eleven

This, now: this was how a woman ought to live.

When that woman was Jiao, at least. When her arm didn’t feel rightly balanced without a blade in it, when her long legs needed to stretch and strain, when her skin felt better sweating under leather than silk.

When roads were for running down and doors for kicking in, when the glazed light of morning found her unslept and already filthy, an ache in her shoulders and a stiffness in her neck, a twitch in her muscles and her eyes sore from jabbing into shadows.

No blood on her naked tao, not yet, but that couldn’t last. With that certainty came the rising tang of fear that she felt like steel in her bones, chill and stiff and something she could use, a strengthening. Some people were disabled by fear, but Jiao seized it gratefully, like a gift. If she wasn’t afraid, what would throw her into the noise and stink of battle, what would drive her arm to kill strangers as innocent, as uninvolved, as mercenary as herself?

She felt no passionate commitment to the emperor, that was sure. She hadn’t gone to Taishu in support of his cause, nor followed him here to achieve it. Neither did she feel hatred or contempt for Tunghai Wang and his rebels. They were soldiers, just as she was; just like the baying pack of men at her back, who would have fought as easily for the rebel cause if they’d happened to fall in with Tunghai Wang’s recruiters instead of the emperor’s …

They might have wished for that, every day during their long retreat. They might have longed to be rebels instead of imperial troops, to be the ones who chased. One thing, though: that year on the road had taught them to be proper soldiers, her kind of soldier, pirates of the road. Let others charge ahead, let them race to be first to the city, first to the fight, first in the emperor’s favor. Let them chase fleeing rebels down the road, across the paddy, through the forests and all the way to the hills. She led her troop in a slower pursuit, checking every hut they came to. Searching empty granaries and busy temples, scouring woodland, looking for the spies and assassins, the ambushes that she would certainly have left behind.

Looking and not finding yet, finding only priests and peasants who cowered or wept or were sullenly silent, who gathered close their idols or their children, their ducks or their little stores of rice in helpless protective gestures. Not a man at her back who would touch the idols, or the children; pirates could be as superstitious as they were sentimental. Besides, there was no more value in a broken statue than there was in a dead peasant.

Hungry peasants mattered less. Barely a man at her back who didn’t have a duck in his bag now, or a sack of rice at his belt. Every pirate-soldier is a looter too, and Jiao herself reckoned herself wealthier by two days’ food, though she had one of the men carry it for her.

Here was a barn that might have been heaped high with rice-straw at this season and was empty, sign of a bad harvest or a harvest not gathered in, lost to war or weather. The barn smelled of nothing but its own shadows and dust, dried dung and rot. Nevertheless she sent men climbing into the roofspace to find who was hiding in the rafters, who had disturbed the cloud of bats they’d seen issuing like smoke before they came.

A shriek, a plummeting body landing with a brutal thud: he might have broken bones after such a fall, he must have bruises. Just a boy, though, scrawny and bare-legged, empty-handed, no threat to anyone. Jiao laughed, and nudged him with the toe of her boot.

“You, boy—do you want to be a soldier of the emperor?”

Slitted and shrunken with pain, only his eyes moved, indeterminately. She laughed again.

“Wise boy. You lie there and think about it. If you do, come after us and ask for Jiao; I’ll see you fed and dressed. Armed, too. Otherwise, run and hide, be bare-assed and hungry and free. Your choice.”

If something had broken in him, of course, he would do neither, but only lie there until he died. The way he squirmed, though, when her foot poked at him, she thought he’d do well enough. The emperor didn’t really need more soldiers, but every troop could use a local boy. Give him a tao to carry, he’d never realize he was just a servant. Give him food and trousers and a tao, he wouldn’t care anyway. Give him a sense of belonging, and the emperor might really have another soldier regardless.

A cry hailed her out of the barn. One of the men she’d left to watch the road: she found him doing that exactly, looking back the way they’d come with his eyes shaded against the rising sun.

“What is it, Jing?”

“Runners, coming after us. Should be ours, must be; messengers, I guess. But …”

“But?”

“But they’re women. In skirts. And one of them’s not much of a runner.”

