Silk and Song

by Dana Stabenow

  “Release him, Bo He,” Gokudo said.

  Bo He, an elderly gentleman in a ruffled state, stepped back and smoothed his coat. “As my mistress wishes,” he said.

  Gokudo raised his hand to strike him for his insolence, but Edyk the Portuguese stepped forward. “Where is she? Where is Johanna? Is North Wind in your stables? Take me to them at once!”

  “We shelter neither your whore nor your nag in this house, Edyk the Portuguese,” Gokudo said, not bothering to hide his sneer.

  Edyk stopped and stared at him. “Johanna isn’t here? Where is she? When do you expect her back?”

  Gokudo laughed, and Edyk raised his hand to strike him. Gokudo slapped it to one side and followed up with a sharp blow to Edyk’s sternum with the flat of his other hand. Edyk flew backward, tumbling to the ground in the center of the courtyard. He made as if to scramble to his feet and froze with the point of Gokudo’s naginata at his throat.

  “Get up,” Gokudo said contemptuously. “Please, do get up.”

  Edyk dropped and rolled out out of reach and got back on his feet. He snatched up a hoe someone had let fall in a bed of narcissus during the widow’s rampage and dropped into a guard stance, only to have the blade of the naginata slice off the head. Instead of retreating as Gokudo had every right to expect, Edyk thrust with the end of the stick, striking Gokudo hard in the chest. By the time the samurai caught his breath Edyk was gone and the bodyguard could hear the sound of hoofbeats from the other side of the gate, departing rapidly.

  He cursed when he got his breath back, loudly and fluently in his native tongue, and spun around to see Bo He watching. He didn’t like the expression on the majordomo’s face so he cut it off. He stepped over the gurgling remains of the old man’s body and went back into the house to find Dai Fang.

  She had returned to her own quarters and was in the restored orderliness of her sitting room with a pot of tea steaming in front of her. The madness of her fury was gone, vanished as if it had never been, to be replaced by a cold and deadly intensity that caused a ripple of unease to break out down the back of even his warrior spine.

  She poured tea for both of them, and presented his cup with both hands. “Find her,” she said.

  “My lady—”

  She raised her eyes to his. “Find her, and bring her to me.”

  He did the only thing she would permit. He bowed his head, accepted the tea, and said, “As my lady wishes.”

  Her voice stopped him at the door. “And Gokudo?”

  “My lady?”

  Her glittering eyes raised to his. “In what condition she is returned to the home of her father is of no concern to me.”

  He bowed again, and thought, not for the first time, of the bronze braid wrapped around his fist, and of forcing wide the long, lissome legs of the daughter of the house. “As my lady wishes.”

  10

  Spring, 1322

  THE YAMBS THE GREAT KHAN commanded to be built half a century before that greeted those traveling the road west at every eighth league had yet to fall into disrepair, and the great trees he planted to show the way were just beginning to leaf out as Johanna’s tiny group passed between them. Occasionally they met an imperial mailman, hurrying to complete his sixty daily leagues, but for most of the way the road was as bare of company as her companions were bare of conversation.

  Jaufre had been curt and uncommunicative since Johanna’s return from the summerhouse, riding North Wind. Johanna, rebuffed in her efforts to share her wonderful new feelings of freedom and independence, was bewildered and resentful and surly in turn. Shasha, glancing surreptitiously from one to the other as if to gauge the amount of unvented spleen gathering in each youth, kept her own counsel.

  And the glittering roofs of Cambaluc faded in the distance. They followed the road west, stopping at Shensi only to feed and water the horses and find a quick meal for themselves. They traveled well into the night, made a cold camp and were up again before the sun the following morning.

  “What’s the rush?” Jaufre said finally, and irritably.

  Johanna settled the saddle in place, looking over North Wind’s back at the road they had come down the day before. “My father’s second wife doesn’t like being crossed,” she said. As if aware that this was a meager explanation for driving them down the road like a slave trader late for an auction, she added, “She will be very angry that she will now not receive the commission on Edyk’s marriage settlement.” She checked again to see that the clasp on the leather pouch she wore at her waist was secure.

