Astrological chart of the constellation of the Baker. Fine rag paper and ink. Signed in the lower-right corner with the character for “lucky.”
Astrological chart of the constellation of the Crying Widow. Fine rag paper and ink. Signed in the lower-right corner with the character for “mourning.”
Astrological chart of the constellation of the Rooster. Fine rag paper and ink. Signed in the lower-right corner with the character for “open-eyed.”
Chih had thought the rear room to be a simple storage room at first. They had not expected to slide open the door and to be confronted with stacks of star charts filed into glass-fronted cabinets, indexed with a dab of dye in one corner and kept as carefully as the great scrolls of the abbey in Singing Hills.
Above them, Almost Brilliant whistled, though whether the sound was meant to be surprised or taunting Chih could not guess.
“Well, this is certainly a mess.”
“I suppose it is.”
“Do you think you can get through all of them fast enough to get to the eclipse?”
Chih bit their lip. It would be a close thing. They worked fast, but after a certain point, speed became the enemy of precision. Precision was the watchword of the clerics who had raised them, but the tug of the capital and the eclipse over the Palace of Gleaming Light was powerful.
Finally, they shrugged, going to the topmost shelf on the right and pulling out paper, inkstone, ink, and brush again.
“This could take all month,” Almost Brilliant said, alighting on their shoulder. Chih absently brushed the hoopoe off, ignoring the soft squawk of offense.
“It could. I hope it won’t.”
It would be, not appropriate, perhaps, but understandable to move on, to list the general contents of the room and to continue with the cataloging of Thriving Fortune. Another cleric could be sent, or perhaps Chih themselves could return at some point. By then, however, looters might have moved in and, as Chih listened to Rabbit’s footsteps shushing somewhere through the compound, things might be very different.
Empress In-yo, dead precisely a year before the upcoming eclipse, was one of the most well-recorded monarchs in history. She had brought the clerics of Singing Hills back from their exile beyond the borders of Anh, and she personally gifted them a gorgeous ivory and brass aviary to nest the next generation of neixin. Then she had shut off every record of herself before her ascension, every place she had lived between her banishment from court and her return six years later.
The clerics of the Singing Hills never liked gaps in their knowledge, but in return for their lands and their restored place in Anh, they had let it go. Eventually, the historian clerics knew, things would come out, whether it took five years, fifty, or a hundred.
If Chih did not finish their work here, they knew with the slow patience of seven hundred years’ worth of records at the abbey that it would be finished someday.
But I think this needs to be finished now. Soon.
The star charts ranged in quality from simple market scratches on elderly trash paper to beautifully elegant scrolls that described the heavens and their effect on those below in intense detail. Chih took a second glance at the ones related to their own birth sign, the Spoon, and was variously amused and impatient by turns to find predictions of varying accuracy. They had indeed come far from where they began in the foothills of Wa-xui, but they were hardly going to be called demure, maidenly, or docile.
A prickling along their back made them look up, and they turned to see Rabbit kneeling in the doorway behind them. She was not kneeling as if she were a dedicated servant waiting for orders, but instead, she knelt as if her legs would no longer support her, one hand on the door’s edge, the other fisted on her knee.
“Grandmother! Did you fall?”
Chih came over to help the old woman up, but she pushed Chih aside, coming into the room to sit with the star charts and the slips of astrological fortunes.
“Grandmother?”
“Have you seen the secret yet?”
“No, not yet, grandmother. I see a great many fortunes. I see as many stars as there are in the sky, but I do not see the secret yet.”
They thought Rabbit would tell them another story, but instead she merely pulled out two star charts. The first one Chih recognized from a famous old text that was part and parcel of every village fortune-teller’s tool kit. She opened it to the constellation of the Rabbit, and then she pulled down another chart, one that Chih had already noted, passing the ball of her thumb over the signature in the corner, the character for lucky.
“Now play eagle-eye and look closely.”
Chih did as they were bid, and after a few moments, they thought they had it.
“They are different. There are fewer stars in the newer chart, and even the ones that are meant to be there are shifted perhaps? Or twisted?”
