Hidden Cities

by Daniel Fox

  That would be Tunghai Wang if the generalissimo had his way, if Ma laid it out for him.

  If he could keep the dragon from interfering, more than she had already.

  He was in the place to do that, the right place, sure.

  A high place, and the sound of hammering.

  THERE WAS a window, small and square and shuttered. A finger of pale mountain sunlight had poked through a knothole in the wood. Ma judged the angle of that acutely, flung back his quilts and tumbled his boy out of bed.

  “Master?” Yueh lay sprawled on rugs, laughing up at him, naked and beautiful and his own.

  “Washing-water,” Ma grunted, “and food, whatever these monks are used to eat in the mornings.” Tsampas, he guessed, and more butter tea: great churned pipes of it for the monastery at large, more delicate pots for the abbot’s guests and the butter to mix themselves. That would do him admirably. The men he’d brought might struggle, perhaps—but food was food and they should be grateful. Something hot in their bellies and no dragon in the sky, no imperial soldiers hunting: they should be glad enough. They should be settling here, anticipating days of this. Barrack walls against the weather, barrack food and barrack beds, no work, no fear, no worry. Nowhere to go, nowhere to be but here.

  He hoped to disappoint them, sooner than they imagined. For now, though, let them lie, let them snore and scoff and squabble …

  With his boy gone trotting off, Ma rolled himself out of bed and hobbled to the window, sore it seemed in every part that moved. Well, he would hope to disappoint himself also, if his self had hopes of rest and recovery here. Butter tea.

  The shutter swung inward, to show a broad stone ledge—or was it rock, the actual rock of the mountain? Was the monastery a blown egg, a mine dug from the living hill?

  He leaned out foolishly and tried to see, and couldn’t quite. Built or otherwise, the monastery presented one flat face to the wind, like a cliff that clung to the mountain at its back. He could go down and out into the yard below, peer up at it and look for the marks of man, try to guess if it were one or the other or both together, half built and half dug out.

  Or he could ask the abbot. He needed to speak to the abbot, as soon as might be.

  As he leaned out like this, perilous above the fall of it, the sound of hammering rose up to meet him, hard and metallic and perfunctory.

  The sound of his boy’s laughter at his back was less clear, muffled by his own naked bulk wedged in the window frame.

  He heaved himself back in, helped somewhat by Yueh’s hands but only somewhat, as the boy was seized by giggles. Ma cuffed him equably—he had seen his master’s vast buttocks before, after all—and only then spotted the parade of monks behind him, bearing bowls and towels and a tray, none of them wreathed in steam enough to have disguised the view.

  No matter. Ma wrapped himself in a quilt and thought himself magnificent enough.

  LATER, WASHED and fed and dressed, he left the boy in the room—he would sleep, of course, if he was given nothing more to do; Ma gave him nothing bar a clip on the ear and a handful of dried fruit to munch on—and stopped the first monk he found, asked to be taken to the abbot.

  And was taken down and out, into the hard stone yards and then along, through one and then another. They were ordered almost like the courtyards of a house. Here was the entrance yard beyond the gate, that he had seen already by lamplight, roofed with stars. Here next the stable yard, where his own cursed mule was stalled alongside rugged ponies, where there was room also for all the monastery cattle to be housed and fed come winter, though the beasts were out on a lower pasture now. Here next—

  Here was the hammering like a wall, like a gate closed against them. Stepping through the arch, Ma felt as though he stepped through a solid fall of water, though it was only sound.

  Here were broad-chested men, monks with shaven heads, stripped to the waist as they worked: as they bent over anvils with great hammers in their hands, as they stood back to let wiry novices—stripped even further, some of those, stripped to a twist of cloth, scrawny buttocks and gangling limbs showing burn-scars everywhere—take their work and thrust it back into a furnace or else quench it in an iron trough of water, in a sudden scalding gout of steam.

  Here were half a dozen furnaces, fed and stoked by those same sweating novices; here were a dozen anvils, all of them in use; here was no noise except the hammers, but the hammers were noise enough for this mountain. Too much noise for Ma, he couldn’t bear it.