  “Wu Li’s widow will be delighted to be rid of us,” Jaufre said, yanking at a cheek strap so hard that his horse whinnied and danced in reproof. “Three less bellies to fill, three less servants to pay. The heir to Wu Li’s estate conveniently missing. I doubt she’ll make any effort to come after you.”

  “Nonetheless, I, too, will rest more easily when we are out of her reach,” Shasha said, watching Johanna with a speculative gaze.

  Johanna saw Shasha watching her. She flushed and dropped her hand.

  “Well, then, perhaps you could just tell us where it is we’re going in such a hurry,” Jaufre said with awful sarcasm.

  Johanna froze up. “I would have thought you would recognize the road,” she said, as haughty as a mandarin’s mistress.

  Shasha beat a strategic retreat and waited for the explosion from a safe distance. She hoped it would be a loud one. With blows, even. Anything to clear the air.

  A bright ray of morning sun flooded their campsite with light. Johanna was here, Jaufre thought in sudden realization, here, with him. She had not stayed behind with Edyk. She had turned her back on the security of marriage, a life of ease and comfort, and the affection of a man sure to love her and indulge her all her life long.

  She had not chosen that life. Instead, she was traveling the Road west with him, Jaufre. The Road was no refuge, no sanctuary, no safe haven. At every league there was a new and almost invariably fatal disease waiting to infect them, thieves and bandits eager to rob them, rival merchants hoping to cheat them, bears and wolves with their next meal on their minds. There were poisonous snakes and insects and wells poisoned by nature or by man. They could be struck by lightning on the plains, smothered in sand in the desert, buried in snow in the mountains. They could lose their way. They could be deliberately misdirected, and attacked.

  But here she was, with him, on that Road. Edyk the Portuguese was a memory back in Cambaluc, and Cambaluc was falling farther behind them every day.

  North Wind shied at a dragonfly and pulled at his picket, his white coat gleaming in the dawn light. North Wind, the preeminent race horse of his day and Edyk’s pride and joy, now Johanna’s saddle horse.

  Jaufre burst out laughing. Johanna looked around, startled. Still laughing, he reached out to pull her braid in not quite his old, brotherly manner, but close enough to lay her hackles. Johanna melted instantly, grinning at him, every constraint falling away, not thinking to question why there had been any constraint to begin with.

  Shasha muttered to herself. They looked at her. “So we go to Chang’an,” she said. “And who do we meet in Chang’an?”

  “Guess,” Johanna said.

  Shasha stared at her with rising suspicion. “Johanna, you wouldn’t!”

  “I would, too,” Johanna said.

  Shasha groaned. “Not old No-Nuts!”

  “The very same,” Johanna said proudly. She moved to tie her bedroll to the back of North Wind’s saddle, and added in a reproving voice, “And I don’t think that’s a very respectful way to refer to my honorable uncle, either.”

  Jaufre turned his face so that Shasha wouldn’t see his grin.

  Shasha took a deep breath and swore with a surprising range and fluency.

  Johanna widened her eyes and said in a shocked voice, “But, Shasha! I thought you liked Uncle Cheng!” Shasha wasn’t finished swearing and Johanna said reproachfully, “Such is gratitude. And after Uncle Cheng rescued your teeth from
that prince in Zeilan, too.”

  “If that idiot hadn’t tried to buy off the local priest with pork instead of beef, my teeth wouldn’t have been in any danger in the first place,” Shasha said tartly.

  “Well,” Johanna said, vaulting astride North Wind and glancing at the increasing light on the eastern horizon, “the sooner we start the sooner you can abuse him all you like to his face. We’ve got to hurry. He wrote me that he wants to start no later than the night of the new moon.”

  “Isn’t that tonight?” Jaufre said.

  The sound of North Wind’s hoofbeats racing away was her reply.

  And indeed Wu Cheng was seen to be pacing impatiently up and down in front of the East Gate of Chang’an, alternately kicking and cursing any camel unfortunate enough to get in his way.

  Johanna waved. “Uncle Cheng! Uncle Cheng!”

