The nomads' leader dismounted, he and the shaman approached the servant, spoke quietly, with unwonted deference. Tai couldn't make out the words, too quick and soft for his limited grasp of their tongue. The servant said something brisk in reply.
The Bogu leader turned and gestured to the slope. Two more riders detached from the company. They started down, leading two horses, these carrying the gifts they'd brought all this way.
Magic and healing did not come without cost.
It was the same back home, Tai thought wryly, and that realization somehow calmed him. You paid for healing, whether or not it worked. It was a transaction, an exchange.
This one would be appallingly strange, but elements of what was to come would be exactly the same as going to an alchemist in Xinan or Yenling to cure a morning-after head, or summoning the plump, white-haired physician from the village to their home by the stream when Second Mother couldn't sleep at night, or Third Son had a dry cough.
A memory of home, with that. Very sharp. Scent of autumn fires, smoke drifting. The ripple of the stream like the sound of time passing. The paulownia leaves would have fallen by now, Tai thought. He could see them on the path from their gate, almost hear the noise they made underfoot.
The shaman's servant spoke again as the horses approached with their gifts. It wasn't a suitable tone, even Tai could tell that, but he did know that shamans carried enormous honour among the Bogu, and that the one here was of particular significance—and power. They'd come a long way to her, after all.
The riders unloaded the gifts. The servant went inside with some of them, came out, carried another armful back in. It took him four trips. Each time, he closed the door behind him. He didn't hurry.
After he went in for the last time, they waited in the sunlight. The horses shuffled and snorted. The men were silent, tense and apprehensive. Their anxiety reached into Tai, a disturbance. Was it possible they could come all this way and be rejected, sent back? He wondered what his own role should be if that looked to be happening. Would it be his task to try to coerce the shaman into seeing Meshag? Would he be sparing the Bogu riders from doing that, if the Kitan took it on themselves? Or would he be performing a gross impiety that endangered all future relationships?
It occurred to him—belatedly—that he might have a serious decision to make in a few moments and he hadn't given it any thought at all. He had considered that Meshag might die before they came here, or that whatever the shaman tried to do would fail. He had never contemplated being refused treatment.
He looked around. There was smoke rising from the cabin chimney. Little wind today, the smoke went straight up before drifting and thinning towards the lake. From where he was, a little to one side, he saw two she-goats in the yard behind, huddled against the back fence, bleating softly. They hadn't been milked yet. It didn't make him any more impressed with this servant. Perhaps there were others, it was not his task?
The man came out again, finally, left the door open behind him for the first time. He nodded, gestured at the litter. Tai drew a breath. One decision he wouldn't have to make. He was angry with himself; he ought to have anticipated possibilities, worked them out ahead of time.
Their own shaman looked desperately relieved, on the edge of tears. His face working, he quickly drew the litter curtain back. Two of the men reached in and eased Meshag out. One cradled him like a sleeping child and carried him into the cabin.
Their shaman made to follow. The servant shook his head decisively, making a peremptory, stiff-armed gesture. The little shaman opened his mouth to protest, then closed it. He stayed where he was, head down, looking at no one. Humiliated, Tai thought.
The servant went into the cabin, reappeared an instant later escorting the man who'd carried Meshag. The servant went back in. Closed the door. They still hadn't seen the old woman, the shaman of the lake. They were left outside, in front of the cabin, in the bright, clear stillness of an autumn afternoon.
Someone coughed nervously. Someone glared at him, as if the sound might undermine whatever was happening inside. Their shaman was still staring at the ground before the door, as if unwilling to meet anyone's gaze. Tai wanted to be inside, then realized that, no, he actually didn't. He did not want to see whatever was taking place in there.
The nomads clustered before the cabin, looking more uncertain than Tai had ever seen them. The rest of the riders, including Tai's own men, remained above on the slope. The lake glittered. Birds were overhead, as always now, streaming south. Some were on the water. No swans that he could see.
Restless, edgy, he dismounted, left his horse to graze the sparse grass and walked around to the back where the outbuilding was and the yard with the two goats. He had a thought of milking them if he could find a pail. Something to do. A task. He slipped the gate latch and went in, closing it behind him.
The fenced yard was good-sized. Two fruit trees, a tall birch for shade. An herb garden at the far, eastern end. He could see the lake beyond it, across the fence. The goats huddled against the shed at the back, clearly unhappy.
No pail to be seen. Probably inside, but he wasn't about to knock on the rear door of the cabin and ask for one.
He crossed the yard towards the garden and the birch. He stood under the tree, gazing across the fence at the small lake, the brightness of it in sunshine. It was very quiet except for the soft, distressed bleating of the two animals. He could milk them without a pail, he thought. Let the servant suffer for his laziness if the shaman had no milk today.
He was actually turning to do that, irritated, when he noticed the freshly dug mound of earth at the back of the garden.
A single thump of the heart.
He could still remember, years after.
He stared, unmoving, for a long moment. Then he stepped carefully to the edge of the neatly ordered garden space, the order undermined—he saw it now—by boot marks and that narrow, sinister mound at the back, right against the fence. The goats had fallen silent for the moment. Tai felt a stir of wind, and fear. It was not a shape, that mound, you could confuse for something else.
He stepped into the garden, fatuously careful not to tread on anything growing there. He approached the mound. He saw, just the other side of the fence, an object that had been thrown over, discarded.
Saw it was a drum.
He swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly dry. Too much silence now. Trembling, he knelt and, drawing a steadying breath, began digging at the earth of the mound with his hands.
But he already knew by then. One of the goats bleated suddenly, making Tai's heart jump in fear. He looked quickly over his shoulder at the rear door of the cabin. It remained closed. He kept digging, scooping, his fingers shifting the black, freshly turned soil.
He felt something hard. A low cry escaped him, he couldn't help it. He looked at his fingers. Saw blood. Looked at the earth he'd moved.
A head in the soil, emerging as from some desperate nightmare into hard sunlight, or from the other world, where the dead went.
There was a single deep, downward gash in it, almost splitting the face in half—and the blood from that blow lay thick in the soil of the garden, and on his own hands now.
Tai swallowed again. Made himself move more earth, wishing so much he had a tool, didn't have to do this with shaking fingers.
He did, however, he did do it. And in a few moments he'd exposed the blade-ruined face of a woman. A very old woman, her eyes still open, staring upon nothingness or into the sun.