Hidden Cities

by Daniel Fox

  Almost glad, bizarrely, to be left in the company of his mother.

  EVEN WHEN the rain came, so long as there was no wind to hurl it in beneath the open roof, she liked to sit out here on the balcony and watch slow changes cross a world she could not reach. Inside her was what mattered, the baby that had not after all died; outside her, this house encompassed her as much as she encompassed the baby.

  The old woman sat with her most days, sometimes late into the night when the hills were shadow against the vivid sky, when the moon was a lamp and the stars were silver dust flung over midnight silk. Never a comfortable companion, the empress was a comfort nevertheless, with her difficult wisdom and her trenchant grip on what mattered.

  “Why do I like this so much—or no, not that, quite. Why is this all I want?”

  “The tea? Because it is bitter, it speaks true to your tongue.”

  “Not the tea,” though the empress was right about that at least. It sat in Mei Feng’s mouth like a curl of steam from a hidden mountain pool, tasting of rock and depth and clarity, nothing soft or sweet. Nothing that grew. Some teas tasted of the untamed forest, or the grasslands she had never seen, or the sea-wind blowing over the paddy: greenness at their hearts. Not this. This held no light at all, no colors. It was a tea for the night, a tea for her baby in its darkness, waiting. “This,” she said, with a wave of her arm across the rail of the balcony, across the dip of the valley to the rise of the hills. “All I want to do is sit here and watch the weather march across the mountains. Watch the moon come and go, watch the sun follow in its tracks,” not watch any more of the world than this. Hug her arms around her swelling belly, feel the baby kick back.

  Sip tea, and talk with the dowager empress; or else sip tea and sit silent with the dowager empress, when she used to eat and jabber and argue with her son.

  “Ah,” said the old woman, a world’s worth of satisfaction in a word. “Because you have an emperor growing inside you, and this is his inheritance.”

  A little bewildered, Mei Feng shook her head. This was the last least shred of his inheritance, the final pendulous drop of it, the belly of Taishu hung above a desert of ocean across which not the greatest of emperors could ever reach. All the empire else lay northerly, behind them, above them, out of view. Out of reach, which was where she wanted it for now.

  “This is the heart,” the old woman insisted. “Not all the unmeasured miles we have come; not even the Hidden City that we left behind, certainly not all the sordid little cities we passed through on the way. Not your grubbly Taishu-town, not even now, when the emperor must make his home there. Not all the myriad people, not all the wealth, not the armies and the power to command them. This. Taishu is the Dragon’s Tear, the Tear of Jade, because of this, because those mountains hold jade at their heart. All that the empire is, is jade; all that it is, is here. All that my son is, all that your baby will be. You are his eyes on his inheritance. You show him what he will be born to. Of course that seeds contentment in your heart. Drink your tea and go to bed, fool child. My grandson needs your sleep.”

  No, thought Mei Feng, no and no and no. The empress was wrong, more ways than she could count. She did not want to sleep, she couldn’t sleep; her baby wouldn’t let her. It had come so close to the other thing, to the hollow bitter empty sleep of death, she thought it clung to her awareness of the world. She didn’t know if other babies slept in the womb, but this one not. If she drowsed, it would kick her awake from within. The tiger-skin could hold her under, and the emperor could do the same. Lacking either, she really only wanted to sit here and watch the night spin away under the slow rhythm of the stars.

  And more than that, far more, the empress was wrong about the heart of empire. Mei Feng used to think it was the beating heart of her boy, the emperor Chien Hua, but of course that wasn’t right. Now she thought it was the slow-beating heart of his mother. The dowager empress was the empire, she held its heart in the weak fierce clutch of her claw fingers; she was the true Hidden City, obscure and protected, unrecognized, unsought. Without her, there would be no Chien Hua, of course; every woman was empress in her own house, mother of empire. More, though: without the dowager, her husband’s death would have been her son’s death too, a change of dynasty, new empire built on the bones of the old. So it went, time and again—but this time it wasn’t a story, this time it was Chien Hua.

