by Daniel Fox
And then Tien’s hands were gone from his hair because they were at her belt, drawing out her slender bamboo tube of needles.
And now they were on his shoulders, urging him to lie down: on his belly, which was odd if she was going to put needles in his hand and his neck as she had before, she had done that face to face; and frustrating, because it meant he couldn’t quite see her anymore. But he could feel her, he knew just where her fingers were, feeling out his ribs and spine, tapping through skin to find blood and muscle and tendon, tapping her first needle home. And there was a lovely liquid warmth stealing through him already, as silver as the needles and as sharp, nothing like sleep at all but it left him helpless in her hands, helpless and trusting …
More needles, pinning him to the bench there as thoroughly as they might have pinned a butterfly.
Now she was mixing something again. He heard the rustle of papers, the chime of glass, the grind of a pestle in a mortar. If it was another draft he didn’t think he could drink it, he had no strength to sit up or swallow, though he had the dragon’s strength to fly, he could feel the wind beneath his scales. Her scales. Whichever: they were the same, as they always had been.
A stutter of pin-pricks on his back, and then another. No matter. Perhaps she was sewing wings to his skin, so that he could fly beside the dragon.
LITTLE THING, what are you at?
HE WAS at nothing at all. He was at lying still, perhaps; at trusting Tien. That was a place to be. Here was another: he was at the dragon’s side. She seemed to know it; it seemed to worry her.
SHE SOARED, and he went with her. He was on her neck and rode her like a horse. She tried to shake him off; he had penetrated her scales, he was under her skin like a worm. She would have scratched at him, but he was in her head: an invader disguised as an embassage, telling lies …
LITTLE THING, you promised … !
Hush, he would have said if he could speak. If he could find words, anywhere in his head, to give a shape to anything he meant.
I keep my word; I want my freedom too. Freedom from you. The chains come off, as soon as Tien is done …
WHAT WOULD they call her, what had they ever called her when she was not the Dragon-in-Chains? When she was free, long centuries ago, hereafter …?
WHAT WOULD she do?
WHAT WAS Tien doing, busy there with her needles on his skin?
JABBING, JABBING. He could feel a trickle down his spine, not the rain that washed the dragon’s scales, though it was hard to be sure when he flew the storm with her. Was he bleeding? Why would he bleed? What could make a dragon bleed? The songs said they bled in gold, but he wasn’t sure. This didn’t smell like gold. Nor blood. Nor tea, though she had been brewing something.
TRUST IS a needle, jabbing, jabbing.
DOUBT IS a dragon, hurling herself about the sky; hurling herself about inside his head and somehow not finding him, finding him elusive, too slippery to seize or crush. As though he were a boat on the water under the goddess’s protection, when all he is, he’s a boy, with a girl jabbing needles in his back.
TRUST IS a needle, jabbing deep.
HE DIDN’T wake, he hadn’t slept; but his body came back to him slowly, and his back was terribly sore. And his mind, now—the dragon was battering at his mind as though she battered at a closed door, although he had not closed it.
She was an open book; he almost thought he could read her deeply.
He stirred, tried to lift himself, both hands on the bench. Tien was there to help him, smelling of herbs and herself, her own weariness and something sharper, something that was not quite fear—not fear of him!—but something close to it. Perhaps she smelled of confession, anticipation, guilt.
He looked at her and loved her, and wondered what she had done to pierce his trust so completely, leave it flaccid and empty, like a purse that has spent all its riches.
He said, “Tien, what did you do?”
She said, “The dragon’s words, that you wear on your chains; I tattooed you, so you wear them on your skin now. Not with ink, quite: with a brew I learned from an ancient recipe. That and the tea you drank, that bound your mind to hers more tightly. We can strike off the chains, they don’t matter anymore. You can’t free her; she can’t escape you. She would have eaten everyone, if you had let her go.”
five
There are degrees of silence, degrees of pain.
