Jade Man's Skin

by Daniel Fox

  Perhaps. He did resent her, that was sure. And resented himself for bringing her here, across the creek. At the time it had been a necessary kindness, but now …

  He looked at her, and at her daughters. She seemed brighter, better fed, more confident of her right to a place in this world. Before, she tried to send her daughters into safety even at the cost of her own; now, he thought, she knew she needn’t do that. She had perhaps always been a fighter, but now she expected to win.

  The little girl had caught some of that from her parent, unless the parent had caught it all from her. Small and fierce and determined, competent because she had taught herself to be, she was stripping green leaves from their stalks and washing them in a bowl in the corner, while she watched her mother, while she listened.

  The elder girl, Jin, was still bereft of sense, but didn’t seem so hollow as before. Whatever her story was, Old Yen had thought her irrecoverable; maybe not. She sat on the floor before the altar, bobbing and bowing before the particular idol that was there because Old Yen had set it there long years before, though it had never been this clean and cared for. Briefly he thought that she was praying, before he remembered that she had no voice.

  And then she turned her head hard to look at him, and her mouth opened, and she spoke in a voice that should never have come from a girl’s mouth, could never have belonged there. It was rich with salt and threat, like the drag and stifle of weed in the shadow of a rock in deep water; and she said, “Fisherman. Tell the dragon, the strait is mine. Tell her that if she will not be my prisoner, she may not be my guest.”

  And the girl’s mouth closed on that dreadful voice, but its presence still hung in the air between them, between them all.

  Her Water’s Voice

  one

  Waking alone; standing and stretching alone, unwatched; stepping out of his rough shelter and still being alone. Going naked to the stream to wash, and then running all down its tumbling length until he plunged into a sea-pool at the bottom, shrieking like an idiot as the surf broke over his head just because there was nobody to see him, nobody to hear. Sometimes he could feel like king of the world. King of his life, his little world, this island.

  He’d never been alone before, in any way that mattered. His family, his master Doshun, Li Ton and the crew of the Shalla—always there had been someone to overlook, to claim his time and assign his space and keep him under their control. Now here he was, marooned. No one actually knew for sure that he was here; only a handful could guess at it.

  One man in the world, perhaps, could come to the Forge to see. And that man was in Li Ton’s hands now, where Han had been before him. Under the pirate’s eye, sailing the only boat the pirate had. The fisherman had greater worries than Han to occupy his mind.

  Besides, Han didn’t need worrying over. He had this whole island, all the Forge to himself; he was doing well. King of the world.

  AT FIRST he’d thought he would never manage on his own. When the dragon left him, he thought it was a death sentence, slow and cruel. A boy alone with a crippled hand on a rock of ghosts, an island of slaughtered monks—how could he live?

  Obviously, he thought, he wasn’t meant to. She couldn’t kill him directly, but she could strand him here and let him die.

  No, he had stranded himself, hadn’t he? He’d sent everyone else away, to save Tien. The dragon had only let it happen. Then she’d flown away and left him, and he would starve to death if he didn’t fling himself off a high cliff first, or die of simple solitude for being all alone.

  That first hour, when he realized the truth of it—that she was unbelievably gone, and the boat was gone, and they were neither of them coming back—he had run madly down to the old broken jetty in case there was a miracle, a boat somehow that he could somehow use; and then back up to the peak again in case of another miracle, some distant sight of the fisherman coming back to rescue him, with Tien at his side.

  And then through the monks’ old ruined settlement, calling pointlessly, screaming almost, because the monks were all still dead and their burned bones lay where he had scattered them.

  Perhaps Tien had slipped away from the others, on their way back to the boat; perhaps she was in hiding somewhere on the island, waiting for him to find her?

  Or perhaps the old fisherman had sent his boy to swim quietly back to shore and hole up until the dragon left, to be Han’s boon-companion in his exile?

  Or perhaps he would find the monksmith’s ghost here, where they had burned his body. That should be frightening too, but what did Han have to fear from an old man’s shade, when he had stood in the dragon’s mind? He wasn’t brave, and all summer he had gone directly from one terror to another, again and again. Nothing could be more frightening than the dragon, though. Now that she had left him, he thought perhaps that nothing would ever frighten him again, because nothing could come close to matching her.

  Except that he was frightened of being on his own, apparently. He would have welcomed the old man’s ghost, if only he could find it.

  No ghost in the ash and ruin of the monks’ compound, only a sudden eruption, half a dozen black chickens battering the air with shrieks and wings and lifting dust as he stumbled through them where they scratched at the grass together.

  He ran on, through the wild gardens and the steep tangle of trees behind, and came to a clifftop and didn’t jump, no, though he did almost go over anyway before he knew it was there. Grabbed at a creeper and saved himself right on the brink, and stood for a little with his heart pounding and the sweat cold on his skin and the fall in his eyes, the long plunge to the water and then farther, all the way to the bottom where her chains lay, where she had lain herself until he cut them …

  … CHICKENS?

  THE MONKS must have kept chickens, and fed them too. Not for weeks, being dead and so forth, but that didn’t matter much. The birds foraged for themselves, in the open and among the trees, but still lingered around the compound.

