by Daniel Fox
Well. He would be without her soon enough.
And here was a sudden welcome weight on her feet, the little cat come back to her, assured of warm clean bedding and a comfortable welcome. He walked all up her body and thrust his nose at hers in a self-contented greeting. There were crumbs in his whiskers. Nobody could feed themselves enough, even here in the palace, but everybody fed her cat.
He was her excuse to slip her hand free of Grandfather’s, to stroke the small round brow and scratch beneath the jaw, feel his purring. He was really all the company she wanted, though of course she could never say so. Go away was the same as let me go, and of them all, only the cat was selfish enough to allow that. Human beings were differently selfish: wanting to keep her, only to spare themselves grief.
It was too late, she thought, for that. Their grief was inexorably coming, however hard they refused to see it.
The cat would come, inexorably in search of her; and find the bed empty, and fuss a little perhaps, and then nest in the quilts anyway, before he went off in search of better warmth and someone else to fuss him.
They could all learn from the cat, she thought, though none of them would do so.
Perhaps she had learned from him herself. There was something ineluctably cat-like in her own wanting to creep away, to find a hole and a silence, a solitude to wrap herself around. Much though she loved her men, she would so like them to leave her alone now, and they would not.
Not for the first time, the emperor said, “We should have brought your doctor, mine are useless. Grandfather, will you go—?”
And not for the first time, before Old Yen could say yes, Mei Feng said, “No, lord. Chien Hua,” just because he liked to hear her say his name. “No. She is not my doctor, just the one who told me I was pregnant. Which I knew already, all but having someone say so. And she doesn’t want to come, and Old Yen doesn’t want to go,” however much she’d like to have him gone. She would willingly send him away, but not to sea. “I will do well enough under your doctors,” but there she lost him because even he could see that she wasn’t doing well enough, not well at all under his doctors.
“She should be here,” he said, and Mei Feng wasn’t sure whether that was sulking or determination.
“She wouldn’t come,” she said. “It would be folly to send. Folly twice. First because she wouldn’t come, and second because you would gift Ping Wen a boat and one of the children. The dragon’s truce won’t take anyone to Santung, you’d need to send a child. Which would anger the dragon and break the truce, give a weapon to the traitor and not help me. Don’t do that, lord. For all our sakes, don’t do it.”
“Well, but you need …”
He didn’t know what she needed. Any minute now he’d fetch his mother in again, in case the old woman had remembered some miracle cure between yesterday and today. Probably her honest best advice would be to find himself another woman. Many more. Create the harem that was his birthright; this was why, Mei Feng was the perfect argument for it. Even the empress had tact enough not to say that, though. Not yet. Perhaps she was waiting for Mei Feng to say it for her.
Not yet. Not now. The little cat curled up on the quilt, tight against her side; Mei Feng sank her fingers into thick warm fur, and waited.
three
oor General Ma was on a mule again, and had been so for hours. His comfortable carriage could never have made this climb.
His comfortable body was not built for mountains, for mules, for adventures. His boy Yueh liked sometimes to call him a man-mountain, but that was another matter, and a boy of course could be tenderly squashed if he grew too mocking. There was nothing tender in Ma just now, except his nether parts.
He had Yueh at his bridle, leading the accursed mule. That was a comfort. And he had men enough, blades enough to discourage any pirates of the road. If there were bandits fool enough to cling to these slopes in hopes of a living. There must of course be traffic up and down the road; food must rise this way and no doubt treasures, gifts. If Ma had the management of it, he would manage it in caravans, occasional and massive, too great to challenge. Bandits would be first daunted and then starved. Even before they were hunted.
The road had climbed through forest and scrub, out onto bare rock. It clung now to slopes of stone, that must be terrible in winter; they were terrible now, Ma thought, in the encroaching dark. The sun kept sneaking away around an outcrop, only to show itself again as the road turned in pursuit. Every time they caught up it had sunk lower, growing fat and red as it fell.
