by Daniel Fox
For now, he was worth more to her alive, and she meant to keep him that way.
For now.
BESIDES, JIAO had let that girl-doctor Tien at her with her needles, and had been feeling heavily, pleasantly sleepy ever since. And a brisk fall of rain had passed over, and now the air was heavy with that scent of hot sun on wetly green, and the breeze had picked up some of that weight and warmth as it pressed like a tender hand against her skin, and she very truly did not want to move.
· · ·
BESIDES …
HERE IN the governor’s gardens was a pavilion that overlooked a pond. The reedy margins had been kept clear of trees, perhaps to draw ducks and herons, to let the birds and the water be seen and admired, painted perhaps, from the balcony above.
That made it a fine place also to keep watch on necessary children. Jin and her little sister lived in the pavilion, very much under the governor’s eye; so did the boy Pao. They were not short of deckhands here in Santung, but he did seem to be required for the girls’ ease of mind, and hence the governor’s.
Sprawled in a chair on the balcony in the sun, Jiao was entirely doing her duty, watching over Ping Wen’s greatest asset.
The children were playing catch beside the pond, the three of them tossing a bright feather-light ball from one to another. The little girl wasn’t very good at catching; her big sister wasn’t very good at paying attention. Pao had been a model of patience and encouragement.
Until the tiger came.
NOW ALL three of them were caught in a twisting wind of laughter that bent them entirely out of shape and even Jiao was grinning, struggling not to join them altogether. It had taken her till now to learn that laughing offered whole new avenues to pain.
The tiger had been lying sprawled on the balcony beside her, asleep or nearly so, his bright flank shifting sunlight as he breathed.
Perhaps the children’s voices had woken him. Drowsing herself, she had been none the less aware when his head lifted to watch them at their play.
When he stirred to crouch alert on his haunches, she dropped a quieting hand on his shoulder, feeling the weight of bone there and muscles like cables beneath the dense coarse fur. She’d sensed a response to her touch, but not what she had reached for, not the discipline of submission. Before she could take a grip on his collar, he was gone: one tremendous leap took him over the balcony rail and down to the grass below, two more bounds and he was in among the children.
Jin was the unlucky one, standing with her back to the pavilion, couldn’t see the tiger coming.
Which meant of course that the other two could and did, but they were as slow as Jiao. Only her mind was moving, keeping up. She saw how little Shola was wide-eyed and scared for her sister, ready to scream but she didn’t have the air; she saw how Pao was just as scared but bold in the moment, ready to hurl forward between beast and girl, but he didn’t have the time.
Even from the back, she saw how Jin herself was blithely ignorant, focused entirely on catching Pao’s high careful lob.
Jiao saw everything, it seemed, every little detail: the ball’s rise and the tiger’s too, those great ground-eating bounds that sent all his lethal mass flying toward Jin’s unprotected shoulders …
TOWARD THEM and above them, close enough to stir the girl’s hair as he overleaped her; and he was turning, twisting in mid-air, stretching out one long vicious leg—
—AND BATTING at the ball as it tumbled by, like a kitten playing with a falling leaf.
SENDING IT—by chance, surely, it had to be chance—straight at Pao, who was stumbling lad-like over his own feet but still managed to hurl a hand out and catch the ball before he fell.
THEY CAME down together, boy and tiger, rolled on the grass and came up almost eye to eye. Caution or downright fear had kept the boy at a distance before this, but now he would have hot musk breath in his face, all the glitter and charm of that fierce eye in his head. Jiao knew. She was almost envious.
He stared, enraptured, and the tiger moved no more than he did.
Then, slowly—oh, so slowly!—the boy raised his arm, cocked it, flung the ball back over the tiger’s head.
The tiger leaped and pivoted, couldn’t quite swat it out of the air.
This time, he landed squarely on all four feet. And then just stood there, looking from girl to girl to boy to distant ball. Not a dog, quite clearly; not going to fetch the thing, no. Expecting it to be fetched.
