Tammary looked up.
“If it’s young Mei, tell her the herbs are on the table in the kitchen,” she said, but something in Zhan’s expression made her drop the wool and sit up sharply. “What? What is it?”
“It isn’t Mei,” Zhan said, and stepped aside.
Tammary dropped her spindle, snarling the thread but heedless of the damage, and surged to her feet.
“Tai!” she cried, throwing her arms around the younger woman with the joyful abandon of a small child. “Oh, Tai, it’s good to see you.”
Tai, laughing and crying, returned the hug generously, and then held Tammary out at an arm’s length, giving her an approving once-over from head to foot.
“You look well,” Tai said. “Motherhood agrees with you.”
“This place agrees with me,” Tammary said, throwing out an expansive arm to indicate the house at her back, its windows flung open to summer sunshine, and the sweep of sward which fell toward a line of trees and the distant glitter of sun on water. Beyond the house, a range of mountains reared on the horizon, some snow-capped even this late in the season, beyond a swathe of forest on their lower slopes. “No walls,” Tammary said. “No fear. No expectations. Nobody here knows me as anything other than Zhan’s wife, Jovanna’s mother, the wise-woman who can deliver an infusion against a headache or a poultice to help heal a cut or a paste to rub on an infant’s gums when it starts teething. And I am content, Tai.”
“You were always fascinated by people, loved to watch them,” Tai murmured, “but you are so isolated out here. Don’t you miss it sometimes?”
“The city? No, Tai. Never. Not once.” Tammary said gently. “It is a part of what made me—but now that I know about that part of my heritage, that is all it is, the past. There is nothing left for me there anymore. But tell me your news.”
“It has been a hard year,” Tai said, her voice tight with the pain of the recent months. “There have been too many funerals. Do you remember my wedding, Amri? All of you standing around me—Yuet and Qiaan and Xaforn and Nhia. All of them gone now. And Khailin has disappeared. I got a letter from her, only one since she vanished, and she said that she was content where she is—but she did not tell me where that is. She seems to have found a home, and a mate.”
“Maxao?” Tammary said, her eyes wide.
“No,” Tai said, smiling despite herself. “I don’t think it’s Maxao. She let it slip in the letter that maybe, if Cahan was willing, she will learn what it is like to have a different kind of immortality. I think what she meant was that she was hoping that she might one day have children of her own. I don’t think Maxao has those plans in his future.”
“It is strange,” Tammary said, “of us all only you … you and I …”
“I thought I saw Khailin at Nhia’s funeral, but she disappeared before I had a chance to try and speak to her, if indeed it was her. She, more even than you, has turned her back on the city. I think that she, too, is seeking this—exactly this.” Tai lifted her eyes to the mountains, and then beyond them, to the clear summer sky streaked with high feathery clouds.
Tammary’s eyes were full of tears. “I wept for all of them. The streets of Linh-an must be empty for you.”
“There is nobody left but Liudan and me,” Tai said. “And Liudan … Liudan is what I came to talk to you about.”
“Did you tell her where I was?” Tammary said, and a wary, almost haunted look came into her eyes for a moment.
“No,” Tai said, “but she does know that you are alive, and happy, and that I know where you are. And I will say no more than that, not without your permission. But she has changed, Amri. The events of this last year have changed her utterly. She has had a great burden to bear, and she almost broke underneath it.”
“She chose it,” Tammary said. She folded her arms across her chest, hugging her shoulders, and paced across the grass before her home. “She wanted it. She wanted to be the Dragon Empress. She put her own shoulder to the wheel, and would accept no partner to help share the load. I know all this. All of you told me the story in your own way at some time or another—you, Yuet, Nhia. What has changed now?”
“Everything,” Tai said. “The future has changed shape, and Liudan is tired. I don’t think she even realized how much she depended on Nhia until Nhia was no longer there.” Tai’s voice broke a little at this last, and Tammary reached over to squeeze her shoulder in mute sympathy.
“You must miss her so,” she whispered.
