The Secrets of Jin-shei Page 11

  “Willow bark,” the young Yuet had piped up before the royal healer had had a chance to respond. “You should boil up some willow bark.”

  “Hush, child!” Yuet’s foster mother had said, embarrassed at the utter lack of decorum shown by the orphaned child whom she had charitably taken into her household less than two years before, mortified that her teachings had not instilled better manners in the girl.

  But the healer had lifted her eyebrows and was gazing at Yuet with interest.

  “And what would you do for a stomachache?” she had asked, almost conversationally.

  Yuet had told her. The information had been accurate, and delivered without an ounce of self-consciousness or shyness.

  The healer had smiled, and it had gone no further at that time. But less than a year later the letter had come to the house, written in flowing jin-ashu script, asking if Yuet wished to be apprenticed to the Imperial healer in Linh-an.

  Yuet had had a very clear sense of her future, and knew that she would probably have graduated quite naturally to becoming the healer and still-woman for her village’s wounds and sicknesses, both animal and human. But even as a very young child she had always possessed a profoundly practical and realistic streak, and she had realized that she’d just been offered an extraordinary chance to pursue her calling in the far more exalted sphere of the Imperial Court when she had apprenticed to old Szewan. She had gone to the city the morning after Szewan’s letter reached the homestead where she had spent her earliest childhood.

  She could not have known then that this day would come, that disaster would be a price she would have to pay.

  Before Tai had spoken, she had not even realized that she was afraid, but now she suddenly faced it—that small flicker of fear that had been part of what had driven her to the lengths to which she had gone. There was healing—and then there was the fact that this was the Imperial family, and that there might be questions raised about what she, Yuet, had done or had not done, whether any of the dead could have been saved with a more experienced healer at the helm, or someone who had simply made different decisions at critical moments. The numbers were already devastating—there had been fifty-eight people in the living quarters of the Summer Palace when the earthquake had struck; some were still unaccounted for, but the bodies of more than half of them were laid out in the gardens and four of those bodies had once belonged to the highest of the Imperial family of Syai.

  Tai’s words were balm, unexpected, healing to the healer—here was someone who was there with her, who had seen what had happened, who could vouch for the decisions that she had made.

  But Tai was far away again—or as near as the shattered gardens, the ruined balcony, the dying princess in the first golden light of the dawn.

  “I wish …” she whispered, very softly, almost to herself.

  “What do you wish?” Yuet asked after a beat.

  “I wish I knew how to keep my promises.”

  If Tai was Yuet’s witness, Yuet was hers. She had been there when Antian had spoken her dying words. Take care of my sister.

  “She wanted you to be there for the Third Princess. I mean, for Empress-Heir Liudan,” Yuet said slowly.

  “Liudan hates me,” Tai said simply.

  Yuet reached out a hand and laid it over Tai’s fingers where they interlaced around her knees. “She does not. She will not. She will need a friend.” She paused, suddenly unsure of what she was about to do, but it felt true, it felt right. “And so will you. I know I am not the Little Empress, I know I cannot take her place, but if you wish it I will be jin-shei-bao to you, I will help you keep your promise.”

  Tai had turned her head a little to look at her, a long, steady look, and then nodded imperceptibly. “You are still wearing her own heart’s blood,” Tai whispered. “I think she would wish it. Jin-shei.”

  They limped back to Linh-an, the survivors, with a slow, snaking line of horse carts bearing twenty-seven bodies in caskets draped in the white of mourning. The walls of the city—massive constructions of dressed stone, nearly sixty feet thick at the bottom and almost forty feet high—were almost hidden, from the north approach, by the white ribbon banners that had been hung from the top battlements. The broad ribbons shifted and eddied in the breeze, and from a distance it looked like the walls themselves had come alive and were trembling with sorrow.

