Hidden Cities (29 page)

Food in his belly, exhaustion in his head: it was satisfaction, perhaps, that closed his eyes one time too often, for a moment too long. The abbot laughed softly and struck a small gong in an embrasure. There was a scurry of sandals on stone, a young monk in the open doorway.

“Go with Kampong Fen,” the abbot said. “He will take you to your bath and bed.”

It was an effort just to heave himself up, but the monk’s hand was at his elbow, a whippy strength he could lean into. Which reminded him: he paused, a little dizzy in his mind but solid on his feet there, still on the abbot’s rugs. “Where’s …? I ought—”

“Your men are settled and content,” the abbot said, “even your mule is fed and sleeping now. Go, go. There is nothing to interrupt your own needs and pleasures, insofar as we can serve them.”

That wasn’t quite right, but Ma seemed to lack the impetus to contest it.

The monk picked up a lamp and Ma followed him, down stairs and along a corridor, through an archway to a suite of rooms more comfortable than the abbot’s.

And here was his boy Yueh waiting in a pool of steamy light, and all was well after all. Here were warm water and clean cloths, sweet oil—butter-oil, he thought, with an inward smile—for his sorenesses and blisters. A teasing, familiar gentleness in the boy’s familiar, long-familiar hands; which turned rough once he was washed, a hard rubbing with coarse towels; which brought him to bed at last, tingling and refreshed, to lie among soft quilts and feel soft warm skin, a slight and wonderful body settle obediently against his own.

And then those hands again, impertinent, precise. He had no resistance, none. One last bone-bare stir of conscience, just enough to ask, “Did they feed you?”—but it seemed that he must be satisfied with no more than a chuckle in response before the tender mouth it came from found other, more determined purpose on his skin.

M
A WOKE
to the sound of hammering, the sound of his own contentment written in the air.

Knowledge is power; and power does not die, it cannot be killed, only suppressed in one quarter to rise again in another. An emperor can be killed—with difficulty, if he can be caught: even this one, Ma thought, this runaway boy with his extraordinary luck, extraordinary tales beginning to attach to him—but the empire abides, another man always rises to seize the Hidden City and the throne.

That would be Tunghai Wang if the generalissimo had his way, if Ma laid it out for him.

If he could keep the dragon from interfering, more than she had already.

He was in the place to do that, the right place, sure.

A high place, and the sound of hammering.

T
HERE WAS
a window, small and square and shuttered. A finger of pale mountain sunlight had poked through a knothole in the wood. Ma judged the angle of that acutely, flung back his quilts and tumbled his boy out of bed.

“Master?” Yueh lay sprawled on rugs, laughing up at him, naked and beautiful and his own.

“Washing-water,” Ma grunted, “and food, whatever these monks are used to eat in the mornings.”
Tsampas
, he guessed, and more butter tea: great churned pipes of it for the monastery at large, more delicate pots for the abbot’s guests and the butter to mix themselves. That would do him admirably. The men he’d brought might struggle, perhaps—but food was food and they should be grateful. Something hot in their bellies and no dragon in the sky, no imperial soldiers hunting: they should be glad enough. They should be settling here, anticipating days of this. Barrack walls against the weather, barrack food and barrack beds, no work, no fear, no worry. Nowhere to go, nowhere to be but here.

He hoped to disappoint them, sooner than they imagined. For now, though, let them lie, let them snore and scoff and squabble …

With his boy gone trotting off, Ma rolled himself out of bed and hobbled to the window, sore it seemed in every part that moved. Well, he would hope to disappoint himself also, if his self had hopes of rest and recovery here. Butter tea.

The shutter swung inward, to show a broad stone ledge—or was it rock, the actual rock of the mountain? Was the monastery a blown egg, a mine dug from the living hill?

He leaned out foolishly and tried to see, and couldn’t quite. Built or otherwise, the monastery presented one flat face to the wind, like a cliff that clung to the mountain at its back. He could go down and out into the yard below, peer up at it and look for the
marks of man, try to guess if it were one or the other or both together, half built and half dug out.