Rabbit laughed hollowly. “Yes. The ones marked like this, they are wrong, or perhaps they are poorly made or made by fools. It is perfect, is it not? Who thinks that a village fortune-teller will have perfect sources? There are so many jokes about them making up the placement and the movement of the stars already.”
Chih looked at the altered star chart more carefully, and as they did, they thought they could see a rhythm in the seeming carelessness and chaos.
“A code,” Rabbit said. “A nearly invisible way to get information through the countryside when all of Anh knew that she was mad for oracles and fortune-tellers. Everyone knew that she talked to them all, the great and the mediocre and the frankly bad alike. It was a joke in the capital. The empress will not get out of bed unless a fortune-teller reassures her that it is all right to do so.”
She paused for a moment, shaking her head.
“In all fairness, she did a great deal of business from her bed, still in her nightclothes. In-yo used to say that if she were going to be doing this kind of business, she might as well be comfortable.”
Chih touched the altered star chart, looking at the offset stars, the missing planets, and a star road that arched in a curve that was foreign to them. If they had run into it in the market, they would have said it was a singularly poor example of the astrologer’s art, a pretty picture at best, and trash at worst. With Rabbit’s explanation, it became something altogether other.
Their fingers brushed over the character in the corner, and Rabbit almost flinched.
“Lucky?”
“He wasn’t, unfortunately.” Rabbit’s words were clipped as though with a seamstress’s scissors. She pointed to a small volume half-hidden on the lowest shelf. It sat in shadow, and Chih wouldn’t have noticed it until they got there.
“That’s the catalog. You may choose to use it instead of marking down each of the charts yourself. It will save you some time, at any rate.”
Chih opened their mouth to thank her, but Rabbit shuffled quickly out the door, sliding it closed behind her.
“Lucky,” they repeated, and then they shivered.
Bad luck, during the reign of the last emperor, could be very bad indeed.
* * *
I missed Kazu after she was sent back to the Palace of Gleaming Light. I didn’t think I would. She was noisy and lazy and always more interested in fun than she was in anything like work, but she livened up the days, and at night she could be convinced to tell the bawdy stories that she learned from the rough men at the inns. You laughed with Kazu around, sometimes because she was so insolent, sometimes because she was so lazy, but most often because she was so much fun.
She was the only girl who ever cried when the Minister of the Left returned to bring her back to the palace, and when she asked to stay, he frowned at her, his mouth turning into the slash of a sharp knife through scraped hide.
“Of course your love for the empress does you credit. Perhaps in a year or two, when you may be spared from court.”
I felt a cold and heavy stone settle in my stomach at his words, but Kazu brightened up considerably.
“Well, a year or so, that’s not so bad. Then I’ll be back and I’ll have all sorts of games to play from the capital, won’t I, In-yo? Won’t I, Rabbit?”
“Oh, you stupid girl, I can’t stand to hear your prattling.”
In-yo turned impatiently to the Minister of the Left even as Kazu looked at her with hurt in her bright eyes.
“Do not send her back. She will not stop talking or gaming, and you can be sure she did not do her chores.”
The two other girls nodded wisely, and the two girls the Minister had brought to replace them with made quiet notes to themselves that the empress did not care for chatter. Kazu drooped like a poplar in drought, and even as In-yo turned around as if the matter bored her, I watched the Minister.
His eyes slid between the empress and Kazu and back again. I could see the grim math being worked there even if Kazu could not. Finally, he tucked his hands into his sleeves and nodded.
“I will endeavor to select better when next I am called upon to choose maidens for your home, my empress.”
In-yo shrugged as if the entire matter was dull to her, and she never looked up to watch Kazu leave with the minister and the two other girls, whose names we had never bothered to learn.
Years later, In-yo tried to find Kazu, looking with both the chroniclers and the executioners, who kept their own secret records. Neither scholar nor killer could remember Kazu. There was a record of her in the registry of accessory wives when she first entered the Palace of Gleaming Light, and a record of her sojourn to Thriving Fortune and her return. After that, nothing.
