What are you looking at? he wondered. Stares he had had all his life; and whispers behind hands—
But he heard the word woman, and then he knew the gist of it, and what they whispered, and why.
The demon-wife, the ensorceller: the rumor still spread, Kegi's messengers, this time. They saw a man snared, they whispered together, they wove details to suit their fancy—and Taizu if she did hear made no sound and no complaint.
He hated it. He had always hated it. Damn his moment's whimsy, damn the whole madness they were involved in—
Gods knew how much she heard: whispers wondering at the scar on her face, about where he had come by her, at how much wife meant—the story growing by the hour and the day, people whispering about her—who had so much expected of her and so little resources left; and no forty years' experience to armor her.
"I know," he whispered into her ear, wrapping her in his arms, the hell with the curious and the gawkers. "Rest. Hell with them. They're crazed."
"They'll get us killed," she said, the first objection she had raised.
They. These people. And us.
No one achieves perfection, master Yenan had said—how many times?
But on the mountain they had touched it. Everything on the mountain had been better than this. It always would be. And it seemed more and more remote from the place they had gotten to.
"Go down to Choedri," he said. "Wait this out. This isn't your kind of fight. I didn't teach you this."
"No," she murmured, working closer to bury her head against his shoulder, and he pulled the blanket over her to give her the dark she was hunting for. "Not Choedri."
She was close to sleep. He was. They had had the argument again and again. He knew the steps, one after another. "Where, then?"
"Sleep." Patiently, wearily, with a sigh against him, a tightening of her arms.
Horses can't take much more, he thought. Too little resources. Too few men. Should have gotten Reidi and his men back across the river, into Hoisan. I should have done everything from there. . . .
If I had the strength—if the horses did—
She knows. I taught her better than this. . . .
She hasn't said a word since we took up with Reidi. Since I asked her—stay with me. . . .
Fool, girl, say it! Damned fool!
I've known—I've known it. Too many well-intentioned, too many brave, without sense—
Too late to turn this around. Too many committed, too many in too far—
There's no damn help in good intentions—
—should have learned that, dammit, should have learned that, ten years and the land's not the same, the land's bled too long, the fighters are dead. This is becoming a disaster.
No hope when we count our numbers in the hundreds and we're this close to Cheng'di—
He slept, while he was trying to work that out . . . sleep like a roll off a cliff, just enough time to know he was going, thump! and gone, until he smelled cooking and woke by firelight, with Taizu's armored body up against his, and Reidi's lieutenant saying, close by them, "Lord Saukendar, please, there's dinner. My master thinks you might want to wake now,"
Another little dark space. "Lord Saukendar?" the voice said, persisting.
Saukendar would have been awake the first time. Saukendar would not be caught that deeply asleep. Shoka dragged his weary limbs up to a sitting position, raked his hair out of his eyes and rubbed his eyes at the firelight glare and the sting of smoke.
He coughed; it was the cold ground; and blinked again, finding Taizu no quicker at least—finding the very ground unsteady under him until he had had a moment to collect himself.
He should be scared, he thought. He had been fretting over their situation when he had fallen asleep and he should be worried now, except he could not remember the details of matters and he found himself lost in a kind of haze in which everything had equal importance—Ghita, their numbers, the horses' condition, the season of the year, his memory of the way ahead, that led to Lungan and the great bridge—
His own calmness amazed him. He sat a moment letting his vision sort itself clear and he still could not muster any emotion about the chance of attack. Nothing was clear yet. Nothing made sense. Nothing was urgent, and it might have been ten years ago, himself suspecting nothing of the stirrings in the capital—
—Meiya, perhaps, taking account of things that night and realizing, because Meiya had always been alert to such things, that his absence and Ghita's shifting this and that man's duty in the palace might mean harm—
Meiya had sent for Heisu in the night. That much he knew—
On that thin charge they had had Heisu's life; and she had had recourse to the cup—
"M'lord." Taizu's voice, Taizu's hand on his. He had no more interest in remembering Meiya. It was the hall he saw around her that he tried to bring into focus, the exact recollection of the palace in a detail that he had not had in memory for all these years. He was there, and all Cheng'di was outside, the land beyond that, every detail of the road. . . .
"Don't," he said to her. It was very close, all the recollection, Cheng'di to Lungan, and the bridge there. . . .
That.
He sat there a moment. He built the entire waterfront at Lungan in his mind, the great bridge—the walled garrison beside it on the esplanade, the street beyond, where it went through a town of red tile roofs and buff walls, of prosperous shops. Trinket-sellers and vendors who cajoled the travelers bound for the Gate of Heaven, in Cheng'di. The road outbound, across rolling land and rich pasture. . . .
"M'lord," he heard someone say, but it was not Taizu. "Let him alone," her voice said fiercely. "He's heard you."
And closer, working backward from the great bridge over the Hisei, nothing more than the shallow, slow-moving Paigji, crossable at virtually any point until it joined the Tei, well past Botai. . . .
"The Paigji ford will be open on our side," lord Kegi said, by the firelight, over a plentiful supper of pork and rice and honey-cakes, and Shoka listened, between mouthfuls. "I thought—" Kegi was a soft-spoken, nervous man, and the scroll, gods help them, was the works of general Bogi'in, six hundred years ago. Kegi had made a study of that book: the old lord had died, cousin Kegi had succeeded to the seat at Choedri, and while his overlord had not yet responded to Reidi's bird-sent messages—nor would respond, Kegi said, until he was sure others were moving—Kegi had taken the field with nothing but that damn musty scroll for advice, that and his priest, his cook, his horse-doctor, and the men of his personal guard. It was Bogi'in this and Bogi'in that—"I thought, by what I read—it seemed good sense—lord Bogi'in said roads were the thing, Roads and Rice—"
Shoka regarded the man with dismay. A classroom came back to him, master Tagyan—roads and rice, and the lazy song of cicadas; the council-rooms, the late Emperor's voice stern and incisive, regarding the incursions of the Fittha raiders and the security of remotest Feiyan—
"Open—on your side of the ford. How many of the Regent's men on the other?"
"Constantly four or five, on both sides."
A cold chill ran through him, imagining the five from the other side, alarmed, taking flight and alarming the countryside all the way to Cheng'di. No damn use except intimidating the peasants, and counting the traffic. Not a way in hell the mercenaries could hold that border. The Paigji was too shallow, the crossings too numerous to guard.
"You've ordered attack," Shoka said.