Imperial Lady (Central Asia Series Book 1)

by Andre Norton

  IMPERIAL LADY

  ANDRE NORTON AND SUSAN SHWARTZ

  Imperial Lady Copyright © 1989, 2016 Andre Norton and Susan Shwartz

  eBook edition published 2016 by Worldbuilders Press, a service of the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency

  Cover art by Matt Forsyth

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Selections of poetry that appear throughout this book are taken from more than a thousand years of Chinese verse. They have been drawn from two principal sources:

  The Orchid Boat: Woman Poets of China, edited and translated by Kennoth Rexroth and Ling Chung. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. Selections include part of the “Lament of Hsi-chun,” (110 B.C.) and the “Poem Written on a Floating Red Leaf (ninth century A.D.) of Ts-ui-p’in. All rights reserved. Used with permission. Copyright © Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

  Translations From the Chinese, by Arthur Waley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941. Selections drawn from a T’ang dynasty poem; Wu-ti’s poems on Li Fu-jen; and from “The Prisoner.” All rights reserved. Used with permission.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  EPILOGUE

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  CHAPTER 1

  Vivid bronze and green against the slanting rays of the winter sun, the pheasant darted up from its cover in a flurry of snow. Just as swiftly, Lady Silver Snow raised her bow of wood and horn, released an arrow. The heavy bird dropped into the underbrush. She nodded, and one of her escort rode off to retrieve it.

  “An excellent shot, most worthy lady!” cried the old trooper Ao Li, his voice as bluff as if he spoke to a recruit. “Not even the women of the Hsiung-nu . . . this one humbly begs your forgiveness. The women of the Hsiung-nu are harsh, ill-spoken, but the thrice-worthy lady . . .” His words trailed off, and his weathered face flushed with mortification.

  None of the others cheered her, as they might one of their fellows. Old soldiers all, they had campaigned with her father, and now, close to the borders of their ancient enemies, the Hsiung-nu, they guarded her.

  Even as Silver Snow held up an imperious hand, Ao Li flung himself from the saddle to her feet in abject shame, yes, and fear of his general who, disgraced and enfeebled though he might be, was still master in his own house.

  Lady Silver Snow turned, her gloved hands so quick upon the reins of her shaggy northern pony that it almost reared. Snow cascaded from its coarse mane and pelt.

  “Rise, please,” she commanded, smiling at him to excuse what he believed as a grave fault. “How should I be offended?” she asked. “Your words honor my lord and father, who taught me. Have I not always heard that the women of those beyond the Purple Wall hear the language of birds and can even gather meaning from creaks of stones and wood, while the most powerful among them even hear the shadow language of the untimely dead calling from their graves?”

  Her breath steamed, a pale mist against a white jade sky, and her feet, in stitched boots of heavy felt, tingled from the cold; but her cheeks burned as crimson as the blood of the fowl that Ao Li scooped up and tied to the board of his saddle, wrought according to the fashion of the Hsiung-nu, who, barbarians though they were, without a doubt were also mounted warriors beyond compare.

  Even as she gravely commended the old guard’s skill in tracking and appraised the plumpness of the pheasant that her bow, lighter and more supple than those of the steppes, had brought down, she blinked away tears of grief and of anger at herself. She was ungrateful. The Son of Heaven might well have executed her father’s entire household for treason; for, if its head turned to evil, how could anyone ever trust the body?

  Thus far, however, they lived; she and her father; lived and even, after a fashion, had been content. At times, she could even forget that they lived, existing solely upon a whim, which even a cup of heated wine could change to death.

  A horncall rang out, followed by a cry, so shockingly loud that Silver Snow expected to hear the crystalline snap of icicles falling from trees. It brought Ao Li around, one age-spotted hand snatching at his swordhilt, the other pulling at his pony’s reins. His mount whinnied a protest as he forced it between his general’s daughter, whom he had sworn to protect with his life and soul, and this intruder.

