by Daniel Fox
At last he could be persuaded to hand her over to another, because Ping Wen was all too visibly, all too impatiently waiting. And for some reason it wasn’t her grandfather who took her, because that old man was still aboard the boat, waiting for something else altogether.
Waiting on imperial orders for Ping Wen, apparently.
So said the emperor: “Ping Wen, good. The man I want. I want you to go to Santung in my place, be my voice there as you have been my voice here: be governor in my name.”
“Majesty, you do me too much honor …” Be a sea away from the Jade Throne, a stone’s throw from Tunghai Wang? There was an end to his ambition, death to his new resolution, death perhaps to himself. In Santung there was nothing that he wanted, or could use.
“No, no,” said the emperor. “You deserve this and more. I would keep you at my side, except that I most especially need a man I can trust in Santung. Go, go now: this boat is waiting.”
“Majesty, I am not ready, I am not packed …”
“All your servants, all your things can be fetched over later. The fisherman has orders to come straight back again for those. I am leaving a squad of soldiers on his boat, to ensure that he does. I have departed the city all too soon, in too much of a hurry, but I had to see Mei Feng home, I had to bring her myself. She bears the hope of us all.” He meant that she was pregnant, which was another blow to Ping Wen’s heart, another problem. Another death, at least, to be arranged from the wrong side of the strait. “Go you, go now. I need you there, and they are ready for you. I have left you an army; you have a city to fortify.”
Ping Wen had no choice. He went.
five
u Shan couldn’t carry Siew Ren all the way to the mountains. That was a loss, a hollowness, a failure every time he looked at her and every time he looked away.
Physically, of course he could have done it. He could have swept her up and run all the way and never felt the weight of her, except on his mind and heart.
Practically, it wasn’t possible. Biao couldn’t have kept up, with all his bags and packs, and it was no use telling him to follow. He needed to keep with her, she actually needed him more than she did Yu Shan. Which was another failure, another loss. Several times a day her weeping skin must be bathed and anointed with Biao’s preparations. Yu Shan wanted to take that duty to himself, but was never allowed to. The mixtures must be made up fresh every time, Biao said, in different proportions as her condition changed. Only he could do that, and only he had the skills to apply them properly, with the proper charms and blessings.
Biao was a dragging weight, then, a land-anchor on Yu Shan’s urgency. More than all his words and fussiness, though, more than his fat puffing slowness when he walked, more than anything was Siew Ren’s pain.
Yu Shan couldn’t carry her because she hurt too much, he hurt her when he did that.
Failure, loss, something to live with.
Siew Ren rode, then, in a padded cart-bed behind slow oxen. Biao of course rode with her most of the way. Between his bags and his bulk, he left small room for anyone else. Yu Shan walked.
Not alone. Other clansfolk had been hurt, burned as Siew Ren was or hacked with blades, crushed by stones or pierced with arrows. They too wanted to go home, in search of family or jade-magic or else just in despair. The emperor’s victory had been too easy won, and all too terribly expensive.
Because Yu Shan was making that same slow journey, of course they came along. It only made sense to go together—and besides, he was Yu Shan. Grim as he was, distressed as he was, they did still want to be with him. Clouded as he was, he saw that and resented it as he resented Biao: something needful and obstructive, coming inevitably between himself and Siew Ren. He wanted to be the one at her side night and day, always there when she reached out, when her eyes opened, when she spoke. He couldn’t have that. And understood all the reasons why, and resented them all even while he saw to the doctor’s little comforts, while he ran up and down the caravan keeping the other wagons to the same careful pace, speaking to everyone, smiling where a smile was most needed. He had a limited ration of smiles these days, and he kept them for these others, friends and comrades. Siew Ren had no use for them, so he might as well spend them elsewhere.
THE ROAD ended—at last!—in a broad open area of stamped grass and mud, where generations of wagoneers had driven their beasts and made camp and traded simple goods for raw jade, watched all the time by generations of wary guardsmen. Here began the mountain paths, climbing to the high valleys. Here the oxen and their wagons could go no farther.
From here on up it was donkeys or feet—and the sick or badly injured could not sit a donkey if they had one. There were few anyway, in the hills. Clansfolk were walkers by nature and by long tradition. Donkeys were a luxury, not to be depended on. Strong legs were better. If their legs failed through age or accident, most people stayed at home. What was there to travel for? Most people stayed home anyway. This campsite was the closest they ever willingly came to the road away, before the emperor changed everything.
Now the road was bringing people back, and some couldn’t climb the mountains. Some couldn’t even walk.
Yu Shan was still not allowed to carry Siew Ren, although she did need carrying.
The clans had come down from their valleys as they did for the jade-wagons, tough folk used to carrying great weights of stone. Forewarned, prepared, they had improvised litters from lengths of bamboo with hammocks slung beneath them.
Those who had devised and made the litters of course insisted on bearing them. It was their right. And Biao of course would walk beside Siew Ren, in case she wanted him. On narrow mountain paths, there would barely be room for him: none at all for Yu Shan too. All he could do was get in the way.
