The Secrets of Jin-shei

by Alma Alexander

  “When Han-fei crossed the Great River and entered the realm of the Gods,” she began, smoothing away Tai’s hair from her eyes with a motion as tender as a mother’s, “he walked far without meeting anyone, and keeping his eyes on the ground, so that he would not offend any being he met by looking at them without their permission. By and by he came upon a beach, and the beach opened onto a great lake, and the lake was dark and still, like a mirror, and beautiful. More beautiful still was the thing which he saw in the lake—glorious mountain peaks, rank upon rank of them, rising majestic and capped with snow, so high that the sky above them was eternally sprinkled with stars. ‘O, beautiful!’ he said, and fell to his knees in worship of it. And a voice said to him, “This is the image, Han-fei, now look up and behold the truth.” And Han-fei looked up, and the mountains were real and stood around the lake in all their majesty and were not offended that he looked upon them, and knew them, and loved them.” She paused. “It may be,” she said gently, “that the thing which you shared with the Little Empress is just a reflection of something greater and truer that will come to you, that she came to you to show you the way. That she was the image on which you must now build your truth.”

  Tai suddenly turned and gave Nhia a fierce hug. “You’ve always been my friend,” she said.

  “Sometimes I think you’ve been my only friend,” Nhia said with a trace of bitterness.

  Tai sat back and gave Nhia a long look. “That’s not true,” she said. “Everybody likes you. People are always asking you what you think. People trust you.”

  “People have never liked me, Tai,” Nhia said.

  “But you’ve solved all sorts of problems back in SoChi Street.”

  Nhia dismissed that accomplishment with a wave of her arm. “That’s not the same. People trust me, yes. Sometimes I think people tell me more than they think I ought to know. But that leads away from affection, not toward it! If they know I know all those things about them, yes, they trust me—but they will never like me. Folks never like those who know too much about them.”

  “You’re one of the wisest people I know,” Tai said sturdily, loyally.

  Nhia smiled. “That’s because you haven’t met many people yet.”

  “I have,” Tai said rebelliously “In the Summer Palace …”

  The words sank into a pool of silence that was sorrow. Nhia reached over and squeezed Tai’s cold fingers.

  “I know you have lost something wonderful,” she said. “But you’ve always been a little sister to me, Tai. Sometimes you really were the only person I could talk to. Whatever else happens in either of our lives, I wanted you to know that. It doesn’t make up for the Little Empress, but …”

  “But I’ve had a real, live jin-shei-bao living next door to me all my life and I never knew it,” Tai said.

  Nhia gave her a startled look. “That’s not what I meant,” she began, but Tai turned her hand and laced her fingers through the older girl’s.

  “But I mean it,” she said, “if you wish it.”

  For a moment, Nhia could not find the voice to speak at all, and then, when the words did come, they were raw with emotion.

  “I can hardly take the place of the first heart’s-sister, of the one who would have been Empress,” she said, “but I’ll be your sister if you want me to be. I would be proud to have you call me that.”

  That had been the second gift, another jin-shei, another place for the love that had been Antian’s legacy to be bestowed.

  The third gift of the Gods had been even more unexpected.

  Five

  Although she’d been coming to the Temple since she was a babe in arms, it had been only in the last year or so that Nhia’s presence had begun making a real impact there. She had barely turned fourteen when she and a young acolyte she had been in conversation with had been approached by a politely deferential older woman who posed the question—to the acolyte—as to which deity she should approach with her problem. “Help me, blessed one, for I am not certain which of the Gods would be best to approach—I am not worthy of what is being asked of me, I need to know …”

  It had been Nhia, aged only fourteen and not bound to the Temple hierarchy at all, who had responded to this plea, with a story of Han-fei, the hapless adventurer whose encounters with Gods and Immortals were such a fertile ground to harvest good advice from.

