Authors: Elizabeth Bear
They moved through a series of corridors—nothing like those in the Citadel or the Great Khagan’s winter palace in the territories that had once been northern Song, but sufficiently imposing (and enclosing) after spending most of a season between the empty horizons. Temur was also amused to see that once they were beyond the glittering white marble facade, these inner corridors were hewn from prosaic—and harder-wearing—granite. Perhaps this was an old stronghold, wrapped by the sparkling modern facade. Or perhaps the wealth of such a small principality only stretched so far, even with the taxes levied upon the
talus
herders.
Finally, however, the guards led them to a small chamber and left them there. One monkish woman warrior remained. The room was furnished in the Song style but with broad windows open on a courtyard garden. Sunlight trickled through green leaves and honey-scented blossoms. Rice-paper screens had been pushed back to allow the air and light to move unimpeded, and the floor was thick with cushions, rugs, and low tables of just the height to take a bite out of an incautious man’s ankle. Everything was embroidered—gold flowers and dragons on silk, windmills and elegant trees. A fine celadon vase sat on a table in the corner, dripping a profusion of midsummer blooms—peonies, poppies, and some Temur could not identify.
Temur had to glance out the window to remind himself that he was not in Song. They did not build this way there, and nothing in that far kingdom matched the shadow of the Steles mounting above the garden walls.
The far door opened, and a woman younger than Temur had anticipated stepped within. Not young, of course, but perhaps only ten years or so beyond Samarkar’s age, with white strands brushed from her temples into the elaborate coils of her hair. Perhaps she was a sister or a servant, he thought. He would have been expected to be relieved of his knife before he met the Dowager Khatun herself.
But no, this woman wore an ivory gown of Song silk, brocaded with a motif of tiny dragons in gold and green. It was fit for a queen, and this woman carried herself like one.
She was tall and broad-hipped, well proportioned to Temur’s eye, built more like a Qersnyk woman than the willowy western princesses he recollected from Qarash. She had a face that showed some Rasan or Qersnyk descent—almond eyes with smooth eyelids, oval cheeks—but her skin was the pale olive-wood color of the southern Song—or, Temur supposed, the Uthman mountain people.
She carried herself straight as a wand. The top seams of her sleeves had been left open, so graceful swags of fabric swung from shoulder to wrist and left her arms largely bare, showing the strong cables of tendons in her forearms, the firm curve of her upper arms. Qersnyk women who hunted had arms like that, and the delicate scar that curved like a lash around her left wrist was the mark of a bowstring snapped under pressure.
Temur bowed from the waist, not quite willing to prostrate himself. He was aware of Samarkar at his side, also bowing so the sweep of her travel-worn coat fell about her legs, and of Payma and Hrahima making their obeisances behind, though Hrahima’s was little more than a shallow bow.
He said, “Nilufer Khatun. I am Re Temur. I have come from Qarash and Tsarepheth with grave news of our family, and to beg a boon of you.”
Nilufer gestured to the cushions and the low tables. “Sit, please,” she said, her eyes on Payma, who rocked from one swollen foot to the other as subtly as she could. “I’ll send for tea.”
She did not seem to issue any such command, just seating herself at one of the low tables and leaving her guests to sort themselves as they saw fit. But by the time Temur had seen to Payma’s comfort and Hrahima reclined against a bolster, there was tea and some small dry cakes and a bowl of peeled boiled eggs cooked in spiced tea. He took a cake and an egg, to be polite, and passed the bowl to Hrahima. She sniffed the eggs dubiously but took one.
Temur tasted the cake—sweet and sharp with honey and spices—and washed it down with tea that smelled of roses. “Perhaps you have heard,” he began, “that the Khaganate is at war with itself? It seems the unrest is spreading.…”
Awkwardly, he spoke for almost an hour—with occasional interruptions for clarification from the others or questions from Nilufer. When he was done, he sat back and cradled a fresh bowl of tea. His mouth ached.
“So this woman, Payma—you, dear—bears an heir to the Rasan throne?”
“I do,” Payma said. “And it’s worth my life and the babe’s if I go back there.”
“I believe you,” Nilufer said. She passed a plump hand across the low table, gesturing Payma to eat. “I know you probably have no appetite, but you need to eat. Eat and move and stay strong, so you have stamina for the birthing.”
