by Alex Jeffers
1.
The child’s ayah said it was high spirits, a paroxysm of affection, but the truth was simple: the envoy’s daughter killed my dog.
She wanted Ìsho the moment she saw him, his flat nose and panting pink tongue and goggle eyes poking out of my sleeve. I was deliberately too dense to take the hint and make a gift of my dear companion to a spoiled child. Given my position, however, I could not refuse to permit her to play with him. I told her and told her Ìsho was delicate, that she should not urge him to run too hard or squeeze him as if he were a stuffed toy. She killed him.
I am not a man who weeps often. I did not weep when the ayah came running to tell me Ìsho had, he said, taken ill. I continued stoic when I came upon the child in the mission’s garden berating the corpse of my dog for not getting to his feet and frolicking with her. Lifting Ìsho’s minuscule weight from the puddle of vomit and urine soaking into the grass, I made sure he was dead, tucked him into my sleeve where he belonged, and told the wretched poppet, really quite steadily, Ìsho would not be able to play with her anymore.
“Why not?” she demanded.
“I am sorry to say Ìsho has died. Do you know what that means?”
By this time the envoy had been summoned so I need not deal with his daughter’s tantrum, merely witness it and his craven response. Of course, once the child was led away I had no choice but to accept the father’s condescending apologies (he regained his aplomb with unnatural speed), the rather large gift, the two days’ leave from my duties. My heart burning hot with resentment that nearly overmastered my grief, I bowed my way out of the mission and carried my dead dog to the little temple of Jù, where the priestesses of that small god who loves our dumb companions promised to burn his body with all honor and send many prayers up with his smoke. I resolved my next dog would be a mastiff.
I had disliked the envoy since his arrival in the Celestial Realm. The mission’s chargé d’affaires, an often clever woman who had been outre-mer nearly as long as I, sent me downriver to Oesei on the Turquoise Gulf to meet him. Having read the same dispatches, I understood her cleverness led her to believe we would be sympathetic, the envoy travelling with his inamorato and I. (I do not believe he loved the man so much as the man’s rank.) When, descending from the Fejz clipper, he saw awaiting him on the dock a kè-torantin dressed in Haisner brocade robes, I recognized the moment he understood who I was—what I was. I might be distressingly useful, he was thinking, but gone too native to be trusted.
The only protocols he deemed valid were those of our empress’s court in distant Sjolussa. The inamorato was introduced with all his titles, inherited and conferred. The daughter was not introduced at all, although of course I knew about her and observed her in his train holding her ayah’s hand. I expect neither envoy nor inamorato sired the child, a pretty blonde poppet who resembled either only in general ways—I expect they bought her as one might purchase a pet.
After Jù’s temple, I walked the long way home. Through the noisy confusion of the songbird market, past the cricket market, along the bank of the wide, slow Carnelian River with its endless traffic of mighty junques and barges and trade vessels of every seafaring nation in the world. Every nation granted a mission in the capital, that is. Willows trailed their leaves like the Kandadal’s ribbons in the silty water. An itinerant godseller had set up her booth among the trees as if awaiting me. She was surprised by a kè-torantin attired in Haisner fashion who spoke her language, recognized her deities, saints, tutelary spirits. In among her stock I discovered a small cast-bronze idol of Jù in his aspect as a flat-faced sleeve dog, nearly forgot to haggle her down to a fair price. That would have meant bad luck, something I required no more of.
Clutching the idol in my hand, I turned back to the streets of crowded Bhekai. I had not for some years resided in the foreigners’ cantonment. At the gate of the White Peonies vicinage the old grandfather nodded me through politely and I went on to Blue Lamp Street where I rented my small house. The blue lamps mark it as a street of actors and other theatre people, although my nearest neighbors were a scholar and a small bureaucrat.
Inside the door, I removed street shoes and outer robe. I called my servant’s name. My compatriots at the mission were quite sure Shàu was my catamite but it wasn’t so. Shàu had been in my service enough years he was no longer a boy but I could not but remember that he was a boy, an orphan, in equal measure terrified of and fascinated by the kè-torantin who had purchased his contract from an aunt with too many children of her own. I would not, could not, ask of him services outside the terms if they were anything I desired. In any event, now he was grown he had no doubts about preferring the whores of the red houses over those of the yellow.
“Shàu,” I said when he came, “sorrowful news: Ìsho has died. I have given his body to Jù. The house will be quiet and dull without him. Please, this robe is soiled and I do not wish to wear it again.”
Tears had welled up in his eyes but he knew the proprieties as well as I. “Ìsho was a good dog, nen-kè,” he murmured. “Jù will welcome him.” He took the robe from my hands. Whether he burned it or laundered and sold it mattered little to me. I believed him sufficiently sensible to do the latter.
“Now I wish to be alone, undisturbed, for a time. Until dark, I think. You needn’t hurry dinner.” I paused. I had already thought it through but Shàu never liked me doing him favors. “In fact, if it wouldn’t wreck your plans, go to Old An’s for noodles. I have a hankering for noodles. You know what I like.”
“Nen-kè.” Mister Ivory. Shàu came up with the title himself, long ago. “Shall I bring you tea?”
“No, thank you, nothing for now.”
I was about to turn away when I saw the tear escape the cage of his eyelashes and roll down his cheek. “Shàu,” I said, “here, take this.” I pressed the small idol of pug-nosed Jù into his hand. Looking over his head—I did not wish to see another tear—I said, “The house will not be ready to welcome another dog for…some time. And yet it will be lonely without our Ìsho. Go—go to the market before An’s. A songbird, a chameleon, a goldfish in a bowl, a cricket in a cage—whatever you choose. Two, buy two.”
I blundered through the door into the garden. The envoy’s daughter had made my servant cry. She killed my dog and made Shàu weep. I walked to the plum tree at the back of the garden, pressed my brow to its trunk, and tightened my eyelids against tears of my own. The idol of Jù had left marks on my palm that took many minutes to fade.
In my garden it was past the season for peonies but the roses Shàu tended were in bloom. Once my eyes had dried I broke a few fragrant yellow blossoms off their bush—tearing the skin of my hands on their thorns—and carried them indoors. At the entrance to my still chamber I hesitated. One is not meant to come agitated before the Kandadal—one is meant to discover tranquility in the Kandadal’s presence. Paradoxes, paradoxes.
I went in. I laid the roses down on the stone altar among the rotted or dried-out relics of previous offerings. The Kandadal’s said to have approved gifts of flowers yet to prefer they not be placed in water to preserve their beauty a moment longer. If decay upsets me I should endeavor to learn why it upsets me, or accept the upset’s value, or offer him unfading blossoms of colored paper or silk. Or all three. So much I fail to comprehend—so much I am intended not to comprehend.
