by Daniel Fox
“In our kitchen, lady.”
Of course, in their kitchen. Not out here and not used for this, but scrubbed and standing ready, like any dutiful servant that has come a long long way with their mistress.
Mei Feng shuddered. She ought to be grateful to the thing, but, “Throw it in the pit, with …” With the man it killed. The man I killed.
“Lady, the empress …”
The empress loved that kettle, yes. Or valued it, or clung to it past reason for reasons that seemed good enough to her. It didn’t really matter which way you said it. The kettle had its own truth, and so did the empress now when Mei Feng turned to look at her. Pointedly.
“The empress … will not be worrying for a while, how her tea is made.” Or ever again, perhaps. Unless Master Biao came soon, unless his tiger-skin could work its miracle one more time, to fetch one more woman back from the land of ghosts.
Meantime, the empress had no voice and no will, and Mei Feng could usurp her utterly. “Throw it in the cess-pit,” she said again. Otherwise it would be kept, she knew, and find its way back into use here or in the workmen’s camp or somewhere. She did not want that. In her head it was crushed, broken, spilling, like a skull. She wanted it gone.
And this at least was an order she had not given already, something not dealt with yet. That was a relief. The world did move on, seemingly; she could still make it move.
“Yes, lady.”
Perhaps she should watch the woman all the way, see the thing done. See the body in the pit, that too, just to know it. Not to see it everlastingly at her feet, and spilling.
Perhaps she should, but she seemed to be sitting down, on her righted chair, just here. Cup in hand, a waft of scented steam, leaves settling into new patterns, still unreadable.
Perhaps she only didn’t want to leave the empress. Someone ought to sit with her, she thought. Till the emperor came.
She wished he would hurry. Master Biao too, him perhaps especially. The old woman was not too strong to fail. Mei Feng could hear her breathing, the fine thin thread of it like silk unreeling. Sometime there must come an end. Hearts beat and beat, and then they stop beating. Even infused with jade, like this water infused with tea: left to stand, it would cool, it would spill eventually or just dry up in the cup. Not even tea was eternal. Not even bitter old women.
Mei Feng sat and wished, sat and waited, sat and watched.
The balcony looked south, toward the mountains; the road from Taishu-port lay northerly, around the hill.
It was Master Biao she watched for, rather than the emperor.
THE SUN lay on the hills like a gift, like tea in a cup. The rain-shadow moved across them like a scrawl of darkness, ink from a brush, leaves in the bottom of a cup.
She saw movement, figures coming out of the trees there.
Too many of them. For a moment she was disappointed, not Master Biao.
She couldn’t hope to see from this distance, but she looked regardless. There was a man, a tubby man with something heavy in his hands: something like the fall of forest shadow, dark and greenly. Master Biao always insisted on carrying the tiger-skin himself. It lent him strength, she thought.
Who were all these other people, then? So many of them, a parade. She was still too far away, or they were—but that tall one leading, the one that almost made her think of the emperor, that had to be Yu Shan. She was surprised that he would come, that he would leave Siew Ren even for this—
—UNTIL SHE had watched for a little while longer, and seen how the figure who walked beside him was bent and awkward, how her walk betrayed her.
That was Siew Ren herself, and walking. Not even with the skin around her shoulders. Mei Feng had not known that she could walk again. Perhaps she had not known it herself. Watching them come in file over open ground, Mei Feng saw that not only Siew Ren was hurt. Little things, really too small to be seen from here: the set of a young man’s shoulders, the swing of a woman’s leg. There was stiffness and the memory of pain, a lingering distrust of the physical world that was echoed all along the line.
Slowly they came, too slowly for her although they were obviously hurrying. Slowly she understood. These were Master Biao’s patients, all those clansfolk he had been treating with the tiger-skin. They were the emperor’s own, all volunteers, his personal bodyguard; that was how they came to be hurt. They might be following the tiger-skin, but they were coming to her. Reporting for duty. They would need her to believe that.
