by Daniel Fox
Yu Shan wasn’t sure, it seemed very fast; but she was never far from the emperor’s side. Perhaps he fed her some of his own food? Or perhaps she didn’t need to eat jade. His sweat was hers, his saliva, his seed. Inside her. Perhaps there was enough stone in him to make a swifter difference in her.
The soldiers, though, who were barely arrived in the mountains, who had barely begun to mingle with the clansfolk, sharing food and sleeping quarters and tentatively, transiently sharing beds … No. It wasn’t that easy. The touch of jade was a life-gift; if you weren’t emperor—or, perhaps, the emperor’s beloved—then it had to be hard-won through years of closeness, years of sweat and hurt and toil in the dark, hacking stone from narrow twisting seams. Hoarding it, breathing its dust, scabbing green where a sharp edge of stone had cut you and you hadn’t noticed until the stone-grit that got everywhere had worked its way into the cut and stopped the bleeding and now you had stone in your blood. Yu Shan wouldn’t have it easier than that, something that one man might casually pass to another, no.
He thought they would be leading soldiers by the hand, if they were still on the path at sunset.
The emperor would lead Mei Feng by the hand in any case, whether it was dark or not.
Yu Shan might have led Jiao the same way if she had let him, which she would not; but this was a trip without Jiao, with Siew Ren instead. Who used to lead him by the hand often and often, away from all paths and up into the forest, her slender fingers imperious and teasing and delighted. He didn’t think she would want to touch him now. Unless she wanted to seize him with hands like manacles, never to let him stray again.
Not sure what he wanted, he was none the less entirely sure that it was not this: the way she stayed close but cold, close enough to watch but not to reach; the way her eyes avoided his except when they did the other thing, when they sought him out, challenging and contemptuous and betrayed. The way she would not speak to him, except when she did and that was worse.
The way the emperor had trapped him with her, sending Jiao away. On the path he felt that absolutely, arranged to the imperial satisfaction. Yu Shan and his clan-cousin were the guides, side by side; the emperor and his consort followed, while their guards ranged before and behind. Perhaps, to the casual eye, the two couples had enough distance between them to ensure privacy, but that was nonsense. The emperor’s hearing was jade-sharp. He could hear a whisper in the next valley if he reached for it; Yu Shan knew. And the emperor knew that, of course, and played with it.
And knew that the same was true the other way, that Yu Shan could hear him. He played with that too, telling Mei Feng how pretty Yu Shan’s cousin was, how fresh, how desirable …
At one point, Mei Feng asked acidly if his majesty desired her for his concubine, as no doubt Yu Shan would be pleased to make the arrangements …?
That won her no more answer than a laugh, or at least a laugh with a kiss for sweetener. Unkissed and not at all laughing, Yu Shan gritted his teeth and walked on, his clan-cousin just there, at his shoulder but out of reach, a stormy silence in the corner of his eye.
YU SHAN heard hard challenges and soft replies at every ridge and valley-head, where the vanguard met another clan on watch. Again and again he heard someone crash away downslope, a runner gone to tell the elders the emperor is here!
He and Siew Ren followed warily, knowing how hard this was for everyone. They were watched, stared at, but not challenged. It was as if they were carried on the wash of something greater; he could hear it at his back, that stillness and silence where the emperor came walking.
Farther down would be the elders, as many as could be swiftly found or gathered; it might be just one family from one mine-head, all that the runner could reach. Whatever their authority—or lack of it—these people couldn’t simply let the emperor pass by. There had to be a formal greeting, a stuttering welcome to clan lands. If there wasn’t quite kowtowing, it was only because court manners were unknown in practice and bewildering in reputation. There was a lot of kneeling in the mud, lowered heads, averted eyes.
The emperor needed a swift technique in gracious brushing-off, and didn’t have one. He had to stop, to speak to the senior there, to ask about the valley’s mines, the jade, how rich the seams and how hard, how tight the workings.
