When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain

by Nghi Vo

  She hoped that the tiger would grow bored as the days passed, or perhaps that she would become distressed by the cultivated lands of the south and the presence of soldiers and hunters and magic-workers. Sometimes, the tiger would be quiet for days, but just when Dieu felt some kind of relief, she would catch a glimpse of orange out of the corner of her eye or she would hear a soft chuffing as she woke up to another gift of charred rabbit or cracked and fire-roasted marrow bones.

  The tiger did nothing, and as they passed through the triple gates of Ahnfi to the capital itself, she had a moment of terror for the tiger in such a place.

  The capital in those days was the last remaining bastion of the Ku Dynasty, their sunset glory, the tomb for their dying sorcery. It was the last place in the falling empire where you could hear the songs of the Midu singers who asked the gods to give them second mouths in their throats, and where you might have your fortune told by the hunted impenetrable Kang Lan sect, who split open stones to read the veins of crystal and nodes of ore found inside them. Ahnfi’s lion banners snapped in the air like the fingers of nobles calling for this death or that delicacy, and from the barred windows of the flower and water district, beauties from all over the world plotted, schemed, and gave rise to a thousand stories of death and ambition.

  It was impossible to tell whether Ahnfi was breathing its last or whether it would rise up again, either on its own or supported like skin over new and foreign bones. The city and its fate whirled like the skirts of a dancing boy, and through it all, Dieu knew that a tiger was stalking her.

  Dieu’s heart might have quivered at the idea of entering the Hall of Ferocious Jade, but she had indeed been studying the classics and the lessons of the past for eighteen years. She knew more than just the law of the land, she knew the written law of the heavens, and they were emphatic—people had their place, and so did the beasts.

  The emperor lived in his palace, the merchant lived in the storehouse, the farmer lived in the field, the scholar lived in the halls of knowledge, and the corpse lived in the grave. The animals the law called friendly—the rooster, the cow, the dog, and the sheep—lived in the world of men, whether it was a palace or a barn. The animals the law considered wild lived in the forest or the mountain. There were animals that were considered equivocal, like cats and goats and rabbits, but there could be no mistake when it came to a tiger.

  Eventually, Dieu thought, the tiger would do something terrible. She would kill a child as she had killed the youngest ghost, or she would decide that some dignitary’s pavilion or worse, his wife, was her territory. Then . . .

  Dieu knew that it was only correct that a wild animal should be killed for crossing into territory declared forbidden to her, but after all, the tiger had saved her life.

  Dieu made a decision, and with the last of the money she had, she rented a room in a well-appointed tea house, and had them butcher for her four fat piglets. Instead of having them cooked, she only had them dressed in savory herbs and she herself poured their blood onto the doorstep.

  As the sun set on Ahnfi, and they lit the first lanterns against the haunted night, the tiger appeared, looking around in appreciation.

  “Well, I suppose there is something to be said for living in the city,” she said, and she allowed Dieu to bring her to the table and to cut with her own hands small slices of meat from the backs and bellies of the piglets and to drop them right into the tiger’s mouth.

  There was a clever boy to strum his moon guitar behind a screen, and the tiger fell back on silk cushions, refusing to feed herself and nudging Dieu’s hands until she fed her more. Dieu smiled, ignoring the blood that stained the edges of her sleeves, and fed the tiger until there were only bones left on the table, and the tiger was stuffed full, her head on Dieu’s lap.

  “We’ll stay in the city a year,” the tiger said drowsily. “And then we shall spend a year in the mountains and decide between us which we like best . . .”

  Dieu said nothing, and she slid her fingers around the tiger’s wrist, feeling the tiger’s pulse grow slower.

  Finally, the tiger was asleep, and the boy with the moon guitar came out to look her over.

  “Well, that was enough poppy to bring down a mammoth calf,” he said.

  “You mustn’t hurt her,” Dieu said anxiously. “She has killed no one—well, no one since coming to the city. She has done nothing wrong . . .”

