Hidden Cities

by Daniel Fox

  “Where are we going, Captain Shola?”

  “Home,” she said. Of course. “We’re going home.”

  Home meant her mother and the temple on the cliff, above the creek. Twice now, Pao had taken her and her sister away from there. Or Old Yen had done it, rather, and at the emperor’s order, but Pao had helped.

  Shola didn’t seem to bear a grudge. Her sister, Jin—well, it was hard to know what Jin might want, but she bore no grudges either. He was sure of that.

  Things change; Jin smiled when she saw him. That was all for now, but it was enough. For now.

  “How’s the weather?”

  “Easy sailing,” she said, gazing about with a faraway look, as a sailor might, as she thought Old Yen did exactly. “Wind’s in the west, south and west; he’ll take us home.”

  He was and he would, if they were going. The little girl might only be at play, but she was playing with what she truly had to hand. Pao liked that, and admired it, and wished that he could offer her something better.

  “Soon now, perhaps,” he said, the best he had, a hope that she had already and did not need from him. “Soon, they’ll let you go, perhaps.” Why not, when the children weren’t needed anymore, now there was a pact with the dragon?

  She just looked at him, a little more cynical than he was. “Where’s Jin?”

  “In the cabin.”

  A mighty frown. “You shouldn’t leave her.”

  “She sent me to fetch you. We have made tea.”

  “You shouldn’t leave her with the kettle …!”

  And Shola was already bustling past him, on her way to save big sister from herself. Pao grinned as he followed in that small determined wake, because things change but Shola was too young yet to understand that, quite.

  THEY CAME into the cabin and there was the kettle, yes, steaming over a charcoal pot; and there was Jin, yes, close enough that Shola might well worry.

  Not Pao. He had seen the slow change in her big raw hollow sister, seen it and treasured it and said not a word about it, not to alarm or excite the little girl, not to alarm or excite himself.

  Pao had grown up with sisters on all sides, older and younger than himself. He had missed them in the army, on the road. There were women, there was a great deal of talk about women and some of it excited him, some excited even as it appalled, but none of it was a substitute for what he’d lost. He liked having girls about him, at ease, at play.

  It didn’t happen, couldn’t happen: not on the road, not in Santung what short time they were there, and not on Taishu either. The local girls were frightened, or else they were taken and claimed by older men, or both.

  And then there was Old Yen and no possibility of girls, until this: these two, back and forth across the strait, a charm against the dragon.

  When they weren’t at sea, they were just girls, one tough and one troubled. The tough one was willing to play little sister to him, willing to let him play brother to them both; the troubled one—well, she was pretty in her heedless awkward way, and he liked to look at her, but she was like another sister in his head.

  Sister growing back into herself, he thought. Perhaps. Now that the goddess didn’t need her.

  He was curious and hopeful and wanted to help, but mostly he just liked to be among them. Playmate, brother. That would do. He was making himself a family that he wouldn’t have to leave.

  His soldier-friends would have been mocking, incredulous, if they had seen him like this: drinking tea with a girl who was empty-headed and ripe for the taking, the only obstacle her baby sister who could be easily tossed out, tossed overboard if necessary, if she made a fuss. Some of the men he’d known—not friends, no—would have tossed her overboard for fun, and only then gone in to her sister.

  Pao had been made a man so many ways this summer, every time the world changed. There was a simple pleasure in being allowed to be a boy again, laughing with sisters.

  At times like this he thought Shola was the elder sister, oldest of them all.

  She was the one who worried, and that was an adult thing to do. Jin had no worries in her head, and Pao worried so little at times like this, his fool mind was so determined to believe the world would do no harm to three children playing families on a boat, he hadn’t even thought to draw the gangplank up.

  If he had thought, he still wouldn’t have done it—Old Yen would be angry, coming back at whatever unpredictable hour to find himself cut off from his own boat; and there were always soldiers on watch on the wharf in any case, so why worry, what need?—but he hadn’t even thought.