  They wouldn’t let Han close enough to catch one, though he made a private diving idiot of himself in trying, again and again. Meantime they laid eggs, sometimes, that sometimes he could find; and he laid traps, each more intricate and hopeful than the last, as thoughts of spitted chicken blazed brighter and brighter in his head with every day that passed meatless. He could smell it, taste it, he could feel the grease of it on his fingers and the shreds between his teeth. Only not the warmth of it in his belly, because he couldn’t—quite—get it there.

  He had the fire ready. The moment he’d realized that he might yet live after all, which was the moment after he hadn’t quite gone over the cliff-edge, he raced back up to the firetop and salvaged still-smoking charcoal from the crush of the dragon’s footprint. He’d kept it alive in a firepot since, fed it twigs and moss and more charcoal, blown it into constant sullen life, dull and red and waiting. Sometimes he thought his stomach was the same, that dull red burning ache of ever-present hunger.

  Not that he was ever truly hungry, or no more so than he always had been. The monks’ gardens were full of greens and onions and garlic, long beans and curious roots, between the rampant overgrowth of summer weeds. In a few short days he’d learned to be a farmer. And he’d found their low stone storehouse, full of grain and dried fish. He made congee daily over a slow fire, and was probably as healthy and as well fed as he’d ever been; only that his belly ached and grumbled, waiting for the promised meat that he could never quite lay hand on. It wasn’t only chickens. There were other birds in the woods, and creatures that scuttled and slithered through the leaf mold, and any of them, all of them might have been edible, if only he could catch them.

  He slept dry or dry enough, first in that same storehouse, then in a roomier shelter that he made for himself close by. He didn’t like to go into the old compound, because there were still bones mixed with the ash where someone had built an inadequate pyre and tried to burn the monks. Some of the bones were bound together by scorched dried flesh and tendons; the skulls s
till had skin of a sort. They were dreadful. He thought they stared at him, with their hollow eyes. He thought they screamed at him with their silent gaping twisted jaws, their blackened teeth; he knew they had good reason. He had been one with the men who killed them, and one again with those who scattered their remnants, searching the dead pyre for wood that would still burn. He hated both those memories, the one cold and the other fresh; his life had turned and turned again around those nights and the days that followed.

  And now his life—which meant Tien, Li Ton, the dragon above all—had left him here, solitary at the last; and he had learned that he could live this way, doing no harm to anyone, having no effect. For a little while he had mattered in the world, and it had all been terrible. Now he was nothing: neglected, abandoned, alone. That was something to rejoice in, except that he missed Tien. She was safer without him, though, and so he should be happy.

  And so he was happy, with no one making demands and no one to be responsible for. No one to watch him, laugh at him, worry over him. No one to see if he threw himself into the surge of the sea and only barely made it back to the rocky shore, no one to be scared or scolding. No one to rub his hair dry and push their fingers through it after, threatening to take a scratchy comb to the tangles. No one to share his tension as he snuck up to his latest chicken-trap and his disappointment when he found it empty, no one to be disappointed in him.

  He did better, with no one else around. He did best alone, and he’d had to be marooned like this to learn it—

  —EXCEPT, OF course, that he never was alone. Not quite. Any more than he was quite entirely here, marooned on the Forge.

  SHE HAD left him, unbelievably, when he was exhausted and numbed and close to surrender, overwhelmed within the great spaces of her mind. She had lifted into the sky and left, not tried to eat him after all. She was gone: and yet she was a silence somewhere in the back of his head, a stone-cold voice that never spoke, a weight that dragged at his thoughts like a pebble thrown into a sheet of silk, distant and potent and inescapable.

  HE? HE was a thread caught in her claws, a tangle of weed around her neck, a tickle in her throat, an irritant. A negligible presence, something she carried because she could not shift it, something she struggled to ignore.

  REMOTELY, THEN, he did still fly with her. Some little part of him was awed, perpetually full of wonder.

  Remotely, then, she did still stay with him. Some little part of him felt the impact of her constant regard and was in perpetual terror, perpetually trying to stand against it, not to be eaten from within.

  two

  It was entirely the wrong way around, for Guangli to be laughing and easy on the road while Jiao was increasingly uncomfortable. It was against the natural order. He was a jade carver, an aging man with a sedentary occupation, a heavy belly, a comfortable house and a settled life that the emperor’s word was fetching him away from. She was an outlaw, a pirate of the road, unencumbered and dangerous and free. This was her proper habitat and she should be rejoicing in it, she should be making a triumphant parade of herself, and …

  And she was scowling and kicking dust like a sulking adolescent, while he smirked and prodded at her temper and marched along like a lad half his age, delighted to be out on the emperor’s highway with his discomforted companion. He was a mean-spirited old man and she was torn by honest doubt and worry about someone who mattered to her deeply, and …

  “Tell me about this clan-cousin of his, then,” Guangli said, not at all for the first time, “who has kept him from coming with you.”

  “It was the emperor,” she snarled, through gritted teeth and not at all for the first time, “who prevented him. He asked to come,” and never mind that he had asked to come alone. Guangli had no need to know that.

