Under Heaven

They will be all right, she thinks. If the war does not last too long.

She looks out her window. Sees summer stars. It is time. She has not changed into her night robe. She is not going to sleep. She’ll need to be quiet, leaving, but the sedan chair she hired ought to be outside the door by now, and the household is accustomed to her restlessness. It ought to be all right.

She takes the part of the cash she’s kept back for herself, and the small bag with the jewellery she will need for a journey. A long journey. A hard one. She’s hired two guards, paid them a third of the negotiated fee, and she’s arranged to join a good-sized group leaving at sunrise. The two guards are her contribution to their safety. That is how these things are done.

There are always parties of one sort or another leaving Chenyao. The leaders of this one seemed to know what they were about, talking with her this morning, which is good. It is not truly safe, of course, especially not now, and for a woman, but the world never is. She wishes she had her pipa, a distracted thought.

Perhaps she’ll find one on the way. It is time to go. She crosses the floor silently and opens her door to the dark hallway. She will need to step over the third step on the stairway down, she remembers. It creaks. She’d tested for that earlier today.

As it happens, it doesn’t matter.

All four of them are in the corridor. Hwan, Qin, both Kanlins. They are dressed to travel.

“Ah, good,” says Ssu Tan. “We had just decided to wake you. The chair has been outside for some time. We have to go, if we are to join the caravan before it leaves.”

Her mouth is open. Hwan is holding, shielding with his hand, a single candle. She can see their faces. Amazingly, all of them are smiling.

Rain says, “You can’t … this isn’t a journey I can ask any of you to take!”

“You didn’t ask,” says Qin. When he has a wall to lean against, he can stand for a time. “We have chosen.”

“You can’t!” she says again. “Do you even know where I’m going?”

“Of course we do,” says Ssu Tan. “We thought you’d decide this some time ago. We talked about it.”

“You … you talked about what I’d decide?” She would like to be angry.

Hwan says, quietly, “We talked about what we’d do, my lady, once you made your decision.”

The younger Kanlin, Zhong Ma, has said nothing. His eyes have never left her, and he’s still smiling.

“But I’m going to Sardia!” she cries.

“You are going home,” says Ssu Tan.

“But it isn’t your home.”

“It isn’t,” he agrees. “But Zhong Ma and I had you entrusted to our care, and it would shame us both to let you slip away.”

“You have no duty once I leave Kitai!” she says. She’s begun to cry, however, which makes it difficult to fight well.

“Not so,” says Zhong Ma, quietly.

Tan smiles. “You may argue as to Kanlin duties once we’re on the road. We will have much time, I believe.”

“It is the Tarkan Desert,” Rain says, despairingly. “People die there!”

“The more reason for us to be with you,” says Hwan. And then, “We bought you a pipa in the market this morning. For the journey.”

IT TAKES HALF A YEAR, a little more, the Silk Road journey through the deserts and then up the narrow, climbing mountain passes to Sardia. They do not die. She almost certainly would have, without them. Qin, it emerges, can ride a camel.

They are attacked twice, the attackers are beaten off. There are sandstorms. The second of these costs Ssu Tan his right eye, but there is a physician with them (the party leader is experienced) and he applies an ointment and gauze bandages and Tan survives. He wears a patch over the eye after that. Rain tells him it makes him look like a bandit from ancient days.

He and Zhong Ma no longer wear their black robes by then. They had removed them after they passed through the third and last of the garrisons in the Kanshu Corridor. At that point, really, they had left the empire behind.

Around that same time she’d made another decision.

“My name is Saira,” she told them.

There is a taste in her mouth like spring cherries, saying it. All of them use it, or refer to her that way, surprisingly easily, from then on.

At the end of the very long road, burnt and weary, they arrive past the end of sand and rock to high, green pastureland surrounded by mountains. When she sees the horses for the first time, the Heavenly Horses (they still frighten her a little), she knows she is home.

It has been nine years. Her mother and father are alive. All but one of her brothers and sisters. There is little of glitter and jade, but less dust and noise, entirely. Merchants go both ways, east and often west now (new powers rising there). Over time she is able to sell, piece by piece, her jewels. Kitan work is highly valued west of here, she learns. The sky is blue and the mountain air is entirely unlike what she’d learned to live with in Xinan, with the yellow wind blowing and two million souls.

There are young children in her own family, amazingly. There is music. She teaches herself not to be afraid of horses, and eventually she rides one, a moment never to be lost. There is sadness, there are memories.

Qin stays, is made welcome in her father’s home at first, and then in hers. Hwan stays. She is wealthy enough to need a steward to run a household.

Zhong Ma goes home. He is young, proud of his journey, and of being a Kanlin. She gives him a letter to carry back. It takes her time to write this one. Sadness, memory.

Ssu Tan stays. She marries him. One of their children, a green-eyed girl, though with darker hair than her mother, is gifted beyond words at learning music. She masters all twenty-eight tunings of the pipa before she is twelve years old.

The world, Saira thinks, through her days, can bring you surprising gifts.

CHAPTER XXVII

He had not been happy in that small fort above Kuala Nor, but Bytsan sri Nespo could not truthfully say that his self-described “flanking manoeuvre” to get away from there had improved his life yet.

His idea for dealing with the horses given to the Kitan had been approved. He’d been promoted and was now understood to have had direct communication with the palace in Rygyal, which was useful, obviously. He was in a far larger fortress now.

On the other hand, he had no clear role in the chain of command here, which was awkward and made him disliked. He outranked longer-serving officers, but he was here only to await one specific person, or message, from across the border.

He also knew, each morning and through each day and into each long summer evening, what his father thought of all this.

Principally, because his father was the commander of Dosmad Fortress. Dosmad, where Bytsan was posted to await the possible arrival of a Kitan gifted with an absurd number of Sardian horses.

Bytsan hadn’t known who had just been made fortress commander here when he’d offered his clever suggestion about the Sardians. One of the (many) unfortunate aspects of having been in such an isolated fort.

It was an unhappy surprise.