by Daniel Fox
She thought that between them, she and the boy Pao might have overpowered this new Jiao who sounded so brash but walked so tentative, who had struggled to climb down on the ladder.
But this new Jiao had her tiger, which was out of sight but had probably not gone beyond earshot. It had left a trail. Here was a body on the beach, some fool rebel who had lingered to watch the slaughter in the boat’s shadow, thinking himself safe away. Finding himself wrong. He must have turned to run again, too late, seeing the tiger bound toward him; he lay on his belly, in the bloody rags of his clothing, with the spine torn out of his body.
The tiger hadn’t lingered, it had killed and run on. There were dark marks in the sand, bloody pawprints on the rocks. Jiao waved them on, but Dandan balked, just for a moment. If they must encounter more bodies, at least the girls needn’t be first in line, the ones who found the dead.
Besides, there was the tiger. Jiao might trust it; she might not care. Neither of those was true of Dandan.
Swiftly, trying to seem indomitable, she set the girls behind her, in Pao’s care, and took the lead herself. Jiao only watched with flat black eyes and an ominous silence.
On, then. On over the rocks, where she had come to gather seaweed. She had had a purpose then, her old men; she had had a basket. Almost she looked around to find it, somewhere on the tideline at their backs. Almost, she thought she ought to fetch it. Almost.
But she could hear the tiger somewhere ahead, beyond the rocks; with the girls at her back, she really had no choice. Someone had to show them how to face tigers.
Like this: up over the rocky margin to the dunes and broken land behind, where men might think—for a minute, for a little minute—that they had room and time to run.
Until the tiger ran them down, one by one, to leave bodies like footprints sprawled all in a line.
Cats will defend their kill. It was standing four-square astride the last in line, and the salt air rumbled with its growling.
As they came closer, Dandan saw that the man was moving, if only a little, while the tiger’s belly-hair dripped seawater on his body.
She seemed to be walking more slowly. Well, she had reason for that. It wasn’t the fear—or no, of course it was the fear, she was terrified entirely, she had seen nothing of this animal except its willingness to kill, but it was more than that. What was she meant to do …?
In her mind, perhaps she could walk up to a tiger where it stood above its prey. Her legs might not manage it, but her imagination could. After that, though, even her imagination failed, came to a dead stop, as her legs did when the tiger lifted its head to look at her.
Still growling.
It still had blood on its teeth. Its tongue licked suddenly, threateningly at its lips as it looked at her.
She didn’t turn away, she couldn’t move. She heard Pao muster the girls to one side, so that Jiao had a clear path forward; she heard the woman’s boots on rock and sand and weed, she heard the woman’s breath at her ear with that little catch in it that spoke of pain, constant and endurable and foul.
Dandan couldn’t even lift her eyes, apparently, not take them from the tiger’s.
She could speak. Apparently. She said, “Will it do what you want?”
“If he wants to.”
Dandan meant, of course, can you keep it from attacking us? Jiao’s answer was not reassuring. The woman had maybe meant it that way. There was a bitter amusement in her voice. Everything in her seemed bitter now, and everything that came out of her: a broken stem that oozed an acrid sap.
The tiger had leaped down from the boat and attacked the rebels, just at her word. It had left Dandan alone and chased the survivors, which was even more extraordinary, again at her instruction. More and somehow worse, save me one of those men she had called down from the deck, and apparently it had done exactly that. In honesty, Dandan thought that Jiao could tell it to step away, lie down, be quiet; she thought it would do those things. Not like a dog, not in obedience, but she thought it would do them anyway. Jiao might not admit it—wanting to feel better about herself, perhaps, or else wanting to be more cruel than she seemed—but the tiger wasn’t in control here. It was pure and deadly with a lust to kill, and it was entirely an aspect of Jiao’s unfathomable will.
She thought.
Even when she was afraid, Dandan could be angry. Even when she was angry, she could still want other people’s lives to be better. She said, “How does it know? What you want?” meaning I know that you’re in charge. You should know it too.
