The contents were dry and pale, nothing but ash and crumbs. Tsulin touched her fingertips to her husband’s remains, as if to prove to herself that they were real.
“I knew he was dead,” she said. “Before you came.”
Xhai frowned.
“Three years, he’s been gone. Three years since your Emperor took him away to war. But five months ago, when the cherry blossom was out along the river … I was drawing water, when Snowgoose began to howl. She sat down and howled all afternoon, until nightfall. She refused to come back to the yurts. I went home, and all the old dogs were howling too. I cast the yarrow sticks—I can do that—and they said: you will lose something of great value. I went to the graves of the ancestors, and I listened to their voices on the wind. The voices said: he is dead.” She stroked her thumb across her fingertips, the ash bleaching her gold. “When did he die?”
“Five months ago, at the Battle of the Red River,” he said, the hair prickling on his neck. The cherry blossom had been falling there, so much further south and east. These mysteries were beyond him.
She met his gaze, her eyes dark and liquid. “Three years I have been alone, and I broke my heart for him. Five months ago I witnessed the signs, and I mourned him again. I thought I had done with my heartbreak. Then you turn up. Now I must sorrow again.”
His eyes burned as if he’d rubbed them with salt. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Liwan made me promise. He said that if he were to die, I must find you and let you know. He said that I must give you this, so that you might marry again, and have children before you grow old.” He held out to her the third object from his pack: a small, loosely-wrapped piece of cloth. She took it from him, and uncovered a thong necklace; white beads strung along leather, of no obvious value.
“I put this around his neck on our wedding day,” she said softly. “And he gave me this in exchange.” She bared her right forearm, revealing a bracelet of carved white plates, like slips of ivory.
“It’s dog bone, is it?” Xhai asked. He wanted desperately to touch the soft skin of the inside of her elbow.
Tsulin nodded, tears trembling on her lowered lashes. “The dog symbolizes love,” she explained. “A dog will love you all its life, no matter if it is ill-treated or abandoned. It will always come home to you. Yesterday I went to the graves of the ancestors and I heard their voices again. They said: he will come back to you. I didn’t understand it.” She looked down at the pot of ashes. “Until now.”
Xhai’s throat felt swollen. “He loved his dogs. I mean—everyone else hated them, the ones that follow the army: they steal food and they …” He stopped. They eat the corpses on the battlefield. He didn’t want to tell Tsulin that. The memories were still too raw. “Liwan picked up a puppy in one of the villages we went through. Everyone thought he was crazy, but he kept it in the wagon and fed it from his own ration. He told me, ‘A man is not a man unless he has a dog that loves him.’”
She smiled—sadly, but the first real smile he’d seen on her face since their first meeting. “What happened to his puppy?”
“Um.” Xhai cleared his throat. “I killed it and burnt it with him on his pyre. To go with him into the afterlife. That was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?”
She nodded. “Yes. That was right.”
He passed his hand over his face, confession blurting out of his throat: “I feel worse about that dog than about all the men I killed in battle.”
For a long moment she stared at him, her eyes black pools that threatened to drown his world. Then she took the cremation pot in her hands and stood. “Come with me.”
♦♦♦
She led him out of the camp, such as remained of it now that all her family were leaving, and up toward the foothills. Snowgoose and a couple of other dogs trotted alongside. The sun was setting, and the green hills were turning gold. Xhai watched her from behind, not worrying about their destination, his chest full of heaviness and his eyes fixed on her slender form. When Tsulin looked back to check that he was still following, he saw that she was clutching the blue jar against her heart, nestled between her breasts, and the sight made his blood churn.
He did not understand this, how he felt. True, it had been far too long since he had lain with a woman, and the sages say that abstinence befouls a man’s soul and threatens his health—but Liwan was dead and she was his grieving widow. He should be feeling only compassion for her, and duty. Not this unspeakable desire. He wanted her. He ached for her—not simply to mount her and fill her with his seed, but to feel the silken brush of her bare skin against his, to bury his face between those gentle breasts, to feel her heart racing beneath his palm. It was as if every inch of his body had woken from a long sleep, ravenous with hunger. It was shameful beyond words.
She led him to a gate with an elaborately carved beam. It stood before a place of small hillocks and rock outcrops—a gate without a fence, black against the fading glory of the sky. Behind them the grass was short, cropped low by the goats and cattle and horses of the Ghan family. Beyond that gate, the grass grew long and lush. Xhai wondered if the herders kept their animals away, or if the beasts knew.
“Come,” said Tsulin, leading the way beneath the great lintel. The dogs did not accompany them. They followed a path crushed through the grass, into a tiny valley, up to one of the jutting outcrops of stone. “This is the burial ground of my family,” she told him.
“Do the ancestors speak to you tonight?” Xhai asked.
She went still, listening. The evening was without a breath of wind. Slowly she shook her head. “They are silent.” Then she pointed ahead. Wedged beneath an overhang was a stone slab, painted with characters that Xhai, despite all his scholarly education, could not read. “Help me move the stone.”
They knelt side by side in the grass to dig away the soil at the base and slide the heavy slab from its place. Where it had been, a black hole gaped; a natural cavity beneath the boulder, Xhai thought, but put to human use. Though the light was fading, he glimpsed several cremation urns inside.
