“The emperor’s loyal armies will, of course,” said Kai Zhen. “And who leads them?”
“Wu Tong is our most experienced general.” Behind him the eunuch’s expression and demeanor were grave and calm again.
“Because of years of losing in Kislik lands?”
“No one wins every battle,” the prime minister said primly.
“Truly. And the emperor isn’t informed of every defeat.”
An open attack. Erighaya. The disaster there, which Wu Tong had led, having been given command by Kai Zhen.
Another nervous ripple in the room, men shuffling, adjusting clothing, looking downwards. The words were reckless to the point of personal danger. But at the same time they did remind the emperor of something that mattered. Kai Zhen had been exiled over events in that war.
Almost time, Daiyan thought.
He looked back over his shoulder at Ziji, beside a pillar at the edge of the room. His friend was staring at him. Ziji looked frightened. This was not their kind of battlefield. There was enmity here, nakedly on display, going back decades through the faction wars. Kitai was on the brink of a decision that could reshape the empire, and battles from long ago were still being fought in this room.
“Serene lord, forgive me for speaking, but of course I can take the Xiaolu’s Southern Capital with our brave soldiers.” Wu Tong’s voice was smooth, sailing above the choppy waters of confrontation.
Lu Chao stared at him. “Will you remember to bring siege engines?”
Daiyan saw the emissary’s nephew, the poet’s son, close his eyes at that. Then the young man opened them again and squared his shoulders. He moved a little—towards his uncle, not away. That took courage, Daiyan thought. And love, perhaps.
He had thought the throne room was tense before. He understood now that he understood nothing, truly. He was here as an instrument, agreeing to be such because it matched (he believed) his own desire. And because you are a fool, Ziji had said to him the one night they’d spent at Little Gold Hill.
He might be. Weren’t the young allowed to be reckless? But he knew his answer: reckless with their own destiny, yes, not with the lives of others.
The next voice was the emperor’s. “Prime minister, you believe we can take this city and hold it? You believe General Wu Tong is the best leader of our armies?”
Directly addressed, Kai Zhen stepped forward in front of the emissary. Head high, voice and appearance sleek as liao silk, he said, “Great lord, I do, and I do. I believe this is the appointed time for you to honour your beloved father and grandfather and regain our rivers and mountains.”
“And Wu Tong?” Repeating it. A direct question.
It is time, Daiyan thought.
“He is loyal to the throne and to the imperial civil service, celestial lord. He carries no taint of military ambition.”
Not, He is a brilliant leader of men. No. He is loyal and has no ambitions as a soldier. The old, old fear, going back centuries to the Ninth Dynasty and its great and terrible rebellion. So many millions dead. A chasm in the history of Kitai. What commanders might do if given too much power, if too much loved by their soldiers, if not kept utterly under control.
I could die today, Daiyan thought. He thought of a woman, moonlit, in Xinan, seen from beside a fountain.
He stepped forward. As near to the throne as the prime minister of Kitai. As advised (spider spinning his web), he dropped, touched his forehead to the floor three times, then straightened.
Do not speak, Hang Dejin had told him, preparing this moment. Kneel and wait. If he has honoured your first remarks about going north of the river alone, he will turn to you. Wait for that.
He waited. The emperor turned to him.
Wenzong’s eyes were colder than before. He said, “What is it, Commander Ren?” He’d remembered the name.
Daiyan said, “Your servant fears to speak, my lord.”
“Clearly you do not, or you would not be where you are. You have done loyal service. Speak to us, unafraid.”
Quietly, he said, “My lord, it is about the prime minister’s companion and general, Wu Tong.”
“What vast presumption is this?” cried Kai Zhen.
The emperor lifted a hand. “The man has been honourable and brave. Go on. We are listening.”
Daiyan drew a breath. No artifice in this pause. He was terrified. He said, from his knees, in front of the three steps of the dais and the Dragon Throne, “Exalted lord, celestial emperor, it is about a tree.”
