three

I am Chung the messenger, he thought, almost desperately, I am Chung the messenger! I am not Chung the warrior! What am I doing here …?

He did know, of course, exactly what he was doing here; he just couldn’t quite believe it of himself.

He was crouched in the bow of a boat that smelled of fish and weed and rank salt water, along with far too many other men. All of whom were warriors trained, who carried arms as naturally as he carried a sealed scroll in a satchel; all of whom were watching the setting sun at least as nervously as he was, and possibly wondering just as hard, quite why they were there.

One of them, the man on his immediate right, was Shen. Who was of course the sole true reason for Chung’s being there: because if he couldn’t stop Shen’s going off on some lunatic adventure—and that was a given, that Shen couldn’t be stopped—then Chung was most certainly going with him.

Even at the cost of this terror and worse, this bewilderment: this not at all knowing what he should do when they came to land, even assuming that they did survive the dragon.

Shen said “Stay with the boat,” but that was … not possible. No.

First, though, first would come the dragon. If she came. If she wasn’t hunting far away, or lurking deep down, ashamed or afraid after her last confrontation with the goddess …

It had all been carefully explained to them, how the little eunuch boy spoke with the voice of the goddess and would keep the dragon off. They all understood that, yes. Whether they believed it, quite—that was another question entirely. Shen of course was from far away and had never heard of the Li-goddess; the same was true for all the emperor’s army, which meant most of the men aboard the fleet tonight. Chung was Taishu born and bred, he had lived all his life—he was told—under the goddess’s favor, as the dragon had lived so long under her guard. Under her waters.

Even so, Chung was terrified. And doubtful. Even here on Old Yen’s own boat, the same that the eunuchs rode in, that had already defied the dragon and made the crossing once. The fisherman might be a special favorite of the goddess; she might have less interest in Chung, none at all in Shen or all these others. There was no good reason to imagine that she would act to save a fleet, just for the sake of one old man and a child.

Which was why the emperor was sending just a raiding party, of course, this first time out. If the fleet was lost, he wouldn’t lose his army.

Nor most of his bodyguard, nor any of his close friends. Shen had volunteered, and still had to argue his way aboard. Where Shen went, Chung followed; that was understood. He was only a messenger anyway, he was expendable.

Mei Feng might not think so, but hopefully Mei Feng would not find out. She wasn’t here, of course. She hadn’t even come to the dockside to see them sail.

The emperor had been there, almost alone by imperial standards. His bodyguard stood all about him and General Ping Wen was at his side, but no Jiao, no Yu Shan. Perhaps they’d taken Mei Feng’s side against this whole affair, and stayed away as a gesture of support. Perhaps they were sulking, because they wanted to come and the emperor wouldn’t let them. It was odd not to see them there, but Chung was grateful; they were more eyes not to see him, not to carry the news back to Mei Feng that her own personal runner had run off on this desperate folly in defiance of good sense and her explicit order. In defiance of his own instinct too. He squatted in the bows and gripped Shen’s sleeve and really really wished that neither of them had come. They would fetch home nothing good, he was sure of it. If they got home at all, with the sea and the enemy and the dragon all working to see that they didn’t.

It was evening under a clearing sky, with the sun just lowering into the last of the day’s clouds. The Forge was a silent, sullen shadow off the port bow, all wrong: no spark of fire at its peak, no hint of hammer-blows rolling over the water. Chung really wished the old man had not chosen to sail so close. Let the others watch the wide open sky, or peer fretfully into the water; Chung watched the Forge.

And so was first to see its shadow stretch and rise. When something else rose, rather, from its shadow. How had he known? He couldn’t say: only that the Forge had been at the heart of the dragon’s story all his life, so where else should a man from Taishu look to find the dragon?

SHE ROSE, and her undulating flanks glittered and sparked in the low sun. A low breath of wonder rose in response from the flotilla, even as all the overloaded boats shifted closer together, packing as tight as they could around Old Yen. Taishu and the emperor could ill afford to lose any boats at all, but if they must, these were the ones they could best do without: low and leaky for the most part, half held together by residues of ancient fish.

The men would be a greater loss. They were close enough to swamping their paltry vessels simply by their numbers; closer now in the rush of their fear, their rush to come within the saving shadow of the boy’s grace, of the goddess. They must cluster and press, barge others out of the way. Boats rocked dangerously into each other, bounced in one another’s wakes, came close to tipping over entirely. Men clutched and yelled, cursed and prayed; few had the sense to sit down and bail.

Perhaps it was the kindness of the goddess, that none of the boats did overturn or sink. Perhaps it was the luck of fools at sea. They gathered close and no catastrophe occurred, but catastrophe was coming none the less. What would a few lost boats matter, after all, against the dragon, who sank entire fleets in her temper …?

She swam in air, as it seemed, more eel-like than birdish, wingless as she flicked her way toward them. Until she stretched her legs down, with all their talons showing. Then she was bird-cruel and malign.

The babble was frantic and futile, curses and imprecations and pleas addressed to the dragon or the goddess or the absent emperor, some other distant treasured god or lover, mother, anyone. What struck through it all was the old man’s voice, Old Yen at the steering oar, chanting his own prayers as though no other man were saying anything. His was a faith Chung was ready to believe in, or at least to cling to: like wreckage, if it could only keep him afloat. Him and Shen together.

Clinging to Shen and gazing back toward the fisherman, Chung saw two other figures emerge from the boat’s cabin, toss back the hoods that hid their faces, look around …

Chung yipped, he couldn’t help it; and thrust his way down off the foredeck, hauling Shen after.

There were men everywhere, surging mindlessly to and fro or else static and staring, watching the dragon come. Chung kept his eyes on his target and plowed relentlessly aft, until at last: “Jiao, Yu Shan! What are you doing here …?”

It was the wrong question, of course, an idiot’s question. They didn’t answer; they didn’t need to. They had sneaked aboard against the emperor’s order and hidden out of his sight below because they didn’t want to be anywhere but here this night, they couldn’t bear to be left behind.

The tall bandit woman glanced upward, nudging Yu Shan to do the same. There was something about Yu Shan that was odd, not himself but the shirt he wore, that rippled and gleamed in the shadows; but his head tipped back, his eyes turned to the sky and dragged Chung’s with them, because in the end nobody could avoid looking at the dragon.

She loomed in the sky above them, like—well, like nothing they had ever seen. Too dense and deadly for the blackest of thunderclouds, too vast and solid for the most extravagant of kites, too ultimately real for a dream. Like death, Chung thought, suddenly trusting not at all in the rumor of a goddess he had never seen, when the dragon was so entirely and absolutely there. And had been the death of many, many men in boats gathered together just like this, just a few short weeks ago.

And meant to be the death of many more, here and now, by the way she coiled and poised like a snake about to strike, if snakes had ever been so monstrous large, so toothed and clawed, so casual in air, so bright and cold and deadly.

She hung for a moment, and the men in the boats all around were screaming now. Here on the fisherman’s decks, they were mostly screaming at the eunuch where he stood in the stern with the little boy in his arms.

“Lift him up!… Let her see him!… Let him speak to her!…”

Some few were screaming at the fisherman to bring his goddess forth, but Chung thought that was just as pointless. The goddess was there in the child, or else she was there in the water or the air or wherever a goddess might choose to linger, or else she was not. Whether or not they cared about mortal lives, gods did not come to mortal call.

The old man paid no attention. He shifted his oar automatically, stared up with the rest of them, wheezed out the monotone of his prayers.

The young eunuch who held the boy, his shaved head was glistening with sweat and he was whispering urgently in the child’s ear, talking either to the boy or to the goddess, who could tell? The child didn’t speak, the goddess didn’t reveal herself by any other means, the dragon didn’t go away.

THE DRAGON struck.

OR TRIED, at least, to strike. Tried to snatch: she came slamming down out of the sky with one foot reaching, claws extended to seize a boat by the bows and shake the crew out of it, or else carry them away still clinging.

