Quyen turned her gaze towards the students, who were still watching them from afar. “Your students are bright,” she said, keeping her voice low. She would make her point without shaming the children.
“They wouldn’t be here otherwise.” Was that pride in his voice, or something else entirely? She didn’t know what vagaries of life’s currents had brought him here in the middle rings. As a tutor to the wealthy, he could have had a much larger allowance. Was it ideals or lack of skills which kept him where he was?
“Our Empire takes talent and knowledge where it can find it,” Quyen said, slowly. “Raising up carps to be dragons. But not all are so fortunate.”
“It’s not fortune.” Tu’s hands had tightened, so strongly they shone as white as ceruse. “You and I both know it, Mistress Quyen.”
“True.” She inclined her head. “It’s hard work. Nights of studying the Classics by the dimmed light of Our Honoured Ancestress, of memorising the proper words and citations. It’s a good teacher who will guide through the complexities of the eight-part dissertation and the Two-Seven poetry. But all of that comes with wealth. How can one study if one has no spare time? And how can one find a good teacher if one does not pay for them?”
Tu blanched, and his eyes narrowed in anger. An idealist, then. She didn’t like that. She’d have few holds on a man like this. “You’re suggesting my students will fail.”
Quyen inclined her head, gracefully. “I’m suggesting your students are at a disadvantage. Which you already know. You’re clever, Tu.”
“And you’re quick to judge.” Tu glanced towards his students. “Flowers don’t bloom by themselves, Lady Quyen. They require... care.” Quyen smiled, catching the hint. He wanted her to get to the point, so he could get back to his neglected pupils.
“Your students’ ancestors were from the outer rings,” she said. “Menials for the most part, with thinned blood. To their descendants they gift blessings, and luck, and happiness. But not, sadly, knowledge.”
Tu said nothing.
Fine. She would take the story to its end, then, propriety or not. If it was a choice between losing face now and standing, day after day, before the ancestral altar with the shame of having failed the Honoured Ancestress and her own ancestors, Quyen knew exactly what she would choose.
“Knowledge can be given away, from ancestor to child,” Quyen said. “Or it can be...stolen.”
“Indeed.” Tu’s voice was flat, his face as blank as a console screen.
“I’m told you’re friends with a man named Thien.” Quyen raised a hand to forestall his objections. “It’s hardly a secret.”
“No.” Tu smiled, his lips as thin as a knife’s blade. “Thien comes often. He understands what it means to seek knowledge.”
“As you do?” Quyen raised an eyebrow.
Tu was looking straight at her, like an equal, like a superior, as if he knew all that she could and couldn’t do, and didn’t care. “As you said, I am a clever man. I know all that it takes for a carp to leap the dragon waterfalls, and if a nudge is needed, then I will give it.” His hands were shaking, a slight tremor. “Whatever it takes to make them rise, I will do. Those who grow wise by learning are among the best, and will rise high in society, as you well know. You don’t understand, Mistress Quyen, what it is to be poor, to be desperate.”
“No one is poor on Prosper,” Quyen said, not knowing what else she could tell him.
Tu smiled. “The beautiful thing about poverty is that it only exists compared to others. True, no one goes hungry on Prosper.” He smiled at that, as if he knew exactly what she was doing, the knife’s edge that currently separated them from ruin and starvation. “But some are richer than others. Some hand out allowances.” He smiled at her, again, a thoroughly unpleasant expression. “Some fly away to other planets, to serve the Dragon Throne. Some have dozens of citizens, to see to their needs, while others have just enough to eat, and to drink themselves insensate in front of their holograms.”
“You want us all to be equal?” Quyen shook her head. “You know that’s impossible.”
“Of course.” Tuyen bowed his head. “I merely want...a chance. An opportunity, for the poor to become the wealthy, to receive the five blessings. I know all about hunger.”
“I see.” Quyen bowed her head, though she didn’t understand him at all. The light in his eyes made her deeply uneasy; it was that of a fanatic, far removed from propriety and balance. “So, you and the venerable Thien hold the same opinions on many things.” She forced her voice to remain quiet. “On hunger, and equality, and theft.”
