The Secrets of Jin-Shei (16 page)

“I wished to thank you, young
sai’an
,” the woman said in a low, deferential voice. “You have helped me understand. My husband’s mother is in need of your wise words, also, but she is bedridden and cannot go to Temple often. Perhaps if you would come?”

“But I am not one of the blessed ones of the Temple,” Nhia had said helplessly.

Just for a moment, the woman looked surprised, and then her expression settled into certainty again. “Maybe you are not one of the ones wearing the robes,
sai’an,
but you have the wisdom of the Immortals in you. My mother-in-law would be grateful if you would come. If only for a few moments. We live in ZhuChao Street, in the yellow house on the corner. If you please,
sai’an
.”

Nhia had wanted nothing more than to bolt into the midst of the marketplace and to lose herself in the crowds—but she could not run. She
could not ever run. Not from this; not from anything. The irony of this made a wry grin touch her lips. The woman interpreted this as acceptance, or dismissal—in any event she had backed away, bowing, accompanied by her brood.

Several other customers at the fishmonger’s stall had been witness to this exchange, and the fishmonger himself, who had known Nhia from babyhood, stood with her intended purchase still in his hand.

“So you are a Sage, now, young NhiNhi,” the fishmonger had said. There was an attempt at levity there, but there was something else also—a curiosity, a careful interest. The marketplace lived by gossip and rumor, this was how the news was spread from one corner of the sprawling city that was Linh-an to the next. There was, maybe, a story here.

“I am no such thing,” Nhia had said, very firmly, and had brought the subject of the conversation back to the fish.

But another woman had stopped her in the street two days later, asking a very specific question. The question concerned the child whom she held by the hand and who stood staring at Nhia with the blank obsidian gaze which was very familiar to her. She had worn that mask herself. The child’s other arm and hand, not the one held by her mother, were thin and withered, her fingers bent into a pitiful claw which she held folded into her belly. This was another Nhia, a cripple whose mother was driven to ask for help where she thought she could find it.

Perhaps it was this that made Nhia speak to her. There had been a parable to fit. Then she had told another tale, directly to the child, another Han-fei story but one aimed at the old pain so familiar to herself, trying to ease the little one’s burden. She had been rewarded with a softening of the eyes, a shy smile. The mother noticed, and her own eyes lit up. She took the incident away with her, cherished it, spoke of it.

After that, more came.

Somehow, before she reached her fifteenth birthday, Nhia had found herself sitting in an unoccupied booth in the First Circle one morning, telling teaching tales to a gaggle of children at her feet. At first it was an irregular thing, just every so often—when sufficient numbers of young disciples accumulated around her, Nhia would sit down somewhere, they would all sit subside on the ground around her, and the cry “A story! A story!” would be raised. But it quickly grew into something more. Something that became striking enough to warrant the attention of the Temple
priestly caste. Several times, in the middle of one of her tales, Nhia would look up and catch the glimpse of a discreet observer, an acolyte draped in Temple robes, who would stand with eyes downcast and hands folded into his sleeves and listen intently to what she was saying. When she caught their presence, Nhia tried to be careful and tell only the tales she
knew
she had heard before here in the Temple, told by the Temple Sages and teachers. But it was sometimes hard to remember which ones she was sure about. All of the stories she told sounded so old and familiar to her. Which ones were old and venerable teaching parables, and which ones had she just invented?

Li, Nhia’s mother, had been wary of the whole thing, and afraid that the Temple would take exception to Nhia’s activities—especially since she often told her stories in the Temple’s own precincts.

“These are games,” Li had said, “and they can be dangerous. You are setting yourself up above the people. You have had your Xat-Wau, and you are no longer a child, Nhia—think about what it is that you want to do with the rest of your life.”

“But perhaps I am already doing that,” Nhia had said slowly.

No marriage; no children; she had come to terms with that. But perhaps these could be her children, the ones who came to her and whose lives she knew she could touch, could sometimes heal. She had much to learn—but already, it seemed, she had much to teach, also. A part of her gloried in it. Her body could not run—but her spirit could fly.