The records close to the end of the emperor’s reign were spotty and confused at best. It was easy to see how one humble and never very popular accessory wife could be lost. One night, In-yo and I became very drunk, and we talked about all the ways that Kazu might have escaped. She might have stolen away on a ship that went across the sea, or perhaps she was picked up by a passing god in disguise who could not resist her delighted laugh and her terrible luck at card games. Perhaps she had fallen in love with some intrepid maid or stableboy, and they had run off together, seeking fame and fortune on the frontier.
It didn’t matter, of course. Whether she escaped or died, neither In-yo nor I ever saw her again.
She did make good on her word, however, despite how hurt she must have been by In-yo’s farewell. A month after we saw the last of her, the fortune-tellers came to call. Some of them were true mystics and some of them were such terrible frauds that we took pity on them and found them work in the countryside. Some were looking for royal favor, and others were looking for fame. Out of the lot, we found three who became integral to In-yo’s plans.
The oldest was Zhang Phuong, whose son had been killed by the imperial guards many years ago. Zhang’s wife had turned herself into a kingfisher out of grief and fled the land, and now all he had to remember his wife by was a kingfisher tattoo on his neck, and all he had to remember his son by was the grief in his heart. He read the future in ivory tablets that clacked on the floor like broken teeth, and whichever you turned up would tell you which way to go.
The youngest was Wantai Mai, a girl from the south. She was an actress born from a gravestone cutter and a dove keeper, and I do not think she could have gotten more disreputable unless she actually did sport a fox’s tail when she wasn’t paying attention. She dyed her hair a bright peppery red, and she painted eyes over her eyelids, frightening me badly until I got used to her. She told me once that she had a nose for trouble, and that it hung off In-yo like the scent of fish off a fisherman. Mai would read a person’s destiny in the lumps in their skull, scrubbing her stubby fingers through their hair and often at the same time surreptitiously feeling for their purse.
Between them was . . .
Ha, what shall I call him? In the missives, he was Lucky, though he was not. The first name that his mother gave him was after the fashion of their people, designed to make him invisible in the eyes of malevolent spirits. It was Bucket, and there was something truthful to it. He moved like a bucket on a rope, always on the verge of spilling all its water, tottering back and forth, faster than he intended to go. There was the name I called him, of course, but the habits of a lifetime die hard, and I do not wish that written down in any place where unfriendly eyes might see it.
When he was on assignment to the north, meeting with In-yo’s oh-so-deadly relatives, they called him Sukai, after a kind of migratory bird. In-yo told me that the sukai spends four months of the year in her homeland, but of the other nine no one knows, so I will call him Sukai here as well.
Sukai lacked Mai’s dashing and Phuong’s dignity, but he had a gift for loyalty. I didn’t know that the morning that he showed up, however. In-yo was in deep consultation with Phuong, and Mai was entertaining the two ladies-in-waiting, promising them fame and fortune and beauty that would echo through the ages.
I was peaceably scrubbing the floors outside In-yo’s quarters again, listening with half an ear to her discussion with Phuong and keeping half an eye out for anyone who might choose to do the same.
Unlike Kazu, Sukai did not surprise me. Instead, he waved until he got my attention from the sand below, until I could not help but put my broom aside impatiently.
“What is it? Have you gotten lost down there?”
He grinned. He was not handsome, with a face that looked a bit like a proper face had been made out of wax and then heated and pulled very gently askew. It was a good face, though, and I was already a little more sympathetic than my hard words suggested.
“No, sis, I’ve not gotten lost, but look at this.”
I watched from the porch as he scooped up one of the rocks from the beach, and then another, and then another. They were pale in his dark hands, and then he threw them up in the air, one after another. I watched with skeptical interest as he juggled for me, but just as I was getting ready to return to my work, I realized there were not three stones, but instead five, and then seven, all without him stooping to pick up another.
You must not think that I am a credulous little fool from the provinces, for all that I was born out here. I had seen some of the finest entertainers the world had to offer during my short stint at court, and as smooth and skilled as Sukai was, I was far from impressed.
He seemed to sense this and, one after the other, he threw the stones he juggled with unerring speed and strength, sending them to strike the trees nearby with a sound like the cracking of the ice in spring.
