When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain Read online

  Chih froze in horror, but Si-yu only gave Piluk another hard whack, sending her lunging forward with a squeal. The mammoth’s speed was ponderous, but it was like a mountain had started to move. If it was coming for you, you didn’t care how fast it was coming, and that was apparently what the naked woman thought as well because in two bounds she was away and lost to the shadows.

  Chih cried out when Si-yu vaulted off the side of the mammoth, throwing herself down to dash her brains out on the road, but then they realized that they were looking at the sole of Si-yu’s boot, the rest of her dangling down over the side of the saddle. Si-yu’s foot was caught in one of the leather loops hanging from the saddle, flexed to hook her into place.

  The moment stretched out, and Chih’s training forced them to notice that the soles of Si-yu’s boots were stitched with faded sinew that had once been dyed green. Then they leaned over to see that Si-yu had grabbed up the man on the ground, hanging on as best she could while shouting a command to Piluk. The mammoth’s head spun around, her trunk came lashing back, and Chih flinched as the muscular trunk connected with Si-yu. For a moment, it looked as if the blow had sent Si-yu and her burden flying, but then Chih saw that it had helped Si-yu regain her seat and drag the terribly still man with her.

  “Grab him!” Si-yu yelped. “Cleric, help me!”

  That broke Chih out of their daze. They helped drag the man, surprisingly light, more like a bundle of twigs in a sheepskin coat than a man, up across the mammoth’s back. Somehow, he ended up facedown over Chih’s lap. The saddle horn would have dug terribly into his belly if he had been conscious, but he wasn’t, and then Si-yu was sending Piluk racing for the barn, the mammoth bellowing the whole time she went.

  Piluk shivered and shook underneath them, and Chih winced when she tossed her head from side to side, trying to face the growls that filled the twilight. Their fingers ached from hanging on to the man Si-yu had rescued, but Chih clung as best they could. They could not fall.

  The barn was a hefty thing, built of notched logs and open on one side. It was big enough that Piluk could fit into it with room to spare, and tall enough that they and Si-yu could fit under the roof with only a slight duck. By the time they reached it, Piluk was moving at a dead run, ears flared out to either side and squalling furiously.

  For just a moment, Chih caught a glimpse of gleaming round eyes in the dark, and then they saw the tiger dash out of the barn, as low to the ground as a python, neatly avoiding Piluk’s broad feet.

  “They won’t rush Piluk or any mammoth head-on,” said Si-yu. “They wouldn’t dare. We’d be as safe as keppi eggs if we had another two scouts with us. Even Uncle and his Nayhi, that’d be enough, they would never.”

  A quick command got Piluk turned around with remarkable speed and dexterity, whirling about so quickly that her iron bells jingled and her long fur swung. Chih, a little taller than Si-yu, didn’t duck a rafter fast enough. There was a sickening rash of pain at their temple, and then it was only cold and wetness and a light-headed determination to hang on as tight as they could.

  A moment later, everything was still, and the world in front of the barn was empty, silent. A nuthatch’s soft whooping call gave the twilight a strangely normal feeling, and Chih swallowed back their panic with a gulp.

  Of course it’s normal. Tigers have dinner every night they can, don’t they?

  Si-yu waited for a moment, and when no tigers appeared to menace them, she nodded. She leaned forward, far enough that Chih thought she might fall despite everything, and she grasped Piluk’s ear, whispering something into it.

  Chih’s fingers tightened reflexively into Bao-so’s coat as the world seemed to rock underneath them, but it was only Piluk settling down, first on her hindquarters and then with her forelegs stretched in front of her, knees bent so that her round feet were flat on the ground.

  Si-yu slid down to the ground, and Chih, as carefully as they could, lowered the unconscious man across their lap after her. Chih was shaking so much that it took them several deep breaths to finally unwind their leg from the saddle horn and to make their way to the ground. They let out a sigh of relief when they were free of the saddle, but then there was a flash of orange out of the corner of their eye, there and gone again in the foliage beyond the barn. In another half hour, probably far less, it would be full dark, and they wouldn’t even see that.

