The Secrets of Jin-Shei (74 page)
Read The Secrets of Jin-Shei Online
Authors: Alma Alexander
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Asian American, #Literary
“Because no place would be safe if you did not,” Tai said, tears standing in her eyes. “I know what it is that I ask of you. But I do not ask it in Liudan’s name, or my own—I ask it because the Gods of Cahan have thrown it into my path. You exist for a reason—all of us are here because there is a role for us to play as the Way unfolds around us. You are what knits together this realm—the bond that is between you and Zhan, your own twin heritage. Liudan won’t have any children. Even I can sense that about her, and every
ganshu
reading she has ever had has confirmed it. Yovann is all we have, Amri.”
“I won’t give my child to the city,” Tammary said. “I won’t! We have made a life here. We are a family. We are happy. Jovanna has barely turned a year old, for the love of all the gods you hold dear! I can’t give her up. I can’t.”
“Amri.” Tai reached out, touched the other woman’s hand gently, and withdrew when Tammary flinched. “I haven’t come here to demand, or to steal,” she said. “What will come, will come—whatever you decide. But think on it.”
“They would take her from me,” Tammary said brokenly.
“She would have to be educated for her position,” Tai said, “yes. But that would not be for years. Nobody wants to steal either her childhood or your role in it.” She swallowed. “I’m sorry, Amri. I almost didn’t even come. I know what I am asking. But I am still bound by the same bonds which once made you ask me to protect you in your flight—it’s
jin-shei
that drives me, even now. It’s
jin-shei
that can save Syai from more bloody strife.”
“Liudan laid the foundation to that,” Tammary said implacably.
“Yes,” Tai said. “She did. But we are all connected, all of our paths crossing and recrossing. I will abide by your decision.”
Tammary buried her face in her hands.
After a moment, Tai reached out and brushed Tammary’s shoulders with her fingertips, very gently “Amri, I’m sorry It hangs by a thread—this thread. Once I knew that, I had to come. I had to ask.”
The candles burned for a long time in Tammary and Zhan’s bedroom that night, and a small rushlight flickered in the room they had given Tai, almost an echo, as she kept her own vigil that night. Once, very late, Tai thought she heard the muted wail of a child, but it was quickly stilled into silence again.
“If someone had come asking me to give up Xanshi to a future with a throne but without me, would I have done it? Would I have done it?” Tai whispered to herself, staring out of her window, into a country-dark sky full of blazing summer stars. “How can I expect her to do it, to give up that child of all children, the joy which was born after so much suffering? How could I even ask her? How could I possibly expect her to come to me tomorrow with any answer but a resounding
no?”
But Yovann would be
jin-shei
‘
s
child, fostered by the sisterhood, raised to a crown, born to hold a country, to keep an Empire prosperous and peaceful. Liudan herself had sworn to that, in the conversation she and Tai had had.
She would be as one born to me and into my line,
Liudan had said, when the existence of Tammary’s daughter had been revealed.
A daughter for the Empire.
But Tammary had been through too much, had endured too much, for this sacrifice to be demanded of her.
Tai watched the sky brighten into the dawn, walked out before sunrise to watch the light starting to spill down the mountains, kindling the snow on the mountaintops into blazing glory, limning the woods on the steep slopes with the glow of summer sunlight, finally touching the small house in the hills where so many had lain sleepless that night.
A soft step behind her told her she was no longer alone, but she waited, without turning, until she heard her
jin-shei-bao
’ voice, a broken whisper.
“Will you promise that she’ll be happy?”
“I can’t, Amri,” Tai said. “Nobody can make that promise in anyone’s name.”
“At least let her marry Baio when her time comes,” Tammary said, with something that was halfway between a laugh and a sob.
Tai turned. “She will be Empress, then, Amri, and it will be the Empress who will choose her mate. But if the stars are right, then my son could
well be one of those whom they present to her. And although
jin-shei
does not cross generations—a sister chooses and is chosen and does not inherit her mother’s sisters’ children as her own circle—it would please me greatly if she and my Xanshi choose as you and I once chose.”
“I talked to Zhan,” Tammary said, and she was crying now, openly. “He says … we decided.”
“It will be many years before she is called,” Tai said, her own throat tight. “I told you, I did not come here to snatch your baby from you, Amri! There are many years ahead of you both. In many ways it is you who will shape the new Empress. But if you are willing, I can go home and tell Syai that there is a Little Empress who will come to claim the throne when she is grown.”
“She will come,” Tammary whispered.
It is pau-kala
, Tai wrote in her journal, late that night.
The branch is still bare. The old tree’s leaves will never return—they are a memory and a song. But there is a sapling, there is a sapling right there beside the old tree, and it’s trembling with promise. There will be a spring again.
There is no end, and no beginning.
We all begin in the clouds of Atu,
made from the same stuff
as the stars.Kito-Tai, Year 28 of the Star Emperor
“Y
es, yes,” Tai said testily, shaking off the helping hands which would have supported her as she approached the ruined edge of what had once been the Summer Palace of the Syai Emperors. “I may be old, but I am not helpless. And I know this place a lot better than you do.”
“But your cane does not,
baya
-Tai,” the cheeky young voice of one of her self-appointed guides piped up.
“Besides …” began the other, a leggy girl of about thirteen years of age, and Tai waved an impatient hand at her.
“I know,” she said. “Your grandmother tamed hawks in these mountains. I know. Now let go of my arm, Amai, you’re going to have me fall over in a minute.”
“But you’re old,
baya
-Tai,” Amai, the girl, pointed out.
“Eia!”
