Andre Norton & Susan Shwartz - [Central Asia 01]

by Imperial Lady- A Fantasy of Han China (epub)

  She gestured at the fire, fearful that chance sparks might spread a wall of flame across the grasslands.

  “The ground is yet too damp for us to worry that a fire might spread beyond control. We leave the hearthfires burning, lady,” Prince Vughturoi told her. With his usual control, he ignored the words that had been spoken loudly enough to reach his ears. “It is a custom of the Hsiung-nu. When we break camp, we leave the hearthfires burning as a sign that, come next winter, we shall return. Because it is spring, and the ground is wet—well, wet for this land—we need not fear that the fires will spread, as they would if we dared this in high summer. When we ride out, we shall turn around at the highest point during the day’s travel. If the fires are still burning, it means good fortune.”

  Silver Snow mounted, then turned to survey what had been a thriving, crowded camp and what now was merely a collection of rutted ground, scattered fire, and baggage, rapidly stowed on restive animals. The shan-yu emerged from his tent, last of all of them to be taken down, climbed laboriously ahorse, and smiled to see the youngest of his wives awaiting the order to ride forth. Wagon after wagon rumbled by, Strong Tongue very much in the vanguard, driving a wagon that Silver Snow would have thought required the services of at least five drovers. She glared to see Silver Snow mounted and unafraid; in turn, Silver Snow smiled.

  After a season of confinement, it would be good to travel again, she thought, and knew not whether that was Hsiung-nu thinking or the desire of her own heart. The wind whipped around her, bringing tears to her eyes. She bent her body, lessening her resistance to the wind, hearing in its howl a voice luring her onward, promising her wonders, change, excitement, and, above all, the freedom of the Hsiung-nu.

  As if the longing to escape from the confinement of the winter camp had abruptly built up past their power to control, the Hsiung-nu warriors shrieked as the shan-yu gave the signal to his horsemen. Horses raced past swaying, sullen camels and the wagons with their lumbering draft animals and out into the plains that were their true home.

  All that day they rode, dismounting only for the briefest intervals and greatest needs, taking food on horseback, conferring on horseback, and riding back and forth along the great, cumbersome train of wagons, herds, and families. The air was very clear. It would be easy for a tracker and rider like Tadiqan to find his people in their summer pastures, pity though that was. Though Silver Snow was certain that they had ridden for miles, the scale of land and sky here was so vast that, when she turned in her wooden saddle, they seemed to have come no space at all from the camp.

  “Try now to spot the fire, lady,” came Vughturoi’s voice. He sounded almost amused at her surprise.

  Silver Snow narrowed her eyes and gazed back at the camp. Fire . . . there had stood her tents, and there the shan-yu's. Plumes of smoke rose from what had been their hearths, and tiny flames still wound merrily upward.

  That was a fine omen, she had been told. Then her eyes strayed to her husband, who was almost invisible in his swad-dlings of fur and felt. Let it be so, she prayed, but she did not know with what power she pleaded.

  = 17 =

  Day yielded to day as the tribe drew closer and closer to spring pastures. The huge flocks of sheep thrived, and as the days grew warmer, the shaggy horses lost patches from their heavy coats. Even the swaying Bactrian camels pulled their loads without savaging their handlers; their doubled humps, which had sunk during the winter, a sign of dearth and hunger in the land, began to rise once again as the grasslands grew brighter and they neared spring pastures.

  Spring pastures were many days’ rides, a vast distance even as the Hsiung-nu counted it. But a day’s ride was no regimented matter of up at dawn and so much land covered, regardless of time or cost to beasts and riders. Nor did the Hsiung-nu travel every day; they might pause in one specially suitable place, a site known for generations, where the water or the hunting was especially good.

  It was no easy life, riding or driving a wagon or flocks across grasslands that seemed to stretch on to the very edges of the world. When the wind blew and the sun shone on the trappings of the riders, the red trimmings of garments, the shining, fat-smeared faces of children who were once again growing plump, and the bronze of the huge cauldrons that were lashed to the camels’ pack saddles, it was a good life, exhausting, absorbing, and richly colored. Compared with the pastel, static life of the Son of Heaven’s Inner Courts—well, Silver Snow could not begin to compare the two. If the air here seared her lungs with its coldness or the violence of the wind, at least there was enough of it for her to breathe.

