The Secrets of Jin-shei Page 6

  She faltered under her father’s rather stern gaze. “And you do remember, I trust, that these lessons are based on a proper attitude on your part. I will not have you interrupting me, Khailin. It shows disrespect to your parents.”

  “Yes, Father,” Khailin said, resigned.

  “Good. That’s settled, then. We will resume our lessons when I return from the Palace. In the meantime, I suggest that you pursue your … other responsibilities. I will have to speak to your mother about that. Within a year or two you may well be married and will have no time for indulging such whims as books and studies.”

  Khailin bowed to her father with the exact degree of respect that was required, keeping her eyes lowered so that he wouldn’t see the rebellion in them. Cheleh, Court Chronicler, permitted himself one affectionate featherlike brush of his hand on his daughter’s hair before bowing back to her with the proper degree of acknowledgment and leaving her alone in her chamber.

  When the door safely closed behind him, Khailin picked up a tasseled cushion from her bed and threw it against the wall with a muted cry. She had just come to an interesting section of a text her father did not know she had purloined from his scroll library, and she had become thoroughly bogged down in it. She had hoped to wheedle some information from him that day, without letting on that she had the scroll, of course, and finish reading the text that evening. It was an old astronomical treatise, written by a Sage from a long-dead Emperor’s court; Khailin could tell, even with her inability to completely understand, that much of it was already obsolete, but there had been several descriptions in there which matched something she had been able to observe herself in the night sky with the distance viewer her father had in his study. She had hoped that she would be able to extract enough information from this scroll to confirm her own observations, and perhaps find out where she could obtain more recent material on one particular celestial object which had caught her fancy, a red-gold sphere with an annulus around it.

  She had started wheedling her father to teach her hacha-ashu, the script of the common tongue, when she first realized that jin-ashu, the script her mother had been dutifully teaching her since she had turned four years old, was not the language in which the really interesting things were written. Jin-ashu was a woman’s language, and it was the heart of a woman’s world. Its writings tended to be confined to poetry, legends, stories, the wisdom of hearth and home, letters between jin-shei sisters (whether separated by the length and breadth of Syai or three streets apart in the same city). Jin-ashu dealt with the everyday and the commonplace, the household chatter of wives and mothers, the pouring out of an unrequited love or the transports of delight of a new wife just initiated into the pleasures of marriage. Khailin had seen a few of the latter, although she was still to undergo her Xat-Wau coming of age ceremony and was considered far too young for what were sometimes frankly erotic letters between grown and sexually initiated women. But Khailin read what interested her, and if she could sneak an astronomy treatise out of her father’s treasured library, her mother’s stacks of jin-ashu letters were a considerably simpler problem to riffle until she found material that caught her eye. She knew considerably more than either of her parents suspected about what awaited her as a young woman who was rapidly approaching marriageable age.

  In fact, she had already started keeping an eye out for likely prospects—young men sufficiently learned to have access to the things that she wanted to find out, or wealthy enough to buy such access, or both. Unfortunately, most of the younger suitors she had considered—the ones her parents would consider suitable—were also dismissed early, on the grounds that they were simply too boring to be of any interest. Khailin wondered if she would be able to hold out for a husband who might be considerably older than her but whose age would be traded off for the fact that he could be more easily cajoled by a young wife to allow her to do the things that Khailin had every intention of continuing to do. Study. Read.

  A diffident knock on her door interrupted her thoughts, and at her barked call of admittance a servant, hands together and bowing deeply to her young mistress, came in to announce that Khailin’s presence was required by her mother, the lady Yulinh.

  “Tell her I will attend her at once,” Khailin said, and the servant backed out, bowing again.

  Khailin sighed. She suspected her father had stopped off in his wife’s quarters to suggest that she take Khailin in hand today, and she knew what that meant.

  She wasn’t wrong.

