Hidden Cities (5 page)

Besides, Mei Feng was her friend, which made it unthinkable in a whole other way.

And besides again, Dandan knew a secret. Mei Feng was pregnant. Or might be. Or hoped that she would prove to be, perhaps. It was a slithery kind of secret, different every day, depending on her mood: whether she had quarreled with the emperor again, or with his mother, or with the court. Pregnancy was a weapon that she didn’t know how to use.

For her own sake, Dandan would have gone. For Mei Feng’s sake, she would have gone. For a baby, an imperial child, just for the possibility—well. There was no question.

Which Mei Feng knew, even before she asked it.

D
ANDAN WAS
neither built nor dressed nor fit for a hard slog on mud roads. No more was Mei Feng dressed for it, but then they met Jiao and her soldier-troop along the way. Mei Feng slit her skirts and kept up with the pirate, trading one companion for a better, leaving Dandan to flail along at the troop’s tail.

And then there was a boy come from somewhere, bare-legged and bruised, and they could flail together. Dandan had decided by then to be angry with Mei Feng, that this was not at all the behavior of a friend.

She took the boy in charge because that was her nature, and, yes, because she had been told to. That was her nature too. The troop moved more slowly, coming into the city; there was time to find him trousers, time and breath enough to bully him a little. He was called Gieh, and he was a peasant through and through. Like any peasant he had been hungry even before the soldiers came. Then he had been hungry and afraid. Then he had been hungry and afraid and charmed, a little, by rough kindnesses. Now he was
all of those things and hopeful too. What peasant boy couldn’t be lured away by a passing army, gifts of food and the promise of another life, sweeter and more interesting, less hard …?

She might have struck him, just for his simplicity. She might have struck Jiao for laying those casual inducements, except that the woman was taller and stronger and certain to strike back even while she laughed. And was besides at the head of her troop, while Dandan and the boy were raggle-taggle at the tail.

It was easier to stay resentful, and cloudedly angry at Mei Feng. Even when she dropped back to walk with you after all, pale and shaken from some rooftop adventure that she didn’t want to talk about. Even then. You might stop seething because she was after all your friend, and needed perhaps to hold your hand for a while, till the trembling in her fingers stopped. Your anger might fall like sediment to leave your spirit clear because she needed you as she knew you, calm and accepting and unchanged. Even so, it was still there like sediment and could be stirred up again.

You might learn so when she dragged you back a little, you and the boy both, to allow the troop to pull ahead; when she tugged you suddenly into a shadowed alley and away, the same trick again, without a word again, with only the boy at your heels; when once again she ran ahead and left you, with only the vaguest instructions what to do and how to follow her.

D
ANDAN AND
the boy together found their way up to the governor’s palace, arriving at the great gate just in time to find Mei Feng tumbling out. This time she couldn’t be forestalled, couldn’t be delayed. Babbling incoherently, some threat against the emperor, conspiracy and traitors—but Mei Feng was always unreliable about traitors, seeing them everywhere at court, even among the emperor’s generals—she barely paused long enough to give fresh orders. Find two men in the palace, guard them and give them over to Jiao, who should bring them before the emperor as soon as might be. Where was she going? Why, to the emperor, of course, to
save his life from traitors. Why couldn’t she take the men herself? Because they would be too slow, she had to go
now
, see her go, pell-mell away in hopes of a boat across the river …

Dandan stood and watched her go, felt herself abandoned one more time, felt the anger stir and start to rise.

It was an old friend, almost. Dependable. She was beginning to understand how some people lived so constantly angry at the world.

Thought she was.

Didn’t know how thin, how weak and selfish it was, that discontent that she called her anger.

Not until she turned and trudged in at the gate with the boy Gieh at her heels, wondering just how the two of them were supposed to search a whole palace and all its grounds for two particular people—whom Mei Feng had not of course described, in all her heedlessness and hurry—when there would no doubt be dozens, maybe hundreds of people here taking shelter from the war, hiding in whatever darkest cubby-hole they could.