If there had been other fighting women aboard the jade ship, or anywhere in that fleet, Jiao didn’t know it. And no one would choose to go to war in a skirt. Nor would anyone choose one woman in a skirt to run a message, let alone two of them.

Jiao grinned and said, “All right. These are for me. Got any more of that chewing-leather on you?”

Other men carried dried meat to chew on; Jing’s preference was fruit, sliced and left to hang in sun and wind until it was dark and shriveled, almost indistinguishable to the eye.

He reached into his belt-pouch; she said, “Not for me. There’s a boy in there feeling sorry for himself. Go in and make him glad he didn’t break his skinny neck in falling, would you? Give him something sweet to suck on, leave him with a good memory of us,” and perhaps there’d be someone else to come chasing after them. Boys enough would be ruined today, one way or another; it would warm her soul a little, to save just one.

She stepped out into the road and lifted a hand, to stop Mei Feng and her woman.

“What,” she asked, entirely redundantly, “are you doing?”

“I need to reach the emperor.” As if it was obvious. Which, Jiao supposed, it was: if you were Mei Feng, or if you knew and understood her.

What was odd—if you knew and understood Mei Feng—was that she’d brought one of her palace women with her. Jiao couldn’t remember her name, had never troubled much to distinguish among them, might not have recognized her anyway in this sweating, disheveled, gasping creature who had no notion how to run.

“I thought you went to all this trouble,” with a gesture at the plain clothes, the improbable skirt, “to hide yourself from the emperor?”

“I’m here now,” as though she could not be sent back again—which might be true, even. There were only two children they thought could guarantee safe passage to Taishu. A wise emperor would play the wise general and keep both at hand, in case of need.

Which would not stop him shutting Mei Feng up under guard, somewhere safe and far from him. Jiao would do exactly that, she thought, if she were emperor.

In the meantime, though, it would be necessary to keep Mei Feng alive; which apparently required Jiao to be scathing now. “And what is it exactly you can do when you reach him? If he lets you stay within reach?” He is the Man of Jade, she was saying, with his magical jade armor that you gave him and his strength and speed that he gets from the stone itself; what can you do, compared with that?

“I can watch his back,” she said stubbornly, “against those who ought to be his friends.”

And no, that was not Jiao she was including in her glower, unless Jiao stood against her. It was Ping Wen, of course, whom Mei Feng believed so devoutly to be a traitor, against whom the emperor would not hear a word.

That was good enough for here, for now, for an encounter by the road a mile short of the war. Jiao gestured with her head, join us and welcome, then. You and your woman too. If you can keep up.

SHE LED her troop on at a lope: not following the road now, taking a farmers’ track that ran parallel, to surprise any hidden rebels who might be hoping to surprise imperial soldiers on the road.

This way was muddy, a little awkward, a little overgrown. A glance back showed both young women trailing behind, impeded by their skirts. They’d just have to catch up at the next halt if they could—except that the next time Jiao looked around, there was Mei Feng at her elbow. With her skirts rudely slashed apart and knotted up around her hips, her bare legs already slathered with mud. Jiao supposed it was decent, by a very crude and basic measure of decency. To judge by their calls and whistles, her men approved thoroughly, by any measure of very crude approval.

Mei Feng called something even cruder back over her shoulder, and then grinned up at Jiao.

“They say there was a boy in the barn back there. If I’d thought, I’d have gone in and stolen his trousers.”

“He didn’t have any. I expect we can find you trousers, farther on. And a tao.”

“I don’t want—”

“How are you planning to guard the emperor’s back, without a blade?”

“I’ve got a knife,” Mei Feng said, slapping the hilt of it where it hung inappropriately from a dainty belt. “That’ll do.”

Jiao grunted, and jerked her head backward. “Your friend—”

“Dandan.”

“Yes. What’s she for? You should have left her to look after the girls. She’ll only slow you down.”

Indeed, she had clung to the decency of her skirts and was making heavy weather of the path, falling farther back now that Mei Feng wasn’t beside her to nag or drive her on.

