UNDER STARS, that same night. They have ridden all day, two brief halts. No cooking fires, berries only, but they’ve stopped by a pond this time. Li-Mei takes off her clothes and bathes in the dark: a need to wash away the memory of flesh being shredded, the sound it made.
After dressing again, she asks him, “What you said before? About the wolves? This is because of what was done to you?”
It is easier to ask in the night.
He has been crouching in the grass, after watering the horses. She sees him look away. She says, “I’m sorry. You don’t have to—”
He says, “Shaman in north was making me a wolf-soul. Bound to him. His command? Hard magic, bad. Not … not done. Wolf his totem creature. He summoned a wolf to come. Your brother killed him as he was doing this. I was … I am caught between.”
“Between?”
There are frogs in the pond. She hears them croaking in the night. He says, “Man and wolf. This body and the other.”
The other. She looks over, against her will. The lead wolf is in the grass, the grey shape. She’d seen him tearing flesh at sunrise, blood dripping from those jaws.
The animal looks back at her, steadily. She can barely make it out but these eyes, unlike Meshag’s, seem to shine. A fearful sensation comes over Li-Mei, and the realization that it would be wrong, wrong for her to push him more, to ask for more.
She lowers her head. Her hair is wet, she feels it dripping down her back, but the night is mild. She says, “I am sorry. Perhaps it would have been better if Tai had not—”
“No!” he says strongly. She looks up quickly, startled. He stands, a shape against horizon and stars. “Better this than what I would have been. I am … I have choices. If that shaman bind me, I am only his, and then die. Shandai gave me this.”
She looks up at him.
He says, “I choose to come for you. To honour Shan … Shendai.”
“And after? After this?” She had just decided not to ask more questions.
He makes his one-shoulder shrug.
She looks over at the wolf again, a shadow more than something you can see. There is a question she cannot ask.
“Ride now?”
He actually puts it as a question.
“Thank you,” she says.
Li-Mei gets up and walks over and mounts one of her horses, by herself. They are changing mounts every time they stop. Just before sunrise he shoots a second swan, but a third one, following behind, wheels away west, very high.
Someone had a wolf for a totem, she thinks. Someone has a swan.
YOU CAN FALL ASLEEP on a horse, but not when it is galloping. Li-Mei collapses into an aching, fitful slumber whenever he allows a halt. She knows why he’s pushing so hard, since shooting the second swan, but body and mind have their demands.
She lies on her back in shorter grass now. Consciousness reasserts, recedes. She has been dreaming of swinging—the swing in the garden at home—arcing higher and higher among spring blossoms, back and forth. She doesn’t know who is pushing her, she never looks to see, but she is not afraid.
The pushing is Meshag, shaking her shoulder.
She opens her eyes. Pale light. Morning. He hands her the water flask, gestures towards the saddlebag beside her. More berries. If there are further days of nothing but this, Li-Mei thinks, a rabbit eaten raw might begin to seem appealing. Then she remembers the wolves and the Shuoki, and that thought slides away.
She drinks, splashes water on her hands and face. Takes a fistful of the berries, and then does it again. She has learned to avoid the unripe ones, picks them out. She is a Kitai princess, isn’t she?
She’s too weary to be amused by her own irony.
She gets to her feet. Her legs hurt, and her back. Meshag is already mounted. He is scanning the sky as it brightens. She does the same. Nothing to be seen. Another fresh day, high clouds. She goes to the horse he’s freed from the line for her. She flexes stiff limbs and gets herself into the saddle. She’s become better at this, she thinks.
She looks at him.
“It will change now,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“The land. You will see. We are leaving the steppe. Your Wall is not far.”
Even fatigued as she is, this makes her heart beat faster. Just the words. The Wall means Kitai, and an exile’s return, if they can get through it to the other side. He’d said they could.
We are leaving the steppe.
She looks back, turning in the saddle. As far as she can see under the risen sun and the high sky the grass stretches, yellow-green, darker green, tall, moving in the breeze. There is a sound to its swaying, and that sound has been a part of her existence since the Bogü claimed her. Even in the sedan chair she’d heard it, incessantly. The murmur of the steppe.
Gazing north, her eyes filled with this vista, imagining how far it goes, she thinks, If there was a morning in the world, this is the way it looked. And that is not a thought natural to her people.
They start south. Li-Mei looks to left and then right, and sees the lead wolf beside them. The others are out there, she knows. But this one is always near.
BY MIDDAY the land begins rising, the grass is shorter, differently textured, darker, and there are clumps of green and silver-green shrubbery, and then bare rock in places. When she sees a stand of poplar trees it is almost shocking. She realizes she isn’t fatigued any more.
They cross a shallow river. On the other bank Meshag halts to let the horses drink. He refills the water flasks. Li-Mei dismounts as well, to stretch her aching legs. She keeps looking at the sky. More wind today, the clouds moving east. Sometimes they pass before the sun and a shadow slides along the land and then away.
She says, “Do you know how close they are, behind us?”
He stoppers the flasks. He takes the line that holds the four horses behind his and makes the changes needed to give each of them new mounts. He swings himself up and Li-Mei does the same.