  Absorbed in this new life, she had even stopped longing for her northern home, with its faded dreams and its cautious poverty, except when, under her husband’s benign, nodding supervision, she dispatched letters by one or two Hsiung-nu warriors who relished the exploit of a mere two or three weeks’ dash to a frontier outpost of the Han, where he would test the truce long enough to convince the garrison to accept and forward the carefully sealed silk strips that bore the honors of a princess of Ch’ang-an and a queen of the Hsiung-nu. Some of the older officers, she suspected, might even remember her father and Li Ling; and might pass on the letters out of ancient loyalties.

  Two things remained to disquiet her: Vughturoi spoke to her shortly, if at all, as if he enacted the role of a disgraced man abasing himself before a queen; and Sable’s brother Basich hafl not returned from delivering the urgent, secret letter that she had entrusted to him. She feared that it had fallen into her enemy’s hands. Of all her letters, that one held the most power to help her or cast her down.

  However, Silver Snow’s life was busy, too busy for cares that might prove, in the end, to be illusions. When the sun shone brightly, and the air quivered in the throat, wilder and even more sweet than the strange wine that, some travelers said, the people of Turfan brewed out of grapes instead of rice, she could even manage to forget such worries in the exhilaration of what lay around her.

  Of all of the things that Silver Snow had never expected, this abundant, exuberant life was foremost. Each day brought her new sights and sounds that occupied her fully. Each night brought the stars close, and, when the camp finally settled itself, the grasslands were so quiet that each stamp of a hoof, each cry of a child, each gust of wind could receive its full tribute of attention and concern. By nights, Willow would dash out and bring in reports of movement in the land: the Yueh-chih toward the west, the Fu Yu northward, on a course toward spring grazing that paralleled their own.

  Tadiqan still rode among the Fu Yu, Silver Snow thought. His absence added to her contentment. “The spirits send that he wander lost,” Willow muttered once when, weary from the anguish of the change, she lay panting on her robes in the grayness before dawn. Silver Snow had wiped her brow, covered her, and bid her hush before she sought her own sleeping furs and silks; yet she had to admit to herself that she would be well satisfied if Strong Tongue’s brutal son never found his way back to his mother’s tenthold.

  She had no such luck, however. The next day, a whistling shriek, followed by the buzz of a flight of arrows that skewered a fat sheep and a whoop of triumph, heralded Tadiqan and his men, triumphant from their dealings with the Fu Yu. That night, the shan-yu held a bigger feast than usual, and his eldest son reclined at his right hand, his mother beaming at the prince’s shoulder, leaning over him to whisper counsel.

  That night, the shan-yu appeared to be more feeble than Silver Snow had ever seen him.

  “Willow!” hissed the girl, much against her custom, which kept her maid well out of the sight of Strong Tongue and her son. “In the chest that Li Ling gave you. Fetch the cordial in the jade bottle.” She pointed with her chin at the shan-yu, who leaned upon Tadiqan’s arm even more heavily than he had leaned, on that much happier evening, upon Vughturoi’s. Why, he was actually drooping, near to collapse.

  “Fetch it or foxglove . . . quickly!” she whispered, and Willow fled, to reappear with a jade tray, a tiny flask, and two tiny whi
te jade cups brimful of an elixir that smelled strong and sweet. Silver Snow herself rose and took one of the cups to her husband. Because she saw no alternative, she offered the other to Tadiqan, who glanced at his mother, then spurned it with an impatient gesture.

  “You drink it, lady,” said the elder prince, as if this might be some test.

  As she had been schooled, Silver Snow demurred politely. From the corner of her eye, she saw Strong Tongue gesture imperatively at her son.

  “I said, drink it!” snapped Tadiqan.

  “Forgive this foolish one her folly, prince of warriors,” Silver Snow said in her softest, most rippling voice. She had hard work translating the formal apologies demanded by the language of her birth into the much more rugged tongue of the Hsiung-nu. “She but meant to let you benefit from the properties of this drink, which contains naught but healthful herbs and wine.” She raised the cup as if to pledge him and drained it; the shan-yu copied her, even to the care with which he replaced the fine jade upon the little tray.

