Hidden Cities (16 page)

Vast it was, still as the mountain, loud as storm. Upslope from her, it stood heraldic against the sky and took her breath away, stole her own movement and made no use of it.

U
NTIL IT
turned, turned its head to look at her.

Eyes like Yu Shan’s, vivid and unreadable.

Was it growling, or purring? And did that, could that make a difference, when either one could make the rock shake beneath her uncertain feet?

A
ND WHY
did cats always, always come to her, as though she would always be a friend?

H
ER TAO
was less than steel tonight, almost a weapon of wind: a whisper as she drew it from her belt, a hiss through the air, barely a glimmer of moonlight.

·  ·  ·

M
EN TALLER
and heavier-built had complained at the weight of her long blade, swinging it in practice. Yu Shan had not complained, but even he had noticed. Tonight it was nothing, it had no weight, only balance as it swung: perfect balance, herself and the blade in a pure ideal of motion and achievement.

T
HE TIGER
was grace itself, ideally adapted. They met, beast and blade, in the exactness of the moment. Jiao hardly even felt the impact in her arms. All the weight was in the tiger, all the shock was in her head, and that was too much hurt already.

A
LL THE
awkwardness, all the ugliness came after. Hot blood spraying and the chaos of the tiger’s fall, its body all unstrung, ungainly, uncat. The brute separate thud of its head, falling onto rock.

And then herself, doing the ugly things.

Breathing, living, she who had unstrung it in her anger.

Heaving up the hot head and setting it on a rock to stare out her anger for her, all across the valley.

Cleaning her tao on the fur of its flank because that’s what you do, it is expected, if only by yourself. Perhaps by yourself and the thing dead at your feet, its ghost needing the contempt of that dismissal.

Setting that blade aside and drawing another, a knife fit for skinning.

Spreading out the body for the first needful cut, noticing it was female and still in milk.

N
O MATTER
. Too late.

S
KINNING IS
a method, a process: once learned, easily adapted. It was only effortful because of the brute weight of death in a creature so long, so massive.

·  ·  ·

J
IAO WORKED
and sweated, peeling the skin free of its carcass; then lifted her head, hearing the sudden second music, the sound of another tiger.

T
HIS WAS
a youngster come in prowl, in prowling search of its mother.

E
YES IN
the darkness, a stiff moment’s staring, sniffing, scenting blood and human; and then the tension, the crouch, the vicious startle of the great leap forward.

H
ER TAO
was out of reach, she was out of time, all she had was this useless little knife; and why, oh, why did they always come to her …?

 

he good doctor sees her patients to the door.

The wise doctor greets her sponsor, the master of her house at his open gateway, with his other servants.

If he is an unknown quantity, where he is to be master of a city and all the lands around, when there is war in the land and a dragon in the sky—then and there the thoughtful doctor goes down to the harbor, to greet him as he sets first foot ashore.

Half the city had the same idea, but Tien was known and cherished now. Simple soldiers made room for her, elbowed her a path through to the wharf, glowered down their own officers when those men objected.

No one knew who the new governor would be. The emperor had departed in a flotilla, promising to send; one single boat, the old man’s fishing boat was returning, still decked haphazardly in yellow. Blessed by the emperor’s own person, it might never net for fish again. Not the emperor aboard this time—he would still be crooning over his pregnant girl, which was sweet, but wearing—but someone high enough, bold enough not to see the boat stripped of decoration before he stepped aboard it.

Tien didn’t particularly care. It would be one man or another. It might be the former governor returned, who had fled to Taishu with the emperor before the rebel army ever reached here. It might be him, but the speculating soldiery around her thought not. Hoped not. They wanted a man who would fight before he fled. It might be one of the generals who had fought alongside the
emperor to win the city back; that was what the soldiers wanted, though some wanted one man and some another, and they were sure to fall out over the choice.

It might be no one they knew: one of the emperor’s civilian entourage, an official from the Hidden City. A eunuch clerk, more used to ink than blood. No one here would welcome that.

“Or his mother,” a voice said, grimly jocular. “Put the strait between him and her, he’d love that.”

“Hush.” Jokes were always dangerous, close to the circles of power. Jokes about the empress could prove lethal. Whoever owned that voice was right, though, the emperor would appreciate the sea’s separation between himself and his mother. Briefly, Tien wondered if Mei Feng—
pregnant
Mei Feng—might have influence enough to make it happen.

Pregnant, though, she might not want it. She might be glad of a strong woman’s presence in the palace, a cushion of experience in a frame of iron will.

Besides, the most fickle of emperors would not send a woman—any woman—to rule a city in a time of war. Nor a clerk, no. It would be a soldier, that was sure.

All that mattered to Tien was that he listen to her, whoever he was: that he give her what she needed, and let her care for her charges in her own way.

All
her charges …

T
HE BOAT
came nosing gently alongside the wharf. Two men stood in the stern. One was grandly dressed and stiffly upright; the other older, more bent, as darkly windburned as the wood of his boat.

