The Secrets of Jin-Shei

The survivors grieved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Here,’ he said, ‘drink this. It will make you feel better.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Empress-Heir. The Empress to be.

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

‘Pardon?’ Kito said, startled.

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

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

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

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

‘Wait,’ Kito said suddenly, instinctively.

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

‘They will not,’ he said quietly, ‘all be destroyed.’

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

Four

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

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

‘We are kept busy,’ he had said, in response to Nhia’s polite inquiry as to his well-being. But his eyes had been smiling at Tai, and hers were downcast, although her mouth curved upwards a little at its corners. Nhia’s eyebrow rose a fraction, and she said smoothly, as though she had noticed nothing at all, ‘I do not know if you have met my friend. Tai, this is Kito, son of So-Xan, the bead-carver. Kito, this is Tai, daughter of Rimshi, the seamstress.’

They bowed to each other.

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

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

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

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

‘And a bowl of green tea,’ Nhia murmured.

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

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

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

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

‘Jin-shei?’ Nhia echoed. ‘With Second Princess Oylian?’

‘With Antian,’ Tai said. ‘With the Little Empress.’

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

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

‘When Han-fei crossed the Great River and entered the realm of the Gods,’ she began, smoothing away Tai’s hair from her eyes with a motion as tender as a mother’s, ‘he walked far without meeting anyone, and keeping his eyes on the ground, so that he would not offend any being he met by looking at them without their permission. By and by he came upon a beach, and the beach opened onto a great lake, and the lake was dark and still, like a mirror, and beautiful. More beautiful still was the thing which he saw in the lake – glorious mountain peaks, rank upon rank of them, rising majestic and capped with snow, so high that the sky above them was eternally sprinkled with stars. “O, beautiful!” he said, and fell to his knees in worship of it. And a voice said to him, “This is the image, Han-fei, now look up and behold the truth.” And Han-fei looked up, and the mountains were real and stood around the lake in all their majesty and were not offended that he looked upon them, and knew them, and loved them.’ She paused. ‘It may be,’ she said gently, ‘that the thing which you shared with the Little Empress is just a reflection of something greater and truer that will come to you, that she came to you to show you the way. That she was the image on which you must now build your truth.’

Tai suddenly turned and gave Nhia a fierce hug. ‘You’ve always been my friend,’ she said.

‘Sometimes I think you’ve been my only friend,’ Nhia said with a trace of bitterness.

Tai sat back and gave Nhia a long look. ‘That’s not true,’ she said. ‘Everybody likes you. People are always asking you what you think. People trust you.’

‘People have never liked me, Tai,’ Nhia said.

‘But you’ve solved all sorts of problems back in SoChi Street.’

Nhia dismissed that accomplishment with a wave of her arm. ‘That’s not the same. People trust me, yes. Sometimes I think people tell me more than they think I ought to know. But that leads away from affection, not towards it! If they know I know all those things about them, yes, they trust me – but they will never like me. Folks never like those who know too much about them.’

‘You’re one of the wisest people I know,’ Tai said sturdily, loyally.

Nhia smiled. ‘That’s because you haven’t met many people yet.’

‘I have,’ Tai said rebelliously. ‘In the Summer Palace …;’

The words sank into a pool of silence that was sorrow. Nhia reached over and squeezed Tai’s cold fingers.

‘I know you have lost something wonderful,’ she said. ‘But you’ve always been a little sister to me, Tai. Sometimes you really were the only person I could talk to. Whatever else happens in either of our lives, I wanted you to know that. It doesn’t make up for the Little Empress, but …;’

‘But I’ve had a real, live jin-shei-bao living next door to me all my life and I never knew it,’ Tai said.

Nhia gave her a startled look. ‘That’s not what I meant,’ she began, but Tai turned her hand and laced her fingers through the older girl’s.

‘But I mean it,’ she said, ‘if you wish it.’

For a moment, Nhia could not find the voice to speak at all, and then, when the words did come, they were raw with emotion.

‘I can hardly take the place of the first heart’s sister, of the one who would have been Empress,’ she said, ‘but I’ll be your sister if you want me to be. I would be proud to have you call me that.’

That had been the second gift, another jin-shei, another place for the love that had been Antian’s legacy to be bestowed.

The third gift of the Gods had been even more unexpected.

Five

Although she’d been coming to the Temple since she was a babe in arms, it had been only in the last year or so that Nhia’s presence had begun making a real impact there. She had barely turned fourteen when she and a young acolyte she had been in conversation with had been approached by a politely deferential older woman who posed the question – to the acolyte – as to which deity she should approach with her problem. ‘Help me, blessed one, for I am not certain which of the Gods would be best to approach – I am not worthy of what is being asked of me, I need to know …;’

It had been Nhia, aged only fourteen and not bound to the Temple hierarchy at all, who had responded to this plea, with a story of Han-fei, the hapless adventurer whose encounters with Gods and Immortals were such a fertile ground to harvest good advice from.