  “My son, you must not snap at my senior wife in such a way,” chided the shan-yu. There was more resonance in his voice, and blood rose in his withered cheeks. Imperiously he pointed to the carpet at Silver Snow’s feet. As Tadiqan abased himself before Silver Snow, the old chieftan beamed equally at his young wife and his huge, glowering son.

  Bemused by Tadiqan’s sudden attack, Silver Snow plaited the fabric of her sleeve. Just as a spell of finding and success lay on Tadiqan’s arrows, a spell of homecoming seemed to bind him to Strong Tongue.

  Did such a spell now bind Khujanga to his son? And did spells even stronger and more sinister bind him to Strong Tongue?

  If so, then perhaps the cordial had weakened them. At least, it would be wonderful to think so, much as Silver Snow doubted it. Shortly thereafter, Strong Tongue beckoned to her son, and the shan-yu turned to speak to some of the older warriors.

  A shadow at Silver Snow’s shoulder made her whip around with a speed no doubt facilitated by the elixir that she had drunk.

  “Do you wonder, lady, how my elder brother returned home?” Her astonishment that Vughturoi would speak to her after so long a silence drew her out of her haze. She murmured something about “powers of Erlik.”

  “Now you speak like a true daughter of the grasslands.” The younger prince smiled. “It is said ...” he dropped his voice, “that in this, as in much else, my brother has the aid of his dam. But it is said, and more truthfully, that we of the Hsiung-nu know our way across the plains that are home to us as a city-dweller knows the way across the small prison that he calls his house. We do not go astray, nor do our arrows.”

  Was that warning or encouragement? Silver Snow could not tell. One thing she knew, however: the powers of the Hsiung-nu were not the beneficent healing magics that Willow, taming her fox nature, had learned, nor yet were they the scholarly powers of Li Ling. Those skills were somewhat familiar to her, and the ones adept in them meant her well. These magics, however, were as deadly as they were unpredictable; and the most skillful of their adepts was her deadly enemy.

  As soon as it was prudent or possible, Silver Snow withdrew.

  When she returned to her tent, Willow eyed her narrowly.

  “I thought you might have run free,” Silver Snow told her maid, surprised that her words came out almost as an accusation.

  With surprising mildness, the lame girl shook her head and bent to the task of undressing her mistress. As she helped Silver Snow to unbind her long hair, she laid a narrow hand on her brow.

  “You seem fevered, Elder Sister. May I brew you a potion? I still have willow twigs, to ease headache and reduce fever,” Willow offered.

  “No!” Silver Snow snapped, then flushed. “No,” she repeated more gently. “It was the heat in the great tent. I simply need to rest.”

  “So?” Willow raised her level brows without further comment. Only she pulled her mirror from its usual hiding place and showed Silver Snow the taut, pale face of the woman pictured therein.

  “It was too hot,” Silver Snow said again. “And Strong Tongue strewed some of her noisome herbs upon the fire. Did you not smell them? Then you must be nose-blind. Just let me sleep.” Even to her own ears, her voice sounded sullen. Willow assisted Silver Snow to lie down. Much to her surprise, the maid did not slip from the tent, to change shape and dance the night away with the brothers-in-fur. Even as Silver Snow heard yapping, Willow went to the flap of the tent and paused there, and the yapping faded into the distance . . . and into the mists of a troubled, haunted sleep.

  The mists swirled about her, then solidified. Once again, she stood at the opening of the shan-yu's great tent. She felt very much alone, very cold. Vughturoi . . . Willow . . . Sable . . . Bronze Mirror . . . where were all of her friends and advocates? As she opened her lips to call for them, the wind blew her words away.

  Pnce again, the mist swirled. Now she saw her father, younger and not nearly as halt, moving with a stealth that was totally alien to her knowledge of him, creeping toward the horse herds, seizing a sturdy beast with sound wind, and fleeing as far as he might, sleeping in the saddle, just as the Hsiung-nu themselves did.

  But he had abandoned a son, a young son. As clearly as if he lay swathed beside her, Silver Snow saw the boy, saw his puzzled, sad eyes. Even as she watched, he shrugged, as if dismissing the loss of a father, the betrayal of a whole life. What must it have been like, Silver Snow wondered as she slept, to have trusted and respected ... a captured enemy? What would it have been like then to lose him?

