Jade Maiden 12.5

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[concluding chapter 12, and the novel]

"You're sure you didn't want to stay?  Wen watched as Fengzi closed the door to the cabin—their cabin now, she'd taken care to tell him. From the way the ship rocked Wen knew they'd cleared the headlands and would soon be turning to the south.  He wondered if people in Měijing and Dà Găng had any idea what was about to hit them.

"Absolutely sure," she said.  Was there a hint of shyness there?  This was the first they'd been alone since they'd broken into heaven.  "You words were very noble, Xia, and I hope that in time they come to have the same meaning for women as they do for the cleaners of fish.  But until I seem some proof that men have suddenly become more noble, I would much rather be on the high seas, where I know I'm appreciated for what I do."

"And for what you are."  He reached for her hand.  "I've never properly thanked you for all you did for me, Fengzi.  I probably never will.  I promise to keep trying, though."

Jade Maiden 12.4

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[continuing chapter 12]

"What do you mean, you're not staying?"  The crowd had somehow disgorged Scholar Wu at its head.  He didn't look happy, as if he'd just been told he was going to have to deal with his ancestors again. "Wen Xia, this is no time to go sailing!  You have to help these people.  They have to consolidate what they've won here today."

"How hard will that be?"  Wen looked at the pile of arms and armor that had been removed from those soldiers who no longer wished to serve in anybody's army.  "This dynasty—and it hardly deserves that word—is brittle, Wu Ming.  One good push will send it tottering in pieces.  You don't need me.  Anyone can give that sort of push."

"I must disagree with you."  Wu Ming gestured, first to the crowd and then to the ships in the harbor.  "Not just anyone inspired this crowd.  Those pirates didn't sail here for me, or for anyone else.  They sailed here and charged down here for you."

Jade Maiden 12.3

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[continuing chapter 12]

There was movement in the military circle.  "Don't you dare!" shouted Governor Li.  "Somebody shoot that man!"

Nobody shot, and one of the spear-men from the front row walked across the square, to a raucous and celebratory welcome from the pirates and people.  No sooner had this happened than two more men dashed across the square.  Then the circle of soldiers around Governor Li melted away like the snows in the eastern mountains in summer, and before Wen had fully recognized what had happened, Li was nearly alone, with just a couple of officers beside him.  And Liang Sheng, who had taken advantage of Fengzi's distraction to quietly levitate himself out of the pit and to his master's side.

Jade Maiden 12.2

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[continuing chapter 12]

"You might have to help me here," he said to Yin Fengzi as he tried and failed to get to his feet.

"Shouldn't you take that off?" she asked, nodding at the armor.  "It's not even all that pretty, you know."

"A small problem there," he said.  "When I came back into my body it was, um, naked under the armor.  Which is damned cold, by the way, and it pinches bits of me I'd rather not talk about."

The way she blushed was amazingly attractive, and interesting in all the right fashions.  Remember to talk about this some more, later, Wen told himself.

Jade Maiden 12.1

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TWELVE

Wen forced his good eye to stay open.  I want to see clearly for as long as I can, he thought. The scimitar blade came down toward his face.

And then it was gone, blown sideways along with Chin Gwai as a huge gust of wind roared across Dockyard Square from the sea.  Wen saw the effects of the wind but felt nothing himself.  Strange weather they have here, he thought.  Then he saw her.

Yin Fengzi was flying toward him, slowly and majestically, gown and trouser-legs fluttering madly in the winds that swirled around her and made a mad thing of her hair.  Sparks and tiny bolts of blue-green lightning emanated from her hands, one of which was wrapped around the hilt of a delicate little sword while the other gestured toward Chin Gwai, who was blown over again as he tried to get to his feet.

"Hey, Li!" Wen shouted, feeling the smile stretching his face, "Can your cheap magician do that?"  Liang Sheng squeaked again, but more angrily this time.

"Sorry we took so long, Xia," Fengzi said as she floated past him.  "Until you got your Dragon Eye back on we thought you were still in the governor's fortress.  We'd made quite a mess of it by the time I realized you were here."  She was grinning broadly herself, and Wen had to resist the urge to leap up, grab her and pull her down with him.

Jade Maiden 11.6

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[concluding chapter 11]

A crossbow bolt thudded into his breastplate.  Wen waited for the pain to come, but apart from a sting where the metal smashed back against his naked chest, there was none.  Cheap though it may have been, the armor had held.  This time.  He looked to see that the oncoming soldiers had paused in order to loose a volley; another bolt shot past him, just missing.  Behind him somebody screamed.