And she failed. She missed; or her leg slid off some barrier that no man could see, that wind and water flowed straight through but dragons apparently could not pass. Her clutch found nothing, and her body plunged into the deep.

It was the fools aboard who cheered. The dragon was at least as dangerous underwater. Maybe more so, because you couldn’t see her coming. Actually that might not make a difference, but water was her element as much as air, that was the point. She was somewhere beneath them, and she hadn’t at all gone away.

The fleet knew it too. At least the captains and masters knew it, and the men learned it soon enough. On this boat they learned it from Jiao, who leaped up onto a barrel, spread her arms wide and bellowed: “Hold tight, hold hard, you fools! Do you not realize she’s coming back up …?”

They snatched hold of ropes or spars or anything fixed that they could reach, and stared down between their feet as though decks and hull were all transparent and the dark sea too. Unless they were expecting to see her eyes burn through wood and water and all. Perhaps they were. Perhaps they would …

Don’t think about it. He took his own hold—on Shen, the most solid object within his reach, who had already bonded himself to the mainmast—and tried not to stare between his own feet. There were Shen’s eyes to gaze into instead, until he scowled and shook his head and nuzzled into Chung’s shoulder. After that there was at least Yu Shan’s curious shirt to look at—like a snake’s skin, made of so many interlocking links and what were they, not steel but … no, surely not, they couldn’t be …?—until, indeed, the dragon rose.

DECKS TOSSED, water threw up white between them, that close gathering of boats was torn apart as she came up like a whale through a spinning school of fish, mouth agape to seize and swallow.

And yet, and yet …

She rose like a spear through a ring, as the water bore the boats apart to make a hollow circle that she exploded through; and so she missed them all another time.

And hung overhead again, and if a creature that was half god and half reptile could look baffled, then Chung dared to think that perhaps the dragon did. She was almost half-hearted, as she plunged to strike again; he was almost not surprised when she missed again.

This time she veered so sharply from her line, no one could think it deliberate. It was as though a wind had struck her, a wind of solid storm, so hard she toppled in the air and twisted as she fell, and met the sea side-on and a long way from the fleet.

The great splash of her falling raised a wave that might have flooded some of the low boats, but that it never reached them. The sea flattened somehow, between her and here; all they did was rock gently in the distant whisper of that shout.

This time the hand of the goddess was manifest, and awesome. This time no one cheered or cried out; there was a terror in seeing the power of an immortal so close, even when it worked to your own good. People were wordless, breathless almost, staring first at the sea and then at one another and then at the rear of the boat, where the old man stood with the eunuchs at his side.

Did Jung go to lift the child high, feeling that massed gaze on him? And did Old Yen still him, with a hand on his arm and a shake of the head?

Chung wasn’t sure, it was hard to see through the surge of men around him as fear of the dragon was consumed by fear of what had forced the dragon off. Someone had voice enough to cry “Will she come back?” without being exactly clear whether he meant the dragon or the goddess. Not even Old Yen had any answer to offer. The only possible response was to sail on and see. The fisherman’s boy Pao elbowed his way through the throng, shrieking for space to work, to help the sails find their lost wind again. Old Yen called across the water in a strange hooting voice, presumably saying the same or something like it to the other boats, give me room here, room to sail, fall back and follow me …

Jiao seized Chung’s arm and hauled him into the cabin. Shen followed by default, because Chung had not let go of his sleeve. Yu Shan came after, and closed the door behind them.

That privacy was a kindness, perhaps, as Jiao unleashed her lashing tongue at Chung. “You asked us—us!—what we were doing here?” When they were both hung with blades, when Yu Shan was hung with that extraordinary shirt, when the answer was obvious. “You, though, what are you doing here? Little running-man? Not too much room to run, is there, up on deck? And no one will be sending messages to Tunghai Wang, at least not the sort that anyone needs to carry …”

It was true, all true, and it had all been running through his head already, even down to the same acid loading. He had no defense to offer, but didn’t need one; Shen reached around him from behind and folded his arms tight about Chung’s chest, and that was defense enough.

Except, “I came,” he said, “Shen didn’t bring me.” Just in case it should look that way, that he’d been pulled aboard like a mascot, without a say in his own folly. It was important, apparently, to assert his own folly. Unless he only wanted to excuse Shen’s.

“Oh, and the difference would be what? Exactly?”

She knew the difference, exactly; she was only tormenting him because she could. It didn’t matter anyway, because he was here now and so were they and no one was going back. Just then the boat rocked beneath them, and Jiao sat down neatly on the cot as it rose up to meet her; and reached out an arm to pull Yu Shan down beside her as it fell away again, and the gesture would have looked entirely normal and natural two months ago, but now all it did was raise another question in Chung’s head, where’s Siew Ren?

Which was impossible of asking, but would have lurked in his head regardless if Shen hadn’t lashed back at her, “At least we weren’t hiding, out of the emperor’s sight …”

Jiao sighed. “No, you weren’t, were you? But then you didn’t have anything to hide, except your own selves,” which he utterly overlooked, of course, which she managed somehow not to say and so of course didn’t need to.

For once, Chung was quicker than Shen. “That shirt, Yu Shan. Is it really jade?”

Yu Shan nodded, as if words were too much for him altogether. Perhaps they were. Chung wasn’t wearing the thing, hadn’t so much as touched it yet, and still felt overwhelmed just to be in the same space as such a treasure. Such a forbidden, impossible treasure …

He had seen Yu Shan’s jade necklace, often and often; he’d touched that, by permission. He had seen the emperor’s rings. He’d seen the Jade Throne itself, and once the emperor upon it. He’d never been so close to so much, so intimate with the stone; and Yu Shan, Yu Shan was wearing it …

It was dim, almost dark in the cabin there. He wanted to go closer, to drop down onto his knees and peer with his nose just a finger’s-width from the shirt. Lacking consent—lacking any freedom of movement, any movement at all, with Shen’s arms still locked around him—all he could do was ask questions. “I don’t understand. How can it be yours, Yu Shan?”

“It isn’t,” though it had to be Jiao who told him so. “It’s meant for the emperor, of course. This is just—oh, call it a trial. We need to be sure that it does what it’s supposed to, and that a man can wear it all night and still run around in the morning.”

“But, but why would the emperor want to wear a shirt of jade?” He was the Man of Jade, but that didn’t mean he had to dress up in stone …

“Oh, he doesn’t. The thought hasn’t crossed his mind. It’s Mei Feng that wants this.”

“I still don’t see … Ouch!”

THAT WAS Shen, rapping his skull with hard knuckles. Then rubbing it better, a little more vigorously than he might. “Chung. Think. Which is harder, your skull or a stone shirt?”

He tried to break Shen’s nose, by slamming his hard head backward; but Shen was ready for it and his head met only those knuckles again, patiently painfully rapping. So then he did think; and, “Oh. Yes.” Jade would turn a blade, and the emperor had been stabbed once already. It would surely stop an arrow, maybe stop a club with no more than bruising for the man who wore it, and he wasn’t sure that the emperor could bruise. “But can you run in it? Really?”

“Yu Shan can. Really. And fight in it, and climb trees. And swim if he has to, though he says it drags him down. The only thing he can’t do is talk, but at least that means he can’t argue.”

“I can talk,” Yu Shan said, as though to assert that he could argue too, only that he chose not to. His voice was odd, as though thinned by distance: the other side of a mountain, say, or swallowed at the bottom of a mine.

“How does it, you know, how does it feel?”

Yu Shan only shook his head. It was Jiao who laughed.

