The Secrets of Jin-Shei

Li, Nhia’s mother, had been wary of the whole thing, and afraid that the Temple would take exception to Nhia’s activities – especially since she often told her stories in the Temple’s own precincts.

‘These are games,’ Li had said, ‘and they can be dangerous. You are setting yourself up above the people. You have had your Xat-Wau, and you are no longer a child, Nhia – think about what it is that you want to do with the rest of your life.’

‘But perhaps I am already doing that,’ Nhia had said slowly.

No marriage; no children; she had come to terms with that. But perhaps these could be her children, the ones who came to her and whose lives she knew she could touch, could sometimes heal. She had much to learn – but already, it seemed, she had much to teach, also. A part of her gloried in it. Her body could not run – but her spirit could fly.

But Li had not been entirely convinced of her daughter’s calling. She had even gone so far as to approach one of the higher-ranked Temple priests, and ask for absolution if Nhia presumed.

‘We considered chastisement,’ the priest had told Li, ‘but first we listened to what she had to say. She makes the children hear her. She has said nothing to which we have taken exception. We think that it has gone far enough that, if she did not do it here, she would do it elsewhere – out in the marketplace, or in the streets.’

‘Not if you forbade it, sei.’

‘But why would we forbid it? Those she touches come straight home to us. She does the Temple’s work,’ the priest had said. There had been something complacent in his smile, but the priests of the Temple had always been pragmatic about their religion. A Temple which had an entire thriving outer Circle devoted to the commerce of faith could not be other. ‘But I understand your concern – we will make sure she is taught.’

So Nhia’s life had started to turn around the Temple, more and more. She taught the young, and in her turn she learned the meditations and the mental purifications of the zhao-cha, reaching out to touch the edges of the luminous, following Han-fei into the gardens of the Gods in search of the Fruit of Wisdom.

Khailin, daughter of Cheleh the Chronicler, had made it her business to keep the crippled girl who had attracted the attention of Sage Lihui under observation. In the months following that encounter in the Temple, Khailin had found out that Nhia frequented the Temple Circles, and had many friends there. She also found out that she and Nhia had more in common than she had thought. Although their focus and their ultimate desires were different, coloured in part by their differing stations in life and their place in Linh-an society, they shared an interest in the Way and in the manner in which it functioned. Nhia’s interest was more in the wisdom and the purity of the path – the zhao-cha, the internal alchemy of the mind and spirit, the calling of the sage, the seer, the wise-woman. Khailin was more attracted to the yang-cha – its rituals, its mathematical magic, its chemistry, its eminently practical nature. They had both been driven to learn, to understand. This was something which Khailin could build on. This could even be part of the reason the Sage Lihui had been interested in Nhia; perhaps he had been drawn to the fierce flame of curiosity, intelligence, yearning to learn. Perhaps, Khailin thought, she and Nhia could be useful to one another.

So she had started keeping an eye out for Nhia at the Temple. A part of Khailin marvelled at how Nhia had found a way of gaining access to all the disciplines of the Way. And she had done it all without reading a single hacha-ashu manuscript about forbidden things. Khailin was uncomfortably aware that her own time was running out.

She had already rejected several suitors whose representatives had come bearing the so ji, the carved jade marriage proposal token. All it had taken, as tradition had it, was her refusal to accept the small sculpture into her own hands from the formally attired elderly aunts and cousins who had been entrusted with its delivery. As my beloved wishes, the words had originally meant. If the bride or groom being courted accepted the token, the marriage proposal was deemed to have been accepted, and the betrothal was official from that moment. Khailin’s suitors had not been to her liking – one had come from a large and tradition-hidebound family, which would have trammelled her like a wild bird in a cage; another had been a man quite a few years her senior, with whom she already had a passing acquaintance at Court and whom she could have accepted except for her utter inability to get past his constantly sweaty palms which, upon reflection, she decided she could not bear near her on a regular basis.

