The Magnolia Sword: A Ballad of Mulan

by Sherry Thomas

  After the riders finally leave, tearing across the grasslands, I sidle up to Tuxi. “Rouran scouts?”

  “Rouran scouts.”

  They are headed east, in the direction of the rumored secret Rouran meeting ground. “Are they going to . . .”

  The princeling is already marching toward his mount. “Let’s find out.”

  At first I’m concerned that we might give ourselves away and the Rouran scouts will realize they’re being followed. But we ride at a leisurely pace, and after a while I start to worry about the opposite: that we’ll lose the Rouran party’s trail.

  “No fear of that,” says Kedan, chewing on a piece of dried mutton. “Look at the ground. I can make out those hoofprints for days.”

  I remember that he is a highly regarded hunter and tracker. “I guess I’m the only one who doesn’t possess any useful skills for life outside the Wall.”

  Kedan laughs. “Hua xiong-di, don’t worry. Idiots live outside the Wall too—I’ve met my share. If you’re willing to learn, skills will come.”

  “Can you teach me to read those trails?”

  Kedan looks toward the princeling, who says, “When we come across the spot where they stopped to rest their horses, we’ll do the same. There you’ll have plenty of trails to show Hua xiong-di.”

  It’s a long time before we stop. And when we do, the trails on the ground are too many: Rouran hoofprints, Rouran footprints, our hoofprints, our footprints, and prints belonging to animals and nomads that passed this way earlier.

  Hoofprints I can make out by the indentations they leave. But the soil is hard and I am sure that I myself leave no marks.

  “Granted, you walk very lightly, Hua xiong-di. But I see your prints.”

  With his sheathed dagger, Kedan draws an outline around one of my prints. I have to put my face very near to the ground and squint to see the faint impression left behind by my boot. And even then I’m only half-confident that I am in fact seeing and not imagining it.

  Kedan points. “This other footprint of yours lies on top of the Rouran scout leader’s and —”

  “How do you know it’s his?”

  “He was the only one who came off his horse earlier, to receive the salt from us. Also, he is the only one in leather boots. The others with him have footwear made of cloth, and they walk more gingerly on the ground.”

  “You have a remarkable eye!”

  “Trust me, Hua xiong-di. I possess no skill as remarkable as that of knocking three arrows at once out of midair while riding at a fair clip. This is just the result of practice.”

  “I could say the same about knocking multiple objects out of midair—just the result of practice.”

  We grin at each other. I slap him on the shoulder in brotherly appreciation.

  “Tell me what you observed of the Rouran riders,” he says. “You must have noticed different things than I did.”

  “I think the rider at the rear is the best fighter. And he is left-handed, which would make him a difficult opponent for me—if, that is, I don’t fall into a dead faint should he come at me. What did you notice?”

  “I was looking at the condition of the horses, wondering how much distance they’ve already covered today. What about you, Tuxi xiong?”

  Tuxi rubs his chin. “To me the man’s accent didn’t sound as if he hails from this region, or areas farther east. I wouldn’t be surprised if his origins are far, far west of here.”

  “I can’t comment on the man’s origins,” says the princeling. “But the horses—they are of the breed for which Emperor Wu of Han waged two different campaigns against the kingdom of Dayuan.”

  Dayuan lies beyond the Takla Makan Desert, even beyond the Heavenly Mountains, which I have always considered impossibly far. There are, of course, realms even farther away, including the eminent yet mysterious empire that produces a luminous glassware much prized in wealthy households.

  But those lands and their peoples have been no more real to me than the immortals who dwell in the Nine Heavens. And the campaigns the princeling refers to, waged with sixty thousand soldiers, took place five hundred years ago.

  “Dayuan horses are said to sweat blood, aren’t they?” I ask the princeling. Or a reddish perspiration, to be more precise, from the shoulders.

  He nods. “When the scout leader dismounted, his sleeve brushed his horse at the withers. His cuff was stained a light reddish color.”

