When all is said and done (more done than said; there are not many wars that can be solved over a cup of jasmine tea), Kougyoku orders for all the peach trees in the orchard to be cut down.
She's not obeyed, of course, partly because there is no sense to destruction of what remained standing after destruction, and partly because no one cares and no one listens and no one, there is no one here and that's how it is.
She was an Empress once.
There is a dinner table, but not the clatter of wooden sticks on porcelain.
Victors choose tableware, Koumei said, and then he became Emperor Koumei and banned wooden chopsticks and landscape-painted porcelain. Silver tastes repulsive in Kougyoku's mouth; it's like eating borrowed coins, or balls of stale gunpowder.
We are not losers, she thinks to the rhythm of sharp metal clinking on the plates. We are not losers, she wants to say aloud. We did not lose anything, we just did not win. She has no voice left.
Alibaba is sitting at the head of the table, garnished with gold and sapphires. They fall to his eyes, thin golden chains, drop-shaped rhinstones, cobweb of pearls, as if he was a courtesan to be auctioned to a court of lecherous nobles. He's the King, now. The enigma, the Chosen one, the one that rules and his kingdom, the brave new world, is immeasurable in vastness, in population, in power and in ways it transcendents worlds and lifetimes and laws of nature. Kougyoku is pretty sure he has no idea what it means. He certainly looks rather confused. He flirts awkwardly with a pretty waitress and it's almost painful to watch.
Aladdin is sat by his side. He's not the scrawny brat anymore, none of them is. They grew, all of them, some of them to become rulers and some of them not.
There is a girl by their side and Kougyoku doesn't know her.
Crown is heavy on Koumei's head. He's an emperor for hard times and great deeds, and there are no songs to be sung for the railway builders and treaty signers. He tries to talk music and fashion and fails so spectacularly that it's more endearing than embarassing. Kougyoku talks cogwheels and dams and no one listens.
The girl doesn't talk. She puts pieces of salted fish to her mouth hurriedly with her fingers. Her nose scrunches with unpleasant taste. Her hands are greasy and sticky from sweet rice. She doesn't seem to care. Her short-cropped hair look like constrained wildfire in the light of lanterns.
Zithara is playing and it is supposed to sound ethereal, graceful, soft and elaborate, embodiment of what Kou strives to be now that it's not marching songs anymore.
„Remember when we were engaged?" Alibaba says and laughs and tin soldiers in a lacquered box he got as a gift scatter around the table.
Kougyoku does.
She also remembers him saving her country, and it's not fair, something is not fair. „Yes," she says and her laugh sounds like thousands of crickets caught in a crystal fruit bowl.
They drink afterwards. They weave flower wreaths with ivy and peonies from marble flowerpots. They still feel like kids, even though they are not and never will be again.
Kougyoku is out of breath when the zithara stops. Koumei falls asleep and morning dew falls on the peach trees, the ones that block any traces of sunlight from coming through the paper door.
The girl that didn't talk is standing alone on the porch. She has scars on her bare ankles. Fanalis, Kougyoku thinks, but nothing follows and she's drunk, so drunk.
'I need a bodyguard,' she says, in the same way she would say I need a friend.
'I need,' the girl says, and the rest of the sentence is not of importance, not at all.
The city is no more safe at night than it is at daylight.
Neither is it more dangerous; narrow streets veiled in shadows at all times, shady teahouses that have never served any tea and illicit rooster fights punishable by beheading or forced labour in mines. In the city, it's easy to hide and easy to be found by the ones that search.
Kougyoku counts on both. She still has a map of the downtown scribbled on a folded paper and silk veil arranged to hide her hair and mouth and everything else bar her eyes in the style of women from Western plains. It doesn't prevent the ever-present smell of vomit and urine from entering her mouth.
„It's still time to turn back," she mutters, more to herself and more to distract herself from her shaking hands. Her companion doesn't care either way.
The Central market is the only place she visits during daylight. Now the lanterns buzz with flies seduced by their flickering light. Drunkards play Weiqi on empty stalls and rules don't seem to matter or exist at all. Tiny courtesan in starched stole and loudly clinking headpieces advertises a brothel. She's eleven or twelve. Her eyes are closing from weariness and Kougyoku turns away.
