She is trembling, and unhappy about that, even though no one is here to see her weakness.
The doctrines of the Sacred Path use the phrase about journeys and destinations to teach, in part, that death does not end one’s travelling through time and the worlds.
She does not know, there is no way she could know, but Bogü belief lies near to the same thought. The soul returns to the Sky Father, the body goes to earth and continues in another form, and then another, and another, until the wheel is broken.
Li-Mei understands something else tonight. She knows something else. And this was so in the moment she saw the wolves on the slope and the man with them, and watched the nomads behind her hurled into chaos and panic—these hard, fierce men of the steppe whose very being demands they show no fear to anyone, or to themselves.
Something is about to happen. A journey, one sort of journey, will end, possibly right here.
She is awake and clothed, waiting. With a knife.
So when the first wolf howls she is unsurprised. Even with that, she is unable to keep from jerking spasmodically at the lost, wild sound of it, or stop her hands from beginning to shake even more. You can be brave, and be afraid. She fears she’ll cut herself with the blade and she puts it aside on the pallet.
A lead wolf by itself at first, then others with it, filling the wide night with their sound. But the nomads’ dogs—the great wolfhounds—are silent, as they have been since the first wolf sighting towards sundown.
That, as much as anything else, is why she is so certain something strange is happening. The dogs should have gone wild at the sight of the wolves before, and hearing them now.
Nothing. Nothing at all from them.
She does hear movements outside, the riders mounting up. They will be happier on horseback, she has come to realize that. But there are no shouts, commands, no warlike cries, and no dogs. It is unnatural.
The wolves again, nearer. The worst sound in the world, someone called their howling, in a long-ago poem. The Kitan fear wolves more than tigers. In legend, in life. They are coming down now. She closes her eyes in the dark.
Li-Mei wants to lie on her small pallet and draw the sheepskins over her head and wish this all away, into not-being-so.
There was a storyteller in the town nearest their estate who used to offer a marketplace tale, a fable, of a girl who could do this. She remembers extending to him a copper coin the first time, then realizing he was blind.
She wants so much to be there, to be home, in her own bedchamber, going back and forth on the garden swing, on a ladder in the orchard picking early-summer fruit, looking up to find the Weaver Maid in the known evening sky …
She realizes there are tears on her face.
Impatiently, with a gesture at least one of her brothers would have recognized, she presses her lips together and wipes at her cheeks with the backs of both hands. In her own way, though she might wish to deny it, showing distress disturbs her as much as it would the nomads outside on their horses.
She forces herself to stand, makes certain she’s steady on her feet. She’s wearing riding boots. She’d made her two women find them in the baggage when she came back from that walk at sundown. She hesitates, then takes the knife again, drops it into an inside pocket of her tunic.
She might need it to end her life.
She draws a breath, lifts back the heavy flap of her yurt, and ducks outside. You have to be afraid for it to count as bravery. Her father had taught her that, a long time ago.
A wind is blowing. It is cold. She is aware of the hard brilliance of the stars, the band of the Sky River arcing across heaven, eternal symbol of one thing divided from another: the Weaver Maid from her mortal love, the living from the dead, the exile from home.
The man is standing before her yurt. She’d had a thought about him before, what he might be, but it turns out she is wrong. It is difficult to tell his age, especially in the night, but she can see that he’s dressed as any other Bogü rider might be.
No bells, no mirrors, no drum.
He isn’t a shaman. She had thought this might be why the horsemen were so afraid. She knew about these men because her brother had told her, years ago. Though, if truth was being demanded, Tai had told their father—and Li-Mei had listened nearby as father and Second Son talked.
Did it matter? Now? She knew some things. And they could have sent her away from the stream, or closed the door, if they’d wanted to. She hadn’t worked very hard at remaining hidden.
The man in front of her yurt is the one from the lakeside slope. She has expected him to come. In fact, she knows more than that: she knows she is the reason he’s here and that he is the cause of the dogs’ silence—though wolves are with him in the camp now, half a dozen of them. She decides she will not look at them.
