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The sun was going to burn the back of her neck at this rate. Rapunzel adjusted her wide straw hat, gifted to her among laughter by her friends in her exchange class, and tried not to squirm too much as she lay on the planks over the grave. All across the battlefield, other students were doing the same, balancing on planks so as not to disturb the close-set graves beneath, using trowels or brushes to reveal the bones beneath.
Her skeleton was an unremarkable ‘Grave 46’, and had started off with just a portion of humerus and clavicle revealed. Rapunzel swapped to a soft paintbrush as she cleared the thoracic vertebrae, pale against the rich red earth. 10R 3/4 on the Munsell Soil Colour Charts, to be precise, and she had checked with her supervisor Ting-Ting to be sure of it.
It was hot and painstaking, as detailed in its own way as any of the art that she painted in her spare time. But slowly, she started to reveal the skull above.
The soldier – this was a battlefield, that was why there were so many bodies for them to excavate, all of the bodies here were soldiers – must have been stripped of his armour after death. Probably by the victorious army. This site was one of many from the Han-Xiongnu War, and whichever side had won it would have taken the armour and weapons of the other. It was only sensible, when all was said and done.
He had his head turned to the side. Rapunzel followed the line of his mandible, then paused, frowning at the mandibular angle. Unusually shallow, for a male skeleton. But bell curves were bell curves for a reason. With a shrug, Rapunzel continued onwards, revealing the teeth. Young; she could see that at a glance, and it made a pang in her chest. Probably only her age.
She continued up, carefully revealing more and more of the skull. It was remarkably intact, not crushed by the weight of the soil above, and even the delicate bones of the face seemed to be intact. Rapunzel’s heart quickened, but her hand remained steady as she switched to her leaf trowel to clear the orbitals.
Once the entire skull was revealed, though, Rapunzel stopped, frowning. It wasn’t just the shallow mandibular angle, that was the thing. The glabella was at best delimited, and the mastoid process was moderate but not exactly large. There was barely an occipital protuberance, either.
If Rapunzel didn’t know better, and if she weren’t on a battlefield, she would have said that was a female skull.
Bell curves, she reminded herself firmly, but she did glance around as if someone was going to materialise to look over her shoulder. Nobody was looking her way, of course; this was just another grave among many, and nobody was that interested in what she was doing. Perhaps if someone found a grave with more impressive armour, or even more impressive wounds, it would get some attention. But not this one.
She scooted off the planks, shuffled them around, and opened up the space over what should be the pelvis. She probably should have worked her way down from the head, looking for injuries and doing a rough inventory along the way, but she could feel adrenaline buzzing under her skin as she worked on downwards.
Despite the nerves, her hands did not shake as she started to clear the earth away from around the pelvis. The left iliac crest came into view first, and she quickly – not hastily, that was not good, she had to keep an eye for anything else in the soil or for any colour changes – sought out the subpubic cavity.
Concave.
Rapunzel swallowed excitement, sat up, and put the back of her hand to her mouth. She was in the same strata as the other skeletons, the soldiers , that was clear. There had been no signs of civilians. This was only a battlefield, and there had been no sign of civilians elsewhere. Everything that they had found so far had been military. Soldiers.
But the skeleton in front of her was undeniably female.
She took a deep breath, made sure that her camera was within arm’s reach, and set to work.
It took the rest of the day to get the skeleton revealed, photographed, and otherwise recorded. Rapunzel kept to herself, not even calling over Ting-Ting and just replying from a distance that she was fine whenever a glance came her way. Everyone was pretty happy to leave her to her own devices; she was known to record well and fastidiously. Aside from working through bottle after bottle of water, she was fine.
By the time that the light was fading, the skeleton was clearly visible. Rapunzel felt another flutter of nervousness in her chest; whatever the explanation for this was, it was going to be groundbreaking. She was going to make herself the centre of attention on this dig. And it was more than possible that someone more experienced would take over the excavation altogether.
She felt strangely protective of this skeleton. It was hard to say exactly why.
Tomorrow, Rapunzel told herself, first thing. Surely it would be better to set aside a whole day than to say something this big at the end of the evening. She drew her dustsheet over the grave, just as others were doing all over the site, and made her way to join her friends.
Su spent the evening talking with huge enthusiasm about the grave she had been working on. She had both signs of injury and of pathology on her skeleton which were bound to make it interesting to work on, but even better she had found a small jade pendant. It was currently face-down, but she was hoping for an inscription on the underside, something that might make her skeleton an individual .
Rapunzel did not talk about her grave.
She had shared an apartment with Ting-Ting, Su and Mei since she started her Erasmus year in China, and though she had been nervous at first it had worked out amazingly well. They shared the cooking, although Ting-Ting with her extra work tended to not be able to be involved so much, and nobody teased Rapunzel too badly when she got tired late at night and struggled with her vocabulary.
