by Nghi Vo
Dieu was very still.
“Yes,” said the second wife encouragingly. “Keep quiet, keep quiet and stay with us. We will feed you all the food that you like best and let you sleep over linen and under silk.”
“Stay with us,” said the first wife graciously. “Keep quiet, keep quiet and marry our son, who is not so bad for being the child of a second wife, and give us a baby boy to lighten our hall with laughter.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Dieu, who knew she would make an even worse wife and mother than she would an imperial official, and she tried to rise, but the second son had not let go of her hand. Now little Jia had stood up on her opposite side and as she was trying to pull away, the little girl popped a hawthorn berry in her mouth, so fast and determined that Dieu swallowed it before she could figure out what had passed.
Oh . . . oh the seeds are poisonous, she thought vaguely, and then she rose and followed the second son through the mansion to his rooms at the rear.
How strange it was, she thought, that the walls of such a well-to-do family were so dark and spangled with mold, and how very odd it was that she kicked up all manner of worms and insects as she walked through the halls.
“Don’t worry about those,” said the second son. “My room is soft and warm and if you keep quiet, keep quiet, you can stay there forever.”
Then he opened the door to his bedroom and for a moment, she saw a sad and sunken grave, the center hollowed out, and the thought came to her, with the calm that barely masks hysteria, Oh, I shall have to be on top, and then her vision blurred and it was only the softest-looking bed she had ever seen, with long gauze curtains in silk that were embroidered with—
They were meant to be embroidered with spells to keep out peeping ghouls and wights, but when Dieu tilted her head around, she could see that they were nothing of the sort. At first she thought that there was simply a stroke or two missing, which might have been a disaster, but common enough, but then she realized that there was something wrong, very wrong with the entire line, and perhaps the entire stanza, and her hand shot out to grab at the gauze.
“Wait, I know this one, it’s not right . . .” she said, and then because she was not a graceful woman, she pulled too hard and dragged the silk drapes down on herself and her new bridegroom, but the drapes in her hands were moldy cotton rotted through, the bed was a grave after all, her bridegroom—
Oh—oh that’s a corpse, that’s a dead person, and he has been dead for some time because his hair has fallen out and his teeth have fallen out and something is sitting where his eyes used to be, but I do not know what it is . . .
She opened her mouth to scream, but then the iron bell above the door rang, and he was a handsome young man who smelled of camellia oil again, except now she knew he was actually—or perhaps also—a corpse, and he smiled at her reassuringly.
“It is only a guest come to call,” he said. “Never worry, my dearest, my darling.”
“We—we should go see who it is,” she managed, her throat dry. “We should not start our marriage by dishonoring our guests.”
She could see him hesitate, could almost see him wondering whether it would be better to simply push her into the grave and wrap his sinew-strung arms around her, but that wasn’t the game, she realized. If she was a bride, then he was a groom, and not a horror. If she was civil, then so must he be.
He smiled, showing perfect white teeth, and nodded.
“Then let us see who is at the door,” he said.
By the time they returned to the banqueting hall, Ho Thi Thao was already there, stretched out casually at the place that Dieu had just vacated, her bare feet dirty on the clean floors as she picked through the fileted pheasant with one idle finger. The Cheng family looked frozen where they sat, the patriarch especially, with his face as foolish as a carved turnip.
“Ah, there you are,” she said. “I came to see how you were doing.”
Dieu took a deep breath. Tiger or corpse, it should have been a harder choice, but of course it wasn’t.
“I need help,” she said, and when the dead second son of the Cheng family’s hand tightened on hers, a low growl from the tiger made him step away entirely.
“Do you?” asked the tiger. “None of your other books looked very interesting.”
“I—I have some money left, and—and some talismans that could . . .”
“No, not very interesting at all,” said the tiger.
“You could take my name,” suggested Dieu, and the tiger wrinkled her nose.
“And what good is that to me?”
The corpses looked between one and the other, and Dieu’s skin tried to crawl off her body. She shuddered.
