“Your stomach will hurt if you do that,” Tai laughed. “You’re meant to savor them, not inhale them. There, that’s the Temple. Yuet never took you there?”
Tammary shook her head, staring at the huge whitewashed walls of the Great Temple, the terraced domes that rose beyond them, and the high tower that soared above them. “So many walls,” she whispered. “So many walls …”
Tai glanced at her, a sudden understanding in her eyes, and then looked away again as though she had seen nothing. “Just a whirlwind tour,” she said, “this time. I’d like to light an incense stick for my mother since we’re here. It can’t do any harm to have the spirits watching over her.”
They joined a steady stream of people who were flowing into the closest of the Temple’s great gates, and Tai purchased her incense from a convenient First Circle vendor and passed through into the Second Circle, making her way to the shrine of Hsih-to, the Messenger of the Gods.
“What does it do?” Tammary asked reluctantly, as though it had been wrenched from her, watching Tai fixing the incense stick into a holder on the small altar.
“Hsih-to is a spirit of the Later Heaven,” Tai explained as she worked. “There are two kinds—the kind that were born mortal and achieved immortality through exalted rank or their great wisdom, like the Emperors or the Sages—people come and pray to them and ask them questions, so they can intercede for the supplicant with the higher powers of Cahan. Others, like Hsih-to, were made in Heaven; people have painted Hsih-to as a man with wings on his heels, or a man-headed eagle who bears the news to the Gods on their high mountains.”
“So what are you asking?”
“That they watch over my mother,” said Tai, her eyes suddenly bright. “That they save her from pain, and that they grant her peace.”
“Is she very ill?”
“She is dying,” Tai said.
“I’m sorry,” Tammary said, after a beat. “I … never knew my mother.”
“I know,” Tai said gently. She had been kneeling at the altar; now she rose to her feet again, and looked up at Tammary with a smile. “Do you wish to see the inner Circles today? We can come back, if you like, and explore some other time. But for now there is something else I want to show you.”
“What?” Tammary asked, a shade of wariness back in her voice.
“We’ll need a pedal cart,” Tai decided. “At least until the gate. It’s too far to walk in this heat. Can you whistle?”
Tammary, startled, nodded.
Tai led the way out of the Temple, and directed Tammary to whistle up a passenger pedal cart—which the red-haired girl did with such relish that no fewer than three carts came to a shuddering stop at the summons and looked expectantly their way. Tai, giggling, picked one of them and instructed the driver to take them to the Eastern Gate of Linh-an, set into the massive city wall. Tammary, her eyes raised to the great arch over her head as she stood within the gate, seemed to shrink at its towering magnificence.
Tai, glancing around, noticed the hunted look about her companion, and said, “Patience. From here, we walk.”
“But this is the end of the world,” Tammary said. “These walls, they are …”
“They are neither the end nor the beginning,” Tai said, leading the way through the gate and out onto the wide road beyond. “Nhia would be better at explaining this, but it is all a part of the Way—the Way is everything, and in everything, and there are no boundaries except the ones we draw. And even they do not ever keep us from anything, or anything from us. Look, there is the wall—and look, there is the gate that breaches it. There is a place here for the world to enter the city, and a place where the city can escape from itself.”
“Where are we going?” Tammary asked, leaning down to adjust a loose sandal strap that had slipped around her ankle.
“The hills,” Tai said. “That’s what you miss, isn’t it? The open sky? Look, look above you.”
It wasn’t the mountains in which she had grown up, but the rolling hills at Linh-an’s eastern flank at least gave the illusion of reaching for the blue summer sky flecked with high white cloud. The slopes closest to the walls were cultivated, with split-rail fences surrounding tidy orchards and a small vineyard or two. Tai quickly turned off the broad main thoroughfare, crowded with carts, sedan chairs, and other people on foot, and struck out into the hills. The path she chose was empty of other walkers. It skirted the orchard blocks, meandered past a duck pond where several inhabitants marked the passing of the two girls with a loud flurry of startled wings, and wound its way up a hillside where a mixed herd of grazing stock companionably chewed their cud together. After a short, easy climb they reached the top of the hill, and Tai turned back toward the city.
