Under Heaven

Li-Mei has lost track of how long they’ve been riding. Five nights? The landscape is unvarying, remorseless. The approach of summer has made the grass very tall and there are few paths or tracks. Time blurs. She doesn’t like it. She has lived her life anticipating possibilities, knowing what is happening, where she is going. Shaping where she is going, to whatever degree she can.

She is much like her oldest brother in this, but would not happily acknowledge that.

She knows how to ride, was taught as a child because her father thought it important, even for a girl, but this much time on a horse, day after day, is hard for her, and Meshag is not inclined to rest very often.

She is in pain at the end of each day and then weary through the next morning’s riding because nights sleeping under stars are cold and not restful. She’d hoped this discomfort would pass.

She says nothing about it, but is aware that he knows. She has a sense they are travelling more slowly than he wants to, because of her. She’s tried to shorten their rest times herself, being the first to stand up, but Meshag has simply ignored her when she does this. He will only move when he is ready to move, or decides that she is, more likely.

But he’d said, back in the cave (another world, where she killed a man), that his brother would follow them, with shamans, and it is clear to her that whatever Meshag, son of Hurok, has become, whatever dark link he might have to wolves and the wild and spirits, he doesn’t want the shamans catching them. Surely for her sake, possibly for his own.

He’s avoided his people, hasn’t he? Stayed clear of his brother all these years since her brother saved his life (maybe saved his life). But now, for her—for Shen Li-Mei, a woman from Kitai—he’s approached the Bogu again, stolen her away, and they are being pursued. So he has told her. Li-Mei has no way of knowing the truth. It leaves her uneasy, even angry. She asked him, some time ago, why they hadn’t already been caught, since they weren’t travelling at great speed.

“They have to find us,” he said. “Have other princess to carry north. They do not know which way we travel. He had to wait for a shaman.”

A long answer, for him.

She has only the barest idea of where they are. They have been riding east. These are Shuoki lands, but if she remembers rightly they move north as the weather warms. The Shuoki are enemies of the Bogu. There are Kitan garrison forts somewhere in this direction, northern outposts. The Long Wall is south of them, of course. She doesn’t know how far, but it will be rising and falling with the land like some serpent heading to meet the sea. Ahead of them will be nothing but grassland if the Shuoki are indeed north. The Bogu do not graze their herds this far east, and they are nowhere near the Koreini Peninsula.

He is taking her into emptiness.

It has been two days since any sign of human life—morning smoke by a distant lake. Meshag had decided not to go that way for water, though they’d been rationing theirs by that point. He’d found a small pool towards evening. They camped there, the wolves on guard.

So she does have some notion of time, after all, she tells herself. A pool of water two nights ago, a slight rise in the land last night in the open. No real shelter since the cave with the horses on the walls.

They have made no fires of their own at night. He hasn’t touched her, except to help her on her horse. She has thought about that. Has thought about it a great deal.

She’d expected to have been taken physically by now, has been preparing for it from the time she waited in the yurt, in darkness. She is a woman alone with a man in an expanse of empty land—certain events usually follow upon that.

Meshag is too different, however, in visible, unsettling ways. She doesn’t know what to think any more.

She has never made love to a man, has only played with the other girls at court, giggling or whispering explorations to little import. Some of the others have done more—with each other, with courtiers (or one of the princes) in the Ta-Ming—but Li-Mei has not. The empress, even when they were still in the palace, was devout and demanding: her women were expected to observe rules of well-bred conduct, which were clear on this matter.

Once, the emperor’s named heir, Prince Shinzu (a special case, of course), had come to stand behind Li- Mei during a musical performance in the Min-Tan, the Hall of Light.

As the musicians played and the dancers began, she had felt sweetened breath on her neck, then a hand brushing her lower back, through silk, gliding down, back up, down again. Shinzu was regarded as vividly irresponsible, charming, rarely sober. There were endless rumours as to how long he’d remain heir, or even why he was Taizu’s chosen successor among so many sons.

She remembers that day extremely well, remembers standing, eyes forward, towards the dancers, not moving at all, breathing carefully, suspended between outrage and excitement and helplessness as he touched her from behind, unseen.

He hadn’t done anything more. Hadn’t even spoken with Li-Mei afterwards, then or at any other time before she went away from the palace with the empress into exile.

With a murmured phrase (she hadn’t even heard the words clearly) he’d moved on when the music ended. She’d seen him talking to another lady of the court, after, laughing, another wine cup in his hand. The woman was laughing, too. Li-Mei could recall ambivalent feelings, seeing that.

She has never considered herself the sort of beauty to drive a man to excesses of desire or recklessness. Nor, even, was she the kind of woman who normally elicited even transitory attention on an autumn afternoon in the Hall of Light.

Had her father been alive she’d be married by now, undoubtedly, and would know much more about this aspect of the world. Men and women. She’s been ready to learn for a while. Were Shen Gao still living, his daughter would not now be alone with a barbarian rider and wolves among the grasslands of the north.

Meshag sleeps a little apart from her. The wolves take stations like sentinels in a wide circle around them. The stars have been more dazzling each night as the moon wanes. She sees the Weaver Maid set each evening, then the Sky River appear overhead as darkness deepens, and then the lost mortal lover rising east, on the far side of the River.

She is never easy about the wolves, still tries not to look at them, but they aren’t going to harm her, she knows now, because of Meshag. Every day he has ridden away before sunrise, mist rising from the grass. He’s made her keep riding alone, heading into the sun as soon as it is up and the mist has burned away. The wolves guide her, guard her.

She still hates them. You couldn’t change a lifetime’s thinking and feeling and fear in a few days, could you?

Each time, Meshag has caught up with them before midday, with food. He is hunting, in the hunter’s time before dawn. He even brings firewood, kindling on his back. He tramples grass, shapes a space, builds low, careful daytime fires.

They eat rabbits, or marmots most recently—today—skinned and cooked, a whittled stick through them. He gives her some kind of fruit to peel. She doesn’t know the name of it. It is bitter but she eats it. Drinks water. Washes her face and hands, always, more symbol than anything else. She is Kitan, and her father’s daughter. Stands and stretches, does it before Meshag does.

They ride on, the sun overhead, clouds, no clouds, the days mild, evenings chilly, the nights cold. The plain stretches, all directions, unlike anything she’s ever known, the grass so high, nearly hiding them, even on horseback, as they go. It does conceal the wolves, she can just about forget that they are there.

She can almost imagine they will ride like this forever, in silence, through tall grass, with wolves.

NOTHING IS FOREVER, not since the world changed after the war in heaven.

Late that same day, the sun behind them. Li-Mei is weary, trying to hide it, glad Meshag rides in front and seldom looks back. He leaves it to the lead wolf to be sure she is keeping up. She has been reciting poetry, not with any theme or coherence, only to distract herself, keep herself riding until he calls a halt.

Then he does halt, too sharply. She hasn’t been paying attention, almost bumps his mount with hers. She pulls up quickly, twitches her reins, comes around beside him.