by Daniel Fox
Her dress she set aside for washing; Mu Gao would find it, before Tien had time to see to it herself. She was accustomed to that too. Her stolen papers went into the bottom of her chest, in among a sheaf of other pages. No one would find those, until she had time to come back to them.
Then, with her hands empty and her mind too, with the light shivering kiss of clean silk against her skin—just where Master Biao would like to set his hands, and dared not—she stepped back into the open tent and bowed to him, and then to the first of their patients sitting waiting on the bench.
AND THEN had no time for anything except medicine: the mental practice of it, listening to Master Biao’s drilled questions—she had him following her uncle’s formula now, when he could remember—and the patients’ replies, halting or shifting, wary or confessional or urgent like a flood; hearing the words and the manner of them both, and seeing how their bodies also spoke, how they sat and stood and gestured, how they breathed, how they sweated; hearing Master Biao’s counts as he took the pulse of heart and liver and spoke each of them aloud; drawing on everything she knew from her uncle to make a diagnosis, irrespective of anything more that Master Biao might say.
And then the physical practice of it, the weighing out and wrapping of ingredients—not in the pages of her father’s books now, but in scraps of silk or linen that she garnered and Mu Gao washed—and giving them to the patients with careful repetitive instructions, making allowance always for what they would forget or ignore or be unable quite to follow. Clean water was hard enough to find; sleep could be harder. Even Tunghai Wang couldn’t find sleep.
She was busy, then, entirely: so much so that the first sounds of soldiers passed her by entirely, and it needed a woman’s scream to alert her.
A woman who might have been a patient coming or going but was hardly likely to be anything other, here in this abandoned camp above the city. The screaming was supposed to be behind them, over, done; but here it was again, all fresh, and now, yes, she could hear men’s voices baying like hunting dogs, the rush of feet, the clash of steel on steel.
And that before the first man appeared in the doorway of the tent, filthy and blooded, his tao bare in his hand and his grin just as bare, just as lethal.
There was terror in the tent then, a quantity of screaming. He looked around, a little dazedly, as a man might who found himself unexpectedly in a palace treasury. With, perhaps, time to loot. Pockets to fill.
No treasures here, in terms of gold or jewels; but there were food and spirits, taken in payment from Master Biao’s patients, which are always treasure to a soldier. And there were women too, just the same. He hardly knew where to start, except that the food and flasks would wait and the women not. Also the food and flasks were as silent as they were patient, which the women were not; and there were men too, with whom something must be done, and—
AND HE had not finished raising his sword to begin to threaten that something, before someone was moving forward through the terror, and that was rather bizarrely herself, Tien, which was alarming; and she was talking already, quite calmly really although she at least could hear the thread of tension in her voice vibrating like a gut-string as she said, “Are you hurt, sir? Please, come in. Master Biao will tend to you directly. In the meantime I have hot water and clean cloths, we can wash the blood away at least; and there is food if you’re hungry, water or something stronger to wash it down. We draw no distinctions here, soldier or civilian, rebel or imperial guard,” said that way because he was surely the emperor’s man, though she wasn’t quite sure immediately how she knew that, “anyone in need of healing is welcome in this tent, and I hope you will say so to all your brother soldiers …”
eight
From first light, every morning now, Ma Lin stood on the cliff’s height and looked across the sea for her daughters, where they were, on that low slip of darkness they called Taishu.
She was not made to be solitary. And never was, for one full day together; people came with offerings and prayers, food for the goddess and food for her. She was scrupulous these days, now she could afford to be, now she had no daughters to feed. She never touched what was meant for the goddess.
Sometimes it was as much as she could do, more than she could remember, simply to eat what was meant for her. There was an ache in her that no food could satisfy, she could eat and eat and still be hungry for her daughters and her man and her city and her lost life and oh! her daughters, so why should she trouble to eat?
This lonely vigil did her no more good than the food; she stared and stared and still got never a glimpse of her girls coming back to her. It seemed important all the same that every morning’s sun should find her here, as still and erect as the temple at her back, a priestess greeting the day. Except that actually and honestly she was no priestess and she was only looking for her distant daughters.
She could bear the dead one, she thought, more easily than this. Death made sense to her, at least. Sometimes she thought a little ghost-girl caught at the leg of her trousers, tug-tug, and she wished that Meuti had found a better rest; but little girls did die in times of war.
Girls were stolen too, of course, by soldiers and such, but not like this. Not to be the voice of a goddess, to speak perhaps to the emperor himself …
It was good to stand with her back to the temple and all that that implied, like a character of denial. Ma Lin could not read, but she knew how to write an emphatic no! with her body flung in silhouette against the sea and sky.
She was doing just that today when the light-stain leaked from sky to sea, to show her angular shadows against the dark glitter of the water, black ink written over spilled ink, boats crossing the strait.
At first, she thought they are bringing my daughters back to me.
But there were too many boats, and some of them great ships too large for girls; and they landed and landed, they landed men and men, an army of men, and all on the other side of the creek.
