“You’re a problem,” Yuet had said to her, with a slow smile that the efforts of the day and the potent rice wine had painted on her mouth. “Some day the Gods will come to me and tell me what I am supposed to do with you.”
In a way, that moment of unguarded honesty had catalyzed something in Tammary that Yuet might have done better to leave alone.
She had been a ‘problem’ back in the Traveler village, too.
The world, it seemed, was full of perfect niches made to seamlessly fit those destined to fill them. Tammary’s niche appeared not to exist. Oh, how the Gods must have laughed—the chayan ones and the Traveler ones, both, collaborating on a practical joke—when they had made her! Torn between the two cultures, Tammary was a peg made to fit two holes, but she had angles where one hole had curves, and curves where the other hole had angles, and she was uncomfortable and frustrated in both.
Tammary adapted, in the city, in the best way she knew how.
She had Court connections through her jin-shei circle, and she did not avoid the Palace, although Liudan was never told of Tammary’s true identity. But the stiffness of Court etiquette irritated Tammary, used as she had been to the Traveler freedom of dress and speech all her life. The ordinary folk of Linh-an, the people whom Yuet had once accused her of studying as though they were exotic animals in a menagerie, were a different story, and Tammary, after a year of being on the outer fringes of everything in Linh-an, began to explore the boundaries of taking part in the vivid life of the streets.
She had started spending more and more time at the city’s teahouses, and she explored the whole range, no matter what kind they were. She had first discovered them as a step down from the Court audiences, following the aristocracy into the plush teahouses of the inner city, where the benches had satin cushions with golden tassels on them and some of the older men, retired officials or minor Princes in their high-collared Court robes of silk brocade, would sit quietly puffing away at a bubbling pipe of viscid poppy brew, inducing mostly a gentle drifting stupor with a handful of vivid dreams interspersed in between. Tammary was recognized there—she was Yuet’s shadow, and someone with her coloring stood out like a fire-salamander among a clutch of brown geckos. People spoke to her with courtesy and with charm; she would have deeply philosophical conversations with the half-stoned old men and with ambitious junior members of the aristocracy or senior civil servants. But it was an environment only marginally less stuffy than the Palace, and Tammary quickly cast her net wider.
The community teahouses on the corners of major streets, out in the teeming residential streets of nonaristocratic Linh-an, were a totally different scene. When Tammary first started dropping in on these, she inevitably began by being a source of gossip, and the cause of much giggling behind fans and concealing hands of the neighborhood women. They quickly discovered that she was privy to a lot of stories they could have no hope of knowing anything about other than through her. When a few of the matriarchs started actively cultivating her, Tammary found herself a popular addition to the teahouse circles. But then she discovered the third kind of teahouse, one which the habitués of the other two considered only one step above the bawdy houses on streets like Nhia’s Street of the Night-walkers—the ones that were known as “water teahouses” because dispensing tea was not really the reason for their existence. And she passed from being a source of gossip about the upper crust to being a fount of gossip as and of herself.
In a way, the water teahouses finally released something that Tammary had kept in strict check ever since she had first arrived in Linh-an. There was a license there, inhibitions and stodginess were left at the door, and Tammary learned to dance to the music of the city. She had a sensuous nature and the lithe body of a young woman in the prime of her life. When the first men sat up and took notice, she saw the interest in their eyes, and taking her first lover had not been too great a step beyond that. He had not lasted long; Tammary, not finding what she sought, quickly turned away and sought another pair of interested eyes. Then another.
In the arms of these men she was not, however briefly, a “problem.” She shared her loneliness; she helped, maybe, someone else’s, however briefly.
“She’s gathering herself a reputation,” Qiaan, with her own burgeoning street informant network, had warned Nhia. “There’s talk of a party for her twenty-fourth birthday in the spring, and by all accounts it isn’t going to be an innocent party. Can’t Yuet do something?”
“I’ll talk to her,” Nhia said. “I’ll talk to both of them.”
