Hidden Cities (8 page)

“And he shall have one. I will make it myself.”

“You? Do you know how?”

He laughed, and kissed her at last. “I do. Yu Shan has taught me.”

Mention of Yu Shan brought another fleeting shadow to her face. But she held her hand out to Old Yen and settled him among her cushions, curled herself up beside him.
News
, the emperor had said, but she didn’t share it yet. She seemed to cast about rather for something else, anything else that she could say instead.

“I am sorry that you had to make that climb, Grandfather. We weren’t up here for the storm, we took shelter in the jade store and that would have been an easier walk for you, only the river wouldn’t stop rising and the emperor wouldn’t let us stay,”
he wouldn’t let me stay
she seemed to mean, “so we all had to troop up here where even he could be absolutely sure the water would never reach us …”

She was hiding something. It might be how she had contrived to come here from Taishu: had she begged a ride from the dragon,
perhaps? A ride on the typhoon? Or it might be why she had contrived to come, what absurdity had brought her in chase of her man. If she was so keen not to tell, Old Yen was at least as keen not to hear it; but the emperor was frowning over his kettle and his teapot, which was nothing to do with the complications of making tea, and he would preempt her if she didn’t hurry up.

The scruffy cat had come back to her and she was fussing with his fur, unteasing mats with her fingers. “Grandfather. I’m, I’m going to have a baby.”

Which made him a very old man indeed, he realized with a rush of delight. Very Old Yen: a great-grandfather. And part of the imperial family, great-grandfather to a dynasty …

He was still absorbing that when the emperor brought him a cup of tea. Imperial tea, fine and extraordinary, not at all the harsh brew he drank himself; and the emperor was sitting at his feet all unexpectedly, for all the world like a son-in-law looking for advice.

“Grandfather, you know more about the goddess than anyone except perhaps her priestesses. And you know the dragon too, you believed in the dragon when perhaps nobody else did.”

Well, of course: the one implied the other, you couldn’t have the goddess unless you had the dragon too, her prisoner.

Her escaped prisoner.

The emperor said, “We need to know how to fight the dragon, how to chain her again.”

 

a Lin had her daughters back.

Those two who were still living, at least, she had those. The third in a way had never left her. Little Meuti’s body might lie unmarked and overlooked between the paddy and the road, in some bare scrabble of soil that even Ma Lin could not find for certain; her ghost was a presence intermittently,
tug-tug
at Ma Lin’s trousers.

For a while she’d been all that Ma Lin had of daughters, and welcome so.

But now the girls were back, the living girls, Jin and Shola. Insofar as Jin ever could come back, which was not very far, perhaps, not far enough. Sometimes she was not there at all, and the goddess lived through her. Which might be Jin’s own choice, but Ma Lin didn’t think so.

She didn’t like to think about her elder daughter’s choices, nor her life.

Still, this life or any was better than what Meuti had,
tug-tug
from somewhere forgotten under earth. And Ma Lin’s own life was better with her girls. Even given the company they came with: women of the emperor’s court—only servants, they insisted, but they seemed terribly grand to Ma Lin—and soldiers too, guards to watch her daughters. Actually she thought they watched her more, to be sure she didn’t steal the girls away.

Even given the women and the soldiers and the emperor’s own
message, written on a paper that she could not read and was obliged to treasure.

There was no need to read it. Ma Lin had understood it from the first, just from the weight of it in her hand, the self-importance of the imperial seal. It said that her girls belonged now to the throne—the Throne Victorious, a battle fought and a city won, and all thanks to her daughter—and were returned to her only as a gesture, as a kindness, for a time. She should hold herself ready, the letter said, to say goodbye again.

The emperor’s words might be holy; she still thought they were wrong.

He might be divine, but he was not alone in that.

If her girls belonged to anyone, she thought it was to the Li-goddess whose temple this was.

S
OMETIMES THEY
could still just be girls, no meaning else. As now, when she sat on the height of the temple steps with Shola, shelling walnuts. Making a game of it, trying to split the shells evenly so that Jin on the step below could float them like little boats in a bowl of water, fill them with dry rice and make a fleet of them, coffle them together with fine-woven ropes of her own hair and tow them like barges from one side of the bowl to the other, as a great fleet of ships might fill itself with men and sail from Taishu to the mainland and back again if it only had Jin to play goddess, to keep the dragon at a distance.

For now there were no ships, no fleets. The biggest boat Ma Lin had seen since the invasion was a sampan on the beach below. The soldiers used that to ferry back and forth across the creek. They brought food over daily, paused to pray, went back to their tents and fires on the beach. They were building huts.

If anyone was bold enough to sail the strait, they didn’t do it under Jin’s guard; she was here.

If anyone tried to keep the dragon at bay, Ma Lin didn’t think that it was working. They saw her often from the headland here.

This little boat didn’t bother her, apparently, or else the river was not hers to claim. Sometimes she seemed to pause, to hang like a fortress in the sky, to peer down in what might be curiosity, might be discontent. There was no saying what she might be looking at: the sampan, the temple. Jin.

