three

Mei Feng went straight to the river, and there was no way across.

Over there she could see, she could actually see imperial troops, any of whom might have told her just where the emperor was and how to reach him fastest. Any of them. If she could only get there …

All her life long, there had been ferries plying this river, back and forth all day and all night too; and if all the ferries were full then a boatman would always take a girl across for a smile and a coin, perhaps for the smile alone. Or she could run down to the docks and find a fisherman, any fisherman. Everyone knew her grandfather, and most of them knew her. The river had never been an obstacle. Till now.

Now there was no way over, below the twin bridges. The ferries were long gone, absorbed into one invasion fleet or the other. Any boatman still on the water when the imperial army’s first outrunners were seen on the heights must simply have fled the easiest way, straight upcurrent, away from war and danger.

Another day, another time, Mei Feng would simply have swum it. Today, now, she had the fate of the emperor in her hands, in her head, she’d never been so urgent; and today, now was the worst of the tide with black clouds scudding in, the river still flood-high from the dragon’s long typhoon and the wind still stiff in sympathy, even starting to rise again.

Which meant that salt water driving in was meeting fresh water pushing out, making for cross-currents and whirlpools all across the breadth of the river, and waves tossing white in the wind. It would be death for anyone to swim in that. She was desperate, but not stupid. If she threw herself away, she threw away the emperor besides, and she would not do that. She would not …

Instead, she set out to run upriver.

One comfort, small thread though it was: this was the way the army was tending, either side of the river. So this would be the way to find the emperor. Alone, hopefully: alone with his guards about him to keep him safe …

She could have laughed at herself, if she hadn’t been so busy running. He had plunged into this war, would surely be looking to fight in the front line, whatever his generals and advisers would demand—and she worried that he was not safe?

But yes, she did worry; and no, he was not safe. If anything could kill him, it would be the blow struck in secret, the coward’s stroke when his back was turned, his armor off and his guard down, his guards outside the door …

Barefoot and heedless, then, she ran to save her man.

If she was too late, if the emperor died: well, then perhaps she would just not stop running. She could run and run, far from Santung and Taishu and the sea between; she could run this soft palace skin off her feet entirely, grow new tougher stuff at the same time as she grew new muscles, as she grew a leather hide about her heart.

WHARVES AND godowns, mud and pools, inlets and bridges and water-gates and men. The men were imperial soldiers, not a sign of a rebel except the dead ones here and there, dragged out of her way along with their hasty barricades. That her way was everyone’s way, that the dragging-aside might not have been directly for her, that didn’t mattter.

What did matter, some of the men tried to stop her, either because they knew who she was or else because they didn’t.

At first she snarled at them, and just kept running.

If they knew her name, mostly a snarl was enough.

If a man’s hand grabbed, she dodged it; she’d always been quick. And they were mostly hurrying themselves, eyes fixed on a different target, a distant war, grabbing just because she was a girl and there. When they missed her, they let her go.

Those few who wanted more, who wanted to drag her off the river road and into any one of these abandoned buildings, who wanted to abandon their own duty and their comrades too—those she showed more than her teeth and her determination.

She took to running with her dagger drawn. A blade made a great discouragement, the way it caught the sun and caught the eye and brought the two together, this is bright and sharp and clean, cleaner than any part of you. Do you really want to see it closer? Closer yet …?

Only one man she actually cut: because she had to, because he wouldn’t see or hear or understand anything less. He had seized her wrist, the arm that held the knife, and thought that made him safe. He was startled when she pulled free of his grip, startled by sailor-strength in a girl, but stupid too; he grabbed again, this time for his own blade, and never got it out of the sheath. Her knife pierced his forearm, pinned it to the belt across his belly.

He stood very, very still then, gone a grubby color, slick with sweat. She explained to him, very briefly, what would happen to him if she gave the emperor his name. That did nothing to improve his color. Then she advised him to sit down, just where he was, and to stay there until she was long out of sight. He might use the time to bandage up his arm, she suggested, as best he could with one hand. If he was lucky, one of his comrades might stop and help; but he really shouldn’t think to come after her anytime that she might turn around and see him.

