Jade Man's Skin
Page 8
It was imperative, she thought, to save Guangli’s head. And her own. She bowed low, and said, “Highness, we do. This is his favorite jade carver, and his majesty has sent for him.”
“Indeed. Why does his majesty want a jade carver?”
“He is in the mountains, highness, among the mines. Perhaps he has found a stone he wishes to see carved. I was only sent to fetch the man.”
“And to lie to your superiors if necessary, to see him safely there? I understand you perfectly. Very well, go your way. And tell his majesty that General Ping Wen has come to visit him; and is waiting at the site of the new palace, but will not wait for long. If his majesty does not come to me there, tell him, I must come to him. However hard he is to find. Tell him there are matters of great importance to discuss. Do you understand me?”
“Highness, I do.” And had foreguessed him, his name at least, which pleased her.
WHAT PLEASED her more, he clapped his hands and started his whole procession moving again, lifting the weight of empire from her shoulders. For a moment there, she’d felt as though the whole edifice had been looking at her, through him: assessing her place, her contribution. Her inadequacies.
She never felt that way when the emperor looked at her. Despite his rank and his extraordinary body, despite his astonishing eyes, despite his undeniable allure, when he looked at her she still only saw a boy. A boy’s curiosity, a boy’s amusement, a boy’s hope.
His empire had been missing all this time. Apparently his general had it, in the pocket of his sleeve.
Had it, and had taken it away.
She counted the hundred soldiers he had in his tail, and waited until the last of them had moved on, shuffle-shuffle out of sight.
Then she helped Guangli up out of the ditch, and set them both to following rather faster than they had been going before. No danger of catching up with the general again, even her long loping pace couldn’t match that short shuffling relentless run, even if Guangli could have kept up with her; but she thought the emperor should hear this sooner rather than later.
If that meant that she saw Yu Shan sooner rather than later, well. That was incidental.
three
Li Ton had seen cities in ferment, and cities in torment; he had seen cities in ruin. More than once, he had been the instrument of that ruin. Fire and sword, the walls broken and the fields sown with salt. He was used to marching with the stink of smoke at his back, the wail of women in his ears, the wet chafing weight of fresh blood on his clothes.
He had never quite seen anything like Santung as it was now, twice defeated, under occupation by a hollow sour army that would shatter at a blow if anyone could land one. Soldiers and civilians both looked to the sky with dread, and found it empty, and saw no comfort in that. All they knew to do was wait, it seemed, until it would not be empty any longer. In the meantime, they had no idea how to live, day to day or with one another.
THE FISHERMAN had been strange last night when he came back from the temple, was strange still this morning, silent and distracted and somehow not afraid of the right things, of Li Ton or this walk into the city, nor of the dragon in the air. Something had scared him for sure, but it wasn’t guessable.
Nevertheless, Li Ton wasn’t leaving him behind, with the boy and the boat. It was Li Ton’s boat now, and he meant to keep it.
The boy was properly frightened of Li Ton, and would do what he was told: rowing the rest of them to land and then returning to the boat to scrub decks and mend sail until they hailed him ashore again. Something might come that he could not deal with—men with boats or intrepid swimmers, a tidal surge, a dragon—but Li Ton was a practical man, and only ever demanded what was possible.
He might have left the doctor, who was no kind of sailor. If he met trouble anywhere between here and Tunghai Wang, though, it was likely to be with the remnants of Tunghai’s army. His own face, his own name would mean little or nothing, whereas the doctor had been well known on the long march here. Soldiers were sentimental about anyone who took care of them in their need; healers or whores were equally cherished. The doctor might see him safely through to the generalissimo if his own resources failed.
He might have left the girl, but he didn’t trust her with the boat. She wanted to get back to her own boy, to Han on the island; she might persuade Pao that the two of them could sail it well enough together. He didn’t think they’d get as far as the Forge, and he was utterly certain that they would lose the boat and themselves on the rocks there if they did, but the young were often idiots. It would be a shame to let them throw their lives away when they might yet be useful to him; it would be folly to lose the boat like that, to a girl’s sentiment and a boy’s susceptibility.
So he took the girl and the doctor and the fisherman too, to the beach and the road and the city.
THEY MET peasants and farmers on the road, if there were any actual difference between the two. Li Ton had never been sure. To a soldier they were all alike, mud-grubbers whose food would keep an army marching, though it had to be taken at the blade’s edge. To a ruined man, to a beggar much the same, except that the food had to be wheedled or stolen from them, when he had no blade. And to a pirate the same again, land-bound, as vegetable as rice and roots. Whether they owned the land or only worked it, whether they were owned themselves, paddy by paddy: no difference.
Certainly there was no distinguishing them on that road, that day. They were all afraid of him. And with reason. There were soldiers on the road too, coming and going, with wagons that were mostly empty. Supplies must be running low and pickings would be few, on land that had been picked and picked already. One lesson that abided, from Li Ton’s time as a general: an army should keep moving, whatever the cost. Once it stalled, for winter or weather or bad country, for any reason at all, that was when trouble came. Not hunger alone, but hunger usually first. He’d always hated sieges; a siege could be as hard on the soldiers outside the wall as it was on the citizens within.
