Читать книгу: «Under Heaven»

CHAPTER II

Bytsan sri Nespo was furious with himself, to the point of humiliation. He knew what his father would have said, and in what tone, had he witnessed this shame.

He had just bowed—far too deferentially—when the Kitan, having removed his stupid hat for some reason, said he was honoured that the Lion knew his name in Rygyal, so far away in glory.

But it was a gracious thing to say, and Bytsan had found himself bowing, hand wrapped around fist in their fashion (not that of his own people), before he was able to stop himself. Perhaps it had been the hat, after all, the deliberate self-exposure of that gesture.

The Kitan could do such things to you, or this one could.

Just when you’d decided, one more time, that they were all about their centre-of-the-world arrogance, they could say and do something like this from within the breeding and courtesy they donned like a cloak—while clutching a completely ridiculous straw hat.

What did you do when that happened? Ignore it? Treat it as decadence, softness, a false courtesy, unworthy of note on ground where Taguran soldiers had fought and died?

Bytsan wasn’t able to do that. A softness of his own, perhaps. It might even affect his career. Although what defined military promotion these days—with warfare limited to occasional skirmishes—was more about whom you knew in higher ranks, had gotten drunk with once or twice, or had allowed to seduce you when you were too young to know better, or could pretend as much.

In order to be judged on courage, on how you fought, there had to be fighting, didn’t there?

Peacetime was good for Tagur, for borders and trade and roads and raising new temples, for harvests and full granaries and seeing sons grow up instead of learning they were lying in mounds of corpses, as here by Kuala Nor.

But that same peace played havoc with an ambitious soldier’s hopes of using courage and initiative as his methods of advancement.

Not that he was going to talk about that with a Kitan. There were limits: inward borders in addition to the ones with fortresses defending them.

But if he was going to be honest about it, the court in Rygyal knew his name now, as well, because of this Shen Tai, this unprepossessing figure with the courteous voice and the deep-set eyes.

Bytsan stole an appraising glance. The Kitan couldn’t be called a soft city-scholar any more: two years of punishing labour in a mountain meadow had dealt with that. He was lean and hard, his skin weathered, hands scratched and callused. And Bytsan knew the man had been a soldier for a time. It had occurred to him—more than a year ago—that this one might even know how to fight. There were two swords in his cabin.

It didn’t matter. The Kitan would be leaving soon, his life entirely changed by the letter he was holding.

Bytsan’s life as well. He was to be given leave from his post when this Kitan left for home. He was reassigned to Dosmad Fortress, south and east, on the border, with the sole and specific responsibility—in the name of the Princess Cheng-wan—of implementing his own suggestion regarding her gift.

Initiative, he had decided, could involve more than leading a flanking attack in a cavalry fight. There were other sorts of flanking manoeuvres: the kind that might even get you out of a backwater fort in a mountain pass above a hundred thousand ghosts.

That last was another thing he didn’t like, and this he’d even admitted to the Kitan once: the ghosts terrified him as much as they did every soldier who came with him bringing the wagon and supplies.

Shen Tai had been quick to say that his own people from Iron Gate Pass were exactly the same: stopping for the night safely east of here when they came up the valley, timing their arrival for late morning just as Bytsan did, working hastily to unload his supplies and do whatever tasks they’d assigned themselves—and then gone. Gone from the lake and the white bones before darkfall, even in winter when night came swiftly. Even in a snowstorm once, Shen Tai had said. Refusing shelter in his cabin.

Bytsan had done that, too. Better ice and snow in a mountain pass than the howling presence of the bitter, unburied dead who could poison your soul, blight the life of any child you fathered, drive you mad.

The Kitan beside him didn’t appear to be a madman, but that was the prevailing explanation among Bytsan’s soldiers at the fort. Probably at Iron Gate, too. Something two outpost armies could agree upon? Or was that just an easy way of dealing with someone being more courageous than you were?

You could fight him to test that, of course. Gnam wanted to, had been spoiling for it even before they’d come down from the pass. Bytsan had briefly harboured the unworthy thought that he’d like to see that challenge. Only briefly: if the Kitan died, there went his own flanking move away from here.

