Under Heaven

Nothing frightens her more than wolves.

She would be dead or taken if they were not here.

The world is not something to be understood. It is vanity, illusion to even try.

Her body is shaking where she lies. She can’t control it. And then, as suddenly as the first cries came, and the terrifying vision of those riders, there is stillness again. The light of morning. Dawn wind. Li-Mei hears birdsong, amazingly.

She makes herself sit up, then wishes she had not.

Beside her, much too near, the dead Shuoki is being devoured. He is blood and meat. The wolves snap and grunt, biting down, snarling at each other.

She is afraid she is going to be sick and, with the thought, she is, on her knees in the grass, emptied out in spasms.

A shadow falls. She looks up quickly.

Meshag extends one of the water flasks. She sits up. Takes it and unstoppers it. She drinks and spits, does so again, heedless of dignity or grace or any such concepts from another world. She drinks again, swallows this time. Then she pours water into her hand and wipes her face. Does that again, too, almost defiantly. Not everything is lost, she tells herself. Not unless you let it be.

“Come,” Meshag says to her. “We take four horses. We can change, ride more fast.”

“Will … will there be more of these?”

“Shuoki? Might be. Soldiers have gone. Shuoki come to see why.”

“Do we know why?”

He shakes his head.

“Come,” he says again. He reaches a hand. She gives him back the stoppered flask, but though he takes it and shoulders it, he puts his hand out again, and she understands that he is helping her get up.

HE CHOOSES two more horses for each of them. The Shuoki horses have scattered, but are well trained and have not gone far. She waits by her own mount, and watches him. He reclaims his arrows, first, approaches one Shuoki horse, examines and leaves it, takes another. She has no idea how he’s making these choices.

Around her, hideously, the wolves are feeding on the dead.

She remembers from another life Tai telling their father (she is in the trees, listening) how the Bogu take their dead out on the grass, away from the tribe, to be devoured under the sky, souls sent back that way.

The sky is very blue, the wind milder today.

He has left her a flask. She drinks again, but only a little, to take the bad taste from her mouth.

She watches him ride back. He has four horses looped to each other, tied to his own. He doesn’t appear to say anything at all, but suddenly wolves spring up and lope away, to be lost in the grass.

Li-Mei takes her reins and does the leap (not graceful) she’s taught herself to get up on a horse without his aid. When you lose your access to pride in almost all things, perhaps you find it somewhere else? She says, “Shouldn’t two of them be tied behind mine, to make it easier?”

“Not easier. We must go.”

“Wait. Please!”

He does wait. The sun is washing the land in morning light. His eyes are dark, nothing comes back from them.

“Forgive me,” she says. “I told you, when I don’t understand, it makes me fearful. I am better when I know things.”

He says nothing.

She says, “Can you, do you control wolves? Do they follow you?”

He looks away, north, the way they’ve come. Says nothing for so long she thinks he’s chosen not to answer, but he hasn’t moved yet. She hears birds singing. Looks up, almost involuntarily, for a swan.

He says, “Not all. One pack. This one.”

The lead wolf is near them again; he is always close to Li-Mei. She looks at him. Fights a new horror and an old fear.

She turns back to Meshag, the black eyes. The wolf’s are so much brighter. The man is waiting. She says only, “Thank you.”

He twitches his reins and she follows him south, leaving the dead behind under birds and the sky.

UNDER STARS, that same night. They have ridden all day, two brief halts. No cooking fires, berries only, but they’ve stopped by a pond this time. Li-Mei takes off her clothes and bathes in the dark: a need to wash away the memory of flesh being shredded, the sound it made.

After dressing again, she asks him, “What you said before? About the wolves? This is because of what was done to you?”

It is easier to ask in the night.

He has been crouching in the grass, after watering the horses. She sees him look away. She says, “I’m sorry. You don’t have to—”

He says, “Shaman in north was making me a wolf-soul. Bound to him. His command? Hard magic, bad. Not … not done. Wolf his totem creature. He summoned a wolf to come. Your brother killed him as he was doing this. I was … I am caught between.”

“Between?”

There are frogs in the pond. She hears them croaking in the night. He says, “Man and wolf. This body and the other.”

The other. She looks over, against her will. The lead wolf is in the grass, the grey shape. She’d seen him tearing flesh at sunrise, blood dripping from those jaws.

The animal looks back at her, steadily. She can barely make it out but these eyes, unlike Meshag’s, seem to shine. A fearful sensation comes over Li-Mei, and the realization that it would be wrong, wrong for her to push him more, to ask for more.

She lowers her head. Her hair is wet, she feels it dripping down her back, but the night is mild. She says, “I am sorry. Perhaps it would have been better if Tai had not—”

“No!” he says strongly. She looks up quickly, startled. He stands, a shape against horizon and stars. “Better this than what I would have been. I am … I have choices. If that shaman bind me, I am only his, and then die. Shandai gave me this.”

She looks up at him.

He says, “I choose to come for you. To honour Shan … Shendai.”

“And after? After this?” She had just decided not to ask more questions.

He makes his one-shoulder shrug.

She looks over at the wolf again, a shadow more than something you can see. There is a question she cannot ask.

“Ride now?”

He actually puts it as a question.

“Thank you,” she says.

Li-Mei gets up and walks over and mounts one of her horses, by herself. They are changing mounts every time they stop. Just before sunrise he shoots a second swan, but a third one, following behind, wheels away west, very high.

Someone had a wolf for a totem, she thinks. Someone has a swan.

YOU CAN FALL ASLEEP on a horse, but not when it is galloping. Li-Mei collapses into an aching, fitful slumber whenever he allows a halt. She knows why he’s pushing so hard, since shooting the second swan, but body and mind have their demands.

She lies on her back in shorter grass now. Consciousness reasserts, recedes. She has been dreaming of swinging—the swing in the garden at home—arcing higher and higher among spring blossoms, back and forth. She doesn’t know who is pushing her, she never looks to see, but she is not afraid.

The pushing is Meshag, shaking her shoulder.