This, now, this would be worse. A siege of sorts, yes, only with water in lieu of a wall: unbridgeable water, a surging sea that had already swallowed one fleet of men.
A surging sea with a dragon to guard it.
Tunghai Wang’s men would likely be hungry by now. There had been too many of them before the dragon, and they had been here too long. No wonder the peasants were afraid.
Even so, hunger was likely the least of Tunghai’s troubles. The generalissimo had ridden this far, all across the empire on a chasing wave; stalled at the last, his men lost and his armada too, what should he do now? Creep back to the capital in defeat, and try to claim a missing throne in an empty city? He would never survive the journey. One of his allies would slay him, the others would challenge for his place, and the whole rebel army would splinter and scatter. Lucky if it didn’t destroy itself entirely, the men all fighting one another, this regiment against that, one general against another until perhaps there was only one survivor, a new generalissimo and no army left to lead.
No wonder then if even the troops were edgy, passing strangers on the road. Li Ton could never look like a peasant; no more could his companions. And Tien was a girl, young and pretty. To a squad of soldiers, any squad of soldiers Li Ton had ever known, that could be enough. It disturbed him, almost, that it was not: that the soldiers looked, touched hands to hilts, muttered among themselves and hurried on by. Under orders, perhaps—no more rape, no more killing, we need the people now; who else will feed us, who else will build more boats?—but even so it worried at him like a needle in the flesh. An occupying army should be prouder: swift to challenge, hard to pass. He was still a soldier in his heart, and he would have had these men flogged, their captains executed for showing their own doubts and fears so openly.
Which would not have helped the army, he understood that. It was too late for discipline, which meant it was too late altogether. This was an army broken, and he was quite surprised that Tunghai Wang still had charge of it, still breathed.
Apparently not, but a voice did hail his little group at last, or one of them at least:
“Doctor!”
Tien’s uncle had been bewildered all day and perhaps for days on end, still not caught up with his change of status. Not a doctor at the moment, not allowed to be—barely more than a hostage, indeed, a creature of some use to someone else—he still reacted to that title.
Came to a startled halt and turned around; gazed a little blankly at the soldier staring back; waited.
The soldier said—quite rightly—“You won’t remember me, doctor. But I was sick on the march, months ago, and you gave me a tea that broke the fever. Blackwater fever, all my troop was down with it but I was the lucky one, I came to you …”
And now the doctor clearly did remember, as they all do, the disease if not the patient; he smiled behind his beard and his sheltering hand, said, “More wise than lucky, perhaps. Asking help when it is needed is the prerogative of wisdom.”
Li Ton thought it was a survival instinct, and didn’t say so.
The soldier said, “I made sure my friends all came to you, after.” All those that lived was understood. “But why are you here, doctor? We missed you, from your tent; word said you had gone with the fleet to Taishu, and were lost …”
Are you a ghost? his eyes said, though they were trying hard not to believe it; and to be sure he looked not at all ghostly to Li Ton’s eyes, only tired and dirty and afraid.
“I went to Taishu,” the doctor said, “and am back.”
Which was as good as to say I am a ghost, and he knew it, and didn’t apparently care; or else he did it deliberately. Perhaps just to assert his own mystery, perhaps just to frustrate Li Ton. For sure it did that, because the soldier paled to a sickly color and hurried away before he could say anything useful, anything at all.
Still, even his departing back left one thing unsaid but apparent, that the doctor was remembered among the troops, that his face could still be useful.
AND HERE at last was the city. No wall, no gate: a town built on wealth alone, buying good relations with its neighbors and ultimately protected by the emperor’s own word, his jade-port, where the stone came in from Taishu. As a pirate, Li Ton had been drawn in; as a soldier, he despised the complacency and felt small pity for the ruin that it was.
Over the ridge of the river valley, and here was where the army camp had ringed the city, where the doctor and the girl and himself had all found one another. All through Han, who was stranded now, with his dragon for company. If the dragon hadn’t eaten him already, or carried him off. Li Ton hadn’t forgotten Han; he still hoped the boy might make a useful piece in this game, for later play. He was another reason to hold on to the fisherman.
The camp was empty now, abandoned, a mess of poles and fabric flapping in the breeze, cold firepits and foul latrines and rotting heaps of trash. A city of flies and rats, that had so recently been a busy city of men encircling a city of the dead.
“Where are they all?” Tien murmured.
Dead, but he didn’t say so.
“Let’s find out,” he said instead, and led the way down into the tangle of lanes and broader ways that made the city proper.
THEY WEREN’T all dead, of course. Tunghai Wang could never have built or assembled enough boats to take his entire army, in the short time he’d had. He must have meant to ferry back and forth.