Shen Tai put his absurd hat back on as Bytsan told him what they were going to do in an effort to keep him alive long enough to get to Xinan and decide how to deal with his horses.

Because the man was right—of course he was right—he’d be killed ten times over for that many Sardian horses if he simply tried to herd them back east openly.

It was an absurd, wildly extravagant gift, but being absurd and extravagant was the privilege of royalty, wasn’t it?

He thought about saying that to the other man, but refrained. He wasn’t sure why, but it might have been that Shen Tai really did look shaken, rereading the scroll again, visibly unsettled for the first time since Bytsan had been coming here.

They walked back to the cabin. Bytsan supervised the unpacking and storing of supplies—metal chests and tight wooden boxes for the food, to defeat the rats. He made another joke about wine and the long evenings. Gnam and Adar had begun stacking firewood, against the cabin wall. Gnam worked fiercely, sweating in his unnecessary armour, channelling fury—which was perfectly all right with his captain. Anger in a soldier could be used.

It was soon enough done, the sun still high, just starting west. Summer’s approach made the run down to the lake easier in obvious ways. Bytsan lingered long enough for a cup of wine (warmed in the Kitan fashion) with Shen Tai, then bade him a brisk farewell. The soldiers were already restless. The other man was still distracted, uneasy. It showed, behind the eternal mask of courtesy.

Bytsan could hardly blame him.

Two hundred and fifty horses, the White Jade Princess had decreed. The sort of overwrought conceit only someone living in a palace all her life could devise. The king had approved it, however.

It was never wise, Bytsan had decided on his way here from the fort, to underestimate the influence of women at a court.

He’d considered saying that, too, over the cup of wine, but had elected not to.

There would be one last supply trip in a month’s time, then life would change for both of them. They might never see each other again. Probably would not. Better not to do anything so foolish as confide in the other man, or acknowledge more than curiosity and a rationed measure of respect.

The cart was lighter on the way back, of course, the bullock quicker heading home. So were the soldiers, putting the lake and the dead behind them.

Three of his men started a song as they left the meadow and began to wind their way up. Bytsan paused in the afternoon light at the switchback where he always did, and looked down. You might call Kuala Nor beautiful in late spring—if you knew nothing about it.

His gaze swept across the blue water to the nesting birds—an absurd number of them. You could fire an arrow in the air over that way and kill three with one shot. If the arrow had room to fall. He allowed himself a smile. He was glad to be leaving, too, no denying it.

He looked across the meadow bowl, north towards the far, framing mountains, range beyond range. The tale of his people was that blue-faced demons, gigantic and malevolent, had dwelled in those distant peaks from the beginning of the world and had only been barred from the Tagur plateau by the gods, who had thrown up other mountains against them, wrapped in magic. The range they were re-entering now, where their small fortress sat, was one of these.

The gods themselves, dazzling and violent, lived much farther south, beyond Rygyal, above the transcendent peaks that touched the foothills of heaven, and no man had ever climbed them.

Bytsan’s gaze fell upon the burial mounds across the lake, on the far side of the meadow. They lay against the pine woods, west of the Kitan’s cabin, three long rows of them now, two years’ worth of bonegraves in hard ground.

Shen Tai was digging already, he saw, working beyond the last of them in the third row. He hadn’t waited for the Tagurans to leave the meadow. Bytsan watched him, small in the distance: bend and shovel, bend and shovel.

He looked at the cabin set against that same northern slope, saw the pen they’d built for the two goats, the freshly stacked firewood against one wall. He finished his sweep by turning east, to the valley through which this strange, solitary Kitan had come to Kuala Nor, and along which he would return.

“Something’s moving there,” Gnam said beside him, looking the same way. He pointed. Bytsan stared, narrowing his eyes, and then he saw it, too.

He’d gone back to digging the pit he’d started two days ago, end of the third row in from the trees, because that was what he did here. And because he felt that if he didn’t keep himself moving, working to exhaustion today, the chaos of his thoughts—almost feverish, after so long a quiet time—would overwhelm him.

There was always the wine Bytsan had brought, another access, like a crooked, lamplit laneway in the North District of Xinan, to the blurred borders of oblivion. The wine would be there at day’s end, waiting. No one else was coming to drink it.

