by Daniel Fox
That was neither true nor relevant. Chung ignored it. “I’m tired, Shen …!”
Shen grinned. “Then I’ll just knock you over quicker, won’t I? Don’t beg, it’s boring.”
He had emphatically not been begging. He was angry now; which of course was what Shen wanted, but there was nothing he could do about that. He chided himself for being weak even as he made a darting move forward, as Shen’s hands came up swiftly in a defensive pose, as the circle fell into silence.
Near silence. There was the sound of the river behind him, but he could ignore that. There was the sound of his own breathing, and he could ignore that too. Shen’s breathing: that mattered. And Shen’s feet as they slid through the grass, that too. A master of the art might claim to hear the creak of his joints, the groan of his muscles as they worked. Chung was no master; he had no hope ever of mastering Shen.
He backed off and they circled each other slowly. Shen’s foot lashed out in a high kick; Chung blocked that with a forearm, and the fist too that followed it. And countered with an elbow to the face, except that Shen’s face wasn’t quite there to be elbowed. His knee slammed into Chung’s thigh and made him stagger, almost knocked him down.
He went back instead, far enough—just—to duck the follow-up kick and make a snatch at the ankle as it fell away. And astonished himself by catching it: only with a half-hand grip, but enough to drag Shen off-balance, enough to follow with jabbing fingers to the belly that the young soldier had no time to block.
That knocked the air out of him, stilled him for a moment; just time enough for Chung’s favorite elbow again, aimed at the throat and not quite making that, driving hard into Shen’s shoulder.
Which should have been good enough, but somehow wasn’t. Chung saw Shen’s face twist in pain. What he didn’t see was Shen’s left hand, slamming upward under his chin.
After that, he saw nothing at all for a while.
WHEN THE WORLD came back to him, when his eyes opened, he saw a dizzying blur that resolved itself slowly into Shen’s face, upside down and grinning.
Then there were Shen’s hands, holding something, a water-skin. Tipping it, squeezing …
A hard spatter of water in his face: Chung sat up suddenly, spluttering, mocked.
Then the laughter stilled, all of a rush. There was a strong arm under his to haul him to his feet, and that was Shen’s as well; and right in front of them, pushing through the circle, there was Mei Feng. The Lady Mei Feng, the emperor’s favorite and only choice of concubine, the small force of nature that ruled this compound and the imperial heart together …
She was, predictably, furious.
“You, Chung. Why are you here?”
“I, uh,” touching his hand to his lip and finding blood, again, “I brought a message, lady. For the emperor.”
“Don’t call me that! You know my name. But why are you here, fooling with this fool Shen—again!—when you have a message for my lord?” And then, when he shrugged, when he obviously had no answer, “And you, Shen—what do you think you’re doing, knocking him unconscious? Again? When you knew, you must have known, he was here with letters for the emperor?”
Shen shuffled his bare feet in the dust. She snorted roundly at both of them, snapped her fingers for the satchel and set off back up to the compound; and paused before she’d gone half far enough, and turned back, and said, “At least get yourselves cleaned up, both of you, before the Son of Heaven sees. You know he’ll want the story if he finds his own runner covered with blood and dust, and he won’t be happy when he hears it.” A pause, just long enough for the world’s heart to beat once, and she went on, “It’s past time you learned to defend his messages better than that, Chung, getting knocked flat every chance. Perhaps we’d best keep you here longer, send someone else to the court and let Shen work on you some more?”
Chung grinned dizzily, and never mind the blood on his teeth. “Yes please, lady.”
“My name is Mei Feng,” but her own smile broke out at last, backed with an exasperated wave. “Go. Wash. Find clean clothes. Both of you. Then you come and speak to my lord, Chung, he’ll want to know how things are at the palace, and in the city.”
“Yes, lady,” but he said that to her retreating back, so that she could pretend not to hear it.
Then Shen’s arm was around his shoulders, and, “Did I hurt you?”
