Hidden Cities

by Daniel Fox

  This close to the shore, it shouldn’t be a killing kind of trouble. She knew nothing about the sea either, but this beach shelved gently even beyond the tideline. If they were trying to keep the boat out at sea and making too poor a job of it, they should just run aground and have to splash ashore, no worse than that. She thought. No unseen rocks to rip the hull apart, not depth enough to sink it.

  Even so, Dandan did make her way down to the water’s edge, to where sodden sand oozed up around her toes. There was a deadly attraction to imminent catastrophe. She wasn’t the only one drawn down here; the beach was littered now with dark still figures watching. She might be the only one with even the vaguest hopes of helping. She thought these others saw only hopes of salvage.

  The boat came on in its inevitable beauty, helplessly bound in the laws of tide and wind and current, like a fish dragged in by a net. Its side loomed, suddenly broad and high in the shallow curve of the bay, as inappropriate as a stranded whale. Perhaps it would destroy itself for very shame, tear itself apart when it struck …

  It turned at the last moment in shallow water to strike bow-first, almost to look intentional. It sounded like the dragon come to land: hissing and snapping, a slow rending groaning crunch. The boat seemed to shiver from stem to stern. Ropes flew loose and the sail fell. One voice—one child’s voice—screamed briefly. Then it was still and quiet, caught upright on the keel, startling and perverse in not enough water to sustain it.

  The incoming tide would float it off, Dandan thought, and more skilled hands would come to sail it up the coast to Santung, to a proper harbor. No great harm, to sit here for a few awkward hours …

  · · ·

  EXCEPT THAT there was a rush suddenly across the sand, and this was no family scavenging for shellfish in the rock-pools, or seeking profit from a wreck. They came from the rocks, where they must have been lurking; but these were men, too many and too rough. Men who seized her up as incidental profit, herself and other women from the beach as they charged into the breaking waves.

  Men who had fought the emperor, rebels. If she hadn’t guessed it already—struggling, kicking, terrified, seeing a new and brief and terrible life emerge like a boat from fog, all too clear—they confessed it, boasted about it as they called up the stranded vessel’s steep dark dripping flank.

  “Ohé there, the boat! Let ropes down, let us aboard!”

  “Who are you, and what can you do to help?” The voice was Jiao’s, no question, for all that she stood like a cripple and moved like one now.

  Would fight like one too, surely, if she could fight at all. If she would try to.

  Even healthy, even Jiao could not have fought this many men alone. If she had wanted to. “We are Tunghai’s men,” their captain called. “Tunghai Wang, who will be emperor. We want this boat, and everything you carry. Everyone you carry,” making it obvious that they knew about the escort-children. “You can come with us, or else we will set you ashore here, if you let down ropes right now.”

  Dandan didn’t believe him. Neither did Jiao; that woman was twice her age, and many times as sharp in the ways of men and war. “Oh yes,” she said, laughing harshly. “I’m sure you’ll be very kind to me, you and all your men in turn. And then toss me overboard after, me with my useless arm and all. It’s a pity; I might have come willingly to your Tunghai Wang, and told him whatever I know about the emperor’s plans. But I don’t think I can trust you now, can I?”

  “I don’t think you have a choice,” the captain called back, while his men hooted and laughed in their turn. One of them leaped to seize a dangling rope-end, to haul himself up hand over hand. Dandan tried to cry a warning, but the man who held her closed his great foul hand across her mouth so thoroughly she could barely even breathe. She tried to bite, but he only tightened his grip and growled in her ear, a slow exploration of everything he meant to do with her later, when they were afloat.

  In any case, Jiao was watching, leaning over the side to see the man as he climbed. Reaching out with her good arm, her heavy tao to cut the rope he hung from.

  The man splashed down eruptively. Jiao laughed from above, and all his colleagues were laughing too, but their captain had a thoughtful expression on his face. He wouldn’t be stalled for long. One man standing on another’s shoulders could reach the boat’s railing. Or an hour’s work ashore would bring back ladders. One minor mocking victory for Jiao was a goad to the rebels, not a defeat.