CHAPTER XIX
It was possible, if you had lived long enough, and knew the people and the ceremonies extremely well, to anticipate and shape events at court, even from a distance.
It was also—the old man had to admit this, if only to himself—a sharp, vivid pleasure to do so. His battles had never been fought with swords, but they had been fought, and usually won.
Hang Dejin was outside again, in his garden at Little Gold Hill, late morning. He preferred being outdoors now, when it was possible: sunlight gave things shape and definition. Shadows took the world away. He looked over to where his son was working on papers, most likely to do with the farm. Hsien was attentive in that way.
His own mind was far off, in the palace, the throne room. Word had come yesterday at evening, by one of his illicit messenger birds, that the emissary was to be received this morning.
So the old man was sitting on a cushioned chair, drinking Szechen tea, listening to birdsong, surrounded by the scent of flowers, and picturing a room he knew very well.
The teachings of the Master urged that men were to be guided by loyalty to family. Also by service to the empire, seen as an extension of family honour. If so, he could say that what he was doing now was for his descendants, down through the future of the family, however far it might go.
If pressed to speak pragmatically, he’d have offered the opinion that, as currently constituted, the Kitan army was best used as a large, massed deterrent along their northern border, manning forts and cities while building up defences through autumn and winter against what might happen next spring.
Using barbarians to control barbarians, that was the ancient doctrine of Kitai concerning the steppe. Let them slaughter each other. Help them do so. Kitai had intervened at times, to promote one leader over another, one tribe against a second and third. In those days, those years, their own army had been a force that signified.
For many reasons, and some could be laid at his own doorstep, Hang Dejin did not think this was true today. The Kislik war—his own war—had shown as much.
When you subjugated army commanders to bureaucrats at court (people like himself), you ensured a measure of stability within your own borders. But you also raised hard, cold concerns about military pride and competence when you sent that army, with the generals they had, to fight for Kitai. And so ...
And so, if Kai Zhen pushed hard for war this morning, and a failed war might undo Kai Zhen, the old man in this distant garden was content. It served his purposes.
He’d needed to tie any war to the prime minister. Then—with a young man’s tattooed back startlingly revealed here—he’d thought of a sudden, splendid way to link any possible success to himself. To make the pattern work either way. It was clever. It was more than that.
There might be dark reverberations to war, like thunder too close on a summer day, shaking cups and bowls on a banquet table, but his judgment was that any fighting would end up much like the Kislik campaign: losses, gains, stasis in the field, soldiers dying, and farmers, anger at increased taxation ... and a treaty deriving from weariness on both sides.
And then a new prime minister to succeed the one blamed for all these things. He had looked at it, over and again, in the still-clear eye of his mind.
He glanced towards his son. In this light he could make him out, the shape of a man beside him in the pavilion. Hsien had his brush in hand, was writing a letter or a note. A good man, his oldest son, attentive, capable, calm. Possibly, just poss
ibly, hard enough to do the things that needed to be done in high office. Although that you never knew for certain until the testing came. He hadn’t known it of himself. Before being tested you were just a shape; the office gave you substance.
If he’d judged the pace of the meeting in the palace rightly, the young soldier he liked well enough (and would be sorry to see killed) would be speaking soon or was speaking now. And then he would remove his tunic in the throne room before the emperor, just as he had here at Little Gold Hill, when Hsien had described to his father, voice trembling, what characters were inscribed upon the man’s back, and in whose hand.
Whatever plans you shaped, in office or out, you needed to be ready to adapt to new possibilities that came.
There might be deaths and chaos. He judged these would be controllable, though he was aware that he might not live long enough to know. That was why you had sons, wasn’t it? Why you did what you did for them.
He knew that mortal judgment was endlessly fallible. Too many things could not be guided or anticipated. Fire and flood. Famine. Childlessness. Early death. A sudden fever in a wintry night. He sometimes imagined them all, men and women, children, everyone in the world, sailing down the Sky River in the hugeness of the dark, surrounded by all the stars.