  The people of Linh-an met the procession in the streets, standing silently as it wound its way through the north gate and into the heart of the city, almost eight miles of twisting roads to the Great Temple which waited to receive the four most important bodies—the Ivory Emperor, his Empress, the Little Empress Antian his heir, and Second Princess Oylian. The houses the procession passed were hung with white ribbons, like the outer walls, or banners with inscriptions of blessing or farewell. The city was stunned. The country reeled.

  The survivors grieved.

  Tai had returned with the Court, back to Rimshi, her still ailing mother, and had clung to her for a long time in silence after the cortège left its dead in the Temple and those who returned from the Summer Palace had gone their separate ways. Tai would not speak of it at all for days, just sat white-faced and silent in a corner of the room or spent long hours at the Temple. There was little spare money to make all the offerings such a death demanded, but Rimshi set aside every copper that she could; Tai burned incense sticks, and offered up rice and saffron for the safe passage of Antian’s soul into the Immortal Lands.

  The Ivory Emperor, Antian’s father, was given his traditional niche in the Hall of the Immortal Emperors, in the Second Circle of the Temple. The new shrine overflowed with the offerings of the people who came filing past to pay their respects or offer up their grief.

  But Antian was not the Emperor, would never have a niche for herself where people would come and pray to her bright spirit. Tai would think of this, her eyes bright with tears she could not seem to shed, as she sat beside the Ivory Emperor’s shrine and watched the cascades of white mourning candles fighting for space with incense holders for sticks saturated with frankincense or lilac essence, with piles of peaches symbolizing immortality, with mounds of rice and of tamarind seeds. The Ivory Emperor would become a lesser God. Antian would remain a fading memory.

  But Tai could not cry. The loss was lodged too deep, like a dagger in her heart, and she nursed the pain fiercely—it was as though she believed that this alone would keep Antian alive for her. The funeral would not be for another twenty days, so that the Emperor’s body and those of his family could lie in state for the proper period. The period of mourning for a dead Emperor was fixed at nine months for the nation, three years for his surviving family. For three years Liudan, now the Empress-Heir, would be allowed to wear only pale colors and no silk garments, in mourning for her family. But because of the way that the Emperor and his family had died, the unnatural and violent way in which they had been taken, it had been decreed that there would be a full year of mourning for the city, during which time all would wear white ribbons and pieces of sackcloth on their garments. But for Tai this marking of time was meaningless. She had seen too much on that morning in the mountains, she had lost something that had barely begun to bloom into a rich and treasured thing in her life, and her mourning was deep, and absolute, and she felt as though it would never end.

  When the tears did come, it was not at the Ivory Emperor’s shrine, or at the sight of his mourners there, or even as she lit her own candles on Third and Fourth Circle altars for Antian. It was an ordinary thing that set her off, not the memory of loss, but a reminder that life went on without pausing to grieve for what was lost, that each sunset was followed by a new dawn … that a new Emperor would follow this one.

  She had been on her way to the gate, stepping out of the Second Circle into the chaos of the First, and had happened to pass close enough to the stall of So-Xan the yearwood bead carver to notice the bin of carved bone beads out by the side of the trestle table, and Kito, So-Xan’s son, patiently ras
ping at the carvings, smoothing the round beads into even, featureless globes which would be dipped into white lead paint and sold for the duration of the mourning year to be strung onto the yearwood sticks to mark the passage of the time.

  It was this, finally, that reached out and drew the dagger from Tai’s heart. She did not expect the pain, the rush of heart’s blood that followed the simple realization that something was over, irrevocably over, that the reign of the Ivory Emperor was done … and that Antian would never choose the Emperor who would take his place. Tai’s breath caught; she staggered, catching herself on a nearby booth for support.

  Kito happened to look up, took in the white face, the wide eyes dilated with shock, and dropped the bead he had been working on back into the bin he’d taken it from, leaping to his feet.

  “Are you all right? You look ill.” He closed the distance between them in two long strides, cupping Tai’s elbow, bending over her solicitously. “Xao-jin!” he called, summoning the proprietor of a booth four or five trestles down. A round, moon-shaped face popped around a partition in response. “Bring me a cup of green tea! Hurry!”

