“I’d ask you what happened,” said your mother, “but you’ve never been one for words. So I will tell you this.”
Now the solemnity crept back in; now her words were heavy as the first rain of the season.
“What you did was foolish. Beyond foolish. If a man strapped raw meat to his person and ran to the Emperor’s dogs—that would be less foolish. You are children; there are grown warriors who’d never dream of fighting a tiger. You lived this time. Next time, you will not. It is by the Mother’s intervention alone that you live.”
I wanted to say something. At the base of my throat, I felt it building. I wanted to tell her that, no, it was not the Mother’s grace, it was my own skill at riding, it was my horse, it was your blade striking the final blow. It was us.
But no, no, it was not the time.
So I sat. I sat and I listened as your mother outlined all the things we’d done wrong. As she told us again and again how foolish we’d been.
“There are bandits in those woods,” she said. “What would you have done if they came for you?”
“Shot them,” you said. However long she’d lectured you before I awoke, you could take no more. “She would’ve shot them, Mother. As she shot the tiger. Repeatedly.”
“Men are not tigers,” O-Shizuru snapped. “I’d rather fight a beast. At least they have dignity. Those men would’ve cut your horse’s legs out from—”
I yelped and drew the covers around my knees. My brown face went lighter, my mouth hung open, my breath left me in harsh gasps.
Your mother reached out a hand. No doubt it was meant to be reassuring, but the thought of my horse being hurt was still on my mind—the image of her crumpling as some godless bandit cut into her. Her cries of pain rang in my ears. I pressed my head against the pillows to drown it out.
You whispered something to your mother.
The Queen of Crows eyed me and sighed. “Shefali-lun,” she said, “no one is going to hurt your horse.”
I peeked out from my self-imposed exile and wrinkled my face.
Your mother pinched the bridge of her nose. “Don’t give me that look,” she said. “You are on our lands. If anyone hurt your horse while you were lying here, I would execute them myself.”
Slowly, slowly, I began to relax. But the look in her eyes still brooked no arguments.
“This changes nothing,” she said. “However incredible it is you slew the tiger, it was a foolish thing to do. You should’ve run, Shefali. You should’ve taken Shizuka up on your horse and the two of you should’ve gotten away, somewhere safe.”
I hung my head.
“People will tell you what you did was brave,” Shizuru said. “My husband among them. But you must remember how easily it could’ve gone wrong. This wound you bear will scar. When you feel stiff skin tugging in your shoulder—you will remember.”
And I drew the sheets closer to myself. I clutched them close. My throat tightened. So many things I wished to say. As she spoke, I watched you squirm in your seat. Each time you parted your lips, your eyes fell on my bandages, and you fell silent.
When your mother left, so did you. Urgent business, she said, that the both of you had to attend to. I watched you go. You looked back at me as you walked out of the room.
And then I sat up. I watched the moon rise. I thought of the tiger somewhere in the castle, rotting. What was I going to do with it? I’d never heard of anyone eating a tiger. An old Qorin poem came to mind. The Kharsa’s daughter has tiger-striped arms.… I could not remember the rest. I racked my brains for it, but I might’ve been milking a stallion for all the good it did me. Eventually my frustration surrendered to exhaustion. I fell asleep and dreamed of the steppes.
At least until you crept into bed next to me.
Still half asleep, I thought I must’ve dreamed you—your hair unbound, your skin flush with anger or embarrassment or …
“Shefali,” you said, lying next to me. How small you were for an eight-year-old, how tall I was. “I’m sorry.”
I must’ve been dreaming.
“I should’ve moved faster.”
I must have been dreaming. Those words would never leave you in the waking world.
“I won’t let it happen again.”
Sleep, then.
* * *
I WENT TO court more than once. I did not like it. There, in the halls of jade, I was stared at by scholars and advisers and sycophants.
“Ah, O-Shizuka-shon!” they might say, when they saw you. They’d bow so low that their beards swiped against the ground. “The Tiger-Slayer! Heaven’s blood runs pure in you.”
