Hsien shook his head. “Perhaps. Or simply aware of why we fell, why we were so unprepared, so easily defeated. Tell me,” he asked, “was it difficult to accept that order to come back?”
Oddly, it had now become difficult to draw breath. He felt as if his mind was too open to this man.
He said, “I told the emperor. We had a way in. We would have opened the gates from inside and flooded through. Hanjin is no place for horsemen. They were dead men in there.”
“And you still came back. Knowing that?”
Another crack of sound from outside. His back was to the window but he saw the other man’s glance go there, and the room was briefly brightened by a light behind him.
“I vowed loyalty to Kitai and the Dragon Throne. What kind of loyalty would it have been if I—”
“If you became another message for another four hundred years that army commanders could never be trusted not to covet power? And seize it with their soldiers.”
After a moment Daiyan nodded. “Yes, partly that. And also ... duty? Just duty.”
The prime minister looked at him.
Daiyan turned away. He said, “I am not an emperor. Of course I’m not. I had no desire to be. If I refused those commands it was rebellion.” He looked at the other man, placed his scarred hands flat on the table.
“And so you returned, knowing your own life was—”
“No. Not that. I am not so much a hero. I did not know what you have just told me. No one knew those terms of the peace.”
“I think you did,” said Hang Hsien gravely. “I think that in some way you knew, and came back regardless. To make some kind of shining of a soldier’s loyalty.”
Daiyan shook his head. “Believe me,” he said, “I have no wish to die.”
“I do believe you. But I also believe you feel a ... heavy duty. Your own word. I said it already: you are an honourable servant of Kitai.”
“So you bring me poison?” He ought to have laughed, or smiled at least, but he didn’t seem able to.
“And I leave two doors open behind me.”
“You might explain that, as a courtesy.”
Hsien did smile. “You are even more formal than I am.”
“My father taught me.”
“So did mine.”
They looked at each other. Hsien said, “If you were to leave here tonight and go somewhere, change your name, live unknown, hidden from men and the records of history, it would please me to know I did not cause your death, Ren Daiyan.”
He blinked, astonished. His heart was beating faster.
“Unknown? How so?”
Hang Hsien’s expression was intense. It could be seen even by the one flickering light. “Change your hair, grow a beard. Become a cleric of the Path, wear their robes. Grow tea in Szechen. I don’t even want to know.”
“I am dead for everyone I know?”
“For everyone. It would be as if you’d left our world. Our time.
If you are faithful to me in this.”
“And if I am somehow found? If some soldier recognizes my voice? Or an outlaw I once knew? If someone ever sees my back? If word spreads and men come rallying to me? If someone announces that Ren Daiyan is alive in the south while you are taxing heavily, claiming a new monopoly for the state, doing something people hate?”
Hsien’s turn to briefly close his eyes. He said, “We are always doing something people hate. I am willing to accept that risk, I suppose.”
“Why? It is foolish! Your father—”
“My father? He would have had you tortured into a confession by now. For these words of mine here he would have denounced me to the emperor and watched while I was executed.”
“The emperor. You would tell the emperor ... what?”
“That you were killed here tonight and your body burned so it could never be buried and honoured.”
“Burned as a traitor to Kitai?”
Hsien shook his head. “I have been running through magistrates. No man wants to make that finding, Ren Daiyan.”
“There will always be someone who can be bought.”
“Always. But you are too important. I’d need someone known to be honourable. This is the very beginning of a dynasty. These things are important.”
“But if I disappear, in the eyes of the world you will have murdered an honourable commander of Kitai’s armies?”
“A heroic one. Yes. I imagine the emperor will grieve in public, be angry, and lay blame—”
“On his prime minister?”
“More likely on treacherous guards here.”
“Because he needs you?”
“Yes. He does.”
“You’d have to find some treacherous guards to execute.”
“Not difficult, commander. That is likely to happen the other way, too.”
“If I die in this room?”
The prime minister nodded. “Someone always needs to be held responsible.” After another moment he stood up, and so Daiyan did. Hsien looked down at the table, the wine cups. He said, “It is painless, I am told. And quicker if you drink two glasses.”
He turned, not waiting for a reply. At the door he removed his furred and hooded outer garment and dropped it on the cot.
He hesitated, then turned back a last time. “This, also, is something I believe. It would have been blood and war and famine and fire if we fought them. For generations. This peace, this surrender of so much, is hard as death, but it is not children and old men dying. Our lives are not only ours.”
He walked from the cell.
