Jade Man's Skin

by Daniel Fox

  The camp around the city was left standing when the rebel army at last moved into Santung: left to fall over, that is, unattended, like a body abandoned by its spirit.

  It had been a city in its own right, populous and distinct. At first it was a city of soldiers, encompassing the ghosts of the city they had killed. Now it was a city of flies and rats under an imperium of cats that couched in shadows, rolled and stretched in sunlight, watched with a wary contempt as humans passed.

  For there was still a human occupation: the desolate, the raped and widowed, the ruin of Santung. Those women not wanted elsewhere, not kept. Some of their children, those who could be saved no other way, not saved from this. A few bold or desperate men crept out of hiding, prepared to believe a rumor of amnesty sooner than die in a hole.

  Also a few of the rebels’ camp-followers, preferring to camp separately from their men. The city proper was no place to be now, where everyone watched the sky in anticipation of the dragon. If she came, it would be brick and stone and tile, the broad streets and high roofs of Santung that drew her—they reasoned, if anyone wanted to call it reason—rather than this squalid tangle of fabric and timber. And until she came, or until people decided that she would not come after all, their men were no good company, no easy company, better no company at all.

  Also, necessarily, people passed through: mostly on the roads, east and west. Soldiers in squads, and soldiers on their own; soldiers driving wagons, rarely full and often empty. Other traffic was more limited, more watchful, tending to scurry in or out early in the morning or else in the growing twilight, always at the end of a watch when men were weary and thinking of food and bed, inclined to be slack.

  THAT SHOULD have been all: a city of transit, a city of the dispossessed. City of vermin. No one native, no one here because here was where they belonged or where they chose to be or where they had to come.

  And yet, and yet …

  THERE WAS one more stream of people, who did not follow the roads through the camp and did not settle into whatever shadowed hovels they could find against the rain. Who came with purpose, fugitive and nervous. Who turned off the road, to follow a path that twisted curiously around obstacles that were no longer there, huts and tents fallen down or blown away or salvaged. Sometimes the path met the opposite effect, where an abandoned ramshackle structure had collapsed across the way. There a new path was being impressed by slow feet around the blockage, this way or that, but it always came back to the original.

  Which led, eventually, to a tent that survived intact, untouched, untroubled. Its pale silk was rain-dirty now, mud-splashed and weary but still standing proud. It still even had its board outside, medicines and treatment here, though few of its current patients could read it.

  Possibly its current doctor couldn’t.

  TIEN STEPPED off the road with purpose in her mind, determination in her legs, a companion at her back.

  Or not so much a companion, perhaps. A companion should more properly walk at her side, not dog her heels. A companion would talk to her, be an equal, be companionable. Have a name that was known and could be used, responded to, even …

  A servant, then? Not by any choice of Tien’s. An assistant would be welcome, in the way that Tien herself had been assistant to her uncle all the months and miles that had brought them here—but an assistant who knew nothing and never spoke? What help she could possibly be, Tien couldn’t guess.

  Except that it was a help already to have someone with her, another body, legs and lungs working in concert with her own. Tien had never been alone, never imagined having to make her way alone, build her own life among the ruins of other people’s.

  And now here she was, having climbed through the ruins of Santung to the ruins of the army camp, looking to build a life. If it could be done at all, it would have to be done in the aching shadow of her uncle’s death, the cold pit of his loss, the ruin of his life and hers together.

  It would have to be done without Han also, with barely a view of the distant jag on the sea’s horizon that was the Forge where she had been forced to leave him. Was he still there? She didn’t know, and had no way to learn it. He would be lighting no beacons now.

  But. It didn’t need to be done on her own, and that was a blessing. She was determined, it would prove to be a blessing.

  It was the temple priestess—of course!—who had suggested that the castrated boy’s mother should come with her.

  “She is better, I am sure, without her child. And of course she is welcome here, as you are—but she is not truly one of us, any more than you are. Like you, she needs to find some other way to live. I think you can help her to it, and I hope she may prove a help to you along the way. Will you take her?”

  “Will she come?”

  “Oh, that I am sure of. Yes, I can promise you that she will come.”

  AND SO she had, and so—for a while, for the walk through Santung—had the priestess herself and some of her temple sisters. It was odd how protected Tien could feel, in the company of other women who should be just as vulnerable as she was herself. There were soldiers still on every corner, idle and afraid, one eye on the sky and the other on whoever came and went. All soldiers were the same soldiers now, those who had desired her and chased after her and hurt her uncle and driven them to the temple steps before the pirate Li Ton faced them down with her uncle’s severed head—but apparently they did not want her now. Not under the eye of the priestess. Rather they called greetings and asked for blessings, or walked a little way alongside: not so much an escort, more as though they themselves craved her protection.

  Perhaps they were right. Perhaps she was as immune to the dragon as she was to the soldiery. Perhaps the goddess shielded her devotees against more than mortal harm? Tien didn’t know, but she was grateful all the way up the hill.

  With all of Santung’s burned and bloodied streets behind them, all her broken walls and dreadful tensions, the priestess called a halt.

  “We turn back here.”

