Hidden Cities (24 page)

It could still astonish him, how much his life had changed since one fog-bound night on the water. He could look around at Taishu, at everything he knew—his own village and Taishu-port, the coastline and the strait, the Forge, Santung beyond the strait, the goddess’s temples and precious little else—and see how very much had changed all over, everything perhaps except the coastline. He could look on a world of change and yet be astonished by how much had changed for him.

The more things changed, the less it seemed to matter. People were still idiots; the goddess was still remote. Even in the high houses and the palaces, people were still idiots, particularly that.

Here in this palace, now, he bottled up his fury and sat quiet, listening to priests and generals plotting how they might inveigle or bully or even dare compel the goddess into doing what they could not, snaring the dragon back into her captivity.

At the risk of feeling disloyal, he might at any time have said,
How do you know that she can do this thing?
There seemed to him small point in plotting the impossible.

Or he might have said,
If she can indeed do this thing, if she wanted to do it, do you not think she would have done it before this?

Or he might just have said,
If she does not want to do this thing, how in the world do you imagine that you can persuade her?

Any of those or all of them, one after another—but none of them, as it happened, because Mei Feng knew his thoughts as soon as he did, and frowned mightily at him across the broad space of the throne room, and so he sat in silence and was no help to anyone on either side of any argument at all.

He stayed for Mei Feng, for no reason else, because it made him happy simply to be with her. Which was just as well, because where the emperor had commanded him he had no right to leave. He was aware of that, vaguely. Nevertheless, it was only Mei Feng’s presence that kept him in increasing discomfort on the polished floor. Old legs were not made for kneeling long. He was used to standing, he could stand all night and into morning with the give of an unsteady deck beneath his feet, and his knees would take that and take it and never an ache or twinge. Here, though, these boards might be magnificent in their dark polished luster, but they were cruelly hard beneath old bones; and he was tired of listening to fools. The priestess from the temple was the only one who spoke sense, and of course they would not listen to her because she was a woman and a native and saying no to all their grand plans and propositions, saying
No, that will not work; this is a goddess you would treat with, and you cannot treat her so
.

Which was what he wanted to say himself, all he really wanted to say. So he held his tongue and his temper both, with a most extraordinary patience; he kept his place until at last the emperor dismissed all these idiots to further study and confabulation, against better ideas on a better day.

Old Yen might have hobbled out of the grand hall in pursuit of the priestess, only to tell her how glad he was of her wisdom, how grateful to hear it. He was painfully aware, though, that he should have supported her and had not. It would seem dishonest to make an ally of her now, walking out the two of them together, where he had done nothing when it mattered to deserve that alliance.

Besides, he wanted to spend more time, real time with his granddaughter.

Besides, his knees had stiffened up abominably, and the priestess was too limber. She was at the door and away before he had contrived to reach his feet.

So he looked instead for Mei Feng to appear at his elbow, dutiful granddaughter skipping across the hall floor as soon as she saw he was in difficulty—but she was unexpectedly slow, slower than he was even, using the willing anxious emperor for leverage as she pulled herself to her feet and shuffled over.

Predictably, she was scolding as she came: “And what, has age stolen your wit along with your tongue, that you didn’t think to ask for a cushion? The goddess herself could testify that we have enough of them here, enough to sit you in luxury all across this floor and halfway back to harbor; but you would first need to ask …”

What she meant, of course, was that she should have seen his discomfort sooner and had not, and was feeling guilty. What she ignored, of course, because it did not suit her, was that it was quite impossible for him or any man to call for a cushion in the emperor’s presence, in the emperor’s throne room yet, where the emperor himself sat uncushioned on the cold hard throne of jade.

The emperor was apparently feeling guilty on his own account. “You too, Mei Feng, you could have had a cushion. I could have thought. And you could have stayed where you were, I could have helped Grandfather come to you …”

She tilted her head back against his shoulder, to scowl up cat-like
into his face. She’d had her little cat in her lap before, but her slow rise from the stool had dislodged it. “Twenty steps! That’s hardly going to upset the baby. I’m not
ill
, Chien Hua. Only carrying my lord’s child …”

She wanted, Old Yen saw, to be petted like the cat, to have her two men chirrup at her. The trouble was, she was conspicuously ill: not carrying her lord’s child well, not well at all.