  Lady Yulinh was a great believer in the power of purification and meditation. She visited the ritual baths frequently, an activity that Khailin profoundly despised for the same reason that she found hacha-ashu more interesting that jin-ashu—she didn’t do well when cooped up in the presence of undiluted femininity for long. She found most of the women at the baths tedious, gossipy, and unspeakably dull. They found her far too direct, almost abrasive, certainly bordering on rude, although she was careful not to directly antagonize any of the matrons whom she might find as a mother-in-law one day. But being on her best behavior and flawlessly and icily polite for three to four hours at a stretch, which was how long her mother’s purification bath rituals usually took, exhausted her and made her severely irritated. Even her mother had learned not to take her along to these occasions any more often than she could help, and to stay out of her way for a while on their return home until Khailin could work out her waspishness on some unsuspecting servant.

  Visits to the Great Temple were another matter. Lady Yulinh was possessed of sufficient stature and financial backing to be regularly admitted into the Third and even the Fourth Circles of the Temple. She insisted that her daughters—for her younger daughter, Yan, had been required to attend these devotional trips since she was eight—perform the required rituals and protocols with her, but once the official part of the visit was over the girls were free to use their time at the Temple as they wished until Yulinh was ready to leave. For Yan, that meant a return to the more colorful and more interesting First and Second Circles; she had become an early addict to ganshu readings and to soothsayers of every stripe. Khailin chose to linger in the inner Circles of the Temple, the Third and Fourth Circles, the ones with fewer people and more power. She preferred her knowledge empirical and her data neatly proved and documented by experimental protocols—but knowledge was knowledge, and the more empirical chemical and alchemical branches of study all had roots in the Temple and the deities it housed. The rest would come.

  At least it was the Temple that Yulinh proposed that day. She did not mention the baths, at least not directly. Khailin was grateful for that mercy, at least; she didn’t think she could have handled the baths with any degree of grace that day. The Temple was at least a potentially worthy substitute for the missed reading lesson.

  Yulinh and her daughters were deposited at one of the Temple gates in their sedan chair, followed by a couple of quiet servants who had followed close behind in a second chair. Yulinh sent one of the servants to purchase a particular kind of incense, the other to obtain a bottle of rice wine and the proper amount of rice and beans for the supplication ritual she had in mind. Then she swept past the teeming corridors of the First Circle, heading into the inner sanctums. Her two daughters, eyes piously downcast, trailed at her heels.

  They had gone straight through to a shrine to I’Chi-sei, one of the Three Pure Ones. Yulinh had been suffering from a lethargy and a lack of energy lately, what with the oppressive heat of the summer. Khailin was privately of the opinion that her mother might have done better to have stayed in the Second Circle and asked succor of the Spirit of Rain instead of beseeching a God of the Early Heavens for the energy which the hot dry weather sapped from her, but she held her tongue. When her mother was immersed deeply enough in her devotions not to notice that Khailin was absent, she slipped away unobtrusively and went seeking her own enlightenment.

  In the gardens of the Third Circle Khailin found an acolyte drawing a finely detailed sand painting mandala
in an oiled wooden frame. He was seated in front of her favorite shrine, that of Sin, Lord of the East, the deity who was ascendant in her own birth sign and to whom she had a special devotion. Khailin stood watching him for a while, her hands tucked decorously into the wide sleeves of her red silk tunic. She knew better than to interrupt, but when he took a break, sitting back and reaching for a flask of rice wine left at hand, she knelt down next to him.

  “What is it for?” she asked.

  “It is for a lady wishing for a favor from the Lord Sin,” the acolyte said courteously. “This will be placed in his alcove with a lamp filled with holy oil, until such time as the lady tells us that her wish has been granted, or that she has withdrawn the petition.”

  “Do they work?” Khailin asked. She had seen them before, the sand paintings, placed in shrines beside more prosaic offerings, beautiful and cryptic and mysterious. She had never seen one being prepared at such close quarters before, and inspected it with some curiosity. “What do you use to dye the sand?”

  “Are you wishing to join the Temple some day, young sai’an?” the acolyte asked, smiling. “These are Temple secrets. We do the Gods’ work. As for whether these are successful, that is not something we are in charge of. We facilitate the contact. The wish and the granting of it are between the one who prays and the God who listens to the prayer.”

