Everything Under the Heavens (Silk and Song) (8 page)

The cry was wrenched from him. “She could be dead by then, Wu Li!”

“She could be dead now.” Wu Li felt Shu Ming’s eyes upon him. This was unlikely, they both knew. Anyone who had paid the price quoted by an awed Barid the Balasagan would have taken very great care of so valuable a property, but if Jaufre set out in pursuit he would be dead shortly thereafter of any one of a number of causes, or a slave himself, in which case his mother would be dead to him and he to her for all time. The world was vast and travel across it slow. Chances were weighted heavily against mother and son ever meeting again, but any small hope Jaufre had of it lay in joining the Wu household.

And this, Jaufre, displaying what would become a lifelong ability to recognize the truth, however unpalatable it was and however much it cost him, came to understand for himself. When they left Kashgar three days later, he rode behind Johanna, swaying over the sand on the back of the young camel.

If he looked over his shoulder too often, surely no one was so cruel as to mention it.

THE ROUTE TO CIPANGU
to trade silk for pearls, initiated by Wu Hai and carried forward with efficiency and dispatch by Wu Li, had become an annual event in the trading house of Wu. This had been a most profitable year, partially due, Wu Li had to admit, if only to himself, to Johanna’s ability to make friends wherever she went. In this case she had ingratiated herself into the society of the women pearl divers of Ama, who had taught her the art of holding her breath underwater for a long enough time as to strike terror into the hearts of her parents waiting anxiously on shore. But what could they do?

“She’s too old to scold and too tall to beat,” Wu Li said ruefully.

His wife gave him a fond look. “As if you have ever done either.”

By the time they reached the Edo docks, Wu Li was concerned enough over the value of their cargo that he hired another half dozen guards from the always steady supply found on any port. One, a youngish thickset man whose black quilted armor and well-kept naginata argued a fall from samurai grace, was so anxious to board ship that he accepted the first salary offer Wu Li made. By the time they reached Kinsai, having proved his value in two encounters with pirates, he was outspoken in his belief that he was deserving of a bonus amounting to twenty-five percent of the value of the trade goods he had helped to protect. He said so, loudly, and this sounded like a fine idea to the other Nippon guards Wu Li had hired in Edo. They stood in front of him in a half-circle, hands resting on their weapons in a manner completely lacking in subtlety.

“The value of your contribution to the success of our voyage is not in dispute, Gokudo,” Wu Li said, answering threat with courtesy. “Indeed, it was my intention to pay you a bonus of ten percent of the worth of the goods you have helped us shepherd safely to port. However.”

His eyes hardened and he made a motion with one hand. Deshi the Scout and a dozen other retainers materialized behind the Nippon guards, armed with swords, pry bars and belaying pins.

“Because of your greed,” Wu Li said, courtesy giving way to contempt, “and your inability to make your case for reimbursement without threat, you will receive the salary we agreed on in Edo, and not one tael more.”

There was the promise of an incipient riot, but Wu Li’s men were in sufficient number to quell it before the Mongol authorities were alerted and all his profit went in fines for failure to keep the peace. “My thanks, Deshi,” Wu Li said, and for the first time noticed that the scout was pale and shivering. “My friend, you are ill! Return home at once and seek out Shu Shao. She will know what to do.”

Unfortunately, in this instance, Shu Shao, already a healer of some repute, did not.

The next morning, Shu Ming fell ill. She complained of loose stool in the morning, and three hours later she, too, was pale and shivering, her skin clammy to the touch, her heart hammering beneath her skin at a frantic, irregular pace. She complained of thirst, when her mind wasn’t wandering, which it did more and more as the day wore on. They tried giving her clear soup and tea but she couldn’t keep anything down, and by the afternoon her sodden bedclothes had to be changed every hour.

Before nightfall, she was dead.

So was the maid who laundered her sheets, the stable boy, Deshi the Scout, and 3,526 other citizens of Cambaluc.

