Traitors' Gate (41 page)

Yes, it would be difficult. Yes, she would cry. But she had a healthy son. She had a fine compound. She had plenty of coin, a house to run, a settlement to administer where folk praised her and asked for her to listen to their disputes and sit in judgment over them even though she was young. She could conduct trade in her own person and with her own collateral. She was learning to figure a proper accounts book and actually to write and read.

“Mistress?” Priya slid the door open just enough to slip through. “The captain has gone out, with the baby.” Her frown creased her forehead.

Mai opened her mouth to speak but no word came out. A hammer had smashed her heart, leaving her breathless. Priya sat down beside her and took her hand.

At length, Mai whispered, “I need something to do, Priya.”

“Yes, Mistress. We'll sweep. Best to change out of that good silk, though.”

They swept the porches and the flagstone pavements, then raked the garden walkways in neat patterns until dusk made it impossible to continue and she had the beginnings of a blister on her right forefinger. She washed face and hands and feet, put aside her clothing, took down her hair, and lay down on the pallet unrolled by Sheyshi. But although she was exhausted she could not sleep. At length, she heard voices and the hiccoughing wails of the baby.

Priya crept in, holding the boy. Mai put him to her breast and his nursing calmed her and made all ill things seem, for the moment, too distant to matter. Male voices conversed nearby, tense but muted, and even their rumble faded as her eyes closed and she dropped away. . . .

To wake.

She was still alone in the bed, of course, a single coverlet nesting her and Atani. A light shone through the rice-paper squares set into the door. She settled the baby in his cot. Her sleeping robe, pale as silver, seemed poured over the chest set on one side of the room. She slipped her arms through the sleeves, bound it around her waist, fumbling the knot. She tried to open the door quietly, but he—still dressed, his hair
still caught up in its topknot, and seated cross-legged on a pillow as though he meant to bide there all night—looked up at once as she paused in the opening, darkness behind her, the lamp's flame dividing her from him.

His expression was as unforgiving as stone. “If you betray me, I will kill you.”

After everything, this was too much.

“When did I ever betray you? When have I ever given you reason to question my honor? You bought me from my father, did you not? Surely that gave me reason enough to feel I was nothing more than your slave. I could have resented you. I could have nursed sorrow. But I held my tongue in the early days. I hoped for something—I don't know—perhaps just those tales and songs I grew up with that you think are so silly, the bandit and the merchant's daughter, like the tale of the Silk Slippers that they tell here in the Hundred where the girl escapes all those who are hunting her and marries the carter's son. Maybe it was foolish of me to dream of those tales as if they could ever have been true. But I wanted to make a decent life for myself out of what had been forced on me. Isn't that what any of us want? Less pain and more joy? I wanted to love you. I wanted—”

The sharp movement of his head, as though she had just slapped him, caught her short.

The flame hissed. He lifted his chin, voice scarcely more than a breath of terrible yearning. “Do you love me, Mai?”

“Of course I love you. Has there ever been a stupider question heard in all the annals of the world than whether I love you? How can you even doubt it?”

“I see how you talk to other men. You smile at them exactly as you smile at me. Like that reeve.”

“Joss?”

“Of course you would think of him first!”

“Besides Miyara, he's the only reeve with whom I've ever exchanged more than ten words. He's personable, it's true. And he's an Ox, like me, and naturally those who are born in the Year of the Ox feel a particular affinity each for the others, because of the particular attributes of our character. Because
we are hardworking and pragmatic, with a dreamer hidden inside.”

“The heart of an Ox leaps to the heavens, where it seeks the soul that fulfills it. For the Ox is very beautiful. Is he not?”

“Handsome, certainly, but very old!” she retorted tartly.

“Not too old to father a child.”

“Anji!” For an instant she was too scalded by fury to see, and then as the haze boiled away she stepped fully into the chamber and grabbed the first thing that came to hand: a ceramic cup off a tray. “All you think about is if I have dishonored
you
. What makes you think I would ever dishonor myself?”

