Hidden Cities (26 page)

“Oh, gods, I don’t know,” Han said, laughing, hurting at the hard of it. “She doesn’t tell me that.”

“Perhaps, do you think, we might
ask
?”

 

hings change.

That was the lesson of Pao’s life, his recent life.

He had been in swift succession a peasant boy, a soldier and a sailor. He still felt the same inside, he still recognized himself every morning: the body he woke into, the feel and stretch of it, the face he saw reflected in a bucket of wash-water. He needed someone else to tell him he was different now, and there was no one.

That was one of the changes. All his life before, he had seen the same people about him every day: his family, their neighbors, the village down the way. Wagoners on the road and boatmen on the river. Until the emperor’s men came and took him to be a soldier. Then he was alone, no one to witness to the life he’d had before. No one to care. A peasant boy, what was that, why would it matter?

So then he was a soldier, one in a crowd, almost invisible even to himself until a sergeant picked him out and sent him to Old Yen to be a deckhand.

Sometimes it seemed that his own name was the only thing he kept, from one shift to the next. Even that didn’t seem to mean him any longer, when he no longer knew quite what he meant.

Things change, and not always for the worse. Perhaps his name was learning a new meaning, as Pao became more and more the sailor. He had his sea-legs and a little sea-sense now. When he was frightened now, it was always of something that came from the land.

Almost always. The dragon frightened him, more than he could say. That was just good sense, no shame, though she was entirely a creature of the sea, storm and wind and water. Even Old Yen, he thought, was a little afraid of the dragon.

Fear hadn’t stopped the old man bargaining with her while Pao clung to the boat. Pao might have been ashamed of that, except that someone had to stay with the girls. Even to himself, they were excuse enough.

T
HINGS CHANGE
, but not everything changes.

This boat, this bastard boat: she didn’t change. Her master might replace every timber in her frame, he might fit new masts and new sails and rig her all anew and she would still be the same wilful, wayward creature, tricky in any weather, responsive only to him. Pao was learning to handle her, but mostly what he learned was that she would not be handled except by Old Yen. Her own choice of master, he thought sometimes, as though she really were the stubborn living thing they all liked to pretend.

Renew every plank and every rope, she’d still smell the same, of salt and fish and bilgewater below. She’d still kick beneath bare feet in a following wind, still wallow in the troughs of a high sea, still try to turn side-on to the swell and so broach. Still be slow and sluggardly against the steering oar, almost too heavy to be hauled across the wind.

She’d still respond to Old Yen’s wise old hand, and not to Pao’s. He was sure of that.

T
HINGS CHANGE
.

A week ago, this was the only boat that dared go to sea alone. A fleet might cluster around her, too close for comfort in a boat that liked her sea-room, but no one else would sail in the dragon’s shadow. Even with an escort child aboard, there was not a sailing-master on Taishu prepared to venture out unless he followed Old Yen’s wake. A week ago.

Now?

Now all the fleet was gone from Taishu-port, and Old Yen’s boat rocked here against the quay alone. Old Yen was ashore, at the palace, where he preferred suddenly to spend his time. The fleet sailed without him and without the magic children too, because he had struck a bargain with the dragon; which left Pao here, on the boat because he had nowhere else to be.

Not alone, though, because things change.

P
AO STOOD
on deck and gazed around at the empty harbor; then he turned aft to where the little girl stood with her arms stretched high above her head, small hands clinging as best they could to the steering oar.

“Where are we going, Captain Shola?”

“Home,” she said. Of course. “We’re going home.”

Home
meant her mother and the temple on the cliff, above the creek. Twice now, Pao had taken her and her sister away from there. Or Old Yen had done it, rather, and at the emperor’s order, but Pao had helped.

Shola didn’t seem to bear a grudge. Her sister, Jin—well, it was hard to know what Jin might want, but she bore no grudges either. He was sure of that.

Things change; Jin smiled when she saw him. That was all for now, but it was enough. For now.

“How’s the weather?”

“Easy sailing,” she said, gazing about with a faraway look, as a sailor might, as she thought Old Yen did exactly. “Wind’s in the west, south and west; he’ll take us home.”

He was and he would, if they were going. The little girl might only be at play, but she was playing with what she truly had to hand. Pao liked that, and admired it, and wished that he could offer her something better.

“Soon now, perhaps,” he said, the best he had, a hope that she had already and did not need from him. “Soon, they’ll let you go,
perhaps.” Why not, when the children weren’t needed anymore, now there was a pact with the dragon?

She just looked at him, a little more cynical than he was. “Where’s Jin?”

“In the cabin.”

A mighty frown. “You shouldn’t leave her.”

“She sent me to fetch you. We have made tea.”

“You shouldn’t leave her with the
kettle
…!”

And Shola was already bustling past him, on her way to save big sister from herself. Pao grinned as he followed in that small determined wake, because things change but Shola was too young yet to understand that, quite.

T
HEY CAME
into the cabin and there was the kettle, yes, steaming over a charcoal pot; and there was Jin, yes, close enough that Shola might well worry.

