by Nghi Vo
“How awful!” said Sinh Cam, shaking her head. “How could they, that’s the best part and they ruined it, that’s not how it went at all.”
Sinh Cam came to her feet, forcing Sinh Loan to sit up in irritation, and she paced back and forth, occasionally biting the cold air as if she wanted to get a bad taste out of her mouth.
“Please tell me how it went instead, lady,” Chih said respectfully. “I can only tell the story as it has been told to me.”
“Even if it is wrong and wicked?” asked Sinh Loan coldly. “Even if, as you said yourself, you knew it to be imperfect?”
There was a primitive part of Chih’s mind that was telling them to run right now, but they ignored it. Instead they took a deep breath and then another because Sinh Loan considered them a person and would give them some warning before she killed them. Probably.
“It is the only version of the story I know,” Chih said. “Tell me another, and I’ll tell that instead.”
“Or you will keep them both in your vault and think one is as good as the other,” said Sinh Hoa, speaking up unexpectedly, her voice gravelly with sleep. “That’s almost worse.”
“I can’t do anything until you tell me what’s wrong, lady,” Chih said, and then they shut their mouth.
A complicated sort of three-way communication passed between the tigers. Sinh Loan looked coldly furious; if a tiger could be said to pout Sinh Cam pouted ferociously; and Sinh Hoa looked sleepy, but perhaps that was only how she always looked.
“So, are they going to eat us because of your story?” Si-yu asked. “If it’s any consolation, I thought that you told it well so far.”
“They might,” Chih said, and because they knew the tigers were listening with at least half an ear, “or they may not, and instead tell me the true version.”
Finally, Sinh Cam and Sinh Hoa settled to the ground again, and Sinh Loan sat up straight, shoulders square and eyes gleaming in the light.
“All right, cleric. This is told to you in good faith. If we allow you to return to the Singing Hills, I trust that you will tell it there in good faith as well.”
* * *
With the pride of the tiger who had eaten one of the sun’s sacred calves, Ho Thi Thao took Scholar Dieu by the hand and led her through her house, pointing out the treasures she had won through longer teeth, sharper claws, and a greater belly than her enemies.
Of all the tigers living in that era, Ho Thi Thao was one of the greatest, proud and hungry, and she had many treasures to show off. It must have been that she already favored Scholar Dieu more than a little because not only did she show her a jar containing the hand bones of a giant and the teeth of the last talking bear in the Boarbacks, she also led her to the deepest parts of her house, so far inside the mountain’s heart that only the oil of dead whales lit the way.
Canopied over Ho Thi Thao’s bed was the pelt of a great tiger, one almost as large as the scout’s calf’s there. The paws swung down, still tipped in silvery claws, and the orange was bright and living and the black was deep and dead.
“Who was that?” asked Scholar Dieu, and Thao smiled.
“It is the skin of He Leaps and Leaps, killed by my grandfather in lawful combat,” she said. “Some people say that he was only ever a story and that his bones are words and his eyes are laughter, but no. He was real, he was hungry, and now his skin stretches over me like the sky when I sleep.”
“And are you worthy of such a thing?” asked Scholar Dieu.
If the words had come from someone less interesting, who smelled less good, who was less beautiful, Ho Thi Thao would have killed them immediately, so insulted she might have left them for lesser things to eat. Instead the words came from Scholar Dieu, and they only made Ho Thi Thao smile.
“Come and see,” she said, pulling her beneath the skin of He Leaps and Leaps. “Let me show you.”
And so Scholar Dieu stayed in Ho Thi Thao’s bed for three nights, and on the morning of the third day, she woke alone, so she dressed and went down the mountain without a single unwanted mark on her body.
* * *
“Thank you, madam,” said Chih, sketching a bow from their seated position. “I have recorded your story here, and if I return to Singing Hills, it will be copied into the archives.”
“Or even if your records return without you,” observed Sinh Hoa sleepily.