  He halted, staring at the three horses galloping in his direction, and then waved back vigorously before turning to shout at the packers. There was a great flurry of movement and the sounds of disgruntled camels spitting and snapping and groaning as they levered themselves up, one half at a time.

  “Nice horse,” Wu Cheng said when Johanna reined in. If North Wind looked familiar to him, Wu Cheng, an inveterate gambler, possessed the discretion not to say so. He scowled at Shasha. “You had to bring her?”

  She grinned. “Of course, Uncle. It wouldn’t do for you to be bored on the journey.”

  The scowl deepened. Unintimidated, Johanna said, “How big is the caravan this year, Uncle? It looks enormous.”

  The scowl faded. One sure way to divert Wu Cheng was to praise his caravan. “A thousand camels.”

  Johanna knew her duty and was properly impressed. “Imagine!”

  Wu Cheng grinned. “Well, maybe nine hundred, and of course not all my own.”

  “How many other traders travel with us?”

  The scowl came back. “A dozen, so far, and a more useless pack of ninnies I never saw—”

  “—in all my days on the Road, and they are many—” Jaufre said.

  “—no more idea of the dangers than a newborn babe, and of less use—” Johanna said.

  “—and all I’m doing by agreeing to take them into my caravan,” said Shasha, unable to resist, “—is inviting disaster down upon all our heads.”

  Wu Cheng stared, and then threw back his head and laughed, a big, booming noise that turned the heads of everyone in line at the Gate. “Well, well,” he said, “it may be that I have guided this caravan before.” He cuffed Johanna lightly across the ears. She ducked out of the way, grinning. “Put your horses with the others, then, and find your camels. The girls of Dunhuang, Turpan, and Kashgar are waiting for us!” he bellowed, and there was a ragged cheer from his men. He mounted his camel and it came gruntingly up on all four ungainly legs. Wu Cheng adjusted his seat and squinted at the horizon, alert to a telltale wisp of cloud or column of dust.

  Shasha and Jaufre both noticed that while Wu Cheng watched the western horizon, Johanna watched the east. Jaufre thought it was because of Edyk. Shasha did not.

  They would both have been surprised. The sun was sinking in a magnificent red-orange blaze, casting a golden shadow over the land. Everything Under the Heavens had never seemed as beautiful to Johanna as it did now, and she discovered to her surprise that there were tears in her eyes.

  Goodbye, my father, she thought. Thank you for giving me life. Thank you for giving me my freedom. I love you. I will always love you. And I will live my life to make you proud.

  She bowed her head, and Jaufre, riding behind, saw the last ray of the setting sun strike her bronzed hair, and knew he would forgive her anything. He urged his camel to come alongside hers and reached for her hand. She looked up, smiling through her tears, and her hand clasped his in return.

  He told himself that it was enough.

  For now.

  They traveled through the night, eating in the saddle, and did not stop until the sun broke free of the horizon the next morning and the temperature began to rise. They made a dry camp, spreading bedrolls beneath yurts and awnings of light cloth fixed between the camels’ saddles and tent poles stuck in the sand. The guards dug latrines. The cooks busied themselves with what would be their main and only hot meal each day. Smoke from the fires curled lazily into a clear, colorless sky slowly darkening to a brassy blue.

  The encampment was the size of a small city and indeed resembled one from the top of a dune a short distance away. Clustered at the top of the dune were Uncle Cheng and Johanna’s party, mounted again on their horses. North Wind was fidgety and finicky, wanting to stretch his neck into a run. Jaufre’s bay gelding was composed and businesslike and disinclined to put up with any of North Wind’s nonsense. Shasha rode a flirtatious little gray mare who in movement seemed to dance rather than canter.

  “My nephew has joined his ancestors, then,” Cheng said.

  Johanna let her eyes trace the tops of the tents of their wayfaring village, outlined against the yellow dunes. It was a familiar sight, lacking only the energetic, capable figure of her father. “He has, uncle.”

  Cheng rested a hand on her knee. “It is better so.” His eyes met Jaufre’s, and he frowned slightly at the hard expression he saw there.

