Raising Fire

by James Bennett

  “It was a simple thing, Oh Wise One,” the merchant said. “Such power, conjured by a re-forged harp. An ancient enchantment, the work of Fay magic, the lullaby was more powerful than the English King, the Pope and all the court put together could have imagined. A lullaby to cross oceans, to touch all lands.” The merchant’s voice trembled as he spoke, a feverish undercurrent of wonder. “You would have wept to see it, lord. The silver tide washed out from the hall on Thorney Island, striking the bells of Westminster Abbey, the old shrine resonating with fairy music. The echoes shivered across London, the notes sounding in every steeple from St. Clement Danes to St. Paul’s and beyond. The music rippled over the city walls, across the fields and into the land, igniting every church along the way like … like dead trees in a forest fire! Windsor, Winchester, Rochester. On and on. By nightfall, even the bells in Scotia were said to have rung.”

  The lullaby, the merchant went on, had drifted on the winds across the sea, across the Holy Roman Empire and Byzantium, into far, dusty Pi-p’a-lo and the Caliphates of Persia. It was in the air. In the sky. In the fabric of things, he said, an enchantment flowing out in all directions, echoing off still water and between hollow trees, eventually spilling into the east. As the song progressed, the magic amplified, weaving outward to encompass the world. And wherever a Remnant heard the song—be they dragon, giant, troll, goblin, wizard or witch—the music would entrance and calm these creatures, the ground under them bubbling and seething, swallowing hundreds down into the Sleep, down into deep, though temporary, graves. Such mo shu! Such power! The lullaby, as the merchant called it, was not without its ambassadors, its diplomats and traders. Envoys like himself, the merchant said, who rode a day or so ahead of the musical tide to speak with the rulers of foreign lands, to press upon them the turning of the age. The envoys travelled at great personal risk to herald the advancement of all that was human, to stress the importance of magical suppression, the enthralment of the ever-warring Remnants.

  It is my honour and my duty, the merchant said—through the mouth of the sage, of course—to present this great golden compromise of choosing one representative from each Remnant tribe to remain safely awake among humans. As long as said Remnant swears to uphold the Lore and refrain from interfering in human affairs, then my sage will gladly sing their name and the lullaby, the enchantment, will not touch them.

  The rest of the Remnants, however, must fade and dwindle into the Sleep, safely removed from the ages, a historic truce to end all discord. At least, he continued, the Remnants must sleep until such a time came when the Xian returned, the climate for peace dawning again, commencing a new golden age where the darkness had passed and Remnants and humans could live in peace. All the legends claimed that the Xian had promised to return, did they not? Everybody knew that.

  Many rulers, like the Khan, had resisted the idea, the merchant confessed, scoffing at the Pact as folly, a truce bound to break—but each king, queen, baron, contessa, sultan, tsarina, pasha, rani and shah soon found themselves inspired by the dream of growth and wealth and power. Of progress.

  The sage, white-haired and dark-eyed, had looked up then, and addressed the Khan in his own voice, making it clear that he was no mere translator, no mere servant.

  Look at the troubles in your lands, he said. Look at the battle between Remnants and humans. Tell me, where do you see its ending?

  Gradually, her heart sinking to depths that only the young can feel, Jia had watched, helpless, as Kublai’s scowls melted into frowns and then into hesitant smiles. The Khan was listening, and, to her horror, nodding in agreement.

  She had looked at the merchant, this Marco Polo, his tongue working overtime as he seduced the Khan, laying silk upon silk, and she could see his hunger as plain as day. For trade. For glory. For rank and power. Frowning, she’d turned her attention to the other envoy, the wandering sage, who for all his thinness and long white hair was not yet old, an impression that had puzzled her at first. Alarm scattered all her perceptions as she realised that he was staring directly up at the dais.

  As she met his strange violet eyes, he bowed slightly in greeting.

  That was all weeks ago. The lullaby had wound its way into the Middle Kingdom with the Great Khan’s blessing—an unusual move from one so staunchly resistant to foreign influence—and Jia Jing, the chosen Imperial ward, could do nothing but watch as the creeping spell ensorcelled her kith and kin, putting the last ragged remnants of her herd under the Long Sleep. From a high watchtower, the white-haired sage had sung her name into the dusk, or so she was told, unable to hear him in the achingly sweet yet terrible music resounding from every temple, every hall, the lullaby taken up by every zither, lute, drum and gong in Xanadu.

