The Tale of the Ive-ojan-akhar's Death
Page 3
A report was delivered, a coincidence it seemed, that her Immortal firstborn was sickly. The Ojan issued a shocking, unprecedented order: the Immortal must depart the Palace Invisible and the capital to accompany Her mother to Geì, where highland airs and plain, good food would restore Her health.
Some years before I had visited Geì myself—not precisely a pilgrimage—so I recognized the magic-lantern scenery beloved of sentimental woodcut artists: the swift tumble of the river here apostrophized as Stormy Jade rather than Carnelian, the beetling, fantastically painted cliffs, the jagged spires that formed forested aerial islands. The monastery itself had been a picturesque ruin for two and a half centuries before I reached it, never fully reclaimed after the Shining Hands overthrew the false immortal who endeavored to suppress veneration of the Kandadal. I imagine the ruins I explored were more grand than the nearly new monastery of the Ive-ojan-akhar’s fatal summer visit but the painter of magic-lantern slides had not felt constrained by history. Here were the stupendous, strangely attenuated images of the nude, ascetic saint carved into the cliff face itself, three standing, five reclining, three kneeling in serene meditation, all adorned with garlands of sculpted and painted blossoms, each with the severe features of a Tall Rider of the steppes where the Ojan was born. Here, standing improbably tall rather than the stump I had seen, was the Tower that Longs for the Sky, there clinging to the cliffs the many aeries like vertiginous swallows’ nests fashioned of bamboo stems and silk cord for solitary contemplation, reached by way of dangling ropes. Here the Abbot’s House, its roof of tiles glazed jade green and gold upheld by sculpted demons bound with iron chains, there in its walled garden of roses, peonies, plum and cherry trees, the Hospice. Everywhere wind-whipped knots of the Kandadal’s eleven-colored ribbons: fastened to the tips of tall bamboo staves, strung across the gorge high above rushing waters, fluttering from the eaves of terrestrial buildings and aeries alike.
Soon, however, we were conducted with the Ojan’s party into the Hospice. The sickly Immortal was installed with Her eunuch ayah and deaf-mute maids in spacious, luxurious chambers, where the child lay enervated on a low couch, glassy stare fixed on a clever fountain. Water-driven automatons of songbirds warbled and flapped their wings while playful automatons of otters and frogs cavorted at the edges of the pool below.
By contrast, Her mother’s room above was a stark pilgrim’s cell, walled and floored in stone, its round window simply a hole in the wall, uncovered. A quilted mat served for bed and seat. A plain, if exquisitely formed, flask held water, an unglazed cup ready beside it in the corner of the cell. For adornment there was a painting on cured horsehide, an image of the Kandadal knelt in veneration before the demon of the abbot’s—and the Ojan’s—native place, which took the form of a bay mare with brilliantly feathered wings at each ankle.
Although she was neither nun nor acolyte, the Ojan divested herself of her clothing and knelt on her mat before this image. I suppose the audience was meant to understand how near her time the Ojan was by the clue of swollen belly and breasts but I am unacquainted with such things. It seemed many moments before her contemplation broke with a thin, breathy moan. Whining with bootless sympathy, the white mastiff left its post by the door and the Ojan clutched porcelain fingers into its mane as her moans became shrieks, became howls.
In the chamber below, the child Immortal roused with a weak moan of Her own, Her eyes turned up to the ceiling. The birds, frogs, otters on the fountain stilled, the Immortal’s attendants with a clatter of wood and porcelain fell to the floor. From the wing, her own wings mantled, the demon Wakè-ì stalked on her great paws. Wakè-ì approached the quailing child, paused. The sire was weak, the demon said, the dam insufficiently wise, the whelp unfit for Heaven’s acknowledgment.
Like a cruel house cat, Wakè-ì batted the child off Her couch and across the stage before stooping with great delicacy to fasten her teeth in the Immortal’s nape. With her burden dangling from her jaws like a kitten, a rat, or a puppet, the demon leapt into the air and away from the stage. The envoy’s inamorato choked down a squeak of dismay—I was startled myself—when the great marionette swooped overhead in a half circle that brought her back to the upper part of the stage where, while we were distracted by the antics in the Immortal’s chamber, Her mother must have given birth.
