Imperial Lady (Central Asia Series Book 1)

by Andre Norton

  Gradually, once again, Silver Snow and Willow found themselves able to see the nightly camps as opportunities for more than a little food and sleep. Shielded from the wind that, it was said, the white tiger blew from the far west, all the way across steppe and plain, by a sturdy tent of silk, felt, and leather, Willow sorted her herbs, and Silver Snow tried either to write or to play her lute.

  One night was so cold that the ink froze on its stone, and, perforce, she must lay aside her latest letter to her father. Instead, she warmed her fingers at their tiny brazier and picked up her lute, strumming idly upon it. After a time, her strumming modulated into a very old song that she had heard her maids at home sing. They had not known that she was present, and once they had seen her, they had broken off at once.

  The song dealt with, she supposed, the emotions of another lady such as she, married to a ruler of the hordes.

  “My people have married me

  In a far corner of Earth:

  Sent me away to a strange land,

  To the king of the . . . ”

  “Mistress!” hissed Willow, more shape of the lips than sound.

  Silver Snow’s fingers struck a discord. “This lute is not in tune,” she excused herself. With her eyes, she followed Willow’s pointing finger. Clearly limned against the rippling wall of their tent was the shadow that they had seen there before.

  Why does be not come in? she asked herself. I am wed to his father, the shan-yu; we are as kin, then; and it is no impropriety.

  Yet, he did not. If he chose to remain outside in the wind, the dark, and the cold, that was his choice; and grave impropriety on her part to seek to sway him from it.

  Once again, she picked up the lute.

  “A tent is my house,

  Of felt are my walls;

  Raw flesh my food . . .”

  Both she and Willow broke off to laugh. It was true that since they had come into the West, they had eaten mutton nearly every night, and that that was a meat little favored in Ch’ang-an. However, the mutton had always been seethed in the huge bronze cauldron borne each day by the most reliable of the camels.

  “Probably, lady, the fool of a poet who wrote that song never journeyed farther west than to the west gate of Ch’ang-an,” Willow observed, her voice wry.

  “Aye, so I think too.”

  “How does it end?” Willow asked.

  Silver Snow, recalling how the song went, wished she had chosen any song but that. The shadow lingering outside to hear her music could not like what he would hear. Nevertheless, to refuse to sing might reveal her awareness of the eavesdropper. Sighing, she picked up the lute for the last time.

  “Always thinking of my own country,

  My heart sad within.

  Would I were a yellow stork

  And could fly to my old home!”

  Decisively, Silver Snow covered the lute and laid it aside. Raising her voice that it might reach her audience, she said, “No yellow stork could survive in the northlands in which I myself was born. A pretty song, but sad and nonsensical. I shall not sing it again.”

  The next morning, as Silver Snow emerged gasping into the cold and brushed away the flakes of snow already clinging to the lavish fur trim of her hood, she knew that the Lord Vughturoi’s eyes were upon her, but she feigned unconcern as she walked to her horse.

  That song had been nonsense. The next evening, Silver Snow asked the Hsiung-nu women to join her too. She waited until the shadow again revealed itself upon the wall of her tent and sang another, which more closely captured the strange beauty of the frozen waste.

  “The north winds coil the earth, the pale grasses break;

  The tartar sky in the eighth month is made of flying snow . . .”

  Then she broke off her song. “Do you hear that?” she demanded.

  One of the Hsiung-nu women, Bronze Mirror, nodded indulgently at Sable, the other. Both were women of some standing among the Hsiung-nu: Bronze Mirror with one son grown; Sable, who was too young by far to be a widow with children (as she was), but who derived her standing from her brother Basich, who stood high in Prince Vughturoi’s favor.

  Their opinions, as Silver Snow knew all too well from her days in Ch’ang-an, would spread like fire, to the rest of the Hsiung-nu. Perhaps this young little Ch’in princess had not collapsed during the trip west and north, but she had her fancies, her weaknesses.

  “It is the wind, lady, roaring across the plain,” Bronze Mirror reassured her.