Her muscles were stiff and sore from lying in place all day, and she worked out as much knots as she could with a fiercely hot shower. She wrung out as much of her hair as she could – some summers, she had considered cutting it, but it had always seemed like a waste of years and so it was now in the middle of her thighs and still growing – and loosely braided it before stumbling to bed.
She always slept well during an excavation. Especially when moving backdirt. Today might have been less physically demanding, but it was still her body more than her mind that was doing the work.
Even with lingering thoughts of ‘her’ skeleton on her mind, it did not take long at all for her to fall asleep.
There was a woman kneeling in front of the window. It was raining outside, and the room was cold, night dark around them with only the dim glow of the moon through the clouds to throw light upon them.
“Hello?” she said. The woman did not respond. Outside, the rain pounded on. Rapunzel tried again, in Mandarin. “Hello?”
The woman raised a sword from the ground in front of her, and Rapunzel tried to lurch forwards but could not. That was strange. When she tried to look down, she could not do that either, could not tear her eyes away from the woman drawing the sword and pausing, looking at the length of the blade.
The room seemed to spin. Rapunzel found herself facing the woman, right where she could be seen, but the woman did not say a word. Her eyes remained locked on the sword as she gathered up her long black hair in the other hand, squeezed closed her eyes, and in one decisive movement cut across her hair.
It fell to the ground at her side. She paused, breathing heavily, then put aside the sword on the tight-woven mat on which she knelt. She yanked out a few stray long hairs, then brushed back her slightly-uneven locks, pulled a strip of green cloth from her navy waist skirt, and used it to tie up her hair into a bun.
For a moment, she looked straight ahead, straight through Rapunzel. Her eyes were determined, face hard to read and set, handsome and androgynous, and Rapunzel felt her heart lurch in her chest. She realised, as well, that the woman could not see her.
A touch brushed against the back of Rapunzel’s neck, and she jumped, whirling around. But there was nothing there but the window and the rain beyond.
When she looked back, the woman was dressed in green armour, armour of the Han dynasty, iron lamellar armour. That was rare for that time, expensive. The armour of a highborn man. But the woman wore it like a second skin, and sheathed the sword at her side again. Its hilt bore the visage of a dragon.
The woman looked up, and for a moment Rapunzel could have sworn that their eyes met, that surprise flickered in the woman’s eyes.
She woke up so sharply that she jerked in her bed and knocked her head against the wall. Groaning, Rapunzel fell back again, putting a hand to her forehead. It had been a while since she had dreamt of her excavations, although archaeological dreams were hardly new for her.
It was still dark outside, but they would be leaving in not much over an hour anyway. Rapunzel sat cross-legged on her bed and starting wrestling with her hair again; it had half-dried overnight, and the sun would finish the job today. When she closed her eyes, she could still picture the hilt of the sword, clasped in the woman’s hand.
When her hair was braided, she found a piece of paper at her desk, and sketched out the design of the sword’s hilt. The woman’s armour had been impressive, but it was the sword that had impressed itself upon Rapunzel’s memory. She pinned it over her desk, among her other sketches and small paintings, before wandering towards the kitchen in search of breakfast. Everyone was used to each other’s pyjamas now.
Mei was always the worst at breakfast, falling asleep in her congee and requiring an elbow or nudge of the leg every so often to stay awake. By the time they piled into Ting-Ting’s car to head to the site, though, Rapunzel was thinking of her find again, and nervousness made her fidget with her hat and the laces of her boots while Su and Mei talked excitedly in the back seats.
“Ting-Ting,” she said cautiously, as they got out of the car again at the dig, “can I talk to you for a minute?”
It earnt her a curious look, but Ting-Ting locked the car door and leant on the bonnet. “Sure. What is it?”
“My skeleton. I mean, the skeleton I’m excavating,” said Rapunzel. Ting-Ting smiled mildly. “I think it might be, well, female.”
That got Ting-Ting’s attention. The older woman frowned, crossing her arms over her chest. “You’re sure?”
“Skull and pelvis,” Rapunzel said, with a slightly awkward shrug. “98%.”
That was what they always cited. 98% accurate. There was still a risk there, still a one in fifty chance that she could be wrong, but that was usually with intermediate cases that were harder to distinguish. The skeleton that Rapunzel had was definitely female.
“I’ll come and have a look,” said Ting-Ting. “We’re in the era of Lu Mu here, but that was peasant revolt, not this organised army. And we’re some time after Huang Guigu. As far as we know, there were no women serving in the Han army at this time. According to some readings of the laws of the time, it may have been prohibited.”