  She whimpered in her sleep. Pounding throughout the dream until it overpowered even the grief she shared with that stranger-lad came the beat of a spirit drum, summoning her, summoning both of them to where their enemy waited with a sharp knife and a cruel laugh.

  Silver Snow woke screaming, and it required all of Willow’s skill to soothe her.

  She was tired all the next day, far weaker than her wont. Strong Tongue looked sleek and satisfied, like a Hsiung-nu child fed on fatty mutton to the bursting point... at least, she looked satisfied until Khujanga spied Silver Snow drooping in the saddle, ordered that her chariot be brought, and himself escorted her to it with tender concern.

  “She does not bear; she does not tend flocks or beat felt; she neither hunts nor cooks,” Sable reported that Strong Tongue snorted . . . well out of the shan-yu's earshot. “Such fear for a useless, jeweled weakling.”

  Children clung to Sable—Basich’s children as well as her own. “Let them ride with me,” Silver Snow asked, and the children whooped with delight.

  Children’s pleasure; a day’s respite—that much she could give to Sable, who had ever been true to her. Her brother’s return, however—that she could not promise. Not even Willow could bring her news of Basich; the brothers-in-fur were silent, too silent, on the subject.

  A night’s rest restored her, and the next day Silver Snow called for her bow. The whoops of approbation from Vugh-turoi’s men convinced her that she acted prudently in doing thus. She killed several wildfowl before the hunting party turned back.

  Willow rode forward to take Silver Snow’s kill from her before anyone else might intervene. Her eyes met her mistress’ with perfect understanding.

  “Pluck them and draw them, Willow,” ordered Silver Snow. “Perhaps Sable and Bronze Mirror would aid you. Tonight, husband”—for the first time, she used the title without having to be coaxed—“this one most humbly begs that you will eat in her tents.”

  Once again, the warriors cheered this sign of closeness between shan-yu and his queen. Nor was Tadiqan present to glower. To Silver Snow’s astonishment, it was Vughturoi who did that.

  And, that night, the shan-yu's almost childlike greed as he ate a delicately spiced dish of his youngest, fairest wife’s hunting and cookery won back any favor that one day’s illness might possibly have cost her.

  After that, by the shan-yu s will, however, they must return to the great tent, where they were greeted with loud, r
ibald cheers. Before the noisy, nightly gathering in the shan-yu's tent broke up, the old man had decreed a great hunt, which his loyal son Vughturoi would lead.

  Was Silver Snow the only person in the tent who heard the sharp snap of broken bone as Tadiqan tightened his fist on the joint of meat that he held?

  “Let us take the little queen who brings peace to the Hsiung-nu!” shouted a warrior, boisterous with too much mare’s milk. “Let her also be named the queen who brings game to our bows!”

  That brought a yell of approval, at which Strong Tongue glared. Vughturoi turned instantly away, and Silver Snow went scarlet, relieved that her flush would go unnoticed in the shadow and the firelight. The smoke that rose through the ceiling vents made her chest tight, and she put up one hand to press her heart. It was no role of lady nor queen to have her name and titles shouted out into her lord’s tent; she was as much ashamed as she was anything else. Would the shan-yu be angry and turn on her as quickly as he had smiled?

  But no, Khujanga smiled. Leaning forward, he patted her hand just as Li Ling had often done. “I cannot spare you, little Queen,” he told her. Though his breath was strong with mare’s milk, it came with more regularity and force than it had for weeks. Even as Silver Snow watched, he looked at the cup of mare’s milk that he held—the goblet formed of the skull of his enemy—then grimaced, and laid it aside. Silver Snow’s smile was unfeigned.

  “Good hunting, Elder Sister!” Willow said, after she had undressed her mistess, by way of good-night greeting. She stretched indecorously, with a suppleness that accorded ill with her lame leg. “And clever thinking. ”

  Silver Snow raised herself on one elbow. “Which hunt, Willow mine,” she asked. “And which thoughts?”

  “It was clever to hunt and to succeed, more clever yet to cook for the old man,” Willow said. “That cup of his,” she grimaced. “It is not well to drink from something so bound up with cruelty.” She limped over to the small chest that was hers, opened it, and brought out her carefully hoarded bags of herbs and simples, many of them the parting gift of Li Ling.