It was very dark behind the yurt. A dead man was lying in the snow. Trained by years in the marsh, Daiyan pulled his arrow from the rider’s throat. You never left arrows if you could avoid it. He saw Junwen dragging the body from in front away from the fire there, to the back. A good thought. He pulled the arrow from that one too. He went up to the yurt.
There was a chance another guard was inside. Daiyan drew his sword and slashed hard, a ripping, two-handed stroke through heavy cloth. Then he was in, twisting through the opening, ready to kill again.
One low brazier, a very little light. Enough, after the blackness outside. Only one man here. He stood up quickly from a pallet on the ground. He looked startled, but not—a good thing—afraid. There was no fire in the yurt, no warmth. Two small bowls beside the dull glow of the brazier, the crude pallet, a bucket for night soil. Nothing else. It was wrong, it was entirely wrong.
Daiyan dropped to his knees. He was breathing hard. An excess of emotion. He lowered his head. Junwen came in through the tear behind him, sword in hand. The soldier froze for a moment—he hadn’t known what they were here to do—then he, too, knelt, let go of his blade, and pressed hands and forehead to the ground.
“My lord prince,” said Ren Daiyan. “We have come for you. Forgive me, but we must go quickly, and it will be difficult.”
“There is nothing to forgive,” said Prince Zhizeng of Kitai, only son of the father-emperor—only direct successor to the Dragon Throne—not trapped inside Hanjin.
His hair was already unbound, he’d been lying down to sleep. He suffered them to help him remove his tunic, to make him look like them, like a steppe rider in the night. After a hesitation, he pulled on his own boots. Daiyan felt an impulse to help, but did not. He handed the prince a knife. He had only the one sword.
Then he took the scroll he’d carried here and he laid it on the pallet, where it would be found.
“What is that?” said the prince.
“I want them to read it,” was all he said.
He looked to the back of the yurt. Junwen had gone out that way, now he reappeared, carrying the body of one of the guards. He dropped the man inside, went out again. He did the same with the other three, moving quickly, quietly. Another good thought. The longer those deaths went undetected ...
When Junwen was done he straightened, waiting. The prince went over and kicked the nearest guard in the head with a booted foot. He is entitled, Daiyan thought.
They went out the back. No stir, no alarm in the vast, dark camp. A few fires burning, far apart. Distant, drunken voices, a song. Soft snow from heavy clouds. The sounds from Hanjin came through this shrouding as if from farther away than they were, as if already in the past, already history, no less terrible for that.
THE CHO MASTER had instructed from his grove that duty to the state and the family were absolute. The teachings of the Sacred Path were somewhat different. They emphasized balance in all things, and this included a man’s words and the stories he told.
So Kang Junwen, even in his later years, when someone was usually forgiven for or even expected to stretch the silk of youthful stories, never did so when he spoke of that night in the Altai camp and what followed.
It seemed his telling resonated more strongly with listeners because it was offered quietly, not dramatized. He was a southern rice farmer and a former soldier, not a market performer, and he was telling a true tale from a dark time. He would simply relate, briefly, how Commander Ren Daiyan had put four arrows in four throats from the darkness by the prince’s yurt, how not one of the guards made a sound, and none of them heard another one die.
There were, he came to reflect, other ways that one might have thought to tell a story. He could have spoken more about himself, but he never did. He knew what his listeners had come to hear, and his own glory, honour, pride emerged as a reflection of Ren Daiyan’s because he’d been there. His own face, young that night, as if seen in a moonlit pool. He did think of it that way, awkwardly or not.
He was also aware that memory could mislead you, or be lost. He vividly remembered the day he was married, for example, but everything blurred in and around the time his wife had died, and that was much, much later.
THEY LEFT THE YURT where the prince was being held. The commander led them towards the farthest edge of the camp, beyond where the guards who had let them through would be. Ren Daiyan whispered briefly to each of them. Junwen had always assumed it was the same thing, but he couldn’t know that, that sort of thing made stories difficult, or opened them up to being changed.
