Silk and Song

by Dana Stabenow

  Wu Hai stood motionless, absorbing this. What Bayan was too tactful to say was that very probably someone in Wu Hai’s own household had sold Shu Lin and Shu Ming in exchange for favor at the new court. His first wife had never liked Wu Hai’s association with the foreign traders who brought him the goods he sold, that had made his fortune, that had provided the substantial roof over her head, the silks on her back and the dainties on her table.

  “They were thrown into the cells below the palace,” Bayan said. “From what I can discover, Shu Lin sold herself to the guards in exchange for Shu Ming’s safety.”

  There was a brief, charged silence as both men remembered the delicate features and graceful form of the dead woman, and both flinched away from images of what she must have endured before her death.

  There was shame in Bayan’s face at his failure to protect his friend’s wife and child. He had gravely underestimated the lengths to which desperate courtiers would go to curry favor with the new khan, and he admitted it now before a man who had also failed in his duty to a friend.

  In a subdued voice, Wu Hai said, “And Shu Ming?”

  Bayan’s face lightened. “Alive. The doctors say she has suffered no harm. No physical harm.” Bayan nodded at the open door of his study, and Wu Hai went through into the garden, where once again the plum trees were in bloom.

  Shu Ming sat with her back to one of the trees, surrounded by fallen petals, a tiny figure in white silk embroidered with more plum blossoms. Of course, he thought, Bayan’s people would have dressed her in mourning. He stopped some distance away, so that she would not be frightened.

  It was unfortunate that she looked more like her father than her mother, long-limbed, hair an odd color somewhere between gold plate and turned earth, eyes an even odder color, somewhere between gray and blue, and, most condemning, round in shape, untilted, foldless. Her foreignness hit one like a blow, he thought ruefully. It would be all too easy to pick her out of any household in Everything Under the Heavens, and given the provincial and xenophobic nature of the native population, she would always be a target simply by virtue of breathing in and breathing out.

  And now, her mother dead, her father gone beyond the horizon, she had no status in the community, no rights, no power. Her father had left them both well provided for, and Wu Hai had secured those funds, had, he thought bitterly, taken better care of their funds than he had of their persons. But money would not be enough to buy her acceptance in Cambaluc.

  The tiny figure had not moved, sitting cross-legged, her hands laying loosely in her lap, her eyes fixed on the middle distance. Her hair had been ruthlessly shorn, no doubt to rid her of the lice that infested every prison, and the cropped head made the slender stem of her neck look even more fragile rising up from the folds of her white tunic. There was almost no flesh remaining on her body. Her skin was translucent, her cheekbones prominent beneath it. Her tiny hands looked like paper over sticks.

  He cleared his throat gently.

  She turned her head to look at him, and he saw with a pang that she seemed somehow much older.

  He bowed. “You see before you one Wu Hai, your father’s most unworthy friend. Do you remember me?”

  She inclined her head, her expression grave. “Of course I do, uncle,” she said, giving him the correct honorific with the precisely correct emphasis and intonation. Again like her father, he thought, she had a facility for any language, her tongue adapting readily from Mongol to Mandarin.

  “I am sorry I was away from home for so long,” he said.

  “My mother is dead, uncle,” she said.

  “To our loss and great sorrow,” he said.

  “And my father is gone.”

  “This, too, I know,” he said.

  “What will you do with her?” Bayan said before they left.

  Wu Hai looked down at Shu Ming’s tearstained face, asleep on his shoulder. “I have a son,” he said.

  “Ah,” Bayan said, a thoughtful hand stroking his mustaches. “Have you given any thought to what your family will say?”

  “I have no other family,” Wu Hai said.

  Bayan said no more.

  Wu Hai returned to his home and turned everyone in the house into the street with what they had on their backs, wife and servants all, with the sole exception of his son.

  His wife sobbed and groveled at his feet. “Where will I go, husband? What will I do?”

  Before them all he deliberately put the sole of his foot against her shoulder and shoved her through the gate. She rolled and rose to her feet, the lacquer on her face running in great rowels down her cheeks. “You had a wife!” Her voice rose to a scream. “What need had you of another!”