Walled on two sides with mortared brick, the still chamber was cool. Folding my legs, I settled on the earthen floor before the altar, looked into the Kandadal’s eyes. My idol is varnished wood, one of the jolly young Kandadals, grinning to show his strong, crooked teeth, his eyes crinkled to slits. In the dusk of the unwindowed, unlit chamber the brown glass inset within the slits did not glint. Like myself the Kandadal was a foreigner. Scholars say he never visited Haisn, his philosophies brought in the train of the Owe-ejan-akhar’s daughter centuries after the mortal Kandadal’s decease. The vale of Sfothem, his native place, is nearer Bhekai than to Sjolussa but the people who live there, I’m assured, resemble me more than they do natives of central and northern Haisn, having narrow high-bridged noses and round eyes, the men hirsute more often than not.
The Kandadal is not a god (at any rate he denied being a god) yet he is venerated as if he were. He suggested there are no gods at all, no purpose or design in the universe, yet encouraged his followers to revere the gods and beliefs of all peoples in every nation of all the world. My nation, the people to which I was born, recognizes no gods as such. What the Kandadal would make of our ancient beliefs and customs I can’t imagine. I respect the nameless, numberless virtues and excellences honored in my country but their authority has always been recognized to be parochial—they do not travel: in Haisn they could not protect or aid me.
So much I will never make sense of. I gazed into my Kandadal’s eyes. He is a plump, merry, moon-faced Haisner, handsome and beautiful and, even now, very strange to me. “I want the envoy’s daughter to die,” I told him. Children are forever dying. The envoy could acquire a new one as easily as the last. “I want to kill her as she killed my dog.”
You want her to die, the Kandadal replied. (He did not reply.) You want to kill her.
“She is useless in the world, a monster. Evil.”
A useless, evil monster.
“I do not wish to meet her or her father again.”
Of course my savings were already sufficient, even without the addition of the envoy’s bribe, to buy passage back to Sjolussa. But I had little prospect of a position in that tightly wound city I hardly knew anymore, hardly cared to know—if I wished to leave Bhekai and Haisn. I did not. I wished the laws of the Celestial Realm allowed me to earn my living in some other manner than employment in the Sjolussene mission. But if Haisners—if the child Immortal in the Palace Invisible (may She forever prosper) and Her court and magistracy—if they trusted foreigners they would not be Haisners and I would doubtless not like them so well. They call us kè-torantin, automatons fashioned of ivory, and believe us not fully (if at all) human. It was likewise forbidden for me to work in the mission of another foreign nation than my own, if any would have me.
We argued, the Kandadal and I. (I argued with myself.) Time did not pass. The still chamber became dark, the air thick with the fragrances of roses, mold, and rot. Shàu tapped at the door frame. “Nen-kè. I have brought noodles from Old An’s.”
“Yes, thank you, Shàu,” I said without turning. “A moment longer.”
My servant retreated—I assumed he did—and I prostrated myself full length on the floor before the Kandadal’s altar. He did not like one to be rigid, invariable, to make irrevocable decisions or to find conclusions. Rising to my knees, I kissed the Kandadal’s cool brow, and then I withdrew from his presence.
The panels of the dining chamber’s window were folded open to the dusky garden. Flame guttered in an iron lamp by the window and danced on the wick of a smaller lamp on the low table. Near the lamp sat a porcelain bowl I did not recognize, glazed blue-black without, white within. It was not a bowl for noodles: filled nearly to the brim with clear water, it housed an elegant fish the length of my index finger, swimming in endless, listless circles. Its ancestors were doubtless gold but this variety’s scales and flowing fins were brocaded in splotches of scarlet, black, silver-blue, and white. I watched the enervated prisoner explore a cell that could provide no surprises and when Shàu brought my noodles I said, “She will not survive long in so small a bowl.”
“No, nen-kè,” he said, placing a smaller bowl before me. “I put the other in the great tub the previous tenants left in the garden. But I thought….”
“It was a kind thought, Shàu. She is very lovely.” Not as lovely as Ìsho, I did not say. Not a dog—not a friend, a companion, merely an ornament to admire. “Thank you. After we’ve eaten we’ll take her to join her sister.”
Watching the fish make its unceasing rounds, I ate fat noodles in savory broth with slivers of pork, onion, salt-dried cherry. Cross-legged in the corner, Shàu slurped from his own bowl. His noodles’ accompaniment would be different, for Shàu liked the incendiary cuisines of southeastern Haisn where the Celestial Realm’s uncertain borders bleed into Regions Heaven Does Not Acknowledge—the Sjolussene protectorates Aveng and U—and where the Immortal’s subjects speak languages She does not comprehend. Those heavily spiced dishes with their chilis and gingers and vinegars, subtleties difficult to discern under the burn, gave me indigestion so Shàu never served them unless I asked.
I continued holding my bowl after I finished, waiting for Shàu—he would interrupt his own meal if I set it down—watching the fish. I did not wish to be alone in my head all night, dreaming up vengeances and punishments for the envoy’s daughter. At length I said, “I will visit the yellow house this evening, Shàu.” I turned to look at the young man in the dim corner. “You may go to the red house if you like.” He understood I was granting permission to use household monies to ease his grief and ducked his head.
We took the brocade fish to join its fellow. The glazed ceramic barrel in a shaded corner of the garden was made to contain goldfish although I had not previously used it for the purpose. Shàu would have scoured it clean while I was with the Kandadal, carried bucket after bucket of fresh water from the well. The previous occupants of the house had also left an eccentric weathered stone eroded into fantastic spires and grottos for the fishes’ entertainment. When Shàu tipped the smaller bowl and water began to spill into the larger a glint of yellow-orange appeared in the depths as a perfectly ordinary goldfish nosed out of a cranny to investigate. I felt a pang of disappointment that Shàu had chosen the common, doubtless cheaper fish for himself—then reflected, admiringly, he must have pocketed the difference.
Poured into its new home, the brocade fish swam in startled circles near the surface while its new companion withdrew again into hiding. I touched Shàu’s shoulder in gratitude as he peered into the water, and then I withdrew myself.
On the barge forging upriver from Oesei I had endeavored to take the new envoy’s measure. He, it was clear, had already taken mine so far as he wished to take it. We sat under a waxed-silk awning, he upright and stiff on a subcontinental-style chair I had made sure would be aboard, I cross-legged on a rice-straw mat. He disdained my tea, drinking instead a tisane of dried flowers and herbs brought in his baggage from Sjolussa.
Studying the envoy’s polished leather boots with their pewter buttons, I answered questions about his predecessor’s contracts and negotiations. These I learned were unambitious. I discovered I was not to venture opinions or advice concerning the goods Haisner merchants might wish to import from the west. Their wishes were of no consequence. Goods were the least of what he planned to offer. Had I, he asked without wishing an answer, ever visited Kyrland—that islanded nation with its two grand capitals, Girrow in the south, Ocseddin in the north?
I had not, as doubtless he knew. As well as I knew of his own immediately previous position in the embassy at Girrow. The two realms were not then at odds: rather, allied to frustrate the ambitions of the Great King whose subcontinental dominions lay between Sjolussa and the Kyrlander home islands.
