Imperial Lady

13

Day after day, they traversed a land in which no tree, stream, rock, nor hill appeared to separate one day’s travel from another. Then, one morning, the sight of ten rocks crumbling, perhaps once the site of some ancient outpost, came as a surprise. The sight of this ruin, its stonework tumbled, was a major event—for Silver Snow, that was. The Hsiung-nu simply shrugged as they rode on.

“The sky,” growled one close enough for her to hear, “is all the roof that the Hsiung-nu need.”

She herself was concerned. If such ruin existed this close to the Wall (for they had turned slightly south and could still sight that barrier now and then), would the Middle Kingdom not grow overly dependent upon the Hsiung-nu for protection? She had not believed what Li Ling had told her: that smug officials at court were wont to assure the Emperor: that the Wall was more a defense for the barbarians against the Middle Kingdom.

Certainly it was folly for Ch’in to rely always upon the Wall to keep out invasion, to rely too much upon the goodwill of such horsemen. Was that a vain thing, too? I myself am a weapon in my nation's hands, Silver Snow told herself when the wind lashed tears from her eyes to freeze on the edges of the scarf against her cheeks.

The air grew cold and dry, then colder and dryer yet. Snow covered the dead grasses. Some days, the sky itself turned pale, and the sun gleamed in it like silver cash, providing light but no warmth. To Silver Snow’s astonishment, despite the cold and the wind, the tough, stocky horses, each bearing its owner’s mark, became more and more shaggy, even thrived, while the camels strode on through the waste, sublimely indifferent to everything save their burdens, their handlers, and their sullen dispositions.

At first, the days’ journeys tired Silver Snow so sorely that at night all she wanted to do was creep into her fur blankets and sleep, perhaps without even bothering to eat. There was so much that no one at court understood about the Hsiung-nu, so much that she had not fully comprehended from her father’s stories, now made clear! Their hatred of walls and restraint, their curious dress, with its shorter tunics and trousers rather than proper robes, even their diet, heavy in meat and fats, were not signs of savagery but simply ways they embraced in order to live in this land. Here, under the vast bowl of the sky, which resounded, day after day, with windsongs more poignant and memorable than those of any voice or bamboo flute, those ways made sense. They possessed a particular rhythm, even a grace, that Silver Snow knew that she would one day come to appreciate.

Gradually, however, the result of the training she had had in her father’s house was regained. Used to the sweet smells of the Inner Courts, at first she found the pungency of the Hsiung-nu’s dung fires to be eye-watering and intolerable. Then she became inured to the smell and smoke, and, finally, she did not notice either. She had been healthy before; now she became hardy, flesh and sinew fining down to form a creature that, if she were less consciously elegant than the vision in pearls and kingfisher feathers who had charmed the Son of Heaven, was nevertheless beautiful and perfectly suited to thrive in her new home.

“Do I look,” she asked Willow once, “precisely now as Mao Yen-shou painted me—thin, weathered, and mannish?”

Willow laughed. “Lady, you lack a black mole, while Mao Yen-shou lacks a head. There is no point even in speaking of him.”

The Hsiung-nu who earlier had inspected them and had shaken heads, especially so the women, began, if not to approve, to assume that the women from Ch’in could endure a day’s travel without lamenting, fainting, or growing ill. Silver Snow wondered if they were disappointed. Their leader, Prince Vughturoi, rarely spoke. Was he angry, perhaps, that some girl-princess of Ch’in had been sent out to supplant his mother? She tried to cause no trouble and knew that she had succeeded in that; but still he kept away from her.

Then she noticed something else. Even though Willow was lame, mounted, she was as hardy as the rest of the troop. Nor, because of her blood, did the cold afflict her as harshly. And, where the Hsiung-nu had been inclined to think Silver Snow too frail, too alien for the journey to Khujanga the shan-yu s court, they greeted Willow with what could pass for grudging respect. As Li Ling had said, some women of the Hsiung-nu were said to have powers more than mortal. Gradually, Willow’s herb-lore let her gain face among a people who, if they were wild and harsh, were also open and free. It was even the source of some half-heard, partially understood jests.

“You need a strong tongue to withstand one of her herb drenches,” joked a rider who had come to Willow for a potion.

“Aye, and will that very strong tongue ...”

At that moment, however, the Lord Vughturoi had appeared from behind a tent, and the men had dispersed like whipped curs. The prince had simply glared and stalked on his way.

Gradually, once again, Silver Snow and Willow found themselves able to see the nightly camps as opportunities for more than a little food and sleep. Shielded from the wind that, it was said, the white tiger blew from the far west, all the way across steppe and plain, by a sturdy tent of silk, felt, and leather, Willow sorted her herbs, and Silver Snow tried either to write or to play her lute.