The Bogü riders are rigid, an almost formal stillness. They sit their horses at intervals around her yurt, but no one is moving, no one reacts to the intruder among them, or his wolves. They are his wolves, what else can they be? She sees no nocked arrows, no swords unsheathed. These men are here to escort the Kitan princesses to their kaghan, to defend them with their lives. This is not happening.
Stars, a waning moon, campfires burning between yurts, sparks snapping there, but no other movement. It is as if they have all been turned to moonlit statues, the man and his wolves, the horsemen and their horses and the dogs, as in some legend of dragon kings and sorcerers of long ago, or fox-women working magic in bamboo woods by the Great River gorges.
The Bogü look, Li-Mei thinks, as if they could not move.
Perhaps that is true. An actual truth, not a fable told. Perhaps they are frozen in place by something more than fear or awe.
It isn’t so, she decides, looking around her in the firelit dark. One man twitches his reins. Another draws a nervous hand down his horse’s mane. A dog stands up then sits quickly again.
Folk tales and legends are what we move away from when the adult world claims our life, she thinks.
For a brief, unstable moment, it crosses her mind to walk up to the man with the wolves and slap him across the face. She does not. This isn’t the same as before. She doesn’t understand enough. She doesn’t understand any of it. Until she does, she can’t act, can’t put her stamp (however feeble) on events. She can only follow where the night leads, try to hold down terror, be prepared to die.
The knife is in a pocket of her robe.
The man has not spoken, nor does he now. Instead, looking straight at her, he lifts a hand and gestures, stiffly, to the east—towards the lake and the hills beyond it, invisible now in the dark. She decides she will treat it as an invitation, not a command.
Not that it makes a difference.
The wolves—six of them—immediately get up and begin loping that way. One passes close to her. She doesn’t look at it. The man does not turn to watch them. He continues to face Li-Mei, waiting.
The riders do not move. They are not going to save her.
She takes a hesitant step, testing her steadiness. As she does, she hears a sigh from those on horseback: a sound like wind in a summer grove. She realizes, belatedly, that everyone has been waiting for her. That is what this stillness has been about.
It makes sense, as much as anything does in this wide night in an alien land.
He has come for her, after all.
CHAPTER XI
He was tired. It had been a very long day and his body was telling him as much. Tai was hardened and fit after two years’ digging graves by Kuala Nor, but other factors could enter into making someone weary at day’s end.
It would also be dishonest to deny that a measure of his languor could be traced to an encounter upstairs in the White Phoenix, just now.
He was aware that the woman’s scent was still with him, and that he didn’t know her name. That last wasn’t unusual. And whatever name he’d learned wouldn’t have been her real one. He didn’t even know Rain’s real name.
That suddenly became a
sadness, joining others.
Stepping outside with the most celebrated poet in the empire, his new companion—the reality of that was going to take time to settle in—Tai saw someone waiting, and decided he’d be happier if his recently hired Kanlin guard hadn’t looked so smugly amused. Registering her expression, he wished he were sober.
Wei Song approached. She bowed. “Your servant trusts you are feeling better, my lord.” She spoke with impeccable courtesy—and unmistakable irony.
Tai ignored her for the moment. A useful tactic, when your thoughts offered no good reply. He looked around the night square. Saw the governor’s sedan chair behind her. Other soldiers had replaced those who’d taken the would-be assassins. Caution—another new thing—made him hesitate.
“You saw these men arrive?” he asked, gesturing.
Song nodded. “I spoke with the leader. You may safely ride with them.” Her tone was proper, her expression barely so. He really wished she hadn’t said what she’d said back at Iron Gate, about women waiting for him in Chenyao.
Tai became aware of an extreme delight showing in the face of the rumpled poet beside him. Sima Zian was eyeing Tai’s bodyguard with appreciation by the light of the lanterns on the porch.