  “They’re still there,” Chih hissed, shrinking back against Piluk’s hairy side even as Piluk shifted restlessly.

  “It’s fine for now. Well, not fine, but they won’t rush us while Piluk is facing the entrance.”

  Si-yu was calm enough that Chih decided to be calm as well, and they came to kneel opposite Si-yu on the other side of the older man’s body.

  Even by the fading light, his skin was parchment-pale and the corners of his mouth were drawn painfully tight. For a moment, they were certain that Si-yu had done that daring bit of riding for a corpse, but then they saw the slight rise and fall of his chest. It was ragged, and there was a stutter to it that made Chih nervous, but it was still there.

  “Thank the Sky, oh thank the Sky,” Si-yu murmured, clasping her hands in front of her mouth. Her hood fell back, and she looked young then, too young by far.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Chih asked, their voice hushed.

  “More like what’s not wrong with him,” Si-yu said. “His skull isn’t cracked. His stomach hasn’t been chewed open.”

  Si-yu took a long wavering breath and sat up straight, pulling Bao-so’s hood more securely around his head.

  “He’s breathing. As long as he is breathing, we can say that he will be fine.”

  Chih smiled a little.

  “That was some riding you did.”

  “If only riding were enough.”

  “What do you—”

  Si-yu nodded towards the open front of the barn, and when Chih turned their head to look, their breath snagged hard in their throat, threatening to choke them.

  Three tigers waited beyond the shelter of the barn, and as the last of the light faded from the sky, the largest one started to laugh.

  Chapter Three

  CHIH REMEMBERED A STORY that said it was tremendously unlucky to hear a tiger laugh, but they couldn’t remember why. Was it a cultural taboo? Was it a curse? Was it simply that tigers thought that killing and eating people was funny? They wished they could remember. They wished they could stop shaking. They wished the tigers would simply leave.

  None of those things happened, and Piluk lumbered back to her feet, snorting and tossing her head from side to side. Si-yu rose to stand next to the mammoth with her lance gripped tight in her hand, but Chih could see that the scout was shaking.

  “They won’t come to meet Piluk head on,” she repeated. “They’re cowards, they won’t come close if she’s facing them . . .”

  “You may stop saying that at any time,” said the largest tiger, and there was something so inhuman about it, words shaped in a tiger’s throat, that Piluk pawed at the ground, bugling in alarm, and Si-yu had to pull Chih back before Piluk’s trunk knocked them off their feet.

  “Stop it!” Si-yu cried. “Stop it, talk like a person!”

  No, no, the tiger is a person. It is only that the tiger is a person that might eat us if we get too close, Chih thought, but before they could shape that thought with their mouth, the tiger made a chuffing sound, still threatening, less unnatural.

  For a moment, the air between the barn and the tiger grew strangely dense, thick like boiled gelatin or a soupy fog, and then instead of a tiger, there was a woman there, the same one that Chih had seen momentarily next to Bao-so’s prone body.

  The woman was of medium height, and her thick black hair was braided and coiled into multiple loops secured to her head by a wooden comb. Otherwise, she was completely naked, her body thick and strong with small breasts set high on her chest, and a belly halved with a heavy crease that sagged just a little towards her thick powerful thighs. She was a han
dsome woman, but the animal impassivity of her eyes and the way her teeth looked a little too large for her mouth gave her a menacing look, the tiger in her sitting in wait beneath her human skin.

  “There,” she said. “Now bring out the man so that my sisters and I might eat him.”

  Si-yu growled, and Chih swallowed hard before speaking up. It was a small chance, but then, so was their chance of getting through this without something going terribly wrong.

  “Begging your pardon, Your Majesty, but our laws do not allow this,” they tried.

  “Your Highness?” echoed Si-yu, but Chih could see the tigers’ ears flatten momentarily in understanding.

  The naked woman, her face inexpressive and unable to gesture with her whiskers or her ears, nodded and sighed.

  “Ah. You are something like a civilized thing, and I suppose that I must treat you as such.”