()nc night was so cold that the ink froze on its stone, and, perforce, she must lay aside her latest letter to her father. Instead, she warmed her fingers at their tiny brazier and picked up her lute, strumming idly upon it. After a time, her strumming modulated into a very old song that she had heard her maids at home sing. I hey had not known that she was present, and once they had seen her, they had broken off at once.

The song dealt with, she supposed, the emotions of another lady such as she, married to a ruler of the hordes.

“Mistress!” hissed Willow, more shape of the lips than sound.

Silver Snow’s fingers struck a discord. “This lute is not in tune,” she excused herself. With her eyes, she followed Willow’s pointing finger. Clearly limned against the rippling wall of their tent was the shadow that they had seen there before.

Why does he not come in? she asked herself. I am wed to his father, the shan-yu; we are as kin , then; and it is no impropriety.

Yet, he did not. If he chose to remain outside in the wind, the dark, and the cold, that was his choice; and grave impropriety on her part to seek to sway him from it.

Once again, she picked up the lute.

Both she and Willow broke off to laugh. It was true that since they had come into the West, they had eaten mutton nearly every night, and that that was a meat little favored in Ch’ang-an. However, the mutton had always been seethed in the huge bronze cauldron borne each day by the most reliable of the camels.

“Probably, lady, the fool of a poet who wrote that song never journeyed farther west than to the west gate of Ch’ang-an,” Willow observed, her voice wry.

“Aye, so I think too.”

“How does it end?” Willow asked.

Silver Snow, recalling how the song went, wished she had chosen any song but that. The shadow lingering outside to hear her music could not like what he would hear. Nevertheless, to refuse to sing might reveal her awareness of the eavesdropper. Sighing, she picked up the lute for the last time.

Decisively, Silver Snow covered the lute and laid it aside. Raising her voice that it might reach her audience, she said, “No yellow stork could survive in the northlands in which I myself was born. A pretty song, but sad and nonsensical. I shall not sing it again.”

The next morning, as Silver Snow emerged gasping into the cold and brushed away the flakes of snow already clinging to the lavish fur trim of her hood, she knew that the Lord Vughturoi’s eyes were upon her, but she feigned unconcern as she walked to her horse.

That song had been nonsense. The next evening, Silver Snow asked the Hsiung-nu women to join her too. She waited until the shadow again revealed itself upon the wall of her tent and sang another, which more closely captured the strange beauty of the frozen waste.

Then she broke off her song. “Do you hear that?” she demanded.

One of the Hsiung-nu women, Bronze Mirror, nodded indulgently at Sable, the other. Both were women of some standing among the Hsiung-nu: Bronze Mirror with one son grown; Sable, who was too young by far to be a widow with children (as she was), but who derived her standing from her brother Basich, who stood high in Prince Vughturoi’s favor.

Their opinions, as Silver Snow knew all too well from her days in Ch’ang-an, would spread like fire, to the rest of the Hsiung-nu. Perhaps this young little Ch’in princess had not collapsed during the trip west and north, but she had her fancies, her weaknesses.

“It is the wind, lady, roaring across the plain,” Bronze Mirror reassured her.

Silver Snow might have blushed and let the subject drop had she not, at that moment, seen Willow. She crouched at the sealed tent flap, almost as if she sought to outwait some prey, and her eyes gleamed feral and green the way that they did»whenever she scented danger.

“The breath of the white tiger,” she whispered.

What of it? Silver Snow knew that the sigil of the West was the white tiger; the wind could well be called its breath. Once again rose the sound that had caused her to break off her music. Involuntarily she glanced at the tent wall. The shadow that she had come to expect there had also stiffened. Then it disappeared.

“That is not the mere breath of the white tiger,” Silver Snow stated flatly. “That is an animal out there. Perhaps a white tiger, perhaps something else,” she added, more for bravado than because she believed it to be true. She had heard that white tigers and snow leopards were among the dangers to be found in the West: and suddenly, terrifyingly, she suspected that such a beast now stalked their camp, perhaps came sniffing about her very tent.

Aside from the wind and the sound of whatever prowled and stalked outside, the tent grew suddenly, ominously still. Silver Snow glanced over at Willow, who had stiffened, her red hair glowing in the light from the brazier. Her green eyes seemed to glaze over, as if she listened to something that her mistress could not hear.

Gradually sounds insinuated themselves into that silence: what seemed almost like a purr of feral satisfaction and the rhythm of a huge heart pounding.

Willow’s lips pulled back from her teeth. Had she been in beast form, she would have growled. The Hsiung-nu women, almost shy for the first time since Silver Snow had met them, hung back, not in fear, but in awe. Then their eagerness for a fight—and possibly their fear of the Lord Vughturoi and his father—awoke.

