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Cai Wenji knew the day she started to soften towards her barbarian husband, to hate him a little less. She could not have given it in a calendar, for the barbarians did not track the days like the Han, only months by a strange reckoning, Salt Marsh Moon and Cuckoo Moon, Roebuck Moon and Gyrfalcon Moon, the years turning in an endless wheel from too-brief spring and summer to bitter winter.
It was before she welcomed his touch, before she bore her first son, before she began to understand the barbarian speech and brought herself to let it pass her lips.
There had been a party of traders in camp that day, and she had flown to them, not caring for propriety or even courtesy. The sound of the Han speech was like a gentle fall of water, musical to her ears; she had not realized until she heard the flat, unmusical barbarian tongue how beautiful her language was, and she had not realized until she heard it again how she had missed it. “What of my father, Cai Yong of Chenliu?” she asked. “What of my mother? Have you heard news of them?”
But the traders had only shaken their heads. “O most worthy lady, we are not from Chenliu; we are from Liyang county in Xindu prefecture,” they said. “We are sorry we bring no news of your family.”
Disappointed and embarrassed, she had hung back after that, hesitant to go too far away to hear them speak amongst themselves. They brought all kinds of wares--woven silk and cotton cloth, millet and rice, iron pots, small pieces of elegant lacquered furniture, embroidery silks and delicate needles--but Wenji only had eyes for the paper and ink.
At first she had tried to compose poetry only in her head and recite it to herself, but it would not fix there as it did once she had cleared her mind and written it down. Then, whenever they camped near a lake or river, she took a knife and stripped bark from the white steppes birches, not caring about the fragments that caught under her nails or the cold that slowed her hands. She scratched her poems into the bark, carefully, with a sharp bit of stone or one of the crude bone needles the barbarian women used to sew their coarse garments.
But paper, oh, paper. The mulberry paper was not of the best quality, but its whiteness shone in the dusty landscape, brighter than clouds. They had inksticks, a deep sooty black, and bamboo-handled brushes haired with goat and weasel and rabbit. Wenji wanted them, longed for them with all the faint hope left in her, but she would not ask her barbarian husband for anything, so she only looked, and let her fingers trail for a moment over the smooth coolness of an inkstone carved like a crane, its wings encircling the bowl.
He brought them to her than evening, her barbarian husband Liu Bao, offered the Four Treasures of the Study to her with a bow as if he were some kind of courtier. She was not sure whether to laugh or cry, but she took them from his hands.
“Thank you,” she made herself say in the barbarian tongue, and when he looked up at her with hope in his flat-featured, ugly barbarian face, she almost felt sorry for him.
Before, in her father’s house, she had practiced the discipline of calligraphy boldly, learning the different strokes, the properties of each brush, the proper method for grinding the ink. Before, in her father’s house, her poems had been beautiful, more than simply words, but here the paper was too precious. She held the brush carefully, writing with only the very tip, as small as she could: My dwelling is often covered by frost and snow.
Her father had denounced the practice of appeasing the barbarians with Han princesses, but Wenji thought sometimes that she might not have resented exile so much if she had been a heqin bride, buying peace with her sacrifice as poor Wang Zhaojun had done before her. Willing or unwilling, those heqin brides had not gone to their barbarian husbands in vain, as Wenji had. Her suffering bought nothing, no peace for her Han kin.
Her father had taught her to play Wang Zhaojun’s song from Principle of the Qin soon after she began learning the instrument; she had made it moan and sing, coaxed forth all the sorrow she could imagine Zhaojun had felt. Her parents’ friends had praised her skill and feeling, and yet she had not imagined half of of what Zhaojun must have endured. How could she, in her gauze-sheltered innocence?
Zhaojun bought sixty years of peace from the barbarians, her father had said, adjusting her fingering on the strings. We must admire her duty, but it is too high a price to pay.
When Liu Bao stole Wenji from her home he had left nothing in return but the sorrow of parents rendered childless in an instant.
When her first son Qubei was old enough Wenji tried to teach him the way of writing Han characters. His little hand, so sure on a bowstring or rein, was clumsy in grasping the brush, his strokes stiff and awkward. He tried faithfully, laboring bent over the paper, ink staining his fingers and tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration. At these times she tried to find something Han in his face, something of her, but she saw only his father--eager to please but never quite able to succeed.
The day she realized she could not teach him to write, she had given him a simple poem to copy. It seemed to take forever for him to copy the first line, only a few characters long. His writing was shaky, meandering to one side down the paper, and Wenji sighed, but said nothing.
