Deep as the sky red as t.., p.26
Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, page 26
Against well-armed ships, the best strategy was often to wait until they had exhausted their fire. And yet the Portuguese just kept firing. Had they traveled here with Europe’s entire supply of rounds and black powder? So it was at some point during the third or fourth hour of engagement that the desertions started.
She should have expected this. Most battles at sea simply didn’t last this long. The briefness of most engagements and the threat of death to aspiring deserters were usually enough to keep most people fighting until the end, but now her people were confused, tired, and as a result of her recent spy-hunting, probably more than a little resentful of her authority.
“Hold the line!” she said, but of course that accomplished nothing.
Suddenly somebody shouted from the port side, “They’re boarding!”
Several of the Portuguese were already on board, whereas others were hacking through the ropes that bound the fishing nets and ox hides to the ship. It made no sense: if she’d had a ship as fortified as theirs, she would have simply kept firing or rammed the line. But there they were.
“Arms!” All the people who weren’t currently operating large guns reached for their swords or pistols or spears. In the space of the maybe ten heartbeats she had before the Portuguese climbed aboard, she sprinted belowdecks, found Yan-Yan hiding in her cabin with the baby as Shek Yeung had ordered her to do, and said, “Barricade the door. Keep a weapon in your hand. And do not let anyone in except me, not even if it sounds like the fighting has stopped.”
The Portuguese quickly swarmed the main deck, still outnumbered, yes, but better armed and better trained. Shek Yeung fought defensively, trying to conserve energy for what promised to be a long fight. She hovered a little off to the side of the younger, stronger crew members, waiting until they’d weakened an opponent enough so she could sneak in and deal the death stroke, freeing them to focus on someone new. When she noticed a Portuguese sailor using a pistol instead of a blade, she quickly closed the distance between them to nullify the advantage of his firearm, forcing him to draw his sword instead, which gave her enough time to run him through with hers. At some point, she found herself near the top of the stairs. That was when she glimpsed Yan-Yan.
Why had that ridiculous girl left the cabin? There she was, stubbornly blocking the door with a spear in her hands, the worst possible choice for the cramped conditions of the lower deck, but Shek Yeung never insisted that she learn to use anything else, did she? She’d thought she would be able to protect the girl from the worst of the fighting. A little off to Yan-Yan’s side stood the northern woman, armed with two knives.
Another blast rocked the ship, a solid hit this time. It threw her to the deck and slid her several paces. Her elbows bore the brunt of the impact, and she felt skin scraping away from bone as she tried to stop her momentum with only her arms. What actually stopped her was the body of one of her best men. She pushed herself upright, hands slipping around on the bloody deck.
And that might have been the moment—or maybe the moment right after, when Shek Yeung noticed the new wave of Portuguese boarding—that she realized she might well lose everything today.
Death crept along the ship like poison vines, clambering onto one person, and then another, and then another, making blood blossom from chests and bellies and mouths. It sprouted shoots belowdecks. Out of the corner of her eye, Shek Yeung saw Yan-Yan lunge at a man with her spear and get knocked against the wall. The spear fell. Yan-Yan hadn’t been able to make the kill, she realized. The girl had hesitated, and that was the opening the enemy needed. Shek Yeung elbowed her way closer, but the northern woman got there first, throwing herself at the man who towered over Yan-Yan. He stumbled, and his blade carved Yan-Yan’s arm open.
The northern woman thrust a knife into the man’s stomach and then, using both hands, pushed the blade down the center of his body, slicing him from sternum to groin.
“Get her inside!” Shek Yeung shouted at the northern woman, who nodded and dragged Yan-Yan back into the cabin. Not that that was going to do much good. The Portuguese would find them eventually, after they had killed everyone else.
Ma-Zou, I beg you.
The goddess, it was well established, went by two names: Ma-Zou, Maternal Ancestor, and Tin-Hau, Empress of Heaven. If one wanted something extravagant like riches or a household of sons, then one had to call upon the latter name. But if one needed urgent aid, then one had to call upon the former. Don’t believe it? Pay attention the next time a child gets hurt and cries, “Mama!” See how fast the mother comes.