“I did not kill the tiger,” you’d say. You said this each time we went to court, at least five times. “I struck the last blow, but I did not kill it.”
“Do not be so modest,” they might say. Or “Your humility is an inspiration.”
With a sharp gesture, you’d wave them away. Under your breath, you would mutter curses at them. A bit louder, you would apologize to me on their behalf.
But me?
“Oshiro-sun,” they might say, if they were being charitable. “Yun” was far more common from them than “sun,” as if I possessed the Traitor’s cunning simply for being born darker than they were. “Your father is a fine man, and your brother fares well.”
But these courtiers never seemed to have any words for me. Nothing for Shefali. No praise. Did they know my name? Was I simply Oshiro to them? I must be. Not once during those summer months did I hear my personal name, save from your family.
And that honorific—“sun.” I do not pretend to understand Hokkaran honorifics. Some things are beyond explanation. My people have twenty different words for the color brown, most of which relate to the color of a horse’s coat. Your people have eight sets of four honorifics, one for each god. Using the wrong one in the wrong context was as bad as spitting in the eye of a person’s mother right in front of them. To make matters worse, half of them sounded the same.
I knew only a few. “Sun” was the lowest form of the Grandmother’s honorific. Depending on the person speaking it, it might be affectionate. Most of the time, however, it indicated that the speaker thought themselves far above the subject.
The other ones I knew were “mor,” which was the highest for the Mother; “lor,” the second highest for the Sister and your father’s favorite; “tono,” used for the Emperor alone; and “shon.”
Shon was the Daughter’s highest. Who better to wear it than the girl born on the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year, at Last Bell?
You are doomed to be Shizuka-shon all your life, as I am destined to be Barsalai-sul for all of mine.
Honorifics were the least of our concerns, however. If we were annoyed by them, that meant we were at court, and if we were at court, there were other matters to distract us. Court itself, for instance. I had no clothes to wear. Your father was kind enough to buy me a new dress, for I was too tall to use any of yours. It was not so bad, for a Hokkaran dress—green, with painted horses along the sleeves and hem.
There was the matter of etiquette, of which I knew little. I solved that problem by letting you do all the talking, and bowing only when you glanced toward me expectantly.
And though it involved me little, there was also the matter of what people were saying.
* * *
AS THE SPACE between a hammer and a pot, that was the court in those days. Emperor Yoshimoto could do little to stop the worries faced by his people.
“We will increase patrols along the Wall of Flowers,” he said.
Two weeks later, those patrols were found mangled and broken just outside the Wall.
“We will consult the oracles,” he said.
When the Hokkaran oracle was brought in to read the future in her vapors, she frothed at the mouth, screamed, and died on the gilded floor.
And then came Yoshimoto’s famous motto:
“We will endure.”
It became something of a saying among
the peasants.
A farmer struck his hoe against the ground—a new hoe he had made himself with fresh wood not a week ago. Sure enough, it would splinter. He’d pick up the metal end and heft it high overhead. After getting his wife’s attention, he would grin a sad, gap-toothed grin.
“We will endure,” he’d say.
A fisherman strikes out to sea. He takes with him a good net and a good rod. He sails far out and casts his net. Soon it is filled with pink salmon, flopping about, taking their last breaths. Just as he closes his eyes to thank the kami for his bounty, he smells something off. He opens his eyes.
The fish are rotten.
“We will endure” is his bitter laugh.
Already the words began to haunt us.
* * *
NOT LONG AFTER I started healing, your mother left for another one of her missions. The magistrates out in Shiratori were having issues with a rebellion—they’d already caught the leader, but wanted your mother to make an example of him for the crowd. She did not look happy when she left—although your father managed to make her smile, whispering some secret promise in her ear.
Your father sat at the head of the dinner table and spoke blessings over our food. He teased you constantly. In his easy way, he would smile and call you the most read woman in Fujino.
“After all,” he said. “Your notices hang on every door. Your poetry is clear and simple, as refreshing as spring water—”
“Father,” you’d say, scrunching up your face as if you’d tasted something sour. “They are your brother’s words.”
