The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle #1)(14)
“Well, that sounds very fine. Here, let me show you how to play.”
Chih sat down across from Rabbit on the porch and watched as the old woman capped the box and rattled the sticks packed inside. As she did so, she took on the droning cry of the market fortune-tellers.
“Here Xao Min, goddess of luck! Here Fei-wu, god of wealth! Here Shao Mu, saint of love! Look upon our hands with kindness, and guide us towards what is right!”
She gave the small container a little bounce in her hand while at the same time turning it over and removing the cap. The sticks themselves were too tightly packed to all come out, but three slid forward partway. With a practiced hand, Rabbit whipped them free and spread them on the ground in front of Chih.
“I take it you do not know T’lin?”
“They started teaching it after I served my novitiate. Those who came after me knew it, but I’ve not had the time to take it up, personally.”
“You should find the time. It will never replace Anh as the national writing, but it will only grow more common the more traders come from the north. Ah, but let’s see what you have drawn. I see the rune for north, the rune for run, and the rune for ambergris.”
As Chih watched, Rabbit dug two fingers into the canister, pulling out a fragile piece of paper folded into thirds. It was covered with an insectile script, and Rabbit squinted at it for a long moment before she nodded.
“See, this combination means that you will be successful in your career, but only if you remember to take things in their own time. No one likes a prodigy, after all. Patience should be your watchword.”
“So my teachers have always said. Thank you for reading for me.”
“Now show me you have the trick of it. Why don’t you try reading the fortune that was tucked where you found this one?”
Chih shrugged and rolled open the bundled sticks, some fortune drawn long ago. In another place, they might have been impatient with this, but after what they had already learned and from the way Rabbit was watching them—teaching them—there was something else to be gained here.
The sticks were slightly darker than the ones in the canister, as if they had been turned hand to hand over a long period of time. It took Chih a few moments to parse out the blocky T’lin script, so very different from the curving syllabary employed throughout most of Anh. Then they hunted the matching ideogram on the ancient piece of paper, careful not to crumple it in their fingers.
“I think . . . this must be the rune for wind, and this the rune for wool? And perhaps this one is the rune for water?”
“No, they’re not. It’s not eagle-eye this time. Listen instead, and remember that the back of the north was originally broken by the empire of Anh in the days of Emperor Sho. In those days . . .”
“They spoke the southern Anh dialect, not what we speak now.”
Rabbit smiled. “Yes. They still teach the southern dialect to the clerics, don’t they?”
“Yes. So in the southern dialect, let’s see. Water. Wind. Wool. Water. Wool. Water. Wind . . . Ba. Ber, kon . . .”
“And that’s the southern dialect. Now bring it back to the northern tongue.”
Chih concentrated. Translate the syllabary from T’lin, and from there into the southern tongue, and then use those building blocks to create words. . . .
“Konshi . . . Erh Shi Ko. He was a general, wasn’t it? The one who led the Anh troops at Ko-anam Fords.”
“It was. Very good. In-yo insisted on sending her fortunes at Lucky Sticks back to her home for interpretation. Of course the Minister of the Left suspected espionage. It was, after all, his job. He never let her send the sticks themselves, but he had a scribe come down and copy the markings to send along. The fool never knew that it wasn’t In-yo’s language that doomed him, but his own, brought to the north generations ago.”
Chih played with the sticks, sounding out the name of the so-called Iron General, Erh Shi Ko. He died in the first purge, and his head was torn from his body and stuck on a stake as he had once ordered for all the men he’d captured in the northern conflict.
The clerics of the Singing Hills were always aware of the risk of seeing too much. The burn marks on the abbey’s thick stone walls spoke of many warlords and monarchs who did not wish to be seen so clearly, and then every few years an elder neixin, rich in wisdom and experience, was traded with the sibling-abbey in Tsu, where she could teach the foreign hatchlings all she knew.
Chih had grown up with the history of the world in the very walls of their home, fluttering above their head, cooked into the barley they ate. This was the first time they could feel such a weight of it pressing down on them, wrapping around them like a blanket of wet wool.
*
The cleric looks at Thriving Fortune and sees the history they own as a subject of the empire. As a member of their order, perhaps they own it twice over, and I do not begrudge them that. The Empress of Salt and Fortune belongs to all her subjects, and she was romantic and terrible and glamorous and sometimes all three at once. There are dozens of plays written about her, and some are good enough that they may last a little while even after she is gone. Older women wear their hair in braided crowns like she did, and because garnets were her favorite gem, they are everywhere in the capital.
In-yo belonged to Anh, but Thriving Fortune only belonged to us.
It was a prison at first, because it always was one, a place where emperors could banish wives who no longer pleased. It was better than the executioners’ silk garrote, at least, though the emperor’s executioners could travel as well as anyone. There are some very elegant ghosts that walk the edge of the lake, their long hems fading into the bracken. Some of them have handmaidens following along behind them, tongueless, handless, and eyeless, and I knew very well what might come of my loyalty to In-yo.