Andre Norton & Susan Shwartz - [Central Asia 01]

by Imperial Lady- A Fantasy of Han China (epub)

  Yuan Ti was a man of strange decisions and passions, Silver Snow decided. At one moment, he wanted to banish her; in the next, he would incite a war to keep her. He turned on his advisors like Mao Yen-shou, then rewarded those whom he had turned on—like her father.

  Silver Snow glanced at the rigid, unyielding Hsiung-nu. She rather thought that she would take her chances among them.

  “This one, as always, is obedient to your commands,” she told the Emperor. “But if she were permitted her own will, she would act as would best serve the Son of Heaven, who has done her the unutterable honor to make her a princess of Ch’in, the Middle Kingdom, and her father. To this one’s weak mind, desolate as she is to admit it, she might serve best as the shan-yu s first wife.”

  She bowed herself at the Emperor’s feet in farewell just as, long ago, she had bowed before her own father.

  The Son of Heaven clapped his hands. “You shall be sent to the Wall with all that befits your rank, lady: an imperial chariot, a mounted escort, musicians to enliven your journey, and whatever servants you require. You may bring companions, should you wish. We reserve only the worthy Li Ling, and we charge you to write to him and to your father, that we may profit from your observations.”

  The court murmured approval of his words. Then Yuan Ti stepped forward. “As for me, lady,” he said, his voice all but trembling, “once you leave, I shall issue an edict of mourning. The court will fast and wear white robes, as it did”—he drew a deep breath—“the last time that I lost you. And, once you leave Ch’in through the Jade Gate in the West, I decree that it shall ever afterward be called the Gate of Tears.”

  Wearied of this courtliness in a language of which he was but an imperfect master, the Hsiung-nu prince stepped forward. “How soon can the princess be ready to depart? We would pass through this Gate of Tears of yours before the frosts.”

  Once again Silver Snow glanced up at the Son of Heaven, whose eyes mutely urged delay. Then she looked over at Li Ling, who shook his head, almost imperceptibly. She did him—and herself—no favor by delaying, he clearly thought. Every day that she remained would be a temptation for the Son of Heaven to withdraw his consent to her going and embroil Ch’in in war.

  The Hsiung-nu, she understood, were restless, able always to lash up their felt tents and to journey to new pastures. Speed might be the most auspicious beginning of her new life among them. She nodded at Li Ling.

  “Behold: already, the princess is a dutiful wife to the shan-yu. As soon as the princess’ chariot is made ready,” Li Ling stepped forward and spoke in the Hsiung-nu’s tongue, “she will depart.”

  Seated in the lavishly equipped imperial chariot, Silver Snow could not help but contrast her previous “wedding journey” with the one she now took. Then, shabbily dressed, she had climbed into an ox-cart, her few belongings rolled into it or strapped on pack animals. There had been fewer than ten tens of torches and no musicians, no sounds at all save the clicking and ringing harness of the mounts of her escort and the official in whose train she rode, the least and loneliest. So she had ridden to the bright heart of the Middle Kingdom, the Inner Courts of Ch’ang-an, and had thought never to leave.

  Now she went journeying once again. No, she thought. That was not true. The Hsiung-nu were nomads. Henceforward, her life would be one long journey, and never again would she be confined within the walls of a city or a palace— or within any walls at all.

  There was no loving, grieving father to say farewell to Silver Snow this time, but Li Ling stood by to oversee the preparations. For the first time that Silver Snow could remember, he had dressed in the full magnificence of silks and sables available to a ranking eunuch, as if to do her honor. It was hard to recognize in the ornately robed official the same friend and teacher who had called, the night before, wearing a worn scholar’s robe, and had presented gifts that, homely as they were, Silver Snow and Willow both esteemed more than furs, jades, or silk. For Silver Snow, he had strips of wood and treated silk, a supply of fine brushes, and a new inkstone. For Willow, he had pouches of dried herbs at which she sniffed and nodded, eyes bright.

  He locked her into the chariot, as one must always lock a bride, and presented the key to Vughturoi, who received it as something strange and not wholly welcome. Then, at a gesture, musicians struck up a tune that managed simultaneously to suggest both cheers and wailing.