  He stood just within the arch, saw the abbot an impossible distance ahead, almost at the far side of the yard, beyond the anvils. Beyond the noise, unreachable.

  Ma looked a mute appeal at his guide—no point in speaking under this heaviness of sound, this brute iron rain of blows—and gestured, pleadingly. Would you fetch him to me? Would he come? You will find me back there, if he will. In the stables. Doing my duty by my mule …

  THE MULE took Ma’s arrival as a matter of course, only to be expected. Ma felt that perhaps he was owed a little more, that someone somewhere ought to be acknowledging the surprise of it, and really there was only the mule.

  And then the abbot came, and Ma struggled a little under the surprise of that, and struggled a little not to show it. He was used to ordering the comings and goings of a thousand men at a time, but only on paper, with brush and ink. In the flesh, he had trouble sometimes giving orders to his boy. The notion that the abbot of a high establishment should come to him—to fat and comical General Ma, who was only made general because he was useful and convenient, not because he was any kind of soldier—and only because he asked it … Well. Yueh would take it for granted, but Ma was taken aback.

  “What,” the abbot murmured, “you have come all this way and climbed my mountain at the last, you have suffered pains and discomforts and a thousand inconveniences on the way, and shall I not walk across a courtyard?”

  “My lord abbot, you were busy among your brothers; it ill befits a guest to interrupt the work of the house, let alone the work of its master.”

  “My first work is to take care of our guests. And all my brothers know their own work, and get on very well without me.” He was a brisker man in daylight than he had seemed last night. If they stayed any longer in the mule’s stall, Ma was afraid that he would cast about for a brush and start to groom the beast. Or find a broom and sweep dung out of the stall.

  To spare them both, Ma walked out into the yard again. It was a bright day, a pleasure to enjoy a clear sky with no equivocation, no anxious peering for the dragon.

  He said, “The work of your house is in iron, I find.”

  “Indeed. I think it a useful discipline, to remind us of the iron grip the gods take on our world. We are born in chains, General Ma; freedom is as much an illusion as wealth and power and achievement. The wheel of life has an iron rim, and we are bound upon it. Up here, we sit above the world and its fogs, we see more clearly—and what we see is a rigid order, discipline beyond the mortal. Our own life of ritual and labor is a shadow, an expression to the gods of what we see below. We account for every hour, we bind ourselves about with prayer and smoke and custom—and we work in iron, we make axles and wheel-rims and chains.”

  That was an invitation, and Ma was not slow to seize it. He said, “There was another house, a sister-house of yours I guess, that was famous for its chains.”

  The abbot nodded, smiled. “The world called it the Forge, I know. Sometimes when the wind blows I call this valley of ours the Bellows.”

  Was that another invitation, was the abbot laying out a path of stones for him, step here, and now step here …? Ma was unsure, but swift to step regardless. He said, “Does the typhoon reach this far inland, this high into the mountains?”

  “We have our own storms,” the abbot said judiciously, “mountain-storms. The typhoon is a tale here, rather than a trouble to us. Still, we look down on the world and see how much it is troubled. We do know of the typhoon.”

  He could look down
on the dragon, Ma thought, from the height of this cliff-house: look down on her as she flew. He was glad to have a wall around the yard here, to hide him from the edge. It was a great wrong to find himself standing higher than birds in flight, higher than clouds. Higher than the dragon. That was why he feared heights so much, he thought; it was an impertinence, to lift himself above his proper place.

  Some men were not afraid, apparently. He looked down at the abbot, surprised as he always was by courage and by size, the incompatibles. “You may know how much we have been troubled recently along the coast, since your sister-house came to its unhappy end?”

  “Indeed. Pirates, we hear, slew our brothers at their work. So of course the dragon rose, and brought storm with her from the depths. Storm and war.”

