Heart and Soul (15 page)

Third Lady shrugged. “One cannot account for what foreign devils believe,” she said, in certainty, while reasoning that the emperor had been foolish indeed to let his redheaded concubine raise her daughter. But the crone in the oracle cave had said that Jade had foreign magic. A strand of it. And if so, that must mean her mind, too, had a strand of foreign-devil thought, the poor thing. “But I can tell you,” and she found her hands weaving midair as they had learned to do when she’d been trained as a singsong girl, while she was telling stories, “that thought is a force, and a force that moves magic. Why should not the beliefs of each kind of people create their own underworld? And why should not the people who believe in that underworld go there, or get reborn, or whatever they believe they deserve? And in the case of China, why should we not submit to the laws of China in the underworld as we do in the world of the living? Why should we stoop to the ways of the foreign devils?”

“You are saying that we each judge ourselves,” Jade said, her eyes wide, as though the thought were impossible.

“Of course. Who knows us better? But after a time, too, the force of these thoughts for millennia creates entities as solid and real as the people here. The Jade Emperor is real, and he’s seen generations born and die. He knows more than we do about how the world operates and how justice can be obtained. And the underworld courts are real, too.” She shrugged. “And they summon witnesses and claim verdicts. On living and dead alike. For if people go on living, in some form, after death, how else are we to process claims against them, or they against us? The Chinese have orderly minds. Or at least I do, and I like to believe the rule of laws extends after we leave our bodies.”

She didn’t know if she’d managed to persuade the foreign-devil mind within her sister-in-law. Lady Jade looked at her a moment, her eyebrows knit as though she was deep in thought. “I cannot do it,” she said. “If the oracle was right about me, then I must fail.”

“Why?” Third Lady asked, looking at her. “They said you were born to do this. How can you choose to fail before even trying?”

“Because I cannot leave the Dragon Boats now,” Red Jade said, in a low, miserable tone. “I cannot leave if you’re going to take Wen away to the underworld. I cannot leave them with no one in charge. What if the boats should need to fly? What if Zhang tries to come back and claim the allegiance of all aboard? What if—”

Third Lady grinned, despite herself. She was not used to seeing her composed and masterful sister-in-law act like the one who did not know how to proceed. “Ah, but it is not that way.” Her hand went up in the air again, her fingers instinctively weaving thought and words and gesture together. “It is not that way at all. The underworld does not run on the same time as our world. In fact, there are many, many legends that speak of people who spend what they think are a few hours in the underworld, and who come back to find that everyone they knew has been dead for centuries.”

“That doesn’t help,” Red Jade wailed. “What you’re saying is that though you may save my brother, his cure will come in some future century which I cannot touch or know. And that the whole weight of the Dragon Throne now rests on my shoulders. I suppose you think I will marry Grasshopper and breed a line of regents, until Wen returns to claim the throne.”

“I think no such thing,” Third Lady said. “Besides, regents are notoriously self-interested and unstable, and not someone I would trust with the throne of an absent ruler.” Realizing her humor was lost on her sister-in-law, who was groping for words, she dared to reach out a hand and touch the other woman’s cool, delicate hand. “My lady, it is not like that. While the time may run that way, it may run the other way, too. I can arrange it so it will be as though only a few hours have passed since your brother retired before we return from the underworld. People will think nothing but that he slept a little longer and woke up…well, devoid of his affliction. They might wonder if I used some magic to heal him, but that will be all.” She patted the cool hand with her own small one. “And meanwhile, you may go and seek the jewel that the oracle says shall waken the rivers. The Dragon Boats can do well without you for a few hours.”

“But—” Red Jade started.

“Trust me, milady. Trust the oracle. What else can you do?”

The Lady Red Jade clenched her fists tight and rested them on her knees, managing to give the impression she wanted to pound her knees very hard, to vent her fury. “Oh, why am I brought to such a nonsensical pass? Why must I trust oracles, and bones and—”

“A member of the Fox Clan?” Third Lady asked, with ready wit.

Red Jade looked at her with such a startled expression that it showed she hadn’t been thinking it. Or at least, that she would never consider saying so. And for this Third Lady was grateful. Gratitude made her voice softer as she said, “Because it is what you were born to do, milady. For many years now, you’ve been your father’s counselor, and carried on your shoulders part of his responsibilities. For many years now, you’ve had to think and rethink your every step and to carefully follow every path of conduct in your mind before you did it in fact. But…my lady, the oracle is telling you to trust the dragon, the Jade Emperor and the Mandate of Heaven. For once,” Third Lady added, almost drily, “you’re being asked to obey.”

“And you think it’s high time I should try it?” Red Jade said, with a cocked head and a defiant expression.

Third Lady, who had never been very fond of obeying herself, though the circumstances of her life had often demanded it, smiled a little and shrugged. “Only because you’ve run out of other things to do.”

FEVER AND GHOSTS

Late on the fifth day, and after Mrs. Perigord—who
truly was an excellent cook and who seemed to be a good wife as well as an extraordinary manager—had employed some rather forceful, if purchased, magical healing, Nigel found himself well enough to stand and, enveloped in a voluminous dressing gown that he felt sure must belong to Joe Perigord, he installed himself on the balcony to take the air.