  “Oh, won’t you come—? Just to the tent? It isn’t far now …”

  “No, my dear. You need to do this by yourself, not with a barrage of nuns all about you. I will send my sisters up when they need treatment; or you can send to us, even come to us if you are lacking something.”

  She thought she was lacking everything, courage not excepted. But the priestess was implacable, and at last Tien and her—yes, call her a companion—stepped off the road and onto the path that wound so oddly but determinedly through the wreckage of the camp.

  Once already it had been the path of her life; now it was again, or it would be. Perhaps.

  THEY WEREN’T the first to walk this way today. Tien had come with few expectations, but she hadn’t expected that.

  At heart, she had come up here to see what—if anything—was left of her uncle’s tent and stores. His practice, surely, would be long gone. Tunghai Wang had promised to put another doctor in his place, but that man would long since have followed the army down into the city proper. There could be no constituency here anymore, so why stay?

  And why would anyone move in, to fill his absence?

  She had come in hopes, but not in hope of this: the tent unharmed, the stir of shadows on the walls, the buzz of voices. The clink of a bronze pestle in a mortar.

  A figure in the doorway, coming out. A woman with a twist of paper in her hands, cupped as though it were something precious.

  Tien recognized the pose and what she carried, and what it was wrapped in.

  That was how her uncle’s patients had always seemed, coming out with medicine: supplicant and grateful.

  That was how they carried the twist of herbs that he had given them, except that his were always twisted up in muslin tied with string, sealed with his chop.

  That paper, that held the woman’s herbs today: that was a sheet of Uncle Hsui’s writing, his careful notes on treatments and their uses.

  She was … confused, intrigued, infuriated. All at once. A
nd deeply disturbed on top, because those writings were largely what she’d come for. She hadn’t expected honestly to find a practice here, and she wasn’t honestly sure that she wanted one. To sit in the silent company of this other woman and her uncle’s ghost, to read, to study, to learn—that would have been ideal.

  Almost ideal.

  If her eyes had occasionally lifted to the sea, to that dark little jag on the horizon, to see if any smoke might rise in a message that was readable—well, that would be understandable, surely? Given that the purpose of her study, her need to learn was there, all there?

  And now here was something entirely otherwise, a doctor still in her uncle’s place and somehow finding patients.

  She let this patient go her way, and walked into the tent with her nameless companion still behind her.

  AND FOUND it almost all as she had left it, except for the man who held court there.

  The long table, the bench, the waiting people. Not so many as there used to be, but enough. The shelves, the jars, the chest of drawers.

  The brazier was gone, and so was the kettle that had always steamed above it. The lamps that hung from the tent-poles were gone; the texts remained, though it was almost too dark in here now to read them. It was surely too dark to read the silk and paper labels on the drawers and jars. It didn’t seem to matter.

  A man sat bare-chested on the examination table, just reaching for his shirt. Another man stepped toward the chest of drawers in gray robes too long for him, an old set of her uncle’s clothes that she had washed and patched until she wouldn’t let him wear them anymore, although he wouldn’t let her throw them away.

  “Your blood is cold and sluggish,” the man was saying, “and your kidneys want heat. You must take fu-tzu; make a tea of this,” a handful of dry leaves taken from a single jar, “and drink it three times a day. This much,” adding a judicious sprinkle more to the folded paper and then screwing it closed at the top, “should last you for a week. Come back to see me then. Do not discard the paper; there are charms written on it, as you see, which will be as efficacious as the medicine.”

  His patient bowed and was grateful, and handed him a sack-wrapped package in payment, some kind of trade. Food, perhaps; there could be nothing more precious now.

  Except their lives. Tien tapped her companion on the shoulder and led her swiftly out of the tent, murmured urgently in her ear and waited for her nod. The woman might not speak, but she understood. Something to be grateful for.

  Alone, Tien lingered at the back of the tent, listening while the next patient described sore and flaking skin on her knees and elbows. Then, while the man was bent forward to see the rash in that dim light, she moved swiftly to the shelves behind him. By the time he had straightened and turned, she had already lifted down three jars and was tipping out a measure from each.

  “You, girl—what do you think you’re doing …?”

  “My lord the doctor,” she said, as ingratiating as brusque can be, “has undoubtedly seen eczema many times before, and will no doubt offer the same treatment as my uncle did, who was doctor here before. I used often to prepare it for him, so I thought I could save my lord the time.” And even while she spoke her hands were working, mixing the herbs and wrapping them in another sheet torn from her uncle’s writings.

  This supposed doctor was a fat man, which was suspicious itself in a time of war and famine. He was an ignorant and a dishonest man, Tien knew that much already. She was gambling now on his not being a fool as well.

  She gambled, and she won. He grunted, took a step back, let his indignation fade.

  “Good, yes. Yes. You carry on …”

  She handed over the herbs with instructions, how to make a brew from them that the woman should both drink and wash with, wherever her skin itched at all. Also, washing her clothes would help; Tien couldn’t resist adding that.

  The woman reached into those same malodorous clothes and drew out something wrapped in a scrap of linen. Something wet, that had already soaked the fabric through. Tien caught the dark scent of blood: duck’s liver, perhaps?