“You can’t ask him that, Chung. You can’t ask him anything. Afterward, he’ll tell you that it hurts, except that it doesn’t hurt at all. Like being wrapped in fire that’s cruel but not actually hot, he might say, or wearing an ice-shirt that isn’t really cold, although it is. His blood is so thick with jade, I think it clogs his thinking. I don’t know, maybe the shirt is the real brain. That much jade all linked together, it’s got to be smarter than he is. The shirt talks to the stone-dust in his blood, and the dust talks to him, and he just has to listen …”

Yu Shan smiled peaceably. Jiao rolled her eyes, and tucked her arm through his; and that must be a consequence of his being lost in jade, because he would have jittered away from her and looked around for Siew Ren else. At which point Jiao would have either hit him, or more likely just stormed away and brooded behind the dark shadows of her eyes.

Perhaps it was Siew Ren they had been hiding from, as much as the emperor? If she knew about the shirt, she would surely have been here alongside them. How Jiao had sneaked him away, Chung couldn’t guess and didn’t mean to ask. Really, he wanted to ask more about the shirt, but she was no more help than Yu Shan …

“Never mind, sweet,” Shen murmured in his ear. “It’s only stone,” and this is flesh, the pressure of his body against Chung’s back, entirely discounting their own scant shirts on this hot damp night. “Let’s just sit in the corner here, and talk again about what happens when we land. How you stay in the boat here, yes? And guard Old Yen, and the boy …?”

That was Shen’s plan, it had never been Chung’s. Chung had pleaded his case for coming—rather fluently, he thought—by virtue of his childhood at the docks; he knew boats, he knew how to sail, he would be a useful hand on the return voyage. In truth, though, he only meant to stick to Shen. If the dragon swallowed one of them, she would have to swallow both; that was how close he meant to stick.

Now that the dragon had swallowed no one—well. It meant a night aboard this crowded boat and then a morning of steel and flame, blood and death no doubt, fear and sweat and screaming.

It would be hard to keep both eyes on Shen, but Chung meant to try. And he held the hope that through all the blood and the screaming—which would be Shen’s task, largely, because that man knew nothing whatsoever about boats—Shen would at least occasionally think to keep at least one eye on him.

THE CABIN filled up as time crept past, as slowly as the boat seemed to be creeping across the strait. Men were coming in damp, though there was no sound of rain; indeed there was no sound of anything on deck except an occasional muffled voice, Old Yen calling to his boy or to another boat. The men still out there were as quiet as those who came in, who seemed not to want to talk at all.

After a while, Chung pushed to his feet and tugged Shen up after. As wordless as anyone, even in his own head; not knowing what he wanted, only that it was not this. Shen followed dutifully, out onto the deck—

—AND INTO a thick fog, word-swallowing, world-swallowing. It explained the silence entirely, in the men as well as on the sea; Chung shivered, and groped blindly behind him.

The physical warmth of Shen’s body, the solidity of bone and muscle, the resilience of skin; he should have felt comforted, that those at least had not dissolved into chill vapor. Shen still had his voice, even, for now. Ignorant northerner. But all these men were ignorant northerners, all bar a handful; and all bar Shen had been silenced already. And this close to his ear, Shen’s voice really should not sound so flat and fading as he said, “What, then? Will your old fisherman lose his way in the fog? Will he miss the mainland altogether, or are there rocks …?”

Of course there were rocks, but Chung shook his head, wondering if Shen could even see him do it, as the fog flung itself between them; and groped for his own voice now, and found something scratchy and thin, and used that to say, “The dragon’s breath …”

“What?”

Here was a breath of wind to stir the blanket, to show them Old Yen lighting a lamp at the stern; here was a place to sit unexpectedly, on coils of rope laid ready. “It’s what we call the fog. We’ve always said it, that the fog is her breath rising, where she could not rise herself.”

“What does it mean?”

The words, or the fog? Chung was too fogged to ask. Right now it only meant that he was frightened, and wanted to sit here holding on to Shen until the stars came back.

NO STARS, but Old Yen’s droning prayer was a comfort in itself, like a rope to cling to. They faced aft, to where the old man worked his oar, sooner than stare into the blank nothing ahead; it was better to see the blurred glow of the lamp, the occasional glimpse of another light beyond.

On this boat, only Pao moved, and that not much. The wind had died as the fog had risen, so the boy had little enough to do: tighten a rope here or there, let drop another sail on the foremast more in hope than expectation of another breath to catch.

Still, they made headway. Chung could tell, by the way knots and twists of fog flowed backward in the lamplight. Tide and current must be carrying them onward. They had time enough, plenty of time to cross the strait before first light. They’d only set off so early because they’d wanted to dare the dragon in daylight. Chung wasn’t quite sure why: either the goddess would protect the fleet or else the dragon would destroy it, and either of those could happen just as well in the dead of night. But people seemingly preferred to see their doom approach. And to see her baffled, of course, to see her splash out of sight and not rise again.

But now she was down there, plotting, and it was only her breath that rose; and if the northern men didn’t know it, those from Taishu would be sure to explain it to them.

It was a threat, perhaps, or just a reminder. It was aimed at them, perhaps; perhaps at the goddess.

It was not, in the end, something to be feared. The dragon was defeated; the goddess would not let her touch them. What did it matter, if she wreathed the sea in a sulky fog? The chill of it might bite bone-deep; the dreary weight of it might lie heavy on them all, dulling their minds into wordlessness. If this was the worst she could do, this was their victory. They had the best man imaginable at the tiller, a man who knew these waters by their smell and feel, and was a favorite of the goddess besides; he would see them to land.

So said the men, at least, when they managed to speak at all. Chung said nothing more, but only leaned into Shen and waited for this to pass, the fog and the night and all. None of it, he thought, portended any good.

Also, he watched the cabin door.

TIME AND distance: both crept by. Or seemed to. Perhaps the dragon swallowed them. Perhaps the dragon had swallowed everything, and the goddess hadn’t saved them after all. She might be like this inside, all fog, endless, inescapable …

The cabin emptied suddenly, a stream of men coming out, laughing. Laughing. Those same men who had sidled in there, damp and shivering, with all the warmth and courage sucked out of them. Jiao had done something, said something, set them on fire. Not Yu Shan: people liked to be with him, Chung had seen that again and again and felt it too—this very night, when he first saw them, he had made that dash across the deck, and not for Jiao’s black eyes and sour smile—but Yu Shan was always quiet. Even without the weight of jade on his shoulders. It was Jiao who was the talker.

She must have recovered her voice in the crush of the cabin there, and deliberately stoked up passion in men who had been utterly cold and numb. Even now she called out over their heads, a suggestion so lewd and unlikely that it made Chung gape. Every now and then, this company he kept would just casually and incidentally make him feel awkward and provincial, the little islander he was; he could still be shocked just by the idea of Jiao—a mercenary, a pirate, a woman—even before she opened her mouth. When she did, he could still be appalled.

Hard-traveled Shen chuckled at his side. Someone in the bows roared back a counter-offer, and she invited him to come down and demonstrate. Loosening her tao in its scabbard as she did so, with a loud and deliberate scrape of steel.

Someone else started to sing unexpectedly, what must be a northern marching song, that must have helped to carry them all these thousands of miles from the far fabled Hidden City. Now they had turned, they weren’t running anymore; Chung shivered as Shen joined in, as they all did, as the men’s voices rolled out across the deck and down into the fog and the dark.

Other voices came back to them from other boats. Ashore they might have been more raucous, but they could never have been more needy or more welcome. In the still and the chill of the fog, boat sang to boat, a small army sang together. Not all their songs were about women, and not all of them were coarse, which surprised Chung almost as much as Jiao’s first filthy outburst; and among them at last they sang up a wind that blew the fog to rags even as it collected in their sails, as it helped the tide to carry them across the strait toward Santung.

ALMOST, NOW, he didn’t want the sun to rise.

Sound reaches over water and Old Yen said the coast was close, so they had stopped the singing; a lingering collective warmth still overhung the boat, though, and reached out to embrace the clustered fleet. The warmth of packed bodies was a different thing, immediate and welcome, taken from strangers and given back. The warmth of Shen’s body was different again and more than welcome, needful and desired and right there; and Shen’s voice in his ear, just that low occasional murmur was another nature of warmth, something that happened deep inside and radiated outward.

