Califia's Daughters (20 page)

“My name is Dian,” she started, but got no further. The woman bundled her inside, conjured up another of herself, twenty years younger and forty pounds lighter, who tugged the baby, carrier and all, from Dian's arms with the same single-mindedness that the stable girl had shown, bustling off again into the dim and fragrant depths of the inn. Dian's flustering guide completely ignored Dian's attempts at both Spanish and English but shooed Dian ahead of her through half an acre of glossy red-brown tile floors, massive black beams, and rough, spotless white plaster walls.

At the end of their travels the innkeeper, or her representative, shoved Dian out into a courtyard, a huge sun-washed area broken into intimacy by a number of half-walls, four enormous spreading oak trees, and a meandering and apparently unplanned watercourse with three ponds, a dozen changes of level, and a soothing trickle of water from the wall to mark its beginning. There were two cooking pits, each large enough for half a cow, half a dozen potbellied clay fireplaces, strings of colorful hanging lamps waiting for night, countless flowerpots blazing with marigolds and zinnias and asters, four large bamboo cages of songbirds, a pair of somnolent orange cats, and an incomparable view of the walls of Meijing, that massive silver snake that rode the hilltops and protected the last city in the West from overview. Dian was the only human being in sight.

She walked aimlessly around the courtyard, admired the view and the goldfish in the ponds and the birds in the cages, and had settled into a disconsolate chair to await Willa's return when the door from the cantina burst open and a third black-clad, tightly bunned woman stormed out with a red-enameled tray laden with a large bowl of crisp brown corn chips, three smaller bowls containing dips, and a large blue-glass pitcher filled with a dark brown liquid topped by a thin layer of finely textured froth. She dumped the tray in front of Dian, miraculously not spilling a drop from bowl or pitcher, seized the jug, and paused.

“Bebe Usted cerveza?”

“Sí, señora, con mucho gusto.”

The woman nodded brusquely and dashed the liquid into a tall, narrow blue glass, slapped the pitcher down, and stalked off. The seemingly careless service had resulted in a precise measure of beer with a head of caramel-colored foam that blossomed one half inch above the glass, then subsided without so much as a dribble. It was a beautiful beer, cool and heavy and sweet against the warm, salty chips and the fire of the thin red-brown dip, the tang of the lumpy red one, and the creamy rich garlic of the green one.

All in all, Dian was well satisfied with what she took to be her dinner. Then the other trays arrived. Three of them, carried by three more women (no, surely not three more of these phlegmatic Hispanics?), who marched across the red tiles and dealt out bowls, plates, and baskets with a verve that should have sent each object spinning to the ground but somehow did not. Dian tried to dredge up some appropriately appreciative phrases, but was not fast enough off the mark and could only fling various forms of
gracias
at the black backs.

Bowls of beans and rice, succulent prawns in a
piquante
sauce and chicken
mole,
the chocolate sauce so thick it swallowed the chicken, and flaming
chile verde
, along with a basket of fresh hot tortillas, a platter of
flautas
topped with sour
crema
, a plate of tamales, and—Dian groaned, knowing she could never eat it all, and knowing she was going to make herself ill trying. The sun inched across the tiles, the shadows grew long, and finally Dian sat back, stunned and pop-eyed and incapable of movement. She rested her head against the convenient chair back, and in two minutes she was asleep.

She woke to find a cat in her lap and the sun in her eyes and the table as clear as if the feast had been but a fairy dream. Except for her stomach's evidence—she felt like Judith had looked last month. She pried the disgusted cat from her thighs, got to her feet, and went to find Willa.

There were people in the inn now, perhaps a dozen figures scattered across one corner, as dark and quiet as the rooms themselves. Dian waited for a brusque figure to materialize, and as her eyes adjusted to the low light she realized that three of the seven people sitting at the large corner table, drinking
cerveza
and eating tortilla chips with satisfied, tired movements and low voices, were men, and that the other six women, sitting at three surrounding tables, were guards, their eyes on Dian and their still hands hidden beneath the tables. Dian nodded easily to them and walked off at an oblique angle toward the kitchen smells.

Before she could lay a hand on the doors, they flew open and there stood the first of the black-gowned women, framed by a square of light and an almost tangible air of chilis and grilling tortillas and voices. She had Willa in her hands and thrust her out, carrier and all, toward Dian. Willa had been out of the carrier, though, Dian noted as she buckled it on: the baby was now wearing an allover shapeless garment of scarlet cloth with a flock of tiny, bright-colored birds in flight across the sleeves and down the front. She exclaimed over it, received no reaction from the authoritative figure standing arms akimbo before her, and was seized by a flare of irritation.

“I would like to say thank you to whoever fed Willa,” she said firmly.

“No es necesario.”

