Under Heaven

She wants him dead.

What she also wants, what she needs, is a rest just now, and to be warmer. The wind, since they have climbed higher—skirting the steepest of the hills, but still ascending—is numbing her. She is not dressed for a night walk on the steppe and she has carried nothing with her at all, except a small knife in her sleeve.

She makes a decision. Inwardly, she shrugs. There are many ways to die. As many, the teachings tell, as there are ways to live. She’d never thought about being torn apart by wolves, or ripped open in some Bogu sacrifice on the plain, but …

“Stop!” she says, not loudly, but very clearly.

It does sound too much like a command, in the huge silence of the night. It is mostly fear, infusing her voice.

He ignores her, keeps moving. So, after a few steps to consider that, Li-Mei stops walking.

Being ignored is not something she’s ever been inclined to accept, from girlhood. They are on a ridge. The lake lies to their left and below, the moon shows it to her. There is beauty here for a landscape painter. Not for her, not now.

The nearest wolf also stops.

He pads towards her. He looks directly at Li-Mei, the eyes glowing the way they do in tales. One of the things that is true, she thinks. His jaws open, teeth showing. He takes two more silent steps nearer. Too near. This is a wolf. She is alone.

She does not weep. The wind is making her eyes tear, but that is an entirely different thing. She will not cry unless driven to a deeper abyss than this.

She resumes walking, moving past the animal. She does close her eyes in that moment. The wolf could shred her flesh with a twist of his head. The man has slowed, she sees, to let her and the animal catch up again. He still has not looked back. He seems to know what has happened, however.

She doesn’t know anything, and it can be called intolerable.

Li-Mei takes a deep breath. She stops again. So, beside her, does the wolf. She will not look at it. She calls out, “If you intend to kill me, do it now.”

No reply. But he stops this time. He does do that. Does this mean he understands her? She says, “I am very cold, and I have no idea where you intend to walk like this, how far. I will not willingly go farther unless you tell me what this is. Am I being abducted for money?”

He turns around.

She has achieved that much, she thinks.

For a long moment they stand like that in the night, ten paces apart. She still cannot make out his features, the moon is not enough. Does it matter? she thinks. He is a big man for a Bogu, long arms. He is bare-chested, even in this wind, his loose hair whipped around his face by it. He will not be sympathetic, Li-Mei thinks, to a claim of being cold. He is gazing at her. She cannot see his eyes.

“Shandai,” he says. She is shocked. The fact of speech. “You follow. Shelter. Horse.” He says this in Kitan. Awkwardly, but in her tongue.

He has already turned away again, as if this terse handful of words is all he feels capable of saying, or inclined to say. A man unused to speech, explaining himself. Well, he would be, she thinks, glancing at the wolves.

“Shandai?” she repeats. “That is … where we are going?” She had not looked at any maps before they set out. Regrets it now.

He stops again. Turns, slowly. She can see the stiffness in his posture. He shakes his head impatiently. “Shandai!” he says again, more forcefully. “Why this. Why you. Come! Bogu will follow. Shaman.”

She knows what a shaman is. She’d thought he might be one.

He starts walking again, and she does the same. She is working on it, puzzling it out. She doesn’t feel as cold now, or even tired, with a thought to pursue. He doesn’t want to be caught by a shaman. That seems reasonably clear. Her guards had had none, and feared him. A shaman … will not?

Some time later, directly ahead, she sees the first grey begin to soften the sky, then there is a pale band, and pink. Morning. She looks around. Mist, rising. A rolling away of grass in all directions, between them and every horizon.

Married to a distant horizon.

Perhaps not. Perhaps a different tale?

Just before the sun rose in front of them, making bright the tall grass and the world, under heaven, she understood the word he’d spoken to her.

The imperial way, running utterly straight for eighteen li through the exact centre of Xinan, from the main gate of the Ta-Ming Palace to the southern walls, was four hundred and ninety paces wide.

There was no thoroughfare so broad and magnificent in the empire or the world. It had been designed to overawe and intimidate, proclaim majesty and power on a scale worthy of the emperors ruling here in glory with the mandate of the gods, and as a reasonably effective firebreak.

It was also difficult for anyone to cross, after curfew, without being seen by one of the Gold Bird Guards stationed at every intersection.

You had to run a long way, without any hint of concealment.

Thirty of the guards were at all important crossroads (there were fourteen major east-west roads), five guards at the smaller ones. You faced thirty lashes with the medium rod if found on a major roadway after the drumbeats sounded to lock the ninety-one wards. The night guards were authorized to kill, if one ignored a command to halt.

Order in the capital was a priority of the court. With two million inhabitants, and vivid memories of famine and violent unrest, this was only sensible. Within the wards—each one enclosed by its own rammed-earth walls— one could be abroad after dark, of course, else taverns and pleasure houses and the local dining places, peddlers and snack wagons, men selling firewood and lamp oil and cooking oil, would have had no trade. They did their best business after the two huge city markets closed. You couldn’t slam a city shut at night, but you could control it. And defend it.

The massive outer walls were four times the height of a man. A hundred of the Gold Bird Guards manned the towers above every major gate, day and night, with twenty at the lesser ones. There were three very large gateways through the walls to east and south and west, and half a dozen to the north, four of them opening into the palace courtyards, the administrative offices attached, and the emperor’s vast Deer Park.

Four canals flowed into the city, diverted from the river to provide drinking and washing water, irrigate the city-gardens of the aristocracy (and create lakes for the larger gardens). One canal was assigned to floating in logs for the endless construction and repair and to carrying flat barges with coal and firewood. At the point where each canal came through the walls there were another hundred guards.

Being found in a canal was punished with sixty lashes if it happened after dark. If found in the water by daylight, without an acknowledged labour (such as shifting the logs if they piled up), the punishment was thirty. It was also recognized that men, drunk at sunrise after a long night, could fall into the water without ill intent. The Emperor Taizu, Lord of the Five Directions, was a merciful ruler, ever mindful of his subjects.

Less than thirty lashes with the rod seldom killed, or caused permanent incapacity.

Of course few of these rules and restrictions applied to aristocrats, to imperial couriers, or to the black-clad civil service mandarins from the Purple Myrtle Court—the crows—with their keys and seals of office. Ward gates would be opened or closed for them on command if they were abroad on horseback or in carried litters during the dark hours.

The North District, home to the best pleasure houses, was accustomed to late arrivals from the Ta-Ming and its administrative palaces: hard-working civil servants from the Censorate or the Ministry of Revenue, finally free of their memoranda and calligraphy, or elegantly attired noblemen exiting city mansions (or the palace itself), more than slightly drunk, seeing no compelling reason not to prolong an evening with music and silken girls.

Sometimes it might be a woman travelling one of the wide streets in a discreet sedan chair, curtains drawn, an anonymously clad officer of her household alongside to deal with the Gold Bird Guards and shield her