Jiao laughed shortly. “He sits in my head and listens. I think. I don’t know why he does that. His choice, not mine. He’s not trained,” for all the world as if she sat in Dandan’s head and had listened to her own thought about a dog’s obedience. “I don’t take him for granted.”
Yes, you do, Dandan thought. Even if what she took ultimately for granted was that sooner or later it would make the other choice, and turn on her. Jiao wouldn’t care. Or thought she wouldn’t.
For now, Dandan said, “You told it to save you one,” and it knew, just exactly what you wanted, which the more she thought about that, the more frightened she could be. They said the dragon had a boy now, but this woman had a tiger and she thought that was worse. “It did that, but if you want that man to live you should probably let me look at him. Which means you have to make the tiger step away.”
Jiao laughed. “Are you frightened of my tiger, little one?” It sounded forced, and entirely false. Jiao was not as easy as she pretended, though it was not the tiger that concerned her. She was having trouble dealing with people, Dandan thought, in this new incarnation, unless it was herself she couldn’t deal with.
Dandan said, “Yes, of course I am, how not? And so are the children,” with a jerk of her head to encompass the girls and Pao too. He would be angry if he heard that. “And that man between its paws will die of fear, if he doesn’t die of his hurts first.”
“If my tiger doesn’t eat him first.” Jiao gave Dandan a wintry smile, then unwrapped a chain from where it lay coiled above her bony hips. She swung it casually one-handed and strolled forward, into the tiger’s complaint.
And spoke to the beast as a woman might to a recalcitrant youth who was sulking and dangerous and still susceptible to bullying. Dandan couldn’t hear the words but she knew the tone exactly, she used it herself: on the boy Gieh, often and often on her two old men.
The tiger kept up that rolling roil of a growl, but there seemed to be no great intent behind it. Not enough, at any rate, to challenge Jiao. Who fastened one end of the chain to a leather collar around the tiger’s heavy neck, doubled the other about her fist and heaved unhurriedly, until at last the tiger moved away at her side. Unless it was the other way around, that she paced the tiger as it went padding slowly over the rocks, all weight and purpose until it lay down abruptly in the sunlight and began to wash, all cat.
Dandan was no doctor, but she had learned to be a nurse. She gave the injured rebel as much attention as she could manage, with half an eye still on the tiger and half on Jiao, half again on the girls and their watchful boy. She thought, most likely, the man would survive. She used his ruined clothes to tie up the worst of his wounds, as he groaned and sweated and lacked the strength to yell aloud.
He was another gift that Ping Wen would no doubt be glad of, a man from Tunghai Wang’s camp to be interrogated; which meant that if he was stubborn, if he wouldn’t talk—well.
It would mean work, another kind of work for Ai Guo, and she was helping.
five
iew Ren was sitting up and talking when the soldiers came.
Not sitting up and laughing, no. Never that, never yet. Not sitting in the sunshine either; she wouldn’t leave the gloom of her little hut, didn’t want to join her clan-cousins in the world again. Not ready for that. Whether it was the scars that held her back or the abiding weakness, Biao wasn’t sure and she wouldn’t say. Couldn’t say, perhaps. Something kept her clinging to the shadows
.
Still, though: sitting up. Talking. In the softest, thinnest voice, but talking in any sort was progress. Sitting up was a triumph.
Biao wished, he really wished that he could claim its credit for himself.
He would have done so if only the truth weren’t so widely known, so vividly on display about her shoulders, beneath Yu Shan’s possessive arm.
She sat up with the tiger-skin wrapped around her, the only brightness in the dark of the hut; she spoke from its embrace.
Biao had brought it to her, his little inspiration. He had tucked it around her in the bed, despite her tears and protests, despite her pain; and that same night she had started to improve, and now—
Well. Now she sat up in bed and nestled into Yu Shan’s side, and spoke to him.
