Hidden Cities

by Daniel Fox

  No, no, they assured him, not in the way at all, if he would only take two paces backward, not to stand so exactly between the stack of projectiles and the flinging-arm of the first machine. They were only sorry, they said, that they couldn’t offer him a chair to sit on. As he could see, they were very barely furnished here. There were boxes, there were chests, there was perhaps a ridge of rock …?

  A sharp clap of his hands summoned a functionary at an urgent anxious trot. A word sent the man back to the bridge. His own word had two soldiers racing over the water and back again in very short order, with a heavy ornate chair in gold and red lacquer slung between them.

  A servant from the boat followed, with a cushion in his hands. That was … well, Chung supposed that the fabric could be said to be gold, though when the man set it down for Ping Wen it did look very yellow next to the actual gold of the chair’s embellishments.

  If Ping Wen had ordered it made for himself—well. It was almost a declaration.

  He directed the positioning of his chair, had it moved once because it was unsteady and a second time because he feared an obstructed view. Shen was the very image of respectful patience, a rock carved standing with his hands behind his back. Chung twitched and fidgeted, felt himself doing it, could do nothing to stop it. Not by himself. It needed Shen’s arm to reach out—a rock that moved, a miracle!—to take his wrist and grip it wordlessly. Shen’s own stillness crept into Chung from that touch, and lingered even after Shen’s hand retreated behind his back again.

  They waited, then, side by side until the governor was settled and content. At his nod, Shen released Chung with a glance—this is yours now, your achievement; show it off now, be triumphant—and went himself to stand behind Ping Wen’s chair while Chung joined his men around the machine.

  He didn’t really need to be there. The men had drilled and drilled for this, they knew exactly what they were to do. He wanted, though, to lay his own hands to the work. More, he wanted Shen—whose shoulder would not bear the weight of the work—to be the one who explained things to the governor, that soft insidious voice speaking soldier to soldier.

  He couldn’t have that, it seemed. Shen stood mute: of malice, he was sure. Ping Wen waited inquiringly until Chung had to lift his head, lift his voice, almost shout to be sure his words would carry:

  “Tunghai Wang built machines like this, and set them here. They flung pots across the water, filled with a liquid that caught fire when they struck and broke. Like this …”

  A nod to his men and they went into action, drawing down the flinging-arm and loading its basket, standing to the ropes when all was ready. Chung himself touched the smoking end of a slow-match to the pot’s fuse. “Fling!”

  Ping Wen already knew everything that Chung had told him; and he knew most of what was to come, or else he himself would not have come this far to see it. One did not surprise the great. Besides, Ping Wen had no doubt seen such war-machines before. Used them, very likely. He had been a genuine soldier under the old emperor.

  The men heaved, the long arm hurled upward, the pot flew from its basket and seemed almost to hang in the air for a moment at the top of its arc, black and strange, before it crashed down to earth. They always did that.

  They didn’t always land quite where Chung intended. It was nothing but relief to see the projectile strike rock, rather than splash into the water; relief again when it functioned perfectly, breaking apart and giving Ping Wen a moment’s clear view of its viscous black contents before the eruption of bright flame.

  Chung let the governor watch for a minute how the flame clung, how it burned rock and mud together.

  Then he explained—swiftly and concisely, because he had practiced this as much as the men had practiced pulling ropes—how he revised the missiles to make them explode in mid-air. For demonstration, they loaded the same machine and shifted its aim farther along the riverbank, to where a makeshift cluster of head-high poles and taut-stretched banners stood in for enemy soldiers.

  “Fling!”

  Nothing could go wrong today. It was his triumph. The projectile rose, and hung, and fell; the flame ate down the shorter fuse and licked in through the touch-hole; there was a flash too bright—too yellow, they were all usurping the emperor’s prerogative today—for the sun to drown it, a bang that was frightening even at this distance, even to those who were waiting for it.

  When the smoke cleared, Ping Wen could see exactly what Chung had hoped for, poles ripped from the ground and banners shredded, everything on fire.