Jade was perhaps the only thing he could speak of to these remote and nervous strangers; stone they could always talk about, to anyone. Especially perhaps in these days, with the veins so thin and spare, fresh seams far to seek and never as good, never as promising as they were won’t to be.
And so time passed, in one valley and the next, and there was no hope of reaching Yu Shan’s home by sundown if they ran all the rest of the way. They might as well take their time, then, linger, talk to everyone. Maybe stop the night in this valley, with this household, where they would surely be most fearfully welcomed; or maybe one more rise, one more ridge, stay in the next valley over …
DARKNESS CAUGHT them on a height between one valley and another, that sudden plunge of sun behind a mountain peak that left light in the sky but none pooling in the valley bottoms, where they would actually need it. Yu Shan and the emperor might have gone on comfortably, and the clansfolk with them, but not—as he’d predicted—the imperial soldiers. Mei Feng kept her own counsel, what she could see and what she couldn’t.
Downslopes were more perilous in the dark, and so were clannish watchers who would see only shadows moving through shadow, and might well shoot before they challenged. Safer now to wait for dawn, in this high hinterland between one clan’s ground and the next.
They climbed off the path and found a shelf where leaf mold softened rock still warm from the day’s sun. A rainwater pool refreshed them, and everyone shared what edibles they had; it made an odd meal, but satisfying. The emperor seemed to enjoy every mouthful.
“Shall we gather wood for a fire?” he mumbled, cracking nuts between his teeth.
“Best not, majesty. I’m sorry,” as his face fell, child-like in its disappointment. “It would be a struggle to find dry wood, and one of us might wander too far and get into trouble, and—”
“What he means,” Mei Feng murmured, slipping her arm through the emperor’s and making as if to whisper in his ear, though her voice carried happily to all of them, “is that it would be wonderfully stupid to hold back here until the light comes, but to make a light of our own that might draw all those wicked wary guards we were trying to avoid …”
It was astonishing sometimes, the liberty he allowed her. Here, in this small group of friends, he only smiled and put an arm around her neck and kissed her. “You be my warmth, then,” he said. “How shall we sleep?”
They were barely enough for proper watches, except that better than half of them were touched by jade, at least a little. A night without sleep had never been a trouble, even when he was a boy alone at the mine-head. Tonight, back in true mountains after far too long away, Yu Shan couldn’t imagine sleeping. His bones were thrumming. If mountains had a heartbeat, the slow pulse of jade in their veins, that same pulse was alive in him like a silver wire sliding through his marrow: never quite painful but eternally cold and sharp, all shivery edge and threat.
The emperor showed no signs of sleepiness either, but Mei Feng was dozing already with her head conveniently cushioned in his lap. That should hold him at least for a little while if they were disturbed, if trouble came. At least long enough for Yu Shan to get ahead of him.
In the meantime, there were stars overhead and the night forest all around; and they were both of them young, the emperor and himself, and a long night of talking stretched ahead, and he could be strangely excited about that—
—EXCEPT THAT there was his clan-cousin too, here was his clan-cousin too, on her feet and twitching, restless with unhappiness.
“Walk with me?” she said. Which used to be an invitation to delight, but not tonight. He looked to the emperor and almost hoped for a refusal, an imperial command, you stay here with me—but ins
tead there was a wave of the hand, a casual dismissal, and of course he had to go.
HUMAN FEET turn naturally uphill, and here in the mountains there was always somewhere higher. Sometimes they had to scramble and that was good, it meant they could stop walking awkwardly beside each other and go single-file; just once, the first time, he turned and crouched and reached down a hand for hers. Old habit, remembered pleasure, yearning, forgetfulness: she was still who she was, he forgot that he had changed, and Jiao was nowhere in his head at just that moment.
Jiao must have been still very much in Siew Ren’s head. His clan-cousin didn’t move at all for a moment, and then very deliberately didn’t take his hand; she stretched for a different grip, clambered up another way, came to the top of the boulder and walked on without even looking at him.
