by Kate Elliott
The last glass was sipped dry. With an annoyed gesture, Father Mei’s elder wife Drena sent Cornflower back inside. It hadn’t been the choice of the women, then, to see if Captain Anji could be embarrassed by revealing Cornflower’s charms.
“I apologize that we must speak in such haste,” said Father Mei, although the ceremony of receiving always took at least an hour and the usual opening negotiating formalities might take an equal amount of time. “I had thought the negotiations done and the contract sealed, Captain Anji, but now it appears otherwise. What brings you to us?”
Captain Anji had a soldier’s bluntness. “I sent a messenger ahead to inform you of my situation. You already know my predicament. I’ve received a change of orders. My company rides out in two days. I would like to marry tomorrow so my bride can journey with me. It is the fondest desire of my heart.”
Now he did smile, nodding at Mai. Shai could not see Mai’s reaction because he could see only the back of her head, but he thought her shoulders tightened slightly; it was hard to tell because she was so heavily draped in the layers of blue silk appropriate to an affianced bride. Then again, lots of things were hard to tell with Mai. All loved her for her accommodating, placid nature. She was beautiful, but a little stupid.
“It will be a hardship for my clan to hurry the rites. It will cost us to pay the law courts to move the day, and to make room tomorrow in their schedule, and we won’t have ready the many fine luxuries we wish to dower her with.”
“I have some resources. I can pay the law court what they need. I ask nothing of you except your daughter, Father Mei.”
How coolly he said those words! Shai was impressed. Father Mei would inflate the costs and keep the difference for the family, but Captain Anji was apparently no merchant or bargainer and thereby, according to the rule of the marketplace, ripe for plucking. Or else he simply did not care. Beauty in women captured men that way sometimes.
“We will sustain a loss by having her torn from the house before her time.”
As if on cue, Younger Mei sniffled, then stiffened, knowing he must show no emotion. Emotion gave the opponent a bargaining chip.
The captain slipped a hand into the folds of one sleeve, searched for something, and withdrew his hand, now cupped. “I possess nothing to recompense you for your loss, which is extreme. However, two days ago I purchased an item which I think might be of interest to the Mei clan.”
He unfolded his hand to reveal a ring. It was silver, shaped to resemble a running wolf with its mouth biting into its tail. A rare and perfect black pearl was inlaid as the wolf’s eye.
Grandmother bolted upright in her chair. Her hands gripped the arms like a hawk’s talons. “Girish, bring it to me!” she said querulously.
The wives whispered, horrified. The uncles coughed and hemmed. Ti giggled nervously. Father Mei’s big hands closed, opened, and with his right thumb and middle finger he made the warding sign, but because he did not speak, no one spoke. No one dared correct Grandmother.
Captain Anji raised an eyebrow, puzzled by the exchange.
She seemed to collect herself, and her memory. “Shai!” she snapped. “Nothing-good boy! Hu! I don’t know why Grandfather thought you so clever! Come quickly. Get it and bring it here.”
He padded forward from behind the hedge. The uncles and wives and children seemed surprised to see him. Father Mei grunted, a sign that he was holding his legendary temper in check. It always exploded afterward. But as soon as Shai got between the captain and his eldest brother, blocking Father Mei’s view, Captain Anji winked at Shai as if in sympathy before dropping the ring into his hand.
“Hari,” breathed Shai, not meaning to talk, but the touch of the ring actually hit so hard that he rocked back on his heels and struggled against a wave of dizziness.
It was Hari’s ring. No doubt of that.
He took in a breath to steady himself, then walked back to his mother and placed it gently in her right hand. She slapped him hard with her left, the crack stinging and bitter.
He choked back his surge of anger. He’d gotten so good at doing it that it had become reflexive. The bitch would be dead soon, and he wouldn’t miss her. Anyway, her slap—her dislike of him—didn’t hurt nearly as much as contact with the ring had.
Hari was dead.
