“Are you certain?”
“Superficially there is a resemblance to poisoning, since bad food is in and of itself a kind of poison. But upon examination the situation is clearly distinct.” The physician rose. “Esteemed Prince, please accept it as my informed opinion of the matter.”
Esen’s face remained clouded, but after a moment he said, “Very well. Conduct the burial. This matter should not stand in the way of our normal preparations. Tomorrow, we will travel the usual distance. Prepare yourselves!” He left abruptly.
Lord Wang drifted over to Ouyang. His catlike mien of satisfaction was red-rimmed, and despite his immaculate hair and gown he seemed harrowed—as if he hadn’t slept a wink since Esen’s mistreatment of him two nights before. “How careless. Losing all these commanders right before a critical battle? I would worry about morale.”
Ouyang said cuttingly, “Save your worry for your own morale, my lord. Saddle sores losing you sleep?”
Lord Wang shot him a caustic look. “I’d say I was being haunted by my sins, but then I remember how many sins you have and it doesn’t seem to have stopped you from sleeping, has it?” Then, to Ouyang’s shock, his eyes suddenly slid past Ouyang and his thin lips pressed together in bitter incredulity. The familiarity of that glance turned Ouyang to ice. The thing that animals could see, that made candle flames leap in his presence, was behind him. And now, somehow, Lord Wang could see it. Ouyang’s skin shrank in horror. He knew it wasn’t something he had simply missed about Lord Wang during all the years they had known each other. This was new. Something about the lord had changed since that night in Esen’s ger, and he had no idea what it meant.
He must have displayed some reaction, because Lord Wang’s mouth pinched tighter. “A pity, General, that good commander material is so thin on the ground. They were three of your best leaders, weren’t they? And with time being so short, I imagine it’s going to be hard to cultivate the kind of trust you need for this critical engagement.”
“I have men enough I trust,” Ouyang said shortly. A cold sweat crept and prickled under his armor.
“Do you? For your sake I hope so, General. A lot is riding upon Bianliang. Since I’m not sleeping anyway, perhaps I should spend a few of those hours praying for a good outcome.”
“Pray all you like,” said Ouyang. “It won’t make a difference.”
“Well, obviously your prayers wouldn’t. Which deity or ancestor is going to listen to a filthy eunuch? They might listen to me. But it’s true: I do feel more comfortable putting my faith in the efforts of my own hands.” Lord Wang’s humorless smirk held the sharp edge of a blade, and it unsettled Ouyang that he couldn’t tell which direction it faced. “Plan well, General. I would hate to see you fail.”
21
ANFENG, SECOND MONTH
Ma lay in the lamplight, Zhu’s head between her legs. They had been at it so long that friction was long gone—the slickness of Zhu’s fingers inside her was so flawless that their movement seemed invisible. “More,” Ma said, arching. “More—”
Somehow she knew Zhu was smiling. Zhu increased her fingers to all five in a wedge, pressing in. Stretching in an incremental penetration. Ma felt that. It hurt; it was an all-consuming pleasure that seemed familiar and new at the same time; it was everything in the world. She heard her own voice, crying out.
“Should I stop?”
“No.”
Ma could imagine Zhu’s smile, mischievous and intent, with that edge of detached curiosity that never went away even in the rawest moments between them. Zhu pressed her hand deeper, up to its widest part. Easing in confidently, bit by bit, as Ma panted and whimpered around the stretch of knuckles. When Zhu paused, Ma realized she had lost the ability to form individual thoughts. She was only sensation. Pain and pleasure, pleasure and pain. She had no idea how long the pause had been by the time Zhu moved again. In, or perhaps out—then Ma spasmed helplessly around Zhu’s hand. She was so stretched her muscles fluttered rather than clenched. She gasped and shuddered, feeling the rock-solidness of Zhu within her.
“Still good?” Zhu’s voice floated up to her. Her tongue glided lightly over Ma’s sensitive point, wringing from her a gasp and another round of subdued fluttering. When the flutters subsided Zhu pressed in again, and Ma cried out at a sensation that was too big to contain, and then Zhu pushed one last time and sank inside to the wrist. Ma lay shuddering around it, drawn out of herself by that beautiful terrible ache, muscles all over her body twitching in discordant sequence like the creaking of metal as it cooled.