Chung was happy, in this shifting state between one thing and another: between night and day, between Taishu and the mainland, between one fear and another.

Sunrise meant arrival, and he would rather not arrive. Traveling was better, safer, warm.

But light was sneaking up already, staining the star-black night like spilled ricewater soaking into cloth, as insidious as fog and bringing the same kind of chill with it. This was why they’d come, of course, it wasn’t really to test the goddess against the dragon, or the child as a good-luck charm. It was for this exactly, the light and the land rising together, the bar of black below the taint, the threat of coming sun.

It was for this, the grunt from Old Yen and the clattering rise of bamboo-stiffened sails, the sudden kick of the deck beneath them as they stopped idling and turned purposefully to land.

It was for that, ahead: the first faint distant sparks against the black, fires being lit on cold beaches, where Tunghai Wang’s abiding army was already building and equipping a second invasion fleet.

For this, then: where the ramshackle flotilla split into war parties and swept in with tide and wind and the first touch of sun, to strike at a dozen separate beaches at once. To catch the boatbuilders off their guard and unguarded, because Tunghai Wang was the hunter here, the man who chased. The emperor was the boy who fled, who had never yet dared to stand; who could guess that he might strike now? Who would ever imagine that he could, when a dragon patrolled the strait …?

CHUNG WATCHED the other boats move away in lines and little groups together, shadows drawn on shadow. The men around him shifted and muttered, rubbed bare arms against the sudden chill that promised action at last, touched blade-hilts, touched one another.

He felt Shen’s hand slip away from him, some at least of Shen’s attention going with it. He wanted to protest, and bit down hard on the impulse. Shen was a warrior here, one among his brothers, dragging a long chain of hard miles and bitter memories behind them. Chung was the extra hand, the hanger-on, the danger: inexperienced, unbonded. Not driven by the same cold fire, the absolute need to strike back.

Shen was the better fighter, of course, that was understood: tougher and more vicious, trained both in the yard and in the field, on the road. Shen had killed people. Still, he was not invulnerable. Not wearing a jade shirt. Sometimes even the greatest fighter needed someone else to watch his back. Which was why Chung was here, why the unfamiliar weight of a tao was pulling at one hip, awkwardly unbalanced against the knife on the other side.

If he had a need to use them, he would find a way. If he could get by without, he would do that willingly; he had no wish to be a bloody-handed warrior. That was important to Shen, whom he loved, but it bewildered him. All he wanted of today was a swift engagement and a safe return. With as many of these men as possible, all of them if possible but one in particular. One was not negotiable.

THE BOAT tossed awkwardly as it drove into the shallows, as the beach shelved beneath the hull. There was a dragging hiss when they struck sand, wind and water and momentum still carrying them forward against the land’s resistance.

If there were shouts from the beach, cries of astonishment, challenges, alarms, Chung couldn’t hear them for all the shouting aboard. Men lost their footing as the boat stuck at last, and shouted; men leaped over the side and found the sea farther or deeper or colder than they had thought, and shouted; men shouted simply for the sake of it, to tell the enemy and the world and the attendant gods that they had arrived, they were here, they had braved the dragon and the ocean and come through.

When they had shouted, when they had glanced over the side and seen their brothers struggling in dark waters, they mostly made their sensible way to the bows and jumped from there.

Shen did, if only because Chung had held him back from any wilder leaping. There had been … an exchange of eyes about that, which Chung had possibly won simply by being uncowable, not giving ground.

Shen moved forward then, to the bows and so down into the surf; and once he was gone—almost immediately, indeed, but not quite—Chung followed.

AT FIRST it was impossible to see anything, anyone. There was no hope of finding one man in the surge. Nor of hearing any one voice in all that noise. Was warfare always so loud?

The surf was loud enough, breaking with a roar on that same bar where the boat had beached, then hissing all the way past his feet and higher. Perhaps the men shouted simply to be heard above it. But no one was shouting orders, or indeed anything that needed to be heard. It was just shouting. Or shrieking, as often as not. He might not have guessed that hard men could produce such shrill sounds.

He ran stumblingly among them, disoriented and bewildered, only because everyone around him was running too. Up from the chill and suck of the water and along the sands, where at least it was easier going; they ran into yet more noise, noise like a wall, yelling and screaming and the clash-and-scrape of steel on steel, the wetter thud of steel on flesh.

They’d found someone to fight, then, and something to fight toward: a beacon of flame, a blazing brazier on the sand. Chung saw it intermittently, obscured by the shift and tumble of bodies, black shadows, any one of which might be Shen. He was not, he was not going to cry the man’s name, not distract him when he might be just a blade’s edge from death.

Apparently, he was going to run. Toward the fire, toward the light, just like everyone else: which meant, of course, toward the fighting.

He supposed that he should draw his tao, and perhaps his knife too. He had no idea who was friend and who was enemy, but if anyone came at him with a blade swinging, then he’d know.

Besides, they gave him something, two things to hold on to in the dark, in the hurly. It was good to keep both fists clenched as he waded into the chaos ahead, to feel the weight of two blades probing before him. They almost had more purpose than himself. He only wanted to find Shen and watch his back; his blades, he thought, were more lethally inclined. He needed to be careful with them.

Logically, anyone with their back to him should be a friend, advancing down the beach. That would work, wouldn’t it? If he just didn’t stab anyone in the back …?

But the melee wasn’t like that at all, there was no hint of advance or retreat: only a twisting mess, a morass of men, bloodied and frenzied and so loud …

One man came reeling out of the swirl, like a spark thrown up from the brazier, so random; and there was no confusion suddenly, no possibility of mistake. This was no one from the boat, from any boat. From anywhere on Taishu. He was too fat. And too old to be a fighter, and half naked, as though he had been sleeping somewhere on the beach here and had woken at the first screams of assault and was perhaps still not properly awake, still bewildered by what was happening here.

Except that he had something in his hand, a wicked curved blade on a long handle, which was likely a boatbuilder’s tool of some kind; and it was a steady hand that held that dreadful blade, and a strong arm that brought it sweeping down. Chung even thought he could see stains on the steel, as though it had already bitten deep into others before it reached for him …

And really he had no choice except to fling himself inside the swing of it, too close to the fat man for the hook of the blade to find him. Too close to back away now, almost eye to eye and the man was screaming like every man else; and Chung was too close to do anything, really, except let his own hands do what they had trained for, his own blades do what they so very much desired …

AND THEN the fat man was quiet, quiet at last: quiet and still and hacked open at Chung’s feet, and the wet sands drank what they could of what he had spilled out.

And Chung just stood there, staring down at what he had done, his first time, strange and terrible and not at all what he had come for; and he didn’t even lift his blades in defense as another man ran at him, screaming. Perhaps he couldn’t, perhaps they were too heavy for him now. As though they had drunk more than the sands, drunk and drunk of blood and life and spirit. As though they were over-full now, too much for mortal man. Too much for him.

SO HE only lifted his head as the man came at him, only stared in mute bewilderment. He did see the darkened steel of a long straight sword, he did understand that it meant to gut him; perhaps he thought he deserved that, it was his turn now, as he stood in the strewn guts of the fat man. It might have seemed a pity, perhaps, to die so ugly in the half-dark and without Shen’s hand to hold, but Shen would find him afterward, perhaps, and take his body home, give his ghost rest …

A sudden flower erupted from the man’s chest even as he ran, a flower of dark heart, a solid thing that just kept coming even after the man had entirely stopped. Not a flower at all, then, but he still needed time to understand it as a length of bamboo, sharp enough to be a spear at need. A spear thrusting outward meant that it had been thrust in from behind, but Chung couldn’t see at all, he couldn’t see anything until the man at last fell down, was allowed to fall, because Shen let go the spear.

