Fanfic: The Tea In China.
Title: The Tea In China.
Rating: PG.
Fandom: Doctor Who.
Synopsis: The Doctor takes Rose for a nice cup of tea...in China. Join us as we speak of humidity, archeology, belief, the Chinese gods, and what a decaying rice field really smells like. Written for loneraven's Tenth Doctor Ficathon, for dzturtlepower, who wanted China, no violence, and a question of faith.
Xian-Chu is an actual figure from the old Chinese pantheon, and was the goddess of immortality, magic and the moon, as well as one of the guardians of the Peaches of Immortality. She was also, in the words of my second-year folklore professor, ‘a tidal slut’, and was thrown out of Heaven repeatedly for sleeping with the husbands of the other goddesses.
***
The TARDIS doors opened on humidity. Not just humidity; humidity and heat, the sort of heat that walks up, rings the doorbell, and then punches you square in the jaw when you’re idiot enough to answer the door. Rose reeled. The air smelled of spices and sweat and something that was almost but not quite like the marshy patch of creek-bed that she’d gone to play in with her mates when she was nine, but all of that took a distant second place to the humidity.
Seemingly entirely unaffected by it all (sometimes he could be a right alien git, with his swanning about not giving a damn about the fact that the normal people were being boiled alive in their skins), the Doctor brushed past her, out of the TARDIS and onto the hard-packed dirt of what she presumed was serving as a street. “Ah!” he declared, with sheer, uncomplicated delight. “Beijing, ninth century or so, the reign of Wu Lan -- not one of their longer-lasting Emperors, what with the whole ‘assassinated by the concubine of his eldest son after he had his first-born granddaughter put to death for looking at him funny’ aspect, but a relatively charming fellow, all the same.” He paused. “As long as you didn’t happen to be the granddaughter, that is.” Clapping his hands together, he spun around to face Rose, and grinned that broad, damnably appealing grin of his, the one that made him look like some demented Peter Pan getting ready to race off and challenge the world to a game of tag. “Well?”
Rose eyed him. “Well, what? It’s only a million degrees here. We’re going to be steamed alive.”
“What? No!” Shaking his head in an exaggerated sort of ‘well, that’s just silly’, the Doctor licked his finger and held it up, testing the air. “There’s a lovely breeze coming off the rice fields, that should cool things down a bit, and what with it being past noon, it can’t be more than, oh, half a million degrees. At the most.”
She couldn’t help it. Despite the heat -- she could feel her hair wilting -- Rose giggled. “All right, half a million. Where are we?”
“Where you asked to go!” the Doctor said, still grinning like the star of a live-action Punch and Judy. Spreading his arms wide, he declared, “China!”
Rose looked at him blankly. “China?”
“China!”
“I didn’t ask to go to China.”
“Sure you did! You said you wanted a really good cup of tea, remember? So -- China!” He spread his arms wider, like he was waiting for some sort of a fanfare.
“China.” Rose drew the word out, rolling it slowly around her tongue, like she was checking it for some hidden, previously undetected meaning. Nothing was exactly springing to mind. “Why’d we come to China for tea, exactly?”
“Haven’t you ever heard the expression ‘all the tea in China’?” The Doctor dropped his arms back to his sides. “Here’s China. It’s full of tea.”
“It’s just that usually, you want a good cup of tea, you pop round Mum’s, right, or maybe to some posh little shop on Charing Cross, where you can have it with biscuits and clotted cream. Not to China.”
“Ninth century China.”
“Right, ninth century China. It’s just a bit of a surprise, yeah?” A humid, somewhat smelly surprise. Now that she’d registered the smell, she couldn’t put it out of her mind; it was everywhere, getting into everything. “Should I go change?”
“No need.” The Doctor waved a hand airily. “You and I, we’re barbarians. They’ll expect uncouth, uncivilized behavior from us.”
“Uncivilized behavior?” Rose asked warily.
“Nudity.” The Doctor grinned. “Come on.” Turning, he started off down the packed-earth street.
Rose sighed. “Why do I always have to be the naked one?” she asked the air, and followed.