  Without her the emperor would never have come to Taishu, would never have been found by a certain fisher-girl, blinking in the fog.

  And without her, Mei Feng thought, without her now, Chien Hua would hold on to what he had and let the empire slip away. He had the title and privileges of rank, which he liked; he had the jade, which he needed; he had an island for his plaything and a people to inhabit it, an army to protect it. He had his friends for company, his new palace for distraction.

  He had Mei Feng, heart and body; he had their child coming.

  What more could a young man want?

  He would settle, she thought, without his mother. Be king of Taishu, lord of enough.

  It was the dowager who clutched the idea of empire, and would not let it slip. She whose old eyes had seen the stretch of it, whose tongue spoke with the weight of it, whose pride could not conceive of yielding it. She kept it fresh in her son’s mind, urgent to his generals.

  Yes, there was a dragon in the strait, and a traitor in Santung—but they had means to bypass one and manipulate the other. To her the strait, even the dragon was a defense, not a barrier. Santung was held, not lost: a foothold, not a desperate vulnerable last finger’s-hold. A step forward, not a falling-away.

  She could be wrong and many kinds of wrong, and Mei Feng could love her for it anyway: for her stubbornness, her arrogance, her strength. For being closed off to the changing world, a high walled city, yet unbreached; and for coming down, for being reachable, for bringing her precious boy to where he might hear voices other than her own.

  She was a repository for what might not yet be lost. She could be a touchstone still. She could be essential.

  THE HEART of empire dozed in her chair, a small old woman too twisted by her years to be comfortable lying straight in a bed. The new fresh hopes of empire smiled drowsily, nestled in her own cushions, a small young woman too recently too sick to want her bed ever again, unless her man lay within it. Lounging like this was easier for her too, with the baby forcing all her inward organs out of shape. Fuss lingered in the lamplight beyond the balcony door; maids’ hands waited to put her to bed, maids’ voices to scold. This balcony was sacred space, forbidden. The old woman had taught all the household to leave them alone out here. Mei Feng would make the tea herself, to avoid intrusion; the empress would drink it for the same reason. Being entirely clear as she did so, just how great a sacrifice this was.

  Mei Feng could love her for that too, for giving way on nothing, holding to her sour ungenerous temper as she did to her bitter tea, as she did to the empire.

  MEI FENG could doze in the comfort of cushions and coverlets, and wake to the breeze on her face bringing news of weather and season, of forest and hills and the far sea beyond.

  She could open her eyes and see first far hint of day cloud the clarity of stars. She could shift her oddly heavy, ill-balanced body and feel the baby shift itself inside her, and smile inwardly and slide a little farther down into her own warmth, and drowse again.

  SHE COULD wake again and feel the shift in the wind, first breath of rain on her cheek; she could hear the silence in the house at her back and the waking hills before her, birdsong and monkey-calls and the stir of bodies through trees all melded by distance into a riverfall of noise, a susurration, almost enough to draw her down into sleep again.

  SHE COULD hear a noise that was far closer and just as soft, not as alluring: the squeak of a bare sole on dew-damp lacquered wood. That must be one of the servants, risking the old woman’s anger. Which might only be folly, but they had no fools in the household; which meant that it must be news. Ther
e was no reason else to be fussing out here between two sleeping mothers.

  Nothing could matter that much to either one of them unless it was Chien Hua, news of the emperor himself. And no news could be good news that came light-footed on a gust of rain in the too-early morning, that had a servant standing silent over their sleep sooner than wake either one of them to break it.

  Whatever it was, they should bring it to her. The old woman could have the empire; Mei Feng claimed precedence in the emperor’s heart. And the right to intercept calamity before it reached his mother, that too.

  There was still time. All she had to do was move: open her eyes, lift her head, slide a hand outside the covers to gesture. Bring it here, whatever it is. Tell it to me.