He says, “Most of a day. I think we are enough ahead.”
She is afraid to ask him how he knows this. But she also thinks she knows the answer: not all the wolves are with them here.
“Thank you,” she says.
They begin to ride again, south, under the high sky and the coming and going of light and shadow across the changing land. One more stop, mid-afternoon. He switches their horses again.
They see a swan, late in the day, flying too high for an arrow. A little after that they crest the long, steady rise of land they have been climbing. There is a downward slope in front of them.
Beyond it, stretching to the ends of sight, west and east, lit by the long, late sun, is the Wall.
He has brought her home.
Tazek Karad had never made any real distinction between the nomads of the grasslands, however much they might have hated each other. He looked out over Shuoki lands now, having been abruptly shifted two hundred li east of his normal gatehouse on the Wall.
Both the Shuoki and the Bogü were domesticated, nose-wiping sheep-herders to him. Their women dominated them in their yurts, by day and by night. That, his fellow Kislik joked, was why so many of the steppe-men slept with their sheep.
They might boast of their thick-maned horses, of battling grassland wolves, hunting gazelle, but what did these things mean to a Kislik? His were a people of the desert, where men murdered for half a cup of water, and sometimes drank the blood of the victim, too. Where you’d have to drag your camel down to the ground and shelter against it, wrapping your face completely, to try to survive a sandstorm.
The deserts killed; these steppes nurtured life. You could make a guess, couldn’t you, as to which land produced harder, more worthy men?
Tazek would have denied it if someone had called him bitter. Still, when it came to talking about worthy you could make a case that command of only fifty men in the Kitan Sixth Army after twelve years along or north of the Wall was not even close to showing proper respect. A dui was nothing. He ought to
have had two hundred or more, by now.
True, Kitai and its empire had fed and clothed him since he was fifteen, and had made women and wine (or kumiss, more often) available for soldiers posted along the Wall. True, he had not died in desert sand as his father and two brothers had.
Serving the Kitan emperor was a way of life, and not the worst. But surely anyone worth being named a man wanted to rise, to move nearer the centre. What sort of person would come this close, and look, and say, “It is enough, what I have. I don’t need more.”
Not the person Tazek Karad was, at any rate.
Add the fact—it was on his record—that he’d accepted, uncomplainingly, doubled six-month shifts at outpost forts in the grasslands three times, and you had to concede that the officers either had it in for him, for some reason, or they were just too incompetent in the Sixth District to recognize a man ready for promotion.
Not that he was bitter.
Part of the problem was that the flaccid sheep-lovers of the steppe were too quiet these days. The Bogü had become a subject people of the emperor, selling him horses at the spring gathering by the river’s loop, requesting Kitan intervention in their own squabbles, but not fighting nearly enough in those to let good soldiers engage in the sort of actions that got you promoted.
The Shuoki were more contentious, and the forts in their lands—Near Fort and Far Fort, the soldiers called them—saw some combat. The nomads here had even tried to break through weak places in the Wall on raids. A mistake, and they’d suffered for it. But the two outpost forts and the Wall below them had been manned by soldiers of Roshan’s Seventh Army, so the glory (and citations) from that fighting didn’t get anywhere near Tazek Karad or his fellows in the Sixth.
In the Sixth Army they supervised horse trading, heard whining complaints about sheep raids levelled by one rancid-smelling tribe against another, and let long-haired Bogü riders through with furs and amber, destined for markets in Xinan or Yenling.
It was predictable, safe, unspeakably dull.
Until four days ago, when dui commander Tazek Karad had received urgent orders to lead his fifty men east to take up a position at the gatehouse and towers directly south of Near Fort.
Other officers and men went with them, some halting sooner, some going farther east, thinning the numbers at their own guard posts. Along the way, changing orders overtook a number of them, causing confusion. There was an apparent need to move quickly.
The emerging report was that the soldiers of the Seventh along the Wall had been withdrawn. All of them. They were gone. The gates and the watchtowers between gates were undefended. It was almost inconceivable.
No one told them why. No ranking officer (in the Sixth Army, anyhow) would bother telling a lowly commander of fifty men anything.
Nor did anyone explain why, just two days ago, the garrison soldiers of the Seventh and Eighth, posted in Near Fort and Far Fort, had come marching and riding back, both armies together, thousands upon thousands of them funnelling through the Wall section Tazek now controlled. They disappeared south through a curtain of dust that took most of the morning to settle, leaving an eerie, empty silence behind.
Soldiers had asked soldiers what was happening as the garrisons passed through. Soldiers didn’t know. They never did.
And although army life was almost always lived in a state of ignorance and one grew accustomed to that, there were times when sudden and shifting orders could unsettle the most dour and steady of minor officers, even one with the western desert in his blood.
The sight of the Seventh and Eighth garrisons approaching his gate and passing through and disappearing south had done that for Tazek Karad.
He felt exposed, looking north. He was commanding an important, unfamiliar gate, he was undermanned, and he was above Shuoki lands now. A man might want the chance to fight the barbarians, earn a reputation, but if the nomads raided right now in any numbers he and his men could be in serious difficulty.