But Li had not been entirely convinced of her daughter’s calling. She even gone so far as to approach one of the higher-ranked Temple priests, and ask for absolution if Nhia presumed.

“We considered chastisement,” the priest had told Li, “but first we listened to what she had to say. She makes the children hear her. She has said nothing to which we have taken exception. We think that it has gone far enough that, if she did not do it here, she would do it elsewhere—out in the marketplace, or in the streets.”

“Not if you forbade it,
sei.
”

“But why would we forbid it? Those she touches come straight home to us. She does the Temple’s work,” the priest had said. There had been something complacent in his smile, but the priests of the Temple had always been pragmatic about their religion. A Temple which had an entire thriving outer circle devoted to the commerce of faith could not be other. “But I understand your concern—we will make sure she is taught.”

So Nhia’s life had started to turn around the Temple, more and more. She taught the young, and in her turn she learned the meditations and the mental purifications of the
zhao-cha,
reaching out to touch the edges of the luminous, following Han-fei into the gardens of the Gods in search of the Fruit of Wisdom.

Khailin, daughter of Cheleh the Chronicler, had made it her business to keep the crippled girl who had attracted the attention of Sage Lihui under observation. In the months following that encounter in the Temple, Khailin had found out that Nhia frequented the Temple Circles, and had many friends there. She also found out that she and Nhia had more in common than she had thought. Although their focus and their ultimate desires were different, colored in part by their differing stations in life and their place in Linh-an society, they shared an interest in the Way and in the manner in which it functioned. Nhia’s interest was more in the wisdom and the purity of the path—the
zhao-cha,
the internal alchemy of the mind and spirit, the calling of the sage, the seer, the wise-woman. Khailin was more attracted to the
yang-cha
—its rituals, its mathematical magic, its chemistry, its eminently practical nature. They had both been driven to learn, to understand. This was something which Khailin could build on. This could even be part of the reason the Sage Lihui had been interested in Nhia; perhaps he had been drawn to the fierce flame of curiosity, intelligence, yearning to learn. Perhaps, Khailin thought, she and Nhia could be useful to one another.

So she had started keeping an eye out for Nhia at the Temple. A part of Khailin marveled at how Nhia had found a way of gaining access to all the disciplines of the Way. And she had done it all without reading a single
hacha-ashu
manuscript about forbidden things. Khailin was uncomfortably aware that her own time was running out.

She had already rejected several suitors whose representatives had come bearing the
so ji,
the carved jade marriage proposal token. All it had taken, as tradition had it, was her refusal to accept the small sculpture into her own hands from the formally attired elderly aunts and cousins who had been entrusted with its delivery.
As my beloved wishes,
the words had originally meant. If the bride or groom being courted accepted the token, the marriage proposal was deemed to have been accepted, and the betrothal was official from that moment. Khailin’s suitors had not been to her liking—one had come from a large and tradition-hidebound family, which
would have trammeled her like a wild bird in a cage; another had been a man quite a few years her senior, with whom she already had a passing acquaintance at Court and whom she could have accepted except for her utter inability to get past his constantly sweaty palms which, upon reflection, she decided she could not bear near her on a regular basis.

When two emissaries of a Prince of Syai came calling just before her Xat-Wau ceremony was due to take place, Cheleh had made it clear to his wayward older daughter that another refusal would have been severely frowned upon. The Prince was young, positively callow, precisely the kind of vacuous young man Khailin had no wish to marry. She could see herself delivered into the soft life of the noble houses, being an obedient young wife, having to obey endless rules of protocol and decorum, having to endure the hated ritual baths with the rest of the pampered ladies—perhaps never again to have access to the kind of arcane information she craved or the opportunity to test her knowledge … but, on the other hand, she would be a Princess, which was a kind of power in its own right. And the young husband-to-be might be sufficiently moldable into the kind of husband Khailin could live with. The kind of husband who could, if necessary, be hoodwinked into closing his eyes to her study of the
yang-cha.

Khailin had accepted the Prince’s token, gritting her teeth. The wedding would take place the following summer, but in the meantime Khailin had done her best to make sure that her betrothal did not interfere unduly with the last year or so of freedom. It could turn out well—it might have been for the best—but sometimes she wished savagely that her body was crippled like Nhia’s was—that a good marriage had been harder to arrange. That she had been given more
time.

