That was the number. Tai read it one more time.
It was in the scroll he held, recorded in Kitan, in a Taguran scribe’s thin but careful calligraphy. Two hundred and fifty Heavenly Horses. Given him in his own right, and to no one else. Not a gift for the Ta-Ming Palace, the emperor. Not that. Presented to Shen Tai, second son of the General Shen Gao, once Left Side Commander of the Pacified West.
His own, to use or dispose of as he judged best, the letter read, in royal recognition from Rygyal of courage and piety, and honour done the dead of Kuala Nor.
“You know what this says?” His own voice sounded odd to Tai.
The captain nodded.
“They will kill me for these,” Tai said. “They will tear me apart to claim those horses before I get near the court.”
“I know,” said Bytsan calmly.
Tai looked at him. The other man’s dark-brown eyes were impossible to read. “You know?”
“Well, it seems likely enough. It is a large gift.”
A large gift.
Tai laughed, a little breathlessly. He shook his head in disbelief. “In the name of all nine heavens, I can’t just ride through Iron Gate Pass with two hundred and fifty—”
“I know,” the Taguran interrupted. “I know you can’t. I made some suggestions when they told me what they wished to do.”
“You did?”
Bytsan nodded. “Hardly a gift if you’re … accidentally killed on the way east and the horses are dispersed, or claimed by someone else.”
“No, it isn’t, is it? Hardly a gift!” Tai heard his voice rising. Such a simple life he’d been living, until moments ago. “And the Ta-Ming was a brawl of factions when I left. I am sure it is worse now!”
“I am sure you are right.”
“Oh? Really? What do you know about it?” The other man, he decided, seemed irritatingly at ease.
Bytsan gave him a glance. “Little enough, in the small fort I am honoured to command for my king. I was only agreeing with you.” He paused. “Do you want to hear what I suggested, or not?”
Tai looked down. He felt embarrassed. He nodded his head. For no reason he knew, he took off his straw hat, standing in the high, bright sun. The axes continued in the distance.
Bytsan told him what he’d written to his own court, and what had been decreed in response to that. It seemed to have cost the other man his position at the fortress in the pass above, in order to implement his own proposal. Tai didn’t know if that meant a promotion or not.
It might, Tai understood, keep him alive. For a time, at least. He cleared his throat, trying to think what to say.
“You realize,” Bytsan spoke with a pride he could not conceal, “that this is Sangrama’s gift. The king’s generosity. Our Kitan princess might have asked him for it, it is her name on that letter, but it is the Lion who sends you this.”
Tai looked at him. He said, quietly, “I understand. It is an honour that the Lion of Rygyal even knows my name.”
Bytsan flushed. After the briefest hesitation, he bowed.
Two hundred and fifty Sardian horses, Tai was thinking, from within the sandstorm of his forever-altered life. Being brought by him to a court, an empire, that gloried in every single dragon steed that had ever reached them from the west. That dreamed of those horses with so fierce a longing, shaping porcelain and jade and ivory in their image, linking poets’ words to the thunder of mythic hooves.
The world could bring you poison in a jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn’t know which of them it was.
CHAPTER II
Bytsan sri Nespo was furious with himself, to the point of humiliation. He knew what his father would have said, and in what tone, had he witnessed this shame.
He had just bowed—far too deferentially—when the Kitan, having removed his stupid hat for some reason, said he was honoured that the Lion knew his name in Rygyal, so far away in glory.
But it was a gracious thing to say, and Bytsan had found himself bowing, hand wrapped around fist in their fashion (not that of his own people), before he was able to stop himself. Perhaps it had been the hat, after all, the deliberate self-exposure of that gesture.
The Kitan could do such things to you, or this one could.
Just when you’d decided, one more time, that they were all about their centre-of-the-world arrogance, they could say and do something like this from within the breeding and courtesy they donned like a cloak—while clutching a completely ridiculous straw hat.
