“None better,” said Anji with a brief smile.
“None better! But shamed anyway, because of my daughter.” He picked up the carving and tossed it to Anji, who caught it deftly. “You’ll have to take all your men. Those who won’t go with you I will kill. I can’t take any chances.”
Anji glanced at Priya. “They’ll all go with me.”
“Any men who know you came to me will have to go with you as well, including Tohon. He’s the best scout I have. You can trust him. Your wife can take the Mariha girl as an attendant. I don’t know what use she is except for pouring khaif.”
Anji had an amused smile back on his face. “Where am I to go, Commander? If my uncle the var will not have me, then I cannot ride west. I cannot ride east into Sirniaka. South lies desert and, beyond that, mountains whose passes are so high that travelers die with their own blood boiling on their lips.”
“North,” said Mai. “You said yourself there’s a place that merchants speak of, like that one who found Uncle Hari’s ring. Shai is going there anyway. We’ll go with him.”
Anji laughed.
“There is one pass running north, through high mountains, to this land of a hundred lords,” said Beje. “But it’s said the land there protects its own with ancient magic. That any folk who travel that way with malice in their hearts cannot survive the journey. The road vanishes. Blizzards drown them.”
“Merchants go there,” insisted Mai.
“Merchants travel where soldiers fear to ride,” said Beje with a laugh that sounded uncannily like Anji’s: amused, resigned, ironical.
“Merchants travel, but every merchant travels with a guard,” said Anji. “Mai is right, of course. We’ll go north, if you can put us on the proper road. We can hire ourselves out as a guard to some merchant caravan heading over the pass.”
“These Sirniakans are fiends for official chits and seals. I hear they arrest any person who hasn’t a pass to account for his whereabouts. Heh! Even their dead must have a permission chit for their ghosts to depart for the other life!”
“I still have the palace warrant my mother gave me. We’ll go swiftly.”
“That you must. You’ll have to ride into the northern reaches of the empire, but I think you’ll be safe if you move fast, before anyone suspects the truth.”
“We can leave at once.”
“No baths?” Mai asked, feeling all her dirt, every grain of it.
Anji chuckled. He met her gaze, and she laughed, suddenly not caring. Dirt was the least of it. Dirt was nothing, not if he loved her. “I promise you a bath. When it is safe.”
“Why not now?” asked Beje, eyeing her with the glint of lechery in his expression, nothing she hadn’t seen a thousand times in the marketplace. She smiled, in the way she’d learned to acknowledge men without encouraging them, and he laughed and slapped his thigh.
Anji rose, sobering. “There was a troop of riders on our trail.”
“It’s true you’ll need to leave before they see you,” said Beje, “but you need have no fear of them. They are the men who came from the desert, the ones who found your remains. I’ll need your officer’s tunic, your banner, and your ring.”
“Once I give you the banner and the ring I am no longer Qin.”
“Yes,” agreed Beje. “You are a dead man now, Anjihosh. Try to stay alive, if you can.”
PART FOUR: TRAVELERS
16
AFTER THEY CLIMBED out of the Mariha Valley, they traveled east and north for ten, twenty, forty, sixty and more days along the eastern slopes of the spine of the world, that interlocking chain of mountains and massifs that formed the northern boundary of the world Shai knew. The southern and western deserts—Kartu Town itself—lay three or more months’ journey behind them. Dusty trails led them along grassy hills and through sparse woodland. This late in the year, well into the dry season, the streams falling out of the highlands were running low, although there was still enough water for horses and soldiers alike. In Kartu Town, where water came from a trio of precious springs, water cost a tidy price. Here in the wilderness, water was free.
Tohon took Shai under his wing, as an uncle might. They rode forward to scout every day.
“You’re not skilled enough to be a tailman,” the soldier explained to Shai, “but you’re cousin to captain’s wife, so the men humor you. Better learn a few things.”
“My friends are teaching me to fight,” said Shai, embarrassed by this talk.
“They’re just having fun, beating you up. I’ll teach you a few tricks. Then they’ll respect you.”
