laughter drifted back to where she stood with her chalk drawing still in her hand.
The light had changed, and the sun was almost dipping behind the mountains to the west. The Palace was built clinging to a mountainside; its gardens were tiered, its courtyards enclosed in the safety of high walls and the pavilions of the cloistered women, but there was a series of open terraces on the various levels of the gardens which hung almost suspended from the face of the mountain, separated from the sheer drop only by a carved stone balustrade, and from which the steep valley opened up towards the west in a breathtaking view. At sunset the narrow ribbon of the river, a long, long way below in the valley, turned into a thin skein of gold thread – only for a few minutes, when the angle of the sun was just right, a river of gold flowing off into the mysterious west. Tai could not believe that she was the first to discover this moment of beauty, but either everyone else was already weary of it or perhaps the open balconies made visitors nervous, because she inevitably had the place to herself when she came on her sunset pilgrimages.
On this day, distracted by the encounter with Antian, she was late – almost too late. The glow was already starting to fade when she got to her perch. Usually she left with the sun, coming to this place only to salute its setting, but this time she stayed, watching the sky darken into amethyst, then violet, then deep blue-black. She watched the stars come out above the sharp black silhouettes of the mountain peaks, and had the oddest feeling of transience, as though all of this was just a glimpse, as though the world would turn away in the next moment and she would never see the twilight in the mountains again.
She stayed on the terrace, curled up deep in thought and dream, until the sun-warmed stone against which she leaned had turned cool to her back, and then made her way back through lantern-lighted courts to the outer apartments where she and her mother were housed.
‘You are late,’ Rimshi said as she entered the room they shared.
‘I met the Little Empress,’ Tai said, perhaps by way of explanation.
‘Oh?’ Rimshi said. ‘Your dinner is on the table. Eat, and tell me about it.’
‘She wore a dress which I embroidered,’ Tai said.
‘And …; ?’ Rimshi prompted when Tai appeared not to wish to go beyond this simple statement.
But that was all that Tai had to tell about the encounter at this time. The rest, she was still thinking on. We will talk again, the Princess had said. Whatever had she meant? Her life and Tai’s touched rarely – would not have touched at all had Tai not sneaked into the Imperial gardens to draw butterflies.
Rimshi did not push it; she and her daughter had a good close relationship, and it would come when Tai was ready to talk about it. ‘It’s late,’ she said when Tai had done with her food, clearing the dishes away and setting a pile of scarlet silk and a tangle of bright embroidery thread on the matting next to the oil lamp where she would be finishing off the day’s work. ‘The yearwood, and then bed.’
The yearwood box was at the foot of Tai’s bed, as always. The small carved chest which had been given to her at birth contained the record of her years – the small neat bags containing the bead strings for the years past, marked by bold numbers brushed in ink, and the delicate split wand of the yearwood itself with its beaded strings of the current year. Siantain and Taian hung completed from their pegs, forty beads on each string, a record of another spring of her life having passed, another spring of the reign of the Ivory Emperor. The current string, Chanain, the first month of summer, had only ten beads on it – the first week, with a knot below it. It was the end of another week this night, and Tai obediently extracted ten ivory beads from the box and strung them carefully onto the Chanain string with the help of the bone needle attached to the end of the string. Another week; Chanain half-gone now, a knot tied with small neat hands at the end of the ten beads. Tai worked with focused attention; this was almost an act of weekly devotion for her, this counting of her days. Her task completed, she glanced to her mother for approval and received a nod and a smile.
The duty done, Tai turned to a less demanding task but one that she had always enjoyed a great deal. She fetched her inkwell and brush and the cheap journal book she had been given on New Year’s Day, its thin paper already curling as she opened the cowhide binding. There was a lot to write this day, and nothing at all; for a while she sat nibbling on the already well-chewed end of her wooden brush, and then wrote with quick, neat strokes, forming the jin-ashu letters of the secret language which her mother had been teaching her since she was six years old:
Met Princess. She liked my drawing. She wore my embroidery. I was proud of both, even though I don’t think I am very good with the chalk yet. Saw sunset from balconies, and the golden river flowing west, as always. Saw stars come out. Today something has changed.
Tai stayed away from the inner gardens for several days after her meeting with the Little Empress. She could not have said why – she had felt both exhilarated and frightened by her encounter with Antian, and something in her preferred to avoid a repetition until she could sort it all out in her head.
She made herself useful to her mother instead. She had been trained well, by a renowned artist, and despite her tender age she was already an accomplished seamstress and needleworker, with a gift for design and a meticulous transformation from sketch or a mere mind-picture to magnificent Court garb embroidery. The hem on Antian’s gown had been simple, an early attempt. By this time Rimshi was trusting her daughter with gold embroidery, with designs including pearls and little pieces of coloured glass, with complicated swirls representing dragons and water-serpents. Tai had been working on one particular design, using the stylized symbol for the Female Earth symbol of the Buffalo – her own birth sign – for some time, her small, neat stitching covering the hem and the edges of a heavy formal outer robe made of stiff brocaded golden silk; she used her days of self-imposed exile from the gardens to devote herself to finishing this complex task. When she handed the completed robe to Rimshi for inspection, her mother smiled at her, covering her mouth with one hand as was her habit to hide a missing tooth.
‘This one is for your friend,’ Rimshi said.
Tai would not have claimed the friendship, but knew immediately to whom Rimshi was referring. Her cheeks flushed scarlet. ‘For the Princess? This is for the Little Empress?’
‘Herself. You cannot avoid what is there for you,’ Rimshi said, rather cryptically. She was given to being oracular sometimes.
Tai went back to the garden the next morning, early, while the quick-drying summer dew was still on the flowers. Some were still closed, sleepily waiting for the sun to clear the high walls and pour its golden light into the courtyard, and others were open, eager, breathing in the morning air. It was already warm.
She had brought her drawing stuff but the garden was still drowsy with morning and only just stirring into life. She rarely went out onto the balconies in the morning, because their treasure lay in the sunset hour, but she decided to go out and sit looking at the mountains until the butterflies returned to the inner courts.
She had thought she would be alone out here, but drew a startled breath as she padded out onto the smooth paving stone of the terrace, paper and chalk under her arm, and saw that someone was already there.
Someone with her hair dressed in two long, simple, unadorned black braids which reached almost to the backs of her knees, dressed in the sleeveless robe whose hem Tai recognized. Someone who turned at her approach, and smiled, motioning her forward.
‘I looked for you in the garden,’ Antian said, with only the faintest tone of command in her voice.
‘I was working on a robe,’ Tai said. And then, because she couldn’t help it, smiled. ‘Yours, Princess. The one with the buffalo border. I share the sign.’
‘I have not seen it yet,’ Antian said, returning the smile. ‘I look forward to it, knowing the hand that worked