The emperor said a little of that, as much perhaps as he dared admit. “You were ill this morning.”

“I’m ill every morning now. Ever since that day coming back across the strait, when I was sick on the boat.” She shuddered at the memory, or else at the disgrace of being sick at sea, she who had been practically born there. “It means nothing. If I’m sick on the floor here, someone will clean it up.”

“No doubt. But I would rather not have you sick at all. You can’t afford it,” his long fingers tracing her body beneath her clothes, her bones beneath her skin. Old Yen knew that body, too well for heavy silks to disguise it. She had been work-thin before, all muscle and sinew and not a pad of fat; now he thought the emperor was right, she was too thin suddenly, except where her belly was just showing a bulge. Perhaps there too, perhaps she should be bigger by now. “And all this excitement,” the emperor went on, “all this froth in your head can’t be good for the child either. I think you should go to the Autumn Palace with my mother. We’ve kept men working out there, so you won’t have to camp. That was your idea, remember? It’s really quite comfortable now. And you’ll be safe, and separate from all of this, and my mother will take her doctors so I know you’ll be looked after, and …”

She said, “Separate from all this. Yes.
All this
being the dragon, and the war, and the goddess, and my friends, and my
man
, and …”
That’s you, fool
—she didn’t quite say the words but her voice did, and her hands most certainly did, clenching in the silk of his robe; her eyes too, lifting to glare at him.

“You never wanted anything to do with the war,” he muttered, increasingly defensive, increasingly lost.

“I never wanted
you
to have anything to do with the war. With Ping Wen’s stupid war. But you went ahead and did it anyway. And I was
pregnant
, and I knew Ping Wen was a traitor, so I just had to come after you—and now you want to send me
away
? With your
mother
?”

“I thought you and she were better friends now?”

“Only because we were both fighting Ping Wen, when we’d given up on fighting you. You can’t send me away with her, Chien Hua.”

“I don’t want to. I just think it’ll be better for you and for the baby if you go somewhere quiet. And you’ve no hope of leaving my mother behind, that’s her baby as much as it is mine, so …”

“I said you
can’t
send me. Because I
won’t
go.”

“Mei Feng. You hate these meetings, the endless wrangling; you’re just like your grandfather, you hate it when we even talk about the Li-goddess, because we’re not from Taishu and you think we don’t understand her. You don’t need to worry about me anymore, we’ve isolated Ping Wen on the mainland—your idea!—without any boat that he can use to send any kind of trouble after us. You’ve a baby to build inside you, and you need to build yourself up at the same time, and you’ll never do that while you’re here being sick and worrying about everything. Nothing’s going to be any easier for a long time yet, you’re not doing yourself or the baby any good; there’s just no reason for you to stay in the palace and be ill and unhappy and—”

“Oh, what, you mean I’d be better away in the hills there, being ill and unhappy and out of your sight? No wonder they call it your Hidden City, if you’re just going to hide me away there. With your
mother
, and everyone else you don’t want to deal with.”

“Mei Feng, I don’t know what you
want
 …”

They were both of them missing their cues here. If she could
just say
I want to be with you
, which was the blunt truth of it, he would be utterly disarmed and the fight would be over. But she wouldn’t say that now, she was too busy throwing stones and watching him duck, making him angry.

Old Yen couldn’t interfere, and didn’t want to watch.

Instead, he did what he had wanted to do all morning, what had been impossible till now: he turned his back on the emperor, and on his granddaughter, and walked out of there.

I
T WAS
Mei Feng’s privilege to abuse the emperor, to argue with him, to call him names and tell him he was wrong. She had immunity. With his child in her belly she had an absolute immunity, she was practically sacred in herself.

