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 bloodwet 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.
In 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.”