Imperial Lady (Central Asia Series Book 1)

by Andre Norton

  These older men began to speak of war in the spring, plan for it, hope for it. Silver Snow listened with rising apprehension as the old men worked themselves into a frenzy of anticipation. Beyond a certain point, she feared, there was no recalling them to such sanity as the more warlike Hsiung-nu ever possessed. Besides, she seemed to recall edicts, treaties with Ch’in, that forbade such wars in the grasslands.

  If only Sable’s brother Basich would return! If only Silver Snow knew for certain that her message had been delivered! She clenched her fists within the concealment of her silken sleeves. Just let the letter arrive; to hope for a letter in return was to ask for far too much.

  Vughturoi’s keen eyes studied the other Hsiung-nu too. He must remember those treaties, Silver Snow thought. He must. Why, then, did he choose to enflame his fellow tribesmen? To test to see who his partisans were? To gauge his father’s support? Or—Silver Snow snatched at this thought—did he seek to oust Tadiqan from the camp just as he had been ousted earlier that year? He watched his elder brother like a fox, poised to hunt its prey.

  “I spoke but of an embassy,” Vughturoi said, at length. “Is it not true, Heavenly Majesty,” he finally asked, raising his voice to be heard from his seat that was now so far from his father, “that your treaty with your cousin in Ch’ang-an forbids such a combat?”

  First the stalk; then the pounce. Vughturoi had not forgotten the treaties. Then his suggestion of riding forth to the Fu Yu was a suggestion not of war but of embassy; that Tadiqan snatched it up might do him no favor in his father’s eyes.

  Silver Snow glanced about the tent, and her heart sank. Clever Vughturoi might be, but he was not adept in states-craft. His suggestion had escaped him, much as fire, spilled from a firepot in a dry summer, flames up over the grassland and threatens to devour all that is in its path. Much as his father might favor him, he could not go against the will of his people if it were strongly expressed.

  “What do we care about the swirls of a foolish brush on wood or silk?” came the shouted reply from an elder warrior near the front of the tent. “Such are easily burnt or forgotten! We care about herds and swords, bows, and speedy obedience to our commands!”

  “I have seen the armies of Ch’in,” Vughturoi flung back. “And I say that I would not willingly go up against them.”

  “We have seen their soldiers,” snapped Strong Tongue, taking a shaman’s freedom to intrude in the affairs of war. “When the arrows pierce them, they bleed like other men, though, perhaps, more weakly. Alive, and in our camps, they do the work of slaves.”

  She stroked her spirit drum, as if reminding the assembly that one, at least, of the half Ch’in had done other service to the Hsiung-nu, long after his untimely death. Silver Snow controlled a shudder, then pursed her lips in revulsion. She must pretend to ignore Strong Tongue’s spite.

  “True that may be,” said Vughturoi. “But surely it is also true that those who cannot lay aside their weapons shall in the end be consumed by them.”

  Why, Vughturoi had lifted those words from Confucius’ Spring and Autumn Analects, Silver Snow realized. Perhaps he had even heard them from her or from Li Ling. She had not known just how impressed the prince had been with Ch’in during his stay. No, he was no savage child of a savage race, but a thinking man to whom, he hoped, his father would listen.

  “What coward made that noise?” came a raucous yell, accompanied by some comment about lazy camels and dung, bawled out too fast and too slurred by drink for Silver Snow fully to understand, even had she wished to.

  The shout of coward shattered the control that Vughturoi had maintained, the careful veneer of Han civilization.

  “Coward?” screamed Vughturoi. In that moment, he was all Hsiung-nu. “Coward? Let me show you who is a coward!” He launched himself forward, knife out, his face contorted into a mask of rage.

  Although the Hsiung-nu cheered his energy, they separated prince and warrior before blood could stain the cushions and carpets, and Khujanga shouted for order. “Obey your own words!” he snapped at his younger son, and turned his attention away from him for the rest of the evening. Silver Snow cast one glance at Vughturoi as he sat glowering by the fire, too proud to withdraw, then bent her energies to entertaining the shan-yu and softening his mood. She was very much afraid that she had but indifferent success.

  And in the days that followed, the breach between the shan-yu and his younger son appeared to widen.