When two emissaries of a prince of Syai came calling just before her Xat-Wau ceremony was due to take place, Cheleh had made it clear to his wayward older daughter that another refusal would have been severely frowned upon. The Prince was young, positively callow, precisely the kind of vacuous young man Khailin had no wish to marry. She could see herself delivered into the soft life of the noble houses, being an obedient young wife, having to obey endless rules of protocol and decorum, having to endure the hated ritual baths with the rest of the pampered ladies – perhaps never again to have access to the kind of arcane information she craved or the opportunity to test her knowledge …; but, on the other hand, she would be a princess, which was a kind of power in its own right. And the young husband-to-be might be sufficiently mouldable into the kind of husband Khailin could live with. The kind of husband who could, if necessary, be hoodwinked into closing his eyes to her study of the yang-cha.

Khailin had accepted the Prince’s token, gritting her teeth. The wedding would take place the following summer, but in the meantime Khailin had done her best to make sure that her betrothal did not interfere unduly with the last year or so of freedom. It could turn out well – it might have been for the best – but sometimes she wished savagely that her body was crippled like Nhia’s was – that a good marriage had been harder to arrange. That she had been given more time.

But perhaps Nhia herself would open a few doors.

So Khailin made sure that their paths crossed in the Temple, that Nhia learned to recognize her face, that they started nodding at one another in passing, that they finally exchanged a word of greeting, and then of conversation. Khailin the courtier had cultivated Nhia with all the precision and cunning of any seeker in quest of favours from a higher-ranked aristocrat or sage.

For once, the things that Nhia was being told were not because someone instinctively trusted her with the information, but rather because this was the information that somebody else wished her to know. Since she had never had to field such an approach before, she had not recognized it as artificial; she had accepted Khailin’s overtures, after a startled wariness that such a one would seek her company, with pleasure. She had found a companion of her own age with whom she could discuss the things that interested her.

They spoke of many things, and Khailin, despite the initial venal motives with which she had approached this relationship, found herself growing to like Nhia. She was surprised by a stab of jealousy when Nhia inevitably spoke of Tai, her only close companion before Khailin herself had appeared on the scene.

‘She is so small and delicate,’ Nhia had said to Khailin as they walked in the Temple, less than a week before the Emperor’s funeral procession was due to take to Linh-an’s streets. ‘She wanted so much to say goodbye, but she won’t even see it, not if she is out in the street, behind the crowds.’

Nhia had not mentioned the exact nature of Tai’s connection with the Imperial family, but Khailin’s curiosity was aroused, and she was nothing if not practised at extracting the information she required.

‘We will all mourn,’ Khailin said. ‘This summer has brought great loss to Syai.’

‘No,’ Nhia said, shaking her head, ‘for Tai it is more.’

‘She spent summers at the Palace?’ Khailin asked. ‘With her mother? You said her mother was the Court dressmaker?’

‘Rimshi is the seamstress, yes – and she has taught Tai well, too.’

This was straying too far into minutiae. Khailin brought it back to the Palace. ‘How old is she now – she is a few years younger than you?’

‘Eleven,’ Nhia said.

‘A few summers at the Palace, and she is but a child. It’s been a tapestry to her, a living dream. I can see why it would be hard to let go.’ But then Khailin had suddenly trailed off, her eyes becoming thoughtful. Her family was part of the Court, and she and her sister, although they did not attend the social occasions at the Imperial Palace frequently, attended often enough for someone like Khailin to pick up on Court undercurrents. And one of those undercurrents, in the past year or so, had been a connection forged by Antian, the Little Empress. The Princess who had been killed in the summer’s earthquake.

Tai had wanted to say goodbye.

For Tai, the mourning was more than that of the land for its anointed.

‘But I can understand,’ Khailin said, taking a chance. Putting two and two together and coming up with a conclusion that was tenuous but of which she was suddenly very certain, she made her voice sound compassionate and deceptively assured. ‘It would be hard to come to terms with such a loss. Losing even just a friend to a calamity like this would be difficult. A sister …;’

Nhia’s head had come up sharply, but she said nothing for a moment, watching Khailin’s face. Khailin allowed her features to soften into a small sad smile. ‘There was talk in the Court. The Little Empress and a companion she had taken to spending time with. That was your Tai, was it not? I thought I heard mention of jin-shei.’

