Alma Alexander - The Secrets of Jin-Shei

Saw the sun rise. Mother talked about liu-kala last night, and she was right, I feel something new beginning all around me. But nothing begins except that something else has ended, and I wonder what has ended for me this day. Like one of the stars in the sky this morning, I am gone – gone, but there is something else now where that which I was used to be – something greater than I was. Just like the stars vanish into the morning, and the sun appears, and all is light.

‘I didn’t think I’d find you here so early,’ a soft voice interrupted her thoughts.

Tai’s head came up. It was Antian, her hair in two plain long plaits again, looking much younger than her fourteen years, smiling.

‘I came because you told me mornings were beautiful here too,’ Tai said. ‘And …; I could not sleep.’

‘I was eager for the day, too,’ said Antian. She inclined her head a fraction at the red book Tai held, her smile broadening. ‘I am glad to see it is useful.’

‘It is beautiful,’ Tai said, her fingers caressing the soft leather where they held the notebook. ‘I have never owned anything so precious.’

‘Then I will have to see that you get another just like it when you finish it,’ said Antian, sounding genuinely delighted. ‘And then another, every year, my gift. Perhaps you’ll share some of its contents with me some time.’

‘Thank you,’ whispered Tai. It was not a specific thanks she was expressing, not just for the notebook or the promise of its eternal replenishment; she was thanking Antian for opening the world to her a little, for sharing a wider sphere than Tai could ever have aspired to on her own.

Antian understood, and reached out a hand. ‘Walk with me,’ she said.

Tai closed the journal notebook, folded the lid down firmly onto her inkpot, tucked everything into a pocket of her tunic, and reached out her own trembling fingers. Antian took her hand, tucked it under her arm, and led the way. Side by side like that, with the same dark hair braided in the same long plaits with Tai’s only a little more untidy than Antian’s, they really did look like sisters. Real sisters, sharing the same blood and kin.

But this is better , thought Tai, her heart beating very fast. We are jin-shei. We are sisters of the heart.

They left the balcony arm in arm and crossed over into the garden where the butterflies were waking, the flowers were beginning to open and the air was heady with scent. For the time being they did not talk; they exchanged a word here and there, when one of them would point to a hummingbird or a bumble-bee as if neither had seen them before and whisper, ‘Look!’ For the time being, that was enough. They had to learn to share time, to meld two different lives which had been running in two different streams until last night and had now merged into something bigger, deeper, stronger.

‘Look,’ said Tai, yet again, pointing to something that had caught her eye in the garden. But she was also pointing at the pillars of the shaded cloister where the garden merged into the first open pavilions of the Summer Palace, and as she pointed a thin, fox-faced girl maybe a year or so younger than Antian peeled her back off a pillar on which she had been leaning, gave the two walking girls in the garden a smouldering look, and turned away sharply as though she had been stung by the sight of them.

Tai snatched her arm back, embarrassed. The girl had been wearing turquoise silk, and her hair was dressed formally, with silk flowers and pearls.

‘Who was that?’ she asked, cowed. The look that had whipped her had not been friendly.

‘That?’ Antian said, smiling sadly. ‘That was my sister. My angry sister. That is Liudan.’

But the look on Liudan’s face had not been anger. It had been a recoil born of fear. And pain. And loss.

‘From mother’s arms to cradles

to cribs we grow, and rise

to our feet and walk; and when they lay the first milk tooth

of Lan into a silk cloth where a fond mother

keeps it always

we are no longer babes.’

Qiu-Lin, Year 5 of the Cloud Emperor

It is very quiet out there tonight.

Tai paused, lifting her brush from the page of her journal, listening to the silence.

This was the first year that she had been in the Summer Palace without her mother – Rimshi had developed a debilitating cough and chest infection over the previous winter, and her physician, the healer Szewan who attended the women of the Imperial Court and who had been sent to take care of Rimshi by the Empress Yehonaia herself, had counselled against travel. But this was the second year of jin-shei between Tai and Antian, the Little Empress, and Tai had been invited along in her own right as a guest of the Court. She had not been given the quarters she and her mother usually occupied, out on the fringes of the Palace, in the outer courts. She had a room to herself this summer, close to Antian’s own suite – a room with a window that looked out into the garden, a room full of billowing curtains and soft cushions. There was even a servant who left a beaker of iced tea in the room every morning, when the heat came, as she did in all the women’s chambers.

Tai felt awkward accepting all this. She also felt isolated. That she was jin-shei to Antian was an open secret in the Court – but there were times that the hallowed precepts of jin-shei did clash with the more traditional strictures of status and class, and many of the inhabitants of the plush women’s wing in the Palace did not much like it that a commoner was invited to live amongst them. Antian was of age now, however; Tai had been a guest at the Little Empress’s Xat-Wau ceremony only that spring, and was witness to Antian’s grandmother, the old and fragile Dowager Empress, placing the red lacquered hairpin through Antian’s lustrous piled-up black hair. Antian was an adult, according to Syai custom. She was also a senior member of the Imperial household, with her own personal court which was now her responsibility. She had asked Tai to the Summer Palace, and the other women had to at least be polite.

Or that was the theory of it. Tai had learned to tell the difference between three very specific kinds of women in the Court where she was concerned. There were those who were genuinely pleasant, and offered a smile or a kind word in passing even when Tai was not accompanied by Antian and they felt constrained to be polite in the presence of Tai’s powerful friend and protector.

There were the ones who would pass Tai in silence if they came upon her alone, but smiled and fawned upon her when she was in Antian’s company; Tai soon learned to recognize a smile that did not reach the eyes and the touch of cold, reluctant fingers.

And then there was Liudan.

In the two years of her jin-shei tie to Antian, Tai had completely failed to get anything but cold hostility from Antian’s sister Liudan. It had started on the very first day of the jin-shei , when she and Antian had been walking in the very gardens that her room now gazed out into, when she had pointed at a flower and seen Liudan’s recoil from her.

That was my sister. My angry sister.

Antian had explained about Liudan, later.

‘I was only two when she was born,’ Antian had said, ‘but my mother was the Empress and everyone spoiled me. Every concubine’s child is taken to belong to the Empress, of course, but when Liudan was born, Cai – that’s her mother – did not wish to give her up to be raised by a wet-nurse and then the Court.’