Time Raiders: The Protector

by Merline Lovelace

  Grimacing, Max eased his knee from between hers and put a little space between their lower bodies.

  Cassie blinked awake before dawn. The cell was still filled with inky blackness. She had no idea what time it was, but she didn’t want to be caught with her pants down, literally or figuratively.

  “Max.”

  She got an inarticulate grunt in response, and poked at the solid wall of chest pinning her to the wolf pelt.

  “Roll over.”

  Another grunt. Cassie poked harder.

  “You’re squashing me. Roll over.”

  She scrambled out from under him and dragged his cloak with her. Draping it around her hips, she groped for her clothing.

  The baggy pants were still clammy, but Cassie gritted her teeth and pulled them on before shoving her feet into her straw-filled boots. Good thing, as a heavy tread sounded outside the cell just moments later.

  A key rattled in the lock. The door was flung open. Flickering torches sent up smoky trails as Inspector Li ducked under the low lintel.

  Cassie’s heart pounded. She couldn’t see outside through the smoke of the torches. Had modern science and ancient Zuni wisdom held true, or was it still snowing?

  She sensed Max coming to stand behind her. The soldiers had confiscated his sword and dagger, but he and Cassie both still had their silver cuffs. If it was still snowing, they might well have to abort the mission almost before it got started.

  She edged her right hand across her body, slid it under the opposite sleeve. Her fingers inched upward, toward the cuff.

  Max moved closer. She could feel him behind her, feel the tension radiating from his body until Inspector Li ended the suspense with a terse announcement.

  “The snow ceased to fall an hour ago.”

  He sounded almost disappointed, although his mood was hard to read with that drooping mustache and face that looked as if it hadn’t cracked a smile in the past century.

  “You will leave for Chang’an within the hour. The guards will take you to the latrines to relieve yourselves and wash, and to the mess for breakfast. Then I myself will escort you to the imperial palace.”

  Chapter 4

  A woman ruler is as unnatural as a hen crowing like a rooster at daybreak.

  —Confucius

  T he cavalcade left the Great Wall fortress in the thin gray light of dawn.

  Inspector Li rode at the head of the troop. He was mounted on a well-muscled chestnut with the sloping shoulders, strong joints and hard hooves of the Sanhe breed. The troops accompanying them were similarly mounted. Sanhe, Cassie knew from her intense mission prebrief, translated to “three rivers.” Appropriate, considering the sturdy horses were bred on the vast, grassy plain fed by the three rivers that also served as vital shipping arteries for China’s ancient capital.

  Max and Cassie were given similar mounts so their plodding camel wouldn’t slow the troop down. Thank God! Cassie was more than happy to have seen the last of Garbage Breath. She scrambled into the saddle of a Sanhe and took her place in the small cavalcade.

  Heavily armed soldiers rode in front and behind them. The troops were dressed uniformly in helmets, leather breastplates threaded with small steel disks and baggy trousers. The steel sections clinked in rhythm with the jingle of their bridles and stirrups.

  Inspector Li was apparently so sure of his troop’s muscle that he’d ordered the guards to return Max’s sword and dagger. Max strapped on the sword and shoved the dagger into its scabbard. Then—at last!—they were on their way to China’s ancient capital.

  The first part of the journey was almost straight down as they descended from the high mountain pass. Thick forests of pine and fragrant cypress shrouded the road on either side. Accumulated snow adorned the tree branches, as well as the roofs of the way stations they passed, but by midmorning the sun had taken some of the cold sting from the air.

  A final winding turn gave Cassie and Max their first glimpse of the broad plain at the base of the mountains. Wheat and soybean fields lying fallow in the winter sun stretched in an endless patchwork quilt. Interspersed among the fields were small farms, each with its own grove of mulberry trees. The branches were bare now but come spring their thin, glossy leaves would feed the worms that produced the gossamer thread woven into silk by the farmers’ wives.

  As the troop clattered along the road cutting straight as an arrow across the plain, the sun blazed bright in the winter sky. Cassie began to sweat under her cloak, woolen shirt and linen shift. Her stockinged feet swam inside the straw-filled boots. She itched to shed some of her layers, but had to wait until they made a short stop at noon to peel off her cloak and pluck out the insulating straw.