  NOT UNTIL he heard the plank creak under an unexpected weight, felt the boat tip in response. Someone had come aboard, and not Old Yen. He knew that man’s light tread, the almost imperceptible burden of him, the sense of the whole boat sighing, resettling into herself as her true master came back to her.

  This was something else. Someone else, or more than one; the boat had seriously listed under the gangplank’s pressure. If it was just one person, it was a fat one, or else heavily burdened. And few people were fat on Taishu anymore, and who would be bringing cargoes onto Old Yen’s boat in his absence …?

  There were noises too, a sort of coughing grunt, a clink of chain. He didn’t know.

  Pao picked himself up from the cabin floor, too late and too slow, seeing Shola ahead of him in her worry. He signed to her, hush, I’ll go see; you keep your sister here, keep her quiet.

  The little girl nodded. Pao opened the cabin door, slipped out and closed it again at his back.

  AND ALMOST wished he hadn’t, finding himself face to face with a tiger. Wished he’d left it wide and could cry to the girls to flee, swift and surprising, out the other way and over the side, down to the wharf and away. A door was no protection, the creature would sniff them out regardless, however quiet they held themselves within.

  And no, of course they couldn’t outrun a tiger if it chose to give chase; but this was a tiger on a chain, which might delay it at least a little, maybe long enough …

  TOO LATE now. Too late, too slow.

  THE TIGER was green and black, like a creature risen out of myth.

  Its eyes shone like wet polished stone, like jade, flat and deep together.

  Its mouth hung open, a little; its black lips were drawn back, a little; its teeth seemed very close and very sharp, the chain quite thin.

  A little, a very little part of him thought that perhaps he ought to look the other way, look ashore to see help coming, guards, soldiers, men with bows and blades.

  Most of him, the best of him knew that was nonsense. There was no help, no sound from the wharf at all. The world changed, and no one ever came to stop it.

  Besides, it was hard enough to look away from the tiger at all. Impossible to look back at the world unchanged, untiger’d.

  All he could do now was see who held the chain.

  He lifted his head with a great effort, very great.

  Saw her, knew her. She was famous, almost. Besides, she’d been aboard before.

  She might almost know him.

  For sure she knew the emperor, and Mei Feng too. Why did he not feel reassured, at all?

  Because she had a tiger on a chain, perhaps. And because there was no sound from the wharf, nothing at all, when a woman with a chained tiger should have attracted a noisy chain of followers. This woman particularly, who was always in company and seemed somehow more dangerous yet, positively lethal on her own. Even without her tiger.

  And because she had a smile on her face that he did not like at all, that said I have a tiger on a chain; and because she stood strangely hunched and twisted, as though something unimaginable had broken her, unimaginably badly; and because he simply knew, he always knew when the world had changed again and things had gotten worse.

  He thought perhaps she scared him more than the tiger did, which meant perhaps more than the dragon too.

  He stood on the deck there with his back to the cabin door, and never even thought till
later that he might have made a reckless run himself, down the gangplank and away.

  Jiao smiled that terrible smile and said, “You have the children aboard with you, I know. I have been watching. Where have all the other boats gone?”

  Watching, she said: not listening, not talking to people round about. He supposed it would be hard to ask questions, with a bright shining tiger on a chain. Or at least it would be hard to find answers of any value.

  She could ask him anything, alone as they were in this shifting world, with the girls behind a flimsy door behind him.

  He said, “Fishing.”

  She frowned. “Without the children?”

  There was the other child, the castrated boy—but he was safe ashore, and Jiao might know that. She’d been watching.

  He said, “We don’t need the children any longer, just to go fishing.”

  “How not?” She hadn’t expected this; he could almost feel the world changing for her too, sliding into a new configuration.

  He said, “Old Yen came to … an agreement, with the dragon.” Stood face to face with the dragon, as Pao now stood face to face with a tiger. “She allows us to fish, if every boat flies a green banner to say it is from Taishu and only fishing, not out to cross the strait.”

