Under Heaven

and your soldiers, some rice wine we have brought as a humble offering to those who defend us here. It might be better than what you have.”

Might be better? It couldn’t help but be better, because the accursed soldiers of the Seventh, the ones posted here before, the ones who’d gone away south, had taken all the wine and most of the food stores with them.

He had sent word about the stores as soon as they’d arrived. He was expecting provisions from the west, as soon as tomorrow, with luck. On the other hand, the sun was going down and a dry night stretched ahead.

He nodded to the three in the black robes, and then to the soldier beside him. The man barked the orders.

The gate bars were pulled back. The heavy gates swung inward, slowly. The Bogu father and son waited, then rode through with their horses. Three of the horses were, Tazek saw, smaller ones.

He still didn’t know how the Kanlin had gotten a message, a request for horses, through the Wall to Bogu exiles. That part didn’t make sense. He was trying to decide if it mattered.

He decided it didn’t. Not his problem.

He looked down and saw that the three Kanlins had dismounted and were shifting flasks from their pack horse into the extremely eager hands of his own soldiers.

“Hold off opening those till I get down!” he shouted.

He’d need to count and estimate, figure out how to do this. But rice wine meant that at least one good thing had happened today. Pretty much the only good thing.

He was turning to go down the steps when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a grey shape streak through the gate.

“The fuck was that?” he roared.

“A wolf, I think,” the Kanlin leader said, looking up.

“It just went through my Wall!” Tazek shouted.

The Kanlin shrugged. “They do go back and forth. We’ll shoot it for you if we see it. Is there a bounty this spring?”

There sometimes was, it depended how many there were. Tazek had just arrived here. He was short of men, of food, of water and wine, and he had no idea what had happened with the Seventh and Eighth.

“No,” he said sourly. There might well have been a bounty for all he knew, but he felt like saying no to someone. “Shoot it anyhow.”

The Kanlin nodded, and turned. The five of them rode off, the extra horses trailing after the big, bare- chested Bogu.

Tazek watched them for a while, discontented. Something was still bothering him, a thought teasing at the edge of his mind. Then he remembered the wine and went quickly down the stairs. He never did chase down that stray thought.

When a party of Bogu riders appeared the next morning he ordered his men to begin shooting as soon as the riders were in arrow range. He was undermanned; he did not want the nomads to get close enough to realize it.

They were chasing the horse-thieves, obviously. Well, he’d made his decision to let those two pass through. An officer in the Kitan army didn’t show uncertainty or doubt to barbarians, or his men. You didn’t get promoted that way, and your soldiers would lose faith in you. They were allowed to hate you, they just couldn’t worry about your competence.

He watched the Bogu withdraw out of range and linger there, arguing amongst each other. They had wolfhounds with them, he saw. He had no idea what the quarrel was about. He didn’t care. He watched—with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had done his assigned task well—until they turned and rode off.

Two swans appeared, flying towards the Wall. Tazek let his men amuse themselves shooting at them. They brought one down.

The other wheeled away, higher, and went back towards the steppes.

She is in Kitai again. The Kanlins, silent, courteous, bring them to an inn as darkness falls. Li-Mei sees torchlight and lanterns, hears music. She is shown by bowing servants to a room with walls and a bed, and she bathes in a brazier-heated bath chamber, with hot water, and servants to attend her, and she weeps as they wash her hair.

Her hands are shaking. The girls make pitying sounds when they see her nails and fingers, and one of them spends a long time with brush and file, doing the best she can with them. Li-Mei weeps through this, as well.

They tease her gently, trying to make her smile. They tell her they cannot paint her eyebrows or cheeks if she will insist on crying. She shakes her head, and they leave her face unpainted for this first night. She hears the wind outside, and the knowledge that it will be outside tonight, that she will sleep sheltered, sinks into her like a promise, like warm wine.

She goes downstairs, unadorned, but in clean robes and sandals, and sits with the Kanlin Warriors in the dining pavilion. They speak politely and gracefully. One addresses her by name.

They know who she is.

Fear, for a swift, shattering moment, until she understands that if they were going to expose her, reveal her identity, they’d have done so at the Wall.

“You are taking me to Stone Drum Mountain?” she asks.

The leader, an older man, nods his head. “Both of you,” he says. “My lady.”

“How do you know who I am?”

The briefest hesitation. “We were told,” he says.

“Do you know who is with me? Who he is?”

A nod. “They wish to see him at Stone Drum, as well.”

Li-Mei realizes that there is wine in front of her. She sips, carefully. It has been a long time since she drank rice wine.

“Why?” she asks.

The Kanlins exchange glances. The woman is very pretty, Li-Mei thinks. She has silver hairpins, for the evening.

The older man says, “You will be told when you are there. Questions will be answered. But you do know your brother was among us, once.”

So it is Tai, she thinks. It is Tai again, even so far away. One brother had exiled her, another is drawing her home.

“He told us that when he left Stone Drum, some of you … some were not …”

“Some were not happy, no,” the Kanlin leader says. He smiles.

“Not everyone who comes to the Mountain becomes a Warrior,” the woman says. She sips her wine. Fills three cups. She gestures with the flask to Li-Mei, who shakes her head.

“Where is Meshag?” she asks.

He’s outside, of course. Wooden walls, a wooden roof, a room full of people, Kitan people. He’ll be out in the night he knows, although the land is no longer known. A thought occurs to her.

“You mustn’t kill the wolf,” she says.

“We know that,” says the Kanlin leader. “The wolves are why they want to speak with him at the Mountain.”

She looks at him, a thought forms. “It was a wolf that brought you word of our coming, wasn’t it? You weren’t looking out from the Wall for us.”

It sounds impossible, even as she says it. But he nods his head. “You are very like your brother,” he says.

She begins to cry again. “You knew him?”

“I taught Shen Tai for a time. I sorrowed when he left us. I asked to be one of those sent to bring his sister.”

She is not a woman who cries. They wait, patient, even amused. She wipes her eyes with her sleeve.

She says, looking at the leader, “What has happened? The armies have all left the garrisons, the Wall.