Scale-Bright (6 page)

The tea is untouched for a long time. The water boils, becomes lukewarm, and by the time Julienne gets around to pouring it, it has gone cold.

It would be more than a year before she sees Olivia again.

Book Two

2.1

The thicket is glass and iron, flowers opening into toothless gums that suck at and adhere to her scales. Flat against the soil that gives them life, Xiaoqing does not breathe. The push of her heart oozes slow; the pull of her blood dulls still. It is the right season: snow crystallizes in her mouth and in the crook of her neck, covering her vertebrae with flesh-memories of hibernation.

Her thoughts congeal and clot.

The monk comes, and perhaps for a time he pauses, casting for a sense of reptiles. She rears. Her hand enters and exits him, a drenching of arterial paste like molten lead, a crackling of stomach and kidneys like live coals. He reels with the force of her, onto the iron leaves which unfurl blades sharp as mortality. He bares red-rimmed teeth as the leaves serrate his lungs and intestines.

He thrusts his xizhang into the ground. Its brass loops sing out clear, high notes. Flower-mouths crack and shatter. Iron leaves quiver and retreat. White flakes burst into glittering dust as the monk slowly rights himself. A trickle of warmth from her ear tells Xiaoqing that the xizhang too is a sanctified tool, even if nothing of this monk's person is sacred. A stench of her hair burning and her scales cooking. Sashes and bangles of smoke wreathe her.

She watches as the hole she's made in him closes, ropes of gore flowing back into the wound with soft, wet noises.

Xiaoqing's next swipe exposes cheekbones and jaw and teeth, a crack of skull from which fluids and thought-matter pour. The sharpened tip of his xizhang has of course gone through her. It is so predictable that she almost doesn't feel it, steel whispering frost against her nerves. When the pain comes, she coils it inside her, winding up each muscle and sinew.

Her bones split and her belly opens, viscera-petals in bloom.

On the other side she is all serpent, immense, rippling in every precious shade of green. She opens her maw and disgorges.

The lake living inside the belly of her first self pours, water green with age and weeds, thick with insects and tadpoles, reflections of herons spearing fish in flight and skies threshing black storms.

Beneath the lake newly birthed, the monk drifts in spumes of gore. Flower-mouths close over him.

* * *

The third time Julienne wakes up with tears on her cheeks Elena takes one look at her and says that she has had enough.

"Can't you," Julienne says, still tangled in the duvet, "just ignore it? I didn't wake you up. It doesn't happen all the time."

"I can't." Elena's lower lip quivers, movie-star, and she folds her freckled shoulders tight. "You never tell me what's wrong."

Julienne inhales and remembers only an impression of scales. Scales under her fingers. Scales sliding against her thighs. There is nothing to explain, only that she has strange dreams, and having had them consciousness would reacquaint with her like a weight in her throat, as of anchors and drowning. Even if she tries—even if she locates the words—she knows she will become hysterical trying to articulate it. These odd sourceless tears already strain Elena. "Maybe I just lose control of my tear ducts."

"This only happens after sex."

Julienne touches her face. "But… not every time. It's just a nightmare." She knows it is not. She knows it is more.

"None of my girlfriends ever said sleeping with me gave
them
nightmares."

"It isn't really about you." Meant as reassurance.

"Not about me! Is that supposed to make me feel better? I can put up with your mood swings—I try—but this." Elena springs out of bed, as though she can't stand another minute of sharing it with Julienne. "I'm booking a flight."

"Not back to Sydney?"

"I've always hated Hong Kong. Two months in and I couldn't stand it. I stayed for
you
." More tears. "I can't do this."

She disappears, all hundred and eighty centimeters of her so bare and pale. A sound of her desktop booting up. Julienne stays for a time on the mattress that has absorbed their heat and sweat, and considered putting together an apology. A diversion that begins with her mouth at Elena's breast, that ends with them back on these sheets. She's learned all the ways in which Elena can be distracted, the places that make her pant and fall to her narrow pointed knees.

The same cannot be said of Elena with her. Reciprocation is often more coincidence than intent. This fact juts out so sharply that Julienne can't apportion all the blame to her own pensiveness, her own anxieties. It's an odd moment. In previous relationships the cause of dissolution always seemed obvious: her.