Or so he’d thought, carrying his shovel to work, but the world today was simply not fitting itself to a steady two-year routine.

Standing up, stretching his back, and removing the maligned hat to mop at his forehead, Tai saw figures coming from the east over the tall green grass.

They were already out of the canyon, in the open on the meadow. That meant they had to have been visible for some time, he just hadn’t noticed. Why should he notice? Why even look? No one came here but the two sets of troops from the forts, full moon, new moon.

There were two of them, he saw, on small horses, a third horse carrying their gear behind. They moved slowly, not hurrying. Perhaps tired. The sun was starting west, its light fell upon them, making them vivid in the late-day’s glowing.

It wasn’t time for supplies from Iron Gate. He’d just said farewell to Bytsan and the Taguran soldiers. And when men did arrive, it wasn’t just a pair of them with no cart. And—most certainly—they did not reach the lake in the later part of the day, when they’d have to stay with him overnight or be outside among the dead after dark.

This, clearly, was a day marked for change in his stars.

They were still some distance away, the travellers. Tai stared for another moment, then shouldered his shovel, picked up his quiver and bow—carried against wolves and for shots at a bird for dinner—and started towards his cabin, to be waiting for them there.

A matter of simple courtesy, respect shown visitors to one’s home, wherever it might be in the world, even here beyond borders. He felt his pulse quickening as he walked, beating to meet the world’s pulse, coming back to him.

Chou Yan had expected his friend to be changed, in both appearance and manner, if he was even alive after two years out here. He’d been preparing for terrible tidings, had talked about it with his travelling companion, not that she ever replied.

Then at Iron Gate Pass—that wretched fortress here at the world’s end—they’d told him Tai was still among the living, or had been a little while ago when they’d taken supplies to him by the lake. Yan had immediately drunk several cups of Salmon River wine (he had been carrying it for Tai, more or less) to celebrate.

He hadn’t known, until then.

No one had known. He’d assumed when he left Xinan that he would be journeying ten days or so along the imperial road and then down through civilized country to his friend’s family home with what he had to tell him. It wasn’t so. At the estate near the Wai River, where he’d managed to remain uncharacteristically discreet about his tidings, the third brother, young Shen Chao—the only child still at home—had told him where Tai had gone, two full years ago.

Yan couldn’t believe it at first, and then, thinking about his friend, he did believe it.

Tai had always had something different about him, too many strands in one nature: an uneasy mingling of soldier and scholar, ascetic and drinking companion among the singing girls. Along with a temper. It was no wonder, their friend Xin Lun had once said, that Tai was always going on about the need for balance after too many cups of wine. Lun had joked about how hard keeping one’s balance could be on muddy laneways, weaving home after that many cups.

It was a very long way, where Tai had journeyed. His family had not heard from him since he’d gone. He could be dead. No one could reasonably expect Chou Yan to follow him, beyond the borders of the empire.

Yan had spent two nights among the Shen women and youngest boy, sharing their ancestor rites and meals (very good food, no wine in the house during mourning, alas). He’d slept in a comfortable mosquito-netted bed. He’d poured his own libation over General Shen Gao’s grave, admired his monument and inscription, strolled with young Chao in the orchard and along the stream. He was unhappily trying to decide what to do.

How far did friendship carry one? Literally, how far?

In the event, he did what he’d been afraid he’d do from the time they’d told him of Tai’s departure. He bade farewell to the family and continued west towards the border, with only the single guard he’d been advised to take with him, back in Xinan.

She had told him it was an easy enough journey, when he mentioned where his friend had gone. Yan didn’t believe her, but the indifferent manner was oddly reassuring.

As long as he paid her, Yan thought, she wouldn’t care. You hired a Kanlin Warrior and they stayed with you until you paid them off. Or didn’t pay them: though that was, invariably, an extremely bad idea.

Wan-si was hopeless as a companion, truth be told, especially for a sociable man who liked to talk, laugh, argue, who enjoyed the sound of his voice declaiming poetry—his own verses or anyone else’s. Yan kept reminding himself that she was simply protection for the road, and skilled hands to assemble their camp at night when they slept outdoors—rather more necessary now than he’d expected at the outset. She was not a friend or an intimate of any kind.

