by Zoe Marriott
“All right, enough,” Captain Lu bellowed, waving the recruit who had been working with him back into place amongst the ranks. “Congratulations, men! Despite first appearances, you’re not totally hopeless. Time for something a little more advanced.” He smiled, working his sword idly in figure-of-eights in the air. “Let’s have a new volunteer, shall we?”
The clammy cold breath of inevitability chilled my spine. No. Please.
Lu’s eyes fixed on me. “Ah, Hua Zhi. I’m sure you must be dying to share your skills with your fellows. Come up here. The rest of you, break ranks and gather around – you’ll want to see this.”
Yang Jie bit his lip, looking faintly grey again, but he tapped me bracingly on the shoulder as I passed, working my way through the other recruits. I tried to slow my breathing. Don’t panic.
Clearly I was about to receive some form of payback for having inadvertently made Lu look unprepared in front of his senior officer, and probably for having talked back to him yesterday, too.
But it couldn’t be anything too extreme, could it? Not with all these witnesses. I hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Lu didn’t … he didn’t know. He couldn’t have guessed. No, I just had to play along with it. Take it with grace and a laugh, if I could, and…
And don’t give yourself away.
I stepped into place before the captain and bowed deeply, trying not to wince at the pull in my belly.
Lu’s answering bow was perfunctory, little more than a head nod. It shouldn’t have grated on me, but it did. My father gave even the youngest and most feeble of his challengers a proper bow.
“This is a slightly more difficult form,” Lu said, addressing the gathered men. “Still easy enough for a beginner, though. Its name is Typhoon Water. Do you know it, boy?”
Typhoon Water was one of the most advanced and showy forms for disarming an opponent.
“No, sir,” I said, allowing my – genuine – nerves to colour my voice. Depending on how far he took it, this might be about to hurt a lot. Practice swords were blunt, but they were heavy.
“Just follow my movements and we’ll soon have you up to speed, then,” he said soothingly. “First I will move into your space like this, bringing my sword across your guard like so. Try to block me – no, faster, keep up!”
I allowed him to lead me through the opening movements of the form, arranging my expression into one of tense concentration, even though he wasn’t actually teaching me either the defensive or offensive movements. In fact, he was merely using the inexperienced, fumbling responses of a novice to starkly display his own practised ease.
He hadn’t lied. He was a good swordsman. It took some skill to keep my own movements halting and hesitant without seeming too clownish. But the hardest part was to hide how much I was braced to take a painful hit at any moment. It had to be coming.
“No, no – keep your shoulder extended. Up!” Lu snapped, hitting my elbow from beneath with the heel of his palm. The blow drove the soft flesh of my inner arm against the scale plates of my shoulder armour. This time I let the wince show, and Lu raised his eyebrows.
“Bruise easily? Well, we’ll soon beat that out of you!”
There was a tentative gurgle of laughter from the other trainees, and I aimed a quick grin at them, letting them see that I didn’t mind being the butt of the joke. The laughter became a little more enthusiastic.
I caught the sudden movement from the corner of my eye and whipped back around instinctively, registering the angle and speed of Lu’s blunt blade in the flash of an instant. He was going for my shoulder – the weak place where the two sections of scale armour were laced together – and the full weight of his body was behind the thrust—
If the blow connected, then my shoulder could be dislocated.
I didn’t think. With a yell, I dropped my blunt, useless sword. A flex of the knees and a twist spun me beneath the jab of Lu’s blade.
My right hand flew up as I surged upright with my back to Lu’s chest. My fingers clamped on to his wrist, twisting it outwards in a movement that made him snarl with pain – and allowed me to scoop the sword from his suddenly loosened grasp with my other hand. I twisted the arm that I still held to me with all my might, wrenching it across my body and using the captain’s own instinctive, off-balance movement to throw him over my shoulder to the ground.
He landed with a soft, winded gasp. His sword fell beside him into the mud.
Wary and breathing hard with reaction, I backed away.