Some tried to steer the ship. He had tried. But only the gods could do that, in the end.
Standing near his uncle again, having thought (foolishly) that he might defend him physically, if it came to that, Lu Mah listened as the soldier told them about a tree.
It was a huai, a scholar-tree, one of the longest-lived of all. According to legend, associated with ghosts and spirits. Apparently, one of these was, right now, even as they gathered here, being carried along the Wai River to the Great Canal and from there would come up to Hanjin, having been uprooted from an estate near the Wai.
It was being brought, this most recent treasure of the Flowers and Rocks Network, to grace the Genyue. It was said to be majestic, magnificent. It was, the soldier said, three hundred and fifty years old.
“The Flowers and Rocks activities are the responsibility of Wu Tong, I believe,” added the soldier, whose name was Ren Daiyan. He was standing again, at the emperor’s impatient gesture. If he was afraid, Mah thought, he wasn’t showing it.
“They are,” said Wu Tong comfortably. “And this tree is indeed magnificent. I have monitored all reports from the beginning. It may be the finest example in the empire, my lord. It belongs in the Genyue.”
“Indeed,” said the emperor. “You have served us loyally in matters of our garden.”
“Not so,” said Ren Daiyan, firmly. “Not in this, exalted lord. This is a betrayal of you and the Genyue and of Kitai.”
Mah looked quickly at his uncle and saw the same shock he felt. Perhaps more: his uncle would know precisely how reckless these words were. Mah could only guess, and know he could never have spoken them. The words could not have formed in his mouth.
“This is an accusation? In court?” It was the prime minister. His voice was brittle with fury.
“It is.”
No salutation, Mah realized. Was this man trying to destroy himself?
The prime minister seemed happy to do it for him. “August and serene lord, I request permission to have this soldier removed and beaten with the heavy rod.” Kai Zhen’s fury was obviously real. His features had flushed.
“Not yet,” said the emperor of Kitai, though he paused before he said it. “But Commander Ren, you are being uncivilized, and I must assume that you know it, even if you are new to our court.”
“I am being truthful and loyal, gracious lord. In your service, and Kitai’s. My information comes not from myself, but from the former prime minister. The honourable Hang Dejin told me I had to speak to the emperor of this, before it was too late.”
Lu Mah swallowed, his mouth dry. He understood almost nothing here, but terror still claimed him. The old man was in this, too! He pushed his hands into his sleeves to hide their trembling. He wanted to be at East Slope more than he could say.
“He sent you here?” Emperor Wenzong’s eyes widened. A hand went to his narrow beard.
“I was coming here, exalted lord. He stopped me on the way, received me at Little Gold Hill, and told me something he thought you needed to know.”
Kai Zhen was still and watchful now, Mah saw. He looked like a hooded snake. Mah had seen those on Lingzhou, uncoiling before they killed.
“And what is it that we need to know?” the emperor said. Also watchful now.
Ren Daiyan said, “That the Genyue’s sanctity, its role as a mirror of Kitai, as the harmony at the centre of our harmony ... all this will be shattered if that tree is planted.”
“Why, Commander Ren?”
It was Mah’s uncle, surprisingly. Standing not far from the soldier.
Ren Daiyan turned and looked at him. He bowed, as he had not to the eunuch or the prime minister. “Because, my lord emissary, it was uprooted, without ritual or respect, from a distinguished family’s graveyard, where it shaded illustrious graves. An act of desecration and impiety by a man who cares nothing for right behaviour, even if it weakens and endangers his emperor.”
Lu Mah was horrified. If this was true it marked a profound transgression. A huai tree was half tree, half ghost to start with! And taken from a family burial ground? It was a crime against ancestors, spirits, the gods. They might have, they probably had shifted the graves, if the tree was that old! Whoever this family was, to bring such a tree, haunted by angry spirits, to the emperor’s own garden? The mind could reel and stagger!