“I feel like I could take all of you, however much you give me.” She barely recognized her own voice.
Zhu chuckled. “You’ve taken it all already.” Her head dipped, and Ma felt her tongue brushing between her legs again. She licked a soft repetitive stroke, over and over until Ma’s over-sensitive shivering turned into shudders: an exhausted rebuilding. All she could do was writhe weakly against Zhu’s mouth, her heart beating in the thin skin stretched around the penetration of Zhu’s hand. There was an occult thrill to it: that she could take Zhu in, and hold her within her body, as if she were the only person in the world with that peculiar power.
I would take Zhu forever, Ma thought, terrified. What could this be other than love, this surrendered feeling of her heart beating around Zhu’s hand? Zhu, who could hurt her, but chose not to—who in filling Ma’s body was as intimate as any person could be, and yet who at the same time was always moving away from her in pursuit of her own greatness.
Zhu withdrew her hand in a slow, twisting slide. Ma moaned; Zhu’s tongue slipped faster against her. She floated above a distant feeling of arousal—and then, without realizing she’d even been chasing it, peaked one last time with a choked sob.
Zhu wriggled up the bed with an undignified one-and-a-half-armed flailing, and lay next to Ma with a look of smug accomplishment. She never needed anything from Ma in return, which made Ma slightly sad. Even if Zhu had wanted it, though, this time Ma wouldn’t have been of any use: she was too exhausted to even turn her head for a kiss.
Later, she was dimly aware of Zhu getting up—eschewing trousers in favor of a robe that could be slung on without needing to be tied—and going to her desk where she practiced doing simple things left-handed. The flare of lamplight behind Zhu’s bent head made Ma’s eyes ache. Suddenly the sight of her, silhouetted by light, filled Ma with an unbearable pang of distance. She wanted to run to Zhu and take her in her arms, to turn her from silhouette back into a real person. But even as she watched, Zhu’s details faded further as she receded into that terrible, intensifying light—
Then Zhu was sitting on the edge of the bed, and the light was only daylight. Her left hand was warm on Ma’s shoulder. “Hey, Yingzi.” She smiled down at Ma: genuine and fond, with the faint surprise that struck Ma with the usual punch of delight. She loved that Zhu, always so self-possessed, was still a little bit baffled by her own happiness at finding Ma in her bed. “Will you help me put my armor on? There’s something I need to do.”
* * *
The door of Jiao’s workshop was wide open despite a brisk wind through the streets. Zhu went inside. She was immediately plunged into gloom: the cavernous space lacked even a single candle, though it was pleasantly warm from the foundry next door. There was an overpowering aroma of cast iron and sticky old grease, shot through with the sharper smells of some mysterious alchemy. Zhu felt the urge to sneeze.
Jiao was sitting hunched over a table, weighing powders on a tiny scale. When she blocked the light from the doorway he squinted up at her like a bad-tempered bamboo rat.
Zhu said, “You’ll go blind if you keep working in the dark. Afraid you’ll explode if you use a lantern?” She was wearing her usual combination of armor over old gray robes, now with her right arm slung across the front, and she wondered at the odd silhouette she must make. Neither a warrior nor monk; neither whole nor incapacitated. And what else did Jiao see? A man or a woman, or something else entirely?
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Jiao pushed back from the table and wiped his blackened hands with an even blacker cloth. “I wondered when you were going to turn up.” His eyes flicked to the curved saber she had taken to wearing in place of her normal sword. Not that it was anything more than a decoration. She didn’t have either the strength or the coordination to wield it with her left hand, and no doubt Jiao knew that as well as she did. She had always found his gruff superiority entertaining, but now there was an edge to it she disliked: a superiority not by virtue of his learning, which she respected, but by virtue of what he was. A man. He said, “I presume you’re not here to kill me.”
She saw his confidence. He knew that if it had been her intention to kill him, she’d have done it long before. And because she hadn’t, he thought she was afraid. He thought he was the stronger.
“Do you think it’s because I couldn’t?” Zhu inquired. “Because of the arm, or because of what you know?”
