The room was quiet now. It was late, and though the pleasure districts never really stopped in any city, the mood would change as night deepened. The best houses let some of the lanterns go out in their reception rooms, the ambience grow gentler, the music softer and sometimes even melancholy, for men could take a kind of pleasure in sadness, remembrance of loves long ago or the days of their youth. Someone was singing “The Windmill Above My Village,” which was only played late and made some listeners cry.
He placed his sword where it had been before, and sat opposite the poet again. The taller of the two girls came forward with a cup for him, poured wine, withdrew. Tai drank. He looked at the other man, waiting.
“It is about your sister,” said Sima Zian.
PART TWO
CHAPTER IX
Li-Mei has her own yurt, assembled every evening for her when their travels finish for the day, taken down in the morning when they rise to go on.
The sun is west now, near the end of their fourth day outside of Kitai. She has never been this far. She has never wanted to be this far. There are two ladies attendant on her from the court. She doesn’t know them, doesn’t like either of them. They cry all the time. She is aware that they resent serving her instead of the real princess.
She’s a princess now. Or, they call her one. They made her royal before this journey north started from Xinan. There was a ceremony in the Ta-Ming Palace. Li-Mei, in red-and-gold silk with a too-heavy headdress decorated with white jade, and tortoiseshells and pearls from the south, had paid little attention. She’d been too angry. Her brother had been standing behind the prime minister. She’d stared at him the whole time, never looking away. Making certain that he knew exactly how she felt, as if that would mean anything to Liu at all.
She is still more angry than anything else, though she is aware that this could be a way to hide fear from herself, and from others. It is anger that stops her from being gentler with the two women who are hers now. They are afraid. Of course they are. She could be gentler. None of this is their fault.
There’s no shame to their grief, she thinks. Or their terror, which has grown worse, predictably, since they left Shuquian behind—the last major city north of Xinan—and then reached the Golden River’s great bend and the Wall.
Shuquian had been many days back. They’d passed through the Wall and entered wilderness four days ago. Soldiers saluted from above as their party went through.
Li-Mei is counting, keeping track of time as best she can. A habit of mind. Her father used to say he liked it in her. Her father is dead, or this would not be happening.
The leader of their imperial escort had bowed three times to the princesses, and then he and the Flying Dragon Army from Xinan had turned back at the heavy gates in the Long Wall—back towards the civilized world. Li-Mei had left her sedan chair to stand in a yellow-dragon wind to watch them go. She saw the gates of the world swing shut.
The nomads, the barbarians, had taken custody of two Kitan brides, negotiated—traded—for furs and camels and amber, but mainly for horses and military support.
This is the first time the Bogü have aimed so high, or been given so much.
The actual princess, thirty-first daughter of the Glorious Emperor Taizu (may he live and reign forever, under heaven), will become the newest wife, in whatever ceremony they use on the grasslands, of Hurok, the ruling kaghan, lord of the steppes, or this part of them, loyal (for the most part) ally of Kitai.
It has been duly judged, by the clacking, black-garbed crows who serve the Imperial Throne as advisers, that with a momentarily overextended military, and issues as to both army costs and the supply of horses, it is a sage and prudent time to allow the kumiss-drinking steppe-barbarians this otherwise unthinkable honour.
Li-Mei should not be here, does not want—the gods know it!—to be a princess. Had her father not died, putting a two-year halt to all family ceremonies and celebrations, she’d surely have been married by now, and safe. Her mother and Second Mother had been working on that marriage, through the proper channels.
She is not remotely a true member of royalty, only an attendant to the aging, exiled-to-the-countryside empress. But Li-Mei is also the sister of an ambitious, brilliantly positioned brother, and because of that she is about to become, soon now, the whatever-the-number wife of Hurok Kaghan’s second son, Tarduk, currently his heir.
Not that there is anything certain about remaining an heir on these steppes, if you’ve listened to the stories. Li-Mei is someone who does listen to what is said around her, always has been, from childhood—and her second brother, Tai, had come home from the north with a tale, years ago.
There are—as with everything done in the Ta-Ming Palace—precedents for elevating lesser women to royalty for this purpose. It is a kind of sly trick played on the barbarians. All the subject peoples want, ever, is the ability to claim a link to Kitan royalty. If a woman is called a princess that is more than enough for the second or third member of a wedding party. For the foreign ruler (this has happened a handful of times, though never with the Bogü) a true princess is … made available.
There are more than enough daughters, with this particular emperor, after forty years on the throne and ten thousand concubines from all over the known world.
Li-Mei has thought about the lives of these women, at times. Locked behind walls and gates and silk-paper windows in their wing of the palace, at the top of eunuch-guarded stairways. Most of them have grown old, or will, never having even been in a room with the emperor. Or any other man.
The true princess, the emperor’s daughter, has not stopped having one of her attendant women (she has six of them) sing and play “Married to a Far Horizon” for her since they left Shuquian. They are weeping, day and night, Princess Xue and her women. Endless lamentation.
It is driving Li-Mei to distraction.
