Jade Man's Skin

by Daniel Fox

  Jiao seized Chung’s arm and hauled him into the cabin. Shen followed by default, because Chung had not let go of his sleeve. Yu Shan came after, and closed the door behind them.

  That privacy was a kindness, perhaps, as Jiao unleashed her lashing tongue at Chung. “You asked us—us!—what we were doing here?” When they were both hung with blades, when Yu Shan was hung with that extraordinary shirt, when the answer was obvious. “You, though, what are you doing here? Little running-man? Not too much room to run, is there, up on deck? And no one will be sending messages to Tunghai Wang, at least not the sort that anyone needs to carry …”

  It was true, all true, and it had all been running through his head already, even down to the same acid loading. He had no defense to offer, but didn’t need one; Shen reached around him from behind and folded his arms tight about Chung’s chest, and that was defense enough.

  Except, “I came,” he said, “Shen didn’t bring me.” Just in case it should look that way, that he’d been pulled aboard like a mascot, without a say in his own folly. It was important, apparently, to assert his own folly. Unless he only wanted to excuse Shen’s.

  “Oh, and the difference would be what? Exactly?”

  She knew the difference, exactly; she was only tormenting him because she could. It didn’t matter anyway, because he was here now and so were they and no one was going back. Just then the boat rocked beneath them, and Jiao sat down neatly on the cot as it rose up to meet her; and reached out an arm to pull Yu Shan down beside her as it fell away again, and the gesture would have looked entirely normal and natural two months ago, but now all it did was raise another question in Chung’s head, where’s Siew Ren?

  Which was impossible of asking, but would have lurked in his head regardless if Shen hadn’t lashed back at her, “At least we weren’t hiding, out of the emperor’s sight …”

  Jiao sighed. “No, you weren’t, were you? But then you didn’t have anything to hide, except your own selves,” which he utterly overlooked, of course, which she managed somehow not to say and so of course didn’t need to.

  For once, Chung was quicker than Shen. “That shirt, Yu Shan. Is it really jade?”

  Yu Shan nodded, as if words were too much for him altogether. Perhaps they were. Chung wasn’t wearing the thing, hadn’t so much as touched it yet, and still felt overwhelmed just to be in the same space as such a treasure. Such a forbidden, impossible treasure …

  He had seen Yu Shan’s jade necklace, often and often; he’d touched that, by permission. He had seen the emperor’s rings. He’d seen the Jade Throne itself, and once the emperor upon it. He’d never been so close to so much, so intimate with the stone; and Yu Shan, Yu Shan was wearing it …

  It was dim, almost dark in the cabin there. He wanted to go closer, to drop down onto his knees and peer with his nose just a finger’s-width from the shirt. Lacking consent—lacking any freedom of movement, any movement at all, with Shen’s arms still locked around him—all he could do was ask questions. “I don’t understand. How can it be yours, Yu Shan?”

  “It isn’t,” though it had to be Jiao who told him so. “It’s meant for the emperor, of course. This is just—oh, call it a trial. We need to be sure that it does what it’s supposed to, and that a man can wear it all night and still run around in the morning.”

  “But, but why would the emperor want to wear a shirt of jade?” He was the Man of Jade, but that didn’t mean he had to dress up in stone …

  “Oh, he doesn’t. The thought hasn’t crossed his mind. It’s Mei Feng that wants this.”

  “I still don’t see … Ouch!”

  THAT WAS Shen, rapping his skull with hard knuckles. Then rubbing it better, a little more vigorously than he might. “Chung. Think. Which is harder, your skull or a stone shirt?”

  He tried to break Shen’s nose, by slamming his hard head backward; but Shen was ready for it and his head met only those knuckles again, patiently painfully rapping. So then he did think; and, “Oh. Yes.” Jade would turn a blade, and the emperor had been stabbed once already. It would surely stop an arrow, maybe stop a club with no more than bruising for the man who wore it, and he wasn’t sure that the emperor could bruise. “But can you run in it? Really?”

  “Yu Shan can. Really. And fight in it, and climb trees. And swim if he has to, though he says it drags him down. The only thing he can’t do is talk, but at least that means he can’t argue.”