  She vanished from the side. Above the men’s muttering, Dandan heard the rattle of a chain released, Jiao’s voice sharply raised. Looking up, she saw a shadow spring from the boat’s deck, loom above the men, impossibly overleap them.

  For that little moment, staring up at an ominous dark body, something deep-rooted in her said dragon.

  She was already afraid, then—twice afraid, once of the rebels who had snatched her and once again of this flying thing, this creature—when it came splashing down mightily and twisted around in the water there to face them, lifted its magnificent head and roared, a guttural world-shaking noise, malign and directed and intent.

  Not a dragon, no, of course not. Dragons didn’t ride on boats, nor fly on a human’s say-so.

  Nor did tigers, jade tigers, that she had ever heard.

  DANDAN HADN’T realized that a tiger, any tiger could be so big.

  Or so close to her.

  Or that a jade tiger would be so vicious-seeming. The stories she’d heard, Taishu stories were all about the beasts’ benevolence, unexpected rescue, guidance. Meaning. That above all. It was always significant, if you glimpsed a jade tiger in the forest. They were the gods’ messengers, some said, fetching truth from heaven. Leading the chosen. Even Mei Feng, after her night on the mountain, her encounter, she had said—

  NEVER MIND Mei Feng, and never mind the stories. This was real, present, now. This was a tiger in the flesh, a hot wet fury. Some of the men were running already, and their captives too, the women they’d taken from the shore. Dandan thought that was probably a good idea.

  Actually they were floundering more than running in water that came thigh-high, waves that washed higher. Dandan’s own captor was one of them, abandoning her unheeded.

  She thought probably she ought to follow. It was only good sense, to choose him over the tiger.

  Only, well, the sea was waist-deep on her, and the swell covered her breasts as it came in; she couldn’t hope to keep up. If the tiger came bounding after them, it would reach her first. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be the sacrifice that let the others get away.

  The tiger crouched low, like a cat at play, except that it crouched in the sea. And had such a rage in it: its mouth agape, its wicked teeth like white jade, just that hint of green. Even its stripes were like forest shadow, black in a green light. Its eyes shone, ferocious.

  Dandan wasn’t sure she could have run, even if there had been sense in it. She wasn’t sure she could move, against such a glare.

  Also it was Jiao’s tiger, seemingly. She shouldn’t forget that. That had to be worth something, didn’t it? The men had threatened the boat, and Jiao had unleashed the tiger. There had been that rattle of chain, that command.

  Jiao wouldn’t let it hurt Dandan. They were on the same side. Weren’t they …?

  Remembering what Jiao had said to the rebel captain, Dandan was suddenly not so sure.

  Still didn’t start to run, though. Couldn’t move against the hot stone glitter of those eyes, the coiled tension in its sleek wet dreadful body.

  Also, it was beautiful. That counted for something too. Apparently it was hard to turn your back on beauty, even where it was terrible.

  SHE WASN’T the only one not running.

  A handful of men had stood their ground, rallying behind their captain. They stared back at the tiger, equally tense, moving no more than it was.

  Perhaps, Dandan thought, they could let terror and tension wash through them and ebb away. Perhaps if none of them was stupid, if none drew a weapon, there need
n’t be any kind of fight at all. Perhaps the men could just wade slowly back to shore after their fleeing companions; the tiger could leap up onto the stranded boat again and drip all over its deck while Jiao fastened it to its chain again; and Dandan, Dandan could …

  SHE WASN’T sure, quite, what she could do. What she should.

  AND THEN it didn’t matter anyway, because Jiao spoke a word from above and the tiger leaped.

  FOR A moment, in the air again, it almost blotted out the sun. Eclipsed in its shadow, the men drew blades. Did they really think their simple taos could make any difference to that?

  Dandan shrank back against the dank timbers of the boat’s exposed hull. She thought the tiger would slay the rebels, and then turn to her. She did just want that little pause, that little space between them. To say no, I did not stand with them, I was not one with them, no, if the question ever arose in the afterlife. She didn’t quite see how it would matter then, but I was faithful, loyal to the emperor—it mattered to her, it mattered now.

