by Nghi Vo
Instead, Dieu was well-read in the classics, clever with compositions and translations, and versed in the many laws of the land. At the age of twenty-eight, her tutor nodded and collected enough money to purchase for her a suit of good traveling clothes, a decent map, a few paper talismans, and a little embroidered bag on a woven string so she could wear the jade chip around her neck.
“Well, I have taught you all I could teach you,” he said to her one crisp fall morning. “You are as ready as anyone can be to enter the Hall of Ferocious Jade and emerge a court official rather than a bundle of bones tied up with your own guts—”
* * *
“Oh!” Sinh Cam exclaimed, sitting up in surprise. “That’s right! A bundle of bones tied up with their own guts, that’s what we say.”
“It’s a tiger’s term?” Chih asked. “I thought it was just what the ghosts of the examination hall did to those scholars who who didn’t follow the proper sacrifices . . .”
“No, it’s ours,” said Sinh Loan pleasantly. “It’s what we call someone who is a disappointment. Because that’s what we turn them into. Please continue.”
“Of course.”
* * *
“I’m not sure I’m ready,” Dieu said. “I still have to memorize the lesser chrestomathies, and I feel like I still have a ways to go on the errata of the greater ones. And my Vihnese is still—”
“I don’t think they really test on the lesser chrestomathies any longer,” her tutor said with confidence, “and who speaks Vihnese anymore, anyway?”
“Well, the Vihnese do . . .”
“And I have every confidence that you will excel as it was expected that your great-grandfather would have done. You come from a good family, you are tenacious, you love the intricacies of the classics and how they bind the world to lawful congress, and anyway, the money is quite gone, and so your instruction is at an end.”
Dieu understood that at least, and nodded dejectedly, though she remembered to pay proper obeisance and thanks to her tutor before he set off for points unknown.
Then she handed the keys to the small house with the hawthorn tree in Hue County over to the impatient landlord, took a last long look around the town she had never left in all her life, and started the long trek east.
* * *
“Oh, we never knew any of that about Dieu,” rumbled Sinh Cam, and Sinh Loan nodded speculatively. Their faces possessed a similar curiosity, a strange thing to see stamped on the face of both a woman and a tiger. Sinh Hoa had dropped her head to her large paws, and she only blinked sleepily at the fire.
“It is appropriate they know more about Scholar Dieu,” Sinh Loan said finally, glancing down at her neatly filed nails. “Dieu was, for all of her blessings and beauty, actually a human after all. Next, you must speak of Ho Thi Thao.”
Sinh Loan sat up straight, giving the impression of a cat setting her tail neatly around her toes.
“Please, continue.”
Chih swallowed, remembered not to smile, and obeyed.
Chapter Five
IN THOSE DAYS, Ahn was not the great empire it would grow to be. It was instead one of sixteen warring states that had all declared themselves the heirs of the great doomed Ku Dynasty. Some had good claims, some had large armies, and it would take at least another generation or so before the true heir to the Ku emerged.
It was through this landscape of war and contested territory that Dieu traveled, and she might begin her day in land controlled by Ing, steal behind the lines of a battle between Ing and Fu-lan, and drink her evening tea on the banks of the river claimed by Vihn.
She had turned out to be a better traveler than she had thought, or at least, she had not been eaten by hungry ghosts or had her skull stolen by fox spirits yet. She had mostly stopped panting whenever she needed to climb a rise, and she had learned early on that you never passed a priestess and her road shrine without offering something, even if it was only a tiny coin, a bun, or a prayer.
Not long after Dieu skirted the Battle of Kirshan—where General Peirong was killed by a raging bull that went on to become the king of Kirshan—she came around a bend in the road to find a small shrine to the goddess Xanh-hui. Behind its iron grating, the upright cabinet contained the goddess’s sigils, a rod and a stoppered pot of healing salve, but sleeping in front of the shrine was the least likely priestess that Dieu had ever seen.
