by Daniel Fox
Nevertheless. The men did bind together, as men will, in cliques and clubs and gangs; and Jiao was out there mixing with them, crouching in a circle rolling bones.
She couldn’t talk to her own people, apparently, but she could roar and point and jabber, laugh and roll with strangers, chew something unsavory and spit between her legs.
Jiao was in full land-pirate guise, dress and manner too: the tao on one hip conspicuously balanced by the heavy knife on the other, both blades flaunted here where the workers were forbidden them. She swaggered, she cursed, she turned a shrugging shoulder on those she had come in with; she muttered something that made all the men in hearing choke on illicit laughter, that they struggled manfully, failingly, to suppress. Some coarseness, then: some comment about the emperor, perhaps, that could see a man’s head struck from his shoulders if he made it, if he was overheard. Or else about the general his majesty had come to see. A man who was not quite master could be doubly sensitive of his honor …
Chung wasn’t comfortable here, with any of this. Those men that Jiao was raucous with: conscripted once into the emperor’s flight, fighting their way all across the empire and losing all the way, crowded at last onto this one small island with nowhere else to run; conscripted again into this, building a luxury palace for an idle boy while starvation threatened on one hand, war on the other and a dragon overhead; they had no reason to be loyal, except to save their own skins for one more day of labor. The mainland had already risen in rebellion, and Chung wasn’t the only one who feared that the same might happen on Taishu.
If it was fear that kept the men obedient, then it was Ping Wen they feared; the emperor himself was too remote. Certainly Chung was afraid of him. He didn’t suppose for a moment that the general would remember either him or Shen, or care a whit if he did remember; and certainly no one, not even he could touch them while they stood in the emperor’s protection; and even so, Chung was afraid. He hadn’t even seen the general today, and he was afraid.
The general’s personal guard ringed the tent, just as the emperor’s did; they interspersed each other, more or less. And didn’t talk. It was why Chung’s comrades stood so unnaturally still, or squatted so watchfully on their heels, hands on hilts; it was why he and Shen talked in such soft murmurs, why Shen was actually so anxious about Chung’s being here at all.
Jiao was playing at bones with the soldiers who worked here, and it felt as though she were tossing chances with an enemy in overwhelming numbers, who might turn on her and all of them at any moment.
The emperor was in discussion with his closest and most trusted general, while their own people kept watch outside. It should be the easiest, the most comfortable embassage for both sides, all friends together; and yet, and yet. It seemed more like negotiations for a truce, when neither side trusted the other for a moment.
Maybe life in the valley was breeding paranoia and a taste for isolation? Certainly Chung wanted to be back there, himself and Shen, all their new-adopted clan and their charge the emperor too.
In the meantime, he was desperate for something to happen, to break the tension, to remind them somehow that they were meant to be better than allies: friends indeed, all one people under one throne.
And then the dragon came, and he could almost believe that he had made that happen, just by wishing it.
SHE CAME OVER the mountains, high and sudden, abruptly there: a discontinuity, a break, a line like a worm in the sky, alive and deepening, stretching.
Diving, coming down.
SHE FLEW without wings, writhing through the air; but he thought the sun darkened as though she did indeed have wings, as though she spread the wings of her will all across the sky.
He reached blindly for Shen and blessedly found him, so that they could lean into each other as they rose to meet this on their feet. They didn’t kneel even to the emperor, unless he asked it of them; they should not cower before a dragon, who had less right to their lives than he did.
Less right but more power, simply to take them if she chose.
Others were not so proud, around them. Even some of the guards were screaming or cowering or scuttling away. As though running from the big red tent could save them. Chung thought that if she wanted to eat everyone here, she would do that, however swiftly or crouchingly they ran.
Nothing they could do down here would prevent her. He and Shen stood, hand in hand, and watched her come.
There was noise all through the camp. The tent doors flung back, and figures came striding out: the general, yes, and the emperor.
The emperor flanked by Mei Feng, by Yu Shan, both of them pressing close: far closer than custom or court manners could allow, but for once no one was watching. They came out, they looked around, they saw how everyone not running stood transfixed and staring upward; they glanced upward; they stood transfixed.
She came swooping low over the hill, and Chung thought she would strike like a sea-eagle above a silver glinting swirl of fish: slam down with taloned feet extended, snatch and seize and thrust into the sky again.
But in that last moment before she must come down, her head lifted and she rose like smoke on a windless day, coiling and twisting in the air. Chung thought she was dancing, but only because he had no other word for it. It seemed utterly personal, inward, a private expression of herself.
He thought perhaps she did it only because she could, after a long age of the other thing, when she could not.
A rough voice cut their silence, as it cut the screams that still tore through the camp: “Quickly, then. Away from the tent,” that big bright attractor that must stand out in a sky-view like the sun reflected in a pond. “And take that off, have you no sense at all?”
And here was Jiao, whose voice it was, hurtling away from her bone-rolling companions, who were either cowering or fleeing, according to their tempers. She came straight to the emperor, ripped the yellow tunic from his shoulders and hurled it back inside the tent.