“What graveyard?” asked Wenzong. He was frightening to look at now. The Genyue was sacred to him, everyone knew.
Ren Daiyan said, “The Shen family, my lord. I know the glorious emperor will know them. We all do. General Shen Gao made his family’s name as Left Side Commander of the Pacified West, leading our armies there with honour. He lay under this tree, my lord. One son, also buried there, served as principal adviser to a prime minister, another guided and served the next emperor, is famed for his poetry and for—”
“For his horses,” said the emperor of Kitai. His voice was dangerously soft. “This is Shen Tai?”
Ren Daiyan bowed his head. “It is, my lord. His grave, too, lay under this tree, sheltered by it. And his wife’s, his sons’. Many grandsons and their wives and children were also buried there. There is also an inscribed memorial to his sister, who is not there only because—”
“Because she was entombed with Emperor Shinzu, north of Xinan.”
“Yes, illustrious lord.”
“It is this tree, from that ground, that is being brought here? To be placed in the Genyue?”
Lu Mah saw the soldier bow his head again in silent affirmation.
The emperor drew a breath. It could be seen, even by someone ignorant (and Lu Mah knew he was), that he was in a white, savage rage. Emperors, he thought, didn’t need to hide their feelings. Wenzong turned to his prime minister—and to the man beside him.
“Minister Wu Tong, you will explain.”
Equanimity and poise had limits, it seemed. “Great, great lord,” the man stammered, “of course I did not know this was so! Of course I—”
“You have just told us you reviewed all reports, Minister Wu.”
Another silence. A feeling of doom embedded in it.
“Even so ... even so! I did not know where it ... how it was ...of course I shall have those responsible dealt with. In the harshest ways, serene lord! The tree will be returned and ...”
Serene was not the word Lu Mah would have chosen.
Ren Daiyan, young as he was, lacking rank though he did, turned and faced the eunuch.
“You blamed others for Erighaya, too,” he said.
And when no one replied, he added, very clearly, “In an army, properly led, commanders accept responsibility for failure when the emperor’s needs are not met and his people die.”
During their long journey north
by sea, then inland to meet the Altai, and then back home, Mah and his uncle had had a great deal of time to talk. Lu Chao enjoyed conversation and had a lifetime of wisdom to share.
He’d told his nephew that a career in the civil service could offer a feeling of duty fulfilled: to Kitai and one’s lineage, in the best tradition of the Cho Master.
In Hanjin it could also, he’d said, be dramatic and exciting, as men circled the throne in the quest for access and power. It could also be terrible and destructive, he’d added.
Watching the emperor turn a stony gaze to his prime minister, Lu Mah decided this was one of the terrible moments. He knew—everyone knew—that Kai Zhen and Wu Tong had risen towards power together.
Until, right now, the cost of that became too high.
He hadn’t thought it was possible he could ever feel pity for Kai Zhen. But the man’s face in that moment, as he looked at Wu Tong and then turned slowly towards the palace guards, was the image of someone in pain. Surely you were uncivilized and cruel yourself—a barbarian—if you didn’t respond to that, Lu Mah thought. Or, perhaps that inner response was what made him unsuited to this room, this world.
“Take Minister Wu, guards.” The prime minister’s voice was strained. “Hold him in custody, at the emperor’s pleasure.”
Pleasure wasn’t the right word either, Mah thought. He lowered his eyes and kept them down.
They were in the chief magistrate’s home in the southern part of the city. Daiyan didn’t wait for their host to pour wine. He crossed to the brazier and drank off three cups, one after another. The wine was very hot, Fuyin liked it that way. It almost burned his tongue.
“He had no choice,” the magistrate kept saying. “The prime minister. No choice.”
Fuyin was still shaken by what had happened in the throne room. They all were. Ziji had taken a chair. He’d almost fallen into it.
“It didn’t even matter,” Daiyan said to the magistrate. “What he ordered was changed.”
“He knew it would be, I think.”