She waited for his slow, careful nod of agreement. Then she slid her knife out of his arm. Blood followed, but not the spurting gush that would speak of a ripped artery; he’d live, then. Probably.

She shrugged and turned away, and ran again.

“MEI FENG!”

The city was behind her now, and there was the river’s bend ahead; the bridges should lie beyond it, where the river narrowed, where they had been possible. No man had stopped her so far. No man could stop her now, but apparently her own name could.

Her own name in a woman’s voice, on this road of men and men and more men.

She twisted around, knowing the voice even before she found the rangy figure striding down from where she and her men had been crouching, resting on an unexpected mound beside the road; before Jiao’s long fingers had closed on the back of her neck and given her a monitory shake.

“Mei Feng, always—always!—stay with your people. Going off by yourself is stupid, and dangerous to you and to the friends who have to look for you; and even if you don’t run into the trouble you deserve, you still end up isolated among troops who don’t know you, who can’t tell if you’re one of us or one of them or just a civilian, just prey …”

She knew it, she knew it all, she had seen most of it played out in this last hour, and wasn’t about to give Jiao the satisfaction of saying so. Didn’t have time to apologize, to explain: or wouldn’t take the time she had, which might be all the time the emperor had left. Didn’t have time to argue either, to say that there had barely been any rebels left in the city, or that she’d found the only two who actually mattered, who might have been entirely missed otherwise until it was entirely too late …

She knocked Jiao’s hand away and said it flatly, “No time! Jiao, I have to get across the river.”

“Can’t help you there,” Jiao said. Trying perhaps a little too hard to sound tolerant and amused, not to look surprised at how easily she’d been batted off. “The bridge is down. They were flinging fire at us earlier, the whole army was backed up here, but it seems to be moving again.”

It did. Mei Feng looked at the stream of men hurrying onward, only really seeing it for the first time now that she was standing apart, while only her mind was running on: bridge down, bridge down and of course no boats; there’s a crossing higher up, more running, more time, farther to go …

“I need …”

“I know, you said. You need to cross the river. And I said you need to stay with us. So we’d best get started, yes?” She whistled to her men, gestured with a broad sweep of her arm, that way …

SO MEI Feng found herself running at the heart of a pack, which was probably better. If anyone could get her across the river against the odds, that would be Jiao. And no man now would trouble or delay her; and this steady military jog she could keep up all day; and it might seem slow but it would eat up the distance, she did understand that …

And even so it was intolerable to be trapped here, the wrong side of the water, when she could look across and see so easily where she wanted to be. She could almost, almost shout across, give them a message for the emperor, a warning; but the river was just that little too broad, that little too noisy. Even if anyone would listen to the screechings of some crop-headed ragamuffin in irreverent trousers.

THERE WERE the two bridges, one of them broken, all but gone; there on the mid-island, on their stepping-stone were the residues of a fire, smoke and ash and a huddle of men crouching on the bare rock.

Here on the one bank, there on the other were great scorch-marks, where fire had run all across the road from the river to the paddy, although there was nothing obvious to burn. Nothing but people, at least. There were bodies by the roadside, blackened and twisted like iron in flame, ill-wrought …

Too close to the bodies, too hurt to shift, were burned men who were not dead, or not yet. They were worse: keening or screaming or lying unaccountably, dreadfully still.

Jiao and the troop just kept running, and so necessarily did Mei Feng: glad for once to be so short among these big men, to be able to drop her head and watch their bare feet and nothing else, listen to the heavy squelching tread of them and nothing else.

UNTIL THE men in front stopped dead and she almost went hard into the back of them, it was so unexpected, she had fallen so deep into the rhythm and strain of running.

She caught herself just in time, or else just too late, her hands coming up instinctively to clutch at sweat-slick flesh. One man gave her a look that might have come differently if she hadn’t been who she was, if he hadn’t known it.