*
The hard-packed dirt of the side street where they’d landed gave quickly way to smooth, almost elegant cobblestones, the buildings increasing in both density and height, like plants pushing up out of the earth, until, with no real warning or sense of transition, they were walking down a beautifully-appointed avenue, surrounded on all sides by the sort of delicately scalloped pagodas and homes that Rose was really only accustomed to seeing in miniature, in certain neighborhoods around Leicester Square. Even there, they were clearly replicas, while these were just as clearly the real thing, clinging to their elegance despite patched woodwork, broken shingles, and faded and peeling paint.
As the neighborhood improved, the people began to appear. Just a few at first, then dozens, and finally what seemed like hundreds, all of them going about their business with barely a glance for Rose or the Doctor. That business seemed to consist largely of yelling at one another as loudly as possible, with occasional pauses to bow or buy things from the various small carts that were beginning to line the walkway. Merchants hailed people constantly, waving them over to inspect their wares.
“Why aren’t they yelling at us?” Rose asked, sticking close by the Doctor. Not that she could easily have lost him in the crowd -- he was a good foot taller than most of them, and the only pale-skinned, brown-topped man in sight -- but the thought of being lost in ninth century China was somehow a great deal more unsettling than the idea of being lost on some alien moon or stranded in the distant future. At least there, she wouldn’t have to worry about her mummified remains eventually fetching up in the British Museum.
“Largely because we’re barbarians. Entirely uncouth, incapable of honor, good taste, or, most importantly, paying our bills.” The Doctor paused, studying a sign hung outside one of the gaudier pavilions. “This won’t do at all. We need to find someplace a little less...”
“Crowded?”
“Pleasant. Come on.” Grabbing her hand against her bewildered protests, the Doctor hauled her down a side street.
Once again, it only took a few short blocks to change the character of the city completely. The cobblestones dropped away, replaced by dirt that was somewhat less hard-packed, and more, well, mucky. The merchants and their stalls remained, but took on an air of shabby, unhygienic disarray. Rose started spotting men who were missing legs, or eyes, or the better part of their original ration of teeth. The women weren’t much better. Some of the men -- the ones that could still see -- leered at her, eyes raking up and down the length of her body in a way that made it quite clear that yes, by the standards of the day, she was quite nude.
“Liked it better where we were,” she muttered, pressing closer to the Doctor, refusing to relinquish his hand. “This is some sort of shortcut, yeah?”
“If you want a really good cup of tea around here, you can go to one of two places,” he was saying, seemingly oblivious to her discomfort. “There’s the Emperor’s palace, of course, but I really don’t want to deal with another silly banquet right now -- it’s all pomp and circumstance until someone winds up beheaded, and that just isn’t any fun at all, unless you’re a trifle off.”
“And the other option?” Rose said.
“Find a nice whorehouse. Ah!” The Doctor stopped, looking up at a shabby pavilion painted in shades best described as ‘rotten peach’ and ‘tarnished gold’. “The Peach Orchard is still here! Come on, then!”
Before she could protest, he had hauled her inside.
*
Rose had been in a brothel once before. She was sixteen years old, it was a dare from Tracy down the lane, and she’d only gone in long enough to take a quick, terrified look around before fleeing again, out into the relative safety of the London night. Afterwards, when she’d calmed down enough to think about what she’d actually seen, she couldn’t understand what all the fuss had been about. It was just a plain, gray little room with two battered couches, a dying rubber tree, and a woman about her mother’s age sitting behind a reception desk, snapping her gum as she waited for custom. Tawdry, sure, but not as titillating as your average naughty bookshop.
This, however, was closer to what she’d been expecting back then.
The walls were draped in peach-colored silk, and the light, although cast by covered lanterns, was diffused by clever screens that broke it into patterns of stars, moons, and round things that she could only assume were intended to be still more peaches. The various shapes drifted lazily across the walls and the over-stuffed, oddly-shaped furniture that decorated the room, tangling in the branches of the ornamental peach trees that flanked each of the three doorways. In all that pink and white and peach-colored silk, it was surprisingly easy to overlook the girl in the peach gown who lounged, as decorative as a bit of trim, on one of the over-stuffed couches.