That was one of the things that had drawn Rapunzel to China, when she had first read about its history in books. Its warrior women, scattered throughout their deep and rich history. They had given her strength, in those dark claustrophobic days of her childhood. They had given her the boldness to go to university, to take the Mandarin she had learnt from books and the internet and turn it into a grasp of the language that had actually let her come out here for her third year. It had been the warriors in the books that had given Rapunzel the determination to get away from her mother. It felt strangely like paying them back to have found one.
“Thank you.”
“It’s nothing, really,” said Rapunzel.
Ting-Ting frowned. “What?”
Rapunzel looked at her in equal confusion, the moment hanging awkwardly between them, then Ting-Ting shook her head slowly and rolled upright. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Ting-Ting agreed that the skeleton was female. Then they stood there in silence for a bit, neither quite sure what to do next, and Ting-Ting finally told her to keep on excavating, going back up to the head and shoulders, while she spoke to the dig supervisor. Rapunzel wanted to go herself, but Ting-Ting explained that there would be a lot of Mandarin more rapid-fire and complicated than Rapunzel could probably keep up with – and, that if she already had her trowel in the trench, it was going to be easier to keep her there.
It still rankled, a little. But then Rapunzel saw the gleam in Ting-Ting’s eye and realised that she wanted this find, as well. And that she, of all people, would be willing to share it.
“Thank you,” she said.”
Ting-Ting grinned her wicked little way, and set off.
Hurriedly, Rapunzel got out her tools, uncovered her trench, and climbed back in. From what she had seen, the skeleton was lying on their back, head turned to the side, but fully articulated. She rearranged her planks again and set back to work. Using her leaf trowel, she sought out the delicate vertebrae, scooped the dirt into her trowel to sift it before setting it aside. The longer that it took for Ting-Ting to return, the more that she revealed, but the more nervous she became.
She was just outlining the clavicle, had just found the clear mark of a blade so fresh that it must have been from this same battle, when footsteps sounded above her. For a moment, Rapunzel thought that she saw a figure sitting beside the trench, but there was nobody there and Ting-Ting was walking back by herself with a broad grin.
“She’s ours,” Ting-Ting said. “Double-down on the recording, but she’s ours.”
Rapunzel’s heart leapt.
It was still Rapunzel who did most of the excavation, while Ting-Ting came back intermittently to check on her progress, on the grades of sieve she was using, and how fast she was using up her memory of her digital camera. Apparently the dig supervisor was still not quite sure what to make of the situation, and Ting-Ting had spoken him round to make the most of it for them.
“What do you think her name was?” said Rapunzel, as they sat in the shade of an old tree to eat their lunch.
“Unlikely we’ll ever know,” Ting-Ting replied. “Unless she’s got one of those jade pendants like Su has. They got it out this morning.”
“Read it yet?”
Ting-Ting shook her head. “They aren’t sure how delicate the carving might be. Depends if it’s raised or engraved, I suppose.”
“Probably means he was important, then.”
“She could be more important,” said Ting-Ting, with a nod to their excavation. “If she is, well, who she is.”
A smile traced Rapunzel’s lips, and she hide it in her water bottle. A picture of the woman came to her mind, wearing armour of the era; iron at first, then she mentally amended it to bronze as most armour was. She couldn’t help giving her the same androgynous features that had been in her dream.
“We’ll see,” Rapunzel said, and knocked her water bottle against Ting-Ting’s in lieu of a toast.
It took two days for her to entirely excavate the skeleton. Rapunzel was right: she was a woman, though tall, particularly compared to Rapunzel’s short frame. She had clear sharp force trauma injuries to her clavicle, her left forearm and, as they carefully started to lift the bones, the right side of her face. But Rapunzel carefully searched for every bone, and managed to find every longbone, every vertebra, all but a few of the carpals and tarsals and their associated small bones. She had set aside the rest of the dirt to be sifted again, and even managed to pick out every one of incisors that always came loose during decomposition. Single-rooted teeth, bless them.
The second night, she dreamt of the woman in armour again, training, running, fighting, laughing with her fellow soldiers. Dreamt of her sitting in a small tent, running her thumb over the beautifully polished hilt of her sword. Dreamt of her looking south, her longing for home almost tangible.
Unable to help it, Rapunzel reached out to cup the woman’s cheek. She jumped, spun, and once again just for a moment Rapunzel could have sworn that their eyes met, but then the woman blinked sharply and any recognition was gone.
The third night, she dreamt of fire and blood, and the woman with a cut across her right cheekbone and temple that spilled blood down her face. Her arm was wrapped across her abdomen, darkened with blood. Blood ran in rivulets down her face as she stumbled into the snow, and for a moment again her gaze locked on Rapunzel’s again.
“ You again, ” she said, the words choked out.
Rapunzel scrambled awake drenched in sweat and shaking, grabbing her phone for light until she could turn the actual light on. She’d had plenty of nightmares in her years, and plenty of dreams about archaeology, but she’d never actually managed archaeological nightmares.
