Imperial Lady

4

Silver Snow had little sleep in that last hour before dawn, when the unwieldy train creaked onto the road to Ch’ang-an. Though several times before she had slept comfortably enough in the cart, wedged with quilts and cushions against its lurching, today she did not surrender to any rest. For which of the outriders were Willow’s spies? A number were mounted on bay horses. From where the cart was situated in the line of march, it was impossible for her to tell how many were, or even if Willow had indeed discovered them among the guards.

Also, her maid was listless, almost feverish, too weak for her usual sharp-tongued chaffering with their driver, which, in the past, had brought them scraps of news. Willow dozed or tossed, though she firmly refused to let Silver Snow examine her wounds again.

Thus the day was an ordeal, a test of Silver Snow’s composure and li, or propriety. She must sit calmly in her cart, not crane her neck like an unpledged peasant maid to stare through her private peephole and make sure her soldiers followed closely, their bows strung taut as she had ordered the night before. Nor was she about to demand of this haughty official extra guards and reassurances that he could not, in all truth, give, even to a woman as valuable as a candidate for Imperial Concubine.

Each jolting length the cart traveled became an ordeal, each cloud shadowed a possible massing of Red Brows. The clatter of a peasant’s mattock on frozen field sounded like the first swordstroke of battle. A creak of branch, or a bough snapping from a winter-killed tree, sounded attack signals to her overwrought mind. Yet Silver Snow dared not complain to the official, who would wonder at what she knew and how she had gained that knowledge. His own file of guards was large. She herself, despite her possible future rank, rode less straitly guarded.

Silver Snow kept her hands passively folded in her sleeves. Underneath her outer robe lay dagger and arrows; her bow waited for her, strung, barely concealed by spare cushions. She came tensely to full alert each time they swept past peasants trudging on the road. Who knew whether or not those figures muffled in patches of rag upon rag might not actually be scouts, swords and bows near to hand? Once again she attempted a study of each rider within her range of sight who bestrode a bay horse. Was he the spy? Her fingers slid back and forth across the hilt of the sharp little dagger that she had tucked within her sash.

Slowly, the day wore on, a day of drab skies, and sullen, spitting snow. Rather than shadows here and there, a general haze misted sight. As the afternoon gave way to evening, the sky began to lighten, even to assume a faint imperial vermilion tinge at the western horizon toward which they journeyed. Even the heavy cloud cover began to dissipate, allowing the limited light to send long shadows from man, from horse, from cart across the ice-bound fields.

Willow roused and pulled herself up to find her own spy place behind the driver. She drew a gasping breath that brought Silver Snow to her side. The beggars just ahead, two or three of them, one missing a leg. Armed only with the staves they needed for balance on the treacherous icy road, they squatted by its side to allow the cortege to pass, looking miserably cold. As the official’s own elaborate carriage passed, they held out their cracked palms beseechingly The carriage ground to a laborious halt at the imperious command of one of the official’s outriders.

“Why do you stop?” came a cry, which carried to a distance through the icy air.

“Is charity not a virtue, lord?” The insolence of that must have rendered the official dumb, for he made no answer. Two guards dismounted and walked toward the crouching beggars, leading their horses. Their bay horses.

Silver Snow tensed. The order in which the caravan had stopped brought her own cart to face the beggars. Beside her, Willow hissed. Her hands clenched and unclenched as if she possessed claws in her human, as well as in her animal, guise.

Silver Snow saw those green eyes mirrored her own suspicions and mounting fear. She nodded. Willow took a deep breath to utter a sharp, yapping cry. With the craft of the fox-people, she threw her voice so that the outcry seemed to echo from behind the beggars and those guards who tossed them strings of cash.

Pure shock jolted one of the guards upright. Then Willow yapped again, and from the nearest patch of underbrush burst two foxes, who ran toward the beggars, hurling themselves against the hunched men. Even from where she was, Silver Snow could see that the animals’ eyes were glazed. Their fur roughened in near panic at what Willow had commanded of them, action that violated their every protective instinct.

“Oh, the brave ones. The brave ones!” Silver Snow cried. She dragged the curtain hastily aside and leaned out of her cart to see that her own escort had formed up a wall between the cart and the clamor of the struggle.

“My friends,” murmured Willow, and uttered a series of barks that, even to Silver Snow’s dull human ears, sounded like praise and encouragement. The foxes looked once to the cart, gave tongue sharply, and were gone before any of the cursing men could move.

