seven

Biao was master in the doctor’s tent because Tien allowed it: because it flattered him and did her no harm. Her uncle might have been angry, but he was beyond this world now. She did not, she most determinedly did not believe that the ghosts of beheaded men were cursed to wander for eternity, sundered from heaven. No.

Her uncle had believed it, but—well, right or wrong, his faith could make no difference. None at all.

No.

The space behind the tent, the slope down to the river belonged to the eunuch boy’s mother. She drew water there and washed clothes and dressings and sometimes patients too, just as Tien used to do. She cooked meals there, again as Tien used to do. When it wasn’t raining she spent all her time out there, crouching quietly bereft in those brief times when she could find nothing to do.

Lacking any name for her else, Tien called her Mu Gao, because she was tall and lean and her son was far out of her reach now, and again it cost Tien nothing.

EXCEPT HER space, perhaps. She had lost what she used to have, and had not gained what used to be her uncle’s. Between Master Biao and Mu Gao she could have felt entirely squeezed. Except …

Her proper life was still in healing; her practice was still in her uncle’s tent. It was she who diagnosed the patients and dispensed the medicines, though she worked behind the puppet figure of Master Biao. Everyone knew. It was her they trusted, though it was his fat hands they paid. She had her place and the respect that she was due, though it was all veiled by a conspiracy of deceit. She and he pretended that Master Biao was the doctor here, and the patients pretended to believe it.

Still. He was master in the tent. That was agreed between them. The rest was Mu Gao’s, by right of seizure. Which left nowhere for Tien, except …

Except that Tunghai Wang had come to consult the doctor, because he was not sleeping. She wasn’t sure whether the generalissimo remembered her face, whether he knew she was her uncle’s niece; but he saw soon enough who could help him.

Every morning, then, before sun-up, she would take this walk: away from the tent and from Mu Gao, who would be already awake—Tien was not entirely certain that the dour silent woman ever actually slept—and nursing a slow fire into life, ready for the day, while Master Biao snored on inside the heap of his blankets, never ever ready for the day however late it came.

With no more than a cup of something hot inside her—“white tea” they called it but it might be anything except tea, brewed from whatever fresh leaves they had picked yesterday unless there had not been time to go harvesting, in which case it would be nothing but hot water—and the pearl glow of the sky to guide her, she would follow the steep road down into the city.

Shadows along the way would resolve themselves eventually, reluctantly, into people—they might be soldiers on watch or soldiers on patrol, they might be soldiers at liberty, they might be civilians hungry or hopeful or sick, they might very well be patients on their way to the doctor’s tent even though they knew the doctor would not be seeing patients for hours yet—who would greet her with respect because everyone knew her and what she did.

The high square shadows of the city streets would enclose her, with their little groups of soldiers always gathered at the corners like rubble fallen from the walls. Here now there were no greetings, only the falling silence and that awareness of being watched as she hurried by, knowing she was safe enough because these men knew her too. Which might not have been enough, except they knew also that she had the sanction of the generalissimo to come and go at will, which was like having the sanction of the dragon: exactly like, as both the dragon and Tunghai Wang had lost one battle, one, and the dragon had come back from that, she had risen into her power again, and so why not Tunghai Wang?

At last, here was the governor’s palace that Tunghai Wang had claimed for his own, where she like a little mouse half-hidden and half-ignored had nibbled off a corner for herself.

The guards at the gate knew her, and let her by; so did the guards in the first courtyard. Indeed, they waved her through more briskly than usual, as if she mattered less than ever, as if their minds were thoroughly elsewhere.

In the second courtyard, she glanced briefly toward the gateway to the third, where the generalissimo would ordinarily be bathing and breakfasting and briefing his generals at this time. Today there lacked the usual bustle of horses and litters and guards, but busy or not, she would still not go that way. She did not need to speak to him, to see him, to examine him again. She knew what ailed him, what kept him wakeful. There was no cure for it this side of the strait, except by poisons that would harm him night by night even as they numbed him into sleep, that would kill him quickly by carelessness or slowly by constant repetition. Either way he would be dead too soon, unsatisfied, his ambition unrequited. That would be no use to her, and possibly a danger.

Left, then, to a guarded doorway, where again she was let through unchallenged.

Here was a hall, dark-timbered, dark; she stepped over the threshold and reached to the left, where a lamp was always burning on a shelf. Waiting for her, set ready. Sometimes she wondered if the generalissimo filled it and lit it himself in his restlessness, in hopes that it might guide her to a cure.

If he did, he was doomed to disappointment. Another disappointment. He was a disappointed man already, which was why he could not sleep.

With the lamp cupped between her hands, she walked to a smaller door, a side-chamber, her little miracle, the space that she had made her own.

