Читать книгу Under Heaven - Guy Gavriel Kay - Страница 16

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…

A woman smooth as jade

Waiting all night above marble stairs

At a rice paper window wet with autumn rain.

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.

Tai stepped forward and swung the shovel as hard as he could.

He felt it bite—the sharp spade edge—into flesh, and sink. The figure, still only half seen, threw up an empty hand as if in entreaty or placation, and slumped to the earthen floor.

Soundlessly. Which was good.

Tai had never killed anyone at that point in his life. He didn’t have time to consider what had just happened, what it meant, if it meant anything. He blinked rapidly, willing his eyes to adjust to shadow and dark.

Heart pounding, he made out an interior archway, a curtain over it, no actual door. A two-room cabin. He stepped over the fallen man, then—tardily—turned back and exchanged the shovel for the man’s sword.

He did kneel and check, cautiously, he was aware enough to do that. The man was dead. Another brief disturbance: how swiftly, smoothly, silently life could be present, pulsing, and then be gone.

That thought pushed him forward, treading lightly, towards the fabric curtain. He shifted a corner of it.

There were candles burning in the other room, for which Tai gave thanks. Three men. Two near the front door, whispering fiercely to each other. Tai saw that the door was barred. They wouldn’t have been able to crash in that way. Not without giving a great deal of warning.

Meshag lay on a pallet near the hearth. Tai saw that his tunic had been cut open, exposing his chest. His eyes were still closed. He looked terribly vulnerable. The third figure, tall and bulky, with animal horns attached to his head, was standing over him.

This one wore mirrors and bells and was softly beating a drum and chanting, rocking from side to side, occasionally spinning completely around. A kind of dance. There was a sickly-sweet smell in the room, something burning on a brazier. Tai had no idea what it was.

But he did not believe for a moment that this third man—it was a man, the woman was dead in the garden—was doing anything benevolent for the unconscious figure. They had killed the shaman who dwelled here. They weren’t trying to help Meshag.

They hadn’t killed him yet. Tai didn’t know why. Why should he understand any of this? But, watching through the slightly lifted curtain, breathing carefully, Tai had a disturbing sense that what was happening here was intended to be worse than killing.

He was a long way from home.

That was his last clear thought before he screamed at the top of his voice and exploded through the curtain into the front room.

He went straight for the shaman, not necessarily what an experienced soldier would have done (take out the guards!) but he wasn’t experienced, and surely his task was to try to stop whatever was being done with drum and chant and gathered powers to the man on the pallet.

He had not yet been on Stone Drum Mountain—his time among the Kanlin was a result of what happened that autumn day in the north—but he was the son of a soldier. He had been trained from earliest memory in ways and means of fighting, the more so since his older brother, soft and slightly plump even as a child, had made clear that his own inclinations and path in life did not involve swords or spinning, twisting manoeuvres against other armed men.

The dead nomad’s sword was slightly curved, shorter than Tai’s own, heavier as well, meant for downward blows from horseback. No matter. You used what you had. He had time to see the shaman turn, see fevered eyes open wide, blazing surprise and rage, before he struck a slashing blow above the metal mirrors draping the shaman’s body, protecting it.

A part of Tai, his bearings lost so far away from everything he’d ever thought he knew, enmeshed in sorcery, was surprised when the sword bit the way it should.

He felt it grind on bone, saw blood, heard the shaman cry out and fall (a sound of bells), dropping drum and mallet on the hardpacked floor. He shouldn’t have been startled: they’d killed a shaman woman, hadn’t they? These mirror-and-drum people, they were holy and feared, but they weren’t immortal.

Of course it was also possible that killing one put a curse on you for life. Not a matter Tai was in a position to address just then.

He wheeled and dropped, fear giving him urgency. He saw the nearer of the guards—the one who’d pretended to be a servant outside—rushing to where a bow lay against a wall. Tai sprang after him, twisting to dodge a knife thrown by the other man. He heard shouts outside.

He screamed again, words this time: “Treachery! Get in here!”

The false servant scrabbled for his bow, for an arrow, turned, dodging to avoid Tai’s thrust sword—or trying to avoid it.

Tai caught him in the shoulder instead of the chest, heard the man shriek in pain. Tai jerked free his blade and—instinctively—dropped and rolled again, careful of the sword he held. He banged against objects scattered on the floor (their offered gifts) but the second enemy’s sword sweep whistled over his head.