  They puffed, piped, and drummed as her chariot rolled out of the confines of the Palace. Behind her came her companions, behind them an immense baggage train. Packed amid the silks, the gold, the precious spices was a treasure older than them all: the burial armor fashioned fit for an Empress. The Son of Heaven had sent it with her, since she would not stay to use it. Though the sun had risen, torchbearers ran beside it, and outside the yawning gates, she could see a crowd of people, waiting to witness her passing, guarded by soldiers both of Ch’in and the Hsiung-nu.

  No sooner than the palace gates closed behind her, she knew that Yuan Ti would keep his vow and plunge the court into the deepest mourning for the lady whom first his indifference, then his oath, had taken from him. She suspected that many in her party—the ladies who had been detailed to accompany her to the Wall—felt that they too risked death in traveling that far from Ch’ang-an and the Son of Heaven. She almost thought that she could hear their weeping; certainly Willow had commented scathingly on fine ladies who used herbs and cosmetics to mask their terror and their tears.

  Neither the Emperor nor the ladies who were her unwilling companions could know that Silver Snow regarded her journey as escape from prison.

  The wedding procession, if one could call it that, wound through the city and out through the Western Gate.

  Willow hissed a curse, and Silver Snow roused from the reverie in which she rode with her eyes turned ever to the West.

  “Why such heavy words?” she asked her maid in mild reproof. “In fact, why curse at all?”

  Willow simply pointed.

  Leering from a spike on the Western Gate, the head of Mao Yen-shou was planted, the last witness in the city to her departure.

  Was this a spectacle such as he would have admired? She hardly thought so.

  Silver Snow shivered, then turned her gaze back to the West. Already her eyes and mind were fixed on what might lie ahead of her. High above the rumble of horsemen and the clamor of the Ch’in musicians rose the bamboo flutes of the Hsiung-nu, plaintive, free, and more than a trifle wild.

  = 12 =

  As Silver Snow traveled north and west toward the meeting with her future lord and people, she journeyed through summer into autumn. Behind her, she left a mourning court; but she herself did not lament as her train of guards, ladies, musicians, servants, and Hsiung-nu wound slowly toward the grasslands. Gradually the grass withered, and the scrub that covered the ground turned orange, then bronze, just as Silver Snow remembered it from her earliest childhood. She could not help but compare this journey with her last. When she had left her father’s house for Ch’ang-an, she and Willow had counted themselves lucky to have clean, unpatched quilts and adequate food. A fire was a luxury.

  Now, she traveled in an imperial chariot that made the one in which her former escort had traveled seem as shabby and clumsy as an ox-cart. She wore robes of quilted silk and (when there was need) a cape and hood lined with satin and wrought of fur so soft and deep that her hands sank into it. Should she express the desire to stop for an hour or a day along the line of march, she was instantly heeded and surrounded with every tender attention. Did the lady require rice wine or litchi—or the presence of her maid or a flute-player?

  So many questions; so many tiny, wearisome decisions; and so many calls upon her attention to praise, to mediate, or to chastise just when she wanted to look out at the land, which, day by day, assumed the familiar aspect of her beloved northlands! She might just as well be immured at court, she thought, because her ladies insisted on behaving as if they had not left the Palace. She would be relieved, she realized, to
see the last of them.

  Viewing the Hsiung-nu, supposedly her future subjects, brought her more satisfaction. Though gasps and squeaks from her ladies (when they were not weeping or exclaiming in fear at what was unfamiliar—as nearly everything was) greeted her actions, she questioned her guards, both the men of Ch’in and of the plains. Each day, her command of her new people’s language grew better. She also insisted on riding out, at least for a brief time, every day. At first, she had perforce to ride the disgraceful donkey that the Hsiung-nu had deemed fit for a sheltered princess. Later, as they saw that she neither wobbled in her saddle nor complained, she was raised to the dignity of a horse; the grunts and brief words she overheard from the Hsiung-nu in her train convinced her that her riding, if nothing else, met with their approval.

