Under Heaven (15 page)

Their shaman made to follow. The servant shook his head decisively, making a peremptory, stiff-armed gesture. The little shaman opened his mouth to protest, then closed it. He stayed where he was, head down, looking at no one. Humiliated, Tai thought.
The servant went into the cabin, reappeared an instant later escorting the man who'd carried Meshag. The servant went back in. Closed the door. They still hadn't seen the old woman, the shaman of the lake. They were left outside, in front of the cabin, in the bright, clear stillness of an autumn afternoon.
Someone coughed nervously. Someone glared at him, as if the sound might undermine whatever was happening inside. Their shaman was still staring at the ground before the door, as if unwilling to meet anyone's gaze. Tai wanted to be inside, then realized that, no, he actually didn't. He did
not
want to see whatever was taking place in there.
The nomads clustered before the cabin, looking more uncertain than Tai had ever seen them. The rest of the riders, including Tai's own men, remained above on the slope. The lake glittered. Birds were overhead, as always now, streaming south. Some were on the water. No swans that he could see.
Restless, edgy, he dismounted, left his horse to graze the sparse grass and walked around to the back where the outbuilding was and the yard with the two goats. He had a thought of milking them if he could find a pail. Something to do. A task. He slipped the gate latch and went in, closing it behind him.
The fenced yard was good-sized. Two fruit trees, a tall birch for shade. An herb garden at the far, eastern end. He could see the lake beyond it, across the fence. The goats huddled against the shed at the back, clearly unhappy.
No pail to be seen. Probably inside, but he wasn't about to knock on the rear door of the cabin and ask for one.
He crossed the yard towards the garden and the birch. He stood under the tree, gazing across the fence at the small lake, the brightness of it in sunshine. It was very quiet except for the soft, distressed bleating of the two animals. He could milk them without a pail, he thought. Let the servant suffer for his laziness if the shaman had no milk today.
He was actually turning to do that, irritated, when he noticed the freshly dug mound of earth at the back of the garden.
A single thump of the heart.
He could still remember, years after.
He stared, unmoving, for a long moment. Then he stepped carefully to the edge of the neatly ordered garden space, the order undermined--he saw it now--by boot marks and that narrow, sinister mound at the back, right against the fence. The goats had fallen silent for the moment. Tai felt a stir of wind, and fear. It was not a shape, that mound, you could confuse for something else.
He stepped into the garden, fatuously careful not to tread on anything growing there. He approached the mound. He saw, just the other side of the fence, an object that had been thrown over, discarded.
Saw it was a drum.
He swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly dry. Too much silence now. Trembling, he knelt and, drawing a steadying breath, began digging at the earth of the mound with his hands.
But he already knew by then. One of the goats bleated suddenly, making Tai's heart jump in fear. He looked quickly over his shoulder at the rear door of the cabin. It remained closed. He kept digging, scooping, his fingers shifting the black, freshly turned soil.
He felt something hard. A low cry escaped him, he couldn't help it. He looked at his fingers. Saw blood. Looked at the earth he'd moved.
A head in the soil, emerging as from some desperate nightmare into hard sunlight, or from the other world, where the dead went.
There was a single deep, downward gash in it, almost splitting the face in half--and the blood from that blow lay thick in the soil of the garden, and on his own hands now.
Tai swallowed again. Made himself move more earth, wishing so much he had a tool, didn't have to do this with shaking fingers.
He did, however, he did do it. And in a few moments he'd exposed the blade-ruined face of a woman. A very old woman, her eyes still open, staring upon nothingness or into the sun.
He closed his own eyes. Then opened them again and, pushing and digging more quickly now, uncovered her body farther down. She was clothed, wearing tangled bone necklaces and a strange, glinting collection of metal polished to be ... to be mirrors on her body, he realized.
Mirrors to frighten demons away. His fingers, clawing at the soil, shifted her a little, inadvertently. He heard muted bells in the blood-wet earth.
Tai stood up. A very old woman. Drum, mirrors, bells.
He looked at the heavy cabin door that opened on the yard.
He ran, sunlight overhead, darkness behind him and before.