He was fat and red himself, and had a terror of falling. Mules were said to be sure-footed, and this one had not stumbled yet, even where the road was most broken. He could, he supposed, trust the mule. And his boy at its head. Yueh had been with him a long time now, many months, and never put a foot wrong. Ma approved a careful boy.
The road led them abruptly into a cleft. That was better, with rock rising on either side: no fear of falling here. Ma looked up instead of down and saw a narrow sky above, purple and full of stars. His men called to one another, forward and back, not alarmed quite but discomfited. Sun could be seen ahead, waiting to greet them as they emerged; yet here was night lingering, as though it had been trapped from yesterday or longer. That last of the light was too far for comfort, when they must walk and shiver in this soul-stealing shadow where the night gods lurked.
Ma might not be comfortable himself, but the men’s comforts were his daily task. He spoke to his boy, and Yueh’s bright song rose about them. The rock walls caught it strangely, tossed it about and held it hanging in the air in fading echoes as though it had met its own ghost on the way. But, oh but: Yueh’s voice had an uplifting magic to it, dispelling fears. It raised feet and spirits both, that had been inclined to drag. It gave the men a beat to march to, and—wise boy!—it was a song of the north he gave them, all unprompted. These might be the strange mountains of the far south, almost as far as it was possible to be; they were all northmen yet, and their faces were turned that way, the way this road was tending. Home lay somewhere far ahead, but this was a taste of it, and welcome.
CLOSER THAN home, they found what they had climbed for, why they had come all this way, why Ma had sat his mule and his blisters when he should have been safe below and plotting warfare with Tunghai Wang. Ping Wen the traitor was in Santung; that was all the news that mattered. Great events were afoot, plans were laid but could not be realized without Ma—and yet here he was, miles and leagues and days away, too far to glimpse the sea however dreadfully high he climbed.
And here, here at last was the reason for it: a high wall, a locked gate, a lone lamp shining in the dark.
Someone had already knocked a thunder on the heavy timbers of the gate. By the time Ma’s mule reached it, there was a rattling of chains beyond, and a slow swing open. No questions asked, even of strangers who had made this climb unannounced and with such chancy timing.
Here was a tunnel of stone, the gates drawn back against the walls and still no men, no questions. Another lamp burned in the tunnel; at the other end were gates again, closed again.
They led the way now, Yueh and Ma and the mule. His men packed in behind them, muttering and anxious. More so, when the first gates closed themselves at their backs. There was an arrangement of chains, Ma saw, vanishing into the wall. Let the men fear ghosts again; for him, this was a good beginning. He believed, he chose to believe devoutly in human hands at work on those chains.
The gates ahead swung open, and here at last were people, men with shaven heads and dull robes, bowing them through into a courtyard. Yueh clicked his tongue to draw the mule on, and here was what Ma needed, what his good boy brought him to: a stone block where he could dismount with some degree of dignity, if no grace. And here was a man come to meet him, a man who carried dignity in his own person. One among many, but Ma could still tell the abbot, even in the dark.
“Sir, you are welcome here, you and all your party.” The depth of the bow that proved the welcome, the a
bbot’s head on a level with his feet reminded Ma that he was still standing on the block like a prisoner in shame, like a slave for sale, like an arrogant man asserting his own importance. He stepped down hastily—a little farther down than was comfortable for a heavy man with short legs; it forced a grunt from him, but his boy was there to catch his arm and save him an ungainly stagger—and bowed in his turn.
“My lord abbot, I am sorry to have come so late, and unannounced.”
The abbot smiled. “Most of our guests come late. The only way to be early up here is to spend the night on the mountain. We may close the gate at sunset, but we leave a light burning to help you find us. Come, you have sat that abominable beast for hours, frightened half the way and wretchedly uncomfortable for all of it. I know. What you want now is somewhere for the outer man to sit that neither sways nor teeters above calamitous drops nor rubs its wooden cheeks at your more tender skin. For the inner man, you want tea and hot food. Then the promise of a wash and a soft bed, and you will be contented till the morning. Am I right?”