  Something had snapped, and Tai suddenly found herself racked by great heaving sobs, shuddering convulsively as the tears came. Kito steered her into the inner recesses of the bead-carver’s booth, installing her on a bench, leaving her side only long enough to step out and grab the bowl of steaming tea brought by the man he had summoned and murmur a brief word of thanks. Then he was back, dropping to one knee beside the bench on which Tai sat and wept as though her heart would break.

  “Here,” he said, “drink this. It will make you feel better.”

  The very absurdity of this comment made Tai hiccough and gulp down some of the brew. Kito’s concerned eyes never left her face, at least not until he was satisfied that some color had returned to her cheeks and that, although she was still weeping soundlessly with an inconsolable grief, she was in no imminent danger of doing herself damage from it.

  There was an awkward moment of silence in which Tai would not raise her swimming eyes to look at him and he sat back helplessly, at a loss as to what to do next.

  “Are you all right now?” Kito inquired at last, as she cradled the nearly drained tea bowl between her hands. It would have been impolite to ask, they did not even know each other’s names, but Kito had always had a high degree of empathy for people and some part of Tai’s pain had reached out and touched his own spirit. He found himself wanting to do something to help, anything, but not knowing the cause of it could not do anything to alleviate it.

  Tai understood his reluctance to ask, but felt that she owed him an explanation for bursting into tears upon catching sight of him at his work.

  “It’s …” she began, but her voice was still thick with the tears. She swallowed, hard, fighting back a new wave of weeping. “The Ivory Emperor’s beads. You were …”

  Kito glanced back at his abandoned task. “Yes,” he said, and his voice was oddly gentle. “I am making the mourning beads. And after that I will have to make the regency beads. For the Empress-Heir is still too young to be raised to the throne, and we do not know yet what the next reign’s bead is going to be.”

  Liudan. In all the time since she had nursed her grief for her lost jin-shei sister, Tai had given little thought to the promise she had given as Antian lay dying. Take care of my sister, she had said. Liudan. The angry one.

  The Empress-Heir. The Empress to be.

  “But how can I do that?” she gasped, out loud, answering her own thoughts. How was she to fulfill her last vow to Antian? Liudan had never given Tai the time of day. She was three years older, proud, wounded by too many things Tai could not heal—and yet Tai had promised to take care of her.

  “Pardon?” Kito said, startled.

  Tai finally raised her eyes, and there was gratitude in them, and a warmth of what was almost affection. She got to her feet; Kito unfolded his long adolescent frame and rose also, accepting the tea bowl she handed back to him.

  “Thank you,” she said, and even managed the shadow of a smile. “You have helped.”

  She is beautiful, Kito thought, irrationally, the thought having just swum into his mind from the Gods alone knew where. A part of him scoffed at it, because there was nothing of beauty in Tai’s flushed cheeks and eyes that were red and swollen from first the unshed tears and then the ones that had come out in a torrent of released grief. But there was something in that half-smile that was luminous.

  She bowed to him, formally, her palms together and her fingers laced, and stepped away, about to leave the booth.

  “Wait,” Kito said suddenly, instinctively.

  He reached into the bin of the carved beads he had been working on, took out a whole one as yet unmarred by his ministrations, and folded Tai’s hand around it.

  “They will not,” he said quietly, “all be destroyed.”

  The smile on her face lit up her eyes, just for a moment; her fingers closed tightly around the bead. Tai nodded her thanks, backed away, escaped through the outer gate into the streets of Linh-an, leaving Kito staring after her with an expression of astonishment.

