Читать книгу The Secrets of Jin-Shei - Alma Alexander - Страница 23

Yuet, the healer’s apprentice, had watched the procession of the dead from the window of her room, on the top floor of the home she shared with her mistress, the healer Szewan. Her view was not quite as good as Tai’s but she too had been watching Liudan walk behind the biers, and she was remembering the conversation she had had with Tai in the stables of the shattered Summer Palace. I will help you keep your promise.

Liudan walked alone, isolated even in this tragic procession, her eyes bright and burning in her pale face. Watching the girl, Yuet was painfully aware how prescient Antian, the dead Little Empress, had been. Yuet’s path had crossed with Liudan’s several times in the halls of the women’s quarters, on the occasions that Szewan the healer had had to visit the Third Princess or her sisters during some childhood complaint. Yuet and Liudan had never spoken directly; Yuet had always been in Liudan’s presence as Szewan’s assistant and helpmeet and had been expected to be at hand to help Szewan with whatever she required, with her head bowed and her eyes downcast. But even under those circumstances Yuet had formed a clear impression of the girl. Liudan had always had the knack of appearing to be proud and strong and self-sufficient, but she was still vulnerable and dependent on others, more so now, in fact, than she had ever been before. She was an Empress in waiting, but she was still a child.

Officially so, in fact. Many of Liudan’s contemporaries had already had their Xat-Wau rites by the time they reached her age, but Yuet knew that Liudan herself had still not started her monthly cycles, and had therefore still not reached an age at which girls were ceremonially taken across the threshold from childhood to womanhood. Yuet herself had been fourteen years old when her own Xat-Wau ceremony had taken place, so it wasn’t unheard of – but Yuet was unimportant, a healer’s apprentice, and her passage into adulthood had not been something upon which the world had turned. In Liudan’s case, her status as a minor child meant a formal regency until such time as the Empress-Heir could be properly taken through her Xat-Wau rites.

Yuet had not had time to watch Liudan in the procession for long before someone came knocking on the door of the healer’s house with a screaming child who had fallen and fractured her wrist while perched on a high windowsill trying to see the carts and the mourners. It had been Yuet who had had to deal with the patient. Szewan was getting old, arthritic and half-blind. These days she preferred to act in an advisory capacity, and leave the actual work of administering treatment and medicines to her young apprentice. Many patients had stopped asking for Szewan altogether, and simply called for Yuet’s services. Szewan had been talking for some time about officially retiring and passing her practice over to Yuet completely, but there were still some clients – the older people, who had spent their entire lives under Szewan’s ministrations, and a large portion of the clannish Imperial Court families – who still insisted on at least having her present while Yuet swabbed, bandaged, and concocted poultices and draughts. By the time Yuet had set the child’s broken wrist, immobilized it with a splint and sent the patient and her mother on their way, the procession was past and all that was there to be seen was over.

The crowds were thinning, some streaming to the place of the burning where all the paper offerings would be displayed on and around the four pyres before the whole thing was set alight; that spectacle would draw many witnesses. But for the city the show was over, and the mourning was about to begin.

Liudan and the rest of the Imperial Court would return to the Linh-an Palace in sedan chairs, via a less circuitous route, out of the crowd’s eye, once the immolation ceremonies were over; and once they did so the business of governing Syai would become an issue that would occupy the high-ranking ones in the Palace for some time to come.

I will help you keep your promise, Yuet had told Tai. But, as she cleaned up after her patient, Yuet found herself wondering how she could have possibly made such a rash statement. Tai had been jin-shei-bao to the Little Empress – but that was where the connection to the Court began and ended, and Yuet was certainly in no position to further that connection. She herself was still officially a healer’s apprentice – a journeyman, to be sure, and more and more independent, but nonetheless still coasting on Szewan’s own reputation where the Court was concerned. She certainly had, and would have in the future unless things changed rather quickly, no intimate access to Liudan herself except in Szewan’s presence, and certainly no means to procure such access to someone like Tai. Perhaps Tai could have used the jin-shei connection to gain entry into the Court itself, but Liudan would be very careful with her favours and allegiances right now, especially during the regency period, and the fulfilment of Tai’s promise, a promise doubly binding because it had been asked by a dying woman and in the name of jin-shei, seemed bleakly improbable.