“You didn’t tell it right,” Sinh Cam said sulkily, but Sinh Loan ignored her, instead folding her hands neatly on her lap and nodding to Chih.
“Continue.”
“Of course, madam.”
Chapter Seven
SCHOLAR DIEU CAME DOWN from Wulai Mountain to the banks of the Oanh River. It was broad and wide, placid as a water buffalo except for the places where it bucked and swirled with a secret strange madness. She found at the foot of the mountain a flat-bottomed boat complete with a long pole hitched to one side, but instead of a boatman, there was the tiger resting in the boat, a satisfied look on her face.
Dieu looked left and look right, and the tiger, her eyes half-closed, spoke with Ho Thi Thao’s voice.
“There is a bridge five days north, and a proper ferry seven days south,” she said. “In case you were wondering.”
Dieu bit her lip nervously.
“I have no more food,” she said. “I had intended to stop at the village of Nei after the river crossing.”
“That’s not very interesting to me,” the tiger said, and Scholar Dieu resisted the urge to pick up a river stone and to pitch it as hard as she could at the tiger’s round face.
“Did you eat the boatman?” she asked, and the tiger opened one eye.
“No, but I could if you wanted me to. He ran off somewhere.”
“No, that’s not what I want. I want to get across the river.”
“If only you had a boat to help you.”
“Yes, if only!”
The tiger made as sympathetic a face as a tiger could make.
“It seems I have this boat, little scholar. Why don’t you ask me to get you across the river?”
Dieu took a deep breath.
“Please, Ho Thi Thao, will you take me across the river?”
“What will you give me?”
Angrily, Dieu spread her meager possessions out on the bank. It wasn’t very much, just a change of clothes and some embroidered cloth slippers, and the few books she could keep back from her family’s creditors.
The tiger came to the bank to look over her things carefully, turning her head this way and that. She nosed at the books and the clothes without interest, and finally she shook her head.
“Do you have nothing valuable there?”
“But of course I do,” said Dieu. “Look, here, this is Songs of Everlasting Sorrow, the poems that the poet Lu Bi wrote when his wife had gone ahead of him into death.”
She paused.
“I could read it to you if you like. If that would be enough payment for getting me across the river.”
“Hm. Give me a taste, and if it is good, I will allow you to read the rest. And then I will row this boat across the river with you in it.”
Dieu, a little surprised that that had worked at all, knelt on the side of the river and opened the small volume on her lap. She skipped the first quarter, because it was only the praise of the emperor at the time, and she skipped the first few pages of the second quarter, because it was only a description of the land of the dead, which was beautiful in a certain way, but far from enticing.
“And so you came to my house on the soft pads of a midwinter kitten, the whisper of your black tresses sweeping your heels, and so you came to my heart just as quietly. Why, then, did you make such a terrible noise when you let go of my hand and departed, a great trumpeting of horns, a great beating of drums? We had always kept our home in the sweetest of silence, broken only with a dropped spool of scarlet thread or a soft cry from your lips early in the morning. Now your departure crashes like a thunder, and the timbers of the house shake with
the force of the space you left behind.”
They were Dieu’s favorite lines, and she was almost afraid to look up to see how the tiger took them. When you love a thing too much, it is a special kind of pain to show it to others and to see that it is lacking.
The tiger, however, was nodding her head, an expression of great concentration on her round face.
“Yes, that is good. Read me all of that, and then read it to me again, and I will take you across the river.”
“I did not say that I would read it twice,” Dieu muttered, but quietly, because she read well, and she enjoyed it. “Do you want all of it, or only the part—”
The tiger uttered a low growl, and her eyes took on a peculiar stony hardness, like jade or carnelian, nothing living at all, but very bright.
“I want all of it,” she insisted, “and I want it twice.”
“Very well,” said Dieu, and she opened her book from the beginning and as the tiger listened, she read it through twice. On the second pass, the tiger murmured the words with her, almost perfectly, and then she recited the whole of the poem from memory, perfect in tone as if she could read herself.
