The Silk Map Page 5

  And yet, she thought, there might soon come a time when Qiangguo’s cruel wall-builders consider me nearly as great a legend—if my pet inventor’s tricks work as planned. Thoughts of the future took wing like raptors as her eyes spied movement in the green.

  A grasshopper twitched. She let fly an arrow.

  The insect flew as well, but she’d anticipated its departure, and her shot bisected it.

  Steelfox dismounted and sauntered leisurely to her kill. It was ungrateful to waste Mother Earth’s food, so she popped half the insect into her mouth and crunched away.

  A voice came murmuring upon the wind, as though a woman spoke from deep within a well. You are surely improving, Lady. Though why you choose such bizarre targets, I do not know.

  Steelfox had trained herself not to jump when the shaman projected her words in this manner. “Haytham ibn Zakwan ibn Rihab,” she replied, “claims he was once marooned upon a remote continent. He dwelled in peculiar pointed gers nearly as narrow as trees. He hunted vast buffalo on vaster alien plains. He smoked strange leaves that he hopes to cultivate upon our own continent. He says those foreigners and we Karvaks are much alike, though personally I cannot see why. But they did teach him that a good archer should practice by shooting grasshoppers, because if you can manage to shoot a grasshopper, surely you can shoot a man.”

  Steelfox searched the four directions for the shaman as she spoke.

  To the south lay only the green steppes of spring. To the west lay more of the same.

  To the north was her encampment, a row of thirty-six gers set in an east-west line, with five great wheelships rising behind, their sails bearing symbols in vertical script proclaiming the five elements. The fire-aspected sail belonged to Redwind, Steelfox’s flagship, and it always pleased her to see it. Steelfox beheld much to make her proud. But no shaman.

  To the east, obscured by dawn-glare rose the Great Khatun’s temporary court, with the gray and white slopes of Mastodon Mountain rising beyond, feeding a meandering river that separated the two encampments. Steelfox could glimpse animals that way, but no nearby people.

  Her falcon shrieked overhead, warning her of someone’s approach. That was good, because apparently this morning Steelfox was perceptive as a rock.

  Half that Mirabad madman’s stories come out of his fever dreams, came the shaman’s distorted voice, and the other half out of his ass. If I hadn’t seen his inventions for myself . . .

  “Yes,” said Steelfox, shutting her eyes so she might touch her falcon’s mind.

  There was a moment when her thoughts, normally a disciplined herd, dispersed like a thousand wild horses. But she mounted one and rode it to the mind’s horizon.

  She was nine years old, and her father clutched her hand in his and placed it upon an egg the color of fire. “From the time Earth and Sky became two beings,” Father said, “and learned both loneliness and love, our family has had the privilege of knowing animal minds. The talent is double-edged, as are all gifts. You may only choose one mind at a time, and each will mark you forever. Are you certain?” Father sounded so serious, but Steelfox had no fears. Despite her name, and despite the Karvaks’ history with horses, it was the clouds, not the grasses, she longed to know. She nodded—

  And in the next terrifying moment she was screaming, for she was trapped inside a shell . . .

  Steelfox broke through the memory and all at once she was in the here-and-now and looking down upon herself, a little Karvak princess with her crown of black hair worn high and shiny with animal fat, in her thick, sky-colored tunic coat with its long drape and heavy sleeves: a drop of black-flecked blue in an ocean of green. The tiny woman shivered. The family gift gave her Qurca’s perceptions but only a sliver of the mind that commanded them. Thus what was natural for him always disoriented her, for a time.

  But only for a time. Soon she thrilled with the perceptions of the circling peregrine, swiftest of all beasts. Qurca was on his way to becoming an old bird, and she sensed a trace of stiffness in his wings, but he was agile yet. The steppe opened up before their eyes, a vastness of green to rival the immensity of blue above. Qurca noted slopes human eyes would miss, and burrows of ground rodents, and the occasional black of the sky-stones one found here and there in these lands. She would have to inform the Great Khatun of a few meteorites her smiths could harvest.

  Far to the southeast was a temporary interruption of the green: a fleet of wheelships coming to greet the Great Khatun. They were at least an hour off, and Steelfox couldn’t discern their insignia, but it was good to have this warning.

