Jade Man's Skin

by Daniel Fox

  SOME SOLDIERS—or their commanders—didn’t understand the recruiting power of kindness, and so burned harmless hutments and left peasants dead in the mud.

  Some didn’t always have the time to think about it, or else they didn’t take the time. They were surprised, or they flung themselves forward without looking, or they were sent or driven or led too far, and …

  Jiao had been there herself, time and time again: when the air was filled with screaming and some of it might be, might well be, might as well be your own; when your blade was wet and heavy in your hand, and fear pierced your bones like spikes from deep in the bitter dark, and all the world was closing in around you like a tunnel, a mouth that would swallow you whole; when there were bodies hurtling at you and bodies trying to flee you and you hacked at both simultaneously, indiscriminately, and only wondered later which was which and whether it might matter.

  Here on the ridge at the city’s edge, with the streets running down toward the river and the dark alleys twisting away to either side, their walls unforthcoming and every one of their gates a threat—well, it was no surprise if the first squads here had been just like that, slaying whoever came in reach.

  Here were broken barricades, the wreckage of them, dragged aside along with the wreckage of the men who had defended them; those bodies intermingled with others who had surely not been defending the barricades. Sheltering behind them, rather: women, mostly, because the men of Santung had all fled or been killed before and not many would have found their way back yet.

  Slain without orders—she hoped—and only in that fearful hot frenzy, they were still just as dead. At least none here would know them, unless perhaps the boy did. He was trailing behind still, with Mei Feng and her woman; Jiao only hoped that none of them would look too closely. Bodies were worse, always, when you could put a name to them. Names summoned ghosts into the dark, into the dreamtime, the space behind your eyes. Bodies could be ignored, shrugged off, forgotten—once you were used to them, once you’d learned the ways—but ghosts not. Jiao knew, she’d borne a few ghosts of her own for long enough. Perhaps she still did.

  Despite the bodies, though, despite all the signs of warfare, the city was oddly quiet for a battle-site. Jiao nosed warily past half a dozen alley-mouths, listening for screams or the clash of blades—for anything, really, that would speak of soldiers and fighting, trouble, war—and hearing nothing that mattered, nothing to fret her piratical soul.

  At last she stopped a man, a runner with the imperial yellow sash. He should have been inviolate, untouchable at any time, let alone in a city of war where the emperor himself was fighting; but she stepped into his road, and when he tried to duck around her, she seized his arm and held him.

  “Tell me, man—where has the battle gone?”

  He gaped at her, stuttered, “You, you cannot delay me—”

  —and was promptly shaken hard enough to jar the teeth in his skull. “Oh, can I not? Tell that to the emperor—but make sure I’m standing there beside you, because I’ll enjoy the laugh you get from him. I can delay you as long as I choose. That woman who follows me so closely? She is his chosen concubine, and she could flay you alive and take your skin back to make a cushion for the Jade Throne, and he would not speak a word against her. So forget your own importance and listen to mine, just for this little minute. Where is all the fighting?”

  “There is none,” he muttered. “Tunghai Wang will not fight. That is my message, that I am carrying back to the ships. The rebels are running out of Santung as fast as they can go, all along the river roads. Climb up onto a roof for the view, and you could see them do it. Now let me go, Jiao. I know who you are, and Mei Feng too.”

  There is power in names, even the names of the living; names can summon trouble, which Jiao could just as well live without. She wished the man fair running and let him go.

  There was a high building just on the corner of the street there, with a flat roof and an outside stair. She ran swift-booted up, and yes, the runner had been telling simple truth. There were people streaming away from the city, both sides of the river. At this distance it was all movement, but it was a movement she’d seen again and again throughout her life, there was no mistaking it.

  She had seen herds of animals, deer and cattle being driven, but this was different.

  She had seen pilgrims in progress and refugees in flight, and this was still different.