The word fell in the silence of the courtyard, spread its ripples around the room. In other circumstances, Quyen would have thought the Honoured Ancestress was here, manipulating soundwaves for better effect. But she could feel nothing, not even the trance, as if everything had dropped away from her unexpectedly.
Tu shook his head. “Suspicions are unhealthy, Mistress Quyen.”
“Allow me to entertain them, nevertheless.”
Tu smiled. “You are free to think what you want. Aren’t we all?” He smiled again, and it was a terrible thing, bright and fevered and unhealthy. “But, without proof, you won’t go far.”
“There are other ways.” The words came out of her, torn without conscious volition. Persuasion and torture, and all the planet-side ways that Linh would be so familiar with...
What was she thinking of? This was Prosper, not a planet mired in the dark ages. This was a place of freedom, away from the gaze of the Dai Viet Empire, where the Honoured Ancestress made her own laws. Where a descendant of Lê Thi Phuoc might be poor, might live in the middle rings, but could not be handled with anything other than respect. Blood to blood; flesh to flesh; features to features.
“Of course there are,” Tu said, and she knew, they both knew she couldn’t, wouldn’t use them without utterly shattering Prosper. And another, shameful thought: Huu Hieu wasn’t worth it.
“Was that all, Mistress Quyen?” Tu asked. He drew himself up. He was the respected teacher once again, with no trace of the fanatic, or of the gloating thief.
She knew—they both knew—he had the implants. But until she found out where he’d hidden them, there was nothing she could do about it.
“No, that wasn’t all.” The words tasted like ash on her tongue. “But I’ll be back.”
“I’m sure you will.” A hint of a smile, revealing teeth yellowed by tea leaves. “And I’ll receive you with pleasure.”
She’d have the place searched, from corner to corner. Tear everything apart. But somehow she knew she wouldn’t find the implants, that he was clever enough to have hidden them well. And that what she truly needed was a way to outwit him. She, the uneducated daughter, who had perfunctorily listened to her tutors’ lessons and failed her examinations; who had little knowledge beyond a smattering of poetry, and etiquette...
She looked at the students again, at their bright, almost fevered eyes, their faces taut with the desire to learn; at the cut of their clothes, too trim and too neat, too eager to reflect wealth and ease. And she felt a long way from home again, as if she were back on the ship that had first brought her to Prosper, struggling to find herself amidst the strangeness of the deep planes, bereft of everything, as if she were already an orphan.
***
Linh stood in the banquet hall, watching the light shift from a warm red to the cold, heartless light of Old Earth’s moon: a disk that slowly coalesced in the air above her, growing larger and larger until she could see every crater, every pockmark; even boyish, mythical Cuoi, sitting in the crown of leaves of his banyan tree. A fiction that had nothing to do with the Red Turtle star they orbited around, or with life as it was now, away from the husk of Old Earth.
The light played on the red pillars and the inscriptions they bore, stretched out what was only a modest, low-ceilinged room into a place that could almost have belonged to a planet-side mansion.
Around Linh, the tables were spread: p
lates of silver, of nano-grown fibers made to look like the vanished celadon of old, and the fragile cups, the treasures of the family, all laid out for the admiration of Lady Oanh. It all seemed...pregnant with waiting, like the ancestral altar on the day of the bride’s homecoming.
She’d have laughed if she hadn’t felt so dead inside. If she hadn’t been seeing, over and over, Giap’s face hovering into her field of view; his mouth moving, reproving her for overworking herself yet again; his hands steadying her up, all but carrying her to the tribunal’s kitchen where a steaming teapot would be waiting for her, and the familiar, nutty smell of the tea wafting up to her, a clear scent that flowed into her mouth.
She’d always insisted that Giap take a sip, but he’d smile and say she was the magistrate, and somehow she’d never managed to couch the request in such a way that he’d accept it...
Spirits, how she missed him.
The six voices within her were silent. Even First Ancestor Thanh Thuy had nothing to say, not even some clever quote about the duty of friends to one another.
Linh was alone in her own mind. She was thinking of the Xuyan Classics of Luu Bi, and the Oath in the Peach Garden; of friends not born together, but swearing to die together. And it frightened her. Giap would have told her that she was the magistrate, that she needed not grieve for the death of a subordinate, that parents did not weep for children as much as children for parents.
