The Night Watch

  Major Oliver was in his early forties. No bulky muscles: rather ropy for a Southsider. Lean-faced. The young men from the Southside had always struck Wire as loud and silly, but somewhere around the age of thirty they all seemed to grow into a curious kind of silence, different for each one. In Nick’s case the silence shut you out, empty as the prairies while he worked on a truck engine or studied circuit diagrams. Major Oliver had a different kind of silence, a listening kind. His listening was like a well so deep you found yourself talking into it; your words falling into that deep quiet. You leaned forward, straining to hear the echo.

  “Anything else?” he asked her.

  “More food. Apple juice for Lark, when she wakes up.”

  “We’ll get some.”

  “She can’t drink that disgusting soy milk stuff, and I don’t blame her.”

  “We’ll get the apple juice.”

  “Yeah, well. Okay. Thanks.”

  Major Oliver smiled briefly. Tired crow’s-feet gathered around his eyes. “Do you still want me to lick a cat’s ass?”

  “Until it bleeds,” Wire said. They both laughed at that, and then immediately Wire hated herself for laughing with him. Traitor. The deep silence started to close over them again. “Sorry about your men,” Wire said.

  “Are you? I’m surprised. We just chased you across the mountains. Took your friend’s daughter by force. Brought you both here against your will. Why shouldn’t you be glad Ranford’s men haven’t come back?”

  “That’s sick.” Wire grimaced. “They were just doing their job. Good grief, they’re only boys with muscles.”

  The major regarded her. “I wonder if I would be so understanding.”

  “I know what it’s like to be lost in the Forest,” Wire said. Remembering the way the cedars creaked and swayed overhead. The way the rain dripped down. She touched the locket at her throat, the cameo Raining had made for her.

  “Ms. Chiu painted that charm, didn’t she?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Part of my job. As the Intelligence man with the Chinatown file I studied a lot of tape of Ms. Chiu. Looked at a lot of her work. She’s very good, isn’t she?”

  “Did you have Nick’s apartment bugged?” The Southsider had the manners to look uncomfortable. Wire laughed. “Boy, I’ll bet you got an earful.” She stopped. “Did he ever hit her?”

  “Nick Terleski was a good man.”

  “Did he hit her?—Look, I’ve hit her, okay? So you don’t have to cover for Nick.”

  Oliver looked away. “I don’t know for sure. Maybe shook her once or twice, early on.—Did you know he played hockey?”

  “Nick? I had no idea.”

  “Not in the Infant’s league, of course. But there’s a six-team league from the other Service units. No familiars. He played left D. Not a great skater. A lot of grit. You try to get the D rattled. Forecheck hard. We had a guy on our team, Dan Sheehy. Always a yap or an elbow. Nick drove him crazy. Could not get a reaction out of him. Eventually Dan just left him alone. He knew Nick would always take one for the team.” Oliver glanced at Wire with the ghost of a smile. “I tell you, our boy Dan could have learned a few things from Ms. Chiu.”

  Wire laughed. “You want to see my Fat Picture?” she said, taking the locket off. The major crouched down next to her. He needed a shower. But then, so did she. There hadn’t been much time for anyone to bathe or sleep in the last twenty-four hours. Oliver turned the locket over. Wire liked his hands.

  Suddenly he cocked his head as a priority transmission came through. He listened attentively. Moments later a supplementary landscape of data began to slide across his contacts like reflections of a countryside streaming across a truck window. “I have to go,” he said, rising and returning the locket. Halfway out the door he turned and gave her the strangest, most attentive look, the brother perhaps to his curious silence. First at her; then, even longer, at Lark. Data slid before his eyes, unread. “I wonder how this will all turn out,” he said.

  “No you don’t,” Wire said, surprising them both. “You think you already know, don’t you?”

  Silence. “I have to go.”

  “Don’t you?”

  He turned away.

  When he was gone the silence settled back like a fat man sinking into an armchair. “Well, damn,” Wire said. Lark was still asleep. Wire fingered the locket. Her own face, running to fat. Hair done up. Raining’s little threat that she would turn into her own mother.