Most certainly not someone to think about bedding at night. He had little doubt what she’d say if he raised that matter, and less doubt she’d break a bone or two if he tried to give effect to the desire that had begun to assail him, aware of her lithe body lying near him under stars, or curving and stretching in her exercise rituals—those elegant, slow movements at sunrise. The Kanlin were fabled for discipline, and for how efficiently they killed when need arose.

Need hadn’t arisen as they’d journeyed down the river road to Shen Tai’s family home. One twilight encounter in light rain with three rough-looking men who might have had theft in mind had they not seen a black-clad Kanlin with two swords and a bow. They’d absented themselves quickly down a path into dripping undergrowth.

Once they started west, however, everything began to feel different for Yan. He was at pains to light candles or burn incense and leave donations at any and all temples to any and all gods from the morning they left the Shen estate and began following a dusty track northwest, and then farther west, towards emptiness.

North of them, parallel to their route, lay the imperial road through the prefecture city of Chenyao, and beyond that was the easternmost section of the Silk Roads, leading from Xinan to Jade Gate and the garrisons in the Kanshu Corridor.

The imperial highway had lively villages and comfortable inns at postal stations all the way along. There would have been good wine, and pretty women. Maybe even some of the yellow-haired dancing girls from Sardia, working in pleasure houses, perhaps on their way to the capital. The ones who could arch their bodies backwards and touch the ground with feet and hands at once—and so elicit arresting images in the mind of an imaginative man.

But Shen Tai wasn’t up there, was he? Nothing so sensible. And it didn’t make sense to go five or six days north to meet the highway, when their own path was to Iron Gate by Kuala Nor, not Jade Gate Pass.

That left his friend Yan, his loyal friend, feeling every hard-boned movement of his small, shaggy horse towards the end of a day’s silent ride through late-spring countryside. He wasn’t going to drink that wine or hear music in those inns, or teach fragrant women how he very much liked to be touched.

It was Wan-si who decided how far they’d ride each day, whether they’d reach a village and negotiate a roof under which to sleep, or camp outside. Yan ached like a grandfather each morning when he woke on dew-damp ground, and the village beds were hardly better.

For anything less than the tidings he was bearing he wouldn’t have done this, he told himself. He simply wouldn’t have, however dear his friend might be to him, whatever parting verses and last embraces they’d exchanged at the Willow Inn by the western gate of Xinan, when Tai had left for home to mourn his father. Yan and Lun and the others had given him broken willow twigs in farewell and to ensure a safe return.

The others? There had been half a dozen of them at the Willow Inn, fabled for the partings it had witnessed. None of the others were with Yan on the road, were they? They’d been happy enough to get drunk when Tai left, and then praise Yan and improvise poems and give out more willow twigs at that same inn yard when he set out two years later, but no one had volunteered to go with him, had they? Not even when the expected journey was only ten days or so, to Tai’s family home.

Hah, thought Chou Yan, many hard days west of that estate. At this point, he decided, he himself could fairly be called heroic, a testament to the depth and virtue of friendship in the glorious Ninth Dynasty. They would have to admit it when he returned, all of them: no more wine-cup jests about softness and indolence. It was too pleasing a thought to keep to himself. He offered it to Wan-si as they rode.

As idle an expenditure of mortal breath and words as there had ever been. Black clothing, black eyes, a stillness like no one he’d ever known, this warrior-woman. It was irritating. A tongue was wasted on her. So was beauty, come to think of it. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever seen her smile.

That night she killed a tiger.

He didn’t even know it until morning when he saw the animal’s body, two arrows in it, at the green edge of a bamboo grove, twenty paces from where they’d slept.

He gaped. Stammered, “Why didn’t…? I didn’t even…”

He was in a sweat, hands shaking. He kept looking at the slain beast and quickly away. The dreadful size of it. Fear made him dizzy. He sat down, on the ground. He saw her walk over and reclaim her arrows. A booted foot on the tiger’s flank, twisting the shafts free.

She’d already packed their bedding and gear on the third horse. Now she mounted up and waited impatiently for him, holding his horse’s reins out for him. He managed to stand, to get up on the horse.

“You never even told me last night!” he said, unable to take his eyes off the tiger now.

