The Secrets of Jin-Shei (7 page)

She was out of luck with her offerings this time—her hoarded coins managed to suffice for barely enough incense to placate one of the Second
Circle Sages. But her luck turned when she met up with one of the acolytes she had got to know better than most in the time she spent at the Temple, and was invited to come through with him into the Third Circle as his guest. Nhia accepted gladly, contemplating half an hour or so of pleasant conversation, but they had barely crossed into the inner court of the Third Circle when another acolyte hurried up to them and whispered something in Nhia’s friend’s ear with an air of agitation.

“I apologize,” said Nhia’s acolyte courteously, “but it seems I am urgently required elsewhere. We have one of the Nine Sages in the Fourth Circle today, and he has been … demanding. But please, walk in the garden. I will see if I can return when my duty is done.”

“Thank you,” Nhia said.

He bowed formally, and hurried away with his companion.

The Nine Sages were almost mythical beings to Nhia. They were learned men and women, great Sages, most of whom would gain niches in the Second Circle of the Temple at their passing and many of whose predecessors already inhabited their own niches there. They were adepts of great power and knowledge, Imperial advisers, the first and most honored circle of the Imperial Council. One of them had crossed into the Later Heaven fairly recently; Nhia had been in the street crowd at his funeral parade, and had been deeply impressed at the cortege and at all the implements, meticulously re-created in folded and painted paper, which he required to take with him to the Afterworld. His successor—each Sage named his successor in the circle before he died—was a mystery; nobody had yet seen or heard of the new Sage, none of the common people anyway. All that was known about him was that he was male. He had already been the subject of much street gossip. Stories had it that he was no gray-beard; he was not young, to be sure, because no youth could be a Sage—certainly everyone knew that much. That left a virile man, in the prime of his life, and everyone from the portly matrons making virtuous sacrifices in the highest Temple Circles to the painted bazaar strumpets was speculating on whether he had taken a wife or a concubine or whether he intended to do so. Nhia wondered briefly and with a spark of passing curiosity whether it was in fact the brand-new Sage who had sent the acolytes of the Great Temple into such a frenzy of activity, but it was unlikely that this would be something that she’d ever get close enough to find out.

Left alone in the gardens, Nhia sat for the better part of an hour contemplating
the languid, overfed fish in one of the pools, happy to snatch a moment of perfect peace. It was as she was getting ready to leave that her disability returned to haunt her. She put her weight on her crippled foot in an awkward manner while stepping up onto the paved path leading to one of the gates, and the weak ankle gave way. Nhia crumpled to the path with a gasp of pain.

A hand extended in assistance swam into her field of vision, blurred by the sudden tears that had come into her eyes. Surprised, she took it, and was helped gently to her feet and supported until she gained a steady balance. Only then did she raise her eyes, blinking owlishly, to look at who had come to her aid.

The man’s face was young, unlined, the hair long and lustrous and tied back in a plaited queue as the workers wore—but his hands were not worker’s hands, and his eyes were not a young man’s eyes. The hands were smooth and white, nails manicured, a sure mark of an aristocrat with servants at his beck and call, even if it wasn’t for the telltale fall of expensive material of his gown that spilled in carefully arranged artless folds as he bent to help Nhia up. The eyes were opaque with ageless wisdom, dark and kind and utterly mysterious.

“I … thank you, I am fine now,” she said, knowing as surely as she knew her own name that she was addressing someone a thousand times removed from her in rank and stature and appalled at her temerity in saying anything at all to such a personage. By rights she should have stood quietly with her eyes downcast until addressed directly.

The man dropped one of his hands from her shoulders, and Nhia attempted to stand unsupported but made the mistake of supporting her weight on her weak foot again. She tried to hide the inadvertent wince, but obviously failed when a cultured voice with a Court inflexion and intonation said, “I think not.”

He slipped an arm around her shoulders and helped her off the path, steering her to the nearest bench in the gardens, and letting her subside gently onto the seat.

“Thank you,” she said again, helplessly.

