All that day they rode, dismounting only for the briefest intervals and greatest needs, taking food on horseback, conferring on horseback, and riding back and forth along the great, cumbersome train of wagons, herds, and families. The air was very clear. It would be easy for a tracker and rider like Tadiqan to find his people in their summer pastures, pity though that was. Though Silver Snow was certain that they had ridden for miles, the scale of land and sky here was so vast that, when she turned in her wooden saddle, they seemed to have come no space at all from the camp.
“Try now to spot the fire, lady,” came Vughturoi’s voice. He sounded almost amused at her surprise.
Silver Snow narrowed her eyes and gazed back at the camp. Fire . . . there had stood her tents, and there the shan-yu's. Plumes of smoke rose from what had been their hearths, and tiny flames still wound merrily upward.
That was a fine omen, she had been told. Then her eyes strayed to her husband, who was almost invisible in his swad-dlings of fur and felt. Let it be so, she prayed, but she did not know with what power she pleaded.
17
Day yielded to day as the tribe drew closer and closer to spring pastures. The huge flocks of sheep thrived, and as the days grew warmer, the shaggy horses lost patches from their heavy coats. Even the swaying Bactrian camels pulled their loads without savaging their handlers; their doubled humps, which had sunk during the winter, a sign of dearth and hunger in the land, began to rise once again as the grasslands grew brighter and they neared spring pastures.
Spring pastures were many days’ rides, a vast distance even as the Hsiung-nu counted it. But a day’s ride was no regimented matter of up at dawn and so much land covered, regardless of time or cost to beasts and riders. Nor did the Hsiung-nu travel every day; they might pause in one specially suitable place, a site known for generations, where the water or the hunting was especially good.
It was no easy life, riding or driving a wagon or flocks across grasslands that seemed to stretch on to the very edges of the world. When the wind blew and the sun shone on the trappings of the riders, the red trimmings of garments, the shining, fat-smeared faces of children who were once again growing plump, and the bronze of the huge cauldrons that were lashed to the camels’ pack saddles, it was a good life, exhausting, absorbing, and richly colored. Compared with the pastel, static life of the Son of Heaven’s Inner Courts—well, Silver Snow could not begin to compare the two. If the air here seared her lungs with its coldness or the violence of the wind, at least there was enough of it for her to breathe.
Absorbed in this new life, she had even stopped longing for her northern home, with its faded dreams and its cautious poverty, except when, under her husband’s benign, nodding supervision, she dispatched letters by one or two Hsiung-nu warriors who relished the exploit of a mere two or three weeks’ dash to a frontier outpost of the Han, where he would test the truce long enough to convince the garrison to accept and forward the carefully sealed silk strips that bore the honors of a princess of Ch’ang-an and a queen of the Hsiung-nu. Some of the older officers, she suspected, might even remember her father and Li Ling; and might pass on the letters out of ancient loyalties.
Two things remained to disquiet her: Vughturoi spoke to her shortly, if at all, as if he enacted the role of a disgraced man abasing himself before a queen; and Sable’s brother Basich hafl not returned from delivering the urgent, secret letter that she had entrusted to him. She feared that it had fallen into her enemy’s hands. Of all her letters, that one held the most power to help her or cast her down.
However, Silver Snow’s life was busy, too busy for cares that might prove, in the end, to be illusions. When the sun shone brightly, and the air quivered in the throat, wilder and even more sweet than the strange wine that, some travelers said, the people of Turfan brewed out of grapes instead of rice, she could even manage to forget such worries in the exhilaration of what lay around her.
Of all of the things that Silver Snow had never expected, this abundant, exuberant life was foremost. Each day brought her new sights and sounds that occupied her fully. Each night brought the stars close, and, when the camp finally settled itself, the grasslands were so quiet that each stamp of a hoof, each cry of a child, each gust of wind could receive its full tribute of attention and concern. By nights, Willow would dash out and bring in reports of movement in the land: the Yueh-chih toward the west, the Fu Yu northward, on a course toward spring grazing that paralleled their own.
Tadiqan still rode among the Fu Yu, Silver Snow thought. His absence added to her contentment. “The spirits send that he wander lost,” Willow muttered once when, weary from the anguish of the change, she lay panting on her robes in the grayness before dawn. Silver Snow had wiped her brow, covered her, and bid her hush before she sought her own sleeping furs and silks; yet she had to admit to herself that she would be well satisfied if Strong Tongue’s brutal son never found his way back to his mother’s tenthold.
She had no such luck, however. The next day, a whistling shriek, followed by the buzz of a flight of arrows that skewered a fat sheep and a whoop of triumph, heralded Tadiqan and his men, triumphant from their dealings with the Fu Yu. That night, the shan-yu held a bigger feast than usual, and his eldest son reclined at his right hand, his mother beaming at the prince’s shoulder, leaning over him to whisper counsel.
That night, the shan-yu appeared to be more feeble than Silver Snow had ever seen him.
“Willow!” hissed the girl, much against her custom, which kept her maid well out of the sight of Strong Tongue and her son. “In the chest that Li Ling gave you. Fetch the cordial in the jade bottle.” She pointed with her chin at the shan-yu, who leaned upon Tadiqan’s arm even more heavily than he had leaned, on that much happier evening, upon Vughturoi’s. Why, he was actually drooping, near to collapse.
“Fetch it or foxglove . . . quickly!” she whispered, and Willow fled, to reappear with a jade tray, a tiny flask, and two tiny white jade cups brimful of an elixir that smelled strong and sweet. Silver Snow herself rose and took one of the cups to her husband. Because she saw no alternative, she offered the other to Tadiqan, who glanced at his mother, then spurned it with an impatient gesture.
“You drink it, lady,” said the elder prince, as if this might be some test.
As she had been schooled, Silver Snow demurred politely. From the corner of her eye, she saw Strong Tongue gesture imperatively at her son.
“I said, drink it!” snapped Tadiqan.
“Forgive this foolish one her folly, prince of warriors,” Silver Snow said in her softest, most rippling voice. She had hard work translating the formal apologies demanded by the language of her birth into the much more rugged tongue of the Hsiung-nu. “She but meant to let you benefit from the properties of this drink, which contains naught but healthful herbs and wine.” She raised the cup as if to pledge him and drained it; the shan-yu copied her, even to the care with which he replaced the fine jade upon the little tray.
“My son, you must not snap at my senior wife in such a way,” chided the shan-yu. There was more resonance in his voice, and blood rose in his withered cheeks. Imperiously he pointed to the carpet at Silver Snow’s feet. As Tadiqan abased himself before Silver Snow, the old chieftan beamed equally at his young wife and his huge, glowering son.