Under Heaven

She opens her eyes. Pale light. Morning. He hands her the water flask, gestures towards the saddlebag beside her. More berries. If there are further days of nothing but this, Li-Mei thinks, a rabbit eaten raw might begin to seem appealing. Then she remembers the wolves and the Shuoki, and that thought slides away.

She drinks, splashes water on her hands and face. Takes a fistful of the berries, and then does it again. She has learned to avoid the unripe ones, picks them out. She is a Kitai princess, isn’t she?

She’s too weary to be amused by her own irony.

She gets to her feet. Her legs hurt, and her back. Meshag is already mounted. He is scanning the sky as it brightens. She does the same. Nothing to be seen. Another fresh day, high clouds. She goes to the horse he’s freed from the line for her. She flexes stiff limbs and gets herself into the saddle. She’s become better at this, she thinks.

She looks at him.

“It will change now,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“The land. You will see. We are leaving the steppe. Your Wall is not far.”

Even fatigued as she is, this makes her heart beat faster. Just the words. The Wall means Kitai, and an exile’s return, if they can get through it to the other side. He’d said they could.

We are leaving the steppe.

She looks back, turning in the saddle. As far as she can see under the risen sun and the high sky the grass stretches, yellow-green, darker green, tall, moving in the breeze. There is a sound to its swaying, and that sound has been a part of her existence since the Bogu claimed her. Even in the sedan chair she’d heard it, incessantly. The murmur of the steppe.

Gazing north, her eyes filled with this vista, imagining how far it goes, she thinks, If there was a morning in the world, this is the way it looked. And that is not a thought natural to her people.

They start south. Li-Mei looks to left and then right, and sees the lead wolf beside them. The others are out there, she knows. But this one is always near.

BY MIDDAY the land begins rising, the grass is shorter, differently textured, darker, and there are clumps of green and silver-green shrubbery, and then bare rock in places. When she sees a stand of poplar trees it is almost shocking. She realizes she isn’t fatigued any more.

They cross a shallow river. On the other bank Meshag halts to let the horses drink. He refills the water flasks. Li-Mei dismounts as well, to stretch her aching legs. She keeps looking at the sky. More wind today, the clouds moving east. Sometimes they pass before the sun and a shadow slides along the land and then away.

She says, “Do you know how close they are, behind us?”

He stoppers the flasks. He takes the line that holds the four horses behind his and makes the changes needed to give each of them new mounts. He swings himself up and Li-Mei does the same.

He says, “Most of a day. I think we are enough ahead.”

She is afraid to ask him how he knows this. But she also thinks she knows the answer: not all the wolves are with them here.

“Thank you,” she says.

They begin to ride again, south, under the high sky and the coming and going of light and shadow across the changing land. One more stop, mid-afternoon. He switches their horses again.

They see a swan, late in the day, flying too high for an arrow. A little after that they crest the long, steady rise of land they have been climbing. There is a downward slope in front of them.

Beyond it, stretching to the ends of sight, west and east, lit by the long, late sun, is the Wall.

He has brought her home.

Tazek Karad had never made any real distinction between the nomads of the grasslands, however much they might have hated each other. He looked out over Shuoki lands now, having been abruptly shifted two hundred li east of his normal gatehouse on the Wall.

Both the Shuoki and the Bogu were domesticated, nose-wiping sheep-herders to him. Their women dominated them in their yurts, by day and by night. That, his fellow Kislik joked, was why so many of the steppe-men slept with their sheep.

They might boast of their thick-maned horses, of battling grassland wolves, hunting gazelle, but what did these things mean to a Kislik? His were a people of the desert, where men murdered for half a cup of water, and sometimes drank the blood of the victim, too. Where you’d have to drag your camel down to the ground and shelter against it, wrapping your face completely, to try to survive a sandstorm.

The deserts killed; these steppes nurtured life. You could make a guess, couldn’t you, as to which land produced harder, more worthy men?

Tazek would have denied it if someone had called him bitter. Still, when it came to talking about worthy you could make a case that command of only fifty men in the Kitan Sixth Army after twelve years along or north of the Wall was not even close to showing proper respect. A dui was nothing. He ought to have had two hundred or more, by now.

True, Kitai and its empire had fed and clothed him since he was fifteen, and had made women and wine (or kumiss, more often) available for soldiers posted along the Wall. True, he had not died in desert sand as his father and two brothers had.

Serving the Kitan emperor was a way of life, and not the worst. But surely anyone worth being named a man wanted to rise, to move nearer the centre. What sort of person would come this close, and look, and say, “It is enough, what I have. I don’t need more.”

Not the person Tazek Karad was, at any rate.

Add the fact—it was on his record—that he’d accepted, uncomplainingly, doubled six-month shifts at outpost forts in the grasslands three times, and you had to concede that the officers either had it in for him, for some reason, or they were just too incompetent in the Sixth District to recognize a man ready for promotion.

Not that he was bitter.

Part of the problem was that the flaccid sheep-lovers of the steppe were too quiet these days. The Bogu had become a subject people of the emperor, selling him horses at the spring gathering by the river’s loop, requesting Kitan intervention in their own squabbles, but not fighting nearly enough in those to let good soldiers engage in the sort of actions that got you promoted.

The Shuoki were more contentious, and the forts in their lands—Near Fort and Far Fort, the soldiers called them—saw some combat. The nomads here had even tried to break through weak places in the Wall on raids. A mistake, and they’d suffered for it. But the two outpost forts and the Wall below them had been manned by soldiers of Roshan’s Seventh Army, so the glory (and citations) from that fighting didn’t get anywhere near Tazek Karad or his fellows in the Sixth.

In the Sixth Army they supervised horse trading, heard whining complaints about sheep raids levelled by one rancid-smelling tribe against another, and let long-haired Bogu riders through with furs and amber, destined for markets in Xinan or Yenling.

It was predictable, safe, unspeakably dull.

Until four days ago, when dui commander Tazek Karad had received urgent orders to lead his fifty men east to take up a position at the gatehouse and towers directly south of Near Fort.

Other officers and men went with them, some halting sooner, some going farther east, thinning the numbers at their own guard posts. Along the way, changing orders overtook a number of them, causing confusion. There was an apparent need to move quickly.

The emerging report was that the soldiers of the Seventh along the Wall had been withdrawn. All of them. They were gone. The gates and the watchtowers between gates were undefended. It was almost inconceivable.

No one told them why. No ranking officer (in the Sixth Army, anyhow) would bother telling a lowly commander of fifty men anything.

Nor did anyone explain why, just two days ago, the garrison soldiers of the Seventh and Eighth, posted in Near Fort and Far Fort, had come marching and riding back, both armies together, thousands upon thousands of