They struck from the side, fired from the far end of the cabin, beyond the door. And the wild ghost-wind did nothing to mar their flight, only held her pinned to be killed like a victim for sacrifice. The first arrow took her in the throat, a flowering of crimson, the second went in as deep, below her left breast.
In the instant of her dying the wind, too, died.
The screaming left the meadow.
In the bruised stillness that followed, the woman slid slowly down the wall, crumpled to one side, and lay upon the trampled grass beside his cabin door.
Tai drew a ragged, harrowed breath. His hands were shaking. He looked towards the far side of the cabin.
Bytsan and the young soldier called Gnam were standing there, fear in their eyes. Both arrows had been fired by the younger man.
And though the wild wind-sound was gone, Tai was still hearing it in his mind, that screaming, still seeing the woman pinned flat like some black-robed butterfly, by what it had been.
The dead of Kuala Nor had come to him. For him. To his aid.
But so had two men, mortal and desperately frightened, riding back down from their safe path away, even though the sun was over west now, with twilight soon to fall, and in the darkness here the world did not belong to living men.
Tai understood something else then, looking down at the woman where she lay: that even by daylight—morning and afternoon, summer and winter, doing his work—he had been living at sufferance, all this time.
He looked the other way, towards the blue of the lake and the low sun, and he knelt on the dark green grass. He touched his forehead to the earth in full obeisance, three times.
It had been written by one teacher in the time of the First Dynasty, more than nine hundred years ago, that when a man was brought back alive from the tall doors of death, from the brink of crossing over to the dark, he had a burden laid upon him ever after: to conduct his granted life in such a manner as to be worthy of that return.
Others had taught otherwise over the centuries: that survival in such a fashion meant that you had not yet learned what you had been sent to discover in a single, given life. Though that, really, could be seen as another kind of burden, Tai thought, on his knees in meadow grass. He had a sudden image of his father feeding ducks in their stream. He looked out over the lake, a darker blue in the mountain air.
He stood up. He turned to the Tagurans. Gnam had gone to the dead woman, he saw. He dragged her away from the wall, ripped his arrows out of her body, tossing them carelessly behind himself. Her hair had come free of its binding in that wind, spilling loose, pins scattered. Gnam bent down, spread her legs, arranging them.
He began removing his armour.
Tai blinked in disbelief.
“What are you doing?” The sound of his own voice frightened him. “She’s still warm,” the soldier said. “Do me as a prize.”
Tai stared at Bytsan. The other man turned away. “Do not claim your own soldiers never do this,” the Taguran captain said, but he was staring at the mountains, not meeting Tai’s gaze.
“None of mine ever did,” said Tai. “And no one else will while I stand by.”
He took three strides, and picked up the nearest Kanlin sword.
It had been a long time since he’d held one of these. The balance was flawless, a weight without weight. He pointed it at the young soldier.
Gnam’s hands stopped working his armour straps. He actually looked surprised. “She came here to kill you. I just saved your life.”
It wasn’t wholly true, but close enough.
“You have my gratitude. And a hope I can repay you one day. But that will be prevented if I kill you now, and I will do that if you touch her. Unless you want to fight me.”
Gnam shrugged. “I can do that.” He began tightening his straps again.
“You’ll die,” said Tai quietly. “You need to know it.”
The young Taguran was brave, had to be, to have come back down.
Tai struggled to find words to lead them out, a way to save face for the younger man. “Think about it,” he said. “The wind that came. That was the dead. They are … with me here.”
He looked at Bytsan again, who seemed strangely passive suddenly. Tai went on, urgently, “I have spent two years here trying to honour the dead. Dishonouring this one makes a mockery of that.”
“She came to kill you,” Gnam repeated, as if Tai were slowwitted.
“Every dead man in this meadow came to kill someone!” Tai shouted.
His words drifted away in the thin air. It was cooler now, the sun low.
