Jade Man's Skin

by Daniel Fox

  Ashore they found a road, or at least a track, rising up from the sands of the bay. Before it bent into a stand of bamboo beyond the dunes, Mei Feng turned for one last look at the bay, at the sea, at the bright morning and the fleet that filled the water; and so she might have been first to see the flicker in the sky which was the dragon back again.

  Everyone else saw her soon enough. The dragon swooped, low over the beach; men screamed and ran. If Jin had kept her at bay before, she wasn’t doing it now, even from this little distance. When Mei Feng checked, the girl hadn’t even turned to watch; she was still following the track, alone now but for her sister.

  Perhaps the goddess knew it didn’t matter. The dragon sank no ships, swallowed no men.

  All she did, she seized a boat where it was drawn up high on the shore there.

  She was gliding so low, it was barely possible to make out what she did within her own undulating shadow: but Mei Feng saw the stretch of one long clawed leg, the seize, the rise that followed with a boat like a trophy gripped below.

  There went boat and dragon, and here she stood with so many others, staring, bewildered, too far away to be afraid.

  At last she remembered the emperor, and what she really did have to be afraid of, as he was too stupid to fear it himself. She shook herself and turned to see Jin a fair way farther down the road already with her little sister trotting anxiously along beside, clutching Jin’s hand because she shouldn’t go alone but casting longing glances back because they shouldn’t go alone together and she couldn’t stop the bigger girl at all.

  Mei Feng organized her women and the soldiers too, called them back to their duty, led them in a hurry behind.

  ten

  A city defended once can be defended again. Its reputation will speak through its stones; it has a memory of resistance, walls that say no, gates that refuse to yield.

  A city that has fallen once will fall again. That is … inherent. Shame sinks to its foundations, weakness and loss and surrender lie like characters to be read in the very dust of its streets.

  What the city knows, its people know. Give them time enough, and they might forget the reason; they might not remember why they keep to the walls and shadows, why they slink out of the light, why they walk with their eyes cast down and talk in mumbles, all sidelong and wary. Why it embarrasses them to be who they are, or why they are afraid of strangers.

  They don’t understand how other people can be so strong, so confident, so open; they know there’s something lacking in themselves, and they can’t put a name to it, and they’re afraid of that absence too.

  Or give them no time at all, let them be the ones who took the city; let them remember how easy it was for them, how impossible for those they took it from, how indefensible the streets and slopes and alleys truly are.

  Let them crouch within their hopeless barricades, and wait for war.

  WAR IS always coming, where it has come before. A city that has fallen once will always fall again.

  TUNGHAI Wang walked the streets of Santung and knew, he knew that he could not hold it.

  In his head it was treacherous underfoot, slippery with blood and greasy with fear because he had made it so. In his head, his hands could find nothing to hold on to.

  In fact, it was his men who would not hold. Who were already not holding. They thronged the streets and muttered, turned their heads away when they saw him and muttered more. They watched the ridges east and west, the rising smoke of battle, almost more nervously than they watched the sky, where the dragon had been almost a constant in the hours since dawn, coasting between one low horizon and the other.

  East and west, where the emperor had landed armies. Unlooked-for armies, that should have been impossible and were not.

  The runners who brought reports of it arrived barely ahead of those soldiers who should be building barricades and harrying those armies; who had seen the fleets and the numbers of men and the dragon too, and had tried their utmost to outrun their runners.

  Already they were infecting all his army. He had lost this battle before it was fought, lost Santung before a single imperial troop set foot in it.

  Those troops were at the margins of the city now, and meeting precious little opposition. He and his generals too were learning how it felt to be weak, to order men where they would not go. To be helpless in the face of defiance. He might as well throw name and reputation into the stew of what was lost. Already men were streaming up the river road, northward. Already, he suspected, his generals were joining them. If he went too, if he mounted up and rode off now, he could at least keep his army intact and organized. Retreat was not defeat, not yet.

  eleven

  This, now: this was how a woman ought to live.

