by Daniel Fox
Some few, the lucky few had stayed, if only to keep the idea alive, the emperor’s retreat in the mountains. And to keep some of them out of the palace. Pirates and jade-eaters, say. The rest were back, and not his clan-kin now. His personal guard, most of them, which was still a fine thing to be, but different. And she? She was his concubine again, and nothing more. She could look out of her window and across the courtyard to his mother’s wing, again; and he had deliberately put himself back under that woman’s wing, she thought. If that wasn’t entirely fair, well, she didn’t feel like being fair. She wasn’t obliged to be fair.
He had put himself even more into the hands of Ping Wen, whom Mei Feng liked and trusted no more than she did his mother. Less, perhaps. The empress would try to keep him safe and ineffectual; Ping Wen would do the opposite, make a hero of him, a leader and a warrior.
With faithful Ping Wen right there at his shoulder, of course, number two in the realm, just in case. She was painfully aware—who knew better?—that the emperor had no heir, and the Jade Throne could not be left empty.
Sickness, assassination, war: those were the means of untimely death available to an emperor. She could only think about it ironically, because thinking about it seriously gave her the terrors. Already there had been assassins, and now he was planning a war.
Sickness—well, no. He was absurdly robust. It came with the throne, his vigorous good health and radiant charm and energy and such. At least, it came with the jade that made the throne.
So did strength, the simple strength of stone, and its endurance. He had taken a blade to the chest, and survived it; he could fight all day and exhaust all opposition and still want exercise. If any man, any one man was made to survive a war, he was that one.
And yet, people did die in war however good they were. Emperors, indeed, had died in war. Miraculous powers of recovery wouldn’t stop a frenzied squad of soldiers hacking his head off, and there would be no coming back from that.
Mei Feng hated the thought of war in any case. She hated the actual war that had come so close, seizing Santung and sealing off Taishu. She had hated the little splinter of it that she saw, the assassins who slipped under the island’s skin and drove almost to the heart of empire, the emperor himself. Fleeing and fighting, blood and death, she had hated all of that.
More than anything she hated this, that her idiot the emperor would leave this island, load as many men as possible into the ramshackle fleet that they’d accumulated, and sail over the strait to fight Tunghai Wang and his rebels. The very army that they’d been fleeing for so long, that had driven them here to Taishu, driven the emperor to her in the dragon’s-breath fog.
She hated that he wanted to; she hated and dreaded that he would, that he was committed, if it could only be achieved.
HE WAS speaking to the council now as if it were all his own idea. He said, “We know what happened to Tunghai’s fleet, with so many of his men aboard. What’s left of the rebel army is stranded in Santung now, or else it’s in flight already. We will never have a better chance to strike. One blow, one battle and we can end this. Destroy Tunghai and all his traitors at a stroke …”
He wasn’t even talking like himself, but the council listened to him regardless. Some were nodding their agreement: old generals, men who had fought and won under his father, who thought that winning was the natural order. Who would have fought at the Hidden City when the rebels first rose, would have fought and died and lost everything sooner than run, if they had had command.
The empress was wiser. It was the empress, of course, who had seized up her son and fled, dragging everyone else along in her imperial wake.
She said, “Have you inherited your father’s folly, together with his empire?”
Her son looked at her, momentarily wordless. All the council waited for what in the world could follow. Mei Feng waited too, private in her corner with the tea-things.
“Your father,” said the woman who had perhaps known him best, “was foolish often, when he was young. I had his own word for that. Even later he made mistakes, which other men would pay for. Battles were lost, though few remember those. He became invincible mostly by means of outliving all his enemies, or waiting until they were old and weak before he struck against them. It is an effective tactic, but the first essential is to stay alive long enough to employ it.”
The simple scorn in her voice was like a blow. He did flinch, and Mei Feng almost wanted to cheer for the old woman. How strange was that, to find herself supporting the empress in an argument? With her boy? The empress was the enemy within the palace, whom they fought day in, day out. Until they left the palace.
Now they were back, and something had shifted. The world was new, and the old woman had acknowledged it; at last, she was actually right.
“That’s what I say,” he said, sounding almost child-like for a moment, urging his case against her implacability. “Tunghai is weak at last, and now …”
“Oh, and are you strong?” No one else could interrupt the emperor in council, no one else would dare; he didn’t know how to override her, so he subsided, looking weak. “Do you have more soldiers than you did a month ago, are they more willing to fight?”
“More than him,” he muttered, more and more the sulky boy. “We have more than he does!”
“And you know this how?”
“We saw the dragon destroy his fleet at sea, we have seen the bodies …!”
“Bodies, yes. The dragon, yes. The fleet? How many ships, how many men aboard them?”
His silence was her answer; she let it hang until at last, almost desperate, feeling it all threaten to slide away from him, he said, “We don’t know. How can we tell? No one has been over the strait to see. At least, no one has come back. But it must have been the most of his army.”
“Oh, must it so? Why not a scouting force, a probe, with the most of them held back for another day? How can you tell how many he has lost?”
“Because the dragon took so long to eat them.”
