Hidden Cities (9 page)

B
EING RIDDEN
to the temple, as though the man on her back meant to pray here and needed her to bring him in.

A
LMOST, SHE
almost did. Not quite.

The temple sat with its feet in a hollow. Beyond that was a rising grassy lip, and then the bare rocks of the crag thrusting through like teeth above the drop, above the crashing sea.

The dragon settled on those teeth, right on the edge there, the claws of all four feet biting deep. Ma Lin couldn’t possibly have felt the deep rock of the headland tremble under that sudden weight, no, not possibly—but she thought she had. She thought those teeth had almost broken loose.

Soldiers ran for the temple, which she thought was wise. Others plunged off down the cliff path. That she thought was stupid; there was nowhere to go down there. Perhaps they were swimmers, perhaps they had in mind a swift splash across the river—but she doubted it. She doubted they were thinking at all.

She and the captain were simply standing, watching. She thought that was admirable in him, stupid in herself. She should have gone to the temple. She still could. The dragon was only sitting there, Ma Lin was out of reach and could yet make a run for it …

Except that none of that was true, not quite. The dragon wasn’t only sitting there; she had turned her head to look at them. And her neck, her long neck was coiled back, poised, like a snake on the verge of striking. Ma Lin wasn’t at all sure that she stood out of reach. Or that her legs could run. There was something captivating about the undersea glow of the dragon’s eyes, much that was terrifying about the mouth and claws and the simple dreadful size of her. Between the one and the other, Ma Lin wasn’t actually sure that she could move at all.

The figure on the dragon’s back hoisted his leg across the spiky ridges of her spine and slid down over her extraordinary scaled hide. Using her leg and foot as steps, he came to ground; then staggered a little and had to stand for a moment with one hand clinging to her iron claw, catching his balance, like a sailor come to port.

She just crouched there, monumentally impatient, moving not at all.

At last, he walked away from her. Ma Lin almost thought he pushed himself away, determined but a little reluctant, still a little wanting to cling.

Something about him puzzled Ma Lin. He’d just stepped off a dragon, but not that. Not just that. He didn’t seem big enough, somehow. To be riding a dragon.

Not a legend, not a hero, not a god.

Not a man, not that either, now that she could see him clearly in the sunlight.

Just a boy. That was it: just a frail, bony boy with wild hair and ragged trousers, no shirt, no older than her Jin. He looked like he was made of paper, stretched over a frame of green bamboo.

Then he turned to face the dragon, and now he really did look like he was made of paper, used paper, because all his back was written on, deep black characters that Ma Lin couldn’t read.

S
HE’D THOUGHT
—no, she’d
assumed
that he was coming to one or the other of them, the priestess or the soldier. She did look like a priestess these days, she knew that. It was in her stance perhaps, the way she walked in the world, the goddess at her side.

This boy who rode the dragon, he seemed quite uninterested in her and the captain. Neglectful of them. He faced the dragon, rather; and one arm lifted, and without seeing his face Ma Lin couldn’t tell whether that was a wave of farewell or a gesture of dismissal,
go now
, such as a man might make to a servant, or a mount.

Not, surely not to a dragon.

But the dragon rose, lifting effortlessly from the headland as though she only willed the world to fall away and so it did.

The boy tipped his head back to watch her. She apparently tipped her head down, to look at him.

Ma Lin couldn’t imagine how he bore it, the intensity of that stare, both eyes blazing.

Perhaps he couldn’t turn away, perhaps he was snared entirely in the tangle of her thoughts. Crushed under the simple weight of her attention. But he seemed—well, almost easy. Hands loose at his sides, one foot poised on its toe in the grass, head cocked like a boy caught in conversation.

He might almost have been smiling. She couldn’t see his face, but something in his body said so.

Then the dragon rose farther, turned and was swiftly gone, out across the water.

A great wash of air came from her whipping tail, and Ma Lin could have choked on the stink of it, all sea-mud and rot.

T
HE BOY
, it seemed, meant to stand where he was and watch her. Watch over her, perhaps.