  “I can talk,” Yu Shan said, as though to assert that he could argue too, only that he chose not to. His voice was odd, as though thinned by distance: the other side of a mountain, say, or swallowed at the bottom of a mine.

  “How does it, you know, how does it feel?”

  Yu Shan only shook his head. It was Jiao who laughed.

  “You can’t ask him that, Chung. You can’t ask him anything. Afterward, he’ll tell you that it hurts, except that it doesn’t hurt at all. Like being wrapped in fire that’s cruel but not actually hot, he might say, or wearing an ice-shirt that isn’t really cold, although it is. His blood is so thick with jade, I think it clogs his thinking. I don’t know, maybe the shirt is the real brain. That much jade all linked together, it’s got to be smarter than he is. The shirt talks to the stone-dust in his blood, and the dust talks to him, and he just has to listen …”

  Yu Shan smiled peaceably. Jiao rolled her eyes, and tucked her arm through his; and that must be a consequence of his being lost in jade, because he would have jittered away from her and looked around for Siew Ren else. At which point Jiao would have either hit him, or more likely just stormed away and brooded behind the dark shadows of her eyes.

  Perhaps it was Siew Ren they had been hiding from, as much as the emperor? If she knew about the shirt, she would surely have been here alongside them. How Jiao had sneaked him away, Chung couldn’t guess and didn’t mean to ask. Really, he wanted to ask more about the shirt, but she was no more help than Yu Shan …

  “Never mind, sweet,” Shen murmured in his ear. “It’s only stone,” and this is flesh, the pressure of his body against Chung’s back, entirely discounting their own scant shirts on this hot damp night. “Let’s just sit in the corner here, and talk again about what happens when we land. How you stay in the boat here, yes? And guard Old Yen, and the boy …?”

  That was Shen’s plan, it had never been Chung’s. Chung had pleaded his case for coming—rather fluently, he thought—by virtue of his childhood at the docks; he knew boats, he knew how to sail, he would be a useful hand on the return voyage. In truth, though, he only meant to stick to Shen. If the dragon swallowed one of them, she would have to swallow both; that was how close he meant to stick.

  Now that the dragon had swallowed no one—well. It meant a night aboard this crowded boat and then a morning of steel and flame, blood and death no doubt, fear and sweat and screaming.

  It would be hard to keep both eyes on Shen, but Chung meant to try. And he held the hope that through all the blood and the screaming—which would be Shen’s task, largely, because that man knew nothing whatsoever about boats—Shen would at least occasionally think to keep at least one eye on him.

  THE CABIN filled up as time crept past, as slowly as the boat seemed to be creeping across the strait. Men were coming in damp, though there was no sound of rain; indeed there was no sound of anything on deck except an occasional muffled voice, Old Yen calling to his boy or to another boat. The men still out there were as quiet as those who came in, who seemed not to want to talk at all.

  After a while, Chung pushed to his feet and tugged Shen up after. As wordless as anyone, even in his own head; not knowing what he wanted, only that it was not this. Shen followed dutifully, out onto the deck—

  —AND INTO a thick fog, word-swallowing, world-swallowing. It explained the silence entirely, in the men as well as on the sea; Chung shivered, and groped blindly behind him.

  The physical warmth of Shen’s body, the solidity of bone and muscle, the resilience of skin; he should have felt comfo
rted, that those at least had not dissolved into chill vapor. Shen still had his voice, even, for now. Ignorant northerner. But all these men were ignorant northerners, all bar a handful; and all bar Shen had been silenced already. And this close to his ear, Shen’s voice really should not sound so flat and fading as he said, “What, then? Will your old fisherman lose his way in the fog? Will he miss the mainland altogether, or are there rocks …?”

  Of course there were rocks, but Chung shook his head, wondering if Shen could even see him do it, as the fog flung itself between them; and groped for his own voice now, and found something scratchy and thin, and used that to say, “The dragon’s breath …”

  “What?”

