Jade Man's Skin

by Daniel Fox

  Well, yes. Shen would do that, no doubt. Not Chung.

  Chung scowled, and nodded, and watched his emperor dive neatly into the river with his friend a moment behind.

  And then turned to face a pack of rebels, who could kill him in a moment if they saw a reason to; and lifted his chin, lifted his voice, said, “Your weapons. Take them off, put them down. Make a heap of them, over here,” an open space next to the stack of pots.

  Nobody moved, so he moved himself: went to that space and dropped his knife deliberately in front of them all. “I’m not your captor, didn’t you hear the emperor? I’m here to speak for you. They’re more likely to listen to me if you’re not armed.”

  “And what if they’re ours? If they find us surrendered to one unarmed man?”

  “Listen,” Chung said: and yes, there were sounds coming through the fire. Sounds of combat, of one squad as it might be fighting to defend a bridgehead against an army. “If your men fight back there, they’re going to die; that’s all the imperial guard trying to come over the bridge at once, to find their emperor.”

  They still took a little time for thought, for muttering among themselves, but not much now. One by one, they came and dropped blades, belts, spare knives at his feet.

  One said, “Was that really the emperor?”

  Chung nodded.

  “And the other one, what … who was he?”

  “A man of jade,” Chung said, “out of the mountains. Half the imperial guard comes from the mines, as he did.” Which was true and deceptive, both at once.

  “The emperor is the Man of Jade.”

  “Yes. But the miners have a … special relationship with the stone, just as he does.” They’re not all jade-eaters, but I won’t tell you that. “They all wear a piece of jade next to their skin, he gives them that license,” because they get sick without it, but I won’t tell you that either.

  “Only the emperor can wear jade!”

  “Yes. But this emperor allows his chosen people to wear his sign.”

  “And you?”

  “Oh, no,” he said, “not me, I’m not from the valleys. Just a wharf brat who grew into a runner, me. I was a kitchen servant before—”

  —before I was a friend of emperors he might have gone on to say, but he should probably not have said any of that, and he didn’t get the chance to finish.

  He had too many prisoners under his guard, who had just seen their friends hurt and killed among them. He was as unarmed and as trapped as they were, and he was alone; small surprise if one of them seized his words as a confession of weakness. Perhaps the man thought it was an insult, that the emperor left someone so weak to watch him and all his colleagues.

  Whatever he thought, he struck out suddenly, with no warning, his great fist flying at Chung’s head.

  EXCEPT THAT Chung’s head wasn’t quite there anymore, because actually there had been a warning and Chung wasn’t quite as relaxed as he might have been pretending, and Shen’s training did have some purpose after all.

  A little shift in the man’s eyes, a shift in his feet: Chung knew that punch was coming, and where it would land. Where it was meant to land.

  Reaction was instinctive. Trained, Shen would say. By the time the man had comprehensively missed his mark, Chung was already swaying upright again. His hands were already reaching to grip the man’s thrusting arm, to pull him even more off-balance; all his body was twisting beneath that arm, lending a more organized strength to its effort, doing nothing but help here …

  HELPING TO the effect that the man flew high into the air over Chung’s shoulder, came crashing down helplessly onto bare rock, might well have slid off into the greedy river if Chung hadn’t still kept a cruel locking grip on that arm.

  Chung didn’t even look down at him. He looked at the man’s cohorts and said again, “Just a kitchen servant, until the emperor’s favorite picked me for her messenger. And she only did that to save me from a fight that I was losing.”

  Every man there could see this message, and understand it. Slowly, one by one, they stepped back, they let the tension ebb out of their bodies.

  Chung relaxed his grip, released the man at his feet, reached down to help him stand.

  Then, “I don’t know how safe all these pots are,” he said, “how hot that fire’s going to make them—but I think they’d be safer in the river, don’t you? While we’re waiting?”

  All except one, which he sat on to be sure of it, while the men busied themselves—quite eagerly, he thought, for conscripted labor—hurling the stack of projectiles into the water.

  When one of them turned to him with a gesture, that one too, he shook his head.

  “I want to keep this,” he said, “to experiment with. And if any of you knows how the contents are mixed, what goes into it, whether there’s any sorcery …?”

  three

  Mei Feng went straight to the river, and there was no way across.

  Over there she could see, she could actually see imperial troops, any of whom might have told her just where the emperor was and how to reach him fastest. Any of them. If she could only get there …

  All her life long, there had been ferries plying this river, back and forth all day and all night too; and if all the ferries were full then a boatman would always take a girl across for a smile and a coin, perhaps for the smile alone. Or she could run down to the docks and find a fisherman, any fisherman. Everyone knew her grandfather, and most of them knew her. The river had never been an obstacle. Till now.

  Now there was no way over, below the twin bridges. The ferries were long gone, absorbed into one invasion fleet or the other. Any boatman still on the water when the imperial army’s first outrunners were seen on the heights must simply have fled the easiest way, straight upcurrent, away from war and danger.

