The Secrets of Jin-Shei

Nhia was to remember those times with a pang of regret. It had been years since she had asked her mother a question like that. Years since she had expected a reply from her.

Other stalls in the outer cloister housed the makers of carved yearwood sticks, or sold funeral arrangements, preparation of the paper effigies of the things the deceased needed to take with them into the next world, amulets or talismans, marriage and betrothal tokens, or – slightly clandestinely, because the Temple officially frowned on these – low-level alchemical potions guaranteed to increase fertility, virility or long life. Ganshu diviners elbowed one another for space here, their clients waiting in patient queues for their turn inside the screened booth where the diviner performed his or her work.

An open corridor cut across this cloister from each of the three gates, and led through into the courtyard. Beyond a narrow strip of grass rose a clay wall with three arched openings in line with the three gates; it was painted a ghost-blue, a colour which was almost white except for the wash of blue that made it look like the sky of Linh-an in the full blaze of the summer sun. The wall surrounded a perimeter precisely one flagstone wide around the next level of the Temple, the Second Circle, a building painted the same colour as the wall around it, itself boasting an inner cloister surrounding an open court. But this cloister was clear of anything requiring an exchange of money. It was two storeys high, with an open balcony above the lower cloister. The entire inner wall of the building, on both floors, was a catacomb of wall alcoves and niches, with space for incense and offerings; each niche held an image or a figurine before which some devotee was praying with a fragrant incense stick smelling of cinnamon or flower essence or rain grass in one hand and a bowl with precisely counted rice grains in the other.

Many niches were empty, their own particular deity yet to appear. These were the Later Heaven deities and spirits, the lesser Gods, the spirits of Rain and Thunder and Wind and Fire, Tsu-ho the Kitchen Spirit of Plenty, Hsih-to the Messenger of the Gods, the Syai Emperors of old, and the Holy Sages. This was the place of propitiation, of honouring the Wise, of paying respect to the Great, of asking for advice. Nhia would sometimes drift past the niches with supplicants (sometimes more than one, companionably sharing a deity’s time and attention and often the offering) and absorb the whispers going on around her – whispers asking for help, giving thanks, telling the Kitchen God of the success of a particular feast which was held in the midst of plenty and humbly giving him credit.

‘Please, Rain Spirit, our fields are parched and drying, we humbly come to ask …;’

‘I offer rice and grain in humble gratitude, for my son has found a good bride …;’

‘O Holy Sage, who knows of these things, I come to ask for guidance, for the examinations are near and this problem is too great for me to understand …;’

‘Holy Hsih-to, Messenger of the Gods, please help me make my husband stop being angry at me – for I did not mean it when I said to him …;’

‘Help me, Hsih-to, for my mother-in-law is driving me distracted …;’

These were the simple questions, but they were also the most fundamental ones, the ones lives were built on – and the shrines were open, and there were few secrets. This was the backbone of the Way, the little things that, left unattended, would grow into catastrophes – but which were still small enough, human-scaled enough, to belong to these lesser Gods and spirits and for which the greater deities were not to be disturbed.

For more, for greater miracles, the three arrow-straight corridors leading from the outer gates pierced this Circle full of incense and whispers. Within the inner courtyard of this Second Circle stood another building, this one painted a darker blue, the blue of an autumn sky. Its inner cloisters, also on two floors, were quieter, more sparsely populated. Here, in the Third Circle, there were fewer niches, and the Gods in them were the lower deities of Early Heaven – Cahan, the Spirit Paradise. Here resided Yu, the general of the Heavenly Armies; Ama-bai the Great Teacher; the Rulers of the Four Quarters – Kun, Lord of the North, Sin, Lord of the East, T’ain, Lady of the West and K’ain, Lady of the South. These were the weavers of human fates, the first deities in the tiers of the Heavens with real power over lives, dreams and destinies. Nhia’s astrological antecedents had been complicated – she had been born between two Quarters, and her mother had made offerings to both Sin and K’ain, making sure that she left no stone unturned when she came to pray for Nhia – but it seemed that the in-between children were neither Ruler’s responsibility and Nhia’s mother’s prayers had fallen in the cracks.

