Chapter Five
What the North Wind Carries
We crossed the Long Wall on the eighteenth day.
I had been told all my life that the Wall was a thing the gods had given the empire, that on the steppe side the very air was different, that one knew the moment one had stepped onto barbarian ground because the breath stopped wanting to come.
The Wall, when we came up to it, was a brown ridge of rammed earth no higher than my father's threshing-loft. It had been pounded between wooden forms by an army of pressed labourers three hundred years ago, faced with thin grey kiln-fired tile that had fallen off in the freeze-and-thaw of three hundred winters, and the imperial repair-budget had been eaten, every year, by everyone whose hand the budget passed through, until the Wall existed only as a thing the maps insisted on. Half the watchtowers were empty. Two of them, near the gate we passed through, had no roofs.
The garrison-captain of the gate-fortress came out in a robe stained at the cuffs with cookhouse grease and saluted Bald Wei without looking at him. He had been informed of the column's coming. He had not, I would learn later, been informed in time to clean his cuffs.
The Tenth Legion went through the gate in single column, four wide, with the drum at half-beat and the vermillion silk going past on its pole so that the slate sky and the brown earth and the black-and-grey north wind had a thin red line drawn through them for a quarter of an hour. I went through in my place — third rank, on Little Mountain's left, with Pock-faced Liu on my right and Old Crow behind us. I went through with my head down. I went through with the kitchen-knife at my back and the bow on my shoulder and the bamboo tube against my belly. I went through, in my head, as Yulan, as Arsulan, as the orchard-boy of Shadi, as Qiao Yansheng of Qiaojia, fifty-one years old and lung-rotted — the four of us pressed shoulder to shoulder under one helmet — and not one of us, going through, looked back.
A li past the gate, the road opened onto what I had been told my whole life was the steppe. It was nothing like the steppe.
The country a li past the Wall was a black-sand flat, the surface of it scoured to grit by a wind that had been coming down off the higher plateau for three hundred years. The grit was the colour of damp coal-dust. It moved when the wind moved it. There were no trees. There were no birds. There was, two li out, a single dead horse on the road's verge, kicked clean of its meat, the ribs picked white inside the cage of its lacquered armor — legion lacquer, the rider gone away to wherever riders go. No one in the column commented on it. The horse was a thing the legion had been walking past for two generations.
This was the country I had said I would go into, in the orchard in the dark, with the wolf at the boundary stone.
This was where the second heartbeat in my chest had been pointing me, since the peddler from the north had taken my hand and let it go and gone white to the lips, since I had been ten years old.
I did not weep. I did not let myself. I let the black sand take the grit it wanted off my boots, and I marched.
We came onto true grass on the morning of the twenty-first day.
The black sand thinned, then went, and there was a strip of red mud where a stream had once run in some other spring, and then there was — without warning, without ridge or stand of brush to mark it — the white grass.
I had not believed it.
I had heard it said. Baicaohai. The White Grass Sea. I had thought it a poet's name. The reality was a thing my chest understood before my eye did: a flat unbroken sweep of country from my horse's knees to the curve of the world, every hand-span of it knee-high in tufts of feather-grass tipped silver at the seed, and the wind off the north was bending those silver tips in long waves that travelled away from us toward a horizon I had never had before in my life. The wind was visible. The wind was a thing I could see. The wind ran across the white grass in long slow streamers, and the steppe rose up to meet the wind like a shore meeting a tide, and the tide came in from a distance my eyes did not know how to measure, and I — I, Yulan, Arsulan, Yansheng, the orchard-boy of Shadi — saw a horizon that was not bounded by orchard, by ridge, by Wall, by the second wall of my mother's prohibition, by anything at all.
The second heartbeat in my chest did a slow thing I had not felt it do before.
It did not speed up. It opened. It opened the way a fist opens at the end of a long argument. The wolf in me, who had been pacing the orchard fence for nineteen years, who had been pacing the ridge for three weeks, who had been pacing the squad's left flank since Yulin — the wolf in me put his paws down. He stood still. He breathed in. He looked.
Home, the wolf said, very softly, with no weight at all in the saying, only a kind of long surprised release. Home. Home. Home.
I made a sound in my throat.