  She saw, before she felt, Ao Li’s apologetic touch to her horse’s harness.

  “Lady,” he dared to whisper.

  Behind her, men strung bows and drew swords. Silver Snow shivered, despite the warmth of her sheepskins. They had ridden out far today; had the Hsiung-nu seen them and decided to attack?

  She turned to follow Ao Li’s pointing finger. Though she had always thought him fearless, his scarred hand was trembling now.

  Silver Snow nocked her bow with even greater speed than she had used when she brought down the pheasant. She groaned inwardly and stole a longing glance at the gleaming, curved spine of the Great Wall. It might, she thought as her heart froze and sank within her, be the last thing that she would ever see. Beyond it lay plains and freedom of a sort—as her father had no doubt discovered during his years of exile. Perhaps he should have stayed there, unfilial and ungrateful wretch though she was for daring even to harbor such a thought. For conquered and disgraced though he was, his choice of surrender rather than massacre caused the downfall of ministers in shining Ch’ang-an. He had remained with his captors for ten years as had the deplorable Li Ling, general and traitor. Like General Chang Ch’ien, who had lived among the Hsiung-nu, wed and even bred among them, yet, in time, he too had fled back to the land of the Han.

  Now, riding toward her on a sweating, steaming horse, came such a messenger as she had feared for ten years. What if he came from Ch’ang-an, the capital, where the Sun of Heaven sat in glory on the Dragon Throne and voiced his edicts against those houses he perceived as traitorous? Perhaps this messenger had already delivered the scarlet cord to her father and rode now to order her also to take her own life. Did Chao Kuang’s body now hang cooling on a tree, or lie contorted by poison, or bleeding from a swordcut? She would not survive him long, she vowed; and that choice was not dictated by the will of the Son of Heaven, either.

  Despite the iron control in which she had early been schooled—first as a child growing up in a sad, poverty-stricken inner court, then as a girl raised by a grim, injured father—one tear streaked down her cheek, hot, but rapidly cooling. She forced herself back to a hunter’s stillness as she stared out across the border between Ch’in and the steppes. Guardian of Ch’in since the reign of the First Emperor, the Great Wall curled about the land like a sleeping dragon. That ridge of stone and rammed earth rising grimly above the plain showed pale now, silvered over with fresh drifts and windblown gusts of the translucent snow from which, before she had died of sorrow and solitude, Lady Silver Snow’s mother had named her child. Nor had the lady any living brothers. Sons of a senior wife, those all had died on the frontier, hoping to expiate their father’s sin. For he had been a marquis and general who had failed the Son of Heaven’s trust. Not only had he surrendered the bleeding remnants of an army of Han warriors to the barbarians, but, ha
ving done so, he had dared to remain alive.

  Ao Li gestured sharply, sending the others riding out to flank her, their instant response possible because all of her protectors had campaigned together since before she was born. Silver Snow glanced at the old man, then quickly away. His entire life had been governed by the code of military obedience. Would he really dare to order an attack upon a messenger from the Son of Heaven? Could she, her father’s daughter, draw bow upon such a man?

  She parted trembling lips and swallowed, nerving herself to order Ao Li to hold off. Then, she gasped. Her eyes were younger, quicker than those of the troop leader, despite the way that tears of thankfulness now blurred them when she perceived that the rider whose steaming horse slid and stumbled up the track wore the shabby livery of her father’s men.

  She flung out a hand and touched Ao Li’s, and the old man recoiled as if he had brushed a coal. “A friend,” she murmured, and reined somewhat farther behind her escort, donning proper female shyness like an extra fur cloak.

  The rider would have left saddle to kneel when a growl from Ao Li stopped him. Very young, the boy dared to glance up at her only for an instant. Then he had lowered his eyes to the snowy ground, offering her more the homage due an Empress or a marquis’ first wife, not properly to be given the shabby and unbetrothed virago daughter of a disgraced soldier.