What did you do when that happened? Ignore it? Treat it as decadence, softness, a false courtesy, unworthy of note on ground where Taguran soldiers had fought and died?
Bytsan wasn’t able to do that. A softness of his own, perhaps. It might even affect his career. Although what defined military promotion these days—with warfare limited to occasional skirmishes—was more about whom you knew in higher ranks, had gotten drunk with once or twice, or had allowed to seduce you when you were too young to know better, or could pretend as much.
In order to be judged on courage, on how you fought, there had to be fighting, didn’t there?
Peacetime was good for Tagur, for borders and trade and roads and raising new temples, for harvests and full granaries and seeing sons grow up instead of learning they were lying in mounds of corpses, as here by Kuala Nor.
But that same peace played havoc with an ambitious soldier’s hopes of using courage and initiative as his methods of advancement.
Not that he was going to talk about that with a Kitan. There were limits: inward borders in addition to the ones with fortresses defending them.
But if he was going to be honest about it, the court in Rygyal knew his name now, as well, because of this Shen Tai, this unprepossessing figure with the courteous voice and the deep-set eyes.
Bytsan stole an appraising glance. The Kitan couldn’t be called a soft city-scholar any more: two years of punishing labour in a mountain meadow had dealt with that. He was lean and hard, his skin weathered, hands scratched and callused. And Bytsan knew the man had been a soldier for a time. It had occurred to him—more than a year ago—that this one might even know how to fight. There were two swords in his cabin.
It didn’t matter. The Kitan would be leaving soon, his life entirely changed by the letter he was holding.
Bytsan’s life as well. He was to be given leave from his post when this Kitan left for home. He was reassigned to Dosmad Fortress, south and east, on the border, with the sole and specific responsibility—in the name of the Princess Cheng-wan—of implementing his own suggestion regarding her gift.
Initiative, he had decided, could involve more than leading a flanking attack in a cavalry fight. There were other sorts of flanking manoeuvres: the kind that might even get you out of a backwater fort in a mountain pass above a hundred thousand ghosts.
That last was another thing he didn’t like, and this he’d even admitted to the Kitan once: the ghosts terrified him as much as they did every soldier who came with him bringing the wagon and supplies.
Shen Tai had been quick to say that his own people from Iron Gate Pass were exactly the same: stopping for the night safely east of here when they came up the valley, timing their arrival for late morning just as Bytsan did, working hastily to unload his supplies and do whatever tasks they’d assigned themselves—and then gone. Gone from the lake and the white bones before darkfall, even in winter when night came swiftly. Even in a snowstorm once, Shen Tai had said. Refusing shelter in his cabin.
Bytsan had done that, too. Better ice and snow in a mountain pass than the howling presence of the bitter, unburied dead who could poison your soul, blight the life of any child you fathered, drive you mad.
The Kitan beside him didn’t appear to be a madman, but that was the prevailing explanation among Bytsan’s soldiers at the fort. Probably at Iron Gate, too. Something two outpost armies could agree upon? Or was that just an easy way of dealing with someone being more courageous than you were?
&nbs
p; You could fight him to test that, of course. Gnam wanted to, had been spoiling for it even before they’d come down from the pass. Bytsan had briefly harboured the unworthy thought that he’d like to see that challenge. Only briefly: if the Kitan died, there went his own flanking move away from here.
Shen Tai put his absurd hat back on as Bytsan told him what they were going to do in an effort to keep him alive long enough to get to Xinan and decide how to deal with his horses.
Because the man was right—of course he was right—he’d be killed ten times over for that many Sardian horses if he simply tried to herd them back east openly.
It was an absurd, wildly extravagant gift, but being absurd and extravagant was the privilege of royalty, wasn’t it?
He thought about saying that to the other man, but refrained. He wasn’t sure why, but it might have been that Shen Tai really did look shaken, rereading the scroll again, visibly unsettled for the first time since Bytsan had been coming here.
