22 years ago

Purple-white tongues of lighting forked through a midnight sky, revealing for an instant the roiling black clouds over the Shangyang Mountains. A crack of thunder followed, shaking the walls of a tea house nestled in Kokuji, the fishing village at the foot of the highest peak. Rain poured down all at once as if the lightning had broken open the sky. Storm waves pounded the beach in the village’s little cove, and fat, heavy drops battered the tea house’s roof, partially muffling a scream of agony from within.

“Shhh!” A young woman whispered, squeezing the hand of the laboring soon-to-be mother. As one of the few sensha, or entertaining girls, not engaged this night when no travelers would venture out into the rain to traverse the mountain pass, Daitai was standing in as midwife for her friend. With her free hand, she wiped the sweat-soaked black hair from the young mother’s bright jade eyes. “You have to stay quiet, Lanfen. If you disturb the guests, Madam will send you out into the streets!”

Lanfen fell back onto the bed mat as the contraction ended, limp with relief. She saw the truth in Daitai’s admonishment. Madam was already furious that her most admired sensha had been unable to work these last three months, when it was no longer possible to hide her blossoming stomach. Lanfen would be years in paying back all the silver links Madam believed the tea house had lost because of her pregnancy. It was enough that her child was coming into the world stained by a house of ill repute. Lanfen wouldn’t further dishonor its first breaths by giving birth in the streets like a stray dog.

As the next contraction ripped through her delicate body, Lanfen bit down on the knuckle of her first finger until she drew blood. Sweet singing drifted through the wall, accompanied by the sharp notes of a double-necked lute. One song after another, interspersed with the clinking of fine cups set down too hard by callous, slightly drunk hands and the occasional peal of raucous laughter. Through it all the angry clatter of rain on the roof and rolling thunder overhead.

The next cry that went up was reedy and small, brought forth by a throat just learning to make sound. Daitai forgot to admonish the infant or the mother in her wonder at seeing life’s first moments. It was much smaller than she’d ever imagined, much bloodier. Gently, she bathed the boy with the pile of fabric scraps and the small pot of boiled water Madam had allowed them. Tiny fists, with long, graceful fingers, tipped with scratchy little nails. Scrawny, kicking legs. A head of thick, black hair. In the brief flashes that his eyes were open, Daitai saw jade starburst irises brighter than even his mother’s.

As she washed the delicate shell of the boy’s right ear, Daitai found a moon-mark nestled in the hollow behind his jaw. She wiped the spot clean, then pulled a jasmine-scented oil lamp closer, and leaned in to inspect it. Pale white against his ruddy skin, the mark was like a painter’s hint at a distant caul of rain.

The more she looked at it, the more the mark reminded her of one of those ancient glyphs from Deep Root, the Old Language, with its multitude of intricate lines layering together to make the words. Babies born marked by those old letters were said to have be children of prophecy, their destinies written on their skin. The glyph for white celery predicting a beauty who would topple kingdoms, cicada foretelling the first of an immortal dynasty, phoenix for one who would end a great plague. Or was that cause a great plague? There were so many prophecies that Daitai could never keep them all straight. Lanfen would know—she had such a sharp memory—but the exhausted young mother was dozing so peacefully that Daitai didn’t have the heart to bother her over it.

“Who are you, little one? What does your glyph say you’ll do for us?” Daitai grinned as she chucked the baby’s nose.

He blinked, startled, then opened his mouth.

Daitai giggled. “Are you so hungry? Let’s wake mama.”

Daitai took the infant back to Lanfen’s mat and knelt at her friend’s side.

“Mama Lanfen,” Daitai whispered, nudging her friend softly. “Your son is desperate for his first meal.”

Groggily, Lanfen pushed herself up and took the child to her breast, whispering soothing nonsense as she helped him find his first meal.

Daitai played with a strand of her hair while she watched the mother and child together. She couldn’t recall a destiny for a baby marked by rain caul. Could she have been misreading it? She’d never really mastered reading Deep Root. Who needed it these days when the simpler, more civilized characters of the New Script were so much easier to read and write?

“Does Lanfen remember the destinies prophesied by moon-marks from the Old Language?” Daitai asked, twisting her hair around her finger.

“Mm,” Lanfen said, nodding without looking up from her son. “Why?”

“Oh, silly Daitai!” She pulled a face that never failed to charm the tea house’s patrons, then gestured to the infant. “He has one behind his right ear.”

The new mother lurched upright on the mat and pulled the baby from her breast. He let out a cry of protest as she folded his tiny ear out of the way and studied the pale mark.