CHAPTER VI

I
n Xinan, some years later, after he had found Spring Rain among the singing girls in the North District (or, more accurately, once she had noticed and chosen him among the student-scholars) and they had begun to talk frankly when alone, before or after music, before or after love, she asked him one night why he never spoke about his time north of the Wall.
"It didn't last very long," he said.
"I know that. Everyone knows that. That's what makes it talked about."
"It is talked about?"
She shook her golden hair and gave him a look he knew well by then.
I am enamoured of an idiot who will never amount to anything
was, more or less, the import of the glance.
Tai found it amusing, sometimes said so. She found his saying so a cause of more extreme irritation. This, too, amused him, and she knew it.
She was a glory and a wonder, and he worked hard at not thinking about how many men he shared her with in the North District--one, in particular.
"You were permitted to withdraw from the cavalry. With honour and distinction--during a campaign. That doesn't happen, no matter who your father is. Then you go to Stone Drum Mountain, but leave there
not
a Kanlin ... and then you show up in Xinan, having decided to study for the examinations. It is all ... mysterious, Tai."
"I need to clear up the mystery?"
"No!" She put down her
pipa
and, leaning forward, tugged hard at his hair, which he'd left unbound. He pretended to be in pain, she ignored that.
"Don't you see ... being mysterious is
good
. It is a way of being noticed. That is what you want!"
"I do? It is?"
She made to seize his hair again and he lifted his hands to forestall her. She settled back on the couch and poured more rice wine from the flask upon the brazier at her elbow--pouring for him first. Her training and manners were flawless, except when she was attacking him, or when they were making love.
"If you pass the examinations this spring, and you hope for a position that means something--that doesn't leave you sending little begging poems to senior mandarins for their help--yes, it is what you want. You are trying for rank in the palace, Tai. To swim within the current. At this court, you need to know how the game plays or you will be lost."
He had taught her to use his given name. He insisted on it when they were alone.
"If I am lost, will you come find me?"
She glared at him.
He grinned, at ease. "I've been lucky, if you're correct. I've managed to become noticed without even trying. Rain, I just prefer not to discuss that time above the Wall. It isn't a good memory. I never thought about any of the things you are saying."
"You need to think about these things."
"I could let you keep doing it for me?"
She stiffened, shifted. He regretted his words as soon as he'd spoken them.
"I am," Spring Rain said, "a humble singing girl of the North District, hired by the hour or the night, owned by the proprietor of this house. It is inappropriate that one such as I be offered such a role. It is cruel to say so, even in jest. You will need to master these subtleties for yourself. It is your life we are talking about."
"Is it? Just my life?" he asked. Which
was
a little cruel, but her self-description had wounded him--and he knew at least one man who could afford to buy her from the Pavilion of Moonlight, for the impossible sum she'd command, if he chose to do so.
She flushed, a curse of the fair-skinned from the northwest, which was what she was.
She said levelly, after a moment, "If you pass the examinations you will enter among the most ambitious men on earth. You can decide to leave Xinan--leave yet another life--but if you stay here, at court, those are the people you will be among. They will eat you for breakfast, throw your bones to the dogs, and not know they dined."
Her green eyes--her celebrated jade-green eyes--were hard and cold.
He laughed, a little nervously, he remembered. "That's not poetic language."
"No," she said. "But I'm not a poet. Would you prefer a girl who is, Master Shen? There are some downstairs, and in other houses. I can make suggestions, sir."
A revenge, of sorts, for his own remark a moment before. But this
was
about her life, too. Of course it was ...
A woman smooth as jade
Waiting all night above marble stairs
At a rice paper window wet with autumn rain.
Tai shook his head. He remembered looking at her beside him on the low couch, wanting simply to enjoy beauty and intelligence and nearness, but wrestling with what she'd said.
He murmured, "Women have usually been better at this than men, haven't they? Pursuing these subtleties?"
"Women have no choice but to be this way if we want any kind of influence, or simply a little control of our own lives."
"That's what I meant," Tai said. He tried a smile. "Do I get credit for subtlety?"
She didn't respond to the smile. "A child can know that much. You will be, if you ever decide to study enough to pass the examinations, among grown men who use words like blades and are in mortal combat with each other for position every day and night."