The priestess was a short, squat woman who wore a sleeveless tunic even in the flurry of late spring snow, and instead of trousers and shoes, she went barefoot under a kilt made from the tanned hide of a slate-blue calf. Her hair was loose and tangled, and the only thing that identified her as a priestess at all was the necklace of rough amber beads around her neck from which hung a small wooden carving of the goddess Xanh-hui herself.
* * *
“Oh,” exclaimed Sinh Cam. “That’s Ho Thi Thao!”
“We know,” Sinh Loan said patiently.
“She wore a calfskin kilt because she stole one of the sacred calves from the sun.”
“We know,” Sinh Loan repeated, and Chih sat up a little straighter.
“Actually, I don’t know that story,” they hinted.
“Well, now you do,” said Sinh Cam, pleased.
Sinh Loan sighed, reaching over to ruffle her younger sister’s ears.
“She did,” Sinh Loan said. “When she was very young, her mother told her that she would be forced to eat scraps all her life. She said that Ho Thi Thao was so small that she would trail behind even the pine trees that cared for nothing that tasted good or ran fast.”
“Oh, what a cruel thing for a mother to say,” Si-yu said, and instead of being angry, Sinh Loan inclined her proud head.
“It was. And so to prove her honorable mother wrong, Thi Thao sneaked up to the manor of the sun, where she killed the two cowherds by catching them when they were asleep, and after she ate them, she killed and ate one of the sun’s most precious calves. Then she went home, ate up all the pine trees in Jo Valley, all of the humans, and then her siblings and then her mother.”
“Oh,” said Si-yu faintly, and Sinh Loan smiled briefly at her before turning to Chih.
“There is an addition for your books, cleric. Make a note of it so that they will find it after we eat you. Please continue.”
* * *
Dieu went to put a coin in the bowl at the priestess’s feet, and the priestess came awake with a growl, grabbing her hand before she could complete her obeisance.
“What in the world are you doing?” demanded the priestess.
“I was making an offering,” said Dieu, and now she noticed things she had not seen before. She could see how there were spots of dried blood on the priestess’s tunic, and how her fingernails were thick and white. Priestesses smelled like forbearance and cheap incense, not raw earth and full bellies, and Dieu did her best not to pull her hand from the woman’s grasp.
“Let me see what you are offering,” the woman said, and she made a face when she saw the coin.
“Oh, that’s not worth anything at all.”
“It’s . . . worth one sen or four fi?” suggested Dieu, but the woman shook her head.
“Nothing at all,” she declared, and she smacked Dieu’s hand so that the coin fell into the dirt and rolled away. “What are you going to give me instead?”
“Um. I could say a prayer for the sorrow and suffering of the world . . .”
“No, I don’t want that. What else do you have?”
The woman still smelled full, but there was something in her voice that suggested that was a temporary state, and her eyes, which were round and very lovely, took on a kind of sharp hunger.
“I—I have glutinous rice cakes?”
“Oh!” said the woman in surprise. “That’s fine then. Get them out.”
The rice cakes were all Dieu had to eat for the next two days, but she figured that her chances for being around in two days’ time probably went up if she shared them now. She pulled them one-handed out of h
er bag, giving them to the woman.
To her surprise, the woman pulled her down to sit next to her in front of the shrine, and let her go, dividing the rice cakes between them.
“You can run away if you like,” the woman said callously—
* * *
“No, she would have said that kindly,” rumbled Sinh Hoa, who Chih had thought was sleeping.
“Lady?”
“She wouldn’t have been mean about it,” said Sinh Hoa sleepily. “It’s a courtesy. It’s permission. It’s being nice.”
“I’ll remember that,” Chih said, and continued.
* * *
“You can run away if you like,” the woman said kindly, “or you can stay and eat.”
Dieu, who had not eaten since daybreak, looked down the long stretch of road and then looked at the rice cakes. Her better judgment told her to run, but her belly told her to get at least one of the rice cakes if she could, and her belly had learned to speak very loudly on her travels.
