Deep as the sky red as t.., p.1
Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, page 1
More Praise for Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea
Named a Most Anticipated Novel by: The Washington Post Tor.com Goodreads LitHub Debutiful Chicago Review of Books The Rumpus
“This is richly researched historical fiction with lush mythology and all the excitement and intrigue of action and suspense.” —Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning and Monster in the Middle
“Deep as the Sky will captivate readers regardless of what genre or style they like. This is beautifully written with a sharp eye for pace. It feels cinematic.” —Debutiful, Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2023
“A gripping, powerful portrait of a woman on the high seas who is as ferocious as she is human, determined to survive. Brimming with adventure and intrigue, passion and prophecy, fierce battles and moving moments of grace, this novel captures us on a pirate ship and does not let go until long after we’ve turned the radiant final page.” —Carolina De Robertis, award-winning author of Cantoras
“Rita Chang Eppig is such a daring, thrilling writer. Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea sets a whole new bar for words like swashbuckling, recasting their assumptions while giving us all the big moments: seafaring battles, swords and family intrigue, tales of love and revenge. It’s all here. And in Shek Yeung, Chang-Eppig has given us a heroine for the ages. This is the start of a big career.” —John Freeman, author of How to Read a Novelist
“Historical fiction fans craving high-seas adventures will want to request this look at Shek Yeung, China’s legendary pirate queen, and her fight to command the South China Seas.” —Bookish in NetGalley’s 32 Highly Anticipated Books Hitting Shelves in 2023
“I loved this book. With prose as rich and elegant as it is fierce, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, paints a complex portrait of one of history’s most powerful women, Shek Yeung, while considering the roles that gender, motherhood, and fate play for us all. Gorgeous, vivid … Rita Chang-Eppig has made something truly special.” —Erika Swyler, bestselling author of The Book of Speculation and Light from Other Stars
“It’s refreshing to see not only a mixed-gender crew but also a woman with a complicated relationship to motherhood, her intended place in the world, and her ambitions. Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea is a non-stop adventure with danger at every turn, and Shek Yeung is forced to make decisions to ensure her survival. But she remains ruthless throughout, and her adventures will make you want to take up the sword and learn to sail.” —Tor.com, 30 SFF Titles to Look Forward to in 2023
“So absorbing that I kept neglecting my real life so I could keep reading. I’d have followed this novel’s courageous, complicated pirate heroine anywhere. A dazzling feat of storytelling.” —Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson
“Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea is a riveting, heart-pounding exploration of ambition, grit, and what it takes to survive in a world on the brink—all seen through the eyes of the fiery, magnetic Shek Yeung. Rita Chang-Eppig has delivered a singular heroine and a truly unforgettable tale.” —Kirstin Chen, New York Times bestselling author of Counterfeit
“A pirate queen’s adventures in the South China Sea, based on the life of an actual early-nineteenth-century icon—I’m sold a hundred times over on this debut.” —Julia Fine, author of The Upstairs House, in Chicago Review of Books’ 17 Most Anticipated Books of 2023
“A powerful, gripping and vivid portrayal of one of history’s most fascinating women, and the knife edge she had to walk to survive.” —Samantha Shannon, New York Times bestselling author of The Priory of the Orange Tree and A Day of Fallen Night
“Kaleidoscopic … In this historical fiction novel about adventure and bravery, we meet an instantly classic heroine.” —Our Culture, Most Anticipated Books of 2023
“Epic yet intimate … Rita Chang-Eppig charts the journey of a brilliant and brave heroine who fights for the survival of her fleet—and her family’s—against a fascinating historical backdrop. A stunning debut.” —Vanessa Hua, bestselling author of Forbidden City
“Suspenseful … Y’all had me at the words ‘pirate queen.’ ” —R.O. Kwon in Electric Literature’s 62 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2023
“A stunning novel filled with adventure, intrigue, and stirring contemplations of what it means to endure in a world of scarcity and violence. Chang-Eppig combines the scope and lyricism of Gabriel García Márquez with the propulsive storytelling of Susanna Clarke. This is an epic novel with the intimacy of a portrait, a literary adventure not to be missed.” —Seth Fried, author of The Municipalists
“This heart-pounding high-seas adventure is also the moving story of a girl with no options who finds a way to survive, and the costs and consequences of that survival. Shek Yeung—a pirate queen, a mother, a ruthless killer and a loyal friend—is an unforgettable heroine whose journey will keep readers hooked from beginning to end.” —Anna North, New York Times bestselling author of Outlawed
To my maternal grandparents, who fled war on a leaky boat, and to my grandmother in particular, who filled her pockets with hard-boiled eggs so that she and the child inside her would not starve
CONTENTS
Part I: The King Is Dead
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Part II: Long Live the Queen
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Part III: Deep as the Sky
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Part IV: Red as the Sea
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
PART I
The King Is Dead
1
The moment Shek Yeung saw the enemy’s cutlass carve through her husband, she learned two important things about herself: First, she loved Cheng Yat more than she’d ever thought she would be able to love the man who had, without much consideration of her wishes, stolen her away to the sea. Second, she would not mourn him.