  As winded as his horse from the speed of their coming, the messenger gasped harsh lungfuls of the thin, cold air, then coughed until Silver Snow flinched and vowed silently that that very night, she and her maid Willow must brew herbs against lung-fever. “A . . . a proclamation . . . an edict from the Son of Heaven . . .” He prostrated himself until Silver Snow could scarcely hear the words that he forced out between coughs. “Your most-honored father the general summons . . .”

  “We ride!” The way Silver Snow’s clear voice carried shocked her, as she turned her back on the Wall, leaving behind the bloodstained snow on which, so briefly, the trophies of her hunt had rested.

  This day, Silver Snow and her guards had ridden far in search of game. Even as she pressed her horse for greater speed, she reproached herself. If a messenger from the Son of Heaven guested in her home, she, as lady there, should have been present to ensure that all was done as best as possible to honor the Emperor’s man and to demonstrate that, Northerners though they might be, they served the Dragon Throne with loyal hearts.

  If, however, she had remained ever dutifully at home, she thought, the official from Ch’ang-an might have had to dine off scraps. It was well that their hunt had been successful; the few aging women left in the inner courts would be able to prepare a feast that might not be too unworthy of his tasting.

  Who knew, she thought with another quick jolt of alarm, what guards such a southern lord might have dispatched on his own orders? Even now such men might be watching her. She had been scanning the land about her for enemies, but now she cast down her eyes. With a guest from the capital at her father’s estate, she must remember to observe all the proprieties, even this far from her home.

  A watcher, she knew, might ascribe such a withdrawal to the most decorous modesty, appropriate to an unwed maid. What words would either her Ancestors or the Book of Rites use to describe a maid who flouted proper conduct and even endangered virginity itself to ride out with a bow and hunt like a wild boy? Though the hardships of her life had made her break with customs, she knew she had much to answer for. But the Ancestors might frown at her reply, she told herself in an unusually rebellious, therefore candid, instant.

  This unseen, unknown official might dare to criticize; however, thanks to her, he would eat tonight: and—what was far more to her liking—so would her father, her household, and these her outriders, whose saddles and horses’ flanks all bore the bloody traces of successful hunting; that thereby the Ancestors would continue to be honored.

  Those would not be so served by Silver Snow herself. As a daughter, she might not burn incense and paper images at their shrine to summon their august attention. They might only be attended by her father himself, too crippled now by years in the saddle and old wounds to ride out to hunt; but hale enough to teach his surviving child to take up the bow in his stead, to play chess, and to think and want to act in a manner that she knew full well that Master Confucius—much as she and her father venerated his Li Chi, or Book of Rites, and his Analects in all other ways—would not have at all approved.

  Indeed, Chao Kuang’s First Wife had chosen to hang herself rather than live, shamed and degraded after it was decreed that the general was general and marquis no longer. Her sons, Silver Snow’s thrice-honored brothers, had ridden out to die in battle against Khujanga, shan-yu of the western hosts. Autumn Smoke, the second wife, and heavy with child when the news of her lord’s capture and seeming defection had come from Ch’ang-an with the decree of their disgrace, had remained alive in the hope of bearing a son whose piety might, one day, redeem what the father had lost. At Silver Snow’s birth, however, she had lost hope and life, and left her daughter with a name as melancholy as her own. Such a child might well have been exposed; but, through the love of her mother’s old nurse, she was saved and raised; and, somehow, she thrived.

  When she was ten years old—past the age when a gently reared maid should be confined to the women’s quarters, never to leave them until she was borne to her wedding—her father escaped the Hsiung-nu. Rumor, which traveled faster than he, credited him with the abandonment of a wife (if such as the Hsiung-nu recognized that basic human tie) and baby son, causing fears, in the shabby, chilly women’s quarters, for even the restricted life that had been Silver Snow’s up to that moment. How would the most noble (though, by the Emperor’s decree, he was that no longer) marquis and general Chao Kuang react to the news that he had a daughter and no living sons at all?

