Imperial Lady (Central Asia Series Book 1)

by Andre Norton

She was not, however, to have uninterrupted tranquility for the task. The instant that Silver Snow’s tent was pitched and that her ladies were free to come to her, they broke out in tears and wails of grief and fear.

  Silver Snow sighed. Willow winced. The Hsiung-nu and Ch’in soldiers, not faced with the need for self-control, grimaced and grinned. Silver Snow bent over the most distraught of the ladies.

  “What troubles you?” she crooned in the voice that they all swore was as sweet as litchi. (When they had called her the Shadowed One, however, they had condemned that very same voice as reedy and shrill; best not think of that.) “You are not ill; we shall rest here; and soon you shall return to your home.”

  The mention of home made the wailing break out afresh. That was it, then. The Hsiung-nu ladies had not yet arrived, and now this flock of afrighted palace ladies feared that they never would. In that case, perforce, it would be their obligation to accompany Silver Snow to the court of the Hsiung-nu, from which, they were sure, there could be no return.

  “I shall die!” shrieked one woman.

  “Did you see the grass?” another lamented. “Green, ever green, like the tombs of exiles, watered with tears.”

  “We will never see our homes again!”

  “They will carry us off to the West, and we will never again see the Palace, or a garden, or my little courtyard with the golden carp in the pool. And they will make us eat our meat raw!”

  Had their fear not been so real, and so likely to drive them into a frenzy, Silver Snow might have found it comical. But she was tired and apprehensive herself, and she wanted only to rest and compose her thoughts before she wrote out an account of her days for the men whom she revered most in all the world.

  “This is my work, Elder Sister.” Blessed Willow burrowed into her baggage for the herbs that Li Ling had given her, hastened to the fire, and began to steep a soothing decoction. Her eyes met her mistress’, and Silver Snow nodded.

  At least what few trees remained were stunted, flimsy things that would not hold the weight of a lady who sought to avoid worse by hanging herself with her silken sash. “We are too close to the river here, too close to the rocks,” she murmured. She would have to have the guard doubled around the ladies’ quarters until they turned back toward Ch’ang-an.

  She emerged from her tent, thankful, at least, that their terror forestalled her ladies from criticizing her going out among armed men without proper supervision. Seeking the captain of her guard, she found him in attendance on Prince Vughturoi, who pointed west and gestured, but who broke off at her approach. Silver Snow nodded to him, then explained her wishes.

  The guard captain abased himself, then ran off to do her bidding. The prince, however, held his ground and regarded her with that expressionless stare of his. “There is no illness?” he asked.

  “None, save fear,” she declared. “I seek to prevent the fear driving some fragile soul mad.”

  She glanced out in the direction toward which the prince had been gazing. “Our people approach,” he deigned to tell her.

  How keen his sight must be! She could see nothing except, yes, surely, that was it, a puff of dust, of less size against the immensity of the land and sky than a gnat. She sighed. Uncouth the women of the Hsiung-nu might be, but, at least, they would be used to the land.

  “I shall be glad when they arrive,” Silver Snow ventured to say. For the first time, the prince smiled, the merest quirk of one side of his mouth. Silver Snow withdrew, feeling that she had won a major victory.

  She returned to her tent, where a more ignominious and far louder battle raged, and did her best to calm her overwrought ladies. Long into the night she and Willow labored; it was only when they had put the last of the gulping, shivering ladies to bed and hidden any knife that they might find that she and Willow had time quietly to drink some warmed rice wine themselves, eat but a morsel or two, and, finally, try to sleep.

  Still, the ladies’ wailing had plucked at Silver Snow’s nerves to such an extent that she slept but shallowly. Her sleep was full of dreams of horses and blowing dust, a weird whistling sound, and blood dripping onto the land while, somewhere in the distance, came loud, cruel laughter. She woke, sweating, and breathed quiet thanks into the shaking hands that she held cupped before her lips.

  Then she sat up, as stiff as if she had undertaken a day’s ride after a year’s inaction. The fire had burnt itself out; she might summon a servant to rekindle it, or do so herself, if she wanted to wake Willow, who slept deeply and enviably, with only a twitch, from time to time, to show that she indeed lived. Even if she kindled a fire, she would probably only wake the most distraught of the ladies, who also slept within her quarters.

