Hidden Cities (51 page)

There was a path along the ridge, running north: away from Santung, away from the sea and any distant thoughts of Taishu. She might have forgotten it for a while, but she was still a pirate at heart. A pirate with a twisted shoulder, but still. A land-pirate with a tiger. She should stick to what she knew; and the land lay this way, more land than even she could walk, even in a long, long lifetime.

hey went up, they came down.

Uphill is the harder work, or ought to be: but going up, Dandan had a ream of men to help her. She sat Li Ton in a chair and had him carried on poles, shoulder-high. What he consented to, Ai Guo could scarcely refuse.

Up they went, then, stately in their dignity, like people of importance. Dandan and the boy Gieh followed in their dust.

T
HEN THERE
was the matter of the dragon. Other things happened, perhaps, but it was the dragon that mattered. She came, she burned, she raged, she went away.

Ping Wen in her belly, her own boy in her jaws.

B
Y THEN
almost everyone had run off, everyone who could. Some were too proud, or too busy, or too broken.

Dandan thought she herself was perhaps too slow, no more than that. By the time she thought,
I could run, I suppose
, it was already too late. She had looked for her old men and seen them stranded, abandoned, helpless in the dragon’s glare.

Of course she hadn’t run, then.

The only surprise was that the boy Gieh stayed with her.

T
HE DRAGON
might have eaten more, she might have eaten them all, but she took her boy between her teeth and left the rest to one another.
Perhaps she thinks we will eat one another
, and perhaps
they would. There was a masterless city down below, and at least one man up here who had wanted long to master it, and others who had spent blood already to prevent him.

After the dragon, though—after the dragon, all the mortal world seemed drab and short of meaning. War not worth the effort, a sword too dull to draw. Tunghai Wang might not even claim Santung now if he felt at all the same way she did—emptied-out, adrift, like a bubble in the eddy of a stream—but Dandan thought it would fall to him regardless. She thought he would walk down and find it in his hand: not won and not gifted him, not surrendered, only heedless.

He would have to walk, because all his horses had run away and all his bannermen after them. He might have armies at his beck and call, but not just now.

Just now he was walking less far, perhaps with greater purpose: from there to here, picking his way around the vast rubble crater this paddy had become in its ruin.
Dragon Hollow
they would call it, she thought, and never dare grow rice in it again.

Were they the ones to decide this new dispensation, then, the men still standing here: Tunghai Wang, the monksmith, the pirate and the torturer? Power resides, she supposed, where people leave it. Ping Wen had left much unspoken-for. She wanted to press her two old men back from it, spirit them away. But all their bearers had run, and she was slow in any case, slow again. What should she do, hurl herself between them and whatever Tunghai Wang meant to offer, whatever he meant to demand? She was too small to matter, a sparrow to mob a hawk.

He stopped to speak to the monksmith. Behind him, here came his general:
too fat to run
, she thought, watching how he leaned on the shoulder of his boy.

Dandan didn’t want to watch, didn’t want to overhear.

Tien the same, she thought. At least, Tien was moving toward the smoking chaos of the shattered war-machine, not lingering
to listen in. There were men hurt over there; they mattered more.

Dandan had been playing nurse awhile now to Tien’s doctor, to men in pain. It was something to do.

She seized Gieh by the shirt and tugged him after.

B
ROKEN TIMBERS
, splintered bamboo spars, torn bindings. A serpent’s nest of ropes all tangled. In among that ruin, bodies too: broken, splintered, torn and tangled.

Fire too, fire everywhere. They were lucky, she supposed—if anyone remotely wanted to call this luck—not to have seen the whole paddy engulfed in that same fury that had brought the dragon down. Or else the dragon had been careful even in her agony, not to risk still more harm to herself.

Her flailing tail had crushed and scattered, even as it spread fire through so much that was flammable or explosive. Looking around—because fear was only common sense, it was the stitching that held her together when she was being brave—Dandan couldn’t see a single projectile left whole and deadly. Powders and oils mingled and burned in streaks and puddles, wood cracked and snapped in heat, smoke wreathed the scene and made her cough but nothing erupted or threatened to erupt.

She didn’t feel safe, no, the opposite of that. Still, she went with Tien into the smoke, among the flames.

Among the bodies.

S
OME OF
them were at least moving, dragging themselves toward some dream of safety. Some were barely hurt, except perhaps in their heads. More than one was wandering numbly through the devastation, stumble-footed and directionless.

Tien was the doctor. Dandan herself could be most help to those who didn’t quite need doctoring, only someone to guide them in the smoke.

If an inner voice suggested that she was performing the same service for herself, it was very deep down, a moment of recognition rather than thought:
here I am, being me again. Doing what I do
.

It was a comfort, or it would be, later. Set it aside.

H
ERE WAS
someone who needed other comfort: a young man not noticeably hurt, not moving either. Squatting dangerously close to a pool of flame, not even shifting the tatters of his ripped and blackened clothing from its licking edge.

She said, “Come. Come with me, let me—”

Then the smoke shifted on a breath of air and she could see past him, just that little way she needed: just far enough to show her why he wouldn’t move, why her voice would never draw him, why encroaching fire couldn’t drive him off.

Another man, just as young: lying sprawled on the ground there but not dead, nothing like dead. Hurt, to be sure; and awake, alert, feeling the pain of it. That was a good sign, by all that Dandan knew.

What was not good—not good at all—was the litter of timbers that lay haphazardly across the lower half of his body, thick heavy beams that made a better job than the smoke of hiding whatever damage had been done him.

More than one of those beams was smoking, and there was live fire somewhere underneath.