It was Old Yen’s privilege, it always had been, to take his boat to sea. He had immunity, in the eye of the goddess’s favor.

With one of her chosen children in the belly of his boat, that immunity was absolute. Not even the dragon could touch him.

He stole a little of Mei Feng’s immunity, then, to walk out of the imperial presence and out of the imperial palace, grandfather of the beloved concubine, untouchable, untouched.

Then he walked down to the harbor, to his beloved bastard boat, to claim his own.

“P
AO
!”

“Master?”

His voice called the boy tumbling out of the cabin before Old Yen had set so much as a foot on deck, he was that keen suddenly to be at sea.

“Run up to the temple and ask for one of the children to be fetched down.” It would be the castrated one, most likely, with his nurse. Old Yen didn’t care. “Say that we won’t be long gone, only that we must go now.”

The boy was learning ocean ways. He cast an eye at the water to double-check himself, and found that the tide had shifted not a
fraction from where he thought it ought to be at this time, this day; he lifted his head to sniff the wind; and frowned, and turned back to Old Yen with an argument half formed already, the apprentice ready to instruct his master.

He was a good boy, but this wasn’t the time. Old Yen was in a hurry. “Yes,” he said snappishly. “Nevertheless, we will bring her out into open water, despite tide and wind together. I will show you.
When
we are free to leave, which will be when you have run to the temple as I told you.”

Pao’s shifty glance toward the cabin door was something else altogether, a confession writ large, for anyone who could read the script of boy. Old Yen had fathered sons, raised them on and in and around this very boat; he knew.

He said, “You may see your—friend—off my boat at the same time. Now.” He wasn’t angry, only impatient. He might have expected this, coming back so precipitately; certainly he should have expected it sometime. Should not have forgotten that a boy was a boy above all, even in times like these. Especially, perhaps, in times like these.

“Master,” Pao said, almost desperately, “I don’t … If we shan’t be long at sea, I don’t need to go to the temple, I’ve got …”

His voice and his wits had both failed him, apparently, he needed rescue; and found it in the sudden opening of the cabin door, the little girl looking brightly out.

Little, little girl. If he tried, no doubt Old Yen would remember her name. Her face he was in no danger of forgetting.

He said, “Hullo. Have you been visiting my boat?”

She nodded cheerfully.

“And your sister too?”

Another nod, a little more wary, that came with a glance up at Pao. A boy is still a boy, and her sister was a pretty creature. Pretty and vacant, too easy a conquest perhaps, except that one little girl stood between her pretty helpless sister and the world.

One little girl and the goddess too. There was no telling when
the big girl would be vacant and when she would be possessed. Pao might be a boy, but he was no fool; Old Yen thought he could be trusted.

Aloud, still talking to the girl, he said, “We were about to take the boat out for a sail. Just until sundown. You can help if you like, while your sister sits up in the bows. I know she enjoys that. Pao will show you what to do. Later, you can give me a hand on the steering oar.”

She was no fool either, this sharp little thing; she knew there was no choice being offered here,
would you like to come to sea?
Old Yen had been very careful about that.

Besides, she was used to this, she knew about her sister’s borrowed authority. She went to Pao and took his hand, led him back into the cabin to help tell her sister. Old Yen was glad to see that, not to see trust dismayed.

I
T WAS
work with rope and oar and prayer together, to bring the boat out of harbor at such a time. Without the prayer, he still thought he might have done it. He knew all the workings of the boat intimately, and the waters here too: where the secret currents lay deep to grip the keel, which sail would bring her by the head so that she seemed to dance out against the run of wind and tide together. Prayer gave him confidence, though. What he might or might not manage, the goddess would guarantee.

Unless she knew where he was headed and why, unless she could read his heart. Apparently not. He’d not been certain of that.

Pray and betray. He had served her and observed her, respected and been grateful to her all his days, and never more so than now; and now he went to beg a favor if he could from the very power that opposed her, that he and Mei Feng and the emperor should all oppose.