  When that woman was Jiao, at least. When her arm didn’t feel rightly balanced without a blade in it, when her long legs needed to stretch and strain, when her skin felt better sweating under leather than silk.

  When roads were for running down and doors for kicking in, when the glazed light of morning found her unslept and already filthy, an ache in her shoulders and a stiffness in her neck, a twitch in her muscles and her eyes sore from jabbing into shadows.

  No blood on her naked tao, not yet, but that couldn’t last. With that certainty came the rising tang of fear that she felt like steel in her bones, chill and stiff and something she could use, a strengthening. Some people were disabled by fear, but Jiao seized it gratefully, like a gift. If she wasn’t afraid, what would throw her into the noise and stink of battle, what would drive her arm to kill strangers as innocent, as uninvolved, as mercenary as herself?

  She felt no passionate commitment to the emperor, that was sure. She hadn’t gone to Taishu in support of his cause, nor followed him here to achieve it. Neither did she feel hatred or contempt for Tunghai Wang and his rebels. They were soldiers, just as she was; just like the baying pack of men at her back, who would have fought as easily for the rebel cause if they’d happened to fall in with Tunghai Wang’s recruiters instead of the emperor’s …

  They might have wished for that, every day during their long retreat. They might have longed to be rebels instead of imperial troops, to be the ones who chased. One thing, though: that year on the road had taught them to be proper soldiers, her kind of soldier, pirates of the road. Let others charge ahead, let them race to be first to the city, first to the fight, first in the emperor’s favor. Let them chase fleeing rebels down the road, across the paddy, through the forests and all the way to the hills. She led her troop in a slower pursuit, checking every hut they came to. Searching empty granaries and busy temples, scouring woodland, looking for the spies and assassins, the ambushes that she would certainly have left behind.

  Looking and not finding yet, finding only priests and peasants who cowered or wept or were sullenly silent, who gathered close their idols or their children, their ducks or their little stores of rice in helpless protective gestures. Not a man at her back who would touch the idols, or the children; pirates could be as superstitious as they were sentimental. Besides, there was no more value in a broken statue than there was in a dead peasant.

  Hungry peasants mattered less. Barely a man at her back who didn’t have a duck in his bag now, or a sack of rice at his belt. Every pirate-soldier is a looter too, and Jiao herself reckoned herself wealthier by two days’ food, though she had one of the men carry it for her.

  Here was a barn that might have been heaped high with rice-straw at this season and was empty, sign of a bad harvest or a harvest not gathered in, lost to war or weather. The barn smelled of nothing but its own shadows and dust, dried dung and rot. Nevertheless she sent men climbing into the roofspace to find who was hiding in the rafters, who had disturbed the cloud of bats they’d seen issuing like smoke before they came.

  A shriek, a plummeting body landing with a brutal thud: he might have broken bones after such a fall, he must have bruises. Just a boy, though, scrawny and bare-legged, empty-handed, no threat to anyone. Jia
o laughed, and nudged him with the toe of her boot.

  “You, boy—do you want to be a soldier of the emperor?”

  Slitted and shrunken with pain, only his eyes moved, indeterminately. She laughed again.

  “Wise boy. You lie there and think about it. If you do, come after us and ask for Jiao; I’ll see you fed and dressed. Armed, too. Otherwise, run and hide, be bare-assed and hungry and free. Your choice.”

  If something had broken in him, of course, he would do neither, but only lie there until he died. The way he squirmed, though, when her foot poked at him, she thought he’d do well enough. The emperor didn’t really need more soldiers, but every troop could use a local boy. Give him a tao to carry, he’d never realize he was just a servant. Give him food and trousers and a tao, he wouldn’t care anyway. Give him a sense of belonging, and the emperor might really have another soldier regardless.

  A cry hailed her out of the barn. One of the men she’d left to watch the road: she found him doing that exactly, looking back the way they’d come with his eyes shaded against the rising sun.

  “What is it, Jing?”