Or he could ask the abbot. He needed to speak to the abbot, as soon as might be.

As he leaned out like this, perilous above the fall of it, the sound of hammering rose up to meet him, hard and metallic and perfunctory.

The sound of his boy’s laughter at his back was less clear, muffled by his own naked bulk wedged in the window frame.

He heaved himself back in, helped somewhat by Yueh’s hands but only somewhat, as the boy was seized by giggles. Ma cuffed him equably—he had seen his master’s vast buttocks before, after all—and only then spotted the parade of monks behind him, bearing bowls and towels and a tray, none of them wreathed in steam enough to have disguised the view.

No matter. Ma wrapped himself in a quilt and thought himself magnificent enough.

L
ATER, WASHED
and fed and dressed, he left the boy in the room—he would sleep, of course, if he was given nothing more to do; Ma gave him nothing bar a clip on the ear and a handful of dried fruit to munch on—and stopped the first monk he found, asked to be taken to the abbot.

And was taken down and out, into the hard stone yards and then along, through one and then another. They were ordered almost like the courtyards of a house. Here was the entrance yard beyond the gate, that he had seen already by lamplight, roofed with stars. Here next the stable yard, where his own cursed mule was stalled alongside rugged ponies, where there was room also for all the monastery cattle to be housed and fed come winter, though the beasts were out on a lower pasture now. Here next—

Here was the hammering like a wall, like a gate closed against them. Stepping through the arch, Ma felt as though he stepped through a solid fall of water, though it was only sound.

Here were broad-chested men, monks with shaven heads, stripped to the waist as they worked: as they bent over anvils with great hammers in their hands, as they stood back to let wiry novices—stripped even further, some of those, stripped to a twist of cloth, scrawny buttocks and gangling limbs showing burn-scars everywhere—take their work and thrust it back into a furnace or else quench it in an iron trough of water, in a sudden scalding gout of steam.

Here were half a dozen furnaces, fed and stoked by those same sweating novices; here were a dozen anvils, all of them in use; here was no noise except the hammers, but the hammers were noise enough for this mountain. Too much noise for Ma, he couldn’t bear it.

He stood just within the arch, saw the abbot an impossible distance ahead, almost at the far side of the yard, beyond the anvils. Beyond the noise, unreachable.

Ma looked a mute appeal at his guide—no point in speaking under this heaviness of sound, this brute iron rain of blows—and gestured, pleadingly.
Would you fetch him to me? Would he come? You will find me back there, if he will. In the stables. Doing my duty by my mule
 …

T
HE MULE
took Ma’s arrival as a matter of course, only to be expected. Ma felt that perhaps he was owed a little more, that someone somewhere ought to be acknowledging the surprise of it, and really there was only the mule.

And then the abbot came, and Ma struggled a little under the surprise of that, and struggled a little not to show it. He was used to ordering the comings and goings of a thousand men at a time, but only on paper, with brush and ink. In the flesh, he had trouble sometimes giving orders to his boy. The notion that the abbot of a high establishment should come to him—to fat and comical General Ma, who was only made general because he was useful and
convenient, not because he was any kind of soldier—and only because he asked it … Well. Yueh would take it for granted, but Ma was taken aback.

“What,” the abbot murmured, “you have come all this way and climbed my mountain at the last, you have suffered pains and discomforts and a thousand inconveniences on the way, and shall I not walk across a courtyard?”

“My lord abbot, you were busy among your brothers; it ill befits a guest to interrupt the work of the house, let alone the work of its master.”

“My first work is to take care of our guests. And all my brothers know their own work, and get on very well without me.” He was a brisker man in daylight than he had seemed last night. If they stayed any longer in the mule’s stall, Ma was afraid that he would cast about for a brush and start to groom the beast. Or find a broom and sweep dung out of the stall.

To spare them both, Ma walked out into the yard again. It was a bright day, a pleasure to enjoy a clear sky with no equivocation, no anxious peering for the dragon.