  She coaxed Qurca to spy the land nearer at hand and soon spotted her quarry, a tiny human figure fording the river at an angle that placed it within the dawn-glare for little Lady Steelfox.

  Qurca made an irritated shriek. Morning was a hunting time, and Steelfox was acutely aware of the movements of field mice far below, animals to which as a human she’d been oblivious. Qurca was too disciplined to stoop and slay, but she could sense his desire, a tension as great as any human ambition or lust. That he denied his appetite for her sake showed dedication that could shame a Karvak. She released him to his hunt.

  A woman once more, she saw a bolt of feathers snatch a mouse from this world and fly to a place of feeding. She turned east and smiled. “Haytham’s creation is a marvelous way to travel, shaman,” she teased. “Better than wading through icy rivers!”

  Bah, came Northwing’s conveyed voice, obviously irritated by Steelfox spotting her. Let the Karvaks, with their token single-animal bonds and their wheelships and their Wind-Tamers, say so if they want. I, a taiga shaman, can survey the land through the eyes of a whole flock of cranes. And there’s no better way to greet the day than with cold water.

  Northwing strode out of the sun. She kept her hair short and her face bare of adornment. She wore a hunter’s heavy gray coat and pants, her shamanic charms shining silvery over her coat upon half a dozen necklaces, and like Steelfox she carried a bow and quiver.

  “I do not mean to insult you,” Steelfox said. “Care for half a grasshopper?”

  Bah.

  “As you wish.” Steelfox continued talking while chewing. “Why do you brighten my morning, Northwing?”

  Your late husband treated me with more respect.

  “Fear, you mean.”

  “Is there a difference, Karvak?” Northwing called in mundane fashion across the remaining span.

  “Fear is for those outside the realm! I know you for an honorable vassal! I do not fear you!”

  “Do you fear the Great Khatun?” came the shaman’s answering bellow. “She summons you!”

  This was insolent. With her outcry, Northwing had informed the sharper-eared guards that Steelfox’s liege demanded her presence. Any delay now would be provocative.

  Steelfox strolled with calm deliberation to her pony, mounted, and rode at a measured pace toward where Northwing stood with crossed arms.

  “You may ride if you’re done screeching,” she said as she pulled up beside Northwing.

  “I have legs.”

  They continued toward the river.

  “Did my liege give a reason?”

  “Does the khatun need reasons?”

  “Is mighty Northwing a messenger boy now?”

  “I go where I will, as any man might.”

  “Is mighty Northwing a man now?”

  “I am a shaman, Lady. I walk between life and death, light and darkness, male and female.”

  “I’ll never understand you Reindeer Folk.”

  “Do you not even realize, Lady, after all this time, that ‘Reindeer Folk’ is your name for us, not ours?”

  Steelfox knew but answered, “And what is your name for yourselves?”

  “‘The True People.’”

  “Well, fair enough.” Steelfox held out her arm and Qurca alighted. He had a golden belly and gray wings, and a mix of these colors swirled upon his head, with his beak like the comb of a golden helmet dipped in ash. He swallowed the
rest of Steelfox’s grasshopper in one gulp, his chest puffing. Steelfox cooed and said, “But we’re content to be Karvaks. ‘Archers.’ Let the world know us by what we do.”

  “Bah.”

  They crossed the river and rode past the Great Khatun’s soldiers, beyond poles marking future encampments, for nobles arriving for the Parliament. They passed herds of goats, cows, and aurochs, who’d been relegated to this grazing to preserve the fields closer to the khatun’s tents. Likewise they passed war-animals—ponies, mastodons, woolly rhinoceroses—before Steelfox even spotted the Great Khatun’s gers and her two dozen wheelships.

  The site sprawled over a territory far more vast than the khatun’s own entourage required. Cauldrons big enough to cook an aurochs stood in rows before the tents, leading to a score of tree trunks dragged from the taiga and planted as posts for vast future pavilions. With few people stirring, the grounds had almost the look of a haunted and deserted spot, but rather than a place where humanity had once lived, it was a place where most people had yet to arrive.