  “We would much prefer it, madam,” Chih said respectfully, and the tiger turned towards the darkness, though her two sisters stayed to watch like guardian lions.

  “Did you send them away?” Si-yu whispered urgently, and Chih shook their head.

  “No. How long before your uncle comes looking for you?”

  “Late afternoon tomorrow,” Si-yu said, biting her lip. “Maybe tomorrow night. If the storm comes early . . . not until it’s over.”

  “All right. Then we’re going to hope he’s coming by tomorrow afternoon. The tiger who is speaking, call her Your Majesty when you first speak to her, and then madam after that. Her sisters are ladies. Do not confuse them . . .”

  “Why are we talking to tigers?” asked Si-yu.

  “Because they are talking to us,” Chih said, stifling a somewhat hysterical giggle. “They can talk, and now they’ve seen that we can. That’s—that means that they’ll treat us like people.”

  “But there’s still a chance that they’re going to eat us.”

  “Oh yes. Some people are just more . . . edible than others if you are a tiger.”

  Si-yu stared, but then the woman came back. The firelight glittered over the garnet threads woven through her stiff black tunic. It had a high collar like the robes worn in Anh, but it came down nearly to the jeweled slippers on her feet and was split up to her waist on both sides over wide white silk trousers. Rough rubies dangled from her ears, and she had painted her lips with red cream. She looked beautiful, and dressed for summer while the wind left ice crystals in her hair, she was certainly no human.

  But a person and a queen, and if we can remember that, we might be all right.

  The tiger settled on the ground at the mouth of the barn, as at home as a queen would be in her palace. After a moment, her two sisters came to lie down on either side of her, and she stretched out between them, her feet pressed into one’s belly while looping her arm around the other’s neck.

  “I am Ho Sinh Loan, and here is my sister Sinh Hoa and my sister Sinh Cam. I am the queen of the Boarbacks and the march to the Green Mountain. Tell me your names.”

  Si-yu’s people didn’t call the mountains they stood on the Boarbacks, but it certainly wasn’t the first time that Chih had dealt with alternative geography. By Chih’s best guess, the tiger had just claimed the entire mountain chain and most of territory known in the north as Ogai as well. The Ogaiese would be startled to find themselves under the rule of a tiger, but it wasn’t as if she were levying taxes or soldiers.

  “Your Majesty, I’m Si-yu, daughter of Ha-lan and descended from the Crane from Isai. This is Piluk, by Kiean out of Lotuk.”

  The tiger nodded and turned to Chih expectantly.

  “Madam, I’m Cleric Chih from the abbey at Singing Hills. I’ve come—”

  “To be dinner, I think,” said the tiger cordially. “All three of you will be. The mammoth can go home if she wishes.”

  “The mammoth—” Si-yu started angrily, but Chih elbowed her and she shut up.

  “I’m afraid our laws do not allow it,” Chih repeated. “Madam, I have come north instead to listen to your stories and to glorify your name.”

  “Flattery, cleric,” said the tiger. “It doesn’t taste very good, and it has never filled a stomach.”

  “History, madam,” Chih responded hopefully. “History and your place in it. We have the stories of Ho Dong Vinh and Ho Thi Thao, and—”

  “Ho Thi Thao?”

  The tiger spoke sharply, and at her side, her two sisters sat up, their eyes narrowed and their whiskers pressed aggressively forward.

  “Cleric, what have you done?” asked Si-yu flatly, and Chih resisted the urge to shrink back a little from the display of predatory interest.

  “What do you know about Ho Thi Thao?” asked the tiger.

  “Well, my job is rather to find out what you know,” Chih said, remembering at the last moment not to smile. Smiling bared teeth, and Chih knew that theirs would not hold up next to the tiger’s.

  “Singing Hills does archival and investigative work, and I know for sure that we would love to have your account of the marriage of Ho Thi Thao.”

  “Our account,” sneered the tiger. “You mean the true one.”

  “Of course,” Chih said brightly.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Then . . .”

  “No, I think you are going to tell us what you know instead,” said Sinh Loan.

