knew
she was. A music more precious than any coins anyone could give. He heard sadness, sweet and slow, in the plucked strings, and thought about how a beautiful woman, from within her sheltered, easeful life of luxury and power, was offering sorrow to the spring night, for what had been done to him.
Qin listened, claimed unconditionally by love. He imagined that even the stars were still and listening, above the haze and lights of Xinan. Eventually the music stopped and the night street was quiet. A dog barked, far away.
CHAPTER XX
A
s he had promised her, they see the Kitan fortress before sunrise. Even in the night and far away, it is imposing.
It is another unsettling moment for Li-Mei, among so many: looking under stars at something her own people have built here, this heavy, squared-off structure on the grass. Something set solidly, walls rising. An assertion about permanence in a world where the presence of mankind was transitory, lying lightly on the earth. Everything carried with you where you went.
What did it mean, wanting to proclaim this permanence? Was it better, or wiser--a new thought for her--to be a people who knew there was no such thing?
It is as if, she thinks, looking at the fortress her people have erected, some giant, heavenly civil servant had taken his scroll-stamp--the seal he used to signify he'd read a document--and dropped it on the grass, and left it there.
There is something so unnatural, so foreign, about the walled fort being here that she misses the important thing.
Meshag does not. He mutters something beside her, under his breath in his own tongue, and then, more clearly, he says, "It is empty."
She looks quickly over at him. "How do you know?"
"No torches. No one on the walls. The pastures, there should be night guards for the horses. Something has happened." He stares ahead. They are on a rise of land, the fortress lies in a shallow valley.
Meshag makes a sound to his horse. "Come," he says to her. "I must see." Fearfully, hating her fear, she follows him down.
The fortress is even larger than she'd realized, which means it is farther away. There is a hint of grey in the sky as they finally come up to it. Li-Mei looks to left and right, and now she can see their wolves.
This close, she can see the strangeness of the fort, the thing he understood right away. There is no one here at all. Not on the wall walks, not above the gates, in the squared corner towers. This is a hollow structure, lifeless. She shivers.
Meshag dismounts. He walks to a fenced pasture ahead of them. Goes to the gate, which hangs open, unlatched. It creaks in the wind, banging at intervals against the post. A thin sound. She sees him kneel, then walk a distance south and kneel again. He stands and looks that way.
He turns and walks towards the main gate of the fort. It is far enough that she loses sight of him against the looming walls, in the dark beyond the pasture. She sits her horse, beside wolves, and feels fear blow through her like a wind.
At length, she sees him walking back, the loping, rigid stride. He mounts up. His face is never easy to read, but she thinks she sees concern in it, for the first time.
"When did they leave?" she asks. She knows that is what he's been trying to determine.
"Only two days," he says. "Towards the Wall. I do not know why. We must ride quickly now."
They ride quickly. They are galloping the horses up out of the valley along the southern ridge, the sun about to rise, when they are attacked.
It is called the raider's hour on the steppe, though that is not something Li-Mei has any way of knowing. Attacks in darkness can become confused, chaotic, random. Daylight undermines surprise. Twilight and dawn are--for hunters of any kind--the best times.
Li-Mei is able to piece events together only fitfully, and only afterwards. She experiences the attack in flashes, images, cries cut off, the screaming of horses.
She is sprawled on the ground before she even understands they are being attacked. He must have pushed her down, she realizes. She looks up, a hand to her mouth, from deep grass. Three, no, four now, of the attackers fall before they even come close.
Meshag's movements are as smooth as they were when he shot the swan. He is shooting men now, and it is the same. Sighting, release, another arrow nocked and fired. He keeps his horse moving, wheeling. The raiders have bows, too, she sees--that is why he pushed her down. There are a dozen of them, at least, or there were. One more falls, even as she watches. The others move nearer, screaming, but there is something strange about their horses, they rear and wheel, hard to control.
She is in the grass. They can see her horse, but not her. She doesn't know who these are. Shuoki? Or the pursuing Bogu, come upon them? This is a battle, she has time to think. This was her father's world all his life. Men die in battle. And women, if they find themselves in the wrong place.
Two riders come thundering towards her, whipping their mounts into control, tracking her by her own horse. She can feel the earth vibrate. They are close. She is going to scream. These are not Bogu. Their hair is short, shaved on both sides, long in the middle, there is yellow paint on their faces. They are near enough for her to see this, and understand that these painted features may be her last sight, under nine heavens.
