My Beautiful Enemy (22 page)

Something else sailed toward him. He caught it with just as much ease—she’d returned the pouch of gems. “Diamonds and flowers—are they both for me?”

She tossed a strand of her hair over her shoulder and said grandly, “You may keep them.”

This girl . . . put her in a proper frock and she would enslave legions. “I don’t know that I have anything so nice to give to you in return, unless you’d like some of this tobacco I bartered from the Xibes.”

Her eyes lit with interest. “Well, don’t just talk. Hand me a cigarette.”

He did, after first rolling one. She was lightning swift with her tinderbox and in no time at all was puffing on her cigarette. He rolled one for himself. They sat down, shoulder deep in grass, and smoked in companionable silence.

“Can I have another?” she said, before she was even halfway done with her first.

“How long has it been since you last had one?” he asked, his words muffled as he clamped his cigarette between his lips, his hands busy with tobacco and paper.

“Months.”

He licked the edge of the paper, sealed the new cigarette, and handed it to her. “Hardship indeed.”

She stuck the new cigarette inside her robe. “Why don’t you frown upon my smoking?”

“The day I quit smoking myself,” he answered, “is the day I start lecturing you on
your
filthy habit.”

She threw her head back and laughed. He grinned at her, his heart full of sunshine and spring flowers. Smiling, she
blew a jet of smoke his way. He grabbed the front of her robe, pulled her toward him, and planted a kiss on her cheek.

She laughed again and ran her fingers along his beard. Then her thumb was tracing along his lower lip. Her expression changed, from mirth to the beginning of desire. She glanced down at her cigarette, which still had a good inch left, and stubbed it out.

His heart beat hard all of a sudden.

She looked back at him. “Kiss me—and make sure I don’t regret not waiting until I finished my cigarette.”

He cupped her face. “You won’t.”

T
ell me your name,” said the Persian afterward, as Ying-ying lay with her head in the crook of his shoulder.

Names were troublesome things. A name was never just a name, but an identity, a history, and sometimes an entire genealogy. If she gave her Chinese name, it would raise a whole field of questions. Did she come from the interior of China? Why? And why did she have slate-blue eyes?

Years ago, Master Gordon had told her that the unreadable note she had found among her mother’s things gave the English name her father had wished her to have: Catherine. That, too, would be unhelpful here.

“You tell me your name first,” she said.

“Hmm, come to India with me and I will.”

“After we marry, maybe I will consider it.”

He lifted himself up on one elbow. “You will marry me?”

She narrowed her eyes. “You think I will sleep with anyone I do not already consider my husband?”

An amazed smile spread across his face. “You already consider me your husband?”

“Of course.” She bared her teeth at him. “You look at another woman and I will crush you where it hurts.”

He laughed. “So how do we marry, as soon as possible?”

She inhaled. “We have to go to Kulja.”

“Why Kulja?”

Kulja was the seat of the governor of Ili, where she was increasingly past due. Three days she had traveled west with her Persian, in the direction opposite her destination. Making up for that was another three days. And according to him, six days had passed since the bandits’ ambush.

In her mind she had been making generous allowances for possible delays. It was quite reasonable, wasn’t it, that she could have taken sick somewhere along the route and needed a few days to rest and recuperate? Also quite reasonable that she might have taken a detour, to investigate matters that might be of interest to Da-ren.

Even so, she should have been back in Kulja two days ago. To make matters worse, she usually returned several days early. So from Da-ren’s perspective, by now she would have been missing for almost a week.

“I have family in Kulja,” she said.

“Then of course we will go to Kulja.” He suddenly looked anxious. “Do you think my gems would be enough of a bride price for you? I suppose my firearms are worth something, too—and my horse.”

“Listen to yourself,” she chided. “Are you planning to walk back to India?”

“I just want your family to know that a mountain of gold and a sea of wine is still too paltry a gift when I will have you in exchange.”

Her eyes moistened. What were a mountain of gold and a sea of wine, next to such heartfelt esteem? She could almost imagine Da-ren’s shock as he looked both Ying-ying and the Persian up and down, trying to imagine what this mad foreigner saw in his wayward stepdaughter.

One man’s burden was another’s treasure—that had ever been the case. Except Ying-ying had never dared hope it would be the case for
her.

But now it was. Now she was this man’s greatest treasure.

He was already sitting up. “Let’s pack up and go. There are still five hours of daylight left and—”

“You shouldn’t exert yourself so much.”

She was almost entirely recovered, but the wound on his leg had not come along as well. It made her heart ache to think of how much work he had done, with an injury like that. The grass mattress hadn’t made itself. Their sustenance required that he either hunt or ride out to find the nearest nomad yurts. And though the waterfall was not far, it was quite a steep climb from the cave, with the descent even more treacherous—she could only guess at the number of trips he’d had to make, to keep them supplied with water for drinking, cooking, bathing, and the washing of bandages.

He grinned and held out his hand. “I’ll rest when we are married.”

She took his hand. But instead of letting him help her up, she pulled him back down next to her.

He kissed her on her forehead. “Let’s get on the road for now. After we stop for the night, I’ll be all yours.”

She tsked. “If I were starving, would you wait half a day to feed me?”

His gaze slid down to her lips. “Are you starving now?”

“Famished. And only you can satisfy my hunger.”

He exhaled, a little unsteadily. “If you say it like that, then it becomes a moral obligation on my part, doesn’t it?”

“It does.”

He kissed her on her lips as he fitted her body to his. “I take my moral obligations seriously. Always.”

