Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (42 page)

But Green Siskin seemed to not hear him. She was utterly absorbed with comparing two dresses and trying to decide on one.

“Then kill them,” Yelu said.

The merchants trembled like leaves in the wind, including Wen. But his face remained defiant.

“Prince Yelu,” said Green Siskin, pouting. “Are you hiding the best jewels from me?”

“What are you talking about?”

“That man over there is famous for his wealth. I remember seeing his wife wearing a beautiful strand of pearls at the Spring Festival last year, each of which was the size of a longan fruit.”

“Oh?” Yelu looked skeptical.

“I’m sure he’s hiding it somewhere. If you kill him now, you won’t get it.” Green Siskin strode up to Wen. “I bet you’re hiding it in your servants’ quarters. You asked them to bury it in case you survive.”

Sparrow saw that Wen looked bewildered. If Yelu could tell that Wen had no idea what was going on, Green Siskin’s plan would be ruined.

She stepped up, and despite her racing heart, she added, “Yes, I bet that’s it. I knew his servants, and I saw them acting all secretive the other day, before the city fell.”

Yelu turned to Wen. “Is this true? There’s more treasure hidden?”

Wen was about to deny it when Green Siskin locked gazes with him. “But you don’t know exactly where your servants live, do you? You just know it’s in that neighborhood packed with huts?”

Wen finally seemed to understand. “Yes. It’s true. We all sent our most valuable treasures to be hidden with trusted servants. It might take time to find the hiding places since the servants have died.”

“Then you’ll have to lead my men to the right neighborhood and go through every house,” Yelu said.

The merchants, escorted by the soldiers, left.

“Make sure you look thoroughly,” Green Siskin shouted after them, “especially those houses that had been burned down. Dig deep!”

Green Siskin kept on insisting that there was more treasure to be found, and the expeditions with the merchants kept on turning up just enough additional valuables that Yelu was reluctant to kill the captives.

Sparrow tried to help Green Siskin with her lies as much as she could. But she fretted.

“If Yelu finds out that you’re just making up stuff–”

“Then I die. That was always the most likely outcome.” She fed the swallow another mouthful of chewed-up jerky. The bird was getting stronger, and now could hop around a bit.

“Do you want their gratitude? They don’t even like you!”

Green Siskin laughed. “What good is their gratitude at a time like this? I don’t much like them either – if I could, I’d try to save the poor instead. But I do enjoy their accusation that China fell because of women like me. I never knew I was so powerful!

“I’m sure he never thought that the disdain he and his friends showed for the army had anything to do with it. They cheated on their taxes and starved the funding for the army for decades, but now everything is going wrong because I’m unchaste. This kind of subtle reasoning is clearly beyond you and me, mere females.”

Sparrow had no patience for Green Siskin’s jokes. “Then why are you trying to save them? Is this about karma?”

“I told you, I don’t believe in any of that.”

“Then what–”

“I don’t know anything about morals or virtues.” Green Siskin spat the word
virtues
out like a curse. She checked herself and went on, calmly. “I don’t care about the cosmic balance or the next life. I’m not brave or strong and I’m not trying to earn myself any respect. Someday they might tell stories about how brave Grand Secretary Shi Kefa was to have given his life for the city, but they’ll never care about what women like us have done.

“But much as I want a heart of stone so that I can survive, my heart keeps on telling me what it thinks is
right
. Ah, sometimes it’s so much trouble. Just look at how much work it is to keep you alive!

“Though I can ignore the precepts of dead Confucian sages and living hypocrites, I don’t want to stop living the way
I
want.

“There’s been too much killing, Sparrow. I want to foil Heaven’s unfair plans in whatever way I can. It makes me happy to defy Fate, even if just a little bit.”

On the seventh day after the fall of Yangzhou, Prince Dodo finally gave the order to stop the killings. Corpses in the streets and the canals, soaked in rainwater, had begun to rot, and there was some concern that soldiers might start to fall sick with the miasma and stench. The survivors and the monks were told to start cremating the bodies.

Smoke from the burning pyres filled the sky of Yangzhou. It was impossible to breathe.

