to water.

  She thought this tiger was leading her a dance, it left her so much sign. Here was a pug-mark in the mud, in the moonlight; he
re was a twist of fur caught around a thorn, stiff between her fingers, so pungent to her nose that she didn’t need her eyes to find it out.

  Above all, here and everywhere was the tiger’s song, close enough now that it could not fool her, high on the hill with no encroaching walls to catch an echo.

  AT THE last, up toward the ridge, the trees failed altogether. Here was open rock and scrub, bright moon; here was Jiao; and here, yes, here was the tiger.

  Vast it was, still as the mountain, loud as storm. Upslope from her, it stood heraldic against the sky and took her breath away, stole her own movement and made no use of it.

  UNTIL IT turned, turned its head to look at her.

  Eyes like Yu Shan’s, vivid and unreadable.

  Was it growling, or purring? And did that, could that make a difference, when either one could make the rock shake beneath her uncertain feet?

  AND WHY did cats always, always come to her, as though she would always be a friend?

  HER TAO was less than steel tonight, almost a weapon of wind: a whisper as she drew it from her belt, a hiss through the air, barely a glimmer of moonlight.

  · · ·

  MEN TALLER and heavier-built had complained at the weight of her long blade, swinging it in practice. Yu Shan had not complained, but even he had noticed. Tonight it was nothing, it had no weight, only balance as it swung: perfect balance, herself and the blade in a pure ideal of motion and achievement.

  THE TIGER was grace itself, ideally adapted. They met, beast and blade, in the exactness of the moment. Jiao hardly even felt the impact in her arms. All the weight was in the tiger, all the shock was in her head, and that was too much hurt already.

  ALL THE awkwardness, all the ugliness came after. Hot blood spraying and the chaos of the tiger’s fall, its body all unstrung, ungainly, uncat. The brute separate thud of its head, falling onto rock.

  And then herself, doing the ugly things.

  Breathing, living, she who had unstrung it in her anger.

  Heaving up the hot head and setting it on a rock to stare out her anger for her, all across the valley.

  Cleaning her tao on the fur of its flank because that’s what you do, it is expected, if only by yourself. Perhaps by yourself and the thing dead at your feet, its ghost needing the contempt of that dismissal.

  Setting that blade aside and drawing another, a knife fit for skinning.

  Spreading out the body for the first needful cut, noticing it was female and still in milk.

  NO MATTER. Too late.

  SKINNING IS a method, a process: once learned, easily adapted. It was only effortful because of the brute weight of death in a creature so long, so massive.

  · · ·

  JIAO WORKED and sweated, peeling the skin free of its carcass; then lifted her head, hearing the sudden second music, the sound of another tiger.

  THIS WAS a youngster come in prowl, in prowling search of its mother.

  EYES IN the darkness, a stiff moment’s staring, sniffing, scenting blood and human; and then the tension, the crouch, the vicious startle of the great leap forward.

  HER TAO was out of reach, she was out of time, all she had was this useless little knife; and why, oh, why did they always come to her …?

  one

  he good doctor sees her patients to the door.

  The wise doctor greets her sponsor, the master of her house at his open gateway, with his other servants.

  If he is an unknown quantity, where he is to be master of a city and all the lands around, when there is war in the land and a dragon in the sky—then and there the thoughtful doctor goes down to the harbor, to greet him as he sets first foot ashore.

  Half the city had the same idea, but Tien was known and cherished now. Simple soldiers made room for her, elbowed her a path through to the wharf, glowered down their own officers when those men objected.

  No one knew who the new governor would be. The emperor had departed in a flotilla, promising to send; one single boat, the old man’s fishing boat was returning, still decked haphazardly in yellow. Blessed by the emperor’s own person, it might never net for fish again. Not the emperor aboard this time—he would still be crooning over his pregnant girl, which was sweet, but wearing—but someone high enough, bold enough not to see the boat stripped of decoration before he stepped aboard it.

  Tien didn’t particularly care. It would be one man or another. It might be the former governor returned, who had fled to Taishu with the emperor before the rebel army ever reached here. It might be him, but the speculating soldiery around her thought not. Hoped not. They wanted a man who would fight before he fled. It might be one of the generals who had fought alongside the emperor to win the city back; that was what the soldiers wanted, though some wanted one man and some another, and they were sure to fall out over the choice.