  “I would as soon throw myself into the bear pit,” snorted the clever boy, who would one day become the famous Inspector Wen Jilong. “No, we’re going to cage her and transport her down the coast.”

  “Oh,” said Dieu. “And she’ll be safe there?”

  The boy gave her a strange look.

  “Well, she’ll no longer be in the city, so we’ll be safe from her. And when she wakes up in Lanling, she’ll probably level at least a district before she gets away, and everyone knows that Lanling has no archers or hunters of note. She’ll be fine.”

  Before Dieu could respond to that, men came to secure the tiger with talismans and chains, and then she was alone with only an official letter of thanks for her service to Ahnfi and some very-well-gnawed pork bones.

  * * *

  Chih paused.

  “If Dieu was meant to offer the first bites of her food to Ho Thi Thao, I suppose it makes sense that Ho Thi Thao never suspected her . . .”

  To their surprise, Sinh Loan was watching her with a nearly indulgent expression on her face.

  “Surely you know how silly your story is?”

  “I am telling it to you as it was told to me,” Chih said. “It has never been my habit to tell someone that their story is silly.”

  “But you never questioned it? Not once?”

  “It was told to me when I was very young. We question those stories less.”

  “So question it now,” said Sinh Loan, taking a tone a bit like that of Cleric Ruzhao, who taught the fourth and fifth year acolytes. However, Cleric Ruzhao had only made them write extra lines when they found themselves on the wrong path. Sinh Loan might do something much worse.

  As Chih thought, Sinh Cam’s long tail swished back and forth, and she dropped her chin down to her front paws.

  “I can smell that you are confused and worried,” the youngest sister said proudly. “I can smell that the scout has a lover among the miners of Suying. I can smell that the mammoth wishes she could sleep but feels that she must keep an eye on things . . .”

  “And Ho Thi Thao could certainly smell enough poppy to knock out a mammoth calf,” Si-yu said. “She must have known exactly what it was that Dieu was feeding her.”

  “Oh . . .” Chih considered. “Then I suppose she was very in love with Dieu.”

  Sinh Loan clapped her hands once in disapproval.

  “And what would that mean in the sad little story that you told?” she demanded. “That a great tiger like Ho Thi Thao had grown so heartsick for a skinny little poetry-reading scholar that she would allow herself to be drugged like a water buffalo? That she reckoned her love so cheap that it could be sent to Lanling to terrorize some dockworkers? What does that say?”

  “That it was a story told by humans who never heard it from a tiger, madam,” said Chih, and they sat and waited.

  Sinh Loan glared at them, and then with great dignity, she sat up straight.

  “Very well. But believe me, if this story is told to me like that a second time, I will not wait to hear more, and I will certainly eat the teller.”

  Chih wanted to say something about the fact that stories took longer than that to spread, but then Sinh Loan was speaking again, her voice falling into the easy sway of an elder sister entertaining her siblings with her stories.

  * * *

  Ho Thi Thao spent a week with Scholar Dieu under the branches of the red pine tree, but one morning, she found that the scholar had washed her clothes clean of fox’s blood and dressed herself again. It had only been a week, but she looked strange in her clothes again, and Ho Thi Thao was not s
ure she cared for it.

  “Take those off,” she tried. “Come back here, and I will cook you rabbit just as you like it, and after you have fed me, I will feed you until you are sleepy and ready for me to kiss you again.”

  “I can’t,” Dieu said regretfully. “I need to go to Ahnfi.”

  “Ah,” said the tiger. “Then I will go with you.”

  She followed the scholar all the way to Ahnfi, the city of cages by the sea. Ahnfi was the child of Pan’er, which sunk beneath the waves, and the latter-day daughter of that great city lacked all of the parent’s grace and beauty. Instead Ahnfi smelled like ten thousand people in one place, applying peony oil to their bodies to mask their smells and lighting whale-oil lamps in their windows to hold back the honest night. There were a thousand thousand things to eat in Ahnfi, everything from sheep to horse to cavy to beaver, but Ho Thi Thao did not think she could eat a bite without getting a mouthful of the unsavory taste underneath, something that told her that this place was dying and that the rebirth would not come easy.

