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his bay-coloured Sardian horse forward. The animal was magnificent, breathtaking. They all were, those far-western horses. The captain had the only one in his company. Heavenly Horses they called them in Tai's own land. Legends said that they sweated blood.
The Tagurans traded for them with Sardia, beyond where the divided Silk Roads became one again in the west, after the deserts. There, through yet more harsh mountain passes, lay the deep, lush breeding grounds of these horses, and Tai's people longed for them with a passion that had influenced imperial policy, warfare, and poetry for centuries.
Horses mattered, a great deal. They were why the emperor, Serene Lord of the Five Directions and the Five Holy Mountains, was steadily engaged with the Bogu nomads, supporting chosen leaders among the kumiss -drinking yurt-dwellers north of the Wall, in exchange for a supply of their horses, however inferior they might be to the ones from Sardia. Neither the loess-laden soil in northern Kitai nor the jungles and rice-lands of the south would permit the grazing and breeding of horses of any real quality.
It was a Kitan tragedy, had been for a thousand years.
Many things came to Xinan along the guarded Silk Roads in this Ninth Dynasty, making it wealthy beyond description, but horses from Sardia were not among them. They could not endure that long desert journey. Women came east, musicians and dancers. Jade and alabaster and gems came, amber, aromatics, powdered rhinoceros horn for the alchemists. Talking birds, spices and food, swords and ivory and so much else, but not the Heavenly Horses.
So Kitai had had to find other ways to get the best mounts they could--because you could win a war with cavalry, all else being equal, and when the Tagurans had too many of these horses (being at peace with the Sardians now, trading with them) all else was not equal.
Tai bowed twice in greeting as Bytsan reined up--right fist in left palm. He had acquaintances--and an older brother--who would have judged it a humiliation had they seen him bow so formally to a Taguran. On the other hand, they hadn't had their lives guarded and preserved by this man and the steady arrival of supplies every full moon for almost two years.
Bytsan's blue tattoos showed in the sunlight, on both cheeks and the left side of his neck above the collar of his tunic. He dismounted, bowed, also twice, closed fist in palm, adopting the Kitan gesture.
He smiled briefly. "Before you ask, yes, I brought wine."
He spoke Kitan, most Tagurans did. It was the language of trade in all directions now, when men were not killing each other. It was believed, in Kitai, that the gods spoke Kitan in the nine heavens, had taught it to the original Father of Emperors as he stood, head bowed on Dragon Mountain in the past-that-lay-behind.
"You knew I would ask?" Tai felt rueful, a little exposed.
"Longer twilights. What else can a man do? The cup is a companion, we sing. It goes well?"
"It goes well. The moonlight kept me awake, I am slow to begin this morning."
They knew his routine, the query had not been idle.
"Just the moon?"
Tai's own people asked variants of that question every time they came. Curiosity--and fear. Very brave men, including this one, had told him directly they could not have done what he was doing here, with the dead unburied, and angry.
Tai nodded. "The moon. And some memories."
He glanced past the captain and saw a young, fully armoured soldier ride up. Not one of the ones he knew. This man did not dismount, stared down at Tai. He had only one tattoo, wore an unnecessary helmet, did not smile.
"Gnam, take an axe from by the cabin, help Adar chop firewood."
"Why?"
Tai blinked. He looked at the Taguran captain.
Bytsan's expression did not change, nor did he glance back at the soldier on the horse behind him. "Because that is what we do here. And because if you do not I will take your horse and weapons, remove your boots, and let you walk back through all the passes alone