by Alice Major
“I am Loh-ti,” the tiny animal said. “Thank you for freedom.”
Chapter Eighteen
Joss stood in a corner of the Pavilion of Internal Audiences, looking out over a mass of dark-haired heads. The Court of the Pheasant was a jostle of bodies packed shoulder to shoulder, but in spite of the close contact people were strangely silent, waiting.
Joss, Alasdair and Chuan had been assigned this place near one of the pillars supporting the pavilion’s curved-up roof. From here they could look across the crowd towards the ceremonies on the steps of the Temple. Joss’s feelings matched her high-placed viewpoint. She was elated, excited, even though they had been standing here since shortly after the first meal of the pulse.
At the beginning of the ceremonies, the king had approached the temple as part of a long, stately procession led by the Count of Religious Affairs. The procession had disappeared between the columns of the temple. That was when the watchful silence had settled down. Now and again, the count would come out on the steps and make an announcement in his high, weedy voice. Most of the time, Joss couldn’t make out what he said, but it seemed to be some sort of report on what was happening inside.
At last, two horn blasts sounded out and a pathway opened through the packed courtyard. Along it walked the Director of Horses. He was not dressed in his customary tawny brown, but entirely in white. Joss heard Chuan draw a sharp breath.
“What’s the matter?”
“White. He’s wearing white.” There was a note of superstitious awe in her voice.
“So?”
The answer came, not from Chuan, but from another voice standing behind them. “White is the colour of funerals.”
Joss looked around to see the tall woman, the Count’s wife, standing close by. The woman gazed steadily at the stark white figure crossing the courtyard as she continued, “He dedicates himself to death, if that is the price of victory. He puts his own life and honour in the balance.”
Joss shivered and her sense of excitement ebbed away for a moment. Ssu-ma mounted the wide steps and stood facing the count. He held out first his left hand, then his right. The count took each hand in turn and bent over it.
“What’s happening?”
Again, it was the tall woman who answered her. “They are cutting his fingernails.”
Joss was about to ask for an explanation when the horns blared and the king came out from the temple. The Director of Horses knelt on the steps in front of him. The king handed him a broad, double-headed axe and a second weapon that Joss couldn’t put a name to. It was a long pole, sharply pointed at the tip, with a single, deeply curved axe-blade fixed about three-quarters of the way up. The blade gleamed dull green in the distance.
Ssu-ma rose and turned slowly to face the crowd, holding a weapon high with each hand. The silent crowd responded with a muffled surge of sound in which there were no words—only a strong sense of purpose. Joss felt her heart leap again. Now the count stepped forward with two attendants who carried between them a large metal circle. The count poured some thick, reddish-brown liquid slowly over its surface, and the king struck it once, sending a deep rumbling gong across the courtyard. The sound called to Joss’s heart and lifted it still higher. Then the pathway through the crowd opened again. The two attendants walked down the steps carrying the gong, and the king and Ssu-ma fell in behind them.
This was the signal Joss and her companions had been told to watch for. They hurried to the stairs leading from the Pavilion of Internal Audiences and fell in with the press of nobles that was forming a procession behind the royal party. Slowly the crowd sorted itself out into a column five people abreast and began to wind through the gates of the palace, into the town beyond. They poured along the great avenue that led to the centre gate in the south wall—a gate never used except when the king left the city.
Joss and her companions were wearing the dull, ochre-coloured uniforms worn by lower-ranking officers: thickly quilted tunics, trousers and snug quilted helmets with round leather brims. Ssu-ma himself had ordered their dress.
“Make them as inconspicuous as possible,” he had told his director of supplies after the king had refused to leave the foreigners behind, in spite of all Ssu-ma’s arguments against it.
“The soldiers will not want to march with foreigners, especially a female one, in their midst,” he had warned the king. “They are superstitious. The first thing that goes wrong will be blamed on their presence, and morale will sink faster than a stone in the river.”
But the king had only waved his hand. “The foreigners should see how powerful we are and carry the story back,” he insisted. “They must see how terrible we are.” He lowered his voice significantly. “Remember, they said millions ...”
Ssu-ma snorted. “Where are these millions? Right now, we have a campaign against the White Ti. I can deal with only one enemy at a time.”
“They must see our victory.”
“Then take the boy only.”
Overhearing this, Joss felt her heart skip a beat. Until the king answered, “No, the boy could be lying. He looks like any of us, except for the strange clothing he wore when he arrived. But the girl—she is truly from some other place.”
And so it had been laid down that both of them would go, with Chuan too. Chuan’s presence had become ambiguous. At first, her presence in the palace had been explained because she was a daughter of the garden. The king had obviously forgotten that, however, when he casually ordered that she come with the army “as companion and servant to the foreign girl.” Chuan had looked slightly contemptuous when she heard this, but she was too pleased to be staying close to the king to voice any objection.
They marched out of the capital and grouped on the wide field in front of the gate. Here, the horses were already waiting for the nobles who would ride. Carts, laden with baggage, were drawn up in good order, and three battle chariots—more like huge, wheeled stages than anything else—stood hitched to long columns of horses.
