Lu Mah and the steward had already assembled the farmhands and household men. Each of them held a heavy stick or a weapon. They were arrayed near the gate. The numbers, the poet thought, were approximately equal. Those approaching were on horseback and had real weapons, however.
He looked back towards the door of the main house where his wife stood: his second wife. A woman he admired more than he loved. She was that sort of person. He didn’t think she’d minded. A different sort of relationship, later in a life. He admired her now, seeing her alert, attentive, not visibly afraid.
Looking within himself, he found sorrow but not fear. There were experiences he still wanted from life, from days under heaven, but he’d expected to die long ago. Everything after Lingzhou felt like a gift.
His thoughts were with the younger ones, whose gifts ought to lie in front of them and might not. If this was a raid they had no chance.
“I know the leader,” Chao said suddenly. Chen turned to him, eyes wide. “And also, I think ...”
He trailed off. Chen stared at his brother. “What?” he said, perhaps a little sharply.
“Third man, grey horse.”
Chen looked, the young man was unknown to him. The armed riders had reached their gate.
The leader dismounted. He bowed. He said, “I believe we are in the presence of the Lu brothers at East Slope. May I be permitted to express my very great honour?”
Not an attack. Not death coming along the road.
Chen, older brother, bowed in return. “We are honoured by your salutation. I am embarrassed not to know you. Permit us to welcome you to East Slope. May I ask who you might be?”
The welcome first, then the question.
“Of course,” said the man who’d spoken. “Honourable Lu Chao will not remember me, but I had the honour to observe him at the court when he returned from the steppe.”
“But I do remember,” said Chao. “You are Commander Ren Daiyan, and you should have been the man we sent to take the Southern Capital.”
Chen blinked, then looked more closely at this visitor. Heavily armed: sword, knife, bow, arrows in a quiver. Youthfullooking, though not someone you’d be likely to call young. He had a lean face and hard eyes, a soldier’s eyes, though they altered with Chao’s words, became ironic, intelligent. Not hard, on further reflection.
“Soldiers serve where they are sent,” he said mildly. “I am not important. But we are escorting someone who is.” He gestured to the man on the grey horse.
It was Chao who reacted first.
“My lord prince!” he exclaimed. “I thought that I ... Oh, heaven be thanked!”
He knelt and placed his forehead and his palms on the cold ground of the yard. Chen, hearing that word prince, did the same, and behind them the others followed. But he had no idea ...
Another soldier swung easily down from his horse and assisted the one Chao had named a prince to dismount.
“Prince Zhizeng,” said Ren Daiyan with helpful clarity, “appears to be the only member of the imperial family not taken in the fall of Hanjin.”
“It has fallen, then?”
A ghost had told him. This was the first living man to say the words.
“New Year’s eve. We escaped that night.”
Lu Chen slowly rose to his feet. Zhizeng? The poet was racking his memory. What number son? Twelve? Nine? Who kept track if you weren’t at court where these things mattered as much as food and poison did? He was a son, though, an imperial son. And alive.
“My lord prince!” he exclaimed, as his brother had. “We are humbled beyond words. How are you among us?”
“The intercession of the gods,” said Prince Zhizeng piously.
There would have been men involved, too, Chen guessed. Probably these men. He looked at Ren Daiyan. “What may we offer you? Here is shelter, and hearts loyal to Kitai.”
“Good,” said the prince, answering. “We will be grateful for these things.”
Chen looked over at Mah, who stood up now and moved to open their gate. He didn’t look back but he knew his wife and his brother’s wife, all the women of the house, would be flying, as if into battle, to make East Slope as ready as it could ever be for what had arrived.
Ren Daiyan was smiling slightly. It changed his features. Chen smiled back. He had found, through the years, that people responded to that.
“How did you find us?” he asked.
The commander said, “We were guided by a member of our company who appears to have relied on descriptions you sent in writing.”
“I sent? In writing?”
He felt baffled again. It was not displeasing, to have life startle you sometimes. He thought suddenly of a theme for a poem: how it was not good for a man to feel his existence would hold no more surprises.
“I remembered,” said another of the riders, moving a horse forward, “that you told me East Slope was just east of Mai-lin Stream, very near the Great River, and not far from the real site of Red Cliff—and the false one you wrote about in a poem we discussed in the garden of Master Xi Wengao, in peony season.”
He stared. Then he clapped his hands in delight. He looked at her and his smile came from his heart. He thought: How could any man be so foolish as to imagine life would serve him only the expected? It wasn’t a good idea for a poem, it was an easy thought, not worth the grinding of ink.
“You are very welcome, Lady Lin, you and our prince, and the commander, every one of you. Please enter, grace us with your presence. There is wine and food and whatever comforts we may offer. We will hear your tale whenever you wish to tell it.”
“Forgive me, Father. Please?” It was Mah, who still held his grandfather’s ceremonial sword. He looked at the commander. “Are you being pursued? Is there danger we need to defend you against?”
That was graciously put, his father thought.