  “She had a husband,” Wu Hai said. He surveyed the throng of people gathered around her. Not one of them could meet his eyes. He remembered the delicate features and the gentle disposition of his friend’s wife, brutalized and despoiled and then destroyed, from nothing more than petty jealousy.

  “I have no wife,” he said, raising his own voice so that it would be heard over the sobs and wails of the people who had once formed his household. So they would understand fully the price of betrayal, he himself closed the heavy wooden doors in their faces. The bar dropped inexorably into its brackets with a loud and final thud.

  He turned to face his son.

  Wu Li was a sturdy and handsome fellow, standing with his legs braced and his thumbs in his belt in imitation of his father. He met Wu Hai’s eyes squarely, although his face was a little pale.

  “Do you understand what happened here, my son?” Wu Hai said.

  The boy hesitated, and then nodded once, firmly. “I do, father.”

  “What, then?”

  Unflinching, the boy said steadily, “There is no excuse for betraying a guest in one’s home.”

  Wu Hai’s wife had been an unaffectionate and inattentive mother. He nodded. “It is well,” he said.

  He sold the house for an extortionate price to one of Temur’s new-minted nobles and built a new home on property he owned outside of the city. It sat on the banks of the Yalu, and he built a dock and warehouses there as well, which, once Temur’s policies allowed the realm to recover from the economic instability caused by the ruinous wars of his grandfather, proved to be a profitable move.

  The first ceremony conducted beneath the roof of the new house was the marriage of his son, Wu Li, 9, to Shu Ming, 5. The marriage was in name only until both children had come of age, but in the interim it gave Shu Ming rank and citizenship, entitled to all the rights and at least the outward respect of the citizens of Everything Under the Heavens.

  Temur was an enlightened ruler who appointed people to positions of responsibility regardless of their ethnicity or religion. At court Mongols worked beside Han Chinese, Muslims, Confucians and even a few Latins, usually priests who were missionaries for their faiths, but some merchants as well. In this he was truly the grandson of Kublai Khan. But Wu Hai, who until the end of his life held himself responsible for the betrayal and death of Shu Lin, wasn’t taking any chances with the life of her daughter. He ignored the whispers in the Chinese community, the covert looks his family received when abroad, even the mutterings of his own parents.

  He was every bit as honorable a man as Marco had believed him to be when he committed his wife and daughter into Wu Hai’s care.

  3

  1312, Five days from Kashgar

  JOHANNA HAD GRADUATED to her own camel.

  Her father, Wu Li, had told her that if she managed to keep her seat from the beginning of Kuche to the city of Kashgar that he would let her off the leading string for the journey home. Shu Ming’s protest had died on her lips when she met Wu Li’s indulgent glance.

  Johanna’s camel was young and small, but what she lacked in size and maturity she made up for in energy and a fierce determination to be out in front. At Johanna’s nudge she lengthened her stride to something approaching a canter.

  “Johanna,” Wu Li said in a warning v
oice.

  “I’m sorry, father,” Johanna said, with an impish glance over her shoulder. “She wants to run.”

  “Wu Li,” Shu Ming said, and he looked at her with an expression warring between guilt and pride.

  He shrugged, a twinkle in his eye. “She wants to run.”

  Shu Ming looked at the receding figure of their daughter. “They both want to run,” she said.

  By now three lengths ahead of Deshi the Scout, Johanna was concentrating so hard on keeping her balance while at the same time keeping her back straight that she didn’t see the body until her camel stumbled over it. Her only consolation was that Deshi had not seen it, either, although to be fair the rest of the remnants of the other caravan were well buried in the shifting desert sand. Johanna was almost thrown, almost but luckily not quite.

  Nevertheless, Wu Li had seen. He kicked his camel into a trot and arrived at her side at the same time as Deshi the Scout. “All right, daughter?”

  All three of them stared at the desiccated limb that her mount’s hoof had exposed.

