The Secrets of Jin-Shei

Three

A rush of white noise roared in Tai’s ears as Antian’s lifeless head rested on the arm which she had slipped underneath the nape of Antian’s neck as support. For a moment she could not move at all. She felt like the entire Palace was coming down in ruins all over again, only this time she was inside it, deep inside it, and it was all falling on her and around her and burying her with the pain. It took Yuet several tries before she could get a reaction from her, but Tai eventually became aware that the older girl had her by the shoulder and was speaking to her in a gentle voice.

‘Tai. Tai. Listen to me. Look at me. Look at me. Good.’ Tai had raised her eyes, her pupils dilated with shock, her face stark. ‘I have to go back to …; they will take care …;’ Yuet’s voice faltered for a moment, and then she seemed to change her mind, come to a different decision. ‘No. You go with them. Take the Little Empress back to the summer house in the garden. Make sure she is tended with honour.’

Tai stared at her, swallowed what tasted like bitter aloes. ‘I will.’

‘I will look for you, after. I have to go and take care of …; of whoever is left up there. I will come for you. I am relying on you.’

‘I will do it,’ Tai said, getting to her feet.

Yuet could see that she was not entirely steady as she stood beside Antian’s body, and did not feel happy at leaving her alone – her healer’s instincts told her that what Tai needed right then was someone to cling to, a warm blanket, something hot to drink, all the things needed to stave off shock. But all this was the healing of the mind. She was not physically hurt, and there were others out there who would need Yuet, who might be pulled out of the rubble half-alive, whose lives Yuet could save.

Yuet looked up at the waiting servants. ‘Take the Little Empress to the summer house.’ She hesitated; all hands would be needed, but she could not just leave Tai alone. ‘One of you,’ she said, ‘stay with her and with Tai. And somebody find Tai an outer robe.’

‘Yes, sai’an.’ The man who had gone for help bent down and gathered Antian’s body into his arms, very gently, as though she was a precious porcelain doll, and waited for Tai to lead the way. Tai turned away from the edge of the ruined balcony without looking out to her river again. She walked past Yuet without a word, almost without any sign that she was aware that the healer stood there.

‘I shouldn’t leave her alone,’ Yuet murmured to herself as the servant bearing Antian followed the younger girl into the garden.

But already she could hear the screams and wails, the pain and the terror that was waiting for her in the rubble of the Summer Palace. The voices drew her; for a moment she forgot about Tai, she forgot about Antian whose life’s blood she wore on her own robe. There were other lives.

The morning had fled quickly. They put out two of the smaller fires but the biggest one, the one that had started deepest in the ruins, quickly spread out of control. Thick columns of black smoke rose into the innocent blue of a flawless summer sky, and orange tongues of flame added to the day’s gathering heat. There were survivors – but few, so few, and the lines of bodies covered with sackcloth grew.

Yuet was perched precariously on the edge of a hole she and a few other able-bodied survivors had been excavating into the rubble, chasing down an elusive sobbing cry they had thought might indicate someone alive down there, when the first aftershock hit the mountain. The pile of debris that Yuet had been standing on tilted, nearly throwing her into the hole, and then settled at a different angle, a different slope. When the panicked shouts had settled down, they could no longer hear the voice they had been following in their attempts at rescue, and Yuet had called her team of aides off.

‘It’s useless, look, it’s all fallen in down there.’ She looked up and out across the debris, wiping sweat and dust and drifting ashes out of her eyes, and straightened up as she met the eyes of Antian’s little jin-shei-bao. ‘You? What are you doing here? Are you all right?’

‘I want to help,’ Tai said, her voice trembling just a little. She wore a borrowed gown, at least two sizes too large for her, and looked pitifully small and young and fragile.

‘Wait there a moment.’ Yuet scrambled down from her pile of rubble and came to stand next to Tai, lifting her chin with one hand, peering into her eyes. ‘You should be lying down somewhere and …;’

‘Please,’ said Tai, ‘I cannot. Let me help.’

