Beneath a Sea of Stars (A Follow the Stars Tale)

There were marks on the doorframe of the Pearl Hall.

Everybody in the Southern Sea knew about them. They ran up the inside of the great coral arch that led from the Dragon Emperor’s throne room to his family’s private rooms, little scratches in the pink stone, one above the other, each with a tiny character cut beside it. The first one was very low. About the height of a crab. The next was a little higher. And the next. And the next.

They went up very, very slowly.

For a very long time, there had been so many marks crowded together near the bottom of the arch that they looked like a ladder for a mouse. The palace guards used to walk past them and smile. The court ladies used to stop and point. Visiting dragon lords from the other three seas used to look at them, and then look at the small, loud, furious boy with the horns standing beside them, and say, ”Still?”

And the boy would say, ”I’m growing. I’m growing on the inside,” and kick them in the shin.

That had been a long time ago.

This morning, Prince Ao Tianyu of the Southern Sea stood with his back against the coral arch and his chin up and his heels flat on the floor, and waited for his mother to make the mark.

The Second Princess, Yuelan, stood on her tiptoes. She held a small silver knife flat across the top of her son’s head. She had to reach up to do it. She had had to reach up for the last three marks, and every time, Tian had felt it, and every time he had not been able to stop himself from grinning.

She scratched the mark.

He stepped away from the arch, and turned round, and looked.

The mark was right at the top. Higher than the one before. Higher than the one before that. Higher, by the width of two fingers, than a very old, very deep mark, cut long ago, on its own, off to one side, with a character beside it that said Ao Qin.

His father’s mark.

Tian stood and looked at it for a long time.

“Well,” said his mother, putting away the knife. “There it is.”

“There it is,” said Tian.

“You’re taller than your father.”

“I’m taller than my father.”

“Please don’t tell him like that.”

Tian was already gone.

* * *

Ao Qin, Dragon Emperor of the Southern Sea, was sitting on his throne of white coral in the Pearl Hall, listening to the Minister of Currents explain why the warm water off the eastern islands was flowing slightly to the left this year. He was a big dragon, in his human shape: broad-shouldered and heavy-browed, with a beard the colour of dark seaweed and a crown of black pearls, and a voice like a wave going into a cave. He had ruled the Southern Sea since before most of the islands in it had names. Fish swam out of his way in the corridors. Storms waited outside his door until he told them they could come in.

His son came through the coral arch at a run, skidded to a stop in front of the throne, and stood up very straight.

“Father,” said Tian.

The Dragon Emperor looked at him.

“I’m busy,” he said.

“I won’t be a moment.”

“The Minister of Currents is speaking.”

“The Minister of Currents is always speaking. He was speaking when I was born. He’ll be speaking at my funeral.” Tian nodded to the minister, who was a very old turtle in a long green robe, and who nodded back, wearily, because he had known Tian all his life. “Father, would you stand up, please?”

“Why?”

“Just for a moment.”

The Dragon Emperor looked at his son with his deep, dark, sea-coloured eyes.

Then he sighed, and put down his sceptre, and stood up.

Tian walked up the three steps of the throne and stood beside him. Shoulder to shoulder. Very close. Very straight. With his chin up.

The whole Pearl Hall went quiet.

The courtiers looked. The guards looked. The Minister of Currents, who was quite short, looked from one to the other and back again with his old turtle eyes, and then very slowly took a step back, as if to get out of the way of something.

It was perfectly plain.

The prince was taller.

Not by very much. By the width of two fingers. By the tips of his horns, which had come in properly at last, curving up and back from his forehead, pale and smooth as polished bone. But he was taller. Every dragon in the Pearl Hall could see it. For the first time since he had been born, Ao Tianyu was looking down at his father.

“Hm,” said the Dragon Emperor.

"Yes,” said Tian.

“You’ve grown.”

"I have.” Tian beamed at the entire Pearl Hall. “I’ve grown, Father. Did you notice? I’m taller than you. I’m taller than everybody. I’m the tallest dragon in the Southern Sea. I checked.” He spread his arms wide. “I was going to wait until dinner to tell you. But I couldn’t. I’ve been waiting a very long time.”

His father looked at him a moment longer.

Then he put one large heavy hand on top of his son’s head, the way he had done ever since Tian was small, and patted it.

He had to reach up a little to do it.

“Well done,” said the Dragon Emperor. “Now get off my throne steps.”

* * *

It had taken a very long time to catch up to everyone.

Dragons grew slowly. Everybody said so. Tian had heard it said so many times that he had stopped listening a long time ago. Dragons grow slowly, Tianyu. Be patient, Tianyu. You’ll grow, Tianyu. Eat your kelp. He had eaten his kelp. He had eaten a great deal of kelp. He had been patient for so long that he had forgotten what it was like to be anything else, and while he was being patient, everybody around him had grown up, and gone away, and got married, and come back with children of their own, and patted him on the head.

His cousin Zhaoyang had married an assassin.

His cousin Ren had married a phoenix.

That oaf Hallvard had married Elarinya.

And Tian had stood at the back of every wedding on his mother’s hip, in his best dragon robe with the golden buttons, with his short legs dangling, while the whole of Heaven and the Valley and the North said what a sweet little thing.

Not any more.

He walked through the Crystal Palace that morning, all the way from the Pearl Hall to the Garden of Anemones and back, the long way, past every guard and every courtier and every visiting lord, just so that they could see him. He ducked under every archway. He did not need to duck under most of them. He ducked anyway. He leaned on doorframes so that people had to look up to talk to him. He stopped in front of the biggest guard in the palace, a great grey shark-spirit called Bao who had once carried him around under one arm like a parcel, and looked down at him from a height of exactly half a finger, and said, very kindly:

“Good morning, Bao. Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you down there.”