“You tell me.”
There was cold-blooded calculation in his eyes. He was weighing her up against the others: Chen, the Prime Minister, General Ouyang. And Zhu was already diminished in his eyes. If he were to choose against her, she knew he would sabotage her as much as he could before leaving. It’s what I would do.
Zhu’s stump throbbed in time with her heartbeat, as steady as a water clock. “You think you have power over me because you know a secret. But you don’t.”
“It’s not a secret?” Jiao raised his eyebrows.
“It’s a secret without value. Tell it to whoever cares to listen, and I’ll still do exactly what I plan to do, and get what I want. You think I can’t overcome being exposed, when I’ve overcome everything else in my way?” The eunuch general had made her into the person she needed to be—and now her fate could never be denied to her on the basis of who or what she was, because everything she needed to achieve it was within her.
“I’m not afraid of what you know,” she said. “How can something like that stop me, destroy me, when nothing else has?” She took a deep breath and reached for the white spark that was the seed of her greatness. “Look at me,” she commanded, and Jiao’s chin jerked in unthinking obedience. “Look at me and see the person who will win. The person who will rule.”
She extended her closed left hand, and desired. She felt a disconcerting sensation of opening—of connecting to the world and everything it contained, alive and dead. To everything under Heaven. She gasped as the power ran through her. In an instant the seed of brightness inside her was a blaze, blasting her clean of every other thought and feeling until all that was left was the blinding, ecstatic pain of looking into the sun. She was burning with it; she was on fire with her belief in her own shining future. It was agonizing. It was glorious. She opened her hand.
Light sprang out, faster than thought. A merciless white blaze that blew out every shadow; that raked the dusty gray secrets out of the recesses of Jiao’s workshop, and sent Jiao recoiling with a shout. The unyielding light pouring from Zhu’s palm washed the color from him until he was as ashy as a ghost. His first reaction was terror: he saw a real flame that would explode them both into their next lives. With a twist of satisfaction, Zhu watched as his second reaction took hold: the realization that it wasn’t a real flame, and his ensuing struggle with the impossibility that was all that remained.
After a moment, still breathing heavily, Jiao leaned forwards with obvious effort and took up his scale. That was all the capitulation she got. He was too superior to bow, even in defeat. With his head down over his powders, he said in the manner of someone making a casual inquiry, “That isn’t the color of any dynastic Mandate of Heaven recorded in the Histories.”
Zhu closed her hand around the white flame. Afterimages danced in front of her eyes in the restored darkness. Her body thrummed with energy. “It’s not a color,” she said, and felt the truth of it ringing out like a promise of the future. “It’s radiance.”
* * *
Zhu’s force left Anfeng two days later and reached Bianliang on a darkening afternoon. Even Jiankang, that seat of kings, had been smaller: Bianliang’s inky mass reared in front of them like an oncoming storm. And that was only the inner wall. Zhu had made camp five li to the south, but even that still lay inside the ruins of the outer wall. That whole vast area between the two walls, and even outside the outer wall for another ten li, had once been covered by the mansions of that sprawling imperial capital. But since that time the unchecked Yellow River had flooded the area so often that the wooden buildings had melted back into the ground as if they had never been. Now there was only barren marsh, ghosts, and the call of herons.
A lonely landscape, but they weren’t alone. It had been a closer race than Zhu had thought it would be, given how much further she had to travel, but General Ouyang had still won. East of the inner wall, his encampment was a city in and of itself. Its torches cast a golden glow over Bianliang’s stone ramparts. A line of trebuchets lifted their tall heads in silent regard of the wall in front of them.
Xu Da said, “According to Chen, he arrived on the sixth day of this month.”
“Four days, then.” Zhu had thought she was sufficiently recovered, but the journey had left her feeling paper-thin with exhaustion. Her right arm ached from being bound across her chest, and her back hurt from riding lopsided. No doubt her arm would be useful again one day, but for the moment it was as though she’d lost the entire limb. Its absence gave her an unsettled feeling of blindness on her right side. She often caught herself twisting to the right, as if to see. “But he hasn’t used his siege engines yet, despite having such a limited window. Why?”