She watched them come and waited, then, rather than hurry down the hill to greet them. She wanted to do that and more, to urge them on faster, to appropriate Master Biao’s tiger-skin and run it back up to the balcony. It was her miracle, and she was greedy for it.
But it was theirs too, held in common. They had become their own clan, these young people, bonded in blood and hurt and hardship, and they were bringing their treasure to where it was more needed now. She had to let them do that.
SAT AND waited, then, and saw them intercepted at the fence that enclosed the hill. Everyone knew Yu Shan, everyone knew Master Biao; of course they would be let through. Even so, the guards would be anxious now. Rightly anxious. When the emperor arrived, there would have to be an accounting. The men who failed him, who let an assassin by … Well. They should probably not expect to live. She was sorry for them, a little. Less so every time she glanced to where the old woman lay beside her, in the ragged margin of her life. It was insufferable, to see her brought so low. Those men down there had allowed it, whoever had the duty in the night.
But so had other powers allowed it, so had the world. Where was Grandfather’s goddess when she was needed, or Yu Shan’s tiger?
No, Mei Feng knew where the tiger was. And her cub.
Where was the dragon, then? The dragon might have intervened. People said that jade was the dragon’s tears; people called this whole island the Tear of the Dragon, for its shape and its jade and perhaps for the dragon too, chained in the strait as she had been. Surely there was jade enough in the empress’s blood by now, surely she had earned an intervention …?
Mei Feng examined her own thoughts dispassionately, exhaustedly, and wondered if she was perhaps not entirely sane. Then her eyes flicked to the empress again, and again she was furious at all the powers of the world for letting her come so low, so late.
Well, if the dragon would not intervene, the tiger would. Even dead, it was a power in the land. The touch of its skin would draw the empress’s ghost back into her body, as it had Mei Feng’s own and her baby’s too. It must. The old woman had not gone so far, no, not half so far; and the skin was still a potent thing, a wonder. Here came the proof of that, in single file up the hill, so many people saved from hurt or sickness, saved from death. One more would be no trouble, no …
THEY CAME directly to the balcony, but not to her. Mei Feng was distantly, almost amusedly aware that she was no longer anyone’s first thought. She had been so for Master Biao, for everyone; now he had another patient and she was only a convalescent, pressed politely but firmly to the side of his attention. She had been Yu Shan’s friend and she hoped that she still was, but his mind was all too obviously on Siew Ren: had she walked too far, should he have let her come at all? Could she manage the climb over the balcony rail …?
The hillside dropped away below the house, so that the balcony jutted out a man’s height above the ground. There were posts to support it, and any fit young person could swarm up without much trouble. Yu Shan leaped, seized the high rail with one hand and hung there with his feet against a post, holding the other hand down to help Siew Ren.
Perhaps she would have managed without his help. Perhaps she would have shrugged and walked around the house to the steps, to the door, and so come in as Master Biao did, with a sense of his decorum wrapped around him. Because Yu Shan was there, though—and perhaps because he had earned it, all these long days by her bed—she reached up to him with her uninjured arm, they linked wrists and he hoisted her with one easy swing, u
p to the rail and over.
And went on hanging there, making a fleshly ladder to help his other companions; but his eyes were all on Siew Ren through the rails, and his mind dogged along behind his eyes as young men’s minds will do. Mei Feng could read him at a glance.
Siew Ren could read her too. Perhaps they all could, all these vigorous sick, but it was Siew Ren who came to her where she was still sitting in her chair, not quite knowing what to stand up for.
“Mei Feng, you look terrible.” This from the girl whose voice was scratched and broken, whose face was ruthlessly twisted out of true, who carried brutal scarring like a web of white drawn over her and tugged too tight: whose life the tiger-skin had salvaged, but not her beauty. Her strength perhaps, but not as it had been. Half her body was half gone from her.
It was almost a joke, what she said. She smiled to say so, and that was worse. She wore a face now that should not try to smile.