  This was an army, soldiers in retreat. Disorganized and afraid, armed men still move together in ways that set them apart from civilians. Jiao watched them run and knew how they felt, how they sweated, how they smelled. How they watched each other, how they watched the road ahead and the road behind, how some little corner of their minds was always hoping to find more men around them. A civilian might long for open spaces, room to run, but a soldier knows where his best protection lies. Being faster than your brothers can prove as deadly as being slower. Massed bodies packed about you, that’s a shield and defense if anything can be.

  Sometimes, nothing is. Sometimes absence is the only survival skill. But still: a running army is a roadful of individual soldiers, and most of them—the wise ones, the veterans, the ones who carry scars on their skins and scars in their heads—are pressing inward, jostling for cover as they run.

  Which leaves the recruits, the ignorant, the innocents on the outside, most exposed and barely even knowing it, glad perhaps to have space enough to stretch their legs, even to outspeed their elders. Drawing attention to themselves every way, making themselves first target for spears or arrows or a horseman with a blade …

  LET THEM run. She’d always rather see an enemy’s dust as he fled than his face as he charged. Almost always. Some men needed to die, but not so many; and those apart, it was always better not to fight.

  Almost always.

  If there was a tingle of disappointment in her arm, she could ignore it. And thrust the long-bladed tao into her belt, to make the point more clearly to herself how strong-minded she was, how she could step back from that offer of war, let the bite of fear drain out of her bones, never miss it …

  If there was the enemy, clear to be seen, where was the emperor’s army? Still in the streets or on the riverbanks, harrying the rearguard and giving chase already …?

  Hundreds had gone ahead of her, hundreds more would be coming in from the opposite direction; Santung must be swarming.

  It was hard to see down between the city’s buildings and into its streets. Easier to look across the river, see this side reflected on the opposite slope, see how soldiers like ants poured down the wide streets and into the darkness of the alleys, imagine how they howled …

  Not imagine, so much. If she listened, up here, she could hear it after all: that distant noise of battle, the yells and screams, the clash of steel on steel.

  There was fighting, then, just no resistance. She felt for the rebels, almost; it was so hard to fight and flee, to doom your rearguard, your friends …

  In search of friends, she scoured the ridge across the river, hoping for a mass of yellow which would be the emperor’s personal guard, perhaps a flash of sun-on-green which would be the emperor himself in that ridiculous jade shirt. That’s where she ought to find him, high on the hill there, angling for the best view just as she was herself. Him and all his party, perhaps, on a building just like this, somewhere in that patterned maze that made one half of this city above its river, like a butterfly with its wings spread wide: she stood on one and the people she wanted stood somewhere on the other, and she couldn’t quite see them yet. Now that she was explicitly looking it was something she needed, a sudden seize of worry, and she wanted to leap onto the roof’s parapet for that extra step of height, but it would be quite a stretch up onto glazed and sloping tiles and she wasn’t a fool, she wasn’t going to risk the momentum of her jump carrying her over the edge.

  Just in the corner here was a stack of spare tiles and a mound of what she guessed was the clay used to make mortar, under a length o
f old sacking. A step onto that and a foot on the parapet, she’d be rock-solid and sensibly safe …

  … except that as she stepped onto the sacking, she felt the mound give and shift beneath her weight. For a moment, the briefest of blinks, she thought that was fresh mud underneath and her foot was going to sink right into it.

  EXCEPT THAT the mound gave only a little, only enough to startle when she thought she was stepping onto something solid and hard-baked.

  Then it resisted.

  Then it rose, it erupted beneath her feet and flung her off-balance, flung her all the way over onto her back so that she sprawled helplessly before him as the man beneath the sacking hurled himself up to loom above her, his hand already reaching to his blade.

  THIS WAS IT, of course, what she’d been looking for, why she’d been so wary all the day: this was the stray rebel soldier, abandoned or trapped on his own, trying to wait out the daylight till he could slip out of the city and away.

  Too late now.

  No time, no point even trying to scrabble her tao into her hand; by the time she had it halfway drawn, his steel would be in her heart.