  “That was a lucky shot,” he called to the governor, disarmingly confessional. “They don’t always explode at exactly the right time; they don’t always reach the distance. But if an army marched along this road, we could sit here in safety and promise to destroy it.”

  That was an opening, an obvious flaw. He left it open deliberately, like a gate; the governor obligingly stepped through it.

  “This valley is not the only way to approach the city; that road—what is left of that road—is not the only way to pass this valley.”

  “Indeed, your excellence. If the army marched along the ridge up there, we could not fling our pots that high. If we stood on the same ground as the enemy, we could destroy the front ranks of a charge, but the reach of this machine is just too short; by the time we had reloaded, the ranks behind would have swamped us. What we needed was greater range.

  “A pot that rose higher would fall farther off, but the oil used by Tunghai Wang,” picking up a little jar of it and tipping, pouring a thin stream carefully into another jar, treating it with due respect even while he disparaged it, “is too heavy for a machine like this to fling high or far. In the same warehouse, though, we found many of the powders used for fireworks; and in your service in Santung we found artificers who used to design and make fireworks for imperial celebrations. We brought them here,” the last crucial ingredient in his little team, “and they worked on the canisters while we, Shen and I worked on the machine itself.” While they made one entirely new, indeed, with a longer arm and longer ropes, and no simple basket at the flinging-end but a complex sling of rope and net to extend its reach farther yet, to flick like a whip and so send the missile hurtling on its way.

  First—purely for comparative purposes, and not at all because he was a showman, no—he demonstrated how far the old machine could throw a powder-projectile: not really halfway up the steep slope of the valley’s side, but close enough that he could call it so. And the blessed thing exploded just as it ought, in a fierce sheet of flame: did he have the Li-goddess at his back, had he fetched her here from Taishu on the wings of his wishing, to have this perfect day fall into place about him …?

  While Ping Wen must still have been considering what such a weapon could do to the massed ranks of Tunghai Wang’s army, on any road or across any field, Chung moved his men to the new machine. And loaded its net, set its aim, had them fling.

  The projectile soared, a high black dot against the blue of the sky; it fell to earth up on the ridge there, exploded there, phenomenal.

  Ping Wen perhaps didn’t realize it but he was beaming behind his mustaches.

  “With some few of these machines around the city, excellency, you could put an army to rout from such a distance your own men would never be in danger.”

  “Yes,” was the answer. “Yes …” And then, because of course no one in authority is ever truly satisfied, “Can you make the, the missile go higher?”

  “Higher, excellency, yes.” They had done that; but, “If it goes higher, it does not go so far.” Trial and error had taught them the perfect trajectory. Which he had just demonstrated, and for some reason Ping Wen wanted more, he wanted something other.

  “Work on that. Oh, I will send men to you, and you will teach them how to make these machines, and the … missiles … they fling. And how to use them, of course. Pass on your skills. But you, particularly: I want you to work on this. Make a machine that will fling a canister high, high. And have
it explode high too. At the height of its arc. Work on that.”

  seven

  ld age is all about loss, measurements of loss. He knew that: he had seen it in his grandfather, in his father, in himself.

  BUT OLD Yen had lost his boat, and that was immeasurable.

  FOR A while, for a little while it had almost been supportable. It had almost not mattered, when he thought he would lose his granddaughter. When all he could see was Mei Feng shrinking in the too-big bed, shrinking into her too-small self, and someone came to tell him that his bastard boat was missing from the quay. Was it the emperor, looking back? No, surely not, he surely would have noticed that …

  Whoever it was, he had barely understood them at the time. Had let the words wash by him, almost unregarded. Might have grunted, perhaps, some kind of acknowledgment. Perhaps.

  Then the doctor came from the mountains, with his tiger-skin. That was a bad thing, a jade tiger slain. There had been talk of a jade tiger on the quay, on a chain; he hadn’t troubled himself over that. This, though, this skin was right here under his eyes, vivid green and black, as though some distant forest sunlight fell on it still, even in the shadows of the sickroom.