In his ear the whisper was, simply, “Walk as if we belong here and have somewhere to go.”
They moved briskly but didn’t run. They saw men by a fire, drinking from a flask passed back and forth. Junwen wasn’t sure what they were doing back there, not on guard, not obviously wounded. That group ignored three men passing in the night, if they even saw them.
Towards the southern boundary of the camp, near where guards would be, Daiyan made them halt beside an empty yurt with no fire in front of it. He spoke quietly to each of them again. There were harsh sounds south of them, from the city; they rose and fell but never stopped. Kang Junwen would never forget those noises. He remembered wanting to kill someone.
The commander did the killing.
The guards out this way (had Ren Daiyan seen this, expected it?) were widely spaced, not clustered together as those where they’d entered had been. He used his bow again.
He fired from quite close to each one. As the first guard slumped, Junwen stepped quickly to stand where the fallen man had stood—so that the next guard over to their right, if he looked this way, would see a figure still on duty. Moments later, that next guard over, just visible in darkness, also died. Prince Zhizeng stepped into his place.
Ren Daiyan had disappeared, farther west, to where the next man in line would be. Junwen had no doubt as to that one’s fate. He stayed where he was, facing south, outwards, as if vigilantly on guard.
And it was while doing so, standing thus, that he heard someone approach from behind, and an Altai voice call, “My fucking turn then, piss on it all. Yours for kumiss and a fire.”
Kang Junwen turned smoothly, as if to greet someone, and he drew his sword and plunged it deeply—into a man already falling dead, of an arrow.
“Well done,” murmured the commander, coming up, bow in hand, crouching, not to be seen.
Junwen said, “There will be two others coming.”
“There were,” said Ren Daiyan. “It is all right. We can go.”
“We can prop this one up.”
“If you know how, you do it,” the commander said, and Junwen thought he heard the faintest breath of amusement. “I don’t.”
“Watch me,” said Kang Junwen quietly. He took the second dead man’s body and positioned it facing south, then he manoeuvred the first one sitting upright, leaning against that one’s back. It looked, from a distance, as if a guard was sitting down, or crouching, but present. He pulled the two arrows, for Ren Daiyan.
“Until they topple,” he said. “Maybe they won’t.”
Not something he ever knew. He did know that no alarm was raised as they slipped over to where the prince was standing stiffly, staring out, as if at his post, and then the three of them moved—running, finally—out of the camp and into the night.
IT HAD ALWAYS PLEASED Daiyan to identify someone he thought might be a real soldier and be right about it.
This one, Junwen, was new, had done well getting them into the camp, while in there. There was burning to their left, but where they were running it was black. He stayed beside the prince, a hand out in case he stumbled. He worried briefly whether he’d be able to guide them straight back to the oak trees where the horses were, but then he saw a torch and realized someone was there ahead of them.
“Wait!” he snapped. And then, to Junwen, “If I don’t come back, lead the prince around to the west and then to the woods where the others are. Report to Commande
r Zhao. Kitai will be depending on you.”
He didn’t wait for an acknowledgement. He slipped his bow from his back and fitted an arrow as he ran, an effortless movement, the way some men might brush a hand through their hair. He bent low, moving fast, silent as a spirit. He was afraid, though. If there were numbers here, if they’d seen and seized the horses ...
Only three, and just arrived. The riders had dismounted, were collecting the tethered horses, talking among themselves. Not alarmed, by the sound of it. They might be drunk, might even think they were playing a joke on other riders. They would not be expecting Kitan soldiers from a burning city.
He had done this so many times. It was not a good thing, if you were aimed (like an arrow) towards a virtuous life, but it was almost possible, after many years, to forget you were ending lives.