So she gathers her clothes, puts them on and fetches the few toiletries she's left here in cautious optimism when she should have known better. Elena's always acted as though they were starring in a tragic romance, every gesture exaggerated for a nonexistent camera, every disagreement loud for an imaginary audience.

Out of Elena's flat she goes into a day of biting air and wind tunnels. There will be phone calls in a few hours. Julienne will have to consider whether to answer them, but that is for later.

* * *

She joins her aunt at Kowloon Station. Hau Ngai leans against the wall, a long-tail jacket slung across one arm. A dove-gray cummerbund is buttoned neatly over a shirt snow-bright. "You're picking up Auntie Seung Ngo in a tuxedo?"

"It's conspicuous, but she likes to be surprised. You are early."

"I didn't want to keep you waiting."

"Ah," Hau Ngai says, "the tall girl, I take it."

"She's shorter than you are." Julienne eyes the platform, then turns back to her aunt. "You look stunning. None of this came off the rack? The fit's superb."

"What is made for women to wear is generally incompatible with my shoulders." The god extends her arm. "Mortal girls enjoy being princesses, don't they?"

Julienne flushes. "Are you going to tease me about crushing on you for the rest of my life? It's not my fault I didn't know you were an in-law."

Hau Ngai laughs, and it is such a fine, rare sound Julienne wishes she could bottle it up for Seung Ngo. "I'm only offering you my arm, child."

Despite that she slots her hand into the crook of Hau Ngai's elbow and feels a peculiar little thrill. "I did grow up watching mowhab too. Not the same kind of princesses."

"But whether warrior maids or noble daughters, they inevitably fall into the arms of a strapping boy daihap. It is not a story to console you." They board the train. "Do you want to talk about Elena?"

She doesn't, least of all to Hau Ngai, who will ask something too sudden, give an insight that pierces too sharp and too far, revealing that it was Julienne's fault after all. It's not that her aunt-in-law has ever been unkind, but the archer god doesn't believe in white lies and elisions. "My friends always tell me not to date westerners." The plush seat is a happy relief from the hard plastic of the MTRs. Hau Ngai remains on her feet.

"They are an odd lot, certainly, and godless—or rather they've a frenzy for worshiping spirits that don't exist."

"You mean... none of them are real? Not God? Not the Greek ones?" She blinks and comes to what seems a logical conclusion. Hau Ngai is said to live on the sun, though Julienne's never pried for specifics. "Does that mean there's a reason Apollo is a sun god
and
an archer?"

"Probably. They misapprehended my gender and believed I required sacrifices to protect their cities. Which I couldn't in any case, being preoccupied at the time."

"What about Artemis?"

"I taught Seung Ngo marksmanship. It took a small horde of demons—and then, an ambush—to best her. She's deadly. You should ask her to show you sometime. I can assure you, though, that she never turned anyone into a deer. Were a man to catch her bathing unclothed she'd have simply slit his throat."

"That's a bit—final."

Hau Ngai shrugs into her jacket. "Your aunt is not very forgiving toward men, Julienne."

Julienne tries to imagine that. Auntie Seung Ngo has always struck her as sweet, domestic and feminine to Hau Ngai's martial austerity.

In the arrival hall, billboards dapple the ground with advertisements for rest-and-showers, restaurants, tourist information. Directions white on indigo and white on red, everything a gloss, the announcements spoken in a voice like polished brass. Julienne likes the airport. It's busy without being crowded, peopled without being personal, a place of transitions—

Her thoughts quaver. She stops. Wan sunlight sieved through latticed roof splatters at her feet, patterning her skin, circling and feline.

"Is something wrong, Julienne?"

"Nothing, Auntie."

They meet Seung Ngo at an arrival gate, amongst a flurry of luggage-laden trolleys and passengers. Hau Ngai takes Seung Ngo's hand, sweeping a solemn bow over it.

"You should've let me know you were dressing up." A little pink, Seung Ngo laughs. "I'd have put on something to match. And a corset."

"I don't think we should discuss you and corsets in public." Hau Ngai gives Julienne a sidelong look. "I fear I'll be wearing variants of this for the rest of the week."

"Would you like me to check in at a hotel for a week, Aunties?"