  Day by day, the weather grew steadily cooler, and the wind that swept down from the great bowl of Heaven to ruffle the fur of her cloak and hood became fiercer and dryer. In it, she could smell drying grass and the bruised, hardy plants of the North.

  They had had music from sundown late into the night. Flutes and zithers had played, and her maids had sung. Willow passed wine and sweetmeats about on delicate plates; and, for once, no one had grimaced or recoiled from her. Seated in her tent, basking in the light of many lamps, Silver Snow, her maids, and her companions had drawn together, the music linking them in a unity that was the warmer, the finer for the wind blowing outside and the fact that it had not long to last.

  Finally, as the lamps burned lower, casting shadows on the tent’s taut walls, Silver Snow had let herself be coaxed into singing.

  “This is a song of the North,” she explained, and then she had sung, the wind outside and the drums within fit counterpoint for her sweet, reedy voice.

  Abruptly one of the ladies gasped, hand to mouth. Roused from a trance of music-making. Silver Snow started and broke off her song.

  “Forgive this wretched, foolish one, Imperial Lady,” wept the woman. “But outside, outside, I saw a shadow, and . . . oh, it frightened me!”

  That had ended the night’s music. Silver Snow had had much ado to prevent that lady’s cries and tears from spreading like fire across dried-out brush. When she could spare time to look up, the shadow of which the woman had spoken was gone, assuming that it—one particular shadow among the shadow-dance that played on the tent’s walls—had ever been there.

  Shortly afterward, she had dismissed all of her other attendants, laid aside her heavy garments, and sighed in the peace and solitude.

  * “Good hunting, Elder Sister,” whispered Willow as the girl sank down on a pallet at the foot of Silver Snow’s own bed-place.

  In the light of the one tiny jade lamp that had been left to be extinguished, she rose upon one elbow to study her maid. Willow’s eyes glowed green, reflecting the lamplight, filled with the desire to run free and to hunt. Perhaps she wanted to roam free forever, Silver Snow thought with a pang.

  Then Willow blinked, and her eyes were only those of a young woman’s—tired and red-rimmed from the touch of wind and dust.

  “No,” whispered the maid. “I do not speak for myself, but for you. This is a royal hunt on which we go; you hunt out a future for yourself, and I—I follow at your heels.”

  Then she smiled, showing white teeth that were incongruously, delicately perfect in such an undistinguished face.

  The next day, they spotted the Yellow River, the huge, unruly dragon of a river that swept across Ch’in, bringing life to the lands—or disastrous floods. They would follow the river even farther north, to the rocky pass where Yellow River met the Purple Barrier of the Great Wall, where Ch’in ended and the grasslands of the Hsiung-nu began.

  For now, the river was quiescent, a strong, wide, rippling thing that extended from where they rode to the horizon.

  A flicker of motion on its nearer bank drew Silver Snow’s attention, as, apparently, it drew the attention of the Hsiung-nu, who nodded among themselves, and reached for bows and quivers.

  “Riverbirds,” whispered Willow, coming up beside her mistress’ horse on the donkey that sweated and sidled but, nevertheless, bore her. “Did I not tell you, lady, that we would have good hunting?”

  “Quick, Willow, ride back and fetch my bow,” Silver Snow ordered. Unworthy, unseemly it might be to boast, but she would like to bring down at least one of those waterfowl before the Hsiung-nu, especially before that taciturn Prince Vughturoi. They should see that their new queen could provide food as well as eat it, and that she could ably defend herself.

  Besides, some omen-making part of her mind recalled that she had been hunting wildfowl the day that the summons had come from the Palace. To shoot down another bird today would be an auspicious event.

  Willow laughed mischievously, handed over the bundle that she had strapped to her saddle, and rode away. Silver Snow unrolled it: there lay a quiver of arrows and the bow that Silver Snow had borne in the North and with which she had slain the bandits during her journey to the capital. Silver Snow tested the string, nodded at its faint, sweet twang, and ignored the Hsiung-nu, who, for once, were startled into grins at the sight of the Imperial Lady, bow in hand.

  A fox’s bark yapped from the riverbank, panicking the waterfowl and sending them crying and flapping into the air. The Hsiung-nu drew as one, and Silver Snow drew with them, firing once, then again, almost as rapidly as they.

