Hidden Cities

by Daniel Fox

  Unless she knew where he was headed and why, unless she could read his heart. Apparently not. He’d not been certain of that.

  Pray and betray. He had served her and observed her, respected and been grateful to her all his days, and never more so than now; and now he went to beg a favor if he could from the very power that opposed her, that he and Mei Feng and the emperor should all oppose.

  He supposed that made him a traitor to the emperor too, but it was his goddess that troubled him more.

  · · ·

  THE DRAGON might have been anywhere, in the strait or in the sky or somewhere else entirely. Nothing that he knew of kept her here, except her own sense of possession or her own abiding anger. Both. This was—or had been—her territory, and her prison too; something made her reluctant yet to leave it.

  Not the boy, surely. Just a boy, after all. Boys got everywhere, it was true, in the heart not excluded; and a-dragonback not excluded either. Old Yen had seen that for himself. It seemed impossible, but this new world was full of impossibility.

  And the boy was—in Old Yen’s mind, at least—irrevocably attached to the Forge; and if he wanted to speak to the dragon then he had to speak to the boy, which meant …

  Well, it meant this: the trip he had meant not to take. The kick of the deck beneath his feet and the tug of the tide against the oar as he worked their course northerly, pure solace to be in such direct communion with his goddess except that her welcome was a deception and his acceptance of it a betrayal. The jagged tooth of the Forge on the swift horizon, more jagged than he was accustomed to, and Pao’s cry of warning from the bows as that sharp outline resolved itself into the outline of the dragon, lying curled on the island’s peak where the forge-fire used to gleam like a great eye across the strait.

  The dragon who stirred now, as they sailed in closer.

  Who lifted her head and looked down directly at them.

  Old Yen was glad, more than glad to have the girl aboard, who could keep the dragon away. Even though he betrayed the goddess whose legitimate power it was, who used the girl only as her instrument.

  Even though he hated the way that she did that, and had been appalled each time he heard her speak through one of her chosen children.

  THE DRAGON didn’t lift into the air, nor dive into the sea. She didn’t open her impossible mouth, stretch down an impossible distance and swallow them all, boat and all. She stayed just there as he sailed toward her; as he made his wretched, trusting, treacherous maneuver, depending on the high surf and the goddess in her ambiguity—he used to think it a kindness—to lift the hull over the rocks that waited, to drop himself and his passengers and his precious bastard boat safely into the quiet pool behind.

  “PAO.”

  “Master?”

  “I am going ashore. You will stay here, with the girls.”

  “Of course, master.” That wasn’t of course I will do as you say. By the boy’s voice, by his manner, no other notion had entered his head.

  Old Yen grunted. Shouldn’t boys be more adventurous? Perhaps he had listened to too many stories in his own boyhood; perhaps he had told himself too many. Still, he didn’t think he or any of his sons would have stayed meekly aboard when it was only a short swim ashore and a dragon waited on the island.

  Himself, he did not intend to swim. He told Pao to prepare the sampan. Ordinarily he wouldn’t care. He’d get wet anyway scrambling over the rocks that fringed this narrow lagoon, so why worry?

  Today, that question had an answer.

  There was another boy, a very different boy waiting on the rocks by the water’s edge, and Old Yen wanted to greet him eye to eye and not with seaweed in his beard.

  HE HAD Pao row him across, then, while he stood tall in the bows as though he were somebody important, as though the boards of the sampan didn’t leak and he didn’t have water lapping at his bare feet. Of all the changes of this summer gone, he thought perhaps the change in himself might be most shocking. Everything that had happened made a kind of sense to him, except this: that he had become a man who spoke to emperors. A man who would take it upon himself to speak to dragons.

  WELL, ONE dragon.

  One at a time, at least. He supposed there must be others, elsewhere in the empire. This might become a profession for a younger man, He-who-speaks-to-dragons. It might already be a known profession, elsewhere in the empire. Not here where it would suddenly be useful, now that they had a dragon and needed—Old Yen thought—someone to speak to her.