  No, that wasn’t fair. The woman carved on the locket could be in her future. That was one of Raining’s great gifts, really: to look into the future and face the hard things there. And Wire had always said, what use is that? You have to look for the sunshine if you want to find it…But maybe Rain was right, maybe she would grow old and plump. Not, oh, of course, someday—but for real.

  Maybe Ranford’s men would never come out of the Forest. Maybe David Oliver would be killed by sniper fire. Maybe Lark—Stop. Stop that.

  One of the Buddha statues began to hum.

  No, several of them were humming. And they hadn’t just begun, they had been doing it all the time since she and Lark were brought to this room. Before that, probably. Wire hadn’t noticed it before, that was all. The chanting was very soft, quieter than silence even, but very powerful. The planets might make such a sound, spinning and swinging through space. “Well, what do you think about all this?” she whispered to the nearest smiling Buddha. He was made of carven jade; tiny rubies glittered on the side of his nose, and one above his left breast, and one gleaming richly from his naval. Two more hung in his pendulous ears. “Is everything going to be all right?”

  The jade Buddha regarded her with a benevolence that could shatter stone. A serenity that could unmake worlds. It beheld her utterly, and she dropped her eyes. Then, with glacial slowness, the stone Buddha winked.

  Wire scowled. “Oh, sure, fine,” she growled. “What do gods know, anyway.”

  Chapter

  Eighteen

  While Wire and Lark were confined in the little shrine room in Government House, Water Spider was waking up on the wrong side of Hastings Street to the sounds of his father making tea. His mind was hazy with sleep. They had rescued Jen, though: he remembered that. His father’s old fingers had gripped the hilt of his ancient sword and a power had woken in him that Water Spider had not seen before. For the first time he beheld the man who had been one of the Emperor’s knights in the dark days of ’04.

  Then they had come back, stopping at Li Bing’s house to get Li Mei. Water Spider made them do that. He knew Huang Ti would sell her to the Snows. That fat man had loved the idea of importing some muscle for the Mandarinate. Now the muscle was sitting with its boots on Huang Ti’s desk. Water Spider wondered how much the pompous fool was enjoying the sensation.

  He opened his eyes and winced against the daylight. How long had he slept? Three hours? Four? He was getting too old for this. His father was ninety-six and perfectly spry, but that was magic, no doubt. Magic or the pickling effects of decades of plum wine.

  The good-tempered kettle chuckled and wheezed. Small cups and saucers rattled from a cabinet. Then clink, the lid of the little teapot coming off. Then his father prying up the tin lid of the tea canister, squeak, and the spoon, shtump! digging into tea dry and brittle as beetle shells.

  The wonderful musty secret dark green smell.

  Dry tea scooped into the pot, rattling like rice falling on a tile floor. Floating Ant’s stove got to its punchline and the little kettle shrieked with merriment. Floating Ant picked it up. Hot water, still laughing helplessly, tumbled into the teapot. Water Spider imagined the tea leaves unfurling, opening their arms to the hot water as to a lover’s embrace.

  Water Spider wanted only to curl up and go back to sleep while his father took care of everything…but he was not a boy anymore. The cherry blossoms were beginning to fall for the forty-fourth time since his birth. An unlucky year, Pearl had teased him. Her fortunetelling appeared to
be reliable.

  He remembered his parting with Pearl.

  His father’s wrinkled face appeared, bending over him. “Come,” the old man said quietly. “Take some tea with me.”

  Li Mei slept on a pallet, her mascara smeared. Jen lay on the floor, snoring lightly, with a pile of clothes for a pillow. Water Spider and his father took their cups out onto the balcony, stepping quietly so as not to wake the sleepers. The balcony faced north. Water Spider’s heart leapt to see the white-capped mountains there, cold and pure. As always their distance, their cold serenity, infused his spirit with feelings of honor and mystery. “I have missed this view of the mountains,” he said. “I had not realized how much.”

  Chickens clucked on the next balcony over. Floating Ant poured the first cup of tea from his small pot and held it up to the mountains. “Greatest health,” he said, and then dumped the tea out into the street below. He had done this for as long as Water Spider could remember; a fit and pious way to dispose of the first cup, which connoisseurs usually declined to drink, anyway.