“Of course you hurt me,” wincing, feeling his jaw for soreness. “Did I hurt you? At all? It’ll be okay to lie, if you feel like it …”
“No lie. You got me right in the gut, and I wasn’t ready for it. Nor the shoulder, either. Yes, that hurt.”
Which was triumph for Chung, who had barely managed to lay a hand on Shen the last time they’d sparred, which was the last time they’d seen each other. In the palace, he had no one to train with; he was diligent in exercise and shadow-boxing, but it was never the same as having a solid body to work against. Preferably this particular, this very particularly solid body that he leaned against now, that half held him up as they made a slow path down to the riverbank.
This was the body that had hurt him badly, maliciously, when Shen was a palace guard where Chung was only a servant, when Shen was newly come from the long march with a year of brutalities at his back and Chung was an innocent, a fool with a hot temper and a stupid pride.
When Mei Feng had seen them fighting and saved Chung’s life and Shen’s as well, with some brilliant improvisation under the nose of General Ping Wen. As a result of which, Shen had been co-opted into the emperor’s personal service, to train his guards in ways of fighting hand to hand; and Chung had been co-opted body and soul by Mei Feng, to be her personal messenger.
Her slave, Shen said, which was another reason to learn how to hit him.
Her spy, Chung thought, these days. It was the emperor’s sash he wore and the emperor’s messages he carried, the emperor he would speak to when he made his report; but it was Mei Feng who listened, dictated, demanded, instructed. If she had slaves, they numbered at least one more than one, and that one extra was the Son of Heaven, who was as delightedly devoted as Chung so fiercely denied himself to be, whenever Shen accused him.
Bare feet in cold water, that was good, as he sat gratefully at the river’s edge and let them dangle. Rough fingers pressing on his neck, digging into his shoulders, working the taut strings of his body with a savage intimacy: that was another kind of good, cruelly good, as he leaned back into the groaning, painful pleasure of it. These same hands, that had so delighted in hurting him the first time—well, they did still hurt him, and it was still deliberate, and now at least some of the delight ran the other way. Chung had been remade, from the outside in; the changes had reached his head and heart and belly, and were insinuating themselves deep into his bones.
He closed his eyes and tipped his head back and found Shen’s shoulder exactly there to support it, which put Shen’s ear right here next to his lips, where he need only whisper to say anything he wanted …
There was nothing he could think of. Head to head, skin to skin, that said it all. These same brutal hands were an adjunct, the river in the valley: good to have, but it was the jade in the mountain that mattered.
They had talked to each other, he and Shen: awkwardly, reluctantly, because they had that one thing in common now, that they were alive by Mei Feng’s courtesy when they might both have been stupidly, pointlessly dead. And because she had decreed that Chung too must learn to fight by Shen’s odd northern methods; if he was running her messages, she said, and her lord the emperor’s also, he should be able to defend them. And because it was hard to sweat and hurt and learn at another’s hands and yet not speak to him, not want to know who he was, this swift young man with the black stare and the sudden laugh, the inaccessible skills and the deep shadows at his back. And because …
Because of this, in the end: because one young man and another could slip their clothes off and wash a fight away, shuck all the evidence of difference, be nothing more t
han two bodies in the stream with no intent to harm, no wish in the world.
five
Jiao was not made to be a teacher.
Her patience was a solitary art, the patience of the hunter to squat all night by a trail, waiting for the one clean kill. It was a skill long practiced, an aspect of herself. She had none for other people when they were awkward or idle or slow.
Her restlessness went with her patience, hand in hand. She was a woman who appeared with the evening star, killed if she had to and kissed where she could, and was gone by dawn. She was a creature of the road and the shadow, fugitive as wind; she didn’t linger. That she had stayed with Yu Shan as long as this—well. He was Yu Shan, and she was interested.
Even being here, in a dead-end valley far from the road, walled in by mountains, sleeping in the same bed night after night: even this she would accept, because of him. Because of her interest in him. It came from her, as ever. She wasn’t vulnerable, only engaged.