“Antian was my first jin-shei-bao, but Nhia was the friend of my childhood,” Tai said. “We grew up together, she and I. We remember the same back streets of Linh-an. Our mothers bought our food at the same markets, and drew our water from the same wells. When she and I became jin-shei, it was not a new thing for us—it was as though we were giving a name to something that already existed, that had been there between us for many years. Yes, I miss her. There are times that I cannot believe that she is gone; sometimes I think I can hear that dragging step of hers, when her foot particularly hurt her and she began to limp hard from it, and I turn to greet her, and there is only empty air.”
“The ghosts follow you,” Tammary said. “I could almost hear it, too.” She shivered slightly, as though a shadow had just quenched the liquid summer sunshine that streamed about her. “Would you like some cider?” she said abruptly. “A local apple farmer traded a batch of it to me for a sovereign physic against colic; he said it had been a small price to pay in order to have a few hours’ respite from his newborn son’s screaming misery.”
“Yuet would be proud of you,” Tai said, smiling.
“I hope so,” Tammary murmured, looking away.
“Where’s your daughter?” Tai asked as they entered the house.
“She’s down for her afternoon nap,” Tammary said. “Would you like to look in on her?”
Tai smiled; Tammary’s smile bloomed in return, a mother’s smile, proud and contented.
“She’s in here,” Tammary said, opening a door to a bright bedroom, its walls painted with vivid scarlet flowers and multihued butterflies. In a crib in the corner, a small girl slept with her thumb firmly in her mouth, long dark lashes curled over her cheeks. Her hair, a rich brown chestnut, was braided in two long pigtails and tied with lengths of red wool.
“It took me forever to make Xanshi stop sucking her thumb,” Tai whispered, smiling, careful not to wake the sleeping child. “What did you say her name was? Jovanna?”
“That’s what I call her,” Tammary whispered back. “The Traveler version of it. Zhan insists on calling her Yehovann, or even just Yovann. He said that’s right, and proper, and it’s even a royal name.”
“Antian’s mother, the Ivory Empress, was Yehonaia,” Tai said. “He might be right.”
“She’s Jovanna to me,” Tammary said, smiling, but a hint of stubbornness in her voice. “She always will be.”
“She is beautiful,” Tai said, “under any name.”
They lingered for another moment, bestowing a final glance on the child as Tammary reached to tuck the coverlet more securely around her sleeping form, and then padded carefully out again, closing the door of the bedroom behind them.
“Who did the room?” Tai asked. “The flowers, the butterflies?”
“Zhan,” Tammary said, and dimpled at the thought. “Who knew that I married an artist?”
“I used to sketch, a long time ago,” Tai said. “That’s how I first met Antian, the Little Empress. I loved drawing butterflies, too.”
They talked of times past, and of the present. They spoke of their children, as mothers do; Tammary had fond memories of young Xanshi, Tai’s daughter, and of the child’s insistent covetousness of Tammary’s bright hair.
“She still asks sometimes,” Tai told her jin-shei-bao, laughing. “She’ll ask at the most unexpected times. Sometimes she makes up stories about a fox called Tami who prevails over all other beasts and men through wit and wisdom and sheer good looks. And she’ll haul out that lock
of hair that you gave her once. Do you remember that?”
“Yes, I told her if she slept with it under her pillow her hair would turn that color eventually,” Tammary laughed.
“I think a part of her still believes that,” Tai said. “But she’ll hold that up and say that her Tami is that color all over. I think she misses you.”
Tammary gazed at her visitor with suddenly brooding eyes.
“Tai, you haven’t just come to talk over old times with me,” she said. “I am glad to see you—it’s been a long time, and too much has happened, and I’d forgotten how much joy I always took in your company—but I know you didn’t travel all this way to tell me that your daughter remembers me with fondness. What has really brought you here?”
“The future,” Tai said, after a moment’s pause.
“You want my child,” Tammary said, her cheeks suddenly flushed as though with fever.
“I dreamed of all of this,” said Tai helplessly. “I wrote to you about that. I dreamed about your child, and about what she might grow up to represent. But it’s all been vague, so vague, until this bitter spring came, and we were all that was left in the pau-kala of the circle, and you were the only thing that linked Liudan’s empire and the years to come. You, and Yovann. Zhan may have been right to call that a royal name.”
“You told Liudan I had a daughter?”