“Did you come here to pray about this?” the man inquired courteously, inclining his head the merest fraction to indicate her foot, not naming the affliction, as politeness demanded.

“No,
sei.
No, my Lord, that is my mother’s reason for visiting the Temple.”

“Oh?” he said. “And not yours?”

“I come here to understand, not to beg for petty miracles,” Nhia said, and then bit her lip to prevent a small gasp from escaping. She had offered a discourtesy, at the least, and he could take her remark as borderline blasphemous if he chose.

“How old are you?” asked her benefactor instead, unexpectedly, after a pause which might have indicated surprise.

“I turned thirteen only a few days ago,
sei
,” Nhia said, relieved to be back on safe ground.

“I have heard the name of a young girl who comes here to talk of the spirits with the Temple acolytes,” the man said thoughtfully. “Would that be you? What is your name, child?”

“NhiNhi,” Nhia said, instinctively giving her child-name, the name her mother had called her by when she was a baby, and then flushed scarlet. “I mean … Nhia,
sei.
”

“Nhia,” he repeated, with an air of committing it to memory. “Well, Nhia, seeker of wisdom, perhaps we shall meet again.”

Nhia dared a quick, flickering look to his face. “Yes,
sei
,” she said, aware that she sounded like she was indicating an agreement to that future meeting instead of a simple response that his words seemed to demand.

He straightened, gestured to someone out of Nhia’s line of sight, and then bowed to her lightly—
bowed
to her!—and strode away in a whisper of expensive silk robes.

Nhia realized she was trembling.

When hurrying footsteps approached her a moment later, she lifted her eyes to meet the intensely curious gaze of her friend from the Third Circle. “What did he say to you?” the acolyte demanded, sounding astonished. “Do you realize who that
was
?”

Still thunderstruck, aware of a murmuring crowd gathered in the cloisters which had been a collective witness to this strange encounter, Nhia stared at the gate through which her young lord had disappeared. “I think I do,” she whispered.
One of the Nine Sages is in the Fourth Circle today …

“He is Lihui. That was Sage Lihui. He is the youngest of the Nine Sages, the one who came to honor us today. I saw you fall at his feet and I was afraid, but he …”

Nhia’s eyes were wide as saucers. She had been right but … a Sage? A court
Sage
had stopped to raise a crippled child, to ask her name …

Perhaps we shall meet again,
he had said.

Perhaps the
ganshu
readers had never told Nhia about this encounter because it had never been meant to take place. The acolyte had trusted her with the information that a Sage was in the Temple; the collapse of her ankle might have been pure chance, but a part of her had known at whose feet she had been thrown, and had guided her tongue as she had spoken to him.

Nhia looked around at the flickering lights of candles and oil lamps of the Third Circle, at the haze of brightness surrounding the weavers of human fates, the Rulers of the Four Quarters, and smiled to herself. She had put herself in the paths of the Gods this day. Perhaps she had just taken her first fragile step beyond the veil which
ganshu
had drawn over her life and destiny.

“F
or the love of all the Gods, Khailin, and for the last time—not today! The Chancellor …”

Khailin’s face set in mutinous lines. “The Chancellor! That means I won’t see you until nightfall, and
that
means I don’t get my lesson today.”

“Think of it as a day of rest,” said her father, with some impatience. Then he smoothed the frown off his forehead, and sighed. “Khailin, knowing your
hacha
letters is not going to magically—”

“I know,” Khailin said. “I know what it won’t do for me. But there is so much out there that I want to know, and that I will never know if I can’t …”

She faltered under her father’s rather stern gaze. “And you do remember, I trust, that these lessons are based on a proper attitude on your part. I will not have you interrupting me, Khailin. It shows disrespect to your parents.”

“Yes, Father,” Khailin said, resigned.

“Good. That’s settled, then. We will resume our lessons when I return from the Palace. In the meantime, I suggest that you pursue your … other responsibilities. I will have to speak to your mother about that. Within a year or two you may well be married and will have no time for indulging such whims as books and studies.”