Ren Daiyan smiled at Mah. He seemed to be a man with access to that. “Thank you,” he said. “I remember you, as well. You were with Lu Chao that day in court. No,” he said. “We are not being pursued. Pursuit was dealt with, north of the Wai.”
He looked over at the prince, who had already stepped through the open gate and was approaching the main house.
“We will intrude upon you only briefly,” Ren Daiyan added. “Some of us will escort the prince to Shantong, which is his desire. He will be safe from the Altai there.”
“And others of you?” Chen asked. He’d caught something in that tone.
“Others will be going back north, and we will lay down our lives if need be, fighting the Altai there.”
Instinctively, Lu Chen glanced back. The prince had stopped walking, had turned around. He was looking at Ren Daiyan. Chao had turned as well, same instinct? The brothers exchanged a glance.
“If it is possible to bathe,” said Lin Shan, ending a stillness, “I will offer six songs of praise before sundown.”
“I would like to have them,” said Chen.
They had the farmhands deal with the horses. The poet led their guests inside to where fires had been quickly lit and food was being prepared. He gave the prince his own chair, nearest the front room hearth. They offered wine, and then a meal. They listened to stories told. They told, in turn, what they knew, which wasn’t very much.
They had songs from Lin Shan after night fell. She sang of the victory at Red Cliff, not far away from here, but long ago.
It was proposed and accepted that she stay here with the Lu brothers and their families, a guest honoured for herself, and in the name of her deceased, honourable father and that of her husband, who was also very likely dead, it seemed, or taken north with others of the imperial clan.
The prince had repeated his intentions: he was going to Shantong, nestled between the coast and West Lake. Wealthy, beautiful, steep streets from the harbour, goods bought and sold from ships coming and going all year long, from the Koreini Peninsula, from the southern sea, from beyond that.
Chen knew it well; he’d been prefect there
when young, when their faction held power. West Lake claimed a part of his heart forever. He’d built the long, low bridge across the far side, for people walking by the serene stillness of the lake. They’d named it for him when he left. Lu Chen’s Bridge at West Lake. He could go back. Serve at a new court, if asked. He’d looked at the prince at their table. He was unlikely to be asked. Perhaps his brother would be?
Hanjin had fallen. Kitai needed a court and an emperor. Shantong was probably the best place, yes. And Zhizeng was in the direct line of succession. It made sense.
From his bed he heard the wind chimes in the paulownia in the garden, a quiet music. He’d always liked wind chimes. The moon was bright, just past full. Sima Zian had been the poet of the moon. Chen had joked, when younger, that it was unfair: if any of them wrote of moons since Master Sima’s day, they were only imitating the Banished Immortal.
Another phrase for a poem came to him. Latterly, he would make himself get up, even in the cold, light a lamp, grind ink, water it, and write characters down, for fear his memory might surrender offered words before sunrise.
This phrase, he knew, would not leave him.
He whispered it to himself. “From Hanjin to Shantong is the path of our sorrow.”
He said it again. He listened to the wind chimes and the wind. The moon moved away. He lay awake. He was aware, being observant, and a lover of women all his life, that Ren Daiyan and Lady Lin Shan would likely be together now, in the commander’s chamber or hers.
He wished them what joy they could find—in these times, in this night of shelter at East Slope. Then he slept.
CHAPTER XXVI
By the beginning of spring, after a winter of savagery, the twin armies of the Altai had joined into one marauding force, taken on reinforcements, and moved across the Wai to the banks of the Great River.
Spring was the normal time for war. The riders’ purpose changed. This was now an invasion force. The ease with which they’d succeeded through winter had altered intentions: they were driving to Shantong and the court of the escaped prince, the justcrowned young emperor there.
It was evident, because they didn’t trouble to hide it, where they were going. They sent a demand for surrender. Their messenger was killed. The Altai war-leader ordered three villages north of the river razed, every inhabitant killed and left where he or she lay. They didn’t get every single one, although they tried. Some of the men escaped (some took their wives and children) and sought to find their way south or into the woods or swamps. Some joined the rabble that called itself the army of Kitai.
As it happened, the horsemen gathered their forces on the Great River not far from the battle site of Red Cliff, where an invading army had massed almost a thousand years before. Their current location was near enough for the ensuing confrontation to eventually become known as the Second Battle of Red Cliff.
The line between history and storytelling isn’t always easy to draw.
The Altai were not a marine people, but by now they had large numbers of Kitan labourers to serve them, mostly under duress but some not coerced. There are always those who judge the direction of the wind. Kitan fishermen and craftsmen were set to work building the small-boat flotilla the army needed to cross the river in springtime spate.
In the first battle at Red Cliff, long ago, foot soldiers and archers had waited on opposite banks, and boat had confronted boat in the wide river, until a celebrated, heaven-granted change in the wind (a change shaped by magic, some said) let empty ships on fire be run north into the invading fleet.
It was different this time.
The Altai in their small boats scudding back and forth in the dark did establish a landing on the southern bank as a misty morning dawned. Rain fell lightly, the ground was tricky on the bank, but there was only a shallow climb up, in a place chosen carefully.
The first steppe riders established their landfall. They made their way up from the riverbank, they took up positions to defend it, bows and short-curved swords in drizzling rain.