Dieu tucked her grass traveling shawl a little more snugly around her shoulders, and she nibbled at one of her own rice cakes politely as the woman ate the rest, chewing them with a distracted look on her face. As they ate, Dieu became more aware of the fact that the woman didn’t seem to care about the rice cakes at all, and was more interested in looking at Dieu, inspecting her from the top of her wool cap to the toes of her rag-wrapped sandaled feet.
Finally, there was only one rice cake left between them on the stained waxed leaf wrapper, and they both stared at it contemplatively.
“Well,” said the woman presently. “Here.”
Dieu blinked in surprise as the woman picked up the final rice cake and broke it in two. She examined them with a critical eye, and then she offered the larger of the two pieces to Dieu. Dieu started to reach for it, but then the woman held it up to her lips as if she were a very small child.
Hesitantly, because she wanted to get out of the situation without giving offense and because after all she was very hungry, Dieu opened her mouth and allowed herself to be fed the rice cake.
“Well, that’s that,” said the woman with satisfaction, climbing to her feet.
Standing, she was shorter than Dieu, coming barely up to Dieu’s chin, but she was twice as heavy, if not more. Dieu felt no safer looking down at her than she had sitting and sharing a rice cake with her.
“That’s that,” echoed Dieu, and the woman nodded without smiling, shutting her eyes for a moment instead.
“My name is Ho Thi Thao. I’ll ask for your name when I am sure I want it.”
“Will you? Want it, I mean?” asked Dieu in confusion.
“Well, I suppose we’ll see. Come along now.”
* * *
“Goodness,” said Sinh Loan, looking faintly scandalized. “You mean she didn’t know?”
Chih raised their eyebrows at the tiger’s tone.
“She knew that she was sitting down with someone that might have eaten her, madam,” they said politely.
Sinh Cam shook her ears impatiently.
“She didn’t know that Ho Thi Thao was flirting with her! She was being so sweet and romantic, and Scholar Dieu didn’t even appreciate it!”
“How so?” asked Chih. They had taken out their writing materials because the tiger was right; if they didn’t make it out, the abbey at Singing Hills would be fascinated to know this. Maybe they would even get a personal tablet in the hall for the highly esteemed. That was not really a comfort, but it was a nice thought. Now they opened a new page, scooting a little closer to the fire.
“It’s the opening to a proper courtship,” Sinh Loan said primly. “And our ancestress was a paragon of both decorum and passion. In these lesser days, it’s not unknown for a tiger to simply contract a marriage with the first likely looking thing they met on some forest path.”
She reached down to tweak Sinh Hoa’s tail, making the sleepy tiger grunt and Sinh Cam chuff. The more they talked, Chih realized, the more easy the tigers sounded, the more the threatening rocks were smoothed out of their voices.
“When she shared the food that Scholar Dieu offered her rather than eating it all, she was expressing . . . fond feeling and fascination. When she offered her name without asking for Scholar Dieu’s, she was opening the door.”
“Opening the door for what?” asked Chih, fascinated in spite of themself.
Sinh Loan waved a thick hand.
“To any number of things. To a courtship. To a single night of love. To something that would last far longer. To an opportunity to know her more and better. For more.”
“To be dinner,” Si-yu said with a frown, and Sinh Loan laughed.
“Of course, or do you forbid yourself the privilege of slaying a guest who displeases you at the dinner table?”
Si-yu grumbled, but if she was with the mammoth corps, she knew her history and that was certainly not a privilege that the nobles of the north denied themselves when they decided enough was enough.
“Can you tell us more about the possibilities that Ho Thi Thao was hinting at?” Chih asked. “We know so very little about—”
“That’s by design,” said Sinh Loan, “but now you know the part about how unwelcome guests and inquiries can be turned into welcome dinners, yes?”
“Yes, I do,” said Chih. “Moving on.”
Chapter Six
HO THI THAO was a cave dweller like the people who lived in the Painted Cliffs in Anwar, and her cave was a marvel, stretching deep into the mountain. It was an ancient place, lit by a cunning combination of shafts and mirrors. Where those didn’t suffice, there were oil lamps scattered throughout, their tricky light showing off low benches scattered with furs and silk cushions, chests overflowing with strings of gold ingots and tablets of jade and turquoise and a royal armory’s worth of weapons mounted up on the walls.
