Hidden Cities (22 page)

All those open wounds, that should be scabby and wetly ripe with infection, gleaming with pus—they looked all to be skinned over already, far too soon. She might never be rightly shaped again, but the shape she was, something was preserving.

She looked at him, at his astonishment, and laughed again. The croak turned into a cough, and she wheezed at him. “Have you water? Little fat bewildered man?”

“Yes, yes, that I do …” He thrust the skin at her and she snatched at it one-handed, tipped it, drank with a clumsy greed that spilled as much over her skin as down her throat.

“Ahhh …”

The tiger cub came to her, and licked that runoff from her skin. Her smile was savage, as she took one more swallow for herself and then pushed the spout roughly into the cub’s mouth as it if were a nipple.

As if it were a nipple, the tiger sucked and swallowed.

Drained the skin entirely in two swallows and then closed its jaws more finally, bit off the spout, pierced the bag, played with it, shredded it with claws and a shake of its head.

“That’s what he would have done with me,” Jiao murmured. “Nearly did.”

“Wait, what? The
cub
did that …?”

“Yes, oh yes. Did you think his mother? She wouldn’t have been so uncertain. Have you food? I could use food. So could he.”

Dried fruit, Biao carried. He had nothing else to offer, and she didn’t offer any to the cub. She ate with a dreadful earnestness, her one hand letting the tao dangle utterly while the other filled and filled her mouth; then, smiling through stained teeth, “Need more water now.”

“Sorry, I haven’t …”

“No, of course not. Perhaps I can chance the forest.”

“They are looking for you, the clans. The word is spreading already, valley to valley.”

“Of course.”

Surprising himself, he said, “Wait one more day, and I will bring you food, and water-skins. Medicine too, something for the pain. You do have pain?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes, doctor, I have pain. It is … extraordinary.”

He was pleased, almost, to hear that not all the laws of nature were revoked here. She should have pain; the state of her body demanded it, and so perhaps did justice also.

He said, “How did this
happen
?”

He didn’t say that information was the price of his help, but perhaps she heard it anyway. The glance she gave him was amused, in a terrible way. Terribly amused.

She sat, slowly, and drew the skin up again around her shoulders. He helped, on the left side, where she couldn’t manage with any grace or comfort. The skin side of it felt raw and stiff, nothing like leather; it smelled and was sticky like aging meat. He wiped his fingers on the fur, which was coarse, almost harsh to the touch, but still set a tingle in his flesh.

She said, “I killed his mother,” which was not starting the story in the right place, but Biao was—just—too wise to interrupt. “Killed her and skinned her before he smelled me out, before he came. Perhaps it was her that he smelled. He came … It was dark, and I heard him coming, he’s a noisy brute,” with a glance that might almost be affectionate, if this spare, bare creature could remember affection. Biao wasn’t sure, and would never want to trust it. “All I saw was the eyes, though, and the—the
intent
of him, the purpose.

“And I couldn’t reach my tao, all I had was a skinning-knife and that would do nothing but prick at him like a goad.

“So I did the other thing, all I could think of to do.

“I dropped the knife, grabbed his mother’s hide and wrapped it around myself.”

A pause, a long pause, while she gazed at the cub and remembered, while Biao watched her and tried to imagine; then she shook her head, took a breath, carried on.

“I was too slow, of course. Who can move faster than a tiger? A jade tiger, in his own hills and frantic for his mother …?

“But.”

That seemed to be enough, or she thought it was, that and a gesture: to the tiger-skin, to the tiger.

It wasn’t enough for Biao. “But?”

She sighed, rolled her eyes perhaps, said, “But, once he’d hurt me, once I fell, once we were tumbling downslope and we were all rolled up in her skin together, he was surrounded by the smell of her, which was what he knew and trusted; and it was all mixed up with the smell of me, my blood and her blood together in her fur, and …

“Well. He’s young, he’s not very bright. I think he thinks I’m his mother.”

T
HAT WAS
something, an explanation, not enough.

Nowhere near enough.

Biao said, “Your wounds, your damage … You cannot, you can
not
have recovered this much, this quickly.”

“No,” she said. “I think he should have killed me. Even after he stopped wanting to, the hurt he’d done, I should have died. I’ve seen men die enough, I know dead when I see it. I crawled up here to do that, to die. Like a cat, high and alone. Except that he came with me, so of course I brought the skin. And wrapped myself in it, because he was there, and because I was cold and wanted the comfort. And, well. Like that.

“And then, like this. I am … healing. If you want to call it so. Not dying, that at least.”

“Let me see.”

“For what?” Her expression said
there is nothing you can do, this is out of your hands
. Perhaps it also said
I know what you are, Biao, you are a pirate and a thief like me
. Perhaps that was just his conscience.

He shrugged. “Curiosity.”

Honesty won through, where he thought a bluff would not. She shrugged off the skin again, to let him look more closely in the
light. Flesh was knitting itself together wherever tooth or claw had torn it, skin was forming over the raw. It was happening too quickly for sense, and too quickly for her body too. Broken bones were marrying all askew, in whatever splintered pattern they now lay. Her shoulder was twisted, savaged out of all repair. He was surprised that it could take even the weight of her arm, let alone a blade in it, however unconvincingly.

She said, “Like Mei Feng and the emperor, I’ve been too close to Yu Shan all summer, I have a little of his jade in me. Enough that it won’t let me die that easily. That’s on the inside. The rest? I think it’s the skin. Like sleeping in jade, swimming in it …”

He touched her here and there, and felt the flinching that she would not show. She might always hurt, he thought, this badly. “If I had Tien’s needles here,” he said, “I might do something for your pain.”

