Free Hidden Cities by Daniel Fox Page A

she was sure, could cleave the waves as neatly as a blade. This was a statement, a declaration,
I can!
    A shout, a fling in the face of the goddess.
    Men died, so that one immortal might make her mark against another.
    Nothing changes.
    “I wonder what they wanted,” she said. “Who they were, where they were going.”
    The boy shrugged. “Wherever they went it would have been the same, fire and death.” And then, “No. Whatever they wanted it would have been the same, water and death, their deaths. Whatever they thought, this was always where they were going: to the belly of the dragon, or the belly of the sea.”
    “It is not only their deaths,” Ma Lin said. “The people will starve if they cannot fish, if they dare not go to sea.” She felt like a priestess, negotiating. The Li-goddess had always looked kindly on fishermen, and they on her; her temple in Santung used sometimes to smell more strongly of her worshippers than it did of joss.“Taishu will starve altogether, if her people lose touch with the sea.”
    “She may not always be this angry,” Han said. “I don’t know. She must have let boats sail once, before she was chained. Perhaps she will allow it again, later. But she has been in chains a long time,”
chained by men, held prisoner by your goddess
, “and she is very angry now.”
    She was, yes. Angry, and exultant also. At least, that was what Ma Lin saw, as the dragon breached again: bursting from the water to climb in giddy spirals, high and high. Food in her belly, if dragons needed food; freedom in her waters, freedom in the air. Freedom to strike, where men disregarded her and dared to sail unprotected. Death in her eye. She had much to celebrate.
    Also, she had a boy. A strange boy, but anyone would be strange, the dragon’s voice abroad, her plenipotentiary.
    Food in her belly if she wanted it, but not in his; he was dreadfully thin. And half naked, barefoot, alone …
    Ma Lin said, “Will she come back for you?”
    He smiled. “When she wants me, when she thinks I might be useful. Or when she is angry again, when something goads her temper and she needs someone to hiss at.”
    “Well. While you wait, come inside and I will feed you. Find you a shirt too, and a decent pair of trousers.”
    He shook his head, strange boy. Starveling creature saying no to food, which should have been his first thing. “I won’t wait for her,” he said. “Not here. She can find me when she wants me; she’ll know where I am.” As he knew, always, where she was. Ma Lin had seen that, how his eyes found her irrevocably, exactly. She wondered what it must be like inside his head.
    “Where will you go, then?” In his place she thought she might go far from the sea, far and far, hope to go so far that the dragon would lose touch.
    He said, “I have … someone in the city, if I can find her. She did this to me,” and his hand addressed the skin of his back, thetattooed characters he couldn’t see himself.
She gave the dragon to me
, Ma Lin thought he meant, or else
she gave me to the dragon
.
    “They have had typhoon in Santung, as well as war. She may not be there.”
She may not be living
.
    A shrug; she would not be as easily found as the dragon, perhaps. Nevertheless, he meant to look.
    “It is no good place for a boy to be wandering on his own.” She wasn’t actually sure that she wanted to keep him here, or why that would be, if it was so; she seemed to be arguing for it none the less.
    “No one will trouble me,” he said. “The dragon would not allow it.”
    “The dragon may not be near enough to prevent it.” A sudden blade in a back alley: what could the dragon do? If she were undersea, or soaring to the sun, or guarding her precious strait against another boat’s incursion?
    She expected another shrug, and won another smile: an expression of confidence, rather than carelessness. He thought the dragon would dance at his tail to keep him safe. Strange, strange boy. Or a