One of the beggars, he who had first been thrown off balance by the foxes’ sudden onslaught, strove to lever himself up from the ground. His dirty rag of a cap was lost beneath a headscarf coming askew now ... to expose eyebrows dyed a vivid crimson. Their unnatural color made his eyes gleam as if filled with fire, rather than mere greed and the lust for violence and who knew what—or whom—else.

Silver Snow drew a deep breath. Time for her to act, even though she disliked that she must still enact the defenseless woman. Throwing back her head, she screamed, impressed at the shrill note of terror that she managed to put into her outcry.

Instantly her guard acted. The archers among them formed up on the wings. Ao Li, his voice rusty from years of bellowing commands on the steppe, cried the alarm. “Beware! Bandits, spies! Spearsmen, to me!”

That brought the official’s escort toward him at a run— or a gallop. Unfortunately, it also seemed that from every available patch of cover, from every ditch or from behind every tree, appeared more men in the guise of beggars, their headgear pushed back to reveal eyebrows stained like bloody gashes across their brows. Each of them had both a staff and dagger; many also possessed spears, bows, and swords. Those who came up now in answer to a shrill whistle rode bay horses.

Silver Snow had read of battles, but she had never thought to see one. I his melee across ice and blood-slicked snow bore no resemblance to the orderly massings and dispersals of troops as described in the scrolls written by General Sun Tzu. Even in the cold, the smells of blood and death shocked her. This was as much worse than a hunt as a forest fire was worse than a hearthfire.

Willow retreated into a corner of the cart, huddling, head down, in her robes. Silver Snow caught her wrist.

“Hand me my arrows!” she commanded.

Her own archers, she saw, had assumed a winged formation that would catch the bandits in a lethal crossfire, if the official’s escort drove them between the wings. The only problem—and it was a significant one—was that her own cart lay too close to the path of the necessary charge.

In that press, surely no one would note arrows flying from a direction from which no one would expect them to come. At least, she hoped so. She aimed carefully, trying to pick off a bandit who snarled and thrust at one of the oxen. Then the fellow was scrabbling at his eye, the crimson of blood gouting out over the scarlet of his eyebrow as he sought to pull out her arrow. She discovered suddenly that, even though her quarry might happily have killed or violated her, killing him was far different from killing a beast. Her hand shook; she missed her next shot and was speedily ashamed. Her supply of arrows was strictly limited; she needed a steady hand.

Even the official, she saw, armed with a fine sword, had entered the fight. A mounted bandit, attracted by the richness of the lord’s sable robes, kicked his horse toward the official and swung savagely at him. Carefully Silver Snow aimed, but Ao Li intervened with a shrewd thrust of a spear, to bear the choking man to the ground. At his gesture, two troopers dragged the bandit away from the fight.

That captive must have been the leader. For at his taking, the others panicked as might a hill of ants stirred by a stick. They broke from the rough order in which they had fought, now charging in, cutting, slashing, and shooting with the ferocity of cornered wolves.

Willow’s eyes were bright, and she yapped again, smiling when animals erupted from shadows to slash at the bandits’ ankles, skillfully evading the blows of the men whom they brought down.

“They will be killed!” protested Silver Snow.

“Elder Sister, many will die willingly to protect their kits, or to avenge those already lost. They too are soldiers . . . there!” She pointed, and Silver Snow drew bow and fired at the bandit who had slashed down to cripple Ao Li’s sword-arm, so that he stood weaponless.

“Get back!” shouted Silver Snow, but, of course, the old man would not. Seizing the spear of a fallen bandit in his left hand, he advanced until two of the bandits rode at him from opposite directions. Their double attack brought him down.

Silver Snow blinked furiously. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes, hotter even than her heated cheeks. For Ao Li’s men, his death was a signal as potent as the capture of the bandit chief had been to his followers. The soldiers pushed ahead relentlessly, their faces grim as they deployed in a well-drilled formation that the bandits could not match, nor from which the wretches could not retreat.

“This is death country,” murmured Silver Snow.

“Aye.” Willow pressed closer to her mistress, offering comfort, just as a beast reassures a kit.

“No!” Silver Snow gasped. “It is not just what we see about us. Those whom we fight must have a line of retreat or they are speedily swallowed in death country.”

“More from your dusty scrolls, mistress?” Willow asked. “Yes. Sun Tzu taught that an army should never engage in death country, meaning any ground from which their enemies were unable to retreat.”

-Willow nodded. “So is truth spoken. Flave I not seen a vixen backed up by hounds against a wall turn and fight, killing one hound and forcing the other to let her flee to her earth? We cannot let the soldiers’ blind courage drive these bandits against such a wall.”

