Under Heaven (6 page)

He'd gone back to digging the pit he'd started two days ago, end of the third row in from the trees, because that was what he did here. And because he felt that if he didn't keep himself moving, working to exhaustion today, the chaos of his thoughts--almost feverish, after so long a quiet time--would overwhelm him.
There was always the wine Bytsan had brought, another access, like a crooked, lamplit laneway in the North District of Xinan, to the blurred borders of oblivion. The wine would be there at day's end, waiting. No one else was coming to drink it.
Or so he'd thought, carrying his shovel to work, but the world today was simply not fitting itself to a steady two-year routine.
Standing up, stretching his back, and removing the maligned hat to mop at his forehead, Tai saw figures coming from the east over the tall green grass.
They were already out of the canyon, in the open on the meadow. That meant they had to have been visible for some time, he just hadn't noticed. Why should he notice? Why even look? No one came here but the two sets of troops from the forts, full moon, new moon.
There were two of them, he saw, on small horses, a third horse carrying their gear behind. They moved slowly, not hurrying. Perhaps tired. The sun was starting west, its light fell upon them, making them vivid in the late-day's glowing.
It wasn't time for supplies from Iron Gate. He'd just said farewell to Bytsan and the Taguran soldiers. And when men did arrive, it wasn't just a pair of them with no cart. And--most certainly--they did
not
reach the lake in the later part of the day, when they'd have to stay with him overnight or be outside among the dead after dark.
This, clearly, was a day marked for change in his stars.
They were still some distance away, the travellers. Tai stared for another moment, then shouldered his shovel, picked up his quiver and bow--carried against wolves and for shots at a bird for dinner--and started towards his cabin, to be waiting for them there.
A matter of simple courtesy, respect shown visitors to one's home, wherever it might be in the world, even here beyond borders. He felt his pulse quickening as he walked, beating to meet the world's pulse, coming back to him.

Chou Yan had expected his friend to be changed, in both appearance and manner, if he was even alive after two years out here. He'd been preparing for terrible tidings, had talked about it with his travelling companion, not that she ever replied.
Then at Iron Gate Pass--that wretched fortress here at the world's end--they'd told him Tai was still among the living, or had been a little while ago when they'd taken supplies to him by the lake. Yan had immediately drunk several cups of Salmon River wine (he had been carrying it for Tai, more or less) to celebrate.
He hadn't known, until then.
No one had known. He'd assumed when he left Xinan that he would be journeying ten days or so along the imperial road and then down through civilized country to his friend's family home with what he had to tell him. It wasn't so. At the estate near the Wai River, where he'd managed to remain uncharacteristically discreet about his tidings, the third brother, young Shen Chao--the only child still at home--had told him where Tai had gone, two full years ago.
Yan couldn't believe it at first, and then, thinking about his friend, he did believe it.
Tai had always had something different about him, too many strands in one nature: an uneasy mingling of soldier and scholar, ascetic and drinking companion among the singing girls. Along with a temper. It was no wonder, their friend Xin Lun had once said, that Tai was always going on about the need for
balance
after too many cups of wine. Lun had joked about how hard keeping one's balance could be on muddy laneways, weaving home after that many cups.
It was a very long way, where Tai had journeyed. His family had not heard from him since he'd gone. He could be dead. No one could reasonably expect Chou Yan to follow him, beyond the borders of the empire.
Yan had spent two nights among the Shen women and youngest boy, sharing their ancestor rites and meals (very good food, no wine in the house during mourning, alas). He'd slept in a comfortable mosquito-netted bed. He'd poured his own libation over General Shen Gao's grave, admired his monument and inscription, strolled with young Chao in the orchard and along the stream. He was unhappily trying to decide what to do.
How far did friendship carry one? Literally, how far?
In the event, he did what he'd been afraid he'd do from the time they'd told him of Tai's departure. He bade farewell to the family and continued west towards the border, with only the single guard he'd been advised to take with him, back in Xinan.
She had told him it was an easy enough journey, when he mentioned where his friend had gone. Yan didn't believe her, but the indifferent manner was oddly reassuring.
As long as he paid her, Yan thought, she wouldn't care. You hired a Kanlin Warrior and they stayed with you until you paid them off. Or didn't pay them: though that was, invariably, an extremely bad idea.
