"
Shandai
is my brother!"
Li-Mei's voice is louder than she's intended it to be. They are alone, after all, only the wolves around them in a vast expanse, the sun just risen. But her heart is racing. "That is what you are trying to say? His name? Shen Tai?"
He turns to look at her. There is light, pale and benevolent, warming the land, mist is rising, dispersing. She can see him clearly for the first time, and she knows who this man has to be.
Tai had told them what happened. Well, he'd told their father, with Li-Mei among the willow trees near the stream.
This man with the stiff, ground-covering gait and the lightless eyes will surely be the one assailed by shaman-magic all those years ago, who had almost died. Or half-died. Or had been made into some ... thing suspended between living and dead.
Tai hadn't been able to tell their father which, so Li-Mei didn't know. Couldn't know, even looking now. But what fit was the identity, the remembered name--Meshag, son of Hurok--like the puzzle pieces of wooden toys her mother or Second Mother would sometimes bring home for her on market days long ago.
She should be terrified, Li-Mei thinks. He could be a monstrous spirit, a predator like his wolves, malignant, devouring.
He isn't, though, and so she isn't. He hasn't touched her. The wolves haven't.
He is ... he is rescuing me
, the thought comes. And he is rescuing her, not the true princess, the emperor's daughter, because--
"You are taking me away because of what Tai did?"
He has been staring at her, accepting her gaze in the growing light. After another long moment, his untied hair moving in the breeze, straying across his face, he nods his head once, down and back up.
"Yes," he says. "Shan ... Shendai."
Li-Mei feels herself beginning to tremble, is suddenly much too close to tears. She hates that, but it is one thing to be fairly sure of a guess, it is another to be standing here with a spirit-figure and wolves, and be told it is true.
"How did you know I was with them? How did you know to come?"
She has always been able to think of questions to ask. Her voice is smaller. She is afraid of this answer, for the same reasons, most likely, that the Bogu riders were afraid of him last night.
Magic, whether the foretellings of the School of Unrestricted Night in Xinan, the potions and incantations of the alchemists, or darker, bloodier doings up here with mirrors and drums ... this is not easy ground.
And the story her brother told, all those years ago, is still the worst she's ever heard in her life.
Perhaps the man senses that? Or perhaps for an entirely different reason, he only shakes his heavy head and does not answer. Instead, he takes the leather flask from his hip and extends it to her, his arm straight out.
She doesn't repeat her question. She takes the water, drinks. She pours some into one hand and washes her face with it, a little pointlessly. She wonders if he'll be angry at the waste, but he says nothing.
His eyes are deeply disturbing. If she thinks about how they became so black and flat she will be afraid.
He isn't dead,
she tells herself. Repeats it, within, as if for emphasis. She may need to keep telling herself this, she realizes.
He says, awkwardly, but in her tongue, "Cave not far. You rest. I find horses."
She looks around at the grassland stretching, all directions. The lake is gone now, behind them. There is only grass, very tall, lit by the risen sun. The mist has burned away.
"A cave?" she says. "In
this
?"
For a moment she thinks he is amused. His mouth twitches, one side only. Nothing in the eyes. Light is swallowed there; it dies.
She hands him back the flask. He seals it, shoulders it, turns to walk on. She follows.
Shandai
.
The world, Li-Mei decides, is a stranger place than any sage's teachings can encompass. You have to wonder why the gods in their nine heavens have made it this way.
They reach the cave quite soon.
She'd missed the depression in the landscape ahead of them. From the edge, she sees this is a shallow valley, with another small lake within it. There are wildflowers on the banks. On the far side, the slope back up is steeper.
They descend and start across. It is full morning now, the air is warmer. At the lake Meshag fills his flask. Li-Mei washes her face properly, shakes out and reties her hair. He watches her, expressionless.
He is not dead,
she tells herself.
The lead wolf takes them to the cave at the eastern end. Its entrance is entirely hidden by tall grass. She'd never have seen it. No one who didn't know this was here would see it.
This is not the first time, Li-Mei realizes, that the man and these animals have been here. He gestures. She finds herself crawling, elbows and knees, holding down fear, into a wolf lair.