And with both forts emptied out, there was a good chance the Shuoki would come down to, at the very least, see what was happening here. Tazek didn’t even want to think about what they would do to the two forts. Not his problem, until someone made it so.
He stood in the wooden gatehouse at sundown and looked east and west along the rise and fall and rise of the Long Wall of Kitai, to where it vanished in each direction. They’d used rammed earth to build it here above the grasslands, pressed between wooden frames, mixed with lime and gravel carted north. They’d used stones, he’d been told, where the Wall climbed towards mountains over rocks.
It was a staggering achievement, difficult to think about. They said it stretched for six thousand li. They said four hundred thousand men had died in building and rebuilding it over the centuries. Tazek believed that last part.
He hated the Wall. He’d lived twelve years of his life defending it.
One of his men said something. He was pointing north. Tazek sighted along the man’s extended finger.
Two traders approaching, still far off, a string of horses behind them. Here in Shuoki lands this was uncommon. It was the Bogü who went back and forth, who had the spring meeting by the Golden River’s bend where thousands of horses were brought and bought and led away south for the Kitan army’s endless need.
The Shuoki traded more sporadically. Often the goods were stolen horses—often from the Bogü. It wouldn’t surprise Tazek if that were so now. As the pair drew nearer he saw four horses in addition to the two being ridden. In theory, he could arrest the would-be traders, hold them for tribal justice (which was never pretty), and keep the horses as the price of inconveniencing Kitan soldiers.
In reality, they tended to let traders through. Standard army policy these days: horses mattered too much, you wanted the nomads to keep bringing them, they would stop if it meant being captured. The usual practice was for the gate commander to accept discreet compensation for looking the other way while stolen goods went into Kitai.
He waited for the thieving Shuoki to get closer. He had questions to ask. He needed information more than the horse or the handful of coins they’d likely offer. Their mounts were tired, he saw, even the ones being led on a rope. They’d been ridden hard, probably confirmation they were stolen. Tired horses sold for less.
Tazek stared stonily down at the approaching riders. He wasn’t a happy man.
The two men came up to his gate and halted below.
They weren’t Shuoki. First sign of the unexpected.
“Request to pass through with horses to sell,” the larger one said. He was a Bogü, you could see it in the hair. He spoke Kitan like the barbarian he was. The smaller one was hooded. Sometimes they did that, out of fear in the presence of Kitan soldiers.
Well, fear was proper, wasn’t it.
This was a father and son, Tazek decided, stealing together. But it was a surprise to find Bogü this far east, especially just a pair of them. Not his problem. His problems were different.
“What have you seen to the north, thieving Bogü?” he demanded.
“What do you mean?” No reaction to the insult, Tazek noted.
“The garrison!”
“Fortress empty,” agreed the big man. He was bare-chested, kept his eyes cast down. This, too, was normal—and appropriate. These were barbarians talking to an officer in the Sixth Army of Kitai.
The man said, “Tracks of horses and men go this way. They not come here?”
That was none of his business, was it?
“What about the other fort?”
“Not go so far. But many soldiers go this way. More than one fort. Two days, maybe?”
He didn’t look up, but he had it right. The nomads knew how to read their grass.
“Anything happen up there?”
“Happen?”
“You see any Shuoki?”
“No,” said the big one.
“I need a better answer!” snarled Tazek.
“No, honourable sir,” the man said, which woul
d have been funny, some other time.
“Any of those shit-eaters coming this way? You see them?”
“No Shuoki. There are Bogü behind us.”
“Why?”
“We are … we are exiled from tribe, honourable sir.”
And that put an answer in place as to why these two were so far east. Interesting that they were being pursued, but not interesting enough. The tribes had their laws. If they stayed north of the Wall and didn’t bother the garrisons, it had nothing to do with Kitai. Or with Tazek Karad of the Sixth.
It could, however, get complicated if the Bogü showed up, and he was seen letting these two through. There were horses. Horses mattered. Tazek looked north. Emptiness.
He nodded to the man beside him. “Open them up.”
He looked down at the two riders. “Where you taking these?”
“These horses requested by Kanlins,” the bigger man said.
A surprise. “You aim to go all the way to Stone Drum Mountain with these?”
“Requested by them. Three smaller horses. Some Kanlin are women.”
Well, the gods send a sandstorm to blind fools! As if Tazek didn’t know some of the black-robed ones were women? And that the women could kill you as easily as the men?
“In that case, we have a problem, my shirtless friend. Stone Drum is what, six days? I am not letting Bogü horse-thieves ride alone that far through Kitai.”
“It is only four days, dui officer. You are properly cautious, but it is all right, we are here to escort them.”
The voice was behind him. Speaking impeccable Kitan.
Tazek turned quickly—and saw three Kanlin Warriors, astride their horses, just inside his gates.
It had happened to him before: they could be right up on you, in among you, before you were aware they’d even been approaching. Two men, one woman, he saw. They had hoods down in the evening light, carried swords across their backs, bows in saddles.
Tazek stared down. If he’d been unhappy before it was as nothing now.
“How did you know they were coming?” he demanded.