“Jin and Shola will be fine. They have women enough. And the village priest too, now. I left them in the temple, charming him with gifts. Dandan’s for the other end. When I reach the emperor. It’ll be … difficult anyway, but he’d be furious, he’d be ashamed if I just turned up alone, after running all through a city of war on my own. I can’t do that anymore. I can’t do that to him. So I thought I’d best have a companion, a chaperone …”

It was thin cover, and not likely to help much; but the Mei Feng of even a month ago would not have thought even that far ahead, would never have seen the need for any cover at all. Jiao thought the girl might be growing up, at least a little.

PAUSING ON a sudden hill, she saw a pillar of smoke rising to the north, solitary and unforthcoming; and on the path behind, farther even than Dandan was a jag, a speck, a tentative shadow following.

Jiao called a halt, and picked four men to investigate the smoke. “Mei Feng,” she added, “you go with them. See what’s what.”

She already knew what was what, or could make a fair guess at it. So could the men. This was an aspect of protecting Mei Feng, to introduce her early to the taste of war. It was a kindness in a way, Jiao’s way; if it was short of mercy, that was Jiao’s way also. She didn’t envy Mei Feng the discoveries at the foot of that pillar of smoke; nor pity her for what she would learn there. She had chosen to come to the war. Let her see it, then, for what it was. She would need to know, before they reached the city.

Meanwhile, Jiao’s squad could sit and grunt and murmur in the shade, soldiers seizing the chance, knowing that the day would shift and change before too long; and she could watch those figures on the path back there and calculate how long it would take the boy to catch up with the woman, how long the two of them to reach the squad here.

TOO LONG: she saw the one join the other, but Mei Feng and the men came back before the pair together made the foot of the rise. She wouldn’t wait.

The returning men told her everything she needed to know: empty hands, the jerk of a head, move on.

Even so, she looked to Mei Feng. Make her say it all aloud, give her nowhere she could hide, even inside herself.

Mei Feng’s hands weren’t empty, nor were her legs still bare. Jiao thought she was already doing better than anyone could fairly expect.

She said, “It was, it was nothing. Nothing. Just a hutment in the paddy, a few folk living there, nothing to fight over. No one did fight. They were just … Someone slaughtered them, that’s all. There weren’t any soldiers, just peasants. Dead peasants. Nothing at all …”

Jiao nodded. What did she expect? This was a day for slaughter. And bodies didn’t always tell the tale. There might have been soldiers, rebels, who saw an imperial squad on its way and fled before it reached them. That squad might have seen the running men and suspected a trap, an ambush. Suspicious, frightened soldiers were inclined to slaughter on the off-chance, just in case.

No need to say so. Mei Feng needed the lesson, not the reasons behind it. Besides, Mei Feng had a peasant’s trousers on her legs, and had stopped to wash the mud off before she dressed. And she had an armful of other clothes salvaged from the fire. That was piracy, the pure thing. Jiao was pleased with her, and secretly impressed. “Be kind, then, and take trousers to those two,” where they were still toiling upslope through the mud and their own soreness and exhaustion. There was nothing broken in the boy, bones or spirit; she thought he’d do. Soldiers like to keep a pet. Especially one who can be trained to wash clothes, fetch water, run a hundred little tasks at day’s end in an army camp. Mei Feng would look after her woman her own way, but, “Give the lad a drink, too. And see that he washes, next time we cross a stream.”

Be kind. Let the boy see that there was kindness in the emperor’s army, a little now and the promise of more to come. Clothes and water, something to chew on the road and a little touch of mothering, mind you wash your feet now. He’d thrive on that, and sell his soul for more.

SOME SOLDIERS—or their commanders—didn’t understand the recruiting power of kindness, and so burned harmless hutments and left peasants dead in the mud.

Some didn’t always have the time to think about it, or else they didn’t take the time. They were surprised, or they flung themselves forward without looking, or they were sent or driven or led too far, and …

Jiao had been there herself, time and time again: when the air was filled with screaming and some of it might be, might well be, might as well be your own; when your blade was wet and heavy in your hand, and fear pierced your bones like spikes from deep in the bitter dark, and all the world was closing in around you like a tunnel, a mouth that would swallow you whole; when there were bodies hurtling at you and bodies trying to flee you and you hacked at both simultaneously, indiscriminately, and only wondered later which was which and whether it might matter.

