The Secrets of Jin-Shei (41 page)

“They look exactly the same,” Tammary would respond mutinously.

“They are
labeled
differently!” Yuet tapped with an impatient finger at the labels gummed to the tall jars where the bark was stored. All the containers had these labels, with the contents identified in firm
jin-ashu
script.

“I can’t read that,” Tammary would inevitably say, concluding the discussion, and Yuet would shake her head in frustration.

“Did they teach you
nothing
up there in the mountains?” she would
murmur, and be overheard by Tammary, and the level of resentment would rise another notch.

Tammary guarded her emotions fiercely, allowing them to surface only in her exquisite gift for being awkward about accomplishing even the simplest things. She kept everyone at arm’s length, but it was inevitable that the armor would crack at last. The demands made on her time by Yuet were light, for all the weight both of them carried from their duties to each other, but the issue was one where Tammary could focus her feelings. When she took the wrong container from its shelf yet again—not entirely accidentally, for she had learned that the muddles annoyed Yuet—and Yuet opened her mouth to protest, Tammary slammed the container down on the worktable with bone-rattling force.

“I don’t know! I can’t tell them apart! There’s nothing you can do about it!”

She had turned and fled, up the stairs and into the house, into the small room Yuet had set aside for her own use, and slammed the door hard.

Tai had happened by that afternoon, and Yuet acquainted her with the situation.

“She’s been up there for most of the day,” Yuet said helplessly. “I feel like I have a baby in the house and I can’t cope with it. I begin to have an inkling that I know why I never felt the faintest urge to have any children of my own.”

“Let me talk to her,” Tai said.

When she knocked at the door, at first there was no answer at all, and then Tai was rewarded with a muffled, “Go away.”

She disregarded the words, taking the response itself to be an invitation to enter, and was greeted by a flash of pure fury in Tammary’s dark eyes.

“I said go away,” she said. She had been crying, and was angry and resentful that she had been caught at it. Tai could almost hear her shutting down, slamming the shutters closed, bolting the doors, nobody home.

“I know what the matter is,” she said. “Come with me.”

“Why?” Tammary said. She was three years Tai’s senior, but she sounded like a mutinous three-year-old in response to a serene mother. Not unaware of the irony, Tammary closed up even more. She would not be petted and soothed by this … this
child.
She would not.

But Tai was as implacable as a rock. “Then I will have to stay here until you’ll talk to me again.”

“Why did you bring me to this place?” Tammary whispered. And then, her innate honesty rebelling at the false accusations implicit in that remark, rephrased her question. “Why did I want to come here?”

“That is not something I can tell you, but I know what the matter is right now,” Tai said. “You have never lived in a city. You don’t understand the place, and it probably scares you a little, and there is nothing here of the home you have known all your life.”

“It doesn’t scare me,” Tammary said, tossing her head. “I’ve seen worse things.”

“Have you actually walked through Linh-an since you’ve been here, aside from trotting at Yuet’s heels every so often when she goes to this patient or that?”

“No,” Tammary said unwillingly. She did not want to have this conversation—not now, maybe not ever—but Tai was not going away, that was obvious.

“Then come with me,” Tai said. “It’s my fault—I have been remiss, and I have not shown you my home. My mother is very ill, and I find myself preoccupied with her care, but I will take some time and show you the city. And something else, too. Come with me.”

Scowling, Tammary knuckled at her eyes and put a foot down on the floor. “You’re going to sit here until I do, right?” she said ungraciously. “Might as well get it over with, then.”

Yuet wisely kept out of their way as the two of them slipped out of the house and into the crowded street. Tai took her new
jin-shei-bao
to the marketplace, where vendors of spices and cheeses and berries and squawking live fowl and sides of bloody beef rubbed shoulders with booths selling jade and opals, spinning tops, bonsai trees, brooms, market-baskets, and snuff-bottles hollowed out of a single rock crystal. Carvers of wood and ivory sat side by side with weavers of tapestries and the paper artists whose trade was the making of the funeral replicas of objects the departed would take to Cahan with them. Other booths displayed leather-bound books of the kind that Tai wrote her journal in, or scrolls of teaching tales or poetry by well-known Sages and writers. Tai picked up some essential supplies for herself in the part of the market where those in her own trade shopped for silk embroidery floss in every imaginable color, glass beads, sewing needles, snips and shears and strings of freshwater pearls. Watching her bargain for a skein of sky-blue silk and a handful of yellow glass beads, Tammary began to be fascinated, despite herself.