“My father,” Tsulin said softly. She reached out and brushed her fingers across the glazed surfaces. “Our children.”
Liwan had never mentioned children.
“Rest with our ancestors, husband, and be at peace,” she whispered, setting the blue pot among the others. Xhai stood and moved away, giving her space to pray. He looked out across the darkening landscape and the blue gloaming. Early stars were emerging in the west. The evening was still, no breeze stirring the grass. He could feel his heartbeat, thudding in his chest.
When Tsulin had finished, he helped her replace the grave slab. Her face was pale in the shadows, but he had heard no weeping. They walked away a little.
“I didn’t know you’d had children,” he said softly.
She ran her hand across her head. “They were both born too early, and only half-made. One the second year, one the next, and then the soldiers came and took him away for the Emperor, so I never had a chance to give him another.” Her voice sounded hoarse. “I must have spoken to a widow-woman when I was small, my mother says, and been stricken barren. Now I have passed the widow’s curse on, to my children. To my husband, who is dead of it.”
The weight in his chest was jagged now. “No!” he protested. “You did not kill him; war took him. It is an insatiable thing. I have seen a thousand thousand men dead upon the battlefield—do you think your little curse did that?” He wanted to grab her and shake her. He wanted to seize her face and kiss it. “You did not curse him. Liwan spoke of you often, and always with love. He longed to return to you. You were a joy to him.”
Tsulin turned to him in the blue dusk. He could hear her breath, fast and shallow. She laid a hand on his breast and his heart crashed against it. She tangled the fingers of her other hand in the still-damp ends of his long hair. He clasped her around the waist, before he could think about it, and she pressed
against him, panting. His blood was roaring in his veins, and he was filled with both delight and the terror of teetering upon the edge of doing her a terrible wrong. The scent of her hair filled his head, driving out thought. Her body was pliant under his hands and he couldn’t tell if he was pushing her away or pulling her to him.
Then she reached down and grabbed his cock through his trousers, and his whole world fell apart. He didn’t need to see clearly to clasp her face and lift it, covering her lips with his kiss. She moaned into his mouth, her open palm writhing across the hardness of his shaft, and he staggered, pushing her back across the grass. Both her hands were suddenly at the drawstring of his trousers, pulling frantically, as he kissed her and kissed her and the breathless dusk whirled around them.
It was only when she bared him that he really believed it. Only then that he knew what he was doing. He laid her down in the long grass and yanked open her jacket to reveal those luscious breasts, soft as peaches. The scent of her skin was intoxicating; the ripe swell of her flesh beneath his mouth and the stiff pucker of her nipples drove him out of his senses. He sucked upon her even as his hands tore at her trousers, jerking them down over narrow hips, pulling off one of her boots and hurling it away in his haste to open her legs.
He found her sex, moist and open and soft. There was no question of finesse. Her hands scrabbled at his cock and balls, pulling him to her, squeezing his shaft like it was a spear and she was ready to kill someone with it. So he stabbed her to the core and felt her gasp and heave beneath him. Her heat was all around him, wet and slippery and exquisite; her legs embraced his hips. For a moment he froze, not daring to move. He felt her arch her spine, and heard her growl as she bit at his jaw.
“Yes!” she gasped.
It was like a fight to the death. Her body heaved beneath his. She was slighter and softer and so much weaker than him, but she refused to go limp. He was thrusting with all his weight, but still she fought him, her body growing more and more rigid as he drove in and out. And he didn’t want to hurt her, didn’t want to defile her, but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t tear himself away from the hunger of her mouth, and the fingernails that bit into his clenching buttocks, and the wet hot incredible need of her sex, the need of her body, the need of her lost days and her stolen love.
Until she start to shake, clamped rigid and locked around him, and she jerked and cried out like something dying, and then for a moment he paused because he thought that somehow he was hurting her, and then he knew he was going to die too; he could feel his death pouring through him like a red tide from his balls all the way up his spine. It was coming, coming, coming—he jerked out of her, desperate to spill on the green grass, but he’d lost control of this long ago and he erupted all over her belly and thighs.
Oh, he thought, as he fell through a star-filled void. I had forgotten what it’s like. How good.
“Liwan,” the woman beneath him groaned, and began to sob for the first time—racking wet sobs that went on and on.
Stunned at first, Xhai had no idea how to react. Back home, tears were a private thing. Comportment demanded that he respect her by leaving her—but this time instinct was stronger. He rolled off onto his side and pulled her into his embrace, cradling her against him as she wept into his chest. The scent of crushed grass was like a silken shroud, draping them from head to foot.
He stroked her hair, watching the stars come out, as she cried herself into silence.
♦♦♦
Tsulin’s yurt sat all alone when they got back to it, its walls pale under the narrow moon. No one from her family had lingered to say farewell, but Xhai still hesitated at the door.
“If I am found in your tent …?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said wearily. “I am a widow, already polluted. A widow may do as she wishes. And any man may go to her.”
No, he said inwardly, his jaw tightening. This is not kindly. I will not allow it.
