Hidden Cities (30 page)

Tien might have adopted them into her library and taken charge of their treatments, because she could doctor them properly, where Dandan could only ever nurse. Nevertheless they were Dandan’s old men, no question.

The boy Gieh might have appointed himself their servant, which meant he could spend half the day sitting at their feet while they talked dangerous nonsense at him, and the other half nosing through their things while they were with Tien. Nevertheless, they were still Dandan’s old men. Yes.

She didn’t have to heal their broken bodies, or ease their many pains. Tien would do that, as much as could be done. She didn’t have to bathe them, wash their clothes or clean their room. Gieh did that, as much as he saw the need and they would allow. She didn’t have to fetch them food, the boy did that too, along with far more potent spirits than she thought good for them. Or good for him, because they certainly shared, those wicked old men, they delighted in corrupting the boy. She was growing used to his shrill ramshackle laugh echoing down the passage late at night, his pale sweating silence in the mornings.

On the face of it, perhaps she had no duties now. And yet, they were still her men. She had nothing else that was hers. Mei Feng, Dandan’s mistress and also perhaps her friend, was gone back to Taishu. Dandan had stayed by her own choice: which was in no
way the act of a friend, and almost entirely the fault of the old men. Which really only confirmed how tied they were now, each to each, Li Ton and Ai Guo and she.

Which was entirely sufficient to explain why she was out here on the beach now, some miles from the city. She had a basket on her arm and she was gathering.

She didn’t have the coast to herself. These hungry days, there were scavengers on every beach: digging for whelks and razor-shells, netting shrimps in the shallows, stranding themselves on tidal islands to fish the surf. Eyeing strangers with something close to loathing, as something close to thieves.

Dandan came from the palace, and was in no danger of starving. Nor were her old men. Still, she came from the palace and might have brought trouble with her, and did not. She was tolerated, largely because she never did bring trouble. Tolerated and still watched, muttered over, isolated.
Take what you want but not too much, nothing that we might want ourselves
 …

Day by day she did that, free and distrusted and begrudged. Let them dig and wade, let them swim far out to distant rocks, let them guard their precious waters and take what they could struggle for. Dandan scrambled, rather, and took only what the sea offered up to the sun.

She went out as the tide sank, to ruin hands and feet and clothes together, finger-fishing in revealed pools and gleaning from the sharp-edged rocks around.

Mostly, she collected seaweeds. Kelp drying in tangles on the sand, bubbleweed floating in a shadowed pool; blackweed and threadweed and saltgrass, she knew a dozen and could find them all. One would strengthen the blood, another nourish the liver. Threadweed strangled diseases of the belly, while saltgrass encouraged a healthy flow of urine. She prepared them as needed, soups and teas for her old men. To the boy Gieh they were medicines and not food, and hence no part of his province; to the girl Tien they were foods and not medicine.

It was all that Dandan had just now, and she clung to it tenaciously. Most days would find her out along the shoreline, east or west. If some days she carried her basket home empty, small blame to her for that. Some days, there was nothing worth the bringing back.

Some days, her life seemed barely worth the living. She would gaze across the water toward distant Taishu and wonder if she should have gone when she could have gone, left her old men and been a better friend to Mei Feng. Who was pregnant, after all, and had few friends else.

Dandan could persuade herself, often and often, that she’d done the wrong thing. Trapped herself the wrong side of the strait, among people who didn’t know they needed her. Old men could be obtuse, and boys were worse. Boys could be
obnoxious
.

When she thought of the old men, how she had first seen them, there was reassurance in that. Her anger stirred to life again, and her determination. They were her special cause, and she could still raise them from the pit they’d fallen into. Tortured and torturer together, she could save them both. She could find them a place to be and a way to live, unfettered by their long and dreadful histories.

She was quite certain of that.

And even so, some days she ended up out here on the rocks, empty-handed and helpless, hopeless, almost in despair for herself. Staring at the sea and wondering, rebuilding her own story in her own imagination, telling it otherwise, putting herself otherwhere, seeing herself happy …

S
EEING A
sail break the horizon, today, here, now.