And of course, yes, it was Shen: who had seen Chung and his danger, and was swift enough to save him. And then swift to curse him out for being there, for being stupid, for putting himself at risk: “Didn’t I tell you to stay on the boat? Why are you here, what did you think you could do, all useless …?”

I killed a man, but that wasn’t a useful answer.

Thankfully, this wasn’t the time to debate it. There were other men to kill. And there was other work to do, the fleet hadn’t sailed here just to kill boatbuilders in their fat bewildered fury.

Someone had kicked the brazier over, or else it had just been tumbled in the melee. Glowing charcoals had fallen beyond the stone and sand it stood on, into a stack of rolled sails. Canvas and bamboo were blazing suddenly, spilling light all down the beach: light enough to work by, until the sun at last came up to see what had been done here.

Light enough to show that there were not so many left to kill now. The beach was a boatyard, not a barracks; Tunghai Wang had certainly set soldiers here, but they were to watch for thieves and deserters, to keep the men at work and their work on shore till it was needed. Not to fight off raids from the dragon-guarded sea, an unimaginable assault from the coward army they had chased so far.

They weren’t ready, and they weren’t enough. Mostly they were dead already, and the men they’d guarded slain beside them: boatbuilders and apprentices, doubly doomed for being here and for being what they were. Everyone on the beach would die, because there was no time to sort between them; but anyone with the skills to make or repair a boat, they would die because that was the most loss that Tunghai Wang could feel. He had soldiers and to spare, but he could only build another fleet if he had the men to build it.

The men he had, these dead men had made a strong start, a new beginning since the ruin of his first invasion. Spaced along the sands was a line of hulls, some whole and some half finished, some old wrecks under repair.

Now Chung could snatch Shen’s hand and tug him down to the first of those beached hulls, a river sampan standing proud on a new keel, refitted for sea.

“She’d sail,” he said, “just as she is,” except that all the sails were ablaze behind them and they had no time to rig her anyway. They knew that, they had always known. A rope from her bow to the old man’s boat and a couple of men with oars, they could handle the crossing if the goddess was kind. And why would she be anything other, why save them from the dragon only to drown them now?

The next was just a hull, but she would float; she too could be towed and rowed.

The next was not even so finished as that, only a few timbers shaped around a frame. Not worth the taking, but enough to leave burning at their backs, with all the loose timber and the tar and everything too heavy or too awkward to carry away. Ropes and stores were coming on the boats, as much as they had time to snatch and stow; the rest was for the fire. Iron was coming if possible, or else it was to be tipped into the sea if it could be moved at all. Steal, disrupt, destroy …

SMOKE AND flame and screaming: the city would be alert already. Soldiers would be coming soon, in numbers.

It was hard work, swift work, hauling every seaworthy hull down into the water—not far, blessedly, as high tide coincided with the dawn: Old Yen had known, of course—and flinging ropes from one to another. Running up and down the beach with blazing torches and buckets of pitch, to set fire to whatever they could burn. Dragging crates of nails and fittings to the water’s edge and tipping them into the bobbing hulls for ballast first and use later on Taishu, along with tools and chains, more rope, the boatbuilders’ meager stores of food and tea. Recovered weapons, of course.

Now Shen really should be glad of Chung’s help, there was so much that needed doing and so little time. At least he’d stopped cursing: no time for temper, only to heave and haul, to make quick judgments and quicker dispositions, take this, burn that. No point breaking up stone forges, they were too easily rebuilt, but the iron plates and fitments, yes, take those; an army always wanted iron. The emperor did, and so must Tunghai Wang. Take from one to feed the other: a double benefit.

Which was the point and purpose of this raid, entirely. Tunghai Wang wouldn’t see it as a prelude to anything. Weakened as he was, he must still be the huntsman in this chase. The emperor was a stag in flight, not a tiger turned at bay; in Tunghai’s view he would want boats for his fishermen, not his soldiers. He would be seeking to delay and discourage a second invasion, not to launch one of his own.

So said General Ping Wen, at least, and the emperor at least was persuaded. Mei Feng was not, but the emperor wasn’t listening to her any longer. Chung knew.

He and Shen flung a bundle of bamboo spars into a sampan that wanted only a mast, that could surely be paddled all across the water by herself if need be. A cry from the beach behind them, an arm thrust upward showed them men pouring over the headland. Armed men, a stream that would be a flood soon enough.

Time to go. They could have done more, if they’d been left to do it; these soldiers would know they could have saved more, if they’d only gotten here sooner. War was probably like that, Chung thought, small achievements and small frustrations, more often than it was the triumph and devastation of stories, history on the march.

He and Shen threw their weight against the hull of the sampan, felt it give and check and give again. More men joined them, urgently; at last it was sliding, and there was water around their feet.

Water to their knees, and the sampan floated free. They piled into it and seized paddles and oars—raw timbers, even, if nothing else came to hand—and drove them into the surf, forced the boat away from shore.

Didn’t look back to see who had been left behind, dead or wounded or plunging after, whether they could swim or not. It was every man’s last task to save himself; no one could afford to wait.

Which was why Chung had heaved Shen’s legs aboard before he’d clambered up himself; it was orders, his duty, absolutely.

THEY CAME UP alongside Old Yen’s boat, like a high, wet, rocking wooden wall. A rope was dropped down and tied off; most of the men scrambled up it, but Chung shook his head and let the sampan drift behind, taken in tow when there were only himself and Shen still aboard. It was all they needed, to fend off other craft and bail her out if a wave swamped her; and, “If you want to yell at me some more,” he said, “at least you can do it in private.”

“I don’t want to yell at you.” Indeed, Shen was sinking down to squat at Chung’s feet, amid all the gear they’d flung aboard. “I want to know where you got the idea that you could fight beside us, that’s all.”

“From you, of course. You trained me.”

“Not with blades. It was horrible to watch, you don’t even hold them right. Kitchen boy. You stick to your cleavers next time, and cook supper for when I come home.”

“No. I’m not letting you go off without me. You’d best teach me how to use a tao, if I’m so hopeless. You can start when we get home. What’s the matter with you, why are you—Gods, Shen, are you hurt …?”

“Mmm.” Slowly, carefully, Shen was peeling his sodden shirt away from his shoulder. That dark soak was not all seawater, and not all the blood was other people’s; there was a deep slash from Shen’s shoulder, running down over his ribs.

Chung let his paddle fall onto the boards beside him. “When did that happen?”

“When we were fighting, idiot.” He was trying to be amused, condescending, as he so often was. The light was on his face now, and he looked as gray as the sea, under a slick of sweat.

“But, but then I made you do so much work with me, just to stop you fighting … Why didn’t you say?” Why didn’t I see? was the more honest question, and they both knew it.

“Because then you would have fussed, of course. As you are.” Because I didn’t let you see. They both knew that, too. There wasn’t much they needed to say between them, though Shen seemed to think this one thing was important, lifting his good arm to touch Chung’s, to say, “Shouldn’t you be rowing, or something? We’re going to hit that big boat if you don’t …”

Chung glanced up, to see the high stern of Old Yen’s boat about to overshadow them. He stood, legs spread, and fended them off by hand; and scowled down at Shen and said, “Why didn’t you go aboard with the others? People up there could help you. And you’ll be no use to me down here, bleeding everywhere, getting under my feet …”

Shen lay between his feet, sprawling now that he didn’t have to hold himself up anymore, and grinned up at him. “Truly? I didn’t fancy the climb. I think that sword broke my collar-bone. Besides, there’s more room here. And I can be with you …”

So did Chung think that collar-bone was broken, now that he took another look at it. But the rest of the gash was no worse than ugly; it would scar, but Shen had scars already, and the salt sea had already stanched the bleeding. And yes, he too would far rather have Shen in his boat and under his eye than out of sight somewhere on the crowded boat above, one among dozens, with no one particular to care for him.

