Spirit Gate

by Kate Elliott

  Like all of the inhabitants of Kartu Town, he’d learned to look away. In truth, it was not the sight of the citadel and its square that made him climb every day in good weather to the peace of his shed. It was the vista beyond: endless, open, yawning wide to the west, all sky, the rocky plateau of the desert looming on the southern horizon, and the mountains rising heroically to the north. So beautiful. They were all stark lines and pale slopes with the memory of winter in their snowy peaks.

  “I hate it up here!” cried Ti. “Too much air! Too much sky!” Abruptly, she burst into tears. “I know I shouldn’t have said it—but he’s Qin. What will happen to Mai? How could Father Mei have agreed?” She sobbed like a tempest.

  “He’s decent enough,” said Shai finally as this storm began to die down.

  “Who is?”

  “Captain Anji.”

  “How can you say so?” she shrieked. “A dirty barbarian! You’re a Qin-lover!” Then she clapped a hand over her mouth and began sobbing noisily again. He waited until the worst subsided before scooping up a handful of shavings and handing them to her so she could wipe mucus from her upper lip.

  “He doesn’t have to marry her. He could have just taken her as a concubine. Branded her a pleasure girl and dragged her to the brothel for his use. We couldn’t have stopped him.”

  She hiccoughed, sucked in a watery breath, and gave a bleating moan as she pounded her belly with a fist as if she were mourning. “I know it’s not as bad as it could have been. But I can’t bear to be parted from her! Ei! Ei! Ei!”

  “She’ll just be across town, at the citadel. You can see her every day.”

  “No! No! No! The news just came this morning, by messenger from Captain Anji. The garrison is being pulled out and sent east on the Golden Road. There’s something going on there, I don’t know what. Maybe there’s war on the border. War! They’re going east and she’ll have to go with them, and we’ll never see her again! Ever! Ever! Ever!”

  He set down the adze on the bench, considerably startled by this news. “How soon?”

  “In two days! The wedding is tomorrow, not next month! That’s why you have to speak to Father Mei. Maybe they’ll listen to you. All the other uncles . . . you know them! They always do what Father Mei says. Chicken-hearts! All but Uncle Hari. If he was here still, he’d put a stop to it.”

  “For shame, Ti!”

  “I’m not sorry, even if no one else will talk about Uncle Hari! He was your favorite brother, too! You know it! You know he was the only one tough enough to stand up to Father Mei! He’d tell Father Mei to postpone the wedding. Wait ‘til the garrison comes back. But they’ll never come back. That’s what Captain Anji knows. He knows they’re never coming back and he’s taking Mai away forever and ever and ever!” She once again fell to bawling.

  Ti’s outbursts were usually like cloudbursts in summer—frequent but short in duration, causing brief floods and then getting all that moisture sucked away as soon as the sun came back out—but this time she was truly upset. She and Mai were close as twins, born the same day in the same month in the same year to his eldest brother’s first and second wives, who were themselves sisters. The two girls had never been apart in all their seventeen years.

  No use trying to get any more work done today. He gathered up his tools into the cedar tool chest.

  After a bit, when she could hear him, he said, “You could go as second wife.”

  “He won’t take me!” she wailed. “I already asked, but Captain Anji told Father Mei he can only have one wife. And Father Mei won’t let me go as her maid because it would be dishonorable, and anyway, Captain Anji said he won’t take me even as a servant.”

  He’d be a madman to take you as wife or servant, Shai thought, although in truth he was shocked that Ti would suggest such a thing. A servant! Someday Ti’s impulsive and stormy nature would get her, and the family, in big trouble.

  A slender shape toiled up the path and resolved into the slave girl everyone called Cornflower, for her blue eyes. Ti saw her and got that look all the women in the house did whenever Cornflower appeared in a room. She wiped her eyes and nose before the slave halted twenty steps below them with hands clasped and body bent in a half bow. No need for Cornflower to say anything. Wind tugged at the slave’s wool tunic and her trident braids of uncannily white-gold hair. Her bare feet and calves were burned a pinkish brown, but everyone knew she had unusually light skin beneath her clothes, not like that of normal people but more like that of ghosts, and there was something about the way she stood there so quietly, a well of stillness, that made him always think about what it would be like to . . .

