The Secrets of Jin-Shei

That was my sister. My angry sister.

Antian had explained about Liudan, later.

‘I was only two when she was born,’ Antian had said, ‘but my mother was the Empress and everyone spoiled me. Every concubine’s child is taken to belong to the Empress, of course, but when Liudan was born, Cai – that’s her mother – did not wish to give her up to be raised by a wet-nurse and then the Court.’

‘Which one is Cai? Have I met her?’ Tai had asked.

‘No,’ Antian had said, shaking her head. ‘Cai is dead. She was at the Court for only a few years, but she lived her life like a comet.’

‘Where did she come from?’

‘She was a daughter of a poor farmer, up in the miserable rocks and stones of the north country. He could not afford to keep her – she was the ninth child in the family, the sixth daughter – and so he took her and two more of his daughters and brought them to Linh-an, and sold them into concubinage. Cai was the only one who made the Imperial Court.’

‘What of her sisters?’ Tai had asked, her eyes wide.

‘Who knows? Cai never did, or at least never spoke of them after to anyone here in the Court.’

‘So what happened?’ Tai had asked, held rapt by the sorrow she could sense between the lines of this tale, by the tendrils with which this sorrow had snared Liudan herself.

‘She might have been happy,’ Antian had said. ‘I don’t know, I was only a child. Cai caught the Emperor’s eye quickly enough, but rumour had it not for long. She did bear him a daughter, though. One of only three daughters, including me, that he sired on his women. And we were all more or less born at the same time, too – there is just over a year between me and the next daughter, and then another year between her and Liudan. She’s the youngest of the female line. The rest, well, his line runs to boys. His sons, now, range from their twenties to babes in arms.’

Tai was old enough to do the numbers on this. Inheritance went through the female line in Syai; the Emperor might rule the land, being male and having that power vested in him, but he came into his power through the woman he had married and who had been his path to the throne, and his legacy rested in the daughters he had sired. So the Emperor had secured his succession, and then provided a couple of spare heirs to the Empire, two other daughters, in case anything happened to the Little Empress. The boys would be married off well, and were of no further importance.

But Liudan was the Second Spare, born of a mother who, once her duty was done, became a shadow in the Court, no longer noticed, no longer needed, supplanted by other women in the Emperor’s retinue of concubines. The only thing of value Cai would have had would have been her child …; but Tai had extrapolated from Antian’s earlier words. Cai had not wished to let others raise her daughter – and perhaps, if she had borne a son, she would have been allowed to keep the child and rear him. But she had borne a potential heir – one twice removed from the throne, to be sure, but a potential heir nonetheless – and the child was taken away from her not long after it was born.

‘She must have been very lonely,’ Tai had said.

‘She had two of us she grew up with,’ Antian had said, misunderstanding and applying Tai’s words to Liudan, of whom she had just been speaking.

‘I meant Cai,’ Tai had said. ‘What happened to her after Liudan was born? When did she die?’

‘I don’t really know,’ Antian had said thoughtfully. ‘I do know they said that she was pregnant again less than a year after Liudan was born – but after that, I don’t know. It may be that it was thus she died – in childbirth – her and the babe both because when she disappeared from the Court there was no child left in her wake that I know of, male or female. But then there were the rumours.’

‘Of what?’

‘She was in some sort of disgrace,’ Antian had said. ‘I don’t recall what, but she had done something that reflected badly on her. And that meant on Liudan, too, on her child.’

And Tai had suddenly understood Liudan’s recoil in the garden. ‘She was the one left behind, wasn’t she?’ Tai had whispered. ‘The child of the erring one. Without friends. Except you, Antian. Except you.’

Antian had looked at her with lustrous dark eyes. ‘You see? You always understand. Yes, she grew up as the Third Princess, the youngest in protocol, the last in line, the not-quite-needed. And her mother had fallen from grace, and nobody wanted any part of her other than her continued existence.’

‘And she was afraid, wasn’t she? That morning in the garden, she was afraid that she would be the price of my coming into your life. She’d be abandoned if you chose another companion.’

‘Oh, she was never a companion – not like that – she is my sister.’