Remarkably, it was poor hollow Jin who ran to do that. Who turned and tossed it back toward the tiger; who crouched and leaped and caught it this time on a claw, and dragged it down to earth and snuffled at it while Jin squealed and clapped her hands, while the other two stared at her, at the great cat, at her again.
No longer worried, Jiao subsided into her chair. Now she was just watching.
Pao had his courage back, but still no certainty. He glanced up at the balcony as if for consent, or else refusal. Seeing neither, he was desperately slow again but bolder than before, stepping forward, reaching down to take the ball. To take it from the tiger.
Who was growling, Jiao could hear it from here. The boy might be hoping that was just a purr made gross. It wasn’t, but neither was it a dog’s growl, promise of a fight. Sometimes it was an invitation. Sometimes. He growled when he ate, and she wouldn’t try to take his food away from him.
The ball was only silk and feathers, and it must be torn already; Jiao saw a drift of leakage as the boy lifted it from the tiger’s paw.
The tiger raised his head, and sneezed.
And crouched, his eyes intent on the ball again.
Pao tossed it from hand to hand, making the tiger’s head turn and turn, back and forth. Now both the girls were giggling.
He called to Shola, to be sure the little girl was ready. When he saw her determined nod, saw her hands cup in hopes of a clean catch, he threw the ball.
High over the tiger’s head, who made a wonderful unavailing effort to swat it; and turned again in mid-air to see how it fell, as neatly into the little girl’s hands as if it had been drawn there on a string.
The tiger crouched again, and waited for her to throw.
She stretched her arm out and flung so hard she turned herself entirely around in a circle and so didn’t see how poor the throw was, how she virtually hurled the ball straight into the turf. Instead, she recovered just in time to see the tiger pounce and tumble head-over-heels with his prey, growling mightily the while.
By the time he came to rest, he was closer to Jin. Jiao could see, she could almost measure how the boy struggled to hold himself back, not to interfere. Trust was a hard thing, and he had to trust them both.
There was no hesitation in the big girl, doing what she had seen him do. She stepped forward, bent down, took the ball away from the tiger.
Jiao wasn’t sure, but she thought it was just possible that Jin had murmured a word to the tiger as she did it. Certainly Pao was staring, startled.
Then Jin flung the ball, and the tiger didn’t catch it but Pao did; and then they were all three—no, all four—of them into the game, the ball flying from one child to another while the tiger spun and danced among them, taking the ball more often than any of them but always letting them have it back.
They laughed louder and louder, they hugged themselves with glee, they flung the ball more and more wildly; at last, inevitably, Jin threw it into the pond.
Inevitably, the tiger flung himself in pursuit, with a tremendous splash.
SILK AND feathers. The ball surged away on the tiger’s own ripples. Before the beast could cut through them to reach the sodden mass, it had sunk and was gone.
It didn’t seem to matter. A swimming cat was as much entertainment as a leaping cat, and even less expected. The children gathered at the water’s margin, looking for little things to throw, in hopes that he might chase.
The tiger was perhaps enjoying himself just as much, a cool swim on a hot day. Still not a dog, he was not going to fetch twi
gs, but he did swim back and forth for a while before he hauled himself out, dragging a vast quantity of water with him and shaking it of course all over the shrieking children.
Then he sprawled on the grass and so did they, and it was somehow Jin’s lap that acquired a heavy wet cat-head, Jin’s own head that bent low above, Jin’s falling hair that made a screen to deny Jiao’s curious gaze, too far to tell if she were whispering.
JIAO WAS content so long as the girls were, so long as the tiger was. The boy didn’t particularly concern her.
She drowsed, and kept a weather-eye open, an ear alert. In the late afternoon, the boards of the balcony creaked under a significant weight, and she spoke lightly, without looking.
“Come back to me, have you? Traitor. Don’t look to me for kitten-games, you’ll get none here.”
