The Ascent to Godhood Read online

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  For you, who feels seen when you read these books

  Chapter One

  What do you want? Can’t a woman have a drink in peace these days? I’m not in the mood to talk. Look at all these motherfuckers partying it up, celebrating the news. Well, good for them. I’m in mourning.

  See, the woman I love is dead. Funny, watching everyone cheer what you’ve been working for all these years, yet feeling nothing but sorrow. Go join the party and leave me alone. I’ve earned some time to grieve.

  Alright, you’re persistent. I see that. Who did you say you were again?

  Well, I don’t know you. And Akeha has many acquaintances I don’t care for. Why should I listen to what you have to say?

  Yeah, yeah, sure. Everyone’s got a sob story. Look. I’m sure your lady, whoever it was, you loved her, too. Bet it hurts like hell. Bet it does. But no one knows what it’s like for me. You think you do, but you really don’t.

  So, your lover was a Tensor. What of it? Of course I know who she was. Akeha kept me updated. Do you think the Machinists don’t communicate? I’m their leader.

  I don’t have time for this.

  Fine. If you’re going to stand there and bother me, you might as well buy me a drink. At least I’ll get something out of it.

  You know, I’m surprised. You don’t look like the kind of person who would be with a Tensor. Don’t puff up; that’s a compliment. Hah. But I get it. I get it. Look at my life, after all.

  Tell me a bit about you. How did you come here? How did you get into this mess?

  “A lowlife just like you?” If you’re trying to get in my good books, you’re not doing a very good job. So, you were an outlaw. Born in the margins, were you? How much of the real Tensorate did your beloved show you? You know I saw everything. I was on top of the world, at the peak of heaven.

  That was a life, that it was.

  It’s funny. All those years ago, when I was just a girl, and she was just a girl . . . who could have guessed what would happen? What she would become. What I would become. It’s funny.

  If you want to hear the story, I can tell you. Heaven knows nobody wants to hear her side of it, and with her dead now, maybe nobody ever will. No one can tell her story like I can. There was no one else as close to her, you know? No one . . .

  Strange days upon us. Her guiding hand is gone. The Protectorate is about to change in ways none of us can predict. We’re plunging toward an unknown future. And I . . . I am an old woman. The time for me to weave and play with the threads of fortune is long over.

  Hekate’s gone. Maybe once I tell this story, I’ll be able to release her from this hollow inside me, where she’s been trapped for so long.

  Take a seat. Get comfortable. Get yourself a drink. Take notes, if you want. This is a story few have the privilege of knowing.

  Chapter Two

  Where do I even start? Where do you begin a tale that tangles like a bramble across the years and twines with the fine and cruel threads of fortune? How do I tell the story of the one who burned the world to ash around her and rebuilt it in her image, when it’s the same story as my greatest and deepest heartbreak? How do I balance the silhouette of my private emotions with the vast scale of the world turning around me?

  Maybe I’ll start from the beginning. My beginning. After all, I’m the one telling the story, am I not?

  I was born in a small village north of Jixiang, the third of seven children. My parents were farmers. Most everybody was. It was a poor area and we were poor people. Growing vegetables was the only way to get by. Nostalgia puts a taste in your mouth, doesn’t it? When I think back on those days, I remember peace. The mountains at dawn, draped in white mist, the smell of fresh-cut grass, the feel of loamy clay between my toes. Mother kept an enormous pot of congee bubbling on the stove. Its fragrance greeted you when you walked through the door. Ah, the crisp scent of shallots frying! Sometimes, I think I miss it more than anything else: that smell, in that kitchen, combined with the waft of the jasmine growing in the front courtyard.

  What about you? You look Kebangilan. Grew up on the coast, did you? Different climate, different foods . . . but poverty tastes the same everywhere. Boiled food, everything watery, too cold or too hot. The dreams I had in those days! All I wanted was to escape the grey, rocky life that I led. I imagined simple pleasures: a house with stone walls, a little garden, a goat or two . . . My imagination was so small back then. So pure.

  The year I turned twelve was a hard one. The rains came too much in the winter, and then not at all. Crops grew spindly and yellow in our fields, fish died in the ponds, and a pallor of death wafted through the air in the heated evenings. It was a strange year to come into adulthood. The world was withering and blackening around me, yet there I was, hips and thighs growing plump, legs and arms growing long and strong like tree branches. One morning, I put on my trousers and realized how high their hems hung above my ankles. When had that happened? I couldn’t say. Changes. They just sneak up on you, the little bastards.

  That was the first thing I learned that summer. The second was that there is no logic to the world. No balance. The world outside my window was dying, yet my body was flourishing. Where was all that energy, that life coming from?

  The dust and brittleness of my village were disturbed by a new arrival just as the last of my mother’s rice ran out. A man—no, a vulture. A scavenger waiting for the moment before a living thing became fresh meat. We were a family of eight crammed into that small wooden shack with one stove: five children, my parents, one remaining grandmother. I remember staring up at that man as he stood in the doorway with his smooth face and his neat robe in deep colors, and the idiot child that I was thought he was the most handsome thing I’d ever seen. How important he looked! His gaze swept over me and my siblings huddled listlessly in the heat, and my heart stopped when his eyes settled on me.