First time in his life for that sound: the sound of death averted, passing close. He heard thudding outside, and wild cries as his companions tried to get in, pounding against the barred front door.

“Around the back!” he screamed. “It’s open!”

But in the same moment he took another chance, hurtling to the door. He flung the heavy wooden bar back. Just in time he dodged again, avoiding a downward slash that bit past him into wood.

He was sent staggering as the door flew open, hitting him in the back, but something—pride and anger and fear interwoven like threads in silk—made him step towards the man left standing. Tai slashed at him, parried a hard return as the others spilled into the room behind him.

“They killed the shaman!” he cried over his shoulder. “She’s dead out back! Meshag’s over there! Watch the one on the ground! I only wounded him!”

The one on the ground was seized by three men and dragged upright, off the ground, held like a child’s doll. He received a bonesplintering blow to the side of his head. They didn’t kill him, however. Tai noticed that. And in the same moment he heard one of the Bogü say, “Leave the last one, too. We will use him.”

At those words, the man facing Tai abruptly changed his expression. Tai would remember that look, as well. He could sometimes see it when he closed his eyes in years of nights to come.

The man moved back towards the curtain. He reversed his sword, fumbling for the grip with both hands. He was trying to stab himself, Tai realized. But before that could happen, two carefully placed arrows took him one in each shoulder. The sword fell to the ground.

The man screamed then. A terrible sound, beyond any possible pain of his wounds, Tai thought.

A little later he would begin to understand.

HE’D HAVE SCREAMED like that, he found himself thinking on the ride back south (they had left that same evening, unwilling to remain by the lake, needing as much distance from it as possible).

He’d have tried to kill himself, too, if he’d had any idea what was to come before he was allowed to die. And the man had clearly known. In some ways, that was the most horrific thing.

The Kitan cavalry—Tai’s own men—had come rushing down the slope when the shouts and screaming had begun, but it was all over within the cabin before they were near enough to do anything.

Tai had walked across the grass to join them when he came out. It had been disorienting, to be back in mild sunshine with so little time having passed. The world could change too swiftly.

The thirty Kitan riders had remained apart, together, to see what the nomads would do. Watching in impassive silence at first, then with increasingly intense, shattering revulsion.

The Bogü began by claiming the body of the old shaman from out back and burning it on a pyre they built between cabin and lake. They did this respectfully, with chants and prayer. She had been defiled by murder and burial under ground, it seemed. She had to be returned to the sky—left in the open to be devoured by wolves and other animals—or she could be consumed by flame and rise with the smoke.

They chose fire, because they were beginning a greater burning. They set the outbuildings alight, and then the cabin itself, but not before they brought out Meshag upon his pallet and laid him down in the yard. They dragged out the two men Tai had killed, the guard and the shaman, and finally they brought forth the two who were still alive. They were drinking by then, the Bogü: there had been kumiss in the cabin.

The shaman’s bells chimed as they pulled his body across the trampled grass. His mirrors glinted, splintering sunlight. Tai had wondered if he’d transgressed in killing this man. It was not so, he understood now. He had done something, in the nomads’ eyes, that marked him as a hero. He was to be honoured, it seemed.

They invited him to join in what was now to follow, with the two dead men and the two left deliberately alive. He declined. Stayed with his men, his own people, from a civilized place.

He was physically sick, wrackingly so, when he saw what came next. What he had been invited to share. Many of the Kitan cavalry became violently ill, stumbling or riding away, retching into the grass.

The empire of Kitai had not been shaped through nine dynasties by a placid, pacifist people. Theirs was a violent, conquering grandeur, built upon slaughter through nearly a thousand years, in their own civil wars, or carrying warfare beyond shifting borders, or defending those borders. Such was their history: fires such as these, or greater burnings by far, blood and blades.

There were texts and teachings as far back as the First Dynasty about the tactical utility of massacre, killing children, mutilation, rape. The useful fear all these could spread in foes, the overcrowding of besieged cities as terrified refugees fled before advancing armies. These things were a part of what men did in warfare, and warfare was a part of what men did in life.