Easy, that was, until she uncurled herself, rising to her feet, and bowed in their direction. “This unworthy one is honored to welcome you to our humble place of business,” she intoned. “How may your revered needs be met by such a debased and filth-ridden establishment as ours?”
Rose blinked at her, leaning over to murmur, “Why’s she talking like that?”
“Pretty standard stuff. Means ‘welcome, and if you can’t pay, get out’,” the Doctor said, solemnly. He bowed towards the girl, saying, “These worthless ones are hoping that the mistress of the house might spare a few precious moments to educate us in the proper appreciation of tea.”
This was, apparently, at least in the neighborhood of the correct answer; the girl bowed again, and then turned, vanishing between one of the pairs of peach trees. Their leaves wavered in the wind from her passing. Rose elbowed the Doctor lightly in the ribs, taking his attention away from the departing concubine’s peach-clad derriere.
“We’re having tea with the Madame of the local cathouse?” she asked.
“In a sense,” the Doctor replied. Any further explanation was cut off as a second woman appeared in the doorway, the first standing several feet behind her, watching expectantly. Almost, Rose thought, like she was waiting for the new arrival to throw them both out onto the street. The Doctor beamed, spreading his arms. “Xian-Chu!”
“A thousand apologies, and may the Emperor of Heaven take His most holy attention from the great book of law to strike me to ashes where I stand, but have we met?” asked the woman, slowly.
She wasn’t the sort of woman Rose would have pictured running a whorehouse; she wasn’t a great beauty, or used up and haggard like the prostitutes she used to see around the theatre district after midnight. If it hadn’t been for her hair, half of which was streaked silver-white against the black, Rose wouldn’t have guessed her as much older than she was. That and her eyes, which were a bizarre shade of peach-yellow, were about the only distinctive things about her. She was wearing a white silk gown, embroidered with peach trees and tiny crescent moons in a slightly darker shade of cream.
The Doctor’s smile widened. “Two hundred years ago, a woman challenged a barbarian stranger to a game of cards at an open-air tea shop in Xi’an,” he said. “She wore a yellow dress, because the moon was almost full, and she didn’t want to offend her father.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “The stranger said he’d bring her a gift if he ever came to see her again,” she said. “A sign that it was, in fact, him, since it might be a very long time before they had such a meeting.”
“A gift. Something simple, like, say, a bottle of peach brandy?” The Doctor reached into his coat pocket, pulling out a pint bottle of deep yellow liquor. He held it out towards her, smile gentling. “Hello, Xian-Chu.”
“Doctor,” she said, and bowed again. When she straightened up, her smile was genuine. “How wonderful it is to see you again.”
Rose blinked.
*
Xian-Chu’s private rooms were decorated much more simply than the front room, which was a good thing, as Rose was starting to feel like she was suffering an overdose of the color peach. The walls were draped in white silk, over plain wood, and the furniture, what little there was, was either enameled black or upholstered in white. It was a bit like standing in a giant checkerboard, but it was better than the unending pinkness.
A tea service for three took up much of the center of the floor, provided with eerie speed by the girls in Xian-Chu’s service. There were plates of little rolls and puffed buns that Rose didn’t recognize, pots of what she hoped was jam, and not crushed peppers or something equally unexpected, and the more usual, comprehensible teapot and cups. A second, smaller teapot sat off to one side. Xian-Chu was crushing dried tea leaves, delicately, with a bone china spoon, casting glances at the Doctor as she worked.
Finally, carefully, she said, “I did not expect to see you again.”
“Got distracted,” he replied.
“Your face has changed.”
“Yours hasn’t.” The Doctor smiled, patting Rose on the knee. “Rose here wanted tea. Yours was the best I could think of.”
“Truly, you honor me,” said Xian-Chu, politely, and poured the leaves into the empty pot. Reaching for the second pot, she began decanting boiling water over the top of them. “Is your Rose, too, a lord of all time, beyond the need for such humble things as peaches?”
Rose shot the Doctor a surprised look. Shaking his head, he said, “No. She’s my current traveling companion.”
