Under Heaven

The man seemed distracted, not even certain which way to walk. The Kanlins led him away, including the two who’d been waiting here in the street. The fellow—clearly an aristocrat of some kind, though he wasn’t dressed like one—did pause long enough to offer Qin two more silver coins. That made four, in all, which was more money than anyone had ever given him out here.

He saw the last Kanlin catch up with the man and draw him aside. He saw them speaking, saw her hand over something small. They walked on, farther into the ward, and were lost to sight down the street.

Qin had managed to push himself to his feet, and offer what passed for a bow with him, when he was given the money, but he wasn’t sure the fellow noticed. He sat down again, looking at the four coins. Silver! A breeze came up, stirring the dust. He was thinking about lychees, and when they’d reach the markets. Then he stopped thinking about that.

From within the garden, pipa music began. The sound came faintly to him, for she was some distance away from where he sat against the wall, in the small hut she’d had made to shelter him.

She was playing for him. Qin knew she was. A music more precious than any coins anyone could give. He heard sadness, sweet and slow, in the plucked strings, and thought about how a beautiful woman, from within her sheltered, easeful life of luxury and power, was offering sorrow to the spring night, for what had been done to him.

Qin listened, claimed unconditionally by love. He imagined that even the stars were still and listening, above the haze and lights of Xinan. Eventually the music stopped and the night street was quiet. A dog barked, far away.

CHAPTER XX

As he had promised her, they see the Kitan fortress before sunrise. Even in the night and far away, it is imposing.

It is another unsettling moment for Li-Mei, among so many: looking under stars at something her own people have built here, this heavy, squared-off structure on the grass. Something set solidly, walls rising. An assertion about permanence in a world where the presence of mankind was transitory, lying lightly on the earth. Everything carried with you where you went.

What did it mean, wanting to proclaim this permanence? Was it better, or wiser—a new thought for her—to be a people who knew there was no such thing?

It is as if, she thinks, looking at the fortress her people have erected, some giant, heavenly civil servant had taken his scroll-stamp—the seal he used to signify he’d read a document—and dropped it on the grass, and left it there.

There is something so unnatural, so foreign, about the walled fort being here that she misses the important thing.

Meshag does not. He mutters something beside her, under his breath in his own tongue, and then, more clearly, he says, “It is empty.”

She looks quickly over at him. “How do you know?”

“No torches. No one on the walls. The pastures, there should be night guards for the horses. Something has happened.” He stares ahead. They are on a rise of land, the fortress lies in a shallow valley.

Meshag makes a sound to his horse. “Come,” he says to her. “I must see.” Fearfully, hating her fear, she follows him down.

The fortress is even larger than she’d realized, which means it is farther away. There is a hint of grey in the sky as they finally come up to it. Li-Mei looks to left and right, and now she can see their wolves.

This close, she can see the strangeness of the fort, the thing he understood right away. There is no one here at all. Not on the wall walks, not above the gates, in the squared corner towers. This is a hollow structure, lifeless. She shivers.

Meshag dismounts. He walks to a fenced pasture ahead of them. Goes to the gate, which hangs open, unlatched. It creaks in the wind, banging at intervals against the post. A thin sound. She sees him kneel, then walk a distance south and kneel again. He stands and looks that way.

He turns and walks towards the main gate of the fort. It is far enough that she loses sight of him against the looming walls, in the dark beyond the pasture. She sits her horse, beside wolves, and feels fear blow through her like a wind.

At length, she sees him walking back, the loping, rigid stride. He mounts up. His face is never easy to read, but she thinks she sees concern in it, for the first time.

“When did they leave?” she asks. She knows that is what he’s been trying to determine.

“Only two days,” he says. “Towards the Wall. I do not know why. We must ride quickly now.”

They ride quickly. They are galloping the horses up out of the valley along the southern ridge, the sun about to rise, when they are attacked.

It is called the raider’s hour on the steppe, though that is not something Li-Mei has any way of knowing. Attacks in darkness can become confused, chaotic, random. Daylight undermines surprise. Twilight and dawn are—for hunters of any kind—the best times.

Li-Mei is able to piece events together only fitfully, and only afterwards. She experiences the attack in flashes, images, cries cut off, the screaming of horses.

She is sprawled on the ground before she even understands they are being attacked. He must have pushed her down, she realizes. She looks up, a hand to her mouth, from deep grass. Three, no, four now, of the attackers fall before they even come close.

Meshag’s movements are as smooth as they were when he shot the swan. He is shooting men now, and it is the same. Sighting, release, another arrow nocked and fired. He keeps his horse moving, wheeling. The raiders have bows, too, she sees—that is why he pushed her down. There are a dozen of them, at least, or there were. One more falls, even as she watches. The others move nearer, screaming, but there is something strange about their horses, they rear and wheel, hard to control.

She is in the grass. They can see her horse, but not her. She doesn’t know who these are. Shuoki? Or the pursuing Bogu, come upon them? This is a battle, she has time to think. This was her father’s world all his life. Men die in battle. And women, if they find themselves in the wrong place.

Two riders come thundering towards her, whipping their mounts into control, tracking her by her own horse. She can feel the earth vibrate. They are close. She is going to scream. These are not Bogu. Their hair is short, shaved on both sides, long in the middle, there is yellow paint on their faces. They are near enough for her to see this, and understand that these painted features may be her last sight, under nine heavens.

Then the wolves rise up.

They rise from the grasslands that were theirs to rule before men came with their families and herds, whether treading lightly or trying—hopelessly?—to set wooden structures down to endure as a stamp upon the land.

And when the wolves appear from hiding, she realizes how many more of them there are than she’s been aware of in these days of journeying. She’s seen only the nearest of them—the lead wolf, a handful of others. But there are fifty or more, rising like grey death in the dawn. They have been hidden by the tall grass, are not any more.

They go straight for the Shuoki horses, panicking them wildly into screams and rigid, bucking halts. The horses thrash, kicking out, but to no avail, for there are fewer than ten riders left now, and five times as many wolves, and there is a man (if he is a man) shooting steadily, lethally at them, again and again. And the wolves are his.

Li-Mei sees a yellow-painted Shuoki fall very close to her. She hears something crack as he hits the ground. He screams in pain, in throat-raw terror. Four wolves are on him. She looks away, burying her face in the earth. She hears the man stop screaming, she doesn’t watch it happen. Snuffling sounds, snarling. Then another sound she never forgets: flesh being torn, ripped away.