  Remembering her own time out of favor in Ch’ang-an, Silver Snow could recognize the skill and subtlety of Strong Tongue’s latest gambit: isolate the young prince, make certain that he was angered and placed in bad situations, then spread and nurture doubts about him. Vughturoi’s response came that evening. As Khujanga sat in Silver Snow’s tent, listening to a song of the North, Vughturoi appeared. He bowed to his father, head to earth, though, usually, the shan-yu insisted that sons and warriors who were high in his favor omit the full prostration. Then he nodded to Silver Snow and, at a gesture from his father, sat down.

  Permission that may have been; nevertheless, Vughturoi sat very near to the tent’s opening, as if uncertain of his welcome. He accepted rice wine, but spoke not a word. He was simply there, as a minister who favored an unpopular cause might do at the Son of Heaven’s court: saying nothing; simply maintaining his presence and that of his cause.

  Silver Snow’s fingers flickered upon her sewing, and never had her voice risen so sweetly, her wit sparkled like firelight upon rock crystal. Khujanga shook his head in doting admiration at this stranger-wife of his. “I will admit it; some among my own retainers think me a fool, as they whisper all men are fools who take a young wife. They think me a double fool for listening to her songs and stories. You have seen Ch’in, though. What do you think, son?”

  He had spoken to his out-of-favor son! Silver Snow’s fingers tightened on her handiwork for one moment, and she glanced at Vughturoi, who leaned forward deferentially. His square face was flushed, and light flickered in his eyes.

  “The day that the beloved of heaven is a fool, the plains will become mountains,” Vughturoi began cautiously. “I have been in Ch’in, as you say. I can say that the lady’s stories are true.” Khujanga raised a white, skeptical brow.

  “But,” Vughturoi added, “they are too modest.”

  He glanced quickly at Silver Snow, then away.

  “The people of the Han are a great people,” said the prince.

  “As are we, my son. And we are a freer people, besides.”

  Vughturoi bowed, head to rugs.

  “As indeed we are, Heavenly Majesty. But the Middle Kingdom has as many folk as the desert has pebbles. It is very old and, in its ages, it has enriched itself. One pestilence or one harsh winter will not wipe out a clan and threaten the weal of all. They have abundance; and in their abundance, they can afford to create wonders, to hold treasures, and to protect them beyond the power of our yurts and horses.”

  Resolutely Silver Snow kept her eyes fixed upon her work, glad that it kept her from twining her fingers or plaiting her sleeves with them. Both were unsightly gestures that broke the serene facade that she attempted to show the shan-yu. She must mean rest, peace, and grace for him, so he would seek her out, and, thus, her influence would grow. As father and son spoke together, the days’ estrangement gone from voice and manner, she turned her eyes back to her other work, the finely crafted bag that she was stitching. Though her knowledge violated modesty, she well knew that she was one of the wonders of the Han to which Vughturoi had referred.

  One or two more evenings’ work, she thought, and this scent bag would be completed. This scent bag. Abruptly she dropped the intricately wrought piece of fur and stitchwork into her lap and stared at it. Always in Ch’ang-an, ladies made scent bags as a way of passing the time, of adorning themselves, and—occasionally—of making gifts to men whom they admired.

  Why had she crafted this scent bag of brocades, sables, and heavy silken knotwork? She had more delicate f
abrics and feathers aplenty in her chests; she might well have created something more dainty for her own use. She remembered the herbs that Willow had ready to be selected for such uses—how many of those would be strong enough to serve in this place of over-strong odors—horse sweat, boiling mutton, and unwashed and greasy bodies? Yet not all of Willow’s herbs were prized for their scent. Others possessed the power to stanch blood, to ward off illness, to avert ill-wishing.

  I too might use such powers, she protested to herself, though she knew that she tried to deceive herself.

  Her cheeks flamed again, and she tried to turn the talk to spring and the gardens that she recalled. She was aware that she was chattering just as inanely as any of the Peach Blossoms, Jade Butterflies, or Apricots who thronged the Inner Courts. Shortly afterward, the shan-yu rose to depart. Silver Snow glanced away, as he struggled to his feet, just as she had done for her own father. Yet, the shan-yu accepted the arm of his son and walked out leaning on him. Silver Snow was greatly relieved and heartened, and not solely for the dreams of peace that she cherished between Hsiung-nu and Han.

