Jade Dragon Mountain (40 page)

The Emperor squared his broad shoulders and raised a finger. “I declared my intention to preside over an eclipse of the sun here in Dayan. The people were to witness my divinity. I invited foreigners to cross the border and attend. We provided the Company with a stage on which to enact their own charade. Against the backdrop of the festival and the eclipse, my death would have seemed as divine as the power I intended to display. My sons would have known. They would have planned to avenge me. But the empire would have been in chaos, and none of the princes are wise enough yet to lead. That is what this Company hoped.”

Li Du heard something in the Emperor's voice and, aware of the powers of perception directed at him, he kept his expression carefully under control, allowing no sign or suggestion of what he was thinking to alter his appearance. He was thinking about the second prince, about rumors that had begun years ago, that he was eager to rebel against his father. How had the Company known so much? And how had Gray escaped? The Emperor may have cast a tight net across the province, but the crown princes had their own resources.

The Emperor spoke again. “My instinct about these foreigners has been correct. I predict conflict with these Western empires in the future. I will not allow this attempt on my life to enter my history, but I will not forget it. Now I wish to speak to my close advisors on the apprehension of the assassin. You are both dismissed. And for your services, Li Du, I grant you an end to your banishment. You will not be reinstated to your former position, but to a new one, as head librarian of the Forbidden City.”

*   *   *

Lady Chen was outside the kitchen issuing instructions to a cook. “Remember,” she was saying, “that the Chief Commander of the Cavalry does not care for bird's nest, and finds the sight of it unappetizing. So you must not place it near him when you serve the table. If he is not there when you serve, you will know his place by the purple and green porcelain. Do you understand?”

The cook nodded that he did, and hurried back through the smoke-blackened doors into the kitchen, repeating Lady Chen's words to himself in a whisper.

When she saw Li Du, Lady Chen nodded in greeting and walked over to him. “We have not spoken,” she said, “since the night you named that snake who had disguised himself in our home. And since that time, a great deal more has occurred.”

“As you say.”

“When I saw you speak to the magistrate I knew that there was grave danger. I will confess to you that in that moment I turned all my thoughts to the wish that he would listen to you this once. He does not like that you are more clever than he is.”

Li Du shook his head modestly. She smiled at this, aware that her comment had pleased him in spite of his effort to brush it aside.

“You have heard,” she said, “that I am to accompany the family to Beijing?”

“My congratulations. And do you look forward to the change?”

“To see the capital city? A woman would be out of her wits not to be filled with excitement at the prospect. The official who is to be the new magistrate in Dayan is also here without his wives, and will need someone to maintain the mansion. I have recommended my maid Bao for his consideration as first consort.”

Li Du blinked. “Bao? But you quarreled…”

“For someone who has been out of society for years, you have navigated the complexities of our situation very deftly. You have shown yourself adept in understanding politics, science, even the bizarre religion of the foreigners. But I assure you—the workings of a household remain beyond your comprehension. Bao has been useful to me, and I admire a woman who is not docile. I would never have left my own dirty village if I had not had some spite in me. It is a good quality, when kept under control.”

“I have been meaning to thank you for leading me to Brother Pieter's journal.”

Lady Chen waved a pale hand dismissively. “I noticed it during my inventories in the library and thought it might of importance to you.”

“You will pardon me, but I do not think that is what happened.”

Lady Chen's countenance changed, and her voice adopted the formal, authoritative edge that she used with servants. “But that
is
what happened. And now I must ask your pardon. Tonight's guests are beginning to arrive, and the musicians have not yet taken their places. The chimes last night were out of key, and one the guests complained.”

Their steps had brought them to a secluded place on one of the garden paths. Seeing no one, Li Du said, “You have concealed the truth about your past in order to keep your position in the magistrate's family. I know as well as you my cousin's concern about reputation. I know that your status as daughter of a village leader was important to him in his decision to accept you into his home. He considers family lineage an essential aspect of a person's worth.”

Lady Chen stopped abruptly, and the pearls and silver in her hair trembled above her still face. Li Du had stopped also, and she spoke to him very quietly, without turning to face him. “You have misunderstood,” she said. “I am not as fearful as you think. I know how to shift a situation to my advantage. But I prefer to control exactly what is said about me, and when it is said. A consort who does not have the security of marriage must have power over the opinions of others. The time may come when my parentage is valuable to me, when I might wield it as an attractive mystery.” She spoke, not with bitterness, but with flat resolve. “It would have been inconvenient for … for complications about my past to have come up during the past weeks. The magistrate needed me as his confidant, not as another problem to consider.”

Now she met Li Du's eyes. Finding sympathy in them, she gestured impatiently and began to turn away. She stopped when Li Du said, so quietly that she would not have been able to hear his words had she not guessed what they would be, “Did you know that Pieter was your father from the moment you met him?”

There was a long silence. Then Lady Chen's posture and expression relaxed almost imperceptibly. “No,” she said. “Not at first. When I learned that he had come to Dayan before—that was when I began to wonder. My mother was a widow when the foreign man came to stay with her family. It was not a very secret romance, and it invited no particular condemnation. My aunt and uncle were very happy to call me their own when my mother died. As for my father—he never knew that she was with child when he was called away by his superiors.”