Had they been making fun of him all along, in the guise of friendship? Was he that great of a fool, just like his mother and elder brothers—all but Hari—had always said? Had he mistaken all the signs?
“Herdsmen,” said Tohon, pointing toward distant slopes.
Shai saw nothing. Escarpments limned the sky, although there were never any mighty peaks to be seen glittering on high. But the landscape kept no secrets from the scout.
“That cliff. Track, down. Here, now, follow my hand. Those aren’t a field of stone. Those are sheep. Captain will send Chief Tuvi up there to trade. We’ll eat mutton tomorrow night. You try that throw I taught you on Jagi and Pil. You’ll see.”
The Qin loved to wrestle. When Shai threw Jagi the next night, catching his ankle behind a heel and upending him flat on his rump, the soldiers hooted and hollered in a way that shamed and pleased Shai.
“Didn’t think you could do that,” said Chief Tuvi. “We’ll make a tailman of you after all.”
Having bet on the outcome, Tohon won a cupful of millet, which he shared in halves with Shai. “Not much of this left,” he said. They washed the thick porridge down with pungent fermented mare’s milk. He seemed unconcerned that the field rations they’d been issued by Commander Beje were, at long last and after being carefully rationed, running out. Mostly, they ate meat killed on the march.
They were camped beside a stream. Mai, with Priya and Sheyshi in attendance, had gone a little ways upstream. Shai could see her scrubbing at her arms and face, although the water was snowmelt, gaspingly cold. In the last light, men set snares, and one of the foreign camp men netted for fish. Anji was seated cross-legged, repairing a harness while chatting with a pair of veterans as easily as if they were family.
“Why are you teaching me?” Shai asked Tohon.
“Eh? Because we Qin respect a man who can fight.”
“No. I meant, why are you willing to teach me?” If it’s true that the others were doing nothing but beating me up. But he didn’t want to speak that thought aloud.
“You’re tough. You don’t complain. You have the hands of a man who works, not like those soft-handed Mariha princelings. Anyway, I miss my sons.”
“What happened to them?”
“One is dead. Another is a soldier. The youngest tends the herds in the range given to my clan by the ancestor gods. Anyway, these here are Itay men. I’m Vasay.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The ancestors. It’s an old feud between two clans. I give glory to my Vasay mother by teaching you to win a few rounds and get their respect.”
The next day Tohon paused to eye a pair of hawks hanging on the winds above the long ridgeline to their west. Although this land was tough and dry, it was still handsomely fertile with tall grass and copses of birch, pine, pipe, and thorn-brush trees. Game animals were plentiful.
“Deer. See. There.”
With Shai hanging back, out of the way, Tohon went after the herd, and killed three before the rest scattered out of range. Shai retrieved a few of the arrows that had missed their targets. He’d been given a knife big enough and sharp enough to butcher with, and he set to work as Tohon studied the eastern horizon.
“Smoke,” said Tohon now, but although Shai squinted, he saw nothing except tender wisps of high cloud strung along the reach of sky above the endless rolling hills. The wind was pushing up out of the southeast, and it e
ddied here where the higher ridge fell away into the broken hills through which they rode. “Must be coming into empire’s territory. You can see how the line of trees begins to break into denser growth. That means the land falls away pretty quickly up ahead, into some kind of valley. There’s another pair of hawks riding the wind where the secondary ridge falls away.”
Shai didn’t see them, but he nodded.
“You ride back. Let captain know. It’s a decent-sized place up there, forty hearths at least. He’ll want warning. Decide our tactics.”
“Who lives out here? There’s been no one for days. Except those herdsmen.”
“We’ve stayed in the wild lands for a reason. Any farther east, and we’d be in the empire. Now, the mountains are pushing us there, so we have to go.”
“Do the Sirniakans think of the Qin as enemies, or as friends?”
“Best hope the official who rules the lands out here got the news that the Qin are allies now. Maybe he didn’t. Anyway, even if they treat us as friends, they’ll have orders to kill Captain Anji. If they can catch him. If they figure out who he is. Go on. Send Jagi up to finish the butchering.”
