“Oh, yes, surely that is so.” She sounded anything but sure. Her frightened smile attempted to placate Lily.
Lily stared at the closed door in frustration. For a long moment she considered storming out of there and demanding the return of her things. But while Grandmother might be able to pull that off, she doubted her own ability to impress armed warriors when she was buck naked. Not in a way that added to her status anyway.
“Your ankle is hurt, yes?” Ah Hai said timidly. “When you are finished soaking, I will wrap it for you and apply salve to your other hurts. I have good salves. If you will sit, honored lái?”
Lily sighed, limped back to the nearest stool, and sat. “Tell me about the Zhuren.”
“They are very great,” Ah Hai whispered.
“Very powerful, yes,” Lily agreed, and began unfastening the braid she’d put her hair in roughly one day and two worlds ago. “We don’t have Zhuren where I come from.”
The woman sucked in a breath in startled sympathy. “I will pour the water now, if you will tip your head back.” She did so, wetting Lily’s hair thoroughly, then began working some of the soft soap into her scalp. Her fingers brushed Lily’s skin and Lily’s lips parted in surprise. Ah Hai was an empath, God help her. It was a very minor Gift, though, so maybe it didn’t cause her too much misery. The little woman might have to touch someone to pick up their emotions clearly.
Not that she’d pick up anything from Lily. Her own Gift blocked all magic, the helpful along with the harmful, although for reasons she didn’t understand, the kind of body sensing healers used did work on her . . . but Ah Hai’s empathy wouldn’t. That must seem very odd to the woman.
Half a dozen questions pushed into Lily’s mind. Her fingers itched to jot them down, but she didn’t have her notebook, a pen, or anything else, and she had to set priorities for this interview. So as Ah Hai lathered Lily’s hair, Lily coaxed her to talk about the Zhuren. Nothing secret, she assured the woman. Only those things that everyone here knew.
“Would you know our history?” the woman asked hesitantly.
“That would be good.”
Most of what Ah Hai told her came through clearly to Lily’s mindsense, suggesting the woman was on comfortable ground with the tale. For long and long, people here lived primitive lives. So many things wanted to eat them, and the people had so little! Without a village, a community, how could a person survive? And so they gathered in tiny villages, but life was hard. Most of the lái knew little when they fell through, after all. A man who had grown rice his whole life might know how to dig, plant, irrigate, and harvest, but he did not arrive here with all his tools. He might know how to make a bucket, but not how to make the tools he needed to do that.
Ah Hai rinsed Lily’s hair and applied hair oil, combing it through. She began lathering Lily’s body now. Lily did not hiss or flinch when the soap stung the shallow cut on her forearm. Warriors didn’t do that sort of thing.
That was the First Age, Ah Hai went on, and none knew how long it had lasted, for the people had neither the time nor the knowledge to make paper to write down their history. Then one day—oh, many generations ago, many-many—an entire village fell through. A large village.
No, Ah Hai did not know how such a thing could happen, but it had. Some said the earth shook so hard it broke open, revealing the intact village, but that was only stories, not part of the official teaching. But the earth did shake sometimes, did it not, when the great worm asleep at the heart of the world rolled over in her dreams? (The “great worm” bit didn’t sound Chinese to Lily, though she had the vague idea there was something similar in Greek mythology. Or was it Egyptian? Never mind, she told herself. She could chase mythological clues later. Of more interest was the idea that earthquakes were common enough to have birthed a myth.) So perhaps the world had shaken on that day, shaken so hard that the seal between worlds was broken, allowing a whole village to fall through.
This village had tools, everything needed to make life good, including a forge and a smelter, and with them arrived those with knowledge of basic metallurgy and metalworking—bronze, copper, and iron. Paper-making, too, and many other things. That village became Lang Xin, the bright heart of the world, and thus began the Second Age. People lived better, much better. Villages grew larger; famine grew rare.
Yet many beasts still hunted them. Life remained precarious until the dawn of the Third Age . . . when the Zhuren came.
Ah Hai grew downright animated talking about the arrival of the Zhuren. She poured water over Lily as she spoke, describing many portents, none of which sounded reasonable, but the core of her story was that the Zhuren had sailed along the Great Serpent to arrive at Lang Xin’s gates at dawn on that great day. Lily had not seen the gates? They were on the east side of the city and very old, very beautiful. She described the Zhuren as seven tall and beautiful boys. Not adults, no, Ah Hai said in response to Lily’s question, not when they first arrived, but each as tall as an adult man. They had been raised by the Kanas, inhabitants of a distant village, who had kept their existence a secret until it was time for them to take their places in the wider world. Many shrines had been raised to the Kanas, Ah Hai added.
“Shrines?”
Ah Hai sighed. “So sad. The dragons had been kept away from the village by the Zhuren. This angered them. It is said that when the Zhuren left, dragons flew over the village and burned it to the ground. We are told that not one escaped.”
“Tragic,” Lily agreed. And possibly convenient, if someone didn’t want it known just how the Zhuren came to exist. “The Zhuren must have been deeply grieved.”
“Oh, yes. They wore white for an entire generation to show their mourning. Honored lái, we have finished now with washing and rinsing, if you wish to soak in the hot pool.”
An entire generation? Lily stood. “How many generations have passed since the Zhuren arrived and the Third Age began?”
“We are in the fifth generation of the Third Age. Is your ankle very sore? Shall I help you into the pool?”
“No, I can do it. My people count a generation as thirty years. Is that how you count it?”
Ah Hai suddenly reverted to her earlier uncertainty. “This worthless one does not know numbers very well, honored lái.”
“It is not important,” Lily lied, and lowered herself gingerly into the water . . . the really, really hot water. Not boiling, she assured herself. If it were boiling, she’d see bubbles. Her skin was unconvinced by this logic, but if servant women did this all the time, a warrior could, too.