She sat at her desk nursing tea, and tried not to think about the fact that it was three a.m. Even jetlag hadn’t been this bad. She had the uneasy feeling in her gut that usually came from dreaming of her mother, the guilty weight on her limbs that always came with nightmares. She swung open one of the curtains to the still-dark sky, and waited for it to get lighter as she sketched what she had seen. Drawing it out had always helped.
The woman from her dreams looked up at her from the paper with deep, stunning eyes. Rapunzel could not bring herself to draw the injury on her face, and left it unblemished, hair still done up in a neat bun rather than the dishevelled state it had been in her dreams.
She would rather think of the woman like this.
It was harder to eat that morning, but she knew better than to try to dig on an empty stomach. Now she had to clear down to the bottom of the strata, make sure that there was nothing else beside the skeleton and the three jade beads that had been beside it. Skeletons did shift and settle, and this one needed particular care not just because it was female, but because she had been further away from the dense centre of the fighting.
All the same, Rapunzel did not feel up to talking, and Ting-Ting eyed her cautiously as they drove out to the site again. She was looking forward to some peace and quiet. Wishing Su luck with her skeleton, and Mei luck with the decapitated head which she had moved on to, Rapunzel headed over to the empty grave and continued clearing down.
Now, she did not need to use the board, and climbed right into the trench, red dust immediately coating the knees of her light cargo pants. Her braid was so long that she had it tucked into her waistband. But it was always easier in the trench, when she didn’t have to think further than the end of her trowel.
The first thing that she found was a corroded metal square. Rapunzel blinked at it for a moment before realising that it was iron , that it had rusted red rather than corroded green. Her throat went dry, but she carefully cleaned around the find and left it in situ for recording before continuing to move up towards where the head had been.
She was about where the shoulders had been when someone came and sat down on the edge of the trench, throwing a shadow across her. “Hey, Ting-Ting,” said Rapunzel, without looking round. Only Ting-Ting had come after the past couple of days, everyone else needing to work on their own trenches.
“You should try there,” said Ting-Ting, pointing to the top left corner of the trench. There was a stone lapping into the area that Rapunzel had been digging.
“Isn’t that the bottom of the…” for a moment, the word in Mandarin completely escaped her, and Rapunzel knelt up, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. “Stratigraphy,” she finally recalled. “It’s the base of the stratigraphy.”
“If it was exposed at the time, maybe she put something underneath it,” said Ting-Ting.
Only it really didn’t sound like Ting-Ting. Rapunzel looked round to see who was sitting at the side of the trench, but nobody was there at all.
She blinked. Blinked again, just in case the lack of sleep had got to her, but there was definitely nobody there. She had thought that Ting-Ting had sounded funny, voice slightly lowered and a little older, almost, but it was only Ting-Ting that had been coming to the trench.
She was still unsettled from her sleep, she decided, and was probably hearing someone’s distant conversation strangely. Probably a good thing that nobody had seen it, then.
She eyed the stone in the corner of her trench, sticking into the stratigraphy. Well, it probably couldn’t hurt to look.
Before she knew it, she was sticking her hand into a hollow beneath the rock, heart pounding as her fingers brushed over what was undeniably the hilt of a sword.
Rapunzel almost fell over climbing out of the trench to fetch Ting-Ting once again.
A female skeleton was anomaly enough. A female skeleton with – scant, but present – evidence of iron armour would have been astounding. But now Rapunzel was looking at an iron sword, largely protected by its scabbard, with a gold-plated hilt that had been in place for almost two millennia.
And she had found it .
She spent her days waiting for the news that she could start analysing the bones. At night, she continued to dream of the same woman, better this time, doing chores around her family farm, riding free and joyful on the back of a stunning black horse, sharing tea with her father as they sat on the steps of a traditional garden shrine. Happy .
It left her less shaken, but still unsettled, at the very least wanting to see the bones again. She was good at facial reconstruction, she had been told that, and this dig was big enough that they had access to a 3D printer. A 3D print of the skull, and she could bring the woman from the grave back into the world of the living, at least in a way.
And maybe it would get rid of these dreams as well.
So she sifted soil, picking out phalanges and carpals that other people had missed, found stray jade beads and fragments of iron. Her skills in art at least came in somewhat useful when it came to sketching and recording the trenches, even if it meant that she could get overly picky about the exact position of bones in her drawings. Munsell charts were at least easier to objectively agree on.
It looked as if the Xiongnu army had been the victors here, to judge by the remains that they found; the Han army would have come back for the jade beads and pendants, to take home to the families of those who died, and quite likely buried the bodies more neatly as well. These would seem to have been left where they lay, and any number had become disarticulated with the years, forcing some people to push their trenches wider and wider in search for missing skulls or entire arms.
