He hesitated, then did something she couldn’t see, or the Kanlin. He stood up, looked at her in lantern light.
She clasped her hands before her, bowed formally. “My lord, it was too kind of you to visit your servant.”
“I will see you again?” He found it difficult to speak.
“I would like that, but it is hard to know the winding of paths. As you said, my lord. Tonight’s … was not the greeting I would have most wanted to give you.”
She still knew exactly what to say to set his heart beating.
“Nor mine for you,” he said.
“It pleases me to hear that,” said Spring Rain, eyes demurely lowered.
“Come, my lord!” said the Kanlin.
Tai turned, and went from her.
SHE WATCHES HIM go down the steps and away into darkness. She hadn’t even seen the Kanlin, only heard a voice in the night. She looks to her pipa on the railing, sees the moths still fluttering.
Then she sees what he has left behind him on the bench where they’ve been sitting. She picks it up. Looks at it under the light. Her hand begins to tremble.
She swears aloud, in a voice that would shock many of the men who once valued her for serene grace in the Pavilion of Moonlight.
She looks up. The guard had said …
She calls out, “Wei Song? Are you still there?”
A moment, no sound, no woman appearing from the blackness. Then, “I am, my lady. How may your servant be of use to you?”
“Come here.”
Out of the night garden the woman comes. The one she’d met here earlier this year, had hired and sent west. The Kanlin woman bows.
“The servant will be here very soon,” she says.
“I know. He has seen you before.”
“I remember.”
Rain looks at her. A small woman, hooded. She extends the ring Tai has left for her.
“Take this. Give it back to Master Shen. Tell him I could never sell it, or wear it, or even have it cut down to sell, without being at risk. There is writing on the band! This is from the emperor, isn’t it?”
“I have never seen it,” says the other woman. “He didn’t wear it, riding.” Her voice is odd, but Rain has no time to work that through. “I believe the emperor might have been with …”
“Indeed. This ring suggests he was, or sent someone. Tell Tai he must have this, and be seen to have it. He has to wear it. It will protect him. He needs to learn these things. He can’t go around making gifts of something like this. Take it.”
The ring is stunningly beautiful, even in this light. It would match her eyes. She believes—in fact she is certain—that Tai will have thought of that. Not his reason for doing this, but a part of his wanting to.
The Kanlin hesitates, then bows again, takes the ring. “I am sorry I failed you,” she says. “I did not reach Kuala Nor, and I—”
“Master Shen told me,” Rain says briskly. “He also said you fought attackers for him. And he is alive. No one failed. Do I need to pay you more, to continue guarding him?”
The Kanlin, who is smaller than Rain remembered, draws herself up straight. “No,” she says. “You do not.”
“Why not?” says Rain.
“We have been retained by Lady Wen Jian. Ten of us. He is defended.”
“She did that? I see. It is out of my hands, then,” says Rain. She isn’t sure why she says it that way. She looks at the woman more closely, but the light isn’t strong, and the Kanlin is hooded.
The other woman seems about to say something. She doesn’t. She goes down the stairs and east through the garden, the way the others have gone.
Rain is alone. Not for long, and she knows it. She picks up her pipa, is tuning it when she hears Hwan calling to let her know—quite properly—that he is approaching.
He comes into the gazebo bearing a round tray with a small brazier heating wine, and a cup for her.
“Why are you here?” she asks coldly.
He stops, shaken by her tone. He bows, handling the tray carefully. “My lady. It is cold now. I thought you might want—”
“I left instructions, did I not, Hwan?”
She knows why he is here. There is a balance to be achieved in this, as in all else. She needs his devotion, but he must not be allowed to assume, or presume. There are lines to be drawn, not to be crossed.
“My lady,” he says, abjectly. “Forgive me. Your servant thought only that you might—”
“That I might want wine. Very well. Leave it and go. You will not be punished, but you are aware that the master has instructed that servants are to be beaten for failing to follow instructions. He said it is our task to ensure this.”
It is not, she knows, the response he expected. That is all right, she thinks. He bows again, the tray wobbles slightly.
“Put it down and go,” Rain says again. She allows her voice to soften. “It was a kind thought, Hwan. Tell my woman that I will be back shortly. I will want a fire, to take the edge off the night.”
“Of course, my lady,” he says, and backs away. “Do you … do you wish an escort back through the garden?”
“No,” she says. “I just gave you your instructions, Hwan.”
“Yes … yes, my lady.”
She smiles, makes certain he sees it. She is in the light. “No one will be told of this. You are a loyal servant and I value you for it.”
“My lady,” he says again, and leaves her, bowing twice.
Dealing with men of all stations and all ranks, learning their needs and anxieties … is this not what a girl from the North District, especially from one of the best houses, is supposed to be able to do?
She actually does want the wine he’s brought. She removes the top of the warmed flask and pours for herself. Trained girls know how to pour, another skill they are taught.
She seems to be crying, after all.
She sips the spiced wine and puts down her cup. She takes the pipa and begins to play, for herself, but she knows someone will be listening, and she owes him this.