“Lie still, then,” he grunted, and picked up his paddle again, to give them some distance from the fishing-boat. Shen’s shirt was ruined already, so he could use that for a pad and bandages, as soon as he had hands free to dress the wound. If he sacrificed the sleeves of his own, he could knot those into a sling to support Shen’s arm, not to let the broken bone grate and shift around. How the man had fought and run and hauled so much with a bleeding wound and a broken bone and Chung hadn’t even noticed …

HE WAS tired and shaken, but guilt was a lash. He did two men’s work as best he could, keeping the sampan handily out of the big boat’s wake while he patched Shen up and saw him settled. They could hope for a swift and untroubled passage back across the strait, but not quite yet; Old Yen was hugging the coast, sailing westward rather than out to sea.

Ahead and behind, smoke was rising in the clear air, from other raids on other boatyard beaches. The fleet had to reassemble with all its gathered trophy craft; it might not actually be needful—perhaps the goddess could protect a hundred scattered boats, perhaps she could hold the dragon back altogether—but nobody actually knew. It would be a brave man who would sail the strait alone, or anywhere other than in Old Yen’s immediate shadow. A brave man or a foolish one, or both. This fleet was full of brave men, but few of them were foolish in that way. Chung thought that every one of the raiders would find their way to the rendezvous, though it would be a long drag for some.

The old fisherman had nominated a particular creek as a meeting point, farther west than any of the beaches they were raiding. Nobody worried about Tunghai Wang launching boats out of Santung to attack them; the generalissimo had few enough to start with and had lost a lot today, he wouldn’t risk those that he had left in the city docks. Even so, this diversion added time and work, opportunities for trouble.

Chung’s own trouble lay on the sampan’s boards and smiled up at him as he stood in the stern to row. Pain was in Shen’s eyes, the tight contracted pupils; in his face too, another kind of tightness about that mobile mouth and in the way the skin had stretched across his cheekbones.

His voice was as pale and shadowed as his skin, almost but not quite unrecognizable. “You do that very well. Water rat.”

“When, when I was a child,” it was harder to speak, seemingly, when he wasn’t the one who was hurting, “when my father worked at the docks, some days he would take me with him. I could row him across the water, he taught me how; and if there was cargo, sometimes I could ferry it from ship to shore. Sometimes it needed both of us, an oar each, but …”

“But you learned, and you grew, and so you have a skill I didn’t know about.” Shen was mock-scolding as he used his good arm and the boat’s rising side to haul himself up until he could sit and see where they were going and at least pretend to be comfortable, with his back set firmly against Chung’s one leg and his arm curled for bracing about the other.

“I haven’t touched an oar for years,” or been in a boat at all since he was taken into the palace kitchens; and he was feeling it now, already, a dawning ache in his shoulders although this was easy yet. He was mostly working with the towrope, just to keep the sampan from knocking against the other tows or wallowing too much in Old Yen’s wake, not to let it jar Shen’s broken bone.

He could be a stable support, too, his runner’s legs set wide and solid, giving a little to the movements of the boat but shifting not at all; and when Shen turned petulant anyway because he was so sore and didn’t want to show it, when he said, “Why are we going this far out of our way, where’s that mad old man taking us?” Chung could be as calm and deceptive and unforthcoming, as supportive as the sea itself beneath them.

“A creek, he told us. I don’t know why, it’s something that matters to him. It’ll be fine. We’ll get you home soon enough, and I’ll take you straight to the doctor.”

“You won’t need to do that.”

“Oh, what? You’ve been badly cut, that needs cleaning and binding properly, better than I can do it; and someone needs to look at your shoulder too, see if the bone needs setting …”

“Leave it alone, it’ll all heal. We’ve seen worse on the road; there are worse this morning, they need care more than I do. But what I meant was, you won’t need to take me anywhere. They’ll be waiting on the quayside when we dock.”

“Who will?”

“Mei Feng, with doctors.”

“No, sweets.” You’re delirious, but he wasn’t going to say so: kept his sudden worry to himself. “Mei Feng doesn’t want anything to do with this. And how would she know, anyway, that you were hurt …?”

“Not me, but she’ll know there will be hurt people in the fleet; and she’ll need to be sure that her grandfather’s come back safe. And she’ll know by now about Jiao and Yu Shan, even if the emperor doesn’t. And the child too, she’ll want to be sure about the child. So she’ll come, and for excuse she’ll bring the emperor’s own doctors. And she won’t tell him, but one of his servants will, so we’ll either come early and have the fun of seeing him chase after her, or—more likely, seeing that Old Yen is taking us all this far out of the way—we’ll come late and he’ll be there already and they will have had their fight without us. But there will still be doctors waiting, and them too. So don’t you worry about me …”

IT WAS TOO late, of course, not to be worrying about him. Worry was just there, like a weight against his one leg, like an arm wrapped tight around the other. But when he checked, he didn’t think that Shen was bleeding anymore; he might even be a better color, in the better light. And Chung had bound his arm up tight and Shen was being good, not shifting it inside that binding. He said the shoulder hardly hurt at all.

Then again, he also said that pain didn’t matter, that it could be set aside and stepped away from. Which was so obviously nonsense, Chung reminded himself not to listen to anything else the idiot might say. He would make his own judgments, and bring Shen to the doctor as soon as possible.

AS SOON AS he was allowed, that meant. For now seemingly they had to keep sailing along the coast here, even though the long stream of boats behind them suggested that the fleet was all together already and there was really no need to go on. Progress was steady, but uncomfortably slow; at least, Chung was uncomfortable in this little sampan and Shen had to be, although he swore not.

A man with a fast horse might keep pace with them along the coast road. That shouldn’t matter, because no horse could bring a man to sea, but even so he didn’t like the thought of being tracked, watched, perhaps worked against. He didn’t like the sea much either, how it lay there threateningly still, brooding as darkly as the dragon.

She must be somewhere in that water, as she seemed not to be in the sky. There was no certainty that she would not erupt again; nor any certainty that the goddess would protect them again. She might be angry that they used her—or her child—like a good-luck token, like a guarantee, back and forth across the water. Perhaps she had only meant to allow them one safe passage. Perhaps they should have been grateful, taken the dragon as a warning and her protection as a gift, never dared to look for it again …

Old Yen would not say that.

Perhaps.

He at least was confident of his goddess. But old men always are sure of whatever it is, diet or work or worship, that has allowed them to become so old and sure; and old men too can be overtaken by calamity despite all their certainties, let down at the last by their miracle herb or their hard-set bodies. Or their goddess, not so potent after all. Or not so kindly, not so well disposed.

Old men can be wrong.

Also, they can be perverse.

They can lead a fleet of weary sailors, carrying a cargo of wounded and exhausted men and trailing a second fleet of boats not fit to sail; they can lead them not home but along an enemy coast to one particular creek, one narrow inlet below a headland; and there, where no one could see what kind of force the enemy might be mustering landward, they can toss out an anchor, ignore the fleet entirely, demand a boat ashore.

OLD YEN hauled on the towrope, drew the sampan up to the high side of his own craft and let himself down into the bows. All without warning, without even a word called down to Chung.

Then he cast off the rope, made his way to the stern and said, “Take me to the shore.”

Chung said, “My friend is hurt, he can’t …”

“He doesn’t need to. You know how to handle those oars, I’ve been watching you. Or do you want me to take them?”

Chung’s shoulders were on fire and his arms were leaden weights, but no, he didn’t want that. Not with Shen listening, watching, right there.

Nor did he want to go ashore. It was all delay, when they should have been halfway home by now. He said, “The emperor will be angry, when he hears that you wasted time and kept his men in pain for longer than you had to.” His own anger was meaningless, but the emperor’s—well, the emperor was a god too, as well as a forceful youth. He might be one to set against the Li-goddess, in the old man’s head. Especially with Mei Feng at his side, equally angry with her grandfather.

But Old Yen said, “It is the emperor’s order,” and then there was nothing more to say, nothing to do but row.