It was a small sound. It was a half-cough, half-noise, a thing I covered immediately with the back of my wrist as if I were clearing a tickle. Pock-faced Liu, riding beside me, did not turn his head. Pock-faced Liu was looking at the white grass with an expression I had not seen on him, an expression I would in time come to recognize as Pock-faced Liu in the presence of a thing he did not have a joke for. Little Mountain, walking on my left at his slow steady pace, said, "It's bigger than I thought, Yansheng."
"It is."
"Where does it stop."
"It doesn't."
"That doesn't seem right."
"No," I said. "It doesn't seem right."
Old Crow, behind us, said: "The grass stops at the river. The river is twenty days' ride."
"Twenty days," Little Mountain said, the way a child says a number that has come loose from any meaning.
The wolf, in my chest, did not pace. The wolf, in my chest, sat down on his haunches and let me ride a long li of white grass in the warmest peace I had known since the kitchen flagstone.
I let myself have the li. I let myself have a second li. Then, on the third li, I closed my hand on the reins and tightened the belly voice and reminded the second heartbeat that we were in a column of three thousand and four hundred men and that the priest with the orange-peel smell of which Old Crow had begun to murmur warnings was three days behind us and that this was not a country in which one could put one's paws down for very long.
The wolf agreed.
He put his paws down anyway.
The prisoner-column came up to us on the twenty-third night.
The Tenth Legion was encamped in a shallow horseshoe-bend of dry watercourse three li from a salt-pan. The cook-fires were going. The drum-tower at the centre of the camp — a wooden frame thrown up in two hours by the engineering company, no taller than three tall men — beat the second watch and then the third. I was on outer-picket rotation with Pock-faced Liu on my right and Wang Erlang fifty paces past Liu, and Little Mountain a hundred paces past Wang, and the picket-line ran a slow easy circuit through the white grass beyond the squad-tents, and the wind that night was off the north and the wind that night brought the smell.
The smell came in three layers.
The first layer was horse — horse-sweat, horse-fat, horse on the verge of foundering, the smell of a string of mounts that had been pushed too long on too little water. The second layer was iron — a thin cold iron smell, almost a salt smell, a smell I would only later understand as the smell of salt-iron, the empire's bond-cutting alloy, carried in the heads of the arrows the prisoner-column's Vermillion Guard escort had in their quivers. The third layer was something I did not have a name for, and the second heartbeat in my chest gave a long slow recognition under my binding before my nose did.
It was the smell of another bonded.
Not the smell of the bond-animal — the falcon, somewhere overhead in the dark, would have been odorless even at twenty paces — but the smell of the bonded man. The smell, the old kam Möngke-Dam would tell me in three more weeks, of wet fur and woodsmoke under clean wool. The smell of a person who carries another animal inside their chest. The smell that, the second heartbeat said in me, was a smell I had been carrying my whole life and had not known was a smell, and which I was now meeting, for the first time in nineteen years, on another body.
The smell came up on the wind. It came up across the picket-line and across the white grass and across the squad-tents. It was very faint. I do not think anyone else in the legion smelled it that night. I do not think the priest smelled it that night — though the priest was three days behind us, with the Cinnabar Bureau's wagons and the orange-peel — and I do not think Bald Wei smelled it. I think Old Crow smelled it. I think Old Crow, who had a grandmother who had bonded a sable, smelled it and said nothing and stood at the inner picket where I could not see him and watched.
The second heartbeat in my chest gave one quick beat. The wolf, ahead of me on the picket-line, twenty paces out in the dark of the white grass, turned his head.
Then I saw them.
They came in from the north-east, along the salt-pan road, in a column much smaller than I had expected — perhaps thirty mounted Vermillion Guard, perhaps eight wagons, a half-dozen string-horses tied to the rear of the last wagon, no banner. They had ridden the night to come in late. They wanted no audience.
The Vermillion Guard at the head of the column was a man with a long flat face and a long flat mouth and a small flat eye, and he was riding a sorrel gelding too good for the road he was on, and he was tired in the way men in the Vermillion Guard are tired, which is to say he was holding his back very straight and his mouth very closed and his eye on the middle distance. He gave the picket the password without looking at us. Pock-faced Liu, who had the call, gave him the counter-password. The man went past without speaking again.