“I didn’t know there were so many people in the world,” she said, staring around at the throngs around her. “What are those booths?”

“Those are the
ganshu
readers,” Tai said. “Have you had a reading since you got here?”

“No,” said Tammary, recoiling. “I don’t want to know anything they can tell me.”

“These are not the good ones, anyway,” Tai said. “As for people, we’re going to the Temple next. There’s even more people there.”

They threaded their way through the crowded market and out onto the street. It was a bright summer day, and the Linh-an sunshine was liquid heat on their skin. Tai stopped at a sherbet seller’s stand and bought a fruit sherbet each for Tammary and herself. Tammary licked at hers with an experimental tongue, wary, and then, looking rather surprised, finished it all off in very quick order.

“Your stomach will hurt if you do that,” Tai laughed. “You’re meant to savor them, not inhale them. There, that’s the Temple. Yuet never took you there?”

Tammary shook her head, staring at the huge whitewashed walls of the Great Temple, the terraced domes that rose beyond them, and the high tower that soared above them. “So many walls,” she whispered. “So many walls …”

Tai glanced at her, a sudden understanding in her eyes, and then looked away again as though she had seen nothing. “Just a whirlwind tour,” she said, “this time. I’d like to light an incense stick for my mother since we’re here. It can’t do any harm to have the spirits watching over her.”

They joined a steady stream of people who were flowing into the closest of the Temple’s great gates, and Tai purchased her incense from a convenient First Circle vendor and passed through into the Second Circle, making her way to the shrine of Hsih-to, the Messenger of the Gods.

“What does it do?” Tammary asked reluctantly, as though it had been wrenched from her, watching Tai fixing the incense stick into a holder on the small altar.

“Hsih-to is a spirit of the Later Heaven,” Tai explained as she worked. “There are two kinds—the kind that were born mortal and achieved immortality through exalted rank or their great wisdom, like the Emperors or the Sages—people come and pray to them and ask them questions, so they can intercede for the supplicant with the higher powers of Cahan. Others, like Hsih-to, were made in Heaven; people have painted Hsih-to
as a man with wings on his heels, or a man-headed eagle who bears the news to the Gods on their high mountains.”

“So what are you asking?”

“That they watch over my mother,” said Tai, her eyes suddenly bright. “That they save her from pain, and that they grant her peace.”

“Is she very ill?”

“She is dying,” Tai said.

“I’m sorry,” Tammary said, after a beat. “I … never knew my mother.”

“I know,” Tai said gently. She had been kneeling at the altar; now she rose to her feet again, and looked up at Tammary with a smile. “Do you wish to see the inner Circles today? We can come back, if you like, and explore some other time. But for now there is something else I want to show you.”

“What?” Tammary asked, a shade of wariness back in her voice.

“We’ll need a pedal cart,” Tai decided. “At least until the gate. It’s too far to walk in this heat. Can you whistle?”

Tammary, startled, nodded.

Tai led the way out of the Temple, and directed Tammary to whistle up a passenger pedal cart—which the red-haired girl did with such relish that no fewer than three carts came to a shuddering stop at the summons and looked expectantly their way. Tai, giggling, picked one of them and instructed the driver to take them to the Eastern Gate of Linh-an, set into the massive city wall. Tammary, her eyes raised to the great arch over her head as she stood within the gate, seemed to shrink at its towering magnificence.

Tai, glancing around, noticed the hunted look about her companion, and said, “Patience. From here, we walk.”

“But this is the end of the world,” Tammary said. “These walls, they are …”

“They are neither the end nor the beginning,” Tai said, leading the way through the gate and out onto the wide road beyond. “Nhia would be better at explaining this, but it is all a part of the Way—the Way is everything, and in everything, and there are no boundaries except the ones we draw. And even they do not ever keep us from anything, or anything from us. Look, there is the wall—and look, there is the gate that breaches it. There is a place here for the world to enter the city, and a place where the city can escape from itself.”