A
T FIRST
she thought it wasn’t a sail at all, she thought it was only the very tip of the Forge, strangely visible today where it hadn’t been before.

But she watched it, she scrambled higher up the slew of rocks to
give herself a better vantage, and it was definitely a boat. Not a small boat, but flying only a single sail.

She thought, she really thought it ought to hurry more.

Her eyes checked the sky and saw no dragon, but that was no guarantee. The dragon was as likely to erupt from beneath, the sea her element.

There must surely be one of the goddess’s children aboard, or they could never be so casual. Even so, Dandan thought they ought to hurry. She thought one sail was idling, almost insulting, certainly tempting fate.

Watching, she saw the boat edge closer to the coast. She could see a tall figure at the steering oar, a shorter—a boy, she thought—running between the stern and the foremast, where the sail hung.

She thought it was the fisherman’s old boat. It had a distinctive shape and an uncommon size, too large for a sampan but yet not quite a junk. That wasn’t him, though, steering it. And it didn’t seem to be quite sailing where they wanted it to go. There was a sense almost of panic in the boy’s restless skittering forward and back; there was … something else, inexperience or injury at the stern there.

Dandan was almost sure now that the tall figure on the oar was a woman: which meant that it really ought to be Jiao. The woman stood tall but twisted, though, hunched over to one side, not like Jiao at all. She worked the oar one-handed, as best she could, which was only a little short of hopeless. Sometimes it dug in too deep, trying to stir more water than one hand could possibly shift; sometimes the blade lifted suddenly free so that she staggered at the lack of resistance, once almost pitched herself entirely over the side, barely managed to save herself with a rail-grab from her other hand, her bad arm, with results that put her on her knees for a minute there while the oar swung free and the boy had to come pounding back to take it.

Slowly, uncertainly, Dandan understood they were in trouble. She knew nothing about boats, but surely the boat shouldn’t be
standing side-on to the waves as it came, carried in crabwise like flotsam?

This close to the shore, it shouldn’t be a killing kind of trouble. She knew nothing about the sea either, but this beach shelved gently even beyond the tideline. If they were trying to keep the boat out at sea and making too poor a job of it, they should just run aground and have to splash ashore, no worse than that. She thought. No unseen rocks to rip the hull apart, not depth enough to sink it.

Even so, Dandan did make her way down to the water’s edge, to where sodden sand oozed up around her toes. There was a deadly attraction to imminent catastrophe. She wasn’t the only one drawn down here; the beach was littered now with dark still figures watching. She might be the only one with even the vaguest hopes of helping. She thought these others saw only hopes of salvage.

The boat came on in its inevitable beauty, helplessly bound in the laws of tide and wind and current, like a fish dragged in by a net. Its side loomed, suddenly broad and high in the shallow curve of the bay, as inappropriate as a stranded whale. Perhaps it would destroy itself for very shame, tear itself apart when it struck …

It turned at the last moment in shallow water to strike bow-first, almost to look intentional. It sounded like the dragon come to land: hissing and snapping, a slow rending groaning crunch. The boat seemed to shiver from stem to stern. Ropes flew loose and the sail fell. One voice—one child’s voice—screamed briefly. Then it was still and quiet, caught upright on the keel, startling and perverse in not enough water to sustain it.

The incoming tide would float it off, Dandan thought, and more skilled hands would come to sail it up the coast to Santung, to a proper harbor. No great harm, to sit here for a few awkward hours …

·  ·  ·

E
XCEPT THAT
there was a rush suddenly across the sand, and this was no family scavenging for shellfish in the rock-pools, or seeking profit from a wreck. They came from the rocks, where they must have been lurking; but these were men, too many and too rough. Men who seized her up as incidental profit, herself and other women from the beach as they charged into the breaking waves.

Men who had fought the emperor, rebels. If she hadn’t guessed it already—struggling, kicking, terrified, seeing a new and brief and terrible life emerge like a boat from fog, all too clear—they confessed it, boasted about it as they called up the stranded vessel’s steep dark dripping flank.