Szewan had come to the window briefly to peer at the procession but had not stayed long.

‘My hands are hurting me terribly,’ she said, rubbing her swollen, arthritic knuckles. ‘I’ll take a poppy draught and retire to bed for a few hours. You can handle anything that comes up.’

‘I’ll make the draught,’ Yuet said.

Szewan grunted in assent, reaching out to draw the shutters closed, trying to keep the worst of the heat out of the room.

She had already divested herself of her outer robe and had slipped in under the thin sheets in her shift when Yuet came up with the cup of poppy. Her nose twitched at the draught as Yuet proffered the cup.

‘It smells strong,’ Szewan said.

‘I made it strong,’ Yuet said. ‘If you are in enough pain to retire to bed in the middle of the day, you may as well try and sleep through the worst of it. As you say – I will handle anything that comes up.’

‘One of these days,’ Szewan said, taking a delicate sip of the sleeping draught, ‘I will have to draw up the papers properly, and make you a partner. You are no longer an apprentice, Yuet-mai.’

Yuet blushed. ‘I’ll never know all you know,’ she said.

‘You already know more than you think you know,’ said Szewan shrewdly, ‘and, I think, more than I think you know. Sometimes I believe you keep secret notes on everything I say and don’t say. When I am gone and you go through my papers, there is little that you will learn that you have not already found out.’

‘I listen, Szewan-lama.’

‘I know,’ said Szewan. ‘Sometimes you hear far too much.’ She yawned, showing a mouth with many teeth either missing or yellow with age and decay, and handed the cup back to Yuet. ‘I will sleep now. Leave me.’

Yuet bowed her head in acknowledgement and withdrew as Szewan closed her eyes and pillowed her withered cheek on her arm.

‘I will sleep now,’ she murmured again, as Yuet closed the door gently behind her.

There were no further emergencies that morning, and only one house-call she had to make on an ailing patient too ill to come to her, so Yuet spent the morning in her stillroom, making up the supplies of the herbal remedies she used to ease the more common aches and pains of Linh-an and checking up on the stocks of the more rare medicines whose existence was written down in secret books and only in jin-ashu script where a woman might read of them. She looked in on Szewan just before she left to see her patient, but the old healer still slept peacefully, snoring gently through her parted lips. Yuet’s patient appeared to be on the mend – still weak but definitely improving, sitting up and taking solid food for the first time in many days – and Yuet returned home feeling pleased with herself.

She was met by first disaster, and then potentially deepening catastrophe.

The first person she saw as she stepped into the entrance hallway of the chambers she shared with Szewan was the woman who served the healer’s household as cook and maid-of-all-work. She stood in the hall, wringing her hands, her expression equal parts panic, fear and grief. Yuet’s heart stopped for a moment. She instinctively knew what must have happened – but stood frozen, her hand still on the door handle, staring at the servant in silence.

There was a dose of guilt in the servant’s demeanour, too.

‘I heard her breathing funny, mistress – I swear I didn’t know what to do, and you weren’t here, and I went in and I saw – she was breathing funny, mistress, and she was lying on her side with her face into the pillow so I came in to look and I just tried to turn her head, just a little, so that she could get air, and she just …; she just …;’

‘Oh, dear Gods,’ Yuet whispered.

‘I’m sorry, mistress, I didn’t know – I shouldn’t have touched her – I should have waited – I should have sent for you – I should have …;’

‘Is she …; is Szewan dead?’

The servant burst into tears. ‘Yes, mistress, she is dead. I turned her head, just a little, so that she could breathe and she, she, she choked and started coughing and then choked again and it was as if she couldn’t get enough air, and then …;’

‘Enough,’ said Yuet, her eyes full of tears. ‘It is not your doing.’ She hunted for an activity, something to give the servant to do, something familiar to calm her nerves and soothe her panicked guilt. ‘Go …; go make some green tea. Bring it to the sitting room.’