For, yes, your uncle forced you to write all his notices. WE WILL ENDURE, eight hundred times each morning.
“Ah, yes,” Itsuki said. He held his teacup beneath his nose. Its sweet aromas filled his lungs and lent his smile a warmer air. “But your brushstrokes are the poetry.”
You palmed your face and I laughed. O-Itsuki watched you with a bemused look. This was how he always was: calm and relaxed, somehow above stress or worry. I cannot remember a wrinkle crossing his face, save for the lines winging his eyes when he laughed. And he laughed often. Whenever he and Shizuru attended court, he could not contain himself—always a twinkle in his eye, always some unheard joke rolling around his mind.
Many nights we passed like that, speaking with your father. The jokes were a welcome change from his brother’s proclamations. That was the year your uncle announced the eightfold path to plenty. All farmers had to bury specific stones attuned to their patron god in their fields—one every li, in each direction. For farms less than a li square, eight idols had to be buried, each one-eighth of the distance apart.
A superstitious gesture at best, meant to play on current fears. Your uncle claimed that it was Hokkaro’s lack of faith that prompted the Heavenly Family’s abandonment. Only proper veneration would bring them back. Anyone who failed to perform their pious duties would face Imperial justice.
Of course, burying things in a field like that, planting things the way he said to plant them, following all those rules …
I am no farmer, Shizuka. When I die and you leave me out for the vultures—that is the closest I shall come to farming, for flowers will grow where I last lay. But even I saw starving commoners curse your uncle.
Oh, when we were eight, it was not so bad. When we were eight, one could eke out a living, just barely.
But do you remember, Shizuka, when we traveled after—?
I am getting ahead of myself. That part, too, will come.
I had my own set of rooms in Fujino, but that did not stop me from visiting yours. I slept in my own bed perhaps twice in the entire three seasons I was with you.
In the dark of night, when the moon was high, I worked on my project. I’d had the tiger’s pelt brought up to me. With my clumsy hands, I sewed and cut and sewed and cut. The end result was not going to be impressive—but it would be mine.
My mother arrived on the twenty-second of Tsu-Shao. With her came about a third of the Burqila clan, including two of my aunts. And Otgar, of course. I suspect she would’ve come even if she was in the sands at the time. I met them at the gates on my horse.
Otgar came riding up next to my mother. In the absence of my brother, she was a capable interpreter. All that time spent in our ger clued her in to my mother’s language of gestures.
“Needlenose!” she shouted in Qorin. “You live! I heard a tiger ate you!”
You blinked. You sat on your horse next to me. I do not think you’d seen other Qorin before, or at least not so many. Otgar’s loud, long greeting—several times longer in Qorin than it would’ve been in Hokkaran—might’ve startled you.
I waved at her as she pulled in. She clapped me hard on the shoulder and mussed my hair. A little over a year it’d been since I saw her, yet in that time she’d grown into her body far more than I had. Seeing her wide face, her red cheeks, her beautifully embroidered deel, made me feel more at home already. Then she took me close and pressed her nose against my cheeks.
She recoiled. “You smell like flowers!”
I laughed and pointed to you. You drew back.
“What is the matter?” you said. “Why was that girl smelling you?”
“To make sure she is the same Shefali,” Otgar said. Time lightened her Hokkaran accent; she almost sounded native. “Smell never changes, no matter how long she is with pale foreigners.”
Something changed in your posture. “You speak Hokkaran,” you said.
“I do!” she said. “I am Dorbentei Otgar Bayasaaq, and it is my honor to serve as Burqila’s interpreter.”
Next to us, our mothers exchanged their customary greetings. Despite the crowd, my mother embraced yours, held her tight, with her fingers in O-Shizuru’s hair.
But I was more concerned with what Otgar had said.
“Dorbentei,” I repeated. “You are an adult?”
Otgar beamed from ear to notched ear, proudly displaying her missing tooth. “I am!” she said. “When I learned to speak Surian. No braids yet, but soon!”