  In the wild-flower meadow beyond the palace wall, she had wept and kissed her parents goodbye, stern Ziyou and gentle Ye, who were as gods to her. No more would the three of them run wild with the wind across the northern plains, Ziyou whinnying laughter as he goaded Jia to leap gullies and streams, Ye chiding her husband and warning of stones and broken legs, laughing all the same. No more to sit on her mother’s lap in human form, her father cradling them both and a yellowing storybook from the palace library, reading the old tales of the realm, his voice rising to mimic the fright of the Monkey King as he raced from Ox-Head and Horse-Face at the gates to the underworld.

  No more. Jia had listened to her parents’ parting advice, to serve the Khan well, and to heed their reassurance that all would be well.

  We will return one day, daughter, they had told her. When the world is ready for magic again. When the Xian return from the Dark Frontier. We too will come home.

  Jia had one hope and one hope only, and that was to believe them. There was no room to focus on the alternative if she expected to go on with a sound mind, to live. And so the music had come weaving through the trees, an invisible serpent hushing over the grass, bringing loss and loneliness and change and sleep. Then, slowly, one by one, the gathered herd had slumped to the ground and the ground had bubbled and churned, opening in deep, dark funnels of molten earth. Down, down, her parents went, the wild flowers closing over their heads. In moments, the lullaby faded and her mother and father were gone.

  This morning, Jia sat and pouted on the palace steps, remembering. Pining. She missed them. Already she missed them with the aching bewilderment of an only child left to wonder why neither of them had contested the Khan’s will, why they had agreed to leave her behind. At nine years of age, her green silk dress tattered at the hem and her long black braid woven with happenstance leaves, Jia didn’t quite understand why the Khan had chosen her alone to remain. She was the youngest of the herd, true—barely a foal—and thus most useful to the Wise One and all the shining dynasties to come, but what dark fate lay ahead of her? What purpose? Why had her parents refused to tell her? Were they afraid she might refuse?

  At the high altar in the temple, she had bent to sign the merchant’s Pact, nothing more than a tatty bit of scroll, and intoned the sacred words, repeating the chief monk’s oath. “To serve the Emperor of Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom, for all the time to come.” All of the priests and all of the people had witnessed this, a declaration of Remnant alliance and loyalty.

  You serve the Dragon Throne now, the monk had hissed at her, a hunched, wizened elder with no teeth. And you have sworn to uphold the Lore. Make no mistake, your survival depends on it!

  Much as she disliked this warning, the honour was indeed a grand one, and publicly she displayed a quiet gratitude, bowing where necessary, kneeling when required, a distant yet agreeable smile balanced on her lips.

  Privately, it was no use. Sitting on the steps, Jia wiped an eye. Ziyou and Ye might have left these lands like all of her kind, but the memory of them still galloped across the plains of her dreams. Like it or not, she was the last of the sin-you—what the Italian merchant called a “unicorn,” though she disliked the foreign term, disliked hearing her unique and extraordinary kind reduced to nothing more tha
n a European counterpart when she had never been anything other than herself. And every day, she felt the same ache, the same longing, the same need to remind herself.

  They are not dead. They are sleeping.

  To take her mind off her loss, she turned her thoughts to her guardian, her protector (she refused to entertain the word keeper, although she knew, as all her kind knew, that keeper was the uncomfortable truth). This recent change in the Khan’s outlook, his shift from stubborn pride in the realm’s existing state of affairs to a growing concern over its position, lay firmly at the newcomer’s feet, Jia thought. These days, the Khan spent so much time with the dusty Italian merchant, Jia felt just as abandoned by him as she did by her parents. Kublai and this Marco Polo, who’d spent years trekking down the Silk Road and now walked the stone paths of the great garden, chatting through the linguistic efforts of the little scribe bobbing between them. Listen to them! The Khan and his guest. Laughing in the shade of the willow trees!

