Silk and Song

by Dana Stabenow

  She turned her head to see the little mongrel watching her. She dropped her eyes and smoothed the heavy blue silk of her dress. “There is another matter we must discuss. Sit down.” She beckoned a servant forward with one graceful sweep of a hand heavy with rings. “Will you have tea?”

  The girl folded her long frame down onto a pillow, crossing her legs and resting a hand on each knee, instead of kneeling with bent head and clasped hands in an attitude of proper attentiveness. She refused tea. Impolite and graceless as well as ugly, the widow noted, not without pleasure.

  They waited as the tea was poured and the servant retired. The widow sipped delicately at the fragrant liquid in the paper-thin porcelain cup. After a moment of appreciative contemplation of the delicate design traced on its rim, she said, her tone casual, “I have received an offer of marriage for you.”

  “Have you?” The strange light eyes met hers. “From whom?”

  The widow allowed herself a small, playful smile. “It is from the son of Maffeo the Portuguese.”

  The blue eyes widened so slightly that if the widow had not been watching so closely for any change of expression she would have missed it. “Is it?” was all the little mongrel said.

  “It is, and a very generous offer, too,” her father’s widow said. “He offers silk, spices, an interest in future trading ventures.”

  “Generous indeed,” the little mongrel said, after a moment.

  “And of course you have known each other since you were children.”

  “Of course.”

  Her stepmother looked up suspiciously but could perceive no sarcasm in that clear, alien gaze. She folded her tiny hands in her lap and regarded their long polished nails, longer than the fingers themselves, with thoughtful attention. “Altogether a most suitable match.”

  “Isn’t it, though,” the little mongrel said, her tone almost amiable.

  Her father’s widow smiled again, broadly this time. “Then, if you have no objection, I will put the matter in hand at once.”

  “As you wish, my father’s second wife,” the girl said.

  Again her stepmother looked sharply for guile in those strange eyes. She found none. It was not that she had expected outright opposition, but she had been spiteful enough to hope that some aspect of the little mongrel’s planned future would be displeasing to her. Instead, the girl seemed acquiescent, amenable even, to be disposed of so quickly and so efficiently.

  It was with a faint feeling of disappointment that she terminated the interview, and turned with relief to the affairs of her husband’s trading empire.

  Hers now.

  7

  PRIDE KEPT JOHANNA’S departing step to a stroll much slower than her usual ground-eating stride. The widow’s creature scowled and closed the door so swiftly and so firmly behind her that her robe nearly caught in the crack. She paused for a moment to consider it, the heavy mahogany panels carved with the symbols for health and prosperity, the massive bronze ring pulls.

  The heavy bronze lock.

  The door had been closed against her, to keep her out, to separate her from her father and, more importantly, any claim on his estate. She understood that quite well.

  She smiled. It would never occur to the widow or her Nipponese creature that the barrier of the door worked both ways.

  She turned and made straight for her own suite, the two small rooms in the back of the house to which she had been relegated upon the occasion of her father’s remarriage. If asked, Johanna would have replied truthfully that she preferred her new location, as it was closer to the stables, the mews and the kitchen, and horses, falcons and food ranked very high in importance in her life. Her lyra she kept next to her bed, so that music was never out of her reach.

  Once in her room she threw off the heavy silk robe, the wonderfully embroidered Robe of a Thousand Larks that had once belonged to her mother, that she had donned for the visit of state to her father’s second wife, and pulled on trousers and tunic made of heavier raw silk. It was dyed a rich black and trimmed with dull black sateen. Black for travel, not white for mourning. She had been adamant in the face of Shasha’s remonstrations. She would not at this late date bow to the traditions of a place that had treated her like an outsider all her life.

  She smoothed one hand over the nubbled texture. She had bargained for the fabric herself, on their last trip to Suchow. The blue-gray eyes went blank for a moment and she stood still, unmoving, staring at nothing.

