He closed his own eyes. Then opened them again and, pushing and digging more quickly now, uncovered her body farther down. She was clothed, wearing tangled bone necklaces and a strange, glinting collection of metal polished to be... to be mirrors on her body, he realized.
Mirrors to frighten demons away. His fingers, clawing at the soil, shifted her a little, inadvertently. He heard muted bells in the blood-wet earth.
Tai stood up. A very old woman. Drum, mirrors, bells.
He looked at the heavy cabin door that opened on the yard.
He ran, sunlight overhead, darkness behind him and before.
CHAPTER VI
In Xinan, some years later, after he had found Spring Rain among the singing girls in the North District (or, more accurately, once she had noticed and chosen him among the student-scholars) and they had begun to talk frankly when alone, before or after music, before or after love, she asked him one night why he never spoke about his time north of the Wall.
"It didn't last very long," he said.
"I know that. Everyone knows that. That's what makes it talked about."
"It is talked about?"
She shook her golden hair and gave him a look he knew well by then. I am enamoured of an idiot who will never amount to anything was, more or less, the import of the glance.
Tai found it amusing, sometimes said so. She found his saying so a cause of more extreme irritation. This, too, amused him, and she knew it.
She was a glory and a wonder, and he worked hard at not thinking about how many men he shared her with in the North District—one, in particular.
"You were permitted to withdraw from the cavalry. With honour and distinction—during a campaign. That doesn't happen, no matter who your father is. Then you go to Stone Drum Mountain, but leave there not a Kanlin... and then you show up in Xinan, having decided to study for the examinations. It is all... mysterious, Tai."
"I need to clear up the mystery?"
"No!" She put down her pipa and, leaning forward, tugged hard at his hair, which he'd left unbound. He pretended to be in pain, she ignored that.
"Don't you see... being mysterious is good. It is a way of being noticed. That is what you want!"
"I do? It is?"
She made to seize his hair again and he lifted his hands to forestall her. She settled back on the couch and poured more rice wine from the flask upon the brazier at her elbow—pouring for him first. Her training and manners were flawless, except when she was attacking him, or when they were making love.
"If you pass the examinations this spring, and you hope for a position that means something—that doesn't leave you sending little begging poems to senior mandarins for their help—yes, it is what you want. You are trying for rank in the palace, Tai. To swim within the current. At this court, you need to know how the game plays or you will be lost."
He had taught her to use his given name. He insisted on it when they were alone.
"If I am lost, will you come find me?"
She glared at him.
He grinned, at ease. "I've been lucky, if you're correct. I've managed to become noticed without even trying. Rain, I just prefer not to discuss that time above the Wall. It isn't a good memory. I never thought about any of the things you are saying."
"You need to think about these things."
"I could let you keep doing it for me?"
She stiffened, shifted. He regretted his words as soon as he'd spoken them.
"I am," Spring Rain said, "a humble singing girl of the North District, hired by the hour or the night, owned by the proprietor of this house. It is inappropriate that one such as I be offered such a role. It is cruel to say so, even in jest. You will need to master these subtleties for yourself. It is your life we are talking about."
"Is it? Just my life?" he asked. Which was a little cruel, but her self-description had wounded him—and he knew at least one man who could afford to buy her from the Pavilion of Moonlight, for the impossible sum she'd command, if he chose to do so.
She flushed, a curse of the fair-skinned from the northwest, which was what she was.
She said levelly, after a moment, "If you pass the examinations you will enter among the most ambitious men on earth. You can decide to leave Xinan—leave yet another life—but if you stay here, at court, those are the people you will be among. They will eat you for breakfast, throw your bones to the dogs, and not know they dined."
Her green eyes—her celebrated jade-green eyes—were hard and cold.
He laughed, a little nervously, he remembered. "That's not poetic language."
"No," she said. "But I'm not a poet. Would you prefer a girl who is, Master Shen? There are some downstairs, and in other houses. I can make suggestions, sir."
A revenge, of sorts, for his own remark a moment before. But this was about her life, too. Of course it was...
Tai shook his head. He remembered looking at her beside him on the low couch, wanting simply to enjoy beauty and intelligence and nearness, but wrestling with what she'd said.
He murmured, "Women have usually been better at this than men, haven't they? Pursuing these subtleties?"
"Women have no choice but to be this way if we want any kind of influence, or simply a little control of our own lives."
"That's what I meant," Tai said. He tried a smile. "Do I get credit for subtlety?"
She didn't respond to the smile. "A child can know that much. You will be, if you ever decide to study enough to pass the examinations, among grown men who use words like blades and are in mortal combat with each other for position every day and night."
And to that he remembered saying, quietly, "Men like my brother, you mean?"
She'd just looked at him.
Sprinting across the autumn grass from the shaman's grave, Tai thought about screaming a warning, then about running around the front to summon the others. He didn't do either. He couldn't have said, after, that he'd been thinking with clarity. This was an utterly remote, terrifying place. He'd unearthed a murder, and he was very young.
Those truths didn't entirely address why he broke into the cabin alone.
When pressed—and he was, by his officers later—he'd say that if they were going to save Meshag, which was their reason for being where they were, it was unlikely to happen if he alerted those inside by shouting, and he didn't think he had enough time to go around the front.
It sounded true. It was true, if you considered it. He didn't remember considering anything at the time, however. You could say his instincts had been at work. Tai didn't have any idea if that was so.
His sword was on his saddle, so was his bow. There was a shovel leaning against the back cabin wall. He had a fair guess by then how that had been used.
Without pausing to think, plan, to do anything coherent at all, he seized it, grabbed the door latch, and pushed, with no idea what he'd find, what he would actually do in there.
Or what they were doing, whoever these people were who had killed the shaman, buried her in earth to deny her soul access to the sky, and deceived them out in front.
It wasn't locked, the back door. He stepped inside.
It was dark in the cabin. It had been very bright outdoors, he was nearly blind. He stopped. And just made out the shape of someone turning towards him from within the room.