  “When Han-fei met with an Immortal beyond the river Inderyn where the Heavens are,” Nhia had spoken into the expectant silence, while the Temple acolyte was still pondering the question, “he threw himself at the feet of the Blessed Sage and would not raise his eyes from the hem of the robe that the Immortal Sage wore. ‘I am not worthy, O Blessed One, I am not worthy!’ The Sage said, ‘What do you see when you look into the mirror, Han-fei?’ And Han-fei said, ‘I see a man with no beauty in his face and no wisdom in his mind and no humility in his spirit.’ And the Sage bade Han-fei take a mirror from his hand and said, ‘Then look again, for what I see is a man with the beauty of face which is a reflection of the modesty of his soul, with the wisdom of mind to know what he does not know, and with the humility of spirit to spend his life in trying to learn and understand the things he is ignorant of. Rise, Han-fei, for you are worthy.’”

  The woman had taken Nhia’s hand and kissed it, in silence, and backed away, bowing. The acolyte had stood and stared at Nhia for a long moment.

  “Where did you learn that tale?” he had asked.

  “I hear many of them, in these halls,” Nhia had said. “I see the teaching monks with the children in the courtyards sometimes. I listen, and I remember them.”

  “That is good,” the acolyte had said carefully, “except that the one you just told has never been one of the teaching tales. For all I know, it has never been recorded as having happened to Han-fei.”

  “I didn’t just make it up!” Nhia had protested, her heart lurching into her heels. “I must have heard it.”

  “You invented it, Nhia, and it was perfect,” the acolyte had said.

  Nhia’s first reaction was a rising panic. “Don’t tell anyone,” she pleaded. “I won’t do it again. I just meant to …”

  “But why ever not?” the acolyte had asked. “You’re a natural teacher. Perhaps one day you will even be a real part of this Temple; you already know more than some who have been pledged to it for years.”

  Whether or not the acolyte told anyone about the incident, Nhia never found out—but only because events overtook her. Even if the acolyte had held his tongue, the woman to whom Nhia had told her Han-fei tale obviously had not.

  Haggling over a fish at the marketplace, perhaps a week or so after the encounter at the Temple, Nhia turned to a gentle tugging on her sleeve and was surprised to recognize the seeker from the Temple. The woman was accompanied by a brace of small children, one of them only a few years younger than Nhia herself, all of whom stared at Nhia inscrutably. Nhia stared back, nonplussed.

  “I wished to thank you, young sai’an,” the woman said in a low, deferential voice. “You have helped me understand. My husband’s mother is in need of your wise words, also, but she is bedridden and cannot go to Temple often. Perhaps if you would come?”

  “But I am not one of the blessed ones of the Temple,” Nhia had said helplessly.

  Just for a moment, the woman looked surprised, and then her expression settled into certainty again. “Maybe you are not one of the ones wearing the robes, sai’an, but you have the wisdom of the Immortals in you. My mother-in-law would be grateful if you would come. If only for a few moments. We live in ZhuChao Street, in the yellow house on the corner. If you please, sai’an.”

  Nhia had wanted nothing more than to bolt into the midst of the marketplace and to lose herself in the crowds—but she could not run. She could not ever run. Not from this; not from anything. The irony of this made a wry grin touch her lips. The woman interpreted this as acceptance, or dismissal—in any event she had backed away, bowing, accompanied by her brood.

  S
everal other customers at the fishmonger’s stall had been witness to this exchange, and the fishmonger himself, who had known Nhia from babyhood, stood with her intended purchase still in his hand.

  “So you are a Sage, now, young NhiNhi,” the fishmonger had said. There was an attempt at levity there, but there was something else also—a curiosity, a careful interest. The marketplace lived by gossip and rumor, this was how the news was spread from one corner of the sprawling city that was Linh-an to the next. There was, maybe, a story here.

  “I am no such thing,” Nhia had said, very firmly, and had brought the subject of the conversation back to the fish.