Left him his trousers, blessedly, but they had been scarlet once; faded and mud-splashed and soaked, they were nothing anymore, nothing to draw even a dragon’s eye.
Presumably.
“There,” she said, her hands spread against imperial skin and pushing, “sit there,” where she’d sat before, where there had been a circle of men before they’d all run away. “Mei Feng, you with him, of course,” because she wouldn’t be anywhere else. “And you,” snapping her fingers, wanting Shen, “or, no, both of you,” Chung too, then, “you’re no good alone. Sit with him, look ordinary. I want more, too: you and you. Make a crowd around him …”
“Jiao,” the emperor said, quite mildly, “she’s a dragon. If she wants me, I think she can probably sniff me out, don’t you?”
“Perhaps,” frowning, dealing with it, “but if she does, it’ll be the jade she smells. Won’t it? Just being emperor doesn’t give you a different perfume from the rest of us.”
Which was probably heresy, because the emperor was of course a god; but they had lived with him in the valley, some had fought with him, seen him sweat and bleed. Mei Feng said he farted …
Right now she said, “We could smear him with ashes, from the fire there?”
“If you like, but I doubt it would help. This isn’t a jungle hunt. But whatever it is, Yu Shan will smell as strong to her, stronger, if it comes to sniffing.” She turned to him, her orders as impersonal as they had been to the emperor: “Go, run. That way, away from here. Get into the trees if you can.”
“I’m going with him.” That was Siew Ren, of course.
Magnificently, Jiao just shrugged. “If you can keep up. So am I.”
There was nothing more to do or say, apparently, except to snap at the general: “Take your own men about you, try to look no different and go that way,” a nod of her head into the camp. “Look like you’re running, like everyone else. In fact, run.”
One last glance up at the still-rising dragon, and she turned to do the same. It was Shen—from where he sat, ob
ediently next to the emperor, where he had pulled Chung down beside him—who called after her, “Jiao …?”
“Yes, what?”
“What do we, um, do? If she, you know. If she comes down?”
She’s a dragon, he was saying, how do we fight a dragon?
Jiao almost smiled for a moment. “No idea,” she said. “Just—oh, do something, yes? Throw stones at her. Something …”
And then she turned and ran light-footed after Yu Shan, who was keeping steady pace with his clan-cousin when he could certainly have outsprinted her if he’d wanted to.
Chung looked at Shen; Shen gulped a little, and turned to the emperor.
“Um, if we have to throw stones, majesty, your arm’s the strongest …”
“Which would only give away who he was,” Mei Feng pointed out. “I think she’d notice, if he was standing down here hurling pebbles at her.”
“If she’s close enough to reach with a pebble,” the emperor said calmly, “I think she’ll be close enough to know who I am anyway. And if I’m who she wants,” he added almost casually, “do you think I’m just going to sit here and try to hide, while she tears everyone else apart looking for me?”
“Yes,” in a fierce whisper from Mei Feng, “yes, you are!” And her small hands wrapped themselves around his arm, as if she could hold him still and quiet by simple determination, because for sure she had no other way to do it.
He just laughed, and shook his head at her; and then down the dragon came, and her grip on his arm was wholly different suddenly, a match for the way Shen leaned two-handed on Chung’s shoulder, as if they were all equally breathless, all caught in that strange space between wonder and terror.
She came down in a slow spiral, and flew similar turning patterns over their heads, over the hill and all the sprawling camp. She quartered the ground like a kite, almost, head poised and staring down; but whatever she was looking for, she seemed not to find it. At least, she didn’t stoop or snatch, she never came to ground.
They sat very still in her shadow, and she passed over them and moved on, drifting where she would in the windless air, lethally intent, except that seemingly her intent was not to strike.
She looked, she quartered, perhaps she charted this new build, this imminent city in the vast dark recesses of her mind. Then her long undulant body flicked, and she left them.
Left them all unharmed, unmarked except by the passing of her shadow. Which might be a mark that lingered, a lingering kind of harm, but it would need time to say so.
For now—well, for now, no one was moving just here, until the emperor slowly opened his clenched fist, and let a sharp stone conspicuously fall from it.
Mei Feng seemed to choke on an outrage of laughter, and hugged herself against his arm, face hidden.
Shen might not have been the first of the bodyguard onto his feet, but it seemed so to Chung: standing and staring after the dragon where she’d gone, and then reaching down an imperative hand for Chung to grip, so that he was hauled up to stand beside him.
There was nowhere else to look. They stared together at the eastern horizon, where a hair-slender shadow still ripped the sky, promising a spill of tumult from some atrocious world beyond the tear. Who knew what dark ocean the stars had to swim in, or what might leak through?
“Her shortest way to the sea,” the emperor said, behind them.
Maybe so, though she didn’t seem to be in any hurry. They stood and watched—and the emperor moved around to stand directly beside Chung, because Mei Feng couldn’t see over any of them, and she grumbled—until none of them claimed to be able to see any distant living speck of her.
SLOWLY, SLOWLY the camp came back to some kind of life around them. Men dragged themselves up out of the mud, out of the ditches where they had groveled in terror, or out of the tents and huts where they had cowered. Those who had run came back, or some of them did.
