There was that, too, wasn’t there? Good wine, late-night fellowship. Music. Not to be dismissed or despised.
Tai fell asleep on that thought, and with the sudden, fervent hope that the Tagurans had remembered to bring wine. He had almost finished what his own people had delivered two weeks ago. The long summer twilight gave a man more time to drink before going to bed with the sun.
He slept, and dreamed of the woman with her hand on his heart that last night, then over his mouth, her shaped and painted moth-eyebrows, green eyes, red mouth, candlelight, jade pins pulled slowly one by one from golden hair, and the scent she wore.
THE BIRDS WOKE HIM from the far end of the lake.
He had attempted a formal six-line poem several nights ago, their strident morning noise compared to opening hour at the two markets in Xinan, but hadn’t been able to make the parallel construction hold in the final couplet. His technical skills as a poet were probably above average, good enough for the verse component of the examinations, but not likely, in his own judgment, to produce something enduring.
One of the results of two years alone had been his coming to think this, most of the time.
He dressed and built a fire, washed himself and tied back his hair while boiling water for tea. He glanced in the bronze mirror he’d been given and thought about taking a blade to his cheeks and chin, but decided against such self-abuse this morning. The Tagurans could deal with him unshaven. There was no real reason to even tie his hair but he felt like a steppes barbarian when he left it on his shoulders. He had memories of that, of them.
Before drinking or eating, while the tea leaves were steeping, he stood at the eastern window and spoke the prayer to his father’s spirit in the direction of sunrise.
Whenever he did this, he summoned and held a memory of Shen Gao feeding bread to the wild ducks in their stream. He didn’t know why that was his remembrance-image, but it was. Perhaps the tranquility of it, in a life that had not been tranquil.
He prepared and drank his tea, ate some salt-dried meat and milled grain in hot water sweetened with clover honey, then he claimed his peasant-farmer straw hat from a nail by the door and pulled on his boots. The summer boots were almost new, a gift from Iron Gate, replacing the worn-out pair he’d had.
They had noticed that. They observed him closely whenever they came, Tai had come to understand. He had also realized, during the first hard winter, that he’d almost certainly have died here without the help of the two forts. You could live entirely alone in some mountains in some seasons—it was a legend-dream of the hermit-poet—but not at Kuala Nor in winter, not this high up and remote when the snows come and the north wind blew.
The supplies, at new and full moon without fail, had kept him alive—and had arrived only through extreme effort several times, when wild storms had bowled down to blast the frozen meadow and lake.
He milked the two goats, took the pail inside and covered it for later. He claimed his two swords and went back out and did his Kanlin routines.
He put the swords away and then, outside again, stood a moment in almost-summer sunshine listening to the shrieking racket of birds, watching them wheel and cry above the lake, which was blue and beautiful in morning light and gave no least hint at all of winter ice, or of how many dead men were here around its shores.
Until you looked away from birds and water to the tall grass of the meadow, and then you saw the bones in the clear light, everywhere. Tai could see his mounds, where he was burying them, west of the cabin, north against the pines. Three long rows of deep graves now.
He turned to claim his shovel and go to work. It was why he was here.
His eye was caught by a glint to the south: sunlight catching armour halfway along the last turning of the last slope down. Looking more narrowly he saw that the Tagurans were early today, or—he checked the sun again—that he was moving slowly himself, after a moon-white, waking night.
He watched them descend with the bullock and the heavy-wheeled cart. He wondered if Bytsan was leading the supply party himself this morning. He found himself hoping so.
Was it wrong to anticipate the arrival of a man whose soldiers would rape his sister and both mothers and joyfully sack and burn the family compound during any incursion into Kitai?
Men changed during wars or conflict, sometimes beyond recognition. Tai had seen it in himself, on the steppes beyond the Long Wall among the nomads. Men changed, not always in ways you liked to recall, though courage seen was worth remembering.