Not Pao. He had seen the slow change in her big raw hollow sister, seen it and treasured it and said not a word about it, not to alarm or excite the little girl, not to alarm or excite himself.

Pao had grown up with sisters on all sides, older and younger than himself. He had missed them in the army, on the road. There were women, there was a great deal of talk about women and some of it excited him, some excited even as it appalled, but none of it was a substitute for what he’d lost. He liked having girls about him, at ease, at play.

It didn’t happen, couldn’t happen: not on the road, not in Santung what short time they were there, and not on Taishu either. The local girls were frightened, or else they were taken and claimed by older men, or both.

And then there was Old Yen and no possibility of girls, until this: these two, back and forth across the strait, a charm against the dragon.

When they weren’t at sea, they were just girls, one tough and one troubled. The tough one was willing to play little sister to him,
willing to let him play brother to them both; the troubled one—well, she was pretty in her heedless awkward way, and he liked to look at her, but she was like another sister in his head.

Sister growing back into herself, he thought. Perhaps. Now that the goddess didn’t need her.

He was curious and hopeful and wanted to help, but mostly he just liked to be among them. Playmate, brother. That would do. He was making himself a family that he wouldn’t have to leave.

His soldier-friends would have been mocking, incredulous, if they had seen him like this: drinking tea with a girl who was empty-headed and ripe for the taking, the only obstacle her baby sister who could be easily tossed out, tossed overboard if necessary, if she made a fuss. Some of the men he’d known—not friends, no—would have tossed her overboard for fun, and only then gone in to her sister.

Pao had been made a man so many ways this summer, every time the world changed. There was a simple pleasure in being allowed to be a boy again, laughing with sisters.

At times like this he thought Shola was the elder sister, oldest of them all.

She was the one who worried, and that was an adult thing to do. Jin had no worries in her head, and Pao worried so little at times like this, his fool mind was so determined to believe the world would do no harm to three children playing families on a boat, he hadn’t even thought to draw the gangplank up.

If he had thought, he still wouldn’t have done it—Old Yen would be angry, coming back at whatever unpredictable hour to find himself cut off from his own boat; and there were always soldiers on watch on the wharf in any case, so why worry, what need?—but he hadn’t even
thought
.

N
OT UNTIL
he heard the plank creak under an unexpected weight, felt the boat tip in response. Someone had come aboard, and not Old Yen. He knew that man’s light tread, the almost imperceptible
burden of him, the sense of the whole boat sighing, resettling into herself as her true master came back to her.

This was something else. Someone else, or more than one; the boat had seriously listed under the gangplank’s pressure. If it was just one person, it was a fat one, or else heavily burdened. And few people were fat on Taishu anymore, and who would be bringing cargoes onto Old Yen’s boat in his absence …?

There were noises too, a sort of coughing grunt, a clink of chain. He didn’t know.

Pao picked himself up from the cabin floor, too late and too slow, seeing Shola ahead of him in her worry. He signed to her,
hush, I’ll go see; you keep your sister here, keep her quiet
.

The little girl nodded. Pao opened the cabin door, slipped out and closed it again at his back.

A
ND ALMOST
wished he hadn’t, finding himself face to face with a tiger. Wished he’d left it wide and could cry to the girls to flee, swift and surprising, out the other way and over the side, down to the wharf and away. A door was no protection, the creature would sniff them out regardless, however quiet they held themselves within.

And no, of course they couldn’t outrun a tiger if it chose to give chase; but this was a tiger on a chain, which might delay it at least a little, maybe long enough …

T
OO LATE
now. Too late, too slow.

T
HE TIGER
was green and black, like a creature risen out of myth.

Its eyes shone like wet polished stone, like jade, flat and deep together.

Its mouth hung open, a little; its black lips were drawn back, a little; its teeth seemed very close and very sharp, the chain quite thin.

A little, a very little part of him thought that perhaps he ought
to look the other way, look ashore to see help coming, guards, soldiers, men with bows and blades.

Most of him, the best of him knew that was nonsense. There was no help, no sound from the wharf at all. The world changed, and no one ever came to stop it.

Besides, it was hard enough to look away from the tiger at all. Impossible to look back at the world unchanged, untiger’d.

All he could do now was see who held the chain.

He lifted his head with a great effort, very great.

Saw her, knew her. She was famous, almost. Besides, she’d been aboard before.

She might almost know him.

For sure she knew the emperor, and Mei Feng too. Why did he not feel reassured, at all?

Because she had a tiger on a chain, perhaps. And because there was no sound from the wharf, nothing at all, when a woman with a chained tiger should have attracted a noisy chain of followers. This woman particularly, who was always in company and seemed somehow more dangerous yet, positively lethal on her own. Even without her tiger.

And because she had a smile on her face that he did not like at all, that said
I have a tiger on a chain;
and because she stood strangely hunched and twisted, as though something unimaginable had broken her, unimaginably badly; and because he simply knew, he always knew when the world had changed again and things had gotten worse.