The captain moved no more than his eyes, from boy to dragon and back to boy again. For a competent man, he seemed helpless to do anything but watch.

Someone had to move, to speak. That would be Ma Lin, then. Apparently.

She stepped forward, a little hesitantly. The boy wasn’t the only one whose world had rocked beneath him.

She was a short woman, but her head still came up higher than his shoulder. Not a big boy, not a strong boy; scrawny, she would have called him, accustomed as she was to heavy men.

She wanted to say,
who are you?
—but questions are invidious and answers unreliable. She wasn’t even sure who her own daughter was, from one moment to the next.

She said, “I am called Ma Lin.” That at least was a certainty.

He glanced sideways at her, distracted. His mouth moved, and for a little while no sound came from it. He scowled; she thought,
you have been too long talking to the dragon, little one. In your head. You have forgotten how real people need to speak
.

He cleared his throat, shook his head, tried again. This time he found his voice, or a thin unready scrape of it. It was good enough for her; she had heard far worse a voice from one she loved.

He said, “My name is Han. She,” his eyes turned back to the sea, to the dragon, finding her instantly even against the glare of sunlight on water, “I don’t believe she has a name. Or none that she will share.”

“No.” It would be beyond imagining, for a dragon to bear any name a human mouth could pronounce or a human mind encompass. Now she had seen, she understood that exactly. Perhaps it was a kindness in the dragon, not to share. Perhaps a dragon name would break a human mind entirely. “Are you her slave?”

He said, “No. Or yes, perhaps. Sometimes, if she would let me. I have been her master too. Sometimes, when she will let me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No. Nor does she.”

For a moment, Ma Lin thought she had fallen in with a magician. But he smiled and shrugged and shook his head—
how can I possibly understand what baffles her?
—and something in her warmed unscrupulously to this unscrupulous, unsettling boy.

For want of any other question, she said, “Tell me.”

He said, “She likes to kill. She has been a prisoner, our prisoner, chained by our magic; she says she has drowned in human voices for too long. She wants her waters back, the rule of them, but even more she wants to see men die. I can … prevent her, a little. I can prevent her killing me, and others too. Does that make me her slave? Perhaps. I don’t know. The most I ever was before was a pirate’s boy, and the most I ever stopped him doing was killing me.” He stopped and smiled, rubbed his nose, perhaps realizing that some might see that as a gift he had. Survival was a place to start, perhaps.

His face changed as perhaps he remembered someone else, whom the pirate had killed regardless.

She said, “Not everyone would think it was a slave’s place to keep his mistress from what she wanted most.”

“No—but some of us, we have to. Sometimes.” He stared out to sea. “Someone else,” he said, “can stop her killing, on the water. It makes her furious, but some boats, some fleets she cannot touch.”

Ma Lin confessed, a little. “The Li-goddess,” she said, nodding. “This is her temple.”

“Ah. Is that why she brought me here?” It was a question without an answer; he didn’t wait. “She thinks that only some boats are protected. Someone holds her back, she says. Like I can.”

“Yes.” Ma Lin was boastful suddenly, stupidly. “My daughter: she speaks for the goddess. I have her here now,” with a jerk of her head back toward the temple, the crowded temple steps, where soldiers and women together were staring at this priestess who dared speak to the boy who rode a dragon.

“You do? Well, keep her close. The dragon does not love her.
Nor those like her. I think there is more than one. She has been waiting for a boat that had no protection.” His eyes found it, and hers followed: the sampan, a speck now on the water. He knew where it was because the dragon knew, she thought. The dragon hung above it, pendulous, a rock in air.

“You could protect them. You said it.”

“Perhaps. Yes. But she has my promise. She needs to know whether she can still do this.”

“You mean she plans to kill those men? And you will let her …?”

“Will you argue for their lives?”

For any lives
, she meant to say, she wanted to. But her eyes moved willy-nilly to the beach across the creek, where men lay dead because those in the sampan had slaughtered them.

“They are rebels,” she said, as if that mattered, as if it could. As if one lord’s service was different from another’s. And then, “They are men too. Like your pirates, like you. Has your dragon not killed enough rebels?”