“I feel like I can’t get a breath,” Payma admitted, the first complaint Temur had heard her utter. “Let alone eat a bite of food.”
“You’re full up with babe,” Nilufer said. Jade bracelets clinked on her wrist as she gestured. “It’s only to be expected. Is this your first?”
Payma picked up a cake and soaked it in her tea while she nodded. Nilufer smiled, but it did not touch her eyes.
“You’re safe here,” she said. “Unless they come with an army. This is still the Khagan’s land.”
“For what that’s worth,” Temur said, half numb as the words pressed his lips apart. “What has the Khagan ever done for you?”
Nilufer’s smile was mysterious. Intentionally so, he thought. “He let me reign in peace,” she said. “Sent me a fine husband. Gave me the strength of arms to defend my land from bandits and mercenaries, and never demanded more in tribute than I could pay. He was a decent lord.”
“Every lord who offers a modicum of safety in exchange for the bribe money he extracts is a decent lord. If you can make the peasant believe it matters who collects his taxes,” Temur said with a shrug, “then you have all but won the war.”
Her smile widened. “And you have no intention to make yourself Khan of Khans, Re Temur, Khanzadeh?”
It stung. She meant it to, and he deserved it. “I’m not in it for the riches.”
“Of course not,” she said. “More tea?”
* * *
As they were leaving the room, Nilufer caught Samarkar’s arm and pulled her aside. Samarkar had not expected to be manhandled by a Dowager Khatun; she stood as still as if frozen. But the woman treated her like a long-lost confidante, and that seeming openness had its charms. Even if Samarkar was sure it was entirely feigned. “She’s young for childbearing.”
“She is,” Samarkar said. “And I would stay with her until she was delivered, but—”
“—More is at stake,” Nilufer said. “Yes, I gathered. Never fear. I have a witch, and if the girl or the babe can be saved, she will save them. You may go on without guilt.”
“Unlikely,” Samarkar said, feeling a real smile split her face in the first time for spans of days.
Nilufer released Samarkar’s arm and spread her hands. “Still worth trying. You know, you are not the first travelers seeking refuge to arrive here from the east this month. There is a monk, who by his habit and the condition of his feet could have walked all the way from Song.”
“What news?”
Nilufer shrugged. “He is either mute or he’s taken a vow of silence. I gave him some of the Song watercolor ink in solid bars, though that is not what we use, and some brushes he seemed to find acceptable. But I cannot read his writing. I thought perhaps one of you—”
“I can read Song script,” Samarkar said. “And Temur can, a little.”
Nilufer made a beckoning gesture, languid and graceful, that spoke volumes to Samarkar of the training in deportment and bearing that Samarkar, too, had suffered through.
“By all means,” the Dowager Khatun said. “Come with me.”
As they walked, Samarkar made polite conversation, allowing Temur and Payma and Hrahima to trail behind in what she hoped was comfortable silence. When she stole a glance backward, Payma and Temur both looked relaxed, and who could really read a Cho-tse’s expressions, unless the tiger were making an effort to be intelligible?
“You have children?” Samarkar asked, casting about for a subject.
Nilufer nodded. “Three,” she said. “The eldest is a daughter; the others, sons. The girl is married out to the son of one of Mongke Khagan’s generals, north near the city of Kyiv. My elder son has little use for politics, and so I am left to rule while he hunts bandits in the hills.”
“And the younger son?”
“Chatagai is his name. Away to war,” Nilufer said. “He was born before the Great Khagan’s death, and so I can check the sky each night for his moon and know he lives.”
For a moment, her trained facade cracked, and Samarkar saw the woman beneath. It was easy for a peasant to forget that queens and kings were merely mortal, nothing more—especially when the queens and kings in question were trained from birth to hold themselves apart. Some of ruling was creating your legend, enforcing your authority.
But that was a lonely place to stand.
As lonely as being a wizard, perhaps.
“I will pray he comes home safely,” Samarkar said. “Who does he fight for?” Now Temur was listening—listening, and trying not to look as if he listened.
“He fought for Mongke Khagan,” Nilufer said. “I do not know who he fights for now. If, as you say, two cities have fallen—”
“Aye, indeed,” Temur put in. “If he was with Mongke’s army, he may not even be in the fighting, unless some loyalty constrained him to join my brother’s ranks or those of Qori Buqa. I did not know every man who fought for Qulan, but I knew when cousins joined us. He could be in Song, or he could be just about anywhere. But if his moon still shines, he is alive. And that is the best we can hope for in these times.”