That was a score for him, alas, and he had had the line from her. She felt the mood of the room sway, these men so easily persuaded, they wanted war so much, to redeem their mortgaged honors and ride in triumph home, all those long months of miles along the same road where they’d fled.
But the old woman wasn’t done yet.
“Yes,” she said, “the dragon. Why have we not sent more spies to Santung, to try again to learn the true situation there?”
Again she waited, to force it out of him.
“No one will go now,” he mumbled.
“And why not, why don’t you command them across?”
“Because of the dragon. They are afraid …”
“Their fear means nothing, but the dragon, yes. No boat can evade the dragon’s eye, be it dark or day. If she will not let a sail by, then how can you mount this invasion, how can you have your foolish war? Will you tunnel to Santung? You cannot fly, unless the dragon carries you.”
To that, he simply had no answer and offered none. There was no answer to the dragon. The skies were hers, and the seas too. He could command his invasion—no, Ping Wen’s invasion, that he had so gleefully adopted—as often as he liked, as often as he could make men listen to him; blessedly, not he nor Ping Wen nor anyone could command the dragon.
ANOTHER BLESSING, someone came to take Mei Feng away from this: one of the palace eunuchs, sidling into the throne-room where the council met. That was Hui, who had given some time and attention to her when she was new to this life, when she needed training. She had a fondness for Hui, although he was the empress’s man through and through; she thought perhaps he was fond of her too. It was her that he came to now, rather to her astonishment, among all these great figures. He dropped to his knees behind her, as though she too were a person of importance, and leaned forward to murmur in her ear.
“There is a person, lady, who begs an audience.”
“With me?” It came out too loud; it turned heads. Now no voice
would be quiet enough. The old woman at least could read lips, Mei Feng was sure of that. She gestured, then, outside; and bowed low to her puzzled lord and followed through the servants’ door, behind a screen in the corner. Probably not a good idea politically, too much like an admission of her proper status, but right now Mei Feng might not even want to argue that. Making the emperor’s tea hardly qualified her for responsibility and respect. Nor did quarreling with him in whispers in the night, in the suddenly awkward spaces of his bed, trapped by those same heavy curtains that used to offer such a welcome privacy.
OUTSIDE APPARENTLY meant literally outside, though it was raining. The eunuch had an umbrella to hold over her; there was none for her visitor. Visitors. In the public courtyard stood a bedraggled little group of three, not what she had been looking for. She had expected perhaps a message from the forest compound, where they had left some friends behind. Instead, here was a young and shaven-headed stranger, bowed shelteringly over a recumbent child: and—
“Grandfather!”
She should have hurtled, should have hugged him hard and could not, because that too would have found its way back to the empress. Which ought not to matter, never would have mattered until now. Now, though, when they slept hunched apart with their backs turned, when the emperor refused utterly to listen to her, he might slip back into old habits and allow himself to listen to his mother, to let her opinion influence his.
So no: under Hui’s eye, Mei Feng swallowed her delight. She must still have glowed; she might have bounced; her voice did rise indecorously, but only in that first squeal of joy. With that outside her, she could be moderate and duly deferential. She bowed courteously to the stranger, deeply and genuinely to Old Yen. She’d never really treated him with the respect he undoubtedly deserved, all the years she was living with him; she was a beloved child, and then she was crew, and both of those muddied the waters. Now she was—something else again, but distant from him, gone away. She could see him more clearly, and show him something of what she saw.
Also she could fuss over him outrageously, not to let him think that she had changed too much to bear. He always loved it when she fussed, he could be all gruff and weathered, as sweet and stubborn as his boat.
“Grandfather, honored Grandfather, whyever are you standing in the rain? What were my people thinking, to leave you so …?” This, of course, to the man who was soaked through five nights out of seven, who thought nothing of sailing across the strait and back with a bitter wind sealing sodden clothes to his skin, who would barely think of this as rain at all, though it was dripping from his beard.
She might have been more honestly angry about the child, who looked sick, or at least too big to be carried about that way unless he was sick. But she was completely confused about the child, and the man who carried him. Who were they, strays that Old Yen had collected somewhere? Probably so, but he wasn’t supposed to be bringing any more people over the strait. Why would he have fetched them here, and to her …?
Come to that, no one was supposed to be sailing the strait anymore, under the dragon’s watch. The empress had just been exulting about it, laying it like a piece in elephant chess to frustrate any invasion. For a moment there Mei Feng had forgotten that it ought to apply even to her grandfather.
She couldn’t take him or any of them into the palace; protocol would forbid her. She wouldn’t speak to anyone out here in the rain. Very well.
She signed them to follow, and led out of the courtyard and into the broad gardens behind. Hui shuffled along beside her, with the umbrella as his excuse. She kept him because she had to, because it would be a scandal else; she walked far enough ahead that the rain he kept off her would fall on him instead, his punishment for leaving her grandfather out in it.
