Everything Under the Heavens (Silk and Song) (4 page)

Mangu brought him a meal of dried dates and fresh baked naan and the boy tore into it with ferocious greed and looked around for more. “Gently, my friend,” Wu Li said, “gently. You have been hungry too long to eat too much all at once.” He handed the boy a skin full of water. “Drink now, small swallows. Let your stomach remember how to digest its food.”

The rest of the company served themselves. The warm bread and the hot black tea took the edge off their hunger and the rising sun burned the chill from the morning air.

“What is your name?” Wu Li said.

The boy blinked. “Jaufre,” he said at last, as if only just remembering it himself.

“And how do you come to be here, Jaufre?”

The boy looked at the steam rising from the thick earthenware cup. “My father was a guard on a caravan traveling from Baghdad to Karakorum.”

Wu Li looked at the sword laying at the boy’s side. “That is his sword?”

A grubby hand touched the hilt for reassurance. “Yes.”

“I see.”

As did they all. Even beneath all the grime, it was obvious the sword was made of the finest steel, probably Damascus steel, Wu Li thought, and he suspected that the stones in the hilt might be genuine gemstones. A valuable asset, indicating either the wealth of its owner or great favor on the part of the patron who had bestowed it. It was doubtful that a caravan guard could ever afford to buy one such for himself.

That Jaufre had it now meant that his father was dead, because such a weapon would not have left his possession any other way. Wu Li only wondered how the boy had taken it without the raiders noticing.

He said, “And you traveled with your father?”

“Yes.” The boy’s face twisted. “And my mother.”

Behind her Johanna heard Shu Ming draw in a breath.

“You were attacked,” Wu Li said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

“By whom?”

“Many men. On horses.”

“Horses? Not steppe ponies?”

“No. Horses.”

Not Mongols then, Wu Li thought. “How were the men dressed?”

The boy looked confused but answered readily. “Mintans and trousers.”

“On their heads?”

“Sariks.”

“With their faces covered?”

The boy nodded.

“Beda,” Deshi the Scout said.

“Or Turgesh,” Wu Li said. “Although I’ve never heard of either of them this far east before.” He turned back to the boy and spoke again, keeping his voice matter of fact. “Your father?”

The boy’s chin trembled and then firmed. “I buried him.”

“How did they not see you?” Wu Li indicated the sword with his chin. “Or the sword?”

“He fell on me, to hide me from them.” The boy drew in a shaky breath, and Wu Li could only imagine how the moments had passed for the boy, held motionless beneath the dying weight of his father. “And then before they could search him the wind came and blew the sand. I let it cover me.” He swallowed and looked away. “Us. I think I must have fallen asleep.”

Lost consciousness, more like, Wu Li thought.

“When the storm stopped, I woke up and they were gone. So,” the boy said drearily, “I buried him, and I took his sword, and I walked until I found water.”

Shu Ming made a soft sound of distress, and Wu Li knew she was picturing in her mind the small, desolate figure alone on the trackless yellow sands, beneath the scorch of an unforgiving sun. “How did you find water?”

“There were birds,” the boy said. “I followed them.”

“Lucky,” Deshi said in Mandarin.

Smart, Wu Li thought. “And your mother?” he said.

The boy’s face contorted with the effort not to cry. “They took her. They took all the women. And the camels and the horses that weren’t killed in the fighting.” His head drooped. “I looked for tracks, but the wind blew them all away.”

Wu Li raised his head and met Shu Ming’s eyes. “How long ago was that?”

The boy squinted at the rising sun. “Eight days? Nine?” He shook his head, exhaustion showing plainly on his face. “I buried myself in the sand every night to keep warm, and again every day when the sun got too hot to bear.”

“You did well,” Wu Li said.

The boy’s head jerked up. “I hid,” he said with bitter emphasis.

“And you’re alive,” Wu Li said.

The boy stared at him. “I didn’t even try to fight them.”

“You’re alive,” Wu Li said again. “What made you show yourself this morning?”

The boy reddened and he glared at Johanna. “She peed on me!”

Johanna, who had been rapt with interest at the tale thus far, went red again in her own turn. “I didn’t know you were there!”

