In the event, Meshag, in turn privately approached, did not appear to have any great aversion to the suggestion that he might aspire to more than merely being the strongest son of a propped-up kaghan.
They were not an especially subtle people, these nomads of the steppe, and the empire of the Kitan, amongst everything else, had had close to a thousand years and nine dynasties to perfect the arts of political manipulation.
There were books about this, any competent civil servant had them memorized. They were a part of the examinations.
"Consider and evaluate the competing doctrines emerging from Third Dynasty writings as to the proper conduct of succession issues among tribute-bearing states. It is expected that you will cite passages from the texts. Apply your preferred doctrine to resolving current issues pertaining to the southwest and the peoples along the margins of the Pearl Sea. Conclude with a six-line regulated-verse poem summarizing your proposals. Include a reference to the five sacred birds in this poem."
Of course, the appraisal of this work also included judging the quality of the candidate's calligraphy. Formal hand, not running hand.
With whom did these ignorant, fat-smeared barbarians, bare-chested as often as not, hair greasy and to their waists, smelling of sour, fermented milk, sheep dung, and their horses, think they were dealing?
But before this newer plan for the Bogu succession could be implemented, young Meshag had fallen ill, precisely at sundown, in his camp one windy autumn day.
He had been standing by an open fire, a cup of kumiss in one hand, laughing at a jest, a graceful man—then his cup had fallen into trampled grass, his knees had buckled, and he'd toppled to one side, barely missing the fire.
His eyes had closed and had not opened again.
His women and followers, extravagantly distressed, made it clear that this had to have been done by sinister powers—there were unmistakable signs. Their own shaman, small and quavering, said as much but admitted, in the morning, after a night spent chanting and drumming at Meshag's side, that he was unequal to shaping a response capable of driving malign spirits from the unconscious man.
Only someone he named as the white shaman of the lake could overmaster the darkness sent to claim Meshag's soul and bear it away.
This lake was, it appeared, many weeks' journey north. They would set out the next morning, the Bogu said, bearing Meshag in a covered litter. They did not know if they could keep his soul near his body for so long but there was no alternative course. The little shaman would travel with them, do all he could.
Whatever the Kitan expeditionary force thought about this, there wasn't much they could do. Two army physicians, summoned to take the man's pulses and measure auras, were at a loss. He breathed, his heart beat, he never opened his eyes. When the eyelids were lifted, the eyes were black, disturbingly so.
Meshag was, for good or ill, a component of imperial strategy now. If he died, adjustments would have to be made. Again. It was decided that a number of their own cavalry would go north with his party, to maintain a Kitan presence and report back immediately if the man died.
His death was what they expected. Advance word would go to Xinan immediately. The assigned cavalry officer riding north with the Bogu was to exercise his best judgment in all matters that arose. He and his men would be desperately far away, cut off from all others.
Shen Tai, son of Shen Gao, was selected to lead this contingent.
If that decision carried an element of unspoken punishment for the young man having a rank he hadn't earned, no one could possibly be faulted later for giving him the assignment.
It was an honour, wasn't it? To be sent into danger? What else could a young officer want? This was a chance to claim glory. Why else were they here? You didn't join the army to pursue a meditative life. Go be a hermit of the Path, eat acorns and berries in a cave on some mountainside, if that was what you wanted.
They worshipped the Horse God and the Lord of the Sky.
The Son of the Sky was the God of Death. His mother dwelled in the Bottomless Lake, far to the north. It froze in winter.
No, this was not the lake of their journey now, it was much farther north, guarded by demons.
In the afterworld, everything was reversed. Rivers ran from the sea, the sun rose west, winter was green. The dead were laid to rest on open grass, unburied, to be consumed by wolves and so returned to the Sky. Dishes and pottery were laid upside down or shattered by the body, food was spilled, weapons broken—so the dead could recognize and lay claim to these things in the backwards world.
The skulls of sacrificed horses (horned reindeer in the north) were split with an axe or sword. The animals would be reconstituted, whole and running, in the other place, though the white ones would be black and the dark ones light.
A woman and a man were cut to pieces at midsummer in rites only the shamans were allowed to share, though thousands and thousands of the nomads gathered for them from all across the steppe under the high sky.
Shamans engaged in their tasks wore metal mirrors about their bodies, and bells, so demons would be frightened by the sounds or by their own hideous reflection. Each shaman had a drum he or she had made after fasting alone upon the grass. The drums were also used to frighten demons away. They were made from bearskin, horsehide, reindeer. Tiger skin, though that was rare and spoke to a mighty power. Never wolf pelts. The relationship with wolves was complex.
Some would-be shamans died during that fast. Some were slain in their out-of-body journeys among the spirits. The demons could triumph, take any man's soul, carry it off as a prize to their own red kingdom. That was what the shamans were all about: to defend ordinary men and women, intervene when spirits from the other side came malevolently near, whether of their own dark desire, or summoned.
Yes, they could be summoned. Yes, the riders believed that was what had happened here.
Moving slowly north with thirty of his own dui and fifteen of the nomads, accompanying the carried, curtained litter of Meshag, Tai couldn't have explained why he asked so many questions, or hungered so deeply for the answers.
He told himself it was the length of the journey through an expanse of emptiness. Day after day they rode, and the grasslands hardly changed. But it was more than tedium and Tai knew it. The thrill he derived from the crystals of information the riders vouchsafed went beyond easing boredom.
They saw gazelles, great herds of them, almost unimaginably vast. They watched cranes and geese flying south, wave after wave as autumn came, bringing red and amber colours to the leaves. There were more trees now and more rolling hills as they moved out of the grasslands. One evening they saw swans alight on a small lake. One of Tai's archers pointed, grinned, drew his bow. The Bogu stopped him with shouts of menace and alarm.
They never killed swans.
Swans carried the souls of the dead to the other world, and the carried soul, denied his destination, could haunt the killer—and his companions—to the end of their own days.
How could Tai explain how hearing this quickened his heartbeat, set his mind spinning with the strangeness of it all?
It was almost undignified: the Kitan were famously dismissive, never allowing themselves to be more than languidly amused by the primitive beliefs of the barbarians on their borders. Beliefs that confirmed their barely human nature, the appropriateness, in a world rightly ordered, of Kitan pre-eminence. Really: a people that left their dead to be devoured by wolves?