She flung it at him, flung herself back into the sleeping chamber, and slammed the door so hard shut its reverberation startled the baby in his sleep, a flinch heard more than seen, and then he cooed within his baby dreams and settled.

Strangely, the cup had not shattered. Surely she had thrown it hard enough!

She fingered open the door, easing it back just enough to peer through. There stood Anji, in lamplight, holding the cup in one hand and staring at it as if its existence, such an object as a cup that could hold liquid that might please the tongue and warm, or cool, the throat, puzzled him.

Then he smiled, an expression touched by a whisper as of doubt throttled. He tossed the cup into the air and caught it in the same hand. He crossed toward the door, and Mai scuttled back and collapsed to her knees beside the mattress.

He slid the door open with a foot and came in carrying the tray with its two ceramic cups and a matching ceramic bottle, sealed with a cap, and the lamp, still burning. He set the tray on the chest and poured out rice wine into each cup. Offering her one cup, he sat cross-legged on the matted floor and drank the other down in one gulp. She sipped cautiously, watching him.

He undressed, and when he was in his robe he sat down on a pillow at the end of the mattress and handed her a comb, merely gesturing to his topknot, which it was her right and indeed duty as his wife to unbind and comb out.

His black hair was not as coarse and straight as that of the
other Qin, but had a lustrous glow she never tired of. She stroked for a long time, enjoying the peaceful rhythm because it eased her heart. She knew they would have to discuss Miravia, but not now. In truth, she wanted desperately to lean into his back, to kiss the nape of his neck, to entwine him in an embrace that would cause him to turn and caress her, but she remembered what Chief Tuvi had said. She must not seem to be apologizing. Helping Miravia would cause trouble for them, but she could not have done otherwise and still lived with herself; she would accept the consequences. As for the other—going to the temple, and that ridiculous accusation thrown out against Reeve Joss—she had nothing to be ashamed of.
He
ought to be ashamed, for even thinking it.

He shifted, and she thought he was about to speak, but he did not. Yet he did turn, easing the comb from her hand, and turned her to face away from him. He gathered her unbound hair and started working through it with the comb from the top of her head down to its ends, which brushed the floor. It was impossible to concentrate on anything except the warmth of his breath on her neck, the way his fingers brushed against her back, or her arms, or the lobe of her ear. This state of suspension, him brushing and her sitting so still lest she utter his name or throw herself into his arms, was almost painful, and yet she dared not move for fear of breaking the connection. Anji was a patient man, very disciplined, and she began to wonder if he meant to comb her hair all night just to see who would break first. And because she was so very tired, and wrung tight, and aching with misery and hope, she began to laugh, a little hysterically perhaps, but laughter all the same even if there were sobs caught in it.

He set the comb on the tray.

“Enough, Mai,” he said, his voice husky with desire, perhaps with satisfaction, perhaps with anger still simmering. He embraced her, pulling her close. “Enough.”

 

M
UCH LATER, A
sharp voice jostled her awake. Anji was already rising, drawing on his sleeping robe. He grabbed his sword and slid open a door that led onto the covered porch
overlooking their small private garden. The light of a Basket Moon, somewhat past the full, gave a faint sheen to the outlines of the room: the square corners of the chest, the rectangular paper screens of the doors, the puddle of Anji's clothing where he had let it fall on the matted floor. He slid the door closed with his foot, cutting off the light and her view.

The baby was stirring in his cot, and Mai's breasts were heavy with milk. She pulled on her own robe, letting it hang open as she lifted Atani out. As she nursed him, reclining first on her right side and then switching to her left, she listened to low voices in an extended discussion on the porch outside although she could not quite pick out words.

The door scraped open. Anji slipped inside and sank down on the mattress beside her. Atani smacked and gurgled.

“What is it?” Mai whispered.

“One of the guards thought he saw a demon flying overhead, a winged horse, but Sengel has the night watch searching the compound and they have found nothing. The tailman who saw it is one of those who was present when the demon invaded the house.”

She nodded, remembering the evening when the demon in the shape of the dead slave girl, Cornflower, had flown into the compound riding a winged horse and killed two Qin soldiers with sorcery.