They had slaughtered and burned their way farther south than any tribesmen ever had. They were grim and triumphant, the hardest fighting force in the world.
What they did not know, preparing to control a chosen landing place for the horses now swimming across, was that they’d been permitted to land.
Normally, defenders used a river as a barrier to keep an enemy on the far side. In a very few celebrated battles, a general had placed his own army with a river at their backs, to eliminate any chance of retreat, compel courage.
This time, the man leading the gathered forces of Kitai in this part of the world had elected to do things differently.
WAITING IN THE WET, weedy land above the river, Zhao Ziji was afraid. They had heard the Altai splashing ashore, then the sounds of them clambering up the bank. Daiyan wanted a good number of them on land—and cut off. Ziji had always been more cautious, going back to the days when their plans involved no more than attacking a taxation officer’s guards. Perhaps it was because he was older—though he didn’t really think that was it.
Some men seemed to be born prepared to assess a risk and then take it. But they could still make mistakes, any man could, and this one might be too large to recover from, Ziji thought.
He looked at the eastern sky through the slantwise rain. The Altai always tried to time things for sunrise. They knew that about them. It was important. The wind was from the west, which meant the current was even faster. If all was unfolding as it was meant to, they’d soon hear—
Shouts and distant screaming from the river reached him in that moment. Ziji smiled thinly. Fear slipped away, replaced by something colder. He remained motionless, hidden. His men beside and behind him did the same. His own instincts for timing in battle happened to be very precise. He whispered an order to those nearest: Hold, not yet. Heard it being relayed quietly. He had their very best men with him here.
With the growing sounds from the river—which would be the panicked noises of horses and the men guiding them in the water—the Altai below them on this bank began to shift and stir. They’d be uneasy now, some would be turning around. This was supposed to have been a secret crossing, to the west of where they’d massed their main force to be readily seen building boats.
The invaders had brought half their horses this way, well back from the river, unseen, to a spot even farther upstream from here—where they could swim across not fighting the current, letting it bring them to this chosen place where there was a good landing ground and a shallow slope.
The boats being built at the main camp east—those were real, but they were also a clever dissembling, meant to seduce the Kitan into massing there. They were to be used after this secret landing. What the Kitan army was not supposed to know was that the Altai had all those other boats and a large force hidden to the west, and these were the ones who’d come down to the river now, to cross it in the dark.
The plan was clever. Wan’yen was a war-leader who deserved his rank, it was agreed among the horsemen. Only his brother might have been as brilliant and bold.
Once ashore, this western force would mount up and compel most of the Kitan army to move hastily upriver to face them—allowing the other part of the steppe force to cross from where they were.
Kitai didn’t have enough good soldiers to fight them at two different places. And once the riders were on that side of the river ...
THE RAIN DIDN’T BOTHER Daiyan, he hardly noticed it. He’d lived so much of his life in the open, all seasons, all weather.
Over the years, he had also discovered, to his surprise, that he liked being on water. He’d never yet seen the sea, but rivers and boats felt unexpectedly natural for him. “I’d have made a good fisherman,” he’d told Ziji once, drunk, and his friend had laughed.
But he’d meant it. Paths offered and taken could lead the same man to very different lives. He might have been a scholar taking the jinshi examinations if there hadn’t been a drought one year when he was young
. And what if he hadn’t been chosen one day when Magistrate Wang Fuyin needed another guard for a journey? Or, even, if you were letting your mind drift, if seven outlaws hadn’t been where they were that afternoon?
There were so many ways for a life to have been different, moment by moment, year after year. So many paths that did not lead you to this boat, this night.
On the other hand, he thought, rain dripping from his leather helmet, on any of those he’d not have met Shan.
An image had come to him on their one night at East Slope, in her chamber. He’d told it to her. It had to do with the seals emperors used to send out with commanders long ago. The seals would be broken in half. One half would go with the army; the other remained guarded at court. If new instructions had to be sent, the messenger would carry the emperor’s half of the seal, so the commander would know that the orders came from the throne and not from someone trying to deceive him. They’d fit the two halves together and know the words were true.
“You are like that for me,” he’d told her.
She’d been sitting up in the bed, hands around her knees, listening. It was dark, but he knew her by then and knew she wasn’t smiling. And indeed, she said, “I’m not sure I like all of that.”
“Which part?” His hand was on her ankle. He found it difficult not to touch her, even after lovemaking. They’d had so little time, ever, and he was leaving before morning, before the prince awoke—because the prince was going to order him to come to Shantong and guard him there, and Daiyan was not going to do it. He couldn’t refuse a command, so he had to be gone before it came.
He was going north. There was an army to gather.
Shan said, “The part about the commander at war. Those two halves of a seal fitting together don’t speak of love.”
He thought about it. “Trust, then?” he asked. “At least that?”
She took his hand in hers, lacing fingers. “You are too clever to be a soldier.” Then she shook her head. “Don’t say it. I know. We need our soldiers to be clever. I do know.”
“Thank you,” he murmured. “You can do all of the conversation. Make it easier for me.”