The Secrets of Jin-Shei (46 page)

“We tried to put together a small feast that would still be fit for an Empress
and
for a bride on her wedding day,” Yuet said. “Come and break the bridal bread, Kito-Tai.”

“J’m home!” Kito called out as he slipped out of his street shoes at his threshold and padded into his house. “Where are you? I have news!”

“Hush!” Tai’s quiet voice drifted out from the porch room, the one where the late summer sunshine pooled most generously in the afternoons. “I just managed to get Xanshi to go to sleep. Don’t wake her.”

Kito poked his head around the circular arch that was the doorway into the porch room. Tai sat on a wicker chair, a small embroidery hoop in her lap, one foot curled up under her and the other gently rocking the cradle in which a small child slept. Smiling at the picture, Kito walked quietly up and bent to kiss his wife, who reached out a graceful hand to the nape of his neck to fold his head down toward her.

“It’s hard to believe,” Kito said, smiling, “that it’s been over a year, already.”

“It’s been forever,” Tai whispered. “It’s always been this way. Don’t wake the baby. What’s the news? And what’s that you’ve got there?”

Kito handed her a ricepaper scroll. “You have another one out. You’re getting famous.”

“Which one?” Tai said eagerly, unrolling the paper. Her rocking rhythm faltered a little and the baby stirred.

“I’ll rock her,” Kito said. “Look all you want.”

“Which one is it?” Tai asked, unrolling the
hacha-ashu
scroll.

“As it happens, it’s the one about Xanshi,” Kito said, rocking his child’s cradle tenderly.

“Liudan sure picks some strange ones,” Tai said, scanning the neat calligraphic script she could not understand. “I would have thought that particular one would be way too personal for general interest.”

“She obviously didn’t think so, and I think that you will find that others agree. This is the kind of thing that men will buy to give to their wives after their children are born. I think it will sell well. But why do
you still let her choose all the poems to get published? Shouldn’t you have some say?”

“She was the one who started it,” Tai said. “That poem I wrote when the wedding journal arrived from Antian, the one I copied out and sent to Liudan, that was the first one she had published. After that, I just pass them on and she has them copied out into
hacha-ashu
and published—without that, nobody could read them except the women.”

“I could transcribe them for you,” Kito said, sounding faintly rebellious.

“I am not supposed to teach you
jin-ashu
,” Tai said reprovingly. “It’s the women’s tongue. We’ve been through this before, Kito.”

“Doesn’t seem fair that women can have both the languages and men just the one,” Kito muttered.

“Most women only have the one, my stubborn darling—I cannot read or write
hacha-ashu,
or we would not be having this conversation,” said Tai. “Oh, now look what you’ve done.”

The baby gurgled in the crib, exquisitely carved and lovingly made by Kito’s own hand while Tai had been expecting their daughter, and both parents now bent over the child. She was knuckling her eyes, but she didn’t seem bad tempered or weepy, and even beamed at her father, showing toothless gums.

“That’s it.” Tai said, “Your turn to play with her. I need to go and make a record of this.”

Kito hoisted his daughter into his arms, and she squealed happily. “Mama will be back very soon,” he said, his hands under the baby’s armpits as he balanced her chubby feet on his knees and bounced her up and down. “Mama going in to be a writer now.”

Tai took the image with her as she slipped out of the room, a smile of pure gratitude on her face. Xanshi had been born more than three weeks before her time, in the same month that both Tai’s mother and Kito’s father had died. Rimshi had simply fallen asleep at last and never woke; but So-Xan’s end came suddenly and unexpectedly, and quite ironically—he clutched at his heart in the midst of carving a memorial sculpture for the one-year anniversary of a Princess Consort’s death, and all Kito could do was catch him as he fell from his workbench. Xanshi’s premature birth had been precipitated, perhaps, by Tai’s grief, and Yuet had had a battle on her hands to make sure both mother and child survived it without any lasting consequences. But it had taken Kito a long time to get over his daughter’s fragility and tiny form. Mere weeks ago this robust bouncing
would have been unthinkable. Kito would have been too afraid that he would break the child.