There was a silence that seemed very, very long.
Somewhere in the far distance, I could hear briskly raised voices shouting orders, the wind as it moved across the hills above camp, and a songbird warbling. I wondered faintly if it was Bingbing.
The recruits stared as Captain Lu slowly rolled up to his knees, gained his feet, and turned. His face was as pale as wax. He looked at where his practice sword was sinking into the wet dirt. Then he raised his gaze to mine. His eyes flared with rage.
One hand snapped down to his belt, where a whip with a sharp metal tip was coiled. He pulled it free and snapped it out with a sharp crack that made everyone watching leap back.
I alone was frozen, unable to move, to think or even breathe as he took a step forward.
The sound of applause broke the tension like a bamboo pick shattering ice.
“Well done,” Commander Diao boomed, striding forward. “A fine demonstration, Captain! Really very fine! And this is Hua Zhi again, I see. All becomes clear.”
The fury disappeared from Lu Buwei’s eyes instantly, replaced by a bland smile. He swiftly recoiled the whip, and answered with a small laugh. “Yes, sir! Hua Zhi is a promising young soldier.”
“And a good thing, too, from what I saw.” Diao’s face was immobile, steely eyes glinting opaquely in that expression of fearsome geniality which I was convinced was every bit as fake as my shadow mask. “But perhaps Typhoon Water is a little advanced for the first day, Lu Buwei?”
“I took the liberty of assessing Hua Zhi for the advanced training,” the captain said confidently. There was no trace of his former loss of control. I almost believed him. “With Captain Sigong.”
Diao turned his hard eyes on me. “Well. A rare recommendation from Captain Lu! And as it happens, I agree. Tomorrow after the first gong you’ll report to the west field, Hua Zhi. I’ll let Sigong know at dinner. But in the meantime, Captain, perhaps you could finish the morning’s basic training as scheduled. Less disruption that way.”
“Of course, sir. Back to ranks, men!” The captain saluted Diao sharply. His other hand made an equally sharp cutting motion at me, which I interpreted as, Get out of my sight. I almost ran back to the rapidly reforming lines of men, pathetically grateful that Ma Wen was so tall as I darted behind him. He gave me a look of pained sympathy as I passed, but kept his face pointed at the front.
“Are you all right?” Yang Jie murmured behind me.
Was I? I had been one blink, one moment away from disaster. Maybe even from death.
Yang Jie’s hand appeared before me, holding my abandoned sword. The blade and grip were smeared with dirt. I took the practice weapon, letting it droop from my fingers without bothering to wipe it. My hand was shaking so badly I could barely hold on anyway. Belatedly, I nodded. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine. I wouldn’t be fine. He’d really have done it. Broken your arm. Or whipped you for not letting him.” He sounded grim. “Bastard.”
“Did your father teach you to fight like that?” Ma Wen asked out of the corner of his mouth.
I let out a shuddering sigh that changed midway into something shamefully close to a sob. “Yes. Yes, he did.”
“Lucky for you. I wish my father had taught me things like that,” Ma Wen said, sounding a little queasy.
I was beginning to think mine hadn’t taught me nearly enough.
Ten
Almost three months later…
iao had Lu carry out the whipping under the
midday sun in the centre of camp, with all trainees in attendance.
Purple-black stripes bloomed on the recruit’s back. After the tenth blow, the skin broke open, spilling crimson, and flies began to buzz around the red drips on the parched earth. At the twelfth blow, the man broke under the punishment and screamed: hoarse, broken sobs and cries for mercy. At the fifteenth, he passed out, sagging limply from the cords that held him to his post while Lu continued with his task, face gleaming with sweat, teeth bared in a grin of what I hoped was effort.
Next to me, Yang Jie’s hands were clenched, yellow and red with strain, around the buckle of his sword belt. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t look away from the flogging. I wasn’t even sure he was breathing.
