Clockwork Samurai (4 page)

I tried not to think too much of Chang-wei leaving. It would drive me mad.

Instead I absorbed myself in my duties in the physicians' court, and the next days passed by uneventfully. I heard nothing else from the Emperor. Hopefully he'd forgotten about me.

By the time I was to take my monthly leave, the natural rhythm and routine of the harem returned.

Outside of the Forbidden City lay the Manchurian section of the city. My mother had found lodging in a modest courtyard house among the winding
hutong
alleyways. I was given permission once every month to visit her and my brother.

The mechanical sedan chair took me through the palace gates and along the prescribed path through the streets. I always looked forward to these visits away from the protocols and rituals of the palace. Every time I saw my younger brother, I was reminded of exactly why we had come back to Peking.

The property was not much larger than ours had been back in the village. It was comprised of three rooms around a central yard. Nothing like the mansion our family had once occupied in Peking, but that place had been long taken over by some other official. I wouldn't have remembered it if I saw it. That time was a lifetime away from who we were now.

But life had been good to us, all things considered. I drew an imperial salary now, and I sent my earnings to my family. My brother Tian was promptly enrolled into one of the imperial academies after Chang-wei personally presented him to the headmaster. How could the academy refuse when Tian was sponsored by a prominent member of the Ministry of Science? For the first time in years, all things seemed possible.

My duties in the Court of Physicians had taken on a comfortable routine. I knew the eunuchs looked upon me as an outsider, but the work kept me busy. I had hundreds of herbs and ingredients to study and memorize. The imperial records were also fascinating. I pored through historical records of elixirs given to emperors. Elixirs of crushed pearl and mercury, meant to increase virility. Even grant immortality.

It was easy in the shelter of the palace to believe there weren't foreign devils living among us. That the empire wasn't being torn apart from inside by rebellion. But I couldn't forget. At night when I closed my eyes, I could see the ports of Canton and Shanghai clogged with foreign ships. I could hear the explosions that shook the walls of Changsha.

I wouldn't let myself forget.

As I approached the gate of my mother's home, a man with his cap pulled low nearly collided with me. He only glanced at me before departing without apology.

The door of the front room was open, so I entered without needing to knock. Mother was seated over a satchel of papers. She straightened abruptly when she saw me.

“Soling, I had forgotten you were coming today.” Her hands fidgeted, touching the portfolio and retreating. There was a lacquered box beside it.

“Where's Nan?” I asked, glancing at the slim case warily. Our maidservant was always about, but I couldn't hear her in any part of the house.

“I sent Nan to the market for a few things. She should be back soon. How are you, Daughter?” Mother spoke in a rush, all her words strung into a single sentence.

“I'm well. And you?”

Without even thinking, I searched for the signs. The shades were drawn, and Mother was certainly nervous. The pupils were the easiest way to tell if she had taken a pipe, but she was avoiding my gaze.

Immediately I felt guilty. It had been over a year since Mother had touched opium, yet every time I came to see her, I was in fear that she'd weakened and returned to it.

Mother glanced furtively at the lacquered box before redirecting her gaze to me. “I needed something to keep me busy. Especially when your brother is away at the academy.”

Once more, she grasped the edges of the portfolio, straightening it in front of her. What had my mother so agitated?

“What's in the box?” I asked, bracing myself for the worst.

“It's not what you think, Daughter.” With a sigh, she opened the case to reveal a series of brass dials inside. “It's a calculating machine,” she explained when I continued to stare at it without comprehending. “It's been years since I used one of these.”

Her hands caressed the dials almost lovingly. I had only recently learned that my mother had once been a candidate for the imperial science exams. An oddity, since the exam was only open to men.

“The Ministry requires some calculations for their building projects.”

I sat down beside her as she opened the portfolio and rifled through the papers. Each one was covered with mechanical drawings and symbols. After a few pages, my eyes swam.

“Do you understand all of this?”

“Understand it? In many ways this is clearer to me than language.”

Her expression was dreamlike. Disturbingly, it was not entirely unlike an opium trance, though her eyes were focused.

“Engineer Kuo brought this to me.” She straightened the papers and carefully placed them back inside the portfolio.

I was taken aback. “Kuo Lishen? Why would the chief engineer come to you?”

“I sent him a letter a few days ago.” Mother sighed. “Soling, I've been in a waking dream for so many years. It's . . . it's difficult to be back here, in this city. And to have to see everything and feel everything. To not be able to close my eyes.”

I knew it was hard for her to talk about the past.

“Peking is no longer our home. I don't know if we have a home anymore. And the days are so long now. They stretch on forever. We get by from the money you and Engineer Chen provide, but—”

“Chen Chang-wei gives you money?”

She looked surprised that I hadn't known. “For Tian's studies.”

I remembered Chang-wei mentioning he would help my brother when we reached Peking, but I had thought he meant securing him entrance to one of the science academies within the capital.

“We have to give it back.”

Mother didn't argue with me. Instead, she smiled faintly. “So you understand why I contacted Kuo. I asked him if there was any way I could be of service to the Ministry. I was trained in the scientific branch of the Hanlin Academy, did you know? I would have passed the exams as well, if it weren't for . . .”

Her voice trailed away, and she looked sullen. As if a light had sparked within her for only a moment before slowly fading away, starved of oxygen.

“Old Liu Yentai told me you were a gifted mathematician,” I told her gently.

She touched her finger once more to a brass dial on the calculating machine. “We didn't have a calculating machine in my father's shop when I was growing up. When I first came to the Academy, I used only an abacus. But I was faster than most of the other candidates. Confucian scholars insist it is wrong for a woman to take such glory, to boast about her accomplishments, but it was mere fact.”

“You met Father at the Academy?”