  THE MEN were fighters, trained and tested. They knew their lives were in the balance here, they fought to save themselves; they used blades and brains together, they worked with one another, they made a deadly team.

  The tiger had none of that. It was a creature alone, magnificent but lethal only in itself. And still an animal, however splendid. It fought because that was its nature. Almost, it might have been playing. Seeing it so closely—seeing how lean it was in its slicked-down fur and how supple, twisting and rolling in air and water—Dandan was beginning to think it very young. Still monstrous, still vicious, but young. Not quite a kitten but still a cub, a youngling. Almost, she could have pitied it.

  IT LEAPED, and fell among the gathered men and their raised blades. In that little moment she thought she would see a slaughter here, the swift death of something lovely.

  And then the tiger was in the midst of the men, rolling and kicking in the water, yowling when it had air. With a ring of armed men around it, Dandan still thought it should be doomed, dying already, bleeding out into the sea.

  But it was still a tiger, jade tiger, immensely more than any man. Where it kicked, a man was hurled back, brutally bleeding; where it rolled, it rolled with a man between its paws, pierced and pierced, his head in its teeth.

  It could break a man with simple impact, the stone strength of the thing. One long raking kick with a hind leg could gut him, open him from throat to groin and spill out all his innards.

  Why didn’t the men—the surviving men, so few—have sense now to run away?

  Why didn’t she?

  · · ·

  PERHAPS, LIKE her, they still couldn’t turn their backs. Even though it meant their deaths, separate and dreadful.

  The captain was the last to die. She thought perhaps he might have welcomed that. He seemed the type: first to meet the enemy, last to fall.

  Last of the men, at least.

  There was still herself.

  The tiger was sea-washed, still green in all its aspects, only its appalling teeth and jaw stained red as it tossed aside the ruin of that last man and turned its head, unsatisfied.

  Turned to her.

  DANDAN MIGHT have cowered there against the hull until it leaped again. She might have died, her body ripped asunder beneath the tiger’s claws, her lost ghost to haunt the weed-wracked shore.

  She was too afraid of that: so much afraid that she did the other thing, she stepped forward into the tiger’s stare, lifted her head, found her voice.

  Found at least a thin and tremulous memory of her voice, a shadow. Enough—barely—to call up to the deck there, “Jiao …?”

  The pirate presumably could see her. Dandan couldn’t actually look up, she still couldn’t take her eyes from the tiger, but she heard Jiao bark with laughter and then say, “No, you leave her. Leave her be. Get after those who ran away, save me one of those men.”

  The tiger seemed impossibly to understand. Its gaze lingered on Dandan one little moment longer, and she thought it would still like to kill her. Then it turned, almost more liquid than the water, and plunged away in a series of leaps and splashes, bounding high above the breaking waves.

  Jiao watched it go, and pitied the men it chased, and hoped it could distinguish soldiers from civilians, or at least men from women.

  She was still watching that distant racing shadow when a ladder of rope and bamboo clattered down to swing in the air beside her.

  SHE MADE the perilous climb, and at the top she found not Jiao but a boy, pale and anxious as he helped her over the side.

  The two girls she expected to see were in the bows; at this distance she couldn’t tell if they were upset at having run aground, if they were oblivious to the slaughter below.

  Jiao was in the boatmaster’s place, by the stern oar. Dandan didn’t need the jerk of the boy’s head to send her aft. There was never any question who was in charge.

  There were so many other questions—Jiao, what happened to your arm, your shoulder? Where is the old man whose boat this is? Why did you come ashore here? What did you mean, when you said about going to Tunghai Wang? Where, how, why did you find yourself a tiger, a jade tiger …?—that she could apparently ask none of them, they clogged her throat and left her speechless.

  That last especially. The tiger filled her mouth and mind, it left her trembling so hard that she could barely stand. She had to cling to the rail. And could only stare up at Jiao, bewildered and not feeling very rescued after all, still afraid.

  “Well. You’re Mei Feng’s little friend, aren’t you? The one she left behind?”