She’d no sooner whispered her prayer than someone called from the stern, “Help is here!” Shek Yeung ran back up to the main deck, and what she saw made her almost collapse in relief: a hundred black sails coming over the horizon, blotting out the sky.
32
As Kwok Po-Tai’s hundred-odd ships closed the distance, a large multicolored flag went up on the frigate. Immediately the same flag went up on each of the brigs, and the Portuguese aboard Shek Yeung’s ship began to retreat, clambering back over shredded fishing nets and bodies. Her crew chased after them, trying to sneak in a few final thrusts of the spear or swings of the cutlass. Soon all six men-of-war had pulled away, abandoning the meetup, at least for now.
She told Binh, who was injured but still standing, to set a course for Canton, and then she bolted to her cabin. Yan-Yan was on the cot, bleeding through the layers and layers of bandage the northern woman continued to wind around her arm.
“We need more rags,” Shek Yeung told Ahmad, who immediately left the cabin in search of some. To Yan-Yan she said, “Hang on, we’re going to get you help.”
Once back in the city, they could hire a palanquin to the physician, assuming that the girl didn’t bleed out before then.
Ahmad returned with some rags. While the northern woman held Yan-Yan down, Shek Yeung unwrapped and rewrapped the wound, flinging the blackened cloth aside. “Dawa,” Yan-Yan rasped, “it hurts.”
Shek Yeung couldn’t yell at Yan-Yan, so she yelled at Dawa instead. “What the hell was she doing outside of the cabin? I told her to hide.”
“She did, but then she became convinced the barricade would never hold, so she hid the baby and came out. She thought that one body blocking the door was better than none.”
“Of all the stupid …” Shek Yeung glanced at the corner of the cabin, where Siu Yuet was sleeping, unharmed.
When the palanquin finally pulled up in front of the physician’s, Yan-Yan was no longer responsive. The man squinted at the wound and said, “I can stop the bleeding. After that, it’s hard to say.”
He shooed her away so he could work. I already lost one best friend on your watch, she wanted to say to him. Don’t make me lose the other.
The fever started after the bleeding stopped, as they all knew it would. Shek Yeung bought the most potent herbs the physician stocked and made from them a bitter-smelling decoction, half of which she used to rinse and dress the sour-smelling wound. The other half she had to convince Yan-Yan to drink.
Or to be accurate, force Yan-Yan to drink. “No, no,” Yan-Yan said each time, half-conscious, thrashing, face resolutely turned away from the cup. And each time, Dawa locked her in place from behind and gripped her chin while Shek Yeung pried open her mouth with one hand and tipped the liquid inside with the other. Both Shek Yeung and Dawa endured a few bites to the fingers this way. The violence of the process, of Yan-Yan’s bodily rejection of them, made Shek Yeung feel as though they were brutalizing the girl. On a few occasions she had to remove herself from Yan-Yan’s presence afterward just so she could calm her own nerves. The sight of a slack body that had given up the fight—she’d encountered it often enough on the flower boats.
In the end, all they could really do was wait and pray. After several days of fever—Shek Yeung was starting to wonder if she might not have used up all of Ma-Zou’s favors with that final-hour rescue from the Black Banner Fleet—she went to the fortune-teller. “I don’t care what you have to do,” she said to the older woman. “You have a connection to the gods, you ask them to save Yan-Yan.”
“I can draw a stick for your friend,” the fortune-teller said.
“I don’t want a fortune, I want help. What do you need? Expensive incense? Fruit?”
“My powers are what they are. Also, it is already fated how we all live and die.”
“Your freedom, then. If you intercede and Yan-Yan survives, I’ll let you go.”
It seemed the older woman’s eyes flicked to Shek Yeung’s and then back to its usual spot off in space. “I can’t guarantee anything.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
She sent Shek Yeung to buy supplies and hire musicians while she ritually prepared herself. Shek Yeung returned hours later with fine-grade incense, fresh flowers and fruit, paper money, sea creatures sculpted from agar, and two street musicians to whom she’d promised what must have sounded like suspicious amounts of money.
