Fox-spirits’ sky must have many gods, thought her mistress. Had these shape-changers, indeed, a god to whom they prayed? “Well and enough that they did not attack tonight. Your guards were watchful and loyal to you. Others ... I marked one or two. But we can expect bandits along the road: perhaps attack will come today as we go; perhaps not.
“But, Elder Sister, be warned. If we camp outside a town tonight, we must look well to ourselves. This band is strong, and very angry. Many of them are farmers thrust from their lands when they could not pay taxes to bandits of officials, who grasp all in the Emperor’s name.”
“Then it is wrongs which have reduced them to this,” observed Silver Snow.
Willow shook her head. Her eyes were bright and angry. “One of them gave me this, I think, for no other reason than as I walked by, I disturbed his thoughts. Wronged, perhaps they have been, but they themselves have committed greater wrongs since then. Mistress, I tell you, we must look to ourselves lest they put hands on us! Watch for bay horses. I heard bay horses mentioned among them!”
4
Silver Snow had little sleep in that last hour before dawn, when the unwieldy train creaked onto the road to Ch’ang-an. Though several times before she had slept comfortably enough in the cart, wedged with quilts and cushions against its lurching, today she did not surrender to any rest. For which of the outriders were Willow’s spies? A number were mounted on bay horses. From where the cart was situated in the line of march, it was impossible for her to tell how many were, or even if Willow had indeed discovered them among the guards.
Also, her maid was listless, almost feverish, too weak for her usual sharp-tongued chaffering with their driver, which, in the past, had brought them scraps of news. Willow dozed or tossed, though she firmly refused to let Silver Snow examine her wounds again.
Thus the day was an ordeal, a test of Silver Snow’s composure and li, or propriety. She must sit calmly in her cart, not crane her neck like an unpledged peasant maid to stare through her private peephole and make sure her soldiers followed closely, their bows strung taut as she had ordered the night before. Nor was she about to demand of this haughty official extra guards and reassurances that he could not, in all truth, give, even to a woman as valuable as a candidate for Imperial Concubine.
Each jolting length the cart traveled became an ordeal, each cloud shadowed a possible massing of Red Brows. The clatter of a peasant’s mattock on frozen field sounded like the first swordstroke of battle. A creak of branch, or a bough snapping from a winter-killed tree, sounded attack signals to her overwrought mind. Yet Silver Snow dared not complain to the official, who would wonder at what she knew and how she had gained that knowledge. His own file of guards was large. She herself, despite her possible future rank, rode less straitly guarded.
Silver Snow kept her hands passively folded in her sleeves. Underneath her outer robe lay dagger and arrows; her bow waited for her, strung, barely concealed by spare cushions. She came tensely to full alert each time they swept past peasants trudging on the road. Who knew whether or not those figures muffled in patches of rag upon rag might not actually be scouts, swords and bows near to hand? Once again she attempted a study of each rider within her range of sight who bestrode a bay horse. Was he the spy? Her fingers slid back and forth across the hilt of the sharp little dagger that she had tucked within her sash.
Slowly, the day wore on, a day of drab skies, and sullen, spitting snow. Rather than shadows here and there, a general haze misted sight. As the afternoon gave way to evening, the sky began to lighten, even to assume a faint imperial vermilion tinge at the western horizon toward which they journeyed. Even the heavy cloud cover began to dissipate, allowing the limited light to send long shadows from man, from horse, from cart across the ice-bound fields.
Willow roused and pulled herself up to find her own spy place behind the driver. She drew a gasping breath that brought Silver Snow to her side. The beggars just ahead, two or three of them, one missing a leg. Armed only with the staves they needed for balance on the treacherous icy road, they squatted by its side to allow the cortege to pass, looking miserably cold. As the official’s own elaborate carriage passed, they held out their cracked palms beseechingly The carriage ground to a laborious halt at the imperious command of one of the official’s outriders.
“Why do you stop?” came a cry, which carried to a distance through the icy air.
“Is charity not a virtue, lord?” The insolence of that must have rendered the official dumb, for he made no answer. Two guards dismounted and walked toward the crouching beggars, leading their horses. Their bay horses.
Silver Snow tensed. The order in which the caravan had stopped brought her own cart to face the beggars. Beside her, Willow hissed. Her hands clenched and unclenched as if she possessed claws in her human, as well as in her animal, guise.
Silver Snow saw those green eyes mirrored her own suspicions and mounting fear. She nodded. Willow took a deep breath to utter a sharp, yapping cry. With the craft of the fox-people, she threw her voice so that the outcry seemed to echo from behind the beggars and those guards who tossed them strings of cash.
Pure shock jolted one of the guards upright. Then Willow yapped again, and from the nearest patch of underbrush burst two foxes, who ran toward the beggars, hurling themselves against the hunched men. Even from where she was, Silver Snow could see that the animals’ eyes were glazed. Their fur roughened in near panic at what Willow had commanded of them, action that violated their every protective instinct.
“Oh, the brave ones. The brave ones!” Silver Snow cried. She dragged the curtain hastily aside and leaned out of her cart to see that her own escort had formed up a wall between the cart and the clamor of the struggle.
“My friends,” murmured Willow, and uttered a series of barks that, even to Silver Snow’s dull human ears, sounded like praise and encouragement. The foxes looked once to the cart, gave tongue sharply, and were gone before any of the cursing men could move.
One of the beggars, he who had first been thrown off balance by the foxes’ sudden onslaught, strove to lever himself up from the ground. His dirty rag of a cap was lost beneath a headscarf coming askew now ... to expose eyebrows dyed a vivid crimson. Their unnatural color made his eyes gleam as if filled with fire, rather than mere greed and the lust for violence and who knew what—or whom—else.
Silver Snow drew a deep breath. Time for her to act, even though she disliked that she must still enact the defenseless woman. Throwing back her head, she screamed, impressed at the shrill note of terror that she managed to put into her outcry.
Instantly her guard acted. The archers among them formed up on the wings. Ao Li, his voice rusty from years of bellowing commands on the steppe, cried the alarm. “Beware! Bandits, spies! Spearsmen, to me!”
That brought the official’s escort toward him at a run— or a gallop. Unfortunately, it also seemed that from every available patch of cover, from every ditch or from behind every tree, appeared more men in the guise of beggars, their headgear pushed back to reveal eyebrows stained like bloody gashes across their brows. Each of them had both a staff and dagger; many also possessed spears, bows, and swords. Those who came up now in answer to a shrill whistle rode bay horses.
Silver Snow had read of battles, but she had never thought to see one. I his melee across ice and blood-slicked snow bore no resemblance to the orderly massings and dispersals of troops as described in the scrolls written by General Sun Tzu. Even in the cold, the smells of blood and death shocked her. This was as much worse than a hunt as a forest fire was worse than a hearthfire.