  PAO STOOD in the stern and worked his oars with the careful art of a newling determined not to disgrace himself.

  The sampan’s bow nudged rock, and the boy who stood there stretched out an arm to help Old Yen ashore.

  He did it unthinkingly, perhaps: his natural arm, his right.

  As Old Yen reached to take that open hand, he saw how the boy had a rough raw scar where a thumb ought to be.

  Without it—well. He had no grip to mention.

  And he was stick-thin, no weight to him, nothing to balance with. Sooner than have them both end up in the water, Old Yen frog-hopped urgently out of the boat, the way he used to sometimes when he was a boy himself.

  For a moment he was tied to ground only by that insubstantial grip on his wrist, that unreliable boy.

  His feet found rock, wet and slippery. They might have gone either way, the boy and he; they hung either side of a point of unbalance, and could only stare desperately at each other and wonder who would fall first, who would drag the other down.

  If Old Yen let go, he could save himself. He had wise bones; he could trust his legs to find a better balance, his feet to find a grip.

  If he let go, the boy would fall, no question.

  Old Yen had wise bones but a foolish head, apparently. He hung on. A fall into water was no catastrophe, but there were rocks down there and a broken head wouldn’t dry out in the sunshine, a broken boy was not replaceable.

  Not this boy, at least. He was the one who truly spoke to dragons.

  IT WAS Pao who saved Old Yen, saved them both.

  Pao who thrust a sudden dripping oar at him, something to hold on to. Old Yen’s free and wheeling arm snapped down, to clamp the blade of it in his armpit. Pao was just strong enough to hold him, just long enough to let him save the other boy that fall.

  They stood there, teetering a little, laughing a little now, all three of them. Over the water, shrill cheering said they had an audience. That would be the little girl making all the noise—but Old Yen glanced across, and there was the big girl waving.

  He lifted his elbow, to free the oar. Pao hoisted it high in both hands and waved back with cheerful idiocy, while the sampan rocked dangerously beneath him.

  “Pao!”

  “Master …?”

  Fool of a boy, he tried to turn and unbalanced himself, flung the oar about wildly just to make things worse, toppled one way as the boat beneath him tipped the other …

  The end was inevitable. The splash of it made a thorough job of soaking Old Yen and the dragon’s boy together, where they stood hand-fasted on the rock.

  “WHAT ARE you called, boy?”

  The ghost of a smile in response, as they climbed the path to the peak. The boy was almost a ghost in himself, pale and thin and distant.

  “She calls me little thing, largely. I … have been called Han, by people.”

  “Han. Good. Yes. The pirate called you Han, and so did the girl you had with you. I remember.” He was, he realized, only talking: filling his mouth with words, empty words, to keep back the one thought in his head. With an effort, he stilled his tongue. Took a breath, spoke again. Said, “She speaks to you. You can … speak to her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Now that he was here—he could smell her on the air already, he almost thought he could feel the weight of her on the rock beneath his feet, pressing down—he found that he absolutely did not want to be He-who-speaks-to-dragons.

  Now that he was here, indeed, he
found his feet lagging on the path, the air harder to push his body through, harder to breathe. These were not his skills; he was not a man of the dry land, of the climb, any more than he was a diplomat or a clerk. He had no authority, from his emperor or anyone. Only the pressure of his people, his island at his back and the call of the sea before him.

  Besides, why should the dragon listen? He had nothing to offer her. And no defense, unless the goddess stretched her hand this far from the boat, this far above the sea.

  He wondered if the boy would literally be the dragon’s mouthpiece, speak in her voice, all silt and savagery. And if he did, whether the dragon would sound any different from his mouth to the way the goddess sounded from the girl.

  He hated this, he hated all of this. He hated the way his legs faltered abruptly, remembering perhaps how this path turned just one more time around that crag of rock and there it would be, the peak, the forge itself, there she’d be …

  There she was, indeed, that ridge above the crag: that wasn’t rock, that was dragon-flesh, the curved ridge of her spine where she lay coiled and waiting.