She cried out once again in that strange yapping tongue, something that sounded like a string of commands. The power of fox-spirits over the friends-in-fur became manifest as the animals charged from cover, distracting soldiers and bandits dike with their sortie and their equally sudden and inexplicable retreat. Willow had no intention of permitting her friends to be forced into death country of their own.

“The bay horses,” reminded Willow.

That was right. Were not some among the guards spies who deserved no better fate than that of their scarlet-browed conspirators? Creeping to another corner of her cart, Silver Snow peered out just in time to see a man wearing the livery of the escort single out a soldier to slay. She drew and shot, and Willow nodded approvingly.

“Now, that one,” she pointed with a sharp-nailed finger.

“Quick, Willow! Another arrow!” A mounted bandit— one of the men who had killed Ao Li had assailed the official who had seized the reins of a riderless mount. Silver Snow nocked, drew, and shot in one smooth, practiced motion. The bandit fell, doubling over his chest from which an arrow jutted, sunk in almost to the fletching. She had not known that she possessed the strength to send an arrow that deep . . . Ao Li, that death was for you! Do you see it? Do you approve?

However she was not sure that he would. He had spent his life serving the father and his death serving the daughter. Still, he might not have approved a lady’s taking part in a battle.

“Watch the bay horses,” whispered Willow.

The soldiers were pressing forward once again. Then the official shouted, and Silver Snow nodded approvingly. He, too, had read Sun Tzu and wished to risk no more men. The bandits turned and fled, leaving their dead and wounded behind them.

Now that the battle was over, Silver Snow tried to hide her bow beneath the cushions and quilts in the cart, but she was shaking so violently that she allowed Willow to push her down into the nest meant to keep them warm. Her hands trembled, and the bow dropped from them. Runnels of sweat ran beneath her robes, but still she shivered from the cold. She pressed her hands against her burning cheeks, unaware that now she presented the very image of a delicate lady overborne by violence. Her bow—it must be hid! And she mastered herself enough to thrust it beneath a cushion.

Outside, she could hear the official’s now-hoarse voice, commanding that the bandits be bound, that the ones among them who were wounded have those wounds bandaged until they could be sentenced, she was certain, to one of the more painful methods of execution. Hearing the groans and cries of wounded soldiers and wounded bandits alike, she decided that there were far too many methods of inflicting pain and death.

Her father had spent a lifetime in such actions, well learned in such methods. Yet he was not mad, not brutal with others. Truly, he was even more worthy of veneration than she, in what she now perceived to be sheltered innocence, had been capable of understanding. Perhaps she could write to tell him so. He was owed that tribute too.

Then, lamenting, a troop of men in faded garments and old leather armor marched slowly toward her. Several clearly struggled to hold themselves proudly, not out of deference, surely, for her, whom they had known since she was old enough to shoot at a mark or ride a pony. Rather, they marched to honor the man whose body they laid down before the cart.

“Ao Li.” Silver Snow’s eyes filled with tears. The old troop leader’s face still wore a look of anger and surprise, though blood trickling from his mouth and nose turned his well-known (and to her, always kindly) features into a demon-mask. His open eyes gazed up at the darkening sky *What would her father have done? This far away from him, she must stand in the place of Ao Li’s general, for whom he had died. Drawing a deep, shuddering breath, she snatched up a veil and stepped down from the sanctuary of the ox-cart.

She knelt at the guardsman’s side, put out one hand, and closed his staring eyes. “I avenged you, old friend,” she murmured.

A spasm of trembling shook her. For a disgraceful moment, she thought that she might be sick. It would be a terrible, inauspicious moment for such illness. A quick, sharp pinch from Willow’s hand as she aided Silver Snow back to her feet startled her, and she looked up to learn the reason for this attack.

She shut her eyes in momentary exasperation to wish, for the first time in a healthy life, that she had the power to sink into a faint whenever she chose. For only such weakness, she feared, would let her escape confronting the official, his bulky, luxurious robes now sweated and bloodstained, as he puffed and nodded a ceremonious way toward her.

Here she stood, sweaty, shaken, with her father’s troops about her. She was as bare of face as a peasant wench, nor had she scrupled to look upon battles and wounds, or close a dead man’s eyes. At least, she thought somewhat wildly, her bow was safely hidden beneath cushions. Quickly she flung the veil about her.

Had she not regained control of herself, she might have moaned, however, at the official’s first words.

“The lady”—he bowed, as did she, even more deeply—“is a warrior of no mean prowess.”

She contrived, somehow, despite the scarlet painting her cheeks, to look confused. “Ao Li”—she looked down sadly at the dead man—“was one of this worthless one’s father’s most faithful companions.”

