Spirit Gate: Book One of Crossroads (15 page)

“Uncle Shai! You’ve got to come! You’ve got to speak up for Mai!”

He finished the stroke of his adze and ran his hand along the grain of the pine
log he was planing down to make a fine bedstead for the wedding. Good and smooth, ready to cut to length. When he was done, he looked up at Ti.

“But you’ve
got
to! She’s been crying all day. You know it isn’t right that they marry her off to a Qin, even if he is an officer!”

He studied the log, the second of two precious trunks his elder brothers had traded three ewes for so that the family wouldn’t be embarrassed when it came time to stand up at the law court and seal the marriage. The legs, out of the other log, were already carved and oiled. He was preparing the last of the supports, although he wasn’t going to have time to carve as elaborate a frieze into the wood as he would have liked, not with the date already chosen and written into the law court’s record. Seventeen days from now.

“He’ll beat her! He’s buried one wife already. He admitted it himself! We’ll never see her again! Never! Never! Never! He’ll get tired of her and sell her into slavery and there’ll be nothing we can do to stop it! His masters will be overthrown and he’ll be killed in battle and then—!”

“Hush!” He stood, casting his gaze about, but his two younger nephews—Ti’s cousins—were out of earshot tending to the sheep.

She kicked at wood shavings with her pretty red slippers, knowing she had gone too far. While it was perfectly true that the Qin had ruled Kartu Town for only the last twelve years, and that shifting alliances, a death in the var’s family, or an unexpected push from the eastern cities might cause the Qin horsemen to retreat and some other power to take their place, it was still treason to speak of such a thing. Ti was only two years younger than he was. She knew as well as he did what the Qin did to their enemies or even to those who only spoke ill-considered words against them.

She looked back down the path, following his gaze. Kartu Town was not much to look at, a dusty bee’s hive of compounds surrounded by an inner wall which was itself surrounded by startlingly green orchards crisscrossed by slender irrigation canals. Beyond the orchards lay a thick mud-brick outer wall studded with watchtowers and guardposts. The wall was wide enough to allow Qin guardsmen to ride their rounds atop it instead of walking. They hated to walk. The citadel, a circular structure of baked brick, rose at the northwestern corner of the inner town. In the square fronting the citadel rose the gallows, and today three posts were decorated with remains. A vulture circled.

Like all of the inhabitants of Kartu Town, he’d learned to look away. In truth, it was not the sight of the citadel and its square that made him climb every day in good weather to the peace of his shed. It was the vista beyond: endless, open, yawning wide to the west, all sky, the rocky plateau of the desert looming on the southern horizon, and the mountains rising heroically to the north. So beautiful. They were all stark lines and pale slopes with the memory of winter in their snowy peaks.

“I hate it up here!” cried Ti. “Too much air! Too much sky!” Abruptly, she burst into tears. “I know I shouldn’t have said it—but he’s Qin. What will happen to Mai? How could Father Mei have agreed?” She sobbed like a tempest.

“He’s decent enough,” said Shai finally as this storm began to die down.

“Who is?”

“Captain Anji.”

“How can you say so?” she shrieked. “A dirty barbarian! You’re a Qin-lover!” Then she clapped a hand over her mouth and began sobbing noisily again. He waited until the worst subsided before scooping up a handful of shavings and handing them to her so she could wipe mucus from her upper lip.

“He doesn’t have to marry her. He could have just taken her as a concubine. Branded her a pleasure girl and dragged her to the brothel for his use. We couldn’t have stopped him.”

She hiccoughed, sucked in a watery breath, and gave a bleating moan as she pounded her belly with a fist as if she were mourning. “I know it’s not as bad as it could have been. But I can’t bear to be parted from her! Ei! Ei! Ei!”

“She’ll just be across town, at the citadel. You can see her every day.”

“No! No! No! The news just came this morning, by messenger from Captain Anji. The garrison is being pulled out and sent east on the Golden Road. There’s something going on there, I don’t know what. Maybe there’s war on the border. War! They’re going east and she’ll have to go with them, and we’ll never see her again! Ever! Ever! Ever!”

He set down the adze on the bench, considerably startled by this news. “How soon?”