  “Those were the divine horses?” Kedan exclaims in disbelief. “They were ugly!”

  The Rouran horses did have a lean, scrappy, almost hungry look, with their elongated bodies and prominent rib cages.

  “They weren’t prized for their appearance,” I say, recalling what I’ve read of the breed in the Records of the Grand Historian. “But they were said to possess extraordinary stamina, able to cover a thousand li in a day.”

  “Really?” marvels Tuxi. “At that speed, we could cover the length of the Wall in ten days.”

  “I don’t think that was ever true,” says the princeling. “But such horses haven’t been seen for a long time in the Central Plain. The bloodline brought back by Emperor Wu’s campaigns has thinned to complete uselessness. And later raids by the Han Dynasty captured good but not exceptional horses.”

  This gives me pause. The Records of the Grand Historian mentions those later raids, and I thought nothing of them. The Han Dynasty territories didn’t produce the best horses for war, so of course better horses had to be procured somehow.

  But now I wonder. Much has been made of nomadic raids on Han land, and I’ve always thought those tribes unreasonably aggressive. But were they any more aggressive than the supremely civilized Han Dynasty going out to steal horses?

  Kedan pats his chest, as if he’s looking for something inside his clothes. His eyes widen. The next moment, he sucks in a breath.

  The princeling glances at him. “What is it?”

  “I . . . ah . . .”

  “Looking for this?” I open my hand. On my palm is an object that resembles a miniature zongzi, a package of glutinous rice wrapped in bamboo leaves.

  Kedan stares at me. I waggle my brows. He should have taken it as a warning when I told him I observed the Rouran in the rear as the best fighter: My gaze is drawn to movement and my mind to the analysis of movement. I recognized Kedan’s parting slap on the Rouran leader’s chest as more than a friendly gesture, and I imitated it.

  It wasn’t difficult to lift the package from him, given all the dexterity exercises I’ve had to do to deploy and catch hidden weapons. But I haven’t had time to examine the object until now. I glance down. I know my bamboo leaves, and this thing is not wrapped in a bamboo leaf.

  “That’s a grape leaf!” exclaims Tuxi. Then to the princeling, “Isn’t it?”

  “It is.” The princeling’s gaze lands on Kedan. “You took this from the Rouran?”

  Kedan has the grace to look abashed. “He was an ass.”

  “For suspecting you of being a Xianbei spy?” murmurs the princeling. “How dare he.”

  I have to suppress a smile.

  “Well, what’s inside?” asks Tuxi.

  I open the grape leaf, which is the size of my hand with all fingers spread. At the center of the leaf is a small pile of golden raisins.

  “Taste one, Tuxi xiong,” instructs His Highness.

  Tuxi does. “Grown in the Turpan oasis, no doubt about it.”

  The Turpan oasis must be two thousand li west of where we are. And the grape leaf in my palm can’t have been separated from its vine more than seven days ago.

  A shiver darts down my spine. We look at one another in silence. Are the men we are chasing really scouts if they have come from that far away, in such a great haste?

  But if they aren’t scouts, then what are they?

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  That ni
ght, we seek shelter with a band of nomads. I again play the part of the mute servant. Tuxi makes a gift to our hosts of a thumb-sized chunk of salt, which is received with much delight and gratitude.

  After dinner, despite the cold, I bundle up and take a walk with Tuxi, in the hope of unknotting muscles made stiff by yet another day in the saddle. During the walk I ask him to teach me some useful words in Rouran.

  Tuxi takes to the task with relish. He is a good teacher, patient and interested, and tells me that Rouran isn’t that different a language from Xianbei. But since I don’t know any Xianbei, that doesn’t help me.

  “Will I need to learn to read?” I ask after some time. The Records of the Grand Historian mentions that the nomads possessed a script, which has nothing in common with Chinese.