They walked, they climbed independently and together, and in the end he said, “Siew Ren, if you don’t want to talk …” Touching was something else and he knew it, he’d been stupid, unthinking; but if all she meant to do was reject him, stony silence over a cold shoulder, he thought he might go back to the emperor.
She spun around, fierce in starlight, and said, “No, I don’t want to talk. I want you to talk. I want you to say what’s happened to you, what you’ve done to yourself. Look, it’s still summer, you haven’t been gone so long; but you’ve come back someone else in Yu Shan’s skin. Hardly his skin, even,” stumblingly, “even the way you look is different. What have you done …?”
He opened his mouth to tell her, knowing before he took breath that it was hopeless, a waste of breath, he couldn’t begin to explain what had happened to him except for the one thing, the jade beneath his tongue, the little nodule of stone that her own tongue might have found out if they had still been as they were before—but then it didn’t matter because actually she wasn’t looking for answers, she wasn’t actually looking at him at all anymore.
Looking past him, rather: staring, rather, with an expression he’d never seen or thought to see on her face, hers especially. Of all the women in the world, she was not the one to be utterly awed and utterly frightened. She’d faced the emperor with hardly a twitch. And these were their own known mountains, there was nothing to terrify her here. Even a war party coming down high over the hill to avoid the watch, she might see the danger but she wouldn’t be afraid. She certainly would not be awed. She wouldn’t stand there with her eyes as wide as her mouth, caught in cold silence on a hot night.
Besides, he’d heard nothing: not the scratch of metal on metal, not the hissing whisper of a foot softly laid in grass, not the least hint of anything beyond the normal sounds of the forest in its night. He still didn’t. Between the birdsong and the occasional crash of a late monkey in the canopy, the rush and burble of distant water, the sough of wind and his own breathing and Siew Ren’s, there was nothing. He was sure.
And Then He Turned, And—
OH. THAT was—not nothing, no. The opposite of nothing, rather: an entirety, an engulfing.
HE WAS vaguely, heedlessly aware of himself stepping back, because he dared not stand so close; reaching his clan-cousin and stopping there, because he dared not leave her to stand alone.
Feeling her take his hand, like a promise that he would not leave her; she would prevent it.
FEAR AND awe, yes: caught so perfectly between the two, he had no thought of leaving, any more than he had any thought of going closer.
ON A ROCK above their heads, against the twisted shadow of a twisted mountain tree burned a tiger.
It stood as still as they did only more so, magnificently still, still as the rock beneath its vast paws. Except that it was a living, liquid thing, still only because it saw no occasion to move.
Jade tigers, they were called. Stone tigers, sometimes. This one might have been stone itself, true jade just for that moment, if god or man could have cut jade into an absolute of tiger, the essence of it, sight and touch and power. If he could have touched it, Yu Shan was sure of harsh fur and a hot body, skin and muscle and bone beneath, the imperative of movement imperiously contained.
Its eyes shone: two chips of jade, exactly the green of the deep-sea stone, exactly the green of the emperor’s eyes and his own. More than that, its fur shone green between the bands of black.
It … considered them, seemingly. He thought those eyes saw what he had confessed to nobody, the chip of jade in his mouth; he thought they saw how far the stone had penetrated. He thought the tiger was a jade-eater too, or else it was born in the mountain’s heart, born of the stone, jade in its blood from the beginning.
He thought he might die from not breathing.
Sometimes he wondered if he could die at all, but not now; now he wondered how he might dare to go on living, having seen. Having been seen.
The tiger leaped down like moonlight pouring from a jug, a vivid flow immediate in movement and immediate to halt. When it had landed on the path before them, it was entirely still again.
Then its whiskers twitched, it opened its mouth and breathed out. Yu Shan smelled the deep smell of the mines, jade and dust and air that was sodden with stone. He had missed that. The tiger’s eyes said yes, as though something had been understood between them.