“Where are we going?” Tammary asked, leaning down to adjust a loose sandal strap that had slipped around her ankle.

“The hills,” Tai said. “That’s what you miss, isn’t it? The open sky? Look, look above you.”

It wasn’t the mountains in which she had grown up, but the rolling hills at Linh-an’s eastern flank at least gave the illusion of reaching for the blue summer sky flecked with high white cloud. The slopes closest to the walls were cultivated, with split-rail fences surrounding tidy orchards and a small vineyard or two. Tai quickly turned off the broad main thoroughfare, crowded with carts, sedan chairs, and other people on foot, and struck out into the hills. The path she chose was empty of other walkers. It skirted the orchard blocks, meandered past a duck pond where several inhabitants marked the passing of the two girls with a loud flurry of startled wings, and wound its way up a hillside where a mixed herd of grazing stock companionably chewed their cud together. After a short, easy climb they reached the top of the hill, and Tai turned back toward the city.

“Look.”

From the rise, small as it was, Tammary was able to glimpse the shape of the city beyond the encircling walls. She even recognized some landmarks, with a thrill of what was almost possession.

“That’s the Temple tower, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Tai said with a smile.

Tammary raised her eyes from the city to the sky, and sighed. “I do miss it. I miss the air singing in the high peaks, and the cry of Lastreb in the clouds.”

“What is that?” Tai asked.

“Lastreb? That’s my hawk,” Tammary said. “I raised him from a half-grown chick, and he used to come when I whistled for him.”

“Ah, so that’s where you learned to summon pedal carts like that,” Tai murmured.

Almost against her will, Tammary laughed. “And other things,” she said. “I made up a lay about him, but nobody ever cared to hear it except Raian.” The name brought back a stab of pain at the memory, and she broke off abruptly.

“If you would tell me,” Tai said after a pause, “I would be honored to hear it. I write myself, poetry and a journal every night.”

“Write? We don’t write. This was never written. Our lays and laments and tales are all spoken, told around firesides. We are the Travelers.”

“How do you pass things down to the generations that come after?” Tai asked. “It is so easy for the spoken word to be misremembered or forgotten.”

“Not to the chroniclers of the clans. They are our memory. They remember everything. Raian is one—because I told him my lay it is already part of the clan’s lore. But nobody else is likely to care about my Lastreb.”

“Tell me,” said Tai. “I would like to know.”

So Tammary gave her the song of the hawk, the liquid syllables of another language flung into the sky as though, if they were lucky enough and light enough, they might fly home and greet Lastreb the hawk who had once been a friend to a Traveler girl. Tai listened, transfixed.

“Can you translate it?” she asked, when Tammary was done. “Your language is beautiful, but I would like to hear you speak of Lastreb in words I can understand. I don’t have the ability to memorize it all, like your people do, but I would like to write it down so that I don’t forget it. So that it is not forgotten by anybody.”

Tammary was staring at her. “How would you write down something like this?”

“I’ll show you,” Tai said, and fumbled in the pouch at her waist for the red journal she always carried with her. She flipped through the pages carefully.

“Like this one,” she said, selecting one of her poems, and reading it out loud to Tammary. “That’s one of the early ones,” she said, when she was done, in a voice almost apologetic. “It’s not as good as some of the ones I did later, but I like that one.”

“How many have you got in that thing?” Tammary asked.

“Dozens,” Tai said. “They peel off like onion skins, except that the poems peel off on the inner layer, not on the outside—they come out from the heart of me.”

Tammary reached for the journal, and Tai let it slip into her hands; Tammary handled it reverently, almost with awe.

“There is a great Book of the Clans,” she said after a while, looking up, “where all our stories are written down. Or so it is said. Raian believes it, anyway. But you have your own book right here in your hands, and you hold your own stories in your hand. Can you teach me this writing?”

“Of course,” said Tai, and her smile was luminous. “You are my
jin-shei,
and you have the right to
jin-ashu.
If you will tell me your hawk song, in
our language, I will write it down for you and then you can start learning the script from a source that will at least be immediately familiar to you. But …”