The tunnel is narrow, a birth chamber, the smell of wolf all around, and small bones. She feels these, with her hands, under her knees. Panic begins to rise in the blackness, but then the cave opens up. She is in a space with rough stone walls and a ceiling she can't even make out. She stands. It is still dark but not completely so. Light filters in farther up, openings high on the cliff face. She can see.
The strangeness of the world.
Meshag comes through the tunnel. The wolves have not followed them. On guard outside? She doesn't know. How could she know? She is in a wolf cave in the Bogu grasslands beyond the borders of the world. Her life ... her life has carried her here.
The strangeness ...
He hands her a satchel and the flask. "Here is food. Not leave. Wait. My brother will come after us, very soon."
My brother.
His brother is the kaghan's heir. The man she is supposed to marry. She is a Kitan princess, a treaty-bride.
She looks at the man beside her. His speech, she decides, is already clearer. Can the dead
learn
things?
He isn't dead, she reminds herself.
"Where are you going?" she asks, trying to keep apprehension from her voice. Alone, a cave in wilderness, wolves.
He looks impatient. It is almost a relief to see such a normal expression--if you don't look at the eyes.
"Horses. I told before."
He had. She nods. Tries, again, to assemble facts she can work with. She can't say why it matters, but it does. "Your brother. You are opposing him? For me? For ... for Shen Tai? For
my
brother?"
There is enough light for her to see that his eyes remain flat. There is nothing to find in them. It makes her consider how much of what she's known--or thought she knew--of any person has come from their eyes.
"Yes," he says, finally.
But he's taken so long she decides it isn't entirely true, this reply. That might be an error she's making. He might have simply been trying to decide
whether
to tell her. But she still feels ...
"What would he do to you? Your brother?"
Again, he stares. Again, a hesitation.
He says, "He wants me destroyed. He has never found me. Now he will think he can."
Destroyed.
Not killed. But it might be just language again, words. She is working hard.
"He thinks he can find you by following me?"
He nods, that single down and up. "All of us. The wolves. I have allowed myself to be seen."
"Oh. And you haven't done that? Before?"
"Not so near him. Or his shamans. Not difficult. Grasslands are large."
You might imagine you saw a smile there, almost.
She lowers her head, thinking.
She looks up again. She says, "I am grateful. You took ... you are taking a great risk. For me." She bows. Twice, right fist in left hand. She has not done so yet to him, and it is proper. They may call her a princess but she isn't, and it doesn't matter, anyhow.
Meshag (she needs to start using the name, she thinks) only looks at her. She sees that he is not discomfited by her gesture.
He was the kaghan's heir,
she thinks.
She is nowhere near her home.
He says, quietly, "I wish him destroyed, also."
Li-Mei blinks. He looks at her, dead-eyed, bare-chested, hair to his waist, utterly strange, in this cave where they stand, faint light filtering from above.
He says, "He did this to me. My brother."
And it begins, piece by puzzle piece, to come clearer.
HE HAS NOT YET RETURNED. It is now, she judges, well into the afternoon, though it is difficult to measure time inside a cave. There is more light filtering down now, the sun is higher. She has eaten, has even dozed fitfully, lying on earth and pebbles, her head pillowed awkwardly on the satchel. She is obviously not a princess if she can do that.
Awakened by what was probably an imagined sound, she's untied and then retied her hair, used a little of the water to wash her hands again.
She is not to go outside. She can ignore this--she's ignored so many instructions through her life--but she isn't inclined to do so. Nor does it occur to her to run away.
For one thing, she has no idea where to go. For another, the man she's been sent to marry is looking for her. She has no doubt of that, and she doesn't want to be found. She doesn't want to live her life on these steppes. She may end up with no choice (short of death), but for the moment, at least, there appears to be a glimmering of one, like glow-worms in a night dell, or a cave.
She has no idea what Meshag intends to do, but he is helping her away, and that is a start, isn't it? It might get her killed, or he might decide to claim her body as a prize in a war with his brother, take her right here on earth and stone. But what control does she have, in any of this?
What she'd
prefer
(it feels an absurd word) is to be with the empress still, serving her, even exiled from the Ta-Ming. Or, even better, to be home right now at this beginning of summer. She can picture it too well. Not a helpful channel of thought or memory.