  With many head-shakings and warnings, her nurse had presented Silver Snow to him. Even now, as she recalled, it had been a heaven-sent miracle that she had not burst into frightened sobs: her father seemed more like an Ancestor come to uncertain life than a man. For all of a man’s proper, vigorous semblance had fallen from him. His beard and hair, beneath a sober cap, were silvered, while the ample folds of an ancient, frayed silk robe, with its heavy, though cracking, fur collar and lining, sagged inward because of their wearer’s painful thinness.

  Even more painful than that loss of flesh and vigor was the limp that must have made the mad escape from the West a torture worse than any that an Emperor’s officials might inflict. In full sight an ebony cane lay near to his hand, beside a silken scroll of Master Confucius’ writings and the bronze burner wrought in the form of twelve mountain peaks, inlaid with precious metals and carnelian, a treasure of the house. From the burner wafted delicate trails of the piney scent of artemesia; ever afterward in Silver Snow’s mind, she linked those gnarled and enduring pines with her father and his ordeals.

  Even now, as Silver Snow held up one chilled hand and breathed upon it, she recalled the warmth and fragrance from that burner. Then, it had been her one comfort as she had approached, barely moving her feet warily, one short step following another, her eyes downcast, toward the man who sat upright despite the padded cushions at his back, as if mistrustful of their softness. At that moment, as if decreed by kindly gods, sparks had flown from the brazier, and Silver Snow, her painstaking humility forgotten, looked up to meet eyes that immediately compelled her love and trust as they had the right to compel her obedience. Her father extended a hand—thin, weathered, and missing a finger—and she had run to him.

  Thereafter, all thoughts of proper reticence and distance were dispatched: Silver Snow, at age ten, was to be raised as the son whom her father now lacked: to be taught to hunt, to play chess, to sing, and—the most audacious of all—to read and to write poetry.

  So, they continued to live in the North, close by the Great Wall. Traditionally, there had lain their family’s estates since the mist-enshrouded reigns of the Five Emperors; but traditionally, too, ther
e also languished now other exiles, those laboring under the disgrace of a condemnation to life.

  The North might be thought to be exile, but Silver Snow had always loved the severe beauty of her homeland, the vast sweep of plains, broken by the protection of the Wall and the less ancient but equally weathered shelter of her ancestral home. Now the feeble rays of late afternoon sun slanted across the Wall, awakening splendor from the ice and snow upon which her horse and those of her escort cast long violent shadows.

  A greater shadow, to her way of thinking, lay upon her mind, cast by the Wall upon which she had turned her back as she hastened home to obey whatever orders the Son of Heaven, after ten years of silence, had sent them. What her father had told her of the Hsiung-nu made Silver Snow stare out across the great barrier with more curiosity than fear. She knew that beyond lay more than endless wasteland possessed by unholy savages who ate their meat raw, never bathed, and tortured civilized men. Aye, beyond the Wall lay vast spaces and open air—as well as freedom and her father’s lost honor.

  By the time Lady Silver Snow reached the ancient half fort, half mansion (the aged archers in its watchtower nodding as her party swept by in a cloud of snow and breath-steam), the cold was pushing her to full effort just as much as the desire to obey her father and to hear whatever news had caused this youngest of his retainers to risk death to horse and rider in such haste to summon her back. Shaking from cold and excitement, she turned the last corner—past the empty space from which, mysteriously, a jade statue had disappeared last winter, past that wall where a painting had been fading for at least two generations—to reach at last her own tiny courtyard. Here, screens and walls barred the clamor that must surely erupt afresh in the rest of the household at her return.

  Her nurse seized upon Silver Snow, with hands that had the texture of a chicken’s feet and the strength that apprehension lends old age, to tug her toward the innermost room where a fire, steaming water, and robes, which might be shabby but were, most assuredly, warm and scrupulously clean, awaited.