“Horses. I told before.”
He had. She nods. Tries, again, to assemble facts she can work with. She can’t say why it matters, but it does. “Your brother. You are opposing him? For me? For … for Shen Tai? For my brother?”
There is enough light for her to see that his eyes remain flat. There is nothing to find in them. It makes her consider how much of what she’s known—or thought she knew—of any person has come from their eyes.
“Yes,” he says, finally.
But he’s taken so long she decides it isn’t entirely true, this reply. That might be an error she’s making. He might have simply been trying to decide whether to tell her. But she still feels …
“What would he do to you? Your brother?”
Again, he stares. Again, a hesitation.
He says, “He wants me destroyed. He has never found me. Now he will think he can.”
Destroyed. Not killed. But it might be just language again, words. She is working hard.
“He thinks he can find you by following me?”
He nods, that single down and up. “All of us. The wolves. I have allowed myself to be seen.”
“Oh. And you haven’t done that? Before?”
“Not so near him. Or his shamans. Not difficult. Grasslands are large.”
You might imagine you saw a smile there, almost.
She lowers her head, thinking.
She looks up again. She says, “I am grateful. You took … you are taking a great risk. For me.” She bows. Twice, right fist in left hand. She has not done so yet to him, and it is proper. They may call her a princess but she isn’t, and it doesn’t matter, anyhow.
Meshag (she needs to start using the name, she thinks) only looks at her. She sees that he is not discomfited by her gesture. He was the kaghan’s heir, she thinks.
She is nowhere near her home.
He says, quietly, “I wish him destroyed, also.”
Li-Mei blinks. He looks at her, dead-eyed, bare-chested, hair to his waist, utterly strange, in this cave where they stand, faint light filtering from above.
He says, “He did this to me. My brother.”
And it begins, piece by puzzle piece, to come clearer.
HE HAS NOT YET RETURNED. It is now, she judges, well into the afternoon, though it is difficult to measure time inside a cave. There is more light filtering down now, the sun is higher. She has eaten, has even dozed fitfully, lying on earth and pebbles, her head pillowed awkwardly on the satchel. She is obviously not a princess if she can do that.
Awakened by what was probably an imagined sound, she’s untied and then retied her hair, used a little of the water to wash her hands again.
She is not to go outside. She can ignore this—she’s ignored so many instructions through her life—but she isn’t inclined to do so. Nor does it occur to her to run away.
For one thing, she has no idea where to go. For another, the man she’s been sent to marry is looking for her. She has no doubt of that, and she doesn’t want to be found. She doesn’t want to live her life on these steppes. She may end up with no choice (short of death), but for the moment, at least, there appears to be a glimmering of one, like glow-worms in a night dell, or a cave.
She has no idea what Meshag intends to do, but he is helping her away, and that is a start, isn’t it? It might get her killed, or he might decide to claim her body as a prize in a war with his brother, take her right here on earth and stone. But what control does she have, in any of this?
What she’d prefer (it feels an absurd word) is to be with the empress still, serving her, even exiled from the Ta-Ming. Or, even better, to be home right now at this beginning of summer. She can picture it too well. Not a helpful channel of thought or memory.
She is sitting, hands around drawn-up knees. She permits herself to cry (no one can see), and then she stops.
She looks around for what must be the fiftieth time: the low, narrow tunnel leading out, the curved cave walls rising towards light spilling softly down from the openings on the one side. Stones and pebbles, bones scattered. The wolves will have needed to eat, feed their cubs. She shivers. There is one other tunnel, larger than the entranceway, leading farther in. She’d seen it on first entry here.
She can’t say why she decides to explore it now. Anxiety, a desire to do something, make a decision, however trivial. Patience is not a skill she has. Her mother used to talk to her about it.
She finds she can stand in the second tunnel if she bends over. The air seems all right as she goes. She isn’t sure how she’ll know when it isn’t. She keeps her hands on the rough walls to either side and strains her eyes, for the light begins to fade.
It is a short distance, actually. Another birthing passage, she thinks, though she can’t say why that thought has come to her, twice now.
She straightens in a second chamber, not as large, or as high. It is colder. She can hear, faintly, the sound of water dripping.
Something else is different. There is no wolf smell here. She doesn’t know why. Wouldn’t they extend their lair as far from outside as they could? Protect the cubs? What is it that has kept them away? And does that mean she shouldn’t be here either? She doesn’t know. The answers are too remote from any life she’s lived.
Then, as her eyes adjust to fainter light, Li-Mei sees what lies in this chamber.
Both hands go to her mouth, as if to lock in sound. As if a gasp or cry would be sacrilege. Her next thought is that she might know, after all, why the animals have not come here. For this must be—surely it must be—a place of power.
On the wall in front of her, dim in the darkness, but clearly conjured forth, Li-Mei sees horses.
Innumerable, jumbled chaotically, piled on each other all the way up into shadow. Full-bodied, half-forms, some with only heads and necks and manes, in a racing, tumbling, spilling tumult. A herd, all facing the same way, moving the same way, deeper in, as if thundering across the curved cave walls. And she knows, she knows, in the moment of seeing, the moment they emerge from darkness on the wall, that these painted, surging figures are unimaginably old.