In her dreams, the woman finally gained a name, shouted at her by a mother whose love and exasperation both showed in her voice. Mulan .
Finally seeing the bones laid out on the table was a strange feeling. A grey foam mat had been placed underneath to protect them, but the ‘anatomical’ arrangement skewed the skeleton, turning the ribs flat and putting the vertebrae one after the other so that they stretched all of the way down the table. The skull was propped up on its own foam wedge, looking straight at Rapunzel, the cut through the zygomatic now visible extending to clip the orbital.
Over two thousand years old, and the skeleton looked back. It was a person on the table, that was what Rapunzel had never gotten over, and though as much as any of the others she had become comfortable enough around bones to eat in the same room, to talk about her weekend with other people as she worked; only when she had worked with infant bones had it ever become daunting. But she never forgot that there was a person there.
Of course, some of her friends found it funny that she tended to say good morning to the skeleton on whom she was working. But if you were going to be handling someone’s ribs, it only seemed polite.
It took a long time to make a truly thorough record of the bones. The other skeletons would probably not get this treatment; if they were male, foot soldiers, no signs of rank. A note of pathologies, age, rough health, and that would be it. But this skeleton, this woman, was different.
Rapunzel went from toe to head, noting an old break in a metatarsal, the position of the nutrient foramina on the long bones, the smooth surface texture and the sharp apex of the auricular surface of the ilium. Its condition aligned with that of the teeth that Rapunzel had seen so clearly during excavation: the woman was twenty, give or take a couple of years, and no more.
The fresh injuries were confined to the woman’s upper body, so clean that they must have been perimortem. The left radius was completely cut through, the left ulna partially cut and broken, jaggedly, some time later. There was a second, shallower cut to the ulna near to it, and a third injury just below the ulnar head. At least three wounds to the left arm, then; classic defensive injuries. Rapunzel’s heart grew heavier in her chest.
The facial injury might have looked worse than it was, in a sense. It was not deep enough to have reached the eyeball, although it clipped the outside of the socket just where the frontal bone met the zygomatic, and did cut noticeably into the body of the zygomatic itself. It would have been a bloody wound, but not a fatal one.
The injury to the left shoulder could have been fatal, she could see that. The clavicle was completely severed, the scapula actually nicked when Rapunzel examined its broken pieces closely. Scapulae had always been the bane of her existence; at least if phalanges could be found they were sturdy. Scapulae could break with barely a touch.
But she had found, as well, a cut to the anterior of one of the ribs. A sharp edge – a sword, a spear – that had pierced so deep it met the spine.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly to the skeleton, late at night when everyone else had found somewhere else to be. It was just the two of them in the room. Well, just her, but it still felt like two of them. “I know it’s been a long time.”
She supposed that there was nothing that she could do now but record, and give the most honest portrayal of this young woman that she could. And give her back a face once again.
Rapunzel started to mentally paint back on the features over the skull that stood facing her. The injury she filled in immediately, with a thought, then began to overlay muscles and skin in her mind.
There were soft footsteps behind her, and Rapunzel felt a cool breeze pass over the back of her neck, but something prevented her from looking round. “Good evening,” she said, eyeing the darkening sky outside.
“Good evening,” came the reply, low, musical. The voice felt familiar, and made Rapunzel’s heart beat faster in her chest. She kept her eyes turned forwards as the person walked very softly to stand behind her. “You’re taking great care.”
“She deserves it,” Rapunzel blurted.
The person behind her sighed, very softly, and another shift of cool air made the hair on the back of Rapunzel’s neck stand on end.
“She’s special,” said Rapunzel. “The only female skeleton.” There were a couple of others that might have been ambiguous about either the skull or the pelvis, but none that were even ambiguous on both. Let alone as clear as this. “Ting-Ting is working on the preservation of her armour. I want to do a facial reconstruction.”
“She’s injured.”
“I can fix that,” she replied.
The person laughed softly to themselves, and she went to turn in her chair, when a hand came to rest on her shoulder.
“No,” the person said quickly. “Don’t turn around.”
Rapunzel licked her lips. “Will you… disappear again, if I do?”
“I’m not here.” The woman’s voice shook slightly.
“I can hear you.”
The hand was removed from her shoulder again. “You’re only hearing an echo.”
It was too much, and Rapunzel turned in her chair, but the air was indeed empty behind her. She twisted her fingers into her braid, and tried to stop the panic building in her chest. She didn’t understand. Was she actually going mad? Had everything that her mother had told her would happen actually come true, the outside world being too much for her? Maybe Rapunzel had been wrong to come out here. Maybe she was sick.
Just like her mother said.