Khailin bowed to her father with the exact degree of respect that was required, keeping her eyes lowered so that he wouldn’t see the rebellion in them. Cheleh, Court Chronicler, permitted himself one affectionate featherlike brush of his hand on his daughter’s hair before bowing back to her with the proper degree of acknowledgment and leaving her alone in her chamber.

When the door safely closed behind him, Khailin picked up a tasseled cushion from her bed and threw it against the wall with a muted cry. She
had just come to an interesting section of a text her father did not know she had purloined from his scroll library, and she had become thoroughly bogged down in it. She had hoped to wheedle some information from him that day, without letting on that she had the scroll, of course, and finish reading the text that evening. It was an old astronomical treatise, written by a Sage from a long-dead Emperor’s court; Khailin could tell, even with her inability to completely understand, that much of it was already obsolete, but there had been several descriptions in there which matched something she had been able to observe herself in the night sky with the distance viewer her father had in his study. She had hoped that she would be able to extract enough information from this scroll to confirm her own observations, and perhaps find out where she could obtain more recent material on one particular celestial object which had caught her fancy, a red-gold sphere with an annulus around it.

She had started wheedling her father to teach her
hacha-ashu,
the script of the common tongue, when she first realized that
jin-ashu,
the script her mother had been dutifully teaching her since she had turned four years old, was not the language in which the really interesting things were written.
Jin-ashu
was a woman’s language, and it was the heart of a woman’s world. Its writings tended to be confined to poetry, legends, stories, the wisdom of hearth and home, letters between
jin-shei
sisters (whether separated by the length and breadth of Syai or three streets apart in the same city).
Jin-ashu
dealt with the everyday and the commonplace, the household chatter of wives and mothers, the pouring out of an unrequited love or the transports of delight of a new wife just initiated into the pleasures of marriage. Khailin had seen a few of the latter, although she was still to undergo her Xat-Wau coming of age ceremony and was considered far too young for what were sometimes frankly erotic letters between grown and sexually initiated women. But Khailin read what interested her, and if she could sneak an astronomy treatise out of her father’s treasured library, her mother’s stacks of
jin-ashu
letters were a considerably simpler problem to riffle until she found material that caught her eye. She knew considerably more than either of her parents suspected about what awaited her as a young woman who was rapidly approaching marriageable age.

In fact, she had already started keeping an eye out for likely prospects—young men sufficiently learned to have access to the things that she wanted to find out, or wealthy enough to buy such access, or both. Unfortunately, most of the younger suitors she had considered—the ones her
parents would consider suitable—were also dismissed early, on the grounds that they were simply too boring to be of any interest. Khailin wondered if she would be able to hold out for a husband who might be considerably older than her but whose age would be traded off for the fact that he could be more easily cajoled by a young wife to allow her to do the things that Khailin had every intention of continuing to do. Study. Read.

A diffident knock on her door interrupted her thoughts, and at her barked call of admittance a servant, hands together and bowing deeply to her young mistress, came in to announce that Khailin’s presence was required by her mother, the lady Yulinh.

“Tell her I will attend her at once,” Khailin said, and the servant backed out, bowing again.

Khailin sighed. She suspected her father had stopped off in his wife’s quarters to suggest that she take Khailin in hand today, and she knew what that meant.

She wasn’t wrong.

Lady Yulinh was a great believer in the power of purification and meditation. She visited the ritual baths frequently, an activity that Khailin profoundly despised for the same reason that she found
hacha-ashu
more interesting that
jin-ashu
—she didn’t do well when cooped up in the presence of undiluted femininity for long. She found most of the women at the baths tedious, gossipy, and unspeakably dull. They found her far too direct, almost abrasive, certainly bordering on rude, although she was careful not to directly antagonize any of the matrons whom she might find as a mother-in-law one day. But being on her best behavior and flawlessly and icily polite for three to four hours at a stretch, which was how long her mother’s purification bath rituals usually took, exhausted her and made her severely irritated. Even her mother had learned not to take her along to these occasions any more often than she could help, and to stay out of her way for a while on their return home until Khailin could work out her waspishness on some unsuspecting servant.