  Johanna swallowed. “All right, father.”

  “Good. Stay in your saddle.”

  Her back straightened and her chin rose. “Of course, father.”

  Shu Ming had seen, too, and came up fast, and when she yanked on the reins her camel stopped so abruptly that its hindquarters slid out from beneath it and rider and camel both skated past on the sand. On any other day the sight would have provoked laughter and teasing. Today Johanna managed only a shaken smile.

  Deshi the Scout already had his bow out and an arrow nocked, his face stern as he scanned the horizon. Wu Li pulled his mount around and raised a hand. The line of camels halted, some expressing their displeasure by groaning and spitting. One kicked out with his right hind leg, narrowly missing Mangu the Cook, who let loose with a string of cheerful curses that died on his lips when he looked ahead to see what the problem was.

  Wu Li kicked his camel into a kneeling position and slid down, loosening his knife as he went, but the bodies were days dead and the only sound on this lonely expanse of undulating dunes was the rasp of wind on sand. He looked at Deshi the Scout, who withdrew to the nearest rise, there to keep a watch in every direction at once.

  By the time they had uncovered the bodies of three camels, a horse, and thirteen people, it was almost sunset. Wu Li sent a rider ahead to Kashgar to alert the authorities and to let Shu Shao know they would be late in arriving. Mangu located a small oasis with an even smaller spring and two frail date palms half a league from the road and supervised the setting up of a camp while Wu Li gathered what evidence he could to reconstruct what had happened.

  Deshi the Scout found a scrap of sheer red fabric. The edge was hemmed with gilt spangles. “Gujarat weave,” he said.

  “There are no women or children among the bodies,” Wu Li said. “Muslim bandits, then. Every year they move further east. Remember the Buddhist shrine we found last year?”

  “What was left of it I do.” Deshi the Scout hawked and spat. “This kind of thing didn’t happen when the old Khan was alive.”

  Wu Li agreed, but silently, as even here, a thousand leagues from the capitol, one could never be sure who was listening. Kublai Khan’s heirs had been competent but they were not visionaries, and they had allowed the politics of court and the luxuries of the throne to distract their attention from the disintegrating infrastructure of their empire. Over the years the Road had become slowly but steadily more perilous.

  They ate without appetite and mostly in silence that evening, and turned in early. Wu Li took the first watch, knife at his side, bow at his knee.

  They had not pitched the yurts in case they had to to move suddenly and quickly. For a long time into that very long night Johanna watched the figure of her father, back to the coals of the fire, the fronds of the two palms hanging limp and listless over his head, a black sky glittering with stars above.

  Johanna woke to meet the alert eyes of Deshi the Scout. The rising sun set fire to the endless eastern horizon and illuminated his grave smile. She crept from beneath the blankets she shared with Wu Li and Shu Ming and retired behind a convenient dune to attend to the call of nature.

  She squatted, holding her trousers out of the way. The stream of urine steamed in the cold morning air, the acrid smell striking her nostrils. She was almost finished when the sand directly beneath her feet heaved up. She screamed and tumbled backwards, head over heels. She scrambled to her feet, hauling at her trousers.

  Her scream had a particularly piercing and far-reaching quality, and behind her she heard startled voices and loud oaths. “Johanna! Where is Johanna?” her mother cried.

  Before her astonished gaze the sand rose up and assumed a human shape. For a wild moment she thought a demon was materializing before her eyes, an apparition out of one of Deshi’s tales that would pull her back beneath the sand with him, there to devour her whole. She screamed again, backing away, tripping over her own feet and falling once more.

  The sand cascaded in sheets from the apparition. As Wu Li and Shu Ming hurtled around the dune on one side and Deshi the Scout came around it from the other, weapons drawn and ready for action, the figured was revealed to be a boy hardly older than Johanna herself.

  He was thin to the point of emaciation, his blue eyes red-rimmed, his hair stiff with sand, his skin peeling from sunburn. He wore only a filthy kilt that might once have been white in color, and leather sandals.