Here on the ridge at the city’s edge, with the streets running down toward the river and the dark alleys twisting away to either side, their walls unforthcoming and every one of their gates a threat—well, it was no surprise if the first squads here had been just like that, slaying whoever came in reach.

Here were broken barricades, the wreckage of them, dragged aside along with the wreckage of the men who had defended them; those bodies intermingled with others who had surely not been defending the barricades. Sheltering behind them, rather: women, mostly, because the men of Santung had all fled or been killed before and not many would have found their way back yet.

Slain without orders—she hoped—and only in that fearful hot frenzy, they were still just as dead. At least none here would know them, unless perhaps the boy did. He was trailing behind still, with Mei Feng and her woman; Jiao only hoped that none of them would look too closely. Bodies were worse, always, when you could put a name to them. Names summoned ghosts into the dark, into the dreamtime, the space behind your eyes. Bodies could be ignored, shrugged off, forgotten—once you were used to them, once you’d learned the ways—but ghosts not. Jiao knew, she’d borne a few ghosts of her own for long enough. Perhaps she still did.

Despite the bodies, though, despite all the signs of warfare, the city was oddly quiet for a battle-site. Jiao nosed warily past half a dozen alley-mouths, listening for screams or the clash of blades—for anything, really, that would speak of soldiers and fighting, trouble, war—and hearing nothing that mattered, nothing to fret her piratical soul.

At last she stopped a man, a runner with the imperial yellow sash. He should have been inviolate, untouchable at any time, let alone in a city of war where the emperor himself was fighting; but she stepped into his road, and when he tried to duck around her, she seized his arm and held him.

“Tell me, man—where has the battle gone?”

He gaped at her, stuttered, “You, you cannot delay me—”

—and was promptly shaken hard enough to jar the teeth in his skull. “Oh, can I not? Tell that to the emperor—but make sure I’m standing there beside you, because I’ll enjoy the laugh you get from him. I can delay you as long as I choose. That woman who follows me so closely? She is his chosen concubine, and she could flay you alive and take your skin back to make a cushion for the Jade Throne, and he would not speak a word against her. So forget your own importance and listen to mine, just for this little minute. Where is all the fighting?”

“There is none,” he muttered. “Tunghai Wang will not fight. That is my message, that I am carrying back to the ships. The rebels are running out of Santung as fast as they can go, all along the river roads. Climb up onto a roof for the view, and you could see them do it. Now let me go, Jiao. I know who you are, and Mei Feng too.”

There is power in names, even the names of the living; names can summon trouble, which Jiao could just as well live without. She wished the man fair running and let him go.

There was a high building just on the corner of the street there, with a flat roof and an outside stair. She ran swift-booted up, and yes, the runner had been telling simple truth. There were people streaming away from the city, both sides of the river. At this distance it was all movement, but it was a movement she’d seen again and again throughout her life, there was no mistaking it.

She had seen herds of animals, deer and cattle being driven, but this was different.

She had seen pilgrims in progress and refugees in flight, and this was still different.

This was an army, soldiers in retreat. Disorganized and afraid, armed men still move together in ways that set them apart from civilians. Jiao watched them run and knew how they felt, how they sweated, how they smelled. How they watched each other, how they watched the road ahead and the road behind, how some little corner of their minds was always hoping to find more men around them. A civilian might long for open spaces, room to run, but a soldier knows where his best protection lies. Being faster than your brothers can prove as deadly as being slower. Massed bodies packed about you, that’s a shield and defense if anything can be.

Sometimes, nothing is. Sometimes absence is the only survival skill. But still: a running army is a roadful of individual soldiers, and most of them—the wise ones, the veterans, the ones who carry scars on their skins and scars in their heads—are pressing inward, jostling for cover as they run.