  “The Parliament of All is coming,” Steelfox mused, “like it or not. . . . Northwing, in your wanderings between light and darkness, did you happen to pass Redwind?”

  “You mean, did I look in on your mad inventor?”

  “I suppose you could put it that way.”

  “Black smoke was pouring out of the wheelship’s hold. The crew on duty were coughing and cursing the name of Haytham ibn Zakwan. Whether that was a good or bad sign, even a shaman cannot say.”

  “You do not approve of him, Northwing. But do you approve of my project? You have never said.”

  “Bah. It is not for me to approve or disapprove.”

  “But you do it anyway.”

  “You Karvaks will conquer the world. Or you will make it conquer you. That is nothing to me, nor are your unorthodox approaches toward that end—as long as you treat the True People well. Despite your many shortcomings, Lady Steelfox, you have always acted in our interest.”

  “I am glad you think so.”

  “If you are pressing me for advice, however, I do have a word for you. Pride.”

  “You are saying I have too much.”

  “No, Lady. You lack pride. The core of you craves praise, like a beaten dog. It leads you toward flamboyant action.”

  “Ha. Being Karvak is what leads me toward flamboyant action.”

  “As you wish. Here you are.” They were before the gers. Northwing halted and looked around like a penned animal. “I find this encampment far too much like a city for my taste.”

  “Then go. Since you are so good with messages, tell Haytham to be ready for a demonstration as soon as fresh wheelships arrive. It will be within the hour. For that matter, you’d best be ready too.”

  “He’ll pout like a child. He’ll protest it’s too soon.”

  “But he will do it. He has his own form of pride.”

  “As you wish, Lady.”

  As Northwing stalked away, Steelfox set Qurca to circling. Then she dismounted and gave her pony’s reins to one of the khatun’s soldiers.

  The dome-shaped felt tents were arranged in a line, all doorways facing south. Fire-smoke puffed through the roof-holes. Most tents were the color of dry grass or cloudy skies or snow. The Great Khatun’s was white with gold trim.

  “You may enter, honored Lady of the Il-Khanate of the Infinite Sky,” said the guard, “but mind you the Great Khatun speaks now with her poets.”

  The passage from outside to inside was a step from the most public of spaces to the most intimate. Light dimmed, sounds grew muffled, the chill tang of morning gave way to the warm earthy scent of the dung-fire. Movements had to be gentle in this place, for dried meat hung from rafters, cookware and supplies crowded the fringes, and the structure itself was always close at hand. Words in a ger were soft-spoken, for the tent was a crowded, hushed space, the defining opposite of the outside’s eternal green and infinite blue.

  The Great Khatun ruled a dominion comparable to Qiangguo in scope or to the Mirabad Caliphate in its prime. Yet instead of a palace she had this.

  For a Karvak it was enough.

  Steelfox prostrated herself, rose, and knelt beside the door on the western side. The old khatun nodded from where she knelt beside the fire. She who commanded the fates of countless lives was dressed and adorned much as Steelfox, with the exception that her hair rose taller and was more grandly greased and coiled. Her forehead shone with yellow makeup emphasizing her wise brow.

  Her guests were not Karvaks but people of conquered lands. One was an Okcu, a relative of the far-flung folk of Qushkent and of the distant and possibly imaginary Sublime Sultanate. He wore furs, a sharply pointed hat, and thick mustachios. Around his neck was a simple charm of the Nightkindlers, an obsidian disk with an inset agate. Softly he said, “Great Khatun, I have spread word of your bloodless victory in the matter of the Peninsula of Seals.”

  “I hope you did not describe it as bloodless,” said the khatun.

  “Not at all. I composed many a stanza of slaughter and subjugation, and told of how the arctic sea grew so red that icebergs of blood will be seen from southern coasts for years to come.”

  “I am pleased. And you, Akinakhia?”

  “I’ve told how you utterly destroyed the War Sages of the Five Islands,” said a woman of the Oirpata, a tribe on the western fringe of the khatun’s empire, where women dominated. Steelfox could not help squinting to see if the woman had indeed cut one breast from her body to facilitate archery, as some Oirpata were rumored to do. If so, Steelfox could not discern it beneath Akinakhia’s tunic of golden plates. “I have described how the surviving army fled whimpering on their boats, to topple over the world’s edge.”