“Gnam,” said Bytsan, finally, “there is no time for a fight if we want to be away before dark, and, trust me, after what just happened, I do. Mount up. We’re going.”
He walked around the side of the cabin. He came back a moment later, on his magnificent Sardian, leading the soldier’s horse. Gnam was still staring at Tai. He hadn’t moved, the desire to fight written in his face.
“You’ve just won your second tattoo,” Tai said quietly.
He looked briefly at Bytsan, then back to the soldier in front of him. “Enjoy the moment. Don’t hurry to the afterworld. Accept my admiration, and my thanks.”
Gnam stared at him another moment, then turned deliberately and spat thickly into the grass, very near the body of the dead woman. He stalked over and seized his horse’s reins and mounted. He wheeled to ride away.
“Soldier!” Tai spoke before he was aware he’d intended to.
The other man turned again.
Tai took a breath. Some things were hard to do. “Take her swords,” he said. “Kanlin-forged. I doubt any soldier in Tagur carries their equal.”
Gnam did not move.
Bytsan laughed shortly. “I’ll take them if he does not.”
Tai smiled wearily at the captain. “I’ve no doubt.”
“It is a generous gift.”
“It carries my gratitude.”
He waited, didn’t move. There were limits to how far one would go to assuage a young man’s pride.
And behind him, through that open cabin door, a friend was lying dead.
After a long moment, Gnam moved his horse and extended a hand. Tai turned, bent, unslung the shoulder scabbards from the dead woman’s body, and sheathed the two blades. Her blood was on one sheath. He handed them up to the Taguran. Bent again and retrieved the two arrows, gave them to the young man, as well.
“Don’t hurry to the afterworld,” he repeated.
Gnam’s face was expressionless. Then, “My thanks,” he said.
He did say it. There was that much. Even here, beyond borders and boundaries, you could live a certain way, Tai thought, remembering his father. You could try, at least. He looked west, past the wheeling birds, at the red sun in low clouds, then back to Bytsan.
“You’ll need to ride fast.”
“I know it. The man inside …?”
“Is dead.”
“You killed him?”
“She did.”
“But he was with her.”
“He was my friend. It is a grief.”
Bytsan shook his head. “Is it possible to understand the Kitan?”
“Perhaps not.”
He was tired, suddenly. And it occurred to him that he’d have two bodies to bury quickly now—because he’d be leaving in the morning.
“He led an assassin to you.”
“He was a friend,” Tai repeated. “He was deceived. He came to bring me tidings. She, or whoever paid her, didn’t want me to hear them or live to do anything about it.”
“A friend,” Bytsan sri Nespo repeated. His tone betrayed nothing. He turned to go.
“Captain!”
Bytsan looked back, didn’t turn his horse.
“So are you, I believe. My thanks.” Tai closed fist in hand.
The other man stared at him for a long time, then nodded.
He was about to spur his horse away, Tai saw. But he did something else, instead. You could see
a thought striking him, could read it in the square-chinned features.
“Did he tell you? Whatever it was he came to say?”
Tai shook his head.
Gnam had danced his horse farther south. He was ready to leave now. Had the two swords across his back.
Bytsan’s face clouded over. “You will leave now? To find out what it was?”
He was clever, this Taguran. Tai nodded again. “In the morning. Someone died to bring me tidings. Someone died to stop me from learning them.”
Bytsan nodded. He looked west himself this time, the sinking sun, darkness coming. Birds in the air, restless on the far side of the lake. Hardly any wind. Now.
The Taguran drew a deep breath. “Gnam, go on ahead. I’ll stay the night with the Kitan. If he’s leaving in the morning there are matters he and I must talk about. I’ll test my fate inside with him. It seems that whatever spirits are here mean him no harm. Tell the others I’ll catch you up tomorrow. You can wait for me in the middle pass.”
Gnam’s turn to stare. “You are staying here?”
“I just said that.”
“Captain! That is—”
“I know it is. Go.”