"You are throwing away your lives!" he yelled to the soldiers as he waved his followers away from the target he made.  "You are defending a lying bastard who can't lose the mandate of heaven because he never had it!"  Charging at Li and Chin he shouted, "Think of what your ancestors would say!"  I am such a hypocrite, he added silently, stumbling as another crossbow bolt deflected from his leg armor and skittered across the paving stones.

Jade Maiden 11.5

Previous    First

[continuing chapter 11]

"You think you have defeated the Notorious Wen Xia?" he shouted, finishing with a laugh.  "You have merely fallen into my trap, Governor Li!  Or should I call you 'Li the Usurper'?" he added.  Addressing the crowd he shouted, "Know, people of Fusang, that this evil man has falsely claimed the mandate of heaven and would see himself on the emerald throne, ruling over you!  It does not have to be this way!  I have shown, with the way I live my life, that all people are endowed with the right to choose.  Now is your chance to choose not to let this evil fraud complete his foul plot!  Join me and gain your freedom!  Uh-oh," he added more quietly as a squad of soldiers, armed with crossbows, appeared at the edge of the pit.  For the moment they were placed such that Li and his party were between them and Wen, but as he watched their officer began pushing the crowd back and drawing his men around to where they'd have a clear shot.

Jade Maiden 11.4

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[continuing chapter 11]

"Citizens!" boomed the voice, more closely now.  Wen had to struggle to get control of his eyes from the dockworker, but his was the stronger spirit—being the one actually alive in more than a magical-technical sense that only Daoists would care about—and after a moment he was not only able to see, he could move his head a little.

"Your governor, His Excellency Li Ling, has assembled you today in order that you bear witness to his success in ridding the waters of the Fusang coast of that most horrible scourge, the pirates."  The herald couldn't hold a candle in the voice department to Foghorn; Wen suddenly found himself missing the crew as much as he missed the Jade Maiden and the freedom she had always represented to him.  I really want this to work, he thought, stretching his arms again.  Again the ropes held, and he bled a little more.

Jade Maiden 11.3

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[continuing chapter 11]

Hey! said a voice inside Wen's head.  Who is you and what is you doin' here?

Who in the hells are you? Wen thought back.  And what are you doing inside my head?  Wait a minute, he thought.  What's going on here?  I'm supposed to be on the floor of a cell.

Instead he was surrounded by metal.  Very cold metal.  He tried to look to see what was going on, but couldn't make his eyes work.  I be busy with that, said the voice.  You can't has.

Those eyes are mine, you bastard, thought Wen.  They do what I tell them to.  The other presence cursed him, in the manner of a Dà Găng dock-worker, and fought back against his efforts to regain control.  But finally Wen felt his eyes snap open, and he could see again.

What he saw was not reassuring.

Jade Maiden 11.2

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[continuing chapter 11]

Wen rushed over to his father.  "Uh," he said to the others, "he has clearly been upset by all that's happened, and he isn't in his right mind."

"And you," Father said, turning on Wen.  "If you think I'm going to be grateful for a few seconds' ability to speak after months and months of choking, burning suffering, you're even more selfish and stupid than I thought you were!  How could you do this—to anyone, much less to your own father?"

"What has happened to you?" Wen asked, trying not to be horrified by the anger he saw burning in Father's eyes.  He looked at Number One Grandfather, and was startled at how happy the old man looked.

Jade Maiden 11.1

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ELEVEN

"You can't tell me that's therapeutic."  The Jade Emperor's voice rumbled in Wen's ears, in the style of distant thunder.  Please let this go on a bit longer, he thought.

"She certainly seems to be responding to it, though," Lao Zi said.  He sounded puzzled.  Man ought to have got out more while he had the chance, Wen thought.  Then he realized that Fengzi was responding to his kiss.  In a way that might not have been therapeutic but was certainly life-affirming.

Jade Maiden 10.8

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[concluding chapter 10]

"Surely you don't mean —" Wen whispered.

"Of course she does," said the old man, now right beside where Wen knelt, holding Fengzi in a desperate attempt to keep her warm.  "Hello, child," he said.  "You have made me very proud; I thought you should know that.

"And you," he said to the Queen Mother of the West, "would do better to think more about what this young woman did not do than about what she did."  Lao Zi reached into his robe and pulled out a ball about the size of a quail's egg.  Handing it to Wen he said, "See if you can get her to swallow this.  I apologize for the size, but that just seems to be the way they want to make themselves."

Jade Maiden 10.7

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[continuing chapter 10]

"Why am I here?  Isn't it obvious?  Somebody called me."  The being that stood just above the tops of the peach trees wore voluminous yellow robes and had the most sagacious beard Wen had ever seen.  Is this the Heaven Honored Jade Emperor?  "Besides, dear wife, I can't help but think that you're over-reacting here."