“Para Usted, señora, no es, pero para mí, y para este bebé, y”
—she pulled out her trump card—
“para mi amiga Jamilla, sí, es necesario.”
Her Spanish was that of a child, Dian knew, but the message was unmistakable: kindly move out of my way, old woman, before you piss me off. The woman wavered, took half a step back into the busy kitchen, and halted again as the sound of a child's wordless voice rose above the babble. Dian relented slightly.

“Por favor, señora,
my mother raised me to have good manners, and she would be upset if I walked away without saying
gracias
to the woman who gave this baby suck.” As Dian had suspected, the woman's English was up to this, because in a moment she nodded shortly, gestured Dian to stay put, and leaned back to shriek into the kitchen. Voices cut off, pans stilled, and a beautiful young woman, almost a girl, came to the doorway wiping her hands on a towel. The
señora
assaulted her with a string of words unintelligible to Dian, and they both turned to look at Dian, one suspicious and the other smiling happily.

“I was happy to help you,
señora,
” she said to Dian. “It is a pretty child, although the toes, they make my grandmother worried.”

“They make me worried too,” Dian told her, “though probably for different reasons. I appreciate your willingness to have her in your house. And for the red suit. Can I return it . . . ?”

“Oh, no, it is not new, my . . . my child has grown out of it.” Dian interpreted the hesitation in light of the grandmother's obvious reluctance to have her in the kitchen and the sounds of the child on the other side of the door.

“You have a son?” The grandmother made as if to push Dian out the front door of the inn, but the young woman only dimpled.

“Yes. He is almost two. I have a picture,” she said, and fished a much-handled photograph of a sturdy child from the pocket of her apron. The subject of the studio portrait shouted loudly twenty feet away, but Dian would not have asked to see him for the world. She admired the image (thinking privately that the bright pink tinting on the child's cheeks made him look like a doll) and thanked the women again before taking her leave.

The stable girl was there waiting with Simon and the two dogs, perched on the edge of a hitching rail with the reins in her hands, communing with Simon and completely oblivious of the dogs. She seemed reluctant to give over possession of the horse, ignored the coin Dian held out to her, and slouched off to await her next equine visitor. It was as well, Dian thought to herself as she checked the girth and mounted, that some people's passions were fulfilled by their environment.

“TELL THEM A FOREIGN DAMSEL WISHES TO SEE THEM;
AND ASK THEM IF THEY WANT TO SEE ME
INSIDE OR HERE WHERE I AM.”

S
IXTEEN

A
LL AFTERNOON THE FOG HAD BEEN SPILLING OVER THE
tops of the hills from the sea, soft waves that dissipated before they reached the ground. Now, however, the sun's heat was no longer enough to keep it at bay, and it was tumbling over the top of Meijing's walls like an immensely slow tidal wave.

The wave broke over the travelers a mile from the city gates, and the world closed in, clammy and dim. In the half-light the city walls lost their glow and were only gray and very solid. At the city's gates, streamers of fog blew across the huge archway and gave for a brief instant the impression that the city itself was sailing briskly through a stationary cloud.

Dian rode through the gates and dismounted inside the courtyard, which was even more enormous than she remembered, its farthest reaches only a series of glowing lights through the damp. The courtyard functioned as between territory, separated from the interior by the same sheer, high, windowless walls that the city presented to the rest of the world. A person in the Court of Traders might be technically within Meijing's walls, but she was emphatically not within the city.

The courtyard was emptying rapidly in the early dusk; most of the smaller stalls were already boarded and padlocked. The Approvals building here was the great-grandmother of the individual units along the Road, an eight-hundred-foot line of interconnected cubicles, no more than twenty feet deep and studded by dozens of evenly spaced doors alternating with windows. Both ends of the building were dark, but toward the middle quite a few of the cubicles were still fully lit and bustling with desperate energy as the soon-to-be-benighted traders hurried to have their last-minute purchases weighed, tested, and analyzed by the technicians and their gleaming, mysterious array of equipment.

The courtyard had not actually changed much in fourteen years, Dian saw. At the far right end of the Approvals building was the same stretch of unmarked wall with its insignificant door, which according to her mother was one of less than a dozen points of access to the city. She pulled the waterproof neck pouch from under her shirt, took out the letter from Ling, and made for the doorway.

Before she had covered half the distance, a tall Chinese woman in the dark green uniform of the Meijing guard intercepted her. The woman was everything Meijing represented: sleek and strong, her belt strung with compact devices whose purposes Dian couldn't even begin to guess, although all of them looked scary.

“That door is not open to visitors,” the guard said firmly but politely; out of the corner of her eye, Dian saw a figure atop the long building shift her attention as well.