Tai hesitated. “Yes,” she said at last. “The Dragon Empress has lost her fire. She still has no heirs. She does not even want to think about that, not now, not yet, not when everything still lies in ashes around her—but there is one way the line of the Empire can continue unbroken. However that came about, you come of the same royal line; and Zhan has some of that blood too. Yovann is the natural heir, the only one who can lead the Empire peacefully into the future. The alternative is more conflict, as others try to carve their niche into what Liudan leaves empty when she goes.”
“Liudan chose her path!” Tammary said violently, turning away. “She is still young enough to have children of her own if she so chooses! Why my baby?”
“It would not be now. It would not be your baby, not that sweet child asleep in the other room right now. It would be years before she is needed, before she is called.”
“But why? Why do I have to give my child to be chewed and spat out by the Empire? Liudan would have killed me if she had the chance. For merely existing, for having had the temerity to have been born. Why would I now give her my daughter?”
“Because no place would be safe if you did not,” Tai said, tears standing in her eyes. “I know what it is that I ask of you. But I do not ask it in Liudan’s name, or my own—I ask it because the Gods of Cahan have thrown it into my path. You exist for a reason—all of us are here because there is a role for us to play as the Way unfolds around us. You are what knits together this realm—the bond that is between you and Zhan, your own twin heritage. Liudan won’t have any children. Even I can sense that about her, and every ganshu reading she has ever had has confirmed it. Yovann is all we have, Amri.”
“I won’t give my child to the city,” Tammary said. “I won’t! We have made a life here. We are a family. We are happy. Jovanna has barely turned a year old, for the love of all the gods you hold dear! I can’t give her up. I can’t.”
“Amri.” Tai reached out, touched the other woman’s hand gently, and withdrew when Tammary flinched. “I haven’t come here to demand, or to steal,” she said. “What will come, will come—whatever you decide. But think on it.”
“They would take her from me,” Tammary said brokenly.
“She would have to be educated for her position,” Tai said, “yes. But that would not be for years. Nobody wants to steal either her childhood or your role in it.” She swallowed. “I’m sorry, Amri. I almost didn’t even come. I know what I am asking. But I am still bound by the same bonds which once made you ask me to protect you in your flight—it’s jin-shei that drives me, even now. It’s jin-shei that can save Syai from more bloody strife.”
“Liudan laid the foundation to that,” Tammary said implacably.
“Yes,” Tai said. “She did. But we are all connected, all of our paths crossing and recrossing. I will abide by your decision.”
Tammary buried her face in her hands.
After a moment, Tai reached out and brushed Tammary’s shoulders with her fingertips, very gently “Amri, I’m sorry It hangs by a thread—this thread. Once I knew that, I had to come. I had to ask.”
The candles burned for a long time in Tammary and Zhan’s bedroom that night, and a small rushlight flickered in the room they had given Tai, almost an echo, as she kept her own vigil that night. Once, very late, Tai thought she heard the muted wail of a child, but it was quickly stilled into silence again.
“If someone had come asking me to give up Xanshi to a future with a throne but without me, would I have done it? Would I have done it?” Tai whispered to herself, staring out of her window, into a country-dark sky full of blazing summer stars. “How can I expect her to do it, to give up that child of all children, the joy which was born after so much suffering? How could I even ask her? How could I possibly expect her to come to me tomorrow with any answer but a resounding no?”
But Yovann would be jin-shei ‘s child, fostered by the sisterhood, raised to a crown, born to hold a country, to keep an Empire prosperous and peaceful. Liudan herself had sworn to that, in the conversation she and Tai had had. She would be as one born to me and into my line, Liudan had said, when the existence of Tammary’s daughter had been revealed.
A daughter for the Empire.
But Tammary had been through too much, had endured too much, for this sacrifice to be demanded of her.
Tai watched the sky brighten into the dawn, walked out before sunrise to watch the light starting to spill down the mountains, kindling the snow on the mountaintops into blazing glory, limning the woods on the steep slopes with the glow of summer sunlight, finally touching the small house in the hills where so many had lain sleepless that night.
A soft step behind her told her she was no longer alone, but she waited, without turning, until she heard her jin-shei-bao’ voice, a broken whisper.