“Ohé there, the boat! Let ropes down, let us aboard!”

“Who are you, and what can you do to help?” The voice was Jiao’s, no question, for all that she stood like a cripple and moved like one now.

Would fight like one too, surely, if she could fight at all. If she would try to.

Even healthy, even Jiao could not have fought this many men alone. If she had wanted to. “We are Tunghai’s men,” their captain called. “Tunghai Wang, who will be emperor. We want this boat, and everything you carry. Everyone you carry,” making it obvious that they knew about the escort-children. “You can come with us, or else we will set you ashore here, if you let down ropes right now.”

Dandan didn’t believe him. Neither did Jiao; that woman was twice her age, and many times as sharp in the ways of men and war. “Oh yes,” she said, laughing harshly. “I’m sure you’ll be very kind to me, you and all your men in turn. And then toss me overboard after, me with my useless arm and all. It’s a pity; I might have come willingly to your Tunghai Wang, and told him whatever I know about the emperor’s plans. But I don’t think I can trust you now, can I?”

“I don’t think you have a choice,” the captain called back, while his men hooted and laughed in their turn. One of them leaped to
seize a dangling rope-end, to haul himself up hand over hand. Dandan tried to cry a warning, but the man who held her closed his great foul hand across her mouth so thoroughly she could barely even breathe. She tried to bite, but he only tightened his grip and growled in her ear, a slow exploration of everything he meant to do with her later, when they were afloat.

In any case, Jiao was watching, leaning over the side to see the man as he climbed. Reaching out with her good arm, her heavy tao to cut the rope he hung from.

The man splashed down eruptively. Jiao laughed from above, and all his colleagues were laughing too, but their captain had a thoughtful expression on his face. He wouldn’t be stalled for long. One man standing on another’s shoulders could reach the boat’s railing. Or an hour’s work ashore would bring back ladders. One minor mocking victory for Jiao was a goad to the rebels, not a defeat.

She vanished from the side. Above the men’s muttering, Dandan heard the rattle of a chain released, Jiao’s voice sharply raised. Looking up, she saw a shadow spring from the boat’s deck, loom above the men, impossibly overleap them.

For that little moment, staring up at an ominous dark body, something deep-rooted in her said
dragon
.

She was already afraid, then—twice afraid, once of the rebels who had snatched her and once again of this flying thing, this creature—when it came splashing down mightily and twisted around in the water there to face them, lifted its magnificent head and roared, a guttural world-shaking noise, malign and directed and intent.

Not a dragon, no, of course not. Dragons didn’t ride on boats, nor fly on a human’s say-so.

Nor did tigers, jade tigers, that she had ever heard.

D
ANDAN HADN’T
realized that a tiger, any tiger could be so big.

Or so close to her.

Or that a jade tiger would be so vicious-seeming. The stories she’d heard, Taishu stories were all about the beasts’ benevolence, unexpected rescue, guidance. Meaning. That above all. It was always significant, if you glimpsed a jade tiger in the forest. They were the gods’ messengers, some said, fetching truth from heaven. Leading the chosen. Even Mei Feng, after her night on the mountain, her encounter, she had said—

N
EVER MIND
Mei Feng, and never mind the stories. This was real, present, now. This was a tiger in the flesh, a hot wet fury. Some of the men were running already, and their captives too, the women they’d taken from the shore. Dandan thought that was probably a good idea.

Actually they were floundering more than running in water that came thigh-high, waves that washed higher. Dandan’s own captor was one of them, abandoning her unheeded.

She thought probably she ought to follow. It was only good sense, to choose him over the tiger.

Only, well, the sea was waist-deep on her, and the swell covered her breasts as it came in; she couldn’t hope to keep up. If the tiger came bounding after them, it would reach her first. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be the sacrifice that let the others get away.

The tiger crouched low, like a cat at play, except that it crouched in the sea. And had such a rage in it: its mouth agape, its wicked teeth like white jade, just that hint of green. Even its stripes were like forest shadow, black in a green light. Its eyes shone, ferocious.