  Actually it was Tunghai Wang who had brought the war. Which meant that it was Ma, largely, because it was his work that allowed the army to move. “Yes. The dragon has been a dreadful trial to us all, who live beside the sea. As she was before she was chained, as she always will be unless she can be chained again.”

  There, he had said it; and the abbot did not laugh. Nor curse, nor scold him. Yueh was apparently right, as so often: You are not a man to be laughed at, or easily dismissed. Or scolded. You should learn that. You have great weight in the world, a cool hand laid upon the matter of his belly, addressing the substance within. You should learn to see yourself dressed in your own importance, as we all see you. Lord.

  Ma saw himself dressed in his boy’s care, no more than that. And was grateful for it, now especially, something to depend on as he waited. It was a breathless wait, for the abbot would not be hurried and this thin air did Ma no good when he was nervous and hopeful.

  The abbot turned to address two young novices who dragged a hand-cart across the yard, pigs of crude iron making the wheels—iron-bound, yes, and iron-spoked too against the weight on the bed above—clatter and spark on the stones. Their shaven heads gleamed with sweat, their eyes gleamed with mischief as he spoke to them, but not perhaps so much as his own did. They ducked their heads respectfully to him, bowed more deeply to Ma, hauled their load away.

  The abbot said, “I have told them to fetch your boy, take him higher up the mountain and teach him to fly kites. I hope you have no objection?”

  Ma blinked. “No, no, none at all, my lord abbot”—they would find the boy sleeping, and he might as well play as sleep—“but I don’t understand.” There seemed to be little in kite-flying to express the harsh rule boasted of, the strict devotion that accounted for every hour, iron in the soul.

  “No. Our kites are flags, our flags are prayers, we lift them to the gods—but you didn’t bring your boy up here to have him learn our ways. Nor did you come yourself to exercise your mule.”

  “No.” Let it be direct, then. “My lord abbot, I need a monksmith.”

  “Not even that, I think: you need the monksmith.” And that same chastening smile, and, “I am your man.”

  four

  hey were Dandan’s patients, her two old men, her particular care. That was understood.

  Tien might have adopted them into her library and taken charge of their treatments, because she could doctor them properly, where Dandan could only ever nurse. Nevertheless they were Dandan’s old men, no question.

  The boy Gieh might have appointed himself their servant, which meant he could spend half the day sitting at their feet while they talked dangerous nonsense at him, and the other half nosing through their things while they were with Tien. Nevertheless, they were still Dandan’s old men. Yes.

  She didn’t have to heal their broken bodies, or ease their many pains. Tien would do that, as much as could be done. She didn’t have to bathe them, wash their clothes or clean their room. Gieh did that, as much as he saw the need and they would allow. She didn’t have to fetch them food, the boy did that too, along with far more potent spirits than she thought good for them. Or good for him, because they certainly shared, those wicked old men, they delighted in corrupting the boy. She was growing used to his shrill ramshackle laugh echoing down the passage late at night, his pale sweating silence in the mornings.

  On the face of it, perhaps she had no duties now. And yet, they were still her men. She had nothing else that was hers. Mei Feng, Dandan’s mistress and also perhaps her friend, was gone back to Taishu. Dandan had stayed by her own choice: which was in no way the act of a friend, and almost entirely the fault of the old men. Which really only confirmed how tied they were now, each to each, Li Ton and Ai Guo and she.

  Which was entirely sufficient to explain why she was out here on the beach now, some miles from the city. She had a basket on her arm and she was gathering.

  She didn’t have the coast to herself. These hungry days, there were scavengers on every beach: digging for whelks and razor-shells, netting shrimps in the shallows, stranding themselves on tidal islands to fish the surf. Eyeing strangers with something close to loathing, as something close to thieves.

  Dandan came from the palace, and was in no danger of starving. Nor were her old men. Still, she came from the palace and might have brought trouble with her, and did not. She was tolerated, largely because she never did bring trouble. Tolerated and still watched, muttered over, isolated. Take what you want but not too much, nothing that we might want ourselves …

  Day by day she did that, free and distrusted and begrudged. Let them dig and wade, let them swim far out to distant rocks, let them guard their precious waters and take what they could struggle for. Dandan scrambled, rather, and took only what the sea offered up to the sun.