His friend should have been frantic, should have been heaving at the timber with his bare hands for want of any better tool. And was not, was just crouched there unmoving by the young man’s head. Holding one hand, she saw, in both of his.

That said plenty, more than was needed. Even so, she said, “Gieh—!”

The squatting one shook his head. “Don’t bother. I know how much these beams weigh. And everyone’s run away, who was fit to help.”

“Even so.” This time she said it aloud. “We can at least try. You’ll have to get out of the way.”

And still he didn’t move. “I have tried. It’s hopeless. All you can do is make things worse for him.” By stirring hope in the trapped man’s heart, he meant, perhaps; or else that any effort to shift the beams only helped them settle, to hurt him all the more.

Well. He would hurt more soon enough, when that fire caught better hold around him. She understood his friend’s despair, and wouldn’t buy into it: not yet, not ever. She could be furious with him, but there wasn’t time. Not yet …

At least she could stop him burning up with his friend. Whether he wanted that or not.

She bundled up the hem of her own skirt, and went to beat at the flames that licked toward him—and did at last, at least startle a movement out of him, a sudden hand that snared her wrist like a cuff of iron. This close, seeing through the filth, she realized that she knew him: Mei Feng’s runner, he had been, in and out of the palace all summer long.

“Not,” he said, “unless you want to burn too. I
made
that,” a jerk of his head toward the flickering oily pool, “I know how it works. Your skirt will be a wick to it, no more.”

“Then if you
made
it,” she hissed, edging away, “you will know how to
kill
it, will you not …?”

A shake of his head: he didn’t know, or it wasn’t possible. Or he didn’t care, or he couldn’t think. Any of those.

Unexpectedly, it was Gieh who spoke, behind her: “The dragon knew,” he said.

And then he loomed up beside her, with something in his hand—a long pole with a spike at the end, that might have been a weapon or a tool, she couldn’t tell.

She hitched herself urgently out of the way as he drove the beak of it into the soil, that narrow margin between the young man and the fire. An hour ago this ground had been baked brick-hard; she didn’t think mere iron would have dented it. That was before the
dragon crashed to earth. Her simple weight had cracked it and cracked it, the whole terrace, from the natural rock to the retaining wall; her brutal writhing had ground much of it to dust beneath her belly.

Gieh had seemingly no weight at all, all bone and leather, but his wiry strength was inexhaustible. He broke through the soil’s crust and built a hasty rampart to hold the fire back. Then, when Dandan thought he’d dig more clods and scatter them to soak up the oil and smother the flame entirely, he said instead, “Move, both of you. I can’t help unless you move.”

“You can’t—” the young man began, hopeless as before. Gieh ignored him, driving his spike hard into the ground between him and his trapped friend.

And leaned on it, rocked it back and forth, split the crust again; said it again, said, “
Move!
”—and now at last Dandan at least understood.

And took action on her own account, two hands under the squatting man’s shoulders and dragging him away by main determination.

“It’s no use, it’s no
use
…! He can’t shift those timbers, not even with a lever, he’ll just—”

“No, he won’t. He’s not trying to shift the timbers. Look.”

The young man dashed tears and smoke out of his eyes, shook the dread out of his head, and looked.

Gieh was digging away instead beneath the trapped man’s body: breaking the earth with relentless effort, the long handle of his pole rising and falling, rising and falling …

“Oh.” For one precious, terrible moment the young man was still in Dandan’s grip; then he had wrenched himself free and run to seize a tool of his own, an iron bar. On his knees beside Gieh—and now suddenly careful of the fire behind its dike—he seized his share of the work, slamming iron into earth, wrenching out clods in a storm of dust.

·  ·  ·

B
ETWEEN THEM
, they hollowed out the ground beneath the trapped man and so tugged him free, out from under the grip of what they couldn’t shift. Dandan saw how his jaw clenched as they dragged his legs across the rubble, how he bit down on the scream he would not utter.

Unexpectedly merciful, she stopped them before they had hauled him all the way to the paddy wall. “That’s far enough for now. Gieh, you did really well. Now do better, go and fetch Ai Guo.”

“Ai G
uo
?”

“Yes. Hurry.”

Meantime the injured man’s friend looked worse than he did, pale and shaking and needing this respite. Needing to kneel, apparently, with his friend’s head in his lap, needing to see nothing else for a while; needing to murmur, “Oh, why is it always you?” which made small sense in a field of catastrophe and drew an answer so private it had to be expressed without words.

Dandan peeled back ruined clothes while they were distracting each other. She looked, she touched, wiped blood aside and decided not to press more deeply, not to test what moved and what would not.

Instead she lifted her head, spoke to the other one, said, “What’s your name? I don’t remember.”

He just looked at her.

She sighed. “All right, then. What’s
his
name?”

“Shen. He’s called Shen …”

“Shen, can you hear me?”

His eyes glittered in the drifts of smoke, his head nodded fractionally on his friend’s lap. Pain had pushed him away, but not entirely; he was finding his way back. Hand in hand with hope, perhaps, if he would dare it.

“What’s your friend’s name?”

The ghost of a smile. “Chung. He’s called Chung.”

Chung, yes. That was it. “Good, then. My name is Dandan. I
am no doctor, but here,” looming in the smoke, shuffling forward between crutch and boy, “here is Ai Guo, who—”

“Who is no doctor either,” the old man said above her, patiently bewildered. “What game is this?”

“No game. Here,” she said, meaning
here where I need you
, “you are doctor enough. You know exactly what harm a body has taken, who better?”

He grunted, in acceptance of a self-evident truth. Seemed not displeased, but still said, “Where is Tien?”