With one last furious tug, she freed her garments. A moment later—though it would have been too late for the sleepwalker whom the fox now guided—she had the woman by the arm and was steering her toward the tent, when a shadow fell across her path, moonlight glinting from the sharp blade that it held.
Silver Snow gasped and stopped. The fox melted into the nightshadows, and Vughturoi sheathed his blade.
“Is such night walking a custom of Ch’in?” he asked, with no amusement at all in his deep voice.
She was a princess of Ch’in, she was queen of the hordes, and she was her father’s daughter: she had the power to order him away. She did not know why she answered with the absolute truth.
“I dreamed ill,” she said, looking down, suddenly aware that she wore a thin gown and a quilted robe, and that her hair tumbled about her face and down her back. Even if the moonlight silvered over her flush, this was no time for maiden modesty.
“When I woke,” said Silver Snow, “I saw that Jade Butterfly here had left my tent. She was walking in her sleep, crying about a curse that she feared so that she would drown herself lest she yield to it. We do not curse thus in Ch’in,” she added angrily. “It is a strong tongue that can frame that sort of curse.”
“Aye,” muttered Vughturoi, as if he had bitten down on a rotten fruit. “A strong tongue indeed. Shall I see you back to your tent, lady?”
Silver Snow shook her head. “What if this one wakes and sees you? Then we shall have more tears and frenzy. I thank you, Prince, but no.” The sooner she returned to her tent, the sooner Willow might return to her true form. She thought she could hear her maid in fox-guise even now, yapping as she prowled—with a lame leg, yet!—about the outskirts of the camp thrice.
Vughturoi blended back into the shadows with a skill that set at naught her own small knowledge of trail lore. Silver Snow dragged Jade Butterfly back toward the tent and the safety of her own sleeping mats.
It was a long time until she could sleep, and when, finally, her eyes closed, the last things that she saw were Willow’s bright, wary eyes and a rigid shadow mounting guard outside the tent.
By noon of the next day, the Hsiung-nu caravan arrived.
It is as well, lady,” Willow remarked. “The novelty will distract your companions, and we shall be gone before this sleeping Butterfly of yours can awake and claim she was possessed by a fox.”
Silver Snow nodded and waved Willow into her usual, shadowed place. She herself was fascinated by the approaching troop. Leather-armored riders bore the reflexive and bone-reinforced bows of the hordes; musicians who raised weird instruments to bray music like nothing that she had ever heard before; two ladies, who seemed to be taller and broader than half of the Ch’in guardsmen; carts; an immense herd of pack animals and remounts; and the chariot that was clearly intended for Silver Snow.
That especially fascinated her, for it was drawn, not by horses nor by oxen, but by camels, the first that she had ever seen, two smooth-striding, swaying beasts that bore the double humps on their backs with the same unconcern as they pulled the chariot. The whole of the arriving escort shrieked and yelped as they approached Vughturoi, and rode in a circle just beyond the shadow of the Wall.
Above all else, it was the sight of the camels that made so very plain to Silver Snow that she had reached to the place where Ch’in met the wilderness. She drew a deep breath of fear, wonder, and—yes—delight, and turned toward her ladies. Abstracted, she handed a packet of letters, painstakingly calligraphed upon silk, to the chief of them, commended herself to the Son of Heaven and—as if in a dream—by rote to whomever else the lady considered proper, then bid the rest of her short-term companions farewell. She would never see them again, and that contented her well. It surprised her that they seemed to feel otherwise about her. They clustered about and declaimed, some in tears, the sorrow of parting.
Their tears are more than ritual, more than what is due to the Son of Heaven's favor. Yet, I was ever the Shadowed One, she thought, bemused. When and why did they come to love me?
“It is three months’ journey to where my father the shan-yu holds winter court,” Vughturoi remarked as Silver Snow mounted and prepared to ride out beyond the Wall and the only country she had ever dreamed of knowing.
“Indeed?” She raised brows that had not lost their delicacy, even if she no longer bothered to pluck and pencil them to the proper moth-wing shape. Where she rode, there would be none to care for such things, in any case. “That being the case, lord Prince, had we not better start immediately?”
They rode up to the Wall, and her Ch’in guards presented their tokens. The gate that the Son of Heaven had decreed must henceforward be called the Gate of Tears groaned open. Despite herself, Silver Snow glanced back once at the confusion as her camp beside the Yellow River was dismantled. She was disconcerted by how very little she cared for the bustle of plots and activity that she was leaving behind. She raised hand in farewell, and a wail of grief went up from those ladies who had assembled to see her go. She winced as she touched heels to her horse’s flanks.
As Silver Snow crossed through the gate, her horse’s hooves rasped against the grit and scant scrub of the true desert, deposited here by the wind. Thus, she rode out into the lands of the Hsiung-nu, and the wind, laden with dust and sand, buffeted her scarf-protected face.
13
Day after day, they traversed a land in which no tree, stream, rock, nor hill appeared to separate one day’s travel from another. Then, one morning, the sight of ten rocks crumbling, perhaps once the site of some ancient outpost, came as a surprise. The sight of this ruin, its stonework tumbled, was a major event—for Silver Snow, that was. The Hsiung-nu simply shrugged as they rode on.
“The sky,” growled one close enough for her to hear, “is all the roof that the Hsiung-nu need.”
She herself was concerned. If such ruin existed this close to the Wall (for they had turned slightly south and could still sight that barrier now and then), would the Middle Kingdom not grow overly dependent upon the Hsiung-nu for protection? She had not believed what Li Ling had told her: that smug officials at court were wont to assure the Emperor: that the Wall was more a defense for the barbarians against the Middle Kingdom.
Certainly it was folly for Ch’in to rely always upon the Wall to keep out invasion, to rely too much upon the goodwill of such horsemen. Was that a vain thing, too? I myself am a weapon in my nation's hands, Silver Snow told herself when the wind lashed tears from her eyes to freeze on the edges of the scarf against her cheeks.
The air grew cold and dry, then colder and dryer yet. Snow covered the dead grasses. Some days, the sky itself turned pale, and the sun gleamed in it like silver cash, providing light but no warmth. To Silver Snow’s astonishment, despite the cold and the wind, the tough, stocky horses, each bearing its owner’s mark, became more and more shaggy, even thrived, while the camels strode on through the waste, sublimely indifferent to everything save their burdens, their handlers, and their sullen dispositions.
At first, the days’ journeys tired Silver Snow so sorely that at night all she wanted to do was creep into her fur blankets and sleep, perhaps without even bothering to eat. There was so much that no one at court understood about the Hsiung-nu, so much that she had not fully comprehended from her father’s stories, now made clear! Their hatred of walls and restraint, their curious dress, with its shorter tunics and trousers rather than proper robes, even their diet, heavy in meat and fats, were not signs of savagery but simply ways they embraced in order to live in this land. Here, under the vast bowl of the sky, which resounded, day after day, with windsongs more poignant and memorable than those of any voice or bamboo flute, those ways made sense. They possessed a particular rhythm, even a grace, that Silver Snow knew that she would one day come to appreciate.