Wan-si was hopeless as a companion, truth be told, especially for a sociable man who liked to talk, laugh, argue, who enjoyed the sound of his voice declaiming poetry--his own verses or anyone else's. Yan kept reminding himself that she was simply protection for the road, and skilled hands to assemble their camp at night when they slept outdoors--rather more necessary now than he'd expected at the outset. She was not a friend or an intimate of any kind.
Most certainly not someone to think about bedding at night. He had little doubt what she'd say if he raised that matter, and less doubt she'd break a bone or two if he tried to give effect to the desire that had begun to assail him, aware of her lithe body lying near him under stars, or curving and stretching in her exercise rituals--those elegant, slow movements at sunrise. The Kanlin were fabled for discipline, and for how efficiently they killed when need arose.
Need hadn't arisen as they'd journeyed down the river road to Shen Tai's family home. One twilight encounter in light rain with three rough-looking men who might have had theft in mind had they not seen a black-clad Kanlin with two swords and a bow. They'd absented themselves quickly down a path into dripping undergrowth.
Once they started west, however, everything began to feel different for Yan. He was at pains to light candles or burn incense and leave donations at any and all temples to any and all gods from the morning they left the Shen estate and began following a dusty track northwest, and then farther west, towards emptiness.
North of them, parallel to their route, lay the imperial road through the prefecture city of Chenyao, and beyond that was the easternmost section of the Silk Roads, leading from Xinan to Jade Gate and the garrisons in the Kanshu Corridor.
The imperial highway had lively villages and comfortable inns at postal stations all the way along. There would have been good wine, and pretty women. Maybe even some of the yellow-haired dancing girls from Sardia, working in pleasure houses, perhaps on their way to the capital. The ones who could arch their bodies backwards and touch the ground with feet and hands at once--and so elicit arresting images in the mind of an imaginative man.
But Shen Tai wasn't up there, was he? Nothing so sensible. And it didn't make sense to go five or six days north to meet the highway, when their own path was to Iron Gate by Kuala Nor, not Jade Gate Pass.
That left his friend Yan, his
loyal
friend, feeling every hard-boned movement of his small, shaggy horse towards the end of a day's silent ride through late-spring countryside. He wasn't going to drink that wine or hear music in those inns, or teach fragrant women how he very much liked to be touched.
It was Wan-si who decided how far they'd ride each day, whether they'd reach a village and negotiate a roof under which to sleep, or camp outside. Yan ached like a grandfather each morning when he woke on dew-damp ground, and the village beds were hardly better.
For anything less than the tidings he was bearing he wouldn't have done this, he told himself. He simply wouldn't have, however dear his friend might be to him, whatever parting verses and last embraces they'd exchanged at the Willow Inn by the western gate of Xinan, when Tai had left for home to mourn his father. Yan and Lun and the others had given him broken willow twigs in farewell and to ensure a safe return.
The others? There had been half a dozen of them at the Willow Inn, fabled for the partings it had witnessed. None of the
others
were with Yan on the road, were they? They'd been happy enough to get drunk when Tai left, and then praise Yan and improvise poems and give out more willow twigs at that same inn yard when he set out two years later, but no one had volunteered to go with him, had they? Not even when the expected journey was only ten days or so, to Tai's family home.
Hah,
thought Chou Yan, many hard days west of that estate. At this point, he decided, he himself could fairly be called heroic, a testament to the depth and virtue of friendship in the glorious Ninth Dynasty. They would have to admit it when he returned, all of them: no more wine-cup jests about softness and indolence. It was too pleasing a thought to keep to himself. He offered it to Wan-si as they rode.
As idle an expenditure of mortal breath and words as there had ever been. Black clothing, black eyes, a stillness like no one he'd ever known, this warrior-woman. It was irritating. A tongue was wasted on her. So was beauty, come to think of it. He couldn't remember if he'd ever seen her smile.
That night she killed a tiger.
He didn't even know it until morning when he saw the animal's body, two arrows in it, at the green edge of a bamboo grove, twenty paces from where they'd slept.
He gaped. Stammered, "Why didn't ...? I didn't even ..."
He was in a sweat, hands shaking. He kept looking at the slain beast and quickly away. The dreadful size of it. Fear made him dizzy. He sat down, on the ground. He saw her walk over and reclaim her arrows. A booted foot on the tiger's flank, twisting the shafts free.
She'd already packed their bedding and gear on the third horse. Now she mounted up and waited impatiently for him, holding his horse's reins out for him. He managed to stand, to get up on the horse.
"You never even told me last night!" he said, unable to take his eyes off the tiger now.