“He did have to bring the trebuchets in pieces from Anyang. Maybe they aren’t all assembled yet.”
“Maybe,” Zhu said, unconvinced. Turning inwards, she sank past her exhaustion into that faint vibration that was the sense of some distant self. The shivering entanglement of their qi seemed as intimate as the breath shared between lovers. And now that he had helped her become who she needed to be, they were more entangled than ever.
He wasn’t waiting out of simple incompetence, she thought. No; it was something else. She remembered the circle of his watching ghosts as they fought. Of all the people in the world, he was the only one she’d ever seen who was haunted by ghosts. Who were they, and what did they want from him? And why were there so many of them? It was if a whole village had been wiped out in a single act—
Distantly, she heard the Prime Minister saying: Under the old rules, a traitor’s family was executed to the ninth degree.
General Ouyang, a Nanren slave of Mongol masters, whose only pleasure seemed to come from revenge. Who had told her a truth about himself when his sword had been sunk inside her: What I want has nothing to do with who wins.
All of a sudden, she knew why he waited.
Xu Da was giving her a look of forbearance from beneath lowered eyebrows. “You have an idea.”
“I do. And you’re not going to like it.” Zhu was surprised to find she had broken out in a cold sweat. She wasn’t afraid, but her body was; it remembered pain. She bit down on a gasp as her phantom arm flared in agony. “I have to meet General Ouyang again.”
After a beat Xu Da said in a measured tone, “Meet.”
“Just speak to him! Preferably this time without being skewered.” Beneath her pain she felt General Ouyang’s presence in the distant Yuan camp like a coal in the heart of a fire. Understanding fire doesn’t mean it can’t still burn you. “And it has to be now.”
“Last time you had to face him,” Xu Da protested. There was fear on his face, and remembered pain. “This time we have other options.”
Zhu smiled with some effort. “Remember what the Buddha said? Live like your head is on fire.” Instinctively, she knew her desire could never be satisfied by hanging on to Chen’s ankles as he rose. But if she wanted more than the scraps of power he might toss her, she would have to jump into the fire.
She squeezed Xu Da’s shoulder fondly with
her left hand. “He didn’t destroy me last time, and that’s all that matters. So whatever happens this time—” She felt a thrill of rightness, even sweeter than anticipation. “It will be worth it.”
* * *
General Ouyang’s problem, Zhu mused as she slipped through the dark space between their two armies, was that he lacked Chen’s imagination. If you really wanted to make me useless, you should have cut off all my limbs and kept me in a jar like Empress Wu did with her enemies. Once she was inside the Yuan’s perimeter it took her no time at all to find his flag-crowned tent standing alone on the outer edge of the command cluster. It seemed entirely characteristic of him that he should keep himself apart despite the inconveniences it caused. And the diminished security.
The round Mongolian tents seemed big from the outside, but on the inside they were gargantuan. Or perhaps it was just the empty space that gave that impression. Except for all the braziers (which, added to the central fire, made it rather too warm) and the multiple hides layered over the springy woolen floor, General Ouyang’s living space was as utilitarian as Zhu’s own room in Anfeng. Two sets of armor hung on stands, next to an empty stand that presumably belonged to the set he was wearing. A stack of rectangular cases held bows and arrows. There was a chest of clothes, and another of small tools and the assorted bits of leather one keeps about for fixing tack. A bow-legged low table covered with papers lined in running Mongolian script, with a helmet on top like an oversized paperweight. A washbasin and simple pallet dressed with a felt blanket. Bare as the space was, it still carried something of him, which surprised Zhu more than it should have. For all she understood him, she had never really thought of him as having an ordinary aspect: of being a person who slept and ate, and had preferences about his clothes.
There was a murmur of ghosts outside. Zhu braced herself as the doorflap brushed aside and General Ouyang stepped over the threshold board, bareheaded with his sheathed sword held loosely in his hand. When he saw her he stopped and stood very still. The connection between them rang deafeningly in Zhu’s head. She had taken off her sling before coming. Now, slowly and deliberately, she spread her arms to the side. Her left hand open and empty. Her right arm ending in a bandaged stump. She let him look. Let him see what he had done.
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