Heart and Soul (14 page)

A young woman had come out of the shadows. She led the sisters-in-law out of the deep cave, past the passage, at a much faster pace than they’d gone in.

In the outer cave, their boat lay waiting. They climbed in, and before they could touch the oars, the boat lifted off. It flew through the deep blue. And Jade found herself too stunned to speak.

THE FOREIGN-DEVIL MIND

Third Lady was deep in thought. She didn’t know
what her sister-in-law had understood of the dictates of the oracle, but she herself was stunned. When they’d said the maiden who loved Wen should take him to the underworld, her heart had stopped beating for a moment. Not that she thought they meant for her to kill Wen, but that they’d referred to her as a maiden. Which, indeed, she was.

She remembered meeting Wen. It had been at parties he attended with his father, in the village nearby where the Dragon Boats were normally moored, and sometimes at parties aboard the Dragon Boats themselves. The local people were no more than successful crafters and merchants, or perhaps successful bandits, which often came much to the same in locals’ estimation.

Oh, she wasn’t so foolish as to think that every farmer family nearby didn’t know that the collection of oddly assorted barges and boats was the domain of the True Dragon Emperor. She wasn’t a fool. The peasants knew or suspected, even if no one else did.

But a long time had passed since the Dragon Dynasty had ruled China. Millennia. Men uncounted had been born and lived and turned to dust. The peasants still knew that some people had the power to become animals, and to each animal they attributed certain qualities. Nobility to the dragon. Sly scheming to the fox. But that didn’t mean they necessarily believed there had ever been a first Dragon Emperor, a first dynasty connected to the land like one of its limbs. No. They would think it nothing more than a pretty legend, a nice story. And in the privacy of their own homes, talking to their grandchildren, they might speak of the barges and boats as the domain of the True Emperor. But in the full light of day, in the crowded rooms of the tavern, while they might know that these neighbors of theirs could change their form and fly through the air, they’d never admit to one another that they believed in lost monarchies.

Third Lady—Precious Lotus, as she then was—the main singsong girl in this party of traveling entertainers, had known right away that she was performing for her emperor. Her father often got magical dispatches from the dragon capital in which the dragon spoke from a magical image in midair. She knew the emperor’s look, that pinched expression about his eyes, and the way his mouth was set as though he suffered from a deep discontent. She did not know his son. Wen—broad of shoulder, very slim, his hair like black silk, spilling down his shoulders—had seemed to her quite the most beautiful young man of her acquaintance. His slightly detached, distant look only made him more interesting and unattainable. And the fact that his eyes lit up when he looked at her did not disconcert her at all.

One night, after many months of thinking about only him, she had performed as if just for Wen. That night, he had stolen her heart. And when the emperor had come, having noticed Wen’s partiality, to purchase her contract from the master of the singsong troupe, the man, not knowing the true status of the one addressing him, had demurred. After all, someone of Third Lady’s ability and beauty might become even the first wife of a minor nobleman or a well-to-do merchant. Certainly, she could do better than third wife of a member of a ragtag itinerant merchant or crafter band.

It had taken all her cunning to persuade him to sell her contract. And only part of it had been done because the man negotiating was the True Emperor. Precious Lotus had never had dreams of becoming royalty or even of mingling with it. No. It had been done because she dreamed of Wen and wanted to be by his side. He had captured her heart with a glance.

But the marriage had not gone well. Wen had taken opium before their wedding night, and slept on his side of the bed, all but ignoring her. And it had not changed since.

He still preferred her. And in his more lucid moments, she thought she saw his eyes appraise her figure, covetously. But he’d not done anything about it, and therefore a maiden she remained. She didn’t know about his other wives, whom she decorously called Elder Sisters, but she suspected that they were much in the same state. And just like her, they would rather die than admit their virginal nature.

If the oracle was right, then Wen’s soul was captive in the underworld, held on some contrived offense by Zhang and his dead ancestors. She might attract his body, she might attract his mind, she might attract his heart—but she could never make him love her as he should, not until his soul was freed.

If she understood it all correctly, getting Wen addicted to opium had been Zhang’s means to make sure that Wen’s soul could be detached from his body and detained indefinitely in the underworld. She bit her lower lip, in deep thought, trying to remember what she knew of the underworld and of how to rescue someone held prisoner there. Even if the oracle hadn’t told her, she knew Judge Bao—a judge who’d lived many centuries before and who, upon moving to the underworld at death, had become the ruler of the Office of Speedy Retribution—would be the man to appeal to. His court required far fewer bribes than others, and he was known for taking fast and conclusive action. Hence the name of his office.

But while, like every maiden of the Fox Clan, Third Lady knew well enough how to arrange the travel to Feng Du and how to conduct herself there, she was not versed in legal matters. She must consult some of the scrolls on the records boat, scrolls that went back to when Wen’s ancestors were seated on a physical throne and ruled over an immense area. They were magically preserved, kept from aging, and they were open to all, provided you neither removed them from the records boat nor damaged them, something the hovering archivists ensured.

Sitting opposite her, Lady Red Jade cleared her throat. “You do not set…too much store by the words of the oracle, do you, Third Lady?”