  “That is well, since owing to bad weather we’ve barely been able to hold half of one island. And what word of the Northwest?”

  A bearded man in chain mail and wolf’s fur grinned. “Great Khatun, I have told how your annihilation of the city of Ingenstadt was reflected in the Mirrored Sea until the heavens wept at the devastation, accounting for the great hailstorm of last summer.”

  “I believe we acquired a small trading town called Ingen in that region,” the khatun mused.

  “That is all that’s left! Of course, the story is more believable because I’ve spread word of wondrous Ingenstadt for three years now, even to the point of circulating curios.”

  “Ah, planning ahead. Well, I would be happier if you told of an actual battle. But we have not been able to mount much of an advance in your region, so it is understandable. I am pleased with your work, my poets and rumormongers! Go now to the Supreme Judge to learn of more recent events, and to consider how you may embellish them to strike terror in every soul.”

  The poets bowed to the khatun, and to Lady Steelfox, and departed the ger.

  Steelfox prostrated herself anew. “I greet you, Great Khatun.”

  “Yes, yes, I am greeted,” the khatun said rising. “Now come and hug your mother.”

  Steelfox embraced the most powerful woman of the known world. “I’m sorry I arrived only just last night, Mother. It’s always difficult rousting enough Wind-Tamers to roll the fleet.”

  “Nonsense,” said the khatun. “You’re the first to arrive. Jewelwolf had best have a good excuse.”

  Steelfox felt a mix of rain and sun, as she often did at her sister’s name. “A fleet is approaching,” she said. “It might be her.”

  “I know.”

  “Our brothers are late too—”

  Mother grunted. “Your brothers! They had desperately important drinking and sporting to do, I’m sure. I’m tempted to have my poets tell the truth about them. But that would be bad for the empire. The realm your father worked so hard to carve out of nothing. Well, no more of this. Are you hungry?”

  Steelfox tried protesting that the ruler of the Four Directions shouldn’t be making breakfast for anyone, but it was to no avail. Mother’s habits were older than the empire, after all. Years
ago she’d been no khatun but merely the wife of a minor chief, her clan on the edge of destruction. Much had changed, but not, in so many respects, Mother.

  The fire was always going, and within the ger meat and vegetables were always close at hand, and soon mother and daughter were sipping soup and sharing news.

  “It sounds as though the consolidation is going well,” Steelfox said.

  “Consolidation, yes. Expansion, not so much. Jewelwolf will likely have words for me about that. Her husband will too, though he’s always careful with his words, that one.”

  “Jewelwolf speaks out of love for Father’s dream. Not out of anger at you.”

  “What I love about you, daughter, is that you’re always searching for the way out of the trap, social or physical. You don’t want your family fighting, so you seek the verbal tactic to prevent it. You struggle at the limits of your assigned domain, half steppe and half taiga, and seek clever ways to enhance your position. I’ve heard about your pet inventor.”

  Steelfox let herself smile. “Soon you may more than hear.”

  “Intriguing! Earth and Sky know I could use diversion from the Parliament of All.”

  “I can well imagine.”

  “It is as it is. One never calls a Parliament for just one reason. There is the matter of a new Grand Khan, yes. But there are also marriages to arrange, armies to assign, delegations to receive, justice to be done. And love and sport, of course, as your brothers would remind me.” This time the khatun did not sound so annoyed with her wayward sons. “Yet, none of these matters is as close to my heart as what I must say.”

  Dread filled Steelfox’s own heart. She was about to be married off again.

  Oh, there would be a pretense of choice, a dance of respect, but she and her mother both knew that Steelfox would ultimately accept the khatun’s recommendation, for the good of the realm.

  She hadn’t chosen her late husband, a Reindeer Folk man, though in hindsight it had been a lucky match. He’d been kind to her, and she’d mourned when he perished in battle before fathering a child. She loved him most, however, for bringing her into the circle of his people—so different from the Karvaks but now so close to her heart. Steelfox had put off all other suitors, reasonably claiming she was unready, and that suzerainty of the Reindeer Folk and the bordering steppelands took all her time.