Under Heaven

“He could have just come in and seized me when you left? No?”

He considers that. “Yes. So must have meant to take you to them. Maybe afraid you kill yourself, so he changed.”

She clears her throat. Her hand is hurting.

“Must go now,” he says.

“What about him?”

He looks surprised. He gestures at the bones around them. “Leave to wolves. It is what we do.” He pauses, looks a little awkward. Then he says, “Was good, killing this one. Was very bravery? Is the word?”

She sighs. “Brave. I suppose it is the word.”

Again he hesitates. He motions with a stiff hand. “You see what is next cave?”

“The horses? I saw. I didn’t go farther. I felt … not brave.”

“No,” he shakes his head. “Was right. Not to go. For priests, spirit-walkers. Very old. But you see last horse? Above?”

“I saw it.”

He looks at her, seems to make a decision. “Come. One thing we do, then go.”

She has exhausted her reserves for resisting. She lets him lead her back into the dimness of the horse- cave with those animals on the wall, laid upon each other long ago. And she watches as he does go into the last cave, the one she would not enter. Very old.

He comes out with a shallow earthen bowl, and mixes into it water from a second flask he’s carrying, and he stirs with a wooden stick, his motions stiff as they always are. There is no grace to him, how he moves. She is surprisingly certain there was, once.

He signals her nearer. She goes. He takes her right hand—the first time he’s ever touched her—and lays it flat in the bowl. There is a paint of sorts, white, or very nearly.

At that point she realizes what is happening.

He leads her over by the wrist and he lays her hand on the flank of the king-horse above the tunnel leading to the third cave, so that a fresh imprint is made there among all the others, which means that her existence, her presence, her life having been here has now been recorded, registered. And perhaps (she will never know) that does play a role in what follows.

It is so hard to see the patterns, to be sure that they are there.

They leave that cave and then the other one, go back out into sunlight. She blinks in the day’s brightness.

He has found one horse only, but the dead shaman’s is still tethered here, unmenaced by the wolves, though lathered with fear—and so they have two mounts, after all, along with the food and the clothing Meshag has taken from who knows where.

He helps her on the smaller horse, and then he mounts and gentles the shaman’s, and they ride a path out of that valley and go east with the sun overhead and the wolves beside them.

Li-Mei has no notion, no least idea where he is taking her, but she is alive, and not going placidly into the fate devised for her against her will and desire, and, for now, for this moment under heaven, that is enough.

CHAPTER XIV

Wujen Ning, of the Second District cavalry, had been the first to see Master Shen Tai and his horse appear like ghosts out of a grey dawn west of Iron Gate Fortress.

Now, not many days after, he was dimly aware that his life might be changed—or might have already been changed—by them.

It was not normal for peasant labourers or soldiers without rank to undergo such alterations in the flowing of their lives. You worked your fields, dealt with flood or famine, married, had children born, had them die (and wives). Events far away rolled on, vaguely apprehended, perhaps heard about over rice wine in a tavern, if you went to taverns.

Or you joined the army, were posted where they posted you—usually far from home these days. You dug ditches and latrines, built and rebuilt garrison walls and buildings, patrolled for bandits or wild animals, caught fevers, lived or died, marched, did go to taverns and brothels on leave in market towns. Sometimes you fought, some of you died in battle, some lost an eye or an arm and wished they’d died. The sweep of distant events among the great might come more often to your ears in the way of army talk, but it tended to have just as little impact, short of a major campaign, or perhaps a rebellion.

Change wasn’t a part of life as Wujen Ning had understood or experienced it. This truth was currently … undergoing change.

For one thing, he was shockingly close to Xinan, to seeing the capital for the first time in his life. Only a night or two away now, they told him.

The countryside had been altering as they’d ridden east from Chenyao. Wheat and barley fields, the occasional mulberry grove (silk farms set back behind them, away from the noise of the road) had given way to village after village, and larger towns, so frequent now you could say they were continuous. People and more people. Temple bells ringing not in haunting isolation but barely audible amid loud populations. Small farms— potatoes, broad beans—were tucked in between the villages, squeezed.

There was an endless line of market carts or wood-cutters’ wagons going both ways along the imperial road, clogging it, slowing them. This was the outermost sprawl of Xinan, he was told. They were getting close now.

It was not something Ning had ever thought about, or wanted. The capital had been as remote to his grasp of the world as the sea. It terrified him, to be honest: so many people. Already. He tried not to let that show, and since no one in their company was really looking at him and he talked little, he thought he’d kept his secret. He did catch himself whistling nervously sometimes.

He wondered, as they travelled, how the other soldiers felt about coming to the capital. There were thirty riders now, not just the five that had set out from Iron Gate to escort Master Shen. Governor Xu had insisted that Shen Tai, as an honorary officer of the Second District army, carrying tidings (and riding a horse) of greatest importance, be accompanied—and protected.

There was some anger and some amusement among the Iron Gate soldiers (Ning didn’t see the humour, but he wasn’t good at that, he knew) arising from the belief that it was carelessness among the governor’s guards that had come near to having Master Shen killed in Chenyao.

One of Ning’s fellows from Iron Gate, a man with no shortage of opinions or wine-soaked breath to voice them with, said he didn’t think any of those soldiers who had been on guard outside their inn that night were still alive.

Governor Xu might no longer be in the prime of youth, he said, but he wasn’t showing any inclination to retire to fruit orchards and trout ponds. He was wealthy, aristocratic, known to have rivalries with other military governors. One big one in particular, he’d said with a knowing look, as if everyone at their table would realize the one he meant. Ning didn’t. It didn’t bother him.

Had Shen Tai been killed (or the horse, Wujen Ning thought, with genuine horror) it would, apparently, have reflected very badly on the governor. Ning didn’t understand or think much about this either, but from the time they’d left Chenyao he had made it his task to stay as close as he could to Master Shen and Dynlal. He honoured Shen Tai; he loved the horse. How could anyone, Wujen Ning thought, not love the horse?

The Kanlin woman, who frightened all of them a little (and elicited some crude talk at night), appeared to have decided Ning was all right. After an amused expression or two, she had accepted him as having a place close to them while they rode, or when they settled for the night.

(Ning didn’t understand her glances. He didn’t know what anyone could find amusing in any of this, but he had learned to accept that what made others smile could be a source of perplexity for him.)

They were stopping at large inns now at sundown, imperial posting stations. Good meals, a change of horses. They had documents, signed by the governor.