by Daniel Fox
“Because—oof!—I am not a fool. This, now, this is uncomfortable, uncivilized, no way for a man to live. Oof! Anywhere near those two just now, with their tempers so foul at each other? That would be—oof!—a life not worth living. Yu Shan, is this hurting you? At all?”
“No.”
“Let me try.” That came from two sides at once, two different voices chiming with one thought at one moment: both female, both full of purpose. Yu Shan shivered, although the day was warm.
He was not as tall as the emperor, but tall enough; a coat measured to the emperor’s size was not ridiculous on him. And he was as strong, perhaps stronger. Certainly he made a good test subject, to stand still in the emperor’s armor and be hit.
Certainly they could not ask the emperor to do it, and no one else could stand up under the weight of a stone coat against the weight of Guangli’s staff, swung with all the effort of his shoulders.
At least, no one else was fool enough to try.
Yu Shan had volunteered for this, in a sense. He had not volunteered to have his clan-cousin Siew Ren take over swinging the staff. She might be a girl half Guangli’s age and half his size, but she had stone in her bones and a good deal of purpose in her arms; and on the other side from her stood Jiao. Who had no staff, and was drawing out her tao instead. At that first grate of steel, everything stopped. It was Guangli who said, “No! Wait, you can’t …!”
“We need to find out if your armor works, don’t we?” Jiao said, the very voice of reason. “The emperor’s enemies won’t be hitting him with sticks. Do you trust this coat of yours, or don’t you?”
“Yes, of course,” he said, with doubt etched deep into his voice. “Those scales will turn any blade. They’ll blunt it, if you’re fool enough to keep hacking. They might break it, if he can just keep on his feet. But—Jiao, it’s Yu Shan, and—well, I could be wrong, I could have made it badly …”
“We’ll find out, then, won’t we? Better to find out on him now than on the emperor when it matters.”
And she swung her blade in the sunlight, and Yu Shan—somehow!—managed to stand still. Jiao favored a long, heavy-bladed tao; he caught the full weight of it across his ribs, as she swung from the shoulders with both arms.
Or maybe not, despite her bravado. Perhaps she didn’t put all her strength into it. Her arms were long and tough and practiced, particularly at hacking with a blade; he ought surely to feel more than a light impact, spread across his chest? None of them had expected the blade to cut through the armor—he thought, he hoped!—but the impact surely should have left a bruise.
He really didn’t think she was trying.
The armor was an eelskin shirt for toughness and suppleness together, sewn with hundreds, maybe thousands of small overlapping jade scales. It hung to his knees, which would be mid-thigh on the emperor. He was … aware of the weight of it, if quite untroubled; just as he was aware of the tingle, the touch of jade, but untroubled by that too. Separated from him by the soft oily eelskin, it barely added to what he had already: the immediacy of jade against his skin, the amulet of beads he wore around his neck; the intimacy of the shard of jade in his mouth, under his skin where his blood could draw on it directly.
Jiao frowned and shook her arms loosely, as if the impact had jarred them to the shoulders. As if she’d put more effort into that blow than he’d felt or realized.
He might have said something, but he couldn’t think how to do it without sounding as though he mocked her, which was the last thing he meant or needed.
Besides, there was a blur in his peripheral vision, and that was Siew Ren taking a turn, swinging that heavy staff once about her head for speed and effect—she was good with a staff, she could take pigeons in the air as they came in to roost; he knew, he’d seen her do it—and then bringing it slamming down toward his shoulders.
And bizarrely misjudging her aim, getting it entirely wrong, so that the blow caught him full-force on the back of the head.
There was an eelskin hood that Mei Feng had procured, but that was still in Guangli’s hut waiting to be sewn with scales once this test was over, in case she could actually persuade the emperor to wear it.
Yu Shan’s head was bare and the staff was hard and Siew Ren had swung it with all the uncoiled tension of her slender body, all the power of mountain-trained jade-enhanced clan muscles.