“You could . . . you could have my hair,” she offered, remembering how taken the tiger had been with the wife’s black hair in Songs of Everlasting Sorrow. “It doesn’t sweep my heels, but it’s pretty.”
“I like it better on your head,” said the tiger. “Maybe try again before I get bored.”
Dieu swallowed hard, and then something came to her. She no longer had Songs of Everlasting Sorrow, but it had been her favorite, and it lived in her mind and in her heart still.
“From the deepest part of the Yellow Springs, my dear husband, I call to you . . .”
“I’m right here,” said the second Cheng son in surprise, and the tiger growled.
“No one was talking to you,” she said.
“My eyes are open for always, my mouth is empty for always, and always will my soul reach for yours. In the land of the dead, there are only blackbirds, and I send this one to you, in the hopes that you remember me still. Light me a stick of incense, and so long as it burns, let me sit in the chamber outside your bedroom again. Until it goes out . . .”
“Let me stay and be for you,” said the tiger, and she rose and drove away the ghosts of the Cheng mansion.
* * *
“Oh!” said Sinh Cam, her eyes wide. “Oh, I like that! Say the verse again, the last part.”
Chih opened their mouth to comply, but Sinh Loan was shaking her head.
“Abysmal, cleric, completely abysmal. That’s not what happened at all.”
“No, but I like it more,” Sinh Cam said enthusiastically. “The verse was—oh!”
She yowled in offense when Sinh Loan reached out to cuff her ear.
“You’re not supposed to like that,” she scolded. “It’s wrong.”
Sinh Cam licked her paw and groomed her affronted ear vigorously.
“I can like it if I want,” she said sullenly.
“You can, but quietly, or the cleric will think it is all right to keep telling it that way.”
“They can tell both,” said Sinh Cam imperiously, and then Sinh Hoa, newly awakened by the fuss, wrapped a large paw over Sinh Cam’s shoulder and started grooming her drowsily.
“They can’t until they’re told the right version,” Sinh Hoa mumbled. “Elder sister?”
“Of course,” said Sinh Loan with dignity.
* * *
Ho Thi Thao’s mouth ached, but she could still smell Dieu’s anger, which was delicious to her, and so she followed her all the way into the forest, making sure to crack sticks and kick stones as she went because how else would Dieu know that she was there?
She was to the edge of her claimed territory now, and though simply being in a place meant that it was her territory, she did not know right away that Scholar Dieu had chosen to stop at a fox’s barrow.
The Cheng family of western Zhou had settled there, exiled and unlucky, and they were devoured in less than a year’s time by the local foxes, who were more than happy to move in afterwards and help themselves to the Chengs’ house, their fine Zhou manners, their clothes, and of course their skulls. The Cheng patriarch had been killed by soldiers, but they made do instead with a carved turnip stuck on a stick. When the old man was called upon to nod with grave dignity or shake his head with disapproval, one of the nearby foxes would reach out and jiggle the stick approp
riately.
All of this Ho Thi Thao saw when she knocked down the gate, and then she was walking into the banqueting hall, where the mother fox sat with her turnip-head husband, her sister, and her cubs by her side. Their table was a rotted well cover, and arranged upon it was the offal that foxes like best to eat, half-rotted moles, moldy purple yams, and piles of termite grubs, dug out from under dead trees.
Ho Thi Thao did not care about any of that. What she did care about was Scholar Dieu, sitting beside the eldest fox cub, her head draped with a decayed white shroud to serve as a bride’s headdress.
“Well, it looks like a wedding,” she said with some surprise, for she had not thought that Scholar Dieu reckoned her affections so lightly.
“It is, and you are not invited,” snapped the mother fox.
“I’m a tiger, I am invited wherever I care to go,” replied Ho Thi Thao.
“I’m inviting her,” said Dieu unexpectedly, and she rose from her bridegroom’s side to take Ho Thi Thao’s arm.
