The Secrets of Jin-Shei (27 page)

“You will have to tell me more about this child later,” Liudan said. “Here comes another dance.”

This time it was four women, dressed in the brightly dyed ankle-length skirts and gathered peasant blouses of their tribe. They were all between their mid-teens and mid-twenties, barefoot, long-limbed and graceful, their long fair hair spilling loose over their shoulders. The youngest girl’s mane reached almost down to the backs of her knees, and curled riotously around her face.

“Ai,” sighed Nhia, who had quite unconsciously reached out to touch her own withered leg, a silent regret that she herself would never know what it felt like to move with grace, to dance, “she looks like the Morning Star if it chose to take human shape.”

Tai reached out and squeezed Nhia’s hand.

The music was different for the women dancers, with softer edges, but without losing the heart of spirit and passion that the men’s dances had been woven around. The women whirled in complicated patterns, their skirts swirling up and revealing flashing glimpses of shapely ankles and muscled calves. Two of them wore thin chains of some pale metal around their ankles, and the fine links sparkled like silver in the light.

Tai started clapping in rhythm with the dance, in pure delight, and Nhia laughed and joined her; soon Yuet was doing likewise, with only
Liudan sitting up with her hands folded with royal dignity in her lap. The dancers had plainly not expected that; they had entered the room wearing a uniform expression of a tense wariness and, perhaps, a glimpse of a concentrated focus on the dance they had been about to perform. When the clapping started in their audience, the youngest girl had been betrayed into a smile after catching Tai’s eye.

All but the eldest were smiling by the time they concluded the dance, and bobbed their heads to the enthusiastic audience. And then Tai gasped inadvertently as another girl slipped into the room, bearing a handful of bright scarves.

The girl with the bright chestnut hair who had been up at the Summer Palace. The spirit girl. The snow dancer.

Their eyes met, very briefly—and the other girl’s were dark under her pale brows, as dark as Tai’s own. Then she dropped her gaze, handed the scarves to the oldest dancer in the room, and ducked out again. There had been mutiny in her face, and there was a corresponding frown on the face of the dancer who had received the scarves; the bright-haired girl’s presence in the room had clearly not been sanctioned. Tai turned, caught Yuet’s eye, opened her mouth to speak …

Yuet, with an instinct she did not understand but obeyed implicitly, gave a quick unobtrusive shake of her head.
Say nothing.

Tai subsided, confused.

She saw very little of the scarf dance, and the one after that, where the men came back in and rejoined the women and all the dancers did a joyous circle dance as the conclusion of their performance that evening. She bid a distracted good night to Liudan and the others, after the musicians and the dancers had packed up and left, and retired to her bed. She had wanted time to try and puzzle things out, but sleep took her unexpectedly, and with it, a vivid dream the like of which she had not had before.

She walked a Summer Palace which was both whole and shattered, in her dream; if she looked directly at a pile of rubble she saw what was but if she was looking elsewhere with that same pile on the edges of her vision the wall which used to be there stood whole again. In the same manner, when she came to the gateway leading up to Antian’s balcony, the terraces beyond looked like they had always done, with the mountain rearing above them, but they were at the same time only ghostly echoes of themselves, the mountainside riven beneath them.

On the incorporeal surface of this beloved balcony, Antian stood on what was alternately solid flagstone and thin air. She was smiling at Tai; and as Tai ran forward to greet her, she changed, flowing into the chestnut-haired girl from the Traveler village—and then into Liudan—and then back into her own gently smiling self.

Take care of my sister,
the spirit said, smiling. She reached out a hand.
Promise me that. Take care of her.

I promise,
Tai said in her dream. Her own trembling fingers sought Antian’s and just as they would have touched Tai woke with a start and sat up in bed. Nhia snored gently in the other bed in the small room, in the far corner, but otherwise she was alone. Her heart was beating like the drum of the Traveler musicians, as though she had just danced the full measure of the sword dance.

“Who?” she whispered, to herself and to the spirit which had visited her in the night. “Who is she?”

