by Daniel Fox
“Of course,” Old Yen said, lying entirely.
“Well, then.” That was all it took. Huang Li forsook his bailing and stepped up; Old Yen stepped down, picked up the bucket and bailed.
Even the bucket had a leak.
AT LAST, there seemed less water in the sampan than there was in the harbor. Old Yen cast off the lines, stepped up to the oars and worked the long boat slowly out into the shift of the sea.
Droning his prayers already, which felt like an impertinence. He wasn’t sure he had the right.
Even so, he did need to be praying. He was doing two foolish, dangerous things at once: taking a bad boat into difficult waters; and challenging the dragon for no reason except that his goddess had betrayed him and betrayed him, she had frightened and bereft him, and she was surely the only power that could keep him afloat in this boat and in the face of the dragon. If he believed anything, he had to believe that.
He was testing her, he supposed.
No, he was sure.
He didn’t have the right.
Nevertheless, he needed to be praying.
OUT, THEN: and farther out than Huang Li would dare without a fleet for shelter, for rescue at need. His sampan did have a keel, she was fitted for sea, but the open sea outfaced her. Spume broke over her sides, and all her seams worked to keep the water oozing in.
Old Yen kept his head high, his voice low, his arms working the oars. If the sea should swallow him, well. It was no doubt better than being swallowed by the dragon.
Between the dragon and the goddess, though, he didn’t think the sea would stand a chance.
The sampan was actually fitted for a mast, though Huang Li never dared to raise one. He’d put a pole up now, purely to fly the dragon’s flag.
Old Yen made no move to do so. He thought perhaps there had been a voice—a scandalized voice, shrill with panic—calling after him as he left harbor, “The flag! The flag!” but he ignored it. He left the fabric folded at the pole’s foot, as wet as everything as water slopped up and down the narrow hull as the sampan met the first swell of the sea, pitched her bows skyward and then plunged into the trough beyond.
· · ·
OLD YEN rowed until Taishu-port was invisible at his back, until Taishu-island was a dark line and a smudge, until the Forge was a prominence, a mountain peak jutting from the sea.
He had no intention of landing. A visit to the Forge was a visit to the dragon, and he expected to have the dragon visit him. Best to have it out here on open water, utterly within reach of the goddess.
If she chose to stretch forth her hand and save him, only because he was himself, and her devotee, and in need of her.
A test, yes. And an impertinence, and a gesture flung in the teeth of all the gods. And a lament, a bitter cry of outrage, inexpressible loss.
OLD YEN rowed, and, yes: here came the dragon.
She lifted from the Forge, where he had looked to find her. At least she came through the air, where he could watch her all the way. Sooner that than have her hunt submerged and rise only at the last to swallow him all unseen, unready.
She flew to him, and stooped down to the water—but not the fierce falling stoop of a raptor to its prey. This was almost a gentle descent, almost a graceless landing: a great splashing belly-flop too close, that had the sampan tossing wildly beneath Old Yen’s feet, shipping water from bow and stern and both sides all at once.
In that same moment, he thought he heard a frantic spluttering cry, a great whoop of protest and exhilaration. When the waters were calm enough that he could afford to lift his head to look—and when he had found his courage again, because this was after all a dragon—the source of that cry was right there to be seen.
And an explanation for the dragon’s approach and her ungainly landing, that too, because a boy—the boy, her boy—was clinging to her neck.
Half naked and thoroughly soaked, he had a mad grin on his face and a chancy, unstable-looking seat astride her neck-ridge. A man might try to ride a dragon, Old Yen supposed—the way he’d ride a mule, clinging with both legs and whatever his hands could grab at—but he’d only stay aboard if she allowed it.
If she was going to eat Old Yen, she’d need to do it more delicately than her custom was. Stretch over, turn her head to nip him lightly out of the boat rather than diving, snatching, plunging, a dragon in all her expressive fury. She’d spill her rider else, and make a waste of that humiliating landing.
