She wants to think this, but has been with the court long enough—arriving the year before the empress's exile—to picture it otherwise. She can almost hear Liu's polished, reasonable voice: "What is so different from offering her as an attendant to the empress, in my proposing her elevation to a princess? Are they not both exaltations for our family? Has she any other duty, or role in life?"
It is difficult, even in the imagination, to shape a sufficiently crushing reply.
Tai might have done so, equally clever, in a different fashion. But her second brother is impossibly far away right now, west, among the ghosts. It is an absolute certainty that Liu took that absence into account, as well, when he shaped his plans. Nor could Li-Mei's sad, sweet empress, exiled from the palace, lost to endless prayers and a dwindling memory, do anything to shield her when the summons to the Hall of Brilliance came.
Li-Mei, being carried north, is beyond all borders herself now. The difference is, Tai—if he is alive—will be going home soon. She never will.
It is a hard thing to live with. She needs her anger.
"Married to a Far Horizon" starts up again, the worst pipa player of the six this time. They appear to be taking turns. Li-Mei allows herself to curse, in a very un-royal fashion. She hates the song by now. Lets that feeling help drive and shape the fury she requires.
She peeks out of her litter (they will not let her ride, of course). One of the Bogu is just then passing, riding towards the front. He is bare-chested, his hair loose, almost all the way down his back. He sits his horse in a way that no Kitan ever has. They all do, she's come to realize. The nomads live on their horses. He looks at her as he goes by. Their eyes meet for an instant before Li-Mei lets the curtain fall.
It takes her a few moments, but she decides that the expression in the rider's face was not conquest or triumph or even a man's lust, but pride.
She isn't sure what she wants to make of that.
After a time, she peers out again. No rider now, he's moved ahead. The landscape is hazy. The evening wind blows dust, as usual. It has done that for several days now. It stings her eyes. The sun is low, blurred above the endless grass. They have seen vast herds of gazelles the last two days. Heard wolves at night since leaving the Wall behind. The Kitan have a terror of wolves, part of the fear and strangeness these northern grasslands evoke. Those stationed in the garrisons past the Wall must hate it like death, she thinks.
Squinting towards the orange sunset, Li-Mei finds herself devising ways in which she might have killed her brother Liu before any of this happened, sent him over to the night.
The visions are briefly satisfying.
She's angry at Tai, as well, she's decided. She doesn't have to be fair to anyone in this wind. He had no business leaving them for two years, not with a father and husband buried. He was needed, if only as a counterweight to Liu. He ought to have known that, foreseen it.
She lets the curtain drop, leans back against pillows, thinking about the two of them, sliding towards memory.
Not necessarily a good thing. It means remembering about home again, but is she really going to be able to keep from doing that? It is, if nothing else, a way of not dwelling upon what is waiting for her when this journey from the bright world ends, wherever it does, in this emptiness.
Second mother, their father's only concubine, was childless. A tragedy for her, cause of nighttime sorrows and sleeplessness, but—in the difficult way of truth sometimes—an advantage for the four Shen children, because she diverted all of her considerable affection to them, and the general's two women did not have competing children as a source of conflict.
Li-Mei was six years old, which means Liu was nineteen, preparing for the first round of examinations in their prefecture. Tai was two years younger than him, training in military arts, already bigger than his older brother. Chao, the baby, was toddling about the yard, falling happily into piled leaves that autumn. She remembers that.
Their father was home, end of a campaign season (another reason she knew it was autumn, that and the paulownia leaves). Li-Mei, who had been diligently studying dance all summer with a teacher arranged by her mothers, was to offer a performance for the family one bright, windy festival-day morning with everyone home.
She remembers the wind. To this day, she believes it was the wind that caused her problem. Were her life not shattered and lost right now she could manage to be amused that she still clings to this explanation for falling.
She had fallen. The only time she'd done that after at least a dozen rehearsals in the days before, for her teacher and her mother. But with both mothers, and father, and her older brothers watching, and the drummer hired to accompany her, she had spun too far halfway through her first dance, lost her balance, tried to regain it, wobbled the other way, and tumbled—ignominiously—into leaves at the edge of the courtyard, as if she were no older than the baby playing in them.
No one laughed. She remembers that.
Liu might have done so in a certain mood, but he didn't. Li-Mei sat up, covered in leaves, shocked, white-faced, and saw her father's immediate, gentle concern, and then his almost-masked amusement at his short-legged little girl-child.
And that made her scramble to her feet and run from the courtyard, weeping uncontrollably. She had wanted to show him—show them all—how she was growing up, that she wasn't an infant any more. And what she'd done was entirely the opposite. The humiliation welling within her was beyond enduring.
Liu found her first, in the orchard under her favourite peach tree at the farthest end of a row, by the stone wall. She was sprawled on the ground, ruining her dance costume, her face buried in her arms. She had cried herself out by then, but refused to look up when she heard him coming.
She'd expected Second Mother, or perhaps (less likely) her own mother. Hearing Eldest Brother's crisp voice speaking her name had startled her. Looking back, she has long since realized that Liu would have told the two women to leave her to him. By then they'd have listened to his instructions.
"Sit up!" he said. She heard him grunt, crouching beside her. He was already plump, it wasn't an effortless position for him.
It was simply not done, to ignore a direct instruction from a first brother. You could be whipped or starved in some other families for that.
Li-Mei sat up, faced him, remembered to bow her head respectfully, hands together, though she did not stand up to do it.
He let that pass. Perhaps her mud-stained face, the tracks of her tears caused him to be indulgent. You could never tell with Liu, even back then.
He said, "Here is what you will learn from this." His voice was controlled, precise—not the tone with which one addressed a child. She remembered that, after. He was quiet, but he made her pay attention.
He said, "We train to avoid mistakes, and we do not go before others unless we believe we have trained enough. That is the first thing. Do you understand?"
Li-Mei nodded, eyes wide on her oldest brother's round face. He had the beginnings of a moustache and beard that year.
He said, "Nonetheless, because we are not gods, or of the imperial family, we cannot ever be certain of being flawless. It is not given to ordinary men, and especially not women. Therefore, this is the second thing you will remember: if we are in public and we err, if we fall in the leaves, or stumble in a speech, or bow too many times or too few... we continue as if we had not done so. Do you understand?"