ACROSS THE narrow span of water to the inlet’s gentle flow, to the western bank below the headland. As soon as he felt the bows grate on shingle Chung was over the side, into waist-deep water. Except that he had to separate himself from Shen first, and so he was not after all so quick, and the old man was ahead of him: plunging in and wading forward, laying tough gnarled hands on the bow and hauling with a will.

With Chung’s urgent help, the sampan was safely grounded above the water’s reach before Shen had pulled himself awkwardly to his feet aboard.

A path led upward from this stony beach—or at least, there was a route where men might scramble up the cliff, where others had done it often enough before them. One-handed, it would be hard; one-handed and in pain at every jolting step, it would be dreadful. Shen looked at it and stiffened, set his lips thinly, said not a word.

Chung spoke for him, to the fisherman: “Why are we here, old man?”

“There is a temple, up above …”

Chung nodded; he had seen it, a small square build against the softer shapes of nature. “And, what, you want to make an offering to your goddess?” Would that buy them another safe crossing of the strait?

“Not that, no. Not that alone,” although he did have a satchel on his shoulder, and his hand touched it lightly at the thought. “There are … people, a few, I had to leave here before. A woman, and her two daughters. We are to fetch them now. It is an order,” stressed again.

Very well. A woman, and a pair of girls. Chung looked at Shen and said, “Stay here with the boat. We can do this very well without you.”

It was a swift unspoken conspiracy between them, that Chung would say that and Shen would believe him. They both knew Shen could not climb that cliff and achieve anything at the top, except a strong antipathy to climbing down again.

“Be careful,” he said. “A woman, after all …”

“And two girls. I will be careful, I promise. You, too. Watch that boat, watch the water; watch for trouble, and call out if you need me.”

“And you,” Shen said. “If you need me.”

They smiled at each other, reasonably content, each knowing the other’s anxiety and thinking it foolish, thinking that this at least should be easy.

CHUNG HAD meant to go first, but Old Yen swept by him at the foot of the cliff, impatient and imperative. The old man was surefooted on that crumbling slope, and his knotted calves drove him upward at a killing pace. Chung was breathless and sweating before they reached the top, his legs burning to match the cruel iron ache left in his arms by miles of rowing.

Old Yen seemed untouched. If he waited for Chung at the top, that was only his native manners; if he waited longer to let Chung recover a little breath and a little composure, that was an effort of manners, made explicit by the old man’s long-suffering silence and his folded arms, his manifest aspect of waiting.

At last he nodded beyond Chung’s shoulder, to make him turn. There stood the temple, its red clay roof-ridge adorned with gods and dragons—their paint long since peeled away, but their figures still clear beneath the sun—and its corners rising to peaks, topped by further dragons.

And there beneath the roof, on the top step, stood a woman, with one girl at her side. Still a child, that girl, despite her solemnity; it would be a good thing, Chung thought, to take her to safety. Before the war came to Santung a second time. If there was safety anywhere, it ought to be in the emperor’s shadow, on an island the enemy couldn’t reach.

Why the emperor would want the girls, or their mother, Chung couldn’t imagine. Imperial motives didn’t matter, though. He could guess at Old Yen’s, and that was enough. Tired as he was, he could help three slight females down the cliff and into the sampan; and then he could row more, as much as he had to, if only he could row home.

To the temple, then, under the wary gaze of the woman and her daughter both; and pausing one step below for the fisherman to say, “I have good news. What you asked that first night, that I should take you and your daughters to Taishu? I have the emperor’s consent to bring you across today.”

The woman was small and sour, and unmoved. She said, “I think we have the goddess’s consent to stay.”

Old Yen blinked, and hesitated; and went on less certainly, “Perhaps I should have said, I have the emperor’s order.”

“Perhaps you should. It makes no difference here. Do the emperor’s orders reach across the strait? I think Tunghai Wang is in command on this side. And I would not listen to him either, if he spoke against the goddess.”

“I would never speak against the goddess. I do not. How could I? It was she who brought me safe across, she has kept me safe all my life. She would not force you to remain here, when war is coming …”

“Is it so? I have seen war, old man, but it didn’t find this house before. The goddess kept it safe. You told me to shelter here, do you remember that? And I have, and she has kept me safe and my girls too. More, she has taken my daughter to be one of her own, while we take care of her and the house together, don’t we, Shola?” The little girl nodded, entirely serious, entirely responsible. “I think the goddess can keep us safe again, if men are stupid again, if they can find anything left to fight over. Come inside, you, and let me show you what we have done.”

“I have seen already …”

“It is different now. Come.”

Inside was smoke and incense and the soft red glow of temple lamps, to set against the bright hard sun outside. And statues, of course, and a few hangings that were not so faded, that Chung thought were new to the temple. And people, too. A girl—or a young woman, almost: husband-high, they would call her on Taishu—knelt before the altar at the front, in the clouds of burning joss, rocking gently and humming beneath her breath. Two men sat shyly against one wall, with a sack of produce at their side. They might have been farmers come to market; likely they were worshippers come to make an offering to the goddess or the priestess, or to both.

They looked relieved, almost, to see more men come in. Even strangers, even with the weary stink of battle clinging to them. At least, Chung did still smell of blood and smoke. Old Yen smelled of the sea.

Men know how to deal with men. The woman and girls, perhaps, had overfaced them, here in the house of the goddess; now they got to their feet and bowed tentatively, warily, and still looked nothing but relieved.

Old Yen nodded back, and turned to the woman. She said, “You see? They took me for a priestess, and the goddess has made it true. Perhaps I should shave my head and be a nun, but it would upset my daughters,” meaning, clearly, the one daughter, the one who rocked and hummed and took no notice of these new arrivals. “Change is difficult, we like to be settled, we like routine,” she does; “so I keep my hair, for now, and we stay here.”

There was no challenge in her, no confrontation. She said it simply, as a thing that was. Was so, was inevitable, simply was.

Old Yen had trouble with that, seemingly. He said, “That first night, you begged me to take your daughters at least, if I couldn’t take you. I can do that, I think. They would be safe on Taishu.”

“They are safe here, now. Under her protection.”

“No. You know what happened to her temple in the city.”

“Of course, but this is different. No one touches her here.”

“Only because this was abandoned and forgotten. If you have brought it back to life, that makes you less safe here, not more.”

“This is her home now,” the woman said, as stubborn as the fisherman, “and ours too. We will not leave it, no.”

“You must. She must, at least,” with a nod toward the girl in the smoke. “The emperor has need of her.”

“Need? Of my daughter? The emperor?”

“Why not? He is a god too,” echoing Chung’s own thought from before. “The goddess has used her to speak to us, to me,” with a little shudder on the emphasis, as though that was a cursed moment as well as a blessed one, “and now the emperor has use for her. Perhaps he wants to speak back to the goddess, through her. How would I know? I am not his confidant, I am his servant. His messenger. He sent me to fetch her, and I will.”

“No.” She meant that to be flat and final, all too clearly; and all too clearly, the fisherman was not about to accept her refusal. With orders from the emperor, how would he dare?

Chung’s easy trip up to the temple and back had suddenly become a great deal more complicated. When the two worshippers glanced at each other and took a pace or two toward their priestess, he wished avidly for Shen—a healthy Shen, a whole Shen, not the drawn and suffering one he’d left down in the sampan—or failing him any other man from the fleet, any of those hard dangerous men so inured to fighting, so heedless of death. A blade looked so natural in their hands, they’d likely not even need to draw one.

Chung himself was hopeless with a blade in his hand. Here, that wouldn’t be a problem. He’d slipped the awkward tao out of his belt while he rowed, and hadn’t remembered to replace it; his knife he had lost somewhere on the beach, in the battle.

Unarmed and alone, he stood behind the fisherman and tried to look dangerous, imposing, so much of a threat that no actual threatening was needed.