  “He came to an agreement.” She had to repeat it, he thought, in order to believe it. Even then her voice was full of doubt and question. “What in the world did he have to offer to a dragon?”

  “I don’t know, he didn’t say.” Not to Pao, at least. Privately, Pao thought that even Old Yen didn’t know actually why the dragon had agreed. What he might himself have conceded. Pao thought the old man was a little scared of that. “All we have to do is fly the banner.”

  “And yet you are tied up here, no banner,” with a glance at the mastheads, “and no fishing with the fleet, although Taishu is still hungry and everyone knows Old Yen would sooner fish than breathe. Why so?”

  “Old Yen is at the palace. Mei Feng … has not been well.”

  “Ah.” Her face would have told no one anything, except that Pao had seen her in other moods and knew how expressive that face could be. What this stillness meant, he wasn’t certain: only that it must mean something. “Well. Girls with babies growing are often not well, and imperial babies are said to be hard work. Also, old men can be fretful, and young men just the same. When the young man in question is the emperor, well …”

  She shrugged quite carefully, quite unconvincingly, with her dreadful twisted shoulder. Pao said nothing. He was both male and young; what did he know, what could he tell her about pregnancies and sickness? He knew that Old Yen was not a fusser, and was sick himself with worry. It wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t have been enough in the face of Jiao alone; under the eye of the tiger, it was nothing.

  She said, “Well. Lacking Old Yen, we must make shift. Can you sail the boat by yourself?”

  Absolutely not. He said so. “It takes two,” two at least, two who knew her temper.

  Comfortably, Jiao said, “Well then, it’s lucky you have me to help. I’ve been on boats enough. Tell me which ropes to haul, and I will haul them. And we have the girls, if we should need them, if there’s anything they can do.”

  Urgently, he said, “You don’t need the girls. I told you, we can fly a banner and sail freely …”

  She said, as he had dreaded, “Not if the dragon’s watching. She would see we are not fishing, and not coming back to Taishu. Did you think I wanted to go out for a pleasure-jaunt, idiot boy? Or to fish, to feed the emperor’s soldiers another day? Or to feed my tiger?” with a little tug on the chain that brought a sidelong glance of jade-green eyes, a low grumble in the collared throat. “He might like fish, I expect he would, but he can wait. We’ll cross the strait to Santung. I think you can bring me there, with the girl to speak for us against the dragon. Unless the goddess abandons us, of course. In which case the dragon can eat us all, and be damned to her.”

  two

  don’t know what you’re doing here, anyway. What, has the sea run out of fish all of a sudden? Or have you finally decided to trust Pao out in your boat alone, unwatched …?”

  Old Yen smiled, a little thinly. “There are men and boats enough, to fish for me.”

  “Grandfather, you are twice ten thousand years old and you have never said that in your life before! You have never believed it in your life, and you don’t believe it now. You think you’re the only man on Taishu who can find where the yellowtails are shoaling, and all the other boats just bob along in your wake and grow fat on your cleverness. And you,” reacting to a snort from the other side of the bed, turning her head to glower at him though even so much effort was a real strain, she was so tired and her neck did ache abominably, she’d never realized just how heavy her head was, “don’t you have, oh, I don’t know, an empire to rule? A war to fight? Go plot the downfall of your enemies …”

  Feed my people she might have said, to both of them together. It was all she really meant to say, apart from go away. But that would have frightened them, it would sound so valedictory, last message of a dying girl: which would only have made them linger longer at her bedside, even more reluctant to move.

  She thought she was dying, probably, and her baby with her. She thought perhaps the baby was dead already, and killing her from the inside. She had bled, a little, two days ago: just enough she thought for a barely begun baby to be bleeding out.

  The pain had come before, brute stabbing pains as if the baby were a blade in her own gut and slashing, slashing. There had been days of that. And then she had bled, that little bit, and now the pain was entirely different in kind. Now it was a slow rotting kind of pain, as if she carried a dead thing inside her to poison her blood and bile. She thought she stank on the inside, she was turning putrid and foul from within.

