Guy Kay - Under Heaven

“It isn’t,” he agrees. “But Zhong Ma and I had you entrusted to our care, and it would shame us both to let you slip away.”

“You have no duty once I leave Kitai!” she says. She’s begun to cry, however, which makes it difficult to fight well.

“Not so,” says Zhong Ma, quietly.

Tan smiles. “You may argue as to Kanlin duties once we’re on the road. We will have much time, I believe.”

“It is the Tarkan Desert,” Rain says, despairingly. “People die there!”

“The more reason for us to be with you,” says Hwan. And then, “We bought you a pipa in the market this morning. For the journey.”

IT TAKES HALF A YEAR, a little more, the Silk Road journey through the deserts and then up the narrow, climbing mountain passes to Sardia. They do not die. She almost certainly would have, without them. Qin, it emerges, can ride a camel.

They are attacked twice, the attackers are beaten off. There are sandstorms. The second of these costs Ssu Tan his right eye, but there is a physician with them (the party leader is experienced) and he applies an ointment and gauze bandages and Tan survives. He wears a patch over the eye after that. Rain tells him it makes him look like a bandit from ancient days.

He and Zhong Ma no longer wear their black robes by then. They had removed them after they passed through the third and last of the garrisons in the Kanshu Corridor. At that point, really, they had left the empire behind.

Around that same time she’d made another decision.

“My name is Saira,” she told them.

There is a taste in her mouth like spring cherries, saying it. All of them use it, or refer to her that way, surprisingly easily, from then on.

At the end of the very long road, burnt and weary, they arrive past the end of sand and rock to high, green pastureland surrounded by mountains. When she sees the horses for the first time, the Heavenly Horses (they still frighten her a little), she knows she is home.

It has been nine years. Her mother and father are alive. All but one of her brothers and sisters. There is little of glitter and jade, but less dust and noise, entirely. Merchants go both ways, east and often west now (new powers rising there). Over time she is able to sell, piece by piece, her jewels. Kitan work is highly valued west of here, she learns. The sky is blue and the mountain air is entirely unlike what she’d learned to live with in Xinan, with the yellow wind blowing and two million souls.

There are young children in her own family, amazingly. There is music. She teaches herself not to be afraid of horses, and eventually she rides one, a moment never to be lost. There is sadness, there are memories.

Qin stays, is made welcome in her father’s home at first, and then in hers. Hwan stays. She is wealthy enough to need a steward to run a household.

Zhong Ma goes home. He is young, proud of his journey, and of being a Kanlin. She gives him a letter to carry back. It takes her time to write this one. Sadness, memory.

Ssu Tan stays. She marries him. One of their children, a green-eyed girl, though with darker hair than her mother, is gifted beyond words at learning music. She masters all twenty-eight tunings of the pipa before she is twelve years old.

The world, Saira thinks, through her days, can bring you surprising gifts.

He had not been happy in that small fort above Kuala Nor, but Bytsan sri Nespo could not truthfully say that his self-described “flanking manoeuvre” to get away from there had improved his life yet.

His idea for dealing with the horses given to the Kitan had been approved. He’d been promoted and was now understood to have had direct communication with the palace in Rygyal, which was useful, obviously. He was in a far larger fortress now.

On the other hand, he had no clear role in the chain of command here, which was awkward and made him disliked. He outranked longer-serving officers, but he was here only to await one specific person, or message, from across the border.

He also knew, each morning and through each day and into each long summer evening, what his father thought of all this.

Principally, because his father was the commander of Dosmad Fortress. Dosmad, where Bytsan was posted to await the possible arrival of a Kitan gifted with an absurd number of Sardian horses.

Bytsan hadn’t known who had just been made fortress commander here when he’d offered his clever suggestion about the Sardians. One of the (many) unfortunate aspects of having been in such an isolated fort.

It was an unhappy surprise.

His father entirely and unreservedly disapproved of the royal gift. He thought it was an act of decadent folly. But since it was impossible in Tagur, even for a high-ranking officer, to say anything like that , Fortress Commander Nespo discharged his ire on his own worthless son, who happened to be serving under him now, and who had evidently proposed amendments to the gift, making it more likely to happen.

The horses were here at Dosmad, in large pens outside the walls. They needed to be fed and watered, ridden regularly, monitored for health. To send defective horses east would reflect badly upon Tagur, Commander Nespo had been caused to understand, and this, in turn, might have implications for him, nearing retirement.

A small army of men had arrived with the horses to discharge these duties, adding to the burdens of a fortress commander. He’d placed his son in charge of them. It was beneath Bytsan’s new rank, but the Sardians were the only reason for his son’s promotion, so he could make sure their hooves and diet were tended to and the shit and mud brushed off them when they rolled in it. He could do it himself, for all Nespo cared. In fact, he’d have preferred it that way. He’d said that to Bytsan.

It was easy to blame his son for all of this: Bytsan had been the one to propose to the court that they hold the horses here.

As far as Nespo sri Mgar was concerned, it was a foolish idea added to a foolish gift. The thing to do, if you had to go through with this, would have been to dump all two hundred and fifty of them on the Kitan at Kuala Nor and let him do what he could to get them back to wherever he wanted them. If the horses were stolen or scattered, grew sick, or died on the way, so much the better for Tagur, in Nespo’s view.

You didn’t give Sardian cavalry horses to a once enemy who might be a future enemy. You didn’t do that. And he wasn’t going to listen to anyone, especially his hopeless son, going on about the treaty signed after Kuala Nor, or honouring the wishes of the so-lovely princess they’d been so kindly granted by the eternally untrustworthy Kitans.

In fact, Nespo had declared to his son one evening earlier in the summer, this whole business of the princess and the horses might be part of Kitai’s intricate plotting.

Bytsan, who was far too modern in his thinking and too inclined to disagree if his father said the sun was shining at noon on a blue-sky day, had said, “After twenty years? Long time to hatch a plot. I think you’re too much afraid of them.”

Nespo had thrown him out of his chambers for that.

He did that often, throwing Bytsan out. He’d call him back the next night, or the one after if he’d been really angered, because … well, because this was his son, wasn’t it? And because not every last thing he said was foolish.

It was possible, just, for an old army officer in Tagur to accept that the world was changing. He didn’t have to like it, mind you.

And he wasn’t sure how he felt when messengers came from across the border in late summer, two riders under a banner of peace, to say that the Kitan from Kuala Nor had come for his horses—which meant his clever son had been proven right.