‘Yes,’ said Nhia after a pause, ‘they were jin-shei.’

‘But that should be enough to ensure that Tai is given a place of honour, if only she spoke up that she wished to be there.’

‘You don’t know her,’ Nhia murmured. ‘She was First Princess Antian’s jin-shei-bao, but she would never take advantage of …;’

She might have manipulated Nhia into offering up the confidences, but the sudden brightness that crept into Khailin’s eyes was genuine. ‘I have never had one,’ she said. ‘I have never had a sister who understood me, who knew me. Yan does what our lady mother tells her to do, without looking right or left – if she were told to walk off the edge of a cliff she would do it and never question why. She would go into the marriage they have planned for me, and be utterly content with it, as she would be content with everything.’ She glanced at Nhia, and veiled her eyes, suddenly afraid of showing too much of her emotion. ‘If I were to die,’ she blurted, unable to keep the words under control as firmly as her features, ‘there would be nobody to mourn me.’

‘Your parents …;’ Nhia began, but Khailin cut her off with a sharp motion of her hand.

‘Nobody,’ she said with conviction.

‘I would be sorry,’ Nhia said after a pause.

‘As you are my friend?’

‘Yes, as I am that.’

‘Would you be my sister if I asked you?’

‘Are you asking for jin-shei?’ Nhia said, suddenly sitting very still.

It had not been quite what Khailin had intended. Her emotions were still high, though, and even as they washed over her and made the blood rush into her cheeks she was also thinking, with a rational part of her mind, that this was what she had wanted, exactly what she had wanted, when she had set out to draw Nhia into her circle. For jin-shei sisters, it would be easy to twine lives and fortunes together – and Nhia could be the only thing left to Khailin, the only source of knowledge, of that power that she needed to keep within reach if she were to remain herself and whole. It would not be the first jin-shei bond which had been born out of a more prosaic need rather than of a purity of heart – but even those, according to Khailin’s mother’s stash of jin-ashu literature, were overcome by the power of the vow. However it began, it always ended as a powerful binding. Someone would care. Someone would be required to care.

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

Nhia reached out hesitantly and took her hand. ‘If you wish it.’

Khailin felt a weight she had not known she was carrying slip off her heart, and she sat up a little straighter, leaving her hand in Nhia’s for a moment.

‘Tell Tai,’ she said abruptly, ‘that she is welcome to watch the procession from the balcony in my family’s house. They will pass along our street.’

That had been the third gift.

Instead of trying to find a way to see past the shoulders and the elbows of the crowds in the street, Tai and Nhia had ascended the spiral staircase in Khailin’s home and had stood on high, Linh-an’s crowded, mourning streets below them, and the three of them had watched the Imperial funeral procession from Khailin’s balcony.

First came the drummers, their instruments fluttering with white ribbons, beating a slow marching pace. They were followed by the carts piled high with the offerings for the dead. The first few carts carried the intricate copies manufactured in paper and papier-mâché of the items the dead would require in the afterlife – there were three life-size sedan chairs, draped in cloth-of-gold; an intricately painted and folded miniature paper carriage complete with figures of horses, intended to transport the spirits to Cahan; a number of full-sized human figures with folded hands and painted faces, servants to take care of their needs; cups, fans, musical instruments, writing tablets, a paper replica of the Imperial Diadem, all meticulously crafted, created, painted, ready to be set to the flame as the bodies of the dead were given to the fire, the ashes of all these necessities mixing with the ashes of the dead, taking form in Cahan where they would have need of them. These carts – and there were a number of them, each carefully compiled for each one of the four dead – were followed by others, bearing ingots of gold and silver, draped with white banners inscribed with prayers and blessings and others extolling the virtues of the departed, and then still more, glowing with shimmering white candles, bearing plates and bowls laden with stacks of ceremonial honey cakes, pomegranates and peaches, and flasks of rice wine.

It took a long time for this all to pass by, but finally a long sigh out in the crowded street heralded the arrival of the first of the four bodies in the procession.