Her companion tenses. In a bad way, Kougyoku notices, but not the one that means danger. Her companion is easy to read, but not to understand. Kougyoku doesn't ask.
„It's dangerous today," Mor says. It's the first thing she said all day, or perhaps few days. Her face is void of emotions and Kougyoku rather admires her persistance. It feels like a game of who shows weakness first. Kougyoku is not sure whether it would mean win or loss.
„Not that much," Kougyoku says. It's not wrong; she's survived through battles and assassination attempts and fights with evil blobs hanging from the sky. She can lead armies and fence and maybe there are still traces of magic left in her and some of that should be useful in the grimy alleys.
Mor says nothing more. Her eyes linger on the tiny courtesan. Drunkards chew qat and spit it out to the courtesan's feet. She sways and invites them to her brothel. Mor averts her gaze.
House of Peonies is painted pink and drapes are of braided silk. It used to be a teahouse, once, when the times were better and plains of tea plantations weren't turned into scorched, forever barren deadlands. Nobody drinks tea anymore in the crimson empire.
Kougyoku sits, facing the window. She's given a cup of water that burns her throat and stings her eyes. Mor is given one, too, but she never drinks. Neither of them did, back then, when the midnight outings had a purpose. What was it, Kougyoku is not sure. Finding out how people live? Listening to the talks that are told only after cups of things that are not tea? Feeling once more like having a purpose, a mission, a place in the great machinery of the new world?
Kougyoku comes to get drunk.
„Lady Mor," she says, because Morgiana is difficult to pronounce even when sober, but she deserves to be respected and titled as much as etiquette allows, „Lady Mor, do you want the brothels to be banned?"
It can be done, she doesn't add. She's not a liar.
„No," Mor says. The way she says it tells Kougyoku all she needs to know. Not all; there is never enough she can know about her. Mor rarely talks and Alibaba never talks about her and Aladdin is too busy and otherworldly to engage in gossips now. There are scrolls about Fanalis and Kougyoku read them, but it's not the same. It's as if someone had read scrolls on all the Royal princesses and all the Royal generals and claimed to understand her.
Spirits swirl in the pitcher, in the way only spirits one got drunk on can.
„Why haven't you returned to the Dark Continent?" Kogyoku asks for the thousandth time. It's the question she asks when drunk, the question she never gets answered.
Mor runs her fingers through her hair. They are cropped almost violently now, with no strands to put hairbeads or gemmed clips on. Kougyoku thinks it's maybe more practical, lower maintenance, more fitting with the scaled armour or leather gauntlets Mor sometimes wears. Kougyoku doesn't ask why Mor did not stay in her homeland, with her kin, with beings just like her in a form that must be more comfortable and more familiar and more her. She knows. She's been told things, by Alibaba and Aladdin and cousin Hakuryuu and by peach brandy they sometimes shared. But Alibaba is the King now, and Aladdin does his godly something, and Hakuryuu governs over the nomads of the Tenzin Plateau in what might be atonement or reward or both. And Kougyoku never lost her unsuppressable urge to know.
Men in the corner are getting louder. They are complaining about new taxes, about military cuts and jobless former soldiers roaming the cities and countryside alike, about unheard-of customs the Emperor forces on people. They don't complain about peace, or Reim wine, or scantily clad Artemyrian women in docks.
Kougyoku remembers crying and shouting big words in front of these people, breaking from a burden too heavy and leading them to the war they won and still came out as losers. She drinks and drinks more.
Mor takes the glass away from her after one too many. Kougyoku expects her to spill it or drink it. She doesn't.
„Who knows," Mor says and it's not an answer.
There is no need for a bodyguard, not until there is.
There is a legend, probably an opium dream of some madman, about a ferryman clothed in robes woven from spiderwebs that has nails long and sharp like swords and claws soul out of body right before death. There is a saying that nothing brings people together like a feeling of imminent, unavoidable end.
Kougyoku does not believe any of them.
She's not even bleeding. It's barely more than a scratch, and there are powders that hide scars and men who don't mind them. She would be quicker with her blade, if only her sleeves weren't so long and ruffled and her pants, the new, Western kind, so uncomfortable. She might not have her Djinn anymore, but it wasn't all she used to be.
It doesn't feel like assassination attempt should feel like, she thinks.