She pushed thoughts of her mother out of her mind as she got to her feet and left the room, feeling as if there was no privacy even in a place she shared only with the dead. It was too much, too much. She locked herself into one of the toilet cubicles and leant against the door, arms wrapped around herself as her breathing threatened to become far too fast.
It still left her wondering if she was going mad. Hearing voices, dreaming of a skeleton, thinking that someone was there when it was clearly impossible for them to be. Was it just stress, from living in China for over six months now? Was it the nightmares? Was it just her overactive imagination, and instead of drawings and paintings it had suddenly decided to express itself like this?
She could hear her unsteady breathing echoing in the cubicle, and forced herself to breathe more calmly again. She was fine. She could do this. It probably was just stress, and nothing more.
When she returned to the skeleton, it was to pack it up with shaking hands, and all but flee the building. She huddled in the taxi on the way home, and did not talk much to the others before heading to her room and falling into a nervous but exhausted sleep.
“Little brother!”
Someone was shouting. Rapunzel looked round curiously from the bench on which she sat, but could not see anyone. From above her, a few more of the magnolia petals slowly drifted down.
“Little brother?”
Rapunzel was about to call back when a dog came lolloping around the tree, his tongue lolling out of his mouth. He was small, white and brown, of an indeterminate breed and with a less than intelligent expression. At the sight of Rapunzel, he plunked his rear end to the ground, dropped the bone in his mouth, and gave her a look of remarkable puzzlement.
“Hey there, boy,” she said, reaching out a hand to him. He sniffed, but did not move towards her. “What are you doing out here?”
The little dog cocked its head further, causing one of its ears to flop back on itself and expose the skin of the inside. Laughing, Rapunzel went to brush it away, but before she made contact the dog sprang to its feet and hopped back, looking uncertain. Not angry, no baring of teeth, but looking at her as if it was not sure what she was about to do. Not the response Rapunzel usually got from animals.
A woman came running through the garden, holding up the chang of her hanfu, looking around with the sort of half-frown that definitely came from looking for animals. It had to be her dog. Rapunzel was about to call out when the woman looked round, straight at Rapunzel, and her eyes widened.
She dropped her chang and stumbled back slightly, face paling and breathing heavily. Rapunzel held up her hands, trying not to look threatening, not sure how she could look threatening, but the woman was looking at her as if…
As if she had seen a ghost.
“It’s okay,” said Rapunzel, almost desperately. “I’m not…” Not what, she asked herself? Going to hurt you, going to do anything? What a ridiculous thing to say. “I’m just me,” she ended up hearing herself say, and somehow that managed to be even more absurd.
The woman caught herself, and approached, still looking cautious. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Rapunzel. I’m not sure how I got here, I…”
She trailed off as she realised that she could not remember how she came to be in this garden. Or even where this garden was. Uncertainty clenched in her own stomach as she looked around, realising that she had no idea where she was or how she had got there.
Still the woman watched her, cautiously, but with a piercing gaze that seemed to look straight through Rapunzel.
“What’s your name?” said Rapunzel.
Still, looking over her. “You wear strange clothes,” the woman said, and Rapunzel looked down to see her sunflower-patterned pyjamas and bare feet, “and your accent is not one I have heard before. Your face is like the travellers from the far west, but…”
“Are you Mulan?” Rapunzel blurted.
Wariness gave way to shock, perhaps edged with concern, and the woman’s back straightened as her posture shifted slightly. Rapunzel had grown good at reading body language over the years, and she knew defensiveness when she saw it.
“I just, I think I heard someone calling you that,” added Rapunzel quickly, almost tripping over her words. “My name is Rapunzel.”
“Rapunzel,” said Mulan softly. There was the slightest of frowns on her face, a faint line between her brows. “You - you seem familiar. How-”
But then the world was dissolving away, and Rapunzel jerked awake in the darkness once again.
“Okay,” said Ting-Ting. She sat down beside Rapunzel at the breakfast table, startling her away from staring into the tea that had long since gone cold. “What’s up?”
“I’m fine.”
She knew that she had shadows beneath her eyes, that she woke with dreams still bright in her mind and difficult to tell apart from the ‘real’ world. It was hard to not think of the skeleton, the work she was doing, and she barely cared for anything else. For days, all of her photographs had been of the woman called Mulan, even if she had taken to not letting the others into her room because she did not want them to see what was probably fast becoming an obsession.
But even so, she knew that her words did not sound like a lie. So it was downheartening when Ting-Ting just looked at her pointedly.
“I’m not asking as your supervisor,” Ting-Ting said. “Or even as your Erasmus host. I’m asking as your friend, Rapunzel.” Her voice softened. “What’s going on?”
Rapunzel twirled the end of her long braid between her fingers. She opened her mouth to speak, could not bring herself to do so, and pressed her lips together again for a few seconds before managing to blurt out anything at all.