The hooves of Shai’s horse kicked up dust as he rode back the way they had come. Captain Anji deployed many layers of scouts. Soon enough Shai hailed the second rank forward, and sent Jagi ahead to join Tohon while Pil headed off the path to signal the two men riding singleton as rangers, one to either side. As he rode up to the main company, he saw Chief Tuvi call a halt. It was an impressive group that made a lot of dust with a big herd of horses and over two hundred mounted men, Mai, and the slaves: Mai’s two female attendants, Mountain, the nine bearers, and a youth who had seen them at Beje’s villa and been given a choice between death or exile.
“What news?” asked Anji as Shai came in.
Mai bent close to listen. Her cheeks and forehead were powdered with dust, and she had wound a cloth tight around her hair to keep it as clean as anything could be in these conditions.
Shai repeated Tohon’s words. There came after this a silence as the captain considered.
“Avoid, or confront?” asked Chief Tuvi.
Anji shaded his eyes. He was scanning the heavens. His gaze had caught on the same pair of hawks that had gotten Tohon’s attention. Shai could see them now. “No choice, I think. The highlands will pinch off these high trails and leave us stranded. We have to dip into the lower lands to reach the road that leads north into the Hundred. There will be some smaller towns, but we aim for the market town of Sarida. That’s where we’ll find our caravan.”
“How do you know this?” All looked at Shai, who had rudely interrupted the considerations of the captain.
“You talk too much,” remarked Chief Tuvi.
Anji replied with no change in expression, watchful as he examined the raptors. “A boy in the palace is trained in an exacting manner. The palace priests command a map room with every temple and way station marked on a vast table sculpted in the manner of a model of the land itself. Every mother of a royal son would whip her boy if he answered a question wrong.”
“Were you whipped?” asked Mai with a laugh. She was the only person bold enough to ask, and not be scolded for asking.
Anji did not smile. He did not frown. The hawks interested him more than the question. “Never,” he said, absently. “Never would I have given my mother any reason to be disappointed in me. Tuvi. Pull in the scouts. Mai. You must play a part.”
“Yes.” She agreed without asking what part she must play.
Shai envied the trust and loyalty she granted her husband. Yet what choice had any of them? They were riding into the enemy’s country now, and Anji was the only one among them who knew the lay, and the law, of the land.
17
In the Sirniakan Empire, women of rank did not appear in public.
For weeks now Mai had ridden in the open air, and she had come to feel comfortable on horseback, breathing the wind. The palanquin had been carefully broken down into pieces and loaded onto packhorses. The bearers, now accustomed to riding rather than bearing, must regain the strength to carry the palanquin all day without faltering.
As soon as they entered the empire, Mai became blind and soft. Off came the sturdy trousers and calf-length felt coat worn by the Qin. In silks and pillows, she became a royal concubine being sent to the north for unspecified reasons and escorted by a band of slave mercenaries from the palace guard who carried a palace warrant. All this she heard secondhand, or strained to hear through beaded curtains at the many toll stations where Anji’s credentials were challenged and, inevitably, accepted.
She listened to the empire and heard many things: the bark of military commands at each checkpoint; the rattle of wheels on stone as they passed carts and wagons; the pounding of hooves and the slap of feet on dirt; the lowing of cows and the bleat of sheep. Water wheels slurped and spat; hammers beat in passing rhythms; laboring men sang working songs in gangs whose melodies rose and fell in volume as she came closer and then was carried away. Towns, she recognized for the clatter of stone beneath them, and because of the incessant clamor of male voices. It was loud even in the market district where an inn could be bespoke for a midday rest or a night’s sleep. According to Priya, they never went in through the inner gates of any town they passed. The royal warrant bought all, yet Mai saw nothing except the inside of the women’s quarters. These consisted most often of a courtyard surrounded by whitewashed walls and paved with polished white pebbles. Here the palanquin would be set down, and a simple room prepared, stripped of all furniture and its rice-paper-covered windows nailed shut.
