Under Heaven

discomfited by her gesture. He was the kaghan’s heir, she thinks.

She is nowhere near her home.

He says, quietly, “I wish him destroyed, also.”

Li-Mei blinks. He looks at her, dead-eyed, bare-chested, hair to his waist, utterly strange, in this cave where they stand, faint light filtering from above.

He says, “He did this to me. My brother.”

And it begins, piece by puzzle piece, to come clearer.

HE HAS NOT YET RETURNED. It is now, she judges, well into the afternoon, though it is difficult to measure time inside a cave. There is more light filtering down now, the sun is higher. She has eaten, has even dozed fitfully, lying on earth and pebbles, her head pillowed awkwardly on the satchel. She is obviously not a princess if she can do that.

Awakened by what was probably an imagined sound, she’s untied and then retied her hair, used a little of the water to wash her hands again.

She is not to go outside. She can ignore this—she’s ignored so many instructions through her life—but she isn’t inclined to do so. Nor does it occur to her to run away.

For one thing, she has no idea where to go. For another, the man she’s been sent to marry is looking for her. She has no doubt of that, and she doesn’t want to be found. She doesn’t want to live her life on these steppes. She may end up with no choice (short of death), but for the moment, at least, there appears to be a glimmering of one, like glow-worms in a night dell, or a cave.

She has no idea what Meshag intends to do, but he is helping her away, and that is a start, isn’t it? It might get her killed, or he might decide to claim her body as a prize in a war with his brother, take her right here on earth and stone. But what control does she have, in any of this?

What she’d prefer (it feels an absurd word) is to be with the empress still, serving her, even exiled from the Ta-Ming. Or, even better, to be home right now at this beginning of summer. She can picture it too well. Not a helpful channel of thought or memory.

She is sitting, hands around drawn-up knees. She permits herself to cry (no one can see), and then she stops.

She looks around for what must be the fiftieth time: the low, narrow tunnel leading out, the curved cave walls rising towards light spilling softly down from the openings on the one side. Stones and pebbles, bones scattered. The wolves will have needed to eat, feed their cubs. She shivers. There is one other tunnel, larger than the entranceway, leading farther in. She’d seen it on first entry here.

She can’t say why she decides to explore it now. Anxiety, a desire to do something, make a decision, however trivial. Patience is not a skill she has. Her mother used to talk to her about it.

She finds she can stand in the second tunnel if she bends over. The air seems all right as she goes. She isn’t sure how she’ll know when it isn’t. She keeps her hands on the rough walls to either side and strains her eyes, for the light begins to fade.

It is a short distance, actually. Another birthing passage, she thinks, though she can’t say why that thought has come to her, twice now.

She straightens in a second chamber, not as large, or as high. It is colder. She can hear, faintly, the sound of water dripping.

Something else is different. There is no wolf smell here. She doesn’t know why. Wouldn’t they extend their lair as far from outside as they could? Protect the cubs? What is it that has kept them away? And does that mean she shouldn’t be here either? She doesn’t know. The answers are too remote from any life she’s lived.

Then, as her eyes adjust to fainter light, Li-Mei sees what lies in this chamber.

Both hands go to her mouth, as if to lock in sound. As if a gasp or cry would be sacrilege. Her next thought is that she might know, after all, why the animals have not come here. For this must be—surely it must be—a place of power.

On the wall in front of her, dim in the darkness, but clearly conjured forth, Li-Mei sees horses.

Innumerable, jumbled chaotically, piled on each other all the way up into shadow. Full-bodied, half-forms, some with only heads and necks and manes, in a racing, tumbling, spilling tumult. A herd, all facing the same way, moving the same way, deeper in, as if thundering across the curved cave walls. And she knows, she knows, in the moment of seeing, the moment they emerge from darkness on the wall, that these painted, surging figures are unimaginably old.

She turns, in the centre of a cascade. On the opposite wall is another herd, galloping the same direction, the horses superimposed upon each other in wild, profligate intensity, so vital, so vivid, even in barely sufficient light, that she can imagine sounds, the drumming of hooves on hard ground. The horses of the Bogu steppes.

But before the Bogu tribes were here, she thinks. There are no men on these walls and the horses are untamed, free, flowing like a river in spate towards the eastern end of the cave, deeper in—where there is a third tunnel, she now sees.

Something rises within her, primitive and absolute, imperative, to tell her she will not go in there. It is not for her. She does not belong, and she knows it.

High above that slit of an entranceway, the largest by far of all the painted horses looms: a stallion, deep- chested, red-brown, almost crimson, its sex clearly shown. And on its body, all over it—and on this one, only—Li- Mei sees the imprint of human hands laid on in a pale-coloured paint, as if branding or tattooing the horse.

She doesn’t understand.

She does not ever, in her life, expect to understand.

But she feels an appallingly ancient force here, and senses within herself, a yearning to claim or possess it. She is certain that those who placed their handprints on this wall, on the painted body of this king-horse, whether they did so ages ago or have come recently through these tunnels, were paying tribute, homage, to this herd.

And perhaps to those who put these horses here, leading the way deeper in.

She will not follow them there. She is not such a person, and is too far from home. There is a barrier in her mind where that third tunnel begins. It is not an opening she can take. She has not led a life guided by magic, infused or entwined with it. She doesn’t like that world, did not, even at court—alchemists hovering, stroking narrow beards, astrologers mumbling over charts.

Still, she looks at these horses, unable to stop turning and turning, aware that she’s becoming dizzied, overwhelmed, consumed by the profusion, the richness here. There is so much power on these walls, humbling, evoking awe, enough to make someone weep.

She has a sense of time stretching, back and back so far it cannot be grasped. Not by her, at any rate. Not by Shen Li-Mei, only daughter of the Kitan general Shen Gao. She wonders, suddenly, what her father would have said had he been with her in this hidden place. A hard thought, because if he were alive she wouldn’t be here.

And in that moment she hears a sound that makes her halt her spinning. She stands motionless suddenly, silent. She listens. The drip of water. Not that. She is almost certain she heard a horse. Fear comes with that.

Then another sound: someone coming into this inner cave from the first one. Instead of frightening her, this reassures. Meshag went to get horses. He knows where she is. The sound she’s heard—faintly—is from outside. A real horse, not the supernatural neighing of a spirit stallion on these walls.

She sees him come through. He straightens. She is about to speak when he holds up a hand, three fingers to his lips. Fear returns. Why silence? Who is out there?

He gestures for her to follow, turns to lead her through the short tunnel to the wider, brighter cave, the first one. She takes a last look at the horses all around, at the king-horse with the human hands upon him, and then she makes her way out.

In the larger cave, with the high openings lending light, Meshag turns again, once more with fingers to his lips urging silence. He is wearing a long, dark tunic now, a leather vest over it. She wonders what clothing he has found for her. She opens her mouth to whisper a question (surely they can whisper?) but his gesture, seeing that, is imperative. His eyes gleam, flashing angrily in the thin light from above.

She registers this, says nothing. She draws a slow breath.