Their fleet had passed the tenth lunar month here raiding off the coast of Vietnam, sails and spirits both a bit tattered after the most recent typhoon season. Merchant ships were passing through the area on their way to the Chinese emperor, each laden with silver like a noble’s bride under her headdress. The emperor needed all this silver because he had spent the past few years suppressing rebellions all over the country. The imperial treasury was empty. Nevertheless, he’d recently launched an expensive campaign to end piracy in the Pearl River Delta. Not that the new laws had made any real impression in the minds of people like Shek Yeung and her crew, who lived and died by the sea’s vagaries. They were starving long before the milksop emperor succeeded the throne, and they would be starving still had Cheng Yat not gathered them like limp reeds and bundled them together to make them stormworthy crafts. So yes, she loved him. She loved him because she feared death.
Slashing her way to his side, crouching instinctively at the occasional boom of cannon fire, she shouted for Cheung Po to come to her aid. The boy spun around at her voice, narrowly sidestepping a dagger to the gut as he did so. No, not boy anymore. She just still thought of him as one, even though he was already twenty-five and would soon inherit Cheng Yat’s fortune. His habitual smirk slackened at the sight of Cheng Yat sprawled on the deck with a dark sash of blood across his torso. He loved the man, too, in his own way.
It had all gone very wrong, very quickly. They’d boarded the Portuguese merchant ship in the night. If the ship had been full of silver for the emperor, they would have been looking at a windfall. Even if they’d found only sugar and sappanwood, they would have still done well for themselves. A few of her men could have made enough to feed their families for the entire year, could have returned to their homes farther inland until the next famine came along, which it always did.
But the Portuguese had come prepared for war. The ship was awash with Portuguese navy sailors, all trained to stand against the pirate ships that fogged the harbors of the South China Sea, all awake despite it being the dead of night, as if forewarned. Perhaps they’d been sent directly by their government to secure the trade route, or perhaps they worked as soldiers of fortune in their spare time. Europe almost certainly had its own share of famines. Last she’d heard a madman named Napoleon had gotten himself elected as the first emperor of France and was warring against seven nations at once. Where there was war, there was hunger.
The foreigner who had injured Cheng Yat, fighting through what appeared to be a dislocated left shoulder, cleaved apart yet another one of her men with his good arm and turn ed his attention on her. His size alone made him formidable, and if he’d felled the commander of the feared Red Banner Fleet, then his fighting ability was likely first-rate. Shek Yeung stood to gain nothing from a one-on-one fight. As far as she was concerned, honor was scarcely different from stupidity.
He lunged at her. She reached behind her back, pulled out the flintlock pistol she kept there for emergencies, and whispered a prayer to Ma-Zou that the black powder had not gotten wet in the chaos.
A loud crack, and then the smell of charcoal and sulfur filled her mouth like a piece of burnt, rotted fish. The foreigner fell backward into the taffrail. Unsure whether she had dealt a final blow or simply grazed skin, she strode over to the man and kicked him into the sea. She hadn’t gotten to where she was in life by not being thorough.
The numbers were on their side. Piracy was, more often than not, a matter of convincing the target of the futility of fighting back. The fleet probably would have triumphed had they continued the battle—except the merchant ship caught fire. A member of her crew might have set the fire deliberately, or someone might have knocked over a lamp. “Retreat!” she yelled. Smoke grew thorns inside her lungs, reemerging from her mouth as gray roses. To Cheung Po she said, “Help me get him back to the ship.”
Somehow they managed it, helped in part by the fact that the Portuguese became preoccupied with putting out the fire. When she ordered Binh to set a course for Hainan, Cheng Yat tugged on her sleeve. “Canton,” he said.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said, “You’ll never make it to the physicians in Canton.”
“I won’t make it either way.”
If their relationship had been anything other than what it was, she might have tried to convince him he would live through this as he’d lived through so many other injuries in their six years together. But she was his wife, captive, chief strategist, and equal partner. Her days of muttering empty reassurances into the ears of powerful men as they lay in her arms were behind her. “I’ll see to it that your family gets word,” she said.
He squeezed her hand weakly.
Having finished helping the rest of the crew off the merchant ship, Cheung Po rejoined the two of them. He knelt, cupping Cheng Yat’s face with one hand. Sometimes she forgot that the boy had been with Cheng Yat since before she joined the fleet. How exactly Cheung Po felt about the man who’d pressed him into service as his ship- and bedmate, she never bothered to ask. It hardly mattered. Typhoons and cannonballs cared nothing for the complicated little folded cranes of feeling that beat their wings in the heart. What mattered was that Cheung Po fought with ferocity and loyalty. What mattered was that he’d never tried to use his own intimacy with Cheng Yat to wrest power away from her.
“The alliance will fail if there’s a rough power transition,” Cheng Yat said. “You must do everything you can to ensure success. Without the alliance, we have no hope against the emperor’s forces.”
