Shallows of Night - 02 (18 page)

“Are you hungry?” she asked now.

“Yes, very.”

She laughed and it was like hot sun glancing off a naked blade. “Well, come then, my strong man, and remember well what you have said.”

Out into the Sha’angh’sei night they went, of moist wispy fog, lavender and blue, of a thousand eyes and ten thousand knives and one million running feet.

Down the wide sweeping stairs and into a square covered carriage Kiri called a ricksha. They climbed in and the bare-footed kubaru lifted his poles and set off without a word, the ride much smoother than Ronin would have imagined because it contained a peculiar rocking motion tied to the runner’s gait that he found soothing.

The blazing streets of the city, aflame with the swinging lanterns and the crush of people, the smells of broiling food and boiling rice, fresh shellfish and spiced wine flowed past them in a rippling without end, a vast variegated canvas upon which it seemed all the events of the ages of man must be painted in subtle colors too potent to be real.

He breathed the musk of her perfume and stared into her eyes when he could tear his vision away from the flashing city. They were so huge that he imagined that an entire universe resided within their depths. Platinum flecks shivering and he saw with a start that her eyes were not black but the deepest shade of violet that he had ever seen.

Upward they climbed, away from the crawling delta of the port, onto higher reaches of the city where silver taels made room for spired houses, ornate balconies, sculpted stone walls, and landscaped greenery.

Trees whispered their mysterious messages and the night deepened as the intense light from the multitude of lamps drifted silently away from them, down the mountainside, the fast receding shore of an incandescent isle, remote now and unreal, just choppy splashes on the dense ocean of the night.

Just the panting of the jogging kubaru’s breath, the slap-slap of his feet, soles burnished like leather, the intermittent tiny sounds of the nocturnal insects, an owl hooting high up in a tree.

Once he thought about telling her but the pale oval of her face caused his words to catch in his throat and he said nothing, but watched the platinum motes.

The ricksha stopped before a two-storied house of dark brick and carved hardwood, columnated, flamboyant. Slender lamps like torches stood on either side of the wide yellow-metal-bound doors.

Ronin stepped out of the ricksha and turned. Kiri came into his arms. Together, they walked up the stone steps. The doors opened inward as they approached. A rather overly dramatic welcome, Ronin thought.

Two tall men stood before them. They were clad in black cotton shirts and leggings, armed with short single-edged swords which hung unscabbarded on thick brass chains at their sides. They had eyes like slits, mouths thin-lipped and wide, their faces peculiarly canine. They bowed to Kiri and stepped impassively away from the doors, allowing them entrance. They stared curiously at Ronin as he passed them.

They were in a towering hallway the height of the entire structure. The whole of its far end was taken up by a forked staircase curving upward to the second story. To the left were two closed doors. To the right opened sliding doors of oiled fragrant wood through which they entered a large room, warmly furnished with satin-cushioned chairs and plush settees without legs. The floor was covered with an enormous rug of dark swirling patterns. The pale green walls were edged in gilt. The room was windowless.

There were perhaps ten people arranged about the room; less than half were women. A tall slender man turned as they entered and a curiously white smile split his long face. He came toward them. He had round eyes of a pale blue and thick graying hair which he contrived to wear very long. Unbound and brushed, it framed his face in such a way as to give him a startlingly leonine appearance. He was dressed in a formal Sha’angh’sei suit, leggings and loose shirt, in a shadow pattern of gilt on gilt.

“Ah, Kiri.”

The voice was deep, well modulated. He smiled again and Ronin saw the semicircular arc of raised white flesh beginning at the left corner of the mouth and terminating at the side of his nose, which at some earlier time had had its left nostril sheared off.

“Llowan,” said Kiri, “this is Ronin, a warrior from the north.”

The man turned his ice eyes on Ronin and bowed formally.

“I am most pleased that Kiri brought you.”

“Llowan is the city’s bundsman. He oversees the transactions of all the harbor hongs, collecting for Sha’angh’sei, duties on each shipment coming in and departing the port.”

Again that strange smile, unnaturally extended by the livid scar.

“You honor me, lady.” Then to both of them: “You must have some wine. Hara,” he called to a servant, who served them a sparkling white wine in stemmed crystal glasses.

