Under Heaven

He is looking at the sky.

A few clouds ahead of them, some to the north, pink and yellow in the light of the low, long sun. No sign of rain, any kind of storm. The wind is easy. It isn’t anything like that.

She sees a swan. Sees that this is what he is watching. His face has become very still. It is just a bird, she wants to say. But she has been among strangeness long enough now to know that he would not be looking up like this, looking like this, if it were simply a bird flying by.

She sees him draw the short, thick Bogu bow from his saddle.

He hadn’t had a bow when he’d come for her. He’d taken this one when he stole the horse. Li-Mei moves her own mount away, to give him room. The swan is flying south, towards them.

It is springtime. Even she knows a swan should not be flying south in spring. It is alone. Perhaps lost, having wandered in the high roads of the sky? She doesn’t really think that. Not when she looks at the man beside her, arrow now to bowstring, the bow lifted. It is a very long shot, she has time to think.

She hears the arrow’s release. Red song of war arrows, red sun. There are so many poems about bow-songs and war in Kitai, back a thousand years to the first shaping of the empire.

Meshag has not looked awkward or rigid, she realizes. Not claiming his bow, fitting the arrow, letting it fly.

The swan falls out of the sky. So white against the colours of the clouds and the blue. It disappears into the grass.

She sees two wolves go after it, swift, avid. There is silence.

“Why?” she asks, finally.

He is looking back west. Sky and grass. He puts the bow away.

“He has found me,” he says. “Ill chance.”

She hesitates. “Your brother?”

He nods. The wind moves his hair.

“The … a swan was searching?”

He nods his head again, absently this time. It is clear that he is thinking. Devising.

He says, “Now when shamans will call it there is no answer. They know direction each bird was sent. Will know I killed it.”

She is afraid again. It is the strangeness of all things that frightens her most. You killed a bird in the sky, just as you killed rabbits or marmots in morning mist, and that meant …

“Couldn’t it have been hunted for food? By someone else?”

He looks at her. The black eyes. “Bogu never kill swans.”

“Oh,” she says.

He continues to gaze at her, a longer look than any she can remember. His eyes take in light and swallow it.

He says, “My brother would hurt you.”

She has not expected this. “Hurt me?”

“He is … like that.”

She thinks a moment. “Some men are, too, in Kitai.”

He seems to be working with a thought. He says, “When I was … I was not like him.”

When I was. When he was a man? She doesn’t want to go towards that, it is dark in that direction.

She says, to fill silence, not really needing an answer, “Why would he hurt me? A Kitan princess, bringing him glory?”

He moves a shoulder, the awkward shrug. “Far too many questions. You are always asking. Not proper for women.”

She looks away. Then back. “Then I need to thank you again, and be grateful I am not going to him, don’t I? Will they catch us now? Where are we riding? What have you decided to do?”

They are a test of sorts, these swift, immediate inquiries. She is the way she is.

She sees the expression she has decided to call a smile.

There are ways of beating back fear, strangeness, the sense of being profoundly lost in the world.

THEY HAVE RIDDEN until darkness has almost gathered the land, eating cold meat in the saddle and the remains of the fruit. The waning moon has set. Li-Mei, in real discomfort, has continued to remain silent about it. They will be pursued now. He is trying to save her. This is no springtime ride in the Deer Park to see animals feeding or drinking at twilight.

He brings her to water again. She isn’t certain how, this far from Bogu lands. It is the wolves, she decides.

He tells her they can rest only a short while, that she is to sleep right away. They will ride in darkness now, will do this every night. But then, after staring towards her in the almost-lost gloaming, his features difficult to see, he orders her to lie face down on the short grass by the pond.

She obeys. Now it begins, she thinks, her heart beginning to race against her will. (How does one control a heartbeat?)

But she is wrong, again. He comes to her, yes, but not in need, or hunger. He kneels beside her and begins to work the muscles of her back, his fingers mingling pain with the easing of pain. When she tenses, wincing, he slaps her lightly, the way you might slap a restive horse. She tries to decide if she’s offended. Then makes herself settle into his hands. She is going to be riding again soon, this is no time or place to carry pride. What can offended mean here? His movements remain stiff, but very strong. She cries out once, apologizes. He says nothing.

She wonders abruptly—perhaps an illumination?—if his physical restraint, this indifference to her being a woman, is caused by what happened to him those years ago. Could it be he has been rendered incapable of desire, or the accomplishment of it?

She knows so little about this, but it is possible, surely. And it would explain …

Then, at one point, as his hands slow, and then slow again, and linger near her hips, she becomes aware that his breathing has changed. She cannot see anything by then, is face down in the grass, can only be aware of him as a presence, touching her.

And though Shen Li-Mei, only daughter of an honourable house, has never shared a bed or couch with any man, or explored very far along even the first pathways of lovemaking, she knows—with instinctive certainty—that this man is not indifferent to her as a woman in the dark with him, and alone. Which means, if he is holding himself back it is not because he cannot feel—

And in that moment she understands another part of what is happening. Now, and since he came for her between the campfires, back west. She closes her eyes. Draws her own slow breath.

His is, in truth, a gesture, from a largeness of spirit she’s not been prepared for. These are barbarians. Everyone living outside the borders of Kitai is a barbarian. You didn’t expect … grace from them. You couldn’t, could you?

She listens to his breathing, feels his touch through her clothing. They are alone in the world. The Weaver Maid, alone as well, is shining in the west. Li-Mei realizes that her heartbeat has steadied after all, though she is aware of something new within herself.

She thinks she understands more now. It calms her, it always has. It makes such a difference. And Shandai was, after all, the first word he’d spoken to her. The name.

She says, softly, “Thank you. I think I will sleep now. You will wake me when it is time to ride?”

She shifts position, onto her side, and then up on her knees. He stands. She looks up at him against the stars. She cannot see his eyes. The wolves are invisible. She knows they are not far.

Still on her knees, she bows to him, her hands touching the earth.

She says, “I thank you for many things, son of Hurok. For my unworthy self, in my father’s name, and in the name of my brother Shen Tai whom you are honouring by … in the way you guard me.” She does not say more. Some things cannot be made explicit, even in the dark.

Night breeze. He says nothing, but she sees him nod his head once. He walks off, not far but far enough, nearer the horses. Li-Mei lies down again, closes her eyes. She feels the wind, hears animal sounds in the grass