Everyone burst into laughter, except for the two combatants. Wu Li recovered first, and said mildly, “Well, Jaufre, we will be glad to offer you safe passage to Kashgar, if that is your wish.” Again he gave the illusion of Jaufre having a choice, and Jaufre, who was old enough to know better, was grateful for this sparing of his dignity, even if he was too young to put a name to it.

Wu Li looked up at the circle of faces. “Finish your breakfasts, water the camels and fill the water skins. We move on as soon as we strike camp.”

He didn’t say what he was thinking, what they were all thinking. With Persian bandits marauding this far east, the sooner they were behind caravansary walls, the better.

They were away in half an hour, the boy Jaufre in the saddle behind Johanna, the sword strapped to the saddlebag behind him. It was difficult to remain aloof in such close proximity. He smelled, but it wouldn’t have been polite to say so and besides, it wasn’t his fault. After a while she said in a stiff little voice, “My name is Johanna.”

She’d given up hope of a response to her overture when he said, “Johanna. Johanna? There was a queen named Johanna once. Or so my father told me.”

“Really?”

“She was the sister of a great warrior king named Richard the Lionheart,” Jaufre said. His voice was dull, but he seemed determined to pay his passage on the back of her camel with the full story. “They were from my father’s country, an island far to the west. She was sent to marry the king of another island. And then he died, and she was held hostage, and her brother had to rescue her.”

“And then what happened?”

“I don’t remember all of it. She was shipwrecked on the way home and her brother had to rescue her again, and then she almost married two other kings, and then she did marry a count of the Franks, and led his army while he was away.”

“And then what?”

“I think she became a nun.”

“What’s a nun?”

Jaufre seemed to wake up a little at this question. “You don’t know what a nun is?”

“No. What is it?”

“Well, it’s—she is like a monk, only she’s a woman.”

“Oh.” All the monks Johanna had met were Buddhists, and male. It was hard to imagine a woman dressed in a skimpy orange robe and bare feet whose only possession was a wooden bowl used for both eating and begging. She wondered if the other Johanna had had to shave her head, like the monks did, and if so, what kept her crown on afterward.

They rode in silence after that. From time to time during that first long day, as the road passed swiftly beneath, she would seek out the familiar, reassuring figures of her mother and her father.

To have lost one was unthinkable. To lose both? Unendurable.

“You will stay with us,” she said to the horizon of undulating sand, to the bleached blue of the sky overhead, to the rump of Deshi’s camel. She was staking a claim.

Jaufre, drained from his ordeal and hypnotized by the rhythm of the camel’s swaying gait, had fallen asleep with his head on her shoulder, drooling a little from the corner of his mouth.

“You will stay with us,” she said again, more softly this time, but with even more conviction.

He snored, too.

THERE WERE NO STORIES
or singing around the fire that night or any other between there and Kashgar. They reached the city in three days instead of five, pushing their mounts hard, making dry camps with everyone taking turns on watch during the night, arms to hand, even Johanna and her small bow, no one getting much sleep. Johanna saw the relief on her father’s face when the high walls of the city came into view.

They halted in the yard of the large caravansary that sat just outside the city walls. Dusty camels knelt, bawling out their hunger and ostlers moved in a continual dance to remain just out of reach of their snapping yellow teeth.

A young woman approached, neat in clean robes correctly tied, and bowed. “It is good to see you safely arrived, Master Wu.” She bowed to Shu Ming. “Sister.”

“It is good to have arrived safely, Shasha,” Wu Li said with a certain grimness. “Your own journey?”

“Without incident, master. Niu Gang and I made excellent time.” Her tone and expression were bland but her eyes were sharp as they scanned the rest of the party, noting the addition of Jaufre perched behind Johanna with interest but no surprise. “I have secured rooms for our party and hired staff for our stay. Niu Gang is arranging feed for the camels with the stable master. Six merchants, including the venerable Wen Yan, have requested first looks at our goods, and the magistrate requests an appointment at your earliest convenience.”

Wu’s expression eased and he gave her a formal bow. “As always, Shu Shao, you reward my trust tenfold.”