Ma Lin looked back, sometimes.
I am a mother; I too can be a dragon
. It was all bluff, of course, but that was easy with the temple at her back and her daughters in the temple. She could be ferocious, when she didn’t need to be.

She had been ferocious actually, physically, at need—but not against a dragon. Nor against the emperor, nor the goddess, though they took her children from her. Ma Lin knew her limits, and they were men.

T
HE DRAGON
was up there now, drifting against the wind, an idle undulation, a livid scar in the sky.

Ma Lin and Shola had watched for a while, but she was almost commonplace at this distance. They turned back to the nuts.

Until there was shouting on the beach across the creek, voices thinned by distance. Other sounds too, scratching jarring sounds that would be worse if they were closer, steel on steel. Ma Lin knew.

Men rose up from where they had been squatting on the headland or drowsing in the sun. Women clustered in the temple doorway.

Ma Lin told Shola to take her sister in. Yes, yes, the nuts too; the rice, the bowl of water; everything, if Jin wanted it. Just, go
in
 …

Then she joined the guards at the cliff-edge, where they could look over the water to the beach.

Where men were fighting, but she knew that already. The sounds were bitterly familiar.

She couldn’t tell, they all looked alike to her; she had to ask, “Who is it, who has attacked the camp?”

This was what the camp was for, of course, to guard the temple and its approaches, its treasures, herself and her daughters. Jin.

The man beside her shrugged. “Rebels.”

She might have said as much herself. Any man with a blade in his hand and not an imperial soldier, he was a rebel by definition. Those men down there might be loyal followers of Tunghai Wang, acting under orders. Or they might have no orders; they might have lost their officers and turned bandit for lack of any other way to live. They might just be hungry.

It didn’t seem to matter. They were men; they were fighting. Ma Lin felt tired more than frightened now. Perhaps they would win, perhaps not. Either way, she thought she would trust herself and her daughters to the goddess, rather than to men. They all looked alike to her. Looked and felt and smelled alike, blood-washed and grim and monstrous. She wanted none of them anywhere near her daughters.

She could be grim herself, if she had to be. She too had smelled of blood.

Her eyes were good enough to pick out the bodies sprawled on sand, the men still standing. Still fighting. And falling, the emperor’s men, one by one under just too many blades.

When the last of them had fallen, then came the aftermath: rebels went among the wounded with knives, and left none living.

The soldier beside her grunted. His captain swore. Then started calling orders, as he saw the rebels head purposefully for the sampan. “You, you and you—down the path, delay them any way you can. Catch them in the boat, as soon as they come to land. Go!”

It was death, surely, three men to delay a dozen. The word itself was a giveaway,
delay
. None the less, the three he picked went pitching down the treacherous footing of the path, blades in hand already.

“You and you, halfway down, that place I showed you. Dig out the rocks we loosened before. Use poles, and stay above them; the path will collapse. Then you can defend the point, as the rebels try to climb. The rest of you, stand ready at the top here. Any who come this far, we are enough for them.”

Perhaps they were. If there weren’t just as many rebels or more sneaking through the woods this side of the creek. The captain did send a couple of men to the trees, to cry a warning. They were all he could spare; that was all they could do.

It lay in the goddess’s hands to defend Ma Lin and her daughters. The soldiers could look after themselves, or die. Most likely die. She thought she would be safe, though, with her girls. She would join them in the temple, when it came necessary. In the meantime she stood with the captain, just to see.

The rebels heaved the sampan into the river’s flow, piled aboard—and left the paddles alone, ignored the punting-poles, drew up the sail and steered with wind and current, out past the headland and into the breakers of the strait.

“Are they … Do they think they can take that out to sea?”

That was the captain, his voice almost querulous with shock.

Apparently they did. Likely it had made at least one journey across the strait, from Taishu in the emperor’s fleet. Perhaps under a former master it had been back and forth like a silk-weaver’s shuttle. These little boats did that, she knew, fishermen with a catch to trade. They used to do it all the time.

Perhaps they would again—but not under the dragon’s eye. Ma Lin would not have taken any boat to sea just now without her daughter aboard, big Jin with the voice of the goddess in her throat.

She cast an eye upward, and there was the dragon indeed. Hanging like a banner in the air, like a long tail of bright silk that defied the wind—or controlled it, summoned it perhaps, her wind, her own—to hold her just exactly there beyond the surf, above the strait.

Her strait, her own.

If that wasn’t true, the dragon surely thought it was.

She looked like a cat, Ma Lin thought, patient for the inevitability of a mouse.

The sampan beat straight out to sea, as the men did snatch up
paddles now to drive it through the awkward waters where surf and tide met current. Ma Lin spared them an occasional, incredulous glance. Mostly, she watched the dragon.

Where she hung in the air, where she turned as though the wind had shifted, as though the wind could shift her.

W
HERE THERE
was something to be seen on her neck, a lumpen strangeness that broke the smooth sleek lines of her, jutting crudely upward.

W
HERE IT
looked almost—almost!—like a man, a rider on the dragon’s back.

W
HERE THE
dragon was moving now, but not toward the sampan. It looked almost, almost as though she were coming to the temple.