  His only possession was a sword as tall as he was. A luminous steel blade rising from a heavy hilt encrusted with stones. As Wu Li and Deshi approached he raised the blade high, or tried to, the muscles of his scrawny arms bunched with effort. He actually got it up over his head, staggering a little, before the weight of all that metal got the better of him and his arms trembled and gave way. The sword dropped behind him, point down in the sand, his hands still grasping the hilt.

  Tears made runnels in the dirt caked on his cheeks, but he didn’t seem afraid. On the contrary, he was swearing like Mangu the Cook when the millet burned to the bottom of the pot. “I’ll kill you!” he said. He was trying to shout but his voice came out in a hoarse croak. “Don’t you touch me, or I’ll kill you all!”

  Wu Li and Deshi the Scout, who had halted, exchanged a glance. The boy had spoken in Aramaic.

  Wu Li turned back to the boy and spoke in the same language. “Gently,” he said. “We mean you no harm.”

  The boy wiped his face on his shoulder, leaving both smeared with dirt and tears and snot, a fearful sight. “I’ll kill you all,” he said, but the fierceness had drained out of him. His head drooped as if it was suddenly too heavy for his neck.

  Johanna, yanking the drawstring of her pants tight, was red-faced and furious, embarrassed at being frightened by a boy no older or bigger than she was. She opened her mouth to call him every name she could think of, and after a life spent on the road with her father, her supply was endless. She encountered her father’s eye, and shut her mouth again.

  “My name is Wu Li,” said her father. “I am a merchant of Cambaluc, traveling to Kashgar.” He gestured. “We have food. Grant us the honor of sharing it with you.”

  Perhaps it was the formality of his speech, or perhaps it was the manner in which he made it, man to man. The boy’s shoulders straightened, and when Wu Li turned and walked back to their camp he followed, the tip of the sword leaving a thin line in the sand behind him.

  Mangu brought him a meal of dried dates and fresh baked naan and the boy tore into it with ferocious greed and looked around for more. “Gently, my friend,” Wu Li said, “gently. You have been hungry too long to eat too much all at once.” He handed the boy a skin full of water. “Drink now, small swallows. Let your stomach remember how to digest its food.”

  The rest of the company served themselves. The warm bread and the hot black tea took the edge off their hunger and the rising sun burned the chill from the morning air.

  “What is your name?” Wu Li said. />
  The boy blinked. “Jaufre,” he said at last, as if only just remembering it himself.

  “And how do you come to be here, Jaufre?”

  The boy looked at the steam rising from the thick earthenware cup. “My father was a guard on a caravan traveling from Baghdad to Karakorum.”

  Wu Li looked at the sword laying at the boy’s side. “That is his sword?”

  A grubby hand touched the hilt for reassurance. “Yes.”

  “I see.”

  As did they all. Even beneath all the grime, it was obvious the sword was made of the finest steel, probably Damascus steel, Wu Li thought, and he suspected that the stones in the hilt might be genuine gemstones. A valuable asset, indicating either the wealth of its owner or great favor on the part of the patron who had bestowed it. It was doubtful that a caravan guard could ever afford to buy one such for himself.

  That Jaufre had it now meant that his father was dead, because such a weapon would not have left his possession any other way. Wu Li only wondered how the boy had taken it without the raiders noticing.

  He said, “And you traveled with your father?”

  “Yes.” The boy’s face twisted. “And my mother.”

  Behind her Johanna heard Shu Ming draw in a breath.

  “You were attacked,” Wu Li said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes.”

  “By whom?”

  “Many men. On horses.”

  “Horses? Not steppe ponies?”

  “No. Horses.”

  Not Mongols then, Wu Li thought. “How were the men dressed?”

  The boy looked confused but answered readily. “Mintans and trousers.”

  “On their heads?”

  “Sariks.”

  “With their faces covered?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Beda,” Deshi the Scout said.

  “Or Turgesh,” Wu Li said. “Although I’ve never heard of either of them this far east before.” He turned back to the boy and spoke again, keeping his voice matter of fact. “Your father?”