‘Is she mine, now, too?’

‘No, the jin-shei bond doesn’t mean you have to take Liudan on,’ Antian had said with a smile. ‘Not like that. She is my blood-sister, and that makes it different from the jin-shei bond. And she is wrong, in that I am not going to abandon her just because I have found a jin-shei-bao to share my heart with. But she has always felt the edge of the Court turned at her, and she has always been angry at the world. And she has grown up alone, for all that these halls are teeming with brothers, sisters, and women who had been her mother’s companions.’

‘She is very pretty,’ Tai had said.

‘So was Cai,’ Antian had said. ‘I don’t remember her, not really – but there is a portrait that the Emperor had done, on ivory – the miniature stands in the Palace back in Linh-an. I’ll show you some time. She was very beautiful.’

‘It was a pity she was not loved,’ Tai had said.

Antian had given her a strange look. ‘Yes,’ she had said slowly. ‘It was a pity.’

It was the custom of the Court that one of the heirs always had to stay behind in Linh-an when the rest of the Court came away to the Summer Palace – just in case of some calamity. In the year that Tai and Antian entered into jin-shei, the third sister, Second Princess Oylian, had been the one to have remained in the sweltering capital city over that long hot summer. The year after that it had been Antian herself. This third summer it was Liudan’s turn – and Tai, despite a guilty cast to her sense of relief, was not entirely unhappy that she did not have the angry Third Princess watching her and Antian together with smouldering, jealous eyes. Her feelings for Liudan ran the gamut from pity to deep resentment that she should be the focus of so much undeserved hatred for no better reason than that she was Antian’s chosen companion.

Second Princess Oylian was a gentle, pliant, pleasant girl who drifted through life – she was a stream of water which flowed around obstacles rather than try and shift them.

‘The worst thing that could ever happen to Oylian and to Syai,’ Antian had said to Tai once in a low whisper one early morning out on their balcony on the side of the mountain, ‘would be for her to ever become Empress. Whoever her Emperor proved to be, he could make her do whatever he said and she would do it to keep the peace. She was born to a family, not an Empire.’

But the Second Princess would smile at Tai, even if she didn’t have much to say to her. Liudan would simply sweep past and ignore her whenever she could. Tai was the danger – Tai was, like Liudan’s own mother had been, of common stock, only one step removed from Liudan’s own now-high station, a reminder of what she could easily have been if she had not been born royal. The Third Princess was a complex mixture of insecurities – left adrift because she was the second spare heiress and therefore less urgently needed than Oylian, left alone because of her mother’s fall from grace for reasons that even Liudan herself did not really understand, afraid of the thin veneer that separated her royalty from the land-grubbing poverty from which her mother’s family had come. Liudan wanted the royalty, needed it as a shield against all kinds of terrors – and it was a thin shield, barely there. She was only Third Princess, after all.

But this summer, the summer that Antian had invited Tai up to the Summer Palace as her guest, Liudan was mercifully absent, back in Linh-an, suffering the summer heat in the Imperial Palace – and probably doing it with better grace than the other two would ever have done because at least it was a signifier of her status, an indication that she was important enough in the hierarchy to be preserved and sheltered against the potential of disaster. And her absence meant that Antian and Tai could laugh more freely, more often, without waiting for Liudan’s brooding presence to cut the laughter short when they met her eyes.

In a way, though, Liudan’s hostility was what made Tai aware of her own status in this Court – although Liudan’s presence was uncomfortable, she and Tai were two points of the same star, both sisters to Antian after a fashion, balancing one another. Without the unconcealed hostility of that one amongst all the Imperial women, it was somehow harder for Tai to winnow the genuine from the sycophant in the rest of the Imperial royal women in the Summer Palace. It was as if, with Liudan there, Tai was on her guard against Liudan alone. With her gone, Tai was on her guard against everybody else.

But she was here, now, in the royal quarters, bent over her journal by candlelight even while the sky lightened in the east. She and Antian were to meet at their balcony that morning, later, but Tai had woken early, uncomfortable about something, not sure what had woken her – until she had picked up her inkwell and her brush and her journal and it had come into focus for her.