„I'm fine," she says, because it seems like a thing to say. No one is asking. Mor is holding a man, one of that kind with face that disappears from memory as soon as one stops looking, and fingers still curled in the hold where knife used to be. Lanterns left from midnight celebrations flicker with pale light the color of dreams. Kougyoku can't recall what was being celebrated.
Mor was dancing, she remembers, with legs bare up to the top of her thighs and red and yellow peonies pinned on her hair. It was different from the court dancers, or the dance of educated courtesans, or even the dances of provincial countrywomen that came to the city in the search of job or a spouse or something that was not rice fields or crawling silkworms. It was graceful in its franticness. It was a whirl of limbs, of cloth, of flowers and beads and copper trinkets and Kougyoku felt like choking and finally having enough air to breathe after whole life of suffocating at the same time.
It was immersive and otherworldly and not a good time to almost die, not at all.
„What now?" Mor asks.
Kougyoku would like to be told, too. There are people around them, as unhelpful and redundant in their useless curiosity as people are prone to be. Her brothers left hours ago, pretending disinterest in elegant ankles and breasts clad in fluttering silk. The Royal guards are drunk or keeping company to the courtesans or whatever they do when they feel like laying their armour and duties off.
„Don't kill him," she says. „He can be part of conspiracy. Rebellion. Bring him to the Palace. Tell the guard to wake up Kouen."
She can see Mor scowling. People scowl, too, denied the further excitement. A Fanalis is involved; a brawl was expected, blood and hair and teeth and thrilling finale to the celebrations. That's not what Mor wants, she thinks and she realizes she has no way to know if she's right.
The walk to the palace is short and chilly and silent. The sky changes colour from ink black to the repulsive grey of long unwashed linen and Kougyoku wonders if finally, this is what will make Mor leave for her home and never come back.
„Lady Morgiana," she whispers into the crisp dew-filled air. It does not sound right and she feels too drunk on the memory of knife pressed to her skin to ponder about it.
They return to her chambers, with dampen clothes and shivering fingers. Kougyoku lights the lamps and watches shadows whirl on Mor's pale cheeks like a storm caught inside a porcelain teacup.
„Are you afraid?" Mor asks, shredding her outer robes.
The coarse undergarments she wears end just over the knees and Kougyoku wants to say yes, she's afraid, she's terrified.
„No," she says instead. She's not afraid to die, because that's what Mor's asking.
„It's okay," Mor replies after ages of silence that fills the room like poison. „I am, too."
There are half-dried petals in her short hair. Kougyoku picks them one by one, holding her breath until her lungs burn, just to see if that's the right thing to do.
When she kisses her, Morgiana's lips are cold and hard. It's not how Kougyoku wanted it to be, but she can manage; her fingers are still in red hair, her knees touch the bare ones, pulse of blood running through veins felt under the skin. It's the exploration of unknown, celebration of unplottable, ghost of understanding.
The kiss takes all the days of human's life and some seconds more and that's how long it takes for Kougyoku to know that she's done something wrong, inherently, unwittingly wrong.
„Morgiana," she whispers in the way of apology and runs, runs as far as confines of her life and the rising morning allow her to.
The road to the Sky Touching Mountains is rocky, uncomfortable and silent with that kind of silence that wakes the dead and lay the living to rest.
Kougyoku can feel road dust seeping permanently deep into her skin. Wind-beaten curtains over the sides of the carriage are of little use, pretty and soft as they were once. It's not the first time she regrets magic gone from this glorious, brave new world. Shellphones were neat and picture bowls entertaining, and traveling by trains was swift and easy like a blink of an eye. But it's been weeks in the carriage, instead, with screeching wheels, biting autumn air, nauseating smell of peaches and her.
Kougyoku feels sick, but she puked twice today already. She needs all the shreds of her dignity left. It's not much, arguably.
The mountains seem distant and infinite, vacant home of gods no one believes in anymore.
The carriage stops. Horses, good, strong, grassland breed, cough and splutter and the dampness of their sweat turns into steam. Kougyoku longs to say continue, don't stop, run, run, run. She feels like only in uninterrupted motion she will not be caught up by thoughts she left home, by answers to unasked questions. It's futile; she's got cramps in legs and can't run fast enough, anyway.
Morgiana is interrupted in her drinking by brakes. A drop of water falls down her throat and Kougyoku follows it with her eyes and it's all unjust, somehow.
