When the wind was right, Silver Snow could hear the clicks of playing pieces, the grunts of disappointment, an occasional laugh of victory from the men’s camp; she could even catch stray words of the grave, self-important speech of the official to underlings and a few scholars who had attached themselves to the procession, eager for a relatively rapid and somewhat safe trip to the capital for the all-important examinations.
She listened eagerly, warmed by the men’s rough laughter, the gibes at this or that official. The names of the latter she set herself to remember with the same zeal that a young soldier polishes sword and armor. At one point, the leader of her escort train laughed and spoke slightingly of Mao Yen-shou, on whom her own fortune could rest. Not for worlds would Silver Snow have dared to violate custom by sending to ask of the man what he knew; but she was sorely tempted.
Huddled in a quilted robe, Silver Snow rubbed her hands before her night fire, waiting for Willow to return from whatever scouting mission the lame maid might have set for herself. A small bronze pot of soup steamed near the flames, and though it was no job of hers to tend it, nevertheless, she did. If only she had been a scholar, even one of the lowest rank, or perhaps simply a candidate journeying to the capital to take the arduous civil examinations, she might have sat at that larger fire to warm mind as well as body.
Her lively intelligence hungered for just such meetings, but, trapped as she was in a female body, she was reduced to tending the soup, forced to wait upon others for news to brighten a day. Her father had always addressed her as he might have spoken to a son and heir. These men, if they were of rank to notice such a fellow traveler—had she emerged directly into their company—would cast such attention on her as they might upon a stray flower, fallen from its stand in a marketplace: fair for the moment, but of no true value to serious-minded men engaged upon their business.
A chaste lady destined for the Emperor’s Inner Courts, Silver Snow could appear to most of them as an item of merchandise—perhaps a roll of fine silk or a carved jade vase—to be kept safely until delivery at the Palace. When the official must speak with her, he used the elaborate, complimentary speech of the court, full of flowery compliments that meant nothing, either to him or to herself, carefully delivered from beyond the protection of the cart’s curtains.
What more could she expect? Even the Lady Pan, who had lived so many years at the court and gained what renown a woman might for her upright conduct and her work on her brother’s histories, claimed in her manual for court ladies a position that Silver Snow had already forfeited at home. Women, decreed Lady Pan, were formed strictly for modesty and submission, discretion and quietness. Silver Snow’s longings to ride in the open air, her desire to hear, at least, the official’s discourse, were highly improper, very possibly impious. She had already noted that some of the ladies who had received her, albeit reluctantly, as a guest regarded her as unfeminine because she could walk into their courts, rather than be carried within, prostrate and ill.
She knew what her father would have said—had indeed said—because of the one time, years ago, she had broached such a subject to him. “What the Lady Pan writes is no doubt good and proper. But the lady herself is also a woman, and therefore subject to error.” The gleam of humor in her father’s eyes had removed any hint of rebuke from his statement.
A snatch of words floated from the official’s camp. Confucius again: “Whatever acts unnaturally will come to an unnatural finish.” Silver Snow shuddered and burrowed more deeply into her sheltering travel robe. For the past several nights, she knew, the guard on the packtrain had been doubled, and her own escort ringed about her more closely. That could mean a threat of bandits, peasants forced off their land for failure to pay taxes, savage in their rage; or (and this was what she hated to think upon) it might mean fear of some beast, wild or not.
Silver Snow stirred the soup again and shivered. Willow . . . her maid had carefully renewed the dye on her hair each night, always keeping to the shadows, still the ugly, barbarous rumors that Willow was more animal than human had sprung up in several houses where they had guested.
That could mean danger. A generation ago, fears of witchcraft had cost some of the Emperor’s ministers their posts and others their heads—or other parts of their bodies. There would be no mercy for a lady and her father against whom toleration and shelter of a witch might be proved: even an accusation of witchcraft could be deadly, especially for a family already judged to be traitors.
Outsiders saw only a red-haired woman (or one with hair stained an unnatural black) with a limp and deemed Willow to be an unnatural creature. They did not know how loving and loyal she was, even when it came to creeping out by night in a camp full of rough, strange men. I shall have to warn her, thought Silver Snow, and regretted the thought. The maid would weep—her face reddening in a curious way that it had, until her green eyes looked even less seemly than usual—and swear that doubtlessly she endangered her beloved mistress by her mere presence.
Footsteps creaked against snow, stopping in the darkness outside the light cast by her fire.
“Most honored lady?”
Silver Snow stopped herself before she leapt up, gasping from surprise.
“Younger brother,” she greeted Ao Li, who was at least thirty years her senior. Fie shifted from foot to foot, his hands behind his back, staring at the ground, as if unsure of how to begin. After a long pause, which she waited for him to break, he thrust out what he had concealed behind his back as he approached her.
“This one dared to think that the Esteemed Lady might wish to have this keepsake,” he said.
It was her bow, carefully maintained, though she had not been the one to do so, and a quiver of lovingly fletched arrows.
Her eyes filled, and she opened quivering lips to thank the old soldier. Instead of vanishing, as she half expected that he might do from sheer embarrassment, Ao Li again shuffled his feet before he stood at attention, almost as if he were about to report to her father.
“The most honorable lady well knows how to use that,” he nodded at the bow. Indeed she did: Ao Li had helped to teach her.
She smiled. When there came no answering smile, her own faded, to be replaced by alarm. “Does the honorable soldier think that she will have to?” she asked. “The guards . . She gestured at the closely picketed horses, the tight circle of protection around her wagon and her fire.
Ao Li glanced around. Despite the cold, his broad forehead was sweaty beneath the scarf that he had pulled down over it. He leaned forward, in discretion, not in insolence. “Wolves, lady,” he whispered. “But not ...”
A crackle, such as a misstep upon a twig might make, forced them to jump.
“The noble lady honors this worthless soldier,” Ao Li said in a voice which sounded false. “He will depart to better guard her. ”
That much she could put full trust in, she thought. But what had frightened the old man so? She laid her cheek against the bow, remembering her last hunt up by the Great Wall before the messenger had summoned her to Ch’ang-an and such strange future as might now lie before her. The grip was smooth, familiar, the string, when she tested it, taut and new.
Where was Willow? If wolves were abroad, Willow was lame; she could neither run nor fight. Silver Snow almost rose to call Ao Li back and order him to seek out Willow. Yet, the maid might not want attention called to her in such a way. She forced herself to sit still, but her fists clenched within her long sleeves until the nails bit into her palms.