They walked back to the cabin. Bytsan supervised the unpacking and storing of supplies—metal chests and tight wooden boxes for the food, to defeat the rats. He made another joke about wine and the long evenings. Gnam and Adar had begun stacking firewood, against the cabin wall. Gnam worked fiercely, sweating in his unnecessary armour, channelling fury—which was perfectly all right with his captain. Anger in a soldier could be used.
It was soon enough done, the sun still high, just starting west. Summer’s approach made the run down to the lake easier in obvious ways. Bytsan lingered long enough for a cup of wine (warmed in the Kitan fashion) with Shen Tai, then bade him a brisk farewell. The soldiers were already restless. The other man was still distracted, uneasy. It showed, behind the eternal mask of courtesy.
Bytsan could hardly blame him.
Two hundred and fifty horses, the White Jade Princess had decreed. The sort of overwrought conceit only someone living in a palace all her life could devise. The king had approved it, however.
It was never wise, Bytsan had decided on his way here from the fort, to underestimate the influence of women at a court.
He’d considered saying that, too, over the cup of wine, but had elected not to.
There would be one last supply trip in a month’s time, then life would change for both of them. They might never see each other again. Probably would not. Better not to do anything so foolish as confide in the other man, or acknowledge more than curiosity and a rationed measure of respect.
The cart was lighter on the way back, of course, the bullock quicker heading home. So were the soldiers, putting the lake and the dead behind them.
Three of his men started a song as they left the meadow and began to wind their way up. Bytsan paused in the afternoon light at the switchback where he always did, and looked down. You might call Kuala Nor beautiful in late spring—if you knew nothing about it.
His gaze swept across the blue water to the nesting birds—an absurd number of them. You could fire an arrow in the air over that way and kill three with one shot. If the arrow had room to fall. He allowed himself a smile. He was glad to be leaving, too, no denying it.
He looked across the meadow bowl, north towards the far, framing mountains, range beyond range. The tale of his people was that blue-faced demons, gigantic and malevolent, had dwelled in those distant peaks from the beginning of the world and had only been barred from the Tagur plateau by the gods, who had thrown up other mountains against them, wrapped in magic. The range they were re-entering now, where their small fortress sat, was one of these.
The gods themselves, dazzling and violent, lived much farther south, beyond Rygyal, above the transcendent peaks that touched the foothills of heaven, and no man had ever climbed them.
Bytsan’s gaze fell upon the burial mounds across the lake, on the far side of the meadow. They lay against the pine woods, west of the Kitan’s cabin, three long rows of them now, two years’ worth of bone-graves in hard ground.
Shen Tai was digging already, he saw, working beyond the last of them in the third row. He hadn’t waited for the Tagurans to leave the meadow. Bytsan watched him, small in the distance: bend and shovel, bend and shovel.
He looked at the cabin set against that same northern slope, saw the pen they’d built for the two goats, the freshly stacked firewood against one wall. He finished his sweep by turning east, to the valley through which this strange, solitary Kitan had come to Kuala Nor, and along which he would return.
“Something’s moving there,” Gnam said beside him, looking the same way. He pointed. Bytsan stared, narrowing his eyes, and then he saw it, too.
He’d gone back to digging the pit he’d started two days ago, end of the third row in from the trees, because that was what he did here. And because he felt that if he didn’t keep himself moving, working to exhaustion today, the chaos of his thoughts—almost feverish, after so long a quiet time—would overwhelm him.
There was always the wine Bytsan had brought, another access, like a crooked, lamplit laneway in the North District of Xinan, to the blurred borders of oblivion. The wine would be there at day’s end, waiting. No one else was coming to drink it.
Or so he’d thought, carrying his shovel to work, but the world today was simply not fitting itself to a steady two-year routine.
Standing up, stretching his back, and removing the maligned hat to mop at his forehead, Tai saw figures coming from the east over the tall green grass.