He would have told her all of this, and she would have known, in her heart of hearts, that he was right.
But she’d never listened to Giap, had she?
Xuan Rua slid by, bringing paper, an ink-stone and a brush onto one of the spare tables. “They’ll be coming any moment.”
“I know,” Linh said.
Xuan Rua set a bowl of water by the side of the bowl, frowning. She looked at the ink stone again, and set it upright. Then, still looking away from Linh, she said, “Thank you for doing this.”
Linh winced. She knew why she was doing this, and there was no good in it. “For Prosper,” she said, thinking of Giap, of the message Quyen had hidden from her, of a place where nothing was private; everything was laid out like corpses on a morgue’s slab. A madhouse ruled by the maddest one of all, far from the Way and its balance, far from Master Kong and his wisdom.
Giap, of course, would have urged her not to think about revenge. “For Prosper,” Linh said again, and Xuan Rua’s head tilted up, as if her student were about to break the rules of propriety in order to meet Linh’s gaze, to look into its depths.
The gates to the room opened, and Lady Oanh walked in.
She looked much more regal than in Linh’s quarters: her ao dai tunic was of brushed, luminescent silk, its patterns slowly rotating, and their contours subtly altering as Lady Oanh crossed the length of the hall. The silk swirled around her like leaves lifted up by the wind. Her face was whitened with ceruse, her hair piled into an elaborate bun, eyebrows plucked into the shape of a moth’s wings.
She looked like a queen from ancient days, truly a Lady from the First Planet, walking in the palaces of the Emperor himself, effortlessly consorting with the highest officials and the favoured concubines.
Behind her was a procession that seemed to include the entirety of Prosper: Cousin Quyen, of course, in green-hued robes embroidered with bamboos and pines; Bao and Huu Hieu, looking stiff and not at all pleased to be there; Cousin Kim-Ly, leading the younger children; and the other, more distant cousins from the rest of the family and a flood of other citizens Linh had never seen, a sea of coloured five-part dresses and long ao dai dresses, and resplendent jewellery that made her eyes ache.
Fake, all of it. A dance on the edge of the abyss in a station depleted by war. Fake, all of it, the smiles, the makeup, the averted gazes and the muttered polite nothings; the moon overhead, the ceiling that she knew was much lower, that was crushing her under its weight.
Fake.
The jostle for the tables had finished, leaving Linh in a spreading circle of silence. Lady Oanh was at the place of honour, with Quyen faced her, closest to the doors and the attendants with their waiting trays. Quyen was impeccably dressed. Of course, that was all she knew how to do, didn’t she. Her face, as she raised it towards the guest, settled in the old, familiar, unbearable arrogance.
“I beg leave to say a few words, as we are gathered here,” she said. “The times are not happy.” Her face twisted in a perfect mockery of sorrow that she did not feel an ounce of. “But then, we of Dai Viet have spent so much time with war it might as well be an old friend. We have known the packing away of bamboo mats, and the flight into darkness; the lords of Trinh and Nguyen tearing Dai Viet apart, as we are torn apart now.”
The past, offered up to explain the present, all so casually, so unfeelingly Linh felt her hands clenched. What about the dead? Would they feel comforted by knowing they were part of an endless cycle, a history endlessly closing in a circle; to know that, even among the stars, death and war and famine still stalked?
“But we are more than that,” Quyen was saying. “We make the red candles burn high.” She gestured, and the hall filled itself with red light, even as the moon seemed to shift and recede into the background.
“We serve the warm wine, and remember our friends scattered like wild geese; and we honour our guests tonight.” Quyen dipped her head towards Lady Oanh, who inclined her own in return. It was an easy gesture, like the Emperor to a supplicant.
Platitudes, Linh thought, rubbing the ink stick against the wet stone and the glaze of black spread to her fingers, dark and sticky like unhealed wounds. Quyen might look smug, but she did nothing more than quote from a few half-remembered poems and stumble, blind, through a room full of the world’s riches, snatching and mangling and calling it her own with misplaced pride.