  Four

  Tai was not part of the funeral procession which wound its way through Linh-an’s streets when the Emperor and his family were taken to their resting place. She could have been, if she had asked—for a jin-shei-bao had every right to follow a sister to her funeral. But this was too raw still, much too private and too deep a grief to expose it to the crowds in the streets. Tai had thought she could pay her respects her own way, just by being in the throngs on the pavements when the procession passed, but she had been resigned to being unable to see much of Antian’s last journey from within the crowd which would gather in the streets. All of Linh-an would be there, the throng would undoubtedly be five or six deep on the pavements—she would have to bid farewell to the sister of her heart from behind a wall of humanity. But the Gods, who had given her so much and then capriciously took it all away again, seemed to have repented of their whim and now showered Tai with many small gifts as if to make amends.

  One was an unexpected friendship begun in the bead-carver’s booth. It had been Nhia, Tai’s neighbor and friend, who had finally formally introduced the two—she had been acquainted with Kito and his father, among the many craftsmen and merchants in the Temple’s First Circle, for most of her young life. Nhia had accompanied Tai on one of her Temple visits during the weeks prior to the Emperor’s funeral, and Kito had chanced to notice them, and called out a greeting.

  “We are kept busy,” he had said, in response to Nhia’s polite inquiry as to his well-being. But his eyes had been smiling at Tai, and hers were downcast, although her mouth curved upward a little at its corners. Nhia’s eyebrow rose a fraction, and she said smoothly, as though she had noticed nothing at all,

  “I do not know if you have met my friend. Tai, this is Kito, son of So-Xan, the bead-carver. Kito, this is Tai, daughter of Rimshi, the seamstress.”

  They bowed to each other.

  “Perhaps you will share another bowl of green tea with me some time,” Kito said. He had been addressing, in theory, both girls—but since Nhia, for all the length of her acquaintance with him, had never partaken of green tea in the bead-carver’s booth she assumed there was a story behind this tea party which excluded her.

  Tai had blushed. “I would enjoy that,” she said, and once more Nhia was excluded.

  Nhia passed over the mystery with studied innocent ignorance. “Perhaps later,” she murmured, and was rewarded by both her companions throwing startled glances first at her and then, very briefly, at each other. They had made their farewells, and the girls had passed on into the Temple while Kito pretended to turn back to his work—although both Nhia and Tai were sharply aware of the weight of his eyes on their backs.

  “He gave me the last Ivory Emperor bead,” Tai had said to Nhia by way of an explanation as they walked away. “I saw him polishing the carvings smooth, making the mourning bea
ds, and he gave me a whole one, one he had not yet marred. He gave me my memory back.”

  “And a bowl of green tea,” Nhia murmured.

  Tai blushed again, uncharacteristically. “I was crying,” she said softly. “That was … the first time I cried for her.”

  Nhia knew that there had been some connection to the Court, over and above Rimshi’s usual Summer Court duties, but she had not known what—and this sentence was cryptic, to say the least. But she was Nhia, and people trusted her—and Tai, after all, was her friend, perhaps her only friend. And now that Antian was gone, there was no secret anymore. Tai raised her head and met Nhia’s eyes.

  “She and I were jin-shei,” Tai said. “This was the third summer that I shared with my heart-sister. And there was so much in those three years, Nhia, so much! I have already lived a lifetime with her. And now she is gone.”

  She had still not named a name, but since this was connected to the Imperial Family it had to be one of the two girls lying dead in the Temple at this very moment.

  “Jin-shei?” Nhia echoed. “With Second Princess Oylian?”

  “With Antian,” Tai said. “With the Little Empress.”

  Nhia’s step faltered a little. “You were jin-shei-bao—to the Little Empress? How in Cahan did that happen?”

  So Tai told the tale again, as they sat side by side on one of the benches by the pools of the Third Circle gardens. The tears ran free now, leaving trails on her cheeks as she spoke, and Nhia’s eyes filled in sympathy She hugged Tai at the end, unsure of what to say to lay balm on the hurt—but she was Nhia, and she was overflowing with the stories and the parables and the wisdom that she had picked up during her years within the Temple’s walls, and now she pulled one from her memory.