“Mother,” asked Qubei suddenly, his finger resting under one character. “What is this word?” He spoke in the barbarian language, even though he knew she liked him to speak the Han tongue with her.
Wenji leaned over to see better, her hand on his shoulder: 芍. “Shao,” she said, and then for an agonizing, terrifying moment, she could not remember what it meant. It was only a sound. Panic gripped her, her heart pounding like a drum.
“Mother, are you well?”
When she remembered, the sense of relief crashed over her like water spilling forth from a breached dam. “It is--” She stopped, tears pricking at her eyes. There was no word for peony in the barbarian language, for there were no peonies in the steppes. “It is a kind of flower,” she said, in the Han tongue. Qubei would never breathe the scent of a peony blossom, never hear a nightingale’s song. For him there were only the little bright steppes flowers that bloomed and died in an instant, and the aching, lonely call of the diving bird, the piercing shriek of the hunting falcon. Her world was unimaginably different from his, and he would never know it.
“Thank you, mother,” said Qubei, turning dutifully back to his laborious work. But she saw how he kept sneaking glances at the other nomad children chasing each other on horseback between the tents, more at ease in the saddle than on foot.
He was hers, more hers than anything else in this cold, harsh land, and yet not enough hers.
She did not bid him to practice writing again, and tried to ignore the ache in her heart when she watched him ride out to hunt marmots, or playing knucklebones with the younger children. This was the life he was meant for, she told herself, and it was no use trying to teach a fish to breathe air.
Winter in the nomad land was brutal; even bundled into layers of fur, her feet tucked inside felt socks and fur-lined boots, Wenji could hardly bear to be outside for a moment. The icy wind clawed at her face, stole her breath and made lungs hurt. In the whirling white, the world narrowed down to Wenji and the tent she dared not move more than a step from, lest she be lost in the snow.
Her first winter, and her second, she had considered taking her hand away from the thick felt wall and walking away, one foot after another, until she could see nothing but snow. It would be a quick death, in this killing cold. But she had not had the courage, and now, with two sons, she no longer felt that wild despair urging her into the storm. Even so, she still ached for the sound of Han voices and her father playing the qin, and she did not think the ache would ever fade.
Inside the tent it was close and warm, lit by the smolder of the fire. Earlier Huyan, Liu Bao’s sister, had been appliqueing felt socks, her needle darting in and out of the fabric, but as the storm moved in and the sky darkened even the light coming in through the smoke-hole, she had set them aside to braid cord. The nomads did not weave or embroider as civilized people did; their clothing was all felt and animal skins, and to decorate it they quilted and appliqued it with crude designs.
Wenji ought to help, she knew--there was too much to do for any hands to be idle, even those of the wife of the Worthy Prince of the Left--but she hesitated, reluctant today to feel the coarse horsehair cutting into her hands. Even after all these years, braiding cord still left her hands red and sore.
“Will you play something for us, Wenji Hatun?” asked Huyan, smiling at Wenji, her oddly-shaped eyes crinkling at the corners. Huyan looked like her brother, sturdy and broad-faced, with coarse brown hair. Wenji had thought her terribly ugly at first, but Huyan was too cheerful and kind to dislike, even when Wenji hated everything else in the barbarian land. Now she always smiled back.
“I don’t know--” said Wenji, politely.
“Oh, yes, please do!” cried one of the other women, one of Liu Bao’s concubines, and then a chorus of voices joined her.
Casting her eyes down out of habit, although she knew none of the barbarians cared for modest behavior, Wenji signaled to one of her attendants to fetch her instrument. It was not a proper qin, this barbarian instrument, but she was a musician’s daughter, and had learned to play the flute and fiddle and zither of the nomads quickly enough. This instrument had a plaintive quality to it that suited her mood more often than not.
Settling it before her, she plucked a few floating notes, silencing the other women. She always sang Han songs when the women asked her to play; she would not play the barbarian music. Today the darkness of the storm had put her in mind of the gentler southern winters, of snow geese by the lake and willow leaves trailing in the water, and she missed them with a sharp pain that turned her thoughts bitter. She felt weighed down by her warm lambskin coat trimmed with fox, and by the jade ornaments and gold plaques of her barbarian headdress. The walls of the felt tent that kept out the wind seemed to close in around her, the Han lands impossibly far away.
Wenji let that grief and bitterness flow out from her through her words, the sweet rise and fall of the Han speech, as she sang Liu Xijun’s lament. And I live in an alien land, a million miles from nowhere. Another cascade of notes, and a sustained stopped high note that tugged at something tight in her chest. Someone lifted the door-flap and ducked inside, sending a lance of brightness and a gust of cold air through the tent, but Wenji could not look without breaking the song. I always think of home and my heart stings. O to be a yellow snow goose floating home again!