  Out of great evil, a good could come. Perhaps. So said Master Biao. He wasn’t like the other doctors, the emperor’s, the old woman’s. Not haughty, not a courtier, not palace-trained at all. Old Yen trusted him not at all, but in a totally different way from how he didn’t trust the palace doctors. This one he thought perhaps might make a difference.

  And perhaps he did, or at least his tiger-skin. Old Yen was afraid of any good that might come from such an evil, he feared some taint might creep into Mei Feng from the naked contact of the skin, the raw rotten ill-cured leather that showed where a knife had hacked it from the carcass and scraped it clean, not clean enough.

  Still, tainted was better than dead. He thought it was, he hoped it was; and he did have reason to hope. Master Biao wrapped Mei Feng in the skin, and she seemed to breathe easier from that moment. After an hour, she opened her eyes. After another, she was trying to speak. Even trying to withdraw an arm from the skin, to reach for a goblet of water.

  The emperor lifted her and Old Yen held that goblet to her lips, as he had many and many a potion that the imperial doctors would have had her drink. This she did drink, she gulped it down and asked for more; and wriggled into the arms that held her, and gazed down at her stripe-swaddled self and said, “Oh.”

  Said, “Oh!”

  Said, “Is it, is it meant to, to, to move …?”

  Just for a moment, Old Yen thought she meant the tiger-skin.

  Then he understood, and his heart twisted inside him.

  AFTER THAT she wept, a little. The doctor had her washed and swaddled her again, and she fell cleanly asleep with her two men sitting over her. And in a way that was the night that she came back to her grandfather, and in another way it was the night that he lost her once again. When she woke Master Biao had become the man that she would listen to, and he was quite determined to take her away from Taishu-port, which meant taking her away from Old Yen.

  “She should come to the Autumn Palace,” Master Biao said, meaning the emperor’s new Hidden City in the hills. “It will be quiet there, for her recovery and her baby’s growth; and I have other patients, people who were badly hurt to protect the emperor. She cannot have the skin whole to herself, it must be shared.”

  Nobody could argue with him now, with Mei Feng entirely his, nodding in weak agreement to everything he said, even when he proposed that the dowager empress go with her. “The emperor must stay, of course,” he must let you go, “he has a world to govern; but you, my lady, you need to rest and restore your strength. Let your baby grow. Away from the world and worry, with eyes to watch you when I cannot, hands to make a home around you. Who better than your child’s grandmother? Let her take charge; let her build the palace while you build the baby, while his majesty builds the empire anew. Put yourself in her hands, hers and mine …”

  In the doctor’s vision, there was apparently no place for Old Yen. Nor should there be, of course. He was a fisherman, and the Autumn Palace was as far as you could come on Taishu from the sea.

  It was then, sitting there, hearing his granddaughter being taken away from him again, that Old Yen remembered about his boat.

  He slipped out of the bedchamber without a word. Found his way out of the palace eventually, blunderingly. Through the courtyards, past the guards: they all knew him, they were all probably surprised to see him leave at last. He was surprised to find it in himself, the strength of leg, the strength of purpose.

  Then he thought no, this was the opposite of strength: he was broken and falling away, a dead branch snapped from its stem.

  A fisherman without a boat: could anything be sadder or less use?

  An old man without his family, perhaps. But granddaughters come and then go: it was only proper. The boat, though—Old Yen had come to it, not it to him. It had been the fixed point all his life, older than the house he lived in. He had built the house he lived in. He thought the boat had more or less built him, and he had never thought to lose it. Pass it on, yes, when he was too old at last, Too Old Yen—but not lose it, even then. He expected to sit on the headland and watch it out and back again. Possibly with a granddaughter aboard, he used to imagine that, Mei Feng steering while her strong young man worked the sails and the nets. Or the other way around, perhaps. She liked hauling ropes, she liked to fish; she liked, he thought, to glance astern and see someone she loved with the boat in his charge and her too.