“Is it rain caul?” Daitai asked. “I thought it might be rain caul.”

But Lanfen didn’t answer. Her bright green eyes sparkled with unshed tears, and she caressed the mark with her thumb.

A tingle of fear crept up Datai’s spine. “What’s wrong? Is his prophecy bad?”

“It says thunder,” Lanfen whispered in a ragged voice.

Daitai’s brows furrowed, then soared for her hairline.

“The chosen one? Daitai held the chosen one?” Her voice was rising steadily, both in pitch and volume. Madam would scold her or worse, but she couldn’t contain her ecstasy. She leapt to her feet and shouted at the rafters, “This filthy sensha bathed the chosen one with these hands! These hands!”

While Daitai rejoiced over her blessed fortune, Lanfen sat silently on her mat, breathing deeply into the soft, soft hair of her newborn son. The chosen one, the thunderbird. A tear dripped off Lanfen’s long eyelashes and onto her baby’s cheek, sparkling in the golden lantern light.

*

Months later, a small form trekked up the mountainside of the highest peak of the Shangyangs, an even smaller bundle slung across her chest. Darkness had long since fallen, making Lanfen glad Daitai had insisted she take a lantern along. Eyes shined in the undergrowth when her meagre light passed by—not only the greens and yellows of natural beasts, but flashes of demonic magenta, teal, and ever shifting rainbows. Fearsome guai, demon beasts, roamed these mountain forests, hungry for hunters and lost travelers.

Lanfen carried nothing more than the child in the sling, the lantern in her hand, and a small pouch tucked into her robes for after her errand was done. When her slender, shaking hand was not comforting her infant son, it frequently returned to the pouch in her robes, as if to reassure itself that the contents had not spilled out. She was more frightened of losing it than her life.

She felt no fear for her son’s safety. Raijin was the chosen one, after all, and the chosen one could not be eaten by guai before he fulfilled his destiny.

Lanfen had no martial skill or training with weapons, had never even cultivated her Ro beyond what she needed to manifest a pick for her moon zither. In the tea house, she sang and played and danced and giggled delicately when the patrons said something they felt was clever. Entertaining was her skill, not fighting, and so all she could do as she journeyed through the eye-filled forest was sing. Raijin at least seemed to enjoy the music, and through the night, no wild beasts or guai attacked, so perhaps they enjoyed it as well.

The sun was rising when Lanfen finally stepped out of the tree line and into the light. She had only a few minutes’ walk under the caress of its warm rays before she ascended into the smoky cloud layer surrounding the peak. Chilly mist wet her face and beaded on Raijin’s eyelashes and hair like diamonds, but the baby only laughed.

Lanfen’s hands shook endlessly now, and in spite of the chill, she was sweating. With no need for the lantern any longer, she dropped it beside the path and kept one hand on her son and the other on the pouch. Its contents were for later, not now, not before the errand was complete, but touching it, reminding herself it was there, made her feel safe.

Near midmorning Raijin began to complain for his meal. He’d been a good boy, gone the night through without eating, and Lanfen’s legs were unaccustomed to such strenuous use, so she stopped gratefully and sat on a flat rock in the shelter of an outcropping to rest and breastfeed him. Usually these days, Raijin ate rice pudding or soft bits of boiled vegetables, but Lanfen had left too suddenly the day before to think about bringing solid food. Now that she was feeding him, however, she was glad she hadn’t brought anything, glad for the closeness. She bent down and kissed his forehead. This would be his last meal with her.

Her shaking intensified at the thought, the nagging ache in her bones turning into an unbearable need. She couldn’t wait until the trip back down the mountain. She reached for the pouch.

The deep call of a great rainbird rumbled overhead.

Startled, Lanfen looked up, searching for signs of the creature. A trio of trailing plume feathers as wide as a grown man and twice as long cut through the pale gray mist. Each one shimmered with greens, indigos, purples, and blacks.

Just before the tailfeathers disappeared, a soft indigo barbule drifted down through the swirling fog to land on Raijin’s cheek.

Lanfen’s fingers trembled so badly that she had to try three times before she successfully plucked the fuzzy barbule from his skin. It was no more than a wisp, so downy she could hardly feel it. She popped it in her mouth.

The barbule tasted of plum blossoms and dissolved on her tongue like a sugar sweet.

Immediately, strength returned to her exhausted limbs, and her blearing vision sharpened. The shaking vanished, her hands becoming as stable and strong as when they were wrapped around the neck of her moon lute or pouring a drink for a wealthy patron. The nagging, aching need battling to take control of her mind dissipated. The pouch remained unopened.