Diao had called the recruit an attempted deserter. A man who had lost his honour. After this he might very easily lose his life. Yet the punishment was still considered merciful. Diao could have had him executed outright for such a serious offence.
Lu paused for a moment. He dragged his forearm over his face, resettled his feet. His eyes were fixed on the bleeding welts, and his tongue came out to moisten his bottom lip. As the whipping restarted, I closed my eyes, clenched my teeth, and tried to be somewhere else in my head.
When it was over and the surgeons had carried the unconscious soldier away, Diao gave the order for us to disperse. It was time for the midday meal but, although my stomach was empty and rumbling, I was sure if I tried to eat anything right now, it wouldn’t stay down long. As the other trainees began to shuffle off – Ma Wen loping past with a wave, in search of extra rations as always – I looked at Yang Jie.
He forced a stiff smile, cleared his throat and said, “You should get the surgeons to look at that black eye before pike training this afternoon.”
“What?”
“It’s swelling. Much more and you won’t see a pike coming, and you’ll have a matching bruise on the other side.”
I snorted out a sound that might have been a laugh. “Mother? Is that you?” The forgotten bruise on my face – gained during advanced sword-work training with Captain Sigong that morning – throbbed.
Yang Jie gave me a withering look, much more natural than the ghastly smile, and shoved me with that surprising strength of his. “Never mind. Go drown yourself instead, fat head.”
“All right, all right – I’ll go!” I said, relief making my smile wide. “This is me going, see?”
But I didn’t.
Even if my eye had been much worse than it was, I wouldn’t have dared to visit one of the doctors here. Military doctors were the best, and that meant they were experts in qi. My father had warned me before I left home that while these men wouldn’t be able to see through my shadow mask, if one of them touched me, they would probably feel that it was there. I really would rather drown myself – in the valley’s stream, now flooded and fast with melt-water from the mountains upriver – than risk that.
If I was discovered, would I be whipped like that poor man? He had begged at first. Begged for mercy, for the pain to stop…
I hurried to the barracks, finding them deserted as they normally were at this time. Grateful that I’d taken to carrying my little hand mirror with me everywhere, I checked on my shadow face, ensuring that the bruise on my skin had transferred perfectly to the illusion. The reflections I could glean at the river weren’t good for that kind of detailed work, although I was getting better with practice. But it would have been far too conspicuous if the bruise hadn’t shown up; at least six other people had seen Sigong nail me right in the cheekbone with his sword hilt.
These were the sorts of details that could ruin me, if I wasn’t careful.
Like that jagged new scar by my right eye, still red and glaring though the wound had been healed for weeks. Lu’s work. I had, according to him, failed to salute promptly enough, and he had shoved me face first into the barracks door.
The sharper cheekbones, those were important. We’d all grown thinner and more hungry-looking, with how often our rations were halved for infractions. My skin was two shades browner now, from training all day in the sun. And I needed to make sure my mask reflected smudges of dirt, a speckle of gunpowder, and stubble. Looking too clean would be a real giveaway, especially since I stank just as much as everyone else.
Spring had long passed into deep summer, and the heat pressed down on our little valley from dawn until after dusk, baking the mud solid. Mountain snow-melt had poured into our stream, turning it into a fast-moving river that was the only place to reliably cool down. But as the sun rose earlier and earlier, it became much harder for me to wash in private. I had endured some ribald remarks and teasing for being so weirdly shy about stripping off … until Yang Jie told everyone that assassins had tried to murder my family when I was a little boy, and I was covered in hideous scars.
When the other men stared at me for confirmation, I stared back, unblinking, until they retreated, mumbling apologies.
“How did you know about that?” I asked him later, wondering if it had ended up in a history book somewhere, or if it was just common knowledge.
He gaped at me. “I – I didn’t? Hua Zhi, I made that up! You mean it’s true?”
I could have corrected him on the hideous scars, but it was a very convenient explanation, so instead I told him a carefully edited account of what had happened, and left his imagination to fill in the rest.