Perhaps he did still mean to. Certainly there were men still busy on every beach, building another fleet. Perhaps there were even the soldiers to man it, or would be by next year, when it might be ready. Some of those squads on the road had raw recruits with them, who must be local conscripts. As local as they could be, when Tunghai Wang had ordered the slaughter of every man and boy in Santung …
The city itself had a population again, but never a natural one. There were men, soldiers, everywhere: doing nothing, as soldiers will, only idling in gangs at street corners, tossing coins and knives and words around as though none of them mattered, as though nothing ever could.
And there were women: the soldiers’ own and the city’s survivors, those who had lacked the sense or the luck to flee. They were busy, busy, always in a hurry, if only to be out from under the eyes of the men. They scurried from door to door, traded briskly in murmurs, vanished into shadow. Or they went slowly, struggling under burdens—a sack of charcoal, a rope of kindling—to show how weak the hungry are. Or how desperate, some of them, who crept out to beg from the soldiers, knowing already what that would cost them.
Men, women, everyone watched the sky in glimpses, all the time. Down at the docks or the beaches, Li Ton guessed everyone would be watching the water too. Not going too close, not willingly taking a punt across the harbor.
The same must be true too on the other side of the strait; he wondered how Taishu would feed itself when no one dared take a boat out to fish. Freeing the dragon might have saved the island and doomed it, both at once. Which meant, of course, saving the emperor and dooming him too. Not that the boy would starve, but he would truly be an emperor without an empire. Let him style himself as he chose, it was over; Tunghai Wang could forget him and go home. So could Li Ton.
If he had a home to go to. If he was allowed to leave. The generalissimo didn’t worry him unduly, but he needed to get that far.
He’d have asked for directions or escort at the gate, but there was none: no gate and no guard on the road, no apparent watch. That wasn’t Tunghai’s discipline, that was the heedlessness of a broken force, men whose officers cared no more than they did.
Officers whose men were let rabble in alleys or linger on street corners, coldly eyeing every passer-by who was not one of themselves. And here came Li Ton with the fisherman in his train and the doctor too, and of course Tien. Of course they attracted stares and interest. He had hoped to do no more than that, but he hadn’t anticipated the slack despair that overhung the city. He’d left an army in good heart under a strict master; what he’d come back to was—well, not that. Not an army at all, by any definition he was used to. Just too many soldiers, in fear of something they couldn’t fight. Wanting something they couldn’t express, something else, not this.
And here came people who didn’t belong among them, and none of the men was young, and the girl was pretty; why in the world would they not call out, not follow? When they had nothing else to do, when there was nothing in the world to prevent them, when there was a dragon in the strait and everything else was just waiting?
“OHÉ. FREEBOOTER.”
Did he look so much like a pirate, that they could read that at a glance? Was it burned into his bones now?
Maybe it was in his walk, a seaman come ashore. What did they know of the sea, these men who had walked ten thousand dry and dusty miles to reach it? It blocked them from journey’s end, the battle they had come for; it spewed dragons, and ate their fellows. That was all they’d had the chance to learn. Maybe they thought all sailors were pirates.
Maybe they were right.
Freebooter was an insult none the less. Li Ton didn’t care, except that it meant they hadn’t recognized his face: hadn’t tagged him as one who knew the generalissimo, an important man, not to be mocked. He wouldn’t care about that either, mockery could hurt him nowhere that mattered; but if they didn’t know him, there was small chance they would help him to Tunghai Wang.
Even so, he turned around at the call. There were five of them: peeling themselves away from the wall now, spreading out as they came toward him. Li Ton’s own companions pressed more closely together at his back.
That said it all: confidence on the one side, fear on the other.
Rightly so, on both sides. Old men and girls should fear such as these, who had every reason, every reason in the world to be utterly confident, to swagger as they walked, to press forward as though a crowd parted before them.
Every reason but one, perhaps. Even now, trying to be impressive, they couldn’t help watching the sky. They had their own fear, these men, but that only made them more dangerous.
It would be deadly to run, which was why Li Ton had stopped. It would be deadly also to wait, to let them set the rules; which was why he stopped them with a question.
“Where can I find Tunghai Wang? Can you conduct me there?”
A moment’s stillness, a sudden bark of laughter, and, “Perhaps. What, do you have a ship to bring him, pirate? He would be glad of that, he would welcome you for that. He has lost all his own.”
They had found drink somewhere, these men. They were not quite drunk, not yet; but still, they had been drinking. Enough to loosen words on their tongues, to slacken discipline, to make them more dangerous still.
He said, “I have a boat under my command, yes. And have served him before, and he will be looking for me to do so again. Indeed, he will be waiting to hear from me now. Where in the city—?”
“Ah, there’s no hurry, captain. Captain pirate. He’s good at waiting, the generalissimo. It’s all he has to do now, with his men so very dead. Did you see them, from your ship? All the dead men? Some of them come to shore, you know. Those the dragon didn’t eat. They come floating in on the surf, and we get to pick them up and try to guess who they were before the little things started to eat them. Will you sell us your girl, pirate captain, sir?”
“No,” he said calmly, keeping his voice easy and his hands a long way from his weapons. “No, I won’t do that. Will you take me to the generalissimo? He knows me well, and will be grateful if you do.”