  She did think this would kill her, tomorrow if not today.

  So did the emperor, perhaps. So did Old Yen. Whatever they said. They sat one on either side and held her hands when she would let them, and said stupid hopeful things when she would hear them, when she could. Sometimes she drifted on a dreary tide, their voices would fade to nothing and she could be blessedly somewhere else for a while; but those same shifting treacherous tides would bring her back again, strand her on this bitter shore, this bed. She would rouse and hear one voice or the other, the two men she had loved most and best in this world, and wish one more time that they would go away.

  This evening she was more sharply here than she had been for a while. She knew it was evening, because the useless doctors had brought her a draft of tea that must be drunk at sunset, they said, before the moon could rise. When the world hung poised, they said, between one power and another. Slack water, she wanted to say, and she knew the same thought was in her grandfather’s head; and she said nothing, because any sailor knew that seafolk die at slack water.

  The doctors were fools, but she forced herself to drink their tea, just to make her menfolk happy.

  And so was sick, brutally stabbingly sobbingly sick, so messily sick that the little cat ran off and the emperor had to lift Mei Feng out of bed so that all her quilts and bedding could be changed.

  Now she was clean and settled again, and her men were sat again on either side of her, and she was stranded high and dry, no hope of drifting off with her insides feeling ripped apart. And so she was grumbling at them, as much like herself as she could manage, in the faint failing hope of sending them away with argument if she couldn’t drive them off with curses.

  Her arguments weren’t working either, her sharp thin nagging little voice had no power to it. The emperor squeezed her hand too lightly and smiled and said, “No wars now. Thanks to you, little one, and your devious mind, and the game you used to play with Grandfather. If Tunghai Wang fights anyone now, if he still has an army, it will be Ping Wen. The rebel and the traitor, let them fight each other. I don’t care.”

  “You should care,” she said frowningly. “When they have killed each other, you n
eed to be ready. Go back and reclaim your empire, march all across it, let everyone see you. All the way to the Hidden City. Take the throne with you, you could have another coronation, you’d like that. Your mother would love it.”

  “It’s a terrible long way, and I like being here with you. I’ll wait till you’re fit to come with me. You and our child, our boy, let the empire see him and know I have an heir …”

  “Stupid. You shouldn’t wait so long.” We will have no boy, she meant, and no girl neither; our baby is dead and so will I be, and what will you have waited for then?

  He only smiled again with a terrible sorrow, squeezed her hand again with that terrible gentleness, didn’t shift. Didn’t go away.

  She might have turned her scowl back on her grandfather, but that would be just as useless. She knew why he was always here now, and never at sea. Oh, he was just as caught in sorrow and anxiety over her, of course he was; but there was more than that. He didn’t want to sail under the dragon’s banner. He had negotiated with the creature himself, and she was still awestruck that he could do that, her own beloved old man, that he could find the courage and the wit to confront an immortal and come away again whole and unharmed and victorious; but at what cost? His own victory was a terrible thing to him. He felt it as a betrayal of the Li-goddess, after serving her all his life and now making a deal with her fled prisoner, her enemy. The best he could manage was to present that deal to the emperor, make him a gift of it, and step away. Not fly the dragon’s green himself.

  Which meant not go to sea, because he wouldn’t willingly use the goddess’s children either. He had always hated that.

  Poor grandfather: in his age, when he should be most easy with himself and the world too, he had lost all his contentment. First his goddess, now his purpose.

  Soon his granddaughter, her too.

  Me too.

  He held her hand, and she really wished he wouldn’t.

  She could feel every one of his years in its hard lean fleshlessness, in the swollen knuckles and the ridged calluses. She’d never minded that, except that she knew his knuckles pained him sometimes. But now she could feel his hesitancy too, all his losses building up, and she couldn’t bear it. It was her fault, she thought, perhaps. If not for her …