at the mountains ranged and piled around them, rising up and farther up, the blue lake ringed in majesty. In the teachings of the Path, mountains meant compassion, water was wisdom. The peaks didn’t alter, Tai thought.
What men did beneath their gaze could change more swiftly than one could ever hope to understand.
He said it. “I don’t understand.”
Bytsan made no reply. Tai looked down at the letter and read the name at the bottom again.
One person there, with permission.
One person. The White Jade Princess Cheng-wan: seventeenth daughter of the revered and exalted Emperor Taizu. Sent west to a foreign land twenty years ago from her own bright, glittering world. Sent with her pipa and flute, a handful of attendants and escorts, and a Taguran honour guard, to become the first imperial bride ever granted by Kitai to Tagur, to be one of the wives of Sangrama the Lion, in his high, holy city of Rygyal.
She had been part of the treaty that followed the last campaign here at Kuala Nor. An emblem in her young person (she’d been fourteen that year) of how savage—and inconclusive—the fighting had been, and how important it was that it end. A slender, graceful token of peace enduring between two empires. As if it would endure, as if it ever had, as if one girl’s body and life could ensure such a thing.
There had been a fall of poems like flower petals in Kitai that autumn, pitying her in parallel lines and rhyme: married to a distant horizon, fallen from heaven, lost to the civilized world (of parallel lines and rhyme) beyond snowbound mountain barriers, among barbarians on their harsh plateau.
It had been the literary fashion for that time, an easy theme, until one poet was arrested and beaten with the heavy rod in the square before the palace—and nearly died of it—for a verse suggesting this was not only lamentable, but a wrong done to her.
You didn’t say that.
Sorrow was one thing—polite, cultured regret for a young life changing as she left the glory of the world—but you never offered the view that anything the Ta-Ming Palace did, ever, might be mistaken. That was a denial of the rightly fulfilled, fully compassed mandate of heaven. Princesses were coinage in the world, what else could they be? How else serve the empire, justify their birth?
Tai was still staring at the words on the pale-yellow paper, struggling to bring spiralling thoughts to what one might call order. Bytsan was quiet, allowing him to deal with this, or try.
You gave a man one of the Sardian horses to reward him greatly. You gave him four or five of those glories to exalt him above his fellows, propel him towards rank—and earn him the jealousy, possibly mortal, of those who rode the smaller horses of the steppes.
The Princess Cheng-wan, a royal consort of Tagur now through twenty years of peace, had just bestowed upon him, with permission, two hundred and fifty of the dragon horses.
That was the number. Tai read it one more time.
It was in the scroll he held, recorded in Kitan, in a Taguran scribe’s thin but careful calligraphy. Two hundred and fifty Heavenly Horses. Given him in his own right, and to no one else. Not a gift for the Ta-Ming Palace, the emperor. Not that. Presented to Shen Tai, second son of the General Shen Gao, once Left Side Commander of the Pacified West.
His own, to use or dispose of as he judged best, the letter read, in royal recognition from Rygyal of courage and piety, and honour done the dead of Kuala Nor.
“You know what this says?” His own voice sounded odd to Tai.
The captain nodded.
“They will kill me for these,” Tai said. “They will tear me apart to claim those horses before I get near the court.”
“I know,” said Bytsan calmly.
Tai looked at him. The other man’s dark-brown eyes were impossible to read. “You know?”
“Well, it seems likely enough. It is a large gift.”
A large gift.
Tai laughed, a little breathlessly. He shook his head in disbelief. “In the name of all nine heavens, I can’t just ride through Iron Gate Pass with two hundred and fifty—”
“I know,” the Taguran interrupted. “I know you can’t. I made some suggestions when they told me what they wished to do.”
“You did?”
Bytsan nodded. “Hardly a gift if you’re…accidentally killed on the way east and the horses are dispersed, or claimed by someone else.”
“No, it isn’t, is it? Hardly a gift!” Tai heard his voice rising. Such a simple life he’d been living, until moments ago. “And the Ta-Ming was a brawl of factions when I left. I am sure it is worse now!”
“I am sure you are right.”
“Oh? Really? What do you know about it?” The other man, he decided, seemed irritatingly at ease.
Bytsan gave him a glance. “Little enough, in the small fort I am honoured to command for my king. I was only agreeing with you.” He paused. “Do you want to hear what I suggested, or not?”
Tai looked down. He felt embarrassed. He nodded his head. For no reason he knew, he took off his straw hat, standing in the high, bright sun. The axes continued in the distance.
Bytsan told him what he’d written to his own court, and what had been decreed in response to that. It seemed to have cost the other man his position at the fortress in the pass above, in order to implement his own proposal. Tai didn’t know if that meant a promotion or not.
It might, Tai understood, keep him alive. For a time, at least. He cleared his throat, trying to think what to say.
“You realize,” Bytsan spoke with a pride he could not conceal, “that this is Sangrama’s gift. The king’s generosity. Our Kitan princess might have asked him for it, it is her name on that letter, but it is the Lion who sends you this.”
Tai looked at him. He said, quietly, “I understand. It is an honour that the Lion of Rygyal even knows my name.”
Bytsan flushed. After the briefest hesitation, he bowed.
Two hundred and fifty Sardian horses, Tai was thinking, from within the sandstorm of his forever-altered life. Being brought by him to a court, an empire, that gloried in every single dragon steed that had ever reached them from the west. That dreamed of those horses with so fierce a longing, shaping porcelain and jade and ivory in their image, linking poets’ words to the thunder of mythic hooves.
The world could bring you poison in a jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn’t know which of them it was.
Bytsan sri Nespo was furious with himself, to the point of humiliation. He knew what his father would have said, and in what tone, had he witnessed this shame.
He had just bowed—far too deferentially—when the Kitan, having removed his stupid hat for some reason, said he was honoured that the Lion knew his name in Rygyal, so far away in glory.
But it was a gracious thing to say, and Bytsan had found himself bowing, hand wrapped around fist in their fashion (not that of his own people), before he was able to stop himself. Perhaps it had been the hat, after all, the deliberate self-exposure of that gesture.
The Kitan could do such things to you, or this one could.
Just when you’d decided, one more time, that they were all about their centre-of-the-world arrogance, they could say and do something like this from within the breeding and courtesy they donned like a cloak—while clutching a completely ridiculous straw hat.
What did you do when that happened? Ignore