For the Ive-ojan-akhar, kneeling again before the painting of the Kandadal and the horse demon, with her dog at her side, now cradled a babe at her breast. She took appreciable moments to notice Wakè-ì’s arrival, seemed not to notice at all the dead Immortal dropped without ceremony before her. The demon spoke again, voice no less grating than before, extending amused thanks to the Ojan for bearing and birthing the babe as she, the demon, could not.
Coming nearly to herself, the Ojan asked whose child it was suckling at her breast.
Why, the demon explained tolerantly, it was the granddaughter of the Ojan’s late husband. As presently constituted the Covenant of Heaven could not allow for a regnant Immortal of foreign antecedent. This was the child of the delegitimated heir and the rough-and-ready sailor the Ojan herself had recently appointed admiral of the war fleet out of Oesei. Sire and dam had never met, the Ojan would be relieved to understand—the former exiled in the distant south, the latter on the Ojan’s own embassy to the recalcitrant princelings of the archipelago east across the Turquoise Gulf—had not met, would not meet, although their destinies were similar. Wakè-ì inclined her great head to the image of the Kandadal on the chamber’s wall. Once recovered from the fever presently troubling him, the late Immortal’s eldest son would renounce the exilic luxury he had been granted to become a mendicant acolyte of the Kandadal, whose precepts and philosophies he would carry farther south, into U and Piq and Tunsesu; while the cargo more valuable than tea, silks, copper, or the threat of arms which the admiral’s fleet bore to obstreperous Djoch-Athe was those same philosophies and precepts.
The demon shrugged and went on kindly. Their unsuspected daughter was meant to continue the Ojan’s needful reforms and innovations, to continue placating Her supposed grandmother the Owe-ejan-akhar, encouraging the spread of the Kandadal’s teachings. She would be remembered as a stolid, unexceptional caretaker of the Celestial Realm, eclipsed in the histories by Her own heir. That glorious Immortal would finally break the yoke of the Akhars and shatter their diminished empires.
The Ive-ojan-akhar, however, gently pronounced the demon, would witness none of this: it was not her concern.
The Ojan’s mastiff growled and leapt from its post at the Ojan’s side, bright teeth meant for the demon’s throat.
Artificial thunder rolled and a crack of artificial lightning blinded me. When my vision recovered I saw upon the upper stage a dead dog fleeced like a white lamb and two Ive-ojan-akhars, two stripling Immortals. One of each pair lay on the floor, apparently deceased. The standing Ojan regarded her dead twin for some moments before turning to the house beyond the burning footlights. With both hands she lifted the mask from her skull, revealing the ivory visage of the demon, which she inclined first toward the envoy and his inamorato on one side of the house, then to me. She dropped the Ojan’s mask. It shattered on the floor. But then as the band began to bang and whine and clatter she raised her hands again to doff this second face, exposing a third we had not seen before: merely a moon-round, jolly Haisner face.
The footlights guttered. In wavering illumination and darting shadow, the false demon turned to offer reverence to the Kandadal on the wall before extending a hand to the new Immortal, leading Her from the stage. The band played on.
3.
The Sjolussene envoy and his inamorato clapped their hands together in the subcontinental manner while I hooted and slapped the table like a Haisner. I rose in somewhat of a hurry, for I did not wish them to get a good look at me, strode out of the hall and the theatre. Finding a shadow of concealment, I waited for them to emerge. When they did, the one was speaking urgently in a voice too low for me t
o understand. The other laughed, careless, clapped his companion’s shoulder, and they turned away. It seemed I was mistaken to believe they had stopped at the House of the Company of the Kandadal’s Colored Cat merely as an interlude before proceeding to more carnal recreation for they returned the way they had come.
I, however, went on as I had first intended to Lìm’s Yellow House. There I was entertained through the night by whores alternately roughneck and exquisite, receiving excellent value for Lìm’s outrageous fees and forgetting for the while the envoy, his daughter, my angry grief, the puzzles posed by The Tale of the Ive-ojan-akhar.
Too soon I was roused ungently, untimely, with the message my servant stood without the house clamoring for my attention. Confused and alarmed, I donned my rumpled suit of Sjolussene garments with what haste I could before rushing out to the street.
