The Secrets of Jin-shei

by Alma Alexander

  The duty done, Tai turned to a less demanding task but one that she had always enjoyed a great deal. She fetched her inkwell and brush and the cheap journal book she had been given on New Year’s Day, its thin paper already curling as she opened the cowhide binding. There was a lot to write this day, and nothing at all; for a while she sat nibbling on the already well-chewed end of her wooden brush, and then wrote with quick, neat strokes, forming the jin-ashu letters of the secret language which her mother had been teaching her since she was six years old:

  Met Princess. She liked my drawing. She wore my embroidery. I was proud of both, even though I don’t think I am very good with the chalk yet. Saw sunset from balconies, and the golden river flowing west, as always. Saw stars come out. Today something has changed.

  Two

  Tai stayed away from the inner gardens for several days after her meeting with the Little Empress. She could not have said why—she had felt both exhilarated and frightened by her encounter with Antian, and something in her preferred to avoid a repetition until she could sort it all out in her head.

  She made herself useful to her mother instead. She had been trained well, by a renowned artist, and despite her tender age she was already an accomplished seamstress and needleworker, with a gift for design and a meticulous transformation from sketch or a mere mind-picture to magnificent court garb embroidery. The hem on Antian’s gown had been simple, an early attempt. By this time Rimshi was trusting her daughter with gold embroidery, with designs including pearls and little pieces of colored glass, with complicated swirls representing dragons and water-serpents. Tai had been working on one particular design, using the stylized symbol for the Female Earth symbol of the Buffalo—her own birth sign—for some time, her small, neat stitching covering the hem and the edges of a heavy formal outer robe made of stiff brocaded golden silk; she used her days of self-imposed exile from the gardens to devote herself to finishing this complex task. When she handed the completed robe to Rimshi for inspection, her mother smiled at her, covering her mouth with one hand as was her habit to hide a missing tooth.

  “This one is for your friend,” Rimshi said.

  Tai would not have claimed the friendship, but knew immediately to whom Rimshi was referring. Her cheeks flushed scarlet. “For the princess? This is for the Little Empress?”

  “Herself. You cannot avoid what is there for you,” Rimshi said, rather cryptically. She was given to being oracular sometimes.

  Tai went back to the garden the next morning, early, while the quick-drying summer dew was still on the flowers. Some were still closed, sleepily waiting for the sun to clear the high walls and pour its golden light into the courtyard, and others were open, eager, breathing in the morning air. It was already warm.

  She had brought her drawing stuff but the garden was still drowsy with morning and only just stirring into life. She rarely went out onto the balconies in the morning, because their treasure lay in the sunset hour, but she decided to go out and sit looking at the mountains until the butterflies returned to the inner courts.

  She had thought she would be alone out here, but drew a startled breath as she padded out onto the smooth paving stone of the terrace, paper and chalk under her arm, and saw that someone was already there.

  Someone with her hair dressed in two long, simple, unadorned black braids which reached almost to the backs of her knees, dressed in the sleeveless robe whose hem Tai recognized. Someone who turned at her approach, and smiled, motioning her forward.

  “I looked for you in the garden,” Antian said, with only the faintest tone of command in her voice.

  “I was working on a robe,” Tai said. And then, because she couldn’t help it, smiled. “Yours, Princess. The one with the buffalo border. I share the sign.”

  “I have not seen it yet,” Antian said, returning the smile. “I look forward to it, knowing the hand that worked it. Have you been drawing?”

  “Not in the last few days, Princess.”

  “Call me Antian,” said the other, with a wave of her hand. “We are alone, and there is no need for protocol here, in this place, halfway between heaven and earth.”

  “I come here in the evenings,” Tai said carefully.

  “And I, in the mornings,” said the princess, with a little laugh. “And nobody else I know comes here at all.”

  “Why?” Tai asked, looking at the valley and the river below them. The light was different, bright, molten-white summer morning sunshine; it almost blotted out the looming mountains with its sheer intensity. “Why the morning? You can’t see anything.”

  “My time is less my own in the evenings,” Antian said. “Tell me about what you come here to see.”

  So Tai described, haltingly at first, then with increasing confidence, the golden river flowing into the sunset—and then the new thing she had absorbed for the first time only the other day, the stars coming out in the summer sky. Antian listened, not interrupting, until Tai came to a halt and drew a deep breath, her eyes still shining with her vision. She realized that the Princess was watching her with a small smile of admiration lighting the slanted dark eyes.

  “You have a gift,” she said. “You have the sight and the tongue of a poet. Not only through your hands but through your heart and your mind and what you see and you hear.” She tossed her head impatiently. “So few around me have that ability,” she said, “to paint me a picture—with chalk, or with thread, or with words. I have to come here at sunset one day and see these things of which you have spoken. Would you like to join my household?”

  The last was unexpected, a question that rounded the corner of the rest of Antian’s words and ambushed Tai with the force of a blow in the stomach. Her eyes were wide with consternation, but what came out was something that was surprised out of her, something that, had she had the remotest chance of thinking about, she could never have said at all.

