Naamah's Kiss (Moirin's Trilogy #1)

The ship pitched alarmingly. "You're sure?"

"Ahh….. no." Bao braced himself around me. "What about your people? Where do you go?"

I leaned my head against his shoulder. "We pass through the stone doorway to join the Maghuin Dhonn Herself in the world beyond this one."

"That's all?"

"Aye." The memory calmed me. "It's enough."

"Everyone?" He sounded skeptical.

I shook my head. "No. No, the bad ones, they wander lost for a time that they might ponder their wrongs. And oath-breakers….." I fell silent, remembering Clunderry. The green mound in the field and the standing stones in the blood-soaked wood. Morwen, my ancestral almost-namesake, had died there. She had sworn an oath and broken it deliberately, offering herself as a sacrifice. Her spirit would be forsaken for ten thousand years, spurned at every turn. I touched my chest where the spark of the Maghuin Dhonn Herself burned within me. The thought of losing it was unbearable. "It's longer for them."

Bao was dismissive. "Doesn't sound so bad."

"No?" I twisted in his arms. "It's a different kind of hell, Bao. And I would rather have my tongue ripped out than my diadh-anam."

To that, he had no reply.

My cabin door crashed open. I yelped. A flash of lightning showed Master Lo Feng in silhouette.

"My pupils." Despite the raging wind tugging at his beard and whipping his robes around him, he sounded as tranquil as ever. "You may find this instructive. Come and behold the storm."

"Master Lo!" Bao protested.

Our mentor beckoned. "Come."

We went.

Stone and sea! It was terrible and it was awesome. We stood atop our deck, clinging to the carved railing. The waves surged around us, lightning forking overhead amid the dark, roiling clouds. I stared, agape, as our ship climbed up the slope of a wave the size of a mountain, teetered on the precipice, then plunged into the trough.

"The sea is like the Way!" Master Lo called above the cacophony. "Ten thousand things arise from it!" He released the railing, clasping his hands together. "Surrender and be at peace with it. Let go of your fear and breathe."

I closed my eyes and drew shallow breaths, my chest tight with fear, salt-spray lashing my face. I didn't dare let go of the slick railing. The ship crashed into the bottom of the trough, timbers groaning. Sailors' shouts pierced the din faintly, distant as bird cries. Water sluiced across the deck.

Bao angled himself behind me, bracing me once more. "I'm here," he murmured in a low voice.

The familiar words made my heart ache. I had left Jehanne because my diadh-anam had sent me here. The least I could do was try to understand why.

I let go of the railing and rode the plunging ship.

When Master Lo spoke of the Way, I understood only bits and pieces of his meaning. What was the Way? It was the force and essence behind all things, the one thing that gave birth to ten thousand things even as the sea gives birth to clouds and rain and rivers and lakes. And it was far, far too vast for me to grasp.

So I thought instead of the Maghuin Dhonn Herself, who had led my ancestors south when the world was frozen. Her mighty tread, Her head blotting out the stars. On uninhabited Alba, Her immense paw sank into the soil for the first time, Her fearsome claws digging furrows in the earth. A freshwater spring rose bubbling around it.

In that moment, my people came to be what we were. And from that moment, our long history arose.

I thought about Naamah, lying down with a stranger for the first time—the bright lady surrendering herself to earn coin that Blessed Elua might eat. What had wandering half-mortal Elua known of love and desire and sacrifice before that moment? Nothing. Somewhere in that moment, the seed of the nation and the people of Terre d'Ange was engendered.

And a thousand years later, a Priest of Naamah laid down on the soil of Alba with a woman of the Maghuin Dhonn, and I was engendered.

Now I was here.

It felt like a revelation too large to encompass. I let it go. I let myself stop trying and breathed the Breath of Ocean's Rolling Waves, yielding to the moment. I was content to understand that the Way was as much bigger than my destiny as the ocean was our ship. Like the ship, my destiny would yield to it or break and be swallowed.

The knowledge gave me a strange sense of peace. Although I was soaked to the skin and my wind-whipped hair was lashing around my head, I was no longer afraid.