He didn’t think Bytsan would grow savage, but he didn’t know. And he could easily imagine the opposite about some of the Tagurans who had come here through two years, arriving armoured and armed, as if to the stern drums of a battlefield, not bringing supplies to a solitary fool.
They were not simple, easily sorted encounters, the ones he had with the warriors of the Empire of the Plateau when they came down to him.
It was Bytsan he saw, as the Tagurans reached the meadow and began circling the lake. The captain trotted his bay-coloured Sardian horse forward. The animal was magnificent, breathtaking. They all were, those far-western horses. The captain had the only one in his company. Heavenly Horses they called them in Tai’s own land. Legends said that they sweated blood.
The Tagurans traded for them with Sardia, beyond where the divided Silk Roads became one again in the west, after the deserts. There, through yet more harsh mountain passes, lay the deep, lush breeding grounds of these horses, and Tai’s people longed for them with a passion that had influenced imperial policy, warfare, and poetry for centuries.
Horses mattered, a great deal. They were why the emperor, Serene Lord of the Five Directions and the Five Holy Mountains, was steadily engaged with the Bogü nomads, supporting chosen leaders among the kumiss-drinking yurt-dwellers north of the Wall, in exchange for a supply of their horses, however inferior they might be to the ones from Sardia. Neither the loess-laden soil in northern Kitai nor the jungles and rice-lands of the south would permit the grazing and breeding of horses of any real quality.
It was a Kitan tragedy, had been for a thousand years.
Many things came to Xinan along the guarded Silk Roads in this Ninth Dynasty, making it wealthy beyond description, but horses from Sardia were not among them. They could not endure that long desert journey. Women came east, musicians and dancers. Jade and alabaster and gems came, amber, aromatics, powdered rhinoceros horn for the alchemists. Talking birds, spices and food, swords and ivory and so much else, but not the Heavenly Horses.
So Kitai had had to find other ways to get the best mounts they could—because you could win a war with cavalry, all else being equal, and when the Tagurans had too many of these horses (being at peace with the Sardians now, trading with them) all else was not equal.
Tai bowed twice in greeting as Bytsan reined up—right fist in left palm. He had acquaintances—and an older brother—who would have judged it a humiliation had they seen him bow so formally to a Taguran. On the other hand, they hadn’t had their lives guarded and preserved by this man and the steady arrival of supplies every full moon for almost two years.
Bytsan’s blue tattoos showed in the sunlight, on both cheeks and the left side of his neck above the collar of his tunic. He dismounted, bowed, also twice, closed fist in palm, adopting the Kitan gesture.
He smiled briefly. “Before you ask, yes, I brought wine.”
He spoke Kitan, most Tagurans did. It was the language of trade in all directions now, when men were not killing each other. It was believed, in Kitai, that the gods spoke Kitan in the nine heavens, had taught it to the original Father of Emperors as he stood, head bowed on Dragon Mountain in the past-that-lay-behind.
“You knew I would ask?” Tai felt rueful, a little exposed.
“Longer twilights. What else can a man do? The cup is a companion, we sing. It goes well?”
“It goes well. The moonlight kept me awake, I am slow to begin this morning.”
They knew his rout
ine, the query had not been idle.
“Just the moon?”
Tai’s own people asked variants of that question every time they came. Curiosity—and fear. Very brave men, including this one, had told him directly they could not have done what he was doing here, with the dead unburied, and angry.
Tai nodded. “The moon. And some memories.”
He glanced past the captain and saw a young, fully armoured soldier ride up. Not one of the ones he knew. This man did not dismount, stared down at Tai. He had only one tattoo, wore an unnecessary helmet, did not smile.
“Gnam, take an axe from by the cabin, help Adar chop firewood.”
“Why?”
Tai blinked. He looked at the Taguran captain.
Bytsan’s expression did not change, nor did he glance back at the soldier on the horse behind him. “Because that is what we do here. And because if you do not I will take your horse and weapons, remove your boots, and let you walk back through all the passes alone among the mountain cats.”