“Sometimes, on watch at night, you sink into a place that is neither dream nor sleep. It's a world demons haunt.”

“Maybe he was dreaming.”

“Maybe.” He tucked his sword alongside the mattress. “Where is your knife?”

The baby released the nipple and exhaled a tiny burp.

“Don't move,” whispered Anji, drawing his sword as one of the doors into the interior slid open. A figure paused on the threshold between the rooms, half in and half out. Its face was concealed beneath a long hooded cloak of a substance that, although dark in color, remained distinguishable from the shadows. Anji rose. Mai tucked the baby against her, using her body to shield the infant.

The figure raised its hands to pull back the hood to reveal its face. “Mai?” it said hoarsely.

By the light that glowed from its right hand, Mai stared into the face of a man she had never thought to see again. “Uncle Hari?” she whispered. “We thought you were dead.”

His gaze opened a well of memory, a shaft down which she plunged. Best of uncles! He had always teased the little ones in that smiling way that made them feel they weren't just a nuisance meant only to stand in silence around the grim adults. He carried them on his back, horse to their Qin warrior, a game played only in the privacy of their own courtyard, for the Qin had forbidden all people of Kartu Town to ride. He could sing a merry tune, and he knew all the best tales, the ones in which the swooning maiden was carried away by the handsome bandit only to discover the bandit was really a prince, the ones in which the villains fought and died, and those in which the prince triumphed and died anyway. After Father Mei had forbidden him from speaking out against the Qin within the Mei compound, he had spent more time away from home and perhaps inevitably had gotten involved in a foolish, doomed scheme which no one had ever had the courtesy to explain to her, only that he had disgraced the family and they were fortunate they weren't all executed because of his rash actions. The Qin had decreed that every man, woman, child, and slave must witness the punishment of the rebels who had dared speak out against those who governed them. Sixty or more young men had been marched in chains out of Kartu Town into the east. Not a single one had ever been seen or heard from again.

Then Hari averted his gaze, as if it was too painful to look on her, and she was back in her sleeping chamber with Anji poised motionless beside her. Hari brushed fingers along his forehead as if it ached.

“Uncle Hari!” She rushed forward with the baby in her arms and flung her free arm around him. “Eihi!” She flinched back, skin stinging where it had pressed against the cloak. “Does that cloth have barbs in it?”

“Mai,” said Anji. “The baby.”

The baby! “Uncle Hari, do you see? You have a great
nephew, this fine young lad. His name is Atani, after his grandfather. It's a water-born name, here in the Hundred. As yours would be—neh, it would not be, would it? For you're really Harishil.” She took a step back to display the child, and another step back, which was far enough to see past Hari's body into the chamber behind, where Tuvi, Sengel, and Toughid were edging in through the open doors.

“I won't harm the baby,” said Hari, turning his gaze to Anji and, after a moment, wrinkling his forehead as in puzzlement. “Call off your men, Captain. Mai, why is this man in your bed?”

“He is my husband! Father Mei married me to him.”

“You were supposed to marry the Gandi-li boy. The sheepherder's clan.”

“So I was. But then Captain Anji wanted to marry me.”

“Naturally my brother would not say no to a Qin officer, even in the matter of his favorite child,” said Hari drily. “He gave them anything they asked for, hoping to remain in their favor. But what he never understood was that they would treat him favorably only so long as they had a use for him. That was their nature, to take what they could use. What they had no use for, they discarded or ignored.” He glanced over his shoulder, his gaze sweeping the dark room behind him, and the soldiers actually cringed away from him. Sengel grunted as if he'd been slugged in the belly, and dropped to his knees.

“Stay where you are,” said Anji in a louder voice, meant to reach his men. Although he wore a fine silk sleeping robe tied with a embroidered ribbon and had his fine black hair falling loose halfway down his back, he could not be mistaken as anything except a soldier. “If I may ask, Uncle Hari,” he went on carefully, “why have you entered this compound without seeking permission at the gate? You can be sure any relative of Mai's would be greeted hospitably.”