  What did he see in me? That I was pretty? That people would pay money for my company? That I was this poor and gullible little fuck with shiny round eyes?

  Maybe he wasn’t even thinking that far. Maybe he was just plucking up children like peaches off a tree.

  You have to understand, out in those areas, we didn’t do gender like they did in the capital. You get born as one thing, you’re expected to stick to it. I popped out, they looked at me, said girl, and that’s how it was. Do I have regrets about it? No, but I’m sure there are many who do. But when things are that hard, and food is a struggle every season, people cling to structure. It makes life easier, see? So, my parents wouldn’t part with sons, my sister was too old, and the youngest was just a baby. Worthless, just another mouth to feed. Couldn’t put it to work, could we? So, what was left? Just little me.

  I don’t know if my parents ever regretted selling me to put food in my siblings’ mouths. They were typical farmer stock, not the kind to talk about their feelings, or very much at all. Only my older sister, Xiuqing, cried when she heard. I don’t know if I cried in return. She had one precious thing, a carved jade elephant she’d been given by a
passing merchant. She pressed it into my hands. Come back soon, she said, clinging to dull hope that my going away was only temporary. Remember us, she said. I told her it was impossible I would ever forget her. Then I was whisked away from the only place I had ever known.

  On nights I can’t sleep, I like to torment myself with an imagined world where my sister was taken instead of me. A world where my big sister became a courtesan and I stayed behind in her place. What would I be? A seamstress? A farmer? Some dull lad’s wife with swollen ankles and a voice hoarse from shouting? I’d have a swarm of children, too. Children to look after the house, children to tend to the fields . . . Children! Fuck, I’d be miserable. No, I don’t regret my life at all. So, I fucked up in all directions, but at least it was an exciting fuckup, you know?

  Of course, I know that’s not true. Even my sister did not end her life as a simple farmer. Maybe I would have become a rebel all the same. Maybe it’s in my family’s blood, all this getting into trouble.

  Right. I get distracted. So many memories. It’s been such a long time since I’ve thought of my girlhood, it’s easy to get lost in nostalgia. Lost in myself.

  You know, all those years, she never asked me about my past. She didn’t think it was relevant. Never did. And you know, I felt the same. I threw away my whole life for her. My whole identity. I wanted to.

  Anyway. There I was, twelve years old, never been farther than two days’ trek from my village, being brought to the capital. The man who bought me was called Wei. I don’t know if it was his real name. I never found out, and I was never able to track him down afterward. He was nice to me, at first. Made sure I ate enough, made sure I slept enough, had a bag of soft, floured sweets that he would offer me during our long journey. He presented me with marvel after marvel. I’d never been in that kind of cart. I’d never seen slackcraft, ever. I would stick my head out to watch the ground speeding by under us as we floated over it.

  Wei bought three other girls during his trip: two who were already traveling with him, and one he picked up in the village next to mine. Their names . . . let’s see, what were they? There was Yixing, of course. And I think the other two were Sara and Min. He told them my name was Huarong, which it was not, but because he said so, that’s what it became. Why the surprised face? You think I was born Lady Han? No. That too was someone else’s name for me.

  All of us were about the same age, except for Sara, who was older, maybe sixteen years old. Tanned and broad from working in the fields, like a boy. Min was very quiet. Then there was Yixing, my neighbor-girl, who I had an automatic connection with. I don’t think we became friends, but it felt like that. I had no one else to talk to.

  Ah, Chengbee! The city of the golden phoenix, the cradle of the Protectorate! You’re a provincial, like me, so you must remember what it felt like to encounter the capital for the first time. The red peaked roofs, shoulder to shoulder, stretching all the way to the foot of the mountains. The throngs in the markets, shoulder to shoulder, filling the air with the noise of their bargaining. The dense smells that come and go as you pass along the street: chestnuts in hot sand, the steam off soup cauldrons, the sewage in the back alleys. Wei took the cart into the densest parts of the city, and the whole way, I peeked out of the window with my mouth hanging open. How could I not? My senses were being assaulted from every direction, on every level. I had never imagined that people could live like this, stacked on top of one another, in constant motion and contact. The city felt so alive, but in a different way from the mountains and fields that I knew. Out in the countryside, being among living things feels full and serene. Everything in Chengbee is small and frantic.

  Our cart passed through the hot, bright center of the city and kept going. I thought we might stop at one of the many inns with their silk ribbons and gilded signs, but we didn’t. Slowly, the buildings grew sparser, the people on the street fewer and more poorly dressed. I asked Wei, Where are we going? I still trusted him at that point. I thought he would take care of us. But he just said, Don’t worry your silly head about it, and barely looked at me.