  It might be no one they knew: one of the emperor’s civilian entourage, an official from the Hidden City. A eunuch clerk, more used to ink than blood. No one here would welcome that.

  “Or his mother,” a voice said, grimly jocular. “Put the strait between him and her, he’d love that.”

  “Hush.” Jokes were always dangerous, close to the circles of power. Jokes about the empress could prove lethal. Whoever owned that voice was right, though, the emperor would appreciate the sea’s separation between himself and his mother. Briefly, Tien wondered if Mei Feng—pregnant Mei Feng—might have influence enough to make it happen.

  Pregnant, though, she might not want it. She might be glad of a strong woman’s presence in the palace, a cushion of experience in a frame of iron will.

  Besides, the most fickle of emperors would not send a woman—any woman—to rule a city in a time of war. Nor a clerk, no. It would be a soldier, that was sure.

  All that mattered to Tien was that he listen to her, whoever he was: that he give her what she needed, and let her care for her charges in her own way.

  All her charges …

  THE BOAT came nosing gently alongside the wharf. Two men stood in the stern. One was grandly dressed and stiffly upright; the other older, more bent, as darkly windburned as the wood of his boat.

  He called out from the steering oar, and a boy stood up in the bows with a rope in his hand. There were men ready below, but he ignored them all to make a wild leap over the rail, landing on the wharf with a barefoot stagger that had Tien wincing.

  All boys are made of leather and bamboo—it was her uncle’s phrase, and the memory of it made her smile. Sometimes they rip, sometimes they break, but you have to be rougher than you’d think.

  Quite unhurt, this boy looped the bow-rope swiftly through an iron ring and tied it off, then ran to take another as it was tossed down from the stern. She watched him, thinking of a different boy altogether. And shook her head, strict with herself, and waited until the old man above and the boy below had set the gangplank in place from deck to wharf.

  By then more men were appearing from the boat’s cabin. Before any of them could get in her way, before the new governor came to shore or any of these waiting officers went aboard to smooth his way, she marched herself up the flexing gangplank and onto the boat, all unexpected and out of proper order.

  It was a day to be surprising, to be impertinent if necessary; and she had her best excuse to hand, in open sight. Those men weren’t the only folk aboard. In the bows of the boat, a woman sat with her arms curled protectively around a child who ought to be too old to be so coddled.

  “General.” Tien had his name now, from the whispers up and down the wharf—Ping Wen, he’s sent Ping Wen—but soldiers and great men like their titles better than their names. Even Tien quite liked to be called Doctor. She bowed low, and read his confusion as she straightened. “General, you have a child aboard, who has been my patient. I am anxious for his welfare, as I think the emperor must be also.”

  That was, if only just, enough. The tall man seemed to consider each one of her words, test their weight and substance, their meanings and implications. Then
he considered her again, in the light of them. “You are a doctor?” It wasn’t—quite—incredulous, but it might have been.

  “By imperial decree and service. I am my late uncle’s heir. I had the honor to attend the Lady Mei Feng before she sailed with the emperor; and as I say, my lord, I have had your escort-child in my care.”

  “Very well.” She was no more than a child herself, in his eyes. He said so with no more than a blink, less than that. But he was willing to be astonished, ready for it, he had that in his favor. He even held up two fingers to keep the shore-officers back as they came sweeping up in outrage at her cheek. “If you wish to examine the child, do so now. I would say take him, keep him for me, take your time, but I am forestalled, I find. Old Yen will sail again immediately, and the boy of course must go with him.”

  “It is the emperor’s own order,” the fisherman said.

  She thought Ping Wen should resent it more, because that order said you are stranded here, without recourse, without retreat; but the general seemed almost complacent.

  She bowed to him once more, genuinely grateful, and went forward to the boy and his nurse.

  The woman was a stranger, a nun, competent enough. The child was clean and fed and seemed content. It would be as well, perhaps, to have him gone again, never properly here. Let him leave before Mu Gao could come in search of her son, before she upset both of them again.

  In any case, the boy was Tien’s excuse and not her reason. She wanted to come close to the new governor, to make herself known to him, to win his favor.

  What she hadn’t expected was to look up and find him at her shoulder.

  He said, “I must endure an hour of ceremonial with these,” one of those delicate little gestures, that didn’t even point toward the cluster of men around the gangplank but nevertheless included them all, “and others like them; but do you come to the palace when you are done here, and wait for me. I will send when I am free. I have a task for you.”