  Another day, another time, Mei Feng would simply have swum it. Today, now, she had the fate of the emperor in her hands, in her head, she’d never been so urgent; and today, now was the worst of the tide with black clouds scudding in, the river still flood-high from the dragon’s long typhoon and the wind still stiff in sympathy, even starting to rise again.

  Which meant that salt water driving in was meeting fresh water pushing out, making for cross-currents and whirlpools all across the breadth of the river, and waves tossing white in the wind. It would be death for anyone to swim in that. She was desperate, but not stupid. If she threw herself away, she threw away the emperor besides, and she would not do that. She would not …

  Instead, she set out to run upriver.

  One comfort, small thread though it was: this was the way the army was tending, either side of the river. So this would be the way to find the emperor. Alone, hopefully: alone with his guards about him to keep him safe …

  She could have laughed at herself, if she hadn’t been so busy running. He had plunged into this war, would surely be looking to fight in the front line, whatever his generals and advisers would demand—and she worried that he was not safe?

  But yes, she did worry; and no, he was not safe. If anything could kill him, it would be the blow struck in secret, the coward’s stroke when his back was turned, his armor off and his guard down, his guards outside the door …

  Barefoot and heedless, then, she ran to save her man.

  If she was too late, if the emperor died: well, then perhaps she would just not stop running. She could run and run, far from Santung and Taishu and the sea between; she could run this soft palace skin off her feet entirely, grow new tougher stuff at the same time as she grew new muscles, as she grew a leather hide about her heart.

  WHARVES AND godowns, mud and pools, inlets and bridges and water-gates and men. The men were imperial soldiers, not a sign of a rebel except the dead ones here and there, dragged out of her way along with their hasty barricades. That her way was everyone’s way, that the dragging-aside might not have been directly for her, that didn’t mattter.

  What did matter, some of the men tried to stop her, either becau
se they knew who she was or else because they didn’t.

  At first she snarled at them, and just kept running.

  If they knew her name, mostly a snarl was enough.

  If a man’s hand grabbed, she dodged it; she’d always been quick. And they were mostly hurrying themselves, eyes fixed on a different target, a distant war, grabbing just because she was a girl and there. When they missed her, they let her go.

  Those few who wanted more, who wanted to drag her off the river road and into any one of these abandoned buildings, who wanted to abandon their own duty and their comrades too—those she showed more than her teeth and her determination.

  She took to running with her dagger drawn. A blade made a great discouragement, the way it caught the sun and caught the eye and brought the two together, this is bright and sharp and clean, cleaner than any part of you. Do you really want to see it closer? Closer yet …?

  Only one man she actually cut: because she had to, because he wouldn’t see or hear or understand anything less. He had seized her wrist, the arm that held the knife, and thought that made him safe. He was startled when she pulled free of his grip, startled by sailor-strength in a girl, but stupid too; he grabbed again, this time for his own blade, and never got it out of the sheath. Her knife pierced his forearm, pinned it to the belt across his belly.

  He stood very, very still then, gone a grubby color, slick with sweat. She explained to him, very briefly, what would happen to him if she gave the emperor his name. That did nothing to improve his color. Then she advised him to sit down, just where he was, and to stay there until she was long out of sight. He might use the time to bandage up his arm, she suggested, as best he could with one hand. If he was lucky, one of his comrades might stop and help; but he really shouldn’t think to come after her anytime that she might turn around and see him.

  She waited for his slow, careful nod of agreement. Then she slid her knife out of his arm. Blood followed, but not the spurting gush that would speak of a ripped artery; he’d live, then. Probably.

  She shrugged and turned away, and ran again.

  “MEI FENG!”

  The city was behind her now, and there was the river’s bend ahead; the bridges should lie beyond it, where the river narrowed, where they had been possible. No man had stopped her so far. No man could stop her now, but apparently her own name could.

  Her own name in a woman’s voice, on this road of men and men and more men.

  She twisted around, knowing the voice even before she found the rangy figure striding down from where she and her men had been crouching, resting on an unexpected mound beside the road; before Jiao’s long fingers had closed on the back of her neck and given her a monitory shake.

  “Mei Feng, always—always!—stay with your people. Going off by yourself is stupid, and dangerous to you and to the friends who have to look for you; and even if you don’t run into the trouble you deserve, you still end up isolated among troops who don’t know you, who can’t tell if you’re one of us or one of them or just a civilian, just prey …”

  She knew it, she knew it all, she had seen most of it played out in this last hour, and wasn’t about to give Jiao the satisfaction of saying so. Didn’t have time to apologize, to explain: or wouldn’t take the time she had, which might be all the time the emperor had left. Didn’t have time to argue either, to say that there had barely been any rebels left in the city, or that she’d found the only two who actually mattered, who might have been entirely missed otherwise until it was entirely too late …

  She knocked Jiao’s hand away and said it flatly, “No time! Jiao, I have to get across the river.”

  “Can’t help you there,” Jiao said. Trying perhaps a little too hard to sound tolerant and amused, not to look surprised at how easily she’d been batted off. “The bridge is down. They were flinging fire at us earlier, the whole army was backed up here, but it seems to be moving again.”