But she hadn’t found an opportunity to speak to Tammary. And it wasn’t until she saw Tammary with her own eyes, walking away with a hot-eyed young man in the Street of the Nightwalkers, that Nhia had realized just how far things had gone.
For a moment Nhia had wondered if she had been projecting—she had just come from another meeting with the Beggar King, and the Street of the Nightwalkers, in its bright and glowing night guise, held some potent memories for her. She could not seem to forget the night that she had found herself there, straight off the ghost road, fresh from Lihui’s dark Palace—it was burned into her memory. But no—it had been a different season, and she had been a different person then, and in any event there had been no mistaking that spill of fox-colored hair tumbling loose down the back of a girl emerging from one of the houses in the Street. The red-haired girl had looked Nhia’s way, and the shock of recognition in those familiar dark eyes was too clear to be imagined, even across the expanse of darkening street. Tammary had dropped her gaze and looked away, tugging at her escort’s arm until he turned and walked with her away from Nhia, toward the far end of the street.
Nhia had told Yuet of Qiaan’s original warnings, but Yuet had been skeptical about the whole thing in the early stages, although she had avoided the direct question of just how many women there could be in Linh-an, with Tammary’s particular shade of hair color, to whom the gossip could be attached. When Nhia came to Yuet to tell her what she had now seen with her own eyes, Yuet had just stared at her.
“It just can’t be,” she said stubbornly. “I know she does go out to the teahouses and spends hours there, even the ones with a reputation, but not that kind of establishment. Not the Street. Tammary is a people-watcher, has been ever since she came here. Where else but in the teahouses … ? But no, she can’t be out at all hours like that, I could tell—there would be bags under her eyes from lack of sleep, a slump in her bearing. She works hard, you know, she doesn’t sleep the days away. She’d have collapsed by now.”
“Yuet,” Nhia said, “Qiaan says that they have a name for her in some of the teahouses you swear she has never set foot into—they call her the Dancer.”
“Oh, for the love of Cahan.” Yuet buried her face in her hands. “I don’t believe it. I just can’t! There is so much at stake for her.”
“I can show you,” Nhia said. “Qiaan even told me which teahouses she likes best.”
“All right,” Yuet said sharply. “I don’t need to go crawling after her to see. I am not her keeper—but I wish there was something I could do.”
“Talk to her. Better still, get Tai to talk to her. For some reason she listens to Tai more than to any of us.”
But it was already too late to keep the secret which Tammary had brought with her to the city. For it had not been any of the three who knew the truth about Tammary who got a chance to talk to her first.
Qiaan had a dozen or so personal “projects,” people she had taken an interest in over and above the requirements of several organizations which she now headed. One of these was a desperately poor family which had been blessed with two sets of twins in quick succession in the last three years, and who now had six children under five in the house. One of the latest set of twins had been born with a bad disability, a cleft lip which left the child unable to suckle naturally and almost unable to feed at all, and Qiaan had taken it upon herself to try and help in any way she could, knowing that the child was probably not go
ing to last the winter. Her visits to this home always left her unaccountably furious at the world in general. How could such a thing be allowed to happen? Why should an innocent child be made to suffer like that? The aides she had assembled around her knew better than to speak to her at all after one of these visits, until she had had a chance to control her anger or at the very least find some other hapless subject on which to vent it.
It was pure coincidence that, on her way home from this particular house, Qiaan passed by one of the “water teahouses” of worse repute than most, and looked up to find Tammary leaning on the doorjamb, wrapped in a warm woolen cloak dyed a rich dark green to set off the color of her hair, laughing up at a young man who had an arm tucked inside the cloak and was obviously doing things in there that were pleasing to her.