Dian signaled the dogs to relax and, careful to make no rapid movements, held the letter out to the woman. The guard did not reach for it but instead, unfailingly polite, asked Dian to open it. Only when it was free of its envelope and the page unfolded did the woman take it, stepping away to read Ling's delicate characters. When she had done so, she looked up thoughtfully at Dian, her dogs, and the baby who was beginning to stir against her chest.

“You will have to wait a short while out here. I am sure you understand, I must give this to my superior.”

“I understand, but if you will be very long, do you think someone could arrange some food for the baby? She will be hungry soon and I have no milk for her.”

The woman looked a bit nonplussed at this, but she merely nodded and tipped her head to speak a few words into the air. Dian started to look and see who the guard was talking to, then caught herself—she was speaking into a shoulder radio, although the device itself was hidden. After a moment, the invisible colleague must have responded, because the woman turned and disappeared through the door, which, oddly enough, did not seem to be locked. Dian left the dogs with Simon and, conspicuously leaving her weapons on the saddle, took the waking baby for a stroll. Whispering soothing nonsense in a singsong voice and jiggling her up and down, Dian stopped to peer in the windows of the Approvals building. In this lab she could see a white-coated woman, her glossy black hair bent over a microscope while a trader waited impatiently on the other side of the counter. In the next cubicle another technician was holding a long strip of paper up before a group of five people, two of them men with heavy beards and bright, elaborately wrapped turbans on their heads. Further down she could see what she took to be a Geiger counter, though it was much larger than any she had seen before. In that stall also there was a pair of women in travel-stained clothing, only these two were shouting at each other in silent pantomime behind the glass. The technician in this cubicle looked on apprehensively, a pile of heavy, gleaming, very old silverware on the counter in front of her. As Dian watched, one of the women threw up her hands, shoveled the forks and spoons roughly into a cloth bag, and slammed out the door.

By now Willa was beginning to tell the world of her hunger, to the curious looks of some of the women remaining in the courtyard. Dian was just starting to wonder if she might be able to find some goat's milk outside the gates when the small door opened and the tall guard came out, followed by two others.

“Would you come with me, please?” she asked. Dian gathered up Simon's dangling reins and glanced up at the rooftop figure, of whom she had been very aware for the last ten minutes. That woman held a wicked-looking black shape in her hands that looked like an old semiautomatic weapon. She nodded politely at Dian as she passed, following the guards through the door, which was just tall and wide enough for a laden horse. The dogs followed, alert but controlled, and Dian entered the forbidden city of Meijing.

Walking down the narrow labyrinth to the echoing clop of the horse's hooves and Willa's sporadic protests, one guard in front and two behind, Dian saw through two sets of eyes. One set was hers as she was now, a woman familiar with the strategies of defense, who knew herself to be the equal of most of the women guarding this city. The other eyes belonged to a gangly adolescent with a new name and a new body, brought from a remote village to this hidden city whose very name evoked its magnificence.

They were now passing doors, some of which had half-recognized characters painted onto them (one something to do with soldiers, another with food requests—Dian kicked herself for not going further with Ling's Chinese lessons) and others which were unmarked. One entrance was obviously the hospital for the area's ill and injured, the doors broad and ramped, the air outside it smelling of drugs and pain. Shortly after the hospital, the roof gave way to open air. An overhead row of electrical lights flickered on, showering a harsh blue illumination onto the passageway and causing Simon to snort and toss his head.

Then the walls turned a sudden corner and ceased altogether, and she was startled to find a view of inner Meijing rolled out before her—she'd only expected to be given access to the walls, not the inner city itself. But here it was, lit by the last rays of the sun that slid underneath the fog, turning the silver walls to a warm rose color and making the world stop to catch its breath at the serenity and perfection within.

All the bustle of the city's business was conducted within the actual structure of the perimeter wall itself. From outside Meijing, the wall seemed only a monolithic barrier, but on the inside there were great variations in depth, with balconies and roof gardens and thousands of windows to overlook the great uneven parkland that was the city, the sweep of countryside meticulously natural and unplanned in its heights and hollows, grassland and lakes, forest groves and tidy orchards and flowering shrubs. When she'd been here with Mother fourteen years ago, it had still looked raw in places, the new hills formed of rubble recently planted and containing unfinished patches; now it seemed that the last of the tarmac and concrete had been hauled off to the walls and the Bay, and under the softening, roseate fog, it looked like a young Eden.

“You are seeing it at the proper time of day,” spoke a quiet, precisely accented voice from Dian's elbow. “The other side of the city is best at dawn, but from this side, dusk is better.”

Dian turned to the tiny figure standing at her side. The face was tantalizingly familiar, but who . . . ? The woman smiled.

“You do not remember me?” she chided.

The smile brought back a flood of memories, among which was a face much younger and not so amazingly small.

“Jung Xiansheng! But you're so—” She stopped, not wishing to cause offense.