A corner of their bedroom had been set up as a writing desk for Tai, with all the implements of her trade laid neatly out on it—a blotter, a selection of quills and brushes, a small portable leather inkwell and several quartz ones lined up along the top edge of the desk. An inlaid wooden box with a shallow drawer, with a knob in the shape of a dragon’s head, housed her current journal; others, those of past years, were stored in a shelf above the desk where a number of scrolls tied up with colored ribbons were also stowed in tidy pigeonholes—her poetry, which Liudan had seen to getting published. The name of Kito-Tai, with which she signed her poems, was starting to get recognition, and there was even some money starting to come in.

Tai, subsiding onto her backless desk chair with the newest scroll still in her hand, stared at a beautifully calligraphed copy of her first published poem which Kito had hung on the wall of their bedroom—it was
hachaashu
script, and she could not read it, but she knew the delicate lines of it by heart. The poem had been so many things to her—a remembrance of Antian, a trembling anticipation of her wedding day that was to come, a gratitude for the presence in her life of the people who had loved her. She had sent it to Liudan in the busy, sometimes chaotic, days just before her wedding, and had then forgotten it as she plunged into the fears and the expectations of the day on which she was to marry Kito. It had not been on her mind at the time of her wedding, but somehow it always recalled that day to Tai’s mind, and today, with her first wedding anniversary only a week or so behind her, was no exception.

Tai and Kito had been taken from the room in which they had made their vows into the banquet hall to break the bridal bread, as was traditional, and had poured each other their first cup of green tea into the special wedding cups. Then they had been escorted into the back room, where the bridal bed had been prepared, and sat perched on the high, rose-petal strewn bedstead, side by side, for endless hours while friends and relatives popped in and out with ribald comments and bearing offerings of cups of wine, nut cakes, fried chicken, rice, almond marzipan sculptures of legendary beasts and dragons whose heads the newlyweds were supposed to bite off to the endless delight of some of the smaller children, and other sundry delicacies.

It was there that Tammary had come to deliver her wedding present—she had taken Yuet’s words to heart and had offered Kito and Tai nothing solid or substantial.

“I was wondering whether I could do this,” she said, “but Liudan did not come and in her presence I don’t know if I would have.” Kito stole a puzzled glance at Tai; he was still trying to figure out some of his new wife’s
jin-shei
connections, but she caught his eyes and shook her head minutely:
Later.
“But she is not here,” Tammary said, “and I want to dance for you. The way my people dance at weddings, in remembrance of all the joys of all the weddings that have gone before, and in promise of the ones to come.”

Her voice had taken on the Traveler cadences of someone telling a tale to commit to the clan memory, and Tai realized that Tammary was offering a gift that was no less than herself. She reached for Kito’s hand.

“Thank you,” she said. Just that. But Tammary’s eyes kindled at the wealth of understanding in Tai’s voice, and she ducked her head, suddenly overcome with a rush of affection.

“There is no music,” Tammary said apologetically, “there wasn’t much I could do about that. There should be drums, and guitarras.”

“I have heard the music of your people,” Kito said.

“So have I,” said Tai, squeezing his fingers in grateful understanding. “We will hear your music in our hearts.”

Tammary had worn the colorful wide skirts and the gathered white blouse of her people; now she kicked off the slippers she wore and walked to the middle of the room on graceful bare feet, narrow and aristocratic, one ankle flashing a glimmer of gold chains as she moved. She brought her feet into position and raised her hands above her head, letting her head fall back, closing her eyes, listening for the music—as she had so often done before, while dancing on her own in the ruins of the Summer Palace in the mountains. It ran through her blood, like a slow fire, and she swayed into motion, her feet beating a tattoo on the floor, her fiery hair swinging, her hands bent at the wrists at angles of delicate grace. There was a sense of giving in her dance, and a sense of freedom, but also of belonging, of two halves coming together to make a whole. She danced a world of bright happiness, made all the more poignant by a fierce and unconcealed longing for it that permeated her every movement, and that Tai, who knew her, knew she had never really known. But she was drawing on all that she had and all that she had heard and seen, in order to give Tai the seed of perfect happiness.