Then the wolves rise up.
They rise from the grasslands that were theirs to rule before men came with their families and herds, whether treading lightly or trying--hopelessly?--to set wooden structures down to endure as a stamp upon the land.
And when the wolves appear from hiding, she realizes how many more of them there are than she's been aware of in these days of journeying. She's seen only the nearest of them--the lead wolf, a handful of others. But there are fifty or more, rising like grey death in the dawn. They have been hidden by the tall grass, are not any more.
They go straight for the Shuoki horses, panicking them wildly into screams and rigid, bucking halts. The horses thrash, kicking out, but to no avail, for there are fewer than ten riders left now, and five times as many wolves, and there is a man (if he is a man) shooting steadily, lethally at them, again and again. And the wolves are his.
Li-Mei sees a yellow-painted Shuoki fall very close to her. She hears something crack as he hits the ground. He screams in pain, in throat-raw terror. Four wolves are on him. She looks away, burying her face in the earth. She hears the man stop screaming, she doesn't watch it happen. Snuffling sounds, snarling. Then another sound she never forgets: flesh being torn, ripped away.
Nothing frightens her more than wolves.
She would be dead or taken if they were not here.
The world is not something to be understood. It is vanity, illusion to even try.
Her body is shaking where she lies. She can't control it. And then, as suddenly as the first cries came, and the terrifying vision of those riders, there is stillness again. The light of morning. Dawn wind. Li-Mei hears birdsong, amazingly.
She makes herself sit up, then wishes she had not.
Beside her, much too near, the dead Shuoki is being devoured. He is blood and meat. The wolves snap and grunt, biting down, snarling at each other.
She is afraid she is going to be sick and, with the thought, she is, on her knees in the grass, emptied out in spasms.
A shadow falls. She looks up quickly.
Meshag extends one of the water flasks. She sits up. Takes it and unstoppers it. She drinks and spits, does so again, heedless of dignity or grace or any such concepts from another world. She drinks again, swallows this time. Then she pours water into her hand and wipes her face. Does that again, too, almost defiantly. Not everything is lost, she tells herself. Not unless you let it be.
"Come," Meshag says to her. "We take four horses. We can change, ride more fast."
"Will ... will there be more of these?"
"Shuoki? Might be. Soldiers have gone. Shuoki come to see why."
"Do we know why?"
He shakes his head.
"Come," he says again. He reaches a hand. She gives him back the stoppered flask, but though he takes it and shoulders it, he puts his hand out again, and she understands that he is helping her get up.
HE CHOOSES two more horses for each of them. The Shuoki horses have scattered, but are well trained and have not gone far. She waits by her own mount, and watches him. He reclaims his arrows, first, approaches one Shuoki horse, examines and leaves it, takes another. She has no idea how he's making these choices.
Around her, hideously, the wolves are feeding on the dead.
She remembers from another life Tai telling their father (she is in the trees, listening) how the Bogu take their dead out on the grass, away from the tribe, to be devoured under the sky, souls sent back that way.
The sky is very blue, the wind milder today.
He has left her a flask. She drinks again, but only a little, to take the bad taste from her mouth.
She watches him ride back. He has four horses looped to each other, tied to his own. He doesn't appear to say anything at all, but suddenly wolves spring up and lope away, to be lost in the grass.
Li-Mei takes her reins and does the leap (not graceful) she's taught herself to get up on a horse without his aid. When you lose your access to pride in almost all things, perhaps you find it somewhere else? She says, "Shouldn't two of them be tied behind mine, to make it easier?"
"Not easier. We must go."
"Wait. Please!"
He does wait. The sun is washing the land in morning light. His eyes are dark, nothing comes back from them.
"Forgive me," she says. "I told you, when I don't understand, it makes me fearful. I am better when I know things."
He says nothing.
She says, "Can you, do you control wolves? Do they follow you?"
He looks away, north, the way they've come. Says nothing for so long she thinks he's chosen not to answer, but he hasn't moved yet. She hears birds singing. Looks up, almost involuntarily, for a swan.
He says, "Not all. One pack. This one."
The lead wolf is near them again; he is always close to Li-Mei. She looks at him. Fights a new horror and an old fear.
She turns back to Meshag, the black eyes. The wolf's are so much brighter. The man is waiting. She says only, "Thank you."