It is very quiet out there tonight.

She stared at the line she had written down, and became preternaturally aware of the stillness that had broken through the depths of sleep to wake her, the silence that surrounded her, the world holding its breath. She thought she heard, far away in a kennel somewhere, the despondent howl of a trapped dog, but even that was there and gone almost before she had had a chance to identify the sound. The silence was absolute.

And then the mountain shuddered, and crumbled.

Two

In less time than it took to blink, silence was a memory. Masonry groaned; things skittered across the surface of the lacquered table, or fell to the ground, leaving the floor strewn with debris. Above it all there was an indescribable sound that was half heard and half absorbed directly through bone and muscle – the roar of wounded stone.

Instinct had taken over in the first moment of terror, and Tai had streaked out of her room and into the garden, out under an open sky. She felt the ground shake under the soles of her bare feet, staggered to keep her balance, lost the battle, fell sideways into a bed of swaying flowers still closed in the pearly pre-dawn grey darkness. Before Tai’s horrified eyes the tiered Summer Palace folded into itself as though it had been made of sticks and leaves, walls falling inward, tiles falling in slow motion and tumbling end over end before shattering into dust, columns snapping in two or falling sideways and knocking out the next column in line, collapsing them in turn like dominoes. Graceful arched windows and doorways became piles of broken brick and crumbs of plaster; wooden window frames snapped like matchsticks. Glass was a precious thing and not often found outside the Imperial Palaces, and even there rare and used sparingly; now, with the wooden frames bending and breaking, the night was alive with the eerie sound of breaking glass, like fairy chimes.

A tree groaned and began to fall over, in slow motion, pulling its old roots out of the ground.

Lifting her eyes to the top of the mountain whose peak had always towered above the Summer Palace, Tai became aware with a shock that the peak had vanished. It was partly the huge rocks from the disintegrating mountainside that had helped wreak this havoc – smashing down on top of buildings, flattening structures in their path, rolling onward in destructive fury. One had levelled a fountain in the gardens, and the spilled water, still dark as the night it reflected, saturated the flowerbeds and flowed into the courtyards whose cobbles looked as though they had been ploughed.

Somewhere in the ruins of the Palace a spark started, then a fire. Then another. And another. Columns of smoke rose into the sky; the air tasted acrid with dust and ashes and fear.

When the noise of tumbling rocks and crashing buildings had subsided at last, leaving an echo ringing in Tai’s ears, she began hearing another sound – human voices, groaning, screaming, weeping. She became aware that she was herself uttering small whimpering sounds. Curled up in the middle of a once-graceful flowerbed, now sodden and blighted out in the shattered gardens, she was barefoot, an almost translucent nightrobe all that she wore – but she was whole, and unharmed, and still clutching the red leather-bound journal that had been Antian’s gift.

Those who had been deeper into the warren of the Palace and had no way to get out …; those who had not woken to the silence before the wrath of the Gods …; those who had tried to run but had not made it out fast enough …;

They were all still in there.

In the wreck of the Summer Palace.

In the piles of still settling dust and rubble, under the weight of a mountain.

Antian.

The sky was lightening in the east, and dawn crept over the ruined Palace, brighter, faster now that the mountainside which had reared up against the eastern sky was gone.

Dawn. Early morning.

The balcony on the mountain.

Her rigid fingers wrapped tightly around the red book that had been Antian’s gift, Tai scrambled to her feet and stood, indecisive, torn, in the shattered garden. Her nightrobe was streaked with mud, her feet and her face smeared with mud and with dust; she had an urgent need to go and do something – help those buried in the rubble, dig with bare hands until she found someone whom she could haul out of the wreckage – and knew that the only one she wanted to find was Antian, the Little Empress, lost somewhere in this chaos. And unable to move – because if she ran to the Palace Antian could be out on the balcony, and if she chose the balcony Antian might die buried under the weight of the broken Palace.

She saw someone running towards the buildings, a weeping servant, followed by another who clutched an awkwardly bent arm and had a face smeared with blood. It might have been this that decided Tai. There would be others coming to the Palace soon – not everything had collapsed, surely, and there had to be people who could move, who could help – but nobody else knew that Antian was going to the balcony that morning. If she was there, then nobody knew to go to her aid.