  “I better go,” said Ti.

  Shai started, unaware he’d been wandering. Cornflower served the two senior wives—Ti’s mother and aunt—so her presence here was a summons for Ti. Her presence was unwelcome to any young man whose greatest ambition was to be left undisturbed.

  “Promise me you’ll come right now.” Ti started down the path at a fast clip, Cornflower trotting behind, head lowered. Ti looked three times back over her shoulder, mouthing words, gesturing almost comically, trying to get Shai to hurry up.

  He didn’t see the point. He was the last person his eldest brother would listen to. But he whistled for his nephews and finished stowing the tools. His flush receded. His thoughts sank back into an orderly flow. The wind tugged at his sleeves, tied back to leave his lower arms bare. It wasn’t warm enough to work bare-chested yet, although he preferred it when it was. He hated to go back down to town, back to the family compound, where sleeves had to be tied down to the wrists and any work you did or comment you made was overseen, overheard, and overruled by others.

  Mai was fortunate. She was escaping.

  Not that she would think of it that way.

  His younger nephew came running, looking important and annoyed. “What is it?”

  “I have to go down,” Shai said, gesturing toward town. “I’ll be back this afternoon.”

  “You better be. I don’t want to sleep out here worrying about thieves!” He scuffed his feet among the wood shavings and sat down hard on the bench.

  Not that there were thieves anymore, not since the Qin took over. Still, no one left good tools and precious wood unguarded, even so.

  “What do you have to go down for, anyway?” The boy shaded his eyes and squinted toward town. “Uh!” He grunted and rolled his eyes, seeing his older cousin far down, retreating on the path. Because of Ti’s way of walking, she could not be mistaken for anyone else: all bouncing sleeves, a spring like that of an antelope in her step. “That Ti! Just a big boiling teakettle, that one! It must be about Mai and the wedding, eh?”

  Shai shrugged.

  “Make sure you’re back here soon. No shirking!” His nephew was eldest son of second brother and, therefore, had more clout than his young uncle Shai, but not enough to overrule Ti’s request, because she was daughter of Father Mei. If Ti asked, Shai must go.

  So Shai left. An ugly scene would no doubt ensue once he reached the compound, but there was no reason to worry about that on the walk down with the day so fine and the sky so merry and blue. The wind skated up from the east, which meant it was clear of dust torn up from the desert. The tips of the mountains to the northwest could be seen, three deep; that was unusual, quite striking. He thought he heard a hawk’s piercing call but when he paused and spun slowly he saw no speck in the sky, nothing flying except one wispy cloud spinning out along the ridge of Dezara Mountain. The slopes still had a hint of spring green in them although they were fading to summer gold. The sheep were hidden above in a fold of land, but he heard a second flock bleating off to the right. That would be the Gandi clan’s herd. There had been talk about a marriage between Mai and an elder Gandi boy, but of course the attentions of the Qin captain had cut those right off.

  Poor Mai. No wonder she was crying. Still, it wasn’t really a surprise. Mai had been doomed from the start.

  He stared east, into the wind. Because i
t was so clear, he could see the old road winding along the mountains for an unexpectedly long way before haze and distance cloaked it. No clouds of dust betrayed a merchant train or travelers. All was quiet and at peace. Shai liked things at peace.

  It wouldn’t last.

  He started down again and soon enough was nodding to the guards at the gate—two grizzled veterans of the town militia who had survived the Qin takeover—and crossed into the verdant oasis of the orchard gardens. The noise of the town was audible but muffled by green leaves and the laughter of the orchard workers. He crossed the Merciful Prayer bridge, passed under the arch of the inner wall, and came out into the sun-blasted citadel square, where no one walked at midday. By the commander’s quarters, two stocky Qin soldiers rode patrol, their heads covered by felt caps whose tilted brims shaded their eyes.

  The gallows and the posts cast almost no shadows. Widow Lae’s remains, dangling from the middle post, clattered in the wind. Keeping his head low, Shai twisted his clan ring three times around his middle finger and walked, trying not to look at the strands of black hair fluttering from the widow’s skull and the tattered remains of her red silk tunic, her best garment. Most of her flesh had been picked clean by wind and vultures and sun, leaving these strings of tendons that bound together her bones, the last remnants of hair and clothing, and her ghost.