After hearing considerable apostrophes to Kyrlander energy, invention, industry, I understood the envoy’s intentions. He meant to import knowledge. I was aware of Sjolussene bounties paid to Kyrlander engineers and inventors—I had read in out-of-date gazettes of the wondrous transformations in my homeland: streets and residences illuminated by piped coal-gas, vast manufactories powered by steam, the iron roads and heliographic systems drawing the metropolitan empire’s towns and cities nearer the capital. It seemed not to have occurred to the man that similar innovations, installed in the Celestial Realm, might strengthen the Immortal’s government—that She would henceforth have less use for foreign goods or the foreigners themselves She despised.
Before leaving my house I donned garments a decade out of fashion I had purchased on my last home leave. The whores at Lìm’s Yellow House enjoyed the novel challenge of getting me out of them. For myself, I felt confined and in a peculiar way exposed, for subcontinental men’s fashions fitted more closely than Haisner to the body. Small as he was, Ìsho would never fit into the sleeve of a Sjolussene coat. Buttoned leather boots pinched my feet.
I called “I am going” into the shadows of the house and went out. At the vicinage gate the neighborhood grandfather on duty smirked, knowing the import of my costume and late departure, and wished me a joyful evening.
My way led toward the river, a broad avenue lined on either side by the whitewashed brick walls of residential vicinages like my own, noodle shops, book shops, apothecaries, fortune tellers, shrines of strictly local gods, small groceries. Naphtha lanterns mounted on the corners of boundary walls lit the street. Soon enough I heard music clanging and banging and whining from Turtle Market ahead. I do not know how long it is since Turtle Market sold turtles. Centuries, I expect.
The street became crowded. Inside the market gate competing red houses stood on either side, touts at the scarlet lacquer doors yelling into the throng—promises, blandishments, compliments, threats. The left-hand tout I knew, as she was sometimes posted at the door of Lìm’s other, yellow, establishment on the far side of the market. She called my name, humorously promising diversion and delight. I nodded, smiled, replied, “Not tonight,” and went on, murmuring under my breath a prayer to the manifold gods of venery that Shàu find comfort if he chose to visit one of the capital’s red houses, Lìm’s in Turtle Market or another.
Beyond the red houses stood dubious apothecaries selling elixirs, potions, devices that promised to enhance virility and stamina, and then noisy taverns. Wearing caricatures of subcontinental costume, the tavern touts claimed their beers were brewed in the manner of Trebt, Kyrland, Necker, Kevvel—possibly true, although I had never tasted good beer anywhere in Bhekai. One acquired a taste for the native yellow and white liquors.
Two tall men wearing authentic subcontinental suits and tall hats emerged from a tavern door and I froze, attempting absurdly to vanish into crowd and shadows. The taller of the subcontinentals removed his hat for a moment but I did not require the confirmation of his yellow hair to recognize them as the envoy and his inamorato.
They appeared not to have noticed me, turning to proceed deeper into Turtle Market. My anger had flared up so that I felt sweat break out on my back and under my arms, wetting the linen of my shirt. Pacing after them, I was too agitated to make further effort at stealth. If they meant to visit one of the yellow houses after a draught of brewed bravado I wanted to ensure I did not enter the same one.
They dawdled. Passing a shrine to the gods of venery, the inamorato averted his eyes, shocked by the spring-driven automatons’ performance, then looked again, while his companion mimicked their actions with his hands in a vulgar fashion, then, with a vulgar laugh, tossed a coin into the offering bowl. It was clear he thought the copulating figures merely toys. The two men did not appear to see, but I did, that the idols’ eyes followed them.
Music from competing bands and orchestras had grown louder as we neared the theatres. The opera, the ancient classics, the modern works that require the specific artificiality of breathing human actors—those of course were staged in grander circuses in more genteel districts. These were marionette and automaton theatres. I expected the envoy and his inamorato not to be interested. Surely they had ventured into Turtle Market solely to indulge in carnal pleasures. I was mistaken.
They paused at the entrance of each theatre to inspect the gaudy printed poster. Most of the works presented by Turtle Market’s companies are farces, variously erotic, or ancient fables or ghost stories. The two men stopped last and longest outside the House of the Company of the Kandadal’s Colored Cat (as if the impresario had thrown dice to determine the most nonsensical name possible), an automaton troupe presenting, so the poster announced, The Tale of the Ive-ojan-akhar. The music from within doors featured drums beating to martial rhythms, squealing horns, gongs, whistles. It overcame the sense of the envoy’s discussion with his inamorato but the tones of their voices and their expressions were complex.
I paid the tariff and followed them into the theatre. I do not understand why. I did not understand why they chose an historical melodrama—I did not understand why I failed to walk on to Lìm’s Yellow House.
I waited several moments in the anteroom with its doors offset to confuse ghosts and kept my face lowered when I entered the hall—a small space to be given that name, dim, loud with the unmuffled noise of the band. Cushions for the spectators were placed around three walls, accompanied by low tables. Aside from us three kè-torantin there was no audience. The envoy and his companion sat at one side. I chose the opposite. Until an attendant brought me a warm flask of adequate yellow liquor and a cup I kept my face turned away, my attention on the mechanical musicians at the corner of the raised stage bashing at their drums and gongs with mallets as wooden as their fists, miming at tooting pipes and trumpets actually played by concealed bellows.
The attendant had been extinguishing the lamps about the house one by one, and now she moved to put out those that illuminated stage and band. Being artificial, the musicians did not require light to play but ceased nevertheless. A voice distorted by some trickery into thunder intoned into darkness: “The Owe-ejan-akhar leaves her third daughter behind.”
2.
It would be tedious to describe the drama as it played. Magic-lantern slides cast glamors upon the stage: improbable architectures, landscapes never seen. The automaton-actors trundled about on casters concealed beneath the skirts of lavish costumes, gesturing their articulated fingers with great conviction, tilting exquisitely painted masks at angles to impersonate living expressions. They spoke—the ventriloquists offstage spoke—with such conviction one scarcely noticed the lines were poetry…doggerel, rather.
It was the old story. Having conquered a quarter of world, the Owe-ejan-akhar bullied the Immortal of the time into buying her favor and protection. He dismissed His generals and advisers and, to seal the alliance, His wives, lemans, concubines, and all His children as well. The daughter the Ejan was willing to spare was her third, a young woman with little aptitude for war who chose to rank the Kandadal’s precepts in different order than her mother preferred.
The marriage of the Immortal of Haisn and the Ive-ojan-akhar was solemnized at the Ejan’s camp and court on the plain of Niw—it was the only time in all His mortal life the Immortal ventured outside the walls of the Palace Invisible. Then in grand cavalcade the Ejan and her Thousand Tall Riders wheeled their horses about and departed once again for the west, about the business of subduing rebellions and conquering further dominions.
Borne in their twin palanquins, escorted by half the northern quarter of Haisn’s Celestial Army, the Immortal and the Ojan travelled southeast more slowly, accompanied by her guards, magicians, shamans, counsellors, and half a monastery’s worth of acolytes of the Kandadal. The Ojan’s old companion, a mastiff fleeced like a lamb, rode in her palanquin.
They crossed the Blue Wall by a bridge demolished as soon as they passed over the mighty channel. It was left up to the governor of the Reclaimed Province how to defend the wide new avenue hacked through the Green Wall, if defense be required. The Cinnabar Wall possessed a gate wide enough but not sufficiently grand, so gilded stands were raised and choirs of sweet-voiced children and eunuchs impressed to sing welcome to the Immortal bringing the mother of unborn Immortals out of Regions Heaven Does Not Acknowledge.
