Nghi Vo’s second novella, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, was released this week and, frankly, I’m surprised there weren’t more accolades and flash to herald the second of the Singing Hills Cycle and a fabulous stand-alone story. If you didn’t catch it from my review of The Empress of Salt and Fortune last week, I’m blown away by this debut author and her command of storytelling, her attention to craft, and the sheer magic she weaves on a page.
Again, I’m committed to no-spoilers, so I’ll reveal nothing you can’t find on the back cover copy (well, almost nothing). Cleric Chih is back and the story takes place in the mountains, among mammoths and tigers. Chih is traveling with a mammoth corps scout, Si-yu and her mount, Piluk, up Kihar Pass, when they meet a trio of tigers. Hungry, angry tigers. Tigers who laugh.
Chih remembered a story that said it was tremendously unlucky to hear a tiger laugh, but they couldn’t remember why. Was it a cultural taboo? Was it a curse? Was it simply that tigers thought that killing and eating people was funny? They wished they could remember.
— from Chapter 3
Chih has learned enough about tiger etiquette to know that good manners count, and so when they address the lead tiger as “Your Majesty,” the tigers decide to treat them with courtesy.
“Why are we talking to tigers?” asked Si-yu.
“Because they are talking to us,” Chih said, stifling a somewhat hysterical giggle. “They can talk, and now they’ve seen that we can. That’s — that means that they’ll treat us like people.”
“But there’s still a chance that they’re going to eat us.”
“Oh yes. Some people are just more . . . edible than others if you are a tiger.”
— from Chapter 3
Before they eat them, the tigers want to know more about their meal, as in, who they are and why they’re there. They’re taking their history before chowing down. As a cleric from the Singing Hills abbey, taking histories is what Chih does. It’s why they’re in the north, among the mammoth corps, in the first place. Explaining their job to the tigers, Chih mentions that tiger stories are recorded in the archives of Singing Hills, such as the story of Ho Thi Thao:
“Ho Thi Thao?”
The tiger spoke sharply, and at her side, her two sisters sat up, their eyes narrowed and their whiskers pressed aggressively forward.
— from Chapter 3
Having touched a nerve, politely Chih asks for the tiger version of Thi Thao’s history. Rather than relating the “true” version, the eldest of the tiger sisters, Sinh Loan, challenges Chih to tell the story of the wedding of Thi Thao, and she will correct the mistakes that humans have made. Like Scheherazade playing for time and forestalling death, Chih begins a remarkable tale, one that may save their life as well as Si-yu and a few others.
Like The Empress of Salt and Fortune, the plot of When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is told indirectly, inside a frame. In The Empress of Salt and Fortune, it’s for Chih (and the reader) to piece together the true history of In-yo’s exile and rise to power. From the first pages we already know that In-yo has died at a great age and as empress, so that part of the story brings no tension — the question is how it happened.
When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain employs a similar frame device, but here the tension comes from several levels. First are the parallels between frame and narrative: Thi Thao’s relationship with the human scholar Dieu and Sinh Loan’s verbal joustings with Chih. Both narratives turn on the human’s ability or failure to read tiger cues and learn the tiger’s customs. In Thi Thao and Dieu’s misadventures, that clash of customs and mutual misunderstandings drive the narrative. The question is whether Chih will make similar mistakes with creatures as wise, fierce and unknowable as Sinh Loan and her sisters, and exactly what Sinh Loan intends when Chih finishes their story.
As the two sides tell the same tale, similar in many respects, each correcting the other in the version that casts its side in the better light, it falls to the reader to pick out what is true. This shouldn’t be hard, right? I mean, they’re talking about history, which is, after all, impartial, nothing but facts and truth.
Yeah, right.
And here is the serious heart of When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain: the role of stories in history. Whose story is the right one? Does it matter?
Of course, I hear you thinking, of course it does. Because history is truth. It’s facts. They’re unassailable. They’re inconvenient things.
Yes, they are. But history is more than facts. Facts and dates are the skeleton of history. We don’t read history for facts and dates; we read to understand what happened, how it happened, and why. Without the stories, we have no interest, no wisdom to glean, nothing to ponder.
This is what Vo grapples with. Because history is itself a product of perspective. Whether it’s Chih unearthing the truth about Empress In-yo or arguing about a love story with a tiger, the history they unearth is explosive, revelatory, and dangerous.
This is true in our world as well (remember, fantasy engages real-world issues at one remove). Official history, history by the victors, is tenuous and suspect, because the truth, even if it takes a long time, will emerge. I’m in mind of the official revision of the battle of Little Bighorn, the death-throes of the South’s Lost Cause mythology, the ongoing re-evaluation of medieval studies in light of, not only White Supremacist co-option, but the very assumptions of racial hegemony in the study of Old English, and in the Middle Ages itself.
So whose story is true, the human’s or the tiger’s, and how is that truth enforced? Of course I won’t tell you — you have to read for yourself.
I don’t need to remind you that the writing is gorgeous and poetic, and that the world Vo has built is packed with tantalizing and allusive details — ghosts and fox women, families benighted with a walking dog curse, assassination by mammoth, and the need for courtesy when talking to tigers.
All of which tease us into hoping there will be many more stories about Cleric Chih from the Singing Hills abbey in the kingdom of Anh. Many many more.