Morgiana has been silent ever since they left the stone roads of then Capital. At first it was tired silence, then confounded silence, then silence Kougyoku did not recognize.
„The snow is melting," says the coachman. He knocks on the wheels, shrugs and looks utterly, unapologetically content. „The rest of the entourage must have been delayed back at the mountain pass. You should've hired a guide. Or a guard."
The coachman mustn't know; there is the strongest woman the East of Reim in his carriage, the one that would stop a mountain if it was falling down and she felt it worthy to stop it.
„It's not far," says Morgiana. She could take the coach out of the mud, Kougyoku knows, and hold it over her head while running through the narrow rocky paths and across frozen mountain lakes. She could take Kougyoku and hold her like brides are held and take her somewhere, anywhere. She could run away and never come back.
"We will go by feet," Morgiana says. Her feet are bare on the cold liquified ground, and scarred and her soles are burnt. There is a story, Kougyoku knows. She thinks she doesn't want to know it. She steps down from the coach. Her soft velvet shoes were not made for walking through rocks and dirt. She feels like coming to the world that doesn't fall to her knees and will not be made to do so.
They walk in one is pregnant with storm, heavy with expectations and fears and sharp lines of unsaid words.
"Why did you come with me?"
There is no answer. Kougyoku doesn't expect one. Silk travelling robes catch on the sharp rocks and raspberry thorns. It's cold, so cold.
"I told Koumei you wouldn't want to go," she says, "I told him you would go back to your kind, or to Balbadd, or somewhere. I thought you would go back to Alibaba."
The mountains echo; they call ba-ba-ba back, like something mother would sing to make her child go to sleep.
"I miss him, you know?" she says and tries not to say anything more and fails. "I think he would understand. But he's the King now, and I'm the governor of-" She waves the hand over the peaks.
It's not Lady Mor she's talking to. She forgot; it seems easy to forget so far away, with clouds that are low enough to touch and mountains that answer more than anyone in the palace. It's Morgiana now, and Kougyoku doesn't understand, but she doesn't need to.
They walk. The path seems endless and trapped in infinite time loop of sunrises and sunsets. Peaks of the mountains remind Kougyoku of golden roofs of the city, of that one hour of early evening, when rays of sun reached the shuttered window of her nursery-turned-hideout-turned-princess's chambers.
"That's what we had in common," she says and wants to think that her lips are freezing and she needs them to move. "I was never supposed to be on a throne." She doesn't mean it. She would be great Empress, once, when the country would be peaceful and calm and overflowing with gold and velvet and peaches. She would be a great general, too, but there is little need for princesses to lead armies in world with no war, and little honor in leading an army of one through the mountain crosses. Gods may be dead, but they are laughing at her from behind their funeral shrouds.
She speaks of shadow-shaped friends, of golden palaces she learned to loathe, of voice of her mother she hears in her dreams that changes with every passing night. She doesn't mention Alibaba anymore. Morgiana loved him once and once can turn into eternity when you're not careful enough.
Snow falls down on her hair. It feels like the mountains are rejecting her gently. Stranger in a strange land.
"I would never return," Morgiana says. "I was a slave back then."
And then, before anything is said or done, there are men on horses and hoarse cries, hands on Kougyoku's arms and waist and darkness and mountains calling soft ene-ene-ene like an owl getting ready to sleep.
Kougyoku wakes to the head of a metal gun on her neck.
She's also warm and unharmed, her legs covered with thick, foully smelling furs. It's not how she was taught abduction by barbarians would look like, but times seem to be changing here as well. There is sharp scent of spirit and sweat. Boisterous laughter. What seems like good-natured cheering in a language with too much 'ts's and 'kh's. The gun is not unlocked; whoever is holding it is not accustomed to using it.
She opens her eyes.
The face is dark and wrinkled, like skin of a plucked chicken left to dry in sun. It moves; the grin is toothless, the gums grotesquely blackened, breath so pugnant she wants to hurl for the third time today. She startles and the man startles with her. She tries to pull away from the gun and find some way to strike the man if needed; he might not know how to use it, but he's a man and men rarely want to play mahjong with their captives.
The man does not seems to comprehend. His grin falters. He removes the gun from Kougyoku's skin and lets it hang in his hand, staring at her intently. She's unarmed and weak and it's no good, it's no good, it's-
'Leave her be.'