He twitches his reins and she follows him south, leaving the dead behind under birds and the sky.
UNDER STARS, that same night. They have ridden all day, two brief halts. No cooking fires, berries only, but they've stopped by a pond this time. Li-Mei takes off her clothes and bathes in the dark: a need to wash away the memory of flesh being shredded, the sound it made.
After dressing again, she asks him, "What you said before? About the wolves? This is because of what was done to you?"
It is easier to ask in the night.
He has been crouching in the grass, after watering the horses. She sees him look away. She says, "I'm sorry. You don't have to--"
He says, "Shaman in north was making me a wolf-soul. Bound to him. His command? Hard magic, bad. Not ... not done. Wolf his totem creature. He summoned a wolf to come. Your brother killed him as he was doing this. I was ... I am caught between."
"Between?"
There are frogs in the pond. She hears them croaking in the night. He says, "Man and wolf. This body and the other."
The other.
She looks over, against her will. The lead wolf is in the grass, the grey shape. She'd seen him tearing flesh at sunrise, blood dripping from those jaws.
The animal looks back at her, steadily. She can barely make it out but these eyes, unlike Meshag's, seem to shine. A fearful sensation comes over Li-Mei, and the realization that it would be wrong,
wrong
for her to push him more, to ask for more.
She lowers her head. Her hair is wet, she feels it dripping down her back, but the night is mild. She says, "I am sorry. Perhaps it would have been better if Tai had not--"
"No!" he says strongly. She looks up quickly, startled. He stands, a shape against horizon and stars. "Better this than what I would have been. I am ... I have choices. If that shaman bind me, I am only his, and then die. Shandai gave me this."
She looks up at him.
He says, "I
choose
to come for you. To honour Shan ... Shendai."
"And after? After this?" She had just decided not to ask more questions.
He makes his one-shoulder shrug.
She looks over at the wolf again, a shadow more than something you can see. There is a question she cannot ask.
"Ride now?"
He actually puts it as a question.
"Thank you," she says.
Li-Mei gets up and walks over and mounts one of her horses, by herself. They are changing mounts every time they stop. Just before sunrise he shoots a second swan, but a third one, following behind, wheels away west, very high.
Someone had a wolf for a totem, she thinks. Someone has a swan.
YOU CAN FALL ASLEEP on a horse, but not when it is galloping. Li-Mei collapses into an aching, fitful slumber whenever he allows a halt. She knows why he's pushing so hard, since shooting the second swan, but body and mind have their demands.
She lies on her back in shorter grass now. Consciousness reasserts, recedes. She has been dreaming of swinging--the swing in the garden at home--arcing higher and higher among spring blossoms, back and forth. She doesn't know who is pushing her, she never looks to see, but she is not afraid.
The pushing is Meshag, shaking her shoulder.
She opens her eyes. Pale light. Morning. He hands her the water flask, gestures towards the saddlebag beside her. More berries. If there are further days of nothing but this, Li-Mei thinks, a rabbit eaten raw might begin to seem appealing. Then she remembers the wolves and the Shuoki, and that thought slides away.
She drinks, splashes water on her hands and face. Takes a fistful of the berries, and then does it again. She has learned to avoid the unripe ones, picks them out. She
is
a Kitai princess, isn't she?
She's too weary to be amused by her own irony.
She gets to her feet. Her legs hurt, and her back. Meshag is already mounted. He is scanning the sky as it brightens. She does the same. Nothing to be seen. Another fresh day, high clouds. She goes to the horse he's freed from the line for her. She flexes stiff limbs and gets herself into the saddle. She's become better at this, she thinks.
She looks at him.
"It will change now," he says.
"What do you mean?"
"The land. You will see. We are leaving the steppe. Your Wall is not far."
Even fatigued as she is, this makes her heart beat faster. Just the words. The Wall means Kitai, and an exile's return, if they can get through it to the other side. He'd said they could.
We are leaving the steppe.
She looks back, turning in the saddle. As far as she can see under the risen sun and the high sky the grass stretches, yellow-green, darker green, tall, moving in the breeze. There is a sound to its swaying, and that sound has been a part of her existence since the Bogu claimed her. Even in the sedan chair she'd heard it, incessantly. The murmur of the steppe.
Gazing north, her eyes filled with this vista, imagining how far it goes, she thinks,