By morning, he was dead. Shek Yeung and Cheung Po kept vigil at his bedside, neither speaking to nor making eye contact with each other. Cheung Po had his foot over his knee and was fidgeting with the dagger hidden inside his boot, making it difficult for Shek Yeung to pay attention to much else. One by one, the ship’s officers came to pay their respects: Binh, the helmsman; Old Wong, the navigator, his arthritic fingers clutching at his route map as if it were a holy book; and Ahmad, the boatswain, who traveled from Malacca years ago and just never went back. Last came Yan-Yan, the purser, tears downpouring from her storm-cloud-colored eyes. It made sense that the girl would take the loss hard. Being young, Yan-Yan hadn’t yet lost many people close to her, didn’t know intimately the contours of grief. Shek Yeung gently pulled her up from the bedside where she sat wailing and guided her out of the cabin. The other deck crew lined the hallway outside the cabin, heads bowed. Some of them, especially those whom Cheng Yat had press-ganged, might have been there only to make sure he was dead.
The passage back to Canton was swift in spite of the westerly headwind. The first two days, she and Cheung Po barely spoke. Both of them, she suspected, were preoccupied by what the commander’s death meant for their own futures. Shek Yeung herself had maintained control over half of the fleet by Cheng Yat’s decree, and while he’d been alive, no one had dared question her authority. Cheung Po, on the other hand, was Cheng Yat’s “adopted son” and thus legal heir. Such a pretense had been necessary to ensure that the fleet would go to a man Cheng Yat trusted upon his death. And though Cheung Po hadn’t exhibited any particular affinity for power grabs while Cheng Yat had been alive, it was hard to know where he stood now. Would he balk at her insistence on holding on to her half? Would this turn bloody?
A leery sun bided its time behind clouds, giving the afternoon an unsettled feel. Waves flexed and stretched, muscling the ship along. In the distance, manta rays breached and valiantly winged through the air but inevitably plummeted back into gray depths. Those in the sea’s thrall, the sea never released.
As a child, she’d gazed out at the waves and seen only freedom. As an adult, she knew nothing was so simple. For every measure of freedom the sea gave, it took one away. In the eyes of the law, she was a criminal now and forever. It didn’t matter that Cheng Yat had coerced her into joining. Eventually, she’d accepted this ship as her new home. The O Yam, named after the red dragon of the South China Sea, was the largest and most stalwart junk in the fleet. With its three majestic masts and vermilion lugsails, the O Yam had witnessed the births of her two children and the deaths of two more, one while still in the womb, the other upon arrival, blue as though it would bleed the ocean if cut. She and Cheng Yat had returned that child to the waves, where it clearly belonged.
If Cheung Po took issue with her position, if they clashed and he won, the kindest outcome would be exile. What then? Back to those dank little “flower boats,” back to those drunken men with heavy hands that they raised at the slightest displeasure? The thought of having to leave behind her life at sea confused her almost as much as it frightened her.
“You promised me a life,” she said to Ma-Zou. The sea did not respond.
At dusk, Yan-Yan came to her cabin. Her face was dry now, but the tear tracks were still visible. Shek Yeung had brought Yan-Yan on board three years ago after catching the girl cheating at a pai gow game in a gambling den in Macau. Yan Yan had been the only woman in the entire establishment—besides Shek Yeung—who was not serving or accompanying the men, so naturally she stood out. Shek Yeung had watched, intrigued, delighted even, as Yan-Yan won game after game, all the while coyly fending off the men demanding her attention. Shek Yeung couldn’t help but be reminded of her younger self, the one who had earned the respect of all the fishermen with her talent and grit. That this tiny girl had talent (and no small amount of nerve) was clear, but talent went only so far in the underworld. It would have been only a matter of time before one of these men decided he was sick of losing to a woman or of being denied her affection. The outcome would have been terrible, and terribly familiar to Shek Yeung.
Instead of turning her in to the pit boss, Shek Yeung pulled her aside after a game. “Girl, you’re good with numbers?”
“We understand each other,” Yan-Yan said, her expression haughty. It was the haughtiness of youth but also of genuine skill. Shek Yeung herself had worn this expression once, before the flower boats.
“Then we can understand each other,” Shek Yeung said.
Yan-Yan had run away from home after being married off to a rich man with “exotic appetites,” who’d developed an obsession with her because of her gray eyes. To support herself, she’d started patronizing pai gow parlors, relying on her skills to increase her funds, namely, the taels of silver she’d stolen from the rich man and the wedding jewelry she’d pawned. But what she possessed in number sense, she lacked in knowledge of the underworld. Only sheer luck and some semblance of self-restraint (she cashed out immediately after small wins) had prevented an early death.
In the years since joining the fleet, Yan-Yan had become indispensable not only because of her duties, which she indeed performed well, but also because of her chattiness. She chatted with people when they were feeling sad, when they were feeling excited, when they maybe wished she weren’t chatting so much. Even still there was something comforting about the chatter for Shek Yeung, who’d lived the first half of her life surrounded by the gossip and unsolicited advice of other women. A few months ago, Yan-Yan had turned most of her attention toward one of the newer crew members, a tall, wiry woman from northern China at least five years older than Shek Yeung herself. From afar, the two looked more like mother and toddler than potential lovers. Shek Yeung often heard the two talking late into the night in their characteristic pidgin of Cantonese and the northern dialect.