And to that he remembered saying, quietly, "Men like my brother, you mean?"
She'd just looked at him.

Sprinting across the autumn grass from the shaman's grave, Tai thought about screaming a warning, then about running around the front to summon the others. He didn't do either. He couldn't have said, after, that he'd been thinking with clarity. This was an utterly remote, terrifying place. He'd unearthed a murder, and he was very young.
Those truths didn't entirely address why he broke into the cabin alone.
When pressed--and he was, by his officers later--he'd say that if they were going to save Meshag, which was their reason for being where they were, it was unlikely to happen if he alerted those inside by shouting, and he didn't think he had enough time to go around the front.
It sounded true. It
was
true, if you considered it. He didn't remember considering anything at the time, however. You could say his instincts had been at work. Tai didn't have any idea if that was so.
His sword was on his saddle, so was his bow. There was a shovel leaning against the back cabin wall. He had a fair guess by then how that had been used.
Without pausing to think, plan, to do anything coherent at all, he seized it, grabbed the door latch, and pushed, with no idea what he'd find, what he would actually do in there.
Or what they were doing, whoever these people were who had killed the shaman, buried her in earth to deny her soul access to the sky, and deceived them out in front.
It wasn't locked, the back door. He stepped inside.
It was dark in the cabin. It had been very bright outdoors, he was nearly blind. He stopped. And just made out the shape of someone turning towards him from within the room.
Tai stepped forward and swung the shovel as hard as he could.
He felt it bite--the sharp spade edge--into flesh, and sink. The figure, still only half seen, threw up an empty hand as if in entreaty or placation, and slumped to the earthen floor.
Soundlessly. Which was good.
Tai had never killed anyone at that point in his life. He didn't have time to consider what had just happened, what it meant, if it meant anything. He blinked rapidly, willing his eyes to adjust to shadow and dark.
Heart pounding, he made out an interior archway, a curtain over it, no actual door. A two-room cabin. He stepped over the fallen man, then--tardily--turned back and exchanged the shovel for the man's sword.
He did kneel and check, cautiously, he was aware enough to do that. The man was dead. Another brief disturbance: how swiftly, smoothly, silently life could be present, pulsing, and then be gone.
That thought pushed him forward, treading lightly, towards the fabric curtain. He shifted a corner of it.
There were candles burning in the other room, for which Tai gave thanks. Three men. Two near the front door, whispering fiercely to each other. Tai saw that the door was barred. They wouldn't have been able to crash in that way. Not without giving a great deal of warning.
Meshag lay on a pallet near the hearth. Tai saw that his tunic had been cut open, exposing his chest. His eyes were still closed. He looked terribly vulnerable. The third figure, tall and bulky, with animal horns attached to his head, was standing over him.
This one wore mirrors and bells and was softly beating a drum and chanting, rocking from side to side, occasionally spinning completely around. A kind of dance. There was a sickly-sweet smell in the room, something burning on a brazier. Tai had no idea what it was.
But he did not believe for a moment that this third man--it was a man, the woman was dead in the garden--was doing anything benevolent for the unconscious figure. They had killed the shaman who dwelled here. They weren't trying to help Meshag.
They hadn't killed him yet. Tai didn't know why. Why should he understand any of this? But, watching through the slightly lifted curtain, breathing carefully, Tai had a disturbing sense that what was happening here was intended to be worse than killing.
He was a long way from home.
That was his last clear thought before he screamed at the top of his voice and exploded through the curtain into the front room.
He went straight for the shaman, not necessarily what an experienced soldier would have done (take out the guards!) but he
wasn't
experienced, and surely his task was to try to stop whatever was being done with drum and chant and gathered powers to the man on the pallet.
He had not yet been on Stone Drum Mountain--his time among the Kanlin was a result of what happened that autumn day in the north--but he was the son of a soldier. He had been trained from earliest memory in ways and means of fighting, the more so since his older brother, soft and slightly plump even as a child, had made clear that his own inclinations and path in life did not involve swords or spinning, twisting manoeuvres against other armed men.
The dead nomad's sword was slightly curved, shorter than Tai's own, heavier as well, meant for downward blows from horseback. No matter. You used what you had. He had time to see the shaman turn, see fevered eyes open wide, blazing surprise and rage, before he struck a slashing blow above the metal mirrors draping the shaman's body, protecting it.
