The Secrets of Jin-Shei. Alma Alexander

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 it. Have you been drawing?’

      ‘Not in the last few days, Princess.’

      ‘Call me Antian,’ said the other, with a wave of her hand. ‘We are alone, and there is no need for protocol here, in this place, halfway between heaven and earth.’

      ‘I come here in the evenings,’ Tai said carefully.

      ‘And I, in the mornings,’ said the Princess, with a little laugh. ‘And nobody else I know comes here at all.’

      ‘Why?’ Tai asked, looking at the valley and the river below them. The light was different, bright, molten-white summer morning sunshine; it almost blotted out the looming mountains with its sheer intensity. ‘Why the morning? You can’t see anything.’

      ‘My time is less my own in the evenings,’ Antian said. ‘Tell me about what you come here to see.’

      So Tai described, haltingly at first, then with increasing confidence, the golden river flowing into the sunset – and then the new thing she had absorbed for the first time only the other day, the stars coming out in the summer sky. Antian listened, not interrupting, until Tai came to a halt and drew a deep breath, her eyes still shining with her vision. She realized that the Princess was watching her with a small smile of admiration lighting the slanted dark eyes.

      ‘You have a gift,’ she said. ‘You have the sight and the tongue of a poet. Not only through your hands but through your heart and your mind and what you see and you hear.’ She tossed her head impatiently. ‘So few around me have that ability,’ she said, ‘to paint me a picture – with chalk, or with thread, or with words. I have to come here at sunset one day and see these things of which you have spoken. Would you like to join my household?’

      The last was unexpected, a question that rounded the corner of the rest of Antian’s words and ambushed Tai with the force of a blow in the stomach. Her eyes were wide with consternation, but what came out was something that was surprised out of her, something that, had she had the remotest chance of thinking about, she could never have said at all.

      ‘No, Princess.’

      They stared at each other in mutual shock – one because she was not used to being refused, the other because she could not believe that she had just uttered the words of refusal to the face of an Imperial Princess.

      But Tai knew why she had said what she had said. Driven to explain, to take back that blurted no that had come tumbling out of her, she raised the hand which still clutched her chalks and her paper.

      ‘Princess …; Antian …; I …; I am honoured. But my mother has told me …;’

      ‘Don’t look like that. You are not a slave, and I won’t go out and buy you with gold,’ Antian said, her voice startlingly sad. ‘I like the way you make me see things. That’s all.’

      ‘My mother has told me something of the Imperial Court,’ Tai said. ‘Of the way things are done, they have to be done, the way everyone’s life is planned and controlled, the way you have to make sure your hair is in place and your hands are in position and you are not allowed to smile or to talk or to look where you are not supposed to look.’

      ‘Yes,’ said Antian, ‘I know.’

      ‘I would have to be like that, too. And that would mean …; I couldn’t watch the butterflies.’

      ‘I know,’ said Antian again, this time with a sigh. ‘You are right. It is a life that binds. You made the buffalo robe with vision but I will wear it with ceremony. I was just wishing …; for someone to let me see the things that ceremony makes me blind to.’ She looked up at the battlements behind them, rising tier upon tier, and straightened. ‘I should probably go in now,’ she said, suddenly reverting to a curious formality. ‘I will look forward to seeing you in the gardens again soon, Painter of Butterflies.’

      ‘Wait,’ said Tai impulsively as the Princess turned to leave. Antian turned her head, watched as Tai fumbled within her sheaf of papers, extracted the drawing she had been working on the day Antian had first seen her in the gardens. She held it out, suddenly shy. ‘I’d like you …; to have this …; if you want to.’

      Antian took the somewhat smudged drawing with a small smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said. There was the slightest of hesitations, as though she had meant to say something else and caught herself, and then she merely inclined her head in a tiny regal motion and turned away.

      Tai stayed on the balcony for a long time, alone, staring out into the valley.

      ‘The Little Empress liked her gown,’ Rimshi said to Tai when she returned СКАЧАТЬ