What she gave him back was pure impatience and a nudge aside, which most certainly would have brought consequences if she hadn’t been who she was, if he hadn’t known her to be untouchable. But she didn’t have time for games, for folly, for outrage. She pushed through to where Jiao stood, at the head of her men and peering forward; she put a hand on her friend’s shoulder for what advantage she could steal and stretched upward, went on tiptoe and still couldn’t see over the heads of all the men in front who had backed up and packed together, blocked the road.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. Another hold-up. Not fire this time, nothing I can see. Hold tight, word’ll come back to us.”

Perhaps it would, but rougher sounds came first: yelling, screaming. Not much steel-on-steel. Whatever that was, it wasn’t fighting. It sounded like slaughter.

Whatever it was, they couldn’t reach it; nor apparently could it reach them. Jiao’s troop colonized the mud bank of the paddy, taking the chance to rest. Jiao went with them, to stand on that high bank and see what she could make out; she sent the smallest of her men to squirm ahead, all elbows; Mei Feng went the other way, to the river.

Looking across was like looking into a mirror: the narrow road that flanked the river on that bank as on this, the steep terraced paddy consuming all the valley else, rising to the ridge. The men who packed the roadway, all that cramped space between the river and the paddy. As there, so here: and so too the sudden obstruction, that sense of hurry stalled.

It was easier to see, across the water. She could look right up-river and see the cause of it, a sudden dam across the road. No, dams were for water; this would be a barricade. And it ran clean across from the paddy to the riverbank, high and strong as a wall, fixed and certain; and there must—she was sure—be another one on this bank, just as purposeful. Those weren’t thrown up in retreat by desperate men, no. Any more than fire-throwing machines were built in desperation.

Tunghai Wang had planned for this retreat, however unlikely he thought it. He had envisioned his men fleeing along this narrow valley, up the river to just this point. Which meant …

Which meant that this was a trap, she might know nothing about war but she knew that; and looked up, urgently up, and yes: there they were, long lines of men emerging, erupting all along the ridge. All those rebels who had fled along the river road, crossed the barricade and doubled up to the ridge, doubled back …

She could see how well the barricade was defended, how thickly men thronged it with spears and bows. Her view of its foot was obscured by the churning mass of imperial troops. That was just as well; she really didn’t want to see how those troops clambered up over the bodies of their own comrades, and died, and were clambered over in their turn.

The dead will always outnumber the living, but she didn’t need to see that played out for her instruction, the slow relentless wearing away of the imperial army as men hurled themselves against an impenetrable hedge of steel.

Her eyes were treacherous, in league with her imagination. They kept coming back to the men on the ridge. If she couldn’t see quite how dreadful the slaughter was at the rampart, if she refused to imagine it, there was no such relief higher up. She could see quite clearly how they came in good order, rank after rank of them down through the paddy, one terrace after another, so fast. It wasn’t possible to wade that fast through the clinging mud of a paddy; they must be following paths already laid out, stone built up almost to the level of the water. Many, many paths, to take so many men so swiftly.

They were ready, the good general Tunghai Wang had been ready for this …

AS OVER there, so over here. Words rising in her terror, caught by some constriction in her throat. She didn’t need to scream a warning, not to Jiao, or to any man here; they knew already. This was what they did. What they would have done themselves if they were good generals, with good troops under their command.

As far as they could, they were organizing. Still trying to breach the rampart ahead, to uncork this bottle-trap; sending word back to the city, calling for help but not along the river roads, not to make things worse; seeking whatever shelter there was against missile weapons—precious little on that low and narrow flat between the paddy and the river, in places barely road-wide—and preparing to meet the rebels as they came down from above.

Jiao wasn’t content to hold a place in the line, to stand and wait while doom filed down toward them. A few sharp words, and she was leading her men up onto the paddy wall and away, across this lowest terrace to the next and so up again, a series of broad flat steps until they met the rebels coming down.