She bent her head without embarrassment and without arrogance, accepting the compliment as no more or less her due. Jaufre, looking on, thought that she wore the assurance of a woman many years her senior. Johanna, too, seemed to him much older than her six.

But then Jaufre, though he did not realize it then, felt like an old man himself. A life lived on the Road encouraged the early acquisition of skills of all kinds. You either survived it or you did not. If you did, you matured fast.

Wu Li busied himself with supervising the unloading of the bolts of silk and bales of tea and crates of porcelain. Shu Shao led Shu Ming and Johanna to their rooms. They were on the second floor, in a corner. Shu Ming opened the shutters of two windows that looked out over a garden with a blue-tiled fountain tinkling in the middle of it.

“Very nice,” Shu Ming said. “How much are we paying?”

“No more than we can afford.”

The two women smiled at each other.

Their hair was drawn severely back into identical thick braids, but there any similarity ended. Shu Ming was taller, her hair a tawny mass with gold glints, her eyes a golden brown. Shu Shao’s hair was smooth and black, her face a round-cheeked oval of olive skin, with tilted eyes as dark as her hair. Shu Ming moved with unconscious grace, her eyelashes casting long shadows on her cheeks. Shu Shao moved with economy and purpose, and her gaze was direct, alert and missed nothing. Shu Ming smelled of peonies in full bloom. Shu Shao smelled of peonies, too, and of ginger and ginseng and licorice and cinnamon. Shu Shao was nearer in age to Johanna but her assurance and self-possession made her seem older than both of them.

“Mother?”

Shu Ming turned to smooth back a curl that had escaped from Johanna’s fat bronze braid. “What is it, my love?”

Johanna raised serious eyes to her mother’s. “I think Jaufre should stay with us.”

The hand stilled.

“Jaufre is the boy?” Shu Shao said.

Shu Ming nodded. “And why is that exactly?” she said to Johanna.

Johanna was only six, and the complexities of human emotion were as yet beyond her articulation. “Because we found him,” she said. “Because he belongs to us.”

“He belongs to himself, Johanna,” Shu Ming said, but her voice was gentle.

“He doesn’t have anyone else, mother.” Eyes a shade darker than her own were openly pleading. “There is no one he knows here in Kashgar, and no family or home waiting for him in Baghdad. There is only us.”

Shu Ming was silent for a moment.

It was a great grief to her that thus far Johanna had been the only child she had been able to carry to term, and her only child to have survived birth. Married to Wu Li almost before she could remember as a matter of survival, it was her very great fortune to have been joined to someone who loved her and cared for her enough to take her with him on his journeys, to have not taken, at least not yet, another wife or concubine. He had never betrayed by word or deed his wish for more children, for a son to inherit his father’s business, to carry his father’s line forward into immortality, to honor his father’s and his father’s bones. She looked into Johanna’s eyes, and she feared what the future had in store for her daughter. A woman alone, without family, was in peril by her very existence on the earth.

She thought of Jaufre, that fierce young boy who had been ready to take on Wu Li and Deshi the Scout and their entire caravan in defense of himself and his father’s sword.

Young as she had been, Shu Ming never forgot the days and weeks she had spent in the cells below the palace in Cambaluc, of the things she had seen, of the things her mother had done for a drop of water or a grain of rice. She alone in Wu Li’s entourage truly understood the repressed horror that dulled Jaufre’s eyes.

Given his ordeal, there would have been no reproaches if all he had done was eat and sleep and ride over the past three days, but instead he had contributed to the daily work of the caravan with ability and determination. He knew as well as Johanna the knots required to secure a pack on a camel’s back and he didn’t balk at joining her in collecting dried dung from the Road for that night’s campfire. Shu Ming had spared a bit of water to clean off the worst of the dirt and had cobbled together a change of clothing, so his appearance was much improved. She liked both the erectness of his spine and the directness of his gaze, and found him well-spoken when addressed.

He also looked a lot more like her daughter than almost anyone else they knew back in Cambaluc, with the exception of those foreign merchants and priests who always clustered about the royal court, seeking attention and favor.

She reminded herself that he was scarcely older than her daughter, and smiled at Johanna. “Let us see what your father says.”

Johanna smiled. She knew what that meant, and she danced away to tell Jaufre he was coming home with them.