  He didn’t have to do this, but someone did. And he was here, where perhaps no one else could come. Which meant that yes, he did have to do this after all. He hated that too, that it had to be him, when he was so very uncertain and afraid.

  Perhaps he should have brought someone else, a courtier, a diplomat, a general—but he didn’t know how, or how he would have persuaded them to come without the emperor’s consent. Against the emperor’s intentions, indeed.

  The boy was smiling again, fractional and absent. “You shouldn’t worry,” he said, “I won’t let her eat you.”

  Just for a moment, that had been almost the least of Old Yen’s worries. Reminded, he nodded his thanks. And thought it was fitting, probably, that he should give himself over from one side to the other, from the protection of the goddess to the protection of the dragon’s boy. So go all traitors, from hand to hand and weaker all the way, more lost, less hopeful. Less to be hoped for.

  And so he came, up the steepness of the path and around the final spur of rock to the summit, to the dragon.

  And the boy went past Old Yen and sat himself on her clawed foot, as though it were a footstool before the throne of her; and curled his arm around her leg in a way that seemed almost protective of her, ridiculous as that might seem; and cocked his head at Old Yen in invitation, tell us why you’re here.

  He could barely remember, for the moment, why he was here. She was … impossible to measure, in her simple impact. And she was looking at him. That was why he watched the boy so closely, because he dared not look at her. He dared not meet her eyes.

  The boy’s feet were dirty. There was an obscure comfort in that, that her hand-servant should come to her with dirty feet. And set those feet on her own foot, and neither one of them care.

  And Old Yen’s seeing that, drawing comfort from it, showed him that he wasn’t even meeting the boy’s eyes, let alone the dragon’s.

  So he lifted his head with an effort, reached for some power of words that he’d never actually possessed, said, “Tell her she is killing my people.”

  Han looked at the dragon, and for a moment Old Yen saw them both in profile: the scrawny fine-drawn boy and the legend risen from the sea, immortal, unchanging. The one whose temper he had come to change.

  There were to be no dreadful voices, from either the dragon or the boy. They looked at each other, that was all; and then the boy turned back to Old Yen. With a shrug.

  The shrug might have been enough on its own, but neither one of them was sure. The boy said, “Yes. She doesn’t care. You don’t matter to her. Only when you come out on the water, on her water. Then she gets angry.” Twice angry, he meant: once for the trespass, and once again when she couldn’t come at them, when they sailed under the goddess’s protection. The boy hesitated for a moment, then spoke again, said it again another way; he was speaking for himself this time, Old Yen thought, defending her. “She leaves you all alone on land, but you shouldn’t come out on the water.”

  “We have to,” Old Yen said simply. “Taishu cannot live without the sea. Even before the emperor came with all his army, Taishu could not live without the sea. Now—well. She will starve the whole island, if she does not let us fish. She used to allow that, I know. There are stories told in our villages, how we used to sail out in her shadow. We had a special agreement; the fishermen of Taishu were safe from her, that was understood.”

  We were her people, he seemed to be saying. He whose whole life had been devoted to the goddess in her waters. The words were like foul mud in his mouth, but that did not keep them from being true.

  Han consulted the dragon, in silent interchange. “She says it was not she who broke that agreement, but it was broken. When the people of Taishu cooperated with the mastersmith to chain her, and with the Li-goddess to keep her chained.”

  He said, “I do not know that history,” but he was prepared to believe it none the less. Perhaps the people of Taishu had been ashamed at the time, or afterward, and so chose not to make it into a story.

  Han said, “She … does not tell stories easily, or I do not understand them when she tries. Her mind is too big for me. But I think there was a ship filled with jade, which tried to sail to the mainland. For an emperor, long ago. And that was not a part of your agreement, and so she ate the jade, she says. I think she means she sank it. The boat. Perhaps she did eat the jade. And the emperor was angry and sent a man, a mage, a mastersmith; and he worked with your priests, and built the forge here and chained her. And your goddess held her prisoner beneath the strait, and you and all your people sailed back and forth above her head, and … Well. She is still very angry.”