“What would you do if you thought you had a ghost following you?”
For a moment, Ting-Ting did not say anything, leaning her elbows on the table. “Well, my grandmother swore by burning sage to keep ghosts away,” she said, as if the idea was not all that strange to her. “But then again, she had this charm from her father that was supposed to attract them. From before Mao, you know? She kept it for the memory of him. Most people don’t think about ghosts so much these days.” She hesitated, then put a hand on Rapunzel’s wrist. “Why? Have you been… worrying about ghosts?”
Worrying was not the word, Rapunzel thought, rolling the inside of her lip between her teeth. Herbs to send ghosts away; charms to encourage them. She had vague memories of reading about the supernatural creatures of China, but had always been more interested in its history instead. Maybe she should have paid more attention. “They aren’t evil, are they?” she said. “Not here. Not like in American horror movies.”
“Rapunzel, is there something you want to talk to me about?” said Ting-Ting. She sounded increasingly worried, but there was something about the question, her guarded tone and perhaps the words themselves, resonating with something that Rapunzel’s mother had once said, and Rapunzel could not help but throw her shutters down.
She forced a sheepish smile, as if she were embarrassed with herself. “Sorry,” she said. “I watched this movie that Mei recommended. Probably should have known better.”
“I did warn you about her taste for horror films,” said Ting-Ting, although she still didn’t sound completely convinced.
“Just… that and working with skeletons all day, I guess,” Rapunzel said. She stood up, letting Ting-Ting’s hand fall away, and crossed to the sink with the remains of her tea before Ting-Ting could realise how cold it was.
“You’ve been having nightmares?”
Rapunzel nodded. She did feel a twinge of guilt, both for lying and for the edge of relief that she could hear in Ting-Ting’s voice. There were some among her dreams that might be considered nightmares, dreams of swords and of crashing snow, but most of them were not. All the same, Ting-Ting looked more relaxed in her chair; nightmares were clearly something much easier to deal with than ghosts.
“I think I still have some Gui Pi Wan from when I had to do my last set of exams. I could barely sleep before I gave it a try.”
“I’d appreciate that. Thank you.”
Rapunzel had excelled in facial reconstruction. Perhaps it was the mixed arts and scientific background from which she came; the knowledge of just what depths of clay to use, tempered with an artistic understanding of how a fraction of an inch or the slightest change of colour could make the whole face come alive. But she had never been so nervous as she was when faced with recreating the face of her mystery female soldier.
She filled in the injuries of the 3D-printed cast she had been giving, smoothing out the chipped orbital and zygomatic, securing the cast incisors back into place with wax. There was no indication that she was anything other than Han Chinese, and Rapunzel had chosen both the colour of her modelling clay and the prosthetic eyes appropriately; soon, the skull looked back with a solemn, brown gaze, brightly coloured depth markers showing her the rough outline of the woman’s face.
Undercuts came next, then the muscles, occipito-frontalis wrapping down to form the forehead, zygomaticus forming the main meat of the cheeks.
There was always an element of art to the reconstruction, Rapunzel knew that, but she tried all the same not to let what she had seen in her dreams affect the way that she shaped and formed the clay. But she could not deny the round cheeks, the line of the jaw, and knew that the precise shade of brown she had used for the eyes was entirely due to Mulan.
Once or twice, she thought that she saw a shadow in the corners of the room, but she did not react to it. She knew better than that, by now.
There was a soft sound beside her, barely more than a breeze, as she hesitated over the exact form of the chin. She still did not look round.
“You’re very talented,” said the voice she had come to know so well. Rapunzel stilled her hands for a moment, making sure that they were not trembling before she continued to shape the clay.
“I was taught well,” she replied, in a murmur.
Mulan sighed. “So much has changed,” she said. “But making faces in clay remains…”
“They found the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, you know,” said Rapunzel. “Forty years ago now. Every face is different.”
“So the stories said.”
“We have different science behind it now. We have the average depth of muscle,” she smoothed the cheek into shape, “ways to work out the angle of the nose. We don’t have the people in front of us to copy.”
A hand came to rest on her shoulder, and she found herself breathing quicker, the hairs on the back of her arm all standing on end. She ached to look round, but remembered what Mulan had said, that she would disappear if Rapunzel did. Absurd thoughts whipped through her head - that she could no more make jokes about Cupid and Psyche than she could about Swayze. Both would be equally alien.
“Why did you go?” she said, voice feeling very small. “You were the only woman there. Did they know?”
“It was my father’s armour,” Mulan replied. Something of the ring of steel and the scream of dying men scraped down Rapunzel’s spine. “He had earned it fighting in an earlier war. He was too old to fight again. They called for one man from each family.”
“You had no brothers.”
“I had a dog called Little brother.” It was almost humourous, just not quite. “No cousins. No uncles.”