“You must not be seen,” Anji had said to her before they left the ridge trails and rode down into inhabited country to set foot on the imperial roads. “Not even by the Sirniakan women who will serve you. They must deal only with your slaves. You must use only your own utensils and bedding. No royal concubine would touch any item handled by commoners.”
White rooms and white courtyards, and herbs whose perfume leavened the stark gardens; scent was all that relieved the monotony of her days. The food was simple, tinted red and green and yellow with spices she had no name for and whose aroma made her queasy. Usually they had for their drink only a hard wine that left a bitter aftertaste in her mouth and a sour feeling in her stomach, but sometimes there was also a sweet juice, the best thing she had ever tasted and which she could never get enough of. More rarely, she was offered a comforting cup of khaif.
Anji did not come to her. He was merely a captain assigned to escort her, and they could not chance that someone might suspect that the truth was different than the tale he spun. Spies were everywhere: children giggling behind unseen peepholes; female voices murmuring on the other side of closed doors; more distantly the shouting and arguments of men and often the boisterous song of drunken men out on the streets just after sunset, following by the ringing of bells and the profound silence of night’s rest. Priya and Sheyshi went about with heads and necks and mouths and noses covered, only their eyes left to them. Otherwise they were hidden in vast shawls that covered them to the ankles.
“The most beautiful silks,” Priya reported. “Inside the home, the women are most beautiful and dressed as richly as queens. Loose silk trousers and long silk jackets that reach almost to the floor and are clasped with braid across the torso. I wish you could admire the fashion here.”
“No one will ever believe I am a royal concubine if I am not dressed in the proper manner. These jackets and robes from Kartu are well enough for a woman of the Mei clan. Yet I wonder if they would seem poor to a royal concubine. You must say we met with some manner of trouble on the way, my wagons lost in a ford when we crossed. When we come to a town with a proper marketplace, it will be necessary for me to replenish my wardrobe.”
Through Priya she sent this message to Anji, and soon thereafter, at each stop, silks arrived, gifts from local lords and magistrates hoping to curry favor.
Here were colors to delight her—marigol
d yellows as intense as sunlight, coral reds and blood reds and rust reds, joyous oranges and plangent blue-greens—and patterns to astonish, blossoms and vines and bulbs and leaves, every manner of floral gaudery both woven and embroidered in the style proper to a woman of rank.
“I will die of boredom in this seclusion,” she said one evening to Sheyshi as they sat in a narrow room whose white walls and papered windows oppressed her. “How soon will we come free of the empire?”
“I do not know, Mistress.” The Mariha girl was combing Mai’s hair in long strokes. She seemed content enough. Mai thought it possible the girl was a little stupid. No fault of the girl’s, of course. Sometimes things just worked out that way.
“When does Priya return with our supper?”
“I do not know, Mistress.”
“It seemed to me this might be a larger town than the others we’ve come to,” she added, because the rumble of traffic had been so loud together with the rattle and shrill of pots and laughter, the barking of dogs and the cackle of fowl, and the drone of myriad voices. As she had rocked along the thoroughfare, she had heard the scrape of carpenters’ adzes and had smelled wood shavings, as if they passed through a carpentry district. She thought of Shai, who loved to work wood, and wondered what he thought of all this. Had Uncle Hari seen similar scenes when he was marched north out of the empire with whatever doomed troop he had fallen in with in the end?
A door slammed shut with a sharp report. Footsteps drummed erratically on wood. A woman shrieked a protest.
The door into her seclusion opened with the same quick spasm as of a gasp drawn inward in surprise. Two men pushed in. One held a long knife. The other drew his sword. Sheyshi screamed and fell flat to the floor, covered her eyes with her hands.
Mai stared at them for a thousand years, it seemed, although in that space of time they did not move more than one step each. They had complexions not darker but different from Kartu folk, and they had also sharper faces, while Kartu folk had broader cheeks and gentler eyes.