He called out from the steering oar, and a boy stood up in the bows with a rope in his hand. There were men ready below, but he ignored them all to make a wild leap over the rail, landing on the wharf with a barefoot stagger that had Tien wincing.

All boys are made of leather and bamboo
—it was her uncle’s
phrase, and the memory of it made her smile.
Sometimes they rip, sometimes they break, but you have to be rougher than you’d think
.

Quite unhurt, this boy looped the bow-rope swiftly through an iron ring and tied it off, then ran to take another as it was tossed down from the stern. She watched him, thinking of a different boy altogether. And shook her head, strict with herself, and waited until the old man above and the boy below had set the gangplank in place from deck to wharf.

By then more men were appearing from the boat’s cabin. Before any of them could get in her way, before the new governor came to shore or any of these waiting officers went aboard to smooth his way, she marched herself up the flexing gangplank and onto the boat, all unexpected and out of proper order.

It was a day to be surprising, to be impertinent if necessary; and she had her best excuse to hand, in open sight. Those men weren’t the only folk aboard. In the bows of the boat, a woman sat with her arms curled protectively around a child who ought to be too old to be so coddled.

“General.” Tien had his name now, from the whispers up and down the wharf—
Ping Wen, he’s sent Ping Wen
—but soldiers and great men like their titles better than their names. Even Tien quite liked to be called
Doctor
. She bowed low, and read his confusion as she straightened. “General, you have a child aboard, who has been my patient. I am anxious for his welfare, as I think the emperor must be also.”

That was, if only just, enough. The tall man seemed to consider each one of her words, test their weight and substance, their meanings and implications. Then he considered her again, in the light of them. “You are a doctor?” It wasn’t—quite—incredulous, but it might have been.

“By imperial decree and service. I am my late uncle’s heir. I had the honor to attend the Lady Mei Feng before she sailed with the emperor; and as I say, my lord, I have had your escort-child in my care.”

“Very well.” She was no more than a child herself, in his eyes. He said so with no more than a blink, less than that. But he was willing to be astonished, ready for it, he had that in his favor. He even held up two fingers to keep the shore-officers back as they came sweeping up in outrage at her cheek. “If you wish to examine the child, do so now. I would say
take him, keep him for me, take your time
, but I am forestalled, I find. Old Yen will sail again immediately, and the boy of course must go with him.”

“It is the emperor’s own order,” the fisherman said.

She thought Ping Wen should resent it more, because that order said
you are stranded here
, without recourse, without retreat; but the general seemed almost complacent.

She bowed to him once more, genuinely grateful, and went forward to the boy and his nurse.

The woman was a stranger, a nun, competent enough. The child was clean and fed and seemed content. It would be as well, perhaps, to have him gone again, never properly here. Let him leave before Mu Gao could come in search of her son, before she upset both of them again.

In any case, the boy was Tien’s excuse and not her reason. She wanted to come close to the new governor, to make herself known to him, to win his favor.

What she hadn’t expected was to look up and find him at her shoulder.

He said, “I must endure an hour of ceremonial with these,” one of those delicate little gestures, that didn’t even point toward the cluster of men around the gangplank but nevertheless included them all, “and others like them; but do you come to the palace when you are done here, and wait for me. I will send when I am free. I have a task for you.”

“General, I will. I would value time to talk.”

That was another startlement for him, that she had interests beyond his unnamed task. He took it well, though, just a quirk and a nod before he walked away.

·  ·  ·

S
HE DIDN’T
know why the emperor was quite so urgent to have the fisherman back so soon. “So that I can come again,” the old man said to her, as they watched formal greetings happen on the wharf, “with the general’s people and his properties. The governor’s, I should say.”

Tien didn’t think even the emperor could be quite that heedless of others’ weakness. The old man looked exhausted already.

“Don’t you dare,” she said, laying fingers on his wrist to count the pulse of his liver, the pulse of his heart. “Go back if you must, if he has ordered it—but rest on the way, let your boy take the tiller. You do
let
your boy take the tiller …?” with a frowning scowl because she knew the answer before she asked the question.

“Well,” he said, equivocating, “the boy is new to the strait and the boat, new to sailing, and the oar is hard to work …”

“… And he will learn far quicker for working it himself, rather than watching you. You are to tell the emperor, if you please: a full day’s rest, a day and a night at least, before you cross the water again. Or shall I send a man back with you, to say so?”

“No need. The governor is sending men enough, with messages of his own; he has been writing all the way across.”

She might not have let him leave, despite the imperial order. She might at least have made him stay one night on this side of the water, except that she thought it would be better, so much better if Mu Gao did not see the child. Let him turn and go, then, weary as he was. His boy understood her orders; so did the men he carried. Let him go now, as soon as Tien had scurried off the boat …

S
HE FOLLOWED
Ping Wen up to the palace. Court politics and army politics and all the needs of a city under siege, and one man to negotiate among them: one man that she must negotiate herself, a stranger needing to be read and learned and swiftly understood.