  It did. Mei Feng looked at the stream of men hurrying onward, only really seeing it for the first time now that she was standing apart, while only her mind was running on: bridge down, bridge down and of course no boats; there’s a crossing higher up, more running, more time, farther to go …

  “I need …”

  “I know, you said. You need to cross the river. And I said you need to stay with us. So we’d best get started, yes?” She whistled to her men, gestured with a broad sweep of her arm, that way …

  SO MEI Feng found herself running at the heart of a pack, which was probably better. If anyone could get her across the river against the odds, that would be Jiao. And no man now would trouble or delay her; and this steady military jog she could keep up all day; and it might seem slow but it would eat up the distance, she did understand that …

  And even so it was intolerable to be trapped here, the wrong side of the water, when she could look across and see so easily where she wanted to be. She could almost, almost shout across, give them a message for the emperor, a warning; but the river was just that little too broad, that little too noisy. Even if anyone would listen to the screechings of some crop-headed ragamuffin in irreverent trousers.

  THERE WERE the two bridges, one of them broken, all but gone; there on the mid-island, on their stepping-stone were the residues of a fire, smoke and ash and a huddle of men crouching on the bare rock.

  Here on the one bank, there on the other were great scorch-marks, where fire had run all across the road from the river to the paddy, although there was nothing obvious to burn. Nothing but people, at least. There were bodies by the roadside, blackened and twisted like iron in flame, ill-wrought …

  Too close to the bodies, too hurt to shift, were burned men who were not dead, or not yet. They were worse: keening or screaming or lying unaccountably, dreadfully still.

  Jiao and the troop just kept running, and so necessarily did Mei Feng: glad for once to be so short among these big men, to be able to drop her head and watch their bare feet and nothing else, listen to the heavy squelching tread of them and nothing else.

  UNTIL THE men in front stopped dead and she almost went hard into the back of them, it was so unexpected, she had fallen so deep into the rhythm and strain of running.

  She caught herself just in time, or else just too late, her hands coming up instinctively to clutch at sweat-slick flesh. One man gave her a look that might have come differently if she hadn’t been who she was, if he hadn’t known it.

  What she gave him back was pure impatience and a nudge aside, which most certainly would have brought consequences if she hadn’t been who she was, if he hadn’t known her to be untouchable. But she didn’t have time for games, for folly, for outrage. She pushed through to where Jiao stood, at the head of her men and peering forward; she put a hand on her friend’s shoulder for what advantage she could steal and stretched upward, went on tiptoe and still couldn’t see over the heads of all the men in front who had backed up and packed together, blocked the road.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Another hold-up. Not fire this time, nothing I can see. Hold tight, word’ll come back to us.”

  Perhaps it would, but rougher sounds came first: yelling, screaming. Not much steel-on-steel. Whatever that was, it wasn’t fighting. It sounded like slaughter.

  Whatever it was, they couldn’t reach it; nor apparently could it reach them. Jiao’s troop colonized the mud bank of the paddy, taking the chance to rest. Jiao went with them, to stand on that high bank and see what she could make out; she sent the smallest of her men to squirm ahead, all elbows; Mei Feng went the other way, to the river.

  Looking across was like looking into a mirror: the narrow road that flanked the river on that bank as on this, the steep terraced paddy consuming all the valley else, rising to the ridge. The men who packed the roadway, all that cramped space between the river and the paddy. As there, so here: and so too the sudden obstruction, that sense of hurry stalled.

  It was easier to see, across the water. She could look right up-rive
r and see the cause of it, a sudden dam across the road. No, dams were for water; this would be a barricade. And it ran clean across from the paddy to the riverbank, high and strong as a wall, fixed and certain; and there must—she was sure—be another one on this bank, just as purposeful. Those weren’t thrown up in retreat by desperate men, no. Any more than fire-throwing machines were built in desperation.

  Tunghai Wang had planned for this retreat, however unlikely he thought it. He had envisioned his men fleeing along this narrow valley, up the river to just this point. Which meant …

  Which meant that this was a trap, she might know nothing about war but she knew that; and looked up, urgently up, and yes: there they were, long lines of men emerging, erupting all along the ridge. All those rebels who had fled along the river road, crossed the barricade and doubled up to the ridge, doubled back …

  She could see how well the barricade was defended, how thickly men thronged it with spears and bows. Her view of its foot was obscured by the churning mass of imperial troops. That was just as well; she really didn’t want to see how those troops clambered up over the bodies of their own comrades, and died, and were clambered over in their turn.

  The dead will always outnumber the living, but she didn’t need to see that played out for her instruction, the slow relentless wearing away of the imperial army as men hurled themselves against an impenetrable hedge of steel.

  Her eyes were treacherous, in league with her imagination. They kept coming back to the men on the ridge. If she couldn’t see quite how dreadful the slaughter was at the rampart, if she refused to imagine it, there was no such relief higher up. She could see quite clearly how they came in good order, rank after rank of them down through the paddy, one terrace after another, so fast. It wasn’t possible to wade that fast through the clinging mud of a paddy; they must be following paths already laid out, stone built up almost to the level of the water. Many, many paths, to take so many men so swiftly.