Hidden Cities (27 page)

He thought perhaps she scared him more than the tiger did, which meant perhaps more than the dragon too.

He stood on the deck there with his back to the cabin door, and never even thought till later that he might have made a reckless run himself, down the gangplank and away.

Jiao smiled that terrible smile and said, “You have the children aboard with you, I know. I have been watching. Where have all the other boats gone?”

Watching
, she said: not
listening
, not
talking to people round about
. He supposed it would be hard to ask questions, with a bright shining tiger on a chain. Or at least it would be hard to find answers of any value.

She could ask him anything, alone as they were in this shifting world, with the girls behind a flimsy door behind him.

He said, “Fishing.”

She frowned. “Without the children?”

There was the other child, the castrated boy—but he was safe ashore, and Jiao might know that. She’d been watching.

He said, “We don’t need the children any longer, just to go fishing.”

“How not?” She hadn’t expected this; he could almost feel the world changing for her too, sliding into a new configuration.

He said, “Old Yen came to … an agreement, with the dragon.” Stood face to face with the dragon, as Pao now stood face to face with a tiger. “She allows us to fish, if every boat flies a green banner to say it is from Taishu and only fishing, not out to cross the strait.”

“He came to an agreement.” She had to repeat it, he thought, in order to believe it. Even then her voice was full of doubt and question. “What in the world did he have to offer to a dragon?”

“I don’t know, he didn’t say.” Not to Pao, at least. Privately, Pao thought that even Old Yen didn’t know actually why the dragon had agreed. What he might himself have conceded. Pao thought the old man was a little scared of that. “All we have to do is fly the banner.”

“And yet you are tied up here, no banner,” with a glance at the mastheads, “and no fishing with the fleet, although Taishu is still hungry and everyone knows Old Yen would sooner fish than breathe. Why so?”

“Old Yen is at the palace. Mei Feng … has not been well.”

“Ah.” Her face would have told no one anything, except that Pao had seen her in other moods and knew how expressive that
face could be. What this stillness meant, he wasn’t certain: only that it must mean something. “Well. Girls with babies growing are often not well, and imperial babies are said to be hard work. Also, old men can be fretful, and young men just the same. When the young man in question is the emperor, well …”

She shrugged quite carefully, quite unconvincingly, with her dreadful twisted shoulder. Pao said nothing. He was both male and young; what did he know, what could he tell her about pregnancies and sickness? He knew that Old Yen was not a fusser, and was sick himself with worry. It wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t have been enough in the face of Jiao alone; under the eye of the tiger, it was nothing.

She said, “Well. Lacking Old Yen, we must make shift. Can you sail the boat by yourself?”

Absolutely not. He said so. “It takes two,” two at least, two who knew her temper.

Comfortably, Jiao said, “Well then, it’s lucky you have me to help. I’ve been on boats enough. Tell me which ropes to haul, and I will haul them. And we have the girls, if we should need them, if there’s anything they can do.”

Urgently, he said, “You don’t need the girls. I told you, we can fly a banner and sail freely …”

She said, as he had dreaded, “Not if the dragon’s watching. She would see we are not fishing, and not coming back to Taishu. Did you think I wanted to go out for a pleasure-jaunt, idiot boy? Or to fish, to feed the emperor’s soldiers another day? Or to feed my tiger?” with a little tug on the chain that brought a sidelong glance of jade-green eyes, a low grumble in the collared throat. “He might like fish, I expect he would, but he can wait. We’ll cross the strait to Santung. I think you can bring me there, with the girl to speak for us against the dragon. Unless the goddess abandons us, of course. In which case the dragon can eat us all, and be damned to her.”

don’t know what you’re doing here, anyway. What, has the sea run out of fish all of a sudden? Or have you finally decided to trust Pao out in your boat alone, unwatched …?”

Old Yen smiled, a little thinly. “There are men and boats enough, to fish for me.”

“Grandfather, you are twice ten thousand years old and you have never said that in your life before! You have never
believed
it in your life, and you don’t believe it now. You think you’re the only man on Taishu who can find where the yellowtails are shoaling, and all the other boats just bob along in your wake and grow fat on your cleverness. And you,” reacting to a snort from the other side of the bed, turning her head to glower at him though even so much effort was a real strain, she was so
tired
and her neck did ache abominably, she’d never realized just how heavy her head was, “don’t you have, oh, I don’t know, an empire to rule? A war to fight? Go plot the downfall of your enemies …”

Feed my people
she might have said, to both of them together. It was all she really meant to say, apart from
go away
. But that would have frightened them, it would sound so valedictory, last message of a dying girl: which would only have made them linger longer at her bedside, even more reluctant to move.

She thought she was dying, probably, and her baby with her. She thought perhaps the baby was dead already, and killing her from the inside. She had bled, a little, two days ago: just enough she thought for a barely begun baby to be bleeding out.

The pain had come before, brute stabbing pains as if the baby were a blade in her own gut and slashing, slashing. There had been days of that. And then she had bled, that little bit, and now the pain was entirely different in kind. Now it was a slow rotting kind of pain, as if she carried a dead thing inside her to poison her blood and bile. She thought she stank on the inside, she was turning putrid and foul from within.

She did think this would kill her, tomorrow if not today.

So did the emperor, perhaps. So did Old Yen. Whatever they said. They sat one on either side and held her hands when she would let them, and said stupid hopeful things when she would hear them, when she could. Sometimes she drifted on a dreary tide, their voices would fade to nothing and she could be blessedly somewhere else for a while; but those same shifting treacherous tides would bring her back again, strand her on this bitter shore, this bed. She would rouse and hear one voice or the other, the two men she had loved most and best in this world, and wish one more time that they would go away.

