A spasm of trembling shook her. For a disgraceful moment, she thought that she might be sick. It would be a terrible, inauspicious moment for such illness. A quick, sharp pinch from Willow’s hand as she aided Silver Snow back to her feet startled her, and she looked up to learn the reason for this attack.
She shut her eyes in momentary exasperation to wish, for the first time in a healthy life, that she had the power to sink into a faint whenever she chose. For only such weakness, she feared, would let her escape confronting the official, his bulky, luxurious robes now sweated and bloodstained, as he puffed and nodded a ceremonious way toward her.
Here she stood, sweaty, shaken, with her father’s troops about her. She was as bare of face as a peasant wench, nor had she scrupled to look upon battles and wounds, or close a dead man’s eyes. At least, she thought somewhat wildly, her bow was safely hidden beneath cushions. Quickly she flung the veil about her.
Had she not regained control of herself, she might have moaned, however, at the official’s first words.
“The lady”—he bowed, as did she, even more deeply—“is a warrior of no mean prowess.”
She contrived, somehow, despite the scarlet painting her cheeks, to look confused. “Ao Li”—she looked down sadly at the dead man—“was one of this worthless one’s father’s most faithful companions.”
“Who has been worthily avenged.” The official waved to two of his own guards and gave swift, welcome orders that they should help set Ao Li’s body in order. Silver Snow fell to her knees.
“This one begs the most noble lord that the worthy Ao Li be returned to her father’s lands, where he may lie in familiar ground,” she whispered, her head down, her tears falling now that the immediate horror of the battle—and the stern composure that had let her know how best to act during it—had ebbed.
“Rise, rise,” insisted the magistrate, waving one well-kept hand, stained now and blistered from his own work with sword and bow. “Let it be done as you wish, lady. But it will mean that you arrive in Ch’ang-an with fewer than your proper guard.”
Silver Snow rose, this time not waiting for Willow’s assistance. “What difference should that make?” she demanded, dropping formal speech and daring to look the man in his astonished black eyes. “Ao Li shall rest in his own place, fitly mourned by his sons and his friends. Compared with that, whether my guard numbers three or thirty is of no matter . . .
my most noble lord,” she added, a guilty instant later after a hiss from Willow.
“You understand a soldier’s loyalty well,” said the official. “I heard you give the order—nay, do not wave your hand at me and look as if you would say it is not so—to let some bandits escape. I would know why.”
Silver Snow looked downward in the direction of the besmirched tips of her felt boots, saw an impatient tapping of one of the official’s boots, and knew that she must answer.
“Death country,” she said, employing the die-away whisper that her nurse had tried to make her use whenever she replied to men. “Their leader was gone. Without him, they are a fowl from which the head has been twisted. It may jump about for a moment longer, but its death has been ordained. Yet, if one would restrain them, they might have fought as one does who knows himself already doomed. Or,” she added hastily, “thus my father once said.”
“And you listen to your father, even when he quotes Sun *Tzu,” the official said.
“It is this one’s duty and her honor to listen if her father deigns to speak.”
“Did he also teach you to draw a bow?” asked the official. Silver Snow again cast down her eyes, realizing how strong a defense the conventional trappings of maidenly shyness might be. “I see that you wear a knife ...”
Once again, she met his eyes, this time without deliberation. “I am the daughter of a marquis, however disgraced. Thus, may it please the Ancestors, I am perhaps to be concubine to the Son of Heaven. How should I then continue to exist should I be besmirched by such as those?”
“Lady, lady,” interrupted the official, “though it be treason to whisper this, you will be wasted in the Palace, where there are ladies perhaps almost as lovely but far more richly adorned and skilled in the art of dissembling than you. If it were left to me . . . lady,” he almost stammered in his eagerness to lay his plan before her, “I have an eldest son, a fine young man. Let me be his go-between ...”
Silver Snow flushed again, this time with true anger. The man had forgotten not just fear but honor in his search for a proper bride for his son. Did he think that, because she was the daughter of a man judged to be a traitor, he could address her thus?
“I am promised—I and my father’s honor with me—to the Palace; and to the Palace I shall go! These words do neither of us proper honor, my lord.”
She turned and began to climb back into her cart.
“Lady, you shame me,” the official called after her. “You are right. But, lady, a word of advice about propriety, from that same Confucius who is, no doubt, its author. When one finds himself in a foreign civilization, one adapts to foreign customs.”
She turned, still angry, and countered his quotation with one of her own. “One’s genuine personal nature is self-sufficient. ”
“But how few people can maintain that for a long time!” the official capped her statement. His own cap, one of its starched black wings almost hacked off, all but bobbed in his zeal and, Silver Snow realized, his pleasure! Thus her father had looked once, the first time she proved to be a not-unworthy opponent in chess.
“When one develops his nature most fully, he finds that the principles of fidelity and mutuality are not something apart from his nature,” he quoted. “We know that is true, and we venerate the sage who first wrote it. But I say to you, lady, beware! You may not always meet men who are honorable, who study and respect the classics and the way of life they teach. And such meetings can test to breaking whether you can maintain your composure in adversity as well as you have done this day in battle. I would have been honored to have you as a daughter-in-law, an honorable and valued addition to the family and its estate. Better thus, than as an idle court ornament.”
Once again, Silver Snow shook her head. “Your words shame us both, you for speaking them; I for listening.”
The official nodded, understanding. “I wish I could say that I would also be glad to have you as a well-wisher at court; but I do not expect you to prosper if you will not bend.” Silver Snow bowed, folded her hands into her sleeves, and, this time, she waited for permission to withdraw. The man, his lips thinned and twisted as if he chewed on some unpalatable food, waved his hand to dismiss her to the refuge of her cart. Moments later, she could hear him shouting angrily at the soldiers.
5
Ahead of the cortege of chariots, carts, horses, and soldiers, some still limping from their encounter with the Red Brows bandits, towered the immense bulwark of Ch’ang-an’s eastern wall. It ran in a straight, splendid line from north to the south, which marked the domain of the Yang and the Sun’s zenith as it soared through the heavens. Silver Snow peered out at the city as her cart maneuvered for place, in company not only with her own party now, but with the thousands of others who thronged into the capital. For the first time since she had started this journey, she was thankful for the heavy curtains that enclosed her. If they left her riding in a constant twilight and prevented her from freely breathing fresh air, at least they protected her father’s daughter from prying eyes as she stared —or tried to stare —at the wonders now rising before her.
Like the Wall that loomed near the home that Silver Snow had resigned herself never to see again, Ch’ang-an’s defenses were wrought of rammed earth and bricks. But that was where the resemblance ended. The Wall at the northern border was old, mounding over in some places: a drowsy dragon covered, as it slept, by snow. Ch’ang-an’s defenses, however, were veritable imperial dragons in comparison, bright with ornament, bearing armed watchmen who peered jealously over each of the three gates that pierced the thick, sloping wall.