Alma Alexander - The Secrets of Jin-Shei

They limped back to Linh-an, the survivors, with a slow, snaking line of horse carts bearing twenty-seven bodies in caskets draped in the white of mourning. The walls of the city – massive constructions of dressed stone, nearly sixty feet thick at the bottom and almost forty feet high – were almost hidden, from the north approach, by the white ribbon banners that had been hung from the top battlements. The broad ribbons shifted and eddied in the breeze, and from a distance it looked like the walls themselves had come alive and were trembling with sorrow.

The people of Linh-an met the procession in the streets, standing silently as it wound its way through the north gate and into the heart of the city, almost eight miles of twisting roads to the Great Temple which waited to receive the four most important bodies – the Ivory Emperor, his Empress, the Little Empress Antian his heir, and Second Princess Oylian. The houses the procession passed were hung with white ribbons, like the outer walls, or banners with inscriptions of blessing or farewell. The city was stunned. The country reeled.

The survivors grieved.

Tai had returned with the Court, back to Rimshi, her still ailing mother, and had clung to her for a long time in silence after the cortège left its dead in the Temple and those who returned from the Summer Palace had gone their separate ways. Tai would not speak of it at all for days, just sat white-faced and silent in a corner of the room or spent long hours at the Temple. There was little spare money to make all the offerings such a death demanded, but Rimshi set aside every copper that she could; Tai burned incense sticks, and offered up rice and saffron for the safe passage of Antian’s soul into the Immortal Lands.

The Ivory Emperor, Antian’s father, was given his traditional niche in the Hall of the Immortal Emperors, in the Second Circle of the Temple. The new shrine overflowed with the offerings of the people who came filing past to pay their respects or offer up their grief.

But Antian was not the Emperor, would never have a niche for herself where people would come and pray to her bright spirit. Tai would think of this, her eyes bright with tears she could not seem to shed, as she sat beside the Ivory Emperor’s shrine and watched the cascades of white mourning candles fighting for space with incense holders for sticks saturated with frankincense or lilac essence, with piles of peaches symbolizing immortality, with mounds of rice and of tamarind seeds. The Ivory Emperor would become a lesser God. Antian would remain a fading memory.

But Tai could not cry. The loss was lodged too deep, like a dagger in her heart, and she nursed the pain fiercely – it was as though she believed that this alone would keep Antian alive for her. The funeral would not be for another twenty days, so that the Emperor’s body and those of his family could lie in state for the proper period. The period of mourning for a dead Emperor was fixed at nine months for the nation, three years for his surviving family. For three years Liudan, now the Empress-Heir, would be allowed to wear only pale colours and no silk garments, in mourning for her family. But because of the way that the Emperor and his family had died, the unnatural and violent way in which they had been taken, it had been decreed that there would be a full year of mourning for the city, during which time all would wear white ribbons and pieces of sackcloth on their garments. But for Tai this marking of time was meaningless. She had seen too much on that morning in the mountains, she had lost something that had barely begun to bloom into a rich and treasured thing in her life, and her mourning was deep, and absolute, and she felt as though it would never end.

When the tears did come, it was not at the Ivory Emperor’s shrine, or at the sight of his mourners there, or even as she lit her own candles on Third and Fourth Circle altars for Antian. It was an ordinary thing that set her off, not the memory of loss, but a reminder that life went on without pausing to grieve for what was lost, that each sunset was followed by a new dawn …; that a new Emperor would follow this one.

She had been on her way to the gate, stepping out of the Second Circle into the chaos of the First, and had happened to pass close enough to the stall of So-Xan the yearwood bead-carver to notice the bin of carved bone beads out by the side of the trestle table, and Kito, So-Xan’s son, patiently rasping at the carvings, smoothing the round beads into even, featureless globes which would be dipped into white lead paint and sold for the duration of the mourning year to be strung onto the yearwood sticks to mark the passage of the time.

It was this, finally, that reached out and drew the dagger from Tai’s heart. She did not expect the pain, the rush of heart’s blood that followed the simple realization that something was over , irrevocably over, that the reign of the Ivory Emperor was done …; and that Antian would never choose the Emperor who would take his place. Tai’s breath caught; she staggered, catching herself on a nearby booth for support.

Kito happened to look up, took in the white face, the wide eyes dilated with shock, and dropped the bead he had been working on back into the bin he’d taken it from, leaping to his feet.

‘Are you all right? You look ill.’ He closed the distance between them in two long strides, cupping Tai’s elbow, bending over her solicitously. ‘Xao-jin!’ he called, summoning the proprietor of a booth four or five trestles down. A round, moon-shaped face popped around a partition in response. ‘Bring me a cup of green tea! Hurry!’

Something had snapped, and Tai suddenly found herself racked by great heaving sobs, shuddering convulsively as the tears came. Kito steered her into the inner recesses of the bead-carver’s booth, installing her on a bench, leaving her side only long enough to step out and grab the bowl of steaming tea brought by the man he had summoned and murmur a brief word of thanks. Then he was back, dropping to one knee beside the bench on which Tai sat and wept as though her heart would break.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘drink this. It will make you feel better.’

The very absurdity of this comment made Tai hiccough and gulp down some of the brew. Kito’s concerned eyes never left her face, at least not until he was satisfied that some colour had returned to her cheeks and that, although she was still weeping soundlessly with an inconsolable grief, she was in no imminent danger of doing herself damage from it.

There was an awkward moment of silence in which Tai would not raise her swimming eyes to look at him and he sat back helplessly, at a loss as to what to do next.

‘Are you all right now?’ Kito inquired at last, as she cradled the nearly drained tea bowl between her hands. It would have been impolite to ask, they did not even know each other’s names, but Kito had always had a high degree of empathy for people and some part of Tai’s pain had reached out and touched his own spirit. He found himself wanting to do something to help, anything, but not knowing the cause of it could not do anything to alleviate it.

Tai understood his reluctance to ask, but felt that she owed him an explanation for bursting into tears upon catching sight of him at his work.

‘It’s …;’ she began, but her voice was still thick with the tears. She swallowed, hard, fighting back a new wave of weeping. ‘The Ivory Emperor’s beads. You were …;’

Kito glanced back at his abandoned task. ‘Yes,’ he said, and his voice was oddly gentle. ‘I am making the mourning beads. And after that I will have to make the regency beads. For the Empress-Heir is still too young to be raised to the throne, and we do not know yet what the next reign’s bead is going to be.’