“Look.”
From the rise, small as it was, Tammary was able to glimpse the shape of the city beyond the encircling walls. She even recognized some landmarks, with a thrill of what was almost possession.
“That’s the Temple tower, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Tai said with a smile.
Tammary raised her eyes from the city to the sky, and sighed. “I do miss it. I miss the air singing in the high peaks, and the cry of Lastreb in the clouds.”
“What is that?” Tai asked.
“Lastreb? That’s my hawk,” Tammary said. “I raised him from a half-grown chick, and he used to come when I whistled for him.”
“Ah, so that’s where you learned to summon pedal carts like that,” Tai murmured.
Almost against her will, Tammary laughed. “And other things,” she said. “I made up a lay about him, but nobody ever cared to hear it except Raian.” The name brought back a stab of pain at the memory, and she broke off abruptly.
“If you would tell me,” Tai said after a pause, “I would be honored to hear it. I write myself, poetry and a journal every night.”
“Write? We don’t write. This was never written. Our lays and laments and tales are all spoken, told around firesides. We are the Travelers.”
“How do you pass things down to the generations that come after?” Tai asked. “It is so easy for the spoken word to be misremembered or forgotten.”
“Not to the chroniclers of the clans. They are our memory. They remember everything. Raian is one—because I told him my lay it is already part of the clan’s lore. But nobody else is likely to care about my Lastreb.”
“Tell me,” said Tai. “I would like to know.”
So Tammary gave her the song of the hawk, the liquid syllables of another language flung into the sky as though, if they were lucky enough and light enough, they might fly home and greet Lastreb the hawk who had once been a friend to a Traveler girl. Tai listened, transfixed.
“Can you translate it?” she asked, when Tammary was done. “Your language is beautiful, but I would like to hear you speak of Lastreb in words I can understand. I don’t have the ability to memorize it all, like your people do, but I would like to write it down so that I don’t forget it. So that it is not forgotten by anybody.”
Tammary was staring at her. “How would you write down something like this?”
“I’ll show you,” Tai said, and fumbled in the pouch at her waist for the red journal she always carried with her. She flipped through the pages carefully.
“Like this one,” she said, selecting one of her poems, and reading it out loud to Tammary. “That’s one of the early ones,” she said, when she was done, in a voice almost apologetic. “It’s not as good as some of the ones I did later, but I like that one.”
“How many have you got in that thing?” Tammary asked.
“Dozens,” Tai said. “They peel off like onion skins, except that the poems peel off on the inner layer, not on the outside—they come out from the heart of me.”
Tammary reached for the journal, and Tai let it slip into her hands; Tammary handled it reverently, almost with awe.
“There is a great Book of the Clans,” she said after a while, looking up, “where all our stories are written down.
Or so it is said. Raian believes it, anyway. But you have your own book right here in your hands, and you hold your own stories in your hand. Can you teach me this writing?”
“Of course,” said Tai, and her smile was luminous. “You are my jin-shei, and you have the right to jin-ashu. If you will tell me your hawk song, in our language, I will write it down for you and then you can start learning the script from a source that will at least be immediately familiar to you. But …”
“What?”
“You do realize,” Tai said, “that once you learn this script you can no longer tell Yuet that you cannot differentiate between willow bark and peppermint leaves?”
Tammary flushed, and then laughed. “I already know where every herb in Yuet’s stillroom is stored,” she said. “I have my clan’s memory; I remember the things that I see and hear. I can do all the recipes she has ever shown me. Blindfolded, and in the dark.” She ducked her head, half in triumph and half in embarrassment. “I just made sure,” she said, “that Yuet never knew that.”