He had hurt Siew Ren enough, too much already. He would not risk a stumble. He could walk in front, perhaps, lead the march home—but there was no need for him or anyone to do that, and this was far from a triumph, and it would be hard then to say goodbye as one litter after another peeled off as the path divided, as they took their own ways to their separate valleys.
No: Yu Shan saw each of the wounded away with those friends who had come to fetch them, made his farewells here and then followed in deep evening shadows, last of all on the steep path home.
LAST EXCEPT for the one who came behind him: distantly, quietly, not distant or quiet enough. Not by a distance. Of course he heard, of course he saw shadow move through shadow. He used not to be so alert, but he was wiser now.
And stronger, quicker, not so kind.
For a while he thought he might just walk on, keep with his people. Keep at their tail, between them and what came after.
Then he thought the other thing.
He let the others get ahead, and farther ahead. Once the last of them was out of sight, he sat on a damp rock and waited.
For what, quite, he wasn’t sure. What he would do, what say—he was trying not to think about it. Nothing in his life was what he wanted now.
It used to make him happy when he saw her. And her, the other way around. No longer so. He saw that as his failure, her loss.
Tonight, he saw her before she could possibly have seen him, the dark of himself entirely still beneath the dark of the trees against the looming dark of the mountain.
He watched her come and felt nothing but guilt and sorrow.
Oh, but she was good, though. She couldn’t have seen him when she first came into his jade-enhanced sight; by the time she was twenty paces short of him, she couldn’t possibly have missed him; even knowing her as he did, he had no idea where in the intervening climb she had finally noticed that he was there. She didn’t pause, she didn’t jerk or lift her head or want to turn away, she gave no sign at all. She only kept on coming. At first she was following him, and then she was coming to him, and that made all the difference in the world but she was too proud to show it.
He stood up, which was not really a gesture of respect, not quite: only that staying sat
on the rock would have been the other thing, a gesture almost of contempt; and he did want to meet her eye to eye. Whatever he was going to say, whatever she was.
She said, “Last time we met in a forest, it was me who surprised you.”
He said, “You’re not surprised to find me here.”
She said, “No.”
And that was it for a little while, as though it had all been said already.
Into their silence came a noise from somewhere else, impossible to locate: a long low rumble that swelled into a reverberative flood as though rocks of sound were being tumbled over and over one another, crashing and grinding together. It echoed between one slope and the other, it climbed under its own impetus or fell beneath its own weight, it might have been higher or lower than them or in another valley altogether. It was like the wind, slipshadow and potent, irretrievable as it died away.
She said, “What,” and swallowed, and tried again: “These are your mountains. What was that?”
He said, “I’ve never heard it before.” And then, more honestly, reluctantly, “It was a stone tiger, I think, but—”
“But you’ve never heard it.”
But he had seen one, when she had not; and he had been with Siew Ren at the time, and not with her; and none of that was good, and none of it was any help right now. He had wanted all his life to hear the jade tiger sing. Some nights he and Siew Ren had sat together in the dark and waited for it, feeling almost that they deserved it, that it would be the mountain’s recognition of themselves.
He really, really wished that it had not happened now.
It came again, filling the valley entirely, a deep-throated claim of possession. Yu Shan had seen the dragon more often now than he could reasonably count; it felt almost like heresy that the tiger seemed somehow more wonderful. If only because it was closer, smaller, more immediate. An achievable astonishment, like jade.
Perhaps the tiger was welcoming Siew Ren and the other wounded back to the mountains and valleys of their birth, to their place of restoration.
Perhaps it was welcoming him.
One thing for sure, it was excluding Jiao, or that was how she heard it: as a warning-off, a curtain drawn between them. A claim on him, a rejection of her.
She stood there, upright and waiting, expectant. More than twice his age, immeasurably more experienced, a dark soul who had been his delight: she stood there, waiting for him to hurt her one more time.
This path only led one way. He said, “I’m sorry, Jiao. I need to be with Siew Ren now, because that’s what she needs. You know, you’ve seen. Go back to the emperor, be his long right arm, someone he can lean on. Mei Feng’s just a distraction now. He needs someone fierce, or he’ll be all swallowed up by the baby and everything else will fall back into his mother’s hands, and you know how well that works.”
She looked at him, she listened with scrupulous care; she said, “You keep talking about what you need, what Siew Ren needs, what the emperor needs. You don’t think, you don’t even wonder what I might need. For me.”
He stopped, he thought about that for a minute; he said, “No. No, you’re right, I don’t. I can’t. I’m sorry, Jiao. I said that already. I am sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. There isn’t space in my head now to worry about you too. Or the emperor, Mei Feng, anyone. You’ll have to do it without me for a while, all of you.”
“All of us. Yes. Even now, I’m just one of them, aren’t I? One of the people you’re leaving behind.”
“I think it’s the other way around, I’m asking you all to leave me behind. You’re the ones with the exciting lives. I’m just going to sit in the valley here and help Siew Ren get better. But—yes. Please, Jiao. Make me happy one last time, go and be with them, help them all. Yes.”