Yuet hesitated. ‘There is little that you can do.’

Someone shouted out, a shout that held gladness; Yuet looked up. A senior servant of the women’s quarters, his tunic torn and his face and arms scratched and sooty, came scrambling over at a trot, carrying something in his arms.

‘It’s a miracle, but he is still alive,’ the servant said, offering Yuet a bawling baby swaddled in a torn silk wrap. ‘I don’t think he is hurt, even; the crying is just fear and hunger.’

Tai intercepted the child, cradled him in her arms, and he stopped crying, blinking up at Tai’s face with a puzzled expression and teardrops caught on his long dark lashes. ‘Shhhh,’ Tai said, rocking him gently against her. ‘Shhh, it will be all right. It will be all right.’

The ground trembled again under their feet, and Tai could not suppress a cry, clutching at the child, who whimpered but did not resume his desperate wailing.

‘Where did you find him? Are there …; ?’

‘No,’ said the servant, dropping his eyes. ‘Only that one. His mother is dead.’

‘Are there other children?’ Tai asked.

Yuet nodded. ‘Maybe half a dozen or so. From swaddling babes like this one to six- or seven-year-olds. They’re in the outer wing.’

‘I know it,’ Tai said. It was the wing where she and Rimshi had always stayed when they were at the Summer Palace. ‘I will take care of the children.’

‘You need …;’ Yuet began, but Tai lifted glittering dark eyes and Yuet stopped, biting back what she had been about to say.

‘I need to do it,’ Tai said, very softly. ‘For her.’

‘Go,’ Yuet said, after a pause. ‘Go, take care of the children.’

‘You are still wearing …;’ Tai began, but then her eyes filled with unexpected tears again, and she turned away quickly, gathering the child to her, and was gone. Yuet glanced down at her robe, and smoothed down the part where Antian’s bright blood had now dried into a stiff brownish stain. Yes, she was still wearing …; she was still wearing Antian’s own blood.

She almost forgot about Tai and the children in the next few hours, taken up with trying to cope with the aftermath of the disaster. She set broken limbs, tended burns, cuts, grazes, gashes and bruises. She cleaned and bandaged and gave out some sedative herbs to the worst-off. She took control of the servants, sent a clutch of them to set up a makeshift kitchen, brew copious quantities of soothing green tea, prepare a meal for the shocked survivors. In the Imperial Palace, decimated of its royalty, Yuet, the healer, reigned as queen for the day, and none questioned her or disobeyed her.

When she finally circled back to the children, they were no longer in the place where she had told Tai they would be, and after some searching she finally found the whole small group in the stables. There were more there than she realized; the survivors from the villages close to the shattered mountain had crept to the Palace in pitiful groups of two or three at a time, seeking help, and Tai had shunted all the children into her group. There were now maybe two dozen youngsters there. Tai had herself commandeered a single servant, and between them they had cleaned out several mangers and made them into makeshift cribs for the youngest babies. Some of them were wailing from hunger, but they were all clean and freshly swaddled and many of them were blissfully asleep. Tai had discovered a litter of eight-week-old puppies in the kennels, and had brought them out to the stable yard where the older children played with them happily, squealing with delight at puppy antics.

Yuet stopped dead, watching the scene; it was the first sight she had had all day of innocence and contentment. She felt the weariness fall from her shoulders, a little, at the sound of children’s laughter.

She found Tai huddled inside the stables themselves, sitting on a bale of hay with her chin resting on the knees drawn up against her chest into the circle of her arms. White-faced, with dark circles under her eyes, she looked as though she had aged ten years in the space of the last few hours.

‘You have wrought miracles,’ Yuet said, coming up beside her.

Tai looked up, without releasing her legs from the circle of her arms. ‘You have had the harder task.’