“No wonder your father taught you to fight,” he mumbled. “Argh, just bury me in a hole. I’m so sorry.”
“I’d only have to dig you out again,” I said cheerfully. “And now people will leave me to wash in peace. Come on, don’t pull that face. Everyone here has their own tale of woe. Even … even you?”
He pulled his lower lip between his teeth. “Maybe.”
Tentatively, I made to touch his shoulder, as he often did mine. He flinched. I realized with a queasy lurch that Yang Jie never seemed particularly keen to strip off entirely at the river either.
I never brought it up again.
Over the past weeks I had watched my friends and fellow recruits calm and settle, toughening up into competent young soldiers. If I could have seen myself from the outside, I wondered if I would have been able to observe the same process taking place – or if my shadow mask would have hidden it from me, as it hid my real self from everyone else. I didn’t feel any different. And I had already been very physically strong, well-trained, used to getting by on less sleep than most people. But now I could run for longer, and faster, fight all-out without getting winded, and I’d had to adjust my armour to accommodate new muscles in my shoulders and upper arms. I walked differently, too. I saw it in the square shoulders of the long black shadow that preceded me as I strode purposefully across camp, and the way that people unthinkingly made room for me when I arrived.
There were still close calls. My monthly bleeding continued to cause me varying levels of anguish and inconvenience each time it came, and once, in sword training, another boy had accidentally ripped a great hole in my shirt, forcing me to hold an illusion over the bandages around my chest for the rest of the afternoon. The drain on my energy and resulting lack of focus had resulted in a sprained knee for me and a bloody lip for him. But despite this, despite all my anxiety and care, sometimes … I forgot I was not Hua Zhi.
I forgot I was different from anyone else in the camp, that I had lived a vastly different life. I forgot I wasn’t born a boy. It ought to have been impossible. But it wasn’t. That was the trouble. It was easy.
Don’t. Just … don’t think about that now.
I tucked the mirror back into my pocket, blew out a deep, slow breath – forcing the memory of those stripes of bruised flesh and oozing blood from my mind – and pushed open the barracks door. Outside, a group of the older recruits were pissing up against the wall, boasting, laughing and gibing. I stopped for a second, going hot with the realization that they had been so near, and I hadn’t heard. One of them might have decided to fling open the barracks door at any time and
seen me adjusting my face. I had let myself become too focused.
I was so busy chastising myself that at first I didn’t notice what they were saying.
“… gave her a good slap and she yelped like a goat in season! So then I bent her over and—”
“Tell us another one, Cheng Yi! You’d have been finished after the first go,” another one jeered, laughing.
“What would you know about it, silk sleeve?” the first one snapped. “You probably can’t tell a woman’s arse from a little boy’s—”
With a yell they flew at each other. Neither bothered to fasten their pants first. I slipped past, holding my breath against more than the stink of their urine.
This was the army and, as far as the army was concerned, it was just a day like any other.
My hastily consumed midday meal gurgled queasily in my stomach. Sweat oozed everywhere, trickling down the back of my neck and between my shoulder blades. I gritted my teeth and thrust the long, octagon-shaped shield – formed of a heavy metal plate laminated with leather – forward into the red, annoyed faces of the other team.
The dozen men who had been assigned to the shields on my side of the field grunted and jostled around me. Many had gained the sergeant’s permission to strip down to their bare chests, and their shoulders gleamed in various deepening shades of bronze under the afternoon sun.
Clad in only a thin linen shirt, with a small additional illusion woven atop the firm binding of my chest, I felt intensely vulnerable as we grappled and slid together in such close quarters. It would only take a little slip and… But surely, even if someone did feel something, they wouldn’t believe it?
Pikes and swords thudded against the barrier formed of our shields as the opposing team attempted to force their way through. One of the men next to me skidded half a pace backwards as a trainee on the opposing side threw themselves violently at the shield wall. A long pike, headed with a blunt blade, found the narrow gap in the defence and jabbed through – heading straight for my face.