But the Kitan did not roast dead enemies over fires and eat their flesh with invocations to the sky. Or cut off slices from men still living, staked out naked upon the ground, and let them watch, screaming, as their own body parts were consumed, cooked or raw.

There was a great deal of smoke, spilling thickly upwards, hiding the sun. A stench of burning in a once-serene space beside a northern lake. The crackling of several fires, howls (humans, not wolves), ritual chants, and someone’s desperate, slowly fading plea for death replaced the sound of birds and wind in leaves. The ugliness of men erasing solitude and autumnal beauty.

It went on for some time.

One of the nomads eventually approached the Kitan where they waited, gentling their nervous horses a distance apart. He was bare-chested, grinning widely, and he was waving the severed forearm of a man. Blood dripped from it, and from his chin.

Unsteady on his feet, he extended the human flesh towards Tai, as to a hero worthy to partake of this great bounty. Giving the Kitan, the stranger, one more chance.

He took an arrow in the chest as he stood before them. He died instantly.

Tai could not, for a moment, believe what had happened. It was entirely wrong, shockingly so. He stood in numbed disbelief. Which was, however brief, too long an interval for a commander of men in a place such as this one had become.

His soldiers, as if released by that single arrow to their own demons, their frenzied response to the horror they were being made to witness, mounted up suddenly, all of them, with smooth, trained efficiency, as if an order had been given.

Seizing bows and swords from saddles, they swept forward—avenging spirits, in and of themselves—into the fires and smoke, infused with a clawing fury, with the sense that this hideous savagery could only be expunged, erased, with savagery of their own.

This understanding of events came to Tai only afterwards. He wasn’t thinking clearly at the time.

His cavalry knifed into and among the outnumbered, on-foot, drunk-on-kumiss nomads, the stumbling, blood-soaked men they’d come north to aid—and they slaughtered them between the fires.

And when it was done, when none of the Bogü were left alive amid the black smoke and the red burning, the blurred sun setting west now, the lake a dark, cold blue, the next thing happened.

Meshag, son of Hurok, stood up.

He looked around the unholy scene created by men in that place. He had been a graceful man. He wasn’t any more. He had changed, had been changed. He moved awkwardly now, as if oddly jointed, had to shift his whole body to turn his gaze, moving stiffly through a full circle. Black smoke drifted between him and where Tai stood rooted to the ground with a gaping horror. He was seeing this, and refusing to believe what he saw.

Meshag stared towards the Kitan riders for a long moment. The last men alive here. Then, shifting his shoulders as if trying to throw back his head, he laughed. A low, distorted sound.

He had not moved or opened his eyes since falling unconscious by another fire to the south weeks before.

It was not his remembered laughter. The way he stood and moved was appallingly different, this shambling, slack-limbed, unnatural posture. The Kitan soldiers, in an alien place among burning and the dead, stopped wheeling their horses about, stopped shouting. They clustered together, close to Tai again as if for protection, keeping their distance from Meshag.

Looking at this man—if he was still a man—Tai understood that the evils of this day had not ended.

He heard sounds beside him, arrows clicking from sheaths, nocked to strings. He stirred, he rasped an order—and was not sure if what he did was right. He might die not knowing, he would decide on the ride back south.

“Hold!” he cried. “No man shoots an arrow!”

What was left of Meshag, or what had become of him, turned, cumbersome and slow, to look at Tai, tracking the sound of his voice.

Their gazes locked through smoke. Tai shivered. He saw a blankness in those eyes, something unfathomable. Cold as the end of all life. It occurred to him, in that same moment, that his task, his duty to what had once been a man, might be to grant him the arrows’ release.

He did not. He knew—he could not deny knowing—that something evil had been happening in that cabin (still burning, a red, roaring chaos) before he burst in and killed the shaman. It might have been interrupted, incomplete, but what that meant, what it implied for the figure standing stiffly before him, holding his gaze, as if committing Tai to memory, he couldn’t hope to grasp.

“Like the swans,” he said loudly to his cavalry. “Killing it might curse us all. This is not our affair. Let it…let him go. He will find his fate without us.”

He said that last as clearly as he could, staring at the soulwracking figure of Meshag. If the creature moved towards them the soldiers would panic, Tai knew. He’d have to allow the arrows to fly, and live with that.