  Birds fell, some upon the land, some splashing into the shallows; and the Hsiung-nu rode forward to retrieve them. Their shouts of triumph rose, then changed. Quickly Prince Vughturoi rode back from the riverbank and gestured, as if begging—as much as Hsiung-nu ever could beg—permission to approach her. Draped before him on his saddle were two plump fowl. One had been felled with two arrows, so close together that their feathers touched. The second had been a clean kill—one arrow, shot neatly through the bird’s neck.

  “Lady,” he said, pointing to the bird that had been killed with two arrows. He looked puzzled, so puzzled that, clearly, he gave no thought to the possibility that Silver Snow might flinch at the presence of blood and death, “This arrow I know. It is of the fletching common in the grasslands. But this arrow—and this one, a fine shot, too—I do not know at all. Is there a marksman among the soldiers of Ch’in who ride among us?”

  Silver Snow reached out one tiny hand to touch the arrow. Its fletching was indeed familiar, the work of her father’s bowyer. She reached into her quiver, and brought out the arrow’s mate. Then she smiled and, very quickly, glanced away.

  Finally they reached the pass where great river and Great Wall met. Strangely enough, in this sheltered place, the winds were fainter, warmer, and the grass still was green. Because the Hsiung-nu for whom Prince Vughturoi had sent had not yet arrived, soldiers and servants pitched tents and unpacked for what might prove to be a long stay.

  Silver Snow dismounted without aid. After days in the saddle, she had regained all of the hardiness that she had feared that her time in the Palace might have cost her. Nevertheless, she thought, as she straightened her cloak, the land here was fair, if bleak. She would use the respite to write to her fathers, she thought, with a wry smile, all three of them: Chao Kuang, who had begotten her; Li Ling, his friend, who had saved her from despair and had taught her; and Yuan Ti, the Son of Heaven, who had adopted her to toss her away, yet who had, in the end, grieved over his decision. That was her obligation; it was also her pleasure. Thanks to Li Ling, she even had silk fit for the task.

  She was not, however, to have uninterrupted tranquillity for the task. The instant that Silver Snow’s tent was pitched and that her ladies were free to come to her, they broke out in tears and wails of grief and fear.

  Silver Snow sighed. Willow winced. The Hsiung-nu and Ch’in soldiers, not faced with the need for self-control, grimaced and grinned. Silver Snow bent over the most distraught of the ladies.

  “What troubles you?” she crooned in the voice that they all swore was as sweet as litchi. (When they had called her the Shadow
ed One, however, they had condemned that very same voice as reedy and shrill; best not think of that.) “You are not ill; we shall rest here; and soon you shall return to your home.”

  The mention of home made the wailing break out afresh. That was it, then. The Hsiung-nu ladies had not yet arrived, and now this flock of affrighted palace ladies feared that they never would. In that case, perforce, it would be their obligation to accompany Silver Snow to the court of the Hsiung-nu, from which, they were sure, there could be no return.

  “I shall die!” shrieked one woman.

  “Did you see the grass?” another lamented. “Green, ever green, like the tombs of exiles, watered with tears.”

  “We will never see our homes again!”

  “They will carry us off to the West, and we will never again see the Palace, or a garden, or my little courtyard with the golden carp in the pool. And they will make us eat our meat raw!”

  Had their fear not been so real, and so likely to drive them into a frenzy, Silver Snow might have found it comical. But she was tired and apprehensive herself, and she wanted only to rest and compose her thoughts before she wrote out an account of her days for the men whom she revered most in all the world.

  “This is my work, Elder Sister.” Blessed Willow burrowed into her baggage for the herbs that Li Ling had given her, hastened to the fire, and began to steep a soothing decoction. Her eyes met her mistress’, and Silver Snow nodded.

  At least what few trees remained were stunted, flimsy things that would not hold the weight of a lady who sought to avoid worse by hanging herself with her silken sash. “We are too close to the river here, too close to the rocks,” she murmured. She would have to have the guard doubled around the ladies’ quarters until they turned back toward Ch’ang-an.