“Yes, yes.” He was disturbingly exact; no man should see so well in such a darkness. But, “The needs and comforts of my men …” Ma knew those to be the first duty of an officer. He was accustomed to arranging them, but only on a grand scale, for a regiment, an army. Faced with his own small squad and far from his proper station—his desk and inks and brushes, dispatch-runners and riders waiting, his web of contacts and communications that made him feel all spider, all in control—he felt as much at a loss as they were. He knew his duty, though: however sore his buttocks, whatever the griping ache in his legs or the different gripe in his belly.
The abbot’s smile was unshiftable. “There is no need. My brothers will take care of all. See …”
Indeed, his tired soldiers were being led away, almost by the hand some few of them, those who stumbled or shivered where they stood. Ma’s boy too, who had attached himself again to the mule’s bridle: a monk was urging him another way, presumably to where a stable stood ready. Stall and straw, grains and water for a weary beast. Yueh gave one last glance back, looking suddenly so weary himself; Ma’s guilty heart stirred in his chest, and he took one instinctive pace toward the boy.
The abbot’s hand on his sleeve checked him, light and absolute.
“Let them go.” The voice was just the same, light and absolute. Ma couldn’t move against it. “Let them all go. You have done what you had to do, you have brought them here safely. They are mine now, until I give them back to you. Let them go, and see to yourself; allow me to see to you. Come,” again, irresistibly.
His hand on Ma’s elbow, his gentlest of touches gripped as a veil of ice will grip a stone in winter, unshiftable again. He could shift all of Ma’s stubborn, reluctant bulk as a breeze will shift a feather, no effort, no strain at all. Ma found himself walking in quite another direction: through an archway and up a staircase and stone walls rising all around him, lamplight and no windows.
It was hard, he found, to tell monastery from mountain. Perhaps that was as it should be; perhaps endurance was the prime quality of both. Ma had cause to hope so.
At the head of the stairs were the abbot’s own apartments, richness and austerity bound curiously together, like a plain meal highly spiced. The abbot guided Ma to a chair, and he sank into its cushions with a gasp of relief. The abbot himself perched on a simple stool, such as he might have made himself in his novice days and used daily since. His long fingers gestured, look your fill; himself, he was looking at Ma.
Self-conscious under scrutiny, knowing himself fat and greasy and a little ridiculous, Ma nevertheless carried on looking. There was a fireplace, cold now in a mountain summer; an idol occupied the ashpit, a bright and gilded god with jeweled eyes, hung with costly silks and wreaths of fresh-picked flowers. A single thread of smoke climbed from a censer at its feet, wrapped itself about the idol like another scarf, like a prayer-flag, and slid away up the chimney.
The floor was as ruthless stone as the walls, but there were rugs beneath Ma’s feet, if none for the abbot. The man’s cot was as rude as his stool; the painted landscape that overhung it was as fine as any Ma had seen.
There were treasures in profusion, on walls and chests and shelves, wealth in gold and wealth in art and craft. If he had been another man—if he had been Tunghai Wang, say—Ma might have looked for jade somewhere in the shadows of the room, and might he thought have found it.
Footsteps on the stairs presaged a scurry of monks with trays. The abbot had eaten already, or else he did not eat supper, or else he did not eat with guests. The heavy tray—all brass and lacquer-work, heavy in itself but a burden mostly because of what it bore, bowls and lidded pots alive with steam—was all for Ma, set down at his elbow on a table of ivory and ebon.
Another monk, another tray, and this one did go to the abbot. This one held the tea: a pot of iron and cups of celadon, lovely in themselves and strange together, a basket of thick white butter. Ma was not sure that he had seen butter since he left the north, the true north, in the spring of the previous year.
“Alas, it is only brick-tea,” the abbot said with a gesture of apology as honest as it was needless. He had perhaps seen where Ma’s eyes lay, on that shallow basket. “We brought the custom with us long ago, and keep it still. I can sweeten it with butter, if that is to your taste?”