Bao looked at him with his flat grey shark’s eyes.

“Highness,” he said.

“I’ve been waiting to say that for a very long time.”

“I know, Highness. You told me. When you were small. You said you were going to say it to me one day.” Bao’s mouth did something that might have been a smile, on a shark. “You were sitting on my shoulders at the time.”

“That’s not the point.”

“No, Highness.”

Tian walked on, very satisfied.

Behind him, Bao watched him go, with his shark’s mouth still doing the strange thing, and then went back to looking at the door, which was his job, and which nobody, in all the time he had been doing it, had ever made more interesting.

* * *

His grandmother sent for him at noon.

The Dowager of the Southern Sea lived in the oldest part of the Crystal Palace, in a great dim hall at the very bottom of it, where the water was coldest and the light from the surface came down green and wavering and thin. She was very old. Nobody knew how old. She had been old when Tian’s father was a boy. She smelled, as she always had, like the bottom of the sea: like cold stone and old shells and deep, dark, quiet water. She sat on a great flat rock in the middle of her hall, with her long white hair spread out round her in the water, and she watched her grandson come in through the door.

He ducked under it.

It was a very large door.

“Grandmother,” said Tian, and bowed.

“Hm,” said the Dowager. “So it’s true.”

“What’s true?”

“That my grandson is walking round the palace ducking under doors that a whale could swim through.” She looked him up and down. “Come here.”

He came.

She looked at him for a long time, the way she looked at everything, very slowly, with her old pale eyes. At his height. At his shoulders. At his horns, which had come in at last, long and pale and curving. At his hands. At his face, which had lost its round child’s cheeks and had become, very suddenly, a young man’s face, with his father’s heavy brow and his mother’s fine dark eyes, and the same mouth he had always had, the one that was always about to say something it shouldn’t.

“You look like your grandfather,” she said at last. “At your age.”

Tian went pink.

"Really?”

“He towered over everyone, too,” said the Dowager. “He never let anybody forget it either.” She reached up and tapped him, very hard, on the end of the nose with one long bony finger. “He was also an idiot. For a very long time. Then he grew out of it.” She lowered her hand. “Grow out of it faster, Tianyu.”

“I’m not an idiot—”

“You’re bored,” said the Dowager. “I can smell it on you. It’s coming off you like ink off a squid.” She leaned back on her rock. “You’ve spent your whole life waiting to be grown. And now you are, and you’ve found out that grown is very dull, and nobody gives you anything to do. So you walk about ducking under doors.”

Tian said nothing. That was, he had to admit, very nearly exactly it.

“Your father’s going to give you something to do,” said the Dowager.

"What?”

His grandmother smiled. It was not a reassuring smile. She had very old teeth.

“Ask him,” she said. “And Tianyu. Whatever it is.” She settled back into the green dark. “Do it properly.”

* * *

“Rain,” said the Dragon Emperor.

He said it at dinner, in the family’s private hall, where the four of them ate together every night at a low table of black coral, with the water outside the windows going dark blue and then black, and the lantern-fish coming out to glow along the walls.

Tian looked up from his bowl.

“Rain?”

“Rain.” His father put down his chopsticks. “In the south, on the mainland, past the Cinnabar Coast. The provinces of Lin and Yao and the river country behind them. There hasn’t been rain there since the spring. The rivers are low. The rice is dying. The people have been praying at our temples for months.” He looked at his son. “It’s the Southern Sea’s duty to answer them. It always has been. And this time, I’m sending you.”

Tian stared at him.

"Me?”

“You.”

“On my own?”

“On your own.”

Tian put down his own chopsticks, very slowly.

His mother, across the table, was watching him with her calm dark eyes, and not saying anything. His grandmother, at the head of the table, was eating a sea urchin, spines and all, and not saying anything either. But she was watching him too.

“You’ve grown, Tianyu,” said the Dragon Emperor. “You told me so yourself. This morning. In front of the whole court.” He picked up his wine cup. “A dragon who’s grown has duties. This is the first one. It isn’t difficult. You call the clouds, you bring them over the land, you let the rain down slowly and gently, and you keep it gentle, and you stay with it until the rivers are full. A few days. A week, perhaps. It’s dull. It’s slow. It’s the most important thing a dragon of the sea ever does.” He drank. “Can you do that?”

Tian looked at his father.

Then he looked down at the table, at his bowl, and his chopsticks, and his own hands, which were not small any more. They were large and long-fingered and strong, a grown dragon’s hands, and he had only had them for a little while, and he still sometimes looked down at them in surprise.

Something went through him then. Something he didn’t quite have a name for. Something that was not quite pride and not quite fear and was very warm and very large and sat in the middle of his chest like a coal.

His father was giving him something to do.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, Father. I can do that.”

“Good.”

“I’ll do it properly.”

“I know you will.” His father picked up his chopsticks again. “You leave at dawn.”

His mother reached across the table and put her hand on his, just for a moment, and squeezed it.

His grandmother finished her sea urchin.

“Hm,” she said.

* * *

That night, Tian lay on his back in his bed in the Crystal Palace, which was not long enough for him any more, so that his feet stuck out over the end of it into the cold water, and looked up at the ceiling.

Rain, he thought.

A whole province. On my own. Clouds and wind and water, and the whole sky over Lin and Yao, and all of them down there looking up, waiting.

Waiting for me.

He grinned at the ceiling in the dark.

It’s going to be the best rain anybody’s ever seen.

He fell asleep still grinning, with his feet sticking out of the end of the bed, and dreamed of clouds.