  “I did it!” she shrilled. She was a wraith, more mist than form, a handsome young woman of about twenty although she’d been three times that age when she’d died. “I’ll get my reward soon enough! Then you’ll all be sorry!”

  The entire town had been forced to assemble to see Widow Lae put to death after she insulted a Qin officer, although everyone knew that she’d been condemned for a more serious offense. A foreign merchant had testified that the widow had asked him to smuggle a letter, whose contents betrayed Qin military secrets, to Tars Fort on the eastern border. At least, that was what the merchant had told a drinking companion at the brothel when they were both drunk. When he’d refused to take the letter, the widow had sent one of her grandsons instead. The young man had never been found or seen again nor had anyone managed to trace his trail, and after the execution all the widow’s dependents had been sold into slavery and her possessions confiscated by the Qin commander, who had given the merchant a percentage of the profits. Her distant kinfolk weren’t even going to be allowed to bury her bones. So shameful!

  No wonder her ghost clung stubbornly to her anger, even though that anger chained her ghost to the earth, to this very citadel square where she had died.

  Shai often wondered what had been in that message, in part because naturally he was curious and in part because Widow Lae’s death had altered the course of Mai’s life. On the day of the widow’s execution, with every man, woman, and child of Kartu Town assembled in citadel square, Captain Anji had first spoken to Father Mei about marrying his beautiful daughter.

  The walls of the town’s many residential compounds closed around him as he left the square and its ghost behind. He whistled under his breath. Father Mei’s second wife, the younger of the two sisters, the one who was also Ti’s mother, hated whistling. He’d learned to amuse himself softly.

  Five turns left, past the town baths, two turns right, and one final left turn down an alley brought him to the servants’ entrance to his family’s compound, just around the corner from the main entrance. He shook the bell. The peephole opened to reveal two suspicious dark eyes that crinkled up as the unseen mouth smiled.

  “Master Shai!”

  One Hand let him in and barred the door behind him, the movements smooth with long practice despite the slave’s disability.

  “Lots of trouble indoors?” Shai asked.

  The old man shook his head with a wry smile. “We are all sad to see the flower leave us, Master. She bears the Merciful One’s gentle disposition in her heart, and holds mercy in her hands.”

  Shai sighed. No doubt the household slaves would miss the extra food Mai slipped them when she thought no one was looking, and the ointments and infusions she smuggled into their sleeping room when one was sick. It would have been easier to stay up on the mountain than face what lay within. It was tempting to enjoy the sun and the quiet of the courtyard and pretend the rest of the world had gone to sleep.

  “Not a lot of people in the streets today,” he said. “No one out on the Golden Road, either, not as I could see from Dezara Mountain. I wonder if this talk of troubles on the eastern border is scaring people. If merchants won’t travel, the markets will suffer.”

  “Storm is not going away while you wait out here, Master Shai,” said One Hand.

  Shai sighed again, but delaying changed nothing. He crossed the dusty courtyard, pausing twice to savor the shade, once under a peach tree and once under the grape arbor. He went into the house past the whitewashed slave barracks, past the tapestried halls that led to his married brothers’ suites of rooms, past the curtained alcove where he and his nephew Younger Mei slept—

  He stopped and stuck his head in. Mei had thrown himself down on the bed they shared. He was weeping, trying to mute his noise in his wool tunic, which was wadded up and squashed against his face. Startled, the boy lifted his head. His entire body shook with a gasp of relief.

  “It’s you! Don’t tell Father Mei.”

  Shai let the curtain fall and sat down at the end of the bed. The rope base sagged under him, cutting lines into his buttocks; the servants had taken the mattress out to re-stuff it with new straw just this morning.

  “I can’t believe she’s leaving. My dearest sister! We are twin souls! Born together! Now I’ll never see her again.”

