There was always the wine Bytsan had brought, another access, like a crooked, lamplit laneway in the North District of Xinan, to the blurred borders of oblivion. The wine would be there at day's end, waiting. No one else was coming to drink it.
Or so he'd thought, carrying his shovel to work, but the world today was simply not fitting itself to a steady two-year routine.
Standing up, stretching his back, and removing the maligned hat to mop at his forehead, Tai saw figures coming from the east over the tall green grass.
They were already out of the canyon, in the open on the meadow. That meant they had to have been visible for some time, he just hadn't noticed. Why should he notice? Why even look? No one came here but the two sets of troops from the forts, full moon, new moon.
There were two of them, he saw, on small horses, a third horse carrying their gear behind. They moved slowly, not hurrying. Perhaps tired. The sun was starting west, its light fell upon them, making them vivid in the late-day's glowing.
It wasn't time for supplies from Iron Gate. He'd just said farewell to Bytsan and the Taguran soldiers. And when men did arrive, it wasn't just a pair of them with no cart. And—most certainly—they did not reach the lake in the later part of the day, when they'd have to stay with him overnight or be outside among the dead after dark.
This, clearly, was a day marked for change in his stars.
They were still some distance away, the travellers. Tai stared for another moment, then shouldered his shovel, picked up his quiver and bow—carried against wolves and for shots at a bird for dinner—and started towards his cabin, to be waiting for them there.
A matter of simple courtesy, respect shown visitors to one's home, wherever it might be in the world, even here beyond borders. He felt his pulse quickening as he walked, beating to meet the world's pulse, coming back to him.
Chou Yan had expected his friend to be changed, in both appearance and manner, if he was even alive after two years out here. He'd been preparing for terrible tidings, had talked about it with his travelling companion, not that she ever replied.
Then at Iron Gate Pass—that wretched fortress here at the world's end—they'd told him Tai was still among the living, or had been a little while ago when they'd taken supplies to him by the lake. Yan had immediately drunk several cups of Salmon River wine (he had been carrying it for Tai, more or less) to celebrate.
He hadn't known, until then.
No one had known. He'd assumed when he left Xinan that he would be journeying ten days or so along the imperial road and then down through civilized country to his friend's family home with what he had to tell him. It wasn't so. At the estate near the Wai River, where he'd managed to remain uncharacteristically discreet about his tidings, the third brother, young Shen Chao—the only child still at home—had told him where Tai had gone, two full years ago.
Yan couldn't believe it at first, and then, thinking about his friend, he did believe it.
Tai had always had something different about him, too many strands in one nature: an uneasy mingling of soldier and scholar, ascetic and drinking companion among the singing girls. Along with a temper. It was no wonder, their friend Xin Lun had once said, that Tai was always going on about the need for balance after too many cups of wine. Lun had joked about how hard keeping one's balance could be on muddy laneways, weaving home after that many cups.
It was a very long way, where Tai had journeyed. His family had not heard from him since he'd gone. He could be dead. No one could reasonably expect Chou Yan to follow him, beyond the borders of the empire.
Yan had spent two nights among the Shen women and youngest boy, sharing their ancestor rites and meals (very good food, no wine in the house during mourning, alas). He'd slept in a comfortable mosquito-netted bed. He'd poured his own libation over General Shen Gao's grave, admired his monument and inscription, strolled with young Chao in the orchard and along the stream. He was unhappily trying to decide what to do.
How far did friendship carry one? Literally, how far?
In the event, he did what he'd been afraid he'd do from the time they'd told him of Tai's departure. He bade farewell to the family and continued west towards the border, with only the single guard he'd been advised to take with him, back in Xinan.
She had told him it was an easy enough journey, when he mentioned where his friend had gone. Yan didn't believe her, but the indifferent manner was oddly reassuring.
As long as he paid her, Yan thought, she wouldn't care. You hired a Kanlin Warrior and they stayed with you until you paid them off. Or didn't pay them: though that was, invariably, an extremely bad idea.
Wan-si was hopeless as a companion, truth be told, especially for a sociable man who liked to talk, laugh, argue, who enjoyed the sound of his voice declaiming poetry—his own verses or anyone else's. Yan kept reminding himself that she was simply protection for the road, and skilled hands to assemble their camp at night when they slept outdoors—rather more necessary now than he'd expected at the outset. She was not a friend or an intimate of any kind.
Most certainly not someone to think about bedding at night. He had little doubt what she'd say if he raised that matter, and less doubt she'd break a bone or two if he tried to give effect to the desire that had begun to assail him, aware of her lithe body lying near him under stars, or curving and stretching in her exercise rituals—those elegant, slow movements at sunrise. The Kanlin were fabled for discipline, and for how efficiently they killed when need arose.
Need hadn't arisen as they'd journeyed down the river road to Shen Tai's family home. One twilight encounter in light rain with three rough-looking men who might have had theft in mind had they not seen a black-clad Kanlin with two swords and a bow. They'd absented themselves quickly down a path into dripping undergrowth.
Once they started west, however, everything began to feel different for Yan. He was at pains to light candles or burn incense and leave donations at any and all temples to any and all gods from the morning they left the Shen estate and began following a dusty track northwest, and then farther west, towards emptiness.
North of them, parallel to their route, lay the imperial road through the prefecture city of Chenyao, and beyond that was the easternmost section of the Silk Roads, leading from Xinan to Jade Gate and the garrisons in the Kanshu Corridor.
The imperial highway had lively villages and comfortable inns at postal stations all the way along. There would have been good wine, and pretty women. Maybe even some of the yellow-haired dancing girls from Sardia, working in pleasure houses, perhaps on their way to the capital. The ones who could arch their bodies backwards and touch the ground with feet and hands at once—and so elicit arresting images in the mind of an imaginative man.
But Shen Tai wasn't up there, was he? Nothing so sensible. And it didn't make sense to go five or six days north to meet the highway, when their own path was to Iron Gate by Kuala Nor, not Jade Gate Pass.
That left his friend Yan, his loyal friend, feeling every hard-boned movement of his small, shaggy horse towards the end of a day's silent ride through late-spring countryside. He wasn't going to drink that wine or hear music in those inns, or teach fragrant women how he very much liked to be touched.
It was Wan-si who decided how far they'd ride each day, whether they'd reach a village and negotiate a roof under which to sleep, or camp outside. Yan ached like a grandfather each morning when he woke on dew-damp ground, and the village beds were hardly better.