What was the bargain? demanded the Ojan—what price would she be required to pay?
No bargain: a simple gift. The demons of the Ojan’s previous acquaintance must be more greedy and ungrateful than those of Haisn if she believed she need drive a bargain. Wakè-ì’s sole concern was to conserve the Covenant of Heaven.
Having no choice, no other hope, the Ojan begged of Wakè-ì this boon, and in the succeeding scene, months later, she was accouched. The audience was not required to witness the birth, although I expect the company’s artisans were fully capable of producing the illusion. An enormous painting of the tiger-demon Wakè-ì overlooked the chamber where the Immortal waited—I noticed its eyes following the Immortal as He paced—and on an altar nearby an idol of the Kandadal. Now and then, when the Immortal looked elsewhere, wooden saint would wink at painted demon.
When midwife and surgeon brought the newborn babe, its Immortal father inquired whether it was fit, which the midwife assured Him it was.
Not a month later, as if in fulfillment of never-spoken prophecy, the Immortal of Haisn went walking among the grottos and cages of His menagerie and paused to contemplate the noble tigers in their moated vicinage. The male remained lazy, basking in summer sunlight, but when the female caught sight of the Immortal and His party she plunged into the moat. Somehow in an instant she scaled the sheer bank and tall fence. Before the guards and more decorative attendants could react the Immortal fell beneath her great paws. He looked up in terror and saw, not the yellow teeth and hot red tongue of a savage beast, but the ivory-carved face of a kè-torantin. Saw, and died.
The tigress was dispatched forthwith, of course. A quick-thinking courtier who may have glimpsed the same apparition made sure to slash the Immortal about chest and throat with his ornamental dagger lest the Son of Heaven’s death be ascribed to something as mortal as fright. As a matter of course the entire party was swiftly excruciated, then executed.
All the late Immortal’s court having been dismissed according to the terms of His marriage contract, the Palace Invisible and the government of Haisn were already in the hands of foreigners. The new Immortal was anointed, proclaimed, and removed from Her mother’s care while the widow was named Her regent. The Owe-ejan-akhar’s agents naturally expected her daughter to give them no trouble—to be timid, compliant, placid.
Once the Celestial seals were in the Ive-ojan-akhar’s possession she allowed her mother’s agents little time to discover otherwise. Aptitude for armed conflict she may not have owned but discovered an aptitude for those more civil forms of warfare known as governance. Taking their measures, she played the Ejan’s instruments off against each other. Those who would not play she had poisoned. As governors of near and far-flung provinces came to pledge fealty to the Immortal, Her regent-mother took their measures as well, sounded out their loyalties and alliances. She found excuses to exile her late husband’s delegitimated elder children to isolated, primitive towns in the desert west or sweltering south. The demon Wakè-ì was often consulted.
Naturally, nearly everybody of any importance outside her own faction, whatever their original loyalty, was outraged by the Ojan’s abrupt ascension. She had never been meant to serve as more than figurehead. But the Celestial Realm remained tranquil, barbarians of the desolate north and northeast beyond the Blue Wall caused no trouble, half-civilized nations to the south and southeast remitted their immemorial tributes, the tributes paid to the Owe-ejan-akhar’s annual embassy were not onerous. The funds the Ojan’s government dedicated to Haisn’s western defenses brought new prosperity to those neglected regions, and nobody cared to wonder aloud what the regent might fear from her own mother’s territories. Harvests were bountiful, trade within the realm and with the Regions Heaven Does Not Acknowledge rewarding: the country was prosperous and there was no claiming the Covenant of Heaven set aside.
Upon the Ive-ojan-akhar’s arrival in Bhekai, the acolytes of the Kandadal in her train had established temples in the city and a monastery at Geì, three days’ journey upriver on the cliffs of the famous defile. For some time they made little impression on a populace content with their own philosophies and native saints and gods. Nevertheless, it was well known the Immortal’s mother was a devotee of the Kandadal. To persons of influence or who wished to be influential the logic of becoming familiar with this foreign cult could not be argued against. Before the Immortal achieved Her tenth year of immortality the monastery’s quota of monks and nuns had doubled and doubled again. In temperate season the acolytes stalking Bhekai’s avenues and byways without clothing or other impediment save staff and offering basket were as likely to be third and fourth children of Haisner aristocrats, scholars, bankers, and merchants as tall barbarians. Their families boasted of them in public.
In the years of the Immortal’s childhood Her mother and the obliging demon Wakè-ì became lovers. This too was a part of the story I had not known and I wondered if it were an invention of the Company of the Kandadal’s Colored Cat. Perhaps they needed to amortize the cost of devising the demon puppet. I did not myself find these scenes arousing but I have never favored women. As best I could determine in dimness and clamor, the Sjolussene envoy and his inamorato were similarly unimpressed.
A supernatural entity, the demon contrived to impregnate the Ojan—it was not mentioned whether the seed was Wakè-ì’s own or if she had acquired it of mortal man or masculine god or demon. The Ojan herself, of course, was astonished and appalled before beginning to surrender to her maternal instincts. Of course she could not afford to be seen to be in that condition for she had no husband, no acknowledged lovers. Fortunately, the fashion of the day already valorized fecundity. Any woman of means made certain of appearing gravid before being seen by strangers. Intimate servants were cozened, threatened, bribed. The Ojan bruited a wish to seclude herself for the hot months of summer at Geì, whose abbot had long ago been a Tall Rider before being appointed the infant Ive-ojan-akhar’s ayah and bodyguard.
A report was delivered, a coincidence it seemed, that her Immortal firstborn was sickly. The Ojan issued a shocking, unprecedented order: the Immortal must depart the Palace Invisible and the capital to accompany Her mother to Geì, where highland airs and plain, good food would restore Her health.
Some years before I had visited Geì myself—not precisely a pilgrimage—so I recognized the magic-lantern scenery beloved of sentimental woodcut artists: the swift tumble of the river here apostrophized as Stormy Jade rather than Carnelian, the beetling, fantastically painted cliffs, the jagged spires that formed forested aerial islands. The monastery itself had been a picturesque ruin for two and a half centuries before I reached it, never fully reclaimed after the Shining Hands overthrew the false immortal who endeavored to suppress veneration of the Kandadal. I imagine the ruins I explored were more grand than the nearly new monastery of the Ive-ojan-akhar’s fatal summer visit but the painter of magic-lantern slides had not felt constrained by history. Here were the stupendous, strangely attenuated images of the nude, ascetic saint carved into the cliff face itself, three standing, five reclining, three kneeling in serene meditation, all adorned with garlands of sculpted and painted blossoms, each with the severe features of a Tall Rider of the steppes where the Ojan was born. Here, standing improbably tall rather than the stump I had seen, was the Tower that Longs for the Sky, there clinging to the cliffs the many aeries like vertiginous swallows’ nests fashioned of bamboo stems and silk cord for solitary contemplation, reached by way of dangling ropes. Here the Abbot’s House, its roof of tiles glazed jade green and gold upheld by sculpted demons bound with iron chains, there in its walled garden of roses, peonies, plum and cherry trees, the Hospice. Everywhere wind-whipped knots of the Kandadal’s eleven-colored ribbons: fastened to the tips of tall bamboo staves, strung across the gorge high above rushing waters, fluttering from the eaves of terrestrial buildings and aeries alike.