It was more expensive to come here than in the Second Circle, for the deities of the Third Circle had their own attendants who tended to the offerings and the lighting of candles and incense sticks so that all was harmonious and acceptable. There was no companionable sharing of Gods and altars here. People came to the Third Circle with a purpose.

Another level deeper in stood the Fourth Circle – not a round building like the others, but a three-sided, three-storey structure. Each of its three sections, all three floors of it, was devoted to one of the Three Pure Ones, the rulers of the Three Heavens of Cahan – the Shan, the I’Chi, the Taikua, the realms of Pure Spirit, Pure Energy, Pure Vitality. The building was painted a darker blue, inside and out, and inside its many candles and lanterns gleamed like stars. The place was full of silence and mystery, and Nhia loved to lose herself here sometimes, when she had hoarded enough coppers to buy an offering rich enough to allow her into this Circle. The inner garden, separating the Third from the Fourth Circles, had scented flowers, and meditation areas with golden sand raked smooth and granite rocks placed as focus for a supplicant’s thoughts. The altars in the Fourth Circle were carved in smooth marble or covered with costly golden silks, tended by special attendants clad in blue and gold and sworn to each deity’s service. There were secluded alcoves where those who came to honour these deities could withdraw after making their offering to the acolytes, and commune in private with the God they had come to revere.

The three straight corridors passed through this quiet, holy place too and finally entered the heart of the Temple – a midnight-blue tower standing in the middle of the inner court of the Fourth Circle, the home of the Lord of Heaven. The worshipper entered this place barefoot, leaving shoes outside the gates, for this was holy ground. Nine small altars ringed the centre of the Tower, three to each gate; these were followed by an inner ring of three larger ones, one per gate, where oil lamps always burned to signify the presence of the God. Beyond these, three steps on a marble platform, was the altar of the Lord of Heaven where the Emperor himself came to sacrifice for Syai’s well-being on the eve of every New Year – an altar where a holy fire burned in a central bowl and cast a flickering light on the carefully arranged offerings tended by one of the three Tower priests. High above, reachable by a catwalk that clung to the walls of the Tower well away from the altar, hung the gigantic brass bell which was rung by the priests every day at noon.

A complex place for a complex faith, an orderly set of beliefs on which heaven and earth were made, a creed which assigned everything to its perfect, particular place.

Nhia had been brought there for the first time when she was a babe in arms, barely born, perhaps a week old – her mother had brought her in, purchased amulets, purchased potions, offered her child and her child’s troubles to the deities of the Second Circle and begged for deliverance. But Nhia’s twisted leg and withered foot did not go away. The child crawled a lot later than most children did, unable to put any weight on the crippled limb; she had not walked until she was almost four years old, and even then it was with a pronounced limp. By that time her mother had progressed to the Third Circle, entreating for salvation from higher authority – but no amount of incense or rice wine helped, and ganshu readings were inconclusive.

The Temple was a daily stop, and more often than not Nhia was required to accompany her mother the supplicant so that she could show the Gods just what they had to do for her. Any other five-year-old or six-year-old or seven-year-old, and as the years wore on Nhia reached and passed all those milestones, would have started pulling the Temple apart stone by stone from sheer boredom. Nhia was different. Her physical disability focused her mind on things others might have missed, and even as a very young child she was an acute observer and an astute interpreter of the throngs of humanity she saw parading in and out of the Temple every day. By the time she was ten she had taken to coming to the Temple by herself. She would strike up conversations on the theology of the Way with some of the younger and more indulgent acolytes of the outer Circles, or some of the older ones willing to indulge an interested and precocious child. It was all couched, as much wisdom of the Way was, in ancient tales and fables. There were many, but there was one which most of Nhia’s Temple friends always returned to in the end.

