by Sarah Zettel
“My uncle is Lien Jinn,” she said firmly. “Are you saying anyone will dare attempt his house, or will succeed in that attempt?”
“Lien Jinn?” repeated the guard, stunned. Mae Shan nodded once. She watched his face shift back and forth as some internal struggle played itself out.
Perhaps it will be the riverside after all.
He stared hard at her ring, now, she was sure, wondering whether she’d stolen it, but a soldier’s bearing was not something a casual thief could fake, and the the hunger for news was strong. “You’ll report to the mayor as soon as your mistress is safe?”
“I will come as soon as I am able.”
“Bring her and enter then.”
Mae Shan bowed in salute and thanks and returned to the thicket where she had left Anna–Tsan Nu and their gear.
“Come, mistress. We have been granted entry.” She hefted her bundle. Tsan Nu looked accusing.
“You did not say your uncle was Lien Jinn.”
“It is not a relationship I can acknowledge inside the Heart,” she said, taking her mistress’s hand. Who is upset at this news? You or your father? she wondered.
“My father says he is a pirate.”
“He is also a sorcerer,” Mae Shan told her. “And he is our only source of help right now.”
Tsan Nu fell silent, and permitted herself to be led through the guard’s portal by Mae Shan and the town’s lieutenant. He presented them with a hastily written passport stamped with his name and the city seal giving Mae Shan and her mistress permission to be out on the streets. Mae Shan tucked it into her sash, while declining his offer of escort. She knew her way.
Mae Shan had only found out about Uncle Lien by overhearing a conversation between her parents. There had been a drought, and things were hard with them. Then, a messenger with a scar over his eye had arrived bearing a letter and a string of silver. Mae Shan, as the tallest of her siblings, had been given the job of stretching up on tiptoe to peek through the window as Father read the missive. The messenger stood there with his thumbs tucked in his sash and his jaw moving constantly as he chewed betel nuts, or something equally noxious. Father weighed the silver in his hand and looked at Mother. Without a word, Mother took the silver and handed it back to the messenger.
“We will take nothing from such a man as Lien Jinn,” Father announced, dropping the letter onto the floor to show his total lack of respect for it. “He is a pirate and a rogue and I do not acknowledge him as family.”
The messenger shrugged, tucked the silver into his sleeve, and went away, without even bowing once.
The speculation that night in the sleeping room had been intense. Wei Lin claimed she had heard of Uncle Lien from her teachers. He was actually their grandfather’s brother. He was a sorcerer and a pirate and had a black beard two ells long that he could crack like a whip over the heads of his “nefarious” crew. Mae Shan wasn’t clear what “nefarious” meant, but it sounded appropriately awful. Her brother Zhi told Wei Lin not to be ridiculous, but he had heard from some older boys that Lien Jinn had once beheaded fifty men in a single hour with his machete because they had tried to hide one pearl from him.
In their excitement, they had forgotten to keep their voices down. Mother and Father had woken up furious, and Father had forbidden the name of Lien from ever passing his children’s lips again.
But Mae Shan’s imagination was fired, and from that time forward, she kept the net of her ears spread for any stories she might catch concerning her mysterious uncle, especially when she accompanied her father and older brother on the boat to sell their produce to the brokers at the markets. At her mother’s insistence, Mae Shan was forbidden to leave the boat, but that did not stop her from listening to the gossip that passed back and forth between the boats when Father and Zhi had gone to conduct their negotiations. It was amazing how much she could hear without leaving sight of the boat, or the warehouse door Father and Zhi had gone through.
All the various rumors and yarns she heard agreed about three things. The first was that Grandfather’s brother, her Uncle Lien Jinn, was a pirate, smuggler, and thief. The second was that he was a sorcerer of great ability who had once served the Heart of the World. The third was that he had a house in town. The length and abilities of his beard remained in dispute.