  It seemed that there were words after all, perhaps there was just a hint of pride. She said, “I stayed, yes.” To take care of her old men, and she would give anything to have them with her now, quiet and experienced and potent at her back.

  “What were you doing here?”

  “Gathering seaweed. There is not much to eat, even in the palace.”

  “Ah. If you’re still in the palace, you can help me to Ping Wen.”

  She could, perhaps. At least, she could take Jiao past the guards on the gate. But, “Your tiger would do that,” half joking, half hoping for a smile. Not seeing it, and plunging on doubtfully, “So would this,” the boat itself; and then, a more specific gesture, “so would they,” the girls in the bows. So, most emphatically, would they.

  “Yes,” Jiao said, “I thought that. Something to bring, a gift. Only polite, I thought. But he can’t have my tiger.”

  With immaculate timing, a low and terrible howling came rolling out across the water. Jiao glanced ashore, and her mouth did twist now into a smile, utterly humorless. “I think he’s done what I asked. Good tiger. That may be another way to buy my way into Ping Wen’s good graces, if I bring him a prisoner.”

  “Jiao, I don’t understand.” In honesty she understood none of this; here was a question she could ask at last. “Why should you need to do that? If you come from the emperor …”

  Her voice died away, in the face of that smile again. It looked worse every time it appeared.

  Not from the emperor, then. Dandan wondered briefly if she herself stood in any danger here. Perhaps she should stop arguing how much Jiao really didn’t need her.

  But there seemed to be no way back from here, for either of them. Once Jiao had made that implicit declaration, I am not here from the emperor, which was to say I am not loyal to the emperor, it didn’t really matter what else was said between them. There were no secrets left, only things that had not yet been said. Dandan said, “You told that man, you might have gone to Tunghai Wang …”

  “Why, so I might. A gift for one will do as well for another. I was fairly sure of my welcome, if I could only find him,” with an awkward one-armed gesture that mocked Dandan’s own, encompassing the boat, the girls in the bows. Not the tiger. “But his people found me first, and I didn’t like them. Did you? So I think perhaps I’ll go to Ping Wen after all. I find I like his people better.” That smile a
gain, meaning Dandan, I mean you.

  Dandan shivered, and knew that Jiao had seen it. She wanted to rub her arms, where her skin was prickling. She said, “But, but Tunghai Wang, he’s a traitor,” and how could she go from one to the other, how could she not care?

  “Yes, of course, you little fool. So is Ping Wen. Didn’t you know?”

  Dandan shook her head slowly, meticulously. She did know that Mei Feng believed that, of course; it was impossible to spend any time with the girl, to be close with her at all and not to know it. Dandan had never believed it, though, a traitor so near to the throne. And if it were true, why on earth would the emperor have appointed him governor of Santung …?

  Ideas, revelations came slowly this morning, it seemed, but they did come. Jiao only stood there, while Dandan worked things through on her fingers. The governor of Santung sat in exile from Taishu, from the throne. The strait lay between them, and the dragon ruled the strait. It could not be crossed except in those vessels protected by the goddess, which carried her chosen children—which Jiao had apparently stolen, in a stolen boat. Brought as a gift to Ping Wen, or else to Tunghai Wang. Two traitors in stranded opposition, and yes, Dandan could see why the emperor would leave them so. And why the girls would be so potent a gift, to either one: how this one boat’s one journey could turn the war.

  “Come,” Jiao said, watching all that parade of thoughts as it tumbled slowly through Dandan’s reeling head. “Let’s go and see what my tiger’s caught me. If he’s left any of them alive.”

  JIAO HAD the boy—Pao was his name—drag a line above the high-water mark and anchor it among the rocks, in case the beached boat should float free on the rising tide. The big girl Jin had to carry little Shola ashore, through water that was breast-high already; Dandan needed to let the waves lift her as they came, or she would have been mouth-under.

  Dripping wet on dry land, Jiao set them in marching order, the girls and the boy and Dandan too. She put herself last, where she could overwatch the line. At her word the two girls set off, firmly hand in hand and it was hard to tell which one led which, though Dandan thought she knew.