  Floating Ant had made some of the precious Ti Kuan Yi for them, the Iron Goddess of Mercy. The color was perfect, the pale green-gold of new leaves; the taste was delicate yet dark, an elusive, acrid yin flavor, like the smell of hemp burning out of sight on a damp day. “I was amazed to see you drinking almond tea when I came here yesterday, Father. What happened to the man who said, ‘You may drink low wine, for wine leads down to the Nine Hells; but to drink poor tea is blasphemy, for tea leads up to Heaven’? Next I will find you drinking lowest quality jasmine.”

  “Never! I was not drinking almond tea. Impudent child.”

  Water Spider grinned. “What was it, then? A white lichee? With milk in it?”

  His father did not answer. Curious, that he should deny it, but Water Spider remembered the almond smell clearly, sweet and bitter at once. Then he remembered the smell of burning paper. And his father, all in white. “Oh.” Water Spider’s hand froze in the act of bringing his cup to his lips. “It was White Blossom in that pot.” A traditional suicide in some of the older parts of Chinatown. “That was why you would not let me drink it,” Water Spider said. “That was why you wore robes of white. The death you had dressed for was your own.”

  “We do not need to talk about these things,” his father said.

  “Those old men were there to see you to the spirit world.”

  “I will not talk of this with you.”

  The wind had come up like Heaven’s broom and swept the sky clean while Water Spider slept. In the clear afternoon sunlight he could plainly see the forests on the lower slopes of the North Shore mountains. Higher up, their snowy peaks blazed with white fire. Together they drank, father and son, and beheld the day.

  “Your man is hurt in spirit,” Floating Ant said, glancing back at Jen. “His body sleeps, but his soul is wounded.”

  “He is lucky to live at all. Lucky that you came to draw him out of hell. I am ten thousand times grateful. You saved my honor with his life.”

  “Hell is not so easy to leave as that.” Floating Ant closed his eyes. “Our darkest hells we carry within.” He glanced at his son. “Do you know that saying, ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once’? No? Well, you always were shockingly ignorant.”

  “How can I express my grief at having failed you?”

  “Wah! Now, no need to get all stiff and offended.” Floating Ant laughed. “You always were a little crab: mince, mince; pince, pince! No, heavens, Spider: I am ninety-six years old. Of course I know more than you. Shakespeare, that was. From King Lear. No, Julius Caesar. Lear is ‘Thou shouldst not have grown old, before thou wert wise.’ Well…” He sipped his tea. “Remember, I grew up in a Peach Blossom time, an ordered, peaceful world. I did not need to learn how to fire a gun or purify water. As a young man I visited Shanghai and Paris and New York, and it was easy. It truly was a global village back then…and we the village idiots. We felt we had tamed the world. We forgot we lived only at its whim, like pilot fish swimming at the shark’s flank. Then the world woke up, and reminded us.”

  He took a little more tea.

  “I suppose you have wondered why I chose to die a thousand deaths, ah? Why your father, one chosen by the Emperor, should have been the only one to betray him, to run from the great battle at the Carnegie and live forever with that shame. You need not answer. I know this must be true…Do I know the answer to this question? How can I? It was very long ago. But I can tell you what I think I remember, looking back through the long wine-colored years.

  “You see, I had a little boy at home. I had a little boy, and the times were very dark. Many parts of Chinatown were taonan then: the crazy fear, the mob fear that makes a man kill for a cup of rice, or a bicycle, or a gun. Everyone was desperate to run, but there was nowhere to go. To the east, the Hill had woken, born in the dungeons of Simon Fraser University. An evil set of buildings if there ever was one. Dark monsters spilled from it. Downtown was swallowed overnight in a Dream of glass and steel. The bridges were clogged with panic; monsters rose up to feast on the people trapped there. For a time, Main Street remained clear, but then the Sikhs walled off Little India to outsiders, and that route was closed. A warlike people. I don’t know what became of them.

  “Up the Fraser Valley, the rivers threw off their dams. They did no other evil to people that I heard, but thousands drowned in the floods. Everything ran on hydroelectric power then; within three days it was gone. By then, the water was going bad.