  She’d always sworn that she would go down fighting. She had also always sworn that when the end came, if it was clear and inevitable, she wouldn’t struggle against it. She’d have dignity enough to look death in the face and laugh.

  It hadn’t occurred to her till now that those two vows might work against each other. She could reach for her tao anyway, although there was no point; or she could gaze up at his and laugh, although there was no dignity in this sprawl on a stranger’s roof, and precious little that was funny either.

  She would be dead either way, dead in moments, it didn’t really matter; except that it did to her, it suddenly mattered exceedingly, and she didn’t quite know what to do.

  Which might be why she turned her head aside—not to avoid the sight of that blade stabbing down, only to give her a moment undistracted, time to think—and so saw a shadow reach across the roof toward her, which was a figure on the stair, which was—

  —MEI FENG, almost the last person she’d want to see there. Any of the men would have been better, genuinely a threat, maybe a distraction to this man who hadn’t quite killed her yet. The boy would likely have yelled for help and gone hurtling back down to ground again.

  Mei Feng, though: Mei Feng might yell but would certainly hurl herself at the rebel, try to help, and so die too. Perhaps do it first, deliberately, try to buy Jiao the time she needed. It wouldn’t work, because the man would have time in plenty to slay Mei Feng and then Jiao while she was still struggling to her feet, struggling with her tao; but Mei Feng might do it anyway.

  Which would be noble and heroic and pointless, and both women would end up dead at his feet. Which they were going to do in any case, and that was just sad, when there were so many other ways for their two stories, their two lives to go on; and other people who cared and would be sorry, and …

  AND YES, Mei Feng launched herself at the rebel, and it was perhaps Jiao’s fault that he had already seen her, she had looked that way and he might have followed her eye. Or he might have caught a glimpse in the corner of his own, a flash of movement, the stretch of her shadow. It didn’t matter either way because there still wasn’t time enough to do anything, though Jiao of course was doing what she could, drawing up her knees—too slow, too slow … !—to kick out at his ankles, in vague hopes of toppling him over the parapet, inevitably too late for Mei Feng and probably for herself too even if she believed that he would so conveniently go over, which she didn’t, but at least she’d answered her own question, what to do. Of course she would fight, helpless and hopeless and empty-handed, empty of head and empty of heart and …

  AND SOMEHOW is a weasel word, but somehow Mei Feng was impossibly fast to cross that roof, so fast it wasn’t possible but there she was, before Jiao could bring her boots in line, before the rebel could raise his sword.

  And Mei Feng didn’t have a sword, of course, she wouldn’t carry one; and she wasn’t a fighter anyway, she wouldn’t know how to use it if Jiao had forced one on her. All she did was barrel into the man, batter his blade aside and hurtle him over.

  Not over the edge, even, only to knock him sprawling; but that was good, that was plenty. Jiao could deal with him now, she’d be up before he was and blade in hand, ready to skewer him as he had meant to skewer her, only she wouldn’t linger so long …

  LONG ENOUGH, apparently, long enough; swift as she was, she was still too slow.

  By the time she was on her feet, she didn’t need the blade.

  She was sorry, almost, to slam it back into her belt-sheath; sorry to crouch beside her friend and peel Mei Feng’s fingers one by one away from the handle of her knife; sorry to need to do this, to wipe the blade and draw the girl back from the seeping pool of blood where she was kneeling, where she had dropped to her knees and slit the rebel’s throat as he lay helpless.

  It might be—must be!—the first man Mei Feng had killed, the first whose blood she had splashed on her own clothes, her skin, her hair. Whose reek she would carry with her for the rest of her days.

  Jiao had seen this often and often: the stillness afterward, the self-absorption, the trembling doubtful wonder. She knew how to deal with it, but only in boys. In raw recruits, who could be bullied and teased, intimidated by a woman so much more at ease with this than they were. Comforted by roughness because their lives were rough, they would turn—when she would let them—to their comrades, their cohorts. Lads their age would be awkward and awed, asking how it was; older men would be mock-casual and celebratory, telling them how it had been for them, their first time; both would do them good.

