Hidden Cities

by Daniel Fox

  She said, “I killed his mother,” which was not starting the story in the right place, but Biao was—just—too wise to interrupt. “Killed her and skinned her before he smelled me out, before he came. Perhaps it was her that he smelled. He came … It was dark, and I heard him coming, he’s a noisy brute,” with a glance that might almost be affectionate, if this spare, bare creature could remember affection. Biao wasn’t sure, and would never want to trust it. “All I saw was the eyes, though, and the—the intent of him, the purpose.

  “And I couldn’t reach my tao, all I had was a skinning-knife and that would do nothing but prick at him like a goad.

  “So I did the other thing, all I could think of to do.

  “I dropped the knife, grabbed his mother’s hide and wrapped it around myself.”

  A pause, a long pause, while she gazed at the cub and remembered, while Biao watched her and tried to imagine; then she shook her head, took a breath, carried on.

  “I was too slow, of course. Who can move faster than a tiger? A jade tiger, in his own hills and frantic for his mother …?

  “But.”

  That seemed to be enough, or she thought it was, that and a gesture: to the tiger-skin, to the tiger.

  It wasn’t enough for Biao. “But?”

  She sighed, rolled her eyes perhaps, said, “But, once he’d hurt me, once I fell, once we were tumbling downslope and we were all rolled up in her skin together, he was surrounded by the smell of her, which was what he knew and trusted; and it was all mixed up with the smell of me, my blood and her blood together in her fur, and …

  “Well. He’s young, he’s not very bright. I think he thinks I’m his mother.”

  THAT WAS something, an explanation, not enough.

  Nowhere near enough.

  Biao said, “Your wounds, your damage … You cannot, you can not have recovered this much, this quickly.”

  “No,” she said. “I think he should have killed me. Even after he stopped wanting to, the hurt he’d done, I should have died. I’ve seen men die enough, I know dead when I see it. I crawled up here to do that, to die. Like a cat, high and alone. Except that he came with me, so of course I brought the skin. And wrapped myself in it, because he was there, and because I was cold and wanted the comfort. And, well. Like that.

  “And then, like this. I am … healing. If you want to call it so. Not dying, that at least.”

  “Let me see.”

  “For what?” Her expression said there is nothing you can do, this is out of your hands. Perhaps it also said I know what you are, Biao, you are a pirate and a thief like me. Perhaps that was just his conscience.

  He shrugged. “Curiosity.”

  Honesty won through, where he thought a bluff would not. She shrugged off the skin again, to let him look more closely in the light. Flesh was knitting itself together wherever tooth or claw had torn it, skin was forming over the raw. It was happening too quickly for sense, and too quickly for her body too. Broken bones were marrying all askew, in whatever splintered pattern they now lay. Her shoulder was twisted, savaged out of all repair. He was surprised that it could take even the weight of her arm, let alone a blade in it, however unconvincingly.

  She said, “Like Mei Feng and the emperor, I’ve been too close to Yu Shan all summer, I have a little of his jade in me. Enough that it won’t let me die that easily. That’s on the inside. The rest? I think it’s the skin. Like sleeping in jade, swimming in it …”

  He touched her here and there, and felt the flinching that she would not show. She might always hurt, he thought, this badly. “If I had Tien’s needles here,” he said, “I might do something for your pain.”

  “If you had Tien’s skill,” she snorted.

  He nodded. “That too. That first, perhaps.” He had the tiger’s whiskers in his sleeve, and did not offer to use them. “She is the wrong side of the water now, but you should seek a doctor out. Not me.”

  “Not you, no.” She said it like a promise. And then, “Not anyone, perhaps. I might just stay here with the tiger.” And the pain.

  “You can’t. How would you live? And the forests won’t be safe for you. I said, the clans are looking. You need to move quickly, get ahead of the word.” If you can. He wasn’t sure it was possible, only that the opposite was not.

