Chapter Thirty
The Watchtower at the Wall
The Wall came up at the third hour past dawn on the twenty-third day.
It rose out of the north in the grey light of the dawn-drum, a brown rib laid across the world, under the lee of the same low ridge of black sand we had ridden down on the morning of the twenty-first. Two days and half a watch from the bridge at the South Fork, and we had not slept under a roof for any of it. We had slept in the lee of the horses — the chestnut, the bay mare, the third horse, the grey jenny, the spare string — pulled into a windbreak in the dry black sand of the empire side, Berke at the windward, Toghrul at the lee, my mother by the bay mare with Anshi at her right. Belegt-Khan lay at my ankles with the two quarrels in his shoulder and the one in his flank. The second wolf lay at the bay mare's lee, head between his paws. Khaghan-bürkii worked the air to the south-east, three li off, and changed his watch every third one.
We had eaten Berke's dry tongues of aaruul and drunk a little mare's-milk from the skin at his left. The wolf at my boot had taken one piece of aaruul in the small hours of the first night and refused everything since. He had walked two days with three salt-iron quarrels in his body, at the long even pace of a wolf who has decided not to let his anda see what it costs him.
It cost him a great deal. I knew because the cost was lodged in me too. The two quarrels in his shoulder rode high, near the joint, and when the chestnut put a hoof wrong on the sliding black sand of the empire side and Belegt checked his stride to keep his pace mine, a thin bright wire of it crossed the inside of my own left shoulder where there was no wound — a pain that belonged to a body I was not living in but could not put down. The flank quarrel was lower and duller, a stone-bruise ache that woke when he lay and went quiet when he walked. I had stopped trying to tell his pain from the memory of it. The bond did not let me. I had asked Berke, the first night, whether it would always be like this, the carrying, and Berke had said only that a kam learns to set a door between her own chest and the animal's, the way you bank a fire so it does not burn the felt, but that a fifteen-week anda has not yet been taught the banking, and so she carries it all, undamped, the whole weight of it, and that this — he had said, into the saddle-felt — was why the old songs were sung by old women and not young ones.
I had not drawn the quarrels. I could not. I knew the soldier's knot in a binding-cloth, three pinches at the rib; I knew the clean wrap and the mare's-milk and the pen-grass on a wound the size of a wound. I did not know how to draw salt-iron from the shoulder of a bonded wolf, and the not-knowing sat in me the whole two days.
I had thought, before the bonding, that to share a chest with an animal would be a kind of company — that I would never again be alone in the dark behind my own breastbone the way I had been alone there for nineteen years with a warmth I could not name. It was company. It was also this: that when the salt-iron rode in his shoulder, it rode in mine, a cold weight I could not put down because it was not in a place I could reach. I carried his iron for him the way he carried the killing for me at the bridge, the way my mother carried a wolf-shadow at an orchard wall for nineteen years. That is what the bond is, under the songs about it. It is the agreement to carry a thing that is not in a place you can reach.
Berke knew, and Berke had told me, the first night, low into the felt of his saddle: "Daughter. The drawing is the kam's work, and the nearest kam is at the bend of the Onon-Selga, at the ordu of the Black Banner — twelve days east. We are two days from the Wall, five more past it to the Iron Gates, nine past that to the willow where the Khan's bürkii perches. Twelve days from the one who can draw the iron out of him."
I had lain in the lee of the horses that first night with the wolf's flank against my boot and the salt-iron riding cold in the false shoulder of my chest, and I had thought about the orchard at Qiaojia, where my mother had set a strip of mutton-fat at the doorstone every dawn for nineteen years against a son who never came home, and I had understood, lying there, that she had been carrying a thing that was not in a place she could reach the whole of my life. The wolf-shadow at the orchard wall. The husband who would die in a wagon. The daughter who did not know what she was. My mother had run a kam's whole grief through a southern kitchen for nineteen years and set it down at a threshold-stone in a strip of fat, and I had taken it for the small private madness of a widow, and it had been the largest sane thing I have ever been near. I had not, until I carried the wolf's iron, had any way to know what it had cost her. I had it now. It rode in my shoulder.
I had said his name, and nothing else.
"He will hold," Berke had said. "The bond holds the wolf. Salt-iron at the breastbone breaks a bond in three weeks, no sooner. He has three weeks. We need twelve days. He will hold."
"And my mother," I had said, in the smallest voice.
"Your mother is the kam's own daughter — Möngke-Mara of the Black Banner, one of the nine bogdo-shamans' line. She has been waiting at the orchard at Qiaojia nineteen years for her own bonding to be given back to her, and at the ordu it will be, and the drawing will be a small thing there. Sleep, daughter. The wolf is at the heel of the anda who said I will not hide what I am from you on the blue snow. The wolf will hold."
