Li-Mei steps back, places her feet together, and bows, hands formally clasping each other inside the wide sleeves of her robe.
Straightening, she then smiles, briefly, royalty condescending to ease a hard moment.
Let them be confused, she thinks. Let them be uncertain of her. Showing anger and independence, then courtesy and even grace. She sees that the curtain of the other princess’s litter (the real princess) has been pulled slightly back. Good. Let her watch. At least the idiotic song has stopped.
Li-Mei hears birds; they are passing overhead, in great numbers. There is a lake nearby. That will be why they’ve chosen this place to stop for the night.
She points to the water. “What lake is that? What is it called in your tongue?”
She looks at the man in front of her. The other two have reined up by now, have remained on their horses, visibly uncertain as to how to proceed. She says, “If I am to live among the Bogu, I must learn these things. Bring me someone who can answer!”
The man in front of her clears his throat and says, amazingly, “We name it Marmot Lake. There are many of them here. Marmots, their burrows on the hills, other side.”
He speaks Kitan. She raises her eyebrows and favours him—again, keeping it brief—with a smile.
“Why did you not tell me you spoke our language?”
He looks away, manages a shrug that is meant to be disdainful, but fails.
“You learned it trading by the river’s loop?”
He looks quickly back at her, startled (but it wasn’t a difficult surmise).
“Yes,” he says.
“In that case,” she says, coldly now, “if you have anything to say to me, including requests I may or may not agree to, you will say it from now on in the language I know. And you will tell the others what I said to you just now. Do you understand me?”
And, gloriously, after a short pause, he nods.
“Tell them,” she says, and she turns her back on them to look east towards the lake and the birds. The wind is tugging at her hair, trying to pulls strands of it free of the long pins.
There is a poem about that, the wind as an impatient lover.
She hears him clear his throat again, then begin to speak in his own tongue to the riders who have gathered.
She waits for him to finish before she turns back, and now she gives him something, gives it to all of them. “I will be trying to learn your language now. I will have questions. You must show me the riders who know Kitan. Do you understand?”
He nods again. But, more importantly, one of those on horseback lifts a hand, as if asking permission to speak (which is proper!) and says, “I speak also your tongue, princess. Better than this one.” He grins, crooked- toothed. An edge of competition here. He is a bigger man.
And Li-Mei sees, with pleasure, that the one standing before her looks angrily at the new claimant. She smiles at the one on the horse this time. “I hear you,” she says, “though I will form my own conclusions as to whose speech is best among those here. I will let you all know, after I’ve had time to judge.”
They must be played, she thinks, kept in balance, the men here. Any woman from the Ta-Ming knows something of how to do that. Meanwhile, this is useful, the first good thing in who knows how long. All her life she has been known for asking questions, and now she might find some answers here.
She needs to learn as much as she can about the man she’s marrying and the life of women on this steppe. If existence is to become a dark horror, she
She looks at the one standing before her. “Your name?” She keeps her tone and bearing imperious.
“Sibir,” he says. Then adds, “Princess.” And inclines his head.
“Come with me,” she says, bestowing this upon him as a gift for the others to see and envy, “while they put together the yurts. Tell me where we are, how far we have yet to travel. Teach me the names of things.”
She walks away without waiting for him, going towards the water, out of this jumbled column of riders and litters and disassembled yurts. The long sun throws her shadow ahead of her.
It pleases her that he does not fall into stride beside her, remaining half a step behind. This is good. It is also good that her heartbeat has slowed. Her right hand stings from when she slapped him. She cannot believe she did that.
The ground is uneven; there are rabbit holes, and those of other animals. Marmots. The grass is astonishingly high, almost to her waist as she nears the lake. Grasshoppers jump as she walks through. She will need better shoes, she realizes. She is unsure what clothing they packed for her at the palace. She deliberately ignored all that at the time, lost in anger. She will have one of her women open the trunks and boxes they are bringing north, and look.
“I intend to do this each morning before we start and every evening when we make camp,” she says, looking around. “Also at midday when we stop to eat, unless you tell me there is danger. I want you to attend upon me. Do you understand?”
The one named Sibir does not answer, unexpectedly. She looks over her shoulder, uneasily. She is not as confident as she sounds. How could she be? He has stopped walking, and so does she.
His gaze is not on her.
He says something in his own tongue. An oath, a prayer, an invocation? Behind them, in the column of riders, the others have also fallen silent. No one is moving. The stillness is unnatural. They are all looking in the same direction—towards the lake, but beyond it, above, to the hills where the marmot burrows are supposed to be.
Li-Mei turns to see.
There is another stirring of wind. She brings up both hands and crosses them on her breast protectively, aware again, powerfully, of how alone she is, how far away.
“Oh, father,” she whispers, surprising herself. Why did you leave me to this?”
Of all creatures living, the Kitan most fear wolves. A farming people—rice and cereal grains, irrigation and patiently cultivated fields—they always have. The wolves of the northern steppe are said to be the largest in the world.
On a hill slope beyond the lake there are a dozen of them, in the open, motionless against the sky, lit by the late-day sun, looking down upon them, upon her.
Sibir speaks, finally, his voice thick with tension. “Princess, we go back. Quickly! This is not natural. They let themselves be seen! Wolves never do. And—”
His voice stops, as if the capacity for words, in any language, has been ripped away from him.
She is still looking east. She sees what all of them see.
A man has appeared on the hilltop, among the wolves.
The beasts make room for him. They actually do that.
And Shen Li-Mei knows with sudden, appalling certainty that her life’s journey is about to change again. Because paths can and do fork, in ways no man or woman can ever truly grasp, for that is the way the world has been made.
CHAPTER X
That same evening, in the Ta-Ming Palace, bordering the northern wall of Xinan, with the vast, enclosed Deer Park visible through open balcony doors, a woman is playing a stringed instrument in an upper-level audience chamber, making music for the emperor and a select company of his courtiers. His heir,