  Silver Snow might have blushed and let the subject drop had she not, at that moment, seen Willow. She crouched at the sealed tent flap, almost as if she sought to outwait some prey, and her eyes gleamed feral and green the way that they did whenever she scented danger.

  “The breath of the white tiger,” she whispered.

  What of it? Silver Snow knew that the sigil of the West was the white tiger; the wind could well be called its breath. Once again rose the sound that had caused her to break off her music. Involuntarily she glanced at the tent wall. The shadow that she had come to expect there had also stiffened. Then it disappeared.

  “That is not the mere breath of the white tiger,” Silver Snow stated flatly. “That is an animal out there. Perhaps a white tiger, perhaps something else,” she added, more for bravado than because she believed it to be true. She had heard that white tigers and snow leopards were among the dangers to be found in the West: and suddenly, terrifyingly, she suspected that such a beast now stalked their camp, perhaps came sniffing about her very tent.

  Aside from the wind and the sound of whatever prowled and stalked outside, the tent grew suddenly, ominously still. Silver Snow glanced over at Willow, who had stiffened, her red hair glowing in the light from the brazier. Her green eyes seemed to glaze over, as if she listened to something that her mistress could not hear.

  Gradually sounds insinuated themselves into that silence: what seemed almost like a purr of feral satisfaction and the rhythm of a huge heart pounding.

  Willow’s lips pulled back from her teeth. Had she been in beast form, she would have growled. The Hsiung-nu women, almost shy for the first time since Silver Snow had met them, hung back, not in fear, but in awe. Then their eagerness for a fight—and possibly their fear of the Lord Vughturoi and his father—awoke.

  Careful not to make a sound, she reached for her fur cloak, donned it, and caught up bow and arrow. Sable and Bronze Mirror drew out sharp daggers. Willow, however, had none. When Sable would have tossed her a knife from her soft, supple riding boot, the maid nodded thanks, but refused.

  “This is the only weapon I need,” she explained, and drew out her mirror, curiously incised with strange symbols, the one she had borne as long as Silver Snow had known her.

  When a horse screamed in mortal fear and agony, Silver Snow realized that her worst fears must be true. Other horses screamed in panic. Now men, too, shouted an alarm as they raced to seize arms and guard the camp against the intruder.

  “We cannot wait here for our fate to come upon us,” she said, shaping her lips without sound lest she draw their enemy upon them. “Not while we are armed and able to defend ourselves.”

  Either Bronze Mirror or Sable could have restrained her with one hard hand. However, before they protested or tried to stop her, Silver Snow slipped outside, and Willow followed.

  Overhead shone the moon, incredibly vast and close-seeming in this land where no houses, walls, or trees might hide it from view. Starlight, obscured at times by gusts of fine snow, bloomed in the night sky and glanced off the mirror that Willow held up.

  “Elder Sister,” the maid whispered, “I think that this is another such sending as troubled Jade Butterfly when we parted.”

  “Aimed at me, do you think?” Silver Snow nodded to herself. Jade Butterfly had been no more a menace than her namesake, but she, with her brideprice and her rank, might well have enemies with whom she had yet to reckon and of whom, she now realized, Bronze Mirror and Sable might not dare to speak.

 
; Perhaps they will trust me if I can prove my strength, thought Silver Snow. Fine archer though she knew that she was, going on foot and armed only with a bow against a tiger was not a test that she would have chosen. She chose an arrow with care and nocked her bow.

  Just as Willow’s mirror flashed a warning, Silver Snow heard the coughing grunt of a beast poised to spring. The light flashed once more, and the leap went awry.

  She whirled, drew, shot, and was rewarded with an anguished yowl. She had wounded the creature, then, but not slain it, she realized. And a wounded beast was ever the deadlier. Paws padded against the ground. She shot again.

  “Behind me!” cried a man, as his horse pounded toward her. She heard the whine of his bow and of several others. The beast shrieked and thrashed, at one point rolling so close to Silver Snow that she could feel its hot breath, rank with blood. She saw the starlight gleam on its teeth and claws, which Seemed to flicker with a phosphorescence of their own. Unholy, accursed! Something shrilled in her mind, and she could not restrain a scream.