No one else came here. Tunghai Wang did not read, assuming for a moment that he could. A man might have the gift of it, she supposed, and still choose not to use it. If he was a warrior, say, if he thought he could win all his arguments at the edge of a blade; or if he was a commander of men, say, with his eyes on yellow silk and a green stone throne, who could order others to read to him, and then most likely only messages and treaties.

Where Tunghai Wang chose not to lead, not a man in his long shadow would push ahead. It took a girl, she liked to think, not sworn to him, a lucky chance, though the luck was all her own.

Not even his looting, raping soldiers had found this room, or troubled with it after it was found. Shelves and boxes full of books and scrolls: why bother? They would be good only to start fires, and Tunghai Wang slew firestarters out of hand.

Tien was careful with her lamp, though not from fear of Tunghai Wang. It would be her tragedy to start a fire here, whatever the consequences. It would be burning out her own heart.

Whoever made this room had worried themselves about fires. Here was a niche set into the wood of the wall, rough stone to stand a light on and bright polished stone to reflect its light out into the room. She put her lamp in the niche, opened shutters in anticipation of the day, sat at the reading-desk and reached to the shelf below. Here was the scroll she had been looking at yesterday. A slip of polished bamboo marked her place.

It was no doubt a terrible thing to be deceiving Tunghai Wang, and terribly dangerous too. She ought to be ashamed; she ought to be afraid. But she did already know the cause of his insomnia, and there was no cure to be found outside himself. She had told him so, as best she could, and given him advice that he was not following because she was a slip of polished girlhood and he carried the marks of a hard lifetime on his body and had no idea how he might listen to her.

Besides, he didn’t want to change his soul, his life or his ambitions. He wanted a draft that he could swallow down and so sleep, and so rise again the same man but better rested.

And—who knew?—perhaps she would find the recipe for such a draft, somewhere in this library. No cure, but a treatment, yes. It was not what she was looking for; she might not believe that it existed; it might turn up none the less. There were records here from a thousand years of medicine and magic. She had not tried to count the many hands, the many minds whose work had been brought far and far across the empire. She wasn’t cataloging the collection—although she could, and someone ought to—nor trying to put it into order. It had an order already, like a map of its first owner, a network of ideas and connections that Tien tried first to trace and then to understand.

If there was a path to what she wanted, here was where she would find it: here if anywhere, if she was able. Where else could such a library have collected, an aggregate of wisdom on the two subjects that most concerned her? She was not the first to wonder, to worry, to need. Her uncle had studied as best he could, without notice or resources; she could do better. She must do better.

What she lacked, of course, was time. She read hastily, skimming anything that didn’t seem useful, dwelling only where she found mention of the dragon or control. Which was unlucky perhaps for Tunghai Wang, but she consoled her conscience with the thought that control was what he needed too. Coupled perhaps with a modicum of insight.

She had brush and ink on the desk there, and a sheaf of little papers supplied by Tunghai Wang, or at least at his order and supplied by his men, which meant that they were torn from any other source of paper that they found. Often there was some part of a painting on the reverse, and she hated that. Using those, she felt as guilty as the hands that had torn it: as though the desecration, the destruction of art, continued beyond the destruction of the thing itself.

Perhaps that was why she was less inclined to copy what she needed, more inclined simply to tear it from the book or from the scroll, to slip it inside her shirt and steal it as she blew out her lamp, as she left the library to the light of morning, a little less every visit than it had been when she came.

Perhaps she wanted to be as guilty as she felt.

Or perhaps she only wanted to be practical. Master Biao had torn so many pages already from her uncle’s books, it was just easiest to hide new pages, needed words among the discards and the ruin where no one would ever think to look.

NO ONE would ever look in any case. It was herself she hid them from. Who else? Master Biao read no more than Tunghai Wang, whether or not he could, and Mu Gao surely not. There were no thieves came sniffing around their tent; one at least of them was always there, and they were known to treat thieves and rogues as well as honest folk. Instead of honest folk, perhaps. There were no honest folk, in this grim city these grim days. People survived by thieving, one way or another.

Perhaps that was why she had taken to it herself, because theft was the currency of the times. Or else because the knowledge was stolen, so the paper might as well be also? Or something deeper, perhaps, and more determined. Whatever she took, she kept from other people. If there was an answer for Han here, he would have to come to her …

OR IT might only be that there was a pleasure in this, scuttling out of the palace in the early day with secrets crinkling against her breast, past guards who knew nothing of them, away from Tunghai Wang who had no notion what she was taking from his seize; climbing the long hill out of the city with something at least to compensate her, something achieved against the desperate cruel failure of the streets around her, that could not feed or shelter or protect their people; coming to the tent with something that Master Biao could not touch, Mu Gao could not interrupt, no one could have anything to say to it but her.