She thought, they have used my daughter to do this, to keep the dragon at bay; and now they have done it, they will bring her back to me, and her sister too.
But when one boat did at last come to her side of the creek, and land people at the foot of the cliff, it was only men they landed. One of them was the old fisherman who had taken her girls away, so she might at least have hoped for news of them; but another was a young man dressed in an extraordinary shimmer of light. He glittered as green as the water below, as green as the eyes of the dragon overhead. And that was the emperor, and even Ma Lin had no courage to do anything but kowtow as she was told to and then play priestess as he brought his offerings of gratitude for safe passage to the temple, and none of those was either one of her daughters.
nine
The emperor and his fleet had turned westerly, to land at first light and follow the coast road to Santung. The jade ship had turned easterly with its fleet, to strike as hard from the opposite direction. The idea was to trap the rebel soldiers between two unkind hammers, to pound and pound, to drive them one way and the other, disoriented and defenseless …
It was more or less the same idea that Tunghai Wang had used, when he took the city in the first place: except that Tunghai Wang had been expected, waited for, even a little bit prepared against. The remnants of the emperor’s army had built barricades and fought as best they could, for as long as they could. Fought and died, as they had expected to.
The plan said that Tunghai Wang would be unprepared, even now: that any defenses he’d thrown up since the raid would face the beaches and the sea, but that there would be no serious defenses anywhere. His enemy was across the water; his enemy had been running and running, the emperor was a coward boy under the influence of his coward mother, he would lurk and lurk until the rebels forced the fight. Even when his men had so unexpectedly struck the beaches, it had only been to burn and steal boats, to delay the inevitable, to win himself one more season of life …
So the plan said they would be thinking, this side of t
he strait.
Did Mei Feng believe it, this wonderful plan? Not for a moment. It was hatched by Ping Wen; she had no doubt there was treachery in it.
Which of course was why she had to come. But the emperor would of course not bring her and not license her, and the only other way she could contrive was this, hiding herself among her women as they tended to Jin, the voice of the goddess, who would see them safe across the water.
Which meant necessarily the jade ship, which meant that she was safe from being seen by either the emperor or her grandfather; but the jade ship was the wrong ship by definition, leading the wrong fleet, taking her as far as she could be from the people she cared about. The emperor went west and she came east, and she couldn’t watch over him at all until the two forces met up again. Hopefully victorious, at Santung-river, with the rebels in full flight—or dead in a river of blood, she supposed, but she’d rather see them running away.
Even that might be too late. Whatever Ping Wen intended, it might be timed for early in the day. It might have happened already. Mutiny on Grandfather’s boat, perhaps? A swift knife in a sailor’s hand: not turned against the emperor, not in that magnificent jademail coat, but to slay the child who spoke for the goddess and kept the dragon away. That way he could slay the entire boatload all at once, the entire fleet indeed. Himself included, but there were men who would do that, swallow their own deaths to achieve something that mattered more than life. And then that same magnificent jademail coat would drag the emperor down swifter than any, and they would all be lost.
Or Ping Wen might have a way to signal the mainland with all their plans and artifice; and the emperor would find his force met with a stronger, right there ready at the beachhead. He and his men would all be slaughtered in the surf, and no mail would help him then.
Or if not there, then on the road.
Or if not on the road, then in Santung before she could fight her own way through to find him.
Or just at that moment, just as she did finally reach him and recognition would be in his eyes as it used to be, just for that one brief moment he would be bewilderedly delighted to see her, and right then would be when treachery struck and death took him and she would see him die and it might even be her fault. Or, or, or …
HE WAS out of her sight, out of her reach; there was nothing she could do to help him, only count the ways that he might die, and that helped neither of them.
She did it anyway, meticulously, because there was nothing else she could do. The jade ship might be so much larger than her grandfather’s boat, but she still floated by the virtues of wood and moved by wind and tide. Mei Feng knew her by touch and feel and sound, by long experience, by dead reckoning; she could count a dozen ways in which to make herself useful aboard. An easy dozen, just by looking around the deck. And she could offer herself for none of them. She was caught in the logic of her own scheming. She was a servant attendant on the strange silent girl who was the goddess’s oblate, not quite a nun but might as well be; or else she was the emperor’s consort, vainly trying to follow her master to war.
If she was the servant, then she might as well be a nun herself for all the work she would be let do with the sailors: tend your mistress, girl, don’t fuss about hauling sheets and tripping over stays and getting yourself underfoot.
And if she was Mei Feng—well, she might be out of favor with her lord and the generals aboard might even know that, but they would still preserve her intact for the emperor’s later judgment. She would be all but locked away, certainly kept far from any fighting. Which would mean far from the emperor too, likely sent back to Taishu with Jin and the women as soon as any craft returned.