Careful not to make a sound, she reached for her fur cloak, donned it, and caught up bow and arrow. Sable and Bronze Mirror drew out sharp daggers. Willow, however, had none. When Sable would have tossed her a knife from her soft, supple riding boot, the maid nodded thanks, but refused.

“This is the only weapon I need,” she explained, and drew out her mirror, curiously incised with strange symbols, the one she had borne as long as Silver Snow had known her.

When a horse screamed in mortal fear and agony, Silver Snow realized that her worst fears must be true. Other horses screamed in panic. Now men, too, shouted an alarm as they raced to seize arms and guard the camp against the intruder.

“We cannot wait here for our fate to come upon us,” she said, shaping her lips without sound lest she draw their enemy upon them. “Not while we are armed and able to defend ourselves.”

Either Bronze Mirror or Sable could have restrained her with one hard hand. However, before they protested or tried to stop her, Silver Snow slipped outside, and Willow followed.

Overhead shone the moon, incredibly vast and close-seeming in this land where no houses, walls, or trees might hide it from view. Starlight, obscured at times by gusts of fine snow, bloomed in the night sky and glanced off the mirror that Willow held up.

“Elder Sister,” the maid whispered, “I think that this is another such sending as troubled Jade Butterfly when we parted.”

“Aimed at me, do you think?” Silver Snow nodded to herself. Jade Butterfly had been no more a menace than her namesake, but she, with her brideprice and her rank, might well have enemies with whom she had yet to reckon and of whom, she now realized, Bronze Mirror and Sable might not dare to speak.

Perhaps they will trust me if I can prove my strength, thought Silver Snow. Fine archer though she knew that she was, going on foot and armed only with a bow against a tiger was not a test that she would have chosen. She chose an arrow with care and nocked her bow.

Just as Willow’s mirror flashed a warning, Silver Snow heard the coughing grunt of a beast poised to spring. The light flashed once more, and the leap went awry.

She whirled, drew, shot, and was rewarded with an anguished yowl. She had wounded the creature, then, but not slain it, she realized. And a wounded beast was ever the deadlier. Paws padded against the ground. She shot again.

“Behind me!” cried a man, as his horse pounded toward her. She heard the whine of his bow and of several others. The beast shrieked and thrashed, at one point rolling so close to Silver Snow that she could feel its hot breath, rank with blood. She saw the starlight gleam on its teeth and claws, which seemed to flicker with a phosphorescence of their own. Unholy, accursed! Something shrilled in her mind, and she could not restrain a scream.

Then the beast toppled, kicked once or twice, and, finally, lay still.

The warrior leapt from his horse, raked one glance over Silver Snow and her maid to assure himself that they were unhurt, and turned to their quarry.

“Bring fire!” he called.

Silver Snow pressed in closer. She too wanted to see the beast that she had helped to slay. Torches wavered and guttered, the wind all but blowing their flame sideways in the cold. In their fitful red light, Silver Snow saw a white tiger. It was immense, with massive paws and jaws upon which a bloody froth was now freezing. Even now, its green eyes glowed, then went out, like emeralds shattered by a hammer blow. Had Silver Snow imagined the light she had seen? No! Flickers still clung to claws and teeth, flickers that faded and died in glittering death throes of their own as the beast’s body twitched and cooled.

Carrying one of the Hsiung-nu’s long, deadly spears, Vughturoi walked toward the tiger and prodded it from a distance. When the beast did not move, he edged in closer and bent over its body, his hand going out to count the arrows that feathered it.

“Another excellent shot, lady,” he said to Silver Snow. “Though you might recall that it is my head that will fall should I fail to bring you unharmed to the shan-yu. ”

Silver Snow knew that she had earned the rebuke for her rashness, but she held her ground. Among the Hsiung-nu, she would gain more face from stubbornness than from retreat, she thought.

Vughturoi investigated more closely. “Two fine shots,” he commented, not at all surprised that she had not withdrawn.

“Very well,” he shouted to the cluster of hunters. “Finish tending the horses and go to your rest, all of you! We will carry this tiger with us—if our own beasts will bear it—until our next stopping point, where we can skin it. And you, lady,” he added in a softer voice, “may present it to my father as a sign of your prowess. It will be interesting to see the flurry that that will cause in the shan-yu s tents.”

Now he sounded, not displeased, but speculative, as if Silver Snow were a gamepiece that a particularly canny player had moved with surpassing skill. She did not understand him in that mood, not at all, nor did she trust it. She returned to her tent and tried to compose herself for sleep.

The next morning, when men came to load the tiger’s body upon the least restive of their packbeasts, they found only the blackened stains of its blood, which even now the snow was covering over, and the charred shafts of the arrows that had slain it. But the beast itself had vanished.

They finished breaking camp in silence and moved on with what was great haste, even among the Hsiung-nu.