Perhaps the boy and she should wait right here in the courtyard for Jiao. Especially as this errand was really Jiao’s in any case, Dandan only the messenger.
Take these people to the emperor
, yes; no harm, surely, in letting it be Jiao who sought them out as well?
Find these people, and take them to the emperor
. Yes …

Except that here they came, two men finding themselves, finding Dandan and the boy. Looking for them, perhaps. There must be some urgency that would bring them out squinting into the sun, as if they had lived long in the dark. Something that would pull them toward the gate when one was twisted and broken and needed a crutch to shuffle himself along, while the other stood straight enough but even so could barely keep up with the first.

Dandan watched their slow and painful progress and broke all too soon, long before she thought she should.

She hurried across the courtyard to prevent them. “No, no, please. Look, here is a bench, sit, sit. Both of you, just sit down. Do you want water? Here …”

The boy Gieh had her bottle. The two men—both of them gray-haired and grizzle-bearded—seemed glad enough to sit, to drink, to pass the bottle between them and then have the boy run to fill it again. He would have gone to the fishpond in the courtyard there if she hadn’t snapped at him to go find a well or a kitchen cistern. Food too if he could do that, if he could sniff it out.

Meantime she had a handkerchief, a square of silk that she could dip into the fishpond to wipe the scouring sweat from the old men’s faces. The breeze was cool up here and clouds were blowing in but even so they sweated, as though they shared a fever.

She thought she knew already what they did share, nothing so easy to treat. Nor so easy to catch. One man certainly could pass it to another, but only over time and only with care and concentration, deliberately, an act of will.

She thought they hurt, deeply and consistently. She thought they had
been
hurt, deeply and consistently. This wasn’t the kind of hurt that comes from birth or accident; nor the kind that comes in war. As a precursor of war, perhaps, or in its aftermath, but not from stabbing or slashing or crushing, not from blades used in anger or terror in the heat and confusion of battle.

No. She thought both these men had been hurt methodically and slowly and with intent. She thought they had been tortured.

Really it wasn’t—or at least it shouldn’t be—a surprise. Of course Tunghai Wang tortured prisoners. He was a traitor and a rebel; no doubt torture would be commonplace to him. No doubt these were loyal supporters of the emperor. She still didn’t see why Mei Feng wanted him to meet them quite so urgently, but that wasn’t important quite yet.

She introduced herself in the simplest way she knew: “Please, my name is Dandan. How may I serve you?” She had her instructions,
get them to the emperor
, but there are ways and ways to hide one purpose in the shadow of another. Ways to hide a disobedience
also. The emperor was on the wrong side of the river, in the middle of a war. Whatever these old men had to tell him, it could wait. She was not dragging two cripples half across the city in chase of him, not even for Mei Feng.

Besides, whatever the old men knew, Mei Feng clearly knew it too. She could tell the emperor herself.

For now, they could all sit here in the sun. Old bones appreciate heat; she didn’t want to move them until she must.

One man, the taller—or perhaps he was only the straighter, they were much of a height sitting down—smiled at her from somewhere, from a well of grace. “Sit,” he said, in a voice worn thin she thought by screaming. “Sit with us. We have seen … entirely too much of each other, in recent days. A fresh face is a blessing.”

“Sit and talk,” said the other. “We have talked so much together, I no longer know which is his voice and which my own. In either case, I think I prefer yours.”

She sat, then, on dry and dusty stone at their feet, and looked up and shivered at something that shrouded them: not quite a smell—they and their clothes were scrupulously clean, as though they had most carefully washed and dressed each other—but the memory of a smell, perhaps, if memories could cling. Their nostrils flared together at the sea-breeze building.

She said, “I think you two have been prisoners together.”

“We have shared the same cell, certainly.” That was the crippled one, crutch laid carefully to hand beside the bench. The other had held his elbow, to ease him down when he sat. There was a courtliness between them that she liked extremely.

“And you have not been treated kindly.” They might prefer not to speak of that, but it was in her nature to be direct.