They were already out of the canyon, in the open on the meadow. That meant they had to have been visible for some time, he just hadn’t noticed. Why should he notice? Why even look? No one came here but the two sets of troops from the forts, full moon, new moon.
There were two of them, he saw, on small horses, a third horse carrying their gear behind. They moved slowly, not hurrying. Perhaps tired. The sun was starting west, its light fell upon them, making them vivid in the late-day’s glowing.
It wasn’t time for supplies from Iron Gate. He’d just said farewell to Bytsan and the Taguran soldiers. And when men did arrive, it wasn’t just a pair of them with no cart. And—most certainly—they did not reach the lake in the later part of the day, when they’d have to stay with him overnight or be outside among the dead after dark.
This, clearly, was a day marked for change in his stars.
They were still some distance away, the travellers. Tai stared for another moment, then shouldered his shovel, picked up his quiver and bow—carried against wolves and for shots at a bird for dinner—and started towards his cabin, to be waiting for them there.
A matter of simple courtesy, respect shown visitors to one’s home, wherever it might be in the world, even here beyond borders. He felt his pulse quickening as he walked, beating to meet the world’s pulse, coming back to him.
Chou Yan had expected his friend to be changed, in both appearance and manner, if he was even alive after two years out here. He’d been preparing for terrible tidings, had talked about it with his travelling companion, not that she ever replied.
Then at Iron Gate Pass—that wretched fortress here at the world’s end—they’d told him Tai was still among the living, or had been a little while ago when they’d taken supplies to him by the lake. Yan had immediately drunk several cups of Salmon River wine (he had been carrying it for Tai, more or less) to celebrate.
He hadn’t known, until then.
No one had known. He’d assumed when he left Xinan that he would be journeying ten days or so along the imperial road and then down through civilized country to his friend’s family home with what he had to tell him. It wasn’t so. At the estate near the Wai River, where he’d managed to remain uncharacteristically discreet about his tidings, the third brother, young Shen Chao—the only child still at home—had told him where Tai had gone, two full years ago.
Yan couldn’t believe it at first, and then, thinking about his friend, he did believe it.
Tai had always had something different about him, too many strands in one nature: an uneasy min
gling of soldier and scholar, ascetic and drinking companion among the singing girls. Along with a temper. It was no wonder, their friend Xin Lun had once said, that Tai was always going on about the need for balance after too many cups of wine. Lun had joked about how hard keeping one’s balance could be on muddy laneways, weaving home after that many cups.
It was a very long way, where Tai had journeyed. His family had not heard from him since he’d gone. He could be dead. No one could reasonably expect Chou Yan to follow him, beyond the borders of the empire.
Yan had spent two nights among the Shen women and youngest boy, sharing their ancestor rites and meals (very good food, no wine in the house during mourning, alas). He’d slept in a comfortable mosquito-netted bed. He’d poured his own libation over General Shen Gao’s grave, admired his monument and inscription, strolled with young Chao in the orchard and along the stream. He was unhappily trying to decide what to do.
How far did friendship carry one? Literally, how far?
In the event, he did what he’d been afraid he’d do from the time they’d told him of Tai’s departure. He bade farewell to the family and continued west towards the border, with only the single guard he’d been advised to take with him, back in Xinan.
She had told him it was an easy enough journey, when he mentioned where his friend had gone. Yan didn’t believe her, but the indifferent manner was oddly reassuring.
As long as he paid her, Yan thought, she wouldn’t care. You hired a Kanlin Warrior and they stayed with you until you paid them off. Or didn’t pay them: though that was, invariably, an extremely bad idea.
Wan-si was hopeless as a companion, truth be told, especially for a sociable man who liked to talk, laugh, argue, who enjoyed the sound of his voice declaiming poetry—his own verses or anyone else’s. Yan kept reminding himself that she was simply protection for the road, and skilled hands to assemble their camp at night when they slept outdoors—rather more necessary now than he’d expected at the outset. She was not a friend or an intimate of any kind.