“Are you really from another civilization?” asked Llowan, leading them into the vortex of figures, beginning the introductions over Ronin’s reply, then, coaxed into a peripheral conversation, leaving Kiri to continue, names tumbling like leaves in an autumn wind, and he concentrated then on the faces.

“Rikkagin,” said the large man with no chin and tiny eyes like broiled insects, “one is becoming quite alarmed by the tales being told of the fighting in the north.”

They were sitting on silk pillows on the bare floor around a low table made of a wood with grain like a stormy sea, polished to a high gloss upon which were laid out glazed pots of hot wine and bowls of various small foods such as pieces of fish, battered and dipped in hot oil, steamed vegetables, small sticky sweetmeats.

“What of it?” said the rikkagin in a tone of voice clearly indicating that he had no wish to discuss the matter. He was a wide-shouldered man with a ruddy complexion vanguarded by a wide red-veined nose. He had a thick gray beard stained yellow around his red lips. “This is a city of tales, Chi’en. Most of them, as I am sure you are well aware, are utterly false.”

“Yet these persist,” said Chi’en, his yellow jowls quivering. He reclined on the pillows, an ornate fan waving at the side of his sad face.

“Tales to frighten hongs such as yourself are easy to create,” the rikkagin said with some disdain. “Do not be an old lady.”

The large man bristled. “But the fighting is not—”

“My dear sir.” The rikkagin was frowning now, his thick brows beetling like thunderheads. “Without the war Sha’angh’sei would still be a muddy swamp with primitive paper houses collapsing in the first high wind and you would be in the rice paddies with your wife earning just enough to survive. It will come as no great news to any of us here that the war is what has made us rich. Without it—”

“You speak of war,” said a thin, dour man with dark eyes and close-cropped hair, “as if it were an object to hold in one’s hand and use as one pleases.” Ronin thought for a moment, recalled his name: Mantu, a priest of the House of Canton. “Yet war is death for thousands and mutilation, starvation, and suffering for countless others.”

“How would you know?” interjected a high-cheekboned woman, another hong. “You who have never ventured forth from the sanctity of your region of Sha’angh’sei.”

“I am not required to do so,” the priest said acidly. “I have quite enough on my hands with the refugees that daily stream into the city from the north seeking sanctuary and solace at the House.”

“Your piousness sickens me, Mantu,” said the rikkagin. “Where would the Canton House be without the war? Without the great suffering who would come to fill your cathedral?”

“Tradition would—”

“Do not talk of your tradition.”

The voice was harsh and heads turned. The man was slender and muscular, with a bony face dominated by eyes like slatted windows, black as night. He had dark curling hair and a long drooping mustache that gave him a sinister appearance. He alone at the table wore plain clothes and a traveling cloak. “Your people came to this land before the rikkagin but as surely as they preached the faith of Canton you took from my people as much as the soldiers. The House of Canton. My tongue grows thick with rage whenever I am forced to utter that hideous name. Yours is not the religion of Sha’angh’sei.”

“Po,” said Llowan kindly, “your people are traders, nomads from the west.”

The slatted eyes flashed like dark lightning. “You delude yourself if you believe that there is a difference. Are not my eyes the same as Chi’en’s? Is not my skin the same color as Li Su’s? They were wealthy hongs of Sha’angh’sei just as their parents were before them. They are from the south, their origins far from my people, is that what you would have me believe? Yes?” His fist hammered the table and the sound was like the crash of hammer onto anvil in the green and gilt room. “I tell you no! Ours is a land of unlimited wealth yet my people eat half bowls of rice and, if they are fortunate, week-old fish heads which they find discarded on garbage heaps. And all the while they toil to distill the fruit of the poppy for the lords of Sha’angh’sei.”

“The tradition of the Canton House is without reproach,” said Mantu somewhat didactically. “It has stood for many years—”

“Growing fat like the rikkagin and hongs from the sweat of our labor,” sneered Po.

“You obviously do not understand the Canton teachings and, like most men, you are misdirected,” Mantu said. “All men crave permanence.” He lifted his arms. “Hence they acquire many things as if in these possessions they may truly find the belief that they will not die.” The arms folded in on themselves, somehow communicating pity without condescension. “Yet all life is transient, and man, in desiring permanence, is inevitably defeated and thus suffers; and in his suffering, makes those around him suffer.”