  Here was a breath of wind to stir the blanket, to show them Old Yen lighting a lamp at the stern; here was a place to sit unexpectedly, on coils of rope laid ready. “It’s what we call the fog. We’ve always said it, that the fog is her breath rising, where she could not rise herself.”

  “What does it mean?”

  The words, or the fog? Chung was too fogged to ask. Right now it only meant that he was frightened, and wanted to sit here holding on to Shen until the stars came back.

  NO STARS, but Old Yen’s droning prayer was a comfort in itself, like a rope to cling to. They faced aft, to where the old man worked his oar, sooner than stare into the blank nothing ahead; it was better to see the blurred glow of the lamp, the occasional glimpse of another light beyond.

  On this boat, only Pao moved, and that not much. The wind had died as the fog had risen, so the boy had little enough to do: tighten a rope here or there, let drop another sail on the foremast more in hope than expectation of another breath to catch.

  Still, they made headway. Chung could tell, by the way knots and twists of fog flowed backward in the lamplight. Tide and current must be carrying them onward. They had time enough, plenty of time to cross the strait before first light. They’d only set off so early because they’d wanted to dare the dragon in daylight. Chung wasn’t quite sure why: either the goddess would protect the fleet or else the dragon would destroy it, and either of those could happen just as well in the dead of night. But people seemingly preferred to see their doom approach. And to see her baffled, of course, to see her splash out of sight and not rise again.

  But now she was down there, plotting, and it was only her breath that rose; and if the northern men didn’t know it, those from Taishu would be sure to explain it to them.

  It was a threat, perhaps, or just a reminder. It was aimed at them, perhaps; perhaps at the goddess.

  It was not, in the end, something to be feared. The dragon was defeated; the goddess would not let her touch them. What did it matter, if she wreathed the sea in a sulky fog? The chill of it might bite bone-deep; the dreary weight of it might lie heavy on them all, dulling their minds into wordlessness. If this was the worst she could do, this was their victory. They had the best man imaginable at the tiller, a man who knew these waters by their smell and feel, and was a favorite of the goddess besides; he would see them to land.

  So said the men, at least, when they managed to speak at all. Chung said nothing more, but only leaned into Shen and waited for this to pass, the fog and the night and all. None of it, he thought, portended any good.

  Also, he watched the cabin door.

  TIME AND distance: both crept by. Or seemed to. Perhaps the dragon swallowed them. Perhaps the dragon had swallowed everything, and the goddess hadn’t saved them after all. She might be like this inside, all fog, endless, inescapable …

  The cabin emptied suddenly, a stream of men coming out, laughing. Laughing. Those same men who had sidled in there, damp and shivering, with all the warmth and courage sucked out of them. Jiao had done something, said something, set them on fire. Not Yu Shan: people liked to be with him, Chung had seen that again and again and felt it too—this very night, when he first saw them, he had made that dash across the deck, and not for Jiao’s black eyes and sour smile—but Yu Shan was always quiet. Even without the weight of jade on his shoulders. It was Jiao who was the talker.

  She must have recovered her voice in the crush of the cabin there, and deliberately stoked up passion in men who had been utterly cold and numb. Even now she called out over their heads, a suggestion so lewd and unlikely that it made Chung gape. Every now and then, this company he kept would just casually and incidentally make him feel awkward and provincial, the little islander he was; he could still be shocked just by the idea of Jiao—a mercenary, a pirate, a woman—even before she opened her mouth. When she did, he could still be appalled.

  Hard-traveled Shen chuckled at his side. Someone in the bows roared back a counter-offer, and she invited him to come down and demonstrate. Loosening her tao in its scabbard as she did so, with a loud and deliberate scrape of steel.

  Someone else started to sing unexpectedly, what must be a northern marching song, that must have helped to carry them all these thousands of miles from the far fabled Hidden City. Now they had turned, they weren’t running anymore; Chung shivered as Shen joined in, as they all did, as the men’s voices rolled out across the deck and down into the fog and the dark.