  “I know, uncle,” Johanna said. “But—”

  “But,” he said, nodding, and gave her knee a final pat before sitting erect in the saddle again. He himself was riding a venerable donkey who carried himself and Wu Cheng with something of an air, as if he knew he provided transportation for the leader of their expedition and was determined to lend them both dignity.

  Cheng himself bore little resemblance to his nephew, being taller and much heavier. The mandarins and the eunuchs were warring factions at court, with the old khan favoring the eunuchs, and castration was seen as way into power by ambitious parents. Cheng had been offered up for the procedure at the age of ten, and was rewarded with an immediate entrance into the Royal Academy. This was followed by a post at court, where a combination of ability and relative honesty saw his star rise fast and far.

  He was among the inner circle of the previous khan, which contributed to his subsequent banishment when the new khan took power and brought in his own eunuchs. He went to Wu Hai, in whose business he had invested most of his own earnings, and Wu Hai put him on the first caravan heading west, which very probably saved his life from the same purge that had taken the life of Johanna’s grandmother. He made his home in Chang’an and once it was safe to return to Cambaluc became an infrequent but familiar guest in Wu Li’s house. One of Johanna’s earliest memories was of sitting on Uncle Cheng’s knees during one of his many visits, learning a complicated game of changing patterns played with a knotted round of string.

  “Where do you go, then?” Cheng said. He had met Wu Li’s second wife. He knew without being told at least one reason why they were leaving Everything Under the Heavens.

  “West,” Jaufre said.

  “Ah,” Cheng said. “And how far?”

  “Until the ocean drops off the edge of the world, uncle,” Johanna said, tears banished now, “and the dragons who live there burn us up with their fiery breath.”

  Wu Cheng laughed. “As far as that? A very long journey, indeed.” He paused. “It is a new and very different world to which you travel, Johanna.”

  “Yes, and won’t it be exciting!” she said. “You know father never traveled beyond Kashgar on our western journeys. I’ve always wondered what the Pamirs look like from the other side. What an adventure, uncle!”

  Her uncle could have said many things in response to this blithe comment, but held his fire, for the moment. “I will be sad to see you go,” he said instead. “It is not likely we will meet again on this earth.”

  “Who is to say?” Johanna said, not wanting to agree but knowing this was most likely true. “We might meet on the Road again one day, honorable uncle.”

  Wu Cheng smiled. “We might at that, honorable niece.”

&nbs
p; She felt for the pouch at her waist. Had her father’s widow missed them yet? Very likely, and how furious she would be, and how much more so with no abomination of a child to take it out on, and how much more furious than that when she sent out riders and discovered that Johanna was now out of her reach. Johanna contemplated her father’s widow’s reaction with a great deal of satisfaction.

  On her left, Shasha noticed the gesture, and wondered at the unease that whispered up her spine.

  Jaufre noticed only the smile pulling at the corner’s of Johanna’s lips. “You look happy,” he said.

  She breathed in, deeply. “Do you smell that, Jaufre?”

  “What?” He sniffed. “You mean the salt air?”

  She shook her head, still smiling. “Freedom,” she said.

  He thought about it, even as she nudged North Wind into motion. The stifling tension that had infused the house of the honorable Wu Li from the moment he had brought his second wife home. The inchoate threat everyone had felt the day Dai Fang introduced Gokudo. The year full of encroaching snubs and slights as Dai Fang moved Jaufre out of the house and into the stables, Johanna from her suite near the garden to her room off the scullery, Shasha from her position as one of the family to that of a kitchen maid.

  The only time they had been able to breathe was on the road with Wu Li. Jaufre had a very clear memory of his own father, but he was long dead and so would Jaufre had been, were it not for Wu Li and Shu Ming and Shasha, and always and ever, Johanna. He knew who his family was.

  He nudged his bay into a stride to match North Wind’s, at least temporarily. Johanna turned her head to meet his eyes. “Freedom,” he said.

  “Freedom!” they shouted together, and their horses, in that unexplainable way that horses do divined the high spirits of their riders and moved smoothly into a gallop, kicking up a cloud of dust that hung in the air, obscuring their passing, leaving only an echo of laughter behind.

  Until the dust settled again, and left their tracks plain for anyone with the eyes to see.