“Oh, are these the weapons of your ancestors?” asked Dieu politely.
“No, they’re the ones that my ancestors took away from those who would reproach them,” said Ho Thi Thao.
Dieu, who after all had studied all her life to be a scholar, recognized some of the weapons on the wall. There was the shield of Wei Lee Lan, who had gone missing some hundred years ago, a pair of matched daggers taken from a captain of the Stinging Nettle Society that went on to become the notorious Sisterhood, and the tiger-killing sword of General Truc Quy. Of course, General Quy had killed tigers until the tigers killed her, and Dieu finally figured out what kind of demon she had followed home.
* * *
“And what else?” asked Sinh Cam excitedly.
Chih, who had been worried about the line about following the demon home, blinked in surprise.
“What else what?”
“What else did Ho Thi Thao have on her wall? What did she show off to Scholar Dieu?”
“We just have records of those three things, the shield and the daggers and the tiger-killing sword . . .”
“Oh, it’s like the tack that the great Ho-shuh was wearing before she and Jo-woon went off to defeat King-Whale,” said Si-yu unexpectedly.
She had settled Bao-so as close to the fire as she dared, and she was seated against Piluk’s foreleg, Piluk’s trunk wrapped around her hand and occasionally swinging it gently.
“Yes?” asked Chih.
“And the storyteller always has to say what Ho-shuh was wearing and where it came from. The stirrups always come from Pari-kie, though, where I’m from.”
“Of course they do,” said Sinh Loan agreeably. “And of course, Cleric Chih, you should make sure that future tellings of this story mention that Ho Thi Thao had the gloves of the Great Butcher Ik-jee on her wall as well. The Great Butcher was defeated by a tiger from the Boarbacks, you know.”
“I will,” said Chih, making the notation. If they or their notes made it back to the Singing Hills, the Divine would be very pleased, especially if this shed some light on what had happened to the hunter the north called the Magnificent Ik-jee, who had disappeared without
a trace some two hundred years ago.
Everyone settled back into an expectant listening air except for Bao-so, who was unconscious, and Sinh Hoa, who was definitely sleeping. The sky beyond the barn was now entirely black, eating up the shapes of the trees and everything but the faint scatter of snow on the ground, which sparkled in the dim firelight. The cold was sinking into everything, and Chih shrugged a little further into their sheepskin coat, folding their hands into the pockets inside the sleeves.
“The next part is a little odd,” they said.
“Oh?” asked Sinh Loan as Sinh Cam buried her nose under her paw with a chuffing sound. If Chih didn’t know better, they would have said it was a giggle.
“Yes. The story of the tiger Ho Thi Thao and Scholar Dieu came down to us long after they were both dead, through a traveling actor who told it to a literate friend. The distortion of some fifty years, a natural storyteller, and a monk from Ue County can be immense . . .”
“Well?” said Sinh Loan.”
“All right. The text as it was given to me says . . .”
* * *
So Ho Thi Thao showed Dieu all the treasures she had, ending with her sleeping place. The bed was covered with a lavish embroidered quilt featuring water bison, pronghorn deer, goats, rabbits, and humans, all running, and stretched over the bed as a canopy was the glorious pelt of an enormous tiger.
“And that,” she said proudly, “is the skin of my mother, who I killed.”
* * *
Sinh Loan’s eyes narrowed and Sinh Cam’s head came up in surprise.
* * *
“Why would you do such a thing?” said Dieu.
“Why, because I wanted what was hers, and because all things are mine. Come here, and let me show you the things I have killed, embroidered on my bed.”
Dieu went to listen to the tiger’s tales of everything she had killed, and the next morning, the tiger gone hunting, she left without a scratch.
* * *
“Well,” said Sinh Loan, her voice as taut as a zither string. “Is that what they say happened?”
“It is,” said Chih. They were aware that Si-yu had stood up, her lance in her hands again.