  Max removed his cloak, too, but kept the wolf pelt. The fur rode across his shoulders like a shaggy mantle. Cassie had to admit the thing made for a dramatic effect. So did Max. With his bristling blond beard and the long hair he’d tied back with a leather thong, he looked every inch the Viking warrior he was supposed to be.

  Li barely gave his men time to water the horses and gobble down a handful of boiled rice before issuing a terse order to remount. Cassie reached for her mount’s iron stirrup and started to climb into the saddle, but shrieking thigh muscles stopped her midlift.

  “Yikes!”

  Max whipped his head around. “What?”

  “I’m, uh, a little stiff.”

  She gripped the pommel with both hands and managed to swing into the hard wooden saddle. She could tell from Max’s sardonic expression it wasn’t a graceful move. Ignoring him, she shoved her other foot into the stirrup.

  “Next stop,” she announced with grim satisfaction, “the Imperial City!”

  Chang’ an rose out of the vast rolling plain like the fabled city of every ancient tale Cassie had ever read or heard. Its massive walls were visible from miles away, as were the multitiered roofs of its many temples and bell towers.

  She wasn’t surprised by its size or obvious splendor. Chang’an served as the capital of a enormously wealthy empire that stretched from the Pacific almost to India, and from Korea in the north to Vietnam and Burma in the south. Incredibly, the city supported a population of more than a million.

  At least half of the inhabitants seemed to be on the road, either going into or coming out of the walled city. The closer Inspector Li’s cavalcade got, the denser the traffic. Finally an impatient Li ordered two soldiers to dismount and march ahead, banging on cymbals to clear a path.

  “Make way! Make way for Inspector Li!”

  The dreaded title of “inspector” had more effect than the cymbals. Peddlers pushing handcarts, farmers driving wagons ladened with produce, even red-robed Buddhist monks threw fearful looks over their shoulders and edged aside.

  As the troop approached the walled city, Cassie spied tall mounds dotting the landscape to the north. Burial mounds, she realized with a gulp. Chinese emperors from as far back as the second century BC had built elaborate tombs in this fertile region—including the first Qin emperor, who’d had an army of larger-than-life-size terra-cotta warriors constructed to guard him in the afterlife.

  They were out there somewhere, those thousands upon thousands of clay figures, already buried in the mists of time and more than eight hundred years of changing dynasties. Amazing to think they would remain just a legend until 1974, when a farmer sinking a rod for a well would stumble on one of the greatest archaeological treasures of all time.

  “Make way for Inspector Li!”

  Preceded by the clash and clang of cymbals, the troop entered Chang’an through a massive gate topped by a guard tower painted bright red.

  The city was laid out in a grid. Its wide, tree-lined streets were aligned at angles as prescribed by the soothsayers to form precise city blocks. Each block formed a lively neighborhood, a hu tong, that boasted its own temples and bazaars and schools for young boys.

  On this bright winter day, people filled the broad streets. Cassie marveled at their rich cultural diversity as she
surveyed wealthy Chinese in fur-trimmed silk robes rubbing elbows with scholars in blue cotton tunics that reached to their slippered feet. There were foreigners, too, traders and explorers and envoys from distant lands who had followed the fabled Silk Road to its terminus here at Chang’an. Cassie spotted white-robed Muslims and black-bearded Hasidic Jews mingling with turbaned Indians and fierce-looking Mongols.

  Noise hammered at her from all sides as they rode toward the walls separating the Imperial City from the rest of Chang’an. Temple bells chimed. Deep-throated gongs boomed the hour. Merchants hawked their wares from open shop fronts, while monks chanted their prayers, acrobats clacked wooden balls in the air and what sounded like hundreds of birds whistled and tweeted from wicker cages in the bird market.

  The smells were just as intense. Incense from local temples, dumplings frying in vats of sizzling oil, steaming dung waiting for the street sweepers to collect it—all combined for a nose-twitching experience. Then their party passed through another massive gate, and the sheer size of the imperial palace drove everything else from Cassie’s mind.