“All right,” she said finally. “Come sit in the boat, and I will row you across the river.”
* * *
Chih paused.
“So how was that?” they asked, and the tigers thought for a moment. At least, Sinh Loan and Sinh Cam thought. Sinh Hoa was probably asleep, though at this point, Chih would not have bet a great deal of money on it.
“Good,” Sinh Cam said. “That is how we tell it, mostly. But why did Ho Thi Thao not eat the boatman? It’s a much better idea than just driving him off.”
“Because it is not such a good story for humans if they get randomly eaten and do not deserve it,” said Sinh Loan, somewhat to Chih’s surprise. “I suppose they mostly tell this story to humans after all.”
“It’s still different from what we would say,” said Sinh Hoa, her eyes closed.
“What would you say?” asked Si-yu abruptly.
Chih glanced at her in surprise. The mammoth scout looked a little calmer at least, and she looked from Chih to the tigers and back again, as if unsure which story she should trust, if either.
Sinh Loan yawned, shrugging her thick shoulders.
“The big difference is that Ho Thi Thao eats her book after she has the story twice.”
Once, Chih sat very still in an Ue County graveyard pretending to be a junior ghost so they could hear the stories that the corpses rose to tell each other at the Rose Moon festival. If they had been caught, they would have been torn from limb to limb, but if they had heard of such a thing from the corpses, there was a good chance that they would have done exactly what they did now, which was gasp and stare.
“Why would she do such a thing?” Chih demanded, and then they covered their mouth with their hand, blushing red.
Sinh Loan smiled triumphantly as if she had caught Chih out. In a very real way, she had. Chih had spent years at Singing Hills perfecting an open face and a listening posture, and being startled to gasps and stares was something that was only meant to happen to very young clerics.
“Scholar Dieu asked the same thing,” Sinh Loan said. “Here.”
* * *
As the sun grew ripe and started to drop towards the horizon, Scholar Dieu read the poem, and as she did, it came to Ho Thi Thao how very beautiful she was. She had been beautiful in bed for three nights, which was important, and she was beautiful now, when she was angry at having her way blocked. It came to Ho Thi Thao that perhaps she wanted to learn how else the scholar was beautiful, and even in what ways the scholar might be ugly, which could also be fascinating and beloved.
She let the scholar’s voice lull her into a half-dream as the boat rocked in the river’s waves, and then, too soon, she closed the book and stood up.
“I have paid my fee, and now you should hold up your end of the bargain,” she said.
“Of course. Give me the book.”
The scholar did, and as my sister said, she gutted it with one stroke of her paw and swallowed the wounded pages in two great bites.
Then Dieu stood up, crying out in pain as if she were the one who had been clawed, and when she stamped her foot, the river itself shook in its banks, so great was her anger.
“Why did you do that?” she demanded, tears falling down her face, and Ho Thi Thao looked at her in puzzlement.
“I told you I wanted it,” she said, “and now it is mine.”
In response, Scholar Dieu scooped up a rock from the river bank and pitched it as hard as she could at poor Ho Thi Thao, flung so hard that it chipped one of her magnificent fangs.
“And so that is yours too,” Scholar Dieu said angrily. “Now fulfill your bargain and take me across the river.”
For a moment, the pain in Ho Thi Thao’s tooth made her want to strike the scholar’s head from her shoulders, but then the word came to her, the way words seldom did, beautiful, and the scholar was.
Instead of killing her, Ho Thi Thao only bowed her head humbly and went into her human form, which could grasp the oars and row as skillfully as any river man.
They were silent as they crossed the Oanh River, and when they came to the opposite side, Dieu gathered up her things and stalked away from the riverbank without a backwards look, taking Ho Thi Thao’s eyes with her.
* * *
Chih cleared their throat.
“Yes, metaphorically,” said Sinh Loan with great patience.
Chih nodded, making another note. In some of the Rose Moon ghoul stories they had heard, it wouldn’t have been.