Now there was a succession of the injured, making their slow negotiated way from neighbor-valleys, neighbor-clans. Some came daily. Some came in litters, and stayed.
Biao was almost not a doctor now, as he almost never had been. Now he was more or less the Keeper of the Skin. Something like a palace eunuch, organizing and arranging: who would be treated when, how long each might claim the skin each day.
Some days he even took it out of the valley. He went under guard, and was never sure if the guards were there to protect him or to contain him, to prevent his running off with it; but still, he was allowed to go, to treat those too hurt to come to him.
Siew Ren was always reluctant to let him go, though really that only meant the skin. She was reluctant even to see it set around someone else’s shoulders, even here in her own hut, even just for an hour. Biao and Yu Shan both told her and told her that it was not hers, she couldn’t claim it, she couldn’t keep it to herself. It was a gift, they said, from the mountain gods who watched over all the clans at once, or else from the jade tigers, from the tiger herself who gave it up; it was a gift to everyone who needed it, and she must share.
She had cried when Biao first wrapped her in it, but she cried again when he first took it away. That time, Yu Shan had moved to stop him. He had to argue against the determined passion of a young man distraught and hopeful both at once, furious and physically daunting.
Biao had no chance ever of wresting the skin away from Siew Ren’s frantic clutch, let alone Yu Shan’s. He only had his words to rely on, as ever—except that this time he had common justice too. Even truth, perhaps. That was something new.
He didn’t actually know how to deal with the truth, so he simply treated it as another lie, familiar territory, fuel for his insinuating tongue.
He left the girl and the skin together in their shadows, drew the young man outside.
Said, “Yu Shan, she has to give it up.”
“No. She needs it. You brought it to her, and she needs it. You said that. You can’t take it away now.”
“She needs it, yes. She is not the only one.”
“She is worst. Worst hurt,” which still bit at Yu Shan like a deliberate cruelty, that it should be his girl who suffered most. “She needs it most.”
“And has had it for a full day and a night together and is better already, you know that. You can see.” That morning there had been a procession of clan elders through the hut, specifically to see. There had been much muttering and stroking of beards, stroking of the tiger-skin. Plans hatched, no doubt, possession to be disputed. Biao needed to establish his own authority quickly. “Even now, you can’t call her worst hurt any longer. You could call her fastest mending.”
“But if you take it away from her—”
“Only for an hour at a time. She won’t get worse again, Yu Shan. I promise you that. It might even be good for her. What’s happening now is magical, the influence of jade or, or the gods,” he had nearly said the immortals but that was so obviously, so spectacularly the wrong word, he bit it back unformed. If this was a miracle, it was wrought in death. “You know yourself,” jade-eater, “too much exposure to the stone will change a man; and stone is cold and dead, long dead. How much more may change, how much must change, when one is wrapped around by what was freshly living, jade in the tiger? Here on Taishu you say that jade is the dragon’s tears, but I think you are wrong, or else that is an old story retold with a new ending. Here, now, I think jade is the tiger’s blood, and I think we should be careful with it. Too much of any magic can be … well, too much. Too much for a mortal to sustain. We should give Siew Ren’s body a chance to begin its own healing.”
Yu Shan looked at him for a moment, said, “You don’t know that. You don’t know any of that.”
“No,” Biao said regretfully, uncomfortable outside his proper ground, trapped in truth. “No, I don’t. I’m … not exactly guessing, but the next best thing,” remembering Jiao and how she looked, how she moved, caught in the snare of too-hasty healing. And again with the truth, open honesty, “I saw Jiao and you didn’t. I may be wrong, of course—but do you want to make that experiment on Siew Ren?”
No. No, he didn’t. Biao talked more, a lot more, about potent medicines and sensible dilution, strong sun and the need for shade, rest after food, all the examples he could think of; but he had won already. He just had to give Yu Shan time to realize it.
At first the other patients all came to Siew Ren’s hut, so that the skin could be taken from her shoulders—by Yu Shan, his gentle fingers working against hers, irresistibly—and immediately wrapped around another’s. Where she could see it, where she could still grip the edge of it, make believe that she was only loaning out, not quite relinquishing. Keeping hold.