When she sat down at the table, she could see that there were three small cups of rice wine—real rice wine, because foxes do have some manners—in front of Dieu. She had drunk two of them, and if she drank the third, then there would be nothing even a tiger could do, for then she would be married to the fox barrow, and nothing could change that.
“I want to leave now,” said Dieu, impressively calm in spite of her fate. “Can you help me?”
“I could,” said Ho Thi Thao, still a little stung by how fast Dieu had found a husband. “What will you give me?”
“My hair,” said Dieu, who remembered how Ho Thi Thao had stroked it over and over again on that first night.
“I like it best on your head, so no,” said Ho Thi Thao.
“I’ll give you my right hand, then,” said Dieu, thinking of their second night.
“It would only be a single bite, and again, it works best attached to you. So, no.”
Ho Thi Thao considered.
“Give me that little green chip you wear around your neck. I see you playing with it all the time, give me that.”
To her surprise, Dieu shook her head.
“I can’t give it to you,” she said, and Ho Thi Thao became very angry.
“Then it sounds to me that you would like to stay here and marry the fox cub,” Ho Thi Thao snapped. “Fine.”
She stood up to go, but Dieu held her back.
“If you bring me out of this place, I will share every meal that I ever have with you. I will let you eat first from every dish and drink first from every cup.”
When she said that, you might have knocked Ho Thi Thao over with a feather, and her heart beat like the hunting drums of the great Kieu clan, and her eyes were as wide as the moon pools in the deepest forest.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
“You can’t do that!” complained the oldest fox sister. “Everyone knows tigers are bad-tempered gamblers who will beat you!”
“She’ll make you watch her cubs while she goes to carouse at the floating ghost palaces,” said the younger. “She’ll leave you alone all the time, and a fox would never do that to you.”
The turnip-head patriarch was shaken in vigorous agreement, but the son only looked on nervously because he had few illusions about what kind of husband he would be, and even fewer about how well he would fare against a tiger in a matrimonial duel.
“Do you mean what you said?” demanded Ho Thi Thao, and when Dieu nodded, the tiger reached over to pull the shroud off her head.
“All right,” she said. “Close your eyes.”
Scholar Dieu did as she was told, and so she only heard and did not see the foxes’ murder, not how the smallest cub was eaten whole or how the adult sisters had their backs broken before their heads were snapped off. Their son escaped and went off to make some trouble for the tiger of the Carcanet Mountains, but that is, of course, another story.
Ho Thi Thao was sensitive and did not want to scandalize her new bride with so much blood. Though Dieu’s clothes were splattered with blood and her shoes quite ruined, Ho Thi Thao was pleased to see that the scholar’s eyes were still tightly closed, even if she shivered like a pine tree in the strong wind.
“All right,” she said. “Come on, and I will find us a better place to sleep than this.”
She led Scholar Dieu out of the foxes’ grave, bringing her to a soft place under a spreading red pine, and there she took off Dieu’s clothes and shoes because they were of course ruined. After that, she hunted for them a fat piglet and allowed Dieu to singe it as she liked best, taking the best pieces that were her due from her new wife’s pretty fingers.
* * *
“I like this one better,” said, of all people, Si-yu.
“I don’t care for food that flatters,” said Sinh Loan coolly, but Si-yu shook her head.
“And I don’t care about poetry. It’s nice, but . . . the first bite of every meal that Dieu eats? That’s good. That’s how the old warriors who don’t like to use words like love talk. My grandfather still says I will always give you the first bite of my dinner, you terrible woman, to my grandmother. I didn’t know that tigers said it too.”
“You must have gotten it from us,” Sinh Loan said with some stiff pride. “That’s something that tigers say, and—yes, cleric? You look puzzled.”
“So at this point in the story, Scholar Dieu is married to the tiger?”
“Of course she is. In fact, she was the one who proposed, and that is what makes her betrayal later even more serious.”
“She couldn’t have known that that was what she was doing,” Chih protested. “She wasn’t a tiger, she didn’t grow up close to tigers. She knew the classics and she could compose original poetry and recite from the great books, but—”
“Well, what else does it mean when someone offers to share every meal with you, and to let you eat and drink from their very plate?” asked Sinh Cam practically, and Chih paused.