“You complain less when you’ve slept a night,” she said, which counted as a long sentence. She started off, the sun rising behind them.

They reached the fort at Iron Gate Pass two evenings later.

The commander fed them for two nights (mutton stew and mutton stew), let Chou Yan entertain with gossip from the capital, and sent them west, with advice as to where to spend three nights on the way to Kuala Nor, so as to arrive at the lake in the morning.

Yan was entirely content with this counsel, having no interest at all in encountering ghosts of any kind, let alone angry ones and in the numbers (improbably) reported by the soldiers at the fort. But Wan-si disdained belief in such matters and did not want to spend an unnecessary night in the canyon among mountain cats, she said bluntly. If his friend was alive by the lake, and had been there for two years…

They pushed on through two long, light-headed days (Yan was finding it difficult to deal with the air this high), past the commander’s suggested stopping places. On the third afternoon, with the sun ahead of them, they ascended a last defile between cliffs and came suddenly out of shadows to the edge of a meadow bowl, of a beauty that could break the heart.

And moving forward through tall grass, Chou Yan had finally seen his dear friend standing at the doorway of a small cabin, waiting to greet him, and his soul had been glad beyond any poet’s words, and the long journey came to seem as nothing, in the way of such trials when they are over.

Weary but content, he brought his small horse to a halt in front of the cabin. Shen Tai was in a white tunic for mourning, but his loose trousers and the tunic were sweat- and dirt-stained. He was unshaven, darkened, rough-skinned like a peasant, but he was staring at Yan in flattering disbelief.

Yan felt like a hero. He was a hero. He’d had a nosebleed earlier, from the altitude, but you didn’t have to talk about that. He only wished his tidings weren’t so grave. But then he wouldn’t be here, would he, if they weren’t?

Tai bowed twice, formally, hand in fist. His courtesy was as remembered: impeccable, almost exaggeratedly so, when he wasn’t in a fury about something.

Yan, still on horseback, smiled happily down at him. He said what he’d planned to say for a long time, words he’d fallen asleep each night thinking about. “West of Iron Gate, west of Jade Gate Pass / There’ll be no old friends.”

Tai smiled back. “I see. You have come this long distance to tell me poets can be wrong? This is meant to dazzle and confound me?”

Hearing the wry, remembered voice, Yan’s heart was suddenly full. “Ah, well. I suppose not. Greetings, old friend.”

He swung down stiffly. His eyes filled with tears as he embraced the other man.

Tai’s expression when they stepped back and looked at each other was strange, as if Yan were a ghost of some kind himself.

“I would not ever, ever have thought…” he began.

“That I would be one to come to you? I am sure you didn’t. Everyone underestimates me. That is supposed to confound you.”

Tai did not smile. “It does, my friend. How did you even know where…?”

Yan made a face. “I didn’t think I was coming this far. I thought you were at home. We all did. They told me there where you had gone.”

“And you carried on? All the way here?”

“It looks as though I did, doesn’t it?” Yan said happily. “I even carried two small casks of Salmon River wine for you, given me by Chong himself there, but I drank one with your brother and the other at Iron Gate, I’m afraid. We did drink to your name and honour.”

The ironical smile. “I thank you for that, then. I do have wine,” Tai said. “You will be very tired, and your companion. Will you both honour me and come inside?”

Yan looked at him, wanting to be happy, but his heart sank. He was here for a reason, after all.

“I have something to tell you,” he said.

“I thought that must be so,” his friend said gravely. “But let me offer water to wash yourselves, and a cup of wine first. You have come a long way.”

“Beyond the last margins of the empire,” Yan quoted.

He loved the sound of that. No one was going to be allowed to forget this journey of his, he decided. Soft? A plump, would-be mandarin? Not Chou Yan, not any more. The others, studying for the examinations, or in the North District laughing with dancing girls as a spring day waned, listening to pipa music, drinking from lacquered cups…they were the soft ones now.

“Beyond the last margins,” Tai agreed. All around them, mountains were piled upon each other, snow-clad. Yan saw a ruined fort on an isle in the middle of the lake.

He followed his friend into the cabin. The shutters were open to the air and the clear light. The one room was small, trimly kept. He remembered that about Tai. He saw a fireplace and a narrow bed, the low writing table, wooden ink-block, ink, paper, brushes, the mat in front of them. He smiled.