He didn’t believe his own swan comparison. He hadn’t even believed killing a swan would curse them…that was Bogü fear. The Kitan had their own animal legends and fears. But the words might offer something to his men, a reason to listen to him. They didn’t normally need reasons: soldiers followed orders, as simple as that. But this northward journey and today’s ending to it were so remote in all ways from their normal lives and world that it seemed necessary to offer one.

As for why, in his own mind, it felt proper to give this dead-eyed, impossibly reawakened figure the chance to leave this place and live—if living was what it was—Tai could only call it pity, then and after.

He wondered if that came through in his voice, in the look they exchanged. He wouldn’t have said it was an entirely human gaze, Meshag’s, but neither would he have said it wasn’t, that there was some demon in there. Meshag was altered, and it seemed to Tai he might well be lost, but he didn’t know.

Killing him might have been the truest answer to what had been done to him, offering the kindness of release, but Tai didn’t do it, and didn’t allow his soldiers to do it. He wasn’t even sure this figure could be killed, and he really didn’t want to test that.

After a long stillness, barely breathing, he saw Meshag—or what had been Meshag—move one hand, in a gesture he could not interpret. The figure turned away from him, from all of them, living and dead and burning. Meshag didn’t laugh again, and he never did speak. He loped away, around the burning cabin and then along the shore of the lake, towards the fire-coloured autumn trees and the distant, almost-hidden mountains.

Tai and his men stayed together, watching him through the smoke until he passed from sight, and then they started the other way, towards home.

They had left the silk farm and the orange flare of the fox far behind.

The sun was going down, also orange now. Tai realized he’d been wrapped in reverie for a long time, tracing memory, the paths that had led him here.

Or, one particular path, that journey north: past Wall, past river’s loop, beyond the steppes to the edge of winter’s land.

In the eye of his mind, riding now with six companions on a glorious Sardian horse, he still saw Meshag, son of Hurok—or whatever he had become—shambling away alone. It occurred to him that, having seen this, having been a part of that day, he ought not to be so quickly dismissive of someone else’s belief in fox-women.

Or, perhaps, because of his own history, that was why he needed to be dismissive? There were only two people in the world with whom he could even have imagined talking about this feeling. One of them was in Xian and it was very likely he would never be able to speak with her again. The other was Chou Yan, who was dead.

No man can number his friends

And say he has enough of them.

I broke willow twigs when you left,

My tears fell with the leaves.

Wei Song was still up front. The stream they were following was on their left, a wide valley stretching from it, fertile lands, both banks. The forest that had flanked them to the south had receded. This was farming land. They could see peasant huts clustering into hamlets and villages, men and women in the fields, charcoal burners’ fires against the darkening trees.

Tai had come this way heading west, approaching Kuala Nor two years ago, but he’d been in a strange state of mind then—grieving, withdrawn—and he hadn’t paid attention to the land through which he rode. Looking back, he couldn’t say he’d begun to think clearly about what he was doing, what he intended to do, until he’d ridden beyond Iron Gate Fort up the long ravine and come out and seen the lake.

He needed to become a different man now.

Spring Rain had warned him so many times about the dangers of the Ta-Ming Palace, the world of court and mandarin—and now he had the army, the military governors to consider as well.

Someone wanted him dead, had wanted that before he’d received the horses. He couldn’t keep them, he knew he couldn’t keep them. Not in the world as it was. The issue was what he did with them, and—before that—how he could live long enough to claim them back at the Taguran border.

He twitched Dynlal’s reins and the big horse moved effortlessly forward to catch up to the Kanlin woman. The sun was behind them, shining along the plain. It was almost time to stop for the night. They could camp out again, or approach one of these villages. He wasn’t sure where the next posting station was.

She didn’t turn her head as he pulled up beside her. She said, “I’d be happier inside walls, unless you object.”

It was the fox, he guessed. This time he didn’t make a jest. He still carried the long day’s dark remembering, a smell of burning in his mind from a northern lake.

“Whatever you say.”

This time she did look over, he saw anger in her eyes. “You are indulging me!”

Tai shook his head. “I am listening to you. I retained you to protect me. Why hire a guard dog and bark yourself?”

Not calculated to appease her, but he didn’t exactly feel like doing that. It did occur to him to mildly regret hiring her. The soldiers from the fort would surely have been enough protection. But he hadn’t known that he’d be given a military escort.