  She stepped back hastily, not to come between the doctor and his fee. That would be crucial.

  So too was confidence. She waited where she was, between the shelves and the chest of drawers, while the man interviewed his next patient with many a sidelong glance at her. She blessed the weeks and months that she had stood just here, watching and listening, learning from her uncle; she blessed the simple troubles that these people brought, that she could diagnose for herself without needing to count a pulse or look at a tongue; she blessed her own swift eyes and mind and fingers, that could again have the medicine half mixed before the doctor could turn to look for it.

  She recited the herbs and their virtues as she wrapped them, as though for the doctor’s approval. By the time they treated their last patients of the morning, he had fallen almost silent, letting her question and diagnose as well as prescribing for them. Good: he was quick to learn.

  And then the very last man limped from the tent, and they had it to themselves; and now she could let her anger blaze, turning on the fraud and demanding, “Who are you? And how dare you steal my uncle’s place, his things, his honor and reputation? You are no doctor, you know nothing, you—”

  The slap that answered her was delivered roundly, by a fat heavy hand. It sent her sprawling across the matting floor, to crack her head on the leg of the examination table.

  “Who am I?” he repeated calmly, standing over her. “I am master here now, and you will not forget that. Who are you?”

  “My name,” she muttered thickly, pulling herself back up, “my name is Tien. I am niece and assistant to the man whose tent this is, whose—”

  “No,” and he slapped her again, just as hard, on the same stinging cheek. This time she was already holding on to the table, and did just about manage to keep her feet, though the blow rocked her sideways and knocked her dizzy. “You are my servant now. If I choose to keep you. If you want to stay here and work for me,” which of course she did, it was her sole purpose now; which he was astute enough to see and to seize upon. “You will show me respect, in front of the patients and when we are alone. You will cook my meals and wash my clothes. I will permit you to dispense the medicines, but only under—”

  But just then they were disturbed: a shadow at the door, a man staggering in. The same man that she had first seen treated here. He had been calm and grateful when he left; now he was in tears, almost, and bleeding from the nose, in high distress, gabbling incoherently about an assault, a woman, a theft …

  Tien hastened to sit him on the bench, to bring water, to wash his face and quench the bleeding.

  “Master Biao, Master Biao! I was attacked! The woman rose up from the shadows and knocked me down! And then she stole the medicine that you had given me, and ran away with it. And, and, I have nothing more to offer you, but please, I need my medicine …”

  “And you shall have it, of course,” Tien assured him swiftly. “You sit here with Master Biao, and tell him everything you can about this wicked woman who attacked you, so that we’ll know her again. I’ll mix you another paper of the medicine you need.”

  She remembered his complaint, she remembered what Biao had given him; she felt Biao’s glare on her as she assembled what her uncle would have dispensed, just a pinch of fu-tzu in among a quantity of other herbs. The patient was too sore and self-involved to notice, and wouldn’t know when he came to make the tea.

  When finally they had persuaded him to leave, still complaining, with his twist of herbs this time securely inside his dress, Biao was clearly about to remonstrate with her, perhaps even to strike her again; but there was abruptly another shadow in the doorway, another person coming in.

  A woman, who most exactly matched the description her recent victim had just given.

  Who was carrying, indeed, openly in her hand, the stolen twist of paper.

  Tien thanked her carefully, wishing only that she knew
the woman’s name; and took the twist and emptied it with equal care back into the jar of fu-tzu.

  Biao had stood gaping throughout. With the lid back on the jar, at last he found his voice; he said, “Girl, is this your creature?”

  “She is my companion,” Tien agreed solemnly. “Her name is lost; we should think of something to call her. Nurse, perhaps?”

  “But she, she assaulted my patient!”

  “She did. At my request. You should thank her for that, Master Biao. She saved your patient’s life.” And then, as he stared and gawped again, “I don’t know where you stole your little knowledge, but fu-tzu is deadly poison, unless it is mixed in proper proportion with its counter-agents. You would have killed that man with his first dose. What I gave instead will cure him.”

  “I told you, girl, you will treat me with respect …!”

  “You said that, yes. I say this, that if you raise your hand to me again—or to my woman here—you will never be able to trust anything that you take from me. Does your food have fu-tzu in it? You would never know. What is in your tea? I will not tell you. I even know what to wash your clothes in, that will have them poison you through your skin when they are dry and you are sweating. You are a fat man, you sweat a lot; you should learn to be careful of your clothes.

  “Also,” she went on relentlessly, “my friend here is watching you. She would not take it well if she saw you strike me. You have seen what she did to your patient, simply to save his life, simply because I asked her. What do you imagine she will do to you? In the dark, perhaps, when you are sleeping? You should learn to fear the dark.

  “Unless,” she said, “unless you and I sit down now, over a drink of tea that I will make and we will share quite comfortably among the three of us, and discover a way that we can all three live together, to the benefit of all.”

  five

  So if you hate it here in the hills so much, old man, why didn’t you go to Taishu-port with the emperor and Mei Feng?”