I had slept. I had carried him in the bowl of my chest the whole of two days — the patient weight of the bond, the wolf at my boot leaning his weight on it — and the bond had carried him, and so we both held.
At the dawn-drum of the twenty-third the Wall came up, two li north of our line. It was a brown thing, lower than the songs make it, made of rammed earth faced with brick at the gates and bare tamped clay between, and the cold had cracked the face of it in long vertical scars where the brick had wept and frozen and wept again across eight hundred winters. From two li it did not look like the thing the empire had spent a dynasty's grain building against the steppe. It looked like a furrow a giant had ploughed and then turned his back on. The watchtowers stood up off it at the bowshot-and-a-half spacing of the old code, square brick keeps with a fighting cap and a kitchen-keep below, and at the third one west of the second county a thread of grey smoke went up off the kitchen-keep into a sky the colour of unwashed wool. Someone up there had a fire going. Someone up there was awake.
We had come up at that third watchtower west of the second county — the same tower we had crossed on the morning of the twenty-first, when it was half-empty with the lung-fever cover Tang Kuai had written for us. It was not half-empty now.
Berke turned in the saddle of the third horse and read it off the bird's eye. "My prince. Fourteen at full muster. Six at the cap with crossbows, four below at the brick with sabers, three at the latrine, one at the kitchen of the lower keep. The lung-fever cover is spent."
"How," said Toghrul.
"The bell at the South Fork carried to the imperial post at the fourth watch. The post-rider rode north at the changing, reached the second county at the dawn-drum of the twenty-second. The tower-senior had the bell by mid-morning and mustered every man he had by this dawn. The four of his fourteen are Vermillion Guard he requisitioned from the salt-fork — and they carry salt-iron at the saddle-bow. They are the four at the cap. The other ten are conscript-rotation, second county. No salt-iron on them."
"Then the second wolf can't take the cap," Toghrul said, working it through. "Salt-iron up there, and your mother has never drawn a bow at a wedge before the bridge, and she is at her count of two already. The second wolf holds the lee." He looked at Berke. "So who takes the four?"
Berke breathed out, and looked away to the south-east. "The bird, my prince. The wolf at the cap is not the wolf in your chest. The wolf at the cap is the bürkii who has been at the willow on the third creek eleven days, waiting."
Toghrul looked off at Khaghan-bürkii, three li up in the south-east, and the bird lifted on the wind and went north — over the cap of the watchtower once, high and slow, the four Guard never raising their heads because the tower-senior had told them at dawn that the bird at the south-east belonged to a post-rider of the third county. Over the cap again. Then back to the chestnut, to the saddle.
"Wing-eye," Toghrul said, low, into the bird. "My wing-eye." He set the back of his wrist over the bird's heart, the gesture of an anda to his bonded brother. "Brother. The cap. The four."
Brother. The four, the bird said, on the bond.
"Go."
The bird went up — up and up to two li above the tower, where it set its eye on the brick, and then it folded and fell. I felt it fall through Toghrul. The bond ran from the bird to him and from him, faintly, sidelong, into the bowl where my own wolf lived, so that for the half-breath of the stoop I had three animals in me at once — my wolf at my boot, the falcon's plunging sky borrowed off Toghrul's chest, and under it the cold patient hum of the salt-iron — and the falcon's sky was the cleanest thing I had felt in two days, a long bright drop with the wind torn back off the leading edges and the brick cap swinging up enormous and slow. It came down on the cap like a thrown stone and took the first Guard at the throat under the chin-strap, the talons going in at the soft place above the gorget and the man folding sideways off the parapet, and he was down before the other three understood the sky had a weapon in it. They got their crossbows up — slow, fumbling at the cold latches, their breath gone to white panic in the dawn air — and loosed, three salt-iron quarrels chasing the gyrfalcon's climb, and the gyrfalcon was already a hundred feet up and climbing and the quarrels went wide into the south parapet and broke against the brick with the small mean crack of witch-iron that has bitten nothing.
Then it was bows, and the bows were ours. We had ranged this the night before in the lee of the horses — who took which Guard, in which order, so that no two arrows crossed the same air. Berke nocked off the third horse and put a grey-fletched arrow through the second Guard's shoulder, turning him into the cap's merlon. I drew. I had drawn this draw ten thousand times at the muster against a straw butt and four times against a man, and the difference was still in my hands and I let it be there and drew through it; the third Guard was bending for a fresh quarrel and I took him under the chin-strap at the throat, the place my father's two winters had taught my fingers to find before my eye found it. Toghrul's arrow took the fourth in the throat a half-breath behind mine. Four down at the cap, all four of them salt-iron, all four of them gone in the space it takes the bird to climb out of bowshot — and the bird climbing still, the borrowed sky in my chest narrowing as Toghrul drew the falcon back to the saddle, until it was only my own wolf and the iron again.