Six
One week before her fifteenth birthday, Xaforn took her place in the ranks as a full-fledged Imperial Guard, the youngest ever to do so.
The incident with Qiaan and the cat might have held Xaforn back in her rapid advancement through the trainee ranks, but that was now history Ink the cat was now a full-grown queen who had, in the fullness of time, produced several litters of gorgeous kittens. As for Qiaan, she and Xaforn had managed to develop a mutually valued friendship from their initial prickly initiation into jin-shei. Xaforn had learned to appreciate the subtlety of the older girl, and Xaforn’s brash honesty and often tactless candor raised a mixed reaction in Qiaan, ranging from exasperation to frank envy of Xaforn’s ability to reduce situations to their most basic components and then act on them. If questions had to be asked, Xaforn asked them, and then did not waste an eternity pondering the answers before acting on them.
Not only by far the youngest cadet to graduate into the rank-and-file in her year, Xaforn had also been picked to perform the martial arts demonstration for the graduation ceremony of her intake. This was an annual affair, glittering and formal, which the Syai Emperors always traditionally attended—for this was their own Guard, the cream of the Syai army, the men and women whose most fundamental duty was the care and preservation of the Imperial family.
Nhia and Yuet had both accompanied Liudan on this particular occasion, sitting with her on the balcony decked out as her observation platform. It had banners fluttering on either side of it, yellow silk painted with scarlet dragons which boasted yellow topaz eyes and a glimmer of scales on their writhing forms picked out in real gold. The day was the first day of autumn, auspicious for several reasons—not only the graduation ceremony of the Imperial Guard, but also Liudan’s birthday and the opening day of her third Autumn Court.
The Dragon Empress, who had made sure that her Guard would stand behind her before she had claimed that title a year before, was resplendent in her glittering regalia. The Imperial Tiara of Syai, heavy with gems and gold, rested on her head with every appearance of having been meant for nobody but her. Even Yuet, who had known the Little Empress Antian during her years at Court at Szewan’s heels and who had never thought at the time that anybody else could ever be in Antian’s place, now found it hard to imagine that crown above any other face.
“Xaforn?” Liudan was saying now, that regal head turned toward Yuet at a quizzical tilt. “Why is it that I remember you mentioning that name to me?”
“I met her in my capacity as healer to the the Imperial Guard before we became jin-shei,” Yuet said. “I was telling you, I believe, of her reputation in the Guard, even then, even as a raw young trainee. Some of the most senior of the Imperial Guard have noticed this one—she is fierce and implacable and has a sometimes stiff-necked sense of honor that is all her own but which she also, sometimes inconveniently, expects all others around her to aspire to. She won’t even be fifteen until next week—that’s young to gather such a reputation, most especially in this outfit, among the best of the best.”
“What is it that she is supposed to do here today, then? I remember attending a few of these things when I was a child, with my family, but not many. It was always Antian who came, or Oylian.” There was still a bitterness here, a thorn that had worked its way deep into Liudan’s spirit and rested there, a permanent wound. “The one I attended here last year was … unremarkable. I don’t think I recall much of it. Did they have a demonstration then?”
“I wasn’t here last year,” Yuet said, “but you’d better not tell them that you don’t even remember last year’s top cadet. Part of the reason for this demonstration is to offer up the best of the new Guard for the personal attention of the one wearing the Tiara. I wonder what happened to last year’s top cadet. You probably have one very frustrated young man or woman in the Guard, Liudan, waiting a year for you to notice them.”
“I will not make the same mistake again,” said Liudan, with a touch of acid.
“No,” Yuet murmured, taking the words at face value, “I don’t believe you’ll forget this one.”
“She is that extraordinary?” Liudan said.
“You’ll see for yourself. Here she comes now.”
In the training grounds, now set up as the demonstration arena, several groups of trainees had already performed their highly choreographed routines for the Empress’s pleasure, to martial music being played by a small group of musicians on another balcony across from Liudan’s own, but they had cleared the area and the musicians had fallen silent. Xaforn, apparently, would perform her own routine in silence.