He’d known it as soon as the ring had touched his skin, just as he knew that no one else would feel it. Hari was dead. He’d been wearing the ring when he died; he’d been angry in an amused kind of way—the anger lingered in the ring. But surely Hari’s spirit had already fled earth through Spirit Gate. There was nothing to hold him here, after all. Anger and bitterness hadn’t chained him in Kartu Town. He’d not waste time lingering on earth as a ghost when there were adventures to face in the afterlife. Not Hari, the boldest and handsomest and most delightful of brothers.
“Fool boy,” muttered his mother sharply. Her hands shook as she struggled to hide her tears, and Father Mei finally took the ring and examined it. As soon as it was out of her hands, she hid her face behind a sleeve.
“This belonged to my younger brother,” Father Mei said. “Hari marched east as a mercenary with one of your regiments six years ago. We have never heard from him. Where did this come from?”
Shai shuffled to the side, turning, to see Captain Anji shrug.
“Certain peddlers have a license to travel from fort to fort selling small wares, curiosities, such things. I found this yesterday among the goods offered for sale by a man who had come from the east along the Golden Road. He said it came from a place called ‘the Hundred,’ which lies north of the Sirniakan Empire. He bought it from a Hundred merchant, traveling in Mariha, who said it was found near a town he called ‘Horn.’ There’d been a battle there. Internal matters, lord fighting lord or some such. I’m not sure of the details. The Hundred folk are barbarians, it seems. They’ve never had a var—a king—to lead them. Scavengers will always pick clean the fields of battle, and it seems it was no different with this ring. I don’t know how many hands it passed through to get this far from the place it was found. But I recognized the ring at once. Mai has a ring like it.”
As did every blood member of the Mei clan.
“Does it bring joy or grief to your house?” the captain asked.
“I cannot know,” said Father Mei. “Is Hari dead, or alive? He cannot rest if his bones do not rest with those of his ancestors. We can never rest, not knowing what became of him.” His lips were thin, a sure sign of anger.
Lots of anger in this house. Shai waited for the blow. It came quickly.
“When my beloved and precious daughter goes with you, she must have servants, familiar ones who have served her for many years.”
“Of course.” Captain Anji nodded.
“She will be alone, who has never been alone. I ask you, Captain Anji, let my young brother Shai accompany her.”
The words struck, shivering like lightning through him. He stood, stunned, as his brother droned on.
“He is still unmarried, so he leaves no obligations behind, and he is almost twenty, old enough to be considered a man. We’ll send a slave with him and provisions and traveling gear, so he’ll be no burden on you. Once he reaches the eastern border, he can make his way north to this place called the Hundred and look for this battlefield near a town called Horn. If he can find our brother’s remains, he can bring them home.”
“A long journey,” mused Captain Anji, “and far beyond the boundaries of the lands the Qin claim.”
“Merchants go there. Peddlers go there.”
Anji grinned as at a private joke. From this new angle, Shai could now see Mai’s face. She was pretending to look down quiescently at her folded hands but in fact she was studying the captain. Her eyes widened slightly; her lips twitched. Although she and Shai had grown up together, lived in the same compound all their lives—she as the cherished, pampered daughter, and he as the unwanted and despised youngest brother—Shai did not understand her. What did this flash
of emotion portend? Impossible to say. Mai was as sweet to him as she was to anyone. She had no hidden depths, no reserves of deep feeling. Most likely she was frightened out of her wits.
But Shai wasn’t, not as the first shock faded.
“Merchants travel where soldiers fear to ride,” said the officer. “Shai is welcome to come, but I cannot guarantee his safety after he leaves my protection.”
“If you set him on the right path, that is all that I ask,” said Father Mei, pompous and condescending as always. “Then we will be square, our debts equal and canceled. Do we have an agreement?”
“We have an agreement.”
With those simple words, Shai was released. Unchained. He was free.
8
Leave-taking turned out to be a troublesome business. In the last three generations the only person in the Mei clan who had left Kartu Town by any road other than Spirit Gate was Hari. Everyone knew what trouble he had caused.