The servant sniffed, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Yes, mistress.’

Yuet closed the door behind her, very slowly, kicked off the sandals she had worn to go outside and set down the leather bag she had carried to her patient’s house. She made her way into Szewan’s sleeping quarters, walking softly on the balls of her bare feet, as though a sharp noise could wake her mistress.

I gave her a strong poppy draught. What if it was this …; ? Should I have made it weaker? Oh, dear Gods.

Szewan was lying half on her side, half on her back – the ministrations of the servant, no doubt. Yuet checked, but it had not been any physical obstruction that had blocked Szewan’s airways – she had not choked on her tongue or anything like that, an event that Yuet had seen occur and had prevented more than once with patients who suffered from fits or seizures. On that, at least, she could reassure the poor cook, who probably thought that her very touch had made the old healer drop dead in her bed.

Perhaps it was just age.

Yuet arranged Szewan’s body in a seemly manner on her bed, laying her on her back and crossing her arms on her thin ribcage. As though there had not been enough death in Linh-an in the month just past. There would be things to arrange with the Temple – there was no immediate family and it would be up to Yuet, the apprentice and the closest thing to a relative old Szewan had in this world, to perform the funerary rites required. But already she was thinking ahead. She said I was no longer an apprentice, Yuet thought to herself as she fussed with the bedclothes. But the papers hadn’t been drawn up yet. What if …; ? What happens now?

There was a tap on the door.

‘Tea, mistress.’

Yuet crossed to the door. ‘I am coming.’

The servant was still wringing her hands. ‘It’s so sudden, mistress, I never meant …; I didn’t mean to …;’

‘You have done nothing wrong. I have looked at her and there are no signs of anything but that you tried to help,’ Yuet said again, soothingly, calming the woman down. ‘There will still be work for you here.’

That was part of the servant’s panic, the fear that she would be dismissed now that the household had changed. She seemed to relax a little at this reassurance, but Yuet found herself wondering if she was in fact in a position to give it. She stepped into the sitting room to pick up the bowl of steaming green tea which the cook had brought in on a lacquered tray, and then went into the tiny alcove that had served Szewan as an office, piled high with scrolls and papers and bound books of recipes for medicines, patient records, agreements, licences and other legal documentation. Somehow Szewan had never quite planned for dying. Yuet knew she would need to go through all this anyway, it was all her responsibility now, at least until she found out otherwise – but she was looking for practical things, for things relating to what would happen to the healer’s practice now that she was gone, whether a journeyman like herself, who had not yet been quite promoted to full mastery, could take over now or if she would need to go looking for some other Linh-an healer with his or her master’s papers and hand over all of Szewan’s accumulated treasury of information to this …; this usurper.

I should have the papers drawn up, Szewan had said. Barely a few hours ago. If only there had been a witness to that – to the utterance which to all intents and purposes graduated Yuet from journeyman to full-fledged healer.

There was. There might have been.

If the cook was led to believe that her having heard that, that her willingness to swear that she had heard that, may have a direct bearing on her livelihood in this household, then maybe a notary could be found …;

Yuet set the bowl of tea aside, and it grew cold, forgotten, as she immersed herself in Szewan’s papers. In rebuilding a future which, through sins of omission, looked as though it might disintegrate around her.

She owed it to Szewan, safeguarding her secrets. She owed it to Szewan’s high-born patients, details of whose illnesses ought not to become bargaining chips for healers who had not earned the trust or the confidence of those patients.

She owed it to Tai, to her jin-shei-bao, to whom she had made a promise – which she might never be able to keep if she was dispossessed of her status and her position. She owed it to the dead of the Summer Palace earthquake, some of whom had passed in their caskets beneath her window that very morning.

She owed it to Liudan, the survivor.

She owed it to herself.