Grief had set Tai’s shoulders as she watched the four caskets pass by, each placed on a cart drawn by a single white horse and piled high with white flowers – some real, some artificial silken creations. The horses paced slowly, each led on a rein by an Imperial Guardsman cloaked in white, each cart surrounded by an honour guard – twelve Guardsmen for the Emperor and for the Empress, six for the Little Empress Antian, four for Second Princess Oylian. Behind the last cart, Oylian’s, walked the remnants of the Imperial Court.

They were led by Empress-Heir Liudan, walking alone, her feet in simple rope-soled sandals, robed in a plain white cotton gown. Her hair was dressed in two long looped braids, and banded with white ribbons; she wore no make-up, her eyes untouched by kohl, staring fiercely in front of her as she paced behind her sister’s cart. She looked neither right nor left, seeming to concentrate on just putting one foot in front of another, her head held high. She had never looked more regal.

‘She always wore formal dress, even in the Summer Palace,’ Tai murmured. ‘She was always so – so royal. Now she looks …;’

All three girls looked closely at Liudan as she walked in Linh-an’s streets to lay her family to rest, and each of them saw a different thing.

Khailin saw the future Empress, the high royal pride of the small tilted chin, the nobility of carriage and posture. Nhia saw past all that, looking deeper, and saw flickers of fear beneath the haughtiness. Tai saw her through a beloved ghost, and saw the loneliness, and the pain, and that same sense of loss with which she had once looked at Tai herself when she had first believed that Antian was turning away from her.

And Liudan saw nothing, heard nothing, walked in white silence behind her dead, her spirit a fierce emptiness, an empty vessel waiting to be filled with her life’s destiny.

Six

Yuet, the healer’s apprentice, had watched the procession of the dead from the window of her room, on the top floor of the home she shared with her mistress, the healer Szewan. Her view was not quite as good as Tai’s but she too had been watching Liudan walk behind the biers, and she was remembering the conversation she had had with Tai in the stables of the shattered Summer Palace. I will help you keep your promise.

Liudan walked alone, isolated even in this tragic procession, her eyes bright and burning in her pale face. Watching the girl, Yuet was painfully aware how prescient Antian, the dead Little Empress, had been. Yuet’s path had crossed with Liudan’s several times in the halls of the women’s quarters, on the occasions that Szewan the healer had had to visit the Third Princess or her sisters during some childhood complaint. Yuet and Liudan had never spoken directly; Yuet had always been in Liudan’s presence as Szewan’s assistant and helpmeet and had been expected to be at hand to help Szewan with whatever she required, with her head bowed and her eyes downcast. But even under those circumstances Yuet had formed a clear impression of the girl. Liudan had always had the knack of appearing to be proud and strong and self-sufficient, but she was still vulnerable and dependent on others, more so now, in fact, than she had ever been before. She was an Empress in waiting, but she was still a child.

Officially so, in fact. Many of Liudan’s contemporaries had already had their Xat-Wau rites by the time they reached her age, but Yuet knew that Liudan herself had still not started her monthly cycles, and had therefore still not reached an age at which girls were ceremonially taken across the threshold from childhood to womanhood. Yuet herself had been fourteen years old when her own Xat-Wau ceremony had taken place, so it wasn’t unheard of – but Yuet was unimportant, a healer’s apprentice, and her passage into adulthood had not been something upon which the world had turned. In Liudan’s case, her status as a minor child meant a formal regency until such time as the Empress-Heir could be properly taken through her Xat-Wau rites.

Yuet had not had time to watch Liudan in the procession for long before someone came knocking on the door of the healer’s house with a screaming child who had fallen and fractured her wrist while perched on a high windowsill trying to see the carts and the mourners. It had been Yuet who had had to deal with the patient. Szewan was getting old, arthritic and half-blind. These days she preferred to act in an advisory capacity, and leave the actual work of administering treatment and medicines to her young apprentice. Many patients had stopped asking for Szewan altogether, and simply called for Yuet’s services. Szewan had been talking for some time about officially retiring and passing her practice over to Yuet completely, but there were still some clients – the older people, who had spent their entire lives under Szewan’s ministrations, and a large portion of the clannish Imperial Court families – who still insisted on at least having her present while Yuet swabbed, bandaged, and concocted poultices and draughts. By the time Yuet had set the child’s broken wrist, immobilized it with a splint and sent the patient and her mother on their way, the procession was past and all that was there to be seen was over.