  She followed them out and peered beyond the flaps of her tent. For a few paces more, father leaned upon son, as if glad of the younger man’s support and nearness. Then, as two horsemen rode toward them, the shan-yu abruptly disengaged his arm from his son’s and walked forward to greet them. Silver Snow could see from the stiffness of his back the effort that Khujanga made not to totter. Vughturoi stared after his father, then melted into the shadows.

  So, he was no longer in disgrace with his father, yet Khujanga seemed to prefer that the tribe think that he was. Silver Snow knit her brows, then knit them more thoroughly as the memories of scandalized, high-pitched voices warning her not to wrinkle her brow dinned in her head. Why would Khujanga not announce his reconciliation with his youngest son?

  She could think of only one reason: that in appearing to draw away from Vughturoi, the shan-yu was actually protecting him.

  Like it or not, a bond existed between Silver Snow and Vughturoi, and had done so ever since Ch’ang-an, when she had fought to clear her father’s name and her own, and won his grudging approval. That bond had strengthened on the journey west, with each new travail.

  Silver Snow knew well that she understood little of men. There had been no other women of her own rank in her home; along the road and in the Cold Palace, she had been isolated from the subtle manipulations by which one thrived in the Inner Courts, the tyrannies and savage, but tiny, humiliations that one used to cast down other women; the flatteries and games that one used to exalt those men by whose favor one rapidly learned to live.

  Silver Snow had never seen men thus. For her, there were men like her father and Li Ling: to be venerated and obeyed as elders and teachers; there were men like the Son of Heaven and the shan-yu, leaders who had the power of life, death, or—worst of all—disgrace; and there were officials, eunuchs, warriors, who owed allegiance to the first two classes, and whose opinion of her depended upon their masters’. However, of young men—with a sudden, painful clarity, she thought of the eldest son to which, long ago, an official had offered to betroth her—over whom a woman might sigh or laugh, she had no knowledge.

  Never had the women in the Inner Courts or in the houses in which she had stayed during her trip to Ch’ang-an seemed more alien and unsympathetic to her than when they spoke of men and what they delicately called spring musings, everlasting longings, mortal yearnings, or a lot of other names: all flowery, and—to her, brought up as she had been in poverty and duty—all foolish.

  Yet she had made a scent bag that fused the art of Ch’in and the wealth of the grasslands, and she knew now that, with every stitch she had taken, she had thought of the prince who had been her first defender among the Hsiung-nu; the prince who had stood outside her tent to listen to her songs and who now spoke in veiled terms of his father’s chief wife, calling her a wonder.

  She was a wedded lady, though no wife; she was a queen; and she was the embodiment of the Son of Heaven’s peace with the Hsiung-nu. Should she abandon that to disgrace herself and giggle like a flighty maid? For that matter, did she dare?

  “Here!” she cried to Willow. “Take this thing and pack it away. I am ashamed at how sloppily I have wrought it.”

  “As you command, Elder Sister,” Willow said, a smile hovering on too-red lips.

  “Do not dare to smile!” Silver Snow commanded.

  “Indeed not,” Willow agreed. “Forgive this one, if her elder sister thought that she smiled at what she terms poor needlework. Yet, the furs are fine and might perhaps be put to another use. I”—at least, she dropped that aggravating, abject courtesy, which was worse than any smile—“shall pack this in the black chest.”

  She did so, then knelt to her mistress. “By your leave,” she said, “the night”—she sniffed at the air, her eyes bright, her head turning constantly toward the opening of the tent—“will be fresh and sweet tonight, if still cold, and I should like to rove. Who knows what I may hear about . . .”

  “Oh, go!” Silver Snow cried. “But see that you meet no handsome male fox as you range free in your desire to scent the spring wind. I should not like to have to explain why a litter of fox kits sleeps by the fire in my tent.”

  She clapped both hands to the treacherous mouth that had uttered such impropriety. Willow, however, laughed sharply, almost a fox’s bark, and vanished behind a heavy hanging. Shortly afterward came a scrabbling at the tent wall, and Silver Snow knew that she was alone.