A part of Tai, his bearings lost so far away from everything he'd ever thought he knew, enmeshed in sorcery, was surprised when the sword bit the way it should.
He felt it grind on bone, saw blood, heard the shaman cry out and fall (a sound of bells), dropping drum and mallet on the hard-packed floor. He shouldn't have been startled: they'd killed a shaman woman, hadn't they? These mirror-and-drum people, they were holy and feared, but they weren't immortal.
Of course it was also possible that killing one put a curse on you for life. Not a matter Tai was in a position to address just then.
He wheeled and dropped, fear giving him urgency. He saw the nearer of the guards--the one who'd pretended to be a servant outside--rushing to where a bow lay against a wall. Tai sprang after him, twisting to dodge a knife thrown by the other man. He heard shouts outside.
He screamed again, words this time:
"Treachery! Get in here!"
The false servant scrabbled for his bow, for an arrow, turned, dodging to avoid Tai's thrust sword--or trying to avoid it.
Tai caught him in the shoulder instead of the chest, heard the man shriek in pain. Tai jerked free his blade and--instinctively--dropped and rolled again, careful of the sword he held. He banged against objects scattered on the floor (their offered gifts) but the second enemy's sword sweep whistled over his head.
First time in his life for that sound: the sound of death averted, passing close. He heard thudding outside, and wild cries as his companions tried to get in, pounding against the barred front door.
"Around the back!" he screamed. "It's open!"
But in the same moment he took another chance, hurtling to the door. He flung the heavy wooden bar back. Just in time he dodged again, avoiding a downward slash that bit past him into wood.
He was sent staggering as the door flew open, hitting him in the back, but something--pride and anger and fear interwoven like threads in silk--made him step towards the man left standing. Tai slashed at him, parried a hard return as the others spilled into the room behind him.
"They killed the shaman!" he cried over his shoulder. "She's dead out back! Meshag's over there! Watch the one on the ground! I only wounded him!"
The one on the ground was seized by three men and dragged upright, off the ground, held like a child's doll. He received a bone-splintering blow to the side of his head. They didn't kill him, however. Tai noticed that. And in the same moment he heard one of the Bogu say, "Leave the last one, too. We will use him."
At those words, the man facing Tai abruptly changed his expression. Tai would remember that look, as well. He could sometimes see it when he closed his eyes in years of nights to come.
The man moved back towards the curtain. He reversed his sword, fumbling for the grip with both hands. He was trying to stab himself, Tai realized. But before that could happen, two carefully placed arrows took him one in each shoulder. The sword fell to the ground.
The man screamed then. A terrible sound, beyond any possible pain of his wounds, Tai thought.
A little later he would begin to understand.
HE'D HAVE SCREAMED like that, he found himself thinking on the ride back south (they had left that same evening, unwilling to remain by the lake, needing as much distance from it as possible).
He'd have tried to kill himself, too, if he'd had any idea what was to come before he was allowed to die. And the man had clearly known. In some ways, that was the most horrific thing.
The Kitan cavalry--Tai's own men--had come rushing down the slope when the shouts and screaming had begun, but it was all over within the cabin before they were near enough to do anything.
Tai had walked across the grass to join them when he came out. It had been disorienting, to be back in mild sunshine with so little time having passed. The world could change too swiftly.
The thirty Kitan riders had remained apart, together, to see what the nomads would do. Watching in impassive silence at first, then with increasingly intense, shattering revulsion.
The Bogu began by claiming the body of the old shaman from out back and burning it on a pyre they built between cabin and lake. They did this respectfully, with chants and prayer. She had been defiled by murder and burial under ground, it seemed. She had to be returned to the sky--left in the open to be devoured by wolves and other animals--or she could be consumed by flame and rise with the smoke.
They chose fire, because they were beginning a greater burning. They set the outbuildings alight, and then the cabin itself, but not before they brought out Meshag upon his pallet and laid him down in the yard. They dragged out the two men Tai had killed, the guard and the shaman, and finally they brought forth the two who were still alive. They were drinking by then, the Bogu: there had been
kumiss
in the cabin.