"Impertinent child." Seung Ngo lets go of her wife. "And how are you, apart from disrespectful?"

"I'm fine." Julienne tries to smile. "Fresh from a break-up, but fine."

There's a long, delicate pause. She's often seen this hesitation from both her aunts.

"It's nothing, Auntie. Please don't trouble yourself over it." They shouldn't have to tiptoe around her. "I saw it coming anyway. Elena wasn't good for me and I wasn't good for her."

Hau Ngai's phone rings. She excuses herself.

"Julienne." Seung Ngo clasps her shoulder. "You can tell me anything. Or Hau Ngai, for that matter. I realize she's intimidating—she can't help that—but you don't have to be afraid of her."

"Thank you, Auntie. But there's nothing to talk about."

"Child, I know I'm not here nearly enough, but we've been family for nigh on two years."

Without meaning to Julienne glances at Hau Ngai. She is probably out of earshot, but who knows what kind of hearing an archer god has? "I don't want to bother you with every little broken nail. It's all just melodrama. Not even as fun as TVB serials. You've bigger things to worry about."

"I'll be the judge of that. Do you know, you sound like me. When I first met Hau Ngai this is nearly word for word what I said—that my concerns were mundane mortal things while she was a god, and surely none of what I had to say, none of what I had to think, could be worthy of her time and attention. Can you guess what she did?"

Hau Ngai is attracting looks—a woman so statuesque in formal suit is a sight anywhere. She pays them no regard. The conversation however can't be going well, if her expression's anything to go by. Julienne observes and after half a minute becomes certain Hau Ngai is actually not blinking. "Kiss you?"

"That came later." Auntie laughs. "She wouldn't admit it now—not in company—but she kissed me first. Back then, though, she just told me that of course she wanted to listen, if I was willing to talk. I told her, oh, everything I suppose. All about my life. You see?"

"I'm not as brave as you are. And I've turned enough people away by being hysterical. Or not hysterical enough." Her living relatives were never able to bear how quiet she was, how ungrieved, at her parents' funeral.

"My child, my niece, you aren't going to turn me away short of committing mass murder—and even then… well, you know who I'm married to. Remember, if not for you I'd still be bound to the moon."

Hers was only a small part. It seems so long ago that a stranger approached her, calling herself Hau Ngai while claiming her wife was Seung Ngo, and told Julienne a very peculiar story.
Will you burn this rope ladder for your grandaunt? An offering, as for the ancestral dead.
Is your wife a ghost then?
Flesh and blood, and beautiful.
And then they entered her life, giving her everything. "I'll try, Auntie. I don't want you unhappy."

Auntie Seung Ngo holds her in cool, long arms. "This isn't about me being happy. But it is a start. Until then, why don't we go shopping? It's my turn to spoil you."

* * *

Houyi is being followed. She has been since Kowloon Station and her wife did not miss the fact. By unspoken agreement then they've divided the labor, Chang'e to keep an eye on Julienne and Houyi to the rest.

She waits at a threshold between mortal earth and banbuduo, an entry gained after another bargaining with Daji. The creature dogging her isn't far behind; it too may straddle the line between worlds.

The earth browns and dries, as it was in the decades following the rising of the ten suns. Above her the sky blazes cloudless and around her a scorched valley rises. Grime covers her robes; on her cheeks sweat has dried to hard salt.

Gaunt-cheeked bandits close in with gleaming blades and gleaming eyes. A line of them on a cliff-face overhead, bent on their knees, arrows against taut strings.

There's blood on her, and hunger straining against her ribs. Her clothes sag loose against limbs gone to skin on bones. This was her death, eons ago.

She could have told the master of this spell that it lacks much; that it doesn't compare, even a fraction, to that of Nuwa's fox.

Absently she kills the men she killed those uncounted mortal lifetimes past. She did not hesitate then; she has less cause now and they shred like waxed paper, like dry bamboo—bloodlessly tidy. Her knife goes through the boy who fired the fatal shot into her breast. But much as others, he returns to his feet stutter-start, hand to the curve of bow: steady, the way she taught the original.

Houyi whips about and drives her blade into the forearm of a bearded, thick-set man. The sound he makes is the creak of wood not meant to flex, wood bent to the threshold of breaking.