  Why did he want to help her, why see her survive? He wasn’t sure of that either. Only of the one thing, that even a token assistance had its price. That was fair, it was honest. It was how he dealt with the world. She would understand. She of all people, she who likely understood him better than anyone on this island.

  He said, “Stay here today, and I will bring you food in the morning.”

  She eyed him sardonically. “The tiger needs to eat too.”

  “For the tiger too. I will bring meat,” though it would likely be dried, and he would have to steal it from the compound’s wind-house. “Milk I cannot manage.”

  “Well. I think he is old enough now to live without his mother’s milk. He will need to be.” Still she eyed him, still she waited.

  He said, “I will tell them that I saw you heading westerly. They’ll think you are trying for the coast, and a boat away. With luck,” and the skills he had, the frauds his life was built on, “they will chase that way.”

  She said, “They must know there are no boats, with the dragon watching.”

  “Jiao, these are mountain people. They dig stone, they live in the forest, they never look at the sky. They never leave the valleys. They don’t think about the dragon. Yes, they’ve heard that, but they don’t know it, it’s not—”

  “Yu Shan knows it.”

  “And Yu Shan says that he will kill you, if he finds you—but he told me where to look, he didn’t come. He doesn’t want to find you. He’ll lead them that way, if I tell him to. Which would let you slip away easterly. If you’re quick, if you’re careful. If you’re lucky. That’s as much as I can do.”

  She looked at him assessingly, and shook her head. “Not yet. If you can do it now, you can do it in a week, when they’re less hot, when they think I’ve gone already. Bring me food and let me rest, let me heal …” Leave me with this, as her good hand pulled the tiger’s hide up again, over her crippled shoulder.

  “No,” he said. “Now, tomorrow, or not at all. Now, or I tell them where to find you. Tell them true.”

  Her fingers clenched in the fur, but her eyes showed no surprise. “What do you want, Biao?”

  “That. The tiger-skin. Tomorrow.”

  “I’m not ready. Another week …”

  He eyed her flatly. “Tomorrow. I’d take it now, but the clan would backtrack me and find you. Tomorrow, in exchange for food. Before I send them westward. I’ll say I had it from you, in exchange for your life. It’ll be true, more or less.”

  Her gaze moved to the cub. “He might follow you, if you take the skin.”

  Biao managed, with a blinding effort, just to shrug. “That’s the risk I take.” He’d bring a tao, but only for his own soul’s comfort, not for use. He wasn’t Jiao, to slay a pouncing tiger.

  “He might not follow me.”

  “No. You’re not his mother. That’s the risk you take. Is your life worth it?”

  She just looked at him.

  four

  he Forge was almost starting to feel like home.

  Han liked it—almost—for the solitude, for the security. At the moment, he thought, there was only one person he cared about, and he didn’t want to be with her. He’d rather be here, on a rock with no jetty, where neither she nor anyone else could come. The solitude was all for him.

  The security was for the dragon. Again because nobody—no magician, no priest, no army—could come to land here. This was a place of safety for her, and he thought she needed that.

  Every time he thought that, he laughed at himself for the rank impertinence of it. What safety did she need, from anyone except perhaps the Li-goddess? And all the goddess ever did was protect people—her own people, perha
ps: not everyone—from the dragon’s attacks. Either she had no aggressive intent, or else she would need to work through people to achieve it, and she had not mustered them yet.

  And yet the dragon did keep coming back to the Forge. She had her own reasons, which she would not share or else he could not understand. When he saw her land once more on the peak, when he saw her turn and turn like a dog making its bed in the rushes, when at last he saw her settle, what came to mind every time was security, for her. Not solitude: solitude was for him, who had lived all his life with other humans on every hand. She was alone all the time, except for him sometimes, who did not count.

  He wasn’t fool enough to think that she came back for him.

  The first time, he’d thought that she might never come back at all, that he was stranded again, marooned again. Doomed again.