‘When Han-fei met with an Immortal beyond the river Inderyn where the Heavens are,’ Nhia had spoken into the expectant silence, while the Temple acolyte was still pondering the question, ‘he threw himself at the feet of the Blessed Sage and would not raise his eyes from the hem of the robe that the Immortal Sage wore. “I am not worthy, O Blessed One, I am not worthy!” The Sage said, “What do you see when you look into the mirror, Han-fei?” And Han-fei said, “I see a man with no beauty in his face and no wisdom in his mind and no humility in his spirit.” And the Sage bade Han-fei take a mirror from his hand and said, “Then look again, for what I see is a man with the beauty of face which is a reflection of the modesty of his soul, with the wisdom of mind to know what he does not know, and with the humility of spirit to spend his life in trying to learn and understand the things he is ignorant of. Rise, Han-fei, for you are worthy.”’

The woman had taken Nhia’s hand and kissed it, in silence, and backed away, bowing. The acolyte had stood and stared at Nhia for a long moment.

‘Where did you learn that tale?’ he had asked.

‘I hear many of them, in these halls,’ Nhia had said. ‘I see the teaching monks with the children in the courtyards sometimes. I listen, and I remember them.’

‘That is good,’ the acolyte had said carefully, ‘except that the one you just told has never been one of the teaching tales. For all I know, it has never been recorded as having happened to Han-fei.’

‘I didn’t just make it up!’ Nhia had protested, her heart lurching into her heels. ‘I must have heard it.’

‘You invented it, Nhia, and it was perfect,’ the acolyte had said.

Nhia’s first reaction was a rising panic. ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ she pleaded. ‘I won’t do it again. I just meant to …;’

‘But why ever not?’ the acolyte had asked. ‘You’re a natural teacher. Perhaps one day you will even be a real part of this Temple; you already know more than some who have been pledged to it for years.’

Whether or not the acolyte told anyone about the incident, Nhia never found out – but only because events overtook her. Even if the acolyte had held his tongue, the woman to whom Nhia had told her Han-fei tale obviously had not.

Haggling over a fish at the marketplace, perhaps a week or so after the encounter at the Temple, Nhia turned to a gentle tugging on her sleeve and was surprised to recognize the seeker from the Temple. The woman was accompanied by a brace of small children, one of them only a few years younger than Nhia herself, all of whom stared at Nhia inscrutably. Nhia stared back, nonplussed.

‘I wished to thank you, young sai’an,’ the woman said in a low, deferential voice. ‘You have helped me understand. My husband’s mother is in need of your wise words, also, but she is bedridden and cannot go to Temple often. Perhaps if you would come?’

‘But I am not one of the blessed ones of the Temple,’ Nhia had said helplessly.

Just for a moment, the woman looked surprised, and then her expression settled into certainty again. ‘Maybe you are not one of the ones wearing the robes, sai’an, but you have the wisdom of the Immortals in you. My mother-in-law would be grateful if you would come. If only for a few moments. We live in ZhuChao Street, in the yellow house on the corner. If you please, sai’an.’

Nhia had wanted nothing more than to bolt into the midst of the marketplace and to lose herself in the crowds – but she could not run. She could not ever run. Not from this; not from anything. The irony of this made a wry grin touch her lips. The woman interpreted this as acceptance, or dismissal – in any event she had backed away, bowing, accompanied by her brood.

Several other customers at the fishmonger’s stall had been witness to this exchange, and the fishmonger himself, who had known Nhia from babyhood, stood with her intended purchase still in his hand.

‘So you are a Sage, now, young NhiNhi,’ the fishmonger had said. There was an attempt at levity there, but there was something else also – a curiosity, a careful interest. The marketplace lived by gossip and rumour, this was how the news was spread from one corner of the sprawling city that was Linh-an to the next. There was, maybe, a story here.

‘I am no such thing,’ Nhia had said, very firmly, and had brought the subject of the conversation back to the fish.

But another woman had stopped her in the street two days later, asking a very specific question. The question concerned the child whom she held by the hand and who stood staring at Nhia with the blank obsidian gaze which was very familiar to her. She had worn that mask herself. The child’s other arm and hand, not the one held by her mother, were thin and withered, her fingers bent into a pitiful claw which she held folded into her belly. This was another Nhia, a cripple whose mother was driven to ask for help where she thought she could find it.

Perhaps it was this that made Nhia speak to her. There had been a parable to fit. Then she had told another tale, directly to the child, another Han-fei story but one aimed at the old pain so familiar to herself, trying to ease the little one’s burden. She had been rewarded with a softening of the eyes, a shy smile. The mother noticed, and her own eyes lit up. She took the incident away with her, cherished it, spoke of it.

After that, more came.

Somehow, before she reached her fifteenth birthday, Nhia had found herself sitting in an unoccupied booth in the First Circle one morning, telling teaching tales to a gaggle of children at her feet. At first it was an irregular thing, just every so often – when sufficient numbers of young disciples accumulated around her, Nhia would sit down somewhere, they would all subside on the ground around her, and the cry ‘A story! A story!’ would be raised. But it quickly grew into something more. Something that became striking enough to warrant the attention of the Temple priestly caste. Several times, in the middle of one of her tales, Nhia would look up and catch the glimpse of a discreet observer, an acolyte draped in Temple robes, who would stand with eyes downcast and hands folded into his sleeves and listen intently to what she was saying. When she caught their presence, Nhia tried to be careful and tell only the tales she knew she had heard before here in the Temple, told by the Temple Sages and teachers. But it was sometimes hard to remember which ones she was sure about. All of the stories she told sounded so old and familiar to her. Which ones were old and venerable teaching parables, and which ones had she just invented?