It did actually jar him from his stance, where he had stood foursquare and untroubled beneath Guangli’s buffets.
It did also actually hurt, quite brutally. Dizzy with the pain of it, he couldn’t actually see Siew Ren’s expression. He did hear her voice say “Oops” in a tone of deep satisfaction, the moment after she struck, in that brief stillness before the pain erupted; but then he heard a softer sound that might have been distressful, just under Jiao’s shout of protest. And when he felt an arm around his chest to hold him up and fingers gently exploratory in his hair, he knew without need of eyes that it was Jiao’s arm that held him but Siew Ren’s fingers that probed for a wound.
And, apparently, couldn’t find one.
“Don’t snarl at me, it hasn’t even cut the scalp, see?”
“You still might have broken his head beneath.”
“Not his. He always was hard-headed,” though she said it with less confidence than the words desired, as if she was astonished not to find him bloody and skull-crushed, knowing just how hard she’d struck, how much harder than she’d really meant to do it.
It was almost pleasant for once to be bickered over, rather than sniped at; but he shrugged them both off—gently, gently!—and tested his own ability to stand.
And could do it, though his head still pounded; could blink away the blindness, though pain still squatted like a venomous toad behind his eyes.
Could look around and smile at them both, and at Guangli too. And shake his head, square his shoulders, say, “Again, then, hit me again. On the armor would be better, probably. That’s what we really want to test.”
“Yu Shan,” Guangli protested, “are you sure?”
Yu Shan smiled. And grimaced at the pain of that little movement, but still, he was sure. “A crack on the head doesn’t change anything. We still need to know that this is right, before we offer it to the emperor.”
He took his stance again, and nodded to Jiao. Gently. And said, “Properly, mind. There’s no point doing this if you’re not trying to kill me.”
“Sweet,” she said, “I’ve been wanting to kill you for weeks. Hold still.”
“Just, not the neck, yes? No higher than the shoulders …”
She grunted, which might have been a promise; and went for a belly cut, slamming in hard—and again the blade bounced off jarringly, and again he felt little more than pressure against his gut.
“That’ll do, won’t it?” Guangli said pleadingly. “That’s plenty, to be sure …”
“Not yet,” Siew Ren said behind him. “I haven’t had my proper turn, and Jiao’s barely started. You got to hit him far more than we have, old man. Stand back now …”
This time she aimed the staff at his ribs, while he lifted his arms judiciously out of the way. The staff thudded into the scales that layered his side, hard enough to break whatever bones might dare to stand against it. It didn’t even knock the breath out of him. He could have snatched this end and twisted it out of her grip while she was still wondering why he wasn’t lying broken on the floor.
There was the sound of stray tinkling, as a few scattered scales were knocked loose and fell to the ground. They’d need to check the stitching, he supposed, if a few blows could shake them off that way …
And then Jiao struck again, while he was distracted. Which of course made no difference to the armor, its attention was absolute; and then Siew Ren, and then Jiao, and he just stood with his hands tucked behind his head and let the women work out all their troubles on his body, because really he wasn’t feeling a thing, although the shirt was suffering, shedding more and more of those carefully-sewn-on scales, and—
AND THERE was a slashed hole in the emperor’s gift, and Yu Shan was bleeding through it, and that wasn’t good. Not by any measure.
HE WAS actually bleeding rather a lot, and it was starting to hurt now. Rather a lot.
SIEW REN made a little mewing sound, and let the staff drop. Jiao was methodically wiping blood from her blade, from instinct or good training or an urgent need to be doing something; which earned her a glare and a hissing accusation, which she only shrugged at. “I’ve seen this before, you haven’t. When the emperor was skewered by one of those assassins we fought here, his wound was worse than this. Far worse. And it just healed up while we watched.”
“Yu Shan is not the emperor!”
“No, but he’s got just as much jade in his blood. If not more. He’ll be fine.”
She wasn’t half as confident as she sounded. Her eyes spoke against her, watching him with a hollow anxiety.