She wants a deeper calm around her in this wilderness, this wind, to nurture the fury within, ward off terror, think about her brother.
Both her brothers. The youngest, Chao, still at home by the stream, doesn’t really count yet. Thinking of home—cascading images of it—is a bad thing to do right now, Li-Mei realizes.
She concentrates her mind, as best she can, on the brother she wants to kill, and on the one who ought, somehow, to have saved her from this.
Although, in fairness, there would have been nothing Tai could have done once Liu had—brilliantly, for his own purposes—proposed his sister as the second princess for the Bogü alliance and had that accepted. But why be fair? Why be accepting in this place of wolves and grass, when she is leaving everything she’s ever known for empty spaces and primitive yurts, yellow-dust wind off the western desert, and a life among barbarians who will not even speak her language?
This would never have happened if her father were alive.
Eldest Son Liu has always been eloquent and persuasive, and daughters are tools. Many fathers would have acquiesced, seen the same family glory Liu did, but Li-Mei, only girl-child of her family, is almost certain that the general, even in retirement, would have stopped his first son from using a sister this way. Liu would have never dared propose it. Ambition for self and family was proper in a balanced man, but there were limits, which were part of balance.
She wants to think this, but has been with the court long enough—arriving the year before the empress’s exile—to picture it otherwise. She can almost hear Liu’s polished, reasonable voice: “What is so different from offering her as an attendant to the empress, in my proposing her elevation to a princess? Are they not both exaltations for our family? Has she any other duty, or role in life?”
It is difficult, even in the imagination, to shape a sufficiently crushing reply.
Tai might have done so, equally clever, in a different fashion. But her second brother is impossibly far away right now, west, among the ghosts. It is an absolute certainty that Liu took that absence into account, as well, when he shaped his plans. Nor could Li-Mei’s sad,
sweet empress, exiled from the palace, lost to endless prayers and a dwindling memory, do anything to shield her when the summons to the Hall of Brilliance came.
Li-Mei, being carried north, is beyond all borders herself now. The difference is, Tai—if he is alive—will be going home soon. She never will.
It is a hard thing to live with. She needs her anger.
“Married to a Far Horizon” starts up again, the worst pipa player of the six this time. They appear to be taking turns. Li-Mei allows herself to curse, in a very un-royal fashion. She hates the song by now. Lets that feeling help drive and shape the fury she requires.
She peeks out of her litter (they will not let her ride, of course). One of the Bogü is just then passing, riding towards the front. He is bare-chested, his hair loose, almost all the way down his back. He sits his horse in a way that no Kitan ever has. They all do, she’s come to realize. The nomads live on their horses. He looks at her as he goes by. Their eyes meet for an instant before Li-Mei lets the curtain fall.
It takes her a few moments, but she decides that the expression in the rider’s face was not conquest or triumph or even a man’s lust, but pride.
She isn’t sure what she wants to make of that.
After a time, she peers out again. No rider now, he’s moved ahead. The landscape is hazy. The evening wind blows dust, as usual. It has done that for several days now. It stings her eyes. The sun is low, blurred above the endless grass. They have seen vast herds of gazelles the last two days. Heard wolves at night since leaving the Wall behind. The Kitan have a terror of wolves, part of the fear and strangeness these northern grasslands evoke. Those stationed in the garrisons past the Wall must hate it like death, she thinks.
Squinting towards the orange sunset, Li-Mei finds herself devising ways in which she might have killed her brother Liu before any of this happened, sent him over to the night.
The visions are briefly satisfying.
She’s angry at Tai, as well, she’s decided. She doesn’t have to be fair to anyone in this wind. He had no business leaving them for two years, not with a father and husband buried. He was needed, if only as a counterweight to Liu. He ought to have known that, foreseen it.
She lets the curtain drop, leans back against pillows, thinking about the two of them, sliding towards memory.
Not necessarily a good thing. It means remembering about home again, but is she really going to be able to keep from doing that? It is, if nothing else, a way of not dwelling upon what is waiting for her when this journey from the bright world ends, wherever it does, in this emptiness.
SECOND MOTHER, their father’s only concubine, was childless. A tragedy for her, cause of nighttime sorrows and sleeplessness, but—in the difficult way of truth sometimes—an advantage for the four Shen children, because she diverted all of her considerable affection to them, and the general’s two women did not have competing children as a source of conflict.
Li-Mei was six years old, which means Liu was nineteen, preparing for the first round of examinations in their prefecture. Tai was two years younger than him, training in military arts, already bigger than his older brother. Chao, the baby, was toddling about the yard, falling happily into piled leaves that autumn. She remembers that.
Their father was home, end of a campaign season (another reason she knew it was autumn, that and the paulownia leaves). Li-Mei, who had been diligently studying dance all summer with a teacher arranged by her mothers, was to offer a performance for the family one bright, windy festival-day morning with everyone home.
She remembers the wind. To this day, she believes it was the wind that caused her problem. Were her life not shattered and lost right now she could manage to be amused that she still clings to this explanation for falling.