And then …

Well, there were a great many rebels, and they would have all the advantages. More soldiers were following Jiao now, more than her own men, but even so …

Not all Jiao’s men had gone; half a dozen were staying down on the road. Making a fine job of calling order to the other men around, posting a look-out up on the paddy wall, bemoaning the lack of archers; but they made a point of calling order to Mei Feng too, putting her tight in against that same wall “where nothing’s going to hit you, coming down; only as soon as it’s men that are coming down you get right back over by the river there, get in the river if you think you can swim for it.” She wasn’t fooled for a moment. This wasn’t their own concern. It certainly wasn’t their choice to stay down here while their mates went up high to fight. This was orders from Jiao, you stay here, look after Mei Feng, keep her safe. Whatever it costs. Your lives don’t matter to the emperor, but hers does. And to me. I care a lot about her, and not a jot about any of you, so mind you keep her safe. I’m the one you’ll answer to first, if I come back to find her dead and you not, any of you …

Mei Feng wasn’t too proud to be kept alive. What she doubted was Jiao’s chance of coming back alive. She watched her long-legged friend stalk off; she watched a wolfish pack of men following, lean and dangerous and not enough; this close to the wall she couldn’t see the rebels coming down, but a glance across the river could estimate their numbers and measure their enthusiasm. No one could survive that, she thought: not the waiting army trapped below, and certainly not the bold few souls—they looked so few, that side of the river, compared against the weight of men above them—heading up to fight among the terraces.

Mei Feng might have gone after Jiao, if she could only think of a reason that would outweigh all her better reasons for staying down below. Friendship was good, but not enough; stubbornness was recognizable, likely even, but stupid. In the end, it was a simple case that she could work out on her fingers. If she climbed up the terraces in pursuit, she couldn’t keep Jiao alive; if she stayed on the road, she might yet save the emperor.

If she could find a way across the river.

It really was as simple as that, as heart-rending and as binding.

She stood still and watched her friend climb up and out of sight, sent a silent wish of luck after her—that kind of impossible luck that battlefield survivors brag about, that no one could work or plan for, no one could achieve or carry—and then she turned away, turned to the men about her, looked for anything she could do to help.

No archers, but more than one of the men had a sling. Quickly, then—before they could shout at her—she scurried around gathering up stones from the road, anything small enough to be slung, loose enough to be picked out with her fingers.

WHEN IT came—when at last it came, when she was bizarrely almost impatient for it, now that we all know you’re coming, please will you hurry so that we can have the battle done with and get on?—the first hail from above was of stones, not steel. Stones bigger than the ones she’d been rooting out for slingshot: ripped from the terrace walls, she guessed, that lifted one paddy above another. Ripped out and hurled down: too big to sling but they needed nothing more than muscle and their own weight to bring them slamming down from height.

Mei Feng covered her head with her arms and ran for shelter, what little shelter the paddy wall afforded, less now that it was crowded with a thousand men doing the same.

The brave ones, the ones with slings and nerve enough to step out beneath that fall of rocks, tried their luck with a stone or two in reply. Or a succession of stones, in fact, as many and as fast as they could spin and hurl them.

If they had any joy, Mei Feng couldn’t tell. All she knew was the other thing, joy for the rebels, as one by one the slingers fell: not to the stones, which must have been tossed more or less at random, but to aimed and lethal arrows.

There were archers up and down the line, if none in Jiao’s squad. They replied as best they could, but it would always be harder ducking out of cover and having to shoot high above them, while the rebels were set and ready and shooting down.

Sounds of fighting came down with the arrows; Mei Feng drew some comfort from that. And men were still running to join in, scrambling over the wall despite the arrows, preferring the risk to the wait.

There was no comfort to be had across the water. There she could see what must be happening on this bank too, played out for her instruction: the steady descent of the rebels, one terrace after another; the thin streams of imperial troops running up to face them; the line of contact, where those who survived that far skirmished and fought and died.

Died, mostly. In places they broke the line and surged forward, but there were always more rebels coming down. Mei Feng could see isolated pockets of soldiers still fighting, entirely engulfed by the rebel horde; she couldn’t see any hope for them.

Nor for these, the men she stood among. Over yonder, the men waiting on the road were dying individually, unhurriedly, picked off from above. Sooner or later the rebel advance would arrive there, and drive them all into the river. Which they would not survive today, because nobody could.

The men on either side of her were ready.

So was she.