She turned, and ran.

Somehow the gate that led to the outer balcony was still intact – its capstone in place, the wall surrounding it deceptively innocent and peaceful in the early morning light. But taking a step through it, and looking up, Tai realized for the first time the extent of the catastrophe that had touched the Summer Palace that day.

The mountain above the Palace wore a different shape. Half of it was gone, vanished. The mountain peak had disintegrated, and a lot of it had fallen down into the buildings and the courtyards of the Palace. The rest of the mountainside had sheared off in a layer of stone and mud and simply slid down the slope, taking a large chunk of the Palace with it.

The lacy pattern of open balconies hanging over the river that flowed golden when the sun was setting was no more. The mountain’s face was a gaping wound of broken balustrades, platforms teetering over nothing, piles of shattered stone a long way below, all the way down to the river. Some balconies had been ripped off completely, and gaping holes in the walls opened from the Palace courts directly out into the abyss. Others were hanging on by a narrow ledge only a single flagstone wide, or by part of a balustrade. Yet others were crazy, broken, multi-levelled wrecks with holes where flagstones had smashed or been ripped in half, looking as though they were being observed with a mirror put together from glass shards, each reflecting a different angle, different aspect.

Tai stood at the edge of this devastation, eyes wide with shock. If Antian had been out here …;

She tried calling, but her voice seemed to have died in her throat, and all that came out was a soft wail. But the sound seemed to have triggered some response, for the broken stones sighed and whimpered and a familiar but very weak voice replied.

‘Who is there?’

Tai’s first reaction was a rush of relief, a fierce joy, the sheer euphoria of hearing that voice at all. And then that soft voice dropped, fading into almost a whisper. ‘Help me.’

No! screamed Tai’s mind. But she stifled it, tried to cling to the happiness she had felt a bare moment before, batted at the sudden rush of tears with the back of her hand. Almost unwillingly, not wanting to see what lay beyond the ruined balcony, not wanting to know the inevitable, Tai crept carefully forward towards the edge, peering over.

Just out of arm’s reach, on a ledge of broken flagstone caught on a rocky protrusion on the mountainside, lay Antian, the Little Empress. One of her long braids had curled on her breast in a long black rope, like a living thing that had come to comfort her; the other had slipped down her shoulder and now hung over the edge of her resting place, swinging out into the chasm below her. She held a hand – always graceful, still graceful! – to her side in a fragile kind of way, as though she was trying to staunch a wound with no strength left to do it with, and indeed there was a dark stain that was spreading into her robe underneath her fingers. Her hand was smeared with red; so was her face, with a gash on her forehead oozing a thin stream of blood into the corner of her eye and down her temple and another graze red and bleeding along the line of her jaw. One of her legs seemed bent at an unnatural angle.

But her eyes were lucid, and she tried to smile when Tai’s face appeared over the edge of the ruin above her.

‘Don’t move,’ Tai said, her voice catching a little. ‘I’ll go get help.’

‘Wait …;’

But Tai was already gone. There had been something about Antian that she could hardly bear to watch – a kind of brightness, an aura that was more than just the first fingers of the dawn’s golden glow, an otherworldly light that told her that Antian had already taken that first irrevocable step into the world beyond, the world of the Immortals.

Tai skidded into the courtyards, panting, her eyes wild, her feet bleeding from scratches and gashes delivered by the broken cobblestones she had stumbled over in her haste. There were people in the courtyards now, but only a few of them were actually moving about or doing something constructive. Bodies were laid out in the garden, and a handful of bloodied survivors had been taken to a sheltered area where one or two servants, themselves bandaged and bleeding from scratches or hobbling on makeshift crutches, tried to tend to them. Someone was crying weakly for water. Somebody else was weeping, a curiously steady sound, as though she did not know how to stop.

A young woman in a white robe streaked with dust and blood was leaning over a woman’s body, gently probing with long fingers, but even as Tai watched she straightened with a sigh, closing her eyes. Her expression told it all.