  Jia scrunched up her face as she heard them, the Khan’s chuckles rumbling up the dazzling marble steps where she sat in the shadow of the watchtower. Like a spindle for the sun, the edifice loomed above her, the Great Khan’s summer palace, Jewel of the North, the rooms of which were all gilt and painted with figures of men and beasts and birds, and with a variety of trees and flowers, all executed with such exquisite art. The beauty of the place had dwindled somewhat in the weeks since the Khan had capitulated to his guest and agreed that the dragons whispering high through the air and the wailing ghosts and the fearsome hopping jiangshi would prove a sword in the cog of any future world empire. Not to mention the skin walkers, the fire-eating goats and the rampaging raksha demons. All must give up. All must give way.

  And as for me? I do not belong here …

  All Jia had to do was lift up her dress a couple of inches and look at her glossy golden hooves on the sun-drenched steps to know this.

  She was thinking this when the shadow fell across her. She started, looking around and up at the silhouette on the terrace behind her. It was the other one. The sage who had arrived with Polo, guiding him across the Taklamakan Desert by all accounts, this tall wanderer with the long hair and fine-boned face, both so white that they shone silver in the sun. Why hadn’t she heard him approach?

  “Good day to you, Daughter of Empires.”

  He moved into the shade of a pillar where she could see him, take in his long robe, the red silk patterned with stars, the formal garb tied loosely at the waist. She recognised the foreign garb as a kimono, an imported luxury—or a stolen bounty—from Japan, and she was already scowling. He probably fancied himself as some kind of sorcerer or prophet-of-the-sands, muttering this and that cosmic nonsense into the ears of fools.

  Jia, who was in no mood for chatter, screwed up her nose even further. She had not forgiven him for singing her name from the watchtower weeks ago, whatever the bidding of the Khan.

  “I am the daughter of Ziyou and Ye, both fallen into the Sleep. And there is but one empire to my knowledge, the greatest upon the earth. I linger here at the wishes of Kublai Khan. Who are you to creep up on one under his protection?”

  To her frustration, the man in the robes chuckled, his scrawny shoulders shaking. Calming himself, he leant down towards her, his strange shadowed eyes like fragments of twilight.

  “An honoured guest, Miss Jing,” he told her, the sound of her name, unoffered, startling her. His accent was as strange as his eyes, a soft, guttural twang from Deguo, the Kingdom of the Franks, that for all its outlandishness courted her attention. His familiar tone, however, nettled her. He smelled of rice wine and dusty scrolls, a combination that she wished she could find unpleasant, seeking a reason to mock him. “I have come to Xanadu—or Shangdu or Cambalu or whatever you like to call it—to foster peace with the Middle Kingdom, to ensure Master Polo’s safety and advance the progress of the Long Sleep. Perhaps I hoped to make a friend or two of the Remnants in these parts, offer my comfort and my counsel, help them adjust to life under the Lore. Alas, all I see is a rude little girl.”

  “Then you don’t see enough,” Jia said, glaring up into his porcelain face, his sharp nose perched above her, casting a shadow of amusement. “For I see more than an interfering sage, dressed in the guise of a man. I see one who would never care about peace, friendship or another’s safety without a heavy price. I see one who doesn’t belong here any more than I do. A creature just as lost and abandoned as—” She caught herself, her breath hitching in her throat. “Oh!”

  Jia had thought this was reasonably clever, up to the point of her shock. As a sin-you, a living, breathing symbol of justice, she had the extraordinary talent of perceiving truth from lie, a talent inherent to all her kind and one that, naturally, made her invaluable to the Great Khan’s court. It was like breathing; as Jia regarded the sort-of-man before her, there was no doubt in her mind about his real nature. And once hitting on the truth, it was hard to keep a grimace of shame from edging through her expression, which only grew deeper when the man straightened up to laugh. Echoes skittered up and away into the palace like doves released from a cage.

  “You wound me.” He pressed a hand to his chest, his eyelids fluttering. “Why, it’s almost as if you’re the first person to ever point that out. Such insight! Such wisdom! Where would the Khan be without you?”

  “I didn’t—”

  He cut her off. “It’s a shame you do not like me, child. The truth is I’m not unused to such greetings. Humans fear what they don’t understand. Which leaves me wondering—what’s your excuse?”