  “She hasn’t tried to eat me.”

  “No.”

  They looked at each other, each perhaps guessing what the other might be thinking, that she did not seem actually so angry anymore.

  Old Yen was a fisherman and not a diplomat, but that only meant he had spent half his life in bargaining ashore. He said, “Han, what does she want?”

  “Oh, gods, I don’t know,” Han said, laughing, hurting at the hard of it. “She doesn’t tell me that.”

  “Perhaps, do you think, we might ask?”

  one

  hings change.

  That was the lesson of Pao’s life, his recent life.

  He had been in swift succession a peasant boy, a soldier and a sailor. He still felt the same inside, he still recognized himself every morning: the body he woke into, the feel and stretch of it, the face he saw reflected in a bucket of wash-water. He needed someone else to tell him he was different now, and there was no one.

  That was one of the changes. All his life before, he had seen the same people about him every day: his family, their neighbors, the village down the way. Wagoners on the road and boatmen on the river. Until the emperor’s men came and took him to be a soldier. Then he was alone, no one to witness to the life he’d had before. No one to care. A peasant boy, what was that, why would it matter?

  So then he was a soldier, one in a crowd, almost invisible even to himself until a sergeant picked him out and sent him to Old Yen to be a deckhand.

  Sometimes it seemed that his own name was the only thing he kept, from one shift to the next. Even that didn’t seem to mean him any longer, when he no longer knew quite what he meant.

  Things change, and not always for the worse. Perhaps his name was learning a new meaning, as Pao became more and more the sailor. He had his sea-legs and a little sea-sense now. When he was frightened now, it was always of something that came from the land.

  Almost always. The dragon frightened him, more than he could say. That was just good sense, no shame, though she was entirely a creature of the sea, storm and wind and water. Even Old Yen, he thought, was a little afraid of the dragon.

  Fear hadn’t stopped the old man bargaining with her while Pao clung to the boat. Pao might have been ashamed of that, except t
hat someone had to stay with the girls. Even to himself, they were excuse enough.

  THINGS CHANGE, but not everything changes.

  This boat, this bastard boat: she didn’t change. Her master might replace every timber in her frame, he might fit new masts and new sails and rig her all anew and she would still be the same wilful, wayward creature, tricky in any weather, responsive only to him. Pao was learning to handle her, but mostly what he learned was that she would not be handled except by Old Yen. Her own choice of master, he thought sometimes, as though she really were the stubborn living thing they all liked to pretend.

  Renew every plank and every rope, she’d still smell the same, of salt and fish and bilgewater below. She’d still kick beneath bare feet in a following wind, still wallow in the troughs of a high sea, still try to turn side-on to the swell and so broach. Still be slow and sluggardly against the steering oar, almost too heavy to be hauled across the wind.

  She’d still respond to Old Yen’s wise old hand, and not to Pao’s. He was sure of that.

  THINGS CHANGE.

  A week ago, this was the only boat that dared go to sea alone. A fleet might cluster around her, too close for comfort in a boat that liked her sea-room, but no one else would sail in the dragon’s shadow. Even with an escort child aboard, there was not a sailing-master on Taishu prepared to venture out unless he followed Old Yen’s wake. A week ago.

  Now?

  Now all the fleet was gone from Taishu-port, and Old Yen’s boat rocked here against the quay alone. Old Yen was ashore, at the palace, where he preferred suddenly to spend his time. The fleet sailed without him and without the magic children too, because he had struck a bargain with the dragon; which left Pao here, on the boat because he had nowhere else to be.

  Not alone, though, because things change.

  PAO STOOD on deck and gazed around at the empty harbor; then he turned aft to where the little girl stood with her arms stretched high above her head, small hands clinging as best they could to the steering oar.