I
t was closer to three weeks, rather than the more traditional single week of retreat as practiced by all her Imperial ancestors, that Liudan decreed a return to Linh-an. None of her companions were any the wiser as to what her decision was in terms of choosing her Emperor, which was ostensibly the reason for the whole journey up to the mountains.

Liudan was perfectly happy to discuss any subject under the heavens with her three
jin-shei
sisters. Her mood was even downright playful at times. She shared of herself as much as she was capable of sharing—she discussed statescraft and the intricacies of the Way with Nhia, and with Yuet, the oldest and most sophisticated of them all, the fascinating topics of people and the way they functioned. She had long, serious discussions on art and poetry with Tai; her remarks about the potential of Tai’s poetry had been no Imperial whim, lightly said and quickly forgotten. But what was to have been the purpose of her withdrawal into the mountains—the choosing of the next Emperor of Syai—seemed to have been conveniently buried out of sight, and Liudan showed no sign of wanting to resurrect it.

There had also been no discussion of the Traveler girl who had haunted Tai’s dream.

“Say nothing, yet,” Yuet had told Tai. “There is something here that I think I ought to have known about, but right now all I have is an inkling. I know nothing for sure, and I will not until I get back to the city and to my records, to Szewan’s records. Until then, say nothing to anyone. Leave her the life that she has—don’t draw attention to her at all. I will look into it, and let you know if I find anything.”

But Tai had been frustrated and curious, and the day before they left the village to return to Linh-an she had gone back to the Summer Palace—again by herself, this time closer to her own favorite time of the day, when the sun was hanging low and golden above the mountains.

She did not know what she had expected to find, but it was not what met her when she climbed up the still snow-covered slopes and through the hushed, empty gardens. In a sunlit corner of a ruined courtyard, like a scrap of tapestry come to life, she saw the girl of her dream dancing, alone.

Her eyes were closed and her arms, bare despite the still-wintry nip in the air, were raised above her head, her wrists bent in graceful arcs, like the wings of a white bird. Her bright hair was loose and streamed in riotous curls, catching the late afternoon sun and glinting red and gold as she whirled to music she alone heard echoing in her mind. She was very fair, her skin like fine porcelain, veins showing blue at her wrists, and her mouth was full and parted as she danced. It was hard to guess at her age because her movements were a woman’s movements, her body a woman’s body with curves at breast and hip, but her face, and the shape of her mouth, and the curious abandon to her pleasure, were all a child’s.

The awareness of not being alone any longer, something that caught her in mid-movement and shivered the shape of her dance into fragments like a falling mirror, was that of a wild thing—neither woman nor child but an unwary mountain beast trapped against a cliff by a hunter. Her eyes flew open and she grabbed at her shawl, draped untidily over a bare tree branch, wrapping herself back into anonymity and turning to flee into the lengthening shadows at her back.

“Wait!” Tai called out, flinging out an arm to stop her. “I mean you no harm! Don’t run! What’s your name?”

“I do not talk to the Court people,” came the unexpected reply, in a soft, oddly accented voice—it was dark and low, and older than Tai expected. “Go home! Leave us alone!”

And then she was gone again.

Tai did not tell Yuet of this encounter, preferring to wait until Yuet came up with some answers of her own. But the strange mountain child was much on her mind as the Linh-an women, the “Court people,” made their way back to the city after Liudan’s three weeks of grace.

The Council demanded the results of her meditations on the day after her return to the Palace.

“I will make an announcement,” Liudan said, “on my birthday. Not before.”

She would still be only fifteen years old on her next birthday, in the summer. Still young enough—in theory—to be reined in, bound by tradition, controlled. The Council, advised by the Sages, allowed her the further
grace. But speculation did not stop running riot, and the city’s betting shops did a brisk trade on which of the suitors Liudan would take as her Emperor at the end of that summer. This Autumn Court would be very different from that of the previous year.

Tai came home determined not to allow Yuet to let the matter of the identity of the Traveler girl slip from her consciousness, but she was soon sidetracked by other events.