At first they came only from this valley, their own clan. As word spread, others began to make their difficult, painful way through the mountains to bargain for their own miracle, a little time in touch with the tiger’s hide. Which might have been refused, should have been impossible if these hadn’t been friends, comrades hurt in common battle, blood-kin. Might still have been refused if Biao hadn’t been there, detached and respected, to put the case for sharing: to say, at the last, “Do you truly want a war? There will be war, if you try to keep this thing to yourselves.”
Scarred men shrugged; there always had been war, between one clan and the next. What difference?
“The difference is that you used to fight for land. This would be for life itself. And it would go on and on. Whoever took it, they would be the next attacked. There would be more and more hurt for the skin to heal, too much. It is a wonder, but you would destroy yourselves over it. No one clan can claim this thing, or the clans will be dead in a generation.”
It was his skill to be glib and persuasive, more of a wonder than the miracles he peddled. This time he had a legitimate miracle, and still needed to outshine it.
“How can we manage it, then?” one old man asked. When they turned to him for the answer, he knew that he’d won. Like Yu Shan, they laid themselves in his hands, and were barely aware of it.
“Leave it with me,” he said, just that one little step short of it is mine. They would come to accept that slowly, as he handled it, as he made the decisions and they did not.
They had done so, even to the point of letting him take it out of the valley. He allowed guards to come with him, for the clan’s own comfort. Never as many as the elders would have sent: “I welcome your protection,” he said, “but I do not need an army massed about me. I am just one man alone with a skin, in the end. Everyone knows me, everyone knows what I bring. No one will harm me, no one will steal what I carry.”
His best guarantee of that lay in the fact that what he said was not quite true. He could send all the guards away and it would still not be true, that he was just one man alone.
There was one, not quite a guard, who would never leave him.
Would never leave the skin, rather, not let it out of his sight.
“Yu Shan,” Biao said, quite mildly, “I thought it was Siew Ren you loved?”
The tall young man said nothing, only reached to touch the wonder-skin with tentative, expressive fingers.
“And
yet you leave her,” Biao went on relentlessly, “overnight and longer, we’ll be two days on the road together this time …”
For once they were on their own, or at least their escort was asleep. Biao and the boy were sitting up over a late low fire. Biao had trouble sleeping, such a treasure in his grasp; Yu Shan seemed to need no sleep at all.
Biao was talking nonsense and he knew it. Goading Yu Shan was like goading jade. He sat there smooth and silent and only said, “I need to be sure.”
“Sure of what?”
“That the skin comes back.”
Not that you bring it back, not quite. Biao still had work to do.
AND WAS doing it, in a manner of speaking, back in Siew Ren’s hut, when the soldiers came.
They were in the doorway suddenly, blocking what little light there was: soldiers as Biao knew them best, veterans, road-scarred. Set these men among Tunghai Wang’s and they would have been indistinguishable.
Soldiers can go anywhere, can be found anywhere; and yet they seemed out of place here, suddenly in the mountains, in the valley, at the door. It was remarkable that they had been let come this far. Mountain folk are jealous of what little they have, their land, their lives. They do not suffer strangers gladly or often.
These strangers wore yellow sashes in their uniforms, which said they came from the emperor. He was a friend known and welcome; even so, Biao thought he should have sent a runner from the clans, some green-eyed youngster who would know the ways of the hills. He still had plenty such among his guard. And he would have thought of that, or if he had not Mei Feng would have reminded him, and when did the emperor ever do anything without Mei Feng’s blessing?
Which meant that sashes or no sashes, these men were not from the emperor; which meant …
Which meant that Biao needed to be careful, but that was his common condition. He needn’t worry for his own skin, not here. The clansfolk would protect that for him. No matter how good these soldiers were, jade-soaked valley warriors would be faster and stronger and very much more vicious.