Shàu was there indeed, hunkered and huddled in the shadow of one of the great yellow doorposts, but this was not my calm, competent servant. “Nen-kè,” cried a wretched, weeping ragamuffin when I emerged through the yellow doors, “nen-kè, your house! The poor fishes!” He bobbed to his feet and I saw without recourse that he was nearly naked, wearing none of the neat outfits I provided but only a filthy clout, and was dirty himself from head to toe. “All burnt!” he gasped, and fell to his knees at my feet.
As I bent to him, confounded, I saw the companion that had shared his shadow: my wooden idol of the Kandadal, its varnish scorched and half the face charred. The surviving brown glass eye twinkled.
“Shàu,” I said, my voice thin and labored, “tell me. What has happened?”
“All burnt!” he moaned again. “All burnt, your house and your treasures.”
“But you are alive, my dear Shàu, and you rescued my Kandadal.” I do not know where I discovered the fatal calm that gripped me. “The rest is no matter though I grieve for the fishes. Come.” I coaxed him back to the yellow column and had him sit by me as I sat by the Kandadal, and I held my servant about his trembling shoulders as if he were not nearly man-grown, as if he were my child. “Tell me how this has happened.”
The day was very young, dawn just pinking the sky. Although the rest of Bhekai would be stirring Turtle Market slept on while Shàu faltered out his tale. He had returned before midnight from a red house less reputable (less distant, less costly) than Lìm’s. After making certain I was still abroad and would not need him, he bade goodnight to the new fishes in their tub, said a prayer for Jù’s favor to poor Ìsho (here he showed me the sole rescued treasure of his own: the small bronze Jù), and took himself to bed.
Some hours later, only a few, he was wakened by a great noise and tumult out of doors on Blue Lamp Street. Like any Haisner house, mine had no windows onto the street, but Shàu rushed to the door left unbarred against my return. When he peered through the grated spy hole—of no such diameter any ghost might pass through—he saw a mob milling about, their own torches illuminating them more effectively than the blue lamps. Shàu dropped the bar across the door at once, although he feared it could not hold against them. As well as torches they carried crude weapons, brazen gongs, and a great many strings of the tiny black-powder bombs used to frighten demons and ghosts, which all at once began popping and banging on the doorstep, against the walls, and on the roof, as if the riot had recognized Shàu’s presence.
He would not tell me the insults the mob yelled, only that there was no doubting they meant his nen-kè. “They wore masks,” he stammered, “the painted faces of snarling tigers hiding their own faces.” Several of the tiger people carried casks on their shoulders and these made sure of keeping some distance from torches and bombs.
At length one among them grew impatient with aimless commotion and directed them here, there in a high, piercing voice. My house was to be surrounded on all sides against escape from within and to ward against damage to properties of true subjects of the Immortal in the Palace Invisible. The cask-bearers were ordered to douse the walls at front and sides with their naphtha. This was accomplished with dispatch. Finally, scorning to risk their own persons by using the torches, the tiger people hurled strings of hissing, banging little bombs to set my house alight.
Shàu had remained at the spy hole until the paint on the door went up in a sudden sheet of flame. Then he fled through my doomed house to the garden door. He must have snatched up the little bronze Jù along the way, he said, though he didn’t remember it. Outside, he retreated to the farthest corner of the garden’s tall brick walls, behind the plum tree, and watched the house burn, cowering at explosions of sparks and the vicious shouts and malign chants of the tiger people.
When in the black hour before dawn the only home he had known was but a smoking ruin and he was half-certain the tiger people had departed the vicinage of the White Peonies, he dared emerge from his poor shelter. A charred roof beam, he saw, had fallen to smash the goldfish tub, but two scorched walls within the ruin yet stood: the brick abutments on either side of my still room. He drenched himself with water from the well and carried a full bucket to splash a path through the ashes before his bare feet.
As he passed the fragile brick bulwarks he glimpsed a glimmer from the Kandadal’s remaining eye, a gleam from the saint’s toothy grin. “I feel he meant me to survive,” murmured Shàu, who had never betrayed any inclination toward the mad philosopher’s cult, “so I must rescue him and bring him to you, nen-kè.”
