Hidden Cities (37 page)

There was the empress, the mother-city: a stronghold bleak and dark and weathered, walled all around. Demanding, untrusting, unyielding.

And then there was herself, open and broken, frightened and hopeful and alone. Too small for the world, needing an alliance.

The empress might have swallowed her whole. Certainly she had intended that. Perhaps she still did intend exactly that. But Mei Feng had proved not quite swallowable so far, more than a mouthful; and she sat as it were at the mouth of a valley, where the empress held the heights. If the dowager meant to come at the world at all, if she was not content—and she was not!—to squat in splendid isolation and scowl down and be ignored, then she had to come through Mei Feng.

Through my child
, Mei Feng thought, hugging the small hard roundness of her belly. To the empress, of course, it was her son’s child, nothing of Mei Feng’s. Even so, Mei Feng was the gatekeeper.

They could never be equals, she and the indomitable old woman; they might never be friends. Little by little, Mei Feng was inheriting what used to be the dowager’s own. Her son’s loyalty, her claim to be mother of empire, everything. Except her rank and title, because Chien Hua might love his little island fisher-girl but he would never marry her. That was understood.

For now, the empress could be counsel and mentor, the only woman living who had borne an imperial child. She knew better
than her own doctors, how this would go. “I have seen normal women,” she said, “give normal birth. It is not like that for us.”

Us
, she said, often and often now. Making an alliance of them, two women against the world: strength in shared secrets, sharing secret strengths. “Imperial seed makes us sick,” she said, “even as it makes us strong. What grows in your womb, what grew in mine, they are not quite human, these sons of empire.”

Mine might be a daughter
, Mei Feng thought, secretly rebellious: her strength, not for sharing.

“Mortal flesh, of course, conceived in mortal passion—but still they have jade in them from the start, at the heart. That’s what makes them so heavy to carry, so hard to us. But we, we women, we have something of the stone in us too, from lying close with emperors. That’s what gives us the strength to carry them, and to endure. It is … always bad for the woman, to bear an emperor’s child. You now, you are having it worse than I did. You are too young, I think. It wants a woman, where you are still a girl. I let slip a dozen, before I could bring the one to term. Still, you have survived the worst of it. I thought the child would die, I admit it, before Master Biao came.”

I thought the child had died. I admit it. And me too, I thought I would die, had died, was dead already
.

I wanted to die, I think. I admit that too. Not the child, though, never that
.

Then … well. Then Master Biao came, and changed everything. Remade me, gave life back to my baby, remade the world
.

W
HEN
M
ASTER
Biao was absent, when he had taken the tiger-skin away, Mei Feng liked to sit out on the balcony of this new and petty palace, first build of the mighty city to come.

With all an isolated hill to build on, this had been her idea: that they should build a swift house first, compact and self-contained, alone on the slope facing south. Nothing grand,
nothing that would eat time and spit out delay. A wooden house, an elaboration of their old beloved tent, sealed against weather and furnished with comfort, fit for two young people and their essential servants and no more. Business and worry could be left in Taishu-port with the generals. Closer at hand, all the noise and fuss of the workers’ tents could be out of sight and out of hearing, north of the hill; all their ongoing work, building the real palace with its barracks and courts, that too, the north side of the hill.

From here she looked south to the mountains and the forest and the sky. Everything that was a trouble lay to the north, away from her: the politics of court, the dragon in the strait, Tunghai Wang and Ping Wen hopefully warring with each other on the mainland. Even Grandfather, in his anxiety and distress. North of her. Not in view.

She had never imagined sharing this little precious house with the dowager empress; but the old woman was here and the emperor was not, or not often. He came when he could and left when he must, when other men insisted or his own conscience drove him away.

She didn’t argue, much or often. He was her man and father of her child, her boy-emperor and her delight, in bed and out of it, waking or sleeping, talking or laughing or silent and intent—and yet, and yet. She was almost glad to see him gone again, to feel the restful spirit of this place close again about her, almost like the embrace of the tiger-skin. Almost that close, that warm, that comforting, encouraging, uplifting.