Those who had been told to run, they came back, and the one who had told them: Jiao came back, with Yu Shan and Siew Ren together. Nothing looked any easier among them.
Presumably the general would be coming back too, with his bodyguard. Chung wished he could think that a good thing.
Somewhere in the camp, a man was shrieking that the dragon was their special protector; she had destroyed the invasion fleet, and was showing herself now to her chosen people.
Chung thought he had never heard anything madder or more stupid.
But that madness at least made them look at one another. Mei Feng said to Jiao, “Has he told you, what was happening in there?”
Jiao glanced at Yu Shan and said, “No.” Of course not, her body said. “He hasn’t told me anything. What?”
“Ping Wen wants to go to war with the rebels. On the mainland. And I think my lord the emperor,” my lord the idiot, she seemed to be saying, “is planning to say yes.”
“Of course I am,” he said, mildly enough, but with that mild implacability of stone that need do nothing, that only has to sit there in the certainty of its decision while lesser forces break themselves against it. She glowered up at him—smaller by any measure, lesser by definition, stormy and unreconciled—and Chung felt a shiver like the first hint of an earthquake, that time when the sea had slipped wrongly out of harbor against its own tide and all the hairs on his arms had stood erect, just before the ground tore itself open all through the city.
six
Oh, and are you too speaking for the goddess now, is that her voice you are using?”
“No,” Tien said with a shudder. “No, it is not. I speak for myself. But I want you to go. I think you should go. I think you have to go, when she tells you to. This is her house, and those are her waters …”
It was a strange reversal, but Old Yen did not want to go to sea.
Not even to escape this hissing confrontation, Tien and the pirate Li Ton snarling at each other right here in the temple courtyard, which was twice profane: once for the fight itself in a holy place, and once again for what they were fighting over, whether or not they should obey the goddess.
It really wasn’t a question, as far as Old Yen understood it. Certainly it should not be a question here. In her house, as Tien said.
And yet, Old Yen stayed silent, and caught himself hopeful that the pirate would win the fight. He had served the goddess all his life, she was his second nature, the spirit that underlay his thoughts as much as she underlay the waters that he sailed; and yet he was afraid of her now, shudderingly reluctant, wanting not to be here.
And not to go to sea.
HIS GODDESS had always been private with him. Never secret—all the world knew him to be her devotee—but never ostentatious: he could talk as much as he liked about how she helped him find his way in fog or lifted him over a mud bank, and all that other people ever saw was good seamanship and local knowledge, never her hand at all.
He was accustomed to that and liked it, rather. Not for the praise it brought him, which he would shrug off discontentedly when it was offered, a coat that fitted ill; but for the sense of intimacy it left him with. What would she care, if no one recognized her touch? He knew it when it came.
Now she was speaking to him directly, and to others too. She borrowed the mouths of muted children but put her own voice within them, and it was nothing, nothing that he recognized. Or wanted to know, or to listen to.
He had excuses, one prime excuse, the dragon: she had allowed him to sail from the Forge to the mainland, but there was no reason to suppose she would allow him to sail back. There was every reason—wreckage on the water, bodies coming bloated to the shore—to imagine that she would not.
In truth, though, he was just a man who had heard at last the true voice of his goddess, and was appalled. And afraid. And wanted to be nowhere near her.
IT WOULD, of course, never be his choice whether he sailed or not.
He was beginning to think that it wouldn’t be Li Ton’s either.
The pirate was still trying to deny that.
“She didn’t tell me to go,” he said, blustering. “She said to tell the fisherman what he is to say to the dragon. Well, I have done that. When he is free to sail as he chooses, no doubt he will do as she says. At this time, he sails for me, where I choose. I see no profit in going back to the Forge, and no purpose in it. We will not go.”
“You’re afraid.”
Of course he was afraid, they were all afraid; of course he could not confess it. “The command is mine, you little fool; that is what matters here. Do you still not understand that? Have I not shown you …?”
He had not changed his clothes; he still wore the spatters of her uncle’s blood. Deliberately, Old Yen thought.
Her head came up, pride in sorrow; she would not be cowed. Not in here, in sight of the goddess, where she was oddly certain of her ground and Old Yen was oddly so very much not.
“That wasn’t command,” she said bluntly, truthfully. “That was desperation. You needed my, my, my uncle,” my uncle’s head, but apparently she couldn’t quite say that, “to save yourself. Perhaps you needed me too; you promised me to them. If I was under your command before, if I was,” meaning that she had never thought so, “I am not now. Perhaps I will stay, and do what I can with my uncle’s medicines, with his teaching and his books; if I do, that will be my choice. I still have a choice. You don’t. You and he,” a gesture of her chin toward Old Yen, “you’re under another command. She spoke to you—and what, you want to just ignore her?”
“I’ve seen fortune-tellers and their tricks before,” the pirate said unconvincingly, unconvinced.
“Do you think she’ll let you sail anywhere else? On her strait, with her message undelivered?”
“There is a world beyond the strait, girl.”
“I know that. But can you reach it?”