“In two days! The wedding is tomorrow, not next month! That’s why you have to speak to Father Mei. Maybe they’ll listen to you. All the other uncles . . . you know them! They always do what Father Mei says. Chicken-hearts! All but Uncle Hari. If he was here still, he’d put a stop to it.”

“For shame, Ti!”

“I’m not sorry, even if no one else will talk about Uncle Hari! He was your favorite brother, too! You know it! You know he was the only one tough enough to stand up to Father Mei! He’d tell Father Mei to postpone the wedding. Wait ‘til the garrison comes back. But they’ll never come back. That’s what Captain Anji knows. He knows they’re never coming back and he’s taking Mai away forever and ever and ever!” She once again fell to bawling.

Ti’s outbursts were usually like cloudbursts in summer—frequent but short in duration, causing brief floods and then getting all that moisture sucked away as soon as the sun came back out—but this time she was truly upset. She and Mai were close as twins, born the same day in the same month in the same year to his eldest brother’s first and second wives, who were themselves sisters. The two girls had never been apart in all their seventeen years.

No use trying to get any more work done today. He gathered up his tools into the cedar tool chest.

After a bit, when she could hear him, he said, “You could go as second wife.”

“He won’t take me!” she wailed. “I already asked, but Captain Anji told Father Mei he can only have one wife. And Father Mei won’t let me go as her maid because it would be dishonorable, and anyway, Captain Anji said he won’t take me even as a servant.”

He’d be a madman to take you as wife or servant,
Shai thought, although in truth he was shocked that Ti would suggest such a thing. A servant! Someday Ti’s impulsive and stormy nature would get her, and the family, in big trouble.

A slender shape toiled up the path and resolved into the slave girl everyone called Cornflower, for her blue eyes. Ti saw her and got
that look
all the women in the house did whenever Cornflower appeared in a room. She wiped her eyes and nose before the slave halted twenty steps below them with hands clasped and body bent in a half bow. No need for Cornflower to say anything. Wind tugged at the slave’s wool tunic and her trident braids of uncannily white-gold hair. Her bare feet and calves were burned a pinkish brown, but everyone knew she had unusually light skin beneath her clothes, not like that of normal people but more like that of ghosts, and there was something about the way she stood there so quietly, a well of stillness, that made him always think about what it would be like to . . .

“I better go,” said Ti.

Shai started, unaware he’d been wandering. Cornflower served the two senior wives—Ti’s mother and aunt—so her presence here was a summons for Ti. Her presence was unwelcome to any young man whose greatest ambition was to be left undisturbed.

“Promise me you’ll come right now.” Ti started down the path at a fast clip, Cornflower trotting behind, head lowered. Ti looked three times back over her shoulder, mouthing words, gesturing almost comically, trying to get Shai to hurry up.

He didn’t see the point. He was the last person his eldest brother would listen to. But he whistled for his nephews and finished stowing the tools. His flush receded. His thoughts sank back into an orderly flow. The wind tugged at his sleeves, tied back to leave his lower arms bare. It wasn’t warm enough to work bare-chested yet, although he preferred it when it was. He hated to go back down to town, back to the family compound, where sleeves had to be tied down to the wrists and any work you did or comment you made was overseen, overheard, and overruled by others.

Mai was fortunate. She was escaping.

Not that she would think of it that way.

His younger nephew came running, looking important and annoyed. “What is it?”

“I have to go down,” Shai said, gesturing toward town. “I’ll be back this afternoon.”

“You better be. I don’t want to sleep out here worrying about thieves!” He scuffed his feet among the wood shavings and sat down hard on the bench.

Not that there were thieves anymore, not since the Qin took over. Still, no one left good tools and precious wood unguarded, even so.

“What do you have to go down for, anyway?” The boy shaded his eyes and squinted toward town. “Uh!” He grunted and rolled his eyes, seeing his older cousin far down, retreating on the path. Because of Ti’s way of walking, she could not be mistaken for anyone else: all bouncing sleeves, a spring like that of an antelope in her step. “That Ti! Just a big boiling teakettle, that one! It must be about Mai and the wedding, eh?”

Shai shrugged.