In the horrible weeks that followed, Wu Li went about looking like a ghost. Johanna attended him white-lipped and withdrawn. Jaufre suffered the loss of his second mother with outward calm and inward agony, taking over the mews and the stables while Shu Shao took charge of the kitchen, and all went on tiptoe for fear that the master of the house would shatter like glass at one wrong word.

One day a month later Jaufre went out to the stables and found Johanna seated on a bale of hay next to Edyk the Portuguese, deep in earnest conversation. She looked more animated than she had since the day her mother died. Edyk was holding one of Johanna’s hands in both of his own, and as Jaufre came around the corner he raised it to his lips.

Johanna looked up and saw Jaufre. She pulled her hand free and jumped to her feet. “Edyk has come.”

“So I see.” The two men exchanged a cool glance.

“I am sorry for the trouble that has visited the house of the Honorable Wu Li,” Edyk said with a formal bow.

Jaufre inclined his head a fraction. He could not rue the lightening of sorrow on Johanna’s face, even if he suspected that their recent troubles were not what had brought Edyk the Portuguese to the house of Wu Li.

Edyk the Portuguese was in his early twenties and, like Johanna and Jaufre, the child of expatriate Westerners, with eyes too round for Cambaluc comfort. A brawny young man, thickly-muscled, again like Johanna and Jaufre he moved with the assurance of someone accustomed to an active life. He had his father’s brown eyes and his mother’s black hair and a charming smile all his own. He was a trader, as the honorable Wu Li had been a trader, and traveling the trade routes with him Johanna had watched that smile melt feminine hearts from Kinsai to Kashgar.

He was shorter than Jaufre by a head, which was some comfort to the crusader’s son, but he made up for his lack of height with a dynamic personality and a great deal of personal charm and energy. He was an up-and-coming merchant in Cambaluc, one of the group of foreign traders resident there by permission of the Khan who accounted for the bulk of foreign goods imported into the city. Since the death of the Great Khan, raiders on the Silk Road had moved from a rarity to a steadily increasing threat. In response, the Cambaluc merchants had banded together in a cooperative association, exchanging information on road conditions and organizing communal caravans at set times during the year. Pooling their resources, they could hire more guards, which increased their chances of a safe arrival at their destination, alive and with their goods intact, and, when they had finished their trading, a safe return home. Their profit would be less from the increased competition at their destinations, but at least they were sure of living to travel and trade another day.

The Honorable Wu Li had been among the proponents of this cooperative, and Edyk the Portuguese had been among the first to join. Young, only five years older than Jaufre and Johanna, intelligent, talented and ambitious, he was quick to see the benefits of Wu Li’s proposal, and a caravan traveling under Wu Li’s direction hadn’t left Cathay in the last three years in which Edyk the Portuguese had not been a full partner, carrying silk west and driving a carefully selected group of purebred horses east. He favored Arabians, but when available he did not turn up his nose at draft horses like the Ardennais, mules, and the occasional zebra, which could be bred with horses to make a hardy pony good for narrow trails at high elevations, a breed championed by a certain faction of Mongol nobles who were willing to pay any amount to acquire better transportation for their troops.

He’d met Johanna during the Cambaluc merchants’ first communal caravan, early one morning when he’d come down to inspect his father’s picket line and had found her galloping up on his most obstreperous stallion. “His front right shoe is a little loose, I think,” she had said without introduction, and slid from the stallion’s back to pick up his right front foot, beckoning Edyk closer for an inspection of the offending shoe. She had been right.

Edyk’s father had been a rogue Cistercian monk, born in Portugal, who had abandoned a life of contemplation and cloister for one of travel and adventure. Like Johanna’s grandfather, upon reaching the East he had offered his services to the court of the Great Khan. Those services had been able enough to achieve recognition and reward, again like Johanna’s grandfather, in the form of Edyk the Portuguese’s mother, the daughter of a Chinese concubine. Again, like Johanna and Jaufre, by virtue of his foreign blood he was shunned by Cambaluc society, and not much more welcomed by the ruling class.