“This is Wei Song, my Kanlin,” he said, briefly. “I mentioned her inside.”
“You did,” agreed the poet, smiling.
Song smiled back at him, and bowed. “I am honoured, illustrious sir.” She hadn’t needed an introduction.
Tai looked from one of them to the other. “Let’s walk,” he said abruptly. “Have the soldiers follow. Song, is there word from the governor? About the men they took?”
“A report will be sent to us as soon as they have something to tell.”
Us. He considered commenting and decided he was too tired for a confrontation, and not sober enough. He didn’t want to argue. He was thinking about his sister. And his brother.
“We’re leaving at sunrise,” he said. “And we’ll be riding faster now. Please advise our soldiers from Iron Gate.”
“Sunrise?” protested Sima Zian.
Tai looked at him.
The poet grinned wryly. “I’ll manage,” he said. “Send this one to wake me?”
Wei Song laughed. She actually laughed, flashing white teeth. “I’ll do that happily, my lord,” she said.
Unable to think of anything to say to that, either, Tai began walking. Sima Zian caught up with him. He showed no evidence of fatigue or the wine he’d drunk. It was unfair. Song walked behind them. Tai heard one of the governor’s men snap a command as they lifted the empty sedan chair and hurried to follow.
Something occurred to him.
Without breaking stride or looking back, he said, “Song, how did those two men get inside?”
She said, “I had the same thought, my lord. I was guarding the back. There is an entrance there. I believed that soldiers of Governor Xu could stop anyone at the front. I have spoken with them about this failure. They know I will mention it to their commander.”
It was difficult to catch her out, Tai thought. As it should be. She was a Kanlin, after all.
“They will not feel kindly towards you,” the poet said. Zian glanced back at Song as they walked.
“I’m certain that is so,” she said. Then, after a pause, she murmured, “I saw the fox-woman again, Master Shen. Near the laneway when you fought the soldiers.”
“A fox-spirit? Inside the city?” The poet looked at her again. His tone had changed.
“Yes,” she said.
“No,” Tai snapped in the same moment. “She saw a fox.”
There was silence from the other two. Only their footsteps and distant noises from other streets. The city, Tai thought. He was in a city again, at night. By the waters of Kuala Nor the ghosts would be crying, with none to hear their voices.
“Ah. Well. Yes. A fox. I wonder,” the Banished Immortal said thoughtfully, “if it will be possible to find an acceptable wine at this inn. I hope it isn’t far.”
THERE WAS NO MESSAGE from the governor when they reached the inn. Nor was there a room available for the poet. Song spoke to the attendant in the reception pavilion, and Zian was assigned her chamber.
She would sleep outside Tai’s room again. The staff of the inn were embarrassed by the awkwardness, eager to provide a pallet on the covered portico. It wasn’t unusual for guards to sleep outside doorways.
There was little Tai could do about it. The poet invited Song to share his room. She declined, more sweetly than Tai would have expected.
He stared at her as the attendant hurried off to give orders. “This is because of those two men?” he asked.
She hesitated. “Yes, of course. And your friend needs a chamber. It is only proper to—”
“It’s the fox, isn’t it?”
He couldn’t say why that upset him so much. Anger was too easily his portion. He’d gone to Stone Drum Mountain, in part, because of that. He’d left for the same reason, in part.
She met his gaze, eyes defiant. They were still in the reception pavilion, no one else nearby.
“Yes,” she said. “It is also that.”
Kanlins, he recalled, were enjoined not to lie.
What was he going to say? It was unexpected on her part, given how controlled she was, otherwise. An embracing of folk legends, ancient tales, but she certainly wasn’t alone in doing that.
The poet had wandered off through the first courtyard into the nearest pavilion, where music was still playing. As Tai glanced that way, Zian reappeared, grinning, carrying a flask of wine and two cups. He came back up the steps.
“Salmon River wine, if you can believe it! I am very happy.”
