along the Golden Road. Mai sat on her divan beside Captain Anji on his stool. She sipped at yoghurt.
When she bent toward him, he, alert to her least movement, turned to smile at her.
'Why are you called east?' she asked daringly, aware of how close he was. If she swayed forward, she could kiss him!
He raised an eyebrow, always a sign of amusement in him. 'I can't say.'
'You can't say because you don't know or because you aren't allowed to tell?'
He laughed. She flushed, embarrassed, pleased, excited, too many feelings thrown together. It made her giddy, and she withdrew-just a little-to give herself breathing space.
'Shai,' he said in a louder voice, still looking at her. 'Come here.'
Shai had been outside sparring with his weapons partners. When he appeared, sweating and dirty, he sat on a stool beside the captain. Anji signaled for the music to stop. The men put away their rattles, and Chief Tuvi sealed up his instrument in its case.
'We are come about halfway,' said the captain, 'the easy part of the road. This place was a town once, on an oasis, but the desert creeps close. The demons are hungry. They've eaten many towns that used to stand here, like this one, and even swallowed the old wells. We'll finish filling our water pouches tonight and press on as soon as the moon rises. We'll rest from midday to a hand's breadth before sunset and travel at night and into the morning. You'll be thirsty but must not drink more than your share. Any who fall behind will be left. Beware demons. They hunt here.'
He stood. 'Rest now. You'll hear the chief's whistle when it's time to ride out.'
The men dispersed, but he stopped Mai as she rose. It was the third time he had ever touched her. His fingers on her wrist were cool, his grip light. 'You must ride, Mai'ili. The slaves cannot carry you on this part of the road. We'll break the palanquin down and bring it as baggage as far as we can. But you must ride now. Do you understand?'
She looked at him carefully. His eyes seemed more lovely to her than they had eleven days ago when they had stood at the law court while the proper contracts were signed and sealed. He was, just slightly, breathing to an unsteady beat as he watched her. His lips were parted just enough that she might slip the tip of her little finger between them, and as if he had heard her speak such words, as if she had actually touched him so intimately, he flushed along his dark cheeks but did not release her.
'Will you leave me behind if I falter?' she asked.
A peculiar expression passed swiftly across his face: pain or anger or a smothered laugh. Something deeper and more complicated.
'You hide yourself,' she said, bolder now. 'Let me see you.'
It was gone, fled as if on the wind. He smiled with that mild look of amusement he often wore. 'You need only ask,' he murmured, and she was burning, all a-tumble, overmatched.
Mercifully, he released her.
She slipped inside the palanquin, lay down on the wool batting, one last time. But she could not sleep. He'd not answered her question, and by not answering, he had answered.
He will leave me behind, if he must. He does not love me.
Yet her wrist burned where he had touched her. She had seen the light in his face, the flush in his cheeks. The story was still being told. Anything might come next. Was this not the truth of life, that until we pass beyond Spirit Gate we live always on the edge between desire and loss, joy and pain, necessity and regret?
Only as Priya sang to her, rubbing her shoulders and back, did she finally relax and sleep.
12
The company rode on at moonrise.
'The locals call this stretch of wasteland the Wailing Sands,' said Chief Tuvi to Shai. 'Demons roam here. If you hear your relatives calling to you from the desert, don't follow their voices. That's how they trick people into wandering out to where they can eat them.'
Shai laughed bitterly. 'I wouldn't follow my relatives anyway, if they called to me.'
'They treated you badly?' Tuvi was a pragmatic man, entirely devoted to Captain Anji because of kinship ties Shai hadn't yet puzzled out. 'If you aren't loyal to your kinfolk then they won't be loyal to you in return.'
'I'm the youngest. There were plenty of other sons. I was just an extra mouth to feed.'
'An extra mouth? No Qin commander scorns another warrior. Your people aren't fighters but farmers. That might account for it. Only so much land to divide up between you. Lots of quarreling, I expect.'
'Isn't there quarreling among Qin brothers?'
'Why?' He gestured toward the road ahead, tracks cutting across a wide expanse of dry land with little more than tumble brush and rocks strewn across it. The hills rose terrible and dark to the north, and to the south lay the wild lands where the desert demons roamed. 'There's plenty of land where my people come from. Good land, lots of pasture. If brothers quarrel, then the one can pack up his tent and herd his flocks elsewhere. But quarreling brothers are like single arrows, easy to snap in two. It's only when they hold to each other that they are strong.'
'The Qin are strong.'
'We are. The var's father united his clan and his clan united the Qin.'
'What will do you in the east?'
Tuvi smiled without taking his gaze off the road. The moonlight blended with the dusty color of the land to give the night a ghostly feel, as though spirits hovered everywhere except along the sandy track they followed. 'We do what our commander tells us to do.'
'Will you return to Kartu Town?'
'That place? I hope not. We've been promoted, which is no more than Captain Anji deserves, after everything he's been through.'
'What happened to his first wife?'
Chief Tuvi looked at him, then bent his gaze back to the road.
'Sorry,' said Shai hastily.
The chief grunted.
'Have I offended?'
The horses ahead of them kicked up so much dust that Shai had to wipe his eyes, but he was comfortable enough on horseback now that he could ride with reins only, not clutching the saddle to keep from falling off. For a long time Tuvi said nothing, and Shai knew he'd gone too far. The Qin were friendly enough, so it was easy to forget that they could kill him if they wished, simply for one wrong word.
But the chief did nothing, examining the landscape with a gaze that never stopped long on any one landmark. Shai had never seen him get angry, but he'd seen him whip a soldier for taking more than his share of rations.
'You talk a lot,' said Tuvi at last. 'There are troubles in the west. The grass demons keep pushing east into lands we've always used as pasture. We need a strong var, and we need other things in order to fight them. We've horses to trade to the Sirniakan Empire east of here, and to Yari down south, and even the Vidi over the Sky Pass. Hu! A man can't breathe up so high, they say.'
'The merchants say the Sirniakan Empire is as broad as the desert, but rich and green. They make silk there, and that parasol my brother gave to Mai last year. Good spices, too. The merchants who travel that way value our hill-fed wool for trade. They say the empire is the greatest and most powerful of all kingdoms.'
'Any kingdom is only as strong as its king. We'll see. Look there.'
Tuvi had better night vision, so it took Shai a while to realize that the shadow the chief was pointing toward was a post. A skeleton dangled from it. Bones murmured as wind stirred them. Someone had tied it together with wire and string, to give it a haunting look. Skeletons didn't scare him. They were as empty as the stones that littered the land, and this skeleton's ghost had long since passed out of the world. Maybe that man, like Shai, had wandered far from home. He mumbled a blessing to the Merciful One, praying that the dead man's soul had felt the breath of mercy before death.
'That skeleton was here last time I rode this way,' said the chief. 'It marks the edge of the stone lands.'