She turns, in the centre of a cascade. On the opposite wall is another herd, galloping the same direction, the horses superimposed upon each other in wild, profligate intensity, so vital, so vivid, even in barely sufficient light, that she can imagine sounds, the drumming of hooves on hard ground. The horses of the Bogü steppes.
But before the Bogü tribes were here, she thinks. There are no men on these walls and the horses are untamed, free, flowing like a river in spate towards the eastern end of the cave, deeper in—where there is a third tunnel, she now sees.
Something rises within her, primitive and absolute, imperative, to tell her she will not go in there. It is not for her. She does not belong, and she knows it.
High above that slit of an entranceway, the largest by far of all the painted horses looms: a stallion, deep-chested, red-brown, almost crimson, its sex clearly shown. And on its body, all over it—and on this one, only—Li-Mei sees the imprint of human hands laid on in a pale-coloured paint, as if branding or tattooing the horse.
She doesn’t understand.
She does not ever, in her life, expect to understand.
But she feels an appallingly ancient force here, and senses within herself, a yearning to claim or possess it. She is certain that those who placed their handprints on this wall, on the painted body of this king-horse, whether they did so ages ago or have come recently through these tunnels, were paying tribute, homage, to this herd.
And perhaps to those who put these horses here, leading the way deeper in.
She will not follow them there. She is not such a person, and is too far from home. There is a barrier in her mind where that third tunnel begins. It is not an opening she can take. She has not led a life guided by magic, infused or entwined with it. She doesn’t like that world, did not, even at court—alchemists hovering, stroking narrow beards, astrologers mumbling over charts.
Still, she looks at these horses, unable to stop turning and turning, aware that she’s becoming dizzied, overwhelmed, consumed by the profusion, the richness here. There is so much power on these walls, humbling, evoking awe, enough to make someone weep.
She has a sense of time stretching, back and back so far it cannot be grasped. Not by her, at any rate. Not by Shen Li-Mei, only daughter of the Kitan general Shen Gao. She wonders, suddenly, what her father would have said had he been with her in this hidden place. A hard thought, because if he were alive she wouldn’t be here.
And in that moment she hears a sound that makes her halt her spinning. She stands motionless suddenly, silent. She listens. The drip of water. Not that. She is almost certain she heard a horse. Fear comes with that.
Then another sound: someone coming into this inner cave from the first one. Instead of frightening her, this reassures. Meshag went to get horses. He knows where she is. The sound she’s heard—faintly—is from outside. A real horse, not the supernatural neighing of a spirit stallion on these walls.
She sees him come through. He straightens. She is about to speak when he holds up a hand, three fingers to his lips. Fear returns. Why silence? Who is out there?
He gestures for her to follow, turns to lead her through the short tunnel to the wider, brighter cave, the first one. She takes a last look at the horses all around, at the king-horse with the human hands upon him, and then she makes her way out.
In the larger cave, with the high openings lending light, Meshag turns again, once more with fingers to his lips urging silence. He is wearing a long, dark tunic now, a leather vest over it. She wonders what clothing he has found for her. She opens her mouth to whisper a question (surely they can whisper?) but his gesture, seeing that, is imperative. His eyes gleam, flashing angrily in the thin light from above.
She registers this, says nothing. She draws a slow breath.
He gestures again for her to follow, turns to take them back towards daylight.
She approaches closely, behind him. And at the edge of the tunnel that will lead them out, in the moment when he bends low to enter it, Li-Mei stabs him in the throat from one side with the knife she’s carried in her sleeve all this way.
She drives the blade in then rips it towards her with all her strength, knowing she’ll have only this one chance, not knowing how to kill a man, where the knife must go. She tears it out and stabs him again, and a third time, sobbing. He grunts only once, a queer chest sound.
He falls with a clattering noise, right at the entrance to the tunnel.
Still weeping (and she is not a woman who weeps), Li-Mei strikes again with the knife, into his back. It hits metal, twists in her hand. She is frantic, terrified, but he lies where he’s fallen, and now she sees how much blood there is.
She scrabbles away, clutching the marred blade. She backs up against the cave wall, eyes never leaving him. If he gets up, if he even moves, she knows she will begin to scream and not be able to stop.
Nothing, no movement. Her rapid, ragged breathing is loud in her ears. The light in this chamber falls as before. It is the light that saved her, that told her. If she is right in this. Her hands are still shaking, spasms she cannot stop. She puts the knife down beside her. She has killed a man. She is quite certain she has killed a man.
It is not Meshag. It is not him. She says that last aloud, shocking herself with the sound, the harshness of her voice. It cannot be him, must not be.
She needs to know. Can only do that if she looks. That means going back to where he lies, face down, before the tunnel. It requires courage. She has more, in fact, than she knows.
Holding hard to inner control, she does crawl back, bent knife in hand. There are stones on the cave floor, they hurt her knees. Her wrist hurts, from when the knife twisted. Why did it twist? She thinks she might know. Needs to touch him to be sure.