And closeness to him brought her close to the emperor, insanely close, which was also interesting. And dangerous, but risk was spice in the pot, fire in the night and welcome. It would bring another kind of danger in the city, where she might not follow unless she chose; she had seen politics and ambition before, and was not interested.
But for now they were here, where dangers came with steel blades and hard fighting, and she was happy.
Except that they were trying to make a teacher of her, and she was bored.
Down by the river, Shen taught his colleagues—imperial soldiers and mining clansfolk, group by mixed group—how to fight bare-handed. Up here, in a forest clearing hacked out for timber, she was meant to teach the same groups how to fight her way on bad ground. It was the emperor’s idea, which meant it was probably Mei Feng’s. Soldiers or miners, they thought they could fight already, and they were mostly right. With their own skills added to Shen’s added to hers, they should be formidable. She and Shen were opposites, a pair. Where he taught them to duck, she taught them to bite; where he taught them to kick, she taught them to back away.
When they were prepared to listen. They had grown up with clan wars, or else they had matured on the long march from the north; they thought they knew how to be vicious, relentless, entirely the killer.
Group after group, it was her task to show them they were wrong. Didn’t these people talk to one another …?
Apparently not. One more time, then: her long steel tao blade, her body—tough as a root but tired now, tired in the worst way, tired of doing this—and her honed experience against one of these implausible clan boys. Implausibly young, implausibly strong, implausibly swift and supple. She could be tired of that, too, but he came at her hard and fast and she didn’t have time. Their blades clattered and sparked. He was aggressive and confident, cocksure; he’d learned nothing from watching the others. She backed across the clearing, always giving ground, faltering under the simple weight of his blows until at last his foot stumbled over a stump hidden by new growth. Even then he didn’t trip, but his eyes glanced down instinctively; in that moment of distraction she slammed the hilt of her tao into the side of his head.
Possibly a little harder than she had to.
He fell very satisfactorily, like a hammer-felled ox. No cause to worry. They weren’t Yu Shan or the emperor, these kids, they didn’t heal miraculously from blows that should have killed an ox, but they did have remarkably strong bones—thick skulls, she liked to say, that needed lessons pounded into them—and powers of recovery that were honestly not quite human.
As witness, this lad was stirring already. He did have the grace to groan, but she thought that might just be to gratify his teacher. She held him down with one booted foot on his shoulder and addressed the gathered circle of her pupils.
“You fight on whatever ground you have to, but be aware: bandits will always choose ground that works to their advantage. And use it. Sometimes it’s easier to go backward. You look like you’re retreating, in fact you draw them on, into—”
She broke off as another figure appeared at the edge of the clearing. Another of these clansfolk, but a face Jiao didn’t know; and she came not from the compound but the forest. A volunteer, then, unless she was a messenger. There was a thin but steady stream of them trickling in, the young and the jadeless and the dispossessed. As word spread through the mountains—the emperor here and recruiting from the clans, offering something new—so they came, nervous and curious and hungry.
And hopeful, and extraordinary, and a little bewildered. This one lifted her eyes—green, yes—and said, “Please, they told me on the ridge-height to come this way …”
Actually they’d probably told her to follow the river, but newcomers tended to keep to the trees. It was no easy matter, Jiao knew, to walk openly into enemy territory, and these clans had been fighting one another for generations. It had been no easy matter to establish this as a valley of truce, let alone to make them all settle together. Having a leaven of imperial soldiers helped, but not enough.
Still, none of them had killed each other yet. And the more clans were represented, the more dilute clan loyalty became, the easier it would be to build a new loyalty. They had someone to follow, who was the emperor; they had someone to resent, who was herself; someone to admire, perhaps, who was Shen. They’d sweat down into a reliable crew soon enough.