Then the wagons. Closed wagons, six of them, all four-wheeled, all roofed in waxed canvas, none with windows. Two outriders to each wagon, both with sword, both with crossbow, both with the salt-iron quiver. I watched them all the way past at twenty paces' distance, and I watched the wagon-axles for the shift that would tell me which wagon was the heaviest — which wagon carried a body — and on the fourth wagon I saw it: the wagon's near rear-spring sat a finger-breadth deeper than the other three. A man in chains. One man, one chain to the wagon-bed. The wagon was driven by an old man with a grey braid and a face like a kicked dog.
He looked at me as he came past.
He did not look at any of the other pickets. He looked at me, and he did not nod, and he did not speak, and he did not blink, and his face did not change, and yet his eye, in the long count of the wagon going past, did one small thing. It moved, almost not at all, from my helmet to my hands and back to my helmet and away.
He had seen my hands.
I had not, in the white grass at the picket, been thinking about my hands. I had let them rest on the reins. I had let them be themselves. The driver of the fourth wagon had taken them in once, in a glance no other man on the wagon-train had spared, and he had moved his eye away.
The second heartbeat in my chest beat one careful beat.
He was a Confederation man. I did not need anyone to tell me. I had a grandmother who had whispered Arsulan over my cradle, and I had a peddler in my memory who had taken my hand and gone white at ten paces, and I knew without question — in the way one knew, in the third grey hour of a black-sand night — that the driver of the fourth wagon was a Confederation-born slave-cook or slave-driver, gut-bonded to the legion since some war his grandfather had lost. He had seen my hands. He would not say. He would not need to say.
The wagon went past.
The fifth wagon. The sixth wagon. The string-horses. The rear-guard.
The smell — the wet-fur-and-woodsmoke smell, the other bonded smell — was at its strongest as the fourth wagon went past, and it dropped away as the wagon receded, and the wind brought it back twice in the next half-hour as the train circled to its tethering-ground on the south side of camp, and then the wind shifted, and the smell went away, and I was on the picket with my hands shaking very lightly on the reins and the wolf in the grass twenty paces out with both his ears canted forward and his great head turned to follow the receding wagon-train down the line of cookfires.
He did not move.
He watched.
He did not name the smell. I knew he did not name it. He sat at the edge of the picket-grass with his eye on the fourth wagon and his lip not quite lifted from his teeth, and he held himself very still, and the second heartbeat in my chest did not slow.
Not yet, the wolf said, with no urgency at all. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.
Not yet, I agreed. With my chest.
Pock-faced Liu, fifty paces behind me, called, "All clear, Yansheng?"
"All clear."
"Pull in. They want us at the squad-fire."
"Coming."
I pulled in. The wolf, behind me in the white grass, lay down on his belly with his head on his paws and his ears canted south after the wagons, and I left him there. He would be where he was. The picket-line would, in an hour, change rotation, and the next man on this stretch of grass would not see what I had not let him see.
I walked back across the white grass to the squad-fire with the smell of the fourth wagon still in the back of my nose.
Bald Wei was waiting at the squad-fire.
He had been waiting, I understood the moment I came up, for me. He stood up when I came into the firelight. He did not bother to be casual. He gestured me with one short jerk of the chin to follow him out past the picket-flame to the dark side of the tents.
I followed him.
He stopped four paces past the tent-line. He put his back to the camp. He spoke into the white grass. He spoke low.
"The prisoner comes to your tent at first watch tomorrow."
"Yes, sir."
"You have the tent to yourself. Liu sleeps with Little Mountain tomorrow. Old Crow sleeps in the orderly tent. Wang sleeps wherever Wang sleeps, I do not care, I am not his mother. The prisoner will be chained to your tent's centre-pole. The chain is six chi. Long enough for him to lie down. Long enough for him to piss into a bowl. Not long enough for him to reach the tent-skin with his foot, and not long enough for him to reach your bed. Do you hear me, Yansheng."
"Yes, sir."
"You do not speak to him. You do not feed him from your own hand. The kitchen-orderly will bring his ration twice a day and pass it through the tent-flap. You take it. You set it within reach of his chain. You do not stand close. You do not stand within his reach. The chain is six chi and a man with a six-chi chain can throw it in a loop and break a guard's neck if the guard stands within four. You stand at six."
