Alma Alexander - The Secrets of Jin-Shei

‘My time is less my own in the evenings,’ Antian said. ‘Tell me about what you come here to see.’

So Tai described, haltingly at first, then with increasing confidence, the golden river flowing into the sunset – and then the new thing she had absorbed for the first time only the other day, the stars coming out in the summer sky. Antian listened, not interrupting, until Tai came to a halt and drew a deep breath, her eyes still shining with her vision. She realized that the Princess was watching her with a small smile of admiration lighting the slanted dark eyes.

‘You have a gift,’ she said. ‘You have the sight and the tongue of a poet. Not only through your hands but through your heart and your mind and what you see and you hear.’ She tossed her head impatiently. ‘So few around me have that ability,’ she said, ‘to paint me a picture – with chalk, or with thread, or with words. I have to come here at sunset one day and see these things of which you have spoken. Would you like to join my household?’

The last was unexpected, a question that rounded the corner of the rest of Antian’s words and ambushed Tai with the force of a blow in the stomach. Her eyes were wide with consternation, but what came out was something that was surprised out of her, something that, had she had the remotest chance of thinking about, she could never have said at all.

‘No, Princess.’

They stared at each other in mutual shock – one because she was not used to being refused, the other because she could not believe that she had just uttered the words of refusal to the face of an Imperial Princess.

But Tai knew why she had said what she had said. Driven to explain, to take back that blurted no that had come tumbling out of her, she raised the hand which still clutched her chalks and her paper.

‘Princess …; Antian …; I …; I am honoured. But my mother has told me …;’

‘Don’t look like that. You are not a slave, and I won’t go out and buy you with gold,’ Antian said, her voice startlingly sad. ‘I like the way you make me see things. That’s all.’

‘My mother has told me something of the Imperial Court,’ Tai said. ‘Of the way things are done, they have to be done, the way everyone’s life is planned and controlled, the way you have to make sure your hair is in place and your hands are in position and you are not allowed to smile or to talk or to look where you are not supposed to look.’

‘Yes,’ said Antian, ‘I know.’

‘I would have to be like that, too. And that would mean …; I couldn’t watch the butterflies.’

‘I know,’ said Antian again, this time with a sigh. ‘You are right. It is a life that binds. You made the buffalo robe with vision but I will wear it with ceremony. I was just wishing …; for someone to let me see the things that ceremony makes me blind to.’ She looked up at the battlements behind them, rising tier upon tier, and straightened. ‘I should probably go in now,’ she said, suddenly reverting to a curious formality. ‘I will look forward to seeing you in the gardens again soon, Painter of Butterflies.’

‘Wait,’ said Tai impulsively as the Princess turned to leave. Antian turned her head, watched as Tai fumbled within her sheaf of papers, extracted the drawing she had been working on the day Antian had first seen her in the gardens. She held it out, suddenly shy. ‘I’d like you …; to have this …; if you want to.’

Antian took the somewhat smudged drawing with a small smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said. There was the slightest of hesitations, as though she had meant to say something else and caught herself, and then she merely inclined her head in a tiny regal motion and turned away.

Tai stayed on the balcony for a long time, alone, staring out into the valley.

‘The Little Empress liked her gown,’ Rimshi said to Tai when she returned to their room later that day after an afternoon fitting session with the princesses. ‘I told her it was mostly your work, and she was pleased to give me something for you.’

Tai looked up, wary. ‘For me?’

‘So she said.’ Rimshi raised her hand to cover her smile. ‘I have brought it to you, here. She said, “Tell your daughter that this is for the butterflies and for the golden river.”’

Tai took the small square package wrapped in an oddment of scarlet silk and unfolded the material to reveal a small book, a journal with a hundred pages gleaming white and blank and waiting to be filled with thoughts and visions, bound in soft, bright red leather with leather ties to hold it closed. Tai’s hands caressed the smooth binding, opened and closed the book several times. Tears which she could not explain stung her eyes. This, after she had told Antian no ?

‘This is a precious thing,’ Rimshi said, observing her daughter’s reaction. ‘She thinks highly of you, it seems.’

‘She likes what I see,’ Tai murmured.

‘Ah,’ said Rimshi, still smiling. ‘Use it well, then, to share that vision.’

‘Look,’ Tai said suddenly, lifting a piece of very fine paper which had been laid between the last page and the back cover. ‘There is something else here. Look!’

‘It looks like a letter,’ Rimshi said.

Tai looked up in consternation. ‘I cannot read letters!’

‘This one you can, I think,’ Rimshi said. ‘She would have written in the women’s tongue.’

‘ Jin-ashu ? The princesses know jin-ashu , too?’

‘All women know jin-ashu ,’ murmured Rimshi. ‘It is our language, the language of jin-shei – passed from mother to daughter from the dawn of time, letting us speak freely of the thoughts and dreams and desires hidden deep in a woman’s heart. Of things men do not understand and do not need to know.’

Tai opened the folded piece of paper with reverence. ‘There is only one thing here,’ she said.

‘What does it say?’ Rimshi asked, although she knew, and her heart leapt at what her daughter had just been given.

Tai lifted shining eyes. ‘ Jin-shei ,’ she whispered.

So young …;

Rimshi had been twelve years old when she had exchanged her first jin-shei vow – with Meilin, the daughter and heir of a family which owned a thriving silk business in Linh-an. It was in their workshop that the young Rimshi had first seen silk thread, had first touched silk cloth, had embroidered her first clumsy sampler in silk – all when she was younger still, much younger than twelve years old. And then the friendship with Meilin had deepened into something else, and they had said the words to each other – jin-shei. After that Meilin, the elder by a handful of years and therefore more accomplished, saw to it that Rimshi’s talents were noticed, and she had been given training and instruction in the silk embroidery.

Jin-shei had shaped Rimshi’s life – it was jin-shei that gave her the gift of her trade, and it was jin-shei , with another jin-shei-bao who had gone on to be an Emperor’s concubine, that had given her the place to practise it. Rimshi had told Tai about the second story and Tai knew all about the romance of it, the glory of the poor but beautiful girl being taken into the Imperial Palace to be a princess. Tai knew only the light of jin-shei , its joys; Rimshi had thought she would still have time to teach her daughter about its duties and its responsibilities. And now it was here, offered by a girl who would be Empress one day.

It could be refused, simply by making no response to the offer, by not accepting jin-shei by responding with the same words. But Rimshi looked at Tai’s face and the bright wide eyes and could think of no reason for her to refuse this great gift that she had been offered. There would be time still, Cahan willing, to teach Tai about the true meaning of the sisterhood – time enough for everything.