Janggin Yelu gave his mistress permission to go outside the city for some fresh air. Escorted by a few Manchu soldiers, Green Siskin and Sparrow rode about ten li from the city, where a green valley between two hills offered some shelter from the suffocating smoke. The soldiers left to patrol the area, and Green Siskin and Sparrow took a walk in the sun. In consideration of Green Siskin’s feet, the soldiers left them a horse.

Green Siskin and Sparrow released the swallow, now fully recovered, and watched the bird fly away.

“I never thanked you properly,” said Sparrow. She paused, feeling that the words were inadequate. She had never studied the Classics. The prettiest words she knew were from Green Siskin’s tanci. “If I could turn into a mongoose someday to knot the grass to help you, I would.”

Green Siskin laughed. “I’m sure I can find a use for a grass-knotting mongoose.”

“But I doubt those merchants will remember how they owe their lives to you,” Sparrow said.

“I’m just grateful none of them have yet asked me to commit suicide to redeem my shame.”

Sparrow and Green Siskin both chuckled bitterly.

Two men emerged from behind a clump of trees. They held rusty swords and wore bright blue scarves around their necks.

“Kneel, traitorous whore,” one of them said.

Green Siskin looked at them. “You’re the remnants of Grand Secretary Shi’s militia?”

The men nodded. “The only way you could have survived the massacre was by collaborating with the enemy.”

“You’ve gotten it all wrong,” Sparrow started to say. But Green Siskin shushed her.

“Don’t,” whispered Green Siskin, keeping her eyes on the men. “The Manchus will be back any minute. If Yelu thinks I’ve been playing him, everyone will die. Now get on the horse.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

Green Siskin’s tone grew impatient. “Haven’t you learned anything? In this world, virtue is worthless. I’m not trying to be a hero. I need you on the horse because you have unbound feet and can use the stirrups. I need to ride behind you and hold onto your waist so the horse can run rather than just walk. Get on there before they’re too close!”

Sparrow obeyed, and the two men began to run towards them.

Green Siskin smiled at the two men. “I’m so glad two great heroes have arrived to rescue me.”

“Your wiles won’t work on us. We’re here to carry out justice.”

“Come on, get up here with me!” shouted Sparrow.

Green Siskin smiled up sadly at Sparrow.

“How am I supposed to get up there with these feet? Now go.” She slapped the horse’s rump and it leapt away. Sparrow screamed and it was all she could do to hold onto the reins.

Looking back, Sparrow saw the two men descend on Green Siskin, who remained standing very straight.

Sparrow and the Manchu patrol looked and looked, but Green Siskin’s body was nowhere to be found.

Instead, in the clearing was a large flock of birds: swallows, sparrows, magpies, hwamei, orioles, black drongos, martins. They were all chirping, twittering, singing, and instead of a cacophony, what emerged was a song that Sparrow instantly recognized: Green Siskin’s tanci melody.

A siskin flew out of the flock and landed on Sparrow’s outstretched hand. Its back, instead of being a bright yellow, was a faint, jade-like green. In its beak it held a jade ring which it deposited in Sparrow’s hand.

“Green Siskin, is that you?” Sparrow’s vision blurred. Her throat was tight and she could speak no more.

The siskin hopped in her hand and chirped.

The Twisted Ladle was doing good business on this night. It was right after the harvest, when people’s purses were full and limbs sore.

The little inn didn’t have the kind of delicacies that the teahouses in the big cities served, but the laborers and laundresses and petty farmers and farming wives who filled its benches didn’t care. Rice wine and sorghum mead flowed freely, and fried tripe came by the plateful. People said what was on their minds, instead of what they thought they ought to say, as was the wont with learned scholars and clever merchants.

But they were all quiet now, listening to the young tanci woman. She strummed her pipa:

I sing of great Yangzhou, the city of white salt,

Of wealth and fame, a thousand refined teahouses.

But one night they came, iron hooves to assault,

So starts the tale of a girl of the blue houses.

The singer-storyteller wasn’t pretty, not exactly. Her face was too thin, with a delicate nose and quick eyes that reminded one of a bird. Her long, dark hair was cropped short, as though to remind her listeners that she was selling music and story, instead of something else that some men might have desired. She wore no makeup or jewelry, save for a jade ring on her right hand.