“I am O-Shizuka,” you said, though no one had asked. “Daughter of O-Itsuki and O-Shizuru, Imperial Niece, Blood of Heaven—”
“Yes, yes,” said Otgar, waving you off. “You are Barsatoq. We know of you already, we have heard the stories.”
I tilted my head. Barsatoq. An adult name, like Dorbentei. But where Dorbentei meant “Possessing Three,” Barsatoq meant …
Well, it meant “Tiger Thief.”
I’m sorry you had to find out this way.
“So you’ve discussed me!” you said. Color filled your cheeks, and something of your old demeanor returned. “Yes, yes, I am Barsatoq Shizuka.”
I covered my mouth rather than laugh. Tiger Thief. My clan bestowed upon you the great honor of an adult name—something only a handful of foreigners received—and they named you Tiger Thief. You were so quick to embrace it! Someone must’ve told you what a mark of acceptance it is to be named by the Qorin.
And yet.
Tiger Thief.
I was saved from hiding my amusement when my mother rode over. As animals sense storms, so I sensed her coming, and all the mirth fell from my face. My mother’s eyes were vipers, her quick gestures as fangs in my flesh. Otgar, too, lost her mirth.
“Shefali,” she said, “Burqila is displeased that you would act in such a foolhardy fashion.”
“She is your daughter, Alshara,” said O-Shizuru. “You are lucky she did not stuff the tiger with fireworks and set it soaring through the sky.”
Alshara shook her head. Another series of gestures, though less sharp.
“Burqila will host a banquet tonight, in her ger, to celebrate her daughter’s well-being,” Otgar said. “You are all welcome.”
Good lamb stew! A warm fire, with my clan sitting around it! My grandmother’s nagging; my aunts beating more felt into the ger; my uncles trying to convince them to do other things instead. The acrid smell of the fire pit, strips of meat hanging just above it to cure. Wind whistling o
utside, rattling the small red door. I’d get to see our hunting dogs again, too—how big were they now? The russet bitch must’ve had her pups.
And the kumaq. By Grandmother Sky, the kumaq!
I bounced in my saddle the whole way to camp, no matter how upset my mother was.
Home.
I was going home again.
WHEN IN DREAMS I GO TO YOU
Home, for me, means two things. The first is you. Above all, you are my white felt ger, you are my bright red door, and you are my warm fire. But if I cannot have you, then I will have silver—the silver of the steppes’ swaying grass, the silver of winter, the silver clouds coloring Grandmother Sky.
In Fujino, you see, everything is green. One look outside your window will tell you why. Your Imperial Forest is so deep a green that it reminds me of the Father’s ocean—and it is only one of many. Your province is covered in too many to name. Your father once called Fujino the land of sun and pine.
He also called it the land of rolling hills.
I hate hills, Shizuka. Did you know? You cannot build a ger on a hill; everything will slide right off your furniture. You cannot camp at the bottom of a hill; the rain can get in and extinguish your fire. You cannot wrestle on a hill without your cousin tumbling down and cracking her head on a rock, as I learned when Otgar tossed me off one when we were ten.
But I admit there is more to it than my own opinion. The sanvaartains tell us that you can find true peace only when Sky and Earth are mirrors of each other. That is when you encounter eternity. Standing at the base of the Rokhon, with Gurkhan Khalsar behind you—is there anything more infinite than that? That is, I think, my favorite spot in the whole world.
And to think, I never got to show it to you.
Well. As far as hills go, and green, Oshiro is a far sight better than Fujino. Oshiro exists on the gentlest slope in the Empire. What few trees mark the landscape are bright white, or warm brown. The people are the same. In Fujino, it’s my appearance that makes people stare: my hay-colored hair, my bowed legs, my skin so dark and cheeks so wide. In Oshiro, I see those features staring back at me on Hokkaran faces—a guard with flecks of green in his eyes, babies born with blue marks on their bottoms and cheeks meant for nibbling. Oshiro is not home, no, for it will always remind me of my father—but I love it when it reminds me of my mother.
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