“There are more answers to that than you may think,” Chih temporized, because there were, but they could see that there was only one answer that really mattered to tigers. They made the appropriate notations.
The temperature had dropped again, and the snow was falling more steadily. Chih stood up to stretch and to feed the fire, and as they did so, Sinh Hoa padded off into the darkness. In a surprisingly short amount of time, she returned with the skinny carcass of a fresh-killed white hare. It would barely be a bite for a tiger, but she tore out the belly with a near-surgical precision and came to drop it into Chih’s hands.
“Eat,” the tiger said graciously. “It’s hardly our custom to starve people telling us stories.”
Chih fought back the urge to ask if this meant that they would be legally or by tradition bound to the tiger sisters. If they were, they would just have to figure it out later.
Si-yu took the hare from Chih, and before she skinned it, she pulled out the entrails and cut out the tiny heart and the somewhat larger liver, holding them out to Chih.
“Pick one,” she said, “I’ll take the other.”
Fascinated, Chih picked the heart, and when Si-yu popped the liver in her mouth, they did the same with the heart.
Most importantly, the heart was still warm, and Chih’s sharp teeth cut neatly through the stiff muscle, making it a little easier to chew. It tasted mostly of iron and blood, things they weren’t really used to, but after fighting back an urge to gag, they swallowed quickly, feeling an almost dizzying rush of warmth and satisfaction. It had been hours since the reindeer meat from that afternoon, and it would be a while yet until dawn.
“And now we’re married,” Si-yu said solemnly, and Chih jumped for a moment, shooting her an exasperated look as she laughed.
“You could be more serious about all of this,” they said, and Si-yu shrugged.
“They said that they would let Piluk go if worst came to worst, Bao-so’s still breathing, and they’re not going to eat us until your story is over. What’ve I got to
be afraid of now?”
“Making fun of our marital traditions?” suggested Sinh Loan.
“I’m making fun of mine, it’s fine,” Si-yu retorted, and Chih was beginning to see perhaps why Si-yu’s family had been in the mammoth corps for two hundred years. It probably wasn’t safe to have them out of it.
The tigers waited patiently as Si-yu cooked the rabbit in a pot over the fire, waited patiently even when Si-yu and Chih ate, and were only a little restless when Si-yu went make sure that Piluk was as comforted as she could be. Piluk seemed to be restless, her trunk swaying back and forth, her head lowered. Her small black eyes seemed to squint at something that Chih couldn’t see, and on occasion, she grumbled, her mouth shut but working fiercely. When Si-yu offered her a handful of fodder from the trough, she turned it away entirely, making the scout frown.
“She’s nervous,” she said. “She’s almost never off her feed.”
“I wonder why?” asked Sinh Loan innocently, and Si-yu glared.
Finally, there was no more stalling, and Chih sat back down by the fire to continue.
Chapter Nine
THE TIGER WAS GLUTTED from her slaughter of the vengeful ghosts of the Cheng clan, and so she did not stir when Scholar Dieu left in the morning.
She continued on her way to Ahnfi, and now the roads grew wider and broader and a little safer. She traveled for a while with some tightrope walkers and tumblers, and then with a young woman with wide eyes painted on her eyelids who felt the lumps on Dieu’s head and predicted for her a future of strange beds but good sex. Then she suggested that the bed upstairs at the inn might be sufficiently strange, which Dieu politely declined, because life was complicated enough.
It certainly wasn’t made easier by the tiger that she quickly realized was following her. The tiger could not be as bold as she had been in the mountains or the forests. Now she had to follow Dieu in her human shape, walking on two legs instead of four and eating as humans did.
She did not come to speak with Dieu, though more often than not, Dieu would wake up with some singed bit of meat or another by her pillow, wrapped in leaves and left for her just before she rose. Dieu realized with some dismay that the tiger was in love with her, as much as any savage beast could be, and the thought filled her with dread.