  “I have heard the saying that the Gods help those who put themselves in their path,” Khailin said. “But this sand painting … this is so passive. It’s like there’s too much cha’ia energy here, and not nearly enough chao.”

  The acolyte raised an eyebrow. “You are learned, young sai’an.”

  “Is it not better,” Khailin said, “to know the prayer and to make something that answers it? If a sickness, then an elixir, or a medicine. If a child, then a way of conceiving, or a way of adopting. If a lover—”

  “That is too much for the Gods’ acolytes to aspire to,” said the acolyte hastily, cutting her off. “And much of that, people do get. But not from here.” He made his disapproval obvious, but did not explain it further.

  Khailin, however, had already read enough to know of the dichotomy of alchemies in the Way of the Cha in which the Gods and Spirits of the Great Temple were enshrined. That had been in one of the earliest scrolls she’d taken from her father’s library. She had practically learned the thing by heart:

  Cha is the path of the spirit and energy and power. Cha is part of every thing and every creature in the world. Pure cha is what the highest Heaven is made of a perfect place where the male and the female, the chao and the cha’ia, meet and meld in flawless balance and equilibirum, where the Seeker loses the self but becomes the whole world …

  That was the ultimate goal of the internal alchemies of the Way of the Cha, anyway—seeking ways to meld the adept’s spirit with the Unknowable, become one with the Gods. The internal alchemy, the zhao-cha, was all about ethereal realms which could only be gained by the incorporeal, the spiritual.

  The external alchemy, yang-cha, was more concerned with understanding the here and now. The empirical science. The part of the Way which drew Khailin’s deepest interest.

  But the Great Temple denied the greatest achievements of those who chose the path of the external alchemy. Astronomers were misunderstood, their findings languishing in old scrolls for only other astronomers to read. As for the preparation of the elixirs, the powerful ones which brought strength, knowledge, even (if legend was to be believed) immortality—those were too secret for the scrolls in Khailin’s father’s collection, their existence only hinted at in darkly mysterious terms until Khailin was driven to distraction with all that was left unsaid.

  “If you will excuse me,” the acolyte began, back to high courtesy, acolyte to supplicant. But he was interrupted by the sound of sandaled feet slapping against the stone flags of the Circle in some haste, and then the wearer of those sandals, another acolyte, came into view around the corner of the cloister. He was almost running, the expression on his face close to panic. At the same time two more acolytes came hurrying out of the Fourth Circle gate through which Khailin herself had emerged and, seeing the mandala-drawer seated before his unfinished masterpiece, made their way toward him. All three newcomers reached the seated acolyte at more or less the same time.

  “You’re wanted,” began the one who had come running around the corner.

  But one of the others, maybe senior in rank or just more prudent than the rest, raised a calming hand, cutting the more impulsive speaker off before he could blurt out things it was not appropriate for a noninitiate to hear.

  “Brother,” he said, addressing the seated acolyte, “there has been a call from the Fourth Circle. I have been sent to gather the necessary assistance. If you will lay aside your task for a moment, please come with me.” He turned to Khailin. “If you will excuse us, young sai’an, the Temple calls us to obey.”

  Khailin, getting to her feet and keeping her face inscrutable enough to hide her curiosity, placed her hands palms together and bowed to them with the reverence due to their station. The one who had spoken bowed back. The mandala-maker had risen too, making obeisance to the Lord Sin in his alcove before stowing the half-finished mandala under the altar for further work when he returned. Then all four of them, with the one who had dismissed Khailin speaking to his companions in a low voice, departed for the gate to the Fourth Circle in some haste.

  Left alone, Khailin considered hauling out the mandala for a closer inspection, but happened to glance up first and met the blind stone eyes of the scowling carved effigy of Lord Sin. A superstitious dread stirred in her, and she offered a hasty obeisance in appeasement, trying to scotch any such irreverent thoughts as she backed away. She might not believe in the power of the mandalas to do any practical good, but other people did, and that did invest them with some power. Khailin had already learned to respect power.