The last note fell into silence broken only by the faint chime of the gold beads in Wenji’s headdress, and a flicker of movement by the door caught her eye. It was her husband Liu Bao, bundled in snowy furs, his broad face unreadable in the firelight. Their eyes met for a moment, and then Huyan sighed and said, “Oh, Wenji Hatun! Are all the Han songs so sad?”
Seeing Huyan’s face, Wenji made herself smile. “Of course not,” she said. “Come, I will play something more cheerful.”
She played a folk song then, a comic one about the misadventures of a farmer and his ox, trying to lighten her own heart as well as Huyan’s. When she looked again, Liu Bao was gone.
Liu Bao wept when he told her why the Han envoy had come. At first she only heard the drone of the barbarian language, as empty of meaning as wind or the chatter of geese, like that first year when she had relied only on gestures, refusing to speak even the few words she did know.
And then, when she understood, there was joy, so intense it stole her breath and weakened her limbs. Home! She would return home, to her father’s house, to the garden with the peonies, to the willows by the lake and the nightingale’s song in the evening. She would again be able to embrace her mother, to sit with her father and play the qin, to wear padded silks in bright colors instead of heavy furs and dull felt. She would taste roasted fish and spring vegetables, millet porridge and peaches sweet and heavy with juice, and never have to eat boiled mutton or drink mare’s milk again.
Her husband released one of her hands to blot his tears with his sleeve. “I would defy the chanyu and your own people for you, if only you wanted to stay,” he said lowly, “but I do not think you have ever been happy here.” There was pain in his voice, and guilt, but his hands were gentle. She wished he had never stolen her. She wished he had not made her love him, if never as much as he loved her.
Wenji stumbled then, falling to her knees among the thick felt rugs and furs on the floor of the tent, her eyes hot with tears. She would be leaving Liu Bao, and Qubei and Wuwei, her nomad sons with their strange speech, whose love was yet familiar as that of her kin in Chenliu. She would never have news from them again, she thought, remembering her failure to teach Qubei to write in Han characters, and the grief cut as deeply as despair and loneliness ever had.
“I have been content,” she told him, brushing away her tears and raising her chin high, “You will find another wife who will come to you freely with undivided heart.” Her voice only shook a little, and hardly sounded bitter at all, but Liu Bao looked shamed. He would not apologize for stealing her, she knew, not after twelve years.
And she--she would miss him, and her children; she would miss Huyan and the other women, and even the white birch and the way the steppes bloomed with a fierce brevity in spring, only for an instant. She would even miss the wailing call of the black-throated diving birds calling for their mates, the mournful sound an echo of her own sorrow and homesickness. But she would not miss them enough.
It was time to go home.
That night, bent over her writing paper and squinting in the dimness, Wenji wrote a poem, her words small and cramped. Her father would despair at the poor quality of her calligraphy, constrained by the expense of paper in the steppes and the necessity of working by firelight, but it was for Liu Bao, who could not read it, and so it did not matter. After it dried, she folded it up and tucked it into the little bag hanging from her belt.
Then she went to Liu Bao, perhaps for the last time.
Before Liu Bao turned his dappled horse back to the north, Wenji pressed the folded piece of near-translucent paper into his hand. He was weeping again, not even trying to hide it, and behind him, Qubei cried as well. Little Wuwei, in the arms of his uncle, struggled to reach her, upset by the sorrow of his parents and elder brother but not truly understanding that his mother would not return.
She could not bring herself to say goodbye. They continued to ride southward through the dry grass, following the wild geese skeined across the sky in a black thread like embroidery silks spilled across blue fabric. Were they Han geese, she wondered, when they fed in Han fields and floated on Han lakes, or were they barbarian geese, here at the sky’s edge in this windswept yellow steppe?
Wenji remembered all the poems she wrote these past twelve years, the poems she recited silently to herself in the darkness to remember her native tongue, the poems she sang to her boys from the moment she first held them in her arms, strange-featured and yet wholly hers to nurture. She remembered the last lines of the poem she had pressed into Liu Bao’s hand, feeling his warmth for the last time: Unless it was fate that preordained such a marriage, how could I have become bound to my enemy in love and trust?
Her life now would be as divided from this nomad life as the living from the dead, but a part of her divided heart would always remain here with the geese and the grass, with the wide, cold sky, and with her barbarian husband and sons. She did not look back behind her, but the last tears she would weep for this life she left behind dried cold on her cheeks in the Han wind that blew from the south.