It was said quietly. There was a silence. Tai realized, with a kind of dismay, how unaccustomed he’d become to such exchanges, a sudden tension rising. This is the way the world is, he told himself. Learn it again. Start now. This is what you will find when you return.
Casually, so as not to shame the captain or the young soldier, he turned and looked across the lake towards the birds. Grey herons, terns, a golden eagle very high.
The young man—he was big, well-made—was still on his horse. He said, “This one cannot chop wood?”
“I believe he can, since he has been digging graves for our dead for two years now.”
“Ours, or his own? While he despoils our soldiers’ bones?”
Bytsan laughed.
Tai turned quickly back, he couldn’t help himself. He felt something returning after a long time. He knew it for what it was: anger had been a part of him, too readily, as far back as he could remember. A second brother’s portion? Some might say that was it.
He said, as levelly as he could, “I should be grateful if you’d look around and tell me which of the bones here is one of yours, if I should feel inclined to despoil it.”
A different silence. There were many kinds of stillness, Tai thought, inconsequentially.
“Gnam, you are a great fool. Get the axe and chop wood. Do it now.”
This time Bytsan did look at his soldier, and this time the other man swung himself down—not hurrying, but not disobeying, either. The bullock had pulled the cart up. There were four other men. Tai knew three of them, exchanged nods with those.
The one called Adar, wearing a belted, dark-red tunic over loose brown trousers, no armour, walked with Gnam towards the cabin, leading their horses. The others, knowing their routine here, guided the cart forward and began unloading supplies into the cabin. They moved briskly, they always did. Unload, stack, do whatever else, including cleaning out the small stable, get back up the slope and away.
The fear of being here after dark.
“Careful with his wine!” Bytsan called. “I don’t want to hear a Kitan weeping. The sound’s too unpleasant.”
Tai smiled crookedly, the soldiers laughed.
The chunk of axes came from the side of the cabin, carrying in mountain air. Bytsan gestured. Tai walked off with him. They stepped through tall grass, over bones and around them. Tai avoided a skull, instinct by now.
Butterflies were everywhere, all colours, and grasshoppers startled at their feet, springing high and away in all directions. They heard the drone of bees among the meadow flowers. Here and there the metal of a rusted blade could be seen, even on the grey sand at the water’s edge. You needed to be careful where you stepped. There were pink stones in the sand. The birds were raucous, wheeling and swooping, breaking the surface of the lake for fish.
“Water’s still cold?” Bytsan asked after a moment.
They stood by the lake. The air was very clear, they could see crags on the mountains, cranes on the isle, in the ruined fortress there.
“Always.”
“A storm in the pass five nights ago. You get it down here?”
Tai shook his head. “Some rain. Must have blown off east.”
Bytsan bent and picked up a handful of stones. He began throwing them at birds.
“Sun’s hot,” he said eventually. “I can see why you wear that thing on your head, though it makes you look like an old man and a peasant.”
“Both?”
The Taguran grinned. “Both.” He threw another stone. He said, “You’ll be leaving?”
“Soon. Midsummer moon ends our mourning period.”
Bytsan nodded. “That’s what I wrote them.”
“Wrote them?”
“Court. In Rygyal.”
Tai stared at him. “They know about me?”
Bytsan nodded again. “They know from me. Of course they do.”
Tai thought about it. “I don’t think Iron Gate’s sending messages back that someone’s burying the dead at Kuala Nor, but I may be wrong.”
The other man shrugged. “You probably are. Everything’s tracked and weighed these days. Peacetime’s for the calculating ones at any court. There were some at Rygyal who saw your coming here as Kitan arrogance. They wanted you killed.”
That, Tai hadn’t known either. “Like that fellow back there?”
The two axes were chopping steadily, each one a thin, clean sound in the distance. “Gnam? He’s just young. Wants to make a name.”
