“I have done nothing,” said Silver Snow, “save my duty, I hope.”
He was looking at her, frankly admiring the way that the thin, pale silks clung in this heat to the delicate curves of her body. She shivered, sought for composure, but failed to achieve it. Had she had a heavy overgarment to catch up and throw about herself, even in this heat, she would have done so.
“You are all silence and obedience,” blurted the shan-yu, “and you look as if one gust of wind would carry you back to the Sky which, surely, must have created someone like you. Yet I have seen you confront an Emperor, rescue a lady, and hunt the white tiger. You do not appear to be strong: you bow; you obey; you bend everywhere . . . and nowhere at all. And you summoned me to your side.”
“The people,” said Silver Snow. “Your people, who are nftw mine . . . need a strong ruler.”
“Just now, too, you summoned me with your music as if it were a spell. But you would not speak to me before my father’s body, before my people. Lady, was there, could there be another reason why you called for me?” His words tripped over one another as if he hoped that her answer might be “yes.” His hands tightened, then released, careful of the fragility of the hands within his grasp.
This, Silver Snow knew, was the time for the pretty speeches about spring longings over which the concubines in Ch’ang-an had sighed and giggled. Those speeches seemed to belong to a vanished, long-ago world; she was as incapable of making them as she was of breaking a wild horse. Silently she turned and went to the chest in which, months ago, she had hidden the scent bag that she had worked in silks and fine, soft sable pelts. She walked back over toward Vughturoi, offering him the bag as it rested across her outstretched palms.
He clasped it and the hands that held it in his own scarred fingers. “Remember, I saw such tokens in Ch’ang-an,” he told her.
She cast down her eyes and waited.
“Basich,” Vughturoi said suddenly, with what Silver Snow privately thought was supreme irrelevance. “He leaves his sister with no protector, his children and hers with no provider. I shall take Sable into my tents as a lesser wife.”
His words, Silver Snow decided, were not irrelevant after all; but they were supremely unwelcome.
She must have grimaced in distaste because laughter rumbled in Vughturoi’s voice. “Sable will wait, if she wants a son from me, though. For I shall put no other woman before my queen, who shall ever be my chief wife and bear my eldest son. Do you understand me, lady?”
She nodded, trembling as if with cold, though she felt most wonderfully warmed and comforted. Vughturoi’s eager gaze no longer seemed so frightening. Though it held a knowledge she lacked, she knew that that would not be for long.
“Then say it!” he commanded.
Why did he not simply embrace her and have done with it? Silver Snow thought. The answer was not as simple: though his own people’s law gave him the right to claim her, he chose to respect her, to wait until she chose to yield. He would not want to wait too long, she sensed. Yet it was hard, hard, to know how to give herself.
For a long moment she stared at Vughturoi. Certainly he was not Han, nor was he simply Hsiung-nu: he was himself. That thought carried her over the moment of her surrender.
Silver Snow smiled. “I think,” she spoke carefully, considering every word, “that we have always understood one another reasonably well.”
Vughturoi stepped forward and raised a hand to touch her chin, turning her face up to look into it. He was grieved, wearier by far than she, Silver Snow realized suddenly. She could give him the assurance that, clearly, he sought from her, and let him rest in comfort, or she could continue to play the modest, die-away games of the ladies of Ch’ang-an: she, who had forced herself to courage by remembering that she was queen of the Hsiung-nu.
She smiled and saw his grief and confusion turn to a kind of elation. Boldly now, she met his eyes. Where he was concerned, she was done forever with downcast looks. Gladness swept over her and she shivered the way she did when the wind brushed the grasslands, turning the long blades silver in the spring.
“The shan-yu Khujanga,” she told her new lord, “was more father than mate to me. I shall miss him. But I had no husband, and I had no son. Now, however . . .”
“Now you shall have both,” promised Vughturoi, and drew her against him, holding her close. His arms were very strong, yet she knew that if she wished to break away from him, at least for now, he would grant her freedom. For a time, perhaps; but not forever. And it was not her wish to escape his hold, which was not that of a stranger or an outlander. Vughturoi had been her first advocate, the first of the Hsiung-nu to prefer her to any other princess and a caravan of silks and gefltns. He had been her first friend, her protector on the long, long journey West.
And she had made the scent bag for him. Greatly daring, Silver Snow glanced up. Vughturoi was looking at her again, as he had the night that she had run from the tents, wearing only nightrobes, her hair loose. The silks she wore now felt too hot, yet their caress made her flush and shiver with a kind of secret delight. It was a shared secret, she realized from the glow in Vughturoi’s eyes. Because it abashed her to watch him any longer, she let herself lean against the man who claimed her for his wife, listening to the beat of a heart that, unlike the throb of Strong Tongue’s drum, did not threaten her but promised instead strength and abiding loyalty for all the days to come . . . days that they would share.
20
Surrounded by her ladies and her guards, the queen who brings peace to the Hsiung-nu sat by the shan-yu s empty chair and awaited his return. That, thought Silver Snow, was one way of thinking of it. But there was another way, one that she far preferred: exiled far from her home, she had made another home for herself; and now she sat among men and women who had become her friends, awaiting the return of her husband Vughturoi.
Summer had passed too rapidly, like amber beads on a silken strand; she only wished now that she could have preserved them as amber preserves the seed or the insect or the bubble of air trapped within it. Only now were the grasslands turning crimson with the approach of autumn, but that summer, the first of her true marriage, seemed to have assumed a kind of memorability: like the ancient doings of the Emperor or her father’s tales. Always before, Silver Snow had felt herself to be like the northland’s snows for which she had been named: silent, still, and passive; content to wait, to obey. And above all, to be cold, so very cold that not all of the wine or the furs in the world could warm her into glowing life.
She thought now that she had been a beautiful statue, nothing more, until Vughturoi had set his hand upon her. His touch, his smile, had overpowered that coldness, that mannered shyness. The vital, glowing creature who now awaited her husband’s return and whom, daily, she saw in Willow’s mirror was as far from the frosts of winter as she could be, though she bore a wintry name. Recently, however, that was not all that she was thought to bear.
Silver Snow smiled gently upon her maid Willow, where she sat beside Sable, plump and sweating in the rich embroideries that befitted even a minor wife of the shan-yu. Both women nodded and whispered together, and Willow approached with a fan. Such great friends they were, united first by service to her, then by sorrow, and now by their assurance that their mistress and elder sister bore beneath her heart a child who would unite both of their peoples.
Only today, Willow had cast the yarrow stalks and promised her that the child would be a boy, a son to secure her line, her power over her people and the shan-yu , if she needed additional power over him. Silver Snow had never considered what it would be like to know that she carried a child. She had expected to feel fear or wild excitement, not this serene cer-taflity. Who would have thought that one would learn such joy of a husband, let alone such a husband?