SHE HUNG in the water by an effort of will, he thought, much as she could hang in the air. She didn’t float, she didn’t bob on the surface like a duck. Rather the water flowed about her, struck and swirled against her flanks as though she were rooted stone, an islet.
Her head was poised like a risen snake’s, the moment before it struck. Even so, it wasn’t the strike that Old Yen feared. Not yet.
It was her eye, rather, her vivid gaze more than her gape: that brutal cold intelligence, the weight of ages, something else …
The need.
She needed something, or she would not have come like this. Like a supplicant. Bringing her boy to be a voice for her.
That was terrifying, that the dragon might want something of him.
THE BOY called out to him, across the water:
“She says, you aren’t flying the flag.”
“I am not.”
“She says, she might have killed you.”
“That she might.”
“Don’t you care?”
That wasn’t the dragon asking. Old Yen was glad that the boy could keep at least something of himself, his curiosity. Not like the children of the goddess, who had to lose themselves, it seemed, before her voice could find them.
He shrugged.
The dragon … leaned over. Her vast head stretched toward him, tilting; the great mouth opened; apparently she was going to eat him after all.
It seemed that he did care after all. Nothing in his body moved, not even his tongue, not even the air that was caught suddenly in his throat. He didn’t call out to her, or try to. But his mind, yes, his mind reached out to the Li-goddess—oh, save me now, if you would save me ever!—and she was there.
There in his head, reaching to batter him aside as a tidal surge will bat a boat aside however well anchored she may be. Reaching to possess him, to take his body to her own use as she did the bodies and voices of her children.
Rising inside him like something old and foul and rotten, an effusion, a bubble of gas from the filthy black mud below the harbor-pool.
Oozing all through him, seizing control, taking everything that was his; leaving almost no space for Old Yen himself …
No, he thought. No, not that. I won’t, you shan’t. I do not give you that.
Then it was a struggle, a still chill wrestling-match, his body the ground and the prize together. He had expected to face the dragon and to test the goddess today; he found himself fighting the wrong one for what little he still valued, his own self.
Fighting and, astonishingly, winning. He would not yield, he clung like weed where he did not cling like limpets; she forced her way in like the tide, passing through and about him, unable to wash him away. Her last clutch was almost feeble, almost desperate, a dead fling of spray that could not reach to the heights of him. And then she ebbed as the tide must, she all but rushed out of him.
He opened his eyes, not realizing that he had closed them. Saw the dragon poised and waiting, interested, apparently not eating him quite yet; and saw the boy leaning dangerously over the dragon’s neck, fascinated, wanting to be closer; and saw the water sloshing in the belly of the sampan, saw how it seemed to move against the rhythm of the boat.
At first it was almost nothing, just odd enough to catch his eye, who had seen so much bilgewater in so many, many boats through all his years of life. This was … slow water: not rushing quite as it ought to, not quite so fast or quite so far.
Less far with every pitch and roll, it seemed. So much water, but it wasn’t reaching t
he side-planks of the sampan. Rather it was heaping itself up amid the thwarts there, massing, drawing itself together around that strew of nets and baskets …
Drawing together and rising up, making a figure of weave and water, rope and bamboo and the sea and the silk of the dragon’s banner too, all tangled together into something that hauled itself up the pole to gain height and coherence, as though even water-flesh needed a spine to hang from, to cling to.
Something that was not quite like a human figure but like enough: it had the height of the pole and as much breadth as it could hold in a frame of broken basket; it had weight and almost solidity; it seemed at least to have two arms and a head above, although there was nothing below that might suggest legs, only a thick twist of rope-and-water about the pole.
The head shaped itself a mouth, and tried to speak—and couldn’t do it.
Old Yen knew her, ached for her a little, unless he ached for what he’d lost, herself as he had known her; thought, I did that. If she had lost her voice, it was because he denied her his own.
