Hidden Cities (42 page)

Then Jin flung the ball, and the tiger didn’t catch it but Pao did; and then they were all three—no, all four—of them into the game, the ball flying from one child to another while the tiger spun and danced among them, taking the ball more often than any of them but always letting them have it back.

They laughed louder and louder, they hugged themselves with glee, they flung the ball more and more wildly; at last, inevitably, Jin threw it into the pond.

Inevitably, the tiger flung himself in pursuit, with a tremendous splash.

S
ILK AND
feathers. The ball surged away on the tiger’s own ripples. Before the beast could cut through them to reach the sodden mass, it had sunk and was gone.

It didn’t seem to matter. A swimming cat was as much entertainment as a leaping cat, and even less expected. The children gathered at the water’s margin, looking for little things to throw, in hopes that he might chase.

The tiger was perhaps enjoying himself just as much, a cool swim on a hot day. Still not a dog, he was not going to fetch twigs, but he did swim back and forth for a while before he hauled himself out, dragging a vast quantity of water with him and shaking it of course all over the shrieking children.

Then he sprawled on the grass and so did they, and it was somehow Jin’s lap that acquired a heavy wet cat-head, Jin’s own head that bent low above, Jin’s falling hair that made a screen to deny Jiao’s curious gaze, too far to tell if she were whispering.

J
IAO WAS
content so long as the girls were, so long as the tiger was. The boy didn’t particularly concern her.

She drowsed, and kept a weather-eye open, an ear alert. In the late afternoon, the boards of the balcony creaked under a significant weight, and she spoke lightly, without looking.

“Come back to me, have you? Traitor. Don’t look to me for kitten-games, you’ll get none here.”

The tiger didn’t reply, unless his settling by her feet was a response of sorts. After a minute or two of fidget and sighs, he began to lick at still-damp fur. When he gave that over in favor of chewing and tugging at a toenail, Jiao sighed in her turn and went to fetch his chain.

en come and take away the things you value most.

That was the lesson, the late lesson of Ma Lin’s life. She used to think it was the other way around, that a man brought gifts: a home, his body, children. Company. Comfort, delight, shelter: the promises of life.

Men had taken all these things from her, one by one this year.

Her home, her security, her man: all lost, all in a day.

Her children, daughters of her flesh: they had been taken and taken, two of them ghost-first before their bodies went. One was dead now, little Meuti, and sometimes her ghost came back,
tug-tug
at Ma Lin’s trousers. The other two had been taken and taken by men and men. Sometimes they were brought back, but only to be taken again.

This latest time, that might have been the last time. She had no notion of seeing them again, coming across the water in a boat. They lay in the hands of the goddess, or the goddess and the emperor together. It seemed unlikely that those two would ever agree that returning her children to her would be best for all.

She would have stayed here in this headland temple just in case. She would have waited, even if there had been nothing to do but wait.

In fact, in their absence she had found work to do. All unpracticed, she played priestess to the local people. Perhaps to the goddess too, she wasn’t sure: only that she gave the people something they seemed to need, and the goddess seemed not to object.

She kept the little temple clean, she kept the weather out. She burned incense and accepted what the people brought, either for the goddess or herself. This was what mattered most, she thought: that someone should be here to take their offerings. The poor need to give. Without a priestess all these years, they hadn’t been able. The goddess needed human hands to act for her, or else food rotted and the rain came in.

The goddess needed a human voice to speak through, and so Ma Lin’s daughters had been taken. Priesthood was no substitute, but it was something, it was a life. A way to be, while the time passed. It mattered, to other people; she could persuade herself that that mattered to her. For now, while she waited.

She didn’t try to persuade the goddess. Sometimes she would talk to one statue or another as she washed off the sticky smoky residues of lamp and censer, but only ever about her daughters, her life of long ago.

T
ODAY SHE
had welcomed her regular women with their shy patient men, their gifts of rice and greens and gathered fruits and time. They had come and gone, as they did, as people do.

Alone again, she stood on the clifftop and watched the sky for dragon, the sea for boats or dragon, hoping not ever again to see boat and dragon come together.

After a while, she wasn’t really watching anymore. There was wind and water, there was bold sun and no cloud; that seemed to be enough. Like her life now, drifting, undriven. Uninformed.

She thought perhaps the weather too was waiting, unless it was the ocean. Unless they were the same.

W
HEN SHE
heard men coming through the forest, she wasn’t for a moment fooled by that.

This was not what she had waited for, unless it was her doom to be always waiting for disaster.

They were too many and too loud, a little lost. Not peasants,
which meant they must be soldiers. For one side or the other, or perhaps the other yet: for the emperor or the governor or the rebels. She didn’t really try to sort them out. She didn’t care; it seemed to make no difference. Men came and took her children. For a little time they had kept them here with her, but not for long: so no, she really didn’t believe these noisy men would be bringing her girls back, no. Really not.

The girls would have shown them the quicker way to come.

Besides, the girls had gone away by boat. If they came back, ever and ever, they would come that way: fetched by the goddess, returned by the old fisherman. She was sure of it.

