There is Always a Burning
Karen L. Abrahamson
Published by Twisted Root Publishing at Smashwords
"There is Always a Burning," Copyright © 2010 Karen Abrahamson
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There is Always a Burning
Karen L. Abrahamson
Admiral Xeng Chu would avenge this day.
The sail snapped in the breeze above the wood-sided junk. Smoke stung his nostrils and he hunched in his armor as the small vessel bobbed in the vastness of the Emperor’s damnable Tanggu harbor.
And his fleet burned.
Vast, blackened-hulled and imperially anointed, still that could not save ships that had sailed to the edge of the known world. The solemn black rags of their shame rose and filled the sky while the flags and banners of the Emperor’s men lined the shore. Imbeciles.
Beyond them, the clutter of the unfriendly city of Tanggu grew up the slopes from the water in a blighted maze of stinking wood and tile buildings.
So unlike the pristine vastness of the Arab sands. So unlike the cool marble halls of the Indian Maharajas.
Home. Once upon a time. The bloody city.
Admiral Xeng shook his round head as the final ship caught fire. “It’s done and it’s a crime against the people; another castration just as surely as they castrated me as a boy.” He clutched the precious casket he wore around his neck. Small and ornate, it carried his three treasures, dried and shrunken, that would go with him to his grave.
Soon now, if the scheming court eunuchs and mandarins had their way. He had amassed too much power and so they brought him down.
Flame licked the hull of his flagship. A new wind blasted the smoke and ash from the sky as if no one should remember the vessel’s great voyages. Beyond her, the charred remains of lesser ships plunged beneath the Yellow Sea, sending steam toward heaven.
“Man is meant for creation, for great things – that’s what sent me on these voyages. Instead a mad court does this.” He shifted his gaze to the burning flagship. “Would that I’d kept sailing east instead of turning north for home. I would have proven us men.”
“You were ordered to, Sir.” Hwe Fong, Xeng’s adjutant, watched the fall of the ships, his shifting features inscrutable. “The tribute had to be delivered.”
“And you? Shall I deliver you to the Emperor, too? A pet djinn for his pleasure?”
Hwe’s eyes gleamed once, brightly, as if the thought excited him and Xeng shook his head.
“I think not. You’d have the court in turmoil in no time at all. And the emperor is a man.”
The smaller Hwe looked like the original man - the son of a hill tribe shaman - but that had changed when the fleet visited the coast of Persia. A djinn had destroyed the real Hwe and Xeng had captured that same djinn: made possible because the djinn tricked men - and Xeng was no longer a man.
“Does the Emperor need more treasure?” Hwe’s voice was measured.
“He’s already the Son of Heaven,” Xeng snapped. He glanced sideways at Hwe whose features flickered between the thin hill-tribe face, and the swarthy visage of the djinn. Only the eyes remained the same.
They carried possibilities.
That, and pride that he had subjugated such a creature, were the only reason Xeng had let the thing live.
A crack sounded like a gunpowder explosion. The flagship’s massive hull parted and the prow plunged into the black depths. The inferno-filled stern floating on oil-tarnished water and the wind fanned the flames like a court concubine. Even from this distance the betraying heat burning Xeng’s skin.
He felt like that ship: broken when they had made him not-a-man, and yet still an ember smoldered. It could burn again given half a chance.
“Turn the boat about. There’s nothing more to see.” He turned back to the hopeless, stinking streets of Tanngu.
They would turn him into a court eunuch again, and his true castration – the castration of his spirit – would begin anew.
Hwe Fong stepped close. “The pain this brings you. Perhaps there is a way….”
Xeng snorted; he’d heard these temptations before. “I only wish it were so, my friend.”
#
Dark waves ahead, and mists filled the sky, but the solid wooden deck of his flagship carried him proudly over the waves as it had for so many years. Home. He was home and yet he had a sense of strangeness that could not compete with the strangeness in his body.