‘When the evil spirits tricked Han-fei into raiding the Gardens of the Gods …;’

‘I know, I know,’ Nhia would interrupt when this sentence was offered to her. ‘He picked too many of the plums from the Tree of Wisdom, and could not carry them, and had to leave all of it behind when he was driven from the Garden by the angry Gods. I know, sei, I know. The plums of wisdom should be taken one by one and savoured. But I would still like to know …;’

The Temple teachers would shake their heads and smile.

But Nhia was told much, and had seen more than any Linh-an child her age and twice as well born as she could lay claim to. She had even glimpsed the Tower altar by the time she was eleven.

By the time she had turned thirteen, Nhia could recite the correct offerings for any deity within the Great Temple – their composition and their timing – to a precise degree. Her mother, Li, had exhausted her avenues of help and appeal in the living world, the healers and the hedge-healers and every connection she had ever had, including her handful of jin-shei sisters. Nothing had helped, and Li had turned almost wholly to the Heavens now, praying daily for intervention in the circumstances concerning Nhia’s withered foot. But for Nhia herself that foot had long since ceased to be of any importance. She would listen to her mother’s entreaties to the Gods, which had started out as abasement and pleading for a miraculous cure and had then proliferated into all kinds of peripheral demands – Send her a husband who will care for her. But Nhia knew that it was unlikely that she would ever marry, or at least unlikely that she would marry well – she was the daughter of a washerwoman, with no inheritance or dowry to speak of, and the handicap effectively removed any possibility of entering some wealthy house as a concubine whose children, taken as such children always were to belong to the primary wife, might stand a chance of inheriting something of their own.

Nhia’s life had been written for her by the Rulers of the Four Quarters long before she was born. This much she knew from her conversations with the acolytes of the Third Circle. There would probably be no marriage, no children for Nhia – but there might be something different, something else. She just wished she knew what. Her mother still regularly haunted the booths of the ganshu readers for answers concerning her crippled child, answers which had a more and more direct bearing on her own life and needs as the years slipped by, but Nhia herself had spent a few precious coppers on a couple of readings from the cheaper ganshu readers – those in the bazaars, not the ones allowed access to the Great Temple, she couldn’t even think about spending that much money on a whim. The readings had been inconclusive and vague, or the readers had been less than adept. Either way, the path Nhia was to tread remained opaque to her.

Six

If Nhia had any gift that set her apart from the rest, it was to make people trust her – not necessarily like her, because she was a bright and intelligent child who appeared to know far too much for her age, and didn’t hesitate to tell what she knew. But people would tell her things, people who otherwise had no business telling her anything, and it was partly this that pushed her into the path of the Gods when she came stumbling into the Great Temple barely a week after her thirteenth birthday, in that hot summer which held all of Linh-an in its iron grip.

The Temple was blessedly cool after the steamy streets, and Nhia paused to catch her breath and rest her aching foot in its special sandal. Her mother always had a spare copper or two for the Temple if Nhia asked, and she had come armed with a handful of coins with which she hoped to buy enough in the way of offerings to get her into the Third Circle.

Thin strips of garden separated each Circle from the next, complete with a handful of carefully cultivated trees bearing plums or peaches, symbols of knowledge and immortality, or just blooming with great scented flowers in their season. But the inner garden of the Third Circle was particularly lush and pleasant. Scattered pools held golden fish, and tiny artificial waterfalls added the murmur of running water to the serene hush of the inner Circles. It was in these gardens that Nhia often found the acolytes who were willing to talk to her about the things that interested her. The Second Circle was full of a chattering and a muttering, and desperate attempts to hush whimpering or wailing children, and shuffling feet, and the occasional squeal or shout; it was hard to gather one’s thoughts here, although Nhia sometimes came there to do just that as an exercise in concentration. But she preferred at the very least the quietness of the Third Circle or, if she had a choice, the hushed holiness of the Fourth.

She was out of luck with her offerings this time – her hoarded coins managed to suffice for barely enough incense to placate one of the Second Circle Sages. But her luck turned when she met up with one of the acolytes she had got to know better than most in the time she spent at the Temple, and was invited to come through with him into the Third Circle as his guest. Nhia accepted gladly, contemplating half an hour or so of pleasant conversation, but they had barely crossed into the inner court of the Third Circle when another acolyte hurried up to them and whispered something in Nhia’s friend’s ear with an air of agitation.