Foreign traders, the proximate cause of so much Mongol wealth, were regarded as somewhere in between, and their children, especially the children of favorite foreigners and ex-Mongol concubines, were even then regarded as a breed apart, not quite other but not quite equal, either. Like Johanna and Jaufre and lacking an alternative, Edyk was drawn to others of his kind.

Where Johanna went Jaufre followed and the three of them had become nearly inseparable over the years, but recently Jaufre had noticed a change in Edyk’s manner toward Johanna, less brotherly and more, well, affectionate, was the only word for it. It set Jaufre’s teeth on edge.

“North Star’s foal was born last night,” Edyk said.

In spite of himself, Jaufre brightened. “All well?”

Edyk grinned. “He was running before he could walk. A winner, I’ll wager.”

And he would, Jaufre thought, and Edyk the Portuguese would win, too. Upon succeeding to his father’s business three years before, Edyk had shifted emphasis from general goods to livestock, in particular racing stock, and had made a name for himself in buying and backing winners.

“And North Star?” Johanna said.

“Well, though I think this is the last time I will breed her. She has done enough for my stables.”

“What are you calling him?”

Edyk smiled at her. She was taller than he was but it didn’t seem to bother him. “What would you like me to call her, Golden Flower?”

Jaufre didn’t like the caressing tone in his voice, and still less did he like Edyk’s employment of Johanna’s Cambaluc name. “What color is his coat?”

Edyk’s smile lessened. “He is pure white, nose to tail.”

A short silence fell. They all knew that white was the color of death. Johanna and Jaufre were still wearing white in honor of Shu Ming’s death, although they would be putting it off when the month of official mourning had passed. “Will Chinese gamblers bet on a white horse?” Jaufre said.

“They will on this one,” Edyk said with more assurance. “And Mongol gamblers certainly will. We’re just lucky it’s a colt and not a filly.”

Johanna and even Jaufre in spite of himself nodded emphatic agreement. A vast herd of white mares was maintained by the Mongol emperor for the production and fermenting of their milk. If North Star had born a female, Edyk would have been expected to gift it to the Mongol court, no matter how fast a foal out of North Star might be expected to run. Koumiss was more of a staple in the Mongolian diet than bread or meat.

“Then call him North Wind,” Johanna said. “Let him be named for how fast he will run.”

A slow smile spread across Edyk’s face. “Perfect,” he said, and swung Johanna up into his arms and whirled her around.

Jaufre, watching, schooled his expression to something that felt a little less like murder.

On the other side of Cambaluc, where families who could trace their ancestries back to the Shang dynasty lived closely together in a section renowned for its insularity, xenophobia and self-regard, another meeting was taking place, with consequences reaching much farther than the selection of a lucky name for a winning horse.

The house was every bit as large as its neighbors, but its appearance had declined with the fortunes of its owners. Luck had not followed the Dai family for three generations. Once one of the richest trading concerns in Everything Under the Heavens, the hopes of everyone under the Dai roof were now vested in the person of Dai Fang, an exquisite beauty of twenty years. Like Johanna, she was the only child of her house. Her mother was an invalid, her father inconstant, and when one day at the age of fifteen Dai Fang discovered that the only food in the house was two eggs laid by a stringy hen who had then immediately died, she had shut her father in a room with the cheapest bottle of rice wine she could find and had stepped forward to take the reins of the family business into her own hands.

Over the past five years, those hands had proved to be capable. Intelligent and ruthless, with an invaluable talent for identifying well in advance of demand that one luxury item that the wives and concubines of Cambaluc simply could not do without that year. Allied with a charm of manner that had seduced many an older trader with more experience and a much harder head, Dai Fang made agreements and partnerships profitable enough to draw the Dai fortunes back up over the edge of disaster. When she had balanced the books at the end of the previous year, for the first time in four years the knot in her belly eased a little. They would not starve. The house would not have to be sold to pay their debts. Her mother could have the services of a decent nurse, who could also provide herbal remedies for Dai Yu’s own needs. If disaster in the form of sandstorm or flood or raiders did not descend upon next year’s caravan, the house of Dai might even see a profit. A modest one, to be sure, but encouraging after so many years of loss.