We stayed on the deck until the storm abated. Slowly, slowly, the waves dwindled from mountains to hills, from hills to hummocks. Lightning ceased splitting the heavens, thunder ceased to boom. The pelting rain diminished to a shower, then stopped altogether. The glowering bank of clouds broke apart, revealing a patch of blue sky.

"So." Master Lo Feng wrung out his soaked sleeves, then folded his hands into them. "Did you find it instructive, my pupils?"

Bao grumbled and banged the side of his head with his hand, trying to dislodge water from one ear. "Yes, Master."

I thought about my answer. I wanted to put my almost-revelation into words, but it was still too big and my understanding too imperfect. "Aye, Master Lo," I said at last. "I believe I did."

My mentor inclined his head. "Like the unborn chick scratching at the shell, you perceive the beginning of wisdom."

I sighed. "Just the beginning?"

Master Lo smiled. "It is a very good beginning."

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

We sailed and sailed. We sailed through an endless, narrow strait with green, fertile land on either side of it, land so close it made me yearn for earth beneath my feet and the scent of growing things. I nearly wept when it fell away behind us. We entered a new sea, turned north and set our course for the still-distant coast of Ch'in.

The more I learned about Ch'in, the more I learned I had to learn. I'd only begun to grasp the tenets of the Way and recognize the names and titles of myriad gods tangled up in Ch'in lore when I discovered that many folk followed a different path altogether.

Suyin gasped with shock when she discovered my ignorance. "You not know Sakyamuni? The Enlightened One?"

"No," I admitted.

She turned to Bao and conversed with him in her native dialect too quickly for me to follow. He protested; acrimony ensued.

"Come." Suyin grabbed my hand, leading me deeper into the women's quarters. "You meet him now."

She led me to a tiny chamber in which a beautiful bronze figurine sat cross-legged on a shrine, eyes closed, a peaceful smile on his face. The chamber was hazy with incense. Suyin lit another stick and placed it in the brazier, kneeling on a cushion before the shrine and pressing her brow to the ground.

"He was a prince in Bhodistan," Bao informed me. "He sat under a tree and meditated until one day….." He made an expansive gesture.

"He understood everything all at once. That's why he is the Enlightened One."

"Everything at once?" After my brush with revelation, it sounded overwhelming.

"Uh-huh." He nodded. "His teaching is called Dharma."

I gazed at the Enlightened One's face. Although it was youthful, the serenity in it reminded me of Master Lo. "How is it different from the Way?"

"Celibate monks." Bao grinned when I shot him a skeptical look. "It's true!" He thought a moment. "There are other differences. Masters of Dharma do not practice medicine like Master Lo—or alchemy," he added.

"Like Black Sleeve," I said, remembering.

He nodded. "In Dharma there are many more teachings, many more schools. They practice breathing meditation, but not like the Five Styles." Bao pursed his lips. "To follow the Way is to seek to live in harmony and balance with the world. To follow Dharma is to seek to be free of the world."

Suyin rose and spoke to Bao, pointing at a smaller figurine, a bronze woman standing gracefully beside the Enlightened One.

"That is Guanyin," he said to me. "She Who Hears Our Prayers. She is one who found enlightenment, but came back to help the suffering."

Suyin held out a stick of incense. "Now you make prayer."

I hesitated, then shook my head. "I'm sorry. I can't pray to a god I've only just met." Bao chuckled. Suyin thrust the incense at me and said somewhat insistent and aggrieved in her dialect. I put my hands behind my back, refusing her offer. "I'm sorry, but I can't! Bao, tell her I'm sorry."

He spoke soothingly to her. In time she relented and accepted my refusal, though it was clear it troubled her.

Later, I talked to Bao about it.

"Was that wrong?" I asked. "Did I offend her?"

"No," he said slowly. "Scared her a little, maybe. She can't understand why you wouldn't offer a prayer. I explained that you are a very strange barbarian girl who worships a bear, and that she must give you time."

"It's just….." I shrugged. "I don't know. I've been trying so hard to learn and understand, when I don't even know why I'm here in the first place. It was a shock to discover there are still so many big things I don't know. Big things right here on this bedamned ship, right under my nose."