You told yourself it was necessary when you were first starting. Some didn’t think about it at all. Some he’d known took joy in killing. He tried to remember when he’d stopped worrying about the ghosts of those he killed.
He loosed, slotted another arrow, released, and then a third—the torch one of them held made it easy. He shot that one last, of course.
It wasn’t as silent as back in the Altai camp. These three were close together; the torch-bearer saw the other two fall. He cried out in surprise, and one of the horses reared up.
Someone made a sound to Daiyan’s right.
Four men, not three. As likely as anything this one had just gone off to relieve himself, or perhaps he was being a good soldier and checking the area where they’d found something unusual.
The sound became his death. Daiyan dropped his bow. The startled grunt he’d heard sent him running through blackness to where an Altai stood on snow-covered, uneven ground.
This one he killed with a sword. The two-handed blades were no good for thrusts. He swept it in a scything motion as if cutting summer grain in a different life. Another ghost to his name when he came to cross to the afterworld.
He had things to do before that happened. Hanjin was being overrun. He thought of the women there. Of ordinary men, children who would never grow out of childhood now. He wasn’t going to spare a moment to think of the mother or father of this man lying at his feet.
He dried the sword on the ground. He reclaimed his bow, went back to get the two men with him. They took all seven horses. He also took a dead rider’s sword and sword belt and gave them to the prince. Junwen silently retrieved Daiyan’s arrows and handed them over.
The snow stopped falling as they came back to the bamboo wood. Approaching, Daiyan hooted like a marsh owl, and Ziji let them live.
They went back to the grove by the tunnel’s entrance. They dismounted there. Daiyan looked around. Darkness, shapes of men. If Kitai was to survive, Hanjin be avenged and regained, it would begin in this wood.
He said, “It is done. We need to move south fast, and have our cavalry meet us on the way because we will be pursued. We need food and drink and proper clothing for Prince Zhizeng, who is with us now.”
And, as he’d expected, as was entirely proper, hearing the name every man knelt down, and the woman he loved.
He could hear horses and shouts and running feet and screaming. His stomach was roiling and twisting, as if he’d swallowed snakes. There were fires, licking the frames of houses up to swallowtail roofs, though not in this square yet, where Qi Wai stood on guard in front of their warehouse.
The square was empty except for him. He knew that wouldn’t last. He held a sword. At some point that began to feel foolish, and then a little later (he hadn’t put it down) it didn’t. He had no idea how to use it, but it was, if nothing else, an honourable way to die.
He’d been stationing himself here against looters in the streets. His own people. Even against them, he knew he wasn’t intimidating, but his thought had been that they might prefer to look somewhere else, where no one at all was on guard, rather than run any kind of risk.
The barbarians thundering through the city would not think that way when they came, and they would come, even if this was a dark, obscure corner of the clan compound. The horsemen would be navigating the city, Wai thought, towards the palace grounds or the entertainment districts first. They would get here, though. Tonight, in the morning, soon. He looked up at the snow. It was soft, even beautiful.
He thought of his mother and father. His father had said, with his easy, enviable confidence, that the barbarians had come only for silver and silk. That they’d withdraw when payment had been made. “After that,” he’d said, “we will take the silver back by trading with them at the border, as we’ve done for years.” The appropriate people would be punished, the new emperor would name new advisers, all would go on.
His father might be dead by now on the other side of the compound, and his mother. Thinking of the Altai and the stories of their conquests, Wai hoped she was dead. A twisting thought. His mother was a cold, severe woman, but he’d respected her, and she’d honoured his own path, his choices, the ones she’d known about.
She’d chosen a wife for him who had been, for years, as much a companion as anything else. He still couldn’t say how and when things had changed. Sometimes a man needed something else in a wife, in life.
His thoughts of Kou Yao, his steward, his lover: those were not complicated. He wanted him south and safe with the child. As safe as the times allowed men and children to be. He’d done what he could about that. As for Shan—his wife might be out of the city by now.