“All right. So after Dieu walked away from the river, she came to the house of the Cheng clan of western Zhou.”
Chapter Eight
THE CHENG CLAN OF western Zhou was a long way from western Zhou.
They had been driven out for supporting the wrong prince, who had at the time seemed like the most righteous son of the previous Zhou emperor and a fairly good bet considering his mother was backed by the Ki clan. Unfortunately, his brother had turned out to be more righteous instead, and also a little handier with a great deal of bear gall poison.
So the Cheng clan fell into some chaos, and what was left of them fled to the hinterlands, purchased a mansion in the heart of a haunted forest, and allowed the ghosts and ghouls and monsters to defend them as righteousness, propriety, and a fully armed house guard could not.
Relying on the protection of ghouls and monsters is as poor an idea as backing the least righteous of an emperor’s sons, and eventually, the Cheng family learned that, though a little too late.
Of course, Dieu knew none of that when she came to their gates just as the sun was setting. She had been aware all day of the tiger behind her, following at what she imagined was a respectful distance and clumsy in her fascination, but the scholar paid her no mind.
Instead, she rang the iron bell at the Chengs’ sturdy door, and when she told the old doorman that she was a prospective candidate for the examinations in Ahnfi, she was ushered in and the door closed quickly behind her.
At the time, the Cheng family was the old patriarch who had served the previous emperor, his first wife, his second wife, his second son, and his baby daughter. They had been more numerous not long ago, and Dieu made it her business not to prod at the holes in their family. Instead, she came to kneel neatly at the table with them as they served her all manner of delicacies from their home, fileted pieces of pheasant fanned out and drizzled with yuzu and ginger, lucky whole fish arranged on the plate with a scatter of salt as if it were swimming, and slivers of a pig’s heart soaked in yogurt and fried in sesame oil. They set in front of her a bowl of pure white rice dusted with ruby salt and sesame seeds, and to her left was a bowl of soup so clear she could see the figure of a fox running at the bottom of the bowl, and to her right, there was a pair of jade chopsticks, bound at the crown by a delicate gold chain.
It was a feast fit to honor a princess, all rolled
out for a rather tattered scholar, but Dieu was so hungry that she simply ate the food that was put in front of her. She had never eaten so well in her life, and as she ate, the Cheng patriarch nodded wisely at the head of the table as his two wives kept up a stream of witty entertaining talk, lively and clever as if they had never left court.
Dieu was almost full when she noticed the little dish of hawthorn berries next to the littlest girl. The red berries gleamed, sprinkled with large crystals of rock sugar, and as Dieu watched, the little girl reached out to pop two in her mouth, swallowing them happily. She caught Dieu watching her, and she scooped up two more, offering them bashfully.
“Here,” she said. “You have some too.”
Her first instinct was to pop them into her mouth, but then an image of the house she had left came to mind, of the hawthorn tree that grew fifteen paces from her door. She had left before the tree burst into leaves, let alone flowers or berries, and the beautiful red berries were autumn-ripe, full to bursting with tart juice and slightly soft under her fingers.
“Ah,” she said, and then she looked down at the rest of the food on the table. Ptarmigan lived in these woods but pheasant was rarer, and sea bass certainly did not swim in the rivers. Suddenly she realized that the eyes of all the family were upon her.
“Why don’t you eat?” asked Patriarch Cheng’s second wife. “You’ll teach little Jia to be wary of the generosity of strangers if you do not.”
“Actually, there are quite a few aphorisms that tell us we should not take advantage of our hosts’ good will,” Dieu said. “Here, I could read us a few . . .”
She reached for her bag, knowing she was babbling, but in her bag were the paper talismans that her tutor had insisted she purchase. Before she could get her hand into her things, however, the second son, who was very handsome with eyebrows like dark charcoal and a face as pale and pretty as a maiden’s, placed his hand over hers.
“Oh, but won’t you keep quiet, keep quiet while I drink in your beauty?” he asked, and his eyes were very dark.