  She shook herself out of her reverie and raised her voice. “Shasha? Where are you?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  Shu Shao, now a kitchen drudge, was stirring a steaming pot over the stove. She looked up, ran her eyes over the girl’s tall form, and said, “I remember the trip to Shandong with your father to buy that silk. It was the first time he permitted you to conduct the bargaining.”

  “I remember,” Johanna said. Unable yet to bring herself to speak casually of her father, she gestured at the empty kitchen. “Where is everyone?”

  Shasha snorted. “Over in her quarters.”

  “You can’t blame them, Shasha,” Johanna said. “They have to eat.” She smiled. “And it will be easier for us to talk.”

  Shasha’s brown eyes were as keen and clever as ever between their narrow lids. She examined the girl before her. “So?”

  “So, we go.”

  Shasha felt a loosening of the apprehension that had been slowly accumulating since Wu Li had brought home his second wife. “When?”

  “Three days. After the cremation.”

  “So soon?”

  “It must be.” Johanna grimaced. “She has arranged a marriage for me.”

  “Who?”

  “Edyk.”

  Shasha’s lids drooped until she looked half asleep. She resumed her stirring. “Hmmm.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “What?”

  “That ‘hmmm.’ You ‘hmmm’ and you nod to yourself. I hate it when you do that.”

  Shasha lifted the spoon out of the pot and setting it to one side. “He does love you.”

  “I know that,” Johanna said. “I love him. It doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t work.”

  “You think not?”

  There was as much pain as there was certainty in Johanna’s reply. “I know not.”

  Shasha nodded again. She moved the pot to the back of the stove and reached for two bowls. “Bird’s nest.”

  “My favorite.”

  The woman and the girl ate in companionable silence. Johanna asked for more and Shasha took great pleasure in filling the bowl to its rim for the second time.

  “What?” Johanna said, catching sight of her expression.

  Shasha shook her head. Wu Li’s widow’s complaints that Johanna ate twice as much as the hungriest horse in the stables lent spice to every bite of food the girl took. Shasha was willing to admit it lent a certain zest to ladling it out, too.

  Johanna finished her third helping, set her bowl aside and stretched. She met the older woman’s eyes with a gravity that sat heavily on her young features. “I must show you something, Shasha,” she said.

  She led the way to her bedroom, going straight to the silken tapestry hanging above her bed, caught up one corner and without hesitation ripped out the lining. Six small packages fell to the bed, each was wrapped in translucent rice paper and tied with string. With a certain solemn ceremoniousness in her manner she untied the string and unfolded the paper. She tilted the package and a gleaming stream of stones fell out, so deeply red they seemed as if they might set the coverlet on fire. Indeed, Shasha picked up one of the stones and where the gem rested her skin felt near to scorching. “From Mien,” she said, and it wasn’t a question. She let the stone slip from her hand back to the patched and faded coverlet.

  “Yes,” the girl said. She stirred the little heap of gems with a pensive forefinger. “We were coming home on the Grand Canal from Kinsai. The night before we started, this funny little man in a dhow
tied up next to us.” She smiled at the memory. “All those junks, and his was the only dhow. We had never seen one so far from Calicut before. Father invited him on board for dinner and when he realized I was a girl he dropped his jib and tied it round him with one of the jib sheets.” At Shasha’s puzzled look she smiled. “All he wore for traveling was a turban, you see.”

  Shasha laughed.

  “His name was Lundi. He had a hooded snake he kept in a basket that lapped milk out of a saucer like a cat. He drank too much wine after dinner and started telling the story about Princess Padmini of Rajputana and the Moslem invader Ala-ud-din, only the way he told it Ala-ud-din got to Rajputana before Padmini killed herself. I could tell Father was about to send me to bed when Lundi’s turban fell off and all these rubies fell out. It was like the story of From-Below-the-Steps and the night it rained emeralds. They were so beautiful. Father bought all of them on the spot.”

  Johanna smiled again. “Edyk said the last time he was in Kinsai that Lundi had bought a house by the river and filled the garden with hooded snakes and the house with pretty concubines, all named Padmini.”