Himself, he didn’t feel fine at all. His tongue groped for the little nodule of flesh in his mouth that masked the chip of jade, as if touching it, pressing against it would initiate the magic. He was too dizzy, though, to remember what he really believed. He thought perhaps he ought to sit down.
He did sit down, right there, in a pool of warmly sticky—oh. That would be his blood, then. He didn’t like that, but wasn’t sure he had the strength to stand again.
Besides, here was Siew Ren, easing him back, making a pillow of her lap for him to rest on. He did like that. It was the first tender sign he’d had since she arrived, first memory of that easy closeness they used to share.
Jiao was bent over his middle, working the armored shirt up under his armpits to see how hurt he was.
He couldn’t see it himself, not with Siew Ren cupping her hand beneath his chin to prevent his looking. All he could do was look at her, then, measure his damage by the depths of her anxiety. And then by the depths of Jiao’s relief as she said, “See? The bleeding’s stopped already.”
“It can’t have done. That terrible great slash? It goes right down into his—oh …”
“Not anymore, it doesn’t. That’s what I mean, we can sit here and watch it all knit itself together. He’ll be seamed like jade, a little, when it’s done, but he won’t even have a proper scar. These boys’ bodies don’t work like normal flesh, there’s too much stone in them. Stone doesn’t flow like blood does, it doesn’t cut like meat. Yu Shan? Does it even hurt?”
“Not … so much. Not anymore. It did, at first.”
“Yes, and then your body remembered not to do that.” She slapped his bare flank—the other side, not where she had cut him open—and said, “Do you want to get up and try again?”
Yu Shan opened his mouth to say no, no thank you, and was forestalled:
“No, he does not! We’ve seen enough, we’ve proved the shirt doesn’t work. We’d proved it sooner, when all the scales fell off; you didn’t have to keep hacking at him …”
“Child, you were the one who knocked the scales off, and I notice you didn’t stop hitting him after. You’d have stove all his ribs in before I ever had the chance to cut him, if his bones weren’t made of rock.”
Just briefly, he’d imagined that their mutual concern for him might have knitted them together, at least a little, in concert with his flesh. No such joy; of course they would blame each other, if they could. His body was what they fought over, after all.
He wished above all that he could bring them to peace. There seemed to be nothing in his body that could do that, though, and his mind was an empty rattle.
Guangli’s voice cut across the two of theirs, bleakly authoritative. “Oh, be quiet. There is no point in arguing fault. The boy is hurt, and getting better,” and Yu Shan at least could hear his fascination in that, his obsession with all things jade, even under the disappointment of failure. “This is a catastrophe in other ways, in every way. We have spent—I don’t know, how many days?—in shaping these scales and sewing them all in place; and it was all wasted. In a real battle, the emperor might as well have been naked. Our work is lost, and we have nothing to show Mei Feng.”
“Oh, not all wasted, surely?” That was Siew Ren, looking for hope urgently because she couldn’t bear to start again. “Look, none of the actual scales broke, you and Yu Shan carved them so well; it was only the threads that snapped, and then the blade cut the eelskin. We just need to find something stronger to sew the scales on with, and maybe a tougher lining, maybe oxhide, or …”
“Oxhide would never be supple enough, and it would cut just the same unless you boiled it, in which case it would not be supple at all and we could sew nothing to it. Besides, what stronger thread do you know, than this waxed silk we have been using? That’s the first point of failure. We can go nowhere if we can’t attach the scales; and there is nowhere farther to go in that direction.”
“Wire is stronger than thread,” Jiao suggested.
“Only in pulling. Wire will snap under blows. Any wire flexible enough to sew like thread will snap like thread, but sooner.”
“Wait, then … How clever are you, Guangli?”
Yu Shan couldn’t see his face—indeed, all he could see was Siew Ren’s face, where she was still holding his head—but he knew Guangli’s expression sight unseen: the eyes half closed, the cheeks puffed out a little, the lips pursed in a silence that spoke loud enough to carry. Clever enough, woman. Cleverer than you.