For all her other virtues, Qiaan had a broad prudish streak in her. The warnings she had channeled toward Nhia and Yuet about Tammary were partly based on a feeling of jin-shei obligation to protect a sister of the circle—and partly on a growing personal distaste for Tammary’s lifestyle. And now here it was, being flaunted in her face, and she was already full of that rage which made her aides scatter before her like chickens before a fox. Qiaan’s eyes narrowed and she marched across the street toward the couple, who were still oblivious to her presence. It was cold out in the street, and their breath came out in white gasping clouds as they laughed together; for some reason this only served to enrage Qiaan even further. Tammary was not only flouting Qiaan’s own personal code of behavior, she was going out of her way to do it in public, where she could flaunt it, where she could be sure that other people would see it, could hear the liquid laughter of seduction, could catch a scent of sex.
“You’re a scandal, you know that?” Qiaan hissed as she came up on the two lovers.
The young man whipped his head around, his mouth a round O of surprise, snatching his arm out from underneath Tammary’s cloak. Tammary herself, her eyes clouded by wine, merely pulled the cloak tighter about her and smiled languidly.
“It’s a bit late for you to be out, isn’t it?” she asked. “You’re usually in bed planning good deeds by now.”
“I’m taking you to bed,” Qiaan snapped.
Tammary laughed. “I prefer men,” she said.
But the man in question had seen the daggers in Qiaan’s eyes and the seduction scene out in the sharp winter air had been quite ruined for him. He muttered something to Tammary about “tomorrow,” and fled. The two women faced each other across the shallow steps leading up to the teahouse, a murmur of voices and laughter and faint music coming from inside.
“You’re a fanatic, Qiaan,” Tammary said. “Go home. Get some sleep.”
“You’re coming with me,” Qiaan said. “I told Yuet about this, but she has obviously said nothing to you. Don’t you know that the whole city is talking about you? Don’t you care? They are all just waiting their turn, those men. They don’t want you, they just want a chance at you—and you’re giving it away. You’re jin-shei to the Empress herself, for the love of Cahan. This isn’t the way that someone like you should behave.”
“You think the Empress sleeps alone?” Tammary said, her smile broadening a little. “There’s a plant which you can grow quite happily in a pretty pot in a corner of your room, Qiaan, and it even blooms with these dainty red flowers, and it’s a nice thing to look at in a room and nobody knows any different—but chew a leaf from that plant once a week, and you don’t have to worry about pregnancy any more. Liudan has four of them in her room. I gave them to her. And I’m sure that before that she had put pressure on Yuet to provide something else—or, if not Yuet, then some other healer willing to curry favor with the Empress by letting her taste the pleasure without the pain. We are not celibates by nature, we are made to be part of something that is not solitude.”
“At least she doesn’t flaunt it. If she has her flings, she is discreet about them,” Qiaan said sharply after a pause, outflanked. “She is an Emperor’s daughter, and she knows how to behave like one.”
“You think being an Emperor’s daughter makes you immune to the need to be loved?” Tammary asked, after a beat of silence. “Trust me, it doesn’t. I ought to know.”
She held Qiaan’s eyes for a moment, and then whirled, somewhat unsteadily, and vanished into the shadows of the street.
Qiaan had been too furious to register the remark at the time. While she stood where Tammary had left her, fighting to regain control of her ragged breathing and unclench her fists, she was also oblivious of the young man who had been dallying with Tammary on the steps—who had not gone too far, who had certainly been in earshot, and who, as soon as Qiaan had turned her back on the teahouse door and stamped away homeward, had slipped back into the crowded teahouse sharing his own interpretation of Tammary’s parting remark with an avid crowd.
When Yuet had finally confronted Tammary with her secret life, only a few days after that incident, it was already far too late. There were four different versions of the story in the bazaars, to be sure, but it was out, in the open. Tammary’s mother changed with every telling, but her father remained the same—the Ivory Emperor. Liudan’s father.
And, through him, Tammary was suddenly a single step away from a claim to the Empire.
“Do you have any idea what this could lead to?” Yuet said vehemently. “You may have endangered all of us. You may have endangered yourself. Liudan could …”
“Liudan won’t do anything to you,” Tammary said. “The whole mess predates you by a long way; it’s hardly your fault.”