Until now all converse between the Immortal and His wife had been formal, witnessed. Once entered into the Celestial Realm the Immortal felt secure requesting she invite Him to attend her privately. Knowing as well as her husband the urgent need for an heir—the Immortal had merely disinherited and delegitimated His former children, not had them killed—the Ojan acquiesced. She had, of course, ceased chewing banleaf the day before her wedding.
This took place in the Black Palace of Husth, ancient war capital of the eldest and northernmost of the Nine Principalities that had become Haisn. The magic-lantern depictions of the palace were splendid. Wearing His saffron-orange nightgown, the automaton playing the Immortal traversed endless black corridors guarded by innumerable porcelain warriors in antique armor, the immortal army of the First Immortal. When at last He reached the Ojan’s chambers He was ushered in by members of her own guard, not as tall as her mother’s Tall Riders but towering nonetheless over the Haisner Immortal. The white mastiff inside the door growled but she was tied up.
Because it was a Turtle Market production the automaton the Immortal found within was already nude and reclining, cunningly articulated in all her members. While music from the band attempted to drown out the click and whirr of gears, the clack and thump of porcelain limb against wooden trunk, Immortal and Ojan performed the act of coition in elaborate detail—I heard the envoy’s inamorato snicker—and then the scene changed.
Now the stage became some artist’s naïvely voluptuous vision of the Palace Invisible in Bhekai some months later. The Ojan’s womb had failed yet to quicken. Counsellors of both personages were nearly as concerned as the Ojan and her husband. None dared suggest relegitimating the Immortal’s cast-off heir for the Owe-ejan-akhar had many spies. The Immortal dedicated great sums to the gods of venery, fertility, increase, and visited the Ojan as often as His appetites permitted.
Always least favored of the Ejan’s daughters, the Ojan had grown fearful. She knew the shamans and magicians in her train were her mother’s agents. She knew very well her mother’s ruthlessness. This was a mother whose several sons had not been permitted to survive past their second breaths, for the magnates and warriors of her people would not answer to masculine authority. If the Ojan proved barren the Ejan would never hesitate to dispatch a different daughter to take her place—perhaps, if impatience rather than good sense had the upper hand in the Ejan’s mind, instead to breach Blue, Green, and Cinnabar Walls herself and lead her Tall Riders into the Celestial Realm. In either case the failed Ojan would be disgraced. She made sure to welcome the Immortal into her chamber, her bed, her body whenever the urge struck Him, but when He departed she threw her arms about the neck of the white mastiff and groaned in frustration and despair.
These scenes were played, of course, to titillate the audience. For myself, after the first, I found them tedious. They were dolls on the stage, clever unnatural toys. I had seen automaton productions no less lewd involving men with other men which were scarcely more entertaining. But after the third I understood I was meant to understand the Ojan’s wretchedness was not solely on account of fear. Fearful Himself, in fatal need of an heir, for all His divinity merely a stupid self-involved man, the Immortal took no pains to involve His wife in the act, to give her pleasure.
After the third, the Ojan took up an ancient Haisner book few members of any Turtle Market audience would know except by reputation for it had been banned again and again, and read a passage aloud—the only prose in the entire drama. I heard the envoy’s inamorato hoot with embarrassed laughter when he understood what he was hearing. What he was seeing for, while the offstage ventriloquist recited Lady Tonnù’s ghost’s counsel to her living granddaughter, the Ojan-automaton’s articulated fingers tapped and fiddled at the delicately sculpted crevice between her legs until she broke off the recitation with a cry.
The white mastiff howled. Clever small pyrotechnics set about the front of the stage flared with blinding flashes, deafening bangs. A new personage descended on wires from the flies.
I, for one, had read Summer Sunlight in the Walled Garden, less for its scandalous anecdotes of courtiers two millennia dead than its prose. The book’s—and author’s—most vicious critics acknowledge its style to be immaculate, unprecedented: few great works of Haisner literature don’t bear its stamp. At any rate, although this twist in the Ive-ojan-akhar’s tale was new to me I recognized the figure represented by the device making its appearance in the Ojan’s chamber, half spring-powered automaton, half marionette.
The Ojan’s white dog whined and quailed but tall mistress rose from low bed and demanded to know what being it was dared approach her uninvited.
“Wakè-ì,” the demon named herself, at which the Ojan tilted her painted face into shadow. In the language of today wakè-ì alludes to a hopeless yearning that can never be satisfied whilst also serving as an old-fashioned synonym for vengeance. Stepping back, the Ojan laid a hand on her dog’s head while the demon pranced and capered about, displaying herself to the audience: a kind of lithe tigress, scarlet and black, bearing great ebony and cinnabar bat wings between her shoulders and wearing the mask of a human face.
When for an instant that mask was fully illuminated I choked on my tepid yellow liquor and either the envoy or his inamorato uttered a shocked noise. Wakè-ì’s was not the full, round moon face of Haisner beauty. A person from the distant west regarded the darkness beyond the stage lights—a person with mottled pink and white complexion, axe-blade nose and hollow cheeks and thin lips, round eyes with irises of pale blue glass. It was neither quite womanly nor quite manly yet I had no trouble imagining the envoy’s daughter wearing that face if she were to reach maturity.
A moment only. The monster’s capers brought her again to face the Ojan and she stilled, spoke again. Wakè-ì’s voice was unpleasant, grating, a harridan’s screech. She could, she said, ensure the Ojan bore the Immortal’s heir if that was truly the woman’s desire.
What was the bargain? demanded the Ojan—what price would she be required to pay?
No bargain: a simple gift. The demons of the Ojan’s previous acquaintance must be more greedy and ungrateful than those of Haisn if she believed she need drive a bargain. Wakè-ì’s sole concern was to conserve the Covenant of Heaven.
Having no choice, no other hope, the Ojan begged of Wakè-ì this boon, and in the succeeding scene, months later, she was accouched. The audience was not required to witness the birth, although I expect the company’s artisans were fully capable of producing the illusion. An enormous painting of the tiger-demon Wakè-ì overlooked the chamber where the Immortal waited—I noticed its eyes following the Immortal as He paced—and on an altar nearby an idol of the Kandadal. Now and then, when the Immortal looked elsewhere, wooden saint would wink at painted demon.
When midwife and surgeon brought the newborn babe, its Immortal father inquired whether it was fit, which the midwife assured Him it was.
Not a month later, as if in fulfillment of never-spoken prophecy, the Immortal of Haisn went walking among the grottos and cages of His menagerie and paused to contemplate the noble tigers in their moated vicinage. The male remained lazy, basking in summer sunlight, but when the female caught sight of the Immortal and His party she plunged into the moat. Somehow in an instant she scaled the sheer bank and tall fence. Before the guards and more decorative attendants could react the Immortal fell beneath her great paws. He looked up in terror and saw, not the yellow teeth and hot red tongue of a savage beast, but the ivory-carved face of a kè-torantin. Saw, and died.
