Awkwardly she crouched beside Silver Snow and dangled a tiling that she held where her mistress could see it.
“What is that foul thing?” Silver Snow cried, and flung up a hand to ward off Willow’s trophy. “Do they bring you carrion now? I never knew that fox and kite were kin before.”
» “Look you.” Willow’s voice was softer but more inexorable than Silver Snow had ever known it to be. Some of Strong Tongue’s power of command seemed to lie beneath it: in this moment, Willow was shaman, not serving maid.
Silver Snow looked. What Willow held appeared to be a tangle of leather straps, much chewed and fouled with old, dried blood. For a moment, her hand trembled, then she disciplined it to such stillness that she might have been a statue.
“It looks like harness leathers,” Silver Snow mused. “But . . . there is a medallion there, still fastened to the strap. Wait!” she breathed. “This is a bridle, and that medallion, those cheekpieces ...”
The design incised on the bronze was unmistakable: a squat, fat woman, or goddess, or some such creature. She had last seen that piece of harness on one of Basich’s horses.
Silver Snow sat up, her sleeping furs dropping to her waist. “Where got you this?” she demanded.
She pushed past it, snatched up her robes where Willow had laid them at the foot of her bed, and began to dress before Willow could assist her.
“The brothers-in-fur waited,” Willow said, “until the white tiger fed, then brought this hither.”
Silver Snow remembered a cold, clear night, its silence broken only by frightened breathing, the occasional footstep, and the thumping of a huge, hostile heart that she had heard when the white tiger stalked her tent and as she stalked the white tiger. Basich had not been as fortunate. Sable would wail; and how was Silver Snow to comfort her? How could she demand redress? Did she even have proof that Sable’s brother was dead?
And what became of your letter, or of some reply? came the quiet, fearsome voice that constantly chided Silver Snow for choosing the personal over the political. Angrily she shook her head. This was not Ch’in; this was the grasslands—and statecraft was as much a matter of personal ties as it was of law or custom.
“Did they ...” her voice faltered. “Did your kin on the plains discover any traces of the man, as well as his horse?” Willow shook her head, but her eyes under their level brows were mournful. Seeing how Silver Snow’s eyes followed her grisly prize, she wrapped it in a square of silk and hid it from sight in the chest where she stored instruments for divining. Did Silver Snow imagine it, or did Willow’s hand linger on the chest after she closed it?
“He might have lived, might yet have sacrificed his horse and escaped.” Neither she nor Willow could put much faith in that, however. The grasslands were immeasurably broad. A man who might be wounded, who would be weary and mortally afraid of the white tiger, a man, above all else, who had ridden lifelong, how should such a man in Basich’s case ever find the tribe again?
“Perhaps,” Willow said slowly. “Perhaps.”
“Willow, you should warn your kin to watch for him.” Silver Snow glanced quickly at her maid. She seemed grieved by Basich’s disappearance.
Willow smiled. “They know to watch for me, and they will ward him; I have told them that he was kind to me. Believe me, Elder Sister, they hate and fear the white tiger just as we do. Let us learn who sends it against us, and we shall speedily see a hunt even greater than those of this shan-yu of yours!”
18
Spring yielded to summer on the grasslands, which grew greener and more lush; ewes dropped their lambs, and the flocks prospered; the great herds of horses grew sleek once again, and even the camels thrived, their doubled humps ever swelling, a sign of ample food and water. The Hsiung-nu rode as pleased hearts and minds across the immensity of the plains that stretched out so far below the impossibly huge, impossibly distant horizon where shadowy mountains reared up until their snow-crested peaks were indistinguishable from the clouds that clustered there, but nowhere else in the sky.
Against such vastness, even a clan the size of the royal clan with its huge herds seemed no more than a trail of ants, following its leader across a piece of jade. Silver Snow’s eyes became accustomed to the sun and to the vastness of the land; she could barely remember the times when an ordinary day’s ride had left her exhausted and sore. Day after day, the Hsiung-nu rode, but they drew no closer to the mountains where, by now, snow was melting from the living ice and flowing down to the fields, making them green and rich.
They were like ants, Silver Snow thought, walking across not a piece of jade, but across a drum. The game was to pass by in silence, lest the drum rumble and expose them to discovery. All that spring and well into summer, she had the sensation that she had had years ago in the North before a storm: the sky might be clear and the winds mild, but hints of thunder flickered along her nerves the way that the grass bent before the breath of the wind.
Spring was fair, summer fairer still. Very often the warriors rode out to tend the herds, leaving the tents themselves in the charge of the oldest men and the women. Yet, if Vughturoi was absent, so too was Tadiqan. That was a fair trade, and the way that the shan-yu Khujanga had welcomed his younger son made it fairer still in Silver Snow’s eyes. Always, she took care to keep her eyes down, a contrast to the Hsiung-nu women, who looked where and at whom they would, and even to her earlier behavior, before she realized why she had wrought a scent bag of fine Hsiung-nu sables and elegant Ch’in perfumes, now buried far beneath her heaviest robes.
For hours at a time, Silver Snow might ride, work, and live in contentment, to be jolted back to awareness of jeopardy by a glower or an accusation of neglect from Strong Tongue, who had many adherents among the elder women who ruled the great tents. Still, if Strong Tongue had her partisans, so did Silver Snow, and she was happy when she realized that their number waxed day after day.
She had all but forgotten that she had never received a reply to that first message she had sent out in such urgency and fear with Basich. Gradually she came to accept that if Basich had not perished under the claws and fangs of the white tiger, he must have died of exposure and the letter been lost. That acceptance helped her to comfort Sable, who boasted of her hardihood, that she could not grieve over what was fated to be, yet who mourned all the more passionately for her inability to lament publicly. Quite often Willow sat with her, easing her grief by her silent calm, in the fashion that wild beasts tend one another by their presence alone.
Was Silver Snow alone in perceiving summer to be a time of calm between storms that rose like the brief, ferocious rain squalls that pounded down from the heights? Such storms brought water to the fields, and thus were welcome; yet, if the fields were dry, such storms also brought lightning and the threat of fires that the wind would drive howling across the grasslands, as hungry, free, and violent as the Hsiung-nu themselves, but disastrously more fleet.
For the first time, Silver Snow truly understood how sacred fire was to the Hsiung-nu. In the winter, fire had to be guarded because it cooked their meals and warmed their yurts; in the summer, it must be restrained lest it devour them. Silver Snow heard tales of the Hu far to the west, who thought of fire as a demon. Barbarians they might be, but understanding the Hsiung-nu’s fear of flame in the grasslands, she could sympathize with their belief.
Still, Khujanga thrived. Strong Tongue’s full hostility seemed to have subsided, yet Silver Snow retained that sensation of a drumhead about to sound out the cadence of a huge pulse, or of a beast—say, a white tiger—-crouching to await its tiny prey’s first unwary movement.