“Ah,” Xian-Chu said, with a small nod. “The vigil endures.” Looking to Rose, she added, politely, “Please, sample the confectionery. If it does not suit you, I will have my cooks beaten in the square at dusk.”
“What?”
“She doesn’t mean it literally, Rose,” the Doctor assured her. “Go ahead. Have a biscuit.”
Cautiously, Rose reached for one of the smaller cookies. It tasted of fruit and cloves, and dissolved like frosting on her tongue. “That’s good!” she said, surprised.
“I will refrain from beating my cooks,” Xian-Chu said mildly.
Rose swallowed, and looked between the pair. “So...if it’s been two hundred years since the last time you two saw each other...are you from…?” Rather than saying anything as uncouth as ‘outer space’ or ‘another dimension’, she unfolded one finger and pointed, carefully, upwards.
Calmly, Xian-Chu nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I am from the Heavenly Gardens of the Moon.”
Rose blinked. She hadn’t been expecting that. The ‘moon’ part wasn’t so surprising, but the heavenly gardens? That was new.
“Xian-Chu,” said the Doctor, “is a goddess.”
“Oh,” said Rose. “Well. That just explains everything, doesn’t it?”
*
“China has long suffered from an infestation of gods,” said the Doctor, reaching for a cookie. “They’ve got even more than the Greeks do. Thousands and thousands, even millions of gods. At the height of their worship, there were more gods than people in China. Not just a god for every taste -- a god for every person.”
“Come now, don’t exaggerate,” said Xian-Chu, swirling the tea inside the pot. “Some also serve animals, or ideals. There are people who find no patron.”
“It started when a colony ship crashed here, on the mainland, oh, a few million years ago. Their life support systems were damaged in the crash, and most of the colonists stayed in suspended animation, waiting for a rescue that would never come. But every millennia or so, the automatic systems would kick on, thaw out the top-ranked members of the crew to see whether repair was possible.” The Doctor took another cookie. “They were dying out two and three at a time, because they just kept waking up to dinosaurs and insects and primordial ooze. Until everything changed.”
“What changed?” asked Rose, wide-eyed.
“They found people.” The Doctor popped the cookie into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and said, “Humans changed everything.”
Rose frowned. “How’d we manage that?”
“You believed,” said Xian-Chu, solemnly.
“See, Xian-Chu’s people are immortals -- or effectively so, anyway,” said the Doctor, watching as Xian-Chu poured the tea out into their cups. “That’s enough for me, thanks. They feed off belief. Believe in them, and they can live forever.”
“What, like vampires?” Rose asked, frowning.
Xian-Chu clucked her tongue. “I’m sure you could find a more judgmental way of saying that, if you really worked at it. Perhaps this unworthy one might give you a few hours to prepare yourself, before we attempt this discussion again?”
Rose’s frown deepened. “Are you making fun of me?”
“Such an act would be entirely beneath me, and of no lasting benefit,” said Xian-Chu, serenely. “Yes, I am.”
“Play nice at the table, both of you,” said the Doctor. “The Chinese gods aren’t vampires; they don’t take anything as concrete as blood, or even brainwaves. They just pull the belief out of the air. It’s like oxygen for them. Without it, they wither away and die.”
“But...you called them gods. They aren’t really, are they? They’re just aliens, like you. People from somewhere else.”
“We care for our believers. Encourage them, tend to them, and grant their prayers, when such may be done,” said Xian-Chu, solemnly. “Is that not the purpose of divinity?”
“You grant their prayers by running a whorehouse?” asked Rose.
Xian-Chu smiled. “There are a great many of us. Enough that we might have gods for everything.”
Rose couldn’t think of a thing to say.
*
They walked back to the TARDIS through the crowded streets of Beijing, merchants and shoppers shouting on all sides, their feet clattering on the smoothly rounded cobblestones. The Doctor had a pocket full of cookies, which he was eating one at a time while they walked.
“Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“If she’s a goddess...and all the Chinese gods and goddesses are, well, gods and goddesses...what does that say about, well...God?”
“Lots of things can be called gods, Rose,” said the Doctor. “What that means, exactly, you’ll have to decide for yourself.”
The wind that blew through the China night was warm, and humid, and it tasted like peaches.
