Silver Snow blinked. As quickly as she could, she must write that news to Li Ling and to her father, together with what she thought best to do. Yet, to do that, she must observe, must spend time within these tents. That, of course, would be easy enough; henceforward, they were to be her home.
“Tents have been prepared for you and . . . you have brought ladies? Those sent to you were adequate?” asked Khujanga the shan-yu as if he truly cared what became of her. “They shall unpack . . . ah, I see a lute! Do you play?”
She nodded and cast down her eyes, grateful for one thing: that her Hsiung-nu ladies had assured her that this man, old enough to be her father’s father, was past bed-sport.
“I am glad. I favor the music of the Middle Kingdom and much else that that ancient, rich land has given us. Your name and family, child?” Abruptly he shot that question at her, and Silver Snow realized that, kindly though he was, he was still every shrunken inch the ruler.
“Before the Son of Heaven raised me up, I was Silver Snow of the house of Chao; he who begot me was Chao Kuang, marquis and general—”
“And long-time dweller in my tents.” The shan-yu nodded.
“But come in, come in and eat with us, drink with us, meet those over whom you will rule.”
Silver Snow followed the shan-yu into his palacelike tent and allowed herself to be seated next to a brazier, elaborately wrought of bronze trimmed with jade, malachite, and lapis lazuli. Scented smoke coiled up from it, masking the everpresent odors of dung, sweat, beasts, and cooking meat. She was handed a delicate cup that contained a coarse dark brew at which she sipped and concealed her reaction to its taste. That it was warm and made her tingle sufficed.
From outside came the shriek of a whistle, followed by the buzz of a flight of arrows, then a chunk as they went home in ... in what? Silver Snow remembered the words of Kursik, who had met her train on the way to the shan-yu 's camp. That must have been one of Prince Tadiqan’s whistling arrows. The Ancestors send that it had found its mark only in a post, not in a human heart.
When a squat, bandy-legged man, his face gashed, his sheepskins and furs grimy, stalked into the tent, brandishing a bow, Silver Snow knew that she had guessed aright. This must be the eldest prince, son of Strong Tongue, master of many men and horses. And if he succeeded his father as shan-yu, tribal custom decreed that he would become her husband in turn. Judging from the way his dark eyes raked her, he would most definitely be her husband in far more than name. She controlled herself before she could recoil, a movement that most probably would have tumbled her from her cushions onto the scattered carpets.
Unfortunately, as she composed herself, with one foot she knocked over a plate, and the meat that it contained rolled into the fire. Only a quick grab by one of the other women saved her knife from going after it.
That, Silver Snow thought, was nothing too bad compared with what might have occurred.
Instantly she was proved wrong. The tent grew silent, the Hsiung-nu very still . . . too still. In that quiet, the pad-pad of heavy, booted feet was all too loud, all too reminiscent of the beat of a huge, hostile heart. Many of the Hsiung-nu sighed and turned their heads away, they, who prided themselves on their very fearlessness.
Silver Snow, seeing no cause for silence or fear, looked up, expecting speedily to see a slave or servant who might clean up what she had dropped.
Instead, she felt a sudden gust of wind as the tent flap was hurled open. The fire sparked and swirled upward toward the vent in the ceiling. A huge bulk loomed on the threshold of the tent. Even as Silver Snow watched, it resolved into the figure of an enormous woman, one hand thrust out in accusation.
“The hearthfire is polluted!” The woman’s voice rose up in reprimand and lamentation. It was deeper than any woman’s voice that Silver Snow had ever heard, and it had about it an odd, growling rasp. “Douse it, that I may purify the hearth to warm this ignorant, frail creature whom those weaklings beyond the Wall have sent here to supplant me.”
An immense and immensely powerful woman pushed her way through the clustering Hsiung-nu. At her approach, they laid aside mutton and mare’s milk to watch her. Many bowed. Resembling Prince Tadiqan, by whom she took up a defensive stance, she was broad and squat. Like the shaman who Silver Snow had seen on the road, she wore a robe trimmed with feathers, strips of fur, and snakeskins. Also like him, she bore a spirit drum, its drumhead taut with a skin too delicate to belong to horse or sheep or camel or aught else . . . until Silver Snow looked down at her own hand and wrist, where they emerged from her sleeves, and surmised the fate of one, at least, among the Ch’in prisoners or the children whom they had had.
This then was Strong Tongue. Her sister-wife—and, by every readable sign, her enemy.
15
With a speed astonishing in one who was lame, Willow edged out from behind Silver Snow and knelt between her and Strong Tongue, by the fire’s edge. As if to obey Strong Tongue’s imperious demand that she be allowed through to purify the hearth, she carried implements for tending a fire. Her long hair gleamed russet in the light of the polluted fire, then darkened as she extinguished the blaze.
“Get away, girl!” snarled Strong Tongue. “What do you women of Ch’in know about that which is of Tangr, of the gods?”
She raised a foot, massive in heavy stitched leather and felt, as if to spurn Willow with her foot. Silver Snow stepped forward quickly, her jaw set, one hand flashing out to clasp her maid’s shoulder and support her. Like an animal dodging a blow, Willow twisted to one side. As she moved, her silver mirror rolled from safekeeping in the bag that Willow ever kept tucked into the breast of her robes. It clattered and rang with the sweetness of fine metal. As it glinted up at Strong Tongue, the characters incised upon it glowed.
“Stand off, slave,” commanded Strong Tongue. “Lest I curse you and that whey-faced weakling who holds your leash.”
“My mistress did not know; does not know,” hissed Willow. Silver Snow had not thought that her maid had learned so much of the Hsiung-nu’s speech. “But I do.” She pitched her voice with a curious little hissing whine and met the older woman’s eyes. A fox, facing off against a wild sow, each well aware of the other's will to fight, shoidd there he need, Silver Snow thought.
“Willow, get back!” Silver Snow ordered, fear for her maid making her whisper more harsh than any she had ever before used with the girl.
Willow grabbed after her mirror before Strong Tongue could spurn at it or someone else could snatch it away. Then she looked up at her mistress. In the half light of the shan-yu s great tent, her skin seemed very pale, her eyes huge and lustrous. Her long hair, freed of its coils, billowed and crackled about her, its reddish glints seeming to send up sparks that held the light in the way that amber, rubbed by silk, attracts and clings to it.
Do not challenge this woman! Silver Snow wished at her maid. Sun Tzu might not have written thus in his Art of War, but it was only common sense not to go up against a strong foe in that foe’s own territory. As if Willow understood her mind, she looked aside from Strong Tongue, and the tension that crackled between the two of them subsided. There would be no battle between them: at least, not this day.
Silver Snow glanced quickly about the great tent, past where Strong Tongue postured in righteous indignation and made great play of dispatching follower after follower for this packet of herbs or this image, or that other flute, while her son Tadiqan stood behind his mother, arms crossed on his chest, bandy legs splayed. Behind them clustered what seemed to be hundreds of Hsiung-nu, all watching.