“We ride!” The way Silver Snow’s clear voice carried shocked her, as she turned her back on the Wall, leaving behind the bloodstained snow on which, so briefly, the trophies of her hunt had rested.
This day, Silver Snow and her guards had ridden far in search of game. Even as she pressed her horse for greater speed, she reproached herself. If a messenger from the Son of Heaven guested in her home, she, as lady there, should have been present to ensure that all was done as best as possible to honor the Emperor’s man and to demonstrate that, Northerners though they might be, they served the Dragon Throne with loyal hearts.
If, however, she had remained ever dutifully at home, she thought, the official from Ch’ang-an might have had to dine off scraps. It was well that their hunt had been successful; the few aging women left in the inner courts would be able to prepare a feast that might not be too unworthy of his tasting.
Who knew, she thought with another quick jolt of alarm, what guards such a southern lord might have dispatched on his own orders? Even now such men might be watching her. She had been scanning the land about her for enemies, but now she cast down her eyes. With a guest from the capital at her father’s estate, she must remember to observe all the proprieties, even this far from her home.
A watcher, she knew, might ascribe such a withdrawal to the most decorous modesty, appropriate to an unwed maid. What words would either her Ancestors or the Book of Rites use to describe a maid who flouted proper conduct and even endangered virginity itself to ride out with a bow and hunt like a wild boy? Though the hardships of her life had made her break with customs, she knew she had much to answer for. But the Ancestors might frown at her reply, she told herself in an unusually rebellious, therefore candid, instant.
This unseen, unknown official might dare to criticize; however, thanks to her, he would eat tonight: and—what was far more to her liking—so would her father, her household, and these her outriders, whose saddles and horses’ flanks all bore the bloody traces of successful hunting; that thereby the Ancestors would continue to be honored.
Those would not be so served by Silver Snow herself. As a daughter, she might not burn incense and paper images at their shrine to summon their august attention. They might only be attended by her father himself, too crippled now by years in the saddle and old wounds to ride out to hunt; but liale enough to teach his surviving child to take up the bow in his stead, to play chess, and to think and want to act in a manner that she knew full well that Master Confucius—much as she and her father venerated his Li Chi , or Book of Rites, and his Analects in all other ways—would not have at all approved.
Indeed, Chao Kuang’s First Wife had chosen to hang herself rather than live, shamed and degraded after it was decreed that the general was general and marquis no longer. Her sons, Silver Snow’s thrice-honored brothers, had ridden out to die in battle against Khujanga, shan-yu of the western hosts. Autumn Smoke, the second wife, and heavy with child when the news of her lord’s capture and seeming defection had come from Ch’ang-an with the decree of their disgrace, had remained alive in the hope of bearing a son whose piety might, one day, redeem what the father had lost. At Silver Snow’s birth, however, she had lost hope and life, and left her daughter with a name as melancholy as her own. Such a child might well have been exposed; but, through the love of her mother’s old nurse, she was saved and raised; and, somehow, she throve.
When she was ten years old—past the age when a gently reared maid should be confined to the women’s quarters, never to leave them until she was borne to her wedding—her father escaped the Hsiung-nu. Rumor, which traveled faster than he, credited him with the abandonment of a wife (if such as the Hsiung-nu recognized that basic human tie) and baby son, causing fears, in the shabby, chilly women’s quarters, for even the restricted life that had been Silver Snow’s up to that moment. How would the most noble (though, by the Emperor’s decree, he was that no longer) marquis and general Chao Kuang react to the news that he had a daughter and no living sons at all?
With many head-shakings and warnings, her nurse had presented Silver Snow to him. Even now, as she recalled, it had been a heaven-sent miracle that she had not burst into frightened sobs: her father seemed more like an Ancestor come to uncertain life than a man. For all of a man’s proper, vigorous semblance had fallen from him. His beard and hair, beneath a sober cap, were silvered, while the ample folds of an ancient, frayed silk robe, with its heavy, though cracking, fur collar and lining, sagged inward because of their wearer’s painful thinness.
Even more painful than that loss of flesh and vigor was the limp that must have made the mad escape from the West a torture worse than any that an Emperor’s officials might inflict. In full sight an ebony cane lay near to his hand, beside a silken scroll of Master Confucius’ writings and the bronze burner wrought in the form of twelve mountain peaks, inlaid with precious metals and carnelian, a treasure of the house. From the burner wafted delicate trails of the piney scent of artemesia; ever afterward in Silver Snow’s mind, she linked those gnarled and enduring pines with her father and his ordeals.
Even now, as Silver Snow held up one chilled hand and breathed upon it, she recalled the warmth and fragrance from that burner. Then, it had been her one comfort as she had approached, barely moving her feet warily, one short step following another, her eyes downcast, toward the man who sat upright despite the padded cushions at his back, as if mistrustful of their softness. At that moment, as if decreed by kindly gods, sparks had flown from the brazier, and Silver Snow, her painstaking humility forgotten, looked up to meet eyes that immediately compelled her love and trust as they had the right to compel her obedience. Her father extended a hand—thin, weathered, and missing a finger—and she had run to him.
Thereafter, all thoughts of proper reticence and distance were dispatched: Silver Snow, at age ten, was to be raised as the son who her father now lacked: to be taught to hunt, to play chess, to sing, and—the most audacious of all—to read and to write poetry.
So, they continued to live in the North, close by the Great Wall. Traditionally, there had lain their family’s estates since th£ mist-enshrouded reigns of the Five Emperors; but traditionally, too, there also languished now other exiles, those laboring under the disgrace of a condemnation to life.
The North might be thought to be exile, but Silver Snow had always loved the severe beauty of her homeland, the vast sweep of plains, broken by the protection of the Wall and the less ancient but equally weathered shelter of her ancestral home. Now the feeble rays of late afternoon sun slanted across the Wall, awakening splendor from the ice and snow upon which her horse and those of her escort cast long violent shadows.
A greater shadow, to her way of thinking, lay upon her mind, cast by the Wall upon which she had turned her back as she hastened home to obey whatever orders the Son of Heaven, after ten years of silence, had sent them. What her father had told her of the Hsiung-nu made Silver Snow stare out across the great barrier with more curiosity than fear. She knew that beyond lay more than endless wasteland possessed by unholy savages who ate their meat raw, never bathed, and tortured civilized men. Aye, beyond the Wall lay vast spaces and open air—as well as freedom and her father’s lost honor.
By the time Lady Silver Snow reached the ancient half fort, half mansion (the aged archers in its watchtower nodding as her party swept by in a cloud of snow and breath-steam), the cold was pushing her to full effort just as much as the desire to obey her father and to hear whatever news had caused this youngest of his retainers to risk death to horse and rider in such haste to summon her back. Shaking from cold and excitement, she turned the last corner—past the empty space from which, mysteriously, a jade statue had disappeared last winter, past that wall where a painting had been fading for at least two generations—to reach at last her own tiny courtyard. Here, screens and walls barred the clamor that must surely erupt afresh in the rest of the household at her return.