As soon as Raijin finished his meal, Lanfen pushed away from the boulder and returned to her climb. Her delicate feet seemed to fly over the rocky path as if her silken shoes, which had been nearly destroyed by the journey so far, no longer touched the earth. It was as if she had become a storm cloud drifting through the sky. Before she knew it, a dark shape began to emerge from the mist.

Lanfen had been told all her life that the structure at the top of the Shangyang’s highest peak was a monastery filled with monks watching over Kokuji and the mountain pass to the east. These holy men were said to be the reason the village had never been overrun by guai.

As she drew closer to the structure, her jade eyes followed the line of the building’s ancient wood porch around each corner. The wooden shakes of the roof had been painted a deep forest green, and its eaves were upturned at the corners in a foreign or forgotten architecture. She counted three sets of sliding doors along this wall, all closed against the pervasive chill. Each panel depicted in golden paint an ornate Deep Root glyph—wisdom, self-control, improvement.

Still floating on the essence of the rainbird’s barbule, she glided up the steps and let herself into the center door—self-control, something she’d had precious little of in her life—sliding the panel shut behind her.

Lanfen found herself standing in a corridor that ran the length of the building. Doorways stood open on the interior wall, and at each end, she could see the hallway turned the corner. A pervasive warmth burned away the cold, wet of the mountain’s atmosphere. She could hear the muted din of many voices, but she couldn’t tell from which direction they were coming.

She chose one end of the corridor and began walking.

Just before she reached the end, a young man of an age with her came around the corner wearing the loose gray pants and jacket of warrior artists, held closed by a blue-gray sash tied about his waist. The young man stopped suddenly when he saw her, surprise lighting his face. Before his reaction could be considered rude, however, he recovered his manners.

He pressed his fists together and bowed deeply to Lanfen, keeping his eyes locked on hers. It was the first time in years Lanfen had been bowed to as one equal greets another, and she thought it unlikely he would do the same if he knew her occupation. The New Tongue had dozens of speech tones for varying levels of familiarity and respect, and Lanfen was surprised once more when the young man spoke to her in a tone of kind reverence.

“You have traveled a great distance to our school, honored guest,” the young man said. “How may I make you comfortable?”

Lanfen returned his greeting bow, one hand holding her baby’s head stable against her breast as she bent.

“Gratitude, brother, but I’m confused. Is this establishment not a monastery?”

He smiled at her familiar address. Most men did.

“This is the school of the Path of Darkening Skies, sister,” he said, matching her tone. “Are you lost?”

“I am beginning to wonder,” she admitted. “In Kokuji, your sister was told of a monastery on the highest peak of the Shangyang Mountains, peopled by an ancient order awaiting the thunderbird of prophecy.” She raised Raijin in his sling so that the young man could see the baby inside. “You see, brother, I have him. The chosen one is here.”

Rather than burst into throes of ecstasy as Daitai had, the young man just nodded.

“You are looking for Grandmaster Feng. Follow me, little sister. I will bring you to him.”

*

The young man led Lanfen down the corridor and into one of the doorways on the interior wall.

Lanterns hung from the ceiling and a hearth stood in the corner, saturating the room with light and warmth. Elaborately woven silk tapestries lined the walls, wafting in a draft too faint to feel, each one valuable enough to set Lanfen up comfortably as the madam of her own tea house in a much nicer city than Kokuji. A low desk on a thick, colorful rug faced the doorway. Sitting behind it was a man with long, white hair as fine as spider’s silk, ageless skin, and ancient sapphire eyes. As they entered, he looked up from the scroll he was studying.

The young man with the blue-gray sash dropped to his knees before the desk and pressed his forehead to the rattan mat on the floor, just inches shy of the colorful rug.

“Apologies, Grandmaster, but I met with an honored guest in the hallway who needed to speak with you.”

“Yes, yes,” the Grandmaster said, waving a hand heavy with rings.

The young man rose up to his knees and backed to the doorway before bowing his face to the floor once more, then standing and leaving.

Bored sapphire eyes turned to inspect Lanfen.

“Which mud-farm village are you from?” the Grandmaster asked in a rude tone she was much more accustomed to hearing. She opened her mouth to answer, but was stopped by another dismissive wave of his hand. Firelight glinted off the precious metals and stones in his many rings. “Never mind, I don’t care. I can hardly keep track of them anymore, anyway. Tell me about the latest chosen one. The child is the reason you’ve come here, is he not?”