When Father caught her whispering her latest tidbits of information to Zhi, he beat her black and blue for defying his order. After that, Mae Shan became determined to meet this fabled relation. She gathered all the information she could and stole out through the streets at night. She was big and she was fast, and she kept to the river’s edge where the farmers moored their boats on market days. All of which probably saved her life, she reflected, now that she knew more about the streets of Huaxing. She had found the house, however, and she had scaled the wall, and then fell on her head.
The woman she would come to know as Auntie Cai Yun found Mae Shan wandering in a daze by the lily pool. Mae Shan remembered nothing of that. She did remember waking up in a strange, luxurious bed. Next to her sat a white-haired man with a beard that was nothing more than a tracing of neatly trimmed snowy hairs along the line of his chin.
“And now that the lily blossom has opened, perhaps she will reveal to us who she is,” he said mildly.
Mae Shan’s back had gotten up, pushed in part by the strangeness of being referred to as a lily blossom. That was the sort of thing people normally said to Wei Lin.
“I am Mae Shan Jinn, daughter of Menh Jinn and the great-niece of the mighty Lien Jinn, so you will tell him I am here to pay my respects. Please,” she added, filial piety and headache rapidly wilting defiance.
The aged man blinked at her. “You are Menh’s daughter? And you climbed my wall to see the mighty Lien Jinn?”
Mae Shan nodded, the feeling that she was missing something perfectly obvious beginning to dawn on her.
“You’d better tell me how you came to be here.”
Mae Shan did, realizing by the time she was done that despite the disappointing length of his beard, it was Uncle Lien she spoke to.
“You are brave and you are audacious, Mae Shan, daughter of Menh,” he said when she had finished. “But I sense also you do have some piety in you despite your excursion tonight. So. We will wrap your head in a vinegar bandage and you will stay here until dawn, when you will return to your father’s boat with your cousin, Cai Yun. He does not know her and she will not give her right name. You will not speak of where you have been, and you will take the beating you deserve for your disobedience. You will from this day forward disdain our relationship as you should.”
Despite his words, a light shone in his keen eye.
“And then?” Mae Shan ventured.
“Who am I to say what a stubborn girl will do then?” he replied placidly. “But I think a short ladder inside the wall is needed, just in case.”
That was the beginning of a strange and surreptitious relationship. Sometimes during the fall trips, Mae Shan would sneak away in the night to visit her uncle, and sometimes she would only wander the garden, as the house was shut up tight. Sometimes she would glimpse Uncle Lien in one of the riverside teahouses, dressed as a merchant or a sailor, and she would in her casual way of eavesdropping overhear stories of her family and the wide world beyond the riverbanks and farms.
All that came to an end when Wei Lin was selected to enter the Heart of the World. Lonesome and disappointed, despite the fact that this was the thing everyone had prayed for, Mae Shan had argued with her father over some trifle and run to Uncle Lien’s gardens, without even taking her regular precautions. As was his way, he heard her out thoughtfully, until she asked to be allowed to come live with him and be a pirate too.
“No, Mae Shan.”
“Why not? I’m big, for a girl. I’m strong. I can learn to use a sword …”
“I know that,” said Uncle Lien, “and you will, but not in my service.”
“But why, Uncle? I want …”
He held u
p his hand. “Because you have the possibility of a good life ahead of you that dwelling on this connection would ruin. You must go home, Mae Shan, and you must not come here again. I will ask you to trust that I will still know of you and will be here if you ever have nowhere else to turn. But you are a young woman now, not a mischievous girl, and you must act like it.”
Mae Shan bridled. “What life will I have? Wei Lin’s going to forget all of us behind the Saffron Walls. They will marry me off to some fat farmer and I will raise fifteen children, each one rounder and more dirty than the last, and that will be that.”
“That is not true,” replied Uncle Lien.
“What do you know, old man?” shouted Mae Shan.
Uncle Lien did not blink or hesitate. “I know I am a sorcerer and that I have drawn a horoscope for my hardheaded grand-niece which says if she embraces her duty, she will stand against fire and death and be the salvation of the helpless.”