The other ten — the conscript-rotation, second county — did not raise a saber or a bow.
They stood at the cap and the lee and the latrine and the kitchen, and they let the silence go long, and then the eldest of them, the conscript at the cap by the dead Guard, set the back of his right hand at his left elbow in a small old gesture, and laid his other hand flat over his heart, and steadied himself, and looked down the three li to where we sat at the lee of the ridge.
He looked at me. He looked at my mother. He looked at Anshi on the grey jenny. He looked at Belegt at my boot with the iron in his shoulder.
He drew a slow breath, and he called down, in the flat carrying voice of an old conscript of the Tenth Legion, a thing he had been holding behind his teeth a long time:
"Lu Qiaojia. Lu of Qiaojia."
I did not move.
"Lu of Qiaojia," he called again. "The wife of Qiao Yansheng. The mother of the squad-archer of Squad Five."
I looked at the man at the cap. He was a man of fifty-three in a conscript's brick-coloured under-shirt, the lamellar he had been issued left unlaced at the side because a fifty-three-year-old man of the second county's rotation does not lace it for a muster he means to lose, and I knew the face, though in nineteen years I had never known the name. It was the face of the man who had come to our kitchen door at the noon-bell of a threshing-day in my tenth year with a basket of millet and the small bow of a neighbour at a neighbour's threshold — a man who had worked the salt-foundry of the second county beside my father fifteen years, who had carried my father home over his own shoulder the year the foundry-roof came down and broke two of his ribs, who had eaten at our table at the new-year of every one of those years and laughed too loud at his own jokes and gone home across the third creek in the dark. His own wife had set a strip of mutton-fat at her own doorstone every one of the same nineteen years my mother had set one at ours. I had thought, all my life, that the mutton-fat at our doorstone was my mother's small private madness, a southern widow's grief turned to ritual. I understood now, looking at the man at the cap, that it had never been one woman's. There had been a second doorstone at the third creek the whole time, and a second strip of fat, set by a second woman who knew exactly what she was feeding and why.
My mother said it on the bond, into mine, in the kitchen-tongue of Qiaojia: Daughter. Old Yang.
I called it back, in the smallest voice I had, across the three li: "Yang."
"Lu. Daughter," he answered. And he kept his hand over his heart, and he said: "The watchtower is mustered at fourteen. Four are at the cap, and the four are down. The other ten are not at the watchtower, daughter. The ten are at the lee of the brick. The ten are at the kitchen. The ten are at the latrine, with the saddles and the bedrolls and the kits of fourteen days' provision. By the writ of the second county's rotation, this dawn, the ten are not at the watchtower at all. The ten are blameless."
He let that stand. Then, in the smallest voice: "Daughter. Ride."
"Yang," I said.
"Lu. Daughter. The wife of Old Yang has set the mutton-fat at her doorstone nineteen years. She will set it again tonight, and at the dawn-drum tomorrow, and every dawn-drum after. The wife of Old Yang has known what you are the whole time. Ride."
"Yang," I said again, because there was nothing else of him I could keep.
"Ride, daughter."
We rode. We rode at a long gallop across the line of the third watchtower west — bay mare and chestnut and third horse and grey jenny and spare string, the second wolf three paces off my mother's right and Belegt three paces off my boot, the gyrfalcon two li up in the south-east — and not one of the ten conscripts raised a saber. They watched us go. The dead Guard lay where they had fallen along the cap, four cinnabar-edged shapes the dawn had not yet warmed, and the ten living men of the second county did not look at them either; they kept their eyes on us, on the riding, on the thing they had decided not to be part of. Belegt held his gallop level beside my stirrup and the iron rode in him at every stride and rode in the false shoulder of my own chest at every stride, and I bent low to the chestnut's mane and carried it and let him carry me and we went. And Old Yang stood at the cap with the back of his hand still over his heart, and he did not put it down — held it through the whole of our riding, through the grey dawn-light, while the wind off the steppe came down over the Wall and lifted the loose flap of his unlaced lamellar and did not move his hand at all, until the horses had crossed under the shadow of the Wall and the steppe-side snow took us and the white grass at the lee of the higher plateau closed around us.
We were back on the steppe.
The wolf at my boot, with the two quarrels in his shoulder, kept the patient weight of himself on the bond, and the second wolf — the wolf-shadow that had haunted the orchard at Qiaojia for nineteen years — ran now at my mother's right side under the open steppe sky, no longer at any orchard at all. The orchard was three thousand li south, empty. The threshold-stone of the kitchen door was the threshold-stone of an empty kitchen.
The strip of mutton-fat, my mother said, on the bond, in the kitchen-tongue of Qiaojia. The wife of Old Yang will set it. Ride.
I rode. I did not look back.