Gradually, however, the result of the training she had had in her father’s house was regained. Used to the sweet smells of the Inner Courts, at first she found the pungency of the Hsiung-nu’s dung fires to be eye-watering and intolerable. Then she became inured to the smell and smoke, and, finally, she did not notice either. She had been healthy before; now she became hardy, flesh and sinew fining down to form a creature that, if she were less consciously elegant than the vision in pearls and kingfisher feathers who had charmed the Son of Heaven, was nevertheless beautiful and perfectly suited to thrive in her new home.
“Do I look,” she asked Willow once, “precisely now as Mao Yen-shou painted me—thin, weathered, and mannish?”
Willow laughed. “Lady, you lack a black mole, while Mao Yen-shou lacks a head. There is no point even in speaking of him.”
The Hsiung-nu who earlier had inspected them and had shaken heads, especially so the women, began, if not to approve, to assume that the women from Ch’in could endure a day’s travel without lamenting, fainting, or growing ill. Silver Snow wondered if they were disappointed. Their leader, Prince Vughturoi, rarely spoke. Was he angry, perhaps, that some girl-princess of Ch’in had been sent out to supplant his mother? She tried to cause no trouble and knew that she had succeeded in that; but still he kept away from her.
Then she noticed something else. Even though Willow was lame, mounted, she was as hardy as the rest of the troop. Nor, because of her blood, did the cold afflict her as harshly. And, where the Hsiung-nu had been inclined to think Silver Snow too frail, too alien for the journey to Khujanga the shan-yu s court, they greeted Willow with what could pass for grudging respect. As Li Ling had said, some women of the Hsiung-nu were said to have powers more than mortal. Gradually, Willow’s herb-lore let her gain face among a people who, if they were wild and harsh, were also open and free. It was even the source of some half-heard, partially understood jests.
“You need a strong tongue to withstand one of her herb drenches,” joked a rider who had come to Willow for a potion.
“Aye, and will that very strong tongue ...”
At that moment, however, the Lord Vughturoi had appeared from behind a tent, and the men had dispersed like whipped curs. The prince had simply glared and stalked on his way.
Gradually, once again, Silver Snow and Willow found themselves able to see the nightly camps as opportunities for more than a little food and sleep. Shielded from the wind that, it was said, the white tiger blew from the far west, all the way across steppe and plain, by a sturdy tent of silk, felt, and leather, Willow sorted her herbs, and Silver Snow tried either to write or to play her lute.
()nc night was so cold that the ink froze on its stone, and, perforce, she must lay aside her latest letter to her father. Instead, she warmed her fingers at their tiny brazier and picked up her lute, strumming idly upon it. After a time, her strumming modulated into a very old song that she had heard her maids at home sing. I hey had not known that she was present, and once they had seen her, they had broken off at once.
The song dealt with, she supposed, the emotions of another lady such as she, married to a ruler of the hordes.
“Mistress!” hissed Willow, more shape of the lips than sound.
Silver Snow’s fingers struck a discord. “This lute is not in tune,” she excused herself. With her eyes, she followed Willow’s pointing finger. Clearly limned against the rippling wall of their tent was the shadow that they had seen there before.
Why does he not come in? she asked herself. I am wed to his father, the shan-yu; we are as kin , then; and it is no impropriety.
Yet, he did not. If he chose to remain outside in the wind, the dark, and the cold, that was his choice; and grave impropriety on her part to seek to sway him from it.
Once again, she picked up the lute.
Both she and Willow broke off to laugh. It was true that since they had come into the West, they had eaten mutton nearly every night, and that that was a meat little favored in Ch’ang-an. However, the mutton had always been seethed in the huge bronze cauldron borne each day by the most reliable of the camels.
“Probably, lady, the fool of a poet who wrote that song never journeyed farther west than to the west gate of Ch’ang-an,” Willow observed, her voice wry.
“Aye, so I think too.”
“How does it end?” Willow asked.
Silver Snow, recalling how the song went, wished she had chosen any song but that. The shadow lingering outside to hear her music could not like what he would hear. Nevertheless, to refuse to sing might reveal her awareness of the eavesdropper. Sighing, she picked up the lute for the last time.
Decisively, Silver Snow covered the lute and laid it aside. Raising her voice that it might reach her audience, she said, “No yellow stork could survive in the northlands in which I myself was born. A pretty song, but sad and nonsensical. I shall not sing it again.”
The next morning, as Silver Snow emerged gasping into the cold and brushed away the flakes of snow already clinging to the lavish fur trim of her hood, she knew that the Lord Vughturoi’s eyes were upon her, but she feigned unconcern as she walked to her horse.
That song had been nonsense. The next evening, Silver Snow asked the Hsiung-nu women to join her too. She waited until the shadow again revealed itself upon the wall of her tent and sang another, which more closely captured the strange beauty of the frozen waste.
Then she broke off her song. “Do you hear that?” she demanded.
One of the Hsiung-nu women, Bronze Mirror, nodded indulgently at Sable, the other. Both were women of some standing among the Hsiung-nu: Bronze Mirror with one son grown; Sable, who was too young by far to be a widow with children (as she was), but who derived her standing from her brother Basich, who stood high in Prince Vughturoi’s favor.
Their opinions, as Silver Snow knew all too well from her days in Ch’ang-an, would spread like fire, to the rest of the Hsiung-nu. Perhaps this young little Ch’in princess had not collapsed during the trip west and north, but she had her fancies, her weaknesses.
“It is the wind, lady, roaring across the plain,” Bronze Mirror reassured her.
Silver Snow might have blushed and let the subject drop had she not, at that moment, seen Willow. She crouched at the sealed tent flap, almost as if she sought to outwait some prey, and her eyes gleamed feral and green the way that they did»whenever she scented danger.