Ssu-ma mounted one of these chariots, where he stood well above the heads of the horses and waited for his troops to mount. The king climbed onto a second chariot; the nobles swung themselves onto horses; the baggage drivers took up whips and reins; and the foot soldiers hoisted their heavy packs. Joss and Alasdair sat on short, sturdy ponies while Chuan stood at the horses’ heads like a groom. Looking down at her thick braid, Joss felt guilty.
“We’ll switch places as soon as we can,” she whispered down.
Chuan smiled her dark, tight-lipped smile. “You’ll probably want to,” she replied. “Riding that beast will be like riding on a trestle table.”
And indeed, Joss’s legs already felt like she was sitting astride a grand piano with the inner muscles of her thighs stretched tight enough to play tunes. But she hardly realized the discomfort. A jingle of purpose ran down the column in which they were placed.
“We’re off,” she heard Alasdair say.
It seemed that every person in the capital had turned out to see the army off. Young women waved and cried. Peddlers pushed up close to the soldiers, selling charms and foodstuffs and other last-minute items. The crowd followed them as they left the walls of the capital and made their way along the main road to a shallow ford across the river. Here, the water was a kilometre wide, but hardly deeper than the horses’ knees. There was great splashing and cursing as they dragged the wagons and war chariots across. On the following pulse, there was more swearing and lashing as long trains of horses pulled the wagons up the steep road that wound out of the river valley towards the north.
Alasdair and Joss rode close to the front of the army, along with the king’s official attendants. At the top of the valley, they paused to look back. The last of the wagons was still back near the ford and the whole road between the river and the top of the valley was a toiling mass of soldiers and animals.
“How many do you think there ar
e?” asked Joss.
“Thousands,” said Chuan, standing by her bridle.
“Seven thousand, five hundred.” It was the king’s voice, coming from above their heads. His war chariot had been pulled off from the road to form an impromptu reviewing stand. His voice was as young and vibrant as the bright red of his garments as he squinted into the distance. “The largest army since my father sent troops to subdue the people of Chou.”
“A nobler army by far.” It was the clear, oily voice of Ssu-kung, standing beside the king on the lofty platform. He spoke just in time to be heard by Ssu-ma. The Director of Horses had left his chariot to ride back and forth along the column on a big, rough-coated horse with a chest like a shield.
“Nobility should be judged at the end of a campaign rather than at the beginning,” he said grimly. “Sir, your horses should not be standing still after so hard a climb. They will take harm if you do not walk them gently for a while.”
Alasdair caught sight of the charioteer nodding agreement from his seat tucked below the level of the stage, out of the king’s sight. Ssu-kung was about to reply angrily but the king laughed. “Then we will move on.” Guiltily, Alasdair and Joss put their own ponies into a plodding pace behind the chariot.
They soon found it took a long time to move a large army. It took time to draw up the supply wagons, unpack the king’s ceremonial tent, bed down the animals and prepare meals. It took as long again on the next pulse to get going again, to feed and pack up. The middle two meals of each pulse were eaten on the march—rough cakes pulled from pouches and washed down with flasks of some drink that tasted like flat beer. But even with these meals-on-the-go, Alasdair estimated that the whole army was actually in motion for the equivalent of only about six or seven hours in each pulse.
But even this slow pace ate up miles and miles of countryside as the time went by. Now and again, they stopped outside small towns or the country houses of nobles. Here, they did not put up the huge silk-and-bamboo tent for the king. Instead, he and a few favoured nobles would be accommodated in the private apartments of the noble.
At each town there was an official welcoming party—nervous officials bobbing their heads at the king. There would also be unofficial greetings, from townspeople watching to give a special welcome to some of the individual soldiers. These were obviously the men who had been recruited from this particular area and they would go off rejoicing to eat and sleep with their families.
Alasdair suspected that they did not always return to the army. In the early part of the march, he had frequently noticed one particular soldier who had a badly twisted front tooth. At one li, Alasdair spotted this man being welcomed tearfully by an elderly woman; after that he did not see him again.
Joss and Chuan preferred the halts that were not made at a town or noble’s house. They were never among the three or four invited into the noble dwellings, although sometimes Joss was trotted out to have her foreign features displayed to another wondering audience. She would have resented being shown off like a zoo animal, except for the king’s boyish enthusiasm. She even came to like the attention her appearance gained from him.
But she still preferred the halts where there were no townspeople to astonish. On these occasions, she and her companions were often called to entertain the king after the late meal. They sat in the large square reception area, sumptuous with carpets, at the heart of the tent and told him stories of their own world. Sometimes he would laugh at them; now and again he would flare up in a little spurt of anger and pretend not to believe them. Alasdair noticed that the angry times came if they happened to mention someone very important, like a prime minister or a queen.
Other times, they simply sat nearby while the king and Ssu-ma pored over maps and discussed the eventual battle with the enemy.
“We must be careful not to get ourselves trapped in the hill country,” warned Ssu-ma. “Your army has always fought in the open plains of the Middle Kingdom, sire.”