Rating: PG.
Fandom: Doctor Who.
Synopsis: The Doctor takes Rose for a nice cup of tea...in China. Join us as we speak of humidity, archeology, belief, the Chinese gods, and what a decaying rice field really smells like. Written for loneraven's Tenth Doctor Ficathon, for dzturtlepower, who wanted China, no violence, and a question of faith.
Xian-Chu is an actual figure from the old Chinese pantheon, and was the goddess of immortality, magic and the moon, as well as one of the guardians of the Peaches of Immortality. She was also, in the words of my second-year folklore professor, ‘a tidal slut’, and was thrown out of Heaven repeatedly for sleeping with the husbands of the other goddesses.
***
The TARDIS doors opened on humidity. Not just humidity; humidity and heat, the sort of heat that walks up, rings the doorbell, and then punches you square in the jaw when you’re idiot enough to answer the door. Rose reeled. The air smelled of spices and sweat and something that was almost but not quite like the marshy patch of creek-bed that she’d gone to play in with her mates when she was nine, but all of that took a distant second place to the humidity.
Seemingly entirely unaffected by it all (sometimes he could be a right alien git, with his swanning about not giving a damn about the fact that the normal people were being boiled alive in their skins), the Doctor brushed past her, out of the TARDIS and onto the hard-packed dirt of what she presumed was serving as a street. “Ah!” he declared, with sheer, uncomplicated delight. “Beijing, ninth century or so, the reign of Wu Lan -- not one of their longer-lasting Emperors, what with the whole ‘assassinated by the concubine of his eldest son after he had his first-born granddaughter put to death for looking at him funny’ aspect, but a relatively charming fellow, all the same.” He paused. “As long as you didn’t happen to be the granddaughter, that is.” Clapping his hands together, he spun around to face Rose, and grinned that broad, damnably appealing grin of his, the one that made him look like some demented Peter Pan getting ready to race off and challenge the world to a game of tag. “Well?”
Rose eyed him. “Well, what? It’s only a million degrees here. We’re going to be steamed alive.”
“What? No!” Shaking his head in an exaggerated sort of ‘well, that’s just silly’, the Doctor licked his finger and held it up, testing the air. “There’s a lovely breeze coming off the rice fields, that should cool things down a bit, and what with it being past noon, it can’t be more than, oh, half a million degrees. At the most.”
She couldn’t help it. Despite the heat -- she could feel her hair wilting -- Rose giggled. “All right, half a million. Where are we?”
“Where you asked to go!” the Doctor said, still grinning like the star of a live-action Punch and Judy. Spreading his arms wide, he declared, “China!”
Rose looked at him blankly. “China?”
“China!”
“I didn’t ask to go to China.”
“Sure you did! You said you wanted a really good cup of tea, remember? So -- China!” He spread his arms wider, like he was waiting for some sort of a fanfare.
“China.” Rose drew the word out, rolling it slowly around her tongue, like she was checking it for some hidden, previously undetected meaning. Nothing was exactly springing to mind. “Why’d we come to China for tea, exactly?”
“Haven’t you ever heard the expression ‘all the tea in China’?” The Doctor dropped his arms back to his sides. “Here’s China. It’s full of tea.”
“It’s just that usually, you want a good cup of tea, you pop round Mum’s, right, or maybe to some posh little shop on Charing Cross, where you can have it with biscuits and clotted cream. Not to China.”
“Ninth century China.”
“Right, ninth century China. It’s just a bit of a surprise, yeah?” A humid, somewhat smelly surprise. Now that she’d registered the smell, she couldn’t put it out of her mind; it was everywhere, getting into everything. “Should I go change?”
“No need.” The Doctor waved a hand airily. “You and I, we’re barbarians. They’ll expect uncouth, uncivilized behavior from us.”
“Uncivilized behavior?” Rose asked warily.
“Nudity.” The Doctor grinned. “Come on.” Turning, he started off down the packed-earth street.
Rose sighed. “Why do I always have to be the naked one?” she asked the air, and followed.