And then it had turned and was leaving, leaping away, and was gone; and its absence was a sudden aching hollow in the world that the night could rush into, rush and rush and never hope to fill.
Siew Ren clung to his arm two-handed, like a monkey on a rope. Eventually—because one of them after all did have to say something, do something, change the world, or else they would only stand there forever in the same bewildered daze—she said, “Do you, do you think that was an omen?”
“I think it was a message,” which might be the same thing, if an omen was a message from the gods. “I just don’t know what it means.”
She nodded, her cheek against his shoulder, and they were quiet again, still again.
“Was it even real?”
“It was real. See, it left pug-marks on the path,” an enormous spread of paw and striking deep where it had landed, so much weight behind it, how could it not be real?
“Yes,” she said, “and its breath smelled of forest pools with the sun on them—but if it came from the gods, that still doesn’t mean it’s real.”
He knew stone tigers were real, even if he’d never seen one before. The mountains were full of stories; he had stroked the fur of a skin, it almost seemed long ago now, in the jademaster’s palace. Even so, he understood her doubts. If a god were involved, it could be real and real and still not actually exist, not now be padding through the forest with the rumble of hunger in its gut and a weary ache in its bones.
He found it hard to imagine, tired. Sleeping, that was hard too; it was either there or it wasn’t, he couldn’t see it in any other way. Not vulnerable, turned away from the world, adrift.
Hungry wasn’t hard at all. He thought it might have swallowed them both, quite neatly. If it had done that—well, he thought they would both be really dead. That was real enough for him.
He didn’t say so, quite. Only, “I don’t know how to tell the difference, between something that’s real like we are and something that’s real because the gods sent it.”
The notion itself was unreal, that the gods would send something to him. To them. She had seen it, or at least smelled it, differently; perhaps it had been two different messages, both equally incomprehensible?
At least Siew Ren seemed not to be hating him just now. That would return, no doubt; her anger had simply ebbed, in the face of something infinitely greater. Something shared. Something for Yu Shan to be grateful for, except that that seemed like a monumental impertinence: neither jade tigers nor gods would stoop to interfere with mortals simply to hush a quarrel or smooth over a betrayal.
He assumed not, in any case. Perhaps that was impertinent too, and he should just be grateful.
CONFUSED, HE settled for being in a hurry; she was pulling at his arm, hurrying already.
Hurrying back down the hill, back to the emperor where he sat with Mei Feng cushioned against him, in the circle of his arm but not at all asleep anymore; and when they said what they had seen, the emperor nodded and said yes, him too. Mei Feng too. And no, they had no idea what it meant, only that they were both sure that it meant something.
eight
At least the pirate had sea-sense and common sense together; his sense of self-preservation encompassed everyone aboard.
That did not stop Old Yen resenting him. This boat might be a bastard, but she was his own bastard, and had been for a long time. He had refused to let any of his sons take her over, even at the cost of losing them as crew; he loathed to lose command of her now. Especially to a strong man with a dark soul and shadows at his back, more of a bastard creature than the boat had ever been.
If there weren’t other people with their lives in the balance, he might have resisted Li Ton, at whatever cost to himself. He didn’t believe even a pirate captain could have sailed this boat well enough to make a landing at the Forge, let alone brought her out again whole. He didn’t believe he could have done it himself without the hand of the Li-goddess to guide him, to smooth the waters and raise the hull; he wouldn’t have attempted it, if he didn’t believe wholeheartedly in her kindness.
But there was the girl and her uncle, and there was young Pao too; any of those might have died, to teach a simple brutal lesson to the others.
Also, of course, there had been the dragon.
Old Yen had seen her distantly, rising and swooping and rising again. Pao had seen more from the masthead, and called down more than he cared to know.
And then she had come here, to the Forge. Seen from below she was a mighty terror, a shadow like ink against the bright paper sky, blotted of all color. She flew without wings—on the wings of her will, as the storytellers had it—with a slow sinuous motion like the flow of spilled ink while her head turned this way and that, surveying all that lay below her.