Xeng staggered, then caught himself against the rail. His crew worked methodically over the rigging of the nine, red, silk sails. His ship as it should be.
But his robes draped differently. He stood straighter and had not gone to fat so much around the middle.
Hwe appeared at his elbow.
“What is this? Where am I?” He grabbed the little man’s shoulder. “I feel….” The strange timber of his voice; the way it rumbled in his chest. His breast no longer sagged against the silk. His thighs cradled something other than the urination tube he’d worn since castration.
Hwe gazed at him. “Where else would you be, Lord Xeng?”
Xeng squeezed the djinn’s shoulder and shook him. “But the burning…. The mandarins….”
Hwe’s lips quirked. “Burning? It is many days since you ordered us east, Admiral. They’ve no ships that could pursue.”
“East?” He peered east across the ocean, but the mists defied his eyesight. “We’ve just returned from the kingdoms of the Indus.”
Hwe raised his brow and leaned in close, his breath smelling of damp shadows and things under rocks. “Do not say such strange things in front of the men.”
Xeng rubbed the itch of a moustache lip, the slight growth on his chin. He had never owned such things. He was certain of it. Certain of the burning, and his body. But his body was – changed.
Whole.
His fists clenched with more force than he’d had before.
The world and he were whole again. Master of all he saw.
He threw his shoulders back and Hwe bowed low. As he should.
“Admiral, the men think we near land. Note the coolness of the air. And there are more seabirds and sightings of great fish.”
Xeng nodded cautiously. But he had just watched his ships burn. If the world had changed and he had never gone westward, how did the djinn still stand beside him? A trick? Surely the djinn knew better than to try anything.
A mist lay across the ocean, like the confusion in his mind. To cross the ocean took great time and yet he recalled nothing.
But then a wind parted the fog.
“Land!”
The lookout’s call brought his crewmates to work. With the parting of fog, came the distant sound of surf, the scent of sea-wrack. The men lowered rigging that could carry them onto the rocks ahead.
The thick strands of excitement caught in Xeng’s belly, caught in his groin and tightened. He wanted to yell, to shout his victory to the world.
He gripped the rail of the ship and an unfamiliar need washed through him.
Ping.
His body ached for the girl he had named ‘happiness’ when they traveled to the Emperor’s court as children. Ping who was the Emperor’s favorite consort. Ping who Xeng loved.
“North or south, Admiral?” Hwe asked.
Xeng studied the sky. “The current tugs us northward. Let us follow the path the ancestors have chosen.”
Hwe kow-towed, and retreated.
Xeng allowed himself a strange sense of destiny. He would explore this place, name it and be forever remembered for it. He would father children who would inherit it.
The current carried them into the broad mouth of a straight, carried them northward where black and white whales coursed past their prow, schools of fish flashed silver in the waves and the sun lifted over tall mountains to the east, like the tallest peaks of Pu Tuo Shan, home of the compassionate one, Guan Yin.
There were spirits here, he was certain. This place seemed created with the perfection of the temple gardens, each tree placed with purpose.
The land receded into a great bay. A group of plank houses sat before the pine and cedar and thin trails of smoke rose into the air. A line of low craft launched into the water.
Surely this was real. The burning of the ships was the dream, his castration was the dream. There could not be so much destruction in a life.
He realized his casket with his three shrunken manhood treasures - was gone. Instead he smelled wood smoke from shore and felt his blood burn through his veins.
On shore he saw women.
He would accept this better reality and assume the greatness this voyage would bring him. That would be his one good decision in life. It was all each man could ask.
#
The people from the shore were an intelligent, long-haired race with eyes dark as his own, high cheekbones and skin ruddier than his and his men’s. The men were similar height and straight bodied, though bare-chested, and clothed in animal skins tanned to fine leather.
They rode great carved canoes and climbed the ladders lowered for them and strode up to Xeng with a swagger that said they owned this place.
Xeng half-bowed, and offered them a drink of the last of his wine. The men tasted, spat it out, then gestured from Xeng to the shore.