“If you had Tien’s skill,” she snorted.

He nodded. “That too. That first, perhaps.” He had the tiger’s whiskers in his sleeve, and did not offer to use them. “She is the wrong side of the water now, but you should seek a doctor out. Not me.”

“Not you, no.” She said it like a promise. And then, “Not anyone, perhaps. I might just stay here with the tiger.”
And the pain
.

“You can’t. How would you live? And the forests won’t be safe for you. I said, the clans are looking. You need to move quickly, get ahead of the word.”
If you can
. He wasn’t sure it was possible, only that the opposite was not.

Why did he want to help her, why see her survive? He wasn’t sure of that either. Only of the one thing, that even a token assistance had its price. That was fair, it was honest. It was how he dealt with the world. She would understand. She of all people, she who likely understood him better than anyone on this island.

He said, “Stay here today, and I will bring you food in the morning.”

She eyed him sardonically. “The tiger needs to eat too.”

“For the tiger too. I will bring meat,” though it would likely be dried, and he would have to steal it from the compound’s wind-house. “Milk I cannot manage.”

“Well. I think he is old enough now to live without his mother’s milk. He will need to be.” Still she eyed him, still she waited.

He said, “I will tell them that I saw you heading westerly. They’ll think you are trying for the coast, and a boat away. With luck,” and the skills he had, the frauds his life was built on, “they will chase that way.”

She said, “They must know there are no boats, with the dragon watching.”

“Jiao, these are mountain people. They dig stone, they live in the forest, they never look at the sky. They never leave the valleys. They don’t think about the dragon. Yes, they’ve heard that, but they don’t know it, it’s not—”

“Yu Shan knows it.”

“And Yu Shan says that he will kill you, if he finds you—but he told me where to look, he didn’t come. He doesn’t want to find you. He’ll lead them that way, if I tell him to. Which would let you slip away easterly. If you’re quick, if you’re careful. If you’re lucky. That’s as much as I can do.”

She looked at him assessingly, and shook her head. “Not yet. If you can do it now, you can do it in a week, when they’re less hot, when they think I’ve gone already. Bring me food and let me rest, let me heal …”
Leave me with this
, as her good hand pulled the tiger’s hide up again, over her crippled shoulder.

“No,” he said. “Now, tomorrow, or not at all. Now, or I tell them where to find you. Tell them true.”

Her fingers clenched in the fur, but her eyes showed no surprise. “What do you
want
, Biao?”

“That. The tiger-skin. Tomorrow.”

“I’m not ready. Another week …”

He eyed her flatly. “Tomorrow. I’d take it now, but the clan would backtrack me and find you. Tomorrow, in exchange for
food. Before I send them westward. I’ll say I had it from you, in exchange for your life. It’ll be true, more or less.”

Her gaze moved to the cub. “He might follow you, if you take the skin.”

Biao managed, with a blinding effort, just to shrug. “That’s the risk I take.” He’d bring a tao, but only for his own soul’s comfort, not for use. He wasn’t Jiao, to slay a pouncing tiger.

“He might not follow me.”

“No. You’re not his mother. That’s the risk you take. Is your life worth it?”

She just looked at him.

he Forge was almost starting to feel like home.

Han liked it—almost—for the solitude, for the security. At the moment, he thought, there was only one person he cared about, and he didn’t want to be with her. He’d rather be here, on a rock with no jetty, where neither she nor anyone else could come. The solitude was all for him.

The security was for the dragon. Again because nobody—no magician, no priest, no army—could come to land here. This was a place of safety for her, and he thought she needed that.

Every time he thought that, he laughed at himself for the rank impertinence of it. What safety did she need, from anyone except perhaps the Li-goddess? And all the goddess ever did was protect people—her own people, perhaps: not everyone—from the dragon’s attacks. Either she had no aggressive intent, or else she would need to work through people to achieve it, and she had not mustered them yet.

And yet the dragon did keep coming back to the Forge. She had her own reasons, which she would not share or else he could not understand. When he saw her land once more on the peak, when he saw her turn and turn like a dog making its bed in the rushes, when at last he saw her settle, what came to mind every time was security, for her. Not solitude: solitude was for him, who had lived all his life with other humans on every hand. She was alone all the time, except for him sometimes, who did not count.

He wasn’t fool enough to think that she came back for him.

The first time, he’d thought that she might never come back at all, that he was stranded again, marooned again. Doomed again.

That first time, he’d felt relief at the first sense of her returning.

Now he took her coming for granted, but was still sure that it was not for him.

She wanted to feel safe, he thought, and so she came here, where no one could come at her. Except himself, of course, but she knew that she was safe from him.

Safe with him: he would protect her, if he could.

Which was another absurdity, and almost worse.

She could go to the sky, or to the sea, where she would be safe from anyone who could neither fly high nor swim deep and deep.

That might not include the goddess. Han didn’t know. He did know that someone, somehow, had chained the dragon once, and that she dreaded its happening again, and that she kept coming back to the Forge.

Sometimes she lay curled at the peak there and watched the water, like a guard at her duty.

Sometimes she watched Han, like someone intrigued by another’s little life: the bathing, the digging, the gathering and gleaning. The cooking. He always wanted to show Tien, when he cooked. And found himself showing the dragon instead, which wasn’t quite the same.

Sometimes she watched him from the inside, which was worse.

Sometimes she slept. He was fairly sure that whenever she wanted to sleep, she came back to the Forge. For her safety.

Once, just once he had slipped into her mind while she slept, to watch her from the inside. He had walked deliberately in her dreams.

Never again.

I
T SURPRISED
him sometimes that she would want to sleep at all, after centuries on the sea floor, trapped in dreaming.