The tigress was dispatched forthwith, of course. A quick-thinking courtier who may have glimpsed the same apparition made sure to slash the Immortal about chest and throat with his ornamental dagger lest the Son of Heaven’s death be ascribed to something as mortal as fright. As a matter of course the entire party was swiftly excruciated, then executed.
All the late Immortal’s court having been dismissed according to the terms of His marriage contract, the Palace Invisible and the government of Haisn were already in the hands of foreigners. The new Immortal was anointed, proclaimed, and removed from Her mother’s care while the widow was named Her regent. The Owe-ejan-akhar’s agents naturally expected her daughter to give them no trouble—to be timid, compliant, placid.
Once the Celestial seals were in the Ive-ojan-akhar’s possession she allowed her mother’s agents little time to discover otherwise. Aptitude for armed conflict she may not have owned but discovered an aptitude for those more civil forms of warfare known as governance. Taking their measures, she played the Ejan’s instruments off against each other. Those who would not play she had poisoned. As governors of near and far-flung provinces came to pledge fealty to the Immortal, Her regent-mother took their measures as well, sounded out their loyalties and alliances. She found excuses to exile her late husband’s delegitimated elder children to isolated, primitive towns in the desert west or sweltering south. The demon Wakè-ì was often consulted.
Naturally, nearly everybody of any importance outside her own faction, whatever their original loyalty, was outraged by the Ojan’s abrupt ascension. She had never been meant to serve as more than figurehead. But the Celestial Realm remained tranquil, barbarians of the desolate north and northeast beyond the Blue Wall caused no trouble, half-civilized nations to the south and southeast remitted their immemorial tributes, the tributes paid to the Owe-ejan-akhar’s annual embassy were not onerous. The funds the Ojan’s government dedicated to Haisn’s western defenses brought new prosperity to those neglected regions, and nobody cared to wonder aloud what the regent might fear from her own mother’s territories. Harvests were bountiful, trade within the realm and with the Regions Heaven Does Not Acknowledge rewarding: the country was prosperous and there was no claiming the Covenant of Heaven set aside.
Upon the Ive-ojan-akhar’s arrival in Bhekai, the acolytes of the Kandadal in her train had established temples in the city and a monastery at Geì, three days’ journey upriver on the cliffs of the famous defile. For some time they made little impression on a populace content with their own philosophies and native saints and gods. Nevertheless, it was well known the Immortal’s mother was a devotee of the Kandadal. To persons of influence or who wished to be influential the logic of becoming familiar with this foreign cult could not be argued against. Before the Immortal achieved Her tenth year of immortality the monastery’s quota of monks and nuns had doubled and doubled again. In temperate season the acolytes stalking Bhekai’s avenues and byways without clothing or other impediment save staff and offering basket were as likely to be third and fourth children of Haisner aristocrats, scholars, bankers, and merchants as tall barbarians. Their families boasted of them in public.
In the years of the Immortal’s childhood Her mother and the obliging demon Wakè-ì became lovers. This too was a part of the story I had not known and I wondered if it were an invention of the Company of the Kandadal’s Colored Cat. Perhaps they needed to amortize the cost of devising the demon puppet. I did not myself find these scenes arousing but I have never favored women. As best I could determine in dimness and clamor, the Sjolussene envoy and his inamorato were similarly unimpressed.
A supernatural entity, the demon contrived to impregnate the Ojan—it was not mentioned whether the seed was Wakè-ì’s own or if she had acquired it of mortal man or masculine god or demon. The Ojan herself, of course, was astonished and appalled before beginning to surrender to her maternal instincts. Of course she could not afford to be seen to be in that condition for she had no husband, no acknowledged lovers. Fortunately, the fashion of the day already valorized fecundity. Any woman of means made certain of appearing gravid before being seen by strangers. Intimate servants were cozened, threatened, bribed. The Ojan bruited a wish to seclude herself for the hot months of summer at Geì, whose abbot had long ago been a Tall Rider before being appointed the infant Ive-ojan-akhar’s ayah and bodyguard.
A report was delivered, a coincidence it seemed, that her Immortal firstborn was sickly. The Ojan issued a shocking, unprecedented order: the Immortal must depart the Palace Invisible and the capital to accompany Her mother to Geì, where highland airs and plain, good food would restore Her health.
Some years before I had visited Geì myself—not precisely a pilgrimage—so I recognized the magic-lantern scenery beloved of sentimental woodcut artists: the swift tumble of the river here apostrophized as Stormy Jade rather than Carnelian, the beetling, fantastically painted cliffs, the jagged spires that formed forested aerial islands. The monastery itself had been a picturesque ruin for two and a half centuries before I reached it, never fully reclaimed after the Shining Hands overthrew the false immortal who endeavored to suppress veneration of the Kandadal. I imagine the ruins I explored were more grand than the nearly new monastery of the Ive-ojan-akhar’s fatal summer visit but the painter of magic-lantern slides had not felt constrained by history. Here were the stupendous, strangely attenuated images of the nude, ascetic saint carved into the cliff face itself, three standing, five reclining, three kneeling in serene meditation, all adorned with garlands of sculpted and painted blossoms, each with the severe features of a Tall Rider of the steppes where the Ojan was born. Here, standing improbably tall rather than the stump I had seen, was the Tower that Longs for the Sky, there clinging to the cliffs the many aeries like vertiginous swallows’ nests fashioned of bamboo stems and silk cord for solitary contemplation, reached by way of dangling ropes. Here the Abbot’s House, its roof of tiles glazed jade green and gold upheld by sculpted demons bound with iron chains, there in its walled garden of roses, peonies, plum and cherry trees, the Hospice. Everywhere wind-whipped knots of the Kandadal’s eleven-colored ribbons: fastened to the tips of tall bamboo staves, strung across the gorge high above rushing waters, fluttering from the eaves of terrestrial buildings and aeries alike.
Soon, however, we were conducted with the Ojan’s party into the Hospice. The sickly Immortal was installed with Her eunuch ayah and deaf-mute maids in spacious, luxurious chambers, where the child lay enervated on a low couch, glassy stare fixed on a clever fountain. Water-driven automatons of songbirds warbled and flapped their wings while playful automatons of otters and frogs cavorted at the edges of the pool below.
By contrast, Her mother’s room above was a stark pilgrim’s cell, walled and floored in stone, its round window simply a hole in the wall, uncovered. A quilted mat served for bed and seat. A plain, if exquisitely formed, flask held water, an unglazed cup ready beside it in the corner of the cell. For adornment there was a painting on cured horsehide, an image of the Kandadal knelt in veneration before the demon of the abbot’s—and the Ojan’s—native place, which took the form of a bay mare with brilliantly feathered wings at each ankle.
Although she was neither nun nor acolyte, the Ojan divested herself of her clothing and knelt on her mat before this image. I suppose the audience was meant to understand how near her time the Ojan was by the clue of swollen belly and breasts but I am unacquainted with such things. It seemed many moments before her contemplation broke with a thin, breathy moan. Whining with bootless sympathy, the white mastiff left its post by the door and the Ojan clutched porcelain fingers into its mane as her moans became shrieks, became howls.