‘I apologize,’ said Nhia’s acolyte courteously, ‘but it seems I am urgently required elsewhere. We have one of the Nine Sages in the Fourth Circle today, and he has been …; demanding. But please, walk in the garden. I will see if I can return when my duty is done.’

‘Thank you,’ Nhia said.

He bowed formally, and hurried away with his companion.

The Nine Sages were almost mythical beings to Nhia. They were learned men and women, great Sages, most of whom would gain niches in the Second Circle of the Temple at their passing and many of whose predecessors already inhabited their own niches there. They were adepts of great power and knowledge, Imperial advisers, the first and most honoured circle of the Imperial Council. One of them had crossed into the Later Heaven fairly recently; Nhia had been in the street crowd at his funeral parade, and had been deeply impressed at the cortège and at all the implements, meticulously recreated in folded and painted paper, which he required to take with him to the Afterworld. His successor – each Sage named his successor in the circle before he died – was a mystery; nobody had yet seen or heard of the new Sage, none of the common people anyway. All that was known about him was that he was male. He had already been the subject of much street gossip. Stories had it that he was no greybeard; he was not young, to be sure, because no youth could be a Sage – certainly everyone knew that much. That left a virile man, in the prime of his life, and everyone from the portly matrons making virtuous sacrifices in the highest Temple Circles to the painted bazaar strumpets was speculating on whether he had taken a wife or a concubine or whether he intended to do so. Nhia wondered briefly and with a spark of passing curiosity whether it was in fact the brand-new Sage who had sent the acolytes of the Great Temple into such a frenzy of activity, but it was unlikely that this would be something that she’d ever get close enough to find out.

Left alone in the gardens, Nhia sat for the better part of an hour contemplating the languid, overfed fish in one of the pools, happy to snatch a moment of perfect peace. It was as she was getting ready to leave that her disability returned to haunt her. She put her weight on her crippled foot in an awkward manner while stepping up onto the paved path leading to one of the gates, and the weak ankle gave way. Nhia crumpled to the path with a gasp of pain.

A hand extended in assistance swam into her field of vision, blurred by the sudden tears that had come into her eyes. Surprised, she took it, and was helped gently to her feet and supported until she gained a steady balance. Only then did she raise her eyes, blinking owlishly, to look at who had come to her aid.

The man’s face was young, unlined, the hair long and lustrous and tied back in a plaited queue like the workers wore – but his hands were not worker’s hands, and his eyes were not a young man’s eyes. The hands were smooth and white, nails manicured, a sure mark of an aristocrat with servants at his beck and call, even if it wasn’t for the telltale fall of expensive material of his gown that spilled in carefully arranged artless folds as he bent to help Nhia up. The eyes were opaque with ageless wisdom, dark and kind and utterly mysterious.

‘I …; thank you, I am fine now,’ she said, knowing as surely as she knew her own name that she was addressing someone a thousand times removed from her in rank and stature and appalled at her temerity in saying anything at all to such a personage. By rights she should have stood quietly with her eyes downcast until addressed directly.

The man dropped one of his hands from her shoulders, and Nhia attempted to stand unsupported but made the mistake of supporting her weight on her weak foot again. She tried to hide the inadvertent wince, but obviously failed when a cultured voice with a Court inflexion and intonation said, ‘I think not.’

He slipped an arm around her shoulders and helped her off the path, steering her to the nearest bench in the gardens, and letting her subside gently onto the seat.

‘Thank you,’ she said again, helplessly.

‘Did you come here to pray about this?’ the man inquired courteously, inclining his head the merest fraction to indicate her foot, not naming the affliction, as politeness demanded.

‘No, sei. No, my Lord, that is my mother’s reason for visiting the Temple.’

‘Oh?’ he said. ‘And not yours?’