The fortune-teller had piled her own hair in the shape of a small boat atop her head, a red flower sticking out of it like a full sail. She’d also changed into a dark-blue short robe and a red skirt. The older woman set the altar with a sure hand, placing each offering on its own plate and then surrounding the plates with the flowers.
At the fortune-teller’s signal, the yee-wu player began his bowing. The song was a touch melancholy if for no other reason than that it was slow, and all slow songs played on the yee-wu hinted at parting, each drawn-out note an outstretched hand. Then the gu-zang player joined in, each delicately plucked note a teardrop.
“Burn the incense,” the fortune-teller said. Shek Yeung lit the joss sticks, bowing with them pointed first toward Heaven and then toward the Ma-Zou statue, three times each, before wriggling them into the sand in the brazier.
“Present the offerings.” Shek Yeung set the paper money aflame.
“Kneel.” Shek Yeung and the fortune-teller both kneeled.
“Kowtow.” This they had to do nine times.
“Make your petition.” Shek Yeung, still on her knees, fixed her eyes on the statue. “Ma-Zou,” she said, “please spare Yan-Yan’s life. I was the one who brought her into all this, and she got injured only because she was trying to protect my child.” She closed her eyes and bowed deeply one more time. When she opened her eyes, she saw that one of the joss sticks in the brazier had gone out.
And then one by one, the remaining sticks went out.
“Oracle,” she said. She described what had happened.
The fortune-teller frowned. Shakily, Shek Yeung relit the sticks—one didn’t need to be an oracle to know this was a bad sign—but after a moment they extinguished themselves again.
“I think you have your answer,” the fortune-teller said quietly.
“You light them.”
“What’s the use?”
“The gods like you more. You do it.”
The older woman laughed. “Is that what you think? The blind woman who was practically starving before she got abducted by pirates is favored by the gods?”
“You’ll notice you’re no longer starving. In fact, you eat more than some of the men in the fleet.”
“I hope your friend recovers, I do. But you don’t fear for or mourn any other member of the fleet like this. You said to Ma-Zou that you brought your friend into this life as if you didn’t bring most of the fleet into this life. Where’s your concern for them? What about the ones you killed? Is your compassion reserved for so few?”
“I don’t accept this,” Shek Yeung said. She’d never heard her own voice so shrill.
“Heaven doesn’t care what you accept and neither do I,” the fortune-teller sneered, and suddenly Shek Yeung was filled with so much hatred for her that she couldn’t contain it. So she raised her hand, ready to slap that look off the woman’s face.
The woman flinched.
“You’re not blind,” Shek Yeung whispered.
It all made sense. Who else besides essential crew members knew about every raid ahead of time? Superstitious as he was, Cheung Po never embarked on a campaign without first seeking a reading. And when had she met the fortune-teller, if not on the day she met Pak Ling? For all she knew, Pak Ling had planted this woman in Shek Yeung’s path that afternoon and asked her to deliver a fortune that would presage his appearance. Shek Yeung had invited his spy right into her fleet.
All the secrets she and Cheung Po had shared with this old woman, they were Pak Ling’s now. All their hopes about their child, their fears and doubts about their future. Pak Ling had probably laughed at each one.
“How do you send messages to Pak Ling?” Shek Yeung demanded.
“What?” The fortune-teller shook her head. “Fine, I’m not blind. But people believe you more when they think you’ve been touched by the gods. And I was hungry. We were all hungry.”
“Have any of your prophecies been real? No wonder you told me to retire. Was that Pak Ling’s idea?”
She was still shaking her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but my fortunes are as real as any reader’s. You draw a stick, the stick is associated with a poem, and I interpret the poem the best I can in that moment. And sometimes certain images or words come to me. I can’t control when or how.”
Shek Yeung drew her knife.
The fortune-teller put up her hands. “I swear, I haven’t lied to you about anything except the blindness. I’ll prove it. Lately I’ve been hearing in my mind the words, ‘Beware the tiger’s mouth.’ I’m not sure what it means, but I think you need to listen, I think the fleet’s survival depends on you listening.”