  Since it was probably true, Shai didn’t murmur reassurances. He listened for the tread of hard feet, keeping Mei company while he sniveled. Slaves passed twice, but they walked with light footsteps and none were foolish enough to tell tales on the youth who would one day be head of household, should he live so long. Poor Mei. Father Mei and any of Younger Mei’s other uncles would whip him for crying if they heard. In a way it was better to be least and superfluous, seventh of seven sons, an unlucky position certainly but one without expectations and demands beyond remaining silent, keeping out of the way, and doing what you were told.

  “All right,” said Mei finally. He sat up and wiped his face dry with his tunic. “I’m ready.” He stood, straightened his knee-length silk coat, and examined his spotless nails. “They’ve already gathered in the fountain court.”

  The Mei family compound had the same layout as most every family compound in Kartu Town. First you would see the massive outer wall built of earth or bricks. Behind this wall, and usually ringing the inner portion of the compound, lay a buffering outer courtyard where livestock and chickens could be quartered, a garden and fruit trees could grow, and the servants could launder, cook, clean, and take care of the necessary chores that none of the household kin desired to smell or listen to. The inner compound had a barracks built on the eastern end and a maze of rooms for the family, the most recent added on only four years ago. Some compounds in town were smaller, scarcely more than hovels erected within a corral of sticks; others were palatial and boasted marble floors and second stories.

  Unmarried men like Mei and Shai slept in alcoves; unmarried daughters slept in their mothers’ suites with the other children. At the center of the house lay the fountain court where Father Mei entertained guests or negotiated contracts. Although a painted, windowless corridor led from the main gate to the fountain court so that visitors would not glimpse the secret heart of the family’s private life, Shai and Mei took the slaves’ hall that wound through the warren of rooms. It let them in behind the hedge-like screen of flowering bitter-heart from which they might first observe before revealing their presence.

  Everyone was assembled. Father Mei sat in the black chair, facing the splashing fountain. Grandmother—Shai’s mother—sat on Father Mei’s left. She was tiny, frail, and half asleep but otherwise quite magnificent in a gold silk woman’s
coat, the extraordinarily long, square sleeves embroidered with red leaping antelopes. The uncles sat to Father Mei’s right, all in a line. The wives stood a step behind them, and there were at least a dozen children kneeling with heads bowed and hands resting on thighs off beyond the uncles. From this angle Shai could only see the top of Mai’s head; she was seated on a pillow halfway between Father Mei and the fountain. In this same way he would present a valuable item to be admired and examined before the haggling began.

  Captain Anji sat on the fountain bench with spray wetting the back of his gold silk Qin tabard and the peculiar braided topknot that all the Qin officers made of their hair. Remarkably, he had come alone except for two attendants standing with arms crossed back by the gate. The Qin were famous for their arrogance.

  Cornflower was offering rice wine to each of the uncles. Someone had put her in a concubine’s revealing bedroom silks so that every time she bent at the waist to proffer the cup, a flash of pale hip was revealed. Despite this provocation, Captain Anji kept his gaze fixed on Father Mei. He was a man of powerful control.

  Shai could not stop peeking through the bitter-heart. Her braids had a caressing way of sliding to and fro over her shoulders and upper arms. They were fastened at each tip by tiny nets sewn with lazulite beads as blue as her eyes. Shai shut his eyes.

  Thank goodness the ceremony of receiving had almost reached its conclusion! The family had been out here for a while, while Shai was dawdling.

  The sigh that escaped Younger Mei’s lips was as fragile as the ghost of a wind passing through scattered rose leaves. Shai looked at him, squeezed his arm, and lifted his own chin: Hold firm! Mei gave Shai a look, like that of a frightened rabbit determined to bite the hawk that has cornered it but not sure it will survive the altercation. Then he stepped out from behind the hedge.

  The heir’s place, of course, was to stand at his father’s right hand. Mei did so, taking up position smoothly and without a sound. Captain Anji flashed the merest glance Mei’s way but did not otherwise betray that anything was amiss or that another man might have taken insult at the heir’s belated arrival. Shai waited behind the hedge, partly because he was so aroused by the sight of Cornflower in her bedroom silks but mostly because no one had bothered to place a chair for him with the rest of the uncles and he refused to kneel with the children. Ti was seated first among the children, her hands clenched and her round face streaked with dirty tears. She looked as if she’d rubbed her face in the dust. But she kept her mouth shut.