  The tent should have been dark, but moonlight shone into it, letting Silver Snow see her warm robe wadded at the foot of her pallet, her sleeping maid—and the small, hunched shadow-figure that darted from the tent toward the river.

  Quickly Silver Snow rose and whipped her robe, then her cloak, about her. She thrust her feet into fur-lined boots, seized up her bow, and set out after the shadow.

  Behind her Willow muttered, sleepy, but rapidly coming alert and alarmed. However, Silver Snow could not stay to reassure her. With a huntress’ care, Silver Snow stalked the figure whose shadow she had seen. Her feet in their furred boots made no sound, even on the crisp ground scrub; and soon she had reached the too-green grass that her ladies had chosen to see as a sign of ill-omen.

  She was nearing the figure. It was all silver-gray in the moonlight, but Silver Snow recognized the embroideries on the gown that straggled from the woman’s shoulders, trailing after her on the grass. It was the lady who had feared that she would be made to eat raw meat. Silver Snow stifled a groan. Of all of her women, that one was the most sensitive. Let a pet bird be injured, and she was in tears; let a friend be ill, and she too took to bed.

  What had caused her to walk in her sleep? Silver Snow raised her hands to clap them sharply together, thus waking the woman into sense. Then, she thought better of it. Who knew to what strange realms her spirit might have fled, or what might happen if she were waked thus unceremoniously?

  She quickened her pace to catch the woman and turn her before she reached the river. That was when Silver Snow heard the whimpering. “Winds across the plains . . . no rest . . . no peace . . . no friends. I shall die, and none will remain to mark my grave or set up a tablet in my memory . . . misery, misery . . . to be cursed so far from my home.”

  To be cursed? Silver Snow stopped and drew a deep breath. As if she herself were a creature of the wilds, she sniffed at the air. It was sweet and untainted; from whence came this muttering of curses and exile?

  Silver Snow felt her robe catch in the ground scrub. She freed it with a tearing sound, and hurried more quickly after the endangered lady. The long skirt caught again, and again, until she was tempted to shed it and run after the lady in her undergown. Above her, the sky seemed suddenly to whirl, and she flung out a hand to protect herself. The ground was twirling and shaking; there was no anchorage, no stability anywhere . . . she herself would fall into the river that rippled so steadily and deeply ahead and be carried away, beyond anyone’s ken . . .

  Then a cold nose touched the hand she had flung out, and metal rattled against it.

  Silver Snow gasped and looked down at the fox that nuzzled her fingers. Larger than most it was, with a particularly lush coat. It walked with a peculiar limp, and, in its mouth, it bore an amulet dangling from a chain.

  “I cannot reach her,” she gasped, still giddy from whatever force had all but hurled her to the ground. The fox pressed its pointed muzzle into her hand, releasing the amulet into her palm.

  As Silver Snow looped the cord of the amulet about her neck, the fox ran on ahead. As it had with Silver Snow’s, it nuzzled the dreaming lady’s fingers, then took them delicately in its mouth and began, ever so gently and patiently, to tug her away from the river, and back toward Silver Snow.

  With one last
furious tug, she freed her garments. A moment later—though it would have been too late for the sleepwalker whom the fox now guided—she had the woman by the arm and was steering her toward the tent, when a shadow fell across her path, moonlight glinting from the sharp blade that it held.

  Silver Snow gasped and stopped. The fox melted into the nightshadows, and Vughturoi sheathed his blade.

  “Is such night walking a custom of Ch’in?” he asked, with no amusement at all in his deep voice.

  She was a princess of Ch’in, she was queen of the hordes, and she was her father’s daughter: she had the power to order him away. She did not know why she answered with the absolute truth.

  “I dreamed ill,” she said, looking down, suddenly aware that she wore a thin gown and a quilted robe, and that her hair tumbled about her face and down her back. Even if the moonlight silvered over her flush, this was no time for maiden modesty.

  “When I woke,” said Silver Snow, “I saw that Jade Butterfly here had left my tent. She was walking in her sleep, crying about a curse that she feared so that she would drown herself lest she yield to it. We do not curse thus in Ch’in,” she added angrily. “It is a strong tongue that can frame that sort of curse.”