The tall one smiled again. The other had a solemnity that suggested he would rarely smile. Perhaps that was only because she looked up from below, saw all the lines of pain and their shadows; but she was seeing them both from the same angle. And most of
the people she had to deal with in palace life, sooner or later she saw them from her knees. One way or another. She was accustomed to making judgments from below.

The tall one said, “We have … shared the same suffering, also.” That odd little break in his voice was almost laughter, she thought, though it was also almost pain, as though the two instincts were somehow the same physical spasm, and needed the same little catch of breath to carry him over.

“Yes,” she said. “I am sorry for it. But the emperor has come now, and he will see you safe.”

“The emperor may not be so pleased to see us at all.”

“Not? But Mei Feng was quite determined …”

“Yes. I think she is probably quite often quite determined. And for sure he will want to know what we have told her. But whether he will want to see us afterward, if he survives it—well. Perhaps. Or perhaps only our heads, he might appreciate that more.”

“Your heads? I don’t understand.”

“Of course not. You don’t know who we are. Or who we were, perhaps. Now we are only two ruins sitting in the sun, watching a storm blow in. With the dragon, I think, riding above it. My eyes are not so good just now, but I think that was the dragon.”

She would not turn her head to look, not be distracted. “Who you were? Who are you, then?”

“Two ruins; I have said. But once I was Li Ton the pirate, and the enemy of your emperor. Before that I was General Chu Lin, a loyal servant disgraced and banished by his father.”

“And this?”

“Oh, this is Ai Guo. Tunghai Wang’s most excellent torturer. I have been … the object of his attentions for some time now. I said, we have shared the suffering: he at the eye of the needle, I at the point.”

B
LESSEDLY, HERE
came Gieh running back with the bottle filled and a string of dried figs glistening with water. He had found
them, he said, dropped in the stable yard in someone’s hurry to be gone. He had washed the muck from them, and they were perfectly good. He thought they should be good, he amended hastily, not realizing that a streak of fig-seeds on his wet chin was giving him away; and did they think there would be a typhoon? Only the sky seemed so dark suddenly, and the wind was turning vicious …

She hadn’t realized, but he was right. With or without the dragon, a storm was on its way. Li Ton pulled himself to his feet by way of Gieh’s obedient shoulder, and leaned on the boy quite heavily as he started his slow shuffle toward shelter. Dandan held Ai Guo’s crutch for him while he drew himself up, then paced him at his crablike scuttle in the other man’s wake.

Behind her, at the courtyard gate, she heard voices.

She turned around and there was Jiao, with a string of men at her back.

“You, girl—is Mei Feng with you?”

Dandan shook her head, against the mercenary’s exasperation.

“Where’s she gone this time?”

“Down toward the harbor, I think, looking for a way across the river. Looking to find the emperor.”

“She’ll be lucky if she finds a boat. But—well, we will leave her to her luck. Someone will look after Mei Feng; someone always does. What are you doing with these two?”

“Right now, helping them indoors before the rain comes. Staying with them, until the emperor decides what to do.”
If the emperor wins his battle
, but that was taken for granted. “They’re my prisoners, I suppose. Can you leave me two men, just for comfort?”

“I doubt you’ll need them, but—you and you,” picked out with a flicking finger, “follow Mei Feng down to the harbor. When you don’t find her there—and you won’t, but we’d best be sure she hasn’t run into trouble on the way—double back up here and guard these for me. Understand?”

The men’s grins said they understood entirely. They would be spared the battle, and they had a whole palace to pillage. Dandan wished they wouldn’t leer quite so openly.

T
HEN THEY
were gone, all of them, at a run; and here came the rain, a sudden squall that was really only a precursor, a scudding cloud before the storm.

From the great public courtyard of the governor’s palace, the closest doorway led of course into the great public hall where he held his audiences.

Not a comfortable place. Not a place for hurting old men to stand, however strange, however bad they were; not a place for anyone to stand whose clothes ran with water onto the polished floor.

“Where are your quarters?” Dandan demanded.

“Mine are … in the lower levels. And insalubrious.” That was Li Ton, of course, still almost amused despite his pain.