He heard Wan-si enter behind him. “This is my guard,” he said. “My Kanlin Warrior. She killed a tiger.”

He turned to gesture by way of proper introduction, and saw that she had her swords drawn, and levelled at the two of them. His instincts had been dulled by solitude, two years away from anything remotely like blades pointed towards him. Keeping an eye out for wolves or mountain cats, making sure the goats were penned at night, did nothing to make you ready for an assassin.

But he’d felt something wrong about the guard even as Yan had ridden up with her. He couldn’t have said what that feeling was; it was normal, prudent, for a traveller to arrange protection, and Yan was sufficiently unused to journeying (and had enough family wealth) to have gone all the way to hiring a Kanlin, even if he’d only intended to go west a little and then down towards the Wai.

That wasn’t it. It had been something in her eyes and posture, Tai decided, staring at the swords. Both were towards him, in fact, not at Yan: she would know which of them was a danger.

Riding up, reining her horse before the cabin door, she ought not to have seemed quite so alert, staring at him. She had been hired to get a man somewhere, and they’d come to that place. A task done, or the outbound stage of it. Payment partly earned. But her glance at Tai had been appraising, as much as anything else.

The sort of look you gave a man you expected to fight.

Or simply kill, since Tai’s own swords were where they always were, against the wall, and there was no hope of notching arrow to bowstring before she cut him in two.

Everyone knew what Kanlin blades in Kanlin hands could do.

Yan’s face had gone pale with horror. His mouth gaped, fish-like. Poor man. The drawn sword of betrayal was not a part of the world he knew. He’d done something immensely courageous coming here, had reached beyond himself in the name of friendship…and found only this for reward. Tai wondered what his tidings were, what had caused him to do this. He might never know, he realized.

That angered and disturbed him, equally. He said, setting the world in motion again, “I must assume I am your named target. That my friend knows nothing of why you really came here. There is no need for him to die.”

“But there is,” she said softly. Her eyes stayed on him, weighing every movement he made, or might make.

“What? Because he’ll name you? You think it will not be known who killed me when they come here from Iron Gate? You will have been recorded when you arrived at the fortress. What can he add to that?”

The swords did not waver. She smiled thinly. A beautiful, cold face. Like the lake, Tai thought, death within it.

“Not that,” she said. “He insulted me with his eyes. On the journey.”

“He saw you as a woman? That would have taken some effort,” Tai said deliberately.

“Have a care,” she said.

“Why? Or you’ll kill me?” Anger within him more than anything now. He was a man helped by rage, though, steered towards thought, decisiveness. He was trying to see what it did to her. “The Kanlin are taught proportion and restraint. In movement, in deeds. You would kill a man because he admired your face and body? A disgrace to your mentors on the mountain, if so.”

“You will tell me what Kanlin teachings are?”

“If I must,” Tai said coolly. “Are you going to do this with honour, and allow me my swords?”

She shook her head. His heart sank. “I would prefer that, but my instructions were precise. I was not to allow you to fight me when we came here. This is not to be a combat.” A hint of regret, some explanation for the appraising look: Who is this one? What sort of man, that she was told to fear him?

Tai registered something else, however. “When you came here? You knew I was at Kuala Nor? Not at home? How?”

She said nothing. Had made an error, he realized. Not that it was likely to matter. He needed to keep talking. Silence would be death, he was certain of it. “They thought I would kill you, if we fought. Who decided this? Who is protecting you from me?”

“You are very sure of yourself,” the assassin murmured.

He had a thought. A poor one, almost hopeless, but nothing better seemed to be arriving in the swirling of these moments.

“I am sure only of the uncertainty of life,” he said. “If I am to end here by Kuala Nor and you will not fight me, will you kill me outside? I would offer my last prayer to the water and sky and lie among those I have been burying. It is not a great request.”

“No,” she said, and he didn’t know what she meant, until she added, “It is not.” She paused. It would be wrong to call it a hesitation. “I would have fought you, had my orders not been precise.”

Orders. Precise orders. Who would do that? He needed to shape time, create it, find some way to his swords. The earlier thought really was a useless one, he decided.