She does that, too. Drags him by his legs from the tunnel’s entrance. More light where he lies now. With an effort, grunting, she pushes him onto his back. Into her mind there flashes a horrifying image of this man rising up as she does so. Rising to …
He is dead. He will not rise. And he is not Meshag.
An older man, lean face, thin grey hair. He looks nothing at all like Meshag, son of Hurok. Now. But he had before. Had looked exactly like him, in all but one respect. Which tells her what this man is. What he was, she corrects herself. He is dead. She killed him.
She rips through his tunic, chest to belly, with her reddened, twisted blade. Tears it open with both hands. Metallic mirrors appear, strapped around his body, glinting in the pale light from above.
It is a truth about the nature of human beings that we seek—even demand—order and pattern in our lives, in the flow and flux of history and our own times.
Philosophers have noted this and mused upon it. Those advising princes, emperors, kings have sometimes proposed that this desire, this need, be used, exploited, shaped. That a narrative, a story, the story of a time, a war, a dynasty be devised to steer the understanding of a people to where the prince desires it to go.
Without pattern, absent that sense of order, a feeling of randomness, of being lost in a world without purpose or direction can undermine even the strongest man or woman.
Given this, it would certainly have been noted as significant by any such philosopher or adviser that the second son and the only daughter of General Shen Gao, honoured in his day as Left Side Commander of the Pacified West, each killed a man on the same morning, a long way from each other.
The son had done this before. The daughter had not, had never expected to.
As to the meaning to be attached to such a conjunction, a pattern discovered embedded in the tale …
Who can number, under nine heavens, the jewel-bright observations to be extracted from moments such as these? Who will dare say he knows with certainty which single gem is to be held up to whatever light there is for us, in our journeying, and proclaimed as true?
Eventually Li-Mei begins to think about the horse sound she’d heard: she fears an animal will give her away, reveal the cave, if it is still out there.
It might not be. The wolves might have driven it away. Or killed it. It leaves her feeling oddly passive, after the hideous spasm of action before: someone is lying not far away, blood thickening on stone. It is as if she’s exhausted her reserves of force, her ability to play any further role, help herself, can only wait to see what will follow. It is an unexpectedly peaceful state.
You sat, leaning against a wall, legs extended, in the midst of stones and animal bones and the smell of wolf and the sometimes flutter of a bat or bird overhead, and you waited to see who—or what—would come for you. You didn’t have to do anything, there didn’t seem to be anything left to do.
There is no point going outside to be seen. Where will she walk from here, or even ride, alone? She has no adequate clothing, no food, and the wolves are out there.
So there is a curious measure of tranquility in her when she hears the sound of someone else coming into the cave through the tunnel. She looks over, but she doesn’t stand up, or try to hide. She holds her bent knife in her hand.
Meshag enters and straightens and looks around.
She can see him absorb what has happened. She looks at him closely, of course, though she is very sure the deception isn’t happening again.
He kneels beside the fallen man. She sees that he avoids the blood on the cave floor. He stands and comes towards her. She looks at his eyes.
“He was a shaman?” she asks, though she knows the answer.
He gives his short nod.
“He made himself look exactly, almost exactly like you. He never spoke. He was taking me outside when I …” She doesn’t finish.
“What was not me?”
She stands before answering. Brushes at her leggings and tunic to remove some of the rock dust. There is blood, too, she sees. That isn’t going to disappear so easily.
“His eyes,” she says. “His
… yours couldn’t have been so bright.” She wonders if this will be wounding, for what it implies.
But it looks as if he smiles. She is almost sure she sees it before the expression goes away. He says, “I know. I have seen my eyes in water. In … pools? That word?”
“Yes, pools. This is since what happened to you?”
A stupid question but he only nods again. “Yes, since. My eyes are dead.”
“No, they aren’t!” she says with sudden force. He looks surprised. She feels surprised. “Your eyes are black, but they aren’t … you aren’t dead!”
No smile this time. “No. But too nearly something else,” he says. “Before Shan … before Shendai came. That day.”
That day. “And it was your brother who …?”
“Yes.”
“You know this?”
“I know this.”
“And this one?” She gestures at the body. “He was sent by him?”
Unexpectedly, he shakes his head. She had thought she was beginning to understand. “No. Too soon. I think he sees me when I leave to find horse. Or before, as we came here.”
“He just saw a chance to take me?”
“For himself, or for reward, might be. He sees me to know me. Who I am. Watching the wolves might have told him. Then it takes time to make a spell to shape-change.”
Li-Mei is thinking hard.
“He could have just come in and seized me when you left? No?”
He considers that. “Yes. So must have meant to take you to them. Maybe afraid you kill yourself, so he changed.”
She clears her throat. Her hand is hurting.
“Must go now,” he says.
“What about him?”
He looks surprised. He gestures at the bones around them. “Leave to wolves. It is what we do.” He pauses, looks a little awkward. Then he says, “Was good, killing this one. Was very bravery? Is the word?”
She sighs. “Brave. I suppose it is the word.”
Again he hesitates. He motions with a stiff hand. “You see what is next cave?”
“The horses? I saw. I didn’t go farther. I felt … not brave.”
Under Heaven Page 27