“In your hands, I mean,” Jiao persisted, “in your craft?”
“As clever as any in Taishu,” he said, meaning cleverer than any you could find anywhere. “Why are you asking me these things?”
“I have this bracelet,” she said, accompanied by the scratchy sounds of her unclasping it. Yu Shan knew it well. It was more functional than decorative, he thought, like almost everything she carried: strips of thin steel that linked together to make a guard for her left arm, the arm that didn’t hold a blade. It reached from the wrist halfway to the elbow, and had dents enough to suggest that it had been useful; her skin would be more scarred without it. Perhaps her arm would have broken, under one or two of those blows. With a broken arm, perhaps she might not have survived that encounter, or what followed. Yu Shan held that bracelet in great fondness in his heart. Just now, though, he didn’t entirely understand its relevance.
No more did Guangli. “I see,” he said, over soft metallic rustlings as he must be turning it in his hands. Siew Ren’s fingers pressed lightly on the softness beneath Yu Shan’s chin: not dancing as they used to, only applying pressure. “And?”
“And they are not wired together at all, except the two ends where they clasp. One link grips the next thanks to its shape, that’s all; and they are supple in wear, and rigid under blows, and do not come apart. And I was thinking, a clever man could cut scales of jade to do the same, to cling to each other without need of thread or wire or an undershirt …”
“Metal can be molded, hammered, shaped …”
“I said, he would need to be clever.”
“You can let the flattery lie, Jiao. I have my pride, but I am not entirely foolish.” Even so he was pleased and interested, engaged, turning and turning that bracelet.
Yu Shan thought about wearing a shirt of jade, nothing between it and his skin, all over; he shivered, with a kind of appalled envy.
Siew Ren felt that and said, “What is it? Are you hurting, bleeding again …?”
“No, nothing. Only thinking. Let me sit up now.”
“For what? You will be dizzy, all that blood you’ve lost …”
And he was still lying in it, which would be another reason to move, but he said, “Guangli and I have work to do, if we have to carve that many scales again, to a
different pattern.”
Different patterns for different places on the shirt, he guessed. Scales that would link together and cling, not come apart. Jade would not break under blows, that much at least was certain. Hard to mine and hard to carve, it would resist mortal weapons as strongly as dragonhide. Maybe more so: dragons had been slain, from time to time, by mortal heroes or conspiracy.
So had emperors, of course, but not when they were clad in jade. If Guangli could devise the proper patterns, Mei Feng might be pleased with them yet.
six
Mei Feng, ever since we came to this rat-infested island, you have been telling me that there is not and can never be food enough to feed us and all those we brought with us. Even if we eat the damned rats. This is a solution, this is the only solution, and there will never be a better time than now. Don’t you see …?”
Sometimes, Chung did very devoutly wish that he had never gotten himself mixed up in the affairs of royalty. He should have been a fisherman, or a dock worker like his father. Then he could have stayed safe, or as safe as war and weather would allow. At any rate he wouldn’t need to be here, nervously on his knees, staring down at his fingers while the powers of the palace raged around him.
As far as he could tell, he didn’t actually need to be here anyway. But Mei Feng had summoned him and not sent him away, and now the emperor was here and he didn’t dare move, not a muscle. Most especially he didn’t dare lift his head, because either one of them might catch his eye and who knew what that might lead to? A swift execution for impertinence would be a kindness. Far worse and much more likely, he could find himself called into the argument, on one side or the other. That would be … unimaginable, except that he could imagine it all too clearly. Unimaginably awful. Irrecoverable.
Not his soul, but his service belonged entirely to Mei Feng, so should he side with her? And disagree with the emperor? Face to face, tell his majesty he was wrong?
It was unthinkable. But so was the opposite, to stand against small fierce Mei Feng who commanded his body and his loyalty, if not quite his soul. Even if he thought the emperor was right.