“Will you promise that she’ll be happy?”
“I can’t, Amri,” Tai said. “Nobody can make that promise in anyone’s name.”
“At least let her marry Baio when her time comes,” Tammary said, with something that was halfway between a laugh and a sob.
Tai turned. “She will be Empress, then, Amri, and it will be the Empress who will choose her mate. But if the stars are right, then my son could well be one of those whom they present to her. And although jin-shei does not cross generations—a sister chooses and is chosen and does not inherit her mother’s sisters’ children as her own circle—it would please me greatly if she and my Xanshi choose as you and I once chose.”
“I talked to Zhan,” Tammary said, and she was crying now, openly. “He says … we decided.”
“It will be many years before she is called,” Tai said, her own throat tight. “I told you, I did not come here to snatch your baby from you, Amri! There are many years ahead of you both. In many ways it is you who will shape the new Empress. But if you are willing, I can go home and tell Syai that there is a Little Empress who will come to claim the throne when she is grown.”
“She will come,” Tammary whispered.
It is pau-kala, Tai wrote in her journal, late that night. The branch is still bare. The old tree’s leaves will never return—they are a memory and a song. But there is a sapling, there is a sapling right there beside the old tree, and it’s trembling with promise. There will be a spring again.
PART SEVEN
Atu
There is no end, and no beginning.
We all begin in the clouds of Atu,
made from the same stuff
as the stars.
Kito-Tai, Year 28 of the Star Emperor
“Yes, yes,” Tai said testily, shaking off the helping hand
s which would have supported her as she approached the ruined edge of what had once been the Summer Palace of the Syai Emperors. “I may be old, but I am not helpless. And I know this place a lot better than you do.”
“But your cane does not, baya-Tai,” the cheeky young voice of one of her self-appointed guides piped up.
“Besides …” began the other, a leggy girl of about thirteen years of age, and Tai waved an impatient hand at her.
“I know,” she said. “Your grandmother tamed hawks in these mountains. I know. Now let go of my arm, Amai, you’re going to have me fall over in a minute.”
“But you’re old, baya-Tai,” Amai, the girl, pointed out.
“Eia!” Tai sighed. “If only you could let me forget that for just a moment. Especially here.”
“Tell us a story, baya-Tai.” That was the little boy, six or seven years old, his nose sprinkled with the faintest dusting of freckles and his dark hair shining with an undertone of dark red which was an inheritance from the hawk-taming grandmother, Tai’s jin-shei-bao, Tammary Dead these many years now.
“Did I ever tell you about the fox called Tami?” Tai murmured.
The children sighed. “Yes, baya-Tai,” the boy said with an endearing resignation.
“Hush, Orien,” Amai said, suddenly very much the older sister, reaching for an adult level of insight and understanding. “I’m sure that baya-Tai hasn’t told us all the Tami stories.”
“She used to dance here, you know,” Tai murmured, glancing at Amai’s slender form and seeing the long-legged grace of the young Tammary who had once danced in these ruins to the wild music that only she could hear.
“Who, the fox?” asked the boy, his interest quickening.
“Hush, Orien,” Amai whispered again, staring at Tai’s face. Something had kindled in Tai’s eyes, a distant memory, and she was very far from them at that moment, far away and young again.
It is your grandchildren that bring me here, Amri. No, not your daughter’s children—not the children of the Empress who sits on Syai’s throne. And her Emperor is not my son Baio, as you once wished. Baio is dead, and he never had any children, although he and his bride had an enchanted life. But he died so young, and she mourned, and then came to me and asked if I would forgive her if she married again, and I said that not only I would but that Baio would have wanted that for her. So now she has children—but they are not my blood. And Xanshi had one daughter, and she married into a seafaring family, and lives far, far away now … and I hear from her so seldom, her children are nearly ready for their Xat-Wau by now. They have no further need of a grandmother. So it is these, the children of the son whom you bore to Zhan so late and died of—it is these children who now call me baya-Tai, who call me “grandmother” in your name, although I have no connection to them at all—although they have been born to a woman whom my own son once called wife. Oh, what a tangled path we followed through our lives.
The Secrets of Jin-shei Page 57