  They stood in silence, staring down as the fiery swath of color glittering up at them. Johanna put her arm around the older woman’s shoulders. “Some in the hems of my clothes, some in yours, some in Jaufre’s. We leave in three days.”

  “Does she—”

  “She knows nothing of them. Father gave them to me and told me to hide them.” Her expression was bleak. “He said he thought I might need them one day.”

  “Well,” Shasha said, voice very dry, “at least the man wasn’t a complete fool.”

  There was a brief, taut silence. “Never speak of my father in that way again, Shasha,” Johanna said. “Do you understand me?”

  Oh, I understand perfectly, Shu Shao thought. “He was only a man, Johanna, and he was so lonely and so lost after Shu Ming died. And Dai Fang is very beautiful.”

  Johanna turned abruptly. “I’ll tell Jaufre,” she said over her shoulder, “and then I’m going to Edyk’s.”

  Shasha thought before speaking this time, and then said, very carefully, “Is that wise?”

  “Perhaps not,” Johanna said, pausing in the doorway. “But it is only fair.”

  With a lithe, confident stride she was gone, leaving Shasha to reflect ruefully on the wisdom of tying her future to someone as proud and as stubborn and as reckless as Johanna.

  But then what could one expect of a child born beneath the broom star? The signs had been there the night of Johanna’s birth for all to read. Did the appearance of that cloud banner, that peacock feather in the skies over Everything Under the Heavens not signify the wiping out of the old and the establishment of the new? Certainly the description fit Johanna who, raised by a liberal and loving father, never bothered with the traditional limitations placed on the behavior of females, or children for that matter.

  Shasha chuckled. Wu’s widow would—and had—taken the legend of the broom star even further, to anticipate drought, famine and disease as a natural consequence of Johanna’s birth and continued presence in Wu Li’s house. Wu Li had put up with much from his second wife but he had stopped that nastiness in its tracks, so firmly that the second wife had never referred to Johanna again in his presence. If she could not speak ill of the girl, she would not speak of her at all.

  Shasha swept up the rubies in her hands and smiled to herself. At least life on the road with Johanna would never be dull.

  She thought of Jaufre, and her smile faded. No, not dull at all.

  Jaufre had been moved from the house to the stables at the same time Shasha had been moved from the family quarters to the kitchen. He was seated now on a leather folding stool outside his room, coaxing another year’s use out of a worn bridle.

  “I’ve just come from a royal audience,” she said. “Wu Li’s widow has finally seen fit to inform me of my father’s death.”

  “Twenty-four hours after the fact,” Jaufre said. His hands stilled and his eyes lifted to hers. “It was better this way, Johanna,” he said. “After the accident, it was only a matter of time. Wu Li was not the man to live without his legs.”

  She turned her face into an errant ray of sunshine and closed her eyes against the glare. “I know. It’s just…”

  His hand, hard and warm and slightly sweaty, raised to her cheek. “I know.”

  She pressed her face into his palm. He allowed it for a moment, and then pulled away to resume work on the bridle.

  She pulled out a wisp of hay and chewed it, watching him work. He was as unnaturally tall as she, with smooth, tanned skin and startlingly light hair, the first and still the only golden hair she had ever seen, even on the Road. It was thick and clipped short and in the sun gleamed like a polished helmet. His eyes were blue, too, but much darker, like the sky after sunset. He was muscular and agile from work with the bow and the staff and with the horses and hawks and the soft boxing he practiced daily in the garden, taught him by Deshi the Scout since Jaufre had first joined the Wu household. When Johanna had expressed an interest Deshi the Scout had begun teaching her, too.

  After Deshi’s death, they continued to practice, rising at dawn every morning. After Shu Ming’s death, they had both found comfort in the ritual. After Wu Li’s remarriage, they had done so under the occasional eye of the second wife’s personal guard. He seemed amused. Once Jaufre had said beneath his breath, “I wonder, does he know what happens when we speed this up?”