‘I come here to understand, not to beg for petty miracles,’ Nhia said, and then bit her lip to prevent a small gasp from escaping. She had offered a discourtesy, at the least, and he could take her remark as borderline blasphemous if he chose.

‘How old are you?’ asked her benefactor instead, unexpectedly, after a pause which might have indicated surprise.

‘I turned thirteen only a few days ago, sei,’ Nhia said, relieved to be back on safe ground.

‘I have heard the name of a young girl who comes here to talk of the spirits with the Temple acolytes,’ the man said thoughtfully. ‘Would that be you? What is your name, child?’

‘NhiNhi,’ Nhia said, instinctively giving her child-name, the name her mother had called her by when she was a baby, and then flushed scarlet. ‘I mean …; Nhia, sei.’

‘Nhia,’ he repeated, with an air of committing it to memory. ‘Well, Nhia, seeker of wisdom, perhaps we shall meet again.’

Nhia dared a quick, flickering look to his face. ‘Yes, sei,’ she said, aware that she sounded like she was indicating an agreement to that future meeting instead of a simple response that his words seemed to demand.

He straightened, gestured to someone out of Nhia’s line of sight, and then bowed to her lightly – bowed to her! – and strode away in a whisper of expensive silk robes.

Nhia realized she was trembling.

When hurrying footsteps approached her a moment later, she lifted her eyes to meet the intensely curious gaze of her friend from the Third Circle. ‘What did he say to you?’ the acolyte demanded, sounding astonished. ‘Do you realize who that was?’

Still thunderstruck, aware of a murmuring crowd gathered in the cloisters which had been a collective witness to this strange encounter, Nhia stared at the gate through which her young lord had disappeared. ‘I think I do,’ she whispered. One of the Nine Sages is in the Fourth Circle today …;

‘He is Lihui. That was Sage Lihui. He is the youngest of the Nine Sages, the one who came to honour us today. I saw you fall at his feet and I was afraid, but he …;’

Nhia’s eyes were wide as saucers. She had been right but …; a Sage? A Court Sage had stopped to raise a crippled child, to ask her name …;

Perhaps we shall meet again, he had said.

Perhaps the ganshu readers had never told Nhia about this encounter because it had never been meant to take place. The acolyte had trusted her with the information that a Sage was in the Temple; the collapse of her ankle might have been pure chance, but a part of her had known at whose feet she had been thrown, and had guided her tongue as she had spoken to him.

Nhia looked around at the flickering lights of candles and oil lamps of the Third Circle, at the haze of brightness surrounding the weavers of human fates, the Rulers of the Four Quarters, and smiled to herself. She had put herself in the paths of the Gods this day. Perhaps she had just taken her first fragile step beyond the veil which ganshu had drawn over her life and destiny.

Seven

‘For the love of all the Gods, Khailin, and for the last time – not today! The Chancellor …;’

Khailin’s face set in mutinous lines. ‘The Chancellor! That means I won’t see you until nightfall, and that means I don’t get my lesson today.’

‘Think of it as a day of rest,’ said her father, with some impatience. Then he smoothed the frown off his forehead, and sighed. ‘Khailin, knowing your hacha letters is not going to magically –’

‘I know,’ Khailin said. ‘I know what it won’t do for me. But there is so much out there that I want to know, and that I will never know if I can’t …;’

She faltered under her father’s rather stern gaze. ‘And you do remember, I trust, that these lessons are based on a proper attitude on your part. I will not have you interrupting me, Khailin. It shows disrespect to your parents.’

‘Yes, Father,’ Khailin said, resigned.

‘Good. That’s settled, then. We will resume our lessons when I return from the Palace. In the meantime, I suggest that you pursue your …; other responsibilities. I will have to speak to your mother about that. Within a year or two you may well be married and will have no time for indulging such whims as books and studies.’

Khailin bowed to her father with the exact degree of respect that was required, keeping her eyes lowered so that he wouldn’t see the rebellion in them. Cheleh, Court Chronicler, permitted himself one affectionate feather-like brush of his hand on his daughter’s hair before bowing back to her with the proper degree of acknowledgement and leaving her alone in her chamber.