“Make sure you’re back here soon. No shirking!” His nephew was eldest son of second brother and, therefore, had more clout than his young uncle Shai, but not
enough to overrule Ti’s request, because she was daughter of Father Mei. If Ti asked, Shai must go.

So Shai left. An ugly scene would no doubt ensue once he reached the compound, but there was no reason to worry about that on the walk down with the day so fine and the sky so merry and blue. The wind skated up from the east, which meant it was clear of dust torn up from the desert. The tips of the mountains to the northwest could be seen, three deep; that was unusual, quite striking. He thought he heard a hawk’s piercing call but when he paused and spun slowly he saw no speck in the sky, nothing flying except one wispy cloud spinning out along the ridge of Dezara Mountain. The slopes still had a hint of spring green in them although they were fading to summer gold. The sheep were hidden above in a fold of land, but he heard a second flock bleating off to the right. That would be the Gandi clan’s herd. There had been talk about a marriage between Mai and an elder Gandi boy, but of course the attentions of the Qin captain had cut those right off.

Poor Mai. No wonder she was crying. Still, it wasn’t really a surprise. Mai had been doomed from the start.

He stared east, into the wind. Because it was so clear, he could see the old road winding along the mountains for an unexpectedly long way before haze and distance cloaked it. No clouds of dust betrayed a merchant train or travelers. All was quiet and at peace. Shai liked things at peace.

It wouldn’t last.

He started down again and soon enough was nodding to the guards at the gate—two grizzled veterans of the town militia who had survived the Qin takeover—and crossed into the verdant oasis of the orchard gardens. The noise of the town was audible but muffled by green leaves and the laughter of the orchard workers. He crossed the Merciful Prayer bridge, passed under the arch of the inner wall, and came out into the sun-blasted citadel square, where no one walked at midday. By the commander’s quarters, two stocky Qin soldiers rode patrol, their heads covered by felt caps whose tilted brims shaded their eyes.

The gallows and the posts cast almost no shadows. Widow Lae’s remains, dangling from the middle post, clattered in the wind. Keeping his head low, Shai twisted his clan ring three times around his middle finger and walked, trying not to look at the strands of black hair fluttering from the widow’s skull and the tattered remains of her red silk tunic, her best garment. Most of her flesh had been picked clean by wind and vultures and sun, leaving these strings of tendons that bound together her bones, the last remnants of hair and clothing, and her ghost.

“I did it!” she shrilled. She was a wraith, more mist than form, a handsome young woman of about twenty although she’d been three times that age when she’d died. “I’ll get my reward soon enough! Then you’ll all be sorry!”

The entire town had been forced to assemble to see Widow Lae put to death after she insulted a Qin officer, although everyone knew that she’d been condemned for a more serious offense. A foreign merchant had testified that the widow had asked him to smuggle a letter, whose contents betrayed Qin military secrets, to Tars Fort on the eastern border. At least, that was what the merchant had told a drinking companion at the brothel when they were both drunk. When he’d refused to take
the letter, the widow had sent one of her grandsons instead. The young man had never been found or seen again nor had anyone managed to trace his trail, and after the execution all the widow’s dependents had been sold into slavery and her possessions confiscated by the Qin commander, who had given the merchant a percentage of the profits. Her distant kinfolk weren’t even going to be allowed to bury her bones. So shameful!

No wonder her ghost clung stubbornly to her anger, even though that anger chained her ghost to the earth, to this very citadel square where she had died.

Shai often wondered what had been in that message, in part because naturally he was curious and in part because Widow Lae’s death had altered the course of Mai’s life. On the day of the widow’s execution, with every man, woman, and child of Kartu Town assembled in citadel square, Captain Anji had first spoken to Father Mei about marrying his beautiful daughter.

The walls of the town’s many residential compounds closed around him as he left the square and its ghost behind. He whistled under his breath. Father Mei’s second wife, the younger of the two sisters, the one who was also Ti’s mother, hated whistling. He’d learned to amuse himself softly.

Five turns left, past the town baths, two turns right, and one final left turn down an alley brought him to the servants’ entrance to his family’s compound, just around the corner from the main entrance. He shook the bell. The peephole opened to reveal two suspicious dark eyes that crinkled up as the unseen mouth smiled.