The first was the arrival of a very important milestone. Her cycles began two days before she turned twelve, and her Xat-Wau ceremony was scheduled for the fourth day of the third week of Taian, the day that had been the Little Empress’s birthday. Tai was no Empress, and her ceremony was far simpler than Liudan’s had been—in fact, there was no Temple priest present at all, and it was Nhia, her friend and
jin-shei
sister, who spoke the words of the coming-of-age blessing over her. The only other people present had been Yuet, a smiling brace of neighbors who had been invited in for the celebration, and Rimshi, now seriously ailing and seated throughout the ceremony in a deep cushioned chair and a rug, despite the summer temperatures outside, laid over her knees. Her hands trembled these days, and the Xat-Wau ceremony seemed also to seal the inescapable fact that it was Tai and not her mother who did more and more of the fine embroidery work for the Imperial Court these days.

Nhia had wanted to invite Kito, but Tai, at the last minute, had balked. This occasion would be recorded at the Records Office, right there beside the Temple, and there would be the offerings to be made to the proper spirits, and it had been Nhia who had purchased Tai’s special Xat-Wau bead for her yearwood at So-Xan’s stall so that it might have been Kito himself who had carved it—but she had suddenly been furiously shy at his being present at the rites which promoted her from child into adult woman. She had been practically in tears over it before Nhia realized that it was not just a reaction to teasing but something far deeper than that, and had wisely abandoned the issue.

Frail and delicate as she was, Rimshi had insisted on being part of the ceremony. It was she who placed Tai’s Xat-Wau red pin through the upswept crown of her hair. But it seemed that waiting for her daughter to reach this stepping-stone to adulthood was the only thing that was keeping Rimshi alive. Shortly after the ceremony, at which she had still been able to move around the house and had been bright-eyed and proud and happily accepting the congratulations of her guests and the messages of
those who did not come—even Liudan had sent a special gift for the occasion, which impressed the neighbors immensely—Rimshi took permanently to her bed, and, despite all Yuet’s ministrations, did not look likely to leave it again. It was this looming problem and not the mysterious Traveler girl they had left behind in the mountain village that occupied Yuet’s mind.

When Rimshi passed into Cahan, Tai would be orphaned. This child—well, she was no longer a child, legally, now, but Yuet always thought of sweet, quiet, small-boned Tai in those terms—was her
jin-shei
sister, and therefore her responsibility. Rimshi had left Tai with both the skills and the clientele to pursue a career as a seamstress and sought-after needlewoman—if not one that would gain her riches, then certainly one that would more than adequately support her—but how was she to live on her own when Rimshi was gone? And under whose protection?

She broached the subject with Tai herself one evening, toward the end of Kannaian, with Tai bent over the sumptuous folds of a Second Princess Consort’s new Autumn Court robe and Rimshi, whose job it would have been to finish such commissions until only a few short months ago, asleep in the next room.

“Do not bury her just yet. I am not ready to give her to Cahan,” Tai said in a low voice, her eyes on her work, her hands busy with bright silken thread and fine steel needle. “She is still with me. She has much to teach me.”

“I know,” Yuet said gently. “But when Szewan died I was left alone and it took me utterly by surprise. And I was quite a few years older than you are. I worry about you.”

Tai looked up with an affectionate smile. “I know,
jin-shei-bao.
But things will fall into place as the Way unfolds. Nhia always says that Cahan knows what it is doing.”

“Nhia is often at the Court these days,” Yuet said thoughtfully. “Between the pull of Empress and Temple, do you see anything of her these days?”

“Less than I would like,” Tai said, reaching for a pair of embroidery shears to snip off a thread. “She drops in every few days, but often it’s a brief visit and she’s on her way somewhere else.”

“Is she still teaching?”

“Mm-hmm,” Tai said, her mouth full of embroidery silk as she wet the
end of the skein in order to thread a new needle. “And learning. She studies with one of the senior priests in the Temple now. She says he is an interesting character. Apparently he says that meditation alone is capable of making him invisible. Nhia hasn’t seen him pull that trick yet, but she says that there are times she wishes
she
knew how to do it.”

Yuet grinned. Liudan had taken a great fancy to Nhia, and kept her close. Yuet had an idea why Nhia would want to be invisible sometimes. “Out of sight, out of mind, is it?”