He said, “The work of your house is in iron, I find.”

“Indeed. I think it a useful discipline, to remind us of the iron grip the gods take on our world. We are born in chains, General Ma; freedom is as much an illusion as wealth and power and achievement. The wheel of life has an iron rim, and we are bound upon it. Up here, we sit above the world and its fogs, we see more clearly—and what we see is a rigid order, discipline beyond the mortal. Our own life of ritual and labor is a shadow, an expression to the gods of what we see below. We account for every hour, we bind ourselves about with prayer and smoke and custom—and we work in iron, we make axles and wheel-rims and chains.”

That was an invitation, and Ma was not slow to seize it. He said, “There was another house, a sister-house of yours I guess, that was famous for its chains.”

The abbot nodded, smiled. “The world called it the Forge, I know. Sometimes when the wind blows I call this valley of ours the Bellows.”

Was that another invitation, was the abbot laying out a path of stones for him,
step here, and now step here
…? Ma was unsure, but swift to step regardless. He said, “Does the typhoon reach this far inland, this high into the mountains?”

“We have our own storms,” the abbot said judiciously, “mountain-storms. The typhoon is a tale here, rather than a trouble to us. Still, we look down on the world and see how much it is troubled. We do know of the typhoon.”

He could look down on the dragon, Ma thought, from the height of this cliff-house: look down on her as she flew. He was glad to have a wall around the yard here, to hide him from the edge. It was a great wrong to find himself standing higher than birds in flight, higher than clouds. Higher than the dragon. That was why he feared heights so much, he thought; it was an impertinence, to lift himself above his proper place.

Some men were not afraid, apparently. He looked down at the abbot, surprised as he always was by courage and by size, the incompatibles. “You may know how much we have been troubled recently along the coast, since your sister-house came to its unhappy end?”

“Indeed. Pirates, we hear, slew our brothers at their work. So of course the dragon rose, and brought storm with her from the depths. Storm and war.”

Actually it was Tunghai Wang who had brought the war. Which meant that it was Ma, largely, because it was his work that allowed the army to move. “Yes. The dragon has been a dreadful trial to us all, who live beside the sea. As she was before she was chained, as she always will be unless she can be chained again.”

There, he had said it; and the abbot did not laugh. Nor curse, nor scold him. Yueh was apparently right, as so often:
You are not a man to be laughed at, or easily dismissed. Or scolded. You
should learn that. You have great weight in the world
, a cool hand laid upon the matter of his belly, addressing the substance within.
You should learn to see yourself dressed in your own importance, as we all see you. Lord
.

Ma saw himself dressed in his boy’s care, no more than that. And was grateful for it, now especially, something to depend on as he waited. It was a breathless wait, for the abbot would not be hurried and this thin air did Ma no good when he was nervous and hopeful.

The abbot turned to address two young novices who dragged a hand-cart across the yard, pigs of crude iron making the wheels—iron-bound, yes, and iron-spoked too against the weight on the bed above—clatter and spark on the stones. Their shaven heads gleamed with sweat, their eyes gleamed with mischief as he spoke to them, but not perhaps so much as his own did. They ducked their heads respectfully to him, bowed more deeply to Ma, hauled their load away.

The abbot said, “I have told them to fetch your boy, take him higher up the mountain and teach him to fly kites. I hope you have no objection?”

Ma blinked. “No, no, none at all, my lord abbot”—they would find the boy sleeping, and he might as well play as sleep—“but I don’t understand.” There seemed to be little in kite-flying to express the harsh rule boasted of, the strict devotion that accounted for every hour, iron in the soul.

“No. Our kites are flags, our flags are prayers, we lift them to the gods—but you didn’t bring your boy up here to have him learn our ways. Nor did you come yourself to exercise your mule.”

“No.” Let it be direct, then. “My lord abbot, I need a monksmith.”

“Not even that, I think: you need
the
monksmith.” And that same chastening smile, and, “I am your man.”

hey were Dandan’s patients, her two old men, her particular care. That was understood.