"Yes, sir."
"You will not — Yansheng, you will not — talk to him. Not in the imperial tongue. Not in the steppe tongue, if you have a word of it. Not in your village dialect. Not in any tongue at all. If he speaks to you, you do not answer. If he laughs at you, you do not answer. If he asks for water, you set water within his reach and you do not answer. He is being kept alive. He is not being kept comfortable. He is not being kept entertained. He is not being kept anything except alive and quiet, in that order, and the Marshal will hang you, Yansheng, and the Marshal will hang me, if anything else happens in your tent."
He paused. He turned his head, very slightly. He looked at me sideways. I could not see his eyes in the dark, but I could feel the pock-marks of his cheek in the small thin firelight that came around the tent-corner, and I could feel the pickled-plum salt on his breath.
"And Yansheng."
"Sir."
"He is twenty-four years old."
"Sir."
"He is the eldest son of Yesügen of the Black Banner. He is the Khan-presumptive of the Nine Heavens Confederation. He has killed three men of this legion with the broken shaft of a lance after he was already wounded. He has killed perhaps a hundred men of this legion in the year of this war. He is not, soldier, a man you imagine yourself feeling sorry for. Do you hear me."
"Yes, sir."
"And he is a charming man. They tell me — the men who brought him south — that he is a charming man. He will charm you. He will charm whoever has the door of his tent. That is his way. That is his trade. Do not answer him. Do not look at his face. Do not, Yansheng, let yourself stand close enough to see the colour of his eyes. Stand at six chi. That is your order."
"Yes, sir."
He turned back to the camp.
He said, to the white grass: "You are a good quiet boy, Yansheng. I have not regretted you. Do not start tomorrow."
"No, sir."
He walked back into the firelight.
I stood in the dark past the tent-line for another long count of three. The wolf, somewhere on the picket-grass to the east, paced. The second heartbeat in my chest beat the same beat it had been beating since the fourth wagon went past, the careful beat of not yet. The wind was off the north and brought no smell now but the smell of woodsmoke and millet and mutton and three thousand and four hundred men.
I went into the firelight. I sat down. I ate.
Pock-faced Liu, beside me, did not look at me. He did not ask what Bald Wei had wanted. He had heard the rotation order. He knew. He chewed his millet and offered me, in the small flicking gesture of his hand at his hip, go on, fresh fish, eat. I ate. The millet did not have a taste. I made it have a taste by chewing harder.
Wang Erlang ate at the edge of the firelight with his back to me. The bruise under his eye was the yellow of a week-old plum. He did not turn. He did not speak. He had not spoken to me since the alley.
Old Crow ate beside Wang. His pale eye was on the south side of the camp, where the prisoner-wagons had drawn up into a closed square at the foot of the salt-pan road. He had not said anything since the wagons had come in. I knew, with the small grim legion-clarity I had been earning in pieces since the kumis-still, that Old Crow had also smelled the fourth wagon, and that Old Crow was now measuring — whether the inquisitor three days behind us would smell the fourth wagon before he smelled me, and what he would do if the answer was the wrong one.
I let myself eat my second mouthful of millet.
I let myself, before the third mouthful, look once toward the south side of the camp.
The prisoner-wagons were a low dark line at the foot of the salt-pan road. The fourth wagon — the one with the deeper rear-spring — was in the centre of the line. It had its tail to me. The driver was no longer on the box. The Vermillion Guard outriders were standing at the four corners of the wagon-square in pairs, with their crossbows loose at the hip and the salt-iron quivers high on the saddle, and the wind off the north came down across the wagons toward the squad-fires and brought, in the second I let myself look, the faintest possible trace of the smell again — wet fur, woodsmoke, clean wool over something hot and watching — and the second heartbeat in my chest beat one careful beat.
I looked away.
I ate the third mouthful of millet.
Pock-faced Liu, beside me, in a voice so low it was almost only breath, said: "Fresh fish."
"Pock-face."
"Don't let him talk to you."
I looked at him.