The crowds were thinning, some streaming to the place of the burning where all the paper offerings would be displayed on and around the four pyres before the whole thing was set alight; that spectacle would draw many witnesses. But for the city the show was over, and the mourning was about to begin.

Liudan and the rest of the Imperial Court would return to the Linh-an Palace in sedan chairs, via a less circuitous route, out of the crowd’s eye, once the immolation ceremonies were over; and once they did so the business of governing Syai would become an issue that would occupy the high-ranking ones in the Palace for some time to come.

I will help you keep your promise, Yuet had told Tai. But, as she cleaned up after her patient, Yuet found herself wondering how she could have possibly made such a rash statement. Tai had been jin-shei-bao to the Little Empress – but that was where the connection to the Court began and ended, and Yuet was certainly in no position to further that connection. She herself was still officially a healer’s apprentice – a journeyman, to be sure, and more and more independent, but nonetheless still coasting on Szewan’s own reputation where the Court was concerned. She certainly had, and would have in the future unless things changed rather quickly, no intimate access to Liudan herself except in Szewan’s presence, and certainly no means to procure such access to someone like Tai. Perhaps Tai could have used the jin-shei connection to gain entry into the Court itself, but Liudan would be very careful with her favours and allegiances right now, especially during the regency period, and the fulfilment of Tai’s promise, a promise doubly binding because it had been asked by a dying woman and in the name of jin-shei, seemed bleakly improbable.

Szewan had come to the window briefly to peer at the procession but had not stayed long.

‘My hands are hurting me terribly,’ she said, rubbing her swollen, arthritic knuckles. ‘I’ll take a poppy draught and retire to bed for a few hours. You can handle anything that comes up.’

‘I’ll make the draught,’ Yuet said.

Szewan grunted in assent, reaching out to draw the shutters closed, trying to keep the worst of the heat out of the room.

She had already divested herself of her outer robe and had slipped in under the thin sheets in her shift when Yuet came up with the cup of poppy. Her nose twitched at the draught as Yuet proffered the cup.

‘It smells strong,’ Szewan said.

‘I made it strong,’ Yuet said. ‘If you are in enough pain to retire to bed in the middle of the day, you may as well try and sleep through the worst of it. As you say – I will handle anything that comes up.’

‘One of these days,’ Szewan said, taking a delicate sip of the sleeping draught, ‘I will have to draw up the papers properly, and make you a partner. You are no longer an apprentice, Yuet-mai.’

Yuet blushed. ‘I’ll never know all you know,’ she said.

‘You already know more than you think you know,’ said Szewan shrewdly, ‘and, I think, more than I think you know. Sometimes I believe you keep secret notes on everything I say and don’t say. When I am gone and you go through my papers, there is little that you will learn that you have not already found out.’

‘I listen, Szewan-lama.’

‘I know,’ said Szewan. ‘Sometimes you hear far too much.’ She yawned, showing a mouth with many teeth either missing or yellow with age and decay, and handed the cup back to Yuet. ‘I will sleep now. Leave me.’

Yuet bowed her head in acknowledgement and withdrew as Szewan closed her eyes and pillowed her withered cheek on her arm.

‘I will sleep now,’ she murmured again, as Yuet closed the door gently behind her.

There were no further emergencies that morning, and only one house-call she had to make on an ailing patient too ill to come to her, so Yuet spent the morning in her stillroom, making up the supplies of the herbal remedies she used to ease the more common aches and pains of Linh-an and checking up on the stocks of the more rare medicines whose existence was written down in secret books and only in jin-ashu script where a woman might read of them. She looked in on Szewan just before she left to see her patient, but the old healer still slept peacefully, snoring gently through her parted lips. Yuet’s patient appeared to be on the mend – still weak but definitely improving, sitting up and taking solid food for the first time in many days – and Yuet returned home feeling pleased with herself.