“I’ll go with you,” he said. He turned to Hwe. “You and ten men will accompany me. Tell Admiral Chan he is in command.”
Xeng traveled in one of the native boats sculpted from a single log. At the shore he gave thanks to the ancestors who had brought him here. It was his land. His children’s land.
The thought filled him.
The tightness, the need, was a treasure.
The village’s sloping roofs and posts were topped with strange creatures on guard, like the King of Heaven and his ogres guarded the lintels of Dao temples.
Smoke-scented people flooded down the beach towards him, men, women, children clad in tanned leather and capes decorated with shiny rounds of abalone.
Ancient elders circled Xeng and his men, spoke in low voices. Beyond them warriors stood guard – great men by their strength and weapons they carried.
But it was the circle at the rear that drew Xeng’s eyes: bare breasted women, some with babes in arms. Their long, braided hair hung over their shoulders; their dark eyes gleamed.
Those soft features, the smooth skin. He half closed his eyes, then was drawn back when a tall villager entered the inner circle.
The newcomer was crowned with a cone-shaped wicker headdress with black and white feathers hanging from thongs. The feathers rustled in the wind. They circled the man’s face and hung down his back as if he would, himself, fly away.
He greeted Xeng, then led him and Hwe towards a house - until a great black bird swooped from a cedar tree and landed on the carved likeness on the lintel. The bird croaked a sound like rocks splitting.
Hwe clapped his hands over his breast and bowed. “Brethren, I greet you.”
“Brethren?” Xeng looked at the djinn.
Hwe nodded at the black bird. “My brethren. The bird. And I saw a large grey dog when we landed.”
“A dog, a bird…?”
Hwe’s grin returned. “The first people – the transformers like myself – they take many shapes. Make many shapes and live among the people teaching lessons. They may not be pleased at our coming.”
“A bird and a dog have nothing to say about it. We will have this place for the emperor and ourselves.”
Hwe’s nodded, but Xeng’s attention had already caught on a young woman with skin like gold honey and Ping’s high cheekbones. The delicate bow of the woman’s mouth reminded him so much of his beloved.
“They are a fine people.”
The bird croaked.
Hwe looked at it and turned thoughtful. “Perhaps this place is for itself, Admiral.”
Whatever that meant.
Xeng pushed past into the building.
He gave glass beads from the ship’s trading stores and in return received thick furs and the elder’s welcome to stay among the Sal’sh people.
When he left the building he found Hwe waiting. “We’ll build a camp down the shore. We’ll trade and refurbish the ships and explore. The men will have a chance to be something other than ship’s rats for awhile and we’ll make our future.”
In the shadow of cedars women sat weaving baskets of bark and quill. Among them was the young beauty.
“So be it.” Hwe’s face flickered as he followed Xeng’s gaze. “But be warned, Admiral. Sometimes men’s futures are already written. It’s not good to impose ourselves on other places.”
Hwe’s eyes had lost their dreaming look. Now they flashed keen and ready – as they had before the true Hwe’s destruction.
Xeng caught his shirt-front. “I tire of your insolence, djinn. I’ve almost ended you before; don’t tempt me again.”
Hwe’s features softened. His hands came up, disarming. “Blessed Admiral, have I not been your ally? Do not chase away such friends as you may need again.”
“Pah!” Xeng spat. “I’ll make my friends among such as these.” Xeng motioned to his sailors, to the Sal’sh. “At least they’re men.”
He abandoned Hwe and caught a sailor by the shoulder and led him down the beach past the village’s midden of oyster shells, to a sunny piece of shoreline.
“What’s your name?”
“Po Leung, Sir.”
“Well, Po Leung, we’ll build camp here. Get the natives to help while we repair ship’s hulls. I want you in charge.”
“Me, sir?” The man’s eyes wavered towards Hwe.
“Just get the camp built.”
He left the man giving hesitant orders to his fellows and turned back to the village, stopping to watch the women. The girls giggled, glancing at him and away.