  Guangli might have divined it, to judge by his snort of laughter. “Who is this girl, then, that he’s so eager to escape her and yet fails so profoundly? Is she so very dangerous?”

  She’s half my age, and she’s been his seductive playmate all his life. Also, she amuses the emperor. So yes, she is so very dangerous …

  Quite why it mattered so very much, when she had come and gone through a dozen dozen men’s lives and beds and never hurt too badly over any of them, that was a question she would have found hard to answer. And yet, it did matter. Extremely.

  Which was why Guangli’s teasing mattered, immediately, now; why a long and cynical friendship stood suddenly in the hazard, because he couldn’t see the risk. Because he thought it no more than funny that she had lost her heart to a stripling, to a boy: when he of all people should have understood how much deeper it ran, like a vein of stone running all through her, twisting, lethal …

  He might have learned just how lethal, because her temper was on a short chain and due to snap. Only there was a sound behind them, a sound that she hadn’t heard for a while. That had her stiff and still, turning to look although there was nothing to be seen yet around the bend in the road; gesturing to the old man to be silent, seriously, and to get off the crown of the road, get off the road altogether, get behind her and if that meant get into the ditch then it meant get into the ditch!

  Thankfully, he was wise enough to understand how very much she meant that. Awkward under the load of his tools—wishing no doubt for his former apprentice, for Yu Shan, even as she was wishing for him too, as she had been all this damned journey—he stumbled over the verge and down, to stand sandals and feet and calf-deep in muddy water without the least real notion why he should, except that she had told him to.

  He could hear it too, surely, the slurred steady rhythm of shuffle-running feet. Men in number, under discipline, under an urgency. It meant soldiers, necessarily. On this road, soldiers were nothing new but never in a hurry. Something had changed, then; and on this road, between the one palace and the other, any change must engage the emperor.

  The absent emperor. This might be revolt, rebellion, an army uprising. More likely it would be his mother sending troops to fetch her wayward son: he might not come back for his generals, but for her, surely, he would come as he always had …?

  Those were all the options Jiao could think of, in that little time she had for thinking. Here came the advance guard now, banner-men and troops, sweating hard and trotting steadily, at that mile-eating pace that she knew trained men could keep up all day. She could do it herself, if she had to.

  The banners had a lot of yellow in them. So did the men’s uniforms, scarves flying free in the breeze, tassels around their spearheads. Not the pure yellow of the emperor’s own guard, but close enough. Too close. Any man on this road could claim to be on the emperor’s business, but few declared it in their clothing. She could do so herself, but she’d sooner keep that quiet; which being true, she stepped back off the verge and joined Guangli in the ditch. Better to look like peasants, better to pass entirely unnoticed by anyone this proud or this important. Who could command soldiers and dared assert such close imperial connections? His mother, again; his generals, perhaps.

  And here came a high-wheeled carriage pulled by men, and that too was decked out with yellow streamers; and perhaps she and Guangli both should be kowtowing like real peasants, but she really needed to see this. Whoever it was in that carriage, they must be going to the new palace site, and the emperor would want to know.

  Someone wise in the ways of the court might be able to read what the banners signified, this much yellow and that much blue; she was mystified. All she could usefully do was count the men and hurry back to the valley in the hills …

  Except that the carriage stopped when it reached her, which made her lose her count entirely.

  The carriage door had a sliding screen; it was a man’s hand that slid that screen aside, a man’s face that peered down at her from the shadows. Not the empress, then, she could tell the emperor that much. His mother wasn’t come herself in search of him. This could still be an envoy.

  Except that the man looked entirely too haughty to be anyone’s envoy b
ut his own; indeed, he looked thoroughly out of temper. Which gave her a clue, perhaps, knowing as she did how many messages had been run from the valley to the city and back.

  He said, “You, there. Where are you going?”

  She kept her head low like a terrified peasant, and made the vaguest possible gesture, along the road, highness, that way …

  He said, “No. Don’t try to fob me off. Whom do you serve?”

  He wouldn’t be satisfied with anything but a direct answer; he wouldn’t be satisfied with this, but none the less she said it. “We all serve the emperor, highness.”

  “That is true, but would he miss you, if I took your heads now? Both of you?”

  That brought her head up, no more dissembling. She met him eye to eye and said, “I think he would.”

  “Yes, I thought so too. Where would you actually be going, if not to him?”

  Guangli put his silence aside, to forestall her own answer: “To the new palace, of course, lord. I am a jade carver, and I thought there might be work. The woman is my bodyguard: unusual, I know, but she is an unusual woman. And she is right to say the emperor would miss my work, if I were not there to make it.”

  “No,” the man in the carriage said again, and she was increasingly certain who he was. “Nice—but no. The new palace is not ready for its decoration, and no jademaster would let a skilled carver wander the island unsupervised.”

  “Alas,” Guangli said, “the supply of jade has been … interrupted, since the emperor came. My master has seen none of any quality for too long; he thought perhaps it was being intercepted, diverted to the new palace, to await the emperor’s pleasure. And so he sends me, to please the emperor more.”

  “Almost credible, old man—but, still, no. If you lie to me again, I will take your head in earnest. I think you know where the emperor actually is, and are going to him.”