  He shakes his head. “That wouldn’t be terribly useful. Occasionally a written message might be sent, but by and large, in a nomadic life, there isn’t much use for text.”

  “I find it almost impossible to envision a society without reading and writing,” I muse.

  We walk in silence for some time before he says, “I think writing must have first arisen for record keeping. South of the Wall, with all the fertile land, the population has long been enormous. So many people living so closely together gave rise to a strong government, which required contributions from everyone to build roads, administer laws, and defend the borders. That in turn necessitated detailed accounts of lands, crop yields, births, and deaths.

  “But look around us . . .”

  In the deepening dusk, such an endless open expanse surrounds us that I almost cannot remember the unbroken swaths of cultivation and the teeming towns and cities south of the Wall.

  “The nomadic life results in a much lower population,” Tuxi continues. “Herds of sheep and horses require great areas to graze. The distances involved lead to leagues and confederations, rather than all-powerful kingships. From time to time, a strong leader emerges and the other tribes acknowledge him with gifts and answer his calls to arms. But I’m sure you can see why there has never been the same need for record keeping, or for a sophisticated written language.”

  The mythology around the invention of Han Chinese characters echoes what Tuxi has said about the demand for record keeping. But it never occurred to me that other peoples, living in other places, had no such demands to answer.

  “I too am boggled that my ancestors got by without the written word,” says Tuxi, “especially since I can’t remember not being able to read. Sometimes I tell myself that we Xianbei weren’t a literate people because there was no need for us to be. And other times I wonder, because I grew up south of the Wall, where literacy is so deeply venerated, and where Han Chinese literary traditions are often flaunted as a sign of superiority . . . I wonder whether it’s true: that we were an inferior people.”

  I hardly know where to look. I have held the exact same view of the Xianbei, a casual yet ingrained contempt that I never questioned until a few days ago. Until then I wasn’t even aware of my prejudice, let alone that it might be wrong.

  “You shouldn’t think like that,” I say weakly.

  “I don’t think like that very often.” Tuxi is silent for a few heartbeats. “But there is something regrettable about our lack of literary traditions: We haven’t written our own history. The nomads have been on this earth for as long as the Han Chinese, but the only records that exist of us are what the Han Chinese have chosen to put down, usually because we were at war.

  “Have you ever talked to two people who just had an argument? You come away with two completely different versions of events.” He sighs. “My ancestors’ voices have been lost to time; I will only ever know what their opponents thought of them.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Perhaps because of the precious gift of salt, our hosts vacate an entire yurt for us to sleep in. I lie down in the same thin bedroll and sheepskin cape, but this time around I have a carpet underneath me and blankets above. Still, I won’t be as warm as I was in the small hours of last night, sitting back to back with the princeling.

  “Don’t think we’ll need to worry about wolves tonight,” the princeling murmurs.

  Surprised that he has brought up the subject again, I open my eyes. It’s pitch-dark inside, yet I feel the weight of his gaze from across the yurt. I ought to say something, but what, I’m not sure.

  I clear my throat. “The smoke lit by the beacon towers—I’ve heard it called wolf smoke. People say it’s because it’s lit with wolf dung. How do you suppose they collect enough of it? There are hundreds if not thousands of beacon towers along the Wall. And to make a big column of smoke, each tower must keep a few dou, perhaps a whole shi, of wolf dung on hand.”

  Silence. Then raucous laughter, not only from the princeling, but also Tuxi and Kedan.

  “No, no,” says Kedan, gasping for breath. “They’re not burning wolf dung. There aren’t enough wolves for that! Or at least there aren’t enough guards to forage for it in such quantities, dropping by dropping.”

  Tuxi, through fits of giggles, adds, “They burn ordinary dung for the daytime smoke columns. You know, what they collect from the livestock they keep on hand.”

  “Then why —” I start.

  “Our nomadic brethren, especially the Xiongnu, carried wolf banners,” says the princeling. “At the sight of those banners, Han Dynasty soldiers rushed to light their beacons. That is a more likely reason the smoke columns are called wolf smoke.”