Perhaps these men were looking for the children. If so, she had nothing to offer them, except the chance to wait. No one could cross the water, not from here. Not without her girls.

Ma Lin stood straight and waited, expecting something dreadful.

T
HEY CAME
, shadows through the trees, men calling: this was the way, here was the headland, here the sun, the temple …

They came into the light in a long slow file, ones and twos together. There were too many of them. Even two would have been too many for Ma Lin, even one perhaps, though she had killed one man before. This many made no sense, unless they came—unless they thought they came—to guard the children who were not here.

What use else could there be, here, for so many men?

Some carried long bamboos and coils of rope. Some carried sacks. Perhaps they were nothing to do with her at all, perhaps they meant to climb down the cliffs and harvest eggs or baby gulls, although this was not the season. Perhaps they had some other reason to go over the edge.

Perhaps they meant to work on the temple roof and thought they needed a scaffold to do it, didn’t know that she had done it herself with no help but her own strong arms and legs.

Perhaps …

·  ·  ·

T
HIS WAS
their captain, coming straight to her. Sending his men inside. She didn’t like to see that, too many men in the house of the goddess without herself to watch.

The captain saluted her gravely, almost reverently, and she didn’t like that either. If he thought her a priestess, if he offered her respect and still sent his men to do whatever their duty was, with their poles and ropes in her temple, all unsupervised …

She thought that was reason enough to be unhappy, even before he spoke her name.

She had not thought her name was known beyond her own people here, her little congregation, but this man knew it. He said, “You are Ma Lin, the woman of the temple?”

She nodded, warily. He had not quite said
priestess;
she was not quite prepared to believe that didn’t matter. “Who are you?”

He said, “We are soldiers of the emperor, serving the governor in Santung,” if those two were really the same thing anymore.

“What do you want here, what are your men at?” They were making too much noise in there, too much altogether: grunting and shouting, sounds of breaking.

“We have orders,” their captain said.

And no more, but really no more was needed, because she could see what his men were at. They went in, they came out; they went in empty-handed, and came out loaded.

They carried the smaller statues ill-wrapped in sacks, slung in their arms or roped to their backs. Here came a pair of men with one too heavy to lift alone. That one hung from a bamboo on their shoulders, slung in a cradle of rope. There were men enough to carry it in shifts, and the others too, everything that could be carried.

They stripped out the temple while she watched, made an empty shell of it, left it here as hollow as Ma Lin’s daughter when the goddess was not in her; and where would the goddess go now, and where Ma Lin …?

here was something about Mei Feng.

There always had been. It was more refined these days, less raw, but still powerful. Summoning, sending.

As soon as news came of what had happened to her and to the empress, of how much she needed Master Biao and his tiger-skin, of course Yu Shan had come too. What else? There was something about Mei Feng. Everybody came.

A
ND IT
was like being back in the summer valley, standing watch and training, being together, being young and intense and impressed with themselves, comparing scars. And now here was Mei Feng sending him away in secret, in defiance—in defiance of the emperor, no less!—and here he was, going where she sent him. Because there was just something about her.

And here was Siew Ren come with him, because “Did you think you could just sneak off, and me not know about it?” and “Of course I’m coming too, you’ll need me, how do you imagine you might manage by yourself?” and her tongue might be fierce in her twisted mouth and her face might glare by nature now but it was her good arm that she slipped through his, and that was enough to be going along with. More than enough, given how guilty he felt, how his life was a series of accidents but they were all bad ones and they all happened to other people, and Siew Ren most and worst of all.

He wasn’t thinking about Jiao.

These days, Siew Ren made it easy not to do that, where she used to make it impossible.

I
T WAS
a long walk from the palace to the city, but her legs were strong, and her stride might be stiff but it was long; and she had jade in her blood, jade at her throat, the touch-memory of a stone tiger’s skin wrapped around her own. And she was Siew Ren, which meant determined. And she had Yu Shan to lean on if she needed to, and she clearly regarded that as a victory so long as she never did actually need it.

In fact they needn’t have walked all or any of the way. There were always wagons clattering empty back to the city. Any one would have given them a ride. Many offered, but every time Siew Ren would pull the broad brim of her woven rain hat lower, turn her head away, refuse it with her shoulders. Every time, Yu Shan would translate that into manners, the most gracious refusal he could achieve. She had come this far, out of her hut and out of her valley, out of the hills altogether; it was enough. He was still astonished that she could face the petty palace with its strangers, guards and servants mixed among her friends and kin. She wasn’t truly ready for the road, let alone the city. And was coming anyway, coming for him, unless it was for Mei Feng: and that was courage beyond reckoning. If it cost them a day’s walking, it was worth the price.

If it cost her pain, she was prepared for that and so was he. Her body, her pain. So long as she never mentioned it, neither would he. His arm was there beneath her hand, and if she was leaning more weight on it by the day’s end, if she was gripping it more tightly that would perhaps be his victory but it would pass quite unacknowledged.