The Secrets of Jin-Shei (9 page)

On the way home through the streets that shimmered with heat and swirled with dust-devils in the alleys, she allowed herself a brief bitter moment of self-pity. Would it have been different if she had been able-bodied? Would the miraculous cure of her gimpy foot also bring her a friend or two she could share her dreams with?

The day was far advanced; Nhia had spent too long at the Temple, even by her mother’s admittedly biased measure.

“You’re late,” Li said. “Did you find what you sought at the Temple?”

She always asked that. As though there could be a different answer than the one she always got. Her tone, however, was a little pointed this time, leaving unspoken the barbed implication that whatever Nhia had been looking for there could have taken considerably less time.

“Yes, Mother,” said Nhia, gritting her teeth, coming up with the customary reply to the usual question, choosing not to respond to the undercurrents. “The Temple was fulfilling.”

There could have been a different answer this time, but Nhia, for all that she ached to talk about what had happened, shied from discussing it with her mother. There would be too many questions, too many conclusions being jumped to, too much extrapolation and speculation, possibly far too much unwarranted excitement. That was not what she wanted, not right now.

Li, not knowing that there was anything beneath Nhia’s terse and colorless reply, appeared to be content with the response that she had expected, and delved no deeper. She handed Nhia a pile of mending to be done while she got on with folding the washed, starched, and ironed linen ready to go back to clients before starting on ironing the next batch. There could have been nothing more calculated to dampen Nhia’s enthusiasm and initial euphoria. This was what she was. This was what she would always be. Daughter to the woman who did the laundry and the mending for the wealthy and the well-to-do. The
crippled
daughter of the woman who did the laundry. Someone who could help stir the sheets in the vats, her eyes smarting from the sharp bleach her mother used, or mend small tears in fine tablecloths or women’s underwear. It wasn’t even a craft or a thing of beauty, the sort of thing the much younger Tai could already accomplish with her own needle and the silk embroidery thread. Nhia was neat but her hands were not as skilled, nor her mind that way inclined. For her, the needle was neither more nor less than simple drudgery.

Her mother’s two heavy black irons were set to heat on the heating plate laid over raked embers, and Li had already started on the chore of fiercely flattening recalcitrant starched linen sheets which haughty servants would soon be tucking onto patrician beds draped with brocaded hangings. Li ironed with a fixed snarl on her face, as though punishing the sheets for the pleasure stains with which they had arrived in her establishment—for all the laughter, and the whispers, and the joy with which they mocked her own solitary existence. Li was not widowed—there would have been some sort of honor in that, at least, and she could have held her head high just as Tai’s mother, Rimshi, had done for years. It was worse, far worse. After Nhia’s arrival, Li’s husband had hung around only long enough to realize what his life would be like from then on—the desperate piety, the offerings, the talismans, the
ganshu
readers, the endless pilgrimages to the Temple, the souring, unrewarded faith—and then he had quietly left one day, simply melting away, taking a change of clothes and his yearwood and nothing else at all. The most bitter blow had been when the
rumors had reached Li and her abandoned daughter that her errant husband had established residence on the outskirts of Linh-an, and was openly living with another woman with whom he had started another family. With whom he had a chubby, angelic son who was almost three before Li found out about his existence. A
perfect
child. Already able to toddle. Nearly ready to run.

A living reproach to the woman who had borne the crippled daughter.

For some reason it was the ironing that brought all this out in her. Most of the time Li was ready to blame the cruel Gods and deities for her lot in life—but when she ironed, through a queer chain of associations, it was all Nhia’s fault—Nhia’s fault that she had been born, that her mother had lived for nearly twelve years now without a man to warm her own bed, without the need to wash her own sheets clean of one night’s pleasures, and starch them into crisp cleanliness breathlessly awaiting the next. Nhia knew the pattern, if not the actual details behind it; she knew the lines that crept onto her mother’s face, and knew very well just when it was prudent to make herself scarce.