The younger man hesitated still. His mouth opened and closed. Bytsan’s tattooed face was hard, nothing vaguely close to a yielding there.
Gnam shrugged. He spurred his horse and rode away. They stood there, the two of them, and watched him go in the waning of the light, saw him gallop very fast around the near side of the lake as if spirits were pursuing him, tracking his breath and blood.
CHAPTER III
The armies of the empire had changed over the past fifty years, and changes were continuing. The old fupei system of a peasant militia summoned for part of the year then returning to their farms for the harvest had grown more and more inadequate to the needs of an expanding empire.
The borders had been pushed west and north and northeast and even south past the Great River through the disease-ridden tropics to the pearl-diver seas. Collisions with Tagurans to the west and the various Bogü tribal factions north had increased, as did the need to protect the flow of luxuries that came on the Silk Roads. The emergence of border forts and garrisons farther and farther out had ended the militia system with its back-and-forth of farmer-soldiers.
Soldiers were professionals now, or they were supposed to be. More and more often they and their officers were drawn from nomads beyond the Long Wall, subdued and co-opted by the Kitan. Even the military governors were often foreigners now. Certainly the most powerful one was.
It marked a change. A large one.
The soldiers served year-round and, for years now, were paid from the imperial treasury and supported by a virtual army of peasants and labourers building forts and walls, supplying food and weapons and clothing and entertainment of any and all kinds.
It made for better-trained fighters familiar with their terrain, but a standing army of this size did not come without costs—and increased taxes were only the most obvious consequence.
In years and regions of relative peace, without drought or flood, with wealth now flowing at an almost unimaginable rate into Xinan and Yenling and the other great cities, the cost of the new armies was bearable. In hard years it became a problem. And other issues, less readily seen, were growing. At the lowest ebb, of a person or a nation, the first seeds of later glory may sometimes be seen, looking back with a careful eye. At the absolute summit of accomplishment the insects chewing from within at the most extravagant sandalwood may be heard, if the nights are quiet enough.
A QUIET-ENOUGH NIGHT. Wolves had been howling in the canyon earlier, but had stopped. The darkness was giving way, for those on watch on the ramparts of Iron Gate Fort, to a nearly-summer sunrise. Pale light pulling a curtain of shadows back—as in a puppet show at a town market—from the narrow space between ravine walls.
Though that, thought Wujen Ning, from his post on the ramparts, was not quite right. Street theatre curtains were pulled to the side—he’d seen them in Chenyao.
Ning was one of the native-born Kitan here, having followed his father and older brothers into the army. There was no family farm for him to rely upon for an income, or return to visit. He wasn’t married.
He spent his half-year leave time in the town between Iron Gate and Chenyao. There were wine shops and food sellers and women to take his strings of cash. Once, given two weeks’ leave, he’d gone to Chenyao itself, five days away. Home was too far.
Chenyao had been, by a great deal, the biggest city he’d ever seen. It had frightened him, and he’d never gone back. He didn’t believe the others when they said it wasn’t that large, as cities went.
Here in the pass, in the quiet of it, the dawn light was filtering downwards. It struck the tops of the cliffs first, pulling them from shadow, and worked its way towards the still-dark valley floor as the sun rose over the mighty empire behind them.
Wujen Ning had never seen the sea, but it pleased him to imagine the vast lands of Kitai stretching east to the ocean and the islands in it where immortals dwelled.
He glanced down at the dark, dusty courtyard. He adjusted his helmet. They had a commander now who was obsessed with helmets and properly worn uniforms, as if a screaming horde of Tagurans might come storming down the valley at any moment and sweep over the fortress walls if someone’s tunic or sword belt was awry.
As if, Ning thought. He spat over the wall through his missing front tooth. As if the might of the Kitan Empire in this resplendent Ninth Dynasty, and the three hundred soldiers in this fort that commanded the pass, were a nuisance like mosquitoes.