The tiger didn’t reply, unless his settling by her feet was a response of sorts. After a minute or two of fidget and sighs, he began to lick at still-damp fur. When he gave that over in favor of chewing and tugging at a toenail, Jiao sighed in her turn and went to fetch his chain.
five
en come and take away the things you value most.
That was the lesson, the late lesson of Ma Lin’s life. She used to think it was the other way around, that a man brought gifts: a home, his body, children. Company. Comfort, delight, shelter: the promises of life.
Men had taken all these things from her, one by one this year.
Her home, her security, her man: all lost, all in a day.
Her children, daughters of her flesh: they had been taken and taken, two of them ghost-first before their bodies went. One was dead now, little Meuti, and sometimes her ghost came back, tug-tug at Ma Lin’s trousers. The other two had been taken and taken by men and men. Sometimes they were brought back, but only to be taken again.
This latest time, that might have been the last time. She had no notion of seeing them again, coming across the water in a boat. They lay in the hands of the goddess, or the goddess and the emperor together. It seemed unlikely that those two would ever agree that returning her children to her would be best for all.
She would have stayed here in this headland temple just in case. She would have waited, even if there had been nothing to do but wait.
In fact, in their absence she had found work to do. All unpracticed, she played priestess to the local people. Perhaps to the goddess too, she wasn’t sure: only that she gave the people something they seemed to need, and the goddess seemed not to object.
She kept the little temple clean, she kept the weather out. She burned incense and accepted what the people brought, either for the goddess or herself. This was what mattered most, she thought: that someone should be here to take their offerings. The poor need to give. Without a priestess all these years, they hadn’t been able. The goddess needed human hands to act for her, or else food rotted and the rain came in.
The goddess needed a human voice to speak through, and so Ma Lin’s daughters had been taken. Priesthood was no substitute, but it was something, it was a life. A way to be, while the time passed. It mattered, to other people; she could persuade herself that that mattered to her. For now, while she waited.
She didn’t try to persuade the goddess. Sometimes she would talk to one statue or another as she washed off the sticky smoky residues of lamp and censer, but only ever about her daughters, her life of long ago.
TODAY SHE had welcomed her regular women with their shy patient men, their gifts of rice and greens and gathered fruits and time. They had come and gone, as they did, as people do.
Alone again, she stood on the clifftop and watched the sky for dragon, the sea for boats or dragon, hoping not ever again to see boat and dragon come together.
After a while, she wasn’t really watching anymore. There was wind and water, there was bold sun and no cloud; that seemed to be enough. Like her life now, drifting, undriven. Uninformed.
She thought perhaps the weather too was waiting, unless it was the ocean. Unless they were the same.
WHEN SHE heard men coming through the forest, she wasn’t for a moment fooled by that.
This was not what she had waited for, unless it was her doom to be always waiting for disaster.
They were too many and too loud, a little lost. Not peasants, which meant they must be soldiers. For one side or the other, or perhaps the other yet: for the emperor or the governor or the rebels. She didn’t really try to sort them out. She didn’t care; it seemed to make no difference. Men came and took her children. For a little time they had kept them here with her, but not for long: so no, she really didn’t believe these noisy men would be bringing her girls back, no. Really not.
The girls would have shown them the quicker way to come.
Besides, the girls had gone away by boat. If they came back, ever and ever, they would come that way: fetched by the goddess, returned by the old fisherman. She was sure of it.
Perhaps these men were looking for the children. If so, she had nothing to offer them, except the chance to wait. No one could cross the water, not from here. Not without her girls.
Ma Lin stood straight and waited, expecting something dreadful.
THEY CAME, shadows through the trees, men calling: this was the way, here was the headland, here the sun, the temple …
They came into the light in a long slow file, ones and twos together. There were too many of them. Even two would have been too many for Ma Lin, even one perhaps, though she had killed one man before. This many made no sense, unless they came—unless they thought they came—to guard the children who were not here.
What use else could there be, here, for so many men?
Some carried long bamboos and coils of rope. Some carried sacks. Perhaps they were nothing to do with her at all, perhaps they meant to climb down the cliffs and harvest eggs or baby gulls, although this was not the season. Perhaps they had some other reason to go over the edge.
