The Secrets of Jin-shei

by Alma Alexander

  It is here I sense you most vividly—it is here I found my first jin-shei-bao, Antian the Little Empress, and my last—you. She, who gave me the legacy, and you, who gave us all the hope of the future. I think she is happy, your Yovann, your little Jovanna who came to the city so afraid and now rules it so strong and proud beside the man whom she chose as her mate. The Star Emperor, she named him, and there is some of that about them all, some of that brightness. And you did that, Amri, you made her.

  I wish I could see you again. I wish I could see you dance.

  “Baya-Tai?”

  “Yes, Orien?”

  “Where is this balcony of yours?” Amai interrupted, giving her brother a swift and not very subtle kick on the ankle with the toe of her soft boot to make him hush up.

  “Not very far now. This used to be the garden, once. There was a big tree—really big—right about there where you see the young one now—it must have sprung up from its roots. By Cahan, will you look at that?”

  “How big was the old tree?”

  “Huge,” Tai said, sketching out a gigantic shape with her frail old hands. “Like this. And I used to come out here and draw the flowers when I was a very little girl, younger than you, Amai. And the butterflies—the place was full of butterflies. And they used to hang cricket cages in the trees so they would sing for you in the twilight.”

  “How beautiful,” Amai sighed.

  But Orien was bored. He kicked at a clump of tall woody weeds bearing surprisingly delicate clusters of white flowers, and was immediately diverted by a flurry of wings as a couple of small birds, startled, shot out of the undergrowth. Pleasantly distracted, Orien ran after them, craning his neck.

  “Watch him,” Tai said, “this place is full of holes and rubble. You have to take care of your brother.”

  Take care of my sisters.

  Ah, Antian. It’s been a long time since we walked together in this garden. Are the gardens of the Gods in the valleys of Cahan as beautiful as the vision of our river was from the old balcony?

  I tried—I tried so hard to keep my word. I remember you. I have never let your memory fade in my heart. Your face is as clear to me today as it was nearly seven decades ago now. Your smile, and the light … the light I watched die in your eyes that morning when the world fell to pieces around me.

  And then Yuet was there—it was as though you handed me an impossible promise, and then a friend to help me keep it. Oh Yuet, you died the hardest of us all—you died uselessly, and in pain, and I miss you, I’ve missed you these many years. You should have grown old with me. “The healer is compassionate, treating all patients the same way. The healer goes forth when summoned, laboring day and night, ignoring hunger, thirst, fatigue, heat, or cold. The healer tends to the patient with all of his heart.” I remember quoting the healer’s oath at you, a long time ago, on the way back into the city from these very mountains, Tammary who was the Emperor’s child asleep in the back room in the hostelry where we broke our journey, and you were so afraid, Yuet, of what we were about to do … and now her grandchildren run around me and love me and keep me young.

  I think, Yuet, that you would have been proud of what Amri finally became. The problem child from the mountains who you and I had so much trouble with grew up to be a gracious woman, a loving wife, a selfless mother—and a healer, Yuet, in her turn. I wish you could have lived to see her children. Perhaps, if you had lived, she would not have died. Or perhaps I call your own gifts magic now, remembering them magnified now that they are so long gone from me? But no—you were a healer born. I remember now, that epidemic when you first got to know Qiaan.

  “I got him, baya-Tai,” Amai said, piloting her little brother back by means of a firm hand between his shoulder blades.

  “Shhhh,” Tai said, pointing. “Look over there.”

  A rabbit sat on the wreckage of what had once been a fountain, now overgrown with moss and tall grass. The rabbit was grooming itself in the sunshine, washing its long ears, unaware of company until Orien suddenly sneezed explosively into his sleeve. The rabbit twitched, and disappeared into the grass.

  “Aww!” Orien said, disgusted with himself. “I scared it off!”

  “There are many of them out here now,” Tai said. “We’ll see more of them.”

  “There’s another,” Amai said, pointing to something that left the tall grass swaying gently in the wake of its passing.

  “That was no rabbit,” Orien said, with the utter certainty that only small boys can bear with dignity and seriousness.

  “You’re right, I think,” Tai said. “That didn’t hop, it crept and slunk. It looked rather like a cat, in fact.”

  “A cat? Out here?” Amai asked skeptically.

  “There were many Palace cats when this place was still whole,” Tai said. “Some of them might still be here, and have raised families here. They’d be wild now, but that’s where they came from, the royal cats who were kept as pets and the working cats who kept the mouse population down in the stables.”

  Amai raised shining eyes to Tai’s face. “Do you remember all this, baya-Tai?”

  “Oh yes,” Tai said.

  “Do you remember all the cats?” Orien asked.

  “Not all of them.”

  Not here, anyway. I remember one of the cats, but that one was never up here in the mountains. I wonder what became of you in the end, Ink? When Qiaan died, and Xaforn died, both your protectors … but by that time you had lived a long comfortable life already.