  But another woman had stopped her in the street two days later, asking a very specific question. The question concerned the child whom she held by the hand and who stood staring at Nhia with the blank obsidian gaze which was very familiar to her. She had worn that mask herself. The child’s other arm and hand, not the one held by her mother, were thin and withered, her fingers bent into a pitiful claw which she held folded into her belly. This was another Nhia, a cripple whose mother was driven to ask for help where she thought she could find it.

  Perhaps it was this that made Nhia speak to her. There had been a parable to fit. Then she had told another tale, directly to the child, another Han-fei story but one aimed at the old pain so familiar to herself, trying to ease the little one’s burden. She had been rewarded with a softening of the eyes, a shy smile. The mother noticed, and her own eyes lit up. She took the incident away with her, cherished it, spoke of it.

  After that, more came.

  Somehow, before she reached her fifteenth birthday, Nhia had found herself sitting in an unoccupied booth in the First Circle one morning, telling teaching tales to a gaggle of children at her feet. At first it was an irregular thing, just every so often—when sufficient numbers of young disciples accumulated around her, Nhia would sit down somewhere, they would all sit subside on the ground around her, and the cry “A story! A story!” would be raised. But it quickly grew into something more. Something that became striking enough to warrant the attention of the Temple priestly caste. Several times, in the middle of one of her tales, Nhia would look up and catch the glimpse of a discreet observer, an acolyte draped in Temple robes, who would stand with eyes downcast and hands folded into his sleeves and listen intently to what she was saying. When she caught their presence, Nhia tried to be careful and tell only the tales she knew she had heard before here in the Temple, told by the Temple Sages and teachers. But it was sometimes hard to remember which ones she was sure about. All of the stories she told sounded so old and familiar to her. Which ones were old and venerable teaching parables, and which ones had she just invented?

  Li, Nhia’s mother, had been wary of the whole thing, and afraid that the Temple would take exception to Nhia’s activities—especially since she often told her stories in the Temple’s own precincts.

  “These are games,” Li had said, “and they can be dangerous. You are setting yourself up above the people. You have had your Xat-Wau, and you are no longer a child, Nhia—think about what it is that you want to do with the rest of your life.”

  “But perhaps I am already doing that,” Nhia had said slowly.

  No marriage; no children; she had come to terms with that. But perhaps these could be her children, the ones who came to her and whose lives she knew she could touch, could sometimes heal. She had much to learn—but already, it seemed, she had much to teach, also. A part of her gloried in it. Her body could not run—but her spirit could fly.

  But Li had not been entirely convinced of her daughter’s calling. She even gone so far as to approach one of the higher-ranked Temple priests, and ask for absolution if Nhia presumed.

  “We considered chastisement,” the priest had told Li, “but first we listened to what she had to say. She makes the children hear her. She has said nothing to which we have taken exception. We think that it has gone far enough that, if she did not do it here, she would do it elsewhere—out in the marketplace, or in the streets.”

  “Not if you forbade it, sei.”

  “But why would we forbid it? Those she touches come straight home to us. She does the Temple’s work,” the priest had said. There had been something complacent in his smile, but the priests of the Temple had always been pragmatic about their religion. A Temple which had an entire thriving outer circle devoted to the commerce of faith could not be other. “But I understand your concern—we will make sure she is taught.”

  So Nhia’s life had started to turn around the Temple, more and more. She taught the young, and in her turn she learned the meditations and the mental purifications of the zhao-cha, reaching out to touch the edges of the luminous, following Han-fei into the gardens of the Gods in search of the Fruit of Wisdom.

  Khailin, daughter of Cheleh the Chronicler, had made it her business to keep the crippled girl who had attracted the attention of Sage Lihui under observation. In the months following that encounter in the Temple, Khailin had found out that Nhia frequented the Temple Circles, and had many friends there. She also found out that she and Nhia had more in common than she had thought. Although their focus and their ultimate desires were different, colored in part by their differing stations in life and their place in Linh-an society, they shared an interest in the Way and in the manner in which it functioned. Nhia’s interest was more in the wisdom and the purity of the path—the zhao-cha, the internal alchemy of the mind and spirit, the calling of the sage, the seer, the wise-woman. Khailin was more attracted to the yang-cha—its rituals, its mathematical magic, its chemistry, its eminently practical nature. They had both been driven to learn, to understand. This was something which Khailin could build on. This could even be part of the reason the Sage Lihui had been interested in Nhia; perhaps he had been drawn to the fierce flame of curiosity, intelligence, yearning to learn. Perhaps, Khailin thought, she and Nhia could be useful to one another.