  She went out as the tide sank, to ruin hands and feet and clothes together, finger-fishing in revealed pools and gleaning from the sharp-edged rocks around.

  Mostly, she collected seaweeds. Kelp drying in tangles on the sand, bubbleweed floating in a shadowed pool; blackweed and threadweed and saltgrass, she knew a dozen and could find them all. One would strengthen the blood, another nourish the liver. Threadweed strangled diseases of the belly, while saltgrass encouraged a healthy flow of urine. She prepared them as needed, soups and teas for her old men. To the boy Gieh they were medicines and not food, and hence no part of his province; to the girl Tien they were foods and not medicine.

  It was all that Dandan had just now, and she clung to it tenaciously. Most days would find her out along the shoreline, east or west. If some days she carried her basket home empty, small blame to her for that. Some days, there was nothing worth the bringing back.

  Some days, her life seemed barely worth the living. She would gaze across the water toward distant Taishu and wonder if she should have gone when she could have gone, left her old men and been a better friend to Mei Feng. Who was pregnant, after all, and had few friends else.

  Dandan could persuade herself, often and often, that she’d done the wrong thing. Trapped herself the wrong side of the strait, among people who didn’t know they needed her. Old men could be obtuse, and boys were worse. Boys could be obnoxious.

  When she thought of the old men, how she had first seen them, there was reassurance in that. Her anger stirred to life again, and her determination. They were her special cause, and she could still raise them from the pit they’d fallen into. Tortured and torturer together, she could save them both. She could find them a place to be and a way to live, unfettered by their long and dreadful histories.

  She was quite certain of that.

  And even so, some days she ended up out here on the rocks, empty-handed and helpless, hopeless, almost in despair for herself. Staring at the sea and wondering, rebuilding her own story in her own imagination, telling it otherwise, putting herself otherwhere, seeing herself happy …

  SEEING A sail break the horizon, today, here, now.

  AT FIRST she thought it wasn’t a sail at all, she thought it was only the very tip of the Forge, strangely visible today where it hadn’t been before.

  But she watched it, she scrambled higher up the slew of rocks to give herself a better vantage, and
it was definitely a boat. Not a small boat, but flying only a single sail.

  She thought, she really thought it ought to hurry more.

  Her eyes checked the sky and saw no dragon, but that was no guarantee. The dragon was as likely to erupt from beneath, the sea her element.

  There must surely be one of the goddess’s children aboard, or they could never be so casual. Even so, Dandan thought they ought to hurry. She thought one sail was idling, almost insulting, certainly tempting fate.

  Watching, she saw the boat edge closer to the coast. She could see a tall figure at the steering oar, a shorter—a boy, she thought—running between the stern and the foremast, where the sail hung.

  She thought it was the fisherman’s old boat. It had a distinctive shape and an uncommon size, too large for a sampan but yet not quite a junk. That wasn’t him, though, steering it. And it didn’t seem to be quite sailing where they wanted it to go. There was a sense almost of panic in the boy’s restless skittering forward and back; there was … something else, inexperience or injury at the stern there.

  Dandan was almost sure now that the tall figure on the oar was a woman: which meant that it really ought to be Jiao. The woman stood tall but twisted, though, hunched over to one side, not like Jiao at all. She worked the oar one-handed, as best she could, which was only a little short of hopeless. Sometimes it dug in too deep, trying to stir more water than one hand could possibly shift; sometimes the blade lifted suddenly free so that she staggered at the lack of resistance, once almost pitched herself entirely over the side, barely managed to save herself with a rail-grab from her other hand, her bad arm, with results that put her on her knees for a minute there while the oar swung free and the boy had to come pounding back to take it.

  Slowly, uncertainly, Dandan understood they were in trouble. She knew nothing about boats, but surely the boat shouldn’t be standing side-on to the waves as it came, carried in crabwise like flotsam?