  Then the beast toppled, kicked once or twice, and, finally, lay still.

  The warrior leapt from his horse, raked one glance over Silver Snow and her maid to assure himself that they were unhurt, and turned to their quarry.

  “Bring fire!” he called.

  Silver Snow pressed in closer. She too wanted to see the beast that she had helped to slay. Torches wavered and guttered, the wind all but blowing their flame sideways in the cold. In their fitful red light, Silver Snow saw a white tiger. It was immense, with massive paws and jaws upon which a bloody froth was now freezing. Even now, its green eyes glowed, then went out, like emeralds shattered by a hammer blow. Had Silver Snow imagined the light she had seen? No! Flickers still clung to claws and teeth, flickers that faded and died in glittering death throes of their own as the beast’s body twitched and cooled.

  Carrying one of the Hsiung-nu’s long, deadly spears, Vughturoi walked toward the tiger and prodded it from a distance. When the beast did not move, he edged in closer and bent over its body, his hand going out to count the arrows that feathered it.

  “Another excellent shot, lady,” he said to Silver Snow. “Though you might recall that it is my head that will fall should I fail to bring you unharmed to the shan-yu.”

  Silver Snow knew that she had earned the rebuke for her rashness, but she held her ground. Among the Hsiung-nu, she would gain more face from stubbornness than from retreat, she thought.

  Vughturoi investigated more closely. “Two fine shots,” he commented, not at all surprised that she had not withdrawn.

  “Very well,” he shouted to the cluster of hunters. “Finish tending the horses and go to your rest, all of you! We will carry this tiger with us—if our own beasts will bear it—until our next stopping point, where we can skin it. And you, lady,” he added in a softer voice, “may present it to my father as a sign of your prowess. It will be interesting to see the flurry that that will cause in the shan-yu’s tents.”

  Now he sounded, not displeased, but speculative, as if Silver Snow were a gamepiece that a particularly canny player had moved with surpassing skill. She did not understand him in that mood, not at all, nor did she trust it. She returned to her tent and tried to compose herself for sleep.

  The next morning, when men came to load the tiger’s body upon the least restive of their packbeasts, they found only the blackened stains of its blood, which even now the snow was covering over, and the charred shafts of the arrows that had slain it. But the beast itself had vanished.

  They finished breaking camp in silence and moved on with what was great haste, even among the Hsiung-nu.

  CHAPTER 14

  Silver Snow chose to use her chariot for entrance to the main camp of the Hsiung-nu. Though that decision might make them regard her as weak, she wanted the advantage that a few minutes of study, behind the chariot’s protective curtains, would give her.

  “It is custom,” said Willow, “for a bride to arrive in a carriage or litter. Besides,” she added practically, “should snow fall, you will not ruin your brocades.”

  “Foolish one,” replied Silver Snow, as she pushed away the mirror that Willow held out for her, “what will the Hsiung-nu care about fine silks?”

  “They were eager enough to accept those that the Son of Heaven sent to this shan-yu, and they will be glad, I make no doubt, of those that you bring in your dowry. These are simple, robust people. Let them see you shine out like the sun and the moon, and they will respect you the more.”

  Willow held out Silver Snow’s finest cloak, a magnificent thing of soft brown sable, under which she wore the red robe of a bride. When the call came, she left her tent, gathering her robes about her with more care than she had shown at any other time during the months of their journey to the court of the shan-yu. Behind her, Sable and Bronze Mirror gasped in wonder and admiration.

  “She is worthy,” said one of them, with a fondness in her voice that made Silver Snow arch delicate eyebrows in astonishment as she eavesdropped, “to be called Heavenly Majesty. Indeed, she looks not like a woman at all, but like a creature from the sky.”

  The other chuckled, a ribald laugh that was returned by Sable, Silver Snow decided.

  “Surely, no,” the deeper voice belonged to Bronze Mirror. “Would you lay rude hands upon a piece of jade? The shan-yu’s sons are full-grown, and his daughters have sons of their own. He will cherish this little lady as an ornament for his tent, not his bed-place, being far beyond such sport.”