  “We’ll tell you when you get it wrong,” growled Sinh Hoa abruptly, her voice like falling rocks. “We shall correct you.”

  “Best not get it wrong too often,” advised Sinh Cam, her voice like dangerous water.

  “What are you doing?” hissed Si-yu.

  “Telling a story,” Chih said, and they wished that Almost Brilliant was there to scold them for such a foolish thing.

  * * *

  The tigers waited patiently as Si-yu and Chih built up the fire, Sinh Cam even briefly turning into a human to drag over an armload of firewood from behind the way station. She was younger than Sinh Loan; Chih guessed that both she and Sinh Hoa were, given how they deferred to their sister. When Chih and Si-yu came forward to take the gift of wood, Chih saw that Sinh Cam’s face was completely still, as if she were not used to human expression, and that she gave off an odor of mud and cold and clean fur.

  As Chih built the fire, Piluk made an uneasy groaning sound, swaying from foot to foot like a nervous child. She bumped Chih with her trunk gently, as if trying to draw their attention to the three predators lounging at the mouth of the barn.

  “I know, baby,” Chih said. “It’s all right.”

  “It might be,” Si-yu murmured, rising from Bao-so’s side. “He woke up enough to say a few words to me and to ask for water. He’s not in tremendous shape, but he’ll last. If we don’t all get eaten.”

  “Oh it could be much worse,” Sinh Loan said cheerfully. “His heart has grown steady now, not jumping around like Hare at the sun’s feast.”

  Si-yu made a face, and Chih reminded themself of how good tiger ears were.

  Finally there was a fire roaring between them, built well enough to last the night, if they lasted all night. When they finally sat down by the fire, they felt colder immediately, and Chih gratefully took the extra blanket that Si-yu offered.

  Piluk had settled down, still uneasily whimpering from time to time, but easier now that Si-yu had dragged Bao-so close and came to sit next to her as well.

  Chih looked through the flames at the three faces watching them hungrily, took a deep breath, and began.

  Chapter Four

  MANY YEARS AGO, there lived a scholar named Dieu, who had studied for eighteen years and whose tutor finally reckoned that she was ready for the imperial exams in Ahnfi.

  In those days, Ahnfi was the greatest city in the world, from the shores of the Mother Sea to the dry places where the dragons’ bastards lurked in the black sand dunes. To be anyone who was anyone, you should have been born in the capital to one of the six great families, ideally as an able-bodied eldest boy, ideally without a single mark on your sk
in and without a taste for esoteric magic or radical politics. Since most people in the capital could not even manage this small thing, the next best thing was to excel at the imperial examinations, held every four years in the Hall of Ferocious Jade.

  Unlike the examinations at the provincial and commandery levels, which took place every other year, the imperial examinations were dazzlingly complex, dangerously competitive, and thanks to some eight generations of mysterious deaths in the Hall of Ferocious Jade, more than a little haunted. The candidates came from all over the empire, and the prestige, wealth, and power of an imperial appointment meant that no one who had come so far intended to go home with anything less than top marks.

  Dieu’s great-grandfather had finagled a pass to the imperial examinations and then got assassinated before he had gotten a chance to use it. Her grandmother would have gone to the examinations, but she got distracted by a life of crime in the high mountain passes. Dieu’s father might have been a fine scholar, but he died young with his wives in a river fording as they fled from their enemies one terrible autumn night.

  So in the end, there was only Dieu left, living in a tiny house in Hue County, being raised by a series of diligent tutors and compassionate maids. There was a hawthorn tree in the front, a tiny garden in the back, and a wind from the north that seemed to blow as much good as bad. The house was rented, so she truly possessed only few treasured books, a face that was long and oval like a grain of rice, a mouth that smiled rather too little, and a little jade chip that guaranteed the bearer entry to the imperial examinations.

  She was an over-serious girl, and years of studying late into the long Hue County night left her with an inclination to slouch. Except for the slouch, she would have been tall, and except for her squint, likewise acquired, she might have been passingly pretty.