“Lady Oanh, we are a miserly station on the edge of nowhere. We have no bright painters, no talented speakers of odes. But Cousin Linh has agreed to compose a poem for us tonight, in honour of this happy reunion.”
And she looked at Linh, triumphant and smug, so sure of herself. She hadn’t even thanked Linh for doing this; it had taken Xuan Rua to voice that particular thought. She was so secure in her arrogance, thinking she knew everything in the Heavens and on Earth, that she could command each and every one of them...Had she been so sure of herself, when she’d denied Linh the knowledge of Giap’s death?
You don’t own us, Linh thought, dipping the brush into the ink. Fifth Ancestor Hoang rose in her mind, whispering words about the beauty of the moon, meeting goddesses in the midst of clouds and rain, excursions to lakes on planets long dead. But no, that wasn’t what she wanted. A banquet; an occasion for a reunion.
And for an accounting, too; something that would damage Quyen beyond repair.
For Prosper, Linh thought, tasting ashes and mud on her tongue. Behind Quyen, relegated to one of the lesser tables, was Huu Hieu, his face pale, ill at ease in the presence of so many people.
There is someone else...I’m leaving.
He was going away. Away from Quyen and her machinations, away from the stifling tomb that was Prosper. Up until this moment, Linh had not realised quite how much she envied him his freedom. You don’t own us, she thought, to Quyen who couldn’t hear her. You don’t own him, and I’m proud that he can escape your clutches.
Taking her brush, she painted the verses on the paper in swift movements. The words tumbled atop one another in her mind, flowed like the waters of a stream, like the notes of a song. And every allusion was as clear, as pitiless as the sun on the steppes, as the sea in the morning after a storm, washing up corpses on the beach.
When she was done she stepped away, to look at the words. Xuan Rua was still standing by her side, her eyes widening as she read the poem. And Quyen...Quyen—Underworld demons take her!—was standing, smiling at her, waiting.
Linh spoke up without looking at the paper. The first couplet was a classic, speaking of the joys of friends meeting again:
The broke
n willow-twig is whole again, and the wild geese have flown homewards
Fresh cooked rice with millet, and warm wine in the golden cups.
But the answering couplet...
Caged birds flutter close, their wings drifting in the flame of the red candles
A pair of most filial magpies, their fill eaten, kiss each other like lovers, and fly to Longevity.
Linh could see Lady Oanh frowning. The poem was barely short of suitable, the allusions of its last couplet casting a sinister veil on everything within the hall—the burning of the birds’ wings, the image of hunger and cages...
And then, as the room fell silent, she realised what she had done.
Magpies. The symbol of love and marriages. The birds that went between the Herder and the Celestial Weaver, allowing them to meet and celebrate their love on the bridge of birds. Filial magpies. Huu Hieu’s name meant “most filial”; and, as to the very last words...Longevity. Longevity Station.
She had...She had written the poem in a trance, meaning to damage Quyen’s tainted hospitality. But, instead, she had besmirched Huu Hieu, revealed to the entire hall the existence of his lover, and his intention of leaving the station for Felicity. She had...
Spirits, what had she done?
A slow look of horror was stealing across Xuan Rua’s face, leeching it to the colour of a shroud. Quyen’s whole body had tensed; she was mouthing “filial” under her mouth. Her gaze, narrowing, travelled down the length of the banquet tables, as if struggling to find a face that would bring it all into focus. Lady Oanh’s mouth opened, her arm tensed, opened in a gesture towards Quyen, as if she could stop Quyen from moving altogether.
Linh had been so proud of herself, so idiotically lost in the ecstasy of composing. But no, she couldn’t excuse it that way; she’d meant it all, every spiteful word, even the denunciation of Huu Hieu, who had everything she couldn’t have: a loved one, and a future away from Prosper Station. She’d meant it all, and she’d gone too far.
Quyen’s gaze, narrowing, fixed unerringly on Huu Hieu. Then, too late, Quyen realised what she’d given away, as the first whispers started among the guests, the first spiteful words, the start of rumours that wouldn’t die. Lady Oanh’s hand had fallen back, and she had her mask on again, the magistrate on her dais.
On a Red Station, Drifting Page 8