brothers and their five meddling wives and the truculent ghost of his sixth brother plaguing him. Ti's black braids flapped as she ran. He set his attention back to the work before him as she pulled up, gasping, under the shade of the open shed.
'Uncle Shai! You've got to come! You've got to speak up for Mai!'
He finished the stroke of his adze and ran his hand along the grain of the pine log he was planing down to make a fine bedstead for the wedding. Good and smooth, ready to cut to length. When he was done, he looked up at Ti.
'But you've got to! She's been crying all day. You know it isn't right that they marry her off to a Qin, even if he is an officer!'
He studied the log, the second of two precious trunks his elder brothers had traded three ewes for so that the family wouldn't be embarrassed when it came time to stand up at the law court and seal the marriage. The legs, out of the other log, were already carved and oiled. He was preparing the last of the supports, although he wasn't going to have time to carve as elaborate a frieze into the wood as he would have liked, not with the date already chosen and written into the law court's record. Seventeen days from now.
'He'll beat her! He's buried one wife already. He admitted it himself! We'll never see her again! Never! Never! Never! He'll get tired of her and sell her into slavery and there'll be nothing we can do to stop it! His masters will be overthrown and he'll be killed in battle and then-!'
'Hush!' He stood, casting his gaze about, but his two younger nephews-Ti's cousins-were out of earshot tending to the sheep.
She kicked at wood shavings with her pretty red slippers, knowing she had gone too far. While it was perfectly true that the Qin had ruled Kartu Town for only the last twelve years, and that shifting alliances, a death in the var's family, or an unexpected push from the eastern cities might cause the Qin horsemen to retreat and some other power to take their place, it was still treason to speak of such a thing. Ti was only two years younger than he was. She knew as well as he did what the Qin did to their enemies or even to those who only spoke ill-considered words against them.
She looked back down the path, following his gaze. Kartu Town was not much to look at, a dusty bee's hive of compounds surrounded by an inner wall which was itself surrounded by startlingly green orchards crisscrossed by slender irrigation canals. Beyond the orchards lay a thick mud-brick outer wall studded with watch-towers and guardposts. The wall was wide enough to allow Qin guardsmen to ride their rounds atop it instead of walking. They hated to walk. The citadel, a circular structure of baked brick, rose at the northwestern corner of the inner town. In the square fronting the citadel rose the gallows, and today three posts were decorated with remains. A vulture circled.
Like all of the inhabitants of Kartu Town, he'd learned to look away. In truth, it was not the sight of the citadel and its square that made him climb every day in good weather to the peace of his shed. It was the vista beyond: endless, open, yawning wide to the west, all sky, the rocky plateau of the desert looming on the southern horizon, and the mountains rising heroically to the north. So beautiful. They were all stark lines and pale slopes with the memory of winter in their snowy peaks.
'I hate it up here!' cried Ti. 'Too much air! Too much sky!' Abruptly, she burst into tears. 'I know I shouldn't have said it-but he's Qin. What will happen to Mai? How could Father Mei have agreed?' She sobbed like a tempest.
'He's decent enough,' said Shai finally as this storm began to die down.
'Who is?'
'Captain Anji.'
'How can you say so?' she shrieked. 'A dirty barbarian! You're a Qin-lover!' Then she clapped a hand over her mouth and began sobbing noisily again. He waited until the worst subsided before scooping up a handful of shavings and handing them to her so she could wipe mucus from her upper lip.
'He doesn't have to marry her. He could have just taken her as a concubine. Branded her a pleasure girl and dragged her to the brothel for his use. We couldn't have stopped him.'
She hiccoughed, sucked in a watery breath, and gave a bleating moan as she pounded her belly with a fist as if she were mourning. 'I know it's not as bad as it could have been. But I can't bear to be parted from her! Ei! Ei! Ei!'
'She'll just be across town, at the citadel. You can see her every day.'
'No! No! No! The news just came this morning, by messenger from Captain Anji. The garrison is being pulled out and sent east on the Golden Road. There's something going on there, I don't know what. Maybe there's war on the border. War! They're going east and she'll have to go with them, and we'll never see her again! Ever! Ever! Ever!'
He set down the adze on the bench, considerably startled by this news. 'How soon?'
'In two days! The wedding is tomorrow, not next month! That's why you have to speak to Father Mei. Maybe they'll listen to you. All the other uncles… you know them! They always do what Father Mei says. Chicken-hearts! All but Uncle Hari. If he was here still, he'd put a stop to it.'
'For shame, Ti!'
'I'm not sorry, even if no one else will talk about Uncle Hari! He was your favorite brother, too! You know it! You know he was the only one tough enough to stand up to Father Mei! He'd tell Father Mei to postpone the wedding. Wait 'til the garrison comes back. But they'll never come back. That's what Captain Anji knows. He knows they're never coming back and he's taking Mai away forever and ever and ever!' She once again fell to bawling.
Ti's outbursts were usually like cloudbursts in summer-frequent but short in duration, causing brief floods and then getting all that moisture sucked away as soon as the sun came back out-but this time she was truly upset. She and Mai were close as twins, born the same day in the same month in the same year to his eldest brother's first and second wives, who were themselves sisters. The two girls had never been apart in all their seventeen years.
No use trying to get any more work done today. He gathered up his tools into the cedar tool chest.
After a bit, when she could hear him, he said, 'You could go as second wife.'
'He won't take me!' she wailed. 'I already asked, but Captain Anji told Father Mei he can only have one wife. And Father Mei won't let me go as her maid because it would be dishonorable, and anyway, Captain Anji said he won't take me even as a servant.'
He'd be a madman to take you as wife or servant, Shai thought, although in truth he was shocked that Ti would suggest such a thing. A servant! Someday Ti's impulsive and stormy nature would get her, and the family, in big trouble.
A slender shape toiled up the path and resolved into the slave girl everyone called Cornflower, for her blue eyes. Ti saw her and got that look all the women in the house did whenever Cornflower appeared in a room. She wiped her eyes and nose before the slave halted twenty steps below them with hands clasped and body bent in a half bow. No need for Cornflower to say anything. Wind tugged at the slave's wool tunic and her trident braids of uncannily white-gold hair. Her bare feet and calves were burned a pinkish brown, but everyone knew she had unusually light skin beneath her clothes, not like that of normal people but more like that of ghosts, and there was something about the way she stood there so quietly, a well of stillness, that made him always think about what it would be like to…
'I better go,' said Ti.
Shai started, unaware he'd been wandering. Cornflower served the two senior wives-Ti's mother and aunt-so her presence here was a summons for Ti. Her presence was unwelcome to any young man whose greatest ambition was to be left undisturbed.
'Promise me you'll come right now.' Ti started down the path at a fast clip, Cornflower trotting behind, head lowered. Ti looked three times back over her shoulder, mouthing words, gesturing almost comically, trying to get Shai to hurry up.
He didn't see the point. He was the last person his eldest brother would listen to. But he whistled for his nephews and finished stowing the tools. His flush receded. His thoughts sank back into an orderly flow. The wind tugged at his sleeves, tied back to leave his lower arms bare. It wasn't warm enough to work bare-chested yet, although he preferred it when it was. He hated to go back down to town, back to the family compound, where sleeves had to be tied down to the wrists and any work you did or comment you made was overseen, overheard, and overruled by others.