Nhia found it hard to walk for very long or very far, but somehow there was enough strength in the twisted foot to operate her mother’s pedal-powered linen delivery cart, and so that had evolved into her particular chore. Rimshi, with her Court connections, had helped Li get a lot of commissions from households associated with the Court. There was no obligation there, no duty, no
jin-shei
tie even—but Rimshi had not needed the weight of a
jin-shei
pledge to offer what help she could. But while summer was Rimshi’s busiest time, preparing the Imperial women for the Autumn Court, summers were always a lean time for Li—simply because the actual Court removed to the Summer Palace and that meant no copious quantities of carelessly soiled laundry from the women’s quarters and no substantial commissions or generous gratuities from those rich enough to be able to afford them without qualms. But there were other households, on the fringes, and it was mostly those to which Nhia pedaled with her cartload on those summer days.

She preferred to do her rounds in the early mornings or in the late, late afternoons when the sun was not beating down with quite as much fury as during the molten, white-hot middle of the day—but the summer heat was infinitely preferable to Li’s icy and unspoken reproach which inevitably returned to roost in the rafters of their hot little room when Li laid the black irons in the fire. Seeing the instruments laid ready, Nhia
deferred the mending, pausing only long enough to grab a broad peaked hat which hung over her face and shoulders and tie it securely under her chin with coarse ribbons before scuttling out of the house.

Her deliveries were marked on each individual bundle, on a piece of recycled paper with names and addresses in
jin-ashu
script. Li, despite being constantly torn between her devoted love of her daughter and constant dutiful prayers to unheeding Gods to heal the child and the bitterness which held that same child responsible for her lonely, abandoned existence, had held up her share of that particular bargain.
Jin-ashu
was her daughter’s heritage, it belonged to her as much as it belonged to every woman in Syai, and Li made sure that this, at least, Nhia was not cheated of.

The delivery cart was equipped with a small bell, and at its summons a household servant usually emerged from a side door at any given household to pick up the clean laundry, deliver the next batch of dirty laundry, and hand over Li’s fee, which Nhia slipped into a waist pouch which she wore underneath her tunic. There were only five deliveries to be made that afternoon but Nhia could feel the sun sucking the energy out of her as she pedaled through the dusty streets, could feel rivulets of sweat snaking down along her spine and beading her forehead. Her hair felt damp and plastered down; her straw hat’s snug presence on her head felt like a vice around her temples before she had gone halfway along her route. She passed a sherbet seller who had grabbed a shady spot underneath a courtyard archway and was loudly hawking his cool drinks, but she had spent all her spare coins at the Temple that morning and it was more than her life was worth to hazard any of Li’s hard-earned fee money on such indulgences. A sherbet paid for in the coin of Li’s acid accusations of profligacy on Nhia’s return home was entirely too expensive for Nhia to contemplate. So she just allowed her mind to cool itself on the thought of the sherbet and pedaled on, resigned, to fulfill her chores.

The household of Cheleh, the Court Chronicler, was the last stop on her list. The Chronicler lived in a brick pagoda house of two storeys with a bright red tile roof. It was surrounded by a low wall, with the
hacha-ashu
symbols for prosperity and happiness—common symbols even those unlearned in the script could recognize—painted on the pillars of the gateway which led through it into the Chronicler’s leafy yard, shaded by a number of magnolia trees. The temperature dropped perceptibly as Nhia drove her cart through this archway and around to the back of the house,
riding in the shade of the trees. There even seemed to be a breath of wind here. She paused for a moment, breathing deeply, taking the time to remove her hat and mop her forehead and temples with her sleeve, feeling reprieved enough to look up at the leafy canopy curled protectively around her, between her and the implacable sun, and smile.

Impatient at the sedan chair bearer’s pace, hot and stifled in the curtained enclosure she shared with her mother and docile younger sister, Khailin’s mood was dangerously volatile as the chair approached home. The Temple trip had been augmented by a brief and unscheduled stopover at the hated ritual baths, which had done little to improve Khailin’s disposition, and the long, hot, stuffy trip home had only served to bring her temper from what had been a low simmer up to a definite readiness to boil explosively at the least provocation. Her skin felt greasy from the oils and balms from the bath, her pores clogged and unable to breathe, her clothes sliding unpleasantly on skin slick from sweat and ointment. Apparently unconcerned with such physical discomforts, Yulinh was dozing, reclined into the cushions in the back of the chair; Yan was sitting gracelessly with her legs crossed in an indecorous manner, playing with a couple of puppets in her lap. Yan was entirely too much like a puppet herself, Khailin thought with a savage little frown. She did what whoever was pulling her strings wanted done; she was the perfect child, obedient, respectful, and completely lacking in any initiative or curiosity.