Which leaves the recruits, the ignorant, the innocents on the outside, most exposed and barely even knowing it, glad perhaps to have space enough to stretch their legs, even to outspeed their elders. Drawing attention to themselves every way, making themselves first target for spears or arrows or a horseman with a blade …

LET THEM run. She’d always rather see an enemy’s dust as he fled than his face as he charged. Almost always. Some men needed to die, but not so many; and those apart, it was always better not to fight.

Almost always.

If there was a tingle of disappointment in her arm, she could ignore it. And thrust the long-bladed tao into her belt, to make the point more clearly to herself how strong-minded she was, how she could step back from that offer of war, let the bite of fear drain out of her bones, never miss it …

If there was the enemy, clear to be seen, where was the emperor’s army? Still in the streets or on the riverbanks, harrying the rearguard and giving chase already …?

Hundreds had gone ahead of her, hundreds more would be coming in from the opposite direction; Santung must be swarming.

It was hard to see down between the city’s buildings and into its streets. Easier to look across the river, see this side reflected on the opposite slope, see how soldiers like ants poured down the wide streets and into the darkness of the alleys, imagine how they howled …

Not imagine, so much. If she listened, up here, she could hear it after all: that distant noise of battle, the yells and screams, the clash of steel on steel.

There was fighting, then, just no resistance. She felt for the rebels, almost; it was so hard to fight and flee, to doom your rearguard, your friends …

In search of friends, she scoured the ridge across the river, hoping for a mass of yellow which would be the emperor’s personal guard, perhaps a flash of sun-on-green which would be the emperor himself in that ridiculous jade shirt. That’s where she ought to find him, high on the hill there, angling for the best view just as she was herself. Him and all his party, perhaps, on a building just like this, somewhere in that patterned maze that made one half of this city above its river, like a butterfly with its wings spread wide: she stood on one and the people she wanted stood somewhere on the other, and she couldn’t quite see them yet. Now that she was explicitly looking it was something she needed, a sudden seize of worry, and she wanted to leap onto the roof’s parapet for that extra step of height, but it would be quite a stretch up onto glazed and sloping tiles and she wasn’t a fool, she wasn’t going to risk the momentum of her jump carrying her over the edge.

Just in the corner here was a stack of spare tiles and a mound of what she guessed was the clay used to make mortar, under a length of old sacking. A step onto that and a foot on the parapet, she’d be rock-solid and sensibly safe …

… except that as she stepped onto the sacking, she felt the mound give and shift beneath her weight. For a moment, the briefest of blinks, she thought that was fresh mud underneath and her foot was going to sink right into it.

EXCEPT THAT the mound gave only a little, only enough to startle when she thought she was stepping onto something solid and hard-baked.

Then it resisted.

Then it rose, it erupted beneath her feet and flung her off-balance, flung her all the way over onto her back so that she sprawled helplessly before him as the man beneath the sacking hurled himself up to loom above her, his hand already reaching to his blade.

THIS WAS IT, of course, what she’d been looking for, why she’d been so wary all the day: this was the stray rebel soldier, abandoned or trapped on his own, trying to wait out the daylight till he could slip out of the city and away.

Too late now.

No time, no point even trying to scrabble her tao into her hand; by the time she had it halfway drawn, his steel would be in her heart.

She’d always sworn that she would go down fighting. She had also always sworn that when the end came, if it was clear and inevitable, she wouldn’t struggle against it. She’d have dignity enough to look death in the face and laugh.

It hadn’t occurred to her till now that those two vows might work against each other. She could reach for her tao anyway, although there was no point; or she could gaze up at his and laugh, although there was no dignity in this sprawl on a stranger’s roof, and precious little that was funny either.

She would be dead either way, dead in moments, it didn’t really matter; except that it did to her, it suddenly mattered exceedingly, and she didn’t quite know what to do.

Which might be why she turned her head aside—not to avoid the sight of that blade stabbing down, only to give her a moment undistracted, time to think—and so saw a shadow reach across the roof toward her, which was a figure on the stair, which was—

—MEI FENG, almost the last person she’d want to see there. Any of the men would have been better, genuinely a threat, maybe a distraction to this man who hadn’t quite killed her yet. The boy would likely have yelled for help and gone hurtling back down to ground again.