Tai sighed. “If only you could let me forget that for just a moment. Especially here.”
“Tell us a story,
baya
-Tai.” That was the little boy, six or seven years old, his nose sprinkled with the faintest dusting of freckles and his dark hair shining with an undertone of dark red which was an inheritance from the hawk-taming grandmother, Tai’s
jin-shei-bao,
Tammary Dead these many years now.
“Did I ever tell you about the fox called Tami?” Tai murmured.
The children sighed. “Yes,
baya
-Tai,” the boy said with an endearing resignation.
“Hush, Orien,” Amai said, suddenly very much the older sister, reaching for an adult level of insight and understanding. “I’m sure that
baya
-Tai hasn’t told us all the Tami stories.”
“She used to dance here, you know,” Tai murmured, glancing at Amai’s slender form and seeing the long-legged grace of the young Tammary
who had once danced in these ruins to the wild music that only she could hear.
“Who, the fox?” asked the boy, his interest quickening.
“Hush, Orien,” Amai whispered again, staring at Tai’s face. Something had kindled in Tai’s eyes, a distant memory, and she was very far from them at that moment, far away and young again.
It is your grandchildren that bring me here, Amri. No, not your daughter’s children—not the children of the Empress who sits on Syai’s throne. And her Emperor is not my son Baio, as you once wished. Baio is dead, and he never had any children, although he and his bride had an enchanted life. But he died so young, and she mourned, and then came to me and asked if I would forgive her if she married again, and I said that not only I would but that Baio would have wanted that for her. So now she has children—but they are not my blood. And Xanshi had one daughter, and she married into a seafaring family, and lives far, far away now … and I hear from her so seldom, her children are nearly ready for their Xat-Wau by now. They have no further need of a grandmother. So it is these, the children of the son whom you bore to Zhan so late and died of—it is these children who now call me baya-Tai, who call me “grandmother” in your name, although I have no connection to them at all—although they have been born to a woman whom my own son once called wife. Oh, what a tangled path we followed through our lives.
It is here I sense you most vividly—it is here I found my first jin-shei-bao, Antian the Little Empress, and my last—you. She, who gave me the legacy, and you, who gave us all the hope of the future. I think she is happy, your Yovann, your little Jovanna who came to the city so afraid and now rules it so strong and proud beside the man whom she chose as her mate. The Star Emperor, she named him, and there is some of that about them all, some of that brightness. And you did that, Amri, you made her.
I wish I could see you again. I wish I could see you dance.
“
Baya
-Tai?”
“Yes, Orien?”
“Where is this balcony of yours?” Amai interrupted, giving her brother a swift and not very subtle kick on the ankle with the toe of her soft boot to make him hush up.
“Not very far now. This used to be the garden, once. There was a big tree—really big—right about there where you see the young one now—it must have sprung up from its roots. By Cahan, will you look at that?”
“How big was the old tree?”
“Huge,” Tai said, sketching out a gigantic shape with her frail old hands. “Like this. And I used to come out here and draw the flowers when I was a very little girl, younger than you, Amai. And the butterflies—the place was full of butterflies. And they used to hang cricket cages in the trees so they would sing for you in the twilight.”
“How beautiful,” Amai sighed.
But Orien was bored. He kicked at a clump of tall woody weeds bearing surprisingly delicate clusters of white flowers, and was immediately diverted by a flurry of wings as a couple of small birds, startled, shot out of the undergrowth. Pleasantly distracted, Orien ran after them, craning his neck.
“Watch him,” Tai said, “this place is full of holes and rubble. You have to take care of your brother.”
Take care of my sisters.
Ah, Antian. It’s been a long time since we walked together in this garden. Are the gardens of the Gods in the valleys of Cahan as beautiful as the vision of our river was from the old balcony?
I tried—I tried so hard to keep my word. I remember you. I have never let your memory fade in my heart. Your face is as clear to me today as it was nearly seven decades ago now. Your smile, and the light … the light I watched die in your eyes that morning when the world fell to pieces around me.
And then Yuet was there—it was as though you handed me an impossible promise, and then a friend to help me keep it. Oh Yuet, you died the hardest of us all—you died uselessly, and in pain, and I miss you, I’ve missed you these many years. You should have grown old with me. “The healer is compassionate, treating all patients the same way. The healer goes forth when summoned, laboring day and night, ignoring hunger, thirst, fatigue, heat, or cold. The healer tends to the patient with all of his heart.” I remember quoting the healer’s oath at you, a long time ago, on the way back into the city from these very mountains, Tammary who was the Emperor’s child asleep in the back room in the hostelry where we broke our journey, and you were so afraid, Yuet, of what we were about to do … and now her grandchildren run around me and love me and keep me young.
I think, Yuet, that you would have been proud of what Amri finally became. The problem child from the mountains who you and I had so much trouble with grew up to be a gracious woman, a loving wife, a selfless mother—and a healer, Yuet, in her turn. I wish you could have lived to see her children. Perhaps, if you had lived, she
would not have died. Or perhaps I call your own gifts magic now, remembering them magnified now that they are so long gone from me? But no—you were a healer born. I remember now, that epidemic when you first got to know Qiaan.
“I got him,
baya
-Tai,” Amai said, piloting her little brother back by means of a firm hand between his shoulder blades.
“Shhhh,” Tai said, pointing. “Look over there.”
A rabbit sat on the wreckage of what had once been a fountain, now overgrown with moss and tall grass. The rabbit was grooming itself in the sunshine, washing its long ears, unaware of company until Orien suddenly sneezed explosively into his sleeve. The rabbit twitched, and disappeared into the grass.