So. After her first wild, reckless scramble up the mast, her whooping at the dragon’s belly—a stupid indulgence, but all the crew was cowering in the scuppers and someone had to shriek resistance into the wind, they couldn’t all dance attendance on the silent Jin—she had had nothing to do all the long dark of the crossing but sit on the deck and watch others sail the ship, when she wasn’t listening like everyone else for the waft of dragon overhead or the surge from undersea, looking for a great body to occlude the stars. Waiting for the goddess’s protection to fail them here, or else for it to fail them there, westerly, where her lord had gone, where she could see first the clear lights of her grandfather’s boat and then the smudgy lights of his boat in among so many others and then a single blur of distant light and then nothing at all, no sign of them, no news.
And the dragon came and went overhead all night, which might have meant anything at all or nothing at all, depending; and with first light the jade ship’s captain finally turned her bows toward the land, with all the fleet around him.
AND HERE they were, safely landed. There was no opposition, no one to see except a handful of gawping peasants. If there had been a watch kept on this bay, it was a watch that was running or riding now, swift as it might, back to Santung to make report.
And if that report was redundant, if Ping Wen and Tunghai Wang were in conspiracy, then of course there would be no one to challenge them here. All Tunghai’s men would have gone to face the emperor, the only one they had to kill. The generals might think the plan was working, but generals never budgeted for treachery. Mei Feng expected nothing else.
Mei Feng had her own problem now, as secret as treachery: she had to get away. Away from the other women, except for the one she meant to take with her; away from the jade ship, away from the beach and the bay. All unnoticed by anyone who might want to stop her.
THEY HAD brought the girl Jin out onto the foredeck when the dragon first came swooping over, in case the girl had to see the dragon or the dragon the girl, in case the voice of the goddess had to speak. Apparently not: but when the light came and the jade ship dropped anchor in the bay, when she started to unload her troops, when the sky was empty Jin still wanted to sit out on the deck. Her sister sat with her, of course, and so did the other women, Mei Feng among them. They watched the soldiers disembark, and if there was no reason for anyone to chivvy them back below, nor was there any reason Mei Feng could think of, why they would or how they could argue for a trip ashore.
Until—bless her lost heart!—Jin gave them one.
Unless it was the goddess, of course. If Jin ever spoke on her own behalf, Mei Feng had never heard it. Nor had she ever seen the girl so direct and purposeful, unless perhaps it had been the first time the dragon flew above them, when she turned her head upward to stare and stare while all the women around her flinched and cowered, while Mei Feng shimmied up the mast. One glance she gave now, that seemed to be aimed directly at Mei Feng, with a biting integrity; and then she turned to her sister and said, “I want to go ashore.”
Perhaps the voice was only dusty with disuse, caught with splinters. To Mei Feng it sounded more broken than that, as though something altogether too big and too strong were trying to use it, as awkwardly and damagingly as a soldier’s hard callused hand might rip a fragile and slender glove in trying to draw it on.
The words, though, they were clear enough; and the will that drove them.
The little girl blinked up at the bigger, startled almost beyond measure. Then she asked a little-girl question, as though just for a minute she could shrug off the cloak of competence.
“Why?”
“To give thanks,” Jin said—if it was Jin, which Mei Feng doubted more and more—“for a voyage safe completed. There is a daughter-temple in the village, where we may burn joss to the Li-goddess.”
Was there a village? It wasn’t to be seen anywhere in the bay. Mei Feng might climb the mast again and still not see it; wary of pirates and sea raids, people here tended to live a mile or more from the coast.
A glance at the little girl, a wide-eyed shake of her head: neither she nor her sister knew anything about villages hereabouts, or the temples they might hold.
How did that feel, Mei Feng wondered, to find that someone you loved had been taken for use by a god?
Much as
it might feel, she thought, to find that the boy you loved was emperor and hence a god himself; or the other way around, perhaps, that the emperor-who-was-god was also a boy and could be loved, however difficult he might make that sometimes, however high he tried to sit aloof on his uncomfortable throne of stone.
However many stupid risky wars he dragged her into …
A gesture brought Dandan swiftly to her side. Officially one of her women, a servant, just a few years older than she was; these lonely days, something closer to a friend. A friend who could read, which mattered more today.
“Go to the captain, at the stern there; say that the voice of the goddess wants to go ashore to pray. Two boats, tell him: one for us and one for an escort.” He would certainly send an escort anyway, so she might as well demand one now. “Be … expectant. You know.” As though there were no possibility of a refusal.
Dandan knew. But, “It might be easier if I could say the consort of the emperor expects it.”
“It would. No, though.”
“You are here now …”
“… And they could just as easily send me back. Or hold me here with the ships, far from everything,” far from her lord, her straying love, the idiot endangered emperor who wouldn’t listen to her. “The voice of the goddess should be enough.” More potent even than her own, if the captain had any gratitude in him. Or any sense.
ONE OR the other. Dandan returned with promises, and five minutes later there were boats, and men to man them. Men sufficiently refined—or browbeaten, more likely, just in those few minutes, the goddess herself will be watching how you handle her women, so mind your manners, if you can find them at all—to help awkward feet and nervous hands on the ladders, to see everyone settled more or less comfortably before they pushed off and rowed away.