The wind had stolen words; the rain had not washed but scoured away all talking, the skin of conversation.
They were in shelter now and had nothing to say, or else no way to say it.
All through the jadehouse it was true. The place was packed with soldiers staring at one another in the wonder of their survival, beaten down and beaten back but here. Here especially, in this particular room, lamplit and busy with expectation, pendulous as a drop of water hanging from a hair—here there were silences and silences, layers and currents of silence, silence in drifts and shoals and catastrophes.
Here at least, here in this corner, where Yu Shan crouched with Siew Ren, there was catastrophe. Speechless, unspeakable, beyond any reach of language.
THE JADEHOUSE was no palace, no fit place for the emperor to rest. It was a fortress, rather, a strongroom built too big: a great square block at the waterside where the jade ships landed, where for centuries they had unloaded their treasures for transport up-river and overland to the Hidden City. Doors of steel, walls of stone, no windows.
No palace, but a fine fit place for an emperor and his guard to wait out a typhoon. If he would only not keep going out into the weather for news of his army, one more sight of stragglers coming down the road, one more assurance that the rebels were not following. This was not a retreat, it was a drowning, and Tunghai Wang’s men were as drowned as his, as storm-tossed, as scattered. Worse so, as they had no city to fall back on. His generals had told him so, his own common sense had reinforced the news, and still he had to see for himself, see it and see it.
Yu Shan should have been with him, but Siew Ren …
SIEW REN had been behind the emperor when the fireballs struck the bank. Behind but not far, not far enough. Separated by that wall of flame, Yu Shan hadn’t known; and then there had been the swimming and the fighting and the swimming again, trying to organize half an army in a bottle-trap, trying to fight an enemy that came down from a height; and then there had been the rain, the wind, the dragon.
On the road back to Santung—with the battle left behind them, half fought, abandoned by both sides—he had stopped to help some guards struggling with their wounded. And asked at last after Siew Ren, where was she, ahead or behind: and so was told. And so left the guards, left the emperor, surged through typhoon and terror until he found her and brought her here.
She would not die, she was too hard for that: jade-hard in her spirit, jade in her blood. Some, not enough. Not to make her fireproof.
She had been badly splashed, appallingly burned. One arm was a shriveled, blackened thing, useless to her; and her face …
Well.
She had both eyes still, that would be a blessing, except when she chose to look in a mirror. It was really only her beauty that was gone; her mouth, her jaw still worked.
Only that she had nothing to say, nor he to her.
She had screamed, a little, when he carried her in. Since then the pain had ebbed, a little, or else she had mastered it. Now there was only the silence, that had them both in a grim and unrelenting grip.
WHEN THE emperor came in at last, he was just as grim and just as silent.
He had been supremely happy, Yu Shan knew, earlier this day. Running, swimming, fighting: winning his personal victories, leading his army, seeing his enemy retreat.
He had lost that mood entirely, as soon as he understood that he had led them all into a trap. That Tunghai Wang could so neatly turn evident defeat into probable victory—above all, that Tunghai Wang should have been prepared for this, for his extraordinarily unlikely invasion—was a bitter bl
ow, and not one that the emperor could swiftly recover from. He didn’t know how. Nothing in his life, nothing in his training had taught him resilience.
He would have fought, no doubt, until all his army was dead around him. Even he couldn’t defeat Tunghai Wang on his own, when the generalissimo held all the advantages; he would have fought and lost and died at last, and been rapidly forgotten in the new dispensation.
But there came the dragon, there came the rain: a hammer of rain, a shatter of rain, a crush that bent down even his powerful shoulders, a pounding that went on and on. And with the rain the wind, such that even he staggered a little, even he found it hard to keep his feet in the little furies of the paddy.
By the time he turned, he had no enemy to turn from; the rebels were dead or fled, pulled back to a higher terrace, following their brothers over the ridge in a desperate search for shelter. They knew that no one would be coming after them.