  We stopped at a training school, although I didn’t know what it was then. The school was five or six buildings connected by courtyards, and it had clearly seen better times, maybe as an administrative center or one of those specialized Tensor academies. By the time we got there, its glory days were long over. Tiles sagged on the roof, and the dedication to the Protectorate, painted in gold, had faded to the color of dirt.

  A woman named Madam Wong met us at the door; she was in charge of the place. Wei had us all get out of the cart and stand in a row, while Madam Wong examined us in turn, looking at our faces and teeth, making us turn around. Like horses on sale. Asking us questions to check our diction and bearing. Can you sing? Have you danced before? She asked me what my name was; I said Huarong. If I was going to live in Wei’s world, I might as well use the name that he gave me.

  Out of the lineup, Madam Wong chose Yixing and me. She had no use for the other two. In we went, and out went Wei with the heavy little pouch she gave him. He didn’t turn back. Didn’t offer any parting words to the two girls whose lives he just threw down a completely different path. Just another working day for him.

  As for Min and Sara, who knows what happened to them? Wei probably sold Sara off as a laborer: strong girl like her, and brown too. You know how these people operate—of course you do. Of course you do. I don’t know about Min. Possibly she was auctioned off too. She didn’t talk much—or maybe she couldn’t—but she wasn’t stupid, and she seemed hardworking. There was one time much later, when I was living in the Great High Palace, that I thought I saw her. One of the local magistrates who came to speak with Hekate had a servant girl about the right size and age. She had the same kind of energy, too, that same limpid silence. A big patch of scarring down one cheek. I couldn’t say if it was Min. It had been so long since I’d seen her, and the years in between had erased the lines of my memories enough that any hundred generic faces could have stood in for that pale girl I barely knew. I like to think she survived. I like to think that she still lives on, somewhere in this hope-forsaken land.

  But Min’s not relevant to the story.

  Madam Wong began training Yixing and me at once. You know what’s going on, don’t you? I’d been sold as an entertainer girl. One of the fancy ones who look pretty and smile at parties to make elites feel like their position in society has some benefits. I had to learn to dance, I had to learn to play the zither, I had to learn the hundred and forty stanzas of romantic poetry. I, an almost-illiterate peasant girl, had to pick up things that noble children are taught from birth in six months so I could make some whiskery old administrator feel good about himself while he leered at me. Luckily for me, I learn fast. I had no natural talent for any of it—Madam Wong said I danced like I wanted to strangle somebody—but I was good enough to pass.

  Poor Yixing wasn’t. She was a simple girl, good-hearted, but she had clumsy fingers and a bad memory. Day after day, she would try to grasp the basics of music and dancing and the Chengbee accent, and day after day, she would be sent to bed with her ears and face stinging red from Madam Wong’s slaps. She would be forced to skip meals until she got this and that right. Good for nothing! Madam Wong used to say. Filthy peasant! You wouldn’t be hungry if you weren’t so lazy.

  Yixing would come to me and beg me for help, but what could I do? She wasn’t cut out for that kind of life. Just work harder, I would tell her. You don’t have to be good, just okay. Either that, or you can run away.

  But she never did. I woke up one morning to find her hanging from the wooden beams of the roof, her body already stiff and cold. She’d used one of the silk scarves we’d been learning to dance with. She saw no other way out.

  You know what Madam Wong said? What a waste. A waste of her time and her money! She was pissed that she didn’t get what she paid Wei for. Probably complained to him about it.

  Should I have done more for her? What could I have done
? At that time, I was focused on one thing and one thing only: my own survival. You think that makes me selfish? I never said I was perfect. Who among us is?

  Chapter Three

  I graduated from the training school much faster than the other girls—most took three or four years of training, but I was gone in two. Maybe it was Yixing’s death that motivated me, or maybe I just wanted to escape Madam Wong and those musty rooms. I wanted more out of my life. With this fire in me, I spent every waking moment perfecting my gait, my speech, my way of thinking. I had to act like a highborn girl and master the low arts.

  I hate that name, you should know. Low? There’s nothing low about it. Providing pleasure on demand is as much a skill as any other art form. It takes as much finesse as playing the zither. As much cunning as negotiating a peace treaty. People who mock dancing girls would fail if they tried to do our jobs. Judgmental worms. What do they know?

  I was sent to a dancing house to join other girls Madam Wong had trained. Of course, a girl of my caliber would never end up serving in a common inn—as if the upper crust would go to one of those places to rub shoulders and share cups with lowly merchants and artisans. They held their parties in their houses, with dancing girls delivered by order. In the morning, a trusted servant would come over and we’d line up like goats in a marketplace. The servants chose girls they knew their masters would like, and we would have the rest of the day to get ready.

  I was fourteen, nearly fifteen. We weren’t allowed to go alone with the men until we were sixteen—not because the house cared about our welfare, mind, but because some shit went down in the past with the younger girls and left a huge mess to clean up. So, the houses were just covering their asses. My first year, I danced and poured wine and smiled at old men, but that was all. I watched and learned from the other girls, the ones who were doing the work. It was . . . informative.