She bowed herself at the Emperor’s feet in farewell just as, long ago, she had bowed before her own father.
The Son of Heaven clapped his hands. “You shall be sent to the Wall with all that befits your rank, lady: an imperial chariot, a mounted escort, musicians to enliven your journey, and whatever servants you require. You may bring companions, should you wish. We reserve only the worthy Li Ling, and we charge you to write to him and to your father, that we may profit from your observations.”
The court murmured approval of his words. Then Yuan Ti stepped forward. “As for me, lady,” he said, his voice all but trembling, “once you leave, I shall issue an edict of mourning. The court will fast and wear white robes, as it did”—he drew a deep breath—“the last time that I lost you. And, once you leave Ch’in through the Jade Gate in the West, I decree that it shall ever afterward be called the Gate of Tears.”
Wearied of this courtliness in a language of which he was but an imperfect master, the Hsiung-nu prince stepped forward. “How soon can the princess be ready to depart? We would pass through this Gate of Tears of yours before the frosts.”
Once again Silver Snow glanced up at the Son of Heaven, whose eyes mutely urged delay. Then she looked over at Li Ling, who shook his head, almost imperceptibly. She did him—and herself—no favor by delaying, he clearly thought. Every day that she remained would be a temptation for the Son of Heaven to withdraw his consent to her going and embroil Ch’in in war.
The Hsiung-nu, she understood, were restless, able always to lash up their felt tents and to journey to new pastures. Speed might be the most auspicious beginning of her new life among them. She nodded at Li Ling.
“Behold: already, the princess is a dutiful wife to the shan-yu. As soon as the princess’ chariot is made ready,” Li Ling stepped forward and spoke in the Hsiung-nu’s tongue, “she will depart.”
Seated in the lavishly equipped imperial chariot, Silver Snow could not help but contrast her previous “wedding journey” with the one she now took. Then, shabbily dressed, she had climbed into an ox-cart, her few belongings rolled into it or strapped on pack animals. There had been fewer than ten tens of torches and no musicians, no sounds at all save the clicking and ringing harness of the mounts of her escort and the official in whose train she rode, the least and loneliest. So she had ridden to the bright heart of the Middle Kingdom, the Inner Courts of Ch’ang-an, and had thought never to leave.
Now she went journeying once again. No, she thought. That was not true. The Hsiung-nu were nomads. Henceforward, her life would be one long journey, and never again would she be confined within the walls of a city or a palace— or within any walls at all.
There was no loving, grieving father to say farewell to Silver Snow this time, but Li Ling stood by to oversee the preparations. For the first time that Silver Snow could remember, he had dressed in the full magnificence of silks and sables available to a ranking eunuch, as if to do her honor. It was hard to recognize in the ornately robed official the same friend and teacher who had called, the night before, wearing a worn scholar’s robe, and had presented gifts that, homely as they were, Silver Snow and Willow both esteemed more than furs, jades, or silk. For Silver Snow, he had strips of wood and treated silk, a supply of fine brushes, and a new inkstone. For Willow, he had pouches of dried herbs at which she sniffed and nodded, eyes bright.
He locked her into the chariot, as one must always lock a bride, and presented the key to Vughturoi, who received it as something strange and not wholly welcome. Then, at a gesture, musicians struck up a tune that managed simultaneously to suggest both cheers and wailing.
They puffed, piped, and drummed as her chariot rolled out of the confines of the Palace. Behind her came her companions, behind them an immense baggage train. Packed amid the silks, the gold, the precious spices was a treasure older than them alclass="underline" the burial armor fashioned fit for an Empress. The Son of Heaven had sent it with her, since she would not stay to use it. Though the sun had risen, torchbearers ran beside it, and outside the yawning gates, she could see a crowd of people, waiting to witness her passing, guarded by soldiers both of Ch’in and the Hsiung-nu.
No sooner than the palace gates closed behind her, she knew that Yuan Ti would keep his vow and plunge the court into the deepest mourning for the lady whom first his indifference, then his oath, had taken from him. She suspected that many in her party—the ladies who had been detailed to accompany her to the Wall—felt that they too risked death in traveling that far from Ch’ang-an and the Son of Heaven. She almost thought that she could hear their weeping; certainly Willow had commented scathingly on fine ladies who used herbs and cosmetics to mask their terror and their tears.
Neither the Emperor nor the ladies who were her unwilling companions could know that Silver Snow regarded her journey as escape from prison.
The wedding procession, if one could call it that, wound through the city and out through the Western Gate.
Willow hissed a curse, and Silver Snow roused from the reverie in which she rode with her eyes turned ever to the West.
“Why such heavy words?” she asked her maid in mild reproof. “In fact, why curse at all?”
Willow simply pointed.
Leering from a spike on the Western Gate, the head of Mao Yen-shou was planted, the last witness in the city to her departure.
Was this a spectacle such as he would have admired? She hardly thought so.
Silver Snow shivered, then turned her gaze back to the West. Already her eyes and mind were fixed on what might lie ahead of her. High above the rumble of horsemen and the clamor of the Ch’in musicians rose the bamboo flutes of the Hsiung-nu, plaintive, free, and more than a trifle wild.
12
As Silver Snow traveled north and west toward the meeting with her future lord and people, she journeyed through summer into autumn. Behind her, she left a mourning court; but she herself did not lament as her train of guards, ladies, musicians, servants, and Hsiung-nu wound slowly toward the grasslands. Gradually the grass withered, and the scrub that covered the ground turned orange, then bronze, just as Silver Snow remembered it from her earliest childhood. She could not help but compare this journey with her last. When she had left her father’s house for Ch’ang-an, she and Willow had counted themselves lucky to have clean, unpatched quilts and adequate food. A fire was a luxury.
Now, she traveled in an imperial chariot that made the one in which her former escort had traveled seem as shabby and clumsy as an ox-cart. She wore robes of quilted silk and (when there was need) a cape and hood lined with satin and wrought of fur so soft and deep that her hands sank into it. Should she express the desire to stop for an hour or a day along the line of march, she was instantly heeded and surrounded with every tender attention. Did the lady require rice wine or litchi—or the presence of her maid or a flute-player?
So many questions; so many tiny, wearisome decisions; and so many calls upon her attention to praise, to mediate, or to chastise just when she wanted to look out at the land, which, day by day, assumed the familiar aspect of her beloved northlands! She might just as well be immured at court, she thought, because her ladies insisted on behaving as if they had not left the Palace. She would be relieved, she realized, to see the last of them.
Viewing the Hsiung-nu, supposedly her future subjects, brought her more satisfaction. Though gasps and squeaks from her ladies (when they were not weeping or exclaiming in fear at what was unfamiliar—as nearly everything was) greeted her actions, she questioned her guards, both the men of Ch’in and of the plains. Each day, her command of her new people’s language grew better. She also insisted on riding out, at least for a brief time, every day. At first, she had perforce to ride the disgraceful donkey that the Hsiung-nu had deemed fit for a sheltered princess. Later, as they saw that she neither wobbled in her saddle nor complained, she was raised to the dignity of a horse; the grunts and brief words she overheard from the Hsiung-nu in her train convinced her that her riding, if nothing else, met with their approval.