She had fallen. The only time she’d done that after at least a dozen rehearsals in the days before, for her teacher and her mother. But with both mothers, and father, and her older brothers watching, and the drummer hired to accompany her, she had spun too far halfway through her first dance, lost her balance, tried to regain it, wobbled the other way, and tumbled—ignominiously—into leaves at the edge of the courtyard, as if she were no older than the baby playing in them.
No one laughed. She remembers that.
Liu might have done so in a certain mood, but he didn’t. Li-Mei sat up, covered in leaves, shocked, white-faced, and saw her father’s immediate, gentle concern, and then his almost-masked amusement at his short-legged little girl-child.
And that made her scramble to her feet and run from the courtyard, weeping uncontrollably. She had wanted to show him—show them all—how she was growing up, that she wasn’t an infant any more. And what she’d done was entirely the opposite. The humiliation welling within her was beyond enduring.
Liu found her first, in the orchard under her favourite peach tree at the farthest end of a row, by the stone wall. She was sprawled on the ground, ruining her dance costume, her face buried in her arms. She had cried herself out by then, but refused to look up when she heard him coming.
She’d expected Second Mother, or perhaps (less likely) her own mother. Hearing Eldest Brother’s crisp voice speaking her name had startled her. Looking back, she has long since realized that Liu would have told the two women to leave her to him. By then they’d have listened to his instructions.
“Sit up!” he said. She heard him grunt, crouching beside her. He was already plump, it wasn’t an effortless position for him.
It was simply not done, to ignore a direct instruction from a first brother. You could be whipped or starved in some other families for that.
Li-Mei sat up, faced him, remembered to bow her head respectfully, hands together, though she did not stand up to do it.
He let that pass. Perhaps her mud-stained face, the tracks of her tears caused him to be indulgent. You could never tell with Liu, even back then.
He said, “Here is what you will learn from this.” His voice was controlled, precise—not the tone with which one addressed a child. She remembered that, after. He was quiet, but he made her pay attention.
He said, “We train to avoid mistakes, and we do not go before others unless we believe we have trained enough. That is the first thing. Do you understand?”
Li-Mei nodded, eyes wide on her oldest brother’s round face. He had the beginnings of a moustache and beard that year.
He said, “Nonetheless, because we are not gods, or of the imperial family, we cannot ever be certain of being flawless. It is not given to ordinary men, and especially not women. Therefore, this is the second thing you will remember: if we are in public and we err, if we fall in the leaves, or stumble in a speech, or bow too many times or too few … we continue as if we had not done so. Do you understand?”
She nodded again, her head bobbing.
Liu said, “If we stop, if we apologize, show dismay, run from a courtyard or a chamber, we force our audience to register our error and see that it has shamed us. If we carry on, we treat it as something that falls to the lot of men and women, and show that it has not mastered us. That it does not signify. And, sister, you will always remember that you represent this family, not only yourself, in everything you do. Do you understand?”
And a third time Li-Mei nodded her head.
“Say it,” her brother commanded.
“I understand,” she said, as clearly as she could manage. Six years old, mud and overripe fallen fruit on her face and hands and clothing. Representing her family in all she did.
He stared at her a moment, then rose with another grunt and walked from the orchard down the long row. He wore black, she remembers now. Unusual for a nineteen-year-old, bordering on presumption (no red belt, mind you), but Shen Liu was always going to pass the exams, all three levels, and become a mandarin in the palace in Xinan. Always.
Tai came into the orchard a little later.
It was a certainty that he’d waited for Liu to come and go, as a second brother should. The images of that day are pierc
ingly sharp, a wound: she is equally certain, thinking back, that Tai knew pretty much exactly what Liu had said to her.
She was sitting up still, so this time she saw her brother’s approach. He smiled when he drew near, she’d known he would smile at her. What she hadn’t expected was that he’d be carrying a basin of water and a towel. He’d guessed she’d have been lying on muddy ground.
He sat down next to her, cross-legged, careless of his own clothing and slippers, and placed the bowl between them, draping the towel elaborately over a forearm, like a servant. She thought he’d make a funny face to try to make her laugh, and she was determined not to laugh (she almost always did), but he didn’t do that, he just waited. After a moment, Li-Mei dipped her cupped hands and washed her face and hands and arms. There was nothing she could do about her specially made dance costume.
Tai handed her the towel and she dried herself. He took the towel back and set it aside, tossing the water from the basin and putting that beside him, as well.
“Better,” he said, looking at her.
“Thank you,” she said.
She remembers a small silence, but an easy one. Tai was easy to be with. She’d worshipped both her older brothers, she recalls, but Tai she’d loved.
“I fell,” she said.
He didn’t smile. “I know. It must have felt awful. You would have looked forward so much to dancing.”
She nodded, not trusting her voice.
He said, “It was very good, Li-Mei, until the wind picked up. I started worrying when I felt it.”
She looked at him.
“Perhaps … perhaps next time, maybe even tonight … you might do it inside? I believe that is a reason dancers dislike performing out-of-doors. Any breeze affects how their clothing flows, and … they can fall.”
“I didn’t know … do they prefer inside?”