  “A pity. When her beauty fades, a son would give her more arrows for her bow than she now has. And she is a lady who well understands the use of . . . well, weapons.”

  Why, thought Silver Snow, they wish me well! Would that all in the camp to which I am about to fare do so as well!

  “Aye, indeed. But the Heavenly Majesty wanes. A day may come . . .”

  “Hush!”

  Silver Snow was not at all surprised to see Vughturoi ride up and give the order to start on the very last leg of their journey to the court of his father. She was, however, surprised to see that he had donned fresh leathers and furs and that, round his neck, hung the key with which Li Ling had ceremoniously locked Silver Snow into her chariot upon her departure from Ch’ang-an and then had presented to Vughturoi in token of his authority to guard her.

  He grinned as he rode by her chariot, practically under the noses of the camels that were swaying and groaning their way to their ungainly feet. “Courage, lady!” he called in an undertone as he made the key swing on its heavy chain. “How much worse can it be to enter my father’s tents than to slay the white tiger?”

  That was a question to which Silver Snow would have given all that she possessed or might hope to possess for an auspicious answer.

  The pale winter sun was high overhead when the first riders from the shan-yu’s court met Silver Snow’s caravan, a cavalcade of shaggy horses and men who were wrapped in felts and furs and who bore the bows and long spears of the horde. They rode straight at the caravan as if, at any moment, they might level their spears or nock arrow to bow, and charge.

  Silver Snow peered out from the curtains of her chariot. Her guards were worse, she thought, than no protection at all, for they signaled all too clearly, “Here is she whom you seek.”

  “Do you want your bow, Elder Sister?” asked Willow.

  Silver Snow touched Willow’s hand gently. Though a bow had served her well in many a battle, it was her wits that must serve her now. “Even if I needed it, it would serve no use.”

  She watched Lord Vughturoi ride out toward the newcomers, admiring his skill with horses, a mastery so deep that it was unconscious. Those from the camp were a very different type of man than Vughturoi and his companions, whom, Silver Snow guessed, must have been among the younger and more adaptable of the Hsiung-nu for the shan-yu to risk sending them to Ch’ang-an at all. These riders were not all older men, by no means, but they seemed somehow rougher, wilder, lacking the ref
inements of Ch’in culture that Silver Snow had occasionally noted in her escort. Though, like Vughturoi, they were sparsely bearded, many of these men bore facial scars from the custom that many of the Hsiung-nu still observed of slashing their faces when mourning a friend, a kinsman, or a leader.

  Had the men been any people other than Hsiung-nu, Silver Snow knew that they would have made much of dismounting, of sitting together and sharing food before discussing their business. Such a meeting might well have lasted the entire day. However, she did not expect that the Hsiung-nu would so much as stir from horseback, and she was right. A trick of the wind brought their voices toward her, and she strained to listen.

  “A good journey, and a better one back,” Vughturoi commented to an older man who clapped him about the shoulders. Again the wind blew, and Silver Snow caught only half of his next speech “ . . . not as bad as I expected, and, in fact, well enough. I see that Sandilik the kam-quam, is among you. We have had . . .”

  Again, a gust of the treacherous, frustrating wind blew away the words Silver Snow listened for as if her life might depend upon them. Kam-quam, she knew, meant a male shaman; and, yes, such a one rode among them, with his spirit drum and his robes trimmed with bones and the skins of snakes, here in this land where no such creatures ever hissed and coiled. Vughturoi’s voice had not sounded that strained and anxious even on the night they stalked the white tiger.

  She waited for him to bring up what, she knew, must be the questions that he had suppressed.

  “How is . . . those gashes look fresh, Kursik.”

  “His Heavenly Majesty survived your absence,” replied the man called Kursik. “He is well, and sent us to seek you.”

  “The Sun be praised!” Vughturoi’s voice roughed. “But still, you bear scars that look fresh.”

  “My brother, Prince. Erlik take him, but, for all that, he was my brother.”

  “He followed my esteemed brother Tadiqan, did he not?”