Perhaps they meant to work on the temple roof and thought they needed a scaffold to do it, didn’t know that she had done it herself with no help but her own strong arms and legs.
Perhaps …
· · ·
THIS WAS their captain, coming straight to her. Sending his men inside. She didn’t like to see that, too many men in the house of the goddess without herself to watch.
The captain saluted her gravely, almost reverently, and she didn’t like that either. If he thought her a priestess, if he offered her respect and still sent his men to do whatever their duty was, with their poles and ropes in her temple, all unsupervised …
She thought that was reason enough to be unhappy, even before he spoke her name.
She had not thought her name was known beyond her own people here, her little congregation, but this man knew it. He said, “You are Ma Lin, the woman of the temple?”
She nodded, warily. He had not quite said priestess; she was not quite prepared to believe that didn’t matter. “Who are you?”
He said, “We are soldiers of the emperor, serving the governor in Santung,” if those two were really the same thing anymore.
“What do you want here, what are your men at?” They were making too much noise in there, too much altogether: grunting and shouting, sounds of breaking.
“We have orders,” their captain said.
And no more, but really no more was needed, because she could see what his men were at. They went in, they came out; they went in empty-handed, and came out loaded.
They carried the smaller statues ill-wrapped in sacks, slung in their arms or roped to their backs. Here came a pair of men with one too heavy to lift alone. That one hung from a bamboo on their shoulders, slung in a cradle of rope. There were men enough to carry it in shifts, and the others too, everything that could be carried.
They stripped out the temple while she watched, made an empty shell of it, left it here as hollow as Ma Lin’s daughter when the goddess was not in her; and where would the goddess go now, and where Ma Lin …?
&
nbsp; six
here was something about Mei Feng.
There always had been. It was more refined these days, less raw, but still powerful. Summoning, sending.
As soon as news came of what had happened to her and to the empress, of how much she needed Master Biao and his tiger-skin, of course Yu Shan had come too. What else? There was something about Mei Feng. Everybody came.
AND IT was like being back in the summer valley, standing watch and training, being together, being young and intense and impressed with themselves, comparing scars. And now here was Mei Feng sending him away in secret, in defiance—in defiance of the emperor, no less!—and here he was, going where she sent him. Because there was just something about her.
And here was Siew Ren come with him, because “Did you think you could just sneak off, and me not know about it?” and “Of course I’m coming too, you’ll need me, how do you imagine you might manage by yourself?” and her tongue might be fierce in her twisted mouth and her face might glare by nature now but it was her good arm that she slipped through his, and that was enough to be going along with. More than enough, given how guilty he felt, how his life was a series of accidents but they were all bad ones and they all happened to other people, and Siew Ren most and worst of all.
He wasn’t thinking about Jiao.
These days, Siew Ren made it easy not to do that, where she used to make it impossible.
IT WAS a long walk from the palace to the city, but her legs were strong, and her stride might be stiff but it was long; and she had jade in her blood, jade at her throat, the touch-memory of a stone tiger’s skin wrapped around her own. And she was Siew Ren, which meant determined. And she had Yu Shan to lean on if she needed to, and she clearly regarded that as a victory so long as she never did actually need it.
In fact they needn’t have walked all or any of the way. There were always wagons clattering empty back to the city. Any one would have given them a ride. Many offered, but every time Siew Ren would pull the broad brim of her woven rain hat lower, turn her head away, refuse it with her shoulders. Every time, Yu Shan would translate that into manners, the most gracious refusal he could achieve. She had come this far, out of her hut and out of her valley, out of the hills altogether; it was enough. He was still astonished that she could face the petty palace with its strangers, guards and servants mixed among her friends and kin. She wasn’t truly ready for the road, let alone the city. And was coming anyway, coming for him, unless it was for Mei Feng: and that was courage beyond reckoning. If it cost them a day’s walking, it was worth the price.