This evening she was more sharply here than she had been for a while. She knew it was evening, because the useless doctors had brought her a draft of tea that must be drunk at sunset, they said, before the moon could rise. When the world hung poised, they said, between one power and another.
Slack water
, she wanted to say, and she knew the same thought was in her grandfather’s head; and she said nothing, because any sailor knew that seafolk die at slack water.

The doctors were fools, but she forced herself to drink their tea, just to make her menfolk happy.

And so was sick, brutally stabbingly sobbingly sick, so messily sick that the little cat ran off and the emperor had to lift Mei Feng out of bed so that all her quilts and bedding could be changed.

Now she was clean and settled again, and her men were sat again on either side of her, and she was stranded high and dry, no hope of drifting off with her insides feeling ripped apart. And so
she was grumbling at them, as much like herself as she could manage, in the faint failing hope of sending them away with argument if she couldn’t drive them off with curses.

Her arguments weren’t working either, her sharp thin nagging little voice had no power to it. The emperor squeezed her hand too lightly and smiled and said, “No wars now. Thanks to you, little one, and your devious mind, and the game you used to play with Grandfather. If Tunghai Wang fights anyone now, if he still has an army, it will be Ping Wen. The rebel and the traitor, let them fight each other. I don’t care.”

“You should care,” she said frowningly. “When they have killed each other, you need to be ready. Go back and reclaim your empire, march all across it, let everyone see you. All the way to the Hidden City. Take the throne with you, you could have another coronation, you’d like that. Your mother would love it.”

“It’s a terrible long way, and I like being here with you. I’ll wait till you’re fit to come with me. You and our child, our boy, let the empire see him and know I have an heir …”

“Stupid. You shouldn’t wait so long.”
We will have no boy
, she meant,
and no girl neither; our baby is dead and so will I be, and what will you have waited for then?

He only smiled again with a terrible sorrow, squeezed her hand again with that terrible gentleness, didn’t shift. Didn’t go away.

She might have turned her scowl back on her grandfather, but that would be just as useless. She knew why he was always here now, and never at sea. Oh, he was just as caught in sorrow and anxiety over her, of course he was; but there was more than that. He didn’t want to sail under the dragon’s banner. He had negotiated with the creature himself, and she was still awestruck that he could do that, her own beloved old man, that he could find the courage and the wit to confront an immortal and come away again whole and unharmed and victorious; but at what cost? His own victory was a terrible thing to him. He felt it as a betrayal of the Li-goddess, after serving her all his life and now making a deal
with her fled prisoner, her enemy. The best he could manage was to present that deal to the emperor, make him a gift of it, and step away. Not fly the dragon’s green himself.

Which meant not go to sea, because he wouldn’t willingly use the goddess’s children either. He had always hated that.

Poor grandfather: in his age, when he should be most easy with himself and the world too, he had lost all his contentment. First his goddess, now his purpose.

Soon his granddaughter, her too.

Me too
.

He held her hand, and she really wished he wouldn’t.

She could feel every one of his years in its hard lean fleshlessness, in the swollen knuckles and the ridged calluses. She’d never minded that, except that she knew his knuckles pained him sometimes. But now she could feel his hesitancy too, all his losses building up, and she couldn’t bear it. It was her fault, she thought, perhaps. If not for her …

Well. He would be without her soon enough.

And here was a sudden welcome weight on her feet, the little cat come back to her, assured of warm clean bedding and a comfortable welcome. He walked all up her body and thrust his nose at hers in a self-contented greeting. There were crumbs in his whiskers. Nobody could feed themselves enough, even here in the palace, but everybody fed her cat.

He was her excuse to slip her hand free of Grandfather’s, to stroke the small round brow and scratch beneath the jaw, feel his purring. He was really all the company she wanted, though of course she could never say so.
Go away
was the same as
let me go
, and of them all, only the cat was selfish enough to allow that. Human beings were differently selfish: wanting to keep her, only to spare themselves grief.

It was too late, she thought, for that. Their grief was inexorably coming, however hard they refused to see it.

The cat would come, inexorably in search of her; and find the
bed empty, and fuss a little perhaps, and then nest in the quilts anyway, before he went off in search of better warmth and someone else to fuss him.

They could all learn from the cat, she thought, though none of them would do so.

Perhaps she had learned from him herself. There was something ineluctably cat-like in her own wanting to creep away, to find a hole and a silence, a solitude to wrap herself around. Much though she loved her men, she would so like them to leave her alone now, and they would not.

Not for the first time, the emperor said, “We should have brought your doctor, mine are useless. Grandfather, will you go—?”

And not for the first time, before Old Yen could say yes, Mei Feng said, “No, lord. Chien Hua,” just because he liked to hear her say his name. “No. She is
not
my doctor, just the one who told me I was pregnant. Which I knew already, all but having someone say so. And she doesn’t want to come, and Old Yen doesn’t want to go,” however much she’d like to have him gone. She would willingly send him away, but not to sea. “I will do well enough under your doctors,” but there she lost him because even he could see that she wasn’t doing well enough, not well at all under his doctors.

“She should be here,” he said, and Mei Feng wasn’t sure whether that was sulking or determination.

“She wouldn’t come,” she said. “It would be folly to send. Folly twice. First because she wouldn’t come, and second because you would gift Ping Wen a boat and one of the children. The dragon’s truce won’t take anyone to Santung, you’d need to send a child. Which would anger the dragon and break the truce, give a weapon to the traitor and not help me. Don’t do that, lord. For all our sakes, don’t do it.”