It was early in the morning, and a pinkish glow burnished the roofs of the working class neighborhood in which the Perigords’ home was set. In fact, for the neighborhood, the Perigords’ home was practically lordly, consisting of two floors, the top one containing, presumably, the bedrooms, and the bottom the apartments usually found in such—kitchens and parlors, Nigel supposed. As yet, he’d not been allowed to see them.

The straight streets, lined with—at least here—modest one-floor homes, reminded him of the cities in America where he’d stopped more than once in his peripatetic life as a flight magician. In fact, it reminded him of the American West. Save that here, the narrow gardens of the houses were enclosed not by picket fences but by high, smooth, whitewashed walls. Within the confine of these flourished domestic paradises, often startlingly European in kind—pears and apple trees, peaches and roses. Their fragrance washed up to Nigel’s balcony on the wings of a soft breeze that brought with it also the smell of the sea, from the Cape of Good Hope, which gave the town its name.

Above the town and behind it stood the massive, dark bulk of Table Mountain, its flat top seeming as though a god’s hand had clipped it short in its attempt to reach for the heavens. To the left of it rose Devil’s Peak, more than three thousand feet high. And the mountain to the right was, Perigord had been kind enough to inform him, Lion’s Head, about two thousand feet above the town. Table Mountain itself was a thousand feet higher than Devil’s Peak—a sheer, dark rock against the morning-fired sky.

As Nigel looked, it seemed to him he saw something flutter and tremble at the edge of the mountain, but squinting his eyes against the brightness of the day didn’t bring anything into focus. It would be a heat mirage and nothing more.

He leaned his elbows on the balcony and his chin upon his hands, gazing out. It seemed to him—though it was hard to see it past the Perigords’ garden wall—that there were people on the street. He heard high, musical calls that he rather suspected were peddlers promoting their wares, in that worldwide chant where individual words became unintelligible, unless you were very sure what language they were speaking and had a good inkling what they were selling.

The breeze was growing warmer. Close at hand a dog barked, but it was not enough to keep Nigel’s eyes from closing, as though his eyelids were weighted down with lead. The day would be a scorcher. Later on, he would need to close the curtains to keep the heated light from the room, and the only comfortable activity would be to sleep for two or three hours.

Weakened as he was by his recent illness, Nigel felt as though he could sleep now. With his eyes still closed, he indulged in that state between reality and dreaming. And out of that space—out of his tired, still-fever-fogged mind—a voice came, “Nigel! Nigel, wake up.”

He opened his eyes, startled, because the voice was that of his long-dead brother, Carew. And on opening his eyes, he realized he was looking into the angry, teeth-bared muzzle of a blue dragon, the mouth opening, a smell like a hundred old furnaces emerging.

Nigel screamed and jumped into the room, taking refuge behind the bed. This was a stupid thing to do, since, had the dragon flamed, it could easily have reduced the room, the bed, Nigel and, eventually, the house to ashes.

But the dragon seemed to have other ideas. It perched on the edge of the balcony railing with ridiculous delicacy, its taloned feet clasping the edge of the stone. Its head, which in dragons of its kind was vaguely feline and also vaguely mischievous, poked through the balcony door, shredding the lace curtain that Mrs. Perigord had hung there and carrying it, on the protuberances and bumps of the reptilian head, like a wedding veil.

The mouth, not shaped for speech, spoke in a voice full of hissing. “The jewel. Give me the jewel.”

From behind his bed, feeling like a coward, Nigel looked above the soft mattress and the mounded sheets and blankets, at this horror that he’d last seen melting an entire glass wall. He wanted his answer to be defiant. But what came out instead was a simple, matter-of-fact denial. “No.”

“Give it to me!” the dragon insisted, imbuing even the consonants with hisses. “Give it to me. You don’t need it. I do. And I have the other one.”

Nigel’s hand, groping frantically under the bed, had come up with the fine, silver-tipped, rosewood cane that Joe Perigord had left there earlier, for Nigel’s use. Not that there was anything wrong with Nigel’s legs, but because he was weak, and Perigord feared that Nigel would fall should he try to do too much, or go too far, too fast.

The cane was a paltry weapon against a magical creature. And Nigel was a paltry opponent, barely able to hold himself up. But just now, he felt too enraged to be weak. It had dared come here. It had dared follow him. It—

With the cane firmly grasped in his hand, he threw himself over the bed. It was meant to be a single leap, but it turned into a jump-and-roll on legs that felt far too rubbery. Still, it carried him across the room, within striking distance of the dragon’s head.

“No,” he cried again, his voice clear. “Never!” And lifting the cane in both hands, he hit the dragon repeatedly about the nose with the heavy silver ball at the end of the cane. Then he thrust it hard at one of the dragon’s wide-open, green eyes. “No.”

The dragon looked not so much injured as surprised. He looked, a snickering voice at the back of Nigel’s mind informed him in dispassionate tones, like a hunter who sees the fox turn and attempt to wrest the powerstick from his hands. But Nigel was not listening to the voice in his mind, nor to the reason that told him he could never defeat this creature.