He slapped at one of those on his neck. They were worse to the south, but this pre-dawn hour brought out enough of the bloodsuckers to make for annoyance. He looked up. Scattered clouds, a west wind in his face. The last stars nearly gone. He’d be off duty at the next drum, could go down to breakfast and sleep.
He scanned the empty ravine, and realized it wasn’t empty.
What he saw, in the mist slowly dispersing, made him shout for a runner to go to the commander.
A lone man approaching before sunrise wasn’t a threat, but it was unusual enough to get an officer up on the wall.
Then, as he came nearer, the rider lifted a hand, gesturing for the gates to be opened for him. At first Ning was astonished at the arrogance of that, and then he saw the horse the man was riding.
He watched them come on, horse and rider taking clearer form, like spirits entering the real world through fog. That was a strange thought. Ning spat again, between his fingers this time for protection.
He wanted the horse the moment he saw it. Every man in Iron Gate would want that horse. By the bones of his honoured ancestors, Wujen Ning thought, every man in the empire would.
“Why you so sure that one didn’t bring her to you?” Bytsan had asked.
“He did bring her. Or she brought him.”
“Stop being clever, Kitan. You know what I mean.”
Some irritation, understandable. They’d been on their eighth or ninth cup of wine, at least—it had been considered ill-bred among the students in Xinan to keep count.
Night outside by then, but moonlit, so silver in the cabin.
Tai had also lit candles, thinking light would help the other man. The ghosts were out there, as always. You could hear their voices, as always. Tai was used to it, but felt unsettled to realize this was his last night. He wondered if they might know it, somehow.
Bytsan wouldn’t be—couldn’t be—accustomed to any of this.
The voices of the dead offered anger and sorrow, sometimes dark, hard pain, as if trapped forever in the moment of their dying. The sounds swirled from outside the cabin windows, gliding along the rooftop. Some came from farther off, towards the lake or the trees.
Tai tried to remember the dry-mouthed terror he’d lived with on his first nights two years ago. It was hard to reclaim those feelings after so long, but he remembered sweating and shivering, clutching a swor
d hilt in bed.
If cups of warmed rice wine were going to help the Taguran deal with a hundred thousand ghosts, less the ones buried by Shen Tai in two years … that was the way it was. That was all right.
They’d buried Yan and the assassin in the pit Tai had begun that afternoon. It wasn’t nearly deep enough yet for the bones he’d planned, which made it good for two Kitan just slain, one by sword, one by arrows, sent over to the night.
They’d wrapped them in winter sheepskin he wasn’t using (and would never use again) and carried them down the row of mounds in the last of the day’s light.
Tai had jumped into the pit and the Taguran had handed down Yan’s body and he’d laid his friend in the ground and climbed out of the grave.
Then they’d dropped the assassin in beside Yan and shovelled the earth from next to the open pit back in and pounded it hard on top and all around with the flat sides of the shovels, against the animals that might come, and Tai had spoken a prayer from the teachings of the Path, and poured a libation over the grave, while the Taguran stood by, facing south towards his gods.
It had been nearly dark by then and they’d made their way hastily back to the cabin as the evening star, the one the Kitan people called Great White, appeared in the west, following the sun down. Poets’ star at evening, soldiers’ in the morning.
There hadn’t been anything in the way of fresh food. On a normal day, Tai would have caught a fish, gathered eggs, shot a bird and plucked it for cooking at day’s end, but there had been no time for that today.
They’d boiled dried, salted pork and eaten it with kale and hazelnuts in bowls of rice. The Tagurans had brought early peaches, which were good. And they’d had the new rice wine. They drank as they ate, and continued when the meal was done.
The ghosts had begun with the starlight.
“You know what I mean,” Bytsan repeated, a little too loudly. “Why’re you so sure of him? Chou Yan? You trust everyone who names himself a friend?”
Tai shook his head. “Isn’t in my nature to be trusting. But Yan was too proud of himself when he saw me, and too astonished when she drew her swords.”