The Secrets of Jin-Shei

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 than 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 behaviour 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 colourful 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 succour 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 favourite 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 favour 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 equilibrium, 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 sandalled 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 towards 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 non-initiate 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 honour 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 sight 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 signalled to his escort of acolytes, who moved forward once again. Khailin manoeuvred 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 rumoured 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 favourite 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.

Now Khailin wore a small smile as she went in search of the mystery spirit’s shrine. She thought she might have at last – finally – found a use for the ugly little thing. She’d light an incense stick in front of the mystery God, and ask him to help her solve a mystery.

Help her find the crippled girl.

Eight

Nhia mulled over her encounter at the Temple as she limped home. It was something she hugged close. She might have told little Tai, the daughter of the widow seamstress who lived a block up from Nhia’s compound, because Tai had a knack for listening and for both making something a big thing and for keeping it in its place at the same time. Tai was young enough to be impressed and old enough to know why she was impressed. But Tai and her mother were at the Summer Palace, helping primp the Imperial ladies for the coming Court, and Nhia was stuck in the sweltering city enduring the season as best she could. She found herself a little surprised to find what a dearth of choices she had for a confidante; with Tai absent, it had narrowed down to …; to herself. Herself and the things that people who gave her their instinctive trust gave her. But that was different – that was her being talked to, instead of doing the talking.

On the way home through the streets that shimmered with heat and swirled with dust-devils in the alleys, she allowed herself a brief bitter moment of self-pity. Would it have been different if she had been able-bodied? Would the miraculous cure of her gimpy foot also bring her a friend or two she could share her dreams with?

The day was far advanced; Nhia had spent too long at the Temple, even by her mother’s admittedly biased measure.

‘You’re late,’ Li said. ‘Did you find what you sought at the Temple?’

She always asked that. As though there could be a different answer than the one she always got. Her tone, however, was a little pointed this time, leaving unspoken the barbed implication that whatever Nhia had been looking for there could have taken considerably less time.

‘Yes, Mother,’ said Nhia, gritting her teeth, coming up with the customary reply to the usual question, choosing not to respond to the undercurrents. ‘The Temple was fulfilling.’

There could have been a different answer this time, but Nhia, for all that she ached to talk about what had happened, shied from discussing it with her mother. There would be too many questions, too many conclusions being jumped to, too much extrapolation and speculation, possibly far too much unwarranted excitement. That was not what she wanted, not right now.

Li, not knowing that there was anything beneath Nhia’s terse and colourless reply, appeared to be content with the response that she had expected, and delved no deeper. She handed Nhia a pile of mending to be done while she got on with folding the washed, starched and ironed linen ready to go back to clients before starting on ironing the next batch. There could have been nothing more calculated to dampen Nhia’s enthusiasm and initial euphoria. This was what she was. This was what she would always be. Daughter to the woman who did the laundry and the mending for the wealthy and the well-to-do. The crippled daughter of the woman who did the laundry. Someone who could help stir the sheets in the vats, her eyes smarting from the sharp bleach her mother used, or mend small tears in fine tablecloths or women’s underwear. It wasn’t even a craft or a thing of beauty, the sort of thing the much younger Tai could already accomplish with her own needle and the silk embroidery thread. Nhia was neat but her hands were not as skilled, nor her mind that way inclined. For her, the needle was neither more nor less than simple drudgery.

Her mother’s two heavy black irons were set to heat on the heating plate laid over raked embers, and Li had already started on the chore of fiercely flattening recalcitrant starched linen sheets which haughty servants would soon be tucking onto patrician beds draped with brocaded hangings. Li ironed with a fixed snarl on her face, as though punishing the sheets for the pleasure stains with which they had arrived in her establishment – for all the laughter, and the whispers, and the joy with which they mocked her own solitary existence. Li was not widowed – there would have been some sort of honour in that, at least, and she could have held her head high just as Tai’s mother, Rimshi, had done for years. It was worse, far worse. After Nhia’s arrival, Li’s husband had hung around only long enough to realize what his life would be like from then on – the desperate piety, the offerings, the talismans, the ganshu readers, the endless pilgrimages to the Temple, the souring, unrewarded faith – and then he had quietly left one day, simply melting away, taking a change of clothes and his yearwood and nothing else at all. The most bitter blow had been when the rumours had reached Li and her abandoned daughter that her errant husband had established residence on the outskirts of Linh-an, and was openly living with another woman with whom he had started another family. With whom he had a chubby, angelic son who was almost three before Li found out about his existence. A perfect child. Already able to toddle. Nearly ready to run.

A living reproach to the woman who had borne the crippled daughter.

For some reason it was the ironing that brought all this out in her. Most of the time Li was ready to blame the cruel Gods and deities for her lot in life – but when she ironed, through a queer chain of associations, it was all Nhia’s fault – Nhia’s fault that she had been born, that her mother had lived for nearly twelve years now without a man to warm her own bed, without the need to wash her own sheets clean of one night’s pleasures and starch them into crisp cleanliness breathlessly awaiting the next. Nhia knew the pattern, if not the actual details behind it; she knew the lines that crept onto her mother’s face, and knew very well just when it was prudent to make herself scarce.

Nhia found it hard to walk for very long or very far, but somehow there was enough strength in the twisted foot to operate her mother’s pedal-powered linen delivery cart, and so that had evolved into her particular chore. Rimshi, with her Court connections, had helped Li get a lot of commissions from households associated with the Court. There was no obligation there, no duty, no jin-shei tie even – but Rimshi had not needed the weight of a jin-shei pledge to offer what help she could. But while summer was Rimshi’s busiest time, preparing the Imperial women for the Autumn Court, summers were always a lean time for Li – simply because the actual Court removed to the Summer Palace and that meant no copious quantities of carelessly soiled laundry from the women’s quarters and no substantial commissions or generous gratuities from those rich enough to be able to afford them without qualms. But there were other households, on the fringes, and it was mostly those to which Nhia pedalled with her cartload on those summer days.