Tang Dynasty Harem

The smell hit me first. Sandalwood, mostly. But underneath it, something sharper. Ginger, maybe. And beneath that, the unmistakable weight of incense that hadn't yet stopped burning.

I opened my eyes to a ceiling I'd never seen before. Dark timber beams. A single crack running through the third one from the left, shaped like a river delta. My ceiling back home had water stains that looked like Australia. This was different. This was wrong.

My body felt wrong too. Heavier. Shorter arms. I tried to sit up and my head swam, so I lay back down and stared at that crack until the room stopped spinning.

"Young master is awake."

The voice came from my left. I turned my head too fast and the room tilted again. A woman knelt beside the bed, maybe twenty-five, maybe younger. Hard to tell with the way she'd painted her face. White powder, red lips, eyebrows drawn into two precise arches. Her hair was piled up with pins I couldn't count. She wore silk the color of old blood.

"Where am I?" My voice came out wrong. Deeper than I expected. Rougher.

She tilted her head. "You're home, young master. You've been ill for three days. The physician said the fever would break by nightfall, and it has. Your father would be pleased."

My father. The word landed strange. I had a father. Back home, in the apartment with the broken air conditioner and the neighbor who played bass at two in the morning. He was probably still there, wondering where his son had gone. Or maybe not wondering at all. Maybe he hadn't noticed yet.

"What's your name?" I asked.

Her painted eyebrows rose. "This one is called Mei. Young master knows this. Are you certain the fever has passed?"

I wasn't certain of anything. But I nodded, because what else was I going to do? She watched me for a long moment, then stood and walked to the door. Her movements were careful. Deliberate. Like she was stepping through water.

"I'll inform the others," she said. "They've been worried."

The door slid shut behind her. I was alone with the sandalwood and the ginger and the incense that wouldn't stop burning.

I sat up slower this time. The room was large, larger than my entire apartment back home. A low bed. A writing desk with brushes and an inkstone. A screen painted with cranes. Windows covered in paper that glowed with afternoon light. Everything smelled expensive.

My hands were not my hands. Smaller. Softer. The nails were clean and shaped. I turned them over. No calluses. No scars. The scar on my left thumb from the time I'd cut myself on a broken bottle when I was twelve, gone. Just smooth skin.

I pushed the blanket aside and stood. My legs held, barely. I was wearing white silk that hung loose on a frame that wasn't mine. Shorter. Thinner. I walked to the writing desk and looked down at the papers scattered across it. Characters I could read. That was the strange part. I could read them. Classical Chinese, the kind I'd only seen in textbooks, and my brain processed it like I'd been reading it my whole life.

A poem, half-finished. The ink was still dark. The brush beside it had dried into a stiff point.

The door slid open again. I turned.

Three women entered. The first was Mei, who I'd already met. The second was older, maybe thirty, with a face that hadn't needed as much paint. She wore green, and her eyes moved over me like she was taking inventory. The third was younger. Couldn't have been more than twenty-two. She wore pale yellow and kept her eyes on the floor.

They arranged themselves in a line. Mei on the left. The older one in the middle. The younger one on the right. They didn't speak. They just stood there, waiting.

I understood, suddenly, that I was supposed to say something. That this was a performance, and I'd missed my cue.

"I'm fine," I said. "You can go."

None of them moved.

The older one in green spoke. "Young master, we've been discussing matters while you were ill. There are decisions that need to be made."

"Decisions."

"Regarding the household. Regarding us."

Us. The word hung in the air. I looked at the three of them, really looked, and saw what I should have seen from the beginning. They were afraid. Not of me, exactly. Of what I represented. The original owner of this body had hated them. I could feel it, a residue in my chest like heartburn. He'd hated them for taking his father's attention. For existing in the space where his mother should have been.

And now his father was dead. And they were alone with me.

"The funeral," I said. The words came out before I thought about them. "It's done?"

Mei nodded. "Three days ago. The burial was yesterday. Young master was too ill to attend."

I should have felt something. A man was dead. My father, technically. But I felt nothing except the strange weight of a body that wasn't mine and the smell of incense that was starting to make me nauseous.

"What decisions?" I asked.

The three of them exchanged glances. It was quick, almost imperceptible, but I caught it. The younger one in yellow shifted her weight from one foot to the other. The older one in green folded her hands together.

"Your father left no will," the older one said. "The estate passes to you. But we... we have no standing. No family to return to. No property of our own."

"You want me to take care of you."

"We want to know what you intend."

There it was. The real question. Not what I intended for the estate, or the servants, or the business dealings that I knew nothing about. What I intended for them. Three women who had been married to a dead man and now belonged to no one.

The original soul in this body would have thrown them out. I could feel that too, a phantom impulse to hurt them, to make them pay for a crime they hadn't committed. But I wasn't him. I was just a guy who'd gone to sleep in a shitty apartment and woken up in the Tang Dynasty with a dead father and three stepmothers who looked at me like I was holding their lives in my hands.

"I don't know," I said.

It was the truth. The only true thing I'd said since I woke up.

The younger one in yellow finally looked at me. Her eyes were red-rimmed. She'd been crying, probably for days. Not for my father, I suspected. For herself. For whatever future she saw closing in front of her.

"Young master," she said, and her voice was small. "Please. We have nowhere else to go."

The older one in green shot her a look. A warning. But the damage was done. The plea was out there, hanging in the air with the sandalwood and the ginger and the incense.

I looked at the three of them. Mei, with her careful movements and painted face. The older one, whose name I still didn't know, with her inventory-taking eyes. The younger one, whose name I also didn't know, who had just begged me for her life in the only way she knew how.

Three women. All young. All beautiful, in the way that wealth and leisure made people beautiful. All terrified.

And me. A stranger in a body that hated them. A son who wasn't a son. A man who had no idea what he was doing.

"Stay," I said. "For now. We'll figure out the rest later."

The relief on their faces was almost painful to watch. The younger one's shoulders dropped. The older one's jaw unclenched. Even Mei, who had seemed so composed, let out a breath she'd been holding.

They bowed. All three of them, deep and synchronized, like they'd practiced it.

"Thank you, young master," they said together.

I watched them leave, and when the door slid shut, I sat down on the edge of the bed and put my head in my hands. The incense was still burning. The crack in the ceiling beam still looked like a river delta. And somewhere outside, in a world I didn't understand, a dead man's estate was waiting for me to claim it.

I didn't know how to be a rich man's son. I didn't know how to be a Tang Dynasty noble. I didn't even know my own name.

But I knew one thing. Those three women would do anything to survive. And that made them dangerous.

The question was whether I'd figure that out before they figured out that I wasn't the boy they thought I was.