"I know." Bao gave me a sympathetic look. "I'm a peasant-boy a long way from home, remember?"

"Aye, but you're going home," I reminded him.

He ran a few strands of my hair through his fingers. "You'll like it there. Look how well you speak the Shuntian tongue already. Better than I ever learned yours."

"Aye, because I've had naught else to do but practice for weeks on end!"

Bao laughed. "You'll see."

"When?"

"Soon," he promised. "We will sail into Guangzhou harbor, and then Imperial barges will take us up the Grand Canal to Shuntian. We will help Master Lo to drive out the demon inside the beautiful Princess Snow Tiger. Lord Jiang will relent, all will be forgiven, and the Emperor will shower us with rewards." He smiled smugly. "And then at last you will realize you're in love with me, and we will marry and have many fat, happy babies like in your D'Angeline hero's story."

I eyed Bao doubtfully. He didn't have an ounce of fat to spare, and I couldn't imagine our children would either. "Fat babies, eh?"

"Round as dumplings," he said cheerfully. "You'll see."

I sighed. "Well, I hope you're right about the first part."

He was right about one thing, at any rate. After being at sea for so long that my previous life had begun to seem like a half-remembered dream, the end of our journey was in sight. We reached the coast of Ch'in and began inching our way farther north.

Days passed.

Weeks.

The day I heard a sailor cry out from the observation platform in the tall center mast, I scarce dared credit it. But the cry was taken up and echoed by a hundred other tongues, the ship's crew and myriad passengers bursting into a babble of excitement.

"Guangzhou! Guangzhou!"

"Truly?" I whispered to Master Lo Feng. "We'll make landfall today?"

He nodded. "Truly."

Guangzhou was situated at the mouth of a great river delta. With ponderous grace, the enormous ship entered the delta and made for the harbor. I saw clusters of buildings and the green haze of willow trees. Soon, we would leave the sea behind us. I clutched the railing of our deck and forced myself to breathe the Breath of Earth's Pulse, slow and deep, containing my excitement.

"Uh-oh," Bao muttered.

Master Lo stroked his beard. "Hmm."

Half a dozen ships were heading for us at an alarming pace, oars churning the waves. Flags fluttering from their masts bore the emblem of a white dragon coiled on a blue background. I glanced up at the Imperial flag we flew. It was similar, but the flag was yellow, the dragon a vivid scarlet.

My heart sank. "Those aren't Imperial ships, are they?"

"No," Master Lo said soberly. "They are flying Lord Jiang's banner. I fear the war has begun."

The largest of the ships came alongside us, the others ranging behind it in a semicircle. All were filled with Ch'in soldiers. The big ship carried a strange cargo on its deck, immense bronze tubes pointed upward at us, hollow mouths gaping ominously. I didn't know what it meant, but my blood ran cold.

"I think we shall wish to hear this," Master Lo said.

We descended to the main deck. General Tsieh beckoned us over to the railing. "Jiang's men," he said grimly to Master Lo. "I think they mean to demand our surrender. Would you have me stand and fight?"

There were six ships to our one, but Lord Jiang's warships were only a fraction of our size. Counting in my head, I thought the numbers of soldiers must be nearly even; and surely with our height advantage, our archers could rain arrows down upon them. But Master Lo didn't answer, gazing at the deck of the warship below us, his gaze fixed on one man in particular. Not a soldier—a tall, elegant man in crimson robes.

"Black Sleeve," Bao murmured to me.

"Can we flee?" Master Lo asked quietly.

The general shook his head. "We're too big and the delta is too small. They would be on us in the time it took to turn. But—"

On the other ship, a portly man in ornate armor raised cupped hands to his mouth. "Esteemed General Tsieh!" he called. "I am Admiral Wen Chao. In the name of Lord Jiang, I humbly request that you surrender this Imperial greatship and its cargo!"

There was an acrid smell in the air. It stung my nostrils, evoking a distant memory that seemed out of place. Bao in the Circle of Shalomon's chamber, his staff spitting sparks.