“Philosophy is all well and good for those with time on their hands,” said Chi’en irritably, “but I am more concerned with what I have been hearing, Rikkagin, that the war has changed.”

“Oh, out with it,” said the rikkagin in exasperation, wiping at his beard. “If we must listen to your prattle, best get it over with.”

Chi’en ignored this outburst. “The tales,” he said quite carefully, “filtering into Sha’angh’sei are that the soldiers in the north no longer fight men.”

There was a small uncomfortable silence in the room then, as if an uninvited and unwelcome guest had arrived unexpectedly with news they all dreaded yet wished to hear.

“A tale to be believed by fools,” said the rikkagin disgustedly. “Come then, tell us, Chi’en, what these beings ‘other than men’ are like. No doubt you have detailed descriptions for us.”

The large man’s jowls quivered and his eyes blinked several times in surprise. “No, I have told you all that I have heard.”

The rikkagin grunted and leaned forward to snag a piece of fried fish with his sticks. He sighed rather contentedly. “Yes, it is always most enlightening to hear how the truth is twisted to serve the needs of the individual—”

Po laughed at this, a short discomforting sound like the abrupt cracking of a dry twig in a forest when one had been certain that no one else was around.

The rikkagin looked down his nose at Po and continued. “The Reds have enlisted the aid of a savage tribe, a northern people who, it seems, are much addicted to the fruit of the poppy. From what I understand, they extract the syrup, freeze it, and then chew it.”

“What?” exclaimed Li Su. “Uncured and uncut? It cannot be! The effect would be—”

“Most extraordinary,” said Llowan with his white lopsided smile. “I believe we are all agreed on that point, Godaigo.”

“Quite a frightening habit, I agree,” said the rikkagin.

“I did not say that,” replied Llowan, and they all laughed.

Godaigo wiped his red lips on a silk cloth provided by the host. “Be that as it may, it is this unusual lever that the Reds are using to induce the tribe to join with them against us.” He put his hands up. “And I admit that until reinforcements are in place we will be rather inconvenienced. But that is all.”

“Still the tales exist,” interjected Mantu. “It would be most appropriate if they were true.”

“What are you saying?” said the rikkagin.

“I am telling you quite plainly that I would welcome the veracity of these tales because it would likely mean an end to the war. That is, after all, what the House of Canton seeks.”

“The House seeks dominion over the continent of man,” said Po harshly. “And in that it shall surely fail.”

“We seek dominion over no one; you speak out of ignorance.”

“Just their souls.”

The priest smiled benignly. “Life, my dear Po, is soulless. The essence of each man survives death to be placed in, one hopes, a more worthy body, until the final Nothingness is achieved.”

“Their minds, then.”

Mantu smiled and shrugged. “Shall we debate semantics, trader?”

“Well,” said Llowan, clapping his hands for the servants and seeking to head off another dispute, “I believe that it is time that we get down to the serious business of the evening. I trust everyone has brought that which they need.” The white grin.

The servants first filled everyone’s glass with a cold clear wine, “to clear one’s palate,” as Llowan told them. Then they ladled out a rich steaming soup of fish stock into large enameled bowls.

Following this, new glasses were brought into which was poured a sparkling wine while several dishes of spiced raw shellfish were put before the guests.

Ronin was still thinking of what the priest had said when the servants staggered in with huge platters of meat of a bewildering assortment. Each platter had half the meat shorn in thick slabs from the white carcasses. With this was served more of the clear sparkling wine.

“Mantu,” Ronin said. “This Nothingness you spoke of. What is it precisely?”

The priest turned to Ronin, seeming glad for the interest. “It is the state to which all men must aspire—”

“Women also?”

Mantu was not sure whether he was being mocked.

“Certainly. Theologians use the word ‘man’ as a shortening for ‘mankind.’” His small mouth glistened with grease. “Nothingness is, in essence, the total extinguishing of the ego.”

Ronin was somewhat surprised. “Do you mean that the individuality of each person must be surrendered?”