  “How could I leave my wife to this? My little son?” He looked at Water Spider. “I could not find the way. Some did. Not many of the Emperor’s men had families, but some did. Those men managed to find a way to die. I could not.”

  Water Spider held up his empty cup. “So, in a way, I am responsible for what you did that day.”

  Floating Ant blinked. “Of course not. This was more than seventy years ago. You were not that boy, Spider. That was my first son. We named him Chang An, but called him Peanut, because of how he looked on the ultrasound at fifteen weeks. By the time he was born, we were in the habit of using this name.”

  “I have a brother? Where is he?”

  “Oh, he is dead. He died only a few days after the Carnegie battle. Maybe ten. The water was very bad. He took a fever and all the water left him, shitting and vomiting. He burned down like a birthday candle, not even one year old. Poor little Peanut…No brother. Very sorry. No need to cry, Spider. This was all a very long time ago. I made many tears for this boy already, and for his mother. Their spirits rest easy. Here—wait only a minute. I shall put the kettle on again, and refresh the pot.”

  Floating Ant paused at the balcony door with the teapot in his hands. “So, Spider?” he said softly to his son. “Did you think sorrow was new?”

  To the north, the mountains were just as they had been before Floating Ant began his tale. Just so cold and pure and distant. What is real? My weeping son. Floating Ant said, “Sorrow is a hidden continent. Only when a man discovers his own grief does he see the broad landscape of sorrow, stretching away, away.”

  “More tea,” Water Spider said. “Please.”

  He only slept, I said. The herbalist agreed.

  “Here,” he said, his nails the color of the moon

  Tapping my boy’s cheek,

  Light as moths bumping on a bamboo screen.

  “The shadow passed him over, like a cloud,

  Nothing more.” Our manly paper drum confidence.

  I smiled and held my wife’s hand

  Feeling the thin sand trickle of my luck running out.

  They had clams and noodles for breakfast, fried together with duck’s egg. Floating Ant was a very loud cook, rattling and banging his skillet on the iron stove, cursing the food when it had the impudence to burn and fussing over his teapot like a hen with a prize egg. Water Spider was used to his father’s cooking, but the red chili paste Floating Ant had worked liberally into the
noodles was a shock to Jen and Li Mei. Sleep fled their bleary eyes as if pursued by demons.

  “The sauce I got from a friend in the building, who knows someone in the Marina, who got it from a sailor in Seattle, who got it from a man in Portland, who makes it with peppers from Baja.” Floating Ant peered at Jen, who was slowly turning the color of a lobster. “Is it too strong?”

  “Pain is the way of the warrior,” Water Spider said callously. “Your story is impossible. We don’t have that kind of trade.”

  “You mean the official government of Chinatown has not sanctioned it. But there are plenty of merchants in Double Monkey’s part of town who are doing a nice underground business. Every day cargo comes through the port that you never see, because you don’t look on the north side of Hastings Street.” Floating Ant refilled Li Mei’s cup. “Have something to drink. Sometimes that helps.”

  Li Mei looked down at the fresh tea, which was still boiling hot and smoking fiercely. “Ten thousand thanks,” she gasped.

  “Wah! I have made your breakfast too spicy! My humblest apologies.”

  “Nonsense. ’Sdelicious,” Water Spider said, scooping another mouthful from his bowl. “You can’t be serious about people shipping goods up from Downtown East Side docks. Too dangerous.”

  His father shrugged. “Not so dangerous as it was once. And for the right price, you know…We have a great spirit for business, in this community.”

  Water Spider laughed and shook his head. “I wonder if the Minister for the South knows of this.”

  “Open-palm Johnny? Of course he does. That is his job.”

  “You know him?”

  “He is often in this neighborhood, Spider.”

  “I did not know that.”

  His father grunted. “Then I suppose you were not meant to.” He swirled a noodle around in a blob of chili paste. “The world is getting smaller again, I think. More dry land between the Islands, less ghost-water. Easier to get from city to city. More radios. Maybe soon mail service, weather reports, newspapers. TV! There is money to be made. Mind you, we will not make it if the Snows take over our little town.”