  “Wow,” she murmured, awestruck.

  The palace complex constituted a city within a city, with an outer section lesser mortals could enter and an inner one restricted to the royal family and their servants. The cobbled outer court had to be at least two football fields in length. It was ringed by barracks for the imperial guards, temples, audience halls and the houses of wealthy nobles and high-ranking officials. Cassie was gawking openly at the richly adorned roofs and elaborate facades of some of these houses when Li halted his mount and swung out of the saddle.

  “At last,” she muttered as she and Max dismounted, as well. “I’m aching in muscles I never knew I had.”

  He sent her a quick frown, as if assessing whether her aches and pains could affect their mission. “I’ll see if I can scrounge some horse liniment later and rub you down.”

  “Sure. Just what I need to make a splash at the sophisticated Chinese court. Clothes reeking of camel and skin that smells of eau d’horse liniment.”

  His frown relaxed into a half grin. “Yeah, you are pretty aromatic.”

  Damn! What a difference when he dropped his tough-man persona and grinned like that. It did things to her insides. Hot, tingling things.

  To cover her absurd reaction, Cassie gave a snort. “Have you had a whiff of yourself lately, wolf man?”

  The banter helped ease some of her tension, but adrenaline rushed back with a vengeance when Inspector Li strode over to them.

  “You will wait here,” he informed Max. “I’ll send word to the empress of this gift you have brought her. If she deigns to accept it, I will accompany you into the reception rooms.”

  And take full credit for escorting the gift to the imperial palace, Cassie guessed shrewdly.

  She used the wait to visit one of the courtyard’s ornate fountains. Before facing the most powerful woman in the world, she needed to wash away the grime of their journey and a night spent on a dirt floor. Half-naked. With her bare butt nested on Max’s thighs.

  The memory of those dark, intimate hours bumped Cassie’s pulse up several notches. She stole a look at the man next to her, splashing water over his face and hands. To her profound disgust, her bird’s-eye view of his wide shoulders and rippling muscles worked a number on her insides again.

  Dammit! She had to stop doing this! Brody was Jerry’s friend. He’d made it clear last night he didn’t completely trust her. More to the point, he was her partner on this jump. No way she was repeating past mistakes by getting physical with him.

  Still, she couldn’t help edging closer to Max when Li and another man emerged from a pillared doorway almost an hour later. The inspector crooked an imperious finger at them.

  “Come! Our Most Heavenly Majesty, Empress Wu, has agreed to see you. Chief Eunuch Tai will escort us into her presence.”

  “Showtime,” Max murmured under his breath. “You ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be,” Cassie gulped.

  The man with Li towered over him by five or six inches. His head was shaved except for his topknot, which was held in place with gold pins. His exquisitely embroidered silk robe sheathed an impressive set of shoulders and bulging biceps. He must have developed those before he was castrated and ran out of testosterone, Cassie guessed.

  Unusual, since she’d read that most eunuchs at the Chinese court were castrated as young boys by parents hoping to secure a lucrative position for their son. As palace insiders, eunuchs could acquire power and wealth that often rivaled princes. She’d also read that half of the boys who went under the knife died from shock or blood loss or infection.

  Castration of young males wasn’t unique to China, of course. Nor was it confined to the ancient world. European opera buffs had thrilled to the soprano or mezzo-soprano notes of castrati well into the nineteenth century. Boys in the Vatican choir were emasculated right up until the 1870s to preserve their angelic voices.

  But the primary historical impetus behind the practice of employing eunuchs inside harems and palaces was to keep women chaste and subservient to one man. A sultan or king could have a hundred or more wives or concubines, but they serviced only him. By ensuring his women were watched and tended by eunuchs, the king could also ensure any children they produced sprang from his seed alone.

  This particular eunuch looked Cassie over with eyes both assessing and shrewd before bowing politely to Max.

  “I am Tai Kin Su, Chief Eunuch of the Lotus Court of the Imperial Palace. Please come with me.”

  He led them through a succession of corridors and audience chambers, each more sumptuous than the last. The predominant color was red. Pillars, tapestries, furnishings all glowed with that vibrant color, although the royal yellow grew more visible as they entered the main reception area.