  Respect it enough to crave it.

  When she tried to return to the Fourth Circle to rejoin her mother and sister, Khailin was politely but very firmly refused admittance.

  “But my mother, the lady Yulinh, is in there,” Khailin said. She was not above pulling rank if she could not get her way by any other means, and in this place it was Yulinh’s rank that mattered to those in power.

  “I think not, sai’an. The Fourth Circle has been cleared for a very special occasion. If your lady mother was indeed here with her devotions, she has no doubt already been escorted elsewhere to complete them.”

  “But …”

  “I am very sorry, sai’an.”

  “Where would they have taken her?”

  “Perhaps the shrine of Ama-bai,” suggested the guard.

  Khailin turned away, frustrated. The Third Circle was a little more crowded than usual, with a low murmur of voices in the usually hushed garden, but her mother and sister were not at the shrine of Ama-bai. Khailin continued her circumnavigation of the Third Circle, hoping to run into them. She took her time. Something was going on here, she could smell it, and her curiosity was twitching at the undercurrents like a cat watching the mousehole for movement. Her first circumnavigation yielded no Yulinh and no Yan. Other people were standing around, their own devotions obviously interrupted, whispering softly to one another and looking faintly puzzled, and one serene-looking girl of about her own age sat on a bench in the gardens, contemplating the fish meditatively But there were no answers.

  Until, on her second circumnavigation, now prowling restlessly in search of clues rather than her family, Khailin happened to come in line with the girl on the bench again. The girl rose to her feet as Khailin watched, took a few awkward steps to reach a paved pathway of one of the corridors leading through the Circles, and then collapsed in an ungraceful heap as her leg appeared to give way beneath her—almost precisely as an honor guard of acolytes had passed by that particular spot in advance of a man clad in a rich robe and looking like he walked in power.

  Every instinct in Khailin quivered at the si
ght of him. Here was the embodiment of the knowledge she was seeking. It clung to him like an invisible cloak.

  How she knew this she did not know, but she watched hungrily as the man bent to raise the crippled girl—for her foot was crippled, Khailin was close enough to see this clearly—and then guide her gently to a seat in the garden, allowing her to subside onto it. They exchanged a few words, very low, too low for Khailin to make out—and then he bowed lightly to the girl and signaled to his escort of acolytes, who moved forward once again. Khailin maneuvered herself closer, and was in earshot when a young acolyte came hurrying up to the girl in the garden.

  That was Lihui, the Sage Lihui.

  Khailin’s family was part of the inner Court. She knew of the death of one of the Nine Sages, and of his successor. Nobody had yet seen Lihui in the Palace; it was rumored that he was waiting for the Autumn Court, at which he would be formally presented to the Emperor, to mark his official entry into society.

  And he had spoken to this plainly dressed, crippled child.

  What had he said to her? Who was she? How was it that she had caught the eye of one of the most learned and most powerful men in Syai—just by choosing the precisely correct moment to collapse on the path at his feet?

  Khailin did not know who this girl was, the one on whom fortune had smiled here in the Great Temple under the eyes of the Gods.

  But she would find out. She would make it her business to find out.

  In the meantime, she turned and left the Third Circle, rejoining the buzzing throng in the Second where the passing of the Sage was still being loudly and gleefully discussed. Yan had a particular favorite among the lesser spirits of the Second Circle, an ugly little figure made of mud and rushes; it was at this shrine that Khailin hoped to find her missing family. The provenance of this deity, and thus his power and his ability to accede to prayer, appeared to be a mystery to everyone Khailin knew, including her own mother—but the hideous little effigy of the unknown spirit obviously had more worshippers than just Yan because his altar was always overflowing with offerings. Nobody ever saw anyone actually place anything on that altar, or admitted to it, which had made Khailin say to Yan once, baiting her little sister deliberately, that it was a distinct possibility that the little spirit simply worshipped himself. But Yulinh had thought the idea sacrilegious and had made her displeasure at such remarks plain.