Stand against fire and death and be the salvation of the helpless, Mae Shan turned those words over in her mind as she walked with Anna down the deserted streets of Huaxing. She shook her head. Who knew one could be so tired on the day one’s destiny came true?
You have not saved her yet, Mae Shan. Keep your wits about you.
The silence of Huaxing’s streets discomfited Mae Shan. The city was a prosperous place, as river ports generally were, and she was used to it being full of noise and life. In daylight she had only ever seen its thoroughfares full of pedestrians, carts, carriages, and sedan chairs. On this day, a single person here or there darted furtively between the houses. Guards marched in pairs, their square-toed shoes slapping hard against the cobbles. Mae Shan and Anna were stopped three separate times and ordered to produce the passport. She pictured the mayor huddled in his villa, staring up the river at the cloud of smoke still visible over the hills. Doubtless he wondered which rumors to believe, waited for his magistrates and envoys to bring news and feared what it might be, and tried to keep the people indoors to slow gossip and the panic it bred.
Mae Shan and Anna rounded a corner from the empty Street of Letter Writers onto the Street of Five Golden Willows. All at once, one of those furtive shadows plowed straight into Mae Shan, knocking all the wind out of her. She just had time to reach out and grab the elbow of a skinny, dirty boy whose eyes flashed fear and mischief before he squirmed away.
“Stay here!” shouted Mae Shan to Anna. She was on the boy in three running strides, catching his ear between her thumb and forefinger and dragging him to a halt.
“Ow!” he cried. “Ow! Please, mistress! Let me go! I didn’t mean to run into you! I’m only trying to get to my grandmother! She’s very sick, mistress, and my mother fears for her! Please, mistress!”
In no mood to be patient, Mae Shan pinched his ear harder, ignoring his cries. “You will return my paper, Master Thief, then we will discuss where you’re going.”
The boy slid his gaze sideways and got a look at her thunderous face. Seeing she was not even beginning to believe his story, he stopped his struggles and held out the grubby hand that clutched the now very wrinkled passport.
“Thank you, Master Thief.” Mae Shan plucked the paper from his fingers and returned it to her sash.
Anna was staring at the boy who was no taller than she was. “My father says this boy is dangerous,” she whispered. “He says you should kill him.”
Her words startled Mae Shan badly, but she did not let that show. “Well, Master Thief?” She shook the boy by his ear. “Do you hear what my mistress tells me?”
“Ai-ah!” he cried. “Mistress, please, I swear, I’m sorry. Don’t harm me, please! I was only …”
A new voice cut across whatever the boy had been about to say. “Only what, you monkey? You shame of your family?”
An old man hobbled out of the mouth of an alleyway, leaning heavily on a gnarled cane. He had more hair on his chin than on his head, and all of it was wispy and snow-white. He bowed deeply before Mae Shan.
“Mistress, this most undeserving and unfilial child is my grandson. I beg you show mercy to him. Return him to me and I will see he is well punished and such thievery will not happen again.”
“No, Mae Shan.” Anna grabbed her sleeve. “They are not human. They will tell on us to the Phoenix. Father says you must kill them both, right now.”
Mae Shan swallowed against the tremor that ran through her. What was happening here? Could she trust this ghost that held possession of her mistress?
The old man bowed again. “I beg you, mistress. We are an old and respected family and we have resided long in this city. This child’s disobedience has caused his father to tear out his own beard and his mother to weep tears of shame. Give me back this worthless youth and let me take him home. If the guards find him, they will surely give him a hundred lashes. That is the penalty the mayor has declared for looting. Please, mistress.”
“No, Mae Shan!” said Anna urgently.
The “grandfather” was probably lying, but what was the ghost doing? Mae Shan swallowed again, and pushed the boy into the old man’s arms.
“Take him then, Grandfather, and see that he does not thieve from soldiers anymore.”
“A blessing upon you for this mercy, mistress!” The old man clamped his clawed hand around the boy’s wrist and bowed three times to show his gratitude. Then, with a kick, he sent the boy running back down the alley, hobbling behind with surprising swiftness, even as he waved his cane in the air to urge the boy on.