  She could do that.

  She could.

  SHE COULD open her eyes, just that, and see—

  SEE A figure bent over the empress’s chair, and prop herself up on one elbow with a scowl forming.

  SEE BROAD shoulders and a shaved head, dark clothes. One of the old woman’s eunuchs, then, and no surprise that he went to her—but no, that wasn’t right. Even in the dim shadows under the rain-roof she could see that he wore trousers rather than the proper robe, which no eunuch ever did or would.

  SEE THE old woman’s feet kick suddenly beneath her coverlet, kick and kick.

  SEE IT all very differently, all in a moment.

  NOT A servant bringing news, no. The man was a stranger. His dark clothes said that he came skulking, that he sought to hide in shadows; his wet clothes said that he came from the rain, from the hillslope, over the balcony’s edge.

  His silence named him an assassin. His choice of victim—of first victim—named his master, perhaps. The empress had done what she could to slay Ping Wen, had failed and failed. This was surely the price of failure.

  Mei Feng had done better, sending him into exile. She would be next, no question: she and her baby too, two in one, and that would be the death of empire right here, laid out in their generations in the soft fall of rain. Mother and lover and child, all together. Chien Hua could not survive this.

  The old woman was kicking less strongly already. There was a cushion, Mei Feng thought, held over her head and pressed down, soft and perfumed and relentless. She hadn’t even managed to free her hands. She would hate that, to go to her tomb with her nails unbloodied of her killer.

  Mei Feng had nothing to throw but cushions of her own, and crying an alarm would only bring servants to the slaughter.

  NEVERTHELESS.

  Mei Feng screamed, and hurled cushions.

  Noises in the house behind, too late, too slow, just as she was herself. The killer turned from the old woman’s sprawled body, and now Mei Feng was just another victim in waiting, next in line.

  He was between her and the door, and her legs were tangled in the covers and she was weak yet, not fit for vaulting balcony rails and running from assassins.

  All she could do was tumble out of her long chair into the corner here, with the awkward angularity of the chair itself to shield her just a little.

  She was a woman, that much he knew. Pregnant, sick, he might know those things too.

  If he carried a blade, he didn’t trouble to draw it. His hands were weapons enough, even in a hurry, even with footsteps pounding through the other noises of the house.

  The sprawl of the chair didn’t delay him long. No need to be quiet now, only quick: he kicked it aside and came at her, where she cringed back in the corner. His fingers were reaching already. One good grip of her neck, one swift snap and away. The way he had come, the way she wasn’t fit to go, over the rail and drop down the hill. There were guards, of course, or there should be—but they should have met him coming up the hill.

  Perhaps they did.

  He might live, he might not. It didn’t seem to matter to him yet, so long as she did not.

  He reached down to seize her—

  —JUST AS she came thrusting up, swinging her arm around from behind her back.

  This was the corner where she kept the tea-things.

  He couldn’t see that for the spread of the light sleeping-robe she wore; he couldn’t have imagined that she would find a weapon here, or be fit to use it.

  He could never have anticipated the kettle.

  It was a brutal heavy thing, bronze and ornate, that took a good hour over a charcoal bed to come anywhere near a boil. Mei Feng used it for the empress’s sake, because the old woman treasured it enough to have brought it all the way from the Hidden City; and for her own sake, because once it was heated it would keep its water hot for hours.

  Even now there was a warmth in it, after it had sat half the night half-full and disregarded while they dozed.

  Mei Feng rose up swinging it like a club.

  She might be pregnant, she might still be sick, she might not be fit to leap and run—but she had the strength of emperors in her bones and blood, and perhaps the lingering memory of the tiger’s strength, borrowed from its skin.

  And she had her baby to defend and the old woman to avenge, all her own unborrowed passion to draw on; and if she was screaming again as she surged upward, that was all for herself and her sheer fury that he would dare to do this, to bring cold death to women—and to babies, her baby!—after such a night, after such lives lived or waiting to be lived, such an empress so casually smothered.