“And Pieter? He recognized the wine, didn't he.”

“Yes.” The catch in her voice was so slight he almost missed it. “I was foolish that night,” she said. “But even I sometimes am too romantic. The storyteller was there, and the lantern and the fine guests from the capital. I was emotional, and I thought to test him. I poured his wine, and I said very quietly that it was my mother's recipe, and that she told me once that my father had given the wine a name, a strange word that I remember laughing at as a child.
Cassiopeia
, after a queen whose throne is fixed in the stars.”

“And he remembered.”

“I do not know what I meant to do. It was an impulse, and when he left so suddenly I was truly concerned for him. And I wanted to talk to him, to know something of him. But when I arrived at his room he was dead.”

“And you took the journal.”

“It was horrible.” She closed her eyes tightly, remembering. She opened them and looked again at Li Du. “I could not understand what I saw. But he was, after all, a stranger to me, and I collected my thoughts quickly. I had the idea that the journal I saw him carrying might tell me something of him, and I took it. Of course I realized later that it was in a language I cannot read. I—I could not destroy it, so I hid it in the library.”

“And what made you decide to lead me to it?”

“As I have told you before, there are no secrets from me here. I followed your investigation. I heard of your conversations with the storyteller. When I realized that your goal was in fact to bring the killer to justice, not to gain some advantage for yourself, I decided to help you.”

“It was the journal that set me on the path to the truth.”

She shook her head. “It was your own determination,” she said, “and I admired it. I did not know the foreigner, but neither did I want his killer to go free. My mother loved him. Are you going to speak of this to the magistrate?”

“I see no reason whatsoever to do that.”

“I did not think you would. And now there are tasks to which I must attend. I would prefer not to discuss this again. Now that the household is to move to the capital, I must consider all that is to be done, and all that will be different. Perhaps you and I will meet again in the north.”

She bowed her head in formal dismissal, as if they had been discussing a matter of household business, and Li Du, with an answering bow, took his leave of her.

*   *   *

Some hours later, Hamza and Li Du were sitting in one of the inn's courtyards, as it had become their habit to do. The inn for once was almost empty, its guests of rank well into their wine at that night's banquet, everyone else well into their wine on the festival field. There were to be candles in the dragon canal that evening, and all day people had been buying folded lotus leaf boats in which to float the tiny flames down the stream. From where they sat, Li Du and Hamza could barely hear the booming and crackling of fireworks and the cheers that followed, carried on the wind from the high field.

“It has been an evil month in Dayan,” said Hamza, without rancor. “An excess of bad intentions whose final alchemy was the dissolution of both schemes. Two villains, each one unaware of the other.”

“And I,” said Li Du, “I almost helped one of them succeed.”

Hamza furrowed his brow. “But you foiled them both. What is your meaning?”

Li Du rubbed the back of his neck and looked up as a new star appeared among the crooked branches of the plum tree. “When I corrected the calendar, I doomed the Emperor to death. I set the festival back in line with the clockwork so that the Emperor and the weapon were once more scheduled to meet.” He shivered. “If I had not discovered Jia Huan's sabotage, the tellurion would have remained dormant during the false eclipse. It would have burst into its strange flame on the following day, probably nowhere near the Emperor.”

Hamza sighed. “What will you do, now that you have your pardon?”

“I have not yet accepted the position in Beijing.”

“Can you refuse it?”

Li Du remembered the Emperor's face as he had seen it earlier that day and nodded. “I believe the Emperor would respect the whim of a scholar recluse.”

Hamza chuckled. “I thought you were determined to avoid that title. And what of your library? The grand library of the empire. You don't want to return to it?”

“I do. But perhaps not quite yet.”

“Brother Pieter told me,” said Hamza, “that on the island of his birth, the sea rises so high that it brings shells to the doorsteps and paves the streets with seaweed. You know there is a way to Europe if you travel first north to Tibet. Kalden Dorjee and his caravan are camped outside of Gyalthang for the month, and we should return his mules to him. Perhaps he would guide us as far west as Lhasa.”

“We could,” said Li Du, “see the young Jesuit safely to India, if we are traveling that way.”

“You are right. And I have an assignation in Agra with that eager Frenchman who wants to bind my tales in one of his books. I still condemn it as a foolish project.”

“You do not approve of putting stories into writing.”

“Books are for government records and alchemical recipes and all the insipid wisdom of Confucius, not for stories. You do not agree?”

“I would not imprison words unread in the dark, but I am not sure that I trust them to a place as fragile and prone to distraction as memory.”

“Books can burn or be eaten by worms.”

“Storytellers do not live forever.”

“It is a point of fact that some of them do.”

“Let us say, then, that we serve a common cause.”

Together they watched the stars flare and twinkle and cloud together across the moonless sky. The coals burned red in the brazier, and their lacquered wine cups gleamed as green as spring bamboo in the fading light.

 

About the Author

Elsa Hart
was born in Rome, Italy, but her earliest memories are of Moscow, where her family lived until 1991. Since then she has lived in the Czech Republic, the United States, and China. She earned a B.A. from Swarthmore College and a J.D. from Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. She wrote
Jade Dragon Mountain
in Lijiang, the city that has grown up around the old town of Dayan. It is her first novel. You can sign up for email updates
here
.