  Much against her will, Silver Snow rushed over to the black chest, flung it open, and pulled out the scent bag. Wrapping herself in her furs, she cradled it in her arms, watching the moon through the vent of her yurt, until her eyes closed.

  Scrabbling at the wall of Silver Snow’s yurt brought her halfway out of a deep, almost a drugged sleep, but the effort was too great. Silver Snow moaned and sank back down, burrowing deeper into the furs. When she again woke, it was to a smell of something charred. She sniffed, then glanced with sudden anxiety at the brazier. No, the fire was not just banked; it was dead and must be rekindled. That had ever been Willow’s task.

  Silver Snow tugged her robes about her and grimaced with aggravation as she discovered that she had clung, all night long, to the scent bag that she had wrought. Where was Willow? Out all night; and now that the sun was shining she chose to lie sprawling upon her pallet. All of the Hsiung-nu had, doubtless, been up before dawn.

  Well, she would just go and wake Elder Sister Willow, and then she would speak . . . In this determined mood, she walked toward her maid. The smell of charring intensified.

  When Silver Snow looked down, she saw that a long swathe of Willow’s luxuriant, reddish hair was burned away, as if someone had cast a flaming torch at her. Now the girl slept on her side, curled in protectively about herself, her too-short leg drawn up as that of a stork, standing in the water.

  “Willow?” Silver Snow whispered. “Willow!” She knelt and shook the maid, who came awake with one blink of her greenish eyes. They filled with the morning light, then kindled into such humor and energy that Silver Snow rocked back upon her heels.

  “What happened, child?” said Silver Snow, all her anger gone. She brushed at Willow’s long hair. Reddish hair might be considered a grave blemish in Ch’in, but there was no denying that the lustrous, thick mane that glinted under Silver Snow’s searching fingers had a unique beauty, much like a fine pelt. To see it marred was a sadness that Silver Snow had not expected.

  To her astonishment, Willow laughed. “Ah, such running about as I had! Air and earth are stirring, Elder Sister, and we danced all night, the brothers in fur and I. A foolish ewe ran. thinking that we sought her lamb. Soon the entire flock was in a panic, and men came on horseback. Thus, we fled, they to the grasslands, I into the camp, where she”—a saucy lift of Willow’s chin toward Strong Tongue’s domain told Silver Snow whom she meant—“sat up and muttered over old cantrips. I nudged at her tent
flap with my muzzle, hoping to spy out some matter of use.

  “She is quick, Elder Sister, for all that she has the bulk of a prize ram. Before I could vanish into the shadows, she rose, snapped her fingers, and flung—ho, fire of some sort!—at me, and I yelped and ran off.”

  “You must trim your hair, lest she see it burnt and know,” warned Silver Snow.

  As Willow bent to the task, Silver Snow turned to make up the fire afresh.

  “I should do that, Elder Sister,” said the maid. “It is not fitting that you do my work.”

  “Can I dance with the wind and gather news for myself?” asked Silver Snow. Then, as Willow shook her head, “Well then? What did you learn in the tent of Strong Tongue?”

  “That she is well pleased with your . . . the prince’s disgrace,” said Willow. “Yet not as pleased as she might be; because her own son’s warlike ways take him from home. Indirectly, we have done the old man a favor by keeping Strong Tongue’s son from his side. How much would you wager . . .”

  Silver Snow shook her head. “Not a single cash,” she said.

  Vughturoi might well be in disgrace for his unwillingness to fight when his father’s treaty forbade; but he was here, and Tadiqan was not. As far as Silver Snow was concerned, that was all to the good. If Tadiqan were to inherit, he must be the first of Khujanga’s sons to view his father’s body. To do so, he must first return to the clan. Thus, if Strong Tongue had any plans for speeding the old shan-yu’s departure to the eternal grasslands, she would not, for the sake of her own power as well as that of her son, put them into action as long as Tadiqan rode among the Fu Yu. Let but Tadiqan return, however, and Vughturoi depart . . . in that case, Silver Snow must look to herself and to the husband who was her only protection.