She lit lamps of butter and hung them about the interior. Under their yellow flames her skin seemed to glow golden, and he found himself mesmerized by the play of light upon her smooth cheek. He’d expected the ache of his desire to fade now that he had shot his quiverful, but her flesh still seemed to draw at his. Xhai went to her and untied the sash from about her waist, peeling off her jacket, dropping her trousers to pool at her ankles. Only her jewelry remained: the necklace and the bracelet of bone. She did not resist him; she simply stood looking up at him as he ran his hands over her breasts and waist and hips, and only her nipples responded to his caress, tightening to points.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, the thickening edge of his voice betraying the urge he felt.
She shook her head, very slightly. “I’m too old to be beautiful.”
Certainly she was nothing like the tottering lotus-flower beauties of the Imperial Court, with their painted, sweetly vacant faces like those of children. He had never cared much for those. But Tsulin was lithe and strong, her feet firmly planted, her breasts warm and thrilling with life. He looked into her eyes and saw watchfulness and mistrust there. Well, and why should she not feel that way? he asked himself. We have known each other only a few hours, and I am not of her people, and I am a man, besides. And men, all men, lie to women. We dare not tell them what we truly feel. “Don’t you believe me?” he asked, taking her hand and pressing it to a cock that was already firming beneath the cloth. “Believe this one then.”
She seemed genuinely taken aback, brows arching. “Is he honest?” she murmured.
“To a fault.” Xhai’s lips brushed across hers, tasting her breath, as he twisted out of his own clothes, letting them fall. She looked him up and down as if seeing him for the first time. Her fingers drifted, exploring his body: his thickening shaft, the narrow trail of hair that ascended from his pubic mat, the many scars and blemishes of a man who had been to war. Old scars, white; newer ones, still pink and shiny. Scars of sword edges and arrow points and armor buckles, the knobbled bone of a rib shattered by a fall from his horse and badly healed. He did not mind letting her see, now.
“You are not what I expected … musician.”
“No?” He kissed her parted lips, pulling her up against the hot hard wall of his body.
“Such a lot of … So many …” She pulled away, looking into his face. “Tell me …”
“What?”
“Three years he lived without me. And so much happened to him. But you knew him. Tell me about Liwan. Tell me how you met.” Her eyes shone with unshed tears. “Tell me how he died.”
Xhai took a deep breath as the jagged weight in his chest rolled, then nodded. “Come here, and I will tell you,” he promised. He led her to a bed on a low pallet, and scooped her up to lay her down upon the quilt. The sight of her beneath him was enough to make him want to spear her again, right now, but he held back. Running his lips and the very tip of his tongue up the tender valley between her breasts, he murmured again, “I will tell you.”
And he did. He kissed her breasts and told her how he had met Liwan and spent the whole of that first night demanding songs from him. He circled her nipples over and over, and described his friend’s audience with the Emperor, Son of Heaven. He worked his way down the trembling plain of her belly and murmured about nights in mountains under pounding rain, and days on horseback crossing black deserts, and mornings of crisp fallen snow; about charges and ambushes and bravery and long hours of waiting—for the Emperor, for the enemy, for sunrises that never seemed to come—about evenings off-duty and drinking in inns, and that one night spent pacing their tent banging his head against a wall of lyrics that wouldn’t come to him even though His Imperial Highness wanted the song at dawn and Liwan could only suggest sillier and sillier rhymes until they were both breathless with panicked laughter. He told of a last, courageous battle, and of how Liwan had fallen defending him. He told her how, afterwards, the Emperor had commanded him to sing and he c
ould not, the guqin lying dumb in his hands, the notes broken in his throat.
All the while he spoke, he stroked her thighs and stirred her fleece with his breath and lapped at the unfurling peony of her sex, licking her clit and sucking upon her swelling folds until she was brimming with juices. Her taste was familiar but exotic, a pleasure recalled from ages long past; soft and ripe and fragrant as a peach, making his mouth water and his engorged cock press against the quilt. He made her quiver and stretch and moan, until his words were drowned in her flesh and there was only the sound of her heaving upon the bed and gasping. Her hands clawed at the quilt and she bucked beneath him, crying out in release.
I had forgotten that too, he said to himself, savoring the sharp bite of her juices on his cracked lips, and the particular ache at the back of the neck that comes of eating a woman. It has been so long.
He lifted himself onto braced arms, looking down the length of her body. Her skin shone and she looked more beautiful to him than any treasure of the Imperial Palace—and it was almost more than he could bear.
He had left a great deal out of his narrative of course. All the savagery and the pointless brutality of the long campaign. Much of the stupidity and frustration and the filth and the indignity. He had not told her that after the Battle of the Red River, when the Emperor commanded him to sing at the victory feast, and he would not, that he had been thrown into a dungeon cell. That he’d lain there for days and nights until His Imperial Majesty recalled his existence and had him brought forth before the throne once more, and ordered him again to sing. That he had croaked and shaken his head. That the headsman had been summoned forth with his great curved blade, and that only then, just before the steel was raised, had the Emperor asked him Why? That he had said, “I made a vow to Ghan Liwan, to tell his wife, and I have not kept it. The songs are gone from me.”
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