  So she had started keeping an eye out for Nhia at the Temple. A part of Khailin marveled at how Nhia had found a way of gaining access to all the disciplines of the Way. And she had done it all without reading a single hacha-ashu manuscript about forbidden things. Khailin was uncomfortably aware that her own time was running out.

  She had already rejected several suitors whose representatives had come bearing the so ji, the carved jade marriage proposal token. All it had taken, as tradition had it, was her refusal to accept the small sculpture into her own hands from the formally attired elderly aunts and cousins who had been entrusted with its delivery. As my beloved wishes, the words had originally meant. If the bride or groom being courted accepted the token, the marriage proposal was deemed to have been accepted, and the betrothal was official from that moment. Khailin’s suitors had not been to her liking—one had come from a large and tradition-hidebound family, which would have trammeled her like a wild bird in a cage; another had been a man quite a few years her senior, with whom she already had a passing acquaintance at Court and whom she could have accepted except for her utter inability to get past his constantly sweaty palms which, upon reflection, she decided she could not bear near her on a regular basis.

  When two emissaries of a Prince of Syai came calling just before her Xat-Wau ceremony was due to take place, Cheleh had made it clear to his wayward older daughter that another refusal would have been severely frowned upon. The Prince was young, positively callow, precisely the kind of vacuous young man Khailin had no wish to marry. She could see herself delivered into the soft life of the noble houses, being an obedient young wife, having to obey endless rules of protocol and decorum, having to endure the hated ritual baths with the rest of the pampered ladies—perhaps never again to have access to the kind of arcane information she craved or the opportunity to test her knowledge … but, on the other hand, she would be a Princess, which was a kind of power in its own right. And the young husband-to-be might be sufficiently moldable into the kind of husband Khailin could live with. The kind of husband who could, i
f necessary, be hoodwinked into closing his eyes to her study of the yang-cha.

  Khailin had accepted the Prince’s token, gritting her teeth. The wedding would take place the following summer, but in the meantime Khailin had done her best to make sure that her betrothal did not interfere unduly with the last year or so of freedom. It could turn out well—it might have been for the best—but sometimes she wished savagely that her body was crippled like Nhia’s was—that a good marriage had been harder to arrange. That she had been given more time.

  But perhaps Nhia herself would open a few doors.

  So Khailin made sure that their paths crossed in the Temple, that Nhia learned to recognize her face, that they started nodding at one another in passing, that they finally exchanged a word of greeting, and then of conversation. Khailin the courtier had cultivated Nhia with all the precision and cunning of any seeker in quest of favors from a higher-ranked aristocrat or sage.

  For once, the things that Nhia was being told were not because someone instinctively trusted her with the information, but rather because this was the information that somebody else wished her to know. Since she had never had to field such an approach before, she had not recognized it as artificial; she had accepted Khailin’s overtures, after a startled wariness that such a one would seek her company, with pleasure. She had found a companion of her own age with whom she could discuss the things that interested her.

  They spoke of many things, and Khailin, despite the initial venal motives with which she had approached this relationship, found herself growing to like Nhia. She was surprised by a stab of jealousy when Nhia inevitably spoke of Tai, her only close companion before Khailin herself had appeared on the scene.

  “She is so small and delicate,” Nhia had said to Khailin as they walked in the Temple, less than a week before the Emperor’s funeral procession was due to take to Linh-an’s streets. “She wanted so much to say good-bye, but she won’t even see it, not if she is out in the street, behind the crowds.”