  But then her strong young man, the someone she loved turned out to be the emperor. He took her away, and Old Yen had to look for someone else to take the boat.

  Pao, he had been thinking.

  HE CAME down to the quay like a stranger, shuffling from berth to berth like an old fool who couldn’t remember where he had moored, couldn’t tell his own boat from a stranger’s.

  There were boats and boats, the harbor overflowed with boats, and none of them was his. Uselessly, knowing she was gone—yes, and Pao too, stolen with the boat—he still went all along the quay and back, all along the harbor front and everywhere. Everyone saw him, everyone knew. No one spoke to him. What was there to say? They were a gruff community; they left the talking to others.

  Something to be glad of.

  SOMETHING TO be sorry for: a voice, speaking to him.

  Saying, “They took our girls, as well as your boy.”

  He looked around, and found the temple priestess there: a tiny woman, barely so high as his elbow, like a small fierce coal he had always thought her, incense-sprinkled in a censer. Her own passion raised smoke to the goddess.

  He said, “They?”

  She said, “The woman. And her tiger.”

  “Did she fly the dragon’s banner?”

  She might have lied, of course. A boat can lie.

  “The men say not, or not while they could watch her.”

  A woman with a tiger on a chain, she can certainly lie if she chooses to, but she probably has no need to.

  If she had the temple girls, she certainly had no need to. She could sail wherever she chose, and the dragon would not touch her.

  OLD YEN wanted to go to sea urgently, and not to fish.

  No boat, but he had friends, old friends and a life’s legend at his back. He had courage, unless he was confusing that with pride. Above all, he was prepared to lie for what he wanted. Lie a little, and on land. Not on the water. What, to the dragon? Or to the goddess? While his life hung between them …?

  Still, he was bold enough to exploit his friends and his legend; to toss courage and pride and faith and skill into the hull of another man’s boat, and take it away from him without a qualm.

  “HUANG LI, I need the use of your sampan.”

  Huang Li’s sampan had a legend of her own. Right at this moment her master was bailing her, where she bobbed at the end of a long chained line of better boats. When she did
n’t leak, she swamped; the fleet was all too used to seeing Huang Li pass his fish-baskets up for another boat to carry, while he slipped overboard and turned her entirely turtle, just to empty her of water.

  Startled, he said, “You? Need my …?” like an echo that broke somewhere in that little distance between them, that great gulf. Old Yen was unofficial master of the fleet, could have any other boat for the asking and would be better off with any of them, and must know it.

  Did know it. Old Yen would face down an old friend with dishonesty; he would not willingly do more harm than he could help, and this was the boat the fleet could best afford to lose.

  He might be the man the fleet could least afford to lose, but there was no help for that. Not now.

  “You want to fish?”

  “Yes.” There it was, the first lie: such a little word to take a man’s livelihood from him.

  “We are just returned from fishing.” Obviously they were; there was flurry all around the harbor, baskets and carts and strings of fish. There was a journey’s-worth of water in the belly of Huang Li’s boat, and he was bailing.

  “I know it.”

  “Well, then …”

  “Huang Li, you are tired but your boat is not. And I, I have not been to sea for … many days,” lost days, irrecoverable; and I have lost my boat, and near enough my granddaughter too, “and my soul needs it. You have fetched in many fish, but we can never have too many,” an appeal to Huang Li’s understanding, following the appeal to his heart. Old Yen was learning tricks he didn’t like.

  Like a boy, he was saying, like we were boys again, do you remember? I need to row my heart out of its pain, I need to get wet and weary under a hot wet sun, perhaps I need to shout or scream or weep aloud where no one but the sea can hear me. We will not mention the dragon, or the goddess. We will pretend that we are men, and concerned only with fish.

  “Well then,” said Huang Li, seeing only the lie of it, the appeal to the boy he used to be, “you will fly the dragon’s flag, yes?”