Lanfen thought it likely that when faced with this grandmaster’s rudeness, most people cowered and faltered, uncertain of how to proceed, but his discourtesy didn’t upset her composure. She had dealt with many a merchant and noble so rich they could no longer feel anything but superiority.

She bowed deeply, exposing the back of her neck as if the grandmaster were no more than a fragile elderly man.

“My apologies for interrupting your evening rest, grandfather,” she said, her voice a patronizing coo. “Your granddaughter will be quick so you can make your way to bed. This child is the thunderbird. He has a moon-mark of the Deep Root for thunder behind his right ear. I will bring him close so your tired eyes can see.”

She knelt on the edge of the lavish rug and held Raijin out across the desk. With one finger, she folded her son’s tiny ear flat to better expose the pale mark.

The Grandmaster snorted. “Have you any idea how many ancient symbols that supposedly say ‘thunder’ and ‘rain’ and ‘rainbird’ and ‘storm’ I see every year, woman? Never mind that most of you rural bumpkins are too ignorant to tell a moon-mark from a smear of white sauce, let alone read the ancestor’s language. How many of them do you think can actually be the chosen one?”

“One, grandfather. This one.”

“Get that bastard whelp out of my face and go back to your tea brothel or whatever they're calling it these days, granddaughter,” he sneered. “I’m sure you have customers waiting.”

With that dismissal, the Grandmaster spread his scroll across his desk once more and returned to his reading as if she were no longer there.

Lanfen scowled. The weight of the pouch, so reassuring on her journey up the mountain, now hung heavy in her robes. The pipe and sticky ball of brown qajong inside seemed to burn her skin through the layers of fabric. Panic prickled down her arms and into her fingertips, and she saw her son’s life stretch out in two parallel paths: one growing up in the tea house with a mother who entertained men for room, board, and opiate money and the other in this school.

In her heart, she knew Raijin was the chosen one. Whether the Grandmaster realized the truth didn’t matter. All that mattered was the honorable life her son could lead here.

Holding Raijin to her heart, Lanfen backed away from the desk off the precious rug and pressed her face to the rattan.

“Apologies, venerable Grandmaster. Please forgive this lowly sensha’s insolence. She was ignorant and arrogant to assume that her knowledge outweighed the Grandmaster’s infinite wisdom. She begs you, please do not turn away this child. His mother’s sins are not his, and her dishonor should not be his, either.” She wasn’t surprised to feel tears wetting the mat beneath her eyelids. “Please, revered Grandmaster, if not as a student, then take this child on as a servant. He is weaned and will soon be old enough to complete simple tasks. He need not be a burden, but a boon to your school.”

“This isn’t a monastery where you can drop off your unwanted bastards,” the Grandmaster said without looking up. “Find the door and leave by it.”

His words struck like a fist to Lanfen’s solar plexus. She stifled the sob of desperation that shook her shoulders.

“Please, Grandmaster,” she begged. “Please reconsider.”

The soft grunt of a cleared throat came from behind Lanfen.

“Apologies for the intrusion,” a throaty, elderly voice said.

Lanfen crawled backward once more and turned to the side so she would not be disrespecting either the Grandmaster or this new arrival by giving them her back.

In the doorway stood a stooped, balding, wrinkled old man much closer to her imagined monk. Unlike the Grandmaster, the old man’s brown eyes shined from beneath his wild brows with warmth and barely contained humor.

The Grandmaster sighed. “What is it, Master Chugi?”

“If the Grandmaster would honor Chugi so greatly as to consider his input, the school could greatly use another servant.” The old Master smiled at Lanfen, his eyes twinkling. “And if in time this new servant should prove to be the chosen one, then at least we won’t have to go looking for him.”

Hope tightened Lanfen’s throat. Afraid of what she might find there, she turned her gaze to face the Grandmaster’s face.

“Fine,” the Grandmaster said as if he were bored of the subject and prepared to say anything just to be left alone. “The boy may stay. But until he’s old enough to work, he’s your responsibility, Master Chugi.”

“Thank you, Grandmaster.”

“Feh.” Grandmaster Feng returned to his scroll.

On her knees, Lanfen crawled to Master Chugi and handed him her son, the tears rolling down her face now.

In spite of his elderly appearance, Master Chugi took the baby in strong, sure arms. Lanfen swallowed hard as she let her son go. She could already feel his warmth fading from her skin. The cold that replaced it stung like a blade.

“His name is Raijin, Master,” she whispered, unable to raise her voice any louder.

Master Chugi smiled down at the boy. “It suits him, granddaughter.”