“It’s partly my doing that you’re here in the city,” Yuet snapped.
“No, it’s mine,” Tai said. “It was I who told you to come with us.”
“Tai, I would have come anyway. Sooner or later.” Tammary’s voice had softened.
“But you wouldn’t have been under our protection then,” Tai said.
“I am not under your protection now,” Tammary said.
“Of course you are,” Yuet snapped. “You are jin-shei to both of us. We have a responsibility. We have a duty to each other. I had hoped that, knowing who you were …”
“Yuet, I have never known who I was,” Tammary said. “I have been searching for myself all my life. When I dance I think I touch it, a little—there is a memory there. As though my mother speaks to me through that. And men like it, and I like it that men like it—and for a while, at least, I think I can see a glimpse of who I might be in a lover’s eyes. But not for long. Never for long. It all comes full circle again, and the man is the wrong man, and I dance again to ask my questions, and a new man comes with pretty shining new answers in his hand.”
“I had hoped you could learn to be happy,” Tai said.
“Like you?” Tammary questioned gently. “Who would marry me, Tai? Even not knowing who I really am, let alone if the secret was told?”
“The secret has already been told,” Yuet said grimly.
“No it hasn’t!” said Tammary impatiently. “It’s marketplace rumor and hearsay. Are you telling me that there has never been any gossip about the bastard children of kings in a city like Linh-an before? I don’t believe that for a minute!”
“If there was,” Tai said, “it was never tied to a specific and identifiable individual. I am afraid you do rather stand out, Amri. There could be no doubt about the identity of this particular bastard child.”
“I have a really bad feeling about this,” Yuet said.
“Why? Does Liudan think I would go after her empire?” Tammary laughed. “I watched her, these last few years. She’s painted herself into a corner. I wouldn’t be in her shoes for anything. She is trapped, so trapped, perhaps the most trapped of us all.”
Tai had a sudden flashback to Antian’s poise and acceptance of her position and its responsibilities. Antian would have been a quiet force, acceding to tradition, marrying the best candidate she could find in order to make a gift of a good Emperor to her people, and then doing what all great E
mpresses did—rule the Empire at his side with advice, with empathy, with compassion, dealing with the big issues and leaving her mate and partner to cope with the day-to-day realities of government, as Syai’s traditions demanded. Liudan had chosen to take it all, and while she had always stood tall under the burden, Tai had not failed to notice that sometimes the smile on the young Empress’s face was no more than a grimace of pain as the load grew too heavy for a moment and she staggered under the weight of it. But Antian had been born of the Empress, and sired by the anointed Emperor—twice royal. Liudan was Liudan—her position handed to her by fate, a concubine’s child, her position a fluke, an unexpected twist of fate.
She was a good ruler, but she was an autocrat. She could not help it. She ruled with a fist of iron because otherwise she could not rule at all.
The fact that someone else with a claim to her position might reject it out of hand, as Tammary was now doing, would be almost incomprehensible to her. Liudan had wanted to be somebody, to be important, all of her life—she had ached for that as a little girl, and schemed and fought for it when she grew old enough to fight. Now that she had it in her hand she would do almost anything to keep it. Perhaps they had been wrong, perhaps they had all been wrong, in not going to Liudan with their knowledge in the first place.
Tai bit her lip. She had been the one to advise that, in a way. Had it been her mistake?
“We should go to Liudan,” Tai said unexpectedly. “We have left it late, perhaps too late, but it is better that she hears of this from us before she hears it from someone else.” She glanced up at Yuet. “I know you wanted things to be different, Yuet. But …”
“She may never even hear about it,” Tammary said, dismissing it.
“You underestimate her abilities,” Tai said. “She will know soon, if she does not know already. We’d better go and confess everything. I’ll do the talking, Yuet. It was for Antian’s sake, after all, that I went back to the mountains. She said to take care of her sisters and I’ll try to do that, as long as I can, as well as I can.”
The Secrets of Jin-shei Page 39