Rapunzel tested the way that the nose met the cheek, subtly varying it until it felt right. Alae and nostrils were always hard to gauge.
“I worked the family farm. I was strong.”
“I’ve seen your muscle attachments,” said Rapunzel. She felt the ripple of the air as Mulan chuckled. “They show it.”
“You know a lot about me.”
“Someday people will be able to tell about me by my skeleton, as well. A lot of my colleagues are more interested in your sword.”
Mulan’s hand seemed to grow heavier on her shoulder. “That was my father’s as well,” she said sadly. “I wish that I could have returned it to him.”
Rapunzel’s dreams had not gone beyond Mulan’s death. She wondered how much her family had known; they must have realised that Mulan had done. And they must have realised what had happened when the war ended, and she did not come back.
“What was his name?”
“Fa Zhou,” said Mulan.
“You looked after it well. The sheath helped to preserve it, and the gold saved the hilt. They think they’ll be able to display it.” Rapunzel started on the smaller muscles and folds around the eyes, the intricate shape of skin. She knew that she had to concentrate harder here, although after most of a year in China it probably would be easier, recreating the faces that she knew so well and not the white world that she had seen on television and in the few movies her mother had allowed as she had been growing up. “They might not know his name, but… there’s still part of him there.”
Maybe one day, they would find his body, but it was unlikely that it would ever be connected to his daughter’s. Mulan would be the one that nobody would forget.
“He would have been disappointed if I hadn’t know how to keep a sword sharp.”
Rapunzel took a deep breath, then reached up and rested her hand over Mulan’s, on her shoulder. Instead of a touch through fabric, it was against her skin, and she caught her breath as she felt warm skin against her own. She turned her head, jerky-slow, to look down at her shoulder; when she blinked, there was for a split-second the shadow of a hand, but that was all. When she closed her eyes, though, she could feel the skin warm and firm beneath her fingers, and rolled her hand around so that she could slip it under, into, Mulan’s.
“What are you doing?” said Mulan.
“It’s okay. I’m not looking.”
She could feel the callouses of work on Mulan’s hands, the roughness that had to come from her training with the sword. Rapunzel turned on her stool, still keeping her eyes closed, and stood up, offering her other hand as well.
There was a moment’s hesitation, then Mulan’s hand slipped into hers, and she laughed in relief and giddy joy, squeezing just to feel Mulan squeeze back.
“You shouldn’t do this,” said Mulan, but Rapunzel could hear the ache in her voice.
“Were you alone?” she sobered. “All those years. Were you alone.”
“I don’t remember them. Not until you found me. It’s a little bit like a dream.”
Before the nerve could escape her, Rapunzel opened her eyes. For a flash, she could see Mulan, translucent, horror in her expression, then she was gone again. But she could still feel the hands in hers, and made herself look, look deeper somehow, until the shimmering form became solid, true, in front of her.
Rapunzel smiled, not crying by will alone. She did not want anything that might affect her ability to see Mulan, finally.
Mulan was just as she had seen in her dreams, Bright, smart eyes, bold features, although generally in Rapunzel’s dreams she had not worn the look of shock and amazement and awe that she wore now.
With a shaking hand, Mulan released one of Rapunzel’s hands to stroke her cheek, pushing back a tiny tendril of loose hair behind her ear. “You can see me?” she whispered, as if saying it too loudly would break the spell.
“Yes,” breathed Rapunzel. “Yes. And I never want to stop seeing you again.”
It wasn’t much of a flat. But even a newly-graduated archaeologist could get a job if they happened to be bilingual and as skilled in art as they were in archaeology, and Rapunzel had managed to find her feet in China more easily than she had found her feet in university.
She lay on the couch, her head in Mulan’s lap, fingers toying with her hair. She had finally plucked up the courage to cut it short, even if she had spent the first few days feeling occasional stabs of terror at the knowledge, and was slowly getting used to the way it felt.
Technically, the flat was too small for two people. It certainly would have been too small for her to take a human roommate, but she explained to her friends that she felt confident enough to live alone now, and she was more than capable when it came to instant messaging anyway. That was not quite the truth, though; she was not sure who would be able to see Mulan, whether it would be possible for other people to see her at all, whether there would be too many difficult questions from those who did, or from those who did not.
“You’d look good with brown hair,” said Mulan.
Rapunzel smiled lazily. “I’ll consider it. You’d look good in jeans.”
She wasn’t sure how clothes really worked for ghosts, but she suspected that it was a matter of will. And Mulan was possibly the strongest-willed person that she had ever known. Perhaps she had to be, to reach across the centuries like this.
“I’ll think about it.”
“You’ve got time,” said Rapunzel, voice softening.
Mulan took her hand. “We’ve both got time,” she replied.