Almost glad, bizarrely, to be left in the company of his mother.

E
VEN WHEN
the rain came, so long as there was no wind to hurl it in beneath the open roof, she liked to sit out here on the balcony and watch slow changes cross a world she could not reach. Inside
her was what mattered, the baby that had not after all died; outside her, this house encompassed her as much as she encompassed the baby.

The old woman sat with her most days, sometimes late into the night when the hills were shadow against the vivid sky, when the moon was a lamp and the stars were silver dust flung over midnight silk. Never a comfortable companion, the empress was a comfort nevertheless, with her difficult wisdom and her trenchant grip on what mattered.

“Why do I like this so much—or no, not that, quite. Why is this all I want?”

“The tea? Because it is bitter, it speaks true to your tongue.”

“Not the tea,” though the empress was right about that at least. It sat in Mei Feng’s mouth like a curl of steam from a hidden mountain pool, tasting of rock and depth and clarity, nothing soft or sweet. Nothing that grew. Some teas tasted of the untamed forest, or the grasslands she had never seen, or the sea-wind blowing over the paddy: greenness at their hearts. Not this. This held no light at all, no colors. It was a tea for the night, a tea for her baby in its darkness, waiting. “This,” she said, with a wave of her arm across the rail of the balcony, across the dip of the valley to the rise of the hills. “All I want to do is sit here and watch the weather march across the mountains. Watch the moon come and go, watch the sun follow in its tracks,” not watch any more of the world than this. Hug her arms around her swelling belly, feel the baby kick back.

Sip tea, and talk with the dowager empress; or else sip tea and sit silent with the dowager empress, when she used to eat and jabber and argue with her son.

“Ah,” said the old woman, a world’s worth of satisfaction in a word. “Because you have an emperor growing inside you, and this is his inheritance.”

A little bewildered, Mei Feng shook her head. This was the last least shred of his inheritance, the final pendulous drop of it, the
belly of Taishu hung above a desert of ocean across which not the greatest of emperors could ever reach. All the empire else lay northerly, behind them, above them, out of view.
Out of reach
, which was where she wanted it for now.

“This is the heart,” the old woman insisted. “Not all the unmeasured miles we have come; not even the Hidden City that we left behind, certainly not all the sordid little cities we passed through on the way. Not your grubbly Taishu-town, not even now, when the emperor must make his home there. Not all the myriad people, not all the wealth, not the armies and the power to command them. This. Taishu is the Dragon’s Tear, the Tear of Jade, because of this, because those mountains hold jade at their heart. All that the empire is, is jade; all that it is, is here. All that my son is, all that your baby will be. You are his eyes on his inheritance. You show him what he will be born to. Of course that seeds contentment in your heart. Drink your tea and go to bed, fool child. My grandson needs your sleep.”

No
, thought Mei Feng,
no and no and no
. The empress was wrong, more ways than she could count. She did not want to sleep, she couldn’t sleep; her baby wouldn’t let her. It had come so close to the other thing, to the hollow bitter empty sleep of death, she thought it clung to her awareness of the world. She didn’t know if other babies slept in the womb, but this one not. If she drowsed, it would kick her awake from within. The tiger-skin could hold her under, and the emperor could do the same. Lacking either, she really only wanted to sit here and watch the night spin away under the slow rhythm of the stars.

And more than that, far more, the empress was wrong about the heart of empire. Mei Feng used to think it was the beating heart of her boy, the emperor Chien Hua, but of course that wasn’t right. Now she thought it was the slow-beating heart of his mother. The dowager empress
was
the empire, she held its heart in the weak fierce clutch of her claw fingers; she was the true Hidden City, obscure and protected, unrecognized, unsought. Without
her, there would be no Chien Hua, of course; every woman was empress in her own house, mother of empire. More, though: without the dowager, her husband’s death would have been her son’s death too, a change of dynasty, new empire built on the bones of the old. So it went, time and again—but this time it wasn’t a story, this time it was Chien Hua.