  “No, Princess.”

  They stared at each other in mutual shock—one because she was not used to being refused, the other because she could not believe that she had just uttered the words of refusal to the face of an Imperial Princess.

  But Tai knew why she had said what she had said. Driven to explain, to take back that blurted no that had come tumbling out of her, she raised the hand which still clutched her chalks and her paper.

  “Princess … Antian … I … I am honored. But my mother has told me …”

  “Don’t look like that. You are not a slave, and I won’t go out and buy you with gold,” Antian said, her voice startlingly sad. “I like the way you make me see things. That’s all.”

  “My mother has told me something of the Imperial Court,” Tai said. “Of the way things are done, they have to be done, the way everyone’s life is planned and controlled, the way you have to make sure your hair is in place and your hands are in position and you are not allowed to smile or to talk or to look where you are not supposed to look.”

  “Yes,” said Antian, “I know.”

  “I would have to be like that, too. And that would mean … I couldn’t watch the butterflies.”

  “I know,” said Antian again, this time with a sigh. “You are right. It is a life that binds. You made the buffalo robe with vision but I will wear it with ceremony. I was just wishing … for someone to let me see the things that ceremony makes me blind to.” She looked up at the battlements behind them, rising tier upon tier, and straightened. “I should probably go in now,” she said, suddenly reverting to a curious formality. “I will look forward to seeing you in the gardens again soon, Painter of Butterflies.”

  “Wait,” said Tai impulsively as the princess turned to leave. Antian turned her head, watched as Tai fumbled within her sheaf of papers, extracted the drawing she had been working on the day Antian had first seen her in the gardens. She held it out, suddenly shy. “I’d like you … to have this … if you want to.”

  Antian took the somewhat smudged drawing with a small smile. “Thank you,” she said. There was the slightest
of hesitations, as though she had meant to say something else and caught herself, and then she merely inclined her head in a tiny regal motion and turned away.

  Tai stayed on the balcony for a long time, alone, staring out into the valley.

  “The Little Empress liked her gown,” Rimshi said to Tai when she returned to their room later that day after an afternoon fitting session with the princesses. “I told her it was mostly your work, and she was pleased to give me something for you.”

  Tai looked up, wary. “For me?”

  “So she said.” Rimshi raised her hand to cover her smile. “I have brought it to you, here. She said, ‘Tell your daughter that this is for the butterflies and for the golden river.’”

  Tai took the small square package wrapped in an oddment of scarlet silk and unfolded the material to reveal a small book, a journal with a hundred pages gleaming white and blank and waiting to be filled with thoughts and visions, bound in soft, bright red leather with leather ties to hold it closed. Tai’s hands caressed the smooth binding, opened and closed the book several times. Tears which she could not explain stung her eyes. This, after she had told Antian no?

  “This is a precious thing,” Rimshi said, observing her daughter’s reaction. “She thinks highly of you, it seems.”

  “She likes what I see,” Tai murmured.

  “Ah,” said Rimshi, still smiling. “Use it well, then, to share that vision.”

  “Look,” Tai said suddenly, lifting a piece of very fine paper which had been laid between the last page and the back cover. “There is something else here. Look!”

  “It looks like a letter,” Rimshi said.

  Tai looked up in consternation. “I cannot read letters!”

  “This one you can, I think,” Rimshi said. “She would have written in the women’s tongue.”

  “Jin-ashu? The princesses know jin-ashu, too?”

  “All women know jin-ashu,” murmured Rimshi. “It is our language, the language of jin-shei—passed from mother to daughter from the dawn of time, letting us speak freely of the thoughts and dreams and desires hidden deep in a woman’s heart. Of things men do not understand and do not need to know.”

  Tai opened the folded piece of paper with reverence. “There is only one thing here,” she said.

  “What does it say?” Rimshi asked, although she knew, and her heart leapt at what her daughter had just been given.

  Tai lifted shining eyes. “Jin-shei,” she whispered.

  So young …

  Rimshi had been twelve years old when she had exchanged her first jin-shei vow—with Meilin, the daughter and heir of a family which owned a thriving silk business in Linh-an. It was in their workshop that the young Rimshi had first seen silk thread, had first touched silk cloth, had embroidered her first clumsy sampler in silk—all when she was younger still, much younger than twelve years old. And then the friendship with Meilin had deepened into something else, and they had said the words to each other—jin-shei. After that Meilin, the elder by a handful of years and therefore more accomplished, saw to it that Rimshi’s talents were noticed, and she had been given training and instruction in the silk embroidery.

  Jin-shei had shaped Rimshi’s life—it was jin-shei that gave her the gift of her trade, and it was jin-shei, with another jin-shei-bao who had gone on to be an Emperor’s concubine, that had given her the place to practice it. Rimshi had told Tai about the second story and Tai knew all about the romance of it, the glory of the poor but beautiful girl being taken into the Imperial Palace to be a princess. Tai knew only the light of jin-shei, its joys; Rimshi had thought she would still have time to teach her daughter about its duties and its responsibilities. And now it was here, offered by a girl who would be Empress one day.