Shek Yeung slit her throat.
33
The fever broke on the ninth day. Yan-Yan asked for some water and then, later that afternoon, some food. Per the physician’s instructions, Shek Yeung went to the market and bought three dau of ingredients for blood purification and fortification, and then she and Dawa made a broth that tasted as bad as it smelled. Yan-Yan was able to keep the whole thing down, was even able to poke fun at her cooking a little. It wasn’t so long ago that their roles had been reversed: Shek Yeung, pregnant and nauseated, had gulped down every terrible thing that Yan-Yan had cooked so as to spare herself having to taste it. But what the dishes lacked in flavor, they apparently didn’t lack in nourishment. She was alive, after all, as was Siu Yuet, who spent most of her time since the battle napping away in Shek Yeung’s cabin as if nothing had happened.
When she noticed that Yan-Yan was using her left arm to feed herself, she asked, “Can you move the other arm?” Yan-Yan shook her head.
That wasn’t surprising. Whatever the blade hadn’t severed, the physician probably had. Yan-Yan didn’t seem particularly saddened by the loss—whether she would later, after the relief of surviving such an ordeal had ebbed, Shek Yeung didn’t know. Grief had the quality of a cast fishing line sometimes, in hand at the start, reaching the zenith only once it was in the distance, and not subsiding until even farther out, until it had traversed so much space as to have lost its force. Sometimes it never truly subsided.
What surprised her were the little slips of tongue and memory. One afternoon Yan-Yan asked for her. Shek Yeung hurried to the physician’s, only to be met with confusion. Not only had Yan-Yan forgotten why she wanted to see her, she’d forgotten having sent a messenger in the first place. Another time, the two of them were chatting, and Yan-Yan said, “I want to see your …”
“You want to see what?”
A panicked look crossed Yan-Yan’s face. “Your … that thing …” After a moment, she sighed and said, “Siu Yuet,” and Shek Yeung realized the word she’d been looking for was “child” or “daughter.”
Shek Yeung asked the physician about this.
“Well,” he said, “fevers do that sometimes.”
“Will she get better?” she asked.
He shrugged.
She had Cheung Po bring Siu Yuet over. When she placed the child in Yan-Yan’s lap, Yan-Yan cried in a way that Shek Yeung had never seen from her before. Eventually she calmed down, and instead of talking about why she’d cried, she simply said, “These clothes are getting too tight on her. We’ll have to find her bigger ones.”
After a few more days, the physician decided Yan-Yan was well enough to be discharged, or as well as she was going to be. Shek Yeung had seen this coming and knew what she needed to do.
She hired a couple of palanquins to take Yan-Yan, Dawa, and herself to the sam-hop-yuen. Siu Yuet she carried in a sling across her chest. In the courtyard, the longan trees were bare, but the kumquat were starting to fruit again. Recent rains had thoroughly washed the stone tiles and gave the appearance of a well-kept home.
Yan-Yan settled into the main bedroom, where Siu Yuet had been born to a woman who’d borne her only as a bargaining tool. Shek Yeung had grown to care deeply for Siu Yuet over the past few months. There had even been moments she congratulated herself for successfully acclimating to motherhood, like whenever she stopped Siu Yuet from crying or made her smile. But once the battle started, all she’d been able to think about was the survival of the fleet. Meanwhile Yan-Yan had risked her own life to save Siu Yuet’s.
“I know I said you could recuperate here for a while,” Shek Yeung told Yan-Yan, “but I lied. I want you to stay here with Dawa and with the baby.”
“Okay. How long do you want us to stay?” the girl asked, confused.
“This is your house now, Siu Yuet your daughter. And don’t worry about money. I’ll make sure everyone’s seen to.”
“Who’s going to manage the fleet’s finances?”
“Cheung Po and I will figure it out. You don’t need to worry about it anymore.”
“So you just decide that for me like my parents decided who I was going to marry?” Yan-Yan cried. “What if I don’t want to leave the fleet?”
Shek Yeung’s throat and chest were burning. “I don’t care what you want.”