‘May I?’ Yuet said, indicating the bale, and Tai shifted sideways, giving Yuet space to subside beside her with a sigh. The healer knuckled her eyes, kneaded her temples with weary fingertips. Her head ached abominably. Her heart ached worse.

‘I am glad you were here,’ Tai said suddenly.

Yuet looked up, startled. ‘What?’

‘You care,’ Tai said.

‘I care about life,’ Yuet said.

She could not remember a time that she hadn’t had a calling to heal. Her very earliest patients had been the handful of animals on the tiny homestead where she had been fostered when she had been orphaned at barely four years of age. And then, aged only six, Yuet had stood beside her foster mother as she spoke to a passing dignitary, no less than a healer to the Imperial Court of Syai. Yuet’s foster mother had made some respectful remark about the health of the royal women, and somehow it had come out that she herself was suffering from a blistering headache at the time.

‘Willow bark,’ the young Yuet had piped up before the royal healer had had a chance to respond. ‘You should boil up some willow bark.’

‘Hush, child!’ Yuet’s foster mother had said, embarrassed at the utter lack of decorum shown by the orphaned child whom she had charitably taken into her household less than two years before, mortified that her teachings had not instilled better manners in the girl.

But the healer had lifted her eyebrows and was gazing at Yuet with interest.

‘And what would you do for a stomach ache?’ she had asked, almost conversationally.

Yuet had told her. The information had been accurate, and delivered without an ounce of self-consciousness or shyness.

The healer had smiled, and it had gone no further at that time. But less than a year later the letter had come to the house, written in flowing jin-ashu script, asking if Yuet wished to be apprenticed to the Imperial healer in Linh-an.

Yuet had had a very clear sense of her future, and knew that she would probably have graduated quite naturally to becoming the healer and still-woman for her village’s wounds and sicknesses, both animal and human. But even as a very young child she had always possessed a profoundly practical and realistic streak, and she had realized that she’d just been offered an extraordinary chance to pursue her calling in the far more exalted sphere of the Imperial Court when she had apprenticed to old Szewan. She had gone to the city the morning after Szewan’s letter reached the homestead where she had spent her earliest childhood.

She could not have known then that this day would come, that disaster would be a price she would have to pay.

Before Tai had spoken, she had not even realized that she was afraid, but now she suddenly faced it – that small flicker of fear that had been part of what had driven her to the lengths to which she had gone. There was healing – and then there was the fact that this was the Imperial family, and that there might be questions raised about what she, Yuet, had done or had not done, whether any of the dead could have been saved with a more experienced healer at the helm, or someone who had simply made different decisions at critical moments. The numbers were already devastating – there had been fifty-eight people in the living quarters of the Summer Palace when the earthquake had struck; some were still unaccounted for, but the bodies of more than half of them were laid out in the gardens and four of those bodies had once belonged to the highest of the Imperial family of Syai.

Tai’s words were balm, unexpected, healing to the healer – here was someone who was there with her, who had seen what had happened, who could vouch for the decisions that she had made.

But Tai was far away again – or as near as the shattered gardens, the ruined balcony, the dying Princess in the first golden light of the dawn.

‘I wish …;’ she whispered, very softly, almost to herself.

‘What do you wish?’ Yuet asked after a beat.

‘I wish I knew how to keep my promises.’

If Tai was Yuet’s witness, Yuet was hers. She had been there when Antian had spoken her dying words. Take care of my sister.

‘She wanted you to be there for the Third Princess. I mean, for Empress-Heir Liudan,’ Yuet said slowly.

‘Liudan hates me,’ Tai said simply.

Yuet reached out a hand and laid it over Tai’s fingers where they interlaced around her knees. ‘She does not. She will not. She will need a friend.’ She paused, suddenly unsure of what she was about to do, but it felt true, it felt right. ‘And so will you. I know I am not the Little Empress, I know I cannot take her place, but if you wish it I will be jin-shei-bao to you, I will help you keep your promise.’