In the chamber below, the child Immortal roused with a weak moan of Her own, Her eyes turned up to the ceiling. The birds, frogs, otters on the fountain stilled, the Immortal’s attendants with a clatter of wood and porcelain fell to the floor. From the wing, her own wings mantled, the demon Wakè-ì stalked on her great paws. Wakè-ì approached the quailing child, paused. The sire was weak, the demon said, the dam insufficiently wise, the whelp unfit for Heaven’s acknowledgment.
Like a cruel house cat, Wakè-ì batted the child off Her couch and across the stage before stooping with great delicacy to fasten her teeth in the Immortal’s nape. With her burden dangling from her jaws like a kitten, a rat, or a puppet, the demon leapt into the air and away from the stage. The envoy’s inamorato choked down a squeak of dismay—I was startled myself—when the great marionette swooped overhead in a half circle that brought her back to the upper part of the stage where, while we were distracted by the antics in the Immortal’s chamber, Her mother must have given birth.
For the Ive-ojan-akhar, kneeling again before the painting of the Kandadal and the horse demon, with her dog at her side, now cradled a babe at her breast. She took appreciable moments to notice Wakè-ì’s arrival, seemed not to notice at all the dead Immortal dropped without ceremony before her. The demon spoke again, voice no less grating than before, extending amused thanks to the Ojan for bearing and birthing the babe as she, the demon, could not.
Coming nearly to herself, the Ojan asked whose child it was suckling at her breast.
Why, the demon explained tolerantly, it was the granddaughter of the Ojan’s late husband. As presently constituted the Covenant of Heaven could not allow for a regnant Immortal of foreign antecedent. This was the child of the delegitimated heir and the rough-and-ready sailor the Ojan herself had recently appointed admiral of the war fleet out of Oesei. Sire and dam had never met, the Ojan would be relieved to understand—the former exiled in the distant south, the latter on the Ojan’s own embassy to the recalcitrant princelings of the archipelago east across the Turquoise Gulf—had not met, would not meet, although their destinies were similar. Wakè-ì inclined her great head to the image of the Kandadal on the chamber’s wall. Once recovered from the fever presently troubling him, the late Immortal’s eldest son would renounce the exilic luxury he had been granted to become a mendicant acolyte of the Kandadal, whose precepts and philosophies he would carry farther south, into U and Piq and Tunsesu; while the cargo more valuable than tea, silks, copper, or the threat of arms which the admiral’s fleet bore to obstreperous Djoch-Athe was those same philosophies and precepts.
The demon shrugged and went on kindly. Their unsuspected daughter was meant to continue the Ojan’s needful reforms and innovations, to continue placating Her supposed grandmother the Owe-ejan-akhar, encouraging the spread of the Kandadal’s teachings. She would be remembered as a stolid, unexceptional caretaker of the Celestial Realm, eclipsed in the histories by Her own heir. That glorious Immortal would finally break the yoke of the Akhars and shatter their diminished empires.
The Ive-ojan-akhar, however, gently pronounced the demon, would witness none of this: it was not her concern.
The Ojan’s mastiff growled and leapt from its post at the Ojan’s side, bright teeth meant for the demon’s throat.
Artificial thunder rolled and a crack of artificial lightning blinded me. When my vision recovered I saw upon the upper stage a dead dog fleeced like a white lamb and two Ive-ojan-akhars, two stripling Immortals. One of each pair lay on the floor, apparently deceased. The standing Ojan regarded her dead twin for some moments before turning to the house beyond the burning footlights. With both hands she lifted the mask from her skull, revealing the ivory visage of the demon, which she inclined first toward the envoy and his inamorato on one side of the house, then to me. She dropped the Ojan’s mask. It shattered on the floor. But then as the band began to bang and whine and clatter she raised her hands again to doff this second face, exposing a third we had not seen before: merely a moon-round, jolly Haisner face.
The footlights guttered. In wavering illumination and darting shadow, the false demon turned to offer reverence to the Kandadal on the wall before extending a hand to the new Immortal, leading Her from the stage. The band played on.
3.
The Sjolussene envoy and his inamorato clapped their hands together in the subcontinental manner while I hooted and slapped the table like a Haisner. I rose in somewhat of a hurry, for I did not wish them to get a good look at me, strode out of the hall and the theatre. Finding a shadow of concealment, I waited for them to emerge. When they did, the one was speaking urgently in a voice too low for me to understand. The other laughed, careless, clapped his companion’s shoulder, and they turned away. It seemed I was mistaken to believe they had stopped at the House of the Company of the Kandadal’s Colored Cat merely as an interlude before proceeding to more carnal recreation for they returned the way they had come.
I, however, went on as I had first intended to Lìm’s Yellow House. There I was entertained through the night by whores alternately roughneck and exquisite, receiving excellent value for Lìm’s outrageous fees and forgetting for the while the envoy, his daughter, my angry grief, the puzzles posed by The Tale of the Ive-ojan-akhar.
Too soon I was roused ungently, untimely, with the message my servant stood without the house clamoring for my attention. Confused and alarmed, I donned my rumpled suit of Sjolussene garments with what haste I could before rushing out to the street.
Shàu was there indeed, hunkered and huddled in the shadow of one of the great yellow doorposts, but this was not my calm, competent servant. “Nen-kè,” cried a wretched, weeping ragamuffin when I emerged through the yellow doors, “nen-kè, your house! The poor fishes!” He bobbed to his feet and I saw without recourse that he was nearly naked, wearing none of the neat outfits I provided but only a filthy clout, and was dirty himself from head to toe. “All burnt!” he gasped, and fell to his knees at my feet.
As I bent to him, confounded, I saw the companion that had shared his shadow: my wooden idol of the Kandadal, its varnish scorched and half the face charred. The surviving brown glass eye twinkled.
“Shàu,” I said, my voice thin and labored, “tell me. What has happened?”
“All burnt!” he moaned again. “All burnt, your house and your treasures.”
“But you are alive, my dear Shàu, and you rescued my Kandadal.” I do not know where I discovered the fatal calm that gripped me. “The rest is no matter though I grieve for the fishes. Come.” I coaxed him back to the yellow column and had him sit by me as I sat by the Kandadal, and I held my servant about his trembling shoulders as if he were not nearly man-grown, as if he were my child. “Tell me how this has happened.”
The day was very young, dawn just pinking the sky. Although the rest of Bhekai would be stirring Turtle Market slept on while Shàu faltered out his tale. He had returned before midnight from a red house less reputable (less distant, less costly) than Lìm’s. After making certain I was still abroad and would not need him, he bade goodnight to the new fishes in their tub, said a prayer for Jù’s favor to poor Ìsho (here he showed me the sole rescued treasure of his own: the small bronze Jù), and took himself to bed.