He hoped so. She’d come to ask him to join her, wearing her amusing, ridiculous hat. He had declined. They had bowed to each other. There came a point, and he had arrived there, when you couldn’t separate yourself from what you’d done all your life, what you’d loved.
What he’d loved and done lay, much of it, behind him in the warehouse. He wasn’t about to claim he was being virtuous or brave, standing here awkwardly holding a sword, but he was being true to himself before the world and the gods. Maybe that would come to matter, in some way?
He heard a crash, then a roaring sound, and he startled, afraid. He looked left: a red-orange thrust of fire into the sky, screams from that direction. A house had fallen, beyond the wall of the compound. He tightened his grip on the old sword, waiting in an empty courtyard.
Behind him, behind the locked door, were objects of grace and power, from the Third, the Fifth, the short-lived Sixth. Ritual tripods and bells, one of them massive, brought to Hanjin from the Wai River with great effort. There was jade on lacquered tables, protected in caskets—all colours, green and white and pale, pale yellow. One carving he loved was nearly black. There were figurines and ornaments and vases. Huge wine vessels. Jewellery. There were vases and bowls and cups and ewers, some so old they had been in the world longer than Kitai. There were scrolls—government regulations, edicts, personal journals, poets’ letters, poems, essays, even an order of execution. In the high-ceilinged warehouse were plinths with inscriptions he (and his wife) had transcribed over the years.
These things, and the ones kept at home until this winter, these were the grace and labour of his days. They were what he was. I have been, Qi Wai thought suddenly, a small man carrying a small torch, looking back, and further back. He had tried to light the road along which they had all come. It was not, he thought, a bad way to have lived.
He really had no idea how to use this sword, beyond gripping the hilt and swinging it, one way and then the other, the way small children sometimes did with sticks of bamboo, imagining themselves heroes of the old days. Then their real education began and they learned that in this Twelfth Dynasty such dreams were not suitable, and later they began to grow the little fingernail long on their left hand.
When the first of the riders came into the square they did so without torches and the fires were distant enough that Qi Wai was able to remain unseen in the darkness by the warehouse. He actually wounded the first man to approach the locked door, swinging the blade with all his force. He was startled whe
n the sword bit into the man’s side, the impact of it, the crudeness. He had no time to feel more than that. The next man’s sword ripped into his belly and tore upwards viciously. Qi Wai wore nothing resembling armour, only layers of clothing against the cold. That thrust took his life, sent him through the doors of death into the long night.
The warehouse doors were smashed open behind his body, some looting was done, but it was very dark and eventually most of what was in there, carefully inventoried through the years by Qi Wai, son of Qi Lao, and his wife, the poet Lin Shan, was carried away north to the steppe, along with so much else, and so many people, in a terrible procession.
There are many ways to live a life. His had not been celebrated at all, but he’d offered a real contribution to the state, the empire, which was more than most of the imperial clan ever had. He had been eccentric but not dishonourable. Nor was his manner of dying lacking in honour, when Hanjin fell to the Altai. He had no proper burial. None of them did from that night. There were many ghosts there, too.
PART FIVE
CHAPTER XXV
Just as with the spirit on Lingzhou Isle, Lu Chen had been the only one at East Slope ever to see the ghost there.
The poet had believed from the first that this girl had claimed or intercepted his own death, as they’d waited for spring to free the mountains of snow and let them come home from exile.
He saw this one rarely, usually on the roof of the main house, twice by the stream at the eastern edge of their property as he rose to walk home at dusk from his favourite bench under a tree. And once in his writing room, on the New Year’s eve Hanjin fell.
His candles and lamps had flickered, all at once. One of the candles went out. He looked up. He saw her across the room beside the thin smoke of the extinguished flame. Just for a moment, looking at him, then she flickered as well and was gone. He sensed, in that gaze, that there was a message in her presence this time, and then he had an immediate certainty about what it was she’d come to tell him.