Y
ing-ying hummed to herself as she flitted around the cave, packing. She was alone, her husband-to-be having gone to hunt them something nice for supper. Husband-to-be, she winked at the kindly bodhisattvas on the wall. She never
thought she’d have a husband-to-be. Or at least, she never thought she’d have one she liked.

Tonight, after supper, she would tell him who she was—and prepare him for the ordeal that awaited a nobody who thought he was good enough to marry the stepdaughter of the governor of Ili. Da-ren would disdain him. He would be outraged that she dared to bring back a man she had found on her own, without having gone through any of the proper channels of matrimony. And he would question Ying-ying’s sanity and warn of dire fates in strange lands where she’d have no one to turn to, after the Persian had thrown her out of his household.

In other words, they would be on their knees begging for Da-ren’s blessing and forgiveness—and would receive neither.

But that she would endure. She owed Da-ren this much, to let him know what would become of her, to absolve him of all further responsibilities, and to perform her three kowtows of gratitude and leave-taking. He was the closest thing she had to a father.

He
was
her father, in every sense that mattered.

And now she would depart his household in disgrace, never allowed to darken his doorstep again. In the euphoria of her unofficial engagement, she had not thought through to the inevitable conclusion: In gaining the Persian, she would lose Da-ren.

Not that she’d ever
had
Da-ren. And not that he’d ever spared a thought for her that wasn’t tinged with impatience and disapproval. But he was fair: He held his own flesh-and-blood children to no less stringent standards and meted out just as few words of praise. And he was—and probably always would be—the greatest man Ying-ying had ever known, incorruptible, farsighted, tireless, a man who thought only of his country and never of himself.

She had always dreamed that someday he would tell her
that he wished she had been his own. As long as she remained a member of his household, her dream, however foolish and improbable, was not completely impossible. But when she left with the Persian, that particular door would close and never open again.

And if the Persian were to prove faithless . . .

No, she must not think such thoughts. At every turn he had proved himself a man of the finest caliber. She would trust him, and they would be happy together.

The packing took no time at all. Most everything in the cave had come in their saddlebags and would leave in those saddlebags. The grass mattress would be left behind, alas, and the bucket. But she wanted to take the blankets he had acquired from the nomads—it would probably be very, very cold tackling the Karakoram Pass, even at the height of summer.

She examined the strips of clean bandages that hung on the makeshift rack he’d built and decided that it would be good to have some of those on hand. Now if she wrapped the bigger blanket around her bedroll, she might be able to stuff the thinner one into her saddlebag. Which meant that the bandaging would have to go into his saddlebag.

She gathered and folded several of the longest pieces of bandaging. Then she opened his saddlebag and pushed them in. As she withdrew her hand, it brushed against the side of the saddlebag and there came a curious sound, rather like a piece of paper crinkling under the leather—a sound so faint that a person with less sensitive ears might not even have heard.

She bent the leather of the saddlebag with some force. The sound came again. But her fingertips could not feel any loose flaps or openings of hidden pockets. Taking the saddlebag with her, she went outside for better light. Every seam of the saddlebag was perfectly in place. Perhaps it was just a bit of loose material that had been accidentally sewn into the—

She saw it—one particular seam, instead of ending in a perfectly cut knot, disappeared into a tiny pouch. When she
pulled, a dowel came up, a smooth, flattened wooden stick with thread wrapped around. And when she unwound the thread, and pulled on the seam, a little space opened up, enough for her to see the piece of paper that had been hidden.

At that exact same moment she realized that she was snooping. Until then her curiosity had carried her along and she had not even thought that perhaps she was doing something she ought not to do.

Don’t go around digging in other people’s things
, Amah had once warned her.
Dig long enough and you’ll always find things you wish you hadn’t.

What if it were a letter from his wife? Wouldn’t she want to know now, rather than after she had burned her bridges with Da-ren?

But then again, how would she know if it were a letter from his wife? Persian and Indian languages probably all looked like what Chinese called demon notations.

She stopped arguing with herself, extracted the paper, and opened it. It was no letter, but a map, a rather detailed one at that—the paper was as thin as the skin of an onion and opened to a far larger dimension than she had expected.

The places were indeed labeled in demon notations, so she could not immediately make out what she was looking at. The next moment, however, a chill went down her spine. Was this a map of Chinese Turkestan, with the mountains surrounding the Takla Makan Desert?

She had never used a map in her travels. Da-ren had maps at the governor’s residence, but she found them fairly useless. This map, however, concurred beautifully with the directions and distances she carried in her head.

If this particular faint line marked the course of the Yarkand River, then the city at its southern end would be Yarkand. Going northwest lead them to Kashgar. Back east, around the northern rim of the Tarim Basin, the Heavenly Mountains. And farther to the north, the spines and ridges of
the Altai, in the shadows of which was Kulja, the seat of the governor.

But there was so much more on the map, from the larger settlements she knew to little hamlets she had barely given a glance as she rode past, lakes, rivers, changing from solid line to dotted line to indicate that they were seasonal. The Buddha caves at Kizil were marked with a stylized icon of a Buddha head.

Underneath the map there were calculations done in Arabic numbers. She couldn’t make out what the calculation was about until she remembered rumors of English mapping expeditions, boasting of members so skilled in the art of pacing, that simply by counting their steps, they could measure great distances with only minuscule discrepancy.

No, no, he was on horseback all the time she was with him. So he couldn’t possibly have been on the ground, pacing. But before she could relax, she remembered that he had said that he had come through this area on an earlier part of his visit.