Without her the emperor would never have come to Taishu, would never have been found by a certain fisher-girl, blinking in the fog.

And without her, Mei Feng thought, without her
now
, Chien Hua would hold on to what he had and let the empire slip away. He had the title and privileges of rank, which he liked; he had the jade, which he needed; he had an island for his plaything and a people to inhabit it, an army to protect it. He had his friends for company, his new palace for distraction.

He had Mei Feng, heart and body; he had their child coming.

What more could a young man want?

He would settle, she thought, without his mother. Be king of Taishu, lord of enough.

It was the dowager who clutched the idea of empire, and would not let it slip. She whose old eyes had seen the stretch of it, whose tongue spoke with the weight of it, whose pride could not conceive of yielding it. She kept it fresh in her son’s mind, urgent to his generals.

Yes, there was a dragon in the strait, and a traitor in Santung—but they had means to bypass one and manipulate the other. To her the strait, even the dragon was a defense, not a barrier. Santung was held, not lost: a foothold, not a desperate vulnerable last finger’s-hold. A step forward, not a falling-away.

She could be wrong and many kinds of wrong, and Mei Feng could love her for it anyway: for her stubbornness, her arrogance, her strength. For being closed off to the changing world, a high walled city, yet unbreached; and for coming down, for being reachable,
for bringing her precious boy to where he might hear voices other than her own.

She was a repository for what might not yet be lost. She could be a touchstone still. She could be essential.

T
HE HEART
of empire dozed in her chair, a small old woman too twisted by her years to be comfortable lying straight in a bed. The new fresh hopes of empire smiled drowsily, nestled in her own cushions, a small young woman too recently too sick to want her bed ever again, unless her man lay within it. Lounging like this was easier for her too, with the baby forcing all her inward organs out of shape. Fuss lingered in the lamplight beyond the balcony door; maids’ hands waited to put her to bed, maids’ voices to scold. This balcony was sacred space, forbidden. The old woman had taught all the household to leave them alone out here. Mei Feng would make the tea herself, to avoid intrusion; the empress would drink it for the same reason. Being entirely clear as she did so, just how great a sacrifice this was.

Mei Feng could love her for that too, for giving way on nothing, holding to her sour ungenerous temper as she did to her bitter tea, as she did to the empire.

M
EI
F
ENG
could doze in the comfort of cushions and coverlets, and wake to the breeze on her face bringing news of weather and season, of forest and hills and the far sea beyond.

She could open her eyes and see first far hint of day cloud the clarity of stars. She could shift her oddly heavy, ill-balanced body and feel the baby shift itself inside her, and smile inwardly and slide a little farther down into her own warmth, and drowse again.

S
HE COULD
wake again and feel the shift in the wind, first breath of rain on her cheek; she could hear the silence in the house at her
back and the waking hills before her, birdsong and monkey-calls and the stir of bodies through trees all melded by distance into a riverfall of noise, a susurration, almost enough to draw her down into sleep again.

S
HE COULD
hear a noise that was far closer and just as soft, not as alluring: the squeak of a bare sole on dew-damp lacquered wood. That must be one of the servants, risking the old woman’s anger. Which might only be folly, but they had no fools in the household; which meant that it must be news. There was no reason else to be fussing out here between two sleeping mothers.

Nothing could matter that much to either one of them unless it was Chien Hua, news of the emperor himself. And no news could be good news that came light-footed on a gust of rain in the too-early morning, that had a servant standing silent over their sleep sooner than wake either one of them to break it.

Whatever it was, they should bring it to her. The old woman could have the empire; Mei Feng claimed precedence in the emperor’s heart. And the right to intercept calamity before it reached his mother, that too.

There was still time. All she had to do was move: open her eyes, lift her head, slide a hand outside the covers to gesture.
Bring it here, whatever it is. Tell it to me
.