She stood straight in her sorrow, and—although he stood higher than her on the path, and although he was tall for Taishu, jade-eater tall, and how much easier had his life been when he had nothing on his back to worry him bar a weight of stolen jade, and nothing ahead to worry him bar a journey to find the emperor, and nothing at his side to worry him bar a pirate holding steel at his throat?—she seemed almost to grow, almost to rise above him as though she were a goddess slipping out of human form as she said, “No. What you’re forgetting, Yu Shan, is that I never was one of them. I was only ever with you.”
And then she turned and stepped off the path and was gone like a goddess into the forest and the night; and there was absolutely nothing he could do, not even cry a warning after her. She was a stranger here, and she knew already how dangerous that was.
The clans weren’t the only risk, it wasn’t only men who walked these hills at night, and she knew that too. The tiger didn’t really need to call again.
When it did, Yu Shan closed his eyes to hear better, to see the black-barred green of its fur again, the vivid green of its eyes so like the emperor’s, so like his own; and when the long liquid song subsided, he shivered—not in tribute, exactly, and exactly not in conclusion, there, that’s finished, done with, no—and hurried on up the path again, chasing his companions, chasing Siew Ren, never looking back.
six
f there was one thing worse than riding a horse, General Ma thought—and of course there was, there were many things worse than riding horses, and for some men he himself was one of those worse things—but if there was one thing more immediately uncomfortable than riding a horse, it must be riding a mule.
General Ma was a fat man who had contrived to stay that way down all the many miles of the long pursuit, across half the width of empire, and not by and large by riding horses. Or mules. He was a man who loved his comforts, and one of those was food and another was his carriage, drawn by whatever beasts he could muster, which usually meant the best in any province.
Now, after half a day astride, he did not dismount so much as roll out of the saddle and tumble groundward. He was fortunate to land on his feet and remarkable only for keeping them, for not staggering, not falling flat onto the flags of the courtyard.
He grunted and peered about him at the torches and the lamps and the dark pooling shadows between, looking for another of his comforts, his boy Yueh.
And saw quite another figure advancing at him, and contrived almost to make it look, almost to make himself believe that of course he was not looking for his boy, not looking for comfort, no, not yet. Of course he had been looking for the generalissimo.
“My lord,” he said, with a low and careful bow.
“Ma.” Tunghai Wang still had this disconcerting habit of presence, of being where he was not looked for, even with his army spread impossibly wide across the country. With that, apparently, came the habit of knowing: where one had been, what doing. “What have you learned?”
“Little enough, my lord. Little that we did not know already. It would be easier to interrogate prisoners, easier far to compare what they say one with another, if we could bring them all together in the same place.”
“You mean in the same city, in Santung.”
“Yes, my lord. It would be easier to see your men fed too and kept in order,” which was General Ma’s other task and had been hard enough in all conscience when they were in Santung before, harder on the long road there, was proving harder yet in this chaotic scattering.
Tunghai waved a hand. “This is an old song, old friend.”
“I know it. But songs get to be old by being repeatedly sung; and truths do not become untrue through overtelling. If you could take Santung again,” said that way just to goad him; of course he could, everyone knew he could, “then I could serve you and the army better. And we would have more prisoners, and far better information.”
“And the boy-emperor could come from Taishu again, whenever he chose, and take the city back once more. We can both of us take Santung, and neither one of us can hold it.”
“Perhaps—though the longer you wait, the longer you let him inhabit it, the better chance he has of holding it. They are already building fortificat
ions. You would do well to interrupt.”
“Fortifications, yes. I know this, I have seen. What more?”
“If you wanted more, you should have kept Ai Guo. I have plans of the works; each man draws them differently,” with a shudder at the memories: the stink and the noise of them, those prisoners snatched in raids or trying to raid on their own account, venturing incautiously beyond the city; the garbled speech and ruined fingers struggling to draw, “but you may be able to make some composite sense from them. It may even resemble what they are actually doing,” though he at least would not willingly gamble anything on that, not money nor hope nor certainly his life. Not willingly even other people’s lives.
Tunghai Wang looked at him carefully, spoke thoughtfully, said, “Perhaps you are not the right man to organize my intelligence for me?”
There was so much threat in that, for all that they were old friends, for all its bland consideration. Ma flinched physically, and felt himself do it, and knew that Tunghai would have seen.
“No, no,” he said, trying not to gabble, not to plead; and then—spotting the boy Yueh in the shadows, and desperately recovering some little poise because some things were after all possible under a great compulsion—“you will still not find anyone better than me. Only, I could do better work in Santung. And you should not let the emperor sit there too long undisturbed.”
“Is the emperor still there?”
“No.” Another thing learned today, something to give up. Relief. “The emperor has gone back to Taishu, and will send a governor. We don’t know who, not yet.”
“If the emperor can go with such confidence, he can come back. And bring his army back, and take the city.”
“Perhaps—but how many times? He has taken some soldiers with him, and may take more—but he must leave a garrison. He must spend more men every time you come against him.”