An emerald ring, she is thinking. From the emperor. Perhaps from his own hand. Tai hadn’t said. A delicacy in that. The world is a place of surpassing strangeness, she thinks. And then she is thinking, without knowing why, of her lost home in the west.
QIN SAW THE MAN and his guards come back over the wall. It was harder to get up and out. You needed to be boosted over, and the last one had to be exceptionally skilled at climbing. The last Kanlin was the woman, Qin saw, and she seemed to do it easily.
The man seemed distracted, not even certain which way to walk. The Kanlins led him away, including the two who’d been waiting here in the street. The fellow—clearly an aristocrat of some kind, though he wasn’t dressed like one—did pause long enough to offer Qin two more silver coins. That made four, in all, which was more money than anyone had ever given him out here.
He saw the last Kanlin catch up with the man and draw him aside. He saw them speaking, saw her hand over something small. They walked on, farther into the ward, and were lost to sight down the street.
Qin had managed to push himself to his feet, and offer what passed for a bow with him, when he was given the money, but he wasn’t sure the fellow noticed. He sat down again, looking at the four coins. Silver! A breeze came up, stirring the dust. He was thinking about lychees, and when they’d reach the markets. Then he stopped thinking about that.
From within the garden, pipa music began. The sound came faintly to him, for she was some distance away from where he sat against the wall, in the small hut she’d had made to shelter him.
She was playing for him. Qin knew she was. A music more precious than any coins anyone could give. He heard sadness, sweet and slow, in the plucked strings, and thought about how a beautiful woman, from within her sheltered, easeful life of luxury and power, was offering sorrow to the spring night, for what had been done to him.
Qin listened, claimed unconditionally by love. He imagined that even the stars were s
till and listening, above the haze and lights of Xinan. Eventually the music stopped and the night street was quiet. A dog barked, far away.
CHAPTER XX
As he had promised her, they see the Kitan fortress before sunrise. Even in the night and far away, it is imposing.
It is another unsettling moment for Li-Mei, among so many: looking under stars at something her own people have built here, this heavy, squared-off structure on the grass. Something set solidly, walls rising. An assertion about permanence in a world where the presence of mankind was transitory, lying lightly on the earth. Everything carried with you where you went.
What did it mean, wanting to proclaim this permanence? Was it better, or wiser—a new thought for her—to be a people who knew there was no such thing?
It is as if, she thinks, looking at the fortress her people have erected, some giant, heavenly civil servant had taken his scroll-stamp—the seal he used to signify he’d read a document—and dropped it on the grass, and left it there.
There is something so unnatural, so foreign, about the walled fort being here that she misses the important thing.
Meshag does not. He mutters something beside her, under his breath in his own tongue, and then, more clearly, he says, “It is empty.”
She looks quickly over at him. “How do you know?”
“No torches. No one on the walls. The pastures, there should be night guards for the horses. Something has happened.” He stares ahead. They are on a rise of land, the fortress lies in a shallow valley.
Meshag makes a sound to his horse. “Come,” he says to her. “I must see.” Fearfully, hating her fear, she follows him down.
The fortress is even larger than she’d realized, which means it is farther away. There is a hint of grey in the sky as they finally come up to it. Li-Mei looks to left and right, and now she can see their wolves.
This close, she can see the strangeness of the fort, the thing he understood right away. There is no one here at all. Not on the wall walks, not above the gates, in the squared corner towers. This is a hollow structure, lifeless. She shivers.
Meshag dismounts. He walks to a fenced pasture ahead of them. Goes to the gate, which hangs open, unlatched. It creaks in the wind, banging at intervals against the post. A thin sound. She sees him kneel, then walk a distance south and kneel again. He stands and looks that way.
He turns and walks towards the main gate of the fort. It is far enough that she loses sight of him against the looming walls, in the dark beyond the pasture. She sits her horse, beside wolves, and feels fear blow through her like a wind.
At length, she sees him walking back, the loping, rigid stride. He mounts up. His face is never easy to read, but she thinks she sees concern in it, for the first time.
“When did they leave?” she asks. She knows that is what he’s been trying to determine.
“Only two days,” he says. “Towards the Wall. I do not know why. We must ride quickly now.”
They ride quickly. They are galloping the horses up out of the valley along the southern ridge, the sun about to rise, when they are attacked.
It is called the raider’s hour on the steppe, though that is not something Li-Mei has any way of knowing. Attacks in darkness can become confused, chaotic, random. Daylight undermines surprise. Twilight and dawn are—for hunters of any kind—the best times.
Li-Mei is able to piece events together only fitfully, and only afterwards. She experiences the attack in flashes, images, cries cut off, the screaming of horses.
She is sprawled on the ground before she even understands they are being attacked. He must have pushed her down, she realizes. She looks up, a hand to her mouth, from deep grass. Three, no, four now, of the attackers fall before they even come close.
Meshag’s movements are as smooth as they were when he shot the swan. He is shooting men now, and it is the same. Sighting, release, another arrow nocked and fired. He keeps his horse moving, wheeling. The raiders have bows, too, she sees—that is why he pushed her down. There are a dozen of them, at least, or there were. One more falls, even as she watches. The others move nearer, screaming, but there is something strange about their horses, they rear and wheel, hard to control.