Ti had left off clinging to Mai indoors and come outdoors, where she was now yanking on Shai’s left arm and crying while trying to speak. Her sobs gusted up straight from her belly. Shai admired her capacity; she’d be a natural for one of the touring acting companies that plied the Golden Road.
“Oh! Oh! Oh! You didn’t even try to talk him out of it! You just hid! What will become of me, all alone? Hu! Hu! Hu! I can’t bear it!”
Captain Anji had arrived at dawn with the same pair of soldiers who had accompanied him last time; his officer’s escort were gathered outside the gate. He waited with apparent patience in the shadow of the arbor although it was by now almost noon. The wives had been in an uproar all morning and had repacked Mai’s trunk twice even though Mai had packed it herself yesterday with only the aid of her slave Priya. That linen shift isn’t nice enough; the yellow of that silk doesn’t go well with her complexion; she’ll need thread and her embroidery frame; she’ll need a prayer silk; she can buy thread at any town market; cooking spices. No! Hairpins! Shai and Younger Mei had retreated to their alcove and huddled there while the storm raged. In the end, a rare vase was thrown and broken, and Father Mei had intervened with slaps and shouting.
Now they stood in the courtyard waiting for Mai to be escorted out by Grandmother. Captain Anji was seated on a stool. He was smoking terig leaf, dried leaves rolled up in paper to make a burning stick whose smoke you sucked into your lungs. Periodically, he handed a stub back to his attendants, who were standing behind him, and they finished it off. Shai had never tried terig leaf because it was one of many things forbidden to those who weren’t Qin. The smoke stung in his nostrils, laced with a faintly sweet afterburn. The wisps drifting over to the entrance gate made Girish’s ghost even more irritable than usual, and his wraith-like form danced and gibbered by the hanging tree to the right of the gate, so furious that for once Shai couldn’t understand what he was saying.
Poor Girish. Mother had spoiled him after Hari’s departure, and, as Mai had once said in a moment of startling and unexpected clarity, he had fermented. He’d never forgiven the family for his death, although it had been his own selfishness and cruelty that had gotten him killed. His anger had chained his ghost to the gate for almost a year.
Shai caught Captain Anji’s eye. The Qin officer smiled ever so slightly at him, like a conspirator, and all at once, so strongly that the feeling almost knocked Shai right off his feet, the last two days of tempest focused into a single thought.
I’m glad to be rid of Girish! And the rest of them, too!
Glad! Glad! Glad! None of them could peer into Shai’s mind. He’d made sure of that ever since he was old enough to think twice about keeping his mouth shut. They’d never know the truth of his impious thoughts.
He was free!
Until he found Hari’s bones and had to come back.
The door opened. Father Mei appeared in his best clerk’s silk jacket, flowing to the ground and clasped with intricate knots in three places across the chest. Grandmother tottered beside him, leaning on her eldest son, who was ever burdened with the knowledge that he had never been her favorite. Behind them, Younger Mei escorted his twin, Mai. She wore a blue silk robe fit for display but not traveling; her hair was done up in a complicated series of loops and braids festooned with slender gold chains and tiny brass bells.
Younger Mei was a homely boy; the contrast with his twin sister always astounded no matter how many times one saw them together. The round face, thick lashes, exotic eyes, and flawless bronze-dark complexion that made Mai the best-looking girl in Kartu Town had a doughy lack of firmness in Younger Mei, like bread left to rise too long. Tears streaked his face; he’d get a beating once the cavalcade left. Shai had already said his good-byes to his favorite nephew, the only person he would miss. Younger Mei looked at him despairingly. Ti sniveled; an almost inaudible moan escaped her.
They kept silence while Father Mei made a long speech about the Mei clan’s honor and the exceptional value of its most precious orchid, Mai’ili. Captain Anji remained seated throughout, which in any man but a Qin officer would have been a deliberate insult. The entire household stood as Father Mei declaimed. Everyone’s eyes were red, even the uncles’. They all loved her. Mai was the flower of the clan, and it had shocked them all when the captain had claimed her.