  Neither would be any use here, now, for her. Mei Feng was entirely the wrong person to be first this morning with blood on her blade. Jiao could wipe the steel—on the dead man’s clothes, according to all tradition—but she couldn’t wipe her friend’s mind, which needed it more.

  She slid the cleaned knife back into its sheath on Mei Feng’s belt, with a brief, “Well done. Thank you. You’ll want this.” Give it a hone tonight, or it’ll lose its edge—but that was instruction for a boy, not fit for her. Not from Jiao. She’d have one of the men say it later. Right now, because she simply had to know, she said, “How did you ever move so fast?”

  Mei Feng shrugged, tried out her voice, found that she had one still: “He was going to kill you. I… hurried. That’s all.”

  Suddenly voiceless herself, lacking any words to say how far that fell short of all, Jiao kissed her, and then drew her to her feet—

  —AND THEN let her drop down again because she had to, and held her shoulders while Mei Feng vomited helplessly, sailor-like over the side.

  twelve

  Right now, Yu Shan thought, what the emperor needed most was Mei Feng.

  Or his mother.

  Someone he might at least listen to; someone he used to listen to, at least, even if he was out of the habit now.

  Failing that—as it must fail, as it had, because he would listen to none of the generals who had battered words at him, again and again, like seawater splashing uselessly against a rock—then probably what he really needed was someone faster, stronger, more determined than himself, to physically restrain him.

  Which of course meant Yu Shan, if it meant anyone at all. There was no one other, and even that would be a hard wrestle, a close match. Yu Shan had a sliver of jade in his mouth, and he thought that might give him the edge; but the emperor had an entire shirt made of scales of jade, and hadn’t taken it off all night, all day.

  Yu Shan wasn’t sure. And, in any case, was not going to make the attempt. For fun, yes, and at imperial command, he would wrestle with the emperor. On a battlefield, though, in sight of half the imperial army, in the height of war? And for no fun at all, but purely to prevent the emperor from doing the thing he wanted most?

  No. Mei Feng would do it, any way she could: by argument or by command; by holding on with b
oth hands to his ankle if she had to, if there was no other way. More likely by leaping onto his back like a monkey, wrapping arms and legs around him, covering his green eyes with her palms, making him look ridiculous in the mocking eyes of all the troops he was so eager to lead. That would work, perhaps. But Mei Feng was not here, and not in favor anyway. Yu Shan couldn’t even invoke her name as an argument, Mei Feng would not be pleased. That might have worked before, but now it would act only as a goad.

  His mother would do it, simply with her own frail body set determinedly between him and what he wanted. There was only one person who could induce the emperor to stand up to his mother, and that was Mei Feng, who was not here. Which was an irony of sorts, Yu Shan supposed, except that the dowager empress was not here either.

  Of course, the emperor had brushed them both aside, in his determination to have his war. That was a special case, though, the influence of Ping Wen and the urge to strike back after so long running, the call of history and the need to live up to his father, to make his own legend.

  Besides, he was a boy, and boys will fight. In despite of all their womenfolk. Yu Shan understood that, in a way that Mei Feng never would.

  If his womenfolk were here now, though, and seeing this—well. The emperor would not be brushing them aside, they wouldn’t have it.

  In their absence, what he needed was someone as bold as his womenfolk to stand up to him, to stand in his way, to tell him no.

  Not Yu Shan.

  He had the strength—perhaps—and he had the privileged position, here at the emperor’s elbow. He had the insight, he saw the need. He still would not do it.

  Instead he watched older and wiser men, senior generals, baffle themselves with pleas and arguments that did no good at all. He saw them wish that they could just call up a sergeant to wither this idiot young man into obedience, if emperors were only susceptible to sergeants, or to withering, if there were only one man in all the imperial army bold enough to make the attempt.