“Who has been worthily avenged.” The official waved to two of his own guards and gave swift, welcome orders that they should help set Ao Li’s body in order. Silver Snow fell to her knees.

“This one begs the most noble lord that the worthy Ao Li be returned to her father’s lands, where he may lie in familiar ground,” she whispered, her head down, her tears falling now that the immediate horror of the battle—and the stern composure that had let her know how best to act during it—had ebbed.

“Rise, rise,” insisted the magistrate, waving one well-kept hand, stained now and blistered from his own work with sword and bow. “Let it be done as you wish, lady. But it will mean that you arrive in Ch’ang-an with fewer than your proper guard.”

Silver Snow rose, this time not waiting for Willow’s assistance. “What difference should that make?” she demanded, dropping formal speech and daring to look the man in his astonished black eyes. “Ao Li shall rest in his own place, fitly mourned by his sons and his friends. Compared with that, whether my guard numbers three or thirty is of no matter . . .

my most noble lord,” she added, a guilty instant later after a hiss from Willow.

“You understand a soldier’s loyalty well,” said the official. “I heard you give the order—nay, do not wave your hand at me and look as if you would say it is not so—to let some bandits escape. I would know why.”

Silver Snow looked downward in the direction of the besmirched tips of her felt boots, saw an impatient tapping of one of the official’s boots, and knew that she must answer.

“Death country,” she said, employing the die-away whisper that her nurse had tried to make her use whenever she replied to men. “Their leader was gone. Without him, they are a fowl from which the head has been twisted. It may jump about for a moment longer, but its death has been ordained. Yet, if one would restrain them, they might have fought as one does who knows himself already doomed. Or,” she added hastily, “thus my father once said.”

“And you listen to your father, even when he quotes Sun *Tzu,” the official said.

“It is this one’s duty and her honor to listen if her father deigns to speak.”

“Did he also teach you to draw a bow?” asked the official. Silver Snow again cast down her eyes, realizing how strong a defense the conventional trappings of maidenly shyness might be. “I see that you wear a knife ...”

Once again, she met his eyes, this time without deliberation. “I am the daughter of a marquis, however disgraced. Thus, may it please the Ancestors, I am perhaps to be concubine to the Son of Heaven. How should I then continue to exist should I be besmirched by such as those?”

“Lady, lady,” interrupted the official, “though it be treason to whisper this, you will be wasted in the Palace, where there are ladies perhaps almost as lovely but far more richly adorned and skilled in the art of dissembling than you. If it were left to me . . . lady,” he almost stammered in his eagerness to lay his plan before her, “I have an eldest son, a fine young man. Let me be his go-between ...”

Silver Snow flushed again, this time with true anger. The man had forgotten not just fear but honor in his search for a proper bride for his son. Did he think that, because she was the daughter of a man judged to be a traitor, he could address her thus?

“I am promised—I and my father’s honor with me—to the Palace; and to the Palace I shall go! These words do neither of us proper honor, my lord.”

She turned and began to climb back into her cart.

“Lady, you shame me,” the official called after her. “You are right. But, lady, a word of advice about propriety, from that same Confucius who is, no doubt, its author. When one finds himself in a foreign civilization, one adapts to foreign customs.”

She turned, still angry, and countered his quotation with one of her own. “One’s genuine personal nature is self-sufficient. ”

“But how few people can maintain that for a long time!” the official capped her statement. His own cap, one of its starched black wings almost hacked off, all but bobbed in his zeal and, Silver Snow realized, his pleasure! Thus her father had looked once, the first time she proved to be a not-unworthy opponent in chess.

“When one develops his nature most fully, he finds that the principles of fidelity and mutuality are not something apart from his nature,” he quoted. “We know that is true, and we venerate the sage who first wrote it. But I say to you, lady, beware! You may not always meet men who are honorable, who study and respect the classics and the way of life they teach. And such meetings can test to breaking whether you can maintain your composure in adversity as well as you have done this day in battle. I would have been honored to have you as a daughter-in-law, an honorable and valued addition to the family and its estate. Better thus, than as an idle court ornament.”

Once again, Silver Snow shook her head. “Your words shame us both, you for speaking them; I for listening.”

The official nodded, understanding. “I wish I could say that I would also be glad to have you as a well-wisher at court; but I do not expect you to prosper if you will not bend.” Silver Snow bowed, folded her hands into her sleeves, and, this time, she waited for permission to withdraw. The man, his lips thinned and twisted as if he chewed on some unpalatable food, waved his hand to dismiss her to the refuge of her cart. Moments later, she could hear him shouting angrily at the soldiers.