He came down to three balls, then two, and then the last one he threw right at my face. I squawked, falling back because a good shot with a stone that size could have broken my nose or killed me. I moved back so fast, I landed on my rear on the porch, eyes screwed up and afraid of the dreadful pain.
Instead of a stone striking me, however, I looked up to see a shower of peony petals falling down around me, pink and sweet.
Now Sukai levered himself up on the porch with a broad grin on his skewed face.
“Did you like that? I learned it from a woman who did magic in the low town, and she said it came from nature spirits—”
His words were cut off when in a rage I pushed him back off the porch. He landed with a thump on the soft ground below, but he stared up at me in shock. I must have been quite a terrible sight, my face still screwed up with fear and tears of panic and humiliation in my eyes.
“And now I have to sweep up all this mess! That was awful; don’t do that again!”
I don’t know what kind of response that would have gotten, whether he would have laughed at me or turned mean about how poorly I had taken his joke, but then we both became aware of the door behind me sliding open and In-yo striding out. She took in the scene at a glance, and glared down at the young man on the ground. Even as a young woman, In-yo had a tremendous glare, and Sukai scrambled to his feet, prepared, I suppose, to meet his doom like a man.
“Did you make this mess?”
“Your Majesty, yes, I did. Forgive me.”
I honestly thought In-yo might simply snort and tell him not to do it again, but instead her eyes narrowed. She glanced at him, glanced at me, and then she pointed at Sukai.
“You will help her clean all of this up. And before you play your tricks, why don’t you make sure that people will welcome them?”
“Yes, Your Majesty. Thank you for your mercy.”
She did snort at that, and she went back into her quarters to look over dozens of star maps with Phuong. He was an especially skilled artist, and his maps were always perfectly scaled, perfectly up-to-date.
Sukai looked at me warily from the ground.
“May I come up?”
“She said you could, didn’t she?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean you said I could.”
I waved him up impatiently, and then he startled me by taking the broom out of my hands.
“Here, sit on the rail, all right?”
I wouldn’t. I went to sit with my back to the sliding door instead, but he was just as happy with that.
He swept up the peony petals, and as he did so, he danced with the broom, spinning it in his hands like a beautiful woman. As he did, he hummed a tune that was so jaunty that I couldn’t help but tap my fingers on the porch, and then he grinned at me and started to sing about an angry rabbit who would not be amused no matter how funny a joke was.
“Or maybe you don’t know what a funny joke is, did you think of that?”
He winked at me, as if I had given him the most splendid opening, and he started to tell me jokes, such terrible, terrible jokes, everything from the old one about the rabbit in the moon, to ones about the giant who pissed out the sea, to the dragon who became so drunk its thrashing spelled out the dirtiest joke in the world.
At first, I tried to keep my lips squeezed tight, because I do not think that kind of thing ought to be encouraged, but then my mouth started to tremble, and the laughter, never so much a presence in my life, bubbled up out of me, and I started to laugh.
Of course it encouraged him, and he started to tell even more ridiculous jokes, ones that made no sense at all, but I couldn’t stop laughing, even to catch my breath.
When he finally stopped, my ribs hurt, In-yo and Phuong came out to see what was the matter, and all I could do was try to tell them why the idea of an elephant walking a tightrope wire was so very funny.
“Well, I am glad that someone is having a good time,” she said, but there was a slight smile on her face as she said it.
* * *
Almost Brilliant cocked her head to one side, looking at Rabbit.
“I do not forget anything, you know.”
Rabbit nodded.
“I know. But this cannot be counted like boxes of spice and star charts.”
The hoopoe pecked idly at the grains of rice the old woman had brought her, as if buying herself some time to think.
“This will not be a secret. I will likely tell Chih when we are alone, and of course anyone who asks, as well as my chicks whenever I should have them.”
Rabbit sighed, spreading her hands out as if she did not necessarily understand herself.
“That is fine. But let them ask, and perhaps let them be kind when they do so. Some things are easier to explain to the birds and the beasts of the forests than to even the most sympathetic of clerics. He was unimportant, the least of In-yo’s spies and couriers, but—”
Almost Brilliant fluttered her wings in the dying light.
“I understand. I will remember Sukai for you, and so will my children and their children as well.”
“Thank you.”