But I am not a ruined girl. I am Mai'ili, eldest child and first daughter of the Mei clan. I have no need to cower before these men.
Although it was always wise to be respectful.
She touched her lips to her wolf ring, sigil of the proud Mei clan, as she bent to retrieve a few melons from the box beneath her feet. When she rose she faced the captain, who had moved to stand before her cart. He smiled, just slightly, as she stood there with a melon in each hand. Taking in a firm breath, she arranged them with the others before turning to him. He had a graciously oval face and a pleasingly dark complexion, with deep-set eyes and a light beard, unusual among the Qin, and a mustache. Only his hooked nose seemed out of place, as if it had come from somewhere else. The sun was not brighter than the golden silk of the tabard worn over his black tunic; only officers were allowed to wear that particular intense color.
"How may I help you today, sir? As you can see, I have peaches, melons, sword-fruit, and almonds today."
He did not look at her wares, but his gaze did skip up above her head.
"That's a distinctive amaranth pattern on your parasol. Does it come from Sirniaka?"
She laughed out of surprise, then touched fingers to lips to stop herself. That would teach her to think so well of herself! "I'm not sure," she admitted. "My father bought it for me last year when I celebrated my sixteenth year. He bought it from a merchant who had come from the east. Isn't Sirniaka a great kingdom in the east, beyond the eastern Mariha cities?"
"The Mariha cities are all under the rule of the Qin var now," he corrected, "but otherwise you are right. It's an unusual parasol, quite beautiful. In the Sirniakan Empire, that pattern is reserved for girls of marriageable age. By displaying it, they indicate they are available for an alliance."
She flushed. Her heart raced. "An alliance?"
"Marriage. A wedding. You have such customs here, do you not?"
"Of course we do."
He smiled again. He looked like a man who had seen a fair bit of the world. He was perhaps ten years older than she was, not that that would ever make the slightest bit of difference to her, who was going to marry that boy from the Gandi sheep-herders clan whom she'd known all her life and who was a perfectly nice young man about Uncle Shai's age, not more than two or three years older than she was. Perfectly nice.
"Almonds," he said, as if repeating himself. "Two bowlsful." He beckoned to one of his soldiers, who sauntered up with a small leather sack.
"Oh! Yes!" But Ti had taken her measuring bowl to get juice!
"No bowl?" he asked. "Two handfuls will do as well."
She scooped, and he held out cupped hands so she had perforce to pour the almonds into his waiting hands, and by one means or another he brushed her, or she him. His skin was cool, although the sun was hot. Yet she hadn't lost her wits. She named as an opening price twice what she would charge to a local.
He paid it without haggling.
7
Shai never spoke much. He didn't see the point of speaking, since no one ever listened to him, and those who did then usually snapped at him for having the temerity to speak. Best to keep your own counsel under those circumstances.
So it was a wonder to him when his niece Ti'ili came running on the path that led from town up the gentle, grassy slope of Dezara Mountain to the base of the spring pasture. Here, beside a copse of very young birch trees he'd planted and watered himself, he had set up his woodworking shed so he could work in peace without four elder brothers and their five meddling wives and the truculent ghost of his sixth brother plaguing him. Ti's black braids flapped as she ran. He set his attention back to the work before him as she pulled up, gasping, under the shade of the open shed.
"Uncle Shai! You've got to come! You've got to speak up for Mai!"
He finished the stroke of his adze and ran his hand along the grain of the pine log he was planing down to make a fine bedstead for the wedding. Good and smooth, ready to cut to length. When he was done, he looked up at Ti.
"But you've got to! She's been crying all day. You know it isn't right that they marry her off to a Qin, even if he is an officer!"
He studied the log, the second of two precious trunks his elder brothers had traded three ewes for so that the family wouldn't be embarrassed when it came time to stand up at the law court and seal the marriage. The legs, out of the other log, were already carved and oiled. He was preparing the last of the supports, although he wasn't going to have time to carve as elaborate a frieze into the wood as he would have liked, not with the date already chosen and written into the law court's record. Seventeen days from now.
"He'll beat her! He's buried one wife already. He admitted it himself! We'll never see her again! Never! Never! Never! He'll get tired of her and sell her into slavery and there'll be nothing we can do to stop it! His masters will be overthrown and he'll be killed in battle and then-!"
"Hush!" He stood, casting his gaze about, but his two younger nephews-Ti's cousins-were out of earshot tending to the sheep.
She kicked at wood shavings with her pretty red slippers, knowing she had gone too far. While it was perfectly true that the Qin had ruled Kartu Town for only the last twelve years, and that shifting alliances, a death in the var's family, or an unexpected push from the eastern cities might cause the Qin horsemen to retreat and some other power to take their place, it was still treason to speak of such a thing. Ti was only two years younger than he was. She knew as well as he did what the Qin did to their enemies or even to those who only spoke ill-considered words against them.
She looked back down the path, following his gaze. Kartu Town was not much to look at, a dusty bee's hive of compounds surrounded by an inner wall which was itself surrounded by startlingly green orchards crisscrossed by slender irrigation canals. Beyond the orchards lay a thick mud-brick outer wall studded with watch-towers and guardposts. The wall was wide enough to allow Qin guardsmen to ride their rounds atop it instead of walking. They hated to walk. The citadel, a circular structure of baked brick, rose at the northwestern corner of the inner town. In the square fronting the citadel rose the gallows, and today three posts were decorated with remains. A vulture circled.
Like all of the inhabitants of Kartu Town, he'd learned to look away. In truth, it was not the sight of the citadel and its square that made him climb every day in good weather to the peace of his shed. It was the vista beyond: endless, open, yawning wide to the west, all sky, the rocky plateau of the desert looming on the southern horizon, and the mountains rising heroically to the north. So beautiful. They were all stark lines and pale slopes with the memory of winter in their snowy peaks.
"I hate it up here!" cried Ti. "Too much air! Too much sky!" Abruptly, she burst into tears. "I know I shouldn't have said it-but he's Qin. What will happen to Mai? How could Father Mei have agreed?" She sobbed like a tempest.
"He's decent enough," said Shai finally as this storm began to die down.
"Who is?"
"Captain Anji."
"How can you say so?" she shrieked. "A dirty barbarian! You're a Qin-lover!" Then she clapped a hand over her mouth and began sobbing noisily again. He waited until the worst subsided before scooping up a handful of shavings and handing them to her so she could wipe mucus from her upper lip.
"He doesn't have to marry her. He could have just taken her as a concubine. Branded her a pleasure girl and dragged her to the brothel for his use. We couldn't have stopped him."