"You led us right," he said. "You brought us east. It was east all along."
Chapter Fourteen
Shoka wiped his nose and drank the pleasantly steaming willow-tea with his supper—old mother willow and her sisters gave them a shelter, a canopy of ground-reaching branches that enveloped them, the horses, a level, tolerably dry bank, and a little of the river edge. Sometimes barges and boats passed, bound from Ygotai onward to trifold Mandi, which sat astride the Chaighin where it and the Hoi became the Great River, and flowed on to distant reaches of Sengu and Mendang, and remote outposts where barbarian traders came. And sometimes those boats came back upriver bearing, one supposed, goods from Mandi's bazaars. A rough place, Mandi, a country place, lacking the graces of the imperial city—but prosperous with the trade from the joining rivers and from the outside.
Strange to think that that large city was not so far away, when they sat in their willow-tent sneezing and coughing and warm, thank the gods, the willow tending to confine the smoke so they dared a tiny fire now and again, and shielding them from the wind and the misting rain.
"On the whole," he had said to Taizu, that first morning, "we're quite well situated. Let the furor die down. Let them wonder where we are. We don't seem in any danger of being discovered, no one walks this shore, they go by boat—so I can't think of a better place for the moment."
And Taizu: "I hope the north river isn't this wide, without going back—"
"It's not." He sneezed, and wiped his nose, and seeing how low Taizu's spirits were, got himself a willow-wand and sketched her the wedge shape of Hoishi, with its two main rivers, the Hoi and the Chisei. And Taiyi, the other side. "The Chisei never is much. A soldier knows these things. His supply depends on them. I've neglected your education in maps, girl; maps are the essentials of any campaign—"
His voice was going. They had rubbed the horses down when they had first made their camp, they had cut grass on the dike-side, numb with cold and staggering with exhaustion, and seen that Jiro and the mare had a breakfast. Then they had stopped, tucked up in the quilts their mats had managed to keep dry, both of them cold as corpses and holding onto each other. Warmth came, warmed bodies, warmed limbs, enough to shiver a while, enough for Shoka's leg to start hurting again, an agony that would have kept him awake if he were not so mortally exhausted. As it was he simply clamped his jaws and tried to think of something else, waiting for exhaustion to win out, determined not to give way to the pain in Taizu's hearing. But she made a sound, a kind of steady, hurt whimper with every breath, until he stroked her wet hair and hugged her and she stopped, evidently realizing only then that she was doing it.
Poor girl. There was no strength, he thought, could have carried her; it was the simple, stupid vitality of the young, who had no experience to tell them what was possible.
And seeing her moving around, with the afternoon, a man had to move again, and see to his gear. It was her job, washing their clothes. But it was not the cabin on the mountain, it was the field again; a man took care of his own things if he had no servant. And he did not.
There was no way all the dirt would ever come out of the cloth or the leather. "We'll look like mercenaries for certain," he said, while she used a pot of oil soap to try to restore their tack and the leather of their clothing.
"It's a mess," she said.
"It's always a mess." The leg hurt enough to distract him from the rest of his stiff muscles. "I think I tore something in the knee. I'm not sure whether it's good or bad."
"We haven't got the rags. Except these."
He looked at the oily rags she was using, heating them over a tiny fire in a tin pan; and the ache was enough to blur his vision, the thought of warmth on the joint enough to make his speech thick. "We can try it."
It did help. It helped so much he lay back on the ground beneath the willows and shut his eyes and opened them to find the whole world gone dim.
Twilight.
Taizu sitting by him, waiting.
That was how the willow-tea.
And the map-drawing in the fading daylight, Taizu watching the lines he drew with that thinking-frown on her face and her lip caught in her teeth in that way she had when she was desperate and worried.
Terrified.
"We can go two ways from here," he said. "Back along the Hoi till we can cross; or up to the Chisei. West or east. Your choice."
"If I wasn't with you," she said, fists clenched, "master Shoka, I'd be on into Taiyi."
He shook his head. "You'd be dead back on the riverside. With a good number of bandits to your credit. But you'd be dead." He saw her chin trembled. He thought of home again, on the mountain. He thought of the assassins and the armies, thought of sleepy lord Reidi in Keido, who might be forced, finally—to do something about the exiled lord Saukendar, if only to loose messages north.
Thought of the villagers of Mon, who had fed him all these years, lying dead for no fault but relying on him.
Thought of a young fool who tried too much and did too much and who, damn her, had cleaned their tack and their armor and washed their clothes and made him tea and now had the gall to call him useless and an encumbrance.
It must be the pain. His eyes stung, and he massaged the aching leg.
Her hand rested on his. She leaned forward and put her arm about his neck, her cheek against his. "Please let's go home. Let's go home. I'll marry you."
He put a hand up to push her back. "For what? To keep me from getting you killed?"
He saw the glistening on her cheeks in the last of the light. "It doesn't matter what happened," she said. "It doesn't matter anymore. I'll be your wife. Please let's go home."
Whatever she did—was always at the wrong time. He thought that again: that it was always the right promise at the wrong time.
Damn honor and damn the pride that made men fools. Take what she offered. Take her across the river to the wilds of Hoisan, find another mountain. Have sons and daughters.
Damn the things he had taught her, encouraging the woman he loved to put a premium on honor, and pride, and all the things that made men fools—
But, he had thought, she had come to him already equipped with that. And she had compelled him to teach her. And believed in him, beyond the point she knew him in his mornings and his out-of-sorts days, his worst days and his lameness and all his faults—
She was the invulnerable one. She was young. She was all those things.
And it took his weakness to stop her and make her plead with him, never saying it: Don't kill yourself. I can't stand to watch you. I'll marry you.
He touched her face. He said: "Did I teach you this? Pull yourself together. Plan your retreats. If you want to go back across the river and think a while—we can do that. But I don't say you should give up. I don't say you should ever give up. We can go back a while. That's another part of soldiering. You reconnoiter, you gather information. We've created a little stir, so now I'll tell you what we do, we go back into Hoisan, we wait for the rumor to get to the capital, if it will; we spread the word—like I said, remember?—that I'm at large. That the woman with me has a grudge with Gitu. Let our enemies lose sleep. Let them grow thin worrying. Let the time be ours. You and I—we can be with them—we can be with them closer than their wives of nights. That's what I'd do."
Like I've always done. And gods know if they even care.
Taizu rested her head on her arm, one hand at the back of her neck.
"All right," she said.
In that beaten, weary way that had never been Taizu.