*
The hard-packed dirt of the side street where they’d landed gave quickly way to smooth, almost elegant cobblestones, the buildings increasing in both density and height, like plants pushing up out of the earth, until, with no real warning or sense of transition, they were walking down a beautifully-appointed avenue, surrounded on all sides by the sort of delicately scalloped pagodas and homes that Rose was really only accustomed to seeing in miniature, in certain neighborhoods around Leicester Square. Even there, they were clearly replicas, while these were just as clearly the real thing, clinging to their elegance despite patched woodwork, broken shingles, and faded and peeling paint.
As the neighborhood improved, the people began to appear. Just a few at first, then dozens, and finally what seemed like hundreds, all of them going about their business with barely a glance for Rose or the Doctor. That business seemed to consist largely of yelling at one another as loudly as possible, with occasional pauses to bow or buy things from the various small carts that were beginning to line the walkway. Merchants hailed people constantly, waving them over to inspect their wares.
“Why aren’t they yelling at us?” Rose asked, sticking close by the Doctor. Not that she could easily have lost him in the crowd -- he was a good foot taller than most of them, and the only pale-skinned, brown-topped man in sight -- but the thought of being lost in ninth century China was somehow a great deal more unsettling than the idea of being lost on some alien moon or stranded in the distant future. At least there, she wouldn’t have to worry about her mummified remains eventually fetching up in the British Museum.
“Largely because we’re barbarians. Entirely uncouth, incapable of honor, good taste, or, most importantly, paying our bills.” The Doctor paused, studying a sign hung outside one of the gaudier pavilions. “This won’t do at all. We need to find someplace a little less...”
“Crowded?”
“Pleasant. Come on.” Grabbing her hand against her bewildered protests, the Doctor hauled her down a side street.
Once again, it only took a few short blocks to change the character of the city completely. The cobblestones dropped away, replaced by dirt that was somewhat less hard-packed, and more, well, mucky. The merchants and their stalls remained, but took on an air of shabby, unhygienic disarray. Rose started spotting men who were missing legs, or eyes, or the better part of their original ration of teeth. The women weren’t much better. Some of the men -- the ones that could still see -- leered at her, eyes raking up and down the length of her body in a way that made it quite clear that yes, by the standards of the day, she was quite nude.
“Liked it better where we were,” she muttered, pressing closer to the Doctor, refusing to relinquish his hand. “This is some sort of shortcut, yeah?”
“If you want a really good cup of tea around here, you can go to one of two places,” he was saying, seemingly oblivious to her discomfort. “There’s the Emperor’s palace, of course, but I really don’t want to deal with another silly banquet right now -- it’s all pomp and circumstance until someone winds up beheaded, and that just isn’t any fun at all, unless you’re a trifle off.”
“And the other option?” Rose said.
“Find a nice whorehouse. Ah!” The Doctor stopped, looking up at a shabby pavilion painted in shades best described as ‘rotten peach’ and ‘tarnished gold’. “The Peach Orchard is still here! Come on, then!”
Before she could protest, he had hauled her inside.
*
Rose had been in a brothel once before. She was sixteen years old, it was a dare from Tracy down the lane, and she’d only gone in long enough to take a quick, terrified look around before fleeing again, out into the relative safety of the London night. Afterwards, when she’d calmed down enough to think about what she’d actually seen, she couldn’t understand what all the fuss had been about. It was just a plain, gray little room with two battered couches, a dying rubber tree, and a woman about her mother’s age sitting behind a reception desk, snapping her gum as she waited for custom. Tawdry, sure, but not as titillating as your average naughty bookshop.
This, however, was closer to what she’d been expecting back then.
The walls were draped in peach-colored silk, and the light, although cast by covered lanterns, was diffused by clever screens that broke it into patterns of stars, moons, and round things that she could only assume were intended to be still more peaches. The various shapes drifted lazily across the walls and the over-stuffed, oddly-shaped furniture that decorated the room, tangling in the branches of the ornamental peach trees that flanked each of the three doorways. In all that pink and white and peach-colored silk, it was surprisingly easy to overlook the girl in the peach gown who lounged, as decorative as a bit of trim, on one of the over-stuffed couches.