  “Aye,” muttered Vughturoi, as if he had bitten down on a rotten fruit. “A strong tongue indeed. Shall I see you back to your tent, lady?”

  Silver Snow shook her head. “What if this one wakes and sees you? Then we shall have more tears and frenzy. I thank you, Prince, but no.” The sooner she returned to her tent, the sooner Willow might return to her true form. She thought she could hear her maid in fox-guise even now, yapping as she prowled—with a lame leg, yet!—about the outskirts of the camp thrice.

  Vughturoi blended back into the shadows with a skill that set at naught her own small knowledge of trail lore. Silver Snow dragged Jade Butterfly back toward the tent and the safety of her own sleeping mats.

  It was a long time until she could sleep, and when, finally, her eyes closed, the last things that she saw were Willow’s bright, wary eyes and a rigid shadow mounting guard outside the tent.

  By noon of the next day, the Hsiung-nu caravan arrived.

  “It is as well, lady,” Willow remarked. “The novelty will distract your companions, and we shall be gone before this sleeping Butterfly of yours can awake and claim she was possessed by a fox.”

  Silver Snow nodded and waved Willow into her usual, shadowed place. She herself was fascinated by the approaching troop. Leather-armored riders bore the reflexive and bone-reinforced bows of the hordes; musicians who raised weird instruments to bray music like nothing that she had ever heard before; two ladies, who seemed to be taller and broader than half of the Ch’in guardsmen; carts; an immense herd of pack animals and remounts; and the chariot that was clearly intended for Silver Snow.

  That especially fascinated her, for it was drawn, not by horses nor by oxen, but by camels, the first that she had ever seen, two smooth-striding, swaying beasts that bore the double humps on their backs with the same unconcern as they pulled the chariot. The whole of the arriving escort shrieked and yelped as they approached Vughturoi, and rode in a circle just beyond the shadow of the Wall.

  Above all else, it was the sight of the camels that made so very plain to Silver Snow that she had reached to the place where Ch’in met the wilderness. She drew a deep breath of fear, wonder, and—yes—delight, and turned toward her ladies. Abstracted, she handed a packet of letters, painstakingly calligraphed upon silk, to the chief of them, commended herself to the Son of Heaven and—as if in a dream—by rote to whomever else the lady considered proper, then bid the rest of her short-term companions farewell. She would never see them again, and that contented her well. It surprised her that they seemed to feel otherwise about her. They clustered about and declaimed, some in tears, the sorrow of parting.

  Their tears are more than ritual, more than what is due to the Son of Heaven’s favor. Yet, I was ever the Shadowed One, she thought, bemused. When and why did they come to love me?

  “It is three months’ journey to where my father the shan-yu holds winter court,” Vughturoi remarked as Silver Snow mounted and prepared to ride out beyond the Wall and the only country she had ever dreamed of knowing.

  “Indeed?” She raised brows that had not lost their delicacy, even if she no longer bothered to pluck and pencil them to the proper moth-wing shape. Where she rode, there would be none to care for such things, in any case. “That being the case, lord Prince, had we not better start immediately?”

  They rode up to the Wall, and her Ch’in guards presented their tokens. The gate that the Son of Heaven had decreed must henceforward be called the Gate of Tears groaned open. Despite herself, Silver Snow glanced back once at the confusion as her camp beside the Yellow River was dismantled. She was disconcerted by how very little she cared for the bustle of plots and activity that she was leaving behind. She raised hand in farewell, and a wail of grief went up from those ladies who had assembled to see her go. She winced as she touched heels to her horse’s flanks.

  As Silver Snow crossed through the gate, her horse’s hooves rasped against the grit and scant scrub of the true desert, deposited here by the wind. Thus, she rode out into the lands of the Hsiung-nu, and the wind, laden with dust and sand, buffeted her scarf-protected face.

  CHAPTER 13

  Day after day, they traversed a land in which no tree, stream, rock, nor hill appeared to separate one day’s travel from another. Then, one morning, the sight of ten rocks crumbling, perhaps once the site of some ancient outpost, came as a surprise. The sight of this ruin, its stonework tumbled, was a major event—for Silver Snow, that was. The Hsiung-nu simply shrugged as they rode on.