Some hours later, only a few, he was wakened by a great noise and tumult out of doors on Blue Lamp Street. Like any Haisner house, mine had no windows onto the street, but Shàu rushed to the door left unbarred against my return. When he peered through the grated spy hole—of no such diameter any ghost might pass through—he saw a mob milling about, their own torches illuminating them more effectively than the blue lamps. Shàu dropped the bar across the door at once, although he feared it could not hold against them. As well as torches they carried crude weapons, brazen gongs, and a great many strings of the tiny black-powder bombs used to frighten demons and ghosts, which all at once began popping and banging on the doorstep, against the walls, and on the roof, as if the riot had recognized Shàu’s presence.
He would not tell me the insults the mob yelled, only that there was no doubting they meant his nen-kè. “They wore masks,” he stammered, “the painted faces of snarling tigers hiding their own faces.” Several of the tiger people carried casks on their shoulders and these made sure of keeping some distance from torches and bombs.
At length one among them grew impatient with aimless commotion and directed them here, there in a high, piercing voice. My house was to be surrounded on all sides against escape from within and to ward against damage to properties of true subjects of the Immortal in the Palace Invisible. The cask-bearers were ordered to douse the walls at front and sides with their naphtha. This was accomplished with dispatch. Finally, scorning to risk their own persons by using the torches, the tiger people hurled strings of hissing, banging little bombs to set my house alight.
Shàu had remained at the spy hole until the paint on the door went up in a sudden sheet of flame. Then he fled through my doomed house to the garden door. He must have snatched up the little bronze Jù along the way, he said, though he didn’t remember it. Outside, he retreated to the farthest corner of the garden’s tall brick walls, behind the plum tree, and watched the house burn, cowering at explosions of sparks and the vicious shouts and malign chants of the tiger people.
When in the black hour before dawn the only home he had known was but a smoking ruin and he was half-certain the tiger people had departed the vicinage of the White Peonies, he dared emerge from his poor shelter. A charred roof beam, he saw, had fallen to smash the goldfish tub, but two scorched walls within the ruin yet stood: the brick abutments on either side of my still room. He drenched himself with water from the well and carried a full bucket to splash a path through the ashes before his bare feet.
As he passed the fragile brick bulwarks he glimpsed a glimmer from the Kandadal’s remaining eye, a gleam from the saint’s toothy grin. “I feel he meant me to survive,” murmured Shàu, who had never betrayed any inclination toward the mad philosopher’s cult, “so I must rescue him and bring him to you, nen-kè.”
“And so you did, brave Shàu.” Taking the idol under one arm and my servant under the other, I brought them into Lìm’s Yellow House, where I bullied and bribed a surly eunuch into tending to Shàu—bathing him, clothing him, feeding him—had another attendant fetch me tea and congee, and dispatched a third on urgent errand to the Sjolussene mission. Fortunately, I carried a goodly sum in cash.
Having broken my fast, I sat pondering my scorched Kandadal, unwilling yet to ponder these peculiar disasters. I was called to the door again.
Looking powerfully incongruous on the threshold of a Turtle Market yellow house, six troopers of the Sjolussene militia d’outre-mer and their leader awaited me, armed and in full kit. The downy-cheeked lieutenant saluted me briskly. I knew the fellow’s face although mission staff did not mix with the militia: I had seen him in mufti here in Lìm’s Yellow House on several occasions. “Sir,” he said, “his excellency the envoy is murdered by street ruffians, your house is burnt down, and we have beaten off an assault by native rabble against her majesty’s mission. You will come with us at once.”
“Of course,” I murmured, surprised yet more if somehow undismayed. “I must bring my servant. A moment, please.” I turned back to the door.
Shàu was there already, wan and dignified, attired by the spiteful eunuch in tawdry whore’s finery, cradling my scorched Kandadal in his arms. “Come, my dear,” I said, beckoning. “These soldiers will see us to safety.”
At the mission the chargé d’affaires was raging. “That perilous fool offended the Immortal’s regent. We are proscribed, banished, and a secret society has been set up against us.” She regarded me shrewdly—my dowdy, rumpled, out-of-fashion subcontinental costume. “It was never wise to live outside the cantonment. You have nothing.”
“I have money,” I replied. “In several banks, Sjolussene, Kevveler, and Asaen.”
“All well and good but you cannot draw on those funds at present. Perhaps when we reach Folau. Well, I expect we can see you outfitted for the voyage with what we have here.”
“Folau?” I said, offended. “Voyage?”
“Are you not listening, man? We are expelled. Her majesty’s entire mission and all our chattel. We must quit the capital before sunset tomorrow, presuming the Vengeance Tigers permit it—the realm within the week.” Turning away, she noticed Shàu standing mute by the door and made a moue of polite distaste. “Your boy, is he? I suppose he must accompany us. His life is forfeit if you were to abandon him.” Turning back to me, she sighed. “I expect her majesty’s governor-general in Defre will feel obliged to launch some form of punitive action. She’s related somehow to the late envoy’s late companion.” Abruptly, the chargé made a sour grin. “I look forward with a certain glee to depositing the wretched orphaned daughter with her noble auntie. I don’t imagine you’d care to watch over her until Aveng?”
I said coldly, “She killed my dog.”
“A jest, man.” The chargé slapped my shoulder. “A jest in poor taste—my apologies. Now, you’ll forgive me, I have a great deal to do to organize this exodus. See the adjutant. He’ll get you sorted.”
The Vengeance Tigers mounted another chaotic assault against the mission that night. The downy-cheeked lieutenant’s forces frightened them off. In the austere chamber assigned to me I heard the gongs, the pop-pop of black-powder bomblets, the louder bangs of our militia’s guns. Sleeping Shàu on the pallet by my door whimpered when the noise entered his dreams until I slipped out of bed to comfort him.
We sailed downriver aboard a commandeered merchant vessel never meant to carry passengers, accompanied by a corvette of the imperial navy bearing the militia. We were halfway to Oesei, scudding along through the fertile floodplain of the Carnelian River, before I properly understood I was exiled from the Celestial Realm. Then it was I needed comforting, which Shàu managed with simple tact by requesting instruction in the Kandadal’s teachings.
At Oesei by great good fortune we met up with a packet boat of the Kevveler Company. On imperial credit, the chargé d’affaires bought passage to Folau, chief seaport of Her Imperial Majesty’s Protectorate of Aveng, for all her motley company bar the militia who continued aboard the corvette. One afternoon of the thirty-five-day voyage I witnessed the late envoy’s daughter lay into a yelping puppy with her parasol. I took considerable satisfaction in slapping her away and scooping the poor animal out of her reach.
“It is her property,” the abject ayah said, “given her by a sailor. She may do with it what she pleases. It nipped her.”
“She gave it cause, I don’t doubt. I will not see this wretch kill another dog. It is mine now. She and you may complain as you wish.” I bore the white bitch puppy away. She was frightened, naturally, but childish blows had done her no real injury and she soon rediscovered puppyish enthusiasm for the world around her and all its peoples save small blonde girls.
Thankfully, such creatures are rare in her experience since I declined to settle in the Sjolussene colony at Folau. She lies at my feet, grumbling in her sleep, as I complete this account.