  It could be refused, simply by making no response to the offer, by not accepting jin-shei by responding with the same words. But Rimshi looked at Tai’s face and the bright wide eyes and could think of no reason for her to refuse this great gift that she had been offered. There would be time still, Cahan willing, to teach Tai about the true meaning of the sisterhood—time enough for everything.

  But right now it was a star, a bright and glorious thing that lit up Tai and made her whole being glow with the joy of it.

  “Jin-shei,” Tai repeated, almost with awe. “The Little Empress wants me to be her friend.”

  Rimshi slipped an arm around her daughter’s thin shoulders and hugged her into her side, tightly. “The Little Empress,” she said, “wants you to be her sister, my Tai.”

  Three

  Summer wrapped Linh-an, the capital city of Syai, like a shroud. The walls of the city shimmered with it well before the bells of noon from the Great Temple. But summer or winter, the Imperial Guard compound had its routine. The trainees traditionally found something to whine about in every season of the year. Come late autumn they would complain about being expected to do their drills in the cold rain; in winter they would carp about chilblains and frostbite; now, with summer just beginning to settle in, they did their maneuvers in the cobbled practice yard, the heat reflecting off the gray compound walls, the straw-covered cobbles warm through the thin soles of their practice boots in which their feet slid and sweated. The orderly hierarchies were observed here as everywhere in Linh-an—the elite cohorts practiced in the cool of the early morning, or in the early evening when the evening breezes would start to cool their bare arms, sheened with sweat. They made it all look so easy—the choreographed fights with single blade, double blades, iron-tipped staves, unarmed wrestling in the corner of the yard where the ground was left unpaved to lessen risk of injury. They wore black pants, tucked into their boots, and black sleeveless practice singlets, men and women alike; a bandanna tied low on their forehead mopped up the sweat dripping into their eyes. These were the old pros, the survivors, their arms tattooed with the insignia of several Emperors. The oldest of them wore up to three or even four—the tusk for the Ivory Emperor, currently on Syai’s throne, then the sigils that had belonged to the Sapphire Emperor, the Serpent Emperor. Two even wore the sign of the Lapis Emperor—the oldest of the Guard, the best.

  The current cadre, Guardsmen and Guardswomen with a single tattoo or maybe two, trained straight after the elite forces while the mornings were still as cool as they were going to be in that molten summer, or just before them, in the shimmering heat which pooled in the courtyards in the late afternoon. That left the practice yard free for the rest of the day for the young ones, the children raised by the Guard to fill their ranks.

  Often these were the sons and daughters of the Guard, but these children were not forced into their parents’ profession, and there were always gaps to be filled. With the unwanted, the orphaned, the abandoned—the ones adopted, clothed and fed by the Guard, the ones who owed their life to the Guard. It wasn’t indenture, quite, but in some ways it was worse. Although there was always a theoretical out for a child like this, they were never allowed to forget their debt to the Guard, and by the time they were old enough to choose for themselves they could not choose other than the only life they had ever known. Sometimes barely weaned babies, still in their swaddling clothes, were found abandoned on the doorstep of the Guard compound—orphans or children from families too poor to raise them. That had been Xaforn’s lineage.

  The only thing Xaforn knew about herself was that she belonged to the Guard. There had been nothing left with her when she was found—no amulet, no word, not even a name. All of what she was, all of who she was, she owed to the Guard. She had started watching the elite forces at their daily drills when she was barely five years old, and by the time she was seven and her own cadre of youngsters had been started out on the basic falls, rolls and gymnastics training she had been practicing a few things on her own and shone out like a diamond. She was tough and wiry, long-legged, with promise of height; hard daily physical exercise kept her lean and limber. Within six months of starting training she had been plucked from the novices who were still stumbling around getting no
more than bruises out of their early training and started as the youngest trainee in the cadre two levels above raw beginners. She was two, even three years younger than everyone else in her “class,” and the fact that she was better than many of them earned her few friends in the cadre. She preferred it that way. She was one of the few to take whatever the season threw at her without a word, without a whimper—summer sweats or winter chills, she was Guard, and she trained with a focus and a silent concentration which sometimes scared even her teachers.

  “That one will kill early, or be killed,” they’d tell each other, watching Xaforn go through her exercises.

  “Be killed in training,” they’d add, as they watched her challenge much more advanced opponents to practice fights, and lose, and challenge again with her strategy and her movements changed from one fight to the next, learning from every defeat, every mistake.

  “She scares me,” one of the three-tattoo elites had murmured once, watching Xaforn trying to perfect a particularly difficult kick, doing it again and again, losing her balance, refusing to accept defeat. “Give her a few more years in the practice yard, and I’d send Xaforn to guard the Palace alone against an invasion of barbarians from the plains. They’d be dead of exhaustion before any of them got close enough to wound her.”