And knew it, and shrugged, and dropped down onto her knees and took Mei Feng’s two hands in her own one good one and said, “You have had a terrible night, I know it. You are not to worry anymore, you understand me? We are here now, and you are our task. The emperor wouldn’t take us into war again, being as we are, being as he is, a fool,” a boy she meant, “but even he will allow us to be useful here. He will come soon, and rant and shout and be emperor awhile, and then he will weep and whisper and be a boy awhile, and then he will go away again and we will not. And if any more assassins come, they will find us waiting long before they find their way to you. The empress will be pleased,” if she ever wakes, if she is ever to be pleased again, with a glance aside to where Master Biao had arrived at last, where he was tucking his tiger-skin cautiously, doubtfully around the old woman in her dreadful stillness, “to find her grandchild so very well protected.”
It was a long speech, for someone who had talked little for a long time. Mei Feng was grateful, and squeezed her hand. And didn’t really believe that the empress would rise up to be grateful too; there was something in Master Biao’s manner, even before he shook his head and muttered about time and loss and absence. Or perhaps it was in her nose, that smell of decay, familiar but stronger now, worse now.
Perhaps they were all too late, even the magic too far gone in rot. Perhaps the old woman would die after all. There were too many ways that should not have happened. If anyone in the empire should be safe, it was the dowager empress; if anyone on Taishu should be safe, it was Mei Feng and whomever she chose to spend her time with. To be wrong both ways was an affront, and not just to her. She thought the gods should be angry too, and a little ashamed.
More than a little.
Yu Shan hauled himself over the rail at last. It was still Siew Ren that he watched, but she was with Mei Feng so he came to stand beside her chair, so she could say, “Yu Shan, did you speak to the guards below, to their officer …?”
He knew what she was asking. He said, “I did. The assassin killed three of them down there, without a sound from any. No one knew that he had crossed the fence.”
That word might save a few lives. It might not. She couldn’t tell, in the emperor’s absence, what mood he would bring with him when he came. If he rode in hotly, demanding heads, she could hardly fling herself before the swinging blade.
Just now, it was as much as she could do to sit upright and nod greetings to known faces. In fact, it was apparently a little more than she could do. Someone was talking—was that Siew Ren again, or was it someone else, was it Yu Shan? and how odd, not to be able to tell the difference—but the words weren’t making sense to her. Everything was heavy suddenly, her body, her eyelids. Even the babe in her belly was a weight to drag her down.
She sank back into her cushions, into a cushioning darkness. For a while she lay poised there between wake and sleep, between one world and another. Someone would rouse her, surely, when the emperor came. She only wished they could rouse his mother as easily.
Meanwhile she listened to the noises of the house, this petty palace filling up with people. Strong people, clansfolk with jade in their blood and bone; wary people, who had all been hurt before. Siew Ren was right, they couldn’t have a better guard, the old woman and herself.
But these were young people too, stubborn people, her friends. Even now she could hear them arguing: how many would sleep in which rooms and who should take the watch, how best to organize, where to watch the hillside and where to watch the road. Where to train, where to work their damaged bodies and learn what skills were lost to them. Who should sit with Mei Feng until the emperor came, and afterward: how much trouble that young man might give them, demanding a privacy they would not allow.
Like themselves, this was twisted but familiar. As best they could, she thought, they were bringing her summer back to her, when she had been happy living wild in a mountain valley. They couldn’t take the empress into the hills, but they could perhaps bring the hills down here.
two
unghai Wang had made his plans and laid his plans. With Ma’s invaluable help—a returned Ma, a little altered perhaps by his journey north, perhaps by his best of finds there, a monksmith willing to ride back in his entourage: small and deep, the monksmith, a contrast to Ma in every way—Tunghai had gathered up and organized his forces.
None of that had been easy, and neither would the battle be to come. He must fight it without battle-lights and trumpets, at least in these early hours, when they would have helped the most. By the time his several forces came within sight and sound of each other, they would have victory in their sleeves already and not much need to talk.