He sounded so young, so naïve, that Samarkar hid a smile. Nilufer saw it, though, and hid her own in return. “Through here,” she said, gesturing them to a side passage.
Nobility in the borderlands was not like nobility in Rasa. Samarkar tried to imagine her brother leading guests through the palace by himself, but wound up shaking her head.
They came at last to an airy stone room, bright with sunlight from the courtyard, in which two equally outlandish folks awaited. One was a bald man, barrel-chested and fit, perhaps Samarkar’s age, who wore the onion-dyed robes of a Song monk kilted up to reveal his legs and sandals. The other was an old woman who hunched under layers of tattered rugs, as if she wore the mossy carapace of a
talus
on her own back. The man, who had been idly staring out the window, turned and stood as they entered. The woman did not. She did not even look up from the beads and buttons she was sorting.
“Witch,” Nilufer said.
The old woman grunted. The movement of her arm as she reached for a bit of carnelian set swinging a row of charms stitched to the lumpy breast of her cloak. But she did look up. The monk, meanwhile, bowed, and Nilufer met him with a nod that Samarkar copied.
He seemed calmly accepting of the ragged Rasan princess, the bowlegged Qersnyk warrior, and the towering Cho-tse, but his focus was definitely on Samarkar. He bowed low.
In the speech of northern Song, she said, “I am Samarkar-la, a wizard of Tsarepheth. I am here to serve as your voice. You have ink and paper?”
He backed away, gesturing her to the table. He moved with a fluidity of balance, reassuring Samarkar that he was exactly what he appeared to be. The martial discipline showed in his straight spine, the set of his head, the watchful eyes.
He was a round man: round of head, under the stubble of his shaven hair; round of feature; round of shoulder; and round of belly. She could see the muscular bulge of his thick arms and legs under the fall of his robe, the calf muscles like knots in sheets as he moved. He found paper and a brush and settled cobbler-fashion on the floor, leaning over the small bare area that the witch’s sorting did not cover.
Despite his relative youth, his eyes were clouding blue around the iris edges. Samarkar frowned; she knew what that meant, and she knew as well that even the wizards of the Citadel had no cure for it. No permanent cure, anyway. She knew there was a surgery that could drain the fluid from the eye and give a few days of clear sight—but then the eyeball collapsed, and the blindness became total.
He wet the brush in a water glass and stroked it against the block of ink. Then quickly, with a practiced hand, he wrote.
Like Nilufer’s tongue, the written language of Song was a kind of incantation in itself. Samarkar knew that these border peoples had once ruled great empires of their own. The word-picture spells and blessings of those ancient days still adorned some of Rasa’s oldest temples, a memorial of when the sky that stretched over Rasa—and over Stone Steading—had been a sky no one had seen for hundreds of years.
But the Song language did not rely on word-pictures. Instead, it was constructed of sound-glyphs, each word built by layering the glyphs of its consonants one over the next in a harmonious shape. It was written from the bottom of the page to the top—from foundation to heavens, as buildings are constructed. In the hands of a scholar, the act of writing was a sort of performance—an ephemeral art that produced a permanent record.
But the monk was not performing. He wrote with a spare efficiency, a speed that was in itself beautiful, his head bent close to the paper so he could read his own work through clouded eyes. Samarkar read the columns of words aloud as fast as he could construct them, sounding out a few unfamiliar words.
His name (he wrote) was Hsiung. He was a mendicant, a journeyman monk who went forth from his order for a period of twenty-one years to learn and to be of service in the world.
Samarkar had walked into the room to read over Hsiung’s shoulder. But as she read his words aloud, Temur stirred in his place beside the door.
“You are from the Red Forest,” Temur said, more fluent in Song than Samarkar would have expected, though he spoke a more northeastern dialect. Of course, his grandfather had conquered a great deal of the kingdom that called itself the Heart of the World. Temur had probably fought there.
Samarkar thought Rasa, barricaded deep in the Steles of the Sky, had more to recommend it as the Heart of the World. But no one in Song had ever asked her. And the ones she might have expressed that opinion to, full of scorn, were all dead now.