Easy, that was, until she uncurled herself, rising to her feet, and bowed in their direction. “This unworthy one is honored to welcome you to our humble place of business,” she intoned. “How may your revered needs be met by such a debased and filth-ridden establishment as ours?”
Rose blinked at her, leaning over to murmur, “Why’s she talking like that?”
“Pretty standard stuff. Means ‘welcome, and if you can’t pay, get out’,” the Doctor said, solemnly. He bowed towards the girl, saying, “These worthless ones are hoping that the mistress of the house might spare a few precious moments to educate us in the proper appreciation of tea.”
This was, apparently, at least in the neighborhood of the correct answer; the girl bowed again, and then turned, vanishing between one of the pairs of peach trees. Their leaves wavered in the wind from her passing. Rose elbowed the Doctor lightly in the ribs, taking his attention away from the departing concubine’s peach-clad derriere.
“We’re having tea with the Madame of the local cathouse?” she asked.
“In a sense,” the Doctor replied. Any further explanation was cut off as a second woman appeared in the doorway, the first standing several feet behind her, watching expectantly. Almost, Rose thought, like she was waiting for the new arrival to throw them both out onto the street. The Doctor beamed, spreading his arms. “Xian-Chu!”
“A thousand apologies, and may the Emperor of Heaven take His most holy attention from the great book of law to strike me to ashes where I stand, but have we met?” asked the woman, slowly.
She wasn’t the sort of woman Rose would have pictured running a whorehouse; she wasn’t a great beauty, or used up and haggard like the prostitutes she used to see around the theatre district after midnight. If it hadn’t been for her hair, half of which was streaked silver-white against the black, Rose wouldn’t have guessed her as much older than she was. That and her eyes, which were a bizarre shade of peach-yellow, were about the only distinctive things about her. She was wearing a white silk gown, embroidered with peach trees and tiny crescent moons in a slightly darker shade of cream.
The Doctor’s smile widened. “Two hundred years ago, a woman challenged a barbarian stranger to a game of cards at an open-air tea shop in Xi’an,” he said. “She wore a yellow dress, because the moon was almost full, and she didn’t want to offend her father.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “The stranger said he’d bring her a gift if he ever came to see her again,” she said. “A sign that it was, in fact, him, since it might be a very long time before they had such a meeting.”
“A gift. Something simple, like, say, a bottle of peach brandy?” The Doctor reached into his coat pocket, pulling out a pint bottle of deep yellow liquor. He held it out towards her, smile gentling. “Hello, Xian-Chu.”
“Doctor,” she said, and bowed again. When she straightened up, her smile was genuine. “How wonderful it is to see you again.”
Rose blinked.
*
Xian-Chu’s private rooms were decorated much more simply than the front room, which was a good thing, as Rose was starting to feel like she was suffering an overdose of the color peach. The walls were draped in white silk, over plain wood, and the furniture, what little there was, was either enameled black or upholstered in white. It was a bit like standing in a giant checkerboard, but it was better than the unending pinkness.
A tea service for three took up much of the center of the floor, provided with eerie speed by the girls in Xian-Chu’s service. There were plates of little rolls and puffed buns that Rose didn’t recognize, pots of what she hoped was jam, and not crushed peppers or something equally unexpected, and the more usual, comprehensible teapot and cups. A second, smaller teapot sat off to one side. Xian-Chu was crushing dried tea leaves, delicately, with a bone china spoon, casting glances at the Doctor as she worked.
Finally, carefully, she said, “I did not expect to see you again.”
“Got distracted,” he replied.
“Your face has changed.”
“Yours hasn’t.” The Doctor smiled, patting Rose on the knee. “Rose here wanted tea. Yours was the best I could think of.”
“Truly, you honor me,” said Xian-Chu, politely, and poured the leaves into the empty pot. Reaching for the second pot, she began decanting boiling water over the top of them. “Is your Rose, too, a lord of all time, beyond the need for such humble things as peaches?”
Rose shot the Doctor a surprised look. Shaking his head, he said, “No. She’s my current traveling companion.”