So too did the imperial army know it; they too had already turned and left the field, clinging to one another for support, driving one leg forward and then the other, again and again and once more.
The emperor was the only one who didn’t know that the battle was over. His guards stayed with him, those who had survived this far; so did Yu Shan, of course. They didn’t need to call him back, only to wait: until he had no one to fight and nowhere to stand in the lashing, churning lake of the paddy, as the terraces above overflowed into this one with a force like a river, building like a waterfall …
AND THEN the long way back, and the search for Siew Ren. Yu Shan had snatched up his clan-cousin and run with her, as best he could; and hadn’t thought about anyone else from then till now, but here was the emperor and it was hard not to be aware of him or of his mood, his silence.
He had thought himself mid-victory, and had that snatched away; he had faced defeat in the heat of a furious defense and seen that too snatched away, saved by the weather, there was no comfort in that. And no safety here, in Santung: any city that has fallen once will fall again, and as soon as the typhoon died—as soon as the dragon moved away, Yu Shan thought, for this was dragon-weather—no doubt Tunghai Wang would lead his army back again, and no one here could resist him. Back to the boats, then, away to Taishu with nothing to show but loss and humiliation.
Right now, the emperor was humiliated in another way, foolishly and boyishly embarrassed among this influx of his seniors, his generals, his guards. He’d been trying petulantly to strip his sodden clothes away, and he couldn’t shift his mail.
Yu Shan felt a moment’s mocking pity for the boy so pampered he’d never learned to undress himself. Just pull it over your head, boy—but then one of the generals said that or something like it, a more respectful version, “Majesty, so many supple links, that shirt is marvelously flexible; surely if you raise the hem, it will invert itself as soft as silk, and—”
“Sure it would, General Tso, if I could only lift the hem at all; but see, I can’t get my fingers underneath it, it won’t come apart from my skin …”
Did stone stick to sweaty, filthy men? Yu Shan’s own clothes had been practically washed off him; so much water had run down inside, he thought he’d never been so clean at the end of a hard day. Perhaps the shirt was so well made, so tightly fitting it had allowed no access to the rain. Stone was impervious, after all, even ordinary stone, and jade was special in so many ways …
He might have gone to see. On another day, he might have gone to tease the emperor into a better mood, a mood that would be kinder to everyone, see, majesty, this is how we take our clothes off, we humble poor …
But today could only be the day it was, and he could only be here: squatting at Siew Ren’s side with no freedom to move, holding her hand against the pain because there was nothing else he could do. Nothing she could do either but lie here and hurt, squeezing his hand tight enough to snap fingers if he hadn’t been so much more jade-enhanced than she was, so that he could feel that pressure and not break beneath it.
Never mind the distance or the buzz of voices across the room, he could pick out very specifically when the general said, “Majesty, I—I don’t understand this. It ought not …”
“No,” said the emperor, with that blatant courtly patience, “it ought not.” I believe I said that. “And yet it does.” Are you an idiot?
Apparently yes, the man was an idiot. He went on scrabbling at the shirt’s hem, at the emperor’s skin, trying to separate one from the other and inducing his fellow generals to join in. There was nobody in that room, Yu Shan thought—or at least nobody who knew her—who was not longing for Mei Feng to be there, to slap them all away and take charge of her man in his trouble.
In her absence, it was unexpectedly the eunuch—what was his name, Jung?—who stepped forward from the lamps’ shadows. Yu Shan had barely been aware that he was there, except for the general sense—the sense of the generals, by and large—that eunuch-and-child had protected them all across the strait, so eunuch-and-child should protect them all here on land also, so eunuch-and-child had been fetched up from the harbor.
Eunuch without child, eunuch who had left child nested in a heap of blankets in the corner, Jung said, “Majesty, I have oils here, perhaps I could ease the shirt away from your body, if you would allow it …?”
Majesty allowed it; at that point, Yu Shan thought, majesty would have allowed anything that held out the least hope of working.