Her face was familiar, underneath its coating of grime, and Tai fought her own panic and fear to dredge the name from her memory – this was someone who could be useful – who was it – she knew her, it was precisely the person she had come looking for …;

Yuet. The name swam into her mind, followed by another – Szewan – the healer woman who had tended Tai’s mother that spring. Yuet had tagged at Szewan’s heels. Yuet was the healer’s apprentice.

Szewan was in Linh-an. Yuet was here. Yuet was the healer.

Tai ran to the older girl and snatched at the sleeve of her robe.

‘Come! Oh, you must come! It’s Antian – it’s the Little Empress – she needs your help.’

The young healer turned her head, blinked in Tai’s direction for a moment, the words not sinking in. Then, as she parsed the sentence, as she realized what had just been said, she sucked in her breath.

‘Is she alive?’

‘Yes. Yes! Hurry!’

Yuet drew a shaking hand across her forehead. ‘The Gods be thanked for that, at least!’ She showed no sign of having recognized Tai, although they had met several times during the spring, but right now Yuet would have been hard put to recognize her own mother. All she could see was the death all around her, the death written in the broken women they were scrambling to dig out of the ruins, the despair written in the faces of those who had come to the call for help, themselves bruised, cut, bleeding. The death written in the toppled mountain that had annihilated everything.

The Emperor and the Empress were both dead. The rescuers digging in the rubble of the Palace knew that much already. Oylian, the Second Princess, they had not found yet – and that could not be a good sign. And now, this …;

‘Take me to her,’ Yuet said, turning away from the body at her feet and starting out towards the ruined Palace.

‘This way!’ Tai, who had not let go of her sleeve, tugged her away and across the gardens.

Yuet stopped, confused. ‘Where is the Little Empress?’

‘She was on one of the balconies …; out on the mountain.’

What little colour was left in Yuet’s cheeks drained away. ‘What in the name of Cahan was she doing there? When this was all coming down?’

‘We were supposed to meet at the balcony this morning.’ Tai pulled at Yuet’s arm. ‘Hurry!’

Yuet followed, frowning, until her eyes suddenly lit briefly with recognition. ‘You’re from Linh-an, you’re her jin-shei-bao.’

‘Hurry.’ Tai seemed to have forgotten every other word she ever knew. All that was beating in her heart, in her blood, in her mind, was hurry. The broken doll on the ledge below the balcony, that was just the shell of Antian – but if they didn’t hurryhurryhurry the shell would melt and shred in the mountain winds like a cloud and disappear for ever …; and this was Antian, the Princess who laughed, who cared, who loved, who would be Empress one day …;

Yuet had the presence of mind to snag a relatively able-bodied male servant on their way to the balcony, surmising – rightly – that Antian would have to be extracted out of some unspeakable wreckage before she could be helped. But that hadn’t prepared her for the devastation of the mountainside when the three of them finally emerged onto what was left of the little balcony. Yuet gasped, her hand going to her throat.

‘She survived this?’ Yuet said breathlessly.

Tai had run to the edge of the chasm. ‘Antian? Antian, I’m here. I brought help.’

The manservant reached out and scooped the struggling Tai out of harm’s way, and peered carefully over the edge himself.

‘We would need rope, I think,’ he said.

‘There is no time for that now.’ Yuet had approached and was gauging the distance between herself and her patient. ‘I think there is space enough. Lower me down, and then go fetch a rope and another pair of hands to help you. This will need doing gently. Dear sweet Cahan, she is still alive. Princess? I am coming down to you.’

Antian whispered something, very softly, and Tai thought she heard, No, it is too dangerous. But Yuet had already grasped the manservant’s wrists with her hands, and he had wrapped his own fingers around her wrists and was trying to judge the most stable spot to lower her down on.

‘I don’t think there’s a good place,’ Yuet said at last. ‘There’s no time, there’s no time! Lower me down there and go get help!’

‘Yes, sai’an.’ He grasped her wrists firmly and the corded muscles in his arms knotted as he lowered her slowly, gently, down to where Antian lay. Yuet felt her feet touch something solid, then it lurched beneath her heel. She gasped.