  Ah, those two, light and dark, two sides to the same coin. I wonder if you are still sparring in Cahan? You both walked in honor all of your lives, except for that brief blight that was Lihui at the end of it all, Lihui, whose touch shattered so many of us.

  Oh, Xaforn of bright, bright memory! Motherless child who became Guard because you knew no other life, and then truest jin-shei-bao of them all. You gave yourself for your sister.

  You, and Nhia, my Nhia, the crippled child who rose to be a teacher in the Temple, and Chancellor of Syai, and an Empress’s right hand—and then took her death upon her.

  The warrior and the wise woman.

  Oh, how rich my life was with all of you beside me.

  “The sun’s going down, baya-Tai,” Amai said gently.

  “So it is,” Tai said. “Time we got to the balcony. It’s over there, just past the arch in the old wall.”

  The children came forward to help her again, despite her grumbles, and they finally reached the edge of the garden—even the remnants of the balcony on which the young Tai had used to watch her sunsets, on which Antian had died, had crumbled away over the years and all they could do was perch perilously against the wall, peering through the archway to where the sun was already turning the river golden, in the way that Tai remembered.

  “See? What did I tell you? A river of gold into the west,” Tai said.

  “Oh, yes,” Amai breathed. “It is so beautiful! It’s like magic.”

  It’s like magic—the magic that Liudan tried to rip from Khailin, seeking immortality. She is immortal now, Liudan, although perhaps not in the way she wanted to be. They remember her—the people—sometimes with fury or chagrin, it is true, but often with an odd sort of proud affection. She was such a little girl, and she set her hand to the helm of an Empire, and she was the Empress, the only Empress, the Dragon Empress who flew alone into the sun. Gone, now, but not forgotten, never forgotten. If things had been even slightly different, perhaps she could have been more than she was.

  But there was Lihui, and then there were the risings that fed her insecurities, and oh, Liudan, you were mad in those days, you were mad to ask what you asked … and Khailin broke all the laws of Cahan to give you what you wanted.

  I should have been there for Khailin, at the end—all I knew of her, after, came in those sparse notes she thought were letters—a few sentences here and there, giving me a glimpse into a life that was lived far from me. I know you had a child, Khailin. I do not even know her name. />
  Did I take care of them, Antian, Little Empress who made me promise that I would look out for your sisters when you were gone? I remember my Kito of blessed memory saying once, we are all so young. And we were, Antian, we were. And some of us … some of us never grew old.

  They were all your sisters, after all—not just the one whom you once called your angry sister, but also the soldier, the healer, the alchemist, the sage, the gypsy, the rebel leader. Did I keep my promise to you, made so long ago, here on these tumbled stones?

  “We should go, baya-Tai, it’ll be dark soon,” Amai said practically.

  “I know,” Tai said. “But wait. Wait. Look up at the sky and watch.”

  “What are we watching for?” Orien asked curiously, squinting at the heavens which were turning the transparent colors of sapphire and amethyst where they weren’t flaming with the remnants of the fiery sunset.

  Tai said nothing, but simply pointed to where the first bright evening star had kindled in the twilight.

  And then they sat and watched in wonder, the old woman and the two children, as the stars shimmered into life, one by one, in the summer sky.

  Historical Note

  THE MAKING OF A NOVEL

  One might say that there is no such language as “Chinese”—what we think of as the language spoken in China is actually a complex web of more than five hundred dialects, the best known and most commonly spoken being Mandarin. Possibly the least well known is a secret written language passed from mother to daughter for more than five hundred years, a language called nushu. The last woman who learned it at her mother’s knee is now in her late nineties, and dying. When she is gone, the language passes into history, and into the language laboratory.

  But while it lived in the hearts and minds of China’s women, nushu was a remarkable thing. It enabled women with otherwise little or no education to be literate, and to record events and emotions that no male eye would ever desecrate.

  The Secrets of Jin-shei started out as ten characters searching for a plot. The first ideas for the novel consists of no more than character sketches for ten little girls, situated in a broadly Oriental and very specifically Chinese context. But I had no real idea of the story that would bind these characters together until I found out about nushu and the things that it meant to those to whom it belonged. One study on the nushu language spoke of its origins in a region of China blessed with fertile soils and plentiful harvests. Agriculture was the province of men, leaving the women of the area free to concentrate on gentler arts—spinning, weaving, embroidery, and poetry. Women would gather at each other’s homes and work at these tasks together. Through the shared tie of the secret language, it was a popular custom among the young women to observe something they called Jiebai Zhimei—a sworn sisterhood, pledging commitment of heart and spirit to female friends who were not blood kin. Jiebai Zhimei sisters would write to one another of their joys and sorrows when marriage separated them from one another. My own characters gained an identity, a language, a sisterhood I reinvented and named ‘jin-shei’ in a mythical, not-quite-China, land I called Syai.