“Old, I know. And you have grown half a foot I think since my student your mother brought you here. The news of her death saddened me, but your presence brings me happiness. Come, let us refresh you, and your child. Your milk has not come in, I was told?”

Dian's laugh roused Willa. Raising her voice, Dian said, “She isn't mine. I rescued her at a crossroads, a couple of days ago. A simple birth defect, nothing contagious.” The older woman raised one eyebrow and nodded, then turned to Dian's three escorts with a stream of Chinese too fast for Dian to follow, though she caught a few words, such as
horse
and
mother
and
tea.
One of the women bowed and marched back into the wall passageway. Teacher Jung spoke to Dian, loudly enough to make herself heard over the vigorous little set of lungs, “You will I think want those two monsters with you?” and nodded with a twinkle at Culum and Tomas.

“If it would not trouble you, please. They have excellent manners. I need only my saddlebag, if you wish to take the horse,” she said to the tall guard. “And you would probably be more comfortable if you searched me here, would you not?” Dian transferred the squalling Willa to Teacher Jung's arms, where the infant calmed somewhat. She took the hunting knife from her belt and the narrow throwing knife from the top of her boot and gave both to the guard, who put them into Dian's saddle roll. Dian then held her arms out for a brisk pat search, waited while her bags were examined, and returned the guard's bow. The woman bowed low to Teacher Jung, then nodded to one of the others to lead the horse away, and followed. Jung sighed.

“Mai is a little overzealous in her duties, but a good girl. She is my number-ten grandchild.” She took Dian's arm and started off at an angle across the parkland, talking about her family. An onlooker would have thought that she walked in the park every evening on the arm of a towering, disheveled blond woman with stained clothing, a howling infant tucked into her other arm, and a pair of dogs, either of whom easily outweighed the old woman, sauntering along behind.

Their path soon reached a magnificent freestanding building in a grove of timber bamboo, which Dian took for a temple until excited children of various sizes began to spill from within, chattering wildly at Teacher Jung and only just controlling their obvious desire to gawk at these huge, light-haired creatures (both two- and four-legged). An adult followed, and Jung placed Willa in the woman's arms with brief instructions. Cries of starvation trailed off through the house until they were abruptly cut short. Food had been provided.

Meanwhile, Teacher Jung was making solemn introductions, and Dian bowed formally to each child and promptly forgot the names.

“Now,” said Teacher Jung, slowly and in English, “That is enough for tonight. Miss Dian will be here tomorrow. She will talk with you then. Did you understand, MeiLan?” The smallest tot looked puzzled until an older sister translated for her, and then she presented Dian with a smile of angelic sweetness, bowed with the others, and back they poured up the steps into the temple-house. Teacher Jung watched them go with a grandmother's pride.

“I hope you will pardon their manners,” she said. “They are young and inexperienced.”

“Their manners are beautiful,” Dian said in an unnecessary protest. “I hope I will be allowed to talk with them.”

Teacher Jung nodded complacently.

“I very much hope you will stay some days with us. Ling said in her letter that you are on your way north to investigate a group of potential immigrants to your valley, but she thinks you may not be overly pressed for time.” It was a question.

“I'd love to stay for a day or two, but I'm afraid that you may not find us the easiest of guests.”

“Nonsense. But the baby—oh, goodness, here I criticize the children's manners! You are weary from the road and I make you stand and chatter. Come, one of my granddaughters will show you to your rooms, and when you have refreshed yourself you will come and drink tea with me, and we will talk. First, however, I think Ling will have sent a small parcel for me?”

Dian pulled the thick envelope from her bag and with both hands gave it to the woman, to her evident satisfaction.

“Very good, thank you. Ah, here is CaThai, she will take you upstairs. When you are rested, come down, and someone will bring you to me. There is no hurry, we will not take our meal until eight-thirty.”

Dian bowed and followed the tiny trouser-clad woman upstairs, where she was shown a small room with three comfortable chairs around a burning fire, with an adjoining bedroom, complete with two large furry pads on the floor for the dogs and a spacious bathroom whose tiled tub stretched fully six feet long. She thanked CaThai, who giggled as she left. When Dian was alone, she introduced the dogs to their beds, dropped her grimy saddlebags onto the floor, and went to soak the smell of horse, dog, and dust from her skin.

The water was murky by the time she'd finished, so she fiddled with the control to the shower, a mad arrangement of five spray heads, and when she had finally found how to make it neither scald nor freeze her, nor puncture her more tender parts with streams like needles, she figured she was clean enough and shut it off.

The towels, all four of them, were warm from a loop in the hot-water supply. She wrapped one around her, began to walk out of the steamy bathroom toweling her hair with another one, then came to a dead halt at an absolutely horrifying thought.