She is sitting, hands around drawn-up knees. She permits herself to cry (no one can see), and then she stops.
She looks around for what must be the fiftieth time: the low, narrow tunnel leading out, the curved cave walls rising towards light spilling softly down from the openings on the one side. Stones and pebbles, bones scattered. The wolves will have needed to eat, feed their cubs. She shivers. There is one other tunnel, larger than the entranceway, leading farther in. She'd seen it on first entry here.
She can't say why she decides to explore it now. Anxiety, a desire to
do
something, make a decision, however trivial. Patience is not a skill she has. Her mother used to talk to her about it.
She finds she can stand in the second tunnel if she bends over. The air seems all right as she goes. She isn't sure how she'll know when it isn't. She keeps her hands on the rough walls to either side and strains her eyes, for the light begins to fade.
It is a short distance, actually. Another birthing passage, she thinks, though she can't say why that thought has come to her, twice now.
She straightens in a second chamber, not as large, or as high. It is colder. She can hear, faintly, the sound of water dripping.
Something else is different. There is no wolf smell here. She doesn't know why. Wouldn't they extend their lair as far from outside as they could? Protect the cubs? What is it that has kept them away? And does that mean she shouldn't be here either? She doesn't know. The answers are too remote from any life she's lived.
Then, as her eyes adjust to fainter light, Li-Mei sees what lies in this chamber.
Both hands go to her mouth, as if to lock in sound. As if a gasp or cry would be sacrilege. Her next thought is that she might know, after all, why the animals have not come here. For this must be--surely it must be--a place of power.
On the wall in front of her, dim in the darkness, but clearly conjured forth, Li-Mei sees horses.
Innumerable, jumbled chaotically, piled on each other all the way up into shadow. Full-bodied, half-forms, some with only heads and necks and manes, in a racing, tumbling, spilling tumult. A herd, all facing the same way,
moving
the same way, deeper in, as if thundering across the curved cave walls. And she knows, she
knows
, in the moment of seeing, the moment they emerge from darkness on the wall, that these painted, surging figures are unimaginably old.
She turns, in the centre of a cascade. On the opposite wall is another herd, galloping the same direction, the horses superimposed upon each other in wild, profligate intensity, so vital, so vivid, even in barely sufficient light, that she can imagine sounds, the drumming of hooves on hard ground. The horses of the Bogu steppes.
But before the Bogu tribes were here, she thinks. There are no men on these walls and the horses are untamed, free, flowing like a river in spate towards the eastern end of the cave, deeper in--where there is a third tunnel, she now sees.
Something rises within her, primitive and absolute, imperative, to tell her she will
not
go in there. It is not for her. She does not belong, and she knows it.
High above that slit of an entranceway, the largest by far of all the painted horses looms: a stallion, deep-chested, red-brown, almost crimson, its sex clearly shown. And on its body, all over it--and on this one, only--Li-Mei sees the imprint of human hands laid on in a pale-coloured paint, as if branding or tattooing the horse.
She doesn't understand.
She does not ever, in her life, expect to understand.
But she feels an appallingly ancient force here, and senses within herself, a yearning to claim or possess it. She is certain that those who placed their handprints on this wall, on the painted body of this king-horse, whether they did so ages ago or have come recently through these tunnels, were paying tribute, homage, to this herd.
And perhaps to those who put these horses here, leading the way deeper in.
She will not follow them there. She is not such a person, and is too far from home. There is a barrier in her mind where that third tunnel begins. It is not an opening she can take. She has not led a life guided by magic, infused or entwined with it. She doesn't like that world, did not, even at court--alchemists hovering, stroking narrow beards, astrologers mumbling over charts.
Still, she looks at these horses, unable to stop turning and turning, aware that she's becoming dizzied, overwhelmed, consumed by the profusion, the
richness
here. There is so much power on these walls, humbling, evoking awe, enough to make someone weep.
She has a sense of time stretching, back and back so far it cannot be grasped. Not by her, at any rate. Not by Shen Li-Mei, only daughter of the Kitan general Shen Gao. She wonders, suddenly, what her father would have said had he been with her in this hidden place. A hard thought, because if he were alive she wouldn't