  Other voices came back to them from other boats. Ashore they might have been more raucous, but they could never have been more needy or more welcome. In the still and the chill of the fog, boat sang to boat, a small army sang together. Not all their songs were about women, and not all of them were coarse, which surprised Chung almost as much as Jiao’s first filthy outburst; and among them at last they sang up a wind that blew the fog to rags even as it collected in their sails, as it helped the tide to carry them across the strait toward Santung.

  ALMOST, NOW, he didn’t want the sun to rise.

  Sound reaches over water and Old Yen said the coast was close, so they had stopped the singing; a lingering collective warmth still overhung the boat, though, and reached out to embrace the clustered fleet. The warmth of packed bodies was a different thing, immediate and welcome, taken from strangers and given back. The warmth of Shen’s body was different again and more than welcome, needful and desired and right there; and Shen’s voice in his ear, just that low occasional murmur was another nature of warmth, something that happened deep inside and radiated outward.

  Chung was happy, in this shifting state between one thing and another: between night and day, between Taishu and the mainland, between one fear and another.

  Sunrise meant arrival, and he would rather not arrive. Traveling was better, safer, warm.

  But light was sneaking up already, staining the star-black night like spilled ricewater soaking into cloth, as insidious as fog and bringing the same kind of chill with it. This was why they’d come, of course, it wasn’t really to test the goddess against the dragon, or the child as a good-luck charm. It was for this exactly, the light and the land rising together, the bar of black below the taint, the threat of coming sun.

  It was for this, the grunt from Old Yen and the clattering rise of bamboo-stiffened sails, the sudden kick of the deck beneath them as they stopped idling and turned purposefully to land.

  It was for that, ahead: the first faint distant sparks against the black, fires being lit on cold beaches, where Tunghai Wang’s abiding army was already building and equipping a second invasion fleet.

  For this, then: where the ramshackle flotilla split into war parties and swept in with tide and wind and the first touch of sun, to strike at a dozen separate beaches at once. To catch the boatbuilders off their guard and unguarded, because Tunghai Wang was the hunter here, the man who chased. The emperor was the boy who fled, who had never yet dared to stand; who could guess that he might strike now? Who would ever imagine that he could, when a dragon patrolled the strait …?

  CHUNG WATCHED the other boats move away in lines and little groups together, shadows drawn on shadow. The men around him shifted and muttered, rubbed bare arms against the sudden chill that promised action at last, touched blade-hilts, touched one another.

  He felt Shen�
��s hand slip away from him, some at least of Shen’s attention going with it. He wanted to protest, and bit down hard on the impulse. Shen was a warrior here, one among his brothers, dragging a long chain of hard miles and bitter memories behind them. Chung was the extra hand, the hanger-on, the danger: inexperienced, unbonded. Not driven by the same cold fire, the absolute need to strike back.

  Shen was the better fighter, of course, that was understood: tougher and more vicious, trained both in the yard and in the field, on the road. Shen had killed people. Still, he was not invulnerable. Not wearing a jade shirt. Sometimes even the greatest fighter needed someone else to watch his back. Which was why Chung was here, why the unfamiliar weight of a tao was pulling at one hip, awkwardly unbalanced against the knife on the other side.

  If he had a need to use them, he would find a way. If he could get by without, he would do that willingly; he had no wish to be a bloody-handed warrior. That was important to Shen, whom he loved, but it bewildered him. All he wanted of today was a swift engagement and a safe return. With as many of these men as possible, all of them if possible but one in particular. One was not negotiable.

  THE BOAT tossed awkwardly as it drove into the shallows, as the beach shelved beneath the hull. There was a dragging hiss when they struck sand, wind and water and momentum still carrying them forward against the land’s resistance.

  If there were shouts from the beach, cries of astonishment, challenges, alarms, Chung couldn’t hear them for all the shouting aboard. Men lost their footing as the boat stuck at last, and shouted; men leaped over the side and found the sea farther or deeper or colder than they had thought, and shouted; men shouted simply for the sake of it, to tell the enemy and the world and the attendant gods that they had arrived, they were here, they had braved the dragon and the ocean and come through.

  When they had shouted, when they had glanced over the side and seen their brothers struggling in dark waters, they mostly made their sensible way to the bows and jumped from there.