  “I … I am not afraid of you.”

  “Wunderbar. Your courage will serve you well in the days ahead. Our business here is done, you see, the Pact signed and sealed in the east, but the Khan has asked me to stay on longer. I’m afraid you’ll have no choice but to endure me.”

  Jia’s heart sank to new, uncharted depths.

  “Here? In Xanadu?” Why was she trembling so? Could he tell? “Why?”

  “Oh, something about an education,” he said. “The taming of ill-mannered wards. That kind of thing.”

  Just like that, Jia was scowling again.

  “And you were happy to accept, of course,” she shot back, looking to prick him in return. “For a price.”

  His mirth resolved into a thin-lipped smile.

  “I had heard that your kind see much, truth from lie, the real from illusion, and it fascinated me so. How could one stand before such a creature, his heart rendered as naked as a babe?” He told her this and then, all seriousness, his nose came swooping down towards her again, almost meeting the end of her own. In one swift, graceful motion—the flick of a fish in a pond—he pressed a finger firmly to the middle of her forehead, where the curved point of her secret nature lay hidden beneath her skin. “Well, I’ll tell you. I am a fairy, one of a race that you call the Xian. We are known for our glamour and tricks. And don’t you ever forget it, you naughty green filly.”

  Jia was on her feet—her hooves—at once. All outrage and wonder, she knocked the sage’s finger away and would have delivered a rather sharp kick to his root-thin shins if the Great Kublai Khan and the dusty Italian merchant hadn’t broken through the trees at just that moment, walking onto the broad stone terrace that spread out from the foot of the palace steps.

  “… built this place when my awful grandfather burnt Zhongdu to the ground,” the Khan was saying, his long golden robes glittering in the sun. “Here I have entertained many marvels—from fox spirits to firewalkers—and pleasured many wives.”

  This boast might have impressed the famous Marco Polo, but for all the little scribe’s deciphering chatter, the dark-haired young man in the ragged tunic couldn’t quite seem to grasp the sense of it. Pleasured? he enquired. Wives? Then he gave up, making a strange little sound in his throat, his cheeks turning red. Kublai, who had emerged from the trees with much the same grace as a water buffalo, stifled a chuckle. The hand rising towards his mouth twisted into an
elegant summons as he noticed the pale sage and the little girl standing on the steps.

  The sage and the girl bowed, their argument forgotten. Or perhaps postponed.

  “Ah, Master Von Hart. Welcome, lord, once more to our lands. After all, are you not written into our legends, having fought the white wyrm in the mountains east of here threescore years ago? Are you not older and paler than the walls of Xanadu herself?”

  “All this and more, Great Khan.”

  “Come, Jia, show some courtesy. Bring our envoy extraordinary down here beside the pool. My servants will serve us some tea.” The Great Khan clapped his hands. He clapped them right next to the little scribe’s ear, so no one could be in any doubt who he meant by “servants,” and the little scribe hurried off, rustling down a path between the trees. “I am passing the hour with your courageous friend Master Polo, who really does tell the most remarkable tales. Ghosts in the desert, wasn’t it? And visits to cities years out of his way.” The Khan winked at the young merchant. “Jia Jing, of all my subjects, will happily tell us the truth of them.”

  Polo spluttered at the joke, but he took his place easily enough on the low stone wall around the pool. Now it was Jia’s turn to redden, embarrassed by the thought of the Khan putting her on show. She stared into the pool, the afternoon sun glimmering in the water like the coins strewn on the bottom. Cherry blossoms bobbed on the ripples made by the white and orange koi, both liquid in the scattering light. So much was scattered these days. So much lost.

  The little scribe reappeared from the bushes bearing a rattling tray with a teapot and several cups set out upon it. He was setting this down before the Great Khan as Jia in her tattered green dress and Von Hart in his long red robe joined them on the terrace.

  “Jia, my petal, why do you look so glum?” the Khan asked when the two of them drew near. “Speak up now, my girl. You mope around my halls like a ghost and barely pay attention to matters of state, which is where your lessons will lead you in time. Tell me that your downcast eyes are due to the heat or the brewing war with the Shogunate Regents of Nippon. Anything but the Tiaoyue!”