Khailin had peered out of the sedan chair’s curtains just as the bearers had started to turn into the courtyard, and caught a glimpse of the painted symbol on the left-hand pillar of the gate.
Happiness.
Indeed. Her current rather sour mood saw that sign only as a vague mockery today.

She caught a glimpse of a figure on a pedal cart moving slowly away under the trees at the back of the courtyard, and her eyes narrowed a little at the sight of the cart’s occupant. For a moment it could have been anybody, any one of a thousand thin Linh-an waifs, clad in homespun, features shaded by a huge straw hat. But even as the sedan turned and started to bear Khailin out of sight of the cart and the figure on it, even as she clutched at the sedan chair’s curtains and peered intently at the disappearing cart, the girl on it fumbled under her chin and lifted off her hat, raising her face to the trees, giving Khailin one brief but adequate glimpse of the features she had committed to memory earlier that day at the Temple.

Could it really be this easy?

The little ugly God in the Second Circle was going to have a good fat offering the next time Khailin found herself at the Temple, if indeed this was the same child who had spoken with the Sage Lihui. Khailin scrabbled out of the chair almost before the bearers set it down, drawing a lazy reproof from her somnolent mother.

“Khailin, when are you going to learn that a lady—”

“I’m sorry, Mother,” Khailin said in swift, automatic and thoroughly meaningless apology, and raced into the house.

The thick walls of the pagoda made the air inside soothingly cool after the hot streets, but Khailin didn’t stop to enjoy the change. She skidded around the entrance hall and past the curved staircase leading up to the second floor, and through the door under the stairs, carefully painted to make it practically invisible in the wall, into the back hallway and the servants’ quarters. A woman bearing a tray with delicate porcelain cups on it danced out of Khailin’s way, whisking the tray aside before Khailin smashed into it. A half-closed door farther along the corridor stood ajar, giving Khailin a glimpse of a noisy, crowded kitchen. She nearly ran down another servant, this one bearing a neat bundle of laundry in a white linen bag. At the end of the corridor, a lacquered red door led outside—the back door for deliveries and for the servants’ quarters, the door which opened out into the back couryard. Khailin flung it open, but emerged with a degree of calculated, stately slowness, not wanting to erupt outside looking like she was chasing demons. She was in time to see the back of the cart bouncing away around the corner of the house, with the girl, now wearing her hat again, bent over the steering bar. Seeing just the narrow childish back topped by that gigantic hat like some sort of exotic mushroom … it was hard to be certain … but a sure instinct of recognition made Khailin smile to herself.

It was a simple matter after that to find out who the girl was and what she was doing at Cheleh’s house. Less than four hours had passed since Khailin had first set eyes on her in the Temple.

She made a mental note to find out just
who
the little ugly deity was.

“W
e are here because of
jin-shei
,” Rimshi said to Tai as they sat up late, talking, on the night that Antian’s gift and invitation had arrived from the Little Empress.

“I know,” Tai said, reaching with delight for one of her favorite fairy tales, the one that had been lived, had been real. “You were
jin-shei-bao
to one of the concubines, and she made the rest of them come to you for their Court gowns …” Tai had heard the story many times before but never tired of hearing about it—the story of Xien, her mother’s friend and
jin-shei
sister, the only child of a poverty-stricken family from the warrens of Linh-an whose bewitching dark green eyes and lotus-blossom skin Rimshi had been instrumental in bringing to the notice of the Imperial agents, and who had been raised to the Imperial Court to be the Emperor’s own love. Xien had never borne the Emperor any children, but she had been a beloved companion for years before a wasting disease took her when she was far too young. The Emperor had mourned her, and the Court had missed her; but by the time she was gone Rimshi, the companion of Xien’s childhood and her
jin-shei-bao,
was an essential without whose lavish and meticulous adornments on their garb the ladies of the Court felt incomplete and underdressed.