  That first time, he’d felt relief at the first sense of her returning.

  Now he took her coming for granted, but was still sure that it was not for him.

  She wanted to feel safe, he thought, and so she came here, where no one could come at her. Except himself, of course, but she knew that she was safe from him.

  Safe with him: he would protect her, if he could.

  Which was another absurdity, and almost worse.

  She could go to the sky, or to the sea, where she would be safe from anyone who could neither fly high nor swim deep and deep.

  That might not include the goddess. Han didn’t know. He did know that someone, somehow, had chained the dragon once, and that she dreaded its happening again, and that she kept coming back to the Forge.

  Sometimes she lay curled at the peak there and watched the water, like a guard at her duty.

  Sometimes she watched Han, like someone intrigued by another’s little life: the bathing, the digging, the gathering and gleaning. The cooking. He always wanted to show Tien, when he cooked. And found himself showing the dragon instead, which wasn’t quite the same.

  Sometimes she watched him from the inside, which was worse.

  Sometimes she slept. He was fairly sure that whenever she wanted to sleep, she came back to the Forge. For her safety.

  Once, just once he had slipped into her mind while she slept, to watch her from the inside. He had walked deliberately in her dreams.

  Never again.

  IT SURPRISED him sometimes that she would want to sleep at all, after centuries on the sea floor, trapped in dreaming.

  Perhaps she had no choice. Sleep was one of the words on his back, and he could compel her into a slumped somnolence; that was only a mockery, another way to take her freedom from her. This was something else, a genuine dream-filled slumber. He had been astonished the first time, and he could still be astonished now. Why in the world should she need sleep? She was an immortal, wild as the wind and as restless, shifting as the tides and as relentless …

  She had mocked him for his physical weakness, threatened to do dreadful things while he slept.

  And yet here she was, curled like a snake on a mountain peak. Raising the height of the mountain, making a new peak in herself, of herself. Not snoring, no—not conspicuously breathing, even—and yet apparently asleep. Decidedly asleep. Perhaps her great body demanded it, perhaps that was the price of such tremendous physicality, that she must obey at least a few of the laws that bound mortals to their flesh—but he was still surprised. Astonished, when he thought about it.

  ASTONISHED ALSO at himself, that he would choose to sit here and watch her sleeping. So close to her head, snapping-distance if she should wake, if she could snap, if she would choose to do it.

  He didn’t, now, think that she would. They had come to … an accommodation. Yes. Call it that.

  He sat beside her head and watched her, almost watched over her while she slept.

  When he slept himself, often he woke to find her wakeful on the peak, or in the air just overhead, or thrusting head-up from the sea.

  Often and often, while he slept, he was aware of her lightly in his head, in his dreams, curious and watchful.

  Even now he was aware of an open door that he could step through, into her mind.

  If he chose not, if he found her dreams appalling—well. At least it was his choice, his opportunity.

  · · ·

  SHE MIGHT sleep, but she stayed alert. She was never, ever, sleepy.

  Now her eye, the one great eye that he could see snapped open. Briefly it surveyed him, considered him, engulfed him almost except that she had swallowed him long and long ago; this out here—this body—was only a shadow, a messenger, a husk.

  Her head lifted and swung: out to look over the sea, back to look at him. Both eyes now, the focus of her attention, of her glare.

  What is it, great one?

  There is a boat on the water. On the strait.

  Again?

  Again. Her head turned again, like a needle seeking north. Seeking, finding. She was right, of course: a dot of black against the shifting patterns of green and gray and blue, between Taishu and here. He could pick it out exactly, following her lead. And, This carries one of her cursed children, I can feel it from here. I cannot touch this one. I will not try.

  No.

  He wanted almost to shift his seat, to sit on the height of her leg and throw his arm across the ridges of her neck, just to be physically with her in her shame as they watched the boat go by …

  No.

  As they watched it come.

  five

  he human body,” Ai Guo said, “is a fascinating artefact, a fascinating study.”