The shaman's bells chimed as they pulled his body across the trampled grass. His mirrors glinted, splintering sunlight. Tai had wondered if he'd transgressed in killing this man. It was not so, he understood now. He had done something, in the nomads' eyes, that marked him as a hero. He was to be honoured, it seemed.
They invited him to join in what was now to follow, with the two dead men and the two left deliberately alive. He declined. Stayed with his men, his own people, from a civilized place.
He was physically sick, wrackingly so, when he saw what came next. What he had been invited to share. Many of the Kitan cavalry became violently ill, stumbling or riding away, retching into the grass.
The empire of Kitai had not been shaped through nine dynasties by a placid, pacifist people. Theirs was a violent, conquering grandeur, built upon slaughter through nearly a thousand years, in their own civil wars, or carrying warfare beyond shifting borders, or defending those borders. Such was their history: fires such as these, or greater burnings by far, blood and blades.
There were texts and teachings as far back as the First Dynasty about the tactical utility of massacre, killing children, mutilation, rape. The useful fear all these could spread in foes, the overcrowding of besieged cities as terrified refugees fled before advancing armies. These things were a part of what men did in warfare, and warfare was a part of what men did in life.
But the Kitan did not roast dead enemies over fires and eat their flesh with invocations to the sky. Or cut off slices from men still living, staked out naked upon the ground, and let them watch, screaming, as their own body parts were consumed, cooked or raw.
There was a great deal of smoke, spilling thickly upwards, hiding the sun. A stench of burning in a once-serene space beside a northern lake. The crackling of several fires, howls (humans, not wolves), ritual chants, and someone's desperate, slowly fading plea for death replaced the sound of birds and wind in leaves. The ugliness of men erasing solitude and autumnal beauty.
It went on for some time.
One of the nomads eventually approached the Kitan where they waited, gentling their nervous horses a distance apart. He was bare-chested, grinning widely, and he was waving the severed forearm of a man. Blood dripped from it, and from his chin.
Unsteady on his feet, he extended the human flesh towards Tai, as to a hero worthy to partake of this great bounty. Giving the Kitan, the stranger, one more chance.
He took an arrow in the chest as he stood before them. He died instantly.
Tai could not, for a moment, believe what had happened. It was
entirely
wrong, shockingly so. He stood in numbed disbelief. Which was, however brief, too long an interval for a commander of men in a place such as this one had become.
His soldiers, as if released by that single arrow to their own demons, their frenzied response to the horror they were being made to witness, mounted up suddenly, all of them, with smooth, trained efficiency, as if an order had been given.
Seizing bows and swords from saddles, they swept forward--avenging spirits, in and of themselves--into the fires and smoke, infused with a clawing fury, with the sense that this hideous savagery could only be expunged, erased, with savagery of their own.
This understanding of events came to Tai only afterwards. He wasn't thinking clearly at the time.
His cavalry knifed into and among the outnumbered, on-foot, drunk-on-
kumiss
nomads, the stumbling, blood-soaked men they'd come north to aid--and they slaughtered them between the fires.
And when it was done, when none of the Bogu were left alive amid the black smoke and the red burning, the blurred sun setting west now, the lake a dark, cold blue, the next thing happened.
Meshag, son of Hurok, stood up.
He looked around the unholy scene created by men in that place. He had been a graceful man. He wasn't any more. He had changed, had
been
changed. He moved awkwardly now, as if oddly jointed, had to shift his whole body to turn his gaze, moving stiffly through a full circle. Black smoke drifted between him and where Tai stood rooted to the ground with a gaping horror. He was seeing this, and refusing to believe what he saw.
Meshag stared towards the Kitan riders for a long moment. The last men alive here. Then, shifting his shoulders as if trying to throw back his head, he laughed. A low, distorted sound.
He had not moved or opened his eyes since falling unconscious by another fire to the south weeks before.
It was not his remembered laughter. The way he stood and moved was appallingly different, this shambling, slack-limbed, unnatural posture. The Kitan soldiers, in an alien place among burning and the dead, stopped wheeling their horses about, stopped shouting. They clustered together, close to Tai again as if for protection, keeping their distance from Meshag.