His scattered generals had each their instructions. They knew what they were about, and he knew that he could trust them. So.
Even so. He would sooner and far sooner have come down upon Santung as he did before, the end of a chase, his weary exultant men surging like a river at the heels of his horse, flooding all about him as he waved them on, flooding all through the city, irresistible as water …
Those days were gone. Half his men were gone, dead or lost or slipped away. More than half: he had lost half in his abortive invasion, drowned or eaten by the dragon. More—not many—when the emperor struck back; more and many more in the typhoon that followed, that accursed dragon again, a weapon used against him.
Still. Ping Wen had not so many men to defend Santung, and it really could not be defended. Between them, Tunghai Wang and his generals had rallied men enough. Ma had woven them into a net all about the city: so many here and so many there, these the roads between them, these the men to run messages, here and here stabling for ponies to carry more urgent news. Ma could make a city in the desert if he chose, and feed its people too. Tunghai Wang was nothing but lucky to have Ma on his staff.
Now, though, Ma was safely in the rear somewhere with his monksmith and his boy, his other comforts. This was no night for General Ma; this was a night for soldiering.
Fire and terror are the weapons of the dark. This night they lay in Tunghai Wang’s grasp, in the palm of his hand. He might lack overwhelming numbers, but he ought not to need them. A little display, death and destruction at each cardinal point of the city, east and west and north together, to say that there was no safe road away: that should be enough to bring the unreliable Ping Wen out to parley in the dawn.
No, not to parley. To submit. In support of earlier promises and plans, he would give the city and all his men—half the imperial army!—to Tunghai Wang, and in return he could keep his life, his limbs, even his position. Santung would still need a governor. Known on one side and trusted on the other, Ping Wen’s could be the voice that welded two armies into one force strong enough to take Taishu as soon as the way was clear across the water.
Tunghai Wang might have written all that out and sent it into the city under a flag of truce, but he didn’t want to negotiate with Ping Wen like an equal, generals who matched each other coming to an arrangement. He wanted a swift brutal victory, a surrender on the back of which he could be unu
sually magnanimous for the sake of all, for the future well-being of his empire.
His.
Hence this night, and the cruelties to come. Santung-city knew already how he could be cruel, but the emperor had escaped that lesson with his army largely intact. Tonight was Ping Wen’s opportunity to discover just what it meant to stand in Tunghai Wang’s eye, in his way, in the storm-shadow of his anger.
Tonight, fire and terror, flames and screaming and the stink of smoke. At first light Ping Wen would find himself without men at any of his careful barricades: the watch-houses burned to the ground, the walls arrayed with bodies and a double line of heads along the road to watch as he crept out in answer to the summons.
Let him make his submission with due deference, and this time the slaughter would stop there. Tunghai Wang was not wasteful, and if he were, he had Ma at his elbow to prevent it. There was a time to be savage, and then a time to be generous: both in due and proper order. Yes.
A TIME to be a soldier, that too, however high you stood. However little you were actually needed on the battlefield. Here was Tunghai Wang, then, on the westerly road, sitting high on his horse with the valley-ridge before him, the lights of the doomed watch glowing on their inadequate defenses. He wouldn’t give this up. Far out of sight on the opposite side of the city, out of sight again in the river valley north, other generals would be similarly supplanting their junior officers, simply for the pleasure of remembering that they were soldiers and not bureaucrats, not officials, not Ma.
Westerly—above him and behind—the constellation called the Ghost-Dog was settling toward the horizon. Soon now, its brightest star would touch the rim of the world. That was the signal. He always liked to use signs in the heavens to direct the course of battle. Ping Wen was a dog, a cur who turned tail to betray first one side and then the other. He might think that he had risen, that he had won a high place for himself already; he might be looking higher yet; after tonight, his ambition was a ghost. Come the morning, he would find that his star had set.