“I met your father at the Academy.” She folded her hands before her. Her tone sounded faraway and wistful. “I met Kuo Lishen as well. We were all candidates for the exams, can you believe it? Your father had already failed one attempt. Kuo had failed twice. I believe the examiners at that time expected one to fail. They wanted to select candidates that were determined enough to come back. Science is inherently full of failure, Soling. Failures and retrials.”

It was strange to hear her talking like this. Not like the mother I remembered as a child or the stranger who had been confined to her room, her eyes glassy with opium smoke filling her lungs.

She sounded almost like my father used to when he spoke of his work at the Ministry. In front of me, their conversations had been brief. Reports of what happened that day. But what had their conversations been like in private?

I fell silent, eager to hear more of Mother's secret past—which was apparently only secret to us, her children.

“When I was discovered, another candidate threatened to expose me. I had to leave the Academy and pursue a different life, but I still loved numbers. When the figures come together, when they balance out, there's indescribable beauty in it. Peace.”

She closed the lid of the calculating machine gently, as if it held her most precious jewels.

“So you asked Chief Engineer Kuo to give you work?”

“I was so proud of you when you were appointed to a position within the palace. Envious and proud.” She reached out to tuck back a strand of my hair, and I stiffened, then immediately felt bad for doing so. But Mother continued. “Kuo said it was impossible to employ me at the Ministry. Too many people there knew of my marriage to your father—and of the unfortunate incidents that happened.”

His execution. How the Daoguong Emperor had condemned him. Even though Yizhu had promised to officially clear
Father's name, people still remembered.

“But Engineer Kuo said there was work I could do for him outside the Ministry. Rote work, he admitted. But I was grateful for the chance to do something useful again. So he brought the machine and these designs here.”

I remembered the man who had run into me at the door. I'd only caught a glimpse of his face, but had that been Kuo Lishen?

“The chief engineer came himself?”

Mother nodded as if it were nothing.

With secret documents and some hidden task. I didn't like that one bit. “Let me see those plans again.”

I opened the portfolio to look through the drawings once more, but they were as cryptic to me as they had been upon first glance.

“What is this really, Mother? Why does Kuo need you to work on it outside of the Ministry?”

“It's in pieces,” Mother explained, trying to keep the pages in order as I rifled through them. “There are entire rooms full of retainers calculating such sums in the Ministry.”

I thought of how Kuo antagonized Chang-wei, but did that make him a villain? Mother knew more about the chief engineer than I.

“It's good you've found work, Mother,” I said instead.

“It is good,” she agreed, tapping the calculating machine. “When I was at the Academy, I dreamed of a different life, solving important problems on a grand scale for the Emperor. But everything changes so quickly, Soling. I'm fortunate Engineer Kuo remembers me from before. I suppose it would be hard for him to forget.”

“Was it Kuo who threatened to expose you back then?”

“Hmm?” Mother glanced up from the papers. “Oh no. It was your father who made the most trouble for me. He was a man of strict morals and honor, even then.”

* * *

I stayed awhile longer, sharing tea with my mother. She was absorbed in the new work Chief Engineer Kuo had commissioned, and I could tell she was eager to start.

Nan came back from the market with a sack full of yams for the evening meal. I handed my silk purse of coins over to her, which she pocketed without a word. This silent exchange was routine between us. Mother didn't look up from her formulas, though she was well aware of what was happening. I don't think she even trusted herself with money.

My brother returned from the Academy close to sundown. Tian was ten years of age now, and more serious every year. He gave the calculating machine a curious glance before setting down his books beside it.

“Greet your elder sister properly and wash up for dinner, Son.”

Mother ran a hand over his crown before going to see to Nan in the kitchen. The easy affection between them caught me
by surprise. In the past, it had always been my brother and me, clinging together. It was another sign that time had passed. That we were all different now.

“
Nín hăo
, Soling,” he mumbled.

“How are your studies, Brother?”

“Well, Elder Sister.”

“You seem taller.”

He shrugged and said nothing. Tian was sprouting like a bamboo reed. His face was thinning out as he lost the roundness of youth, which made him look more and more like father.

Supper was in the common room, and the three of us sat around the square tables like we always had. Mother plucked pieces of yam into my brother's bowl, and they exchanged words quietly to each other.

I couldn't help but feel I was intruding. “How are your tutoring sessions with Engineer Chen?”

“He's a good teacher.” Then, after a pause, “He asks about you.”

My heart skipped a beat. “Often?”

Mother glanced up. What made me ask such a foolish question?

“Not often,” Tian amended, causing my spirits to plummet.

I couldn't linger for too long after dinner. My leave only allowed me until sundown to return to the palace. I bid my farewell to my family, promised to return in a month as I always did and said the usual parting words.

“Study hard, Tian. Take care, Mother.”

They stood at the door with Nan just behind them as I set the controls of the sedan. As the machine whirred to life, Mother gave a small wave before putting her arm around Tian to lead him back inside.

A wave of loneliness swept over me as the wheels of the sedan began to turn. My family was growing closer, while I was drifting away. Though we'd been poor in our village, though we'd been hungry and fearful, it was what we knew. There was a strange comfort in that.

But our lives were better now because I worked in the palace. Much better.

I looked over my shoulder to the house at the end of the lane and watched it until it disappeared.

* * *

The sun was setting as the sedan passed through the east gate into the imperial city. A functionary stood just inside, watching my approach expectantly.

He bowed once. “Physician Jin Soling, you have been summoned.”

I was immediately ushered into a carriage that set off out through the gates once more. I watched the streets fly by outside the carriage window, and my stomach knotted as we moved beyond the walls. We were leaving the inner city.

An airship came into view in the distance, the distinctive red balloon visible against the orange dusk. We were headed
toward the Summer Palace.