The tale of her rescue got around the boat very quickly. I was approached by a Kevveler sailor who spoke Sjolussene with a cultivated accent. “I did not understand that child was such a monster,” she told me. “Poor orphaned girl, I thought, in want of a playmate. Thank you, sir, for rescuing the pup. If the dam could speak she would thank you as well.” A sentimental person, the sailor pressed on me a sack of biscuits for the puppy and, twice before we gained Folau, brought mother to romp with daughter. The mother was buff-colored, not white. As the sailor admitted, about the sire there was no knowing. I named my puppy Gad, a Kevveler word meaning comfort. She is hardly the mastiff of my promise to myself but substantial enough, far too big to tuck into any sleeve. Shàu delighted in her. When he visited us after his two-year novitiate, a well made young man whom the nakedness of an acolyte of the Kandadal flattered and who spoke the language of the territory better than I, Gad recognized him joyfully, and when he left us again he went accompanied on his mendicant wanderings by one of her by-blows.
I am ahead of myself.
The voyage south required thirty-five days, as I said. Shàu proved a good sailor, never sickened by the rolling of the seas. He continued to request stories of the Kandadal and his saints and other followers. The packet boat stopped in at its regular ports of call but the navy corvette stood offshore and the chargé d’affaires forbade any of her company to debark so long as they were towns bound by the Covenant of Heaven. The airs grew balmy as we proceeded down the Turquoise Gulf, then quite suddenly sultry. We came to Regions Heaven Does Not Acknowledge—to Folau.
I was able to claim funds of the representatives of my banks in the town without an excess of trouble and within a month had set up a satisfactory household for Shàu, Gad, and myself in a bungalow on a minor canal well away from subcontinental quarters. Aveng being a dominion of the empress in all but name, opportunities for employment for one of her subjects were more varied than in Bhekai. Eventually I settled into a position which chiefly involved negotiating the protocols and courtesies required for the Trebter principals of the Great Eastern Company to deal with merchants of Folau’s Haisntown.
Few of the other Sjolussene exiles remained in Aveng any time. The chargé d’affaires was one, though more in Defre, the capital, than Folau. She delivered the envoy’s daughter to her relative the governor-general there. After some months she wrote a smug letter to inform me the unfortunate poppet had contracted one of the tropic fevers and expired in shuddering misery.
The governor-general in Defre proved a more cautious person than the chargé had imagined. She sent indignant dispatches home to the empress’s government, formal protests to the Immortal’s regent, but took no action on her own—beyond settling indemnities on the refugees (mine was handsome enough not to quarrel with) and bestowing a medal on the downy-cheeked lieutenant, who blushed becomingly and promptly resigned his commission to take a position with me at the Great Eastern Company.
In Bhekai and Oesei, however, the other subcontinental trading nations soon learned what the government and regent of the Immortal of Haisn doubtless knew all along: a rabble is a weapon which, once loosed, cannot easily be restrained. The Vengeance Tigers had tasted kè-torantin blood. The Kyrlander mission was attacked, the mission of Asana, those of the Great King’s clients: Kevvel, Trebt, Necker. Merchant vessels at anchor on the river at Bhekai or in port at Oesei were bombed, burned to the waterline. Foreigners on the streets at dusk or night were never safe, however large the party. Doubtless the Turtle Market taverns were intimidated into no longer selling beer.
The imperial entrepôt at Folau had been open to other subcontinental nations for half a century, was fully stocked with consulates, advocates, and the myriad merchant banks, so we generally saw the refugees first. At home on the far side of the world the powers were as outraged by the sudden scarcity of high-quality tea, porcelains, silks woven and raw as by insult to their citizens outre-mer. A year into my exile we saw pass by offshore an unprecedented allied fleet—including three novel steam-driven warships from the Ocseddin shipyards. This armada fared north into the Turquoise Gulf to rendezvous with a smaller fleet out of Haisn’s sometime client-state Djoch-Athe, eager to garner what pickings it might from the Celestial Realm’s humiliation.
I might have returned to Bhekai after resolution of the Vengeance Tigers’ Rebellion. It would not be the same city, the same realm: the Immortal required to defer to a cabinet of kè-torantin ministers, Her Palace no longer Invisible, Oesei removed from Her suzerainty and divided among the victorious powers. Scholars on government payroll claim the Covenant of Heaven unbroken for the realm is peaceful and prosperous but I cannot believe it so. I might have returned but did not. I offered to send Shàu home. He would have none of it.
He had grown content, even happy, in Folau. His duties had never been overly onerous but now he had Gad’s companionship when I went to work. (That dog, it must be said, could not be trusted in a place of business. It must also be said, she is a more lighthearted, lightheaded, affectionate creature than poor Ìsho ever was.) On his own he discovered the free school attached to the Kandadal temple, where he learned to read—not his own language, however—delved much deeper into the lore that fascinated him than I could ever lead him, took up the practice of painting: mandalas and other devotional images chiefly, but I treasure sketches he made of Gad and of me, several others. I cannot say I was surprised when, five years into our exile, he asked to leave my service to enter the monastery a half-day’s walk south of the port.
By that time I could not securely say I was not also content. I thought less often of Bhekai as I knew it—as I said, I cannot believe it the same city now—of my little house on Blue Lamp Street or my garden (peonies and plums will not grow in this climate lacking any season that resembles winter, though of roses there is a sufficiency). When particularly nostalgic I might visit Folau’s Haisntown, which as good as reproduces in small Oesei-as-was. Aveng and Folau were clients of the Celestial Realm for a millennium before the advent of subcontinental traders and conquerors so much about the place was familiar to me already, if more was novel. My employment was more satisfactory, surely.
I suppose it was Shàu’s departure led me finally to accept the suit of my husband and his husband and the husband’s wives and their other husbands. I did not care to live alone—if not perpetually in so much company. (I kept my city bungalow. It is more convenient to work, for my husband as well as myself.) In some ways my Sjolussene husband has gone less native than I. He speaks the language stiffly, courteously acknowledges rather than honors the gods and demons of the place, turns up his nose at many delicacies. He will not be seen in public wearing local costume, better suited to the sultry climate than the suits he insists on, although he blushes and balks when I bait him to don his old uniform complete with medal. (His cheeks have not been downy for years but I expect he would have no difficulty fitting into the fawn breeches and azure tunic of younger days.) He will not join me when I retreat from children and wives and twittering husbands to the still room to argue with my charred Kandadal. Yet he bought into Avengi marital customs much sooner than I, and Shàu urged me to accept his proposal the first time it was made. In the society of the imperial colony we continue an entertaining scandal.
It seems I am content here, with my dog at my feet on the verandah of the country house. I hear the happy cries of the children—I am not obliged to make or care for them, their mothers my wives only in a contractual sense—playing with Gad’s children and grandchildren. I know my husband and his husband and our husband will return soon from town. Meanwhile Gad and I will go to visit the Kandadal and his lonely companion far from home, the little bronze Jù.
4.
There are wild tigers in the forest here, as there have not been in the Celestial Realm for centuries. I have not seen them, only their tracks and spoor.
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Copyright 2018 Alex Jeffers
Alex Jeffers has no Twitter or Instagram and his website is out of order but he is on Facebook and has a massive collection coming out on May Day. He lives in Oregon with an elderly, cantankerous cat and is thisclose to completing a new novel.