  Together they came to a house that smelled of good tea and mild treachery, and Ho Thi Thao allowed Dieu to settle her there. The four piglets that the frightened servants brought to their table were more than satisfactory, and Ho Thi Thao gorged herself pleasantly on the food from her pretty wife’s hands, well-satisfied with the world.

  “We’ll stay in the city a year,” she said, “and then I will take you back to the mountains for a year. After that, we should know which we like better, but I can tell right now that it will be the mountains.”

  The scholar, however, was a nervous bride, and one still unused to the way of tigers. Perhaps she looked at Ho Thi Thao’s sharp claws and was afraid, or perhaps she considered Ho Thi Thao’s wicked teeth and wondered.

  No matter what the reason, the next day, Ho Thi Thao woke alone, and instead of the wife she had gone to bed with, there was only a simpering creature who shook like a winter leaf as she knelt at the door to the room.

  “Your wife has paid for the room,” she said, her voice soft and wobbling. “You will be fed and honored as is your right—”

  “But where is she?” demanded Ho Thi Thao, and the woman shook her head.

  “She has gone to register for the examinations at the Hall of Ferocious Jade,” said the woman, her tone faltering. As she grew angrier, it was harder and harder for Ho Thi Thao to look like a human. She grew larger and sharper, and her speech had more growls than words.

  “And she did not leave me anything to eat? She did not care to wake me to see her off?”

  The woman groaned at that, the noise so irritating that Ho Thi Thao killed her with a single bound, breaking the woman’s neck and cutting off that awful sound.

  That should have been breakfast, but Ho Thi Thao growled with fury. She would only eat if Dieu fed her, and Dieu was nowhere to be found. The woman she had killed lay at her feet, and in a fury, Ho Thi Thao stepped over her and walked out into the city, looking for her wife.

  Chapter Ten

  CHIH SHIVERED, and it was not just because of the cold. They had stoked the fire up, but it was doing them less good against the night. They were sat as close to it as they dared, and Si-yu was pressed close to them, holding Bao-so close on her other side.

  Sinh Loan smiled coldly.

  “Does it frighten you to think of what a hungry tiger might do in a city like Ahnfi-that-was?” she asked. “Are you thinking of all the people she might have killed?”

  “Yes,” Chih said. They had been taught that where a professional demeanor and inquisitiveness could not be found, honesty would have to serve. “Ho Thi Thao was angry, and she was offended. Ahnfi was the greatest city of the age, and she could not have gone five steps beyond the door without meeting someone else to hurt.”

  Sinh Cam shook her head.

  “No, she wasn’t offended, or she wasn’t just offended. She was heartbroken.”

  “And she was going to take it out on every human that crossed her path?” asked Si-yu with some indignation. “That’s terrible.”

  “What did you do the last time you got your heart broken?” asked Sinh Cam practically.

  “Shouted a lot! Signed up for every long patrol I qualified for, and made a nuisance of myself to whoever was assigned to ride it with me. Brushed Piluk until there was enough wool to felt up a coat for my baby cousin. I didn’t kill people.”

  “But perhaps you wanted to?” asked Sinh Cam, and there was something earnest in her voice.

  Si-yu hesitated, and Chih watched, fascinated.

  “She broke up with me and took an Ingrusk posting without letting me explain,” Si-yu said finally. “Maybe.”

  “But you wouldn’t,” said Sinh Cam. “And I wouldn’t. And Ho Thi Thao probably didn’t, either.”

  “She did,” Sinh Loan said stiffly. “Of course she did.”

  “In all fairness, elder sister, she likely didn’t,” said Sinh Hoa. “If she had, they would still have her skull hung up over the gate in Anh. She didn’t.”

  “Of course she did,” Sinh Loan said, and she turned her hard gaze to Chih. “Cleric, make sure you note the story as I have told it to you, and not as my young and foolish sisters have done.”