On her shoulder sat a green siskin, a lovely bird apparently trained to chirp and harmonize with the playing of the pipa.

“…then the invading army surrounded Yangzhou, like a stormy sea pounding against a rock…”

She clapped two bamboo sticks together to simulate the sound of horses’ hooves. She dragged a rusty nail across an old gong to simulate the sound of armor grinding against armor.

Of course the young woman didn’t call the invaders in her story “Manchus.” It had been more than a decade since the Manchu conquest of China. The new dynasty claimed the Mandate of Heaven, and clever scholars came up with cloying tributes to the wisdom and strength of the Manchu sages.

Like all true stories, her story was set a long, long time ago.

“ ‘What does a lowly woman, a concubine, know of virtue?’ asked the captain.”

The little siskin fluttered from table to table, picking at melon seeds, and everyone marveled at its beauty.

In the same manner, as the young woman told the story, she hopped between voices and expressions. The audience was mesmerized.

“Green Siskin strode up to the soldiers and said, ‘What treasure do you need?’ ”

They clenched their fists as they pictured the bodies in the streets. They cheered and laughed as Green Siskin tricked the invading commander. They spat and slapped the table in anger as the ignorant merchant condemned Green Siskin.

Hundreds of thousands died in six dark days.

A despised woman saved thirty-one.

Ever cunning, she sought no fame nor praise.

Defying fate, she did what could be done.

As far as most in the crowd were concerned, the Yangzhou Massacre never happened. Official histories were always composed by sealing away ghosts.

But the truth always lived on in song and story.

Masters and mistresses, this I know to be true:

There is no Heavenly ledger, no all-fair Judge.

Yet general, prostitute, merchant, or child,

The fate of this world each one of you can budge.

And the little siskin took off from the young woman’s shoulder and circled around the room, chirping and singing, lifted up by the warm air, by the loud cheer that exploded from the crowd: free, free, free.

Art by Nilah Magruder

1843
Jamaica

Jooni woke to darkness and a hammering like hard rain; the little hut shuddered violently, then quickly rattled to a stop. She bolted upright and listened. There was now only her own haggard breath and the chickens fussing in the back of the yard. Pictures from her dream gathered as she glanced wide-eyed around the hut. She felt for the machete beside her banana-leaf mat. All was still. Maybe it was the dream… maybe.

She lay back down on her mat, her heart beating like horses’ hooves battering the earth, and watched the first light of dawn creep through the clumsy window.

Eyes closed now, pictures from her dream descended. Yaa – Jooni’s mama – with scars and blood and empty eyes and buzzing flies around her wounds. The only way she ever came, to haunt her.

Was every morning going to always be like this one? Waking in a sweat after seeing Mama like that, or thinking she was still back there, before 1838 – before Jamaica gave its slaves their full freedom. Sticky, hot slaving fields. The sky a treacherous ceiling. All the buzzing and buzzing in her head. And Mama – Jooni’s everything – gone. Really gone.

It was all settling into her chest now. She could feel it – her whole day was going to be colored by this dream. She could feel how it was knotting up her insides, making her mouth crimple. She held her belly. No vomiting today.
Let me be still today.
But as she said it, she felt it a false hope. The whole world was broken and falling to pieces. She’d never known another truth. Her mama had once said wherever hope was robbed, you turned your hand and fashioned it into existence. But Mama had been wrong about many things. Jooni clenched her teeth and tried to breathe deep. Then
clicketyclackety-clicketyclackety
, there it was again, and the hut rattled. The chickens squawked and clucked. Something was falling on the rooftop. Jooni jumped up with her machete, grabbed the hem of her gown, and flashed to her door. In the soft glow of the morning, milky stones lay scattered on the steps and across the ground. The same milky crystals that had fallen some days ago and which had melted and disappeared in the heat. A man in the village had said he’d heard of it, had said the words
ice
and
hail.
Hard water falling from the clouds. Jooni raised her chin and searched the sky suspiciously. The yard was silent.