Perhaps that was why she stole these pages, to give her sole possession: to let her feel, just for once, this is mine …

Hers and she was holding to it, her whole little stack of knowledge, speculation, fantasy and lies. In there if anywhere was the gem of truth she sought, that moment of recorded wisdom. Set down for the ages, and hers now if she could only find it.

Lost forever, perhaps, if she couldn’t, if it needed other wiser eyes. She should feel guilty; she did feel guilty. More than that, she felt determined. It would be here somewhere, and she would find it, and save so many lives and hopes …

MEANTIME, HERE was a queue of the early sick, and Master Biao livid with her for being absent, again, when he was wanting her.

“You, Tien—where have you been? Again? Always sneaking off when you know you will be needed, when you know mornings are the busiest times, when people bring the diseases of the night to us and I want you most urgently and you are never here, and …”

She stood calm beneath his onslaught, because it was only words; he wouldn’t strike her again. These days, he didn’t even shout: hissed rather, as though all the roughness and sharp edges, all the volume of his voice had been rubbed away by a too long flow of words. She waited for that flow to check, and then bowed low, an insolent submission that he would know to mean nothing.

“Give me one minute,” she said, “to change my clothes, I have the mud of the road on me; then I will be here to help you serve your patients, Master Biao.”

A screen of silk gave the thinnest illusion of privacy, but it was enough. If he eyed her silhouette as she changed, whatever soft shadows the light might cast against the screen, that was only his lust and she was accustomed to it, accustomed not to worry about it. If he was harvesting snatched glimpses of her body—the thrusting peak of a breast, the slim roundness of a buttock—he wouldn’t see what mattered more, what her hands did besides shedding fabric from her skin.

Her dress she set aside for washing; Mu Gao would find it, before Tien had time to see to it herself. She was accustomed to that too. Her stolen papers went into the bottom of her chest, in among a sheaf of other pages. No one would find those, until she had time to come back to them.

Then, with her hands empty and her mind too, with the light shivering kiss of clean silk against her skin—just where Master Biao would like to set his hands, and dared not—she stepped back into the open tent and bowed to him, and then to the first of their patients sitting waiting on the bench.

AND THEN had no time for anything except medicine: the mental practice of it, listening to Master Biao’s drilled questions—she had him following her uncle’s formula now, when he could remember—and the patients’ replies, halting or shifting, wary or confessional or urgent like a flood; hearing the words and the manner of them both, and seeing how their bodies also spoke, how they sat and stood and gestured, how they breathed, how they sweated; hearing Master Biao’s counts as he took the pulse of heart and liver and spoke each of them aloud; drawing on everything she knew from her uncle to make a diagnosis, irrespective of anything more that Master Biao might say.

And then the physical practice of it, the weighing out and wrapping of ingredients—not in the pages of her father’s books now, but in scraps of silk or linen that she garnered and Mu Gao washed—and giving them to the patients with careful repetitive instructions, making allowance always for what they would forget or ignore or be unable quite to follow. Clean water was hard enough to find; sleep could be harder. Even Tunghai Wang couldn’t find sleep.

She was busy, then, entirely: so much so that the first sounds of soldiers passed her by entirely, and it needed a woman’s scream to alert her.

A woman who might have been a patient coming or going but was hardly likely to be anything other, here in this abandoned camp above the city. The screaming was supposed to be behind them, over, done; but here it was again, all fresh, and now, yes, she could hear men’s voices baying like hunting dogs, the rush of feet, the clash of steel on steel.

And that before the first man appeared in the doorway of the tent, filthy and blooded, his tao bare in his hand and his grin just as bare, just as lethal.

There was terror in the tent then, a quantity of screaming. He looked around, a little dazedly, as a man might who found himself unexpectedly in a palace treasury. With, perhaps, time to loot. Pockets to fill.

No treasures here, in terms of gold or jewels; but there were food and spirits, taken in payment from Master Biao’s patients, which are always treasure to a soldier. And there were women too, just the same. He hardly knew where to start, except that the food and flasks would wait and the women not. Also the food and flasks were as silent as they were patient, which the women were not; and there were men too, with whom something must be done, and—

AND HE had not finished raising his sword to begin to threaten that something, before someone was moving forward through the terror, and that was rather bizarrely herself, Tien, which was alarming; and she was talking already, quite calmly really although she at least could hear the thread of tension in her voice vibrating like a gut-string as she said, “Are you hurt, sir? Please, come in. Master Biao will tend to you directly. In the meantime I have hot water and clean cloths, we can wash the blood away at least; and there is food if you’re hungry, water or something stronger to wash it down. We draw no distinctions here, soldier or civilian, rebel or imperial guard,” said that way because he was surely the emperor’s man, though she wasn’t quite sure immediately how she knew that, “anyone in need of healing is welcome in this tent, and I hope you will say so to all your brother soldiers …”