She could not send him out of earshot, so anything said here would be passed on, directly to the empress. Hopefully Grandfather would understand the need, the absolute imperative to be discreet …
As they went along, though, Mei Feng remembered that she was not on terms with her beloved, that there would be no murmured, gleeful sharing of secrets in the curtained dark of the bed tonight, only the hard broad silence of his back. That, rather, she was at one with the empress for once. That, whatever Grandfather had brought her—strangers, a child, news in the flesh and otherwise—she might prefer to share it with the old woman than with the emperor.
That the old woman’s network of spies and servants could be her friend, if she could find a use for it.
That was a revelation, and it needed time to think about. Not now: here was the bench already, where she and Grandfather had sat once before. At least, he had sat while she knelt at his feet. She couldn’t do that today, in the rain and the mud with Hui watching. He had allowed it once, when she was new and foolish; now they were past that, she and he. But if she took the bench, at least Grandfather and the stranger could both come in under the shelter of its roof; and officially she was only a concubine, they needn’t kneel to her. Which was just as well, as Grandfather’s knees were not so good and the thought would probably not occur to him.
The stranger did just that, though, instinctively it seemed; and he took off his rice-straw rain hat so that she could see the stubble on his skull where a shave was growing out. Which explained those little hints of familiarity in the way he stood and moved and bowed: a shaved head was the swift sure way to lose a giveaway queue, if a man for example had to journey unprotected for many days before he could find a way back to his master. This man had been a palace servant, which was what the queue denoted, the intimate service of the emperor; which meant he was a eunuch, and had somehow contrived to come this far because what else could he do, where else did a eunuch belong, except in the service of the Son of Heaven?
And—
“Grandfather, where have you been?” Which was both a question and an accusation, if he was listening properly.
He said, “In Santung,” in a voice she hadn’t heard from him before.
“In Santung? Grandfather … !” That was more than she had expected, worse than she had imagined; it almost put the dragon out of her mind. She glanced instinctively at her eunuch servant under his umbrella. He heard that. Saying you have been to Santung is saying you have been to the enemy; and he is not truly my servant at all, he belongs to the empress. What he hears, she will hear. Oh, what is the death due to traitors …?
The eunuch smiled thinly. “Lady, this rain blurs an old man’s ears. I can hear nothing today.”
Did she believe him? No, of course not; the smile was to emphasize the lie, to draw her into the conspiracy.
Did she trust him? No, not that either. Of course not. Hui had been the empress’s man long and long before he was ever hers. Fondness could not outrank loyalty; it would not prevent betrayal.
But. Information was currency all through the palace, from top to bottom. The empress was weak just now, seeing her son in Ping Wen’s sleeve and not her own. Anything she had, which they did not: that would be jade to the empress in her bitterness, in her determination. Anything she could use.
Information, say, about the state of things in Santung …
Let this go to the empress, then. Mei Feng had Hui’s implicit promise not to bring consequences back to Grandfather. That would be the best that she could get from him, the most that he could offer; she did not think the empress would renege on it.
She didn’t think so. No. The old woman paid her debts.
She said, “Tell me, then. Was it in Santung that you found … these friends you have brought to me?”
“Mm? Oh—no. Well, yes. Yes and no. Mei Feng, this is Jung. He is, uh …”
“He is a eunuch,” she said quietly, “like my friend Hui here; and I think, like Hui, he must have been a servant in the Hidden City, am I right?”
Jung bowed. “Master Hui was too far above me to be troubled by my presence, but I watched him and admired and tried to learn. You see very clearly, lady.”
“I see a queue shav
ed off, and a hard road traveled; I think you were not always so thin. Young, though, I expect you have always been young.” Actually, he was older than her; she forgot sometimes, here at court, how young she was herself. And he was impetuous, unless he was desolate. Foolish either way, to chase so far after the emperor once he had been abandoned. Surely there were others like him, eunuchs left behind, finding other ways to live? Growing out their hair and learning to farm, learning to barter, learning that the world outside the wall was different and difficult but not impossible at all.
She said, “You are welcome here, Jung. You have made a brave journey to where your duty lies,” and oh, when did she become so formal? She sounded like a shadow-empress in a puppet-play, mouthing phrases while the real action went on behind her, where she couldn’t see. What the young man needed was a hot bath and a hot meal, clean clothes and a place to sleep, a place to call his own. Perhaps a hug. She couldn’t hug him, but she could at least arrange the rest. “Master Hui here will see to all your needs and comforts, and the emperor himself will see you tomorrow. But the child? Did you find him on your way, and take him up as charity?” For sure, the palace could take in one more boy—but this boy looked broken. Was he deformed, perhaps, or simple-minded? Something held him slack and heedless in Jung’s arms.
“No, lady. I carry him for Old Yen.”
“And I for the Li-goddess,” her grandfather grunted, just as swift to deny the child.
“Grandfather? A temple offering?” Sometimes a family had a diseased or crippled child and could not cope, would leave it to the nuns to raise and nurture. “Why bring him here?”
“Not … that. Not quite that. Mei Feng …”
He seemed stranded, on this difficult shore of words. She tried to help: “Did you find him in Santung?”
“The child, yes. In the temple. Not Jung, he found us later. But we brought the child here because we must, because he already belongs to the emperor.”