Now they would lose her. They all knew it was unlikely they would ever see her again.
Even Shai would have to leave her once the captain’s regiment reached its new garrison posting, wherever that was to be. Mai’s expression, as Father Mei wound down his speech, had the placid good nature of a cow’s. Her eyes were a tiny bit red, but the only people in the courtyard as composed as she was were her new husband and his stolid attendants.
At last, Father Mei finished. Captain Anji rose while, behind him, one of his attendants folded up the stool and tied it to the back of a packhorse. The girl was handed from one to the other, the contracts, signed yesterday at the law courts, were exchanged, and Ti crumpled to the ground in a dead faint. Mai looked back toward her. Captain Anji, who already held her hand, turned as well, alerted by her movement. There was a pause. Mai’s eyes were very wide but as she came up against Captain Anji’s grip, she stilled and did not tug.
The officer released her hand. She glanced at him with a look of astonishment, lips parting, then spun and returned the few steps to kneel beside her half sister and kiss her brow. But Shai, beside Ti, saw this out of the corner of his eye; he felt Mai’s gesture more than watched her because he was studying Captain Anji. The Qin officer had a peculiar quirk to his lips, unfathomable, as he surveyed the pretty scene of Mai comforting poor Ti, whom grief had silenced. Father Mei began to speak, but caught himself short. Mai was no longer his to scold and discipline.
Ti stirred, regaining consciousness. The girls kissed one last time. As Mai returned to her husband, Ti buried her face in her hands. The captain gestured, the attendant went to the gate, and four slaves entered carrying the palanquin in which she would journey. He twitched the curtain open. Mai ducked inside without a word and without looking over her shoulder, and the curtain slid down before Shai could get a glimpse of the cramped interior. Her chest was hauled away to another packhorse. Mai’s slave Priya waited beside the palanquin.
Ready to go!
Shai gestured to Mountain. The middle-aged slave earned zastras by hiring himself out before dawn hauling night soil to the fields for other families, and five years back he had been given the choice between buying his freedom or using his zastras to pay for a marriage contract between him and Priya. He’d chosen Priya. Now he was being sent with Mai into the unknown. As part of his duties he would attend Shai, until Shai left the company. The big man knelt, fastened the carrying strap across his forehead, and rose with Shai’s small chest of belongings balanced across his shoulders.
Captain Anji beckoned to one of his attendants, who brought a horse forward.
“Uncle Shai.” He gestured toward the saddle. It was not a request.
Panic struck as
an eagle might, plunged straight down and gripped him by the throat. He lost his voice.
Father Mei said, “But it’s forbidden, Captain. You know our people are forbidden to ride horses, by the law of the Qin. It’s a hanging offense.”
Captain Anji nodded. “Among the Qin, only slaves walk. If he does not ride, my soldiers will treat him as a slave. It is up to you, Uncle Shai.”
The formal mode of address calmed Shai. Anji was about ten years older, but he used the honorific appropriate to Shai’s station relative to the captain’s bride, not to the captain himself. The kindness was similar to that Anji had shown Mai by letting her give Ti a final kiss good-bye. Whatever man Anji was, he was not a simple one. He was not a faceless triumphant conquering overlord grabbing what he most coveted. Or he was playing a very deep game.
“Thank you.” He forced the words out and stepped up to the horse, which was absolutely massive and terrifying, and of course he hadn’t the least idea what to do.
The captain leaned close enough to whisper. The terig had a musty, sharp smell, not displeasing. “Loop the reins around the pommel, that post there. Hold on as well as you can. The horse will follow the rest. Trust me.”
No one else heard. Ti had started to wail again, and all the wives were crying, with the children sniffling and coughing and blowing their noses on their sleeves.
Be a brave man, like Hari. Hari wouldn’t have balked! A soldier came forward and gave him a hand up. He had a moment of disorientation, up so high; then Captain Anji left his side and went to his own mount, held by one of his escort.