  Kedan is still cackling. “Oh, Hua xiong-di, you are such a Southerner.”

  “I was told this in the North,” I protest.

  Kedan does not miss a beat. “North or South, the truth gets lost everywhere.”

  Tuxi sighs softly. Is he thinking again of the long-lost history of the nomadic tribes?

  And how strange it is, now that I think about it, that books such as the Records of the Grand Historian are accepted as accurate for events spanning hundreds of years, involving dozens of major players and tens of millions of people—when two conflicting accounts exist for the death of the princeling’s mother at my father’s hands, which took place less than a generation ago.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “We’re falling farther behind,” pronounces Kedan.

  It’s the next day and all four of us are on the ground, studying the tracks left behind by the Dayuan horses. Kedan deems that the tracks are older than the previous set we examined, which implies that the distance between us and our quarry has increased. I don’t see anything different in the tracks, but my well-trained ears pick up something.

  I set one ear squarely to the ground and listen. The princeling, seeing me, does the same. A moment later he leaps to his feet. “On your horses. Now.”

  We mount quickly but ride at only a moderate pace. The time of a stick of incense later, a party of riders sped past us, returning only curt nods to Kedan’s friendly waves.

  They are on Dayuan horses.

  We ride late into the evening, using makeshift torches to check the ground for tracks. When we stop for the night, I’m so tired that I fall asleep as soon as I crawl into my bedroll, and only realize the next morning how cold I am.

  Midmorning, I’ve warmed up only a little when Tuxi shouts excitedly, “Do you sense the change? The wind is coming from the south!”

  Even this far north, spring is arriving. I turn my face southward, half hoping to feel the sultry warmth of my ancestral home, thousands of li away.

  The princeling, however, does not seem pleased. Kedan’s expression is even darker. “It had better not rain.”

  Late in the afternoon, rain pours down for the time of a meal. We huddle under a piece of fur felt, Kedan muttering unhappily all the while. His words are lost in the din of rumbling thunder and hard rain striking our makeshift cover.

  By the time the sky clears, the tracks left by the Dayuan horses have wa
shed away.

  “The first riders were already more than half a day ahead of us,” says Kedan, kicking the ground in frustration. “They could have turned in any direction during that time.”

  “They’ve been headed east for a while,” I say. “Let’s continue on the same course. We might come across their trails again before they make any significant turns.”

  “That’s the only thing we can do now,” the princeling concurs. “Let’s get on.”

  But we do not pick up their trails.

  The weather, after a half day of warmth, turns cold again. The next night we huddle silently around a smoky fire—what fuel we can gather is all damp. I cover my face to shield myself from the sooty air as the wind changes directions capriciously.

  Dinner revives our spirits somewhat: Kedan shot down a wild goose. The migratory birds are returning to their northern home, even though winter squats on in these lands, refusing to be fully evicted.

  “Should we split into two teams?” asks Tuxi when we have finished eating.

  It’s not the first time the question has been raised—we can cover more territory that way and be less likely to miss the Rouran trails. The problem is, once we separate, we are unlikely to reunite except by chance.

  “Not yet,” answers the princeling. “But ask me again tomorrow.”

  I move closer to Tuxi. “Better teach me some more Rouran.”

  It isn’t the group splitting into two that worries me, but that the duo I find myself in might need to split again. I can only get so far pretending to be dumb and mute.

  But learning a language, even a language that doesn’t require me to read, is no minor undertaking. The more time I spend at it, the bigger the task becomes. It complicates matters that we don’t know which phrases will be most useful for me to tackle. Tuxi decides that beyond basic greetings, I should know how to say, I’m looking for riders on western territory horses. But when it comes to the answers I might be given, again we face difficulties. Words for cardinal directions are easy to learn—the nomads might even simply point—but what if they have more information to share?