  “Runners, coming after us. Should be ours, must be; messengers, I guess. But …”

  “But?”

  “But they’re women. In skirts. And one of them’s not much of a runner.”

  If there had been other fighting women aboard the jade ship, or anywhere in that fleet, Jiao didn’t know it. And no one would choose to go to war in a skirt. Nor would anyone choose one woman in a skirt to run a message, let alone two of them.

  Jiao grinned and said, “All right. These are for me. Got any more of that chewing-leather on you?”

  Other men carried dried meat to chew on; Jing’s preference was fruit, sliced and left to hang in sun and wind until it was dark and shriveled, almost indistinguishable to the eye.

  He reached into his belt-pouch; she said, “Not for me. There’s a boy in there feeling sorry for himself. Go in and make him glad he didn’t break his skinny neck in falling, would you? Give him something sweet to suck on, leave him with a good memory of us,” and perhaps there’d be someone else to come chasing after them. Boys enough would be ruined today, one way or another; it would warm her soul a little, to save just one.

  She stepped out into the road and lifted a hand, to stop Mei Feng and her woman.

  “What,” she asked, entirely redundantly, “are you doing?”

  “I need to reach the emperor.” As if it was obvious. Which, Jiao supposed, it was: if you were Mei Feng, or if you knew and understood her.

  What was odd—if you knew and understood Mei Feng—was that she’d brought one of her palace women with her. Jiao couldn’t remember her name, had never troubled much to distinguish among them, might not have recognized her anyway in this sweating, disheveled, gasping creature who had no notion how to run.

  “I thought you went to all this trouble,” with a gesture at the plain clothes, the improbable skirt, “to hide yourself from the emperor?”

  “I’m here now,” as though she could not be sent back again—which might be true, even. There were only two children they thought could guarantee safe passage to Taishu. A wise emperor would play the wise general and keep both at hand, in case of need.

  Which would not stop him shutting Mei Feng up under guard, somewhere safe and far from him. Jiao would do exactly that, she thought, if she were emperor.

  In the meantime, though, it would be necessary to keep Mei Feng alive; which apparently required Jiao to be scathing now. “And what is it exactly you can do when you reach him? If he lets you stay within reach?” He is the Man of Jade, she was saying, with his magical jade armor that you gave him and his strength and speed that he gets from the stone itself; what can you do, compared with that?

  “I can watch his back,” she said stubbornly, “against those who ought to be his friends.”

  And no, that was not Jiao she was including in her glower, unless Jiao stood against her. It was Ping Wen, of course, whom Mei Feng believed so devoutly to be a traitor, against whom the emperor would not hear a word.

  That was good enough for here, for now, for an encounter by the road a mile short of the war. Jiao gestured with her head, join us and welcome, then. You and your woman too. If you can keep up.

  SHE LED her troop on at a lope: not following the road now, taking a farmers’ track that ran parallel, to surprise any hidden rebels who might be hoping to surprise imperial soldiers on the road.

  This way was muddy, a little awkward, a little overgrown. A glance back showed both young women trailing behind, impeded by their skirts. They’d just have to catch up at the next halt if they could—except that the next time Jiao looked around, there was Mei Feng at her elbow. With her skirts rudely slashed apart and knotted up around her hips, her bare legs already slathered with mud. Jiao supposed it was decent, by a very crude and basic measure of decency. To judge by their calls and whistles, her men approved thoroughly, by any measure of very crude approval.

  Mei Feng called something even cruder back over her shoulder, and then grinned up at Jiao.

  “They say there was a boy in the barn back there. If I’d thought, I’d have gone in and stolen his trousers.”

  “He didn’t have any. I expect we can find you trousers, farther on. And a tao.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “How are you planning to guard the emperor’s back, without a blade?”

  “I’ve got a knife,” Mei Feng said, slapping the hilt of it where it hung inappropriately from a dainty belt. “That’ll do.”