Tai lifted a warding hand. “You will undo me. No more tonight.”
The poet’s smile grew wider. He quoted, “At the very bottom of the last cup, at the end of night, joy is found.”
Tai shook his head. “Perhaps, but sunrise will also be found soon.”
Sima Zian laughed. “I thought the same, so why go to bed at all?” He turned to Wei Song. “Keep the room, little Kanlin. I’ll be with the musicians. I’m sure someone there will offer a pillow if I need one.”
Song smiled at him again. “The chamber is yours, sir. Maybe the pillow—or the someone—will prove unsatisfactory. I have my place tonight.”
The poet glanced at Tai. He nodded his head. He didn’t look nearly intoxicated enough.
“I will instruct that any message from the governor tonight be brought to me.” Song had the grace to bow to Tai. “If that is acceptable.”
It probably shouldn’t have been, but he was weary. Too much of too many things. It is about your sister.
He nodded. “Thank you, yes. You will wake me if you judge it proper.”
“Of course.”
Two servants carrying a rolled-up pallet appeared, moving briskly, managing to bow sideways as they passed. They hurried out to the courtyard, past lanterns, towards a building on the left. Zian went out after them, but turned right again, towards pipa music and flutes and a ripple of late-night laughter. There was, Tai saw, an eagerness to his stride.
Tai and Song followed the pallet the other way. It was set down on the covered portico of the first building, outside the closed door of his own chamber. The servants bowed again and hurried away, leaving them alone.
There were torches burning at intervals along the portico. Faintly, from the far side of the courtyard, they could hear the music. Tai looked at the stars. He thought about the last time Song had spent a night outside his room. He wondered if there was a bolt on the door.
He remembered that he’d meant to check on Dynlal before retiring. He could ask Song to do it, and she would, but it didn’t feel right. She’d been awake as long as he had. It was unlikely to be necessary: one of the Iron Gate soldiers, that first one who’d seen Tai approaching, from up on the wall, hardly ever left the horse. Odds were good he was sleeping in the stables.
He didn’t know where th
e other soldiers were … sharing one of the larger rooms, most likely. They’d be long asleep by now.
Night clouds, thin moon, stars,
But a promise of the sun
Remaking the world,
Bringing mountains back.
In a way, Sima Zian had the right idea. Tai had spent entire nights drinking before, many times. With Spring Rain, with Yan and the other students and their women. He wasn’t up to that tonight.
“You’ll wake the men?” he asked Wei Song.
“I’ll wake all of you before dawn.”
“Just knock, for me,” he said. He managed a smile.
She made no reply, just looked at him a moment, hesitating. When she stood so near, he realized how small she was.
“I’ll go tell the stable hands to have the horses fed and watered before sunrise. We’ll need a horse for Master Sima. And I’ll look in on Dynlal.” She bowed briefly, walked quickly down the three steps to the courtyard. He watched her crossing it.
She didn’t look tired either, he thought.
He went into the room, closed the door. Then he stood, just inside, keeping extremely still.
After a moment he opened the door again. “Wait here,” he said to the empty portico. “Come if I call you.” He left the door ajar, turned back into the chamber.
It was her perfume that had registered.
That, and the amber glow in the room: three lamps were lit, which was extravagant, so late. The servants of the inn would not have done that.
There was another entrance, from the covered porch on the opposite side, a private space from which to look at flowers or the moon. The sliding, slatted doors had been pushed back, the room was open to the night. The gardens of the inn went all the way down to the river. Tai saw a star in the opening, quite bright, flickering.
She had changed her gown. She was wearing red now, gold threads in it, not the green of before. He wished it hadn’t been red.
“Good evening,” he said quietly to the daughter of Xu Bihai.
It was the older one, the one he’d liked: sideways-falling fashion of her hair, clever look in her eyes, an awareness of the effect she’d had, bending to pour wine. Her jewellery was unchanged, rings on many fingers.
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