  He was lying on his back, naked. His groin was draped in a scrap of silk for an absurd and ineffectual decency; his head was propped up on a silk-bound wooden block to allow him the very study of which he spoke, his own body the exemplar—the rather disgusting exemplar, though none the less fascinating for that disgust—and Tien the student-master with her silver needles to make her points for her.

  She grunted, not listening, laying hands on his twisted leg. Tapping lightly, feeling out the bones beneath the skin and the run of muscle, judging where her next needle ought to go. In its misshapen state the limb was an artefact indeed, manufacture of another man’s intent. He flinched when she found a point of consistent pain, perhaps unwittingly.

  Perhaps not. She was another article of his study, and her own body spoke against her. Tien was a believer, and one of the tenets of her belief was justice. Something in her thought it right that he should hurt so much. She was a doctor, and would try whatever she could to relieve his hurts; and in doing so she worked against that instinct, and all her body betrayed her. He found the whole process fascinating.

  Like a person under interrogation, she had a story to tell the world and a story to tell herself, and they were different. He could read them both, because that was his profession; and just now his mind was very much on his profession, as those fingers of hers—those doctorly, judicial fingers—tapped out pathways of pain within himself.

  This was instructional in the most useful way, learning from the inside just what could be achieved by pressure applied to old damage. He could look down the length of his body and see the external evidence, what had been done to him, how long ago; he could watch what Tien did now and measure that directly against what he felt, how his body responded.

  Never mind that she was seeking to ease his hurts, however much she felt that he deserved them. There was a lesson in every seeking fingertip. He watched, felt, learned.

  And if all this ruthless self-examination, all this uncharitable consideration of a young girl doing her best to help, all this study was a device to separate himself from the actuality of his pain, well. He did know that. It was an element in his study.

  So was talking about it.

  He said, “We see the mean mechanics of it, laid out here,” with an airy wave at himself as though he were a diagram exhibited, as though the simple lifting and wafting of a hand could cost him nothing, nothing at all, “but the meat is not the man, I think.
Where does the spirit, where does the soul reside?”

  “Where does it hide, you mean,” Tien countered, no fool she, “when the body is unbearable?”

  “That too. Like the emperor, fled to Taishu because the empire is untenable for him at the moment. There is a tether, clearly, but one can achieve at least a little distance. Even without benefit of your teas and needles.”

  “Oh? And did you allow your prisoners the benefit of a little distance, ever?”

  “The art is … not to do that. To keep them absolutely within their bodies, within the pain. Unh,” as her tapping fingers drove a needle in, perhaps a little sharply. “But you and I together, Tien, you with your knowledge and I with mine, with our very different practices, we could combine our skills and experience, and—”

  “There is nothing,” she said harshly, “that I want to do, that your—skills and experience—could possibly contribute to.”

  “Except perhaps to chain the dragon?” he murmured.

  She stood very still, the tip of one needle resting against his skin there, too light to scratch. He knew just where to drive that needle, to extract the utmost pain and the thinnest, most urgent gasp of confession. So, he suspected, did she.

  She only waited, and the needle wasn’t any kind of threat in her hand: only relief withheld. If he pointed that out she would correct it at once, setting the needle just where she meant it to go. He had only distracted her mind, not driven her from her duty.

  He held his silence, enjoying the tremble of waiting in her, the determination not to ask, the absolute expression of patience at its absolute limits.

  Until she broke, as she had to, because he would not: until she drew a tremulous breath and turned her head to face him and said, “Explain?”

  She had dropped her precious needle.

  He thought she hadn’t noticed.

  A cruel man would have pointed it out, perhaps, tormenting her with further delay while she scrabbled about on hands and knees to find it. But Ai Guo never had been cruel; he thought cruelty inefficient, and not interesting. He said, “We know that one spirit may stretch to subdue another, even in its own body. You have seen the goddess do that in her chosen children.”