The king make a clicking sound with his tongue. “You are an old woman, Ssu-ma.”
Alasdair had drawn closer to peer over the king’s shoulder at the map. “Will they even come out to fight us,” he asked.
“Of course they will. What people would not come to defend their land?” the king asked impatiently. But Ssu-ma said, “An excellent question. There is no particular reason why they should confront us in a traditional battle. We know very little of this country—where to obtain food, where to obtain supplies. We are not even very sure what place the White Ti would call their capital. They may prefer to leave the countryside itself to battle us.”
“Cowards,” the king said indignantly.
Usually they were joined in the king’s tent by Ssu-kung, who made pleasant reports on how well things were going. The conversation was not so pleasant on one occasion when the Director of Horses discovered that Ssu-kung had ordered a number of carts full of dried fruit and turnip emptied out in order to carry the king’s regalia.
“You did what?” he snapped, rounding on the Master of Works. His slanting eyebrows drew together in a frown and the creases beside his mouth deepened.
“I could not possibly provide for the king’s wardrobe in the number of carts you allowed,” hissed Ssu-kung.
“So to carry more silk robes, you threw out rations for two hundred men? What are these soldiers to live on—embroidery?”
“We can always refill the other food wagons.”
“Not where we’re going.”
The king intervened. “It’s my fault, Ssu-ma. I told the Master of Works that certain things had to be brought. And after all, what are three carts out of so many? Would you have me enter the capital of the enemy in anything less than the full splendour of the Middle Kingdom?” His voice was coaxing, but Ssu-ma’s dark face did not lighten.
“Spare me, sire,” he said curtly. “I must see whether those carts held any other essential supplies.” He glanced at Joss and Alasdair in the corner. “Say nothing of this to anyone,” he ordered. “I do not want the troops upset any more than they are.”
They held their tongues, but it seemed the news leaked through the army anyway. Although most of the soldiers usually shunned Joss and the others, they still overheard mutterings while they waited in line for food or hay for their horses. It didn’t take long for them to realize that, however popular the campaign was with the king and his intimates, it was an unwelcome intrusion into the life of an ordinary soldier.
When the army passed groups of people labouring over the harvest, the soldiers knew their own wives had the impossible task of harvesting their fields without help. Perhaps their families would go hungry that winter for the lack of strong arms to gather in the millet.
Nor did they like the idea of going into the unknown country ahead of them. Military campaigns had always been short excursions to bring some uppity noble to heel. They were not long journeys into strange territory. Some men whispered rumours—that they were being marched off to fight monsters in the Dragon Lands—and they would eye Joss with resentful curiosity.
One day, Alasdair paused at the top of a long, low rise to look back over the army behind. He frowned, trying to remember the struggling mass of men climbing that first hill at the beginning of the campaign. It seemed to him the column was much shorter than it had been. The thump of hooves distracted him and he looked up to see Ssu-ma on his rough-coated horse. The Director of Horses scanned the long line of the army. The “T” shape of his moustache and beard was emphasized by the way the corners of this mouth were tucked in tightly.
“There aren’t as many as when we started out, are there?” Alasdair asked cautiously.
Ssu-ma looked down at him. “No,” he said. “Many single soldiers have slipped away, back to their fields and families. Three pulses ago, the Count of Ch’i left with his whole company—a full seven hundred men. The king will have to deal with that defection when we retur
n.”
“Will we have enough?”
“I never expected to take more than three thousand men into the country of the White Ti. We should be able to hold that many—as long as the Count of Wei does not leave with his company as well.” He paused and his voice became weary. “Whether three thousand will be ‘enough,’ I cannot say.”
He seemed to remember suddenly who he was talking to and looked back into Alasdair’s eyes. “Do not be concerned,” he said more robustly. “The Count of Wei talks of leaving but I doubt he will dare to do so.”
“I’m not.” Then Alasdair added impulsively, “And I won’t say anything.”
Ssu-ma gave him one of his rare, stiff smiles and nodded. Then he urged his horse back towards the head of the army.
They journeyed north and further north—but not quite so quickly as the light node moved. Gradually it pulled ahead of them and became paler. The harvest weather was ending. The towns and villages, at first so close together, had thinned out. Eventually, the flat landscape of the fields began to break up. Now scrubby trees began to appear frequently, along with small valleys and narrow rivers.
There came a time when Joss looked up from her fat pony’s back to notice a thick purple line on the horizon. Back at the lady’s garden, the same line had been the thinnest of pencil strokes off to the west. Now it was a well-defined brush stroke, not only to the west but also curving in towards them on the north.
“Look,” she said, pointing. “Hills.”
By now the broad road—the main road of the Middle Kingdom—had dwindled into a rough track. The animals strained harder; the carts stuck frequently, and in places the huge war chariots became almost impossible to move. The king would laugh and jolly the troops along from his high perch, but Ssu-ma’s face became grimmer than ever. He began sending out scouts to probe the road ahead of his lumbering army.