“Do you smell something burning?” Aunt Polly asked.
“May—be,” I replied, thinking fast. “Have you had the brakes checked? That’s the first thing my dad says, when he smells something in the car. And the streets are very steep around here.” I was talking a lot so she might not notice I was also cranking open the triangular side window.
“I shall ask your uncle at dinner. You’re a very resourceful girl.”
“I’m learning.” I turned the box around, so the hole was facing the window, and tickled my dragon one more time, grinning as a tiny wisp of her yellow smoke drifted out over San Francisco Bay.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
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The Nine Curves River
R. F. Kuang
R. F. Kuang (www.rfkuang.com) is the Nebula, Locus, and John W. Campbell Award—nominated author of The Poppy War and its sequel, The Dragon Republic. She is currently pursuing an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship. Her debut novel, The Poppy War, was listed by Times, Amazon, Goodreads, and the Guardian as one of the best books of 2018 and has won the Crawford Award and Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel.
We reach Arlong on the fourth day of the Lunar New Year. In Dragon Province, we celebrate the new year over fifteen days. On the third day, families come home to reunite. On the fourth day, we welcome back the gods.
You’ve never been to Arlong before. The farthest you’ve wandered from our home on Ao Island is the local water market over the canal intersection that links together the archipelago where we live. You’ve never come with me and Baba to Arlong, the provincial capital, on our yearly trips to trade bone carvings and dried salted mayau for silks, knives, and new wire for hooks. Mama and Baba have never let you. They’ve always wanted to keep you safe from the capital. Ao Island is a tiny and familiar domain, but Arlong is a rich, greedy, dense, and devouring city. If you’re not careful, a creature as tiny and pretty as you would vanish into the crowd in seconds.
If Mama and Baba could have had their way, you would never have stepped foot off Ao Island. But even they couldn’t stop the coming of this day.
We make the two-hour trip over clear, blue waves in a private, rented sampan. This is a luxury that under any other circumstance would cost three silvers an hour. Father and I usually paddle our own canoe down the coastline to Arlong every autumn. But today is special. Neither of us will lift a finger to labor. Instead, we will sit back, sucking on dried sugarcane sticks while the boatman warbles river songs in a loud, oscillating tone that makes you laugh.
We’ve been giggling at his songs for the past hour, requesting repeats of our favorites and learning the lyrics to the dirtier ones, but you fall silent when Arlong appears on the horizon. The boatman, reading your expression, stops singing. For a long moment, the three of us merely stare as we approach the Floating City, the sprawling network of canals that link lush, green islands together like emeralds inlaid in sapphire. You’ve never seen this many boats and shanties wedged together in one place. You’ve never seen these lily pads thick and wide as frying woks; firm enough for a small child to stand on without sinking.
“Come.” I reach for your hand and tug you gently toward the shore. You’re still staring in wonder, eyes darting frantically around as if you don’t know where to look next. “There’s so much more to see.”
We must reach Arlong’s opposite coast by dark, but the sun is still high in the sky and we have many hours yet. We have time to travel on foot. We step cautiously along the rickety walkways—Arlong’s narrow wooden bridges are notoriously unreliable, and on a day like today, when all ten thousand of its residents are outside cramming the streets on foot or bumping their boats against the buoy posts, a single false step could send us tumbling into the chilly water.
Oh, I know. You don’t need to be careful. You could dance across the canals if you wanted to, jumping nimbly from boat to crate to peg. I’ve seen you navigate the docks at home like a dragonfly skimming the surface of a pond. But slow down, sister. We are not all so gifted.
Relax. You have time to savor this. Take a look around you; drink in the festivities. Most days, Arlong is a drab, busy market center, all commerce and efficiency, but during Lunar New Year, it explodes with color. Red and gold banners, streamers, and firecracker confetti hang suspended in the air, buoyed up by a gentle wind that has decided, just for today, to arrest gravity just so. Merchants line every inch of the narrow walkways gilding the canals, hawking sizzling red bean cakes, fragrant dough buns, caramelized taro cubes, tea eggs, sticky rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves, and rows and rows of tanghulu skewers.
These immediately catch your eye.
“Is that sugar?” you ask. “Are they—are they covered in sugar?”
The tanghulu are dripping with so much sugar my teeth ache to look. I’ve tried the sweet, sticky mountain hawthorns just once. Baba bought me a skewer when I was ten, and I’ve never forgotten the taste. “Of course.”
“Can I have one?”
Why do you even ask? You know that today you can have anything you want.
I reach into my pocket for my money pouch. “How many?”
“Just one skewer,” you say primly, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Such a good child. Such precocious restraint, even today.
I purchase two skewers. You protest, but I press the sticks into your palm until you stop trying to pass them back.
“I can’t eat that many.”
“Then hold on to it for later,” I say without thinking. I clamp my jaw shut, but the last word lingers in my throat like the taste of bitter melon. Later. But there is no later; that is the entire point.
You pretend not to notice.
It has not rained in Arlong for two months.
The city officials have done their best to conceal this. Lunar New Year must always be properly feted, drought or no drought. The yellowing grass has been cleverly concealed with blankets, tents, and scattered flower petals that must have been shipped in from the mainland at great expense. Fresh, juicy, imported fruits are still on display at every corner, though the prices are triple what I’ve seen before.
Mainlanders find it strange to think that drought could be a problem in a place surrounded by blue ocean. But salt water can’t sate humans or nourish crops. Without rain, the beaches grow hard and splinter like tea eggs steeped for too long. I can tell this drought is serious; the canals are far shallower than they used to be, and in some stretches it’s obvious that the boats’ bottoms are scraping along the riverbed. But you’ve never been to Arlong before, and you have no basis for comparison. I glance down at your wide, delighted eyes, and I can tell this city is the loveliest thing you’ve ever seen.
It’s not long before the whispering starts. A pair of old women, walking down the bridge toward us, notice your golden anklets and bracelets and immediately start to chatter. They conceal their whispers behind cupped hands, but they make no effort to avert their stares. I want to slap them as they pass.