She was like a ghost, he thought, adrift without a body. She needed to borrow. Without a human body to work with, she lacked more than voice. Potency, impact. Effect.
She had been his goddess all his life, and now she was—well. Not so deep as a well. A wisp of water clinging to a pole.
Children who had lost themselves in horror, their bodies she could seize and use. Not a whole man’s, who was ready to resist.
If he had yielded to her, perhaps she could have held the dragon off through him. She needed human strength, it seemed. Lacking anything but seawater to work with, she was mute and ineffectual. The dragon peered, closer yet, and there was nothing she could do, his goddess.
Which meant nothing he could do, Old Yen, but stand there waiting in this three-plank shell of a boat. Waiting to be sunk by the dragon or sunk by the goddess in her helpless disintegration, swallowed by the dragon or swallowed by the sea …
HE’D FORGOTTEN. The dragon wanted something.
THE BOY might almost have been sniggering as he looked at what the goddess wrought, what a small thing she made of herself.
He sobered quickly, though, as if the dragon had touched his mind with cold reality. He called across the narrow water. “I will not let her hurt you. Despite the flag. She needs … we need someone to go to Santung. Because no one there will come to us, as you did.”
It was absurd, a conversation with a dragon through her boy; but Old Yen said what was obvious, what was absurd. “You could go to them.”
“We have been. We break things,” and it was clear that he didn’t only mean the dragon. “We need someone else to go. We need you. You will talk to us; you can talk for us.”
“What to say? And to whom? I know no one.” That wasn’t true, and the lie died on his lips. He had ferried Ping Wen across the strait; he knew the governor himself. Not perhaps to speak to, not on his own authority—but any man sailing the strait these days carried an authority he didn’t own himself. Ping Wen would listen, if he went. Again, then, “To say what?”
“To say … to say that we need to talk to them. As we talked to you. To make an agreement, how they may use her waters.”
The goddess, the water-creature on the mast, she seethed and writhed; she wanted to cry my waters! and could not.
Why the dragon should want such an agreement, when she had no need of it—well, that was a matter for her. He would meddle in the affairs of dragons as little as he must, strictly where they collided with his own. The great pressed against the lesser, and something had to be exchanged between them.
He said, “With which side?” There were two armies on the mainland, two commanders. Himself, he would trust neither—but again, that was a matter for her.
“With either. Both. Whoever holds Santung.” The boy shook his head, helpless. The dragon would have small concept of human politics, or war. Why should she care? He said, “Go to Tien, the doctor; she will know who you should speak to. Who you should bring to speak with us.”
“You want me to …?”
“Yes. Bring them to the Forge. Or, if they will not come, have them fly a flag outside the city, somewhere there is room enough.” Where we will not break things, he meant. “We will come.”
THAT WAS it, apparently. The dragon lifted from the water and bore the boy away: back to the Forge, to whatever strange life they inhabited there.
Old Yen stared at what clung to the pole before him, dizzy with revelation, with disappointment. Old age is a measurement of loss.
At last he did what Huang Li did, often and often: he slid over the side into the warm lifting embrace of the sea, reached above his head to grip the sampan’s side, sank and kicked.
Tugged her past her precarious point of balance, overturned her entirely.
Swam beneath her for a moment, and saw nothing; climbed up onto her inverted hull and gripped the keel, heaved, let her toss him off as she righted herself again.
When he slithered back aboard he found her entirely vacated, wet wood and nothing more, except that the dragon’s banner had tangled itself so thoroughly about the pole that it clung there still.
Old Yen spent some time sitting in the sun untangling it, until he could fly it loose and free from the pole like an ambassador’s credentials as he sailed across the strait toward Santung.
He had a mission from the dragon, apparently, which would serve as his excuse. In fact he had, he had always had a mission of his own.
Old Yen wanted his boat back.
one
t was, Mei Feng thought, like a compact between cities.
There was the empress, the mother-city: a stronghold bleak and dark and weathered, walled all around. Demanding, untrusting, unyielding.