“And so you did, brave Shàu.” Taking the idol under one arm and my servant under the other, I brought them into Lìm’s Yellow House, where I bullied and bribed a surly eunuch into tending to Shàu—bathing him, clothing him, feeding him—had another attendant fetch me tea and congee, and dispatched a third on urgent errand to the Sjolussene mission. Fortunately, I carried a goodly sum in cash.
Having broken my fast, I sat pondering my scorched Kandadal, unwilling yet to ponder these peculiar disasters. I was called to the door again.
Looking powerfully incongruous on the threshold of a Turtle Market yellow house, six troopers of the Sjolussene militia d’outre-mer and their leader awaited me, armed and in full kit. The downy-cheeked lieutenant saluted me briskly. I knew the fellow’s face although mission staff did not mix with the militia: I had seen him in mufti here in Lìm’s Yellow House on several occasions. “Sir,” he said, “his excellency the envoy is murdered by street ruffians, your house is burnt down, and we have beaten off an assault by native rabble against her majesty’s mission. You will come with us at once.”
“Of course,” I murmured, surprised yet more if somehow undismayed. “I must bring my servant. A moment, please.” I turned back to the door.
Shàu was there already, wan and dignified, attired by the spiteful eunuch in tawdry whore’s finery, cradling my scorched Kandadal in his arms. “Come, my dear,” I said, beckoning. “These soldiers will see us to safety.”
At the mission the chargé d’affaires was raging. “That perilous fool offended the Immortal’s regent. We are proscribed, banished, and a secret society has been set up against us.” She regarded me shrewdly—my dowdy, rumpled, out-of-fashion subcontinental costume. “It was never wise to live outside the cantonment. You have nothing.”
“I have money,” I replied. “In several banks, Sjolussene, Kevveler, and Asaen.”
“All well and good but you cannot draw on those funds at present. Perhaps when we reach Folau. Well, I expect we can see you outfitted for the voyage with what we have here.”
“Folau?” I said, offended. “Voyage?”
“Are you not listening, man? We are expelled. Her majesty’s entire mission and all our chattel. We must quit the capital before sunset tomorrow, presuming the Vengeance Tigers permit it—the realm within the week.” Turning away, she noticed Shàu standing mute by the door and made a moue of polite distaste. “Your boy, is he? I suppose he must accompany us. His life is forfeit if you were to abandon him.” Turning back to me, she sighed. “I expect her majesty’s governor-general in Defre
will feel obliged to launch some form of punitive action. She’s related somehow to the late envoy’s late companion.” Abruptly, the chargé made a sour grin. “I look forward with a certain glee to depositing the wretched orphaned daughter with her noble auntie. I don’t imagine you’d care to watch over her until Aveng?”
I said coldly, “She killed my dog.”
“A jest, man.” The chargé slapped my shoulder. “A jest in poor taste—my apologies. Now, you’ll forgive me, I have a great deal to do to organize this exodus. See the adjutant. He’ll get you sorted.”
The Vengeance Tigers mounted another chaotic assault against the mission that night. The downy-cheeked lieutenant’s forces frightened them off. In the austere chamber assigned to me I heard the gongs, the pop-pop of black-powder bomblets, the louder bangs of our militia’s guns. Sleeping Shàu on the pallet by my door whimpered when the noise entered his dreams until I slipped out of bed to comfort him.
We sailed downriver aboard a commandeered merchant vessel never meant to carry passengers, accompanied by a corvette of the imperial navy bearing the militia. We were halfway to Oesei, scudding along through the fertile floodplain of the Carnelian River, before I properly understood I was exiled from the Celestial Realm. Then it was I needed comforting, which Shàu managed with simple tact by requesting instruction in the Kandadal’s teachings.
At Oesei by great good fortune we met up with a packet boat of the Kevveler Company. On imperial credit, the chargé d’affaires bought passage to Folau, chief seaport of Her Imperial Majesty’s Protectorate of Aveng, for all her motley company bar the militia who continued aboard the corvette. One afternoon of the thirty-five-day voyage I witnessed the late envoy’s daughter lay into a yelping puppy with her parasol. I took considerable satisfaction in slapping her away and scooping the poor animal out of her reach.