The man turns. He shrugs and puts the gun on the floor of trampled soil and sheepskins. He mutters something and his voice sounds like thunder when the storm is far away.
Morgiana sits on the throne of furs and hand-vowen rugs. She's chewing on something with open mouth. Her head is covered with embroidered scarf with strings of beads falling to her eyes, but her feet are still bare. She looks like she's belonged here, to this place, since she was born.
'Are you hurt?' she asks.
Before Kougyoku answers, another man - clad in rich coloured furs and ribbons in his hair - says something. Kougyoku doesn't speak the language, but the tone of defense is universal. Morgiana nods, makes a calming gesture and offers the man her bowl filled with opaque liquid.
'You can understand them?' Kougyoku blurts out.
Morgiana shrugs.
'I didn't understand when I came from the Dark Continent,' she says, 'I learned to learn quickly.'
Another of the men brings Kougyoku her own bowl, filled with soup or stew or tea, she's not sure. She takes it and thinks how all the men look the very same - leathery face, silver-stained hair, voice of battered steel hitting empty oil jars. The liquid tastes of lard, copper and rock salt. Someone says something - with wheezing 'kh' and jovially spilt cup - and Morgiana takes a thick piece of charred meat and tears it in two and laughs. They start a kind of a dance, with arms mostly, as the hut is not fit for the celebrations of bigger scale, and Morgiana joins, as if she was one of them. Her scarf looks like an aureola of fireworks in the light of embers and Kougyoku doesn't know anything about her, never knew her at all.
She wonders if this is what Alibaba saw. She wonders if it was worth leaving for the throne of the entire world.
Morgiana stands up from the merry whirl of limbs and hair. She sits by Kougyoku's side and hands her a piece of meat, the white, soft meat of breast that is reserved for youngest children and that Kougyoku likes. Her head is a furnace and her skin is marble and she looks imperishable, uninflammable, eternal.
'Sorry for scaring you,' she says. 'I told them you're a princess of Kou. Some of them don't like hearing that name.'
'That's fine,' says Kougyoku, more to Morgiana than to the men. She doesn't ask; the Empire might have taken their land with steel or take their sons to war, they might have poisoned their rivers or just slaughter their kin in the name of greater good. It's not important anymore. Kougyoku smiles and Morgiana smiles back and it feels like one could rule a kingdom, a world, all the worlds ever created and destroyed and rebuilt with that smile.
'They will lead us to the tribe in the morning,' Morgiana says and Kougyoku wonders which one is here to lead and which one is to follow.
Their fingers brush, lines of their fingerprints like a secret script known to no one. Morgiana's hands are covered with grease and her feet are warm next to Kougyoku's, separated by the covers embroidered with suns and moons and stars. There are scars on her ankles and they are from shackles, but she's smiling, even later, when she falls asleep to the sound of wolfs howling outside the tent.
Kougyoku's in love and she doesn't want to be.
Being Kougyoku sometimes feels like painting on glass with water. No matter how long and how hard and how patiently she paints, she's the only one who sees the lines. And they fade, they fade away into nothingness.
Being Morgiana, Kougyoku thinks, must feel like a glass vase. The one in the Emperor's chambers that broke into pieces long time ago and someone found it and melded back together with veins of gold. Kougyoku dreams about running her fingers on the glistening lines. Her fingers leave stains and she wakes to the feeling of fruit juice running down her wrists.
She wishes she found the glass pieces first, because then they would have been melded with sun and kisses and silk ribbons and something really, really warm.
Morgiana keeps the scarf and the beads tangled with her hair are clinking softly in the wind.
The leader, the man in coloured furs, is called Wangchuk. He speaks few words of the language of Capital, but is reluctant to use them and mostly talks to Morgiana with the help of his hands to explain concepts too difficult to explain in simple words. He's distrustful of Kougyoku. She sees it in the way he doesn't look at her, doesn't talk to her, doesn't let her walk by his side. She feels like a little child again, or like a heartbroken princess-warrior made to rule the nation in decay.
War, that is the word Wangchuk knows and uses. His hands show movement from the West, movement of many men and many horses and something else that Kougyoku doesn't understand. Morgiana does; she's frowning under the beads. Wangchuk points at her ankles, than at his neck. Morgiana pales and the frozen rocks covered with lichen and frost break under her steps. She takes great effort not to look at Kougyoku.