  Jiao grunted, and jerked her head backward. “Your friend—”

  “Dandan.”

  “Yes. What’s she for? You should have left her to look after the girls. She’ll only slow you down.”

  Indeed, she had clung to the decency of her skirts and was making heavy weather of the path, falling farther back now that Mei Feng wasn’t beside her to nag or drive her on.

  “Jin and Shola will be fine. They have women enough. And the village priest too, now. I left them in the temple, charming him with gifts. Dandan’s for the other end. When I reach the emperor. It’ll be … difficult anyway, but he’d be furious, he’d be ashamed if I just turned up alone, after running all through a city of war on my own. I can’t do that anymore. I can’t do that to him. So I thought I’d best have a companion, a chaperone …”

  It was thin cover, and not likely to help much; but the Mei Feng of even a month ago would not have thought even that far ahead, would never have seen the need for any cover at all. Jiao thought the girl might be growing up, at least a little.

  PAUSING ON a sudden hill, she saw a pillar of smoke rising to the north, solitary and unforthcoming; and on the path behind, farther even than Dandan was a jag, a speck, a tentative shadow following.

  Jiao called a halt, and picked four men to investigate the smoke. “Mei Feng,” she added, “you go with them. See what’s what.”

  She already knew what was what, or could make a fair guess at it. So could the men. This was an aspect of protecting Mei Feng, to introduce her early to the taste of war. It was a kindness in a way, Jiao’s way; if it was short of mercy, that was Jiao’s way also. She didn’t envy Mei Feng the discoveries at the foot of that pillar of smoke; nor pity her for what she would learn there. She had chosen to come to the war. Let her see it, then, for what it was. She would need to know, before they reached the city.

  Meanwhile, Jiao’s squad could sit and grunt and murmur in the shade, soldiers seizing the chance, knowing that the day would shift and change before too long; and she could watch those figures on the path back there and calculate how long it would take the boy to catch up with the woman, how long the two of them to reach the squad here.

  TOO LONG: she saw the one join the other, but Mei Feng and the men came back before the pair together made the foot of the rise. She wouldn’t wait.

  The returning men told her everything she needed to know: empty hands, the jerk of a head, move
on.

  Even so, she looked to Mei Feng. Make her say it all aloud, give her nowhere she could hide, even inside herself.

  Mei Feng’s hands weren’t empty, nor were her legs still bare. Jiao thought she was already doing better than anyone could fairly expect.

  She said, “It was, it was nothing. Nothing. Just a hutment in the paddy, a few folk living there, nothing to fight over. No one did fight. They were just … Someone slaughtered them, that’s all. There weren’t any soldiers, just peasants. Dead peasants. Nothing at all …”

  Jiao nodded. What did she expect? This was a day for slaughter. And bodies didn’t always tell the tale. There might have been soldiers, rebels, who saw an imperial squad on its way and fled before it reached them. That squad might have seen the running men and suspected a trap, an ambush. Suspicious, frightened soldiers were inclined to slaughter on the off-chance, just in case.

  No need to say so. Mei Feng needed the lesson, not the reasons behind it. Besides, Mei Feng had a peasant’s trousers on her legs, and had stopped to wash the mud off before she dressed. And she had an armful of other clothes salvaged from the fire. That was piracy, the pure thing. Jiao was pleased with her, and secretly impressed. “Be kind, then, and take trousers to those two,” where they were still toiling upslope through the mud and their own soreness and exhaustion. There was nothing broken in the boy, bones or spirit; she thought he’d do. Soldiers like to keep a pet. Especially one who can be trained to wash clothes, fetch water, run a hundred little tasks at day’s end in an army camp. Mei Feng would look after her woman her own way, but, “Give the lad a drink, too. And see that he washes, next time we cross a stream.”

  Be kind. Let the boy see that there was kindness in the emperor’s army, a little now and the promise of more to come. Clothes and water, something to chew on the road and a little touch of mothering, mind you wash your feet now. He’d thrive on that, and sell his soul for more.