When they decided there was no point standing and waiting to die—orders or no orders—so did she. She couldn’t swim the river, there were no boats and no bridges now, she couldn’t fly. She had no way to reach the emperor, no way to send him a message. Sooner or later—if he survived—word would reach him of what she had done, and there was perhaps a message in that; and if she was lucky, if she was careful, if she didn’t let them drive her into the river, perhaps her body would be found and there was most certainly a message in that if he could only read it.

When they leaped up onto the paddy wall to face whatever was coming, blade in hand, so did she.

She was only a beat behind them because she couldn’t leap a wall so high, she had to climb it. Blade in her teeth to free her hands: she could have laughed at herself if only she’d had the time, the courage, someone to tell the emperor what she’d done.

She scrambled up the bank of mud and stone, peering for handholds and for any man above who might reach down to help or else to knock her back.

Because her head was tilted back, she could see a lot of sky.

Because of that, perhaps, she saw the dragon.

IT WAS only a glimpse, but Mei Feng knew what she was seeing: the impossibility of it, the great appalling body that flew without wings, without law.

Today she flew on the wings of a storm, it seemed. As though she dragged cloud like a curtain behind her, great banks of it in sick and heavy colors, yellow and green and gray, as thick as congee. Perhaps the sky was protesting at last, massing up in refusal of a power that would always be alien, never familiar however often the dragon flew.

As Mei Feng watched, that bad sky swallowed the dragon whole.

In the last moment before she was gone, Mei Feng saw that she carried something gripped in her front claws, like an eagle with a fish.

OR AN EEL, more like, a clawed eel: a monstrous clawed eel with a monstrous great …

A great hand reached down and scooped Mei Feng under her armpit, lifted her up onto the top of the retaining wall and shook her, shook what she had seen almost out of her head, almost.

She took the long knife out of her mouth and drew breath to tell it anyway, before someone else could; and he shook her again and said, “What are you doing, Mei Feng? Didn’t you hear Jiao? Stay below, I will leave some men with you …”

“Who will be no more inclined to stay below than you are,” she said, “or me either. I can fight,” waving the blade in her hand to prove it, driving him one step backward, don’t you shake me. “You cut off their heads, I’ll cut off their kneecaps. Or, no, better: the other way around. We’ll wait at that wall,” the next step up, the terrace wall to a higher paddy, “where you can cut them off at the kneecap because that’s as high as you’ll be able to reach when they’re standing on the wall; and then they’ll fall right at our feet, and I can cut off their heads.”

He stared for a moment, and then he laughed; and he was still laughing as he died, as the arrow slammed into his neck and knocked him back onto the road like a broken puppet, loose-limbed in the wrong way, no control.

For a moment she stood there staring, and a second arrow could have taken her too. Then she saw that he’d dropped his tao, and stooped to retrieve it. If there was a second arrow, it went over her head. A third would never have found her, because she’d already jumped down into the paddy.

Water to her knees and the soft mud beneath, where the rice was rooted; she had always hated this at planting time, when all the village turned out to help. She could be wet all day and all night at sea and never worry, but clinging ooze between her toes was vile.

There were bodies, too, half floating, half buried in the mud. Stray hands grasped at her, stray eyes watched her with the lost passion of ghosts. She plunged blindly on till she came hard up against mud and stone, the next terrace rising above her.

She stalled there, hearing men fight overhead, lacking either the courage or the folly to scramble up between their legs; but one man fell down, dead or dead enough, and another jumped down after him.

WHICH OUGHT to make that man a rebel because an imperial soldier should be fighting his way upslope, not coming down.

That was all the thinking time she had before the man caught his balance in the water, looked around, saw her.

Saw her and raised his tao in an instant, snarling his contempt, seeing her perhaps as a boy or perhaps as a woman but barely worth the slaying either way, although he would.

Only he wouldn’t, because her blade was swifter and her wrist was stronger or else she was just more ready. She knocked his tao ringingly aside and took his throat on the backswing, and he fell down to bleed out into the paddy.

And then—not wanting to linger now, not wanting his ghost-glare in her eyes or on her mind—she was apparently bold or foolish after all, because she did haul herself up to the next level. Men were fighting on the wall and on the paths, all through the paddy. It was hard to tell which were imperial troops and which were rebels, in all the mud and the noise and the confusion. Mostly, she hoped the imperial troops would know her.