  Finally they approached a massive pair of red doors studded with brass knobs set in rows of nine. At a nod from Tai, two guards grasped the doors’ brass rings.

  “On your knees,” the eunuch instructed calmly. “Keep your forehead to the floor as you crawl forward. Do not raise your face to the empress until she desires you to.”

  Inspector Li had already dropped to his knees. Cassie glanced at Max and saw he didn’t like the idea of kowtowing and crawling in any more than she did. Lifting her chin, she addressed Tai. “This is not my way.”

  Inspector Li whipped his head around. “Silence, slave! You will do as ordered.”

  Cassie ignored him. Folding her arms across her chest, she locked eyes with Tai. The inspector might have balls, but the eunuch had the power in this situation.

  “I am a princess in my own land and a respected shaman. You may drag me into the empress’s presence by my hair, but I will not crawl. Such is not my way.”

  Infuriated, Li leaped to his feet and lashed out with a bunched fist. Max blocked the blow with an upflung arm.

  “This woman is in my keeping until the empress deigns to accept her,” he told Li, steel in every word. “Until that time, no man but me touches her.”

  His face suffused with fury, Li turned to the eunuch for a decision.

  Tai’s gaze was locked on the silver cuff banding Max’s wrist. When Max dropped his arm, the eunuch’s shrewd eyes shifted to Cassie and swept from her tangle of dark red hair to her snow-stained boots.

  “A wise man,” he said finally, “adapts himself to circumstances, as water shapes itself to the vessel that contains it.”

  Huh? Cassie was still trying to figure out who was supposed to shape to what when the eunuch signaled the guards.

  “We proceed.”

  The massive red doors groaned open. Tai murmured to the ornately uniformed official just inside. The official rapped his staff on the floor three times and announced their presence in a booming voice.

  “Inspector Li of the Bureau of Imperial Oversight, Chief Eunuch Tai of the Lotus Court and Lord Bro-dai from the Land of the Night Sun, with the gift of a slave/seer for Your Most Heav
enly Majesty.”

  Li and Tai entered the hall on hands and knees, foreheads bumping the floor. When Max and Cassie walked in behind them, gasps rose from the scholars and officials already in the hall. More than one imperial guard reached for his sword. Then all eyes turned to the slender woman seated on a gold throne at the far end of the hall.

  Cassie’s first impression was that Wu Jao looked closer to thirty than the fifty Cassie knew her to be. Small and delicate, the empress exuded an aura of almost fragile beauty.

  It just showed how deceptive appearances could be. Those rosebud lips and doelike eyes masked a brilliant mind and a will of tempered steel, Cassie knew.

  The daughter of a high-ranking princess, Wu Jao had been taught to play the flute, sing, write and read the classics. At thirteen, she’d joined the court of the first Tang emperor as a fifth-level concubine. Her wit and charm had enchanted him and his son so much that when the father died, the son brought her back to court as his second-level concubine.

  In the years that followed, Wu bore Junior several sons, and oh, by the way, convinced him to execute his first empress and give her the title. Skilled at the game of power politics, she took the reins of government into her own hands following her husband’s stroke. He was still alive, but a mere figurehead, rarely brought out anymore even for ceremonial occasions.

  At age fifty, the woman was just reaching her prime, Cassie knew. After her husband’s death, Wu would put her third son on the throne, then depose him; then put her fourth son in power and depose him. Finally, she would declare herself sole and supreme ruler. When she died at the age of eighty-two, she would have ruled the vast Chinese empire with an iron fist for more than half a century.

  Assuming, of course, that Cassie and Max didn’t screw with history. Or lose their heads while attempting to screw with history. That possibility appeared more likely with each step they took.

  The empress watched them, her eyes unblinking beneath her elaborate headdress. It had to be at least a foot high, a complicated arrangement of braids and loops of glossy black hair adorned with gold and pearl ornaments. More pearls were draped around her neck. Ropes and ropes of them. So thick and lustrous they almost obscured the curvaceous breasts enticingly displayed by her low-cut silk gown.