Mei Feng, though: Mei Feng might yell but would certainly hurl herself at the rebel, try to help, and so die too. Perhaps do it first, deliberately, try to buy Jiao the time she needed. It wouldn’t work, because the man would have time in plenty to slay Mei Feng and then Jiao while she was still struggling to her feet, struggling with her tao; but Mei Feng might do it anyway.

Which would be noble and heroic and pointless, and both women would end up dead at his feet. Which they were going to do in any case, and that was just sad, when there were so many other ways for their two stories, their two lives to go on; and other people who cared and would be sorry, and …

AND YES, Mei Feng launched herself at the rebel, and it was perhaps Jiao’s fault that he had already seen her, she had looked that way and he might have followed her eye. Or he might have caught a glimpse in the corner of his own, a flash of movement, the stretch of her shadow. It didn’t matter either way because there still wasn’t time enough to do anything, though Jiao of course was doing what she could, drawing up her knees—too slow, too slow … !—to kick out at his ankles, in vague hopes of toppling him over the parapet, inevitably too late for Mei Feng and probably for herself too even if she believed that he would so conveniently go over, which she didn’t, but at least she’d answered her own question, what to do. Of course she would fight, helpless and hopeless and empty-handed, empty of head and empty of heart and …

AND SOMEHOW is a weasel word, but somehow Mei Feng was impossibly fast to cross that roof, so fast it wasn’t possible but there she was, before Jiao could bring her boots in line, before the rebel could raise his sword.

And Mei Feng didn’t have a sword, of course, she wouldn’t carry one; and she wasn’t a fighter anyway, she wouldn’t know how to use it if Jiao had forced one on her. All she did was barrel into the man, batter his blade aside and hurtle him over.

Not over the edge, even, only to knock him sprawling; but that was good, that was plenty. Jiao could deal with him now, she’d be up before he was and blade in hand, ready to skewer him as he had meant to skewer her, only she wouldn’t linger so long …

LONG ENOUGH, apparently, long enough; swift as she was, she was still too slow.

By the time she was on her feet, she didn’t need the blade.

She was sorry, almost, to slam it back into her belt-sheath; sorry to crouch beside her friend and peel Mei Feng’s fingers one by one away from the handle of her knife; sorry to need to do this, to wipe the blade and draw the girl back from the seeping pool of blood where she was kneeling, where she had dropped to her knees and slit the rebel’s throat as he lay helpless.

It might be—must be!—the first man Mei Feng had killed, the first whose blood she had splashed on her own clothes, her skin, her hair. Whose reek she would carry with her for the rest of her days.

Jiao had seen this often and often: the stillness afterward, the self-absorption, the trembling doubtful wonder. She knew how to deal with it, but only in boys. In raw recruits, who could be bullied and teased, intimidated by a woman so much more at ease with this than they were. Comforted by roughness because their lives were rough, they would turn—when she would let them—to their comrades, their cohorts. Lads their age would be awkward and awed, asking how it was; older men would be mock-casual and celebratory, telling them how it had been for them, their first time; both would do them good.

Neither would be any use here, now, for her. Mei Feng was entirely the wrong person to be first this morning with blood on her blade. Jiao could wipe the steel—on the dead man’s clothes, according to all tradition—but she couldn’t wipe her friend’s mind, which needed it more.

She slid the cleaned knife back into its sheath on Mei Feng’s belt, with a brief, “Well done. Thank you. You’ll want this.” Give it a hone tonight, or it’ll lose its edge—but that was instruction for a boy, not fit for her. Not from Jiao. She’d have one of the men say it later. Right now, because she simply had to know, she said, “How did you ever move so fast?”

Mei Feng shrugged, tried out her voice, found that she had one still: “He was going to kill you. I… hurried. That’s all.”

Suddenly voiceless herself, lacking any words to say how far that fell short of all, Jiao kissed her, and then drew her to her feet—

—AND THEN let her drop down again because she had to, and held her shoulders while Mei Feng vomited helplessly, sailor-like over the side.