Perhaps all battles were like this, trust and hope?

There was a storm coming; here was the rain, first fall of it, warm heavy drops as thick and hot as blood. It wouldn’t stop this man coming at her now, trying to kill her; it wouldn’t stop her either. Nor would he.

Always run to meet trouble. His arm was high, his blade was swinging down, he was a fool expecting her to shriek or cower or back away.

She hopped nimbly forward, inside the reach of his arm and lunging. Never mind where his blade went, so long as hers struck home …

Which it did, through leather armor and skin and belly, and when had it become so easy to kill a man?

In and out. She pulled her blade free and watched him fall and looked around, saw a man she was sure of, one of Jiao’s in trouble, and went to help.

Two to one, and that was easy too, so the two of them went on together. And found another that this man would vouch for, and then they were a threesome.

The rain was coming hard now, making everything harder. Footing was treacherous even on the paths; the grip on her tao was slippery. Sighting men was still easy, there were so many, but telling one side from the other …

Most were in the water, churning up the paddy, ruining the crop. A blade lashed out, trying for one of her companions—cut him off at the knees—but hers came down first, steel grating on steel, skewing that thrust aside. Her other man hacked down, half split the rebel’s skull for him. If he was a rebel. She thought so, probably …

And this one too, heaving himself up at her, trying to knock her off her feet, off the path. His shoulder caught her knee, and it was only storm-trained muscles that let her take that, let her catch her balance and keep her feet in the mud. And then he was sprawled across the path and only something to be stepped over. A nod of thanks to the man who had killed him; there should have been more acknowledgment, but breath was short and precious where most of what her mouth could catch was water.

Here came wind too, snatching at what little air she had, trying itself to blast her from the path. She was doubly glad to come to the next terrace wall, glad just to cling to it, to feel her two companions drawing in on either side and clinging too.

It couldn’t be this dark, this time of day; the rain must be knocking the light out of the sky, washing it away …

A glance up showed her worse clouds than the dragon had brought, black thunderheads from horizon to horizon, tossing lightning-flares between them. No hint, no hope of sun. Except around the margins, where bright day still shone, north and south …

“Typhoon!” a voice shrieked in her ear, and what could she do but nod?

She’d never been at sea in a typhoon, Grandfather was just too wise a sailor. She’d never been anywhere but in their little house, hugging whatever came to hand—a puppy, a cushion, a coat: it just felt better, something soft and warm to hold on to—while the wind hurled the rain against the walls and the roof creaked and tried to lift away, tried to lift the whole house away but that Grandfather had built it too tight and too heavy, too well fixed in the earth. Nothing came in, not the least whisper of water, not a stir of the air: only the sounds of the storm, that her child-mind used to picture as monsters stomping and grabbing, spitting and slobbering and utterly denied.

Now the wind could have her, if it wanted her. The rain had drenched her already, and had hopes of drowning her. She thought she’d rather the dragon came to swallow her quickly; or just a rebel, any rebel, there were enough of those around. One quick stab, surely better than this slow pounding to death, or the wind lifting her up and taking her away, set her to fly against the dragon who must still be up there somewhere, still causing this …

The wind made a vicious lash of the rain, and every stroke of it stung her to tears, but she could look.

She saw men doubled over in the paddy, she saw them blown over entirely and struggling to rise, struggling not to drown in that little churn of muddy water. Some would make it to their feet, she thought, some not.

What she didn’t see, she didn’t see anyone fighting now. Who could? Who could conceive of it, even, in this?

She gripped the arms of her two companions, pulled them close and bellowed in her best imitation of Grandfather’s fog-voice: “We need to go back! Back to the city!” There could be no war in this, no victory for either side, only destruction for both. And this was only the fringe, first breath of the typhoon; there would be worse and far worse to come.

She didn’t tell them that. Two tough men and her own unexpected whip-strength to back them, perhaps they could hold to each other and walk, just about, through this. If they could reach solid shelter before its strength grew, before the waters rose, they might be safe. Perhaps …