  “Let’s not show him,” Johanna said with her voice barely above a whisper. “Let’s…keep it in reserve.”

  She made no mention of the way Gokudo sometimes looked at her, of how uncomfortable his presence made her feel. Even on the Road, before the eyes of hundreds of strangers, never had she felt so threatened. She was determined that the widow’s bodyguard would have no prior knowledge of just how well the widow’s husband’s daughter could protect herself at need.

  Jaufre looked up to see her eyes fixed on some distant thought, and allowed himself the rare pleasure of a long, unguarded look. A late ray of sun kissed her cheek to gold, and threw her profile into proud relief, the straight nose, the high, shadowed cheekbones, the full lips that curled upwards at their corners, the chin that was somehow delicate and determined at the same time. His eyes strayed to the rich bronze braid of hair, the curls that slipped from their braid to cup her cheeks, coil over her shoulders and around the promising swell of her breasts. Her waist was narrow, her hips slim but rounded, flowing into the long, smooth length of her legs sprawling negligently beside his in the hay.

  She was a woman now, not the child she had been when she had convinced him to join his fortunes with the honorable house of Wu. He closed his eyes, took a deep and he hoped unobtrusive breath, and focused once more on the bridle.

  Her voice disturbed his thoughts. “Jaufre?”

  “What?”

  “Your father was a Frankish Crusader,” she said.

  He shrugged. “So he said. He left his crusade to ride as a caravan guard. Not a very good one, obviously, or our caravan wouldn’t have been slaughtered to the last man by Persian bandits.”

  He spoke without bitterness, but she remembered the lonely, unmarked mound they had left behind, sand heaped by hand as high as he could make it, grains already shifting with the wind. “And your mother was Greek?”

  His hands stilled on the bridle. “Yes. Why?”

  “All the Greeks I’ve met are dark,” she said. “Was your father fair-haired, as you are?”

  He nodded, still working on the bridle. “He said that where he came from, some island to the west, many people have fair hair.”

  “It is very beautiful.”

  He grinned, and two deep dimples creased his cheeks. “So all the ladies tell me.” She threw a handful of straw at him and he ducked, laughing. “Why so many questions today? You know all you need to know about me.”

  The full lips curved slightly. “Perhaps.”

  He resumed
work on the bridle. “So. When do we go?”

  “Three days from now.”

  “After the ceremonies for Wu Li.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “We could go first to Khuree,” she said tentatively, as if she already knew it was a bad idea.

  Jaufre shook his head. “That’s the last place we want to go. You are the granddaughter of Marco Polo, Johanna. If the Khan learns that we are traveling west he will turn us into official envoys.”

  “But he might give us a paiza, as he did my grandfather and his father and uncle. We would have safe conduct anywhere in the world.”

  “Yes, he might, in fact he probably would, and then we would be bound to his service. He would load us down with missives to the Christian Pope and to all the kings in the West. There would be no time for our own business in the middle of all that tedious diplomacy.” He made a disgusted sound. “You’ve seen them at court, all twittering out of the sides of their mouths, no one meaning a word they say. No, I thank you.”

  She hid a smile.

  “And then we would have to return.” He looked at her. “We’re not coming back, are we?”

  “No,” Johanna said. “No, we are not.”

  “So. Does the widow know we are leaving?”

  “No,” Johanna said.

  He looked at her. “You can hate her, if you want to, Johanna. She deserves your hatred.”

  “There is something else,” she said, missing the grim certainty of his last words.

  Before she could tell him what, there was movement at the stable door, and they looked up to see Gokudo watching them, one hand tucked into the wide sash he wore around his waist. It was as black as his topknot of hair, as black as the padded armor he wore at all times, as black as the ebony shaft of the tall spear he invariably carried. The curved point of the steel blade set into the top of the spear reflected the sunlight in a blaze that could hurt the eyes, did one look at it too closely.