Apparently not. He shrugged. “Your emperor would want them dead, because they killed his men. You might want them dead, because they would have killed you too if they had come up here. She wants them dead, because they are abroad on her waters; and because she really, really needs to know. Keep your daughter in the temple there, don’t let her interfere.”

She said, “I will,” thinking
Shola will;
and, “Can you not …?”

“I can,” he said, with a faraway look in his eye, “but I promised.”

Ma Lin turned back to the glimmering strait. Without his sure gaze for guide she had to scan for the speck that was the sampan, and the darker larger speck above it that was the dragon.

Almost, she wanted to turn around: as if she expected or dreaded to see her daughter stride forth, shrugging off little Shola and fearsome with purpose, inhabited, ridden. If the goddess stood
here and watched, Ma Lin thought, in Jin’s body, she could prevent it.

But she didn’t know, or didn’t care, or else Ma Lin was wrong. Or those men out there were not her people, or else they were beyond her reach.

She didn’t appear, at least, here on the headland or out on the water. Surely she could have shaped herself a body of water, if she had chosen to? She could have risen up to defy the dragon and protect the sampan,
these are my seas …

But she did not, and perhaps they were not.

Ma Lin didn’t exactly see the dragon strike. She saw her fall, spear-straight, a dark rip in the sky; but she lost her against the water, where she had already lost the boat, in the scatter of light and confusion of the waves.

What she saw was the splash of it, a great eruptive rising hurl of sea.

The dragon, she was sure, could cleave the waves as neatly as a blade. This was a statement, a declaration,
I can!

A shout, a fling in the face of the goddess.

Men died, so that one immortal might make her mark against another.

Nothing changes.

“I wonder what they wanted,” she said. “Who they were, where they were going.”

The boy shrugged. “Wherever they went it would have been the same, fire and death.” And then, “No. Whatever they wanted it would have been the same, water and death, their deaths. Whatever they thought, this was always where they were going: to the belly of the dragon, or the belly of the sea.”

“It is not only their deaths,” Ma Lin said. “The people will starve if they cannot fish, if they dare not go to sea.” She felt like a priestess, negotiating. The Li-goddess had always looked kindly on fishermen, and they on her; her temple in Santung used sometimes to smell more strongly of her worshippers than it did of joss.
“Taishu will starve altogether, if her people lose touch with the sea.”

“She may not always be this angry,” Han said. “I don’t know. She must have let boats sail once, before she was chained. Perhaps she will allow it again, later. But she has been in chains a long time,”
chained by men, held prisoner by your goddess
, “and she is very angry now.”

She was, yes. Angry, and exultant also. At least, that was what Ma Lin saw, as the dragon breached again: bursting from the water to climb in giddy spirals, high and high. Food in her belly, if dragons needed food; freedom in her waters, freedom in the air. Freedom to strike, where men disregarded her and dared to sail unprotected. Death in her eye. She had much to celebrate.

Also, she had a boy. A strange boy, but anyone would be strange, the dragon’s voice abroad, her plenipotentiary.

Food in her belly if she wanted it, but not in his; he was dreadfully thin. And half naked, barefoot, alone …

Ma Lin said, “Will she come back for you?”

He smiled. “When she wants me, when she thinks I might be useful. Or when she is angry again, when something goads her temper and she needs someone to hiss at.”

“Well. While you wait, come inside and I will feed you. Find you a shirt too, and a decent pair of trousers.”

He shook his head, strange boy. Starveling creature saying no to food, which should have been his first thing. “I won’t wait for her,” he said. “Not here. She can find me when she wants me; she’ll know where I am.” As he knew, always, where she was. Ma Lin had seen that, how his eyes found her irrevocably, exactly. She wondered what it must be like inside his head.

“Where will you go, then?” In his place she thought she might go far from the sea, far and far, hope to go so far that the dragon would lose touch.

He said, “I have … someone in the city, if I can find her. She did this to me,” and his hand addressed the skin of his back, the
tattooed characters he couldn’t see himself.
She gave the dragon to me
, Ma Lin thought he meant, or else
she gave me to the dragon
.