“Oh, absolutely, please, yes. Please …”
And so there was the hot and coarse and bitter tea, shot through and through with clinging sweet rich oily butter. Ma drank, and sighed, and drank again. The abbot refilled his cup.
And then there was food: no meat, but vegetables and rice and dried fungus, hot pastes and bitter sauces, salt pickles and sweet fruit. Ma ate with busy chopsticks, only marginally disconcerted by the abbot’s watching him. He was used to eating alone: with Yueh to serve him, with clerks and messengers waiting for orders, eyes on every mouthful.
The abbot waited until Ma had finished—too long a time, perhaps, with no expression of impatience, sipping like a man who took pleasure in the little things, the daily tasks, the tea—before he spoke again. And then he said nothing to the purpose, he showed no hint of curiosity why this heavy man had hauled himself so far above the world with a squad of soldiers to protect him and a boy to serve him and a balky mule to carry him where he so very evidently would very much prefer not to be.
Instead it was all a smooth crisp shell of conversation, deliberately hollow, a blown egg. It was a way to say We have the manners of the world here, and the time of the gods. There never will be any hurry, so long as you are our guest. Tomorrow or the next day or when you will, when you are ready we shall talk about why you have come. Till then, we shall talk about anything else, anything but.
The abbot spoke of the monastery and its people, of a long chain of daughter-houses reaching all across the empire, over a long long chain of years. How they had brought their gods, their crafts, their customs and, yes, even their curious shaggy cattle all this way, like children playing hopping-games from point to point. From one peak to the next, for they were a mountain people serving mountain gods and the mountain-chain ran all this way, though these hills were nothing, nothing like the high plateau of home.
That long history was in fact exactly why Ma had come, and he thought the abbot ought to know it. He thought he did know it. Why else would they both be here, why else the monastery? Here?
Food in his belly, exhaustion in his head: it was satisfaction, perhaps, that closed his eyes one time too often, for a moment too long. The abbot laughed softly and struck a small gong in an embrasure. There was a scurry of sandals on stone, a young monk in the open doorway.
“Go with Kampong Fen,” the abbot said. “He will take you to your bath and bed.”
It was an effort just to heave himself up, but the monk’s hand was at his elbow, a whippy strength he could lean into. Which reminded him: he paused, a little dizzy in his mind but solid on his feet there, still on the abbot’s rugs. “W
here’s …? I ought—”
“Your men are settled and content,” the abbot said, “even your mule is fed and sleeping now. Go, go. There is nothing to interrupt your own needs and pleasures, insofar as we can serve them.”
That wasn’t quite right, but Ma seemed to lack the impetus to contest it.
The monk picked up a lamp and Ma followed him, down stairs and along a corridor, through an archway to a suite of rooms more comfortable than the abbot’s.
And here was his boy Yueh waiting in a pool of steamy light, and all was well after all. Here were warm water and clean cloths, sweet oil—butter-oil, he thought, with an inward smile—for his sorenesses and blisters. A teasing, familiar gentleness in the boy’s familiar, long-familiar hands; which turned rough once he was washed, a hard rubbing with coarse towels; which brought him to bed at last, tingling and refreshed, to lie among soft quilts and feel soft warm skin, a slight and wonderful body settle obediently against his own.
And then those hands again, impertinent, precise. He had no resistance, none. One last bone-bare stir of conscience, just enough to ask, “Did they feed you?”—but it seemed that he must be satisfied with no more than a chuckle in response before the tender mouth it came from found other, more determined purpose on his skin.
MA WOKE to the sound of hammering, the sound of his own contentment written in the air.
Knowledge is power; and power does not die, it cannot be killed, only suppressed in one quarter to rise again in another. An emperor can be killed—with difficulty, if he can be caught: even this one, Ma thought, this runaway boy with his extraordinary luck, extraordinary tales beginning to attach to him—but the empire abides, another man always rises to seize the Hidden City and the throne.