“Ah,” Xian-Chu said, with a small nod. “The vigil endures.” Looking to Rose, she added, politely, “Please, sample the confectionery. If it does not suit you, I will have my cooks beaten in the square at dusk.”
“What?”
“She doesn’t mean it literally, Rose,” the Doctor assured her. “Go ahead. Have a biscuit.”
Cautiously, Rose reached for one of the smaller cookies. It tasted of fruit and cloves, and dissolved like frosting on her tongue. “That’s good!” she said, surprised.
“I will refrain from beating my cooks,” Xian-Chu said mildly.
Rose swallowed, and looked between the pair. “So...if it’s been two hundred years since the last time you two saw each other...are you from…?” Rather than saying anything as uncouth as ‘outer space’ or ‘another dimension’, she unfolded one finger and pointed, carefully, upwards.
Calmly, Xian-Chu nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I am from the Heavenly Gardens of the Moon.”
Rose blinked. She hadn’t been expecting that. The ‘moon’ part wasn’t so surprising, but the heavenly gardens? That was new.
“Xian-Chu,” said the Doctor, “is a goddess.”
“Oh,” said Rose. “Well. That just explains everything, doesn’t it?”
*
“China has long suffered from an infestation of gods,” said the Doctor, reaching for a cookie. “They’ve got even more than the Greeks do. Thousands and thousands, even millions of gods. At the height of their worship, there were more gods than people in China. Not just a god for every taste -- a god for every person.”
“Come now, don’t exaggerate,” said Xian-Chu, swirling the tea inside the pot. “Some also serve animals, or ideals. There are people who find no patron.”
“It started when a colony ship crashed here, on the mainland, oh, a few million years ago. Their life support systems were damaged in the crash, and most of the colonists stayed in suspended animation, waiting for a rescue that would never come. But every millennia or so, the automatic systems would kick on, thaw out the top-ranked members of the crew to see whether repair was possible.” The Doctor took another cookie. “They were dying out two and three at a time, because they just kept waking up to dinosaurs and insects and primordial ooze. Until everything changed.”
“What changed?” asked Rose, wide-eyed.
“They found people.” The Doctor popped the cookie into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and said, “Humans changed everything.”
Rose frowned. “How’d we manage that?”
“You believed,” said Xian-Chu, solemnly.
“See, Xian-Chu’s people are immortals -- or effectively so, anyway,” said the Doctor, watching as Xian-Chu poured the tea out into their cups. “That’s enough for me, thanks. They feed off belief. Believe in them, and they can live forever.”
“What, like vampires?” Rose asked, frowning.
Xian-Chu clucked her tongue. “I’m sure you could find a more judgmental way of saying that, if you really worked at it. Perhaps this unworthy one might give you a few hours to prepare yourself, before we attempt this discussion again?”
Rose’s frown deepened. “Are you making fun of me?”
“Such an act would be entirely beneath me, and of no lasting benefit,” said Xian-Chu, serenely. “Yes, I am.”
“Play nice at the table, both of you,” said the Doctor. “The Chinese gods aren’t vampires; they don’t take anything as concrete as blood, or even brainwaves. They just pull the belief out of the air. It’s like oxygen for them. Without it, they wither away and die.”
“But...you called them gods. They aren’t really, are they? They’re just aliens, like you. People from somewhere else.”
“We care for our believers. Encourage them, tend to them, and grant their prayers, when such may be done,” said Xian-Chu, solemnly. “Is that not the purpose of divinity?”
“You grant their prayers by running a whorehouse?” asked Rose.
Xian-Chu smiled. “There are a great many of us. Enough that we might have gods for everything.”
Rose couldn’t think of a thing to say.
*
They walked back to the TARDIS through the crowded streets of Beijing, merchants and shoppers shouting on all sides, their feet clattering on the smoothly rounded cobblestones. The Doctor had a pocket full of cookies, which he was eating one at a time while they walked.
“Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“If she’s a goddess...and all the Chinese gods and goddesses are, well, gods and goddesses...what does that say about, well...God?”
“Lots of things can be called gods, Rose,” said the Doctor. “What that means, exactly, you’ll have to decide for yourself.”
The wind that blew through the China night was warm, and humid, and it tasted like peaches.