ground where Taguran soldiers had fought and died?
Bytsan wasn’t able to do that. A softness of his own, perhaps. It might even affect his career. Although what defined military promotion these days—with warfare limited to occasional skirmishes—was more about whom you knew in higher ranks, had gotten drunk with once or twice, or had allowed to seduce you when you were too young to know better, or could pretend as much.
In order to be judged on courage, on how you fought, there had to be fighting, didn’t there?
Peacetime was good for Tagur, for borders and trade and roads and raising new temples, for harvests and full granaries and seeing sons grow up instead of learning they were lying in mounds of corpses, as here by Kuala Nor.
But that same peace played havoc with an ambitious soldier’s hopes of using courage and initiative as his methods of advancement.
Not that he was going to talk about that with a Kitan. There were limits: inward borders in addition to the ones with fortresses defending them.
But if he was going to be honest about it, the court in Rygyal knew his name now, as well, because of this Shen Tai, this unprepossessing figure with the courteous voice and the deep-set eyes.
Bytsan stole an appraising glance. The Kitan couldn’t be called a soft city-scholar any more: two years of punishing labour in a mountain meadow had dealt with that. He was lean and hard, his skin weathered, hands scratched and callused. And Bytsan knew the man had been a soldier for a time. It had occurred to him—more than a year ago—that this one might even know how to fight. There were two swords in his cabin.
It didn’t matter. The Kitan would be leaving soon, his life entirely changed by the letter he was holding.
Bytsan’s life as well. He was to be given leave from his post when this Kitan left for home. He was reassigned to Dosmad Fortress, south and east, on the border, with the sole and specific responsibility—in the name of the Princess Cheng-wan—of implementing his own suggestion regarding her gift.
Initiative, he had decided, could involve more than leading a flanking attack in a cavalry fight. There were other sorts of flanking manoeuvres: the kind that might even get you out of a backwater fort in a mountain pass above a hundred thousand ghosts.
That last was another thing he didn’t like, and this he’d even admitted to the Kitan once: the ghosts terrified him as much as they did every soldier who came with him bringing the wagon and supplies.
Shen Tai had been quick to say that his own people from Iron Gate Pass were exactly the same: stopping for the night safely east of here when they came up the valley, timing their arrival for late morning just as Bytsan did, working hastily to unload his supplies and do whatever tasks they’d assigned themselves—and then gone. Gone from the lake and the white bones before darkfall, even in winter when night came swiftly. Even in a snowstorm once, Shen Tai had said. Refusing shelter in his cabin.
Bytsan had done that, too. Better ice and snow in a mountain pass than the howling presence of the bitter, unburied dead who could poison your soul, blight the life of any child you fathered, drive you mad.
The Kitan beside him didn’t appear to be a madman, but that was the prevailing explanation among Bytsan’s soldiers at the fort. Probably at Iron Gate, too. Something two outpost armies could agree upon? Or was that just an easy way of dealing with someone being more courageous than you were?
You could fight him to test that, of course. Gnam wanted to, had been spoiling for it even before they’d come down from the pass. Bytsan had briefly harboured the unworthy thought that he’d like to see that challenge. Only briefly: if the Kitan died, there went his own flanking move away from here.
Shen Tai put his absurd hat back on as Bytsan told him what they were going to do in an effort to keep him alive long enough to get to Xinan and decide how to deal with his horses.
Because the man was right—of course he was right—he’d be killed ten times over for that many Sardian horses if he simply tried to herd them back east openly.
It was an absurd, wildly extravagant gift, but being absurd and extravagant was the privilege of royalty, wasn’t it?
He thought about saying that to the other man, but refrained. He wasn’t sure why, but it might have been that Shen Tai really did look shaken, rereading the scroll again, visibly unsettled for the first time since Bytsan had been coming here.
They walked back to the cabin. Bytsan supervised the unpacking and storing of supplies—metal chests and tight wooden boxes for the food, to defeat the rats. He made another joke about wine and the long evenings. Gnam and Adar had begun stacking firewood, against the cabin wall. Gnam worked fiercely, sweating in his unnecessary armour, channelling fury—which was perfectly all right with his captain. Anger in a soldier could be used.
It was soon enough done, the sun still high, just starting west. Summer’s approach made the run down to the lake easier in obvious ways. Bytsan lingered long enough for a cup of wine (warmed in the Kitan fashion) with Shen Tai, then bade him a brisk farewell. The soldiers were already restless. The other man was still distracted, uneasy. It showed, behind the eternal mask of courtesy.
Bytsan could hardly blame him.
Two hundred and fifty horses, the White Jade Princess had decreed. The sort of overwrought conceit only someone living in a palace all her life could devise. The king had approved it, however.
It was never wise, Bytsan had decided on his way here from the fort, to underestimate the influence of women at a court.
He’d considered saying that, too, over the cup of wine, but had elected not to.
There would be one last supply trip in a month’s time, then life would change for both of them. They might never see each other again. Probably would not. Better not to do anything so foolish as confide in the other man, or acknowledge more than curiosity and a rationed measure of respect.
The cart was lighter on the way back, of course, the bullock quicker heading home. So were the soldiers, putting the lake and the dead behind them.
Three of his men started a song as they left the meadow and began to wind their way up. Bytsan paused in the afternoon light at the switchback where he always did, and looked down. You might call Kuala Nor beautiful in late spring—if you knew nothing about it.
His gaze swept across the blue water to the nesting birds—an absurd number of them. You could fire an arrow in the air over that way and kill three with one shot. If the arrow had room to fall. He allowed himself a smile. He was glad to be leaving, too, no denying it.
He looked across the meadow bowl, north towards the far, framing mountains, range beyond range. The tale of his people was that blue-faced demons, gigantic and malevolent, had dwelled in those distant peaks from the beginning of the world and had only been barred from the Tagur plateau by the gods, who had thrown up other mountains against them, wrapped in magic. The range they were re-entering now, where their small fortress sat, was one of these.
The gods themselves, dazzling and violent, lived much farther south, beyond Rygyal, above the transcendent peaks that touched the foothills of heaven, and no man had ever climbed them.
Bytsan’s gaze fell upon the burial mounds across the lake, on the far side of the meadow. They lay against the pine woods, west of the Kitan’s cabin, three long rows of them now, two years’ worth of bonegraves in hard ground.
Shen Tai was digging already, he saw, working beyond the last of them in the third row. He hadn’t waited for the Tagurans to leave the meadow. Bytsan watched him, small in the distance: bend and shovel, bend and shovel.
He looked at the cabin set against that same northern slope, saw the pen they’d built for the two goats, the freshly stacked firewood against one wall. He finished his sweep by turning east, to the valley through which this strange, solitary Kitan had come to Kuala Nor, and along which he would return.
“Something’s moving there,” Gnam said beside him, looking the same way. He pointed. Bytsan stared,