Old Yen said, “I will let you stay here, then, for the goddess’s sake, but the girl must come with me. And she will need her sister too; it’s the little girl who looks after her, isn’t that right? I know it is, I have seen …”

“She said no, old man.” That was one of the local men, stepping up beside the woman, standing between Old Yen and her daughter. Both her daughters, as he shepherded the little girl behind him.

“You should go now,” the other man said, “and tell your emperor that he cannot have these girls.”

They were … just men, country men, peasants: built of the land, soil and stone. Strong as a tree is strong, strong to endure. Chung wouldn’t care to wrestle either one of them. The two together, he thought they would probably tear his head off.

Except that they wouldn’t need to, they could simply cut: what peasant went anywhere in his life without a tao in his belt? Neither one was drawing a blade—yet—in the sanctity of the temple, but if the fisherman pushed this …

Something in his stance said that the fisherman did not want to push it, that he liked nothing about this errand; but he had his emperor’s commission and he wasn’t backing down.

He said, “He is the emperor of us all, and you cannot refuse him. You dare not.”

And he went to push past the men, toward the altar; and one of them seized his shoulder and pushed back.

He was an old man, sure, he carried that in his name; but he had grown old on the sea, he had salt in his bones and his own knotted, tangled kind of strength. He wouldn’t be pushed, not easily.

And so they wrestled, the fisherman and the peasant; and, what, should Chung only stand and watch as the woman did, when the other peasant went to join in with his friend, to hurl the old man out of there? In defiance of the emperor, and in full sight of his own goddess?

Chung hurled himself into that battle and was carried out in the general tumble and the turmoil of it all, to roll bumpingly down the steps and onto the stony grass beyond in a tangle of limbs and heads and breathless cursing.

The peasant men picked themselves up first, and gazed down at the other two with a kind of slow satisfaction, reckoning presumably to know victory when they felt it, defeat when they saw it.

Then they lifted their heads and looked out over the strait, and their faces changed abruptly.

Chung almost felt that that moment paid for the bruises and the mud. Almost.

He stood up slowly, sore in every joint; reached down an arm to help the old man up; turned to look the way that everyone was facing.

Saw what he knew was there, what the peasants were staring at, what he had not felt the impact of till now, till it was needed: all the fleet spread out across the water, the empty boats and the barely-manned making it look larger even than it was.

“Yes,” Chung said, improvising furiously in the peasants’ faces, “yes, those are our friends there. That is the fleet sent by the emperor, to escort this woman and her daughters; that is how much he wants, how very much he values them. The old man and I came up alone to fetch them, as a kindness; must we go back down to fetch a dozen men? Two dozen? Two of us you can roll in the mud, perhaps, but must I fetch enough to roll you right off the cliff-edge …?”

“No.” That was neither of the men; the voice came from behind them, from the temple steps. From the woman standing there. “No, you leave them be. If the goddess will allow it, we will come.”

She sounded weary, as though all fights were unavailing, victory as useless as defeat.

Chung thought she was right. And went in with her none the less, the old man at his back, silent and filthy and breathing hard. Mud in his beard.

Both girls were standing in the altar-smoke, hand in hand. When their mother beckoned them, they went to her; or at least the little one went, tugging her elder sister behind her.

She looked from one adult to another, and no words were needed; in her mother’s too obvious surrender, she found her own.

“Are we all going?” That was her only question, and it was meant for her mother, are you coming too?

The woman was desperately uncertain, looking from her children to the altar and back again, setting her own peace against her daughters’ futures. She said, “I think, I think we should ask the goddess. If she wants me to keep her house here, then I must; but—”

It was her elder daughter that she looked to, as though in hopes of hearing the goddess speak through her. Old Yen had said something much the same. The girl was silent; Chung thought perhaps she was an idiot. Or just too much hurt, like the eunuch boy on the boat.

Like him in other ways, seemingly, a mouthpiece for the goddess when she chose to speak. Not now. In the face of her silence, the mother seemed lost, utterly unable to decide. It was Old Yen who found her a solution.

“Stay,” he said, more gently than Chung had heard him yet, “and I will bring her back to you. I will bring them both. The emperor will not want to keep her long.”

That might not be true. Still, Chung wanted to believe the old man, as much as the old man wanted to be believed. If it was a conspiracy, the woman seized the chance to join. Seized it slowly, reluctantly, but seized it none the less; nodded and said, “Yes. He would not take a daughter from her mother without great need. When the emperor needs, and the goddess does not forbid: yes.

Take her, take them both. Take care of my girls, and bring them back. I will be here. I am sworn to this place now, and these people are sworn to me.”

She was trying, Chung thought, to sound like a priestess, all un-practiced. Perhaps she had been a mother too long.

HE HIMSELF, not used to girls, he left them to the fisherman.

Stepped out of the temple, thinking only of the steep climb down—a little of what help the girls might need, and mostly of Shen who was waiting at the bottom—and not at all of the men they had left out here, the peasants staring at the fleet.

And so found himself staring at two drawn taos, with determined men behind them.

“If you don’t live to run for help,” one said, “your men won’t know to come.”

“Don’t be foolish,” Chung said instinctively, “my friend’s waiting in the boat. If we don’t come down …”

“He’ll come up, and we can finish him too. Or we can go down and do it, when we’ve done you.”

“And, what, you think the fleet will just sail away without us? They’ll come looking.”

“We’ll be long gone by then. We’ll take the priestess and her girls, keep them safe, your men will never know where to look for them.”

Chung could have said no need, we’re leaving you your priestess, but they didn’t give him the chance. They just came at him, there on the steps, while the others were only shadows in the doorway at his back.

Unarmed, against men with blades: Chung suddenly remembered every one of the bruises, nosebleeds, black eyes and concussions that Shen had given him during weeks and months of training in his difficult empty-handed skills. More, he heard Shen’s sharp instructions, almost literally, inside his head:

DUCK UNDER the blade as it swings, so, and be glad the man is no warrior who faces you. Root yourself and strike back, hard and upward, here between his belly and his ribs, where he has no notion of protecting himself. See him double over with the breathless pain of it—and as his head comes down, catch him in the temple with your elbow, so.

Good. As he falls, he lets his tao drop; leave it lie, you’re no good with a blade. And here’s the other man, hewing at you already. These peasants hack as if they were cutting paths through the forest, of course they do, it’s the only speed they know. You work at a different speed, they won’t come near you. Step back beyond the fall of his blade, then swiftly in again and kick. Not the arm that holds the blade, nothing that moves. Kick for his hip, shake him where he stands. Then step inside his reach and use your hands, both hands, swift and hard, no mercy: do you want to live, or not? He wants to kill you. He knows nothing, but he’ll still kill you if he can. If you let him. That would be a shame. You know nothing either, but at least you’re trying to learn …

EVEN IN Chung’s head, in his imagination, Shen still had that sneering whip to his voice that could drive Chung beyond his own limits, past pain or fear or reluctance. His hands hammered at the peasant, at ribs and shoulders and belly. The man had no room to use his tao, so his arm came swinging at Chung like a club; Chung blocked it with his forearm to the wrist, and saw the blade fall from suddenly numb fingers. And knew how that felt, exactly, and punched while the man was still staring down at his dropped weapon, wondering perhaps how to retrieve it.

Chung’s fist broke his jaw, perhaps. Something, at least, shifted in the man’s face; and in his head too, some shift of understanding.

NOW A knee to the groin, now the elbow again, and a kick to the head as he falls …

IT WAS SHEN, almost, more than Chung; he felt little more than a puppet in another man’s hands. That made it easier, perhaps. Especially afterward, when there were two men lying broken and bloody on the ground and one of them might never stand again; when even the fisherman was looking at him askance, stepping out of his shadow; when his voice snapped to hurry the girls to the path down, and the little one looked at him with a kind of hatred mixed with fear, and he could tell himself that that too belonged to another man, who would not care about it.