“Why did you do that?” demanded Anna. “You heard Father. Now he’s very angry with you.”
“I heard,” said Mae Shan solemnly. “I also know that mercy, especially in times of trial, goes further than the harshest punishment.”
“But …”
“I have done what I have done.” Mae Shan took Anna’s hand again, but did not look down at the girl. She feared to see the angry ghost looking out of her green eyes. “On my head be it.”
Keeping her eyes straight ahead she hurried down the street toward her uncle’s house, forcing Anna to trot to keep up.
From the alley shadows, an old man and a young boy watched her depart. Then they both resumed their shapes as foxes and slipped away in the opposite direction.
There were no other such encounters as they worked their way down to the riverside. From the bleary, grim faces of the soldiers they encountered, Mae Shan guessed the mayor, from conscientiousness or fear, had them patrolling through the night to keep such opportunists on the move, if not actually in their hidey-holes. If the man and the boy were not more cautious, they would suffer worse than a sore ear and wounded pride.
Anna had not spoken one word since Mae Shan had let the thieves go, and that silence was as worrying as anything that had happened yet. Was the ghost whispering to her even now? What was it saying?
Be there, Uncle. This is far too much for me.
At last they reached River Street. The grandest houses with the highest walls lined its landward side overlooking the great river with its green-brown waters as full of boats as the streets were empty of people. Flat-bottomed barges such as she remembered from her childhood were poled close enough to the shore that she could see the owners, working steadily, numbly, fleeing as fast as water and muscle could take them. The fear of the fire, the mob, and the demons at the Left Gates returned to Mae Shan as she watched and she had to lower her gaze, lest that fear overwhelm her.
Three boats were tied up to the piers outside Uncle Lien’s gates and Mae Shan was able to take heart again. If he were in his other house, or out on the sea, those would have been up on cradles on the muddy banks.
Unless he had already fled by the other means at his disposal.
Mae Shan turned from the water and picked up the baton for the bronze bell that hung beside the elaborately carved front gate. Uncle Lien had once told her the bell was enchanted and would not ring for any who wished him ill. She had sometimes wondered if this were true. Between Uncle Lien and Auntie Cai Yun,
she had been told that practically every pale brick in the garden walls was enchanted.
Anna stared at the walls, her jaw hanging open. “Does he think he’s the emperor to have woven himself so much protection?” The exclamation was awestruck. Mae Shan felt obscurely proud.
She struck the bell three times and its clear tone rang out across the silent streets and the noisy river. She held firmly to Anna’s hand while they waited.
“I don’t want to go in there,” said Anna. “I’m afraid.”
“You are or your father is?” Mae Shan asked, trying to keep her tone neutral.
“I am. I’m not sure I’ll be able to hear Father inside the walls.”
“If your father is truly safe within your heart, no enchantment can keep him from you.” Mae Shan had no idea whether she spoke the truth, but the words seemed to content Anna for the moment.
Several dark figures moved on the veranda of the house, walking down the steps and the paved path toward the gate. Before long, Mae Shan recognized Auntie Cai Yun dressed in a simple black robe with a red skirt and sash, and carrying a stout cudgel. Behind her came two strangers, both men, both with the seamed, bark-brown faces and square hands of those who had spent years on ships and the open sea. The taller of the two had a series of red and blue knots tattooed on his rough hands and a long knife stuck in his coarse-woven sash. The other made do with a cudgel much like Auntie Cai Yun s, and a look that could have split wood.
As Cai Yun and her escort drew closer, Mae Shan could see her fine-boned face was drawn tight with determination so that the bones of her cheeks and jaw stood out in sharp relief. If Uncle Lien was sending her to the gate with two of his rougher sailors, things had been bad, or were threatening to become so.
Auntie Cai Yun was actually Mae Shan’s cousin, but there was nearly twenty-five years difference in age between them, so Mae Shan used the more respectful title.
When Auntie Cai Yun reached the gate, Mae Shan bowed. “Auntie Cai Yun, it’s Mae Shan!”