Imperial Lady (Central Asia Series Book 1) Read online

“Look, how the ugly wench glares at you. Do you think she heard?” A faint giggling followed that question, and the concubine and her friend flounced away.

  “I do not think that the Emperor will even look at this one,” announced an elder wife to the First Wife. “Country bred, rough, and appallingly healthy. Who knows if she is truly a lady of the Han? You know, they say that her father married among the Hsiung-nu . . .”

  “That would explain her repulsive hardiness, if she were half . . .”

  “Hush!” commanded the First Wife, who approached Silver Snow with a glittering smile in which the girl could discern nothing of welcome.

  Nor did the bath, more elaborate than any she had ever known, warm or refresh her. She took no pleasure in the robes in which they wrapped her, with many comments on her weathered hands, callused from bowstring and blade, and her browned face. Willow’s mirror might show her to be lovely when she sat alone at home; here, however, she saw herself as she was: lacking the insipid prettiness that made each lady resemble the others as one plum resembles its companions on the branch. Where they minced and tripped, she walked; where they fluttered lashes and sleeves, she moved quickly, decisively; her brows, though finely, naturally arched, were too thick, and her mouth far too generous. Even here, she thought, chin raised and with a flash of anger, she was not ill-favored: just very different, very much a lady of the northern frontier.

  As she sat among the others of the inner courtyards, spooning up a savory soup rich in spices such as her own poor kitchen could only sigh for, a sudden spasm of fear clutched her and made the soup taste flat. This was, as its master said, but a provincial house. If this passed as backward and countrified, what must the Imperial Courts be like?

  Would any there accept her more willingly?

  It did not matter. She had made the only choice open to her—to obey with a willing heart.

  The next morning, when the whispers started again, Silver Snow learned that, despite the local magistrate’s pleas, the Son of Heaven’s messenger chose not to remain another day, but to press on instead. She felt only relief.

  But she had not reckoned with the magistrate’s First Wife.

  “Sister,” said the lady, according Silver Snow the tribute of equality since—who could know?—one day, she might be the beloved of an Emperor, “a thousand apologies, but I must impose on you to discuss your attendant.”

  The First Wife’s glossy hair was scented with lilac; and lilacs glistened on her fine robes. Though she spoke of humility and apology, Silver Snow could see neither in her dress, her gait, or her speech. The girl waited courteously, feigning attention and eagerness to listen.

  “The girl is ugly,” said the First Wife. “Forgive this wretched one’s ill-bred speech, but your maid is so ill-favored and halt. She will do you no credit in the capital.”

  Silver Snow cast down her eyes and murmured that Willow had long served her.

  “In the North, perhaps such as she is the best that there is to choose.” The First Wife shrugged a plump shoulder as if anything might be expected to happen in the barbarous North. “You are young and far from your home, younger sister. Let me advise you as should your go-between . . . but you have none, now have you?”

  “She was taken ill,” Silver Snow found herself explaining, feeling oddly defensive, oddly apologetic on behalf of a woman whom she did riot know and who allowed infirmity to interfere with duty.

  “Very well, then. I know that she would advise you to accept my offer of three lovely maids to accompany you to Ch’ang-an. That one can wait here until the old nurse is fit to travel, then return North, or . . . ” Another comfortable, plump shrug indicated that whether or not Willow found herself well suited was of no lasting importance or concern.

  “I thank you, Elder Sister”—Silver Snow bowed—“and I beg you to forgive me; but, having suffered the rigors of travel myself, I cannot bring myself to force one of your ladies—all gently reared—to endure them too. Willow is willing and strong; she suits me well.”

  “Indeed, she does,” said the First Wife, ice in her voice and in her spine as she bowed with the merest possible inclination as Silver Snow prepared to depart.

  The wind whipped at the curtains of her ox-cart, but Silver Snow could have embraced it like a sister. It was not just relief at being out of that too crowded, too hot, and too treacherous women’s quarter; it was enjoyment. Silver Snow would never have imagined that she would adapt with such zest to travel—or that it would be so hard to conceal her interest and delight at each new day from her protectors, who seemed ever concerned that the hardships of the journey not overpower a lady’s fragile body and spirit.

  Day by day, as the land grew less and less familiar, she took increasing satisfaction in peering out from the slit that she had fashioned in the heavy curtains of her ox-cart, listening to the guttural, barely understandable words of the peasants, the arrogant demands and comments of the official and, sometimes, the tax-gatherers, also on imperial orders, who seemed to be a plague upon the land. Her sole regret was that she could not ride out herself among them as she had been accustomed (however improperly) to do at home.

  It was not so much that she could not tolerate the crowded towns, or the company of her hostesses, with their constant concerns and stream of chatter about daughters, servants, concubines, and the kitchens. Not all were as frigid and hostile as the lady at her first stopover. Some were actually kind. Others pitied her; and once again, there came the buzzings, the whispers, the sleeve-pluckings. “Poor child, how weathered she is.”