Kougyoku was not sent to rule over barren lands and men with lives spent by tending cattle and praying to gods of wolves and thunder. She was not sent to be disposed of, or protected, or to tame her ambitions. She was sent to fight and win. Whether to curse or thank Koumei, that she's not sure.
Wangchuk uses the word for town, but it's no town, not even a village, it's not even enough tents to be marked on Koumei's maps. There are three or four untied yaks wandering around the frail, hastily-built shelters. There are no women, no children. There are spears piked where the fireplace should have been, and the spears are broken and bloodied and seem to be more of a memorials than weapons ready for use.
A grandma comes out of a tent to greet Wangchuk's entourage. She's dressed like a queen would, with real gold and silver hanging from stretched earlobes, with faded carpets hanging from shoulders like half-cape and half-armor, with braids of what seems to be generations of women wrapped around her head.
'The attackers come from behind the borders,' Morgiana says.
Her voice is carried away by harsh wind; she's not keeping tribemen's side anymore, but stands far enough for Kougyoku not to be able to reach her, to touch her, to see her face.
'The clans got scattered after first ambush. No one came to help.'
She doesn't say anything else, but Kougyoku knows. The people are taken for slaves, they are defenseless, their supplies are running low and their numbers lower. And the Empire - what's left of it - sends a princess clad in silk soaked in melted snow.
Morgiana doesn't want her pity, so that's not what Kougyoku will give to the people either.
"Who are the attackers?" she asks.
Morgiana seems taken aback. So does Wangchuk, and Dorje, and his brother and the one that others call Dried Well in the language of the Capital. Kougyoku doesn't care about them - she should, she should - but Morgiana has seen her dressed in water and drunk on wrath, has seen her fighting beside her brothers with hair red as blood spilt and beside-
"We have no means to fight a war," she says to the clouds over the peaks of mountains, like a leader would, like a warrior would, like she had seen legendary heroes in old illustrated scrolls do. "I need to know their weapon of choice. Their mounts. Their tactics, and where they sell the slaves, and what they bind them with."
She knows Wangchuk and the others don't understand; the grandma that is the living, breathing memory of the folk once thriving seems enthralled to hear her tone. It's not them she's talking to.
"I've won battles with less to fight with," she says to Morgiana and almost adds and less on stake, because last time, it's been only her family, her country and the whole world.
Morgiana doesn't kiss on lips.
She doesn't want to be touched at first, either, but Kougyoku can manage; she's got blood on fingertips anyway, the kind that doesn't go away without soap and liquor and sleepless nights. Morgiana has pale skin and she doesn't want to stain her, even though it was Morgiana's furs that were soaked in blood after the last of the battles.
They don't talk much.
The tents are keeping warmth, but not voices. They found out soon; the vigour which men adored their liberated wives with, the high-pitched cries that followed their reunions after moons waning and waxing and waning again, the songs that were to be forgotten and lost under the layers of snow and ice. Defying destiny is a nice thing, she said and Wangchuk told her that they don't believe in destiny.
They don't think about what's been.
It comes back, as it's prone to. But if Kougyoku sometimes weaves wreaths with soft scrub branches, if Morgiana takes long walks after making love when she thinks Kougyoku's asleep, if they look at the night sky and think of boys with eyes like stars that are not boys anymore, well, no one needs to know.
And then Morgiana wakes her one night - long after the battle, any of them, long after the notion of peace dug deep into their bones - and tells her everything. The sound of chains, the dreams of rough fingers and laugh like a screech of broken metal cogwheels, the fires and darkness and house on the bottom of nowhere. Love being unloved and family being torn to letters spared of any sense. The womb that will never carry children (and Kougyoku hates Alibaba for a moment, hates him with blinding hatred for not being omnipotent enough to not let Morgiana get hurt). Morgiana tells her the name the tribe calls them and Kougyoku didn't understand. It doesn't mean governors, or spouses, or lovers. It means gods made of hardened steel that rule in pair, Morgiana says and kisses a corner of Kougyoku's mouth and takes her hand and puts her under the furs and Kougyoku decides to believe her.
The water is tinted pink and white and gold - just like peach blossoms in May - and it's good, it's good, it's good.