She is in the grass. They can see her horse, but not her. She doesn’t know who these are. Shuoki? Or the pursuing Bogü, come upon them? This is a battle, she has time to think. This was her father’s world all his life. Men die in battle. And women, if they find themselves in the wrong place.
Two riders come thundering towards her, whipping their mounts into control, tracking her by her own horse. She can feel the earth vibrate. They are close. She is going to scream. These are not Bogü. Their hair is short, shaved on both sides, long in the middle, there is yellow paint on their faces. They are near enough for her to see this, and understand that these painted features may be her last sight, under nine heavens.
Then the wolves rise up.
They rise from the grasslands that were theirs to rule before men came with their families and herds, whether treading lightly or trying—hopelessly?—to set wooden structures down to endure as a stamp upon the land.
And when the wolves appear from hiding, she realizes how many more of them there are than she’s been aware of in these days of journeying. She’s seen only the nearest of them—the lead wolf, a handful of others. But there are fifty or more, rising like grey death in the dawn. They have been hidden by the tall grass, are not any more.
They go straight for the Shuoki horses, panicking them wildly into screams and rigid, bucking halts. The horses thrash, kicking out, but to no avail, for there are fewer than ten riders left now, and five times as many wolves, and there is a man (if he is a man) shooting steadily, lethally at them, again and again. And the wolves are his.
Li-Mei sees a yellow-painted Shuoki fall very close to her. She hears something crack as he hits the ground. He screams in pain, in throat-raw terror. Four wolves are on him. She looks away, burying her face in the earth. She hears the man stop screaming, she doesn’t watch it happen. Snuffling sounds, snarling. Then another sound she never forgets: flesh being torn, ripped away.
Nothing frightens her more than wolves.
She would be dead or taken if they were not here.
The world is not something to be understood. It is vanity, illusion to even try.
Her body is shaking where she lies. She can’t control it. And then, as suddenly as the first cries came, and the terrifying vision of those riders, there is stillness again. The light of morning. Dawn wind. Li-Mei hears birdsong, amazingly.
She makes herself sit up, then wishes she had not.
Beside her, much too near, the dead Shuoki is being devoured. He is blood and meat. The wolves snap and grunt, biting down, snarling at each other.
She is afraid she is going to be sick and, with the thought, she is, on her knees in the grass, emptied out in spasms.
A shadow falls. She looks up quickly.
Meshag extends one of the water flasks. She sits up. Takes it and unstoppers it. She drinks and spits, does so again, heedless of dignity or grace or any such concepts from another world. She drinks again, swallows this time. Then she pours water into her hand and wipes her face. Does that again, too, almost defiantly. Not everything is lost, she tells herself. Not unless you let it be.
“Come,” Meshag says to her. “We take four horses. We can change, ride more fast.”
“Will … will there be more of these?”
“Shuoki? Might be. Soldiers have gone. Shuoki come to see why.”
“Do we know why?”
He shakes his head.
“Come,” he says again. He reaches a hand. She gives him back the stoppered flask, but though he takes it and shoulders it, he puts his hand out again, and she understands that he is helping her get up.
HE CHOOSES two more horses for each of them. The Shuoki horses have scattered, but are well trained and have not gone far. She waits by her own mount, and watches him. He reclaims his
arrows, first, approaches one Shuoki horse, examines and leaves it, takes another. She has no idea how he’s making these choices.
Around her, hideously, the wolves are feeding on the dead.
She remembers from another life Tai telling their father (she is in the trees, listening) how the Bogü take their dead out on the grass, away from the tribe, to be devoured under the sky, souls sent back that way.
The sky is very blue, the wind milder today.
He has left her a flask. She drinks again, but only a little, to take the bad taste from her mouth.
She watches him ride back. He has four horses looped to each other, tied to his own. He doesn’t appear to say anything at all, but suddenly wolves spring up and lope away, to be lost in the grass.
Li-Mei takes her reins and does the leap (not graceful) she’s taught herself to get up on a horse without his aid. When you lose your access to pride in almost all things, perhaps you find it somewhere else? She says, “Shouldn’t two of them be tied behind mine, to make it easier?”
“Not easier. We must go.”
“Wait. Please!”
He does wait. The sun is washing the land in morning light. His eyes are dark, nothing comes back from them.
“Forgive me,” she says. “I told you, when I don’t understand, it makes me fearful. I am better when I know things.”
He says nothing.
She says, “Can you, do you control wolves? Do they follow you?”
He looks away, north, the way they’ve come. Says nothing for so long she thinks he’s chosen not to answer, but he hasn’t moved yet. She hears birds singing. Looks up, almost involuntarily, for a swan.
He says, “Not all. One pack. This one.”
The lead wolf is near them again; he is always close to Li-Mei. She looks at him. Fights a new horror and an old fear.
She turns back to Meshag, the black eyes. The wolf’s are so much brighter. The man is waiting. She says only, “Thank you.”
He twitches his reins and she follows him south, leaving the dead behind under birds and the sky.