The least and slowest hope. Yu Shan heard occasional grunts and protests; he saw more and more, as the generals and officials grew bored or embarrassed and so backed off, found reasons to be elsewhere, to walk among their men or record the day or whatever it was that functionaries did when there was no battle to be fought, no errand to be run, no doing anything in the midst of a typhoon storm.
He saw the eunuch bent over the emperor, working his hands with infinite care under the fabulous mail shirt.
He could measure the progress, how far beneath those hands could reach, how far they had to go.
He could stop worrying; clearly there was progress, and there would be more. They could worry later about why the emperor’s shirt had clung so determinedly to his body. Yu Shan could let them worry and never trouble about offering his own answer, how his own sliver of jade had settled into the skin inside his mouth and melded into his body, become a part of it entirely, not to be cut out now.
Perhaps all that rain had kept the shirt from doing the same thing, eating even deeper into the emperor’s body, singing to the stone in his blood, joining with that same irreparable strength. Perhaps. At least it seemed that the eunuch could separate the two, part the emperor from his shirt eventually, leave him still visibly human. Not wearing scales.
YU SHAN held Siew Ren’s hand and worried about her, and gave the emperor as little attention as he could spare, just a glance and a thought, just a listen now and then.
His own pain he could ignore: it was a nothing, only a horror of the future, her future, which was unknowable. And where is Jiao?, which was unaskable.
At last there was a cry of triumph: from the eunuch, not his master. Yu Shan glanced across to see the glittering green shirt peeled at last from the emperor’s shoulders, pulled over his head and tossed heavily aside.
And then—because his gaze lingered, for no better reason than that the smooth compelling beauty of the emperor’s unmarked skin was far more attractive than Siew Ren’s ruined face—he saw how the eunuch reached inside his own shirt to draw forth a knife, glitteringly sharp and curved.
How he brought it stabbing down clean and swiftly, into the emperor’s unprotected back.
YU SHAN was already diving forward, perhaps the only person in the room who could react in time, except that he couldn’t because Siew Ren had her eyes closed and hadn’t seen it. She still had hold of his hand with a grip that delayed him, that drew him back even as he dived, so that he had no hope of getting there before that blade had bitten home.
He had no hope, but he dived anyway; an
d the tug on his hand checked him anyway; and then Siew Ren opened her eyes to look, and perhaps saw, and let him go, but it was too late anyway.
THAT BLADE, that point, he saw them driving down. All undelayed by his howl of protest.
HE SAW the point strike home.
HE SAW the point snap off where it struck the emperor’s skin, the blade shatter.
HE SAW how the men around and about, all those spare generals and officials and clerks fell on the eunuch assassin as he failed, how they seized him too late and tore him away from the emperor.
WHO SAT there mostly naked, gazing around in bewilderment, what happened …?—in just that moment that Mei Feng hurled herself in through the door, with Jiao in hot pursuit.
She was running with water as they all were, as everyone was who came in from outside; she was running out of breath, gasping hard, as though she’d tried to run even through the typhoon, but she still had air enough to croak a warning, “Chien Hua! Chien Hua, beware the eunuch, you can’t trust the eunuch Jung, he …”
Her voice died away as she stopped in her hurtling progress, as she took in just a little of what she saw: the emperor confused, the eunuch struggling but contained, the event over.
THEN, YU Shan thought, she saw nothing but the emperor.
And went to him much more slowly, those last few little barefoot steps across dusty stone; and absurdly, the first thing she said now that her warning was redundant—now that she’d come too late, but she might not realize that for a while—was, “Why’s your skin all green?”
He glanced down at himself distractedly and tried to rub it off, muttering “Dust, I suppose, from the shirt,” the jade shirt you gave me—but his skin was oily, and it really wasn’t dust. It was a greenish cast that looked internal to Yu Shan, as though it was rising from below like a blush, jade in the blood. Jade risen in response to the shirt, perhaps?