  Herself, she had a lifetime of practice, clubbing fish.

  He was quick, just not as quick as she was. Strong too, he was strong; just … Well. Not as strong.

  He flung his arm out to block hers as it swung.

  She felt the impact, felt his bones shatter.

  He might have screamed then, that might have been his turn to scream, but he didn’t have the time.

  Her arm swung on its arc, barely delayed, with the ponderous weight of the kettle in her grip.

  The great thick bronze rim of it caught his skull and he fell all in a sudden, as a cliff might, undercut. And lay like a rockfall at her feet, utterly still, his crushed head blessedly lost in the shadows.

  · · ·

  SHE HEARD the scream die out of her slowly, losing itself in a whistling kind of gasp.

  SHE HEARD the kettle fall at her side, felt a splash of warmth across her feet.

  VAGUELY, VAGUELY hoped that that was water.

  AND THEN there were people: women and eunuchs rushing from the house, too late; soldiers from the hill, from all around the hill, too late and far too late.

  THEN SHE wanted to sit down, and there was no chair.

  THEN PERHAPS she broke, for a little bit.

  IT WAS later, surely, some time later that she pushed her women away and made herself walk—in fresh slippers, she noticed, and this was not the robe she had been wearing, and when had she come inside the house?—back out onto the balcony, to where the empress still lay on her bed-chair, under a light coverlet.

  THEY HAD taken her cushions away, except for one beneath her head.

  SHE LOOKED terrible, wax-pale and cruelly gaunt and …

  AND NOT dead.

  BREATHING.

  BARELY SO, a hoarse dry rattle in her throat, hardly enough to stir the coverlet across her chest, but breathing none the less.

  · · ·

  MEI FENG dropped to her knees beside her, gripped the old woman’s bone-cold bone-bare fingers and said, “Fetch Master Biao. With his tiger-skin. Now!”

  “Lady,” they said, “we have sent men already. You told us to, before.”

  She did? She didn’t remember.

  “The emperor too,” she said. “Someone should go to tell the emperor …”

  “That too, lady. You ordered it. Of course a message has gone to the emperor.” Of course. Not a summons—one did not summon the Son of Heaven!—but he would come regardless. His mother, his lover, his child-to-be: he would come.

  Till then …

  “Where is the, the, the …?” The body, but a gesture stood in for the word of it, a waft of her hand t
oward the wet scrubbed boards where the assassin had died. At her hand, at her feet. All over her feet.

  “In the cess-pit, lady. Where you had us throw him.”

  She seemed to have been … most efficient. Ahead of herself. It was just so strange, not to remember any of it. Or to remember only those parts she didn’t want to keep. The old woman’s legs kicking at nothing, the assassin’s face as he came for Mei Feng. The splash of warm wet across her feet.

  Her hand was back at her belly where it belonged, but here was one of the women offering her a cup, a steaming cup. Some description of tea: pale gold and clear as sunlight, a scatter of dark twisted leaves settling in the bottom like a dashed character she couldn’t read. She ought to learn to read. The emperor ought to teach her. Then he’d have one cause fewer to be ashamed of her, she’d have one cause fewer to be embarrassed before their child as it grew.

  She reached for the tea, and hesitated just as her fingers touched the cup.

  Oh.

  She lifted her eyes to the woman’s, wishing she had Dandan back. Dandan would have known, wouldn’t need the question.

  “How did you,” no, try again, “where did you make this?”

  “In our kitchen, lady.”

  Of course, in their kitchen. Not out here. Even so …

  “What, what with?”

  Now, at last, the woman understood. Understood and smiled. Mei Feng could hate her for that smile. Could send her back to the city, just for smiling.

  “With our own kettle, lady. Not the empress’s.”

  Of course, not the empress’s, or they would still be waiting for the water to boil. Even so …

  “Where is …?” Not here was not enough of an answer.