  Chih nodded, because that was what footnotes were for. They let out a deep breath, watching the plume of steam roll out in front of the firelight. They were so tired that they were shaking, and their eyes watered copiously.

  “Shall I continue?” they asked.

  Sinh Hoa went back to sleep, Sinh Cam nodded eagerly, and Sinh Loan, after a long moment, gestured her assent with a wave of her broad hand.

  * * *

  After that, there was nothing for Dieu to do but to prepare for her exams. Now that she was in the city, she was the closest she had ever been to the imperial scholars whose ranks she was hoping to join. She saw two of them on the street in their sheltered oxcarts, and when their two entourages met, a great shouting went up. None shouted louder than the two honored scholars themselves, dressed in the red robes lined with black that were their right to wear, flapping their long sleeves like indignant roosters.

  They struck her as being very like roosters, ready to kick the other to death for the matter of a few grubs or right of way on the thoroughfare. She tried to imagine what she herself might look like dressed in red and shouting in the street, and she couldn’t do it, or perhaps, she didn’t want to do it.

  When Dieu finally came to the Hall of Ferocious Jade, she felt like she was entering the mouth of a tiger’s cave, and it did not escape her awareness that she had done just that without this amount of fear and nerves.

  This is what I am meant to do, Dieu thought, pushing away her thoughts of roosters and tigers.

  She was the last prospective scholar to enter. Another turn of the water-clock, and the door would have been barred to her, not to open again for another four years.

  She was met at the door by a gaunt-faced man in the examiners’ dark orange robes, and he took in her travel clothes and her ragged appearance with a carefully but not perfectly concealed disdain. He examined her jade chip under a series of stacked lenses, and it seemed to Dieu that he was disappointed to find that it was not a fraud. He had no reason to have her driven off by the dogs that waited beside him, and so he returned the chip to her hand and asked her the three questions that every scholar entering the hall had to answer.

  Dieu of course, knew the questions by heart, just as she knew that she needed to answer yes to each one to be allowed entry. They were, as her tutor had said, the easiest questions she would be asked, so she should take the time to savor them before what came next.

  The examiner at the gate did not bother rising from his desk, and he gave her a weary look. He had likely asked these questions eighty times that day alone.

  “Do you enter the Hall of Ferocious Jade willingly and with no coercion?”

  “Yes,” Dieu said, because it was true. There was no family behind her that had tacked her braid to the wall b
ehind her to stop her head from drooping over her books in weariness. There was no lover held hostage until she emerged from the Hall with winning marks. She stood at the gates because of nothing but her own will.

  “Do you swear to honor the rules of the Hall of Ferocious Jade?”

  “Yes,” Dieu responded, because she did not want to be killed by the examiners or the angry ghosts of past scholars for the suspicion of cheating. The examiners could be reasoned with, perhaps even, if the whispers were true, bribed, but the dead students, not at all.

  “If you come out from the examinations a triumph, do you accept your place in the heavens of the empire, underneath the authority and protection of the emperor and the nobles?”

  Dieu started to say yes, and then abruptly, she realized that she could not, not honestly. In her head, she thought of the constellation that she lived and moved in, the one that she had accepted, the one under which she slept and the one to which her heart had already been given, and there was no emperor involved. There was only a flash of orange and black, the slow blink of eyes like jade.

  “No,” she said to her own surprise. “No, I can’t. I can’t.”

  She turned on her heel and walked away from the Hall of Ferocious Jade, even as the examiner behind her swore, even as the door closed and locked with the thud of an executioner’s blade. It separated her from the life that she had planned on living, and she realized, as she broke into a run, that she didn’t care about it at all, not really.

  She ran all the way down to the docks, where a crew of sailors were trying to find a way to load the snarling tiger onto a ship. The poppy had worn off, and the tiger lashed out with tooth and claw at everyone who came near.

  “I can help!” Dieu cried. “I can solve this for you!”

  The captain looked at her dubiously, taking in her curved shoulders and her meager frame.

  “You’d barely be a meal for it,” he started.

  “No,” she insisted. “Listen. I can charm tigers, listen, only listen.”