Third Lady looked at her with eyebrows raised, and tried to keep her shock from her face. “Of course I do,” she answered at last. “For you must know it is the most ancient oracle in China, dating from the time when your ancestors ruled the land in deed and right. And never has it been known to be wrong.”

Red Jade frowned, as though she were struggling with the impossible. For one moment of panic, Third Lady thought she would ask about her being called a maiden, and felt her cheeks heat at the thought. But when the Lady Red Jade spoke, it was about something completely different. “But…were they telling you to kill my brother?”

The question so startled Third Lady that she laughed, a high peel of a laugh. “Oh, no, my lady. No.”

Jade raised eyebrows at her, as though demanding an explanation, and Third Lady gave it, in tumbling words. “It is only, you see, that they want me to take him to Feng Du. It is a spirit journey, and it doesn’t necessitate death. Maybe people have visited the hells and come back to tell the story. Indeed, it is quite normal for the courts of the underworld to summon living people to come and testify on some case before them.” She fixed the rudder, now that they were set on a straight course for a while. From the east, a pinkish light had started to glow, making her hope they would make it back to the Dragon Boats before daylight bathed all and revealed they’d even been absent at all.

This done, she folded her hands in her lap and looked at her sister-in-law, who was staring back at her in puzzled wonder. Third Lady smiled a little, remembering that Red Jade had been raised in a very odd way.

It wasn’t that the Dragon Boats didn’t have a clan of women, or even a group of elderly matriarchs ready to transmit ancient lore to the new generation. It was that Red Jade had been doubly isolated. First, because she was the emperor’s only daughter and arguably his favorite child. This had set her apart and made her someone who could not be impunely disturbed or confined to the standards to which most other young women adhered.

For one, past twenty though she was, she had never had a marriage negotiated for her. This was because Wen was sickly. Everyone knew that, should he die, the throne would devolve upon Jade and whomever she married. And, failing that, upon Zhang. But the emperor, desirous of preserving his line, had many times turned down the offers of the widower Zhang for Jade’s hand, in part because he knew that once Zhang married Jade he would waste no time at all in dethroning Wen.

But it went beyond that. In his fondness for his daughter, or his desire to ensure she was well protected, he had taught Jade how to fight and use weapons like any boy. Sometimes, when he thought the raid would be less dangerous than usual—such as when they raided a small vessel, carrying only a family party—he would allow her to join in.

These things made her as alien to the matrons and crones of the Dragon Boats as if she had come from the moon. It also meant no one had taught her the uniquely feminine magical arts, the commerce with the underworld, the sorcery of foreseeing, foretelling and changing the path of events.

If she’d learned any sorcery at all, it had been from her foreign-devil mother, whom the emperor, in fondness or madness, had allowed to rear her. And Third Lady, who had heard not very flattering things of the efficacy of foreign women’s magic, gave her sister-in-law a look of profound pity.

“You must know,” she said, “often when people seem to be dead for a time, and then come back to life and are as before, that was what happened to them. They were taken to testify in the courts of the underworld.”

“Oh,” Red Jade said, but she didn’t look as though she had accepted—much less believed—what Third Lady said. “But…surely…” she said, and paused. “Surely you don’t believe in all that.” She made a gesture that seemed to encompass their own flying boat, the velvet sky, the stars, and the scraggly forest they were flying over.

“All that what, milady?” Third Lady asked, genuinely puzzled, wondering what her sister-in-law could be thinking.

“Well…the…You can’t believe that the underworld, or whatever you wish to call the time after death, has the same rules and laws as our world. You can’t really believe they have an emperor who issues decrees, or a court that judges them. You cannot believe that living people sue the dead, or vice versa.”

“But they do, my lady,” Third Lady said. “Feng Du, or Diyu, is…well, we call it the underworld, because you can enter it from some caves, but it is in fact a mountain in another…universe. In there all the laws of China meet, and it…it rewards and punishes everyone according to their beliefs. Buddhists and Daoists and all are accommodated in Feng Du, where there are courts and judges, punishments and purification for all. And then there is heaven, and the court of the Jade Emperor, where he is the perfect emperor and rules those whose feats have made them almost gods and caused them to ascend to the heavens. And all of it, heaven and Feng Du, is ruled according to rules administered by judges, who also have power over the living. Have you not read records of how the emperors themselves can be sued? How we must purchase the space under the Earth from the gods of the underworld, if we wish to bury our dead there? How tomb contracts must be drawn between the living and the gods of the underworld? Why would we do this, my lady, were it not necessary? Do you think most people, living from hand to mouth as they do, would bother with things that aren’t necessary?”

Red Jade opened her mouth, closed it. When she opened it again, it was to speak in a weak, young voice that made her seem like a girl begging to be instructed. “My mother said there was nothing like it. That there were two places people went after death, and one only if they’d been very good, one if they’d been very bad. She laughed at the underworld courts and…and all that. And her people seem to have as much proof of the existence of their afterlife as you claim we have of ours. And then…there are other people—the followers of Buddha—who believe we must return in an ever-ending cycle of lives, until we give up the joy in life and any interest in human affairs. How do you reconcile that with your idea of the underworld? How can an underworld occupy so many varied places and satisfy so many different beliefs?”