For this, the most martial of honors, Xaforn had been assisted in her preparations not by her Guard peers but by Qiaan, whom she had asked to be her companion. Captain Aric, Qiaan’s father, had been a little put out that she had agreed to Xaforn’s request.
“You never showed any interest in the Guard when I tried to get you involved,” he said to his daughter when she told him that Xaforn had come to her.
“Ah, but you had ulterior motives,” Qiaan had said.
“What motives?” Aric had demanded.
“You wanted me to be part of the Guard,” Qiaan had said. “You didn’t want me there as family, or by choice—you wanted me there by vow and by training. If I said yes to you I said yes to all that. And I never wanted to say yes to the Guard.”
“Your mother …” he began, but then fell silent, and would not be drawn further.
So Qiaan had been the one to help Xaforn into her dress armor, black with the yellow sun of Syai on her breastplate, and strapping on the matt black segmented leg plates.
Xaforn winced when Qiaan accidentally banged into her armored shoulder. Her new tattoo, the Red Dragon for the Dragon Empress, had been in place for only a few days and was still tender, cushioned by a pad of gauze under the armor.
“Wimp,” said Qiaan. “You’re supposed to be able to fight when you’re bleeding to death, or something like that. My father always said so, anyway. There are supposed to be legends about Guards who held off armies while wounded unto death and with one arm cut off.”
“For a Guard brat, you’re remarkably down on us,” Xaforn said conversationally, coiling up her braid to tuck it under the black winged helmet that Qiaan held ready to fasten onto the shoulder armor.
“I don’t believe in the patina of glory,” Qiaan said. “That’s probably why I keep on getting told I’m adopted. I just don’t buy into the Guard mystique. The Empress was born to her station, perhaps; I don’t think that a Guard is.”
“I was,” Xaforn said, her voice muffled by the helmet.
“Oh, you,” Qiaan said. “You’ve always had delusions of grandeur.”
“And you’ve always been humble?” Xaforn shot back. “Besides, I am good at what I do. Thanks, Qiaan. See you after the show!”
For once, she flounced out leaving Qiaan without her customary last word.
Emerging into her arena, alone, Xa
forn felt the weight of the expectant silence descend on her. She walked to the middle of the square, bowed to the Imperial box, and then stood for a moment, closing her eyes, breathing deeply, focusing on an inner light she always carried, something that showed her a center of balance from which she could leap outward. Her sense of time shifted in that strange way to which she had become accustomed, allowing her to see her opponent’s fastest moves in a sort of dreamy slow motion and let her respond in kind—to her senses. In the real world her every motion translated into movements almost too fast to be seen.
It’s a dance, she heard her instructor’s voice echoing in her head. Learn to control it. Learn to become it.
Xaforn started out with the simple things, the baby exercises, her movements really slow motion and exaggerating every step and gesture in the way that the instructors made the youngest cadets do them when they were still learning the routines. It was too simple, of course. People murmured, watching, when the movements began to flow into something ever faster, ever more graceful, ever more deadly, the dancelike weave in the air of a pair of delicate hands that could kill, until Xaforn was a black blur on the training ground, never faltering for a single step outside the tiny circle she had set for herself on the ground. When she stopped, very suddenly, facing the Imperial balcony and subsiding into absolute stillness again, Liudan nodded, fascinated.
“Impressive,” she said, raising her hands to applaud.
“Wait,” Yuet said hastily. “Don’t break her concentration. She isn’t finished yet.”
Liudan raised her eyebrow, but let her hands fall back into her lap.
Assistants brought an assortment of things into the ring now—a wall of woven rushes supported by a bamboo frame, a folding trestle table on which they set a large basket of fruit and vegetables ranging in size from apricots to a watermelon.
The Secrets of Jin-shei Page 32