"You complain less when you've slept a night," she said, which counted as a long sentence. She started off, the sun rising behind them.
They reached the fort at Iron Gate Pass two evenings later.
The commander fed them for two nights (mutton stew and mutton stew), let Chou Yan entertain with gossip from the capital, and sent them west, with advice as to where to spend three nights on the way to Kuala Nor, so as to arrive at the lake in the morning.
Yan was entirely content with this counsel, having no interest at all in encountering ghosts of any kind, let alone angry ones and in the numbers (improbably) reported by the soldiers at the fort. But Wan-si disdained belief in such matters and did not want to spend an unnecessary night in the canyon among mountain cats, she said bluntly. If his friend was alive by the lake, and had been there for two years ...
They pushed on through two long, light-headed days (Yan was finding it difficult to deal with the air this high), past the commander's suggested stopping places. On the third afternoon, with the sun ahead of them, they ascended a last defile between cliffs and came suddenly out of shadows to the edge of a meadow bowl, of a beauty that could break the heart.
And moving forward through tall grass, Chou Yan had finally seen his dear friend standing at the doorway of a small cabin, waiting to greet him, and his soul had been glad beyond any poet's words, and the long journey came to seem as nothing, in the way of such trials when they are over.
Weary but content, he brought his small horse to a halt in front of the cabin. Shen Tai was in a white tunic for mourning, but his loose trousers and the tunic were sweat- and dirt-stained. He was unshaven, darkened, rough-skinned like a peasant, but he was staring at Yan in flattering disbelief.
Yan felt like a hero. He
was
a hero. He'd had a nosebleed earlier, from the altitude, but you didn't have to talk about that. He only wished his tidings weren't so grave. But then he wouldn't be here, would he, if they weren't?
Tai bowed twice, formally, hand in fist. His courtesy was as remembered: impeccable, almost exaggeratedly so, when he wasn't in a fury about something.
Yan, still on horseback, smiled happily down at him. He said what he'd planned to say for a long time, words he'd fallen asleep each night thinking about.
"West of Iron Gate, west of Jade Gate Pass / There'll be no old friends."
Tai smiled back. "I see. You have come this long distance to tell me poets can be wrong? This is meant to dazzle and confound me?"
Hearing the wry, remembered voice, Yan's heart was suddenly full. "Ah, well. I suppose not. Greetings, old friend."
He swung down stiffly. His eyes filled with tears as he embraced the other man.
Tai's expression when they stepped back and looked at each other was strange, as if Yan were a ghost of some kind himself.
"I would not ever, ever have thought ..." he began.
"That I would be one to come to you? I am sure you didn't. Everyone underestimates me. That is supposed to confound you."
Tai did not smile. "It does, my friend. How did you even know where ...?"
Yan made a face. "I didn't think I was coming this far. I thought you were at home. We all did. They told me there where you had gone."
"And you carried on? All the way here?"
"It looks as though I did, doesn't it?" Yan said happily. "I even carried two small casks of Salmon River wine for you, given me by Chong himself there, but I drank one with your brother and the other at Iron Gate, I'm afraid. We did drink to your name and honour."
The ironical smile. "I thank you for that, then. I do have wine," Tai said. "You will be very tired, and your companion. Will you both honour me and come inside?"
Yan looked at him, wanting to be happy, but his heart sank. He was here for a reason, after all.
"I have something to tell you," he said.
"I thought that must be so," his friend said gravely. "But let me offer water to wash yourselves, and a cup of wine first. You have come a long way."
"Beyond the last margins of the empire,"
Yan quoted.
He loved the sound of that. No one was going to be allowed to forget this journey of his, he decided. Soft? A plump, would-be mandarin? Not Chou Yan, not any more. The others, studying for the examinations, or in the North District laughing with dancing girls as a spring day waned, listening to
pipa
music, drinking from lacquered cups ... they were the soft ones now.
"Beyond the last margins," Tai agreed. All around them, mountains were piled upon each other, snow-clad. Yan saw a ruined fort on an isle in the middle of the lake.
He followed his friend into the cabin. The shutters were open to the air and the clear light. The one room was small, trimly kept. He remembered that about Tai. He saw a fireplace and a narrow bed, the low writing table, wooden ink-block, ink, paper, brushes, the mat in front of them. He smiled.
He heard Wan-si enter behind him. "This is my guard," he said. "My Kanlin Warrior. She killed a tiger."
He turned to gesture by way of proper introduction, and saw that she had her swords drawn, and levelled at the two of them.