But perhaps Nhia herself would open a few doors.

So Khailin made sure that their paths crossed in the Temple, that Nhia learned to recognize her face, that they started nodding at one another in passing, that they finally exchanged a word of greeting, and then of conversation. Khailin the courtier had cultivated Nhia with all the precision and cunning of any seeker in quest of favors from a higher-ranked aristocrat or sage.

For once, the things that Nhia was being told were not because someone instinctively trusted her with the information, but rather because this was the information that somebody else wished her to know. Since she had never had to field such an approach before, she had not recognized it
as artificial; she had accepted Khailin’s overtures, after a startled wariness that such a one would seek her company, with pleasure. She had found a companion of her own age with whom she could discuss the things that interested her.

They spoke of many things, and Khailin, despite the initial venal motives with which she had approached this relationship, found herself growing to like Nhia. She was surprised by a stab of jealousy when Nhia inevitably spoke of Tai, her only close companion before Khailin herself had appeared on the scene.

“She is so small and delicate,” Nhia had said to Khailin as they walked in the Temple, less than a week before the Emperor’s funeral procession was due to take to Linh-an’s streets. “She wanted so much to say good-bye, but she won’t even see it, not if she is out in the street, behind the crowds.”

Nhia had not mentioned the exact nature of Tai’s connection with the Imperial family, but Khailin’s curiosity was aroused, and she was nothing if not practiced at extracting the information she required.

“We will all mourn,” Khailin said. “This summer has brought great loss to Syai.”

“No,” Nhia said, shaking her head, “for Tai it is more.”

“She spent summers at the Palace?” Khailin asked. “With her mother? You said her mother was the court dressmaker?”

“Rimshi is the seamstress, yes—and she has taught Tai well, too.”

This was straying too far into minutiae. Khailin brought it back to the Palace. “How old is she now—she is a few years younger than you?”

“Eleven,” Nhia said.

“A few summers at the Palace, and she is but a child. It’s been a tapestry to her, a living dream. I can see why it would be hard to let go.” But then Khailin had suddenly trailed off, her eyes becoming thoughtful. Her family was part of the Court, and she and her sister, although they did not attend the social occasions at the Imperial Palace frequently, attended often enough for someone like Khailin to pick up on Court undercurrents. And one of those undercurrents, in the past year or so, had been a connection forged by Antian, the Little Empress. The Princess who had been killed in the summer’s earthquake.

Tai had wanted to say good-bye.

For Tai, the mourning was more than that of the land for its anointed.

“But I can understand,” Khailin said, taking a chance. Putting two and two together and coming up with a conclusion that was tenuous but of
which she was suddenly very certain, she made her voice sound compassionate and deceptively assured. “It would be hard to come to terms with such a loss. Losing even just a friend to a calamity like this would be difficult. A sister …”

Nhia’s head had come up sharply, but she said nothing for a moment, watching Khailin’s face. Khailin allowed her features to soften into a small sad smile. “There was talk in the Court. The Little Empress and a companion she had taken to spending time with. That
was
your Tai, was it not? I thought I heard mention of
jin-shei
.”

“Yes,” said Nhia after a pause, “they were
jin-shei
.”

“But that should be enough to ensure that Tai is given a place of honor, if only she spoke up that she wished to be there.”

“You don’t know her,” Nhia murmured. “As she was First Princess Antian’s
jin-shei-bao,
but she would never take advantage of …”

She might have manipulated Nhia into offering up the confidences, but the sudden brightness that crept into Khailin’s eyes was genuine. “I have never had one,” she said. “I have never had a sister who understood me, who knew me. Yan does what our lady mother tells her to do, without looking right or left—if she were told to walk off the edge of a cliff she would do it and never question why. She would go into the marriage they have planned for me, and be utterly content with it, as she would be content with everything.” She glanced at Nhia, and veiled her eyes, suddenly afraid of showing too much of her emotion. “If I were to die,” she blurted, unable to keep the words under control as firmly as her features, “there would be nobody to mourn me.”