And then there was herself, open and broken, frightened and hopeful and alone. Too small for the world, needing an alliance.
The empress might have swallowed her whole. Certainly she had intended that. Perhaps she still did intend exactly that. But Mei Feng had proved not quite swallowable so far, more than a mouthful; and she sat as it were at the mouth of a valley, where the empress held the heights. If the dowager meant to come at the world at all, if she was not content—and she was not!—to squat in splendid isolation and scowl down and be ignored, then she had to come through Mei Feng.
Through my child, Mei Feng thought, hugging the small hard roundness of her belly. To the empress, of course, it was her son’s child, nothing of Mei Feng’s. Even so, Mei Feng was the gatekeeper.
They could never be equals, she and the indomitable old woman; they might never be friends. Little by little, Mei Feng was inheriting what used to be the dowager’s own. Her son’s loyalty, her claim to be mother of empire, everything. Except her rank and title, because Chien Hua might love his little island fisher-girl but he would never marry her. That was understood.
For now, the empress could be counsel and mentor, the only woman living who had borne an imperial child. She knew better than her own doctors, how this would go. “I have seen normal women,” she said, “give normal birth. It is not like that for us.”
Us, she said, often and often now. Making an alliance of them, two women against the world: strength in shared secrets, sharing secret strengths. “Imperial seed makes us sick,” she said, “even as it makes us strong. What grows in your womb, what grew in mine, they are not quite human, these sons of empire.”
Mine might be a daughter, Mei Feng thought, secretly rebellious: her strength, not for sharing.
“Mortal flesh, of course, conceived in mortal passion—but still they have jade in them from the start, at the heart. That’s what makes them so heavy to carry, so hard to us. But we, we women, we have something of the stone in us too, from lying close with emperors. That’s what gives us the strength to carry them, and to endure. It is … always bad for the woman, to bear an emperor’s child. You now, you are having it worse than I did. You are too young, I think. It wants a woman, where you are still a girl. I let
slip a dozen, before I could bring the one to term. Still, you have survived the worst of it. I thought the child would die, I admit it, before Master Biao came.”
I thought the child had died. I admit it. And me too, I thought I would die, had died, was dead already.
I wanted to die, I think. I admit that too. Not the child, though, never that.
Then … well. Then Master Biao came, and changed everything. Remade me, gave life back to my baby, remade the world.
WHEN MASTER Biao was absent, when he had taken the tiger-skin away, Mei Feng liked to sit out on the balcony of this new and petty palace, first build of the mighty city to come.
With all an isolated hill to build on, this had been her idea: that they should build a swift house first, compact and self-contained, alone on the slope facing south. Nothing grand, nothing that would eat time and spit out delay. A wooden house, an elaboration of their old beloved tent, sealed against weather and furnished with comfort, fit for two young people and their essential servants and no more. Business and worry could be left in Taishu-port with the generals. Closer at hand, all the noise and fuss of the workers’ tents could be out of sight and out of hearing, north of the hill; all their ongoing work, building the real palace with its barracks and courts, that too, the north side of the hill.
From here she looked south to the mountains and the forest and the sky. Everything that was a trouble lay to the north, away from her: the politics of court, the dragon in the strait, Tunghai Wang and Ping Wen hopefully warring with each other on the mainland. Even Grandfather, in his anxiety and distress. North of her. Not in view.
She had never imagined sharing this little precious house with the dowager empress; but the old woman was here and the emperor was not, or not often. He came when he could and left when he must, when other men insisted or his own conscience drove him away.
She didn’t argue, much or often. He was her man and father of her child, her boy-emperor and her delight, in bed and out of it, waking or sleeping, talking or laughing or silent and intent—and yet, and yet. She was almost glad to see him gone again, to feel the restful spirit of this place close again about her, almost like the embrace of the tiger-skin. Almost that close, that warm, that comforting, encouraging, uplifting.