  “She is but one among five hundred. What hope has she, with no wealth and that browned skin, of being noticed? Thus I told her; and she said that she journeyed to court at her father’s will.”

  “They are strict in the North about obedience, if about nothing else. How mannish is her stride!”

  “Let her creep back to her home. Surely, she would be forgotten. Indeed, I think it likelier that no one will ever notice her in Ch’ang-an. When I saw the city . . .”

  “Once, you saw it, when you were a girl of ten . . .”

  “When I saw Ch’ang-an, let me tell you, younger sister . . . ”

  Silver Snow became adroit at feigning deafness. Never before had she imagined that words might have edges as keen as fangs or blades. The words of the ladies whom she met, kindly or ill-willing, cut deeply.

  At the times when the limitations of women’s quarters and women’s chatter pressed her too closely or wounded her, she reminded herself of her duty to her house and its honor, and held hard to her pride that she, a woman, might serve as the means of its rebirth and the mender of its fortunes.

  She realized that in Ch’ang-an she would enter just such an enclosure as those first ladies kept. Perhaps, if fate was kind, it would be a more luxurious seclusion, but seclusion nonetheless. Still, it had been her choice. Although no one dared to refuse a summons by the Son of Heaven, she was fairly certain that the kindly lady at the last house was right: should the daughter of a disgraced noble have failed to turn up, one among five hundred women, no one would have noticed; or, had someone noticed, he would not have cared. What was more, the other four hundred and ninety-nine would rejoice.

  Then, her ox-cart waited, and they would be on the road again. Once more, Silver Snow would avidly peer out through the rent in the curtain, Willow beside her. Each day was an adventure. Best of all, however, were the nights when the caravan stopped along the road; nights of firelight and starlight and, overhead, the vast, wind-filled bowl of the sky.

  She discovered that she was coming to welcome such nights when the packtrain, cumbersome despite the official’s swift carriage and swifter impatience at delay, bypassed a town, preferring several hours more of travel and a stop on the road for the night.

  If only, then, she might have ridden! Used though she was to a more active existence, she dared not suggest it to the master of their party. Already, he might have heard slighting reports of her; she dared not risk his disfav
or. Even the horse that she had always considered hers was stabled at . . . the place that she must forever afterward regard as her father’s house, not her home: not anymore. The hurt of that realization faded day by day, overlaid by each glimpse of a new town, or peasants, steaming with sweat as they worked on the land or the roads, though it was deep winter.

  Reconciled to idleness as befitted a great lady, Silver Snow watched while camp was made, smiling at the confusion among the official’s servants, approving her own guard’s quick, soldierly ways as the men camped in a protective circle about her cart. Then, once the fire was kindled, her cart became a pavilion that was more comfortable than she would have imagined. She and Willow had their own fire, and, with no walls but the night, their own court, ringed at a discreet distance by her father’s old soldiers.

  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. He 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.

&nb
sp; 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.

  “The Red Brows . . . marauded hereabouts only the night before . . . three peasants . . .”

  Words floated again from the official’s firesite. Not an unnatural animal then. She need have no fears for Willow, at least not yet. But what were “Red Brows”? Perhaps bandits. In which case, Silver Snow was doubly thankful for the gift of the bow . . . assuming it was not a terrible violation of all proprieties if she used it.

  Better, she thought daringly, a violation of the proprieties than of her own body. She was a general’s daughter, an Emperor’s concubine-to-be: no prize for bandits.

  The wind shifted, overpowering the rest of the words the official was addressing to his guard, and making her shiver.

  Abruptly the stars overhead no longer held the promise of freedom. Instead, the very open spaces about her seemed to threaten, rather than promise release. As a gust of wind tossed sparks from her fire high in the air, like an army beacon, Silver Snow rose and entered her wagon, where she hoped to find among her baggage that jade-handled knife she could use either to let out a bandit’s life, or her own.

  A scratching at the hanging of her cart made Silver Snow gasp and whirl around. The wickedly sharp little knife glinted in the firelight as she drew it, ready to her hand as the hangings parted.

  Willow stood before her, her green eyes wary as a vixen’s as she noted her mistress’ knife.

  “Lady?” she began, cautiously using one of the most formal of Silver Snow’s titles.

  Silver Snow flushed and laid the knife aside. She was pleased to note that her hand did not shake, either from fear or from the cold. “Come in, Willow, before the winter rules in here as it does outside.”

  “I rescued the soup, mistress,” Willow said, lifting the pot with one rag-wrapped hand as she drew shut the cart’s hangings behind her, leaving out the wind and the world beyond. As Silver Snow waited, barely schooling herself to patience, Willow made elaborate play of serving the soup, of adjusting bowls and cushions just so: all of which enabled the two of them to sit with their heads close together, bent over the bowls as if inhaling the fragrant steam.