  “The sky,” growled one close enough for her to hear, “is all the roof that the Hsiung-nu need.”

  She herself was concerned. If such ruin existed this close to the Wall (for they had turned slightly south and could still sight that barrier now and then), would the Middle Kingdom not grow overly dependent upon the Hsiung-nu for protection? She had not believed what Li Ling had told her: that smug officials at court were wont to assure the Emperor: that the Wall was more a defense for the barbarians against the Middle Kingdom.

  Certainly it was folly for Ch’in to rely always upon the Wall to keep out invasion, to rely too much upon the goodwill of such horsemen. Was that a vain thing, too? I myself am a weapon in my nation’s hands, Silver Snow told herself when the wind lashed tears from her eyes to freeze on the edges of the scarf against her cheeks.

  The air grew cold and dry, then colder and dryer yet. Snow covered the dead grasses. Some days, the sky itself turned pale, and the sun gleamed in it like silver cash, providing light but no warmth. To Silver Snow’s astonishment, despite the cold and the wind, the tough, stocky horses, each bearing its owner’s mark, became more and more shaggy, even thrived, while the camels strode on through the waste, sublimely indifferent to everything save their burdens, their handlers, and their sullen dispositions.

  At first, the days’ journeys tired Silver Snow so sorely that at night all she wanted to do was creep into her fur blankets and sleep, perhaps without even bothering to eat. There was so much that no one at court understood about the Hsiung-nu, so much that she had not fully comprehended from her father’s stories, now made clear! Their hatred of walls and restraint, their curious dress, with its shorter tunics and trousers rather than proper robes, even their diet, heavy in meat and fats, were not signs of savagery but simply ways they embraced in order to live in this land. Here, under the vast bowl of the sky, which resounded, day after day, with windsongs more poignant and memorable than those of any voice or bamboo flute, those ways made sense. They possessed a particular rhythm, even a grace, that Silver Snow knew that she would one day come to appreciate.

  Gradually, however, the result of the training she had had in her father’s house was regained. Used to the sweet smells of the Inner Courts, at first she found the pungency of the Hsiung-nu’
s dung fires to be eye-watering and intolerable. Then she became inured to the smell and smoke, and, finally, she did not notice either. She had been healthy before; now she became hardy, flesh and sinew fining down to form a creature that, if she were less consciously elegant than the vision in pearls and kingfisher feathers who had charmed the Son of Heaven, was nevertheless beautiful and perfectly suited to thrive in her new home.

  “Do I look,” she asked Willow once, “precisely now as Mao Yen-shou painted me—thin, weathered, and mannish?”

  Willow laughed. “Lady, you lack a black mole, while Mao Yen-shou lacks a head. There is no point even in speaking of him.”

  The Hsiung-nu who earlier had inspected them and had shaken heads, especially so the women, began, if not to approve, to assume that the women from Ch’in could endure a day’s travel without lamenting, fainting, or growing ill. Silver Snow wondered if they were disappointed. Their leader, Prince Vughturoi, rarely spoke. Was he angry, perhaps, that some girl-princess of Ch’in had been sent out to supplant his mother? She tried to cause no trouble and knew that she had succeeded in that; but still he kept away from her.

  Then she noticed something else. Even though Willow was lame, mounted, she was as hardy as the rest of the troop. Nor, because of her blood, did the cold afflict her as harshly. And, where the Hsiung-nu had been inclined to think Silver Snow too frail, too alien for the journey to Khujanga the shan-yu’s court, they greeted Willow with what could pass for grudging respect. As Li Ling had said, some women of the Hsiung-nu were said to have powers more than mortal. Gradually, Willow’s herb-lore let her gain face among a people who, if they were wild and harsh, were also open and free. It was even the source of some half-heard, partially understood jests.

  “You need a strong tongue to withstand one of her herb drenches,” joked a rider who had come to Willow for a potion.

  “Aye, and will that very strong tongue . . .”

  At that moment, however, the Lord Vughturoi had appeared from behind a tent, and the men had dispersed like whipped curs. The prince had simply glared and stalked on his way.