  I threw myself into Chinese research. I found a centuries-old primer on proper behavior for well-bred young women (and promptly made my characters break all the rules); I devoured books such as Court Life in China by Isaac Taylor Headland, which provided me with details of the daily lives of aristocratic Chinese women, with descriptions of period Peking and its streets and bazaars, with childbirth and funeral and marriage customs.

  As I researched my story and my world more and more deeply, a key plot point in the book turned out to be a search for immortality and I found a wealth of information on that in the precepts of Chinese alchemy, which was closely tied into those of Tao. So I researched Tao, and built a world with science and religion with strong roots in that philosophy.

  Somewhere along the line I acquired a book called Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey This was a treasure trove of ideas: the precepts of Confucianism, how a concubine was bought and treated and how her children fitted into hierarchies, the structure of city life, and even the Beggar Guild, which apparently was a real entity. I took the concept and ran with it, transforming it into something rather different in the process, but it was there, waiting for me.

  Ancient China is a lush tapestry, ornate as only things Oriental can be. I used many of its rich threads to weave the story of The Secrets of Jin-shei.

  ALMA ALEXANDER

  March 2003

  PRONUNCIATION GUIDE AND GLOSSARY

  Pronunciation Guide

  Pronunciation mostly follows the Pinyin system, the most commonly used system for transcribing Chinese words into English, with some exceptions. The less familiar pronunciations appear below, with examples; other letters approximate their English sounds.

  C: TS as in “its,” except when before H, in which case it retains the traditional English “ch” pronunciation as in “church”—in other words, Cahan is pronounced Tsahan

  Q: CH as in “chair”—Qiaan is pronounced Chiaan

  X: SH as in “she”—Xaforn is pronounced Shaforn

  Z: DS as in “buds”—Zibo is pronounced Dzibo

  ZH: J as in “jump”—Zhan is pronounced Jan

  A: as in “father”

  AI: or AY: as in “aisle”

  E: OO as in “hook,” except before n or ng, when it is pronounced as U in “sun”

  I: usually pronounced as the I in “machine”

  Exceptions: when it comes after c, s, or z, when it is pronounced like the I in divide; when it comes after ch, r, sh, or zh, when it becomes pronounced like IR in “sir”

  IA: YA as in “yard”

  IAN: YEN—Antian is pronounced Antyen

  IU: EO as in “leo,” with the emphasis on the o—Liudan is pronounced LeOdan

  O: AW as in “law”—Zibo is pronounced Dzibaw

  OU: O as in “joke”

  U: usually pronounced as in “prune”

  Exceptions: pronounced as the u in “pudding” when syllable ends with n (as in Kunan, for instance); pronounced like the u in the French “tu” when it comes after j, q, x, or y—Yuet would be pronounced with this softer u sound

  UI: WAY 496

  Glossary

  Ama-bai the Great Teacher: in life, a wise woman who had achieved first immortality and then the status of a lower deity in Cahan, to whom many prayers for wisdom and enlightenment are made

  Antian: First Princess, daughter to the Ivory Emperor by his Empress, heir to Syai, Tai’s first jin-shei-bao; dies in the Summer Palace earthquake

  Aric: captain in the Imperial Guard, father of Qiaan

  Atu: the Age In-Between—afterdeath/beforebirth, spirit existence

  Autumn Court: the most formal occasion of the Imperial Year, from which reigns are reckoned—whenever an Emperor of Syai is crowned, his reign officially begins on the first day of the first Autumn Court following his coronation. It consists of a week of audiences (private and public), public judgments by the Emperor on selected judicial cases which may be brought before the throne at this time, and grand entertainments. New Court garb is practically mandatory for this occasion.

  Baio: Tai’s son

  baixin: fast-acting poison tasting of ginger

  -ban: endearment suffix, applied to a child by a mother, for example (e.g., Tai-ban)

  -baya: “grandmother,” equivalent to calling someone “granny”

  Beggars’ Guild: a highly structured and hierarchical organization to which professional beggars belong. There is one in every city, and members tithe their earnings to the organization in return for mediation of disputes, codification of begging (including mandatory largesse which delegations of beggars are sent to collect from households holding special celebrations) and other services. Beggars arriving in the city from other places in order to pursue this profession must register with the Guild’s leader before they are given permission to beg in the city and granted territory.

>   Beggar King: see Maxao

  Boar: sign of the Syai zodiac for those born in the month of Tannuan, minor sign, Male Earth

  Brother Number One: title by which the leader of the Beggars’ Guild is known

  Buffalo: sign of the Syai zodiac for those born in the month of Taian, cardinal sign, Female Earth

  Cai: Imperial concubine, mother to Liudan (by the Ivory Emperor) and to Qiaan (by Captain Aric of the Imperial Guard)

  Cahan: Heaven

  cha’ia energy: the feminine form of the energy of Cha, or the Way, which is the source of all things

  Chanain: first month of summer

  chao energy: the male from of the energy of Cha, or the Way, which is the source of all things