Before Silver Snow could stop herself, she reached for the slit that she had made in the curtains of the ox-cart. She had heard much of the gates of Ch’ang-an. Each gate had three separate entrances; each entrance could admit three carts at once. She fancied that even beneath the shaking and lurching of the ox-cart, she could feel the earth tremble as so many carts and horses converged upon one place. Not just thousands of households made up Ch’ang-an, but tens of thousands. Silver Snow had never even thought of so many people, all of them crammed behind the city’s immensely thick barriers. In this hour, laborers shouted and pounded on the walls; their voices reached her from a distance. Uncouth accents of men rounded up from the farthest corners of the Middle Kingdom vied with speech that she knew well.
As her fingers touched the shabby cloth, the lady behind her coughed faintly in reminder and reproof.
“Forgive me, Elder Sister,” said Silver Snow, bowing her head in feigned contrition and true shame, for Lady Lilac, the go-between who had finally rejoined Silver Snow’s wedding procession—such as it was—not two days outside the city, was a woman she could neither respect nor trust. She tucked her hand within her sleeves, lest the lady seize upon its cal-lused, short-nailed appearance for yet another lecture about Silver Snow’s lamentable unworthiness for life in the Palace.
At least her voice was soft and true, and her words appropriately quick and humble! Lilac nodded, a quick, barely perceptible lift of the fur-trimmed hood so bewitchingly framing a face that, though not now in its first youth, had the plump, delicate prettiness that Silver Snow knew that she lacked. Her eyebrows were plucked to mothlike delicacy, and the mouth that smiled grudgingly, as if she had nibbled on a spoiled fruit, yet did not wish to seem rude, had the round fullness of a winter plum, though its smile, like a plum too long preserved, was too sweet to be wholesome. She coughed again, as if to prove that she still suffered from the remnants of the lamentable illness that had compelled her to leave the official’s party at the first suitable magistrate’s estate, sick almost unto death with a cough that racked her, a fever that leeched youth from her face, and shivers that made her teeth chatter in a shockingly unladylike manner. No, even if she had the strength to take this daughter of a disgraced provincial in hand, Lilac would not dream of reproving the girl whom Mao Yeng-shou, the thrice-worthy Chief Eunuch, had dispatched her to guide and guard on her way to Ch’ang-an from whatever barbarous hut in which she had been kenneled. She was only desolate that she could not have tutored Silver Snow all the way back to Ch’ang-an; for, the Ancestors knew, the girl desperately needed training were she to be anything but a laughingstock amidst the refinement and grace of the ladies who, by right, lived within the Ninefold Gates.
Silver Snow lowered her eyes again, and suppressed a sigh. She had come all this way to see Ch’ang-an’s splendid walls; and now it seemed that she would be within them, immured within the Palace itself, and would never have a chance to view them as fully as she would wish. At least, though, she no longer tried to dart a glance of amusement back at Willow. Such sharings were too dangerous for the maidservant. When Silver Snow had first been presented to Lady Lilac in the inner courts of a very grand magistrate indeed, with a great deal of bowing and sleeve-waving of the most decorous type, Lilac had seen Willow in the shadows and had recoiled with horror that, to Silver Snow’s own fear, was only half exaggerated.
For once, perhaps, Silver Snow thought with an irony wholly new to her, the older woman’s reaction had not been feigned. She shrank back, appalled, then turned her gesture into a delicate, dry cough, a reminder of how ill she had been. That cough, as far as Silver Snow could perceive, had been the only trace of illness about her. When she first heard it, Silver Snow had made the mistake of bowing again and, before she had been spoken to, blurting out how much of herbal lore her maid knew. Surely, she suggested, Willow could brew a tisane to ease that cough.
Lady Lilac had glared at the very idea, and Silver Snow had realized that her new go-between was one of the sort of lady who uses illness as an excuse for avoiding a task she loathed—in this case, conveying Silver Snow south to Ch’ang-an. And in an ox-cart! Beyond lamenting that propriety would not permit her to ride, Silver Snow had thought little of its disadvantages as a method of traveling. But Lady Lilac Silk had turned that very unconsciousness into yet another fault: Silver Snow should have swooned until she was presented with a carriage, its wheels wrapped in felt, its windows hung with the finest brocade (and most probably brocade far finer than any robe among her meager store of garments).
Lilac had had, of course, no intention of making the arduous journey north. She had been unable to refuse the command of the Chief Eunuch. Very well, however: it was not her fault that sickness compelled her to drop out of the cortege into the luxurious idleness of the magistrate’s home where she reveled in the attention lavished upon her, as if she had been the illustrious Concubine herself rather than, in her prime, merely a lady of the fourth rank at whom, once or twice, the Emperor had smiled.
She had glared at Willow, before, obviously, dismissing her from the ranks not just of those who mattered, but of humankind. Just as obviously, Silver Snow soon realized, her cough was as false as the smile that she produced, or the affected cries of horror with which she greeted the bow calluses across Silver Snow’s right palm or any other evidence of the total unworthiness of the northern girl for the elevated station to which she was called.
Not, of course, that the Emperor would choose to dignify with his notice a girl whose family was under such a cloud, oh my no! Especially not one as plain of speech, as scant of courtesy, as mannish and as ugly as she made Silver Snow feel. Though Lilac professed never to listen to the gossip of servants or soldiers, in actual fact, she eavesdropped avidly; thus, she had heard of Silver Snow’s battle with the bandits, and she professed horror that any aspirant to the imperial bed could so demean herself.
What would become of Willow if Lilac refused to let the maid accompany her mistress? Silver Snow had no illusions that this far from her father’s estates, Willow could be conveyed back North: no, it would be the poison, the noose, or the slave-market for the faithful maidservant; or worse than death if her secret was discovered, try as Lilac might to pry out what made this odiously self-sufficient northern candidate for the imperial favor and her maid with the ineptly dyed hair and odious limp so very strange.
Silver Snow had tried to placate the elder woman. As might a recruit facing a vastly more experienced adversary, she had opened her arsenal, had recalled and sought to employ each of the tricks that she had seen used in the various inner courts in which she had guested on her way to Ch’ang-an, the die-away whispers, the smiles, the lowered eyes, the professions of utter and abject obedience, even the horror at dirt or cold or any kind of inconvenience. Contemptibly lazy and remiss in her duty Lilac might be, but she was no fool, to be quickly taken in by the mask Silver Snow tried to don. A country girl’s native wits were no match for a court lady’s skill in ruse and falsehood.
Though Silver Snow’s attempts to alter her behavior warmed her go-between not at all, at least they allowed Willow to slink back into shadows, and they enabled Silver Snow to ride in the cart with her sighing, reluctant guardian in at least the semblance of peace.