“Kill an enemy right away?”
“Get it over with. Like your first woman.”
The two of them exchanged a brief smile. Both were relatively young men, still. Neither felt that way.
Bytsan said, after a moment, “I was instructed that you were not to be killed.”
Tai snorted. “I am grateful to hear it.”
Bytsan cleared his throat. He seemed awkward suddenly. “There is a gift, instead, a recognition.”
Tai stared again. “A gift? From the Taguran court?”
“No, from the rabbit in the moon.” Bytsan grimaced. “Yes, of course, from the court. Well, from one person there, with permission.”
“Permission?”
The grimace became a grin. The Taguran was sunburned, square-jawed, had one missing lower tooth. “You are slow this morning.”
Tai said, “This is unexpected, that’s all. What person?”
“See for yourself. I have a letter.”
Bytsan reached into a pocket in his tunic and retrieved a pale-yellow scroll. Tai saw the Taguran royal seal: a lion’s head, in red.
He broke the wax, unrolled the letter, read the contents, which were not lengthy, and so learned what they were giving to him and doing to him, for his time here among the dead.
It became something of an exercise to breathe.
Thoughts began arriving too swiftly, uncontrolled, disconnected, a swirling like a sandstorm. This could define his life—or have him killed before he ever got home to the family estate, let alone to Xinan.
He swallowed hard. Looked away at the mountains ranged and piled around them, rising up and farther up, the blue lake ringed in majesty. In the teachings of the Path, mountains meant compassion, water was wisdom. The peaks didn’t alter, Tai thought.
What men did beneath their gaze could change more swiftly than one could ever hope to understand.
He said it. “I don’t understand.”
Bytsan made no reply. Tai looked down at the letter and read the name at the bottom again.
One person there, with permission.
One person. The White Jade Princess Cheng-wan: seventeenth daughter of the revered and exalted Emperor Taizu. Sent west to a foreign land twenty years ago from her own bright, glittering world. Sent with her pipa and flute, a handful of attendants and escorts, and a Taguran honour guard, to become the first imperial bride ever granted by Kitai to Tagur, to be one of the wives of Sangrama the Lion, in his high, holy city of Rygyal.
She had been
part of the treaty that followed the last campaign here at Kuala Nor. An emblem in her young person (she’d been fourteen that year) of how savage—and inconclusive—the fighting had been, and how important it was that it end. A slender, graceful token of peace enduring between two empires. As if it would endure, as if it ever had, as if one girl’s body and life could ensure such a thing.
There had been a fall of poems like flower petals in Kitai that autumn, pitying her in parallel lines and rhyme: married to a distant horizon, fallen from heaven, lost to the civilized world (of parallel lines and rhyme) beyond snowbound mountain barriers, among barbarians on their harsh plateau.
It had been the literary fashion for that time, an easy theme, until one poet was arrested and beaten with the heavy rod in the square before the palace—and nearly died of it—for a verse suggesting this was not only lamentable, but a wrong done to her.
You didn’t say that.
Sorrow was one thing—polite, cultured regret for a young life changing as she left the glory of the world—but you never offered the view that anything the Ta-Ming Palace did, ever, might be mistaken. That was a denial of the rightly fulfilled, fully compassed mandate of heaven. Princesses were coinage in the world, what else could they be? How else serve the empire, justify their birth?
Tai was still staring at the words on the pale-yellow paper, struggling to bring spiralling thoughts to what one might call order. Bytsan was quiet, allowing him to deal with this, or try.
You gave a man one of the Sardian horses to reward him greatly. You gave him four or five of those glories to exalt him above his fellows, propel him towards rank—and earn him the jealousy, possibly mortal, of those who rode the smaller horses of the steppes.
The Princess Cheng-wan, a royal consort of Tagur now through twenty years of peace, had just bestowed upon him, with permission, two hundred and fifty of the dragon horses.