He was looking at the fire. The pox-marks of his cheek were lit by the small embers. He was perhaps twenty-one years old. He had been kind to me, on the morning I vomited behind the latrine, in a way no person outside my own family had ever been kind to me, and he had walked me back to the squad in the alley of the kumis-shed with his elbow under mine in the smallest possible support, and he had given me the welcome to the squad that I would carry, for the rest of my life, in the same pocket of my chest where I kept the journey-knot my mother had tied at the orchard gate.
He was looking at the fire because he had something to say that he did not want to say to my face.
He said: "The prince. Don't let him talk to you. The sergeant's order, I know. I'm telling you mine. The men they bring back from these — the ones who sit guard — they come back wrong. Some of them. The ones who hear them out, they come back wrong. They start thinking. That's how Bald Wei lost the last quiet boy of Squad Five. Two years ago. A boy named Han Bao. The boy came out of three weeks of guard duty saying — not we are wrong, the boy was not so foolish as that — saying they are not what we said they were. The Marshal had him discharged. Han Bao was a friend of mine."
He paused.
He was still not looking at me. He was looking at the fire.
"Don't think, Yansheng," he said. "Bring him water. Stand at six chi. Don't look at his face. Don't let him be a person. He is not a person. He is the eldest son of a man who burned my mother's village in the year of the dog. He is a thing in chains. Keep him a thing in chains. Bring him water and shut the tent and come out and ride with the squad until the rotation ends. Yes?"
The second heartbeat in my chest beat one beat. The wolf, on the picket-grass, did not move.
"Yes," I said. In the belly voice. With my face doing nothing.
Pock-faced Liu nodded, without looking at me, and he ate his millet, and he was kind to me in the way Pock-faced Liu was always kind, by saying the hard thing first and the warm thing right after.
He said: "Anyway. Old man. You're the squad-archer of Squad Five. We get killed without you. Don't make us go home telling your mother why."
I made a sound that was nearly a laugh. I made it in the belly voice. It came out as a low huh.
"Won't," I said.
"Won't what."
"Won't make you tell my mother."
"Good," Liu said. He elbowed me, very lightly, in the ribs. His elbow went into the binding-cloth and pushed at the chafing-ring, and I made a half-grunt of pain I covered as a grunt of laughter, and Liu did not notice, and we ate the rest of the millet.
The wind brought the smell once more, from the south. Once more, very faintly. I did not turn my head. The wolf, on the picket-grass east of camp, also did not turn his head. We did not turn our heads, neither of us, all the long careful evening, in the manner of every other thing I had not turned my head toward in my whole life: the wolf in the orchard. The peddler in my mother's yard. The braid on the kitchen flagstone. The orchard gate. My mother's hands at the orchard gate.
We do not look at the wolf. We do not name the wolf. If we do not name the wolf, the priest does not come.
Not yet, the wolf in the grass said again, with his head down on his paws and his eye on the south side of the camp, where the wagons sat in their square and the smell, the impossibly faint smell, came up off the canvas of the fourth one in a thin slow stream, not yet.
I held Arsulan in my mouth.
I held Liu's elbow in my ribs.
I held the order of Bald Wei: six chi, no word, no eye.
I held — under all of them, the way one holds a coal under three layers of ash so that the morning's fire will not have to be re-struck — the fact that tomorrow at first watch, I would walk into a private's tent on the south side of camp, and a chained man would be sitting against the centre-pole, and the smell would be in the felt walls and my own throat, and I — Yulan, Arsulan, Yansheng, the squad-archer of Squad Five, the fool with a bamboo tube against her belly and a binding-cloth that had not been dry in five weeks — I would lift the tent-flap, and I would step inside, and I would not, I would not, let the chained man look at my face for long enough to count the colour of my eyes.
I went back to the squad-fire.
I ate the rest of my millet.
I slept against Little Mountain's back, in the squad tent, while Pock-faced Liu coughed once in his sleep and Old Crow did not sleep at all and Wang Erlang turned over twice in the dark, and the second heartbeat in my chest did not slow, and the wolf on the picket-grass kept watch, and tomorrow at first watch was three watches off, and the wind was off the north, and the wind was carrying a thin cold iron smell that I had begun to know better than I had any right to.
Tomorrow at first watch.
The wolf in the grass did not lift his head from his paws.
He did not need to.
He was, for the first time in nineteen years, not the only one.