"Don't you start in on me," the Queen Mother of the West said, and now she no longer sounded like an imperious cat-goddess; she sounded like Mrs. Ling from next door.  "This is my orchard and these are my immortality peaches, and these—these creatures have defiled them! I have every right to impose punishment!"

Jade Maiden 10.6

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[continuing chapter 10]

"To be fair, Majesty, it was never my intent to walk into heaven at all.  Lovely as it is here, by the way.  I really like what you've done with this orchard."  You're babbling, Wen, he thought.  Get hold of yourself.  "The fault is all mine, that I admit.  I was away from home when Father died and did not perform the proper rituals.  Even when I learned of his death I refused, out of spite and willfulness, to do the right thing.  As a result he became a hungry ghost, and I was cursed.  I was merely trying to set everything right again."

Jade Maiden 10.5

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[continuing chapter 10]

The Queen Mother of the West was not a giant, nor was she especially hideous.  In fact, for the most part she was a quite beautiful—if rather tall—woman, with long lovely black hair flowing down her back in an ebony river that seemed to have a soul of its own.

Unfortunately, that long black hair flowed all the way down her back to a tail.  A leopard's tail, to be specific, and one evidently bestowed on her as being emblematic of her temper.  Her mouth was open in anger, allowing Wen to see that her teeth, too, were feline.  Tiger, I believe, he found himself thinking.  Plus, she was floating above the treetops, another clue suggesting that, however mortal most of her might look, this was no mortal.

Jade Maiden 10.4

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[continuing chapter 10]

Wen bit his lower lip to keep from crying out.  It was Father, no doubt about it.  But the sight was heartbreaking.  Father wore his only good suit of clothes—Wen remembered seeing it, as a child—but the way the robe, tunic and trousers hung on him suggested a boy wearing his father's clothing.  "Is it possible," he asked Yin Fengzi, pitching his voice as low as he could in order that the officer not hear him, "that hungry ghosts can actually starve, and shrink?"

Jade Maiden 10.3

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[continuing chapter 10]

"Ah, gentlemen!"  Wen bowed to the soldiers with what he hoped was a suitably heavenly flourish.  "You're just in time to help us."

"Help you?"  The soldiers' spears wobbled and waved, and their officer looked confused, or that's how Wen chose to interpret the response; it was hard to be sure, given the lacquered iron fu-dog mask the man wore.  "We're here to arrest you.  You're trespassing on the precincts of heaven, or hadn't you realized that?"

Jade Maiden 10.2

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[continuing chapter 10]

Heaven didn't look much different from hell, if all you were paying attention to was the landscape.  Nobody would mistake the one for the other, though.  The colors were brighter, the scents sweeter, and the light... There was no light like this anywhere, Wen decided, not even at sunset just of the coast from Měijing.  Heaven was worth attaining to, he decided, if only because you couldn't help but feel better here than anywhere else he'd been.

There was a gate-house in front of the god's mansion, and though it was tiny it was still the most dazzling building Wen had ever been this close to.  Walking up to the window, he rapped his knuckles against the sill.  Should have demanded a fan from that judge, he thought.  "Yes?" a squeaky voice said.  It was more of a demand than a question.

Jade Maiden 10.1

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TEN

Wen rushed to catch up with her, not caring whether the grandfathers were with him or not.  "I don't think I ever thanked you properly for everything you did for me," he said, breathless.  That wasn't what he wanted to say, what he should have said, but he seemed to be frustratingly out of the right sort of words.  "I'm sorry," he added.  "I don't seem to be doing this very well."

She stopped and smiled at him.  "You've said everything that needs to be said," she told him.  Brushing his hand with hers—it was deliciously cool, like shaved ice on a hot day—she added, "I haven't found your father yet, so there really isn't anything to thank me for, Xia.  And it seems to me we're running out of time."

Jade Maiden 9.9

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[concluding chapter 9]

"Whatever else you do," Yin Fengzi said, "Don't eat any peaches you may find on the other side.  Wen, I still think this is extremely dangerous."

"Dangerous?  How could it possibly be more dangerous than what we saw on our way here?"  Wen shook his head; he was never going to be able to forget the sword trees and knife hills they had passed on their way out of Fifth Hell.  "I think the thing that bothers me the most is the way the body parts come back together once the victims have sliced themselves to the point where the bits all fall back to the base of the knife hills."  A shiver gripped him: it wasn't so much the blood or the sliced-off body parts, reminding him uncomfortably of a butcher's shop, that bothered him; it was the beaten-down looks of resignation on the faces of the victims as they prepared to climb the hill again, knowing full well what was going to happen to them.  "Tell me what that punishment is imposed for, and I swear I'll never do it again."