Yuet, who had been alerted by one of the children and had come to discreetly watch from the doorway, had been transfixed by the dance for
quite other reasons. When she had told Tai later, much later, that she had observed the whole thing, Tai had spoken of the sense of sacrifice that she had got from Tammary, a sort of offering of her own potential happiness on the altar of Tai’s own. But Yuet had shaken her head.

“All I could think of,” she had said, “watching her dance that way, was that this must have been the dance her mother once danced for an Emperor. She was a celestial spirit in that moment. There would not have been a man who could have resisted her.”

“Kito did,” Tai had said, laughing.

“Oh, quiet,” Yuet had retorted. “Don’t sound so smug. You did, after all, have an advantage—you had just been married.”

Indeed, Kito had proved that although he had been deeply appreciative of Tammary’s dance, it had been his new wife who had been on his mind. When the guests had all finally said their farewells and the door closed behind the last of them, it was Kito who had taken the pins from her hair and taken down the piled mass of it from the elaborate coiffure that Nhia and Qiaan had spent an hour laboriously putting together, and Kito who peeled away the layers of ceremonial clothes with which Tai’s body had been shrouded.

“You are so beautiful,” he had said to her when she stood before him clad only in that last whisper-thin silk shift, her dark hair falling around her shoulders like a silk cloak. “Just like I always knew you would be.”

“So are you,” she said, running her hands against the smooth bare skin of his chest with a motion at once shy and fiercely possessive, and he had laughed out loud then, for sheer joy, and had lifted her onto the bridal bed and laid her among all the rose petals and removed the last fragile silk shield that stood between them—and had whispered against her skin that she was his love, his joy, the star of his heaven, while he kissed the valley between her small breasts and the pulse that beat wildly in the hollow of her throat. He had caught her small gasps with his kisses as she arched her hips against him. There had been only the two of them in that small world that night; whatever Yuet had said, whatever Yuet had seen, Tammary’s gift had been no more than perhaps a deeper understanding of the emotions that bound them together. It had been that night that Tai had taken on the identity of the poet that she would become; everyone she knew, even Kito himself, continued calling her Tai in everyday interactions, but she had changed into Kito-Tai, the one-that-was-two, in Kito’s arms on the first night of her married life.

When, late the next afternoon, the newlywed pair had presented themselves to Liudan as they had been commanded to do, Liudan had offered them her congratulations, and her regrets that she had not been able to make the nuptials, and also one final gift.

A ricepaper scroll, on which a poem was inscribed.

“I received that yesterday, and would have brought it to the wedding if I had been able to come,” Liudan said, “but I didn’t want to give it to someone else to hand it to you.”

“What is it?” Tai said blankly. “I cannot read this, it’s
hacha-ashu
”

“Into which,” Liudan interrupted, “I once promised you that your poetry would be transcribed. This goes out in the market today.”

Tai gasped, her cheeks turning a bright scarlet. Kito offered the Empress a low bow.

“May I?” he murmured.

Liudan gave him the scroll. “Read it for us,” she ordered, a command to the only person in the room who could in fact read what was written on the paper. Kito accepted the scroll with another bow, and obeyed; he was not a practiced reader, and his voice lacked the proper intonation for reading poetry out loud, but Liudan smiled, nodding, when he was done.

“It will do, as the beginning. It will do very well,” she said.

“How is it signed, Liudan?” Tai murmured.

“With your name, of course,” Liudan said, frowning. “What do you mean?”

“‘Tai,”’ Kito said, glancing at the scroll. “It’s signed ‘Tai,’ and with the date—the Third Year of the Dragon Empress.”

Tai kept her eyes downcast. “If it isn’t too late, may I make a change?”

“This is the first copy, and it is being copied as we speak,” Liudan said. “But I will make the change, if you wish. What do you want done?”

“Sign it ‘Kito-Tai,”’ Tai whispered. “It was that name that inspired this.”

Liudan smiled. “It is done.”

It is done.

“What are you doing in here?” Kito said from the doorway to the bedroom, bouncing Xanshi in his arms. “I thought you were going to make a notation of that in your journal and I was waiting for you out there. I said I had news.”