She said, “Yes, and welcome. Why have you come?” Looking for the emperor, looking for a new life, they had a dozen ways to say it but it was always the same thing, not to eke out their days in ever more strenuous working for ever less stone. This one, though, she looked shy suddenly, perhaps she even blushed a little; her voice was firm enough, though, as she said, “I was looking for my clan-cousin, Yu Shan. I heard he was with the emperor, so I came to see …”
Jiao’s mouth worked a couple of times, soundlessly, before she managed a reply.
“Yes. Yu Shan is here. I can, I can bring you to him …” So could anyone in her class, so could anyone in the encampment, and her lesson was barely begun; but she abandoned it and them, all her curious pupils, as she steered this girl toward the compound.
Her mouth was oddly dry and her mind was oddly dizzy, but one thing at least: she was no longer bored.
six
Ma Lin had been a woman of substance once. She’d had a home, a reputation, a family. A husband and three daughters, all her own. No son yet, but he might yet come. It had been a good foundation, something to build a life upon.
Now her husband was dead, and she had trodden in his spilled body. One of her girls was gone: little Meuti, who had chosen not to live after she saw her father killed and her big sister ruined. She had stopped eating, and would not walk. They had carried her, turn and turn about, most of the miles from there to here, but she had grown lighter and easier day by day, and at last there had been nothing left to bear. So they buried her instead, and her absence had been a harder thing to carry and still was.
The home was lost and left behind, the reputation far forgotten. All Ma Lin had left was two daughters, and one of those was broken beyond measure.
Jin the eldest had always been most useful, but she was gone inside herself now, into bad country. Silent and unreachable, she needed telling when to eat and when to excrete. Some days, she needed washing.
Blessedly, Shola the other daughter—youngest now—could do all that and more. She had become her sister’s keeper, bossy and tender and determined; which left her mother free to worry for them all, as was proper.
MA LIN was a practical worrier, practical in everything. If anyone would be found sitting on the temple steps, looking out over the strait toward Taishu, empty-handed, that would be her daughters, not herself.
“Watch for the old fisherman,” she said. “He knows where we are. Perhaps he will come again.”
Or perhaps it would be the dragon who came again, let them watch a wonder. Or perhaps it would be soldiers bringing terror, but Ma Lin didn’t think so. She thought most of the sold
iers had been on the boats, when the dragon broke them. The temple was a mile’s walk from the road, a good mile through trees and over broken ground; there was no path anymore, and the soldiers were strangers in this country. They wouldn’t know it was here; and if they knew, they wouldn’t care; and if they cared, the Li-goddess whose temple it was, she would protect a mother and her girls, refugees under her roof.
Wouldn’t she?
Ma Lin was no theologer. She waited warily for the goddess, worried about her children, even while she walked the mile or more to the road.
Went cautiously, never quite the same way twice, not to leave a track through the undergrowth; and lurked at a vantage-point still within the trees’ shadow, where she could see the traffic both west and east.
Mostly the traffic she saw was soldiers. These were the destroyers, the men who had rampaged through Santung and ruined everything good that was hers. They enraged her and terrified her both at once, and she trusted neither her rage nor her terror. She crouched in her shadows and watched them pass, and waited.
If the road was clear of soldiers and a farmer came with his mule-wagon or a peasant with his burden, she might slip from cover to beg mutely at the roadside. She was luckier with peasants than farmers; the poor beg best, most profitably from the poor.
When it was women on the road, she did not beg, but offered: her hands, her back, her wisdom or her skills, whatever might be useful to them.
Mostly, almost always she was turned away, but seldom without a blessing. Food was wealth and trade goods; everyone carried something in a bag or a pouch or a pocket. Ma Lin might come away with a handful of rice or a lump of sugar, dried mushrooms sewn into a scrap of silk, perhaps a pot of preserved vegetables. Really the offer to work was just another way to beg, and they all understood it.
When she had strained the day’s luck or the gods’ generosity as far as she dared, then she would pack up her worry and her goods and turn back into the forest.