HE SEEMED TO BE ALONE. He wasn’t certain how much time had passed. He was sitting on the bench, back to the window, elbows on the table. His hands had been covering his eyes. He felt dazed, dizzied, the sensation one had after a blow to the head. He’d had his share of those—from his brother at home, in the marsh years, in battle. He pushed his hair from his eyes and looked around. The door was still open, there were two cups of wine on his table and a flask on the brazier, which had burned out. There was a fur-lined garment on the bed.
The fireworks seemed to have stopped. It must be very late, he thought. He rubbed his eyes. He went to the window with the bench and stood on it and looked down. There were still sounds from the city below but West Lake was dark now under the stars.
He stepped down. He shivered. Then he realized he must be truly shaken, deeply disturbed—because there seemed to be a light in the room and it wasn’t from his lamp. He thought of ghosts, the dead.
Fox-spirits were said to be able to carry their own light, cast a glow if they wanted to, lure night travellers that way. So could some ghosts, theirs were said to be silver-white like moonlight. There was no moon tonight. New Year’s, new moon. He thought of the daiji at Ma-wai. Had he gone with her perhaps he’d have survived, after all, to return to another time, not this one, not these wine cups on the table.
There were, he suddenly remembered, tales that for some, when the tall doors opened for them, they could see the light of the other world, the one to which they were going, before they crossed.
Doors. The cell door was open, and the one down the corridor, Hang Hsien had said. There was a hooded garment here to hide him. He knew how to leave a city. Every outlaw worth anything at all knew how to do that.
He looked at the two wine cups. Quicker with both, Hsien had said. Our lives are not only ours, he had said.
Not a bad man. A good one, you had to think. He had known some good men. He thought about his friends, about wind in your face on a galloping horse, about waiting for dawn and battle, the beating of your heart then. The taste of good wine. Even bad wine sometimes. Bamboo woods, the sun through leaves, a bamboo sword. His mother’s hand in his hair.
Could a man live if he left everything of himself behind? And if trying to do that, he was found after all? What happened then? Was everything undone? Made a lie? But couldn’t a man trained as an outlaw hide himself in a land as large as Kitai still was, even with so much lost? He thought about
Kitai. He had a swift, vast image of the empire in his mind, as if he were flying above it, like a god, among stars, seeing it far below, the rivers and mountains lost, and maybe found again one day.
He thought about Shan then, someone found, the astonishing, undeserved truth of her, and love. He could hear her voice, even here, now. Sometimes a sweetness in the world.
He thought of his father, finally. In the far, far west, at home. Where all the rivers started. He had not seen him for so long. Dreams could lead a man away from home. Honour and duty, pride and love, he thought about them. You tried to do the right thing with your days, he thought. He lifted the nearest cup.
The body of Ren Daiyan was never found. This would have been to preclude the possibility of a shrine, veneration, something that might have undermined the court and its intentions in this matter.
But the absence of a body can also lead to legends, tales, for we have our needs and desires concerning heroes. And so there were shrines and altars, eventually, all over Kitai, with statues of the commander—some on horseback, some standing with a sword. Often, outside these temples there would also be a statue of a kneeling, shackled, head-bowed figure: Hang Hsien, the evil prime minister who had murdered the hero (sending poison or an assassin’s blade) against the will and desire of the illustrious Emperor Zhizeng, founder and saviour of the Southern Twelfth Dynasty.
For generation upon generation, those visiting one of these shrines, coming to honour Commander Ren or seek his spirit’s intervention in their own troubles, would spit upon the kneeling figure of Hang Hsien.
History is not always kind or just.
AT THE HEART of the legends about Ren Daiyan was the story that the commander had had an encounter with a daiji, and he had resisted her out of duty and devotion to the empire, and she had branded him with the words of his loyalty to Kitai.
It was accordingly believed afterwards by some that she might have spirited him away from his cell, from his death, and he could be living in another time, or even in their time. Others, skeptical, would point out that there was no story ever told of a fox-woman intervening to help a mortal man. That wasn’t what they did. And to this, the reply would be made: Was there ever a mortal marked as Ren Daiyan had been?
It was known, also, that the much-loved poet Lin Shan had left the estate at East Slope where she lived, not long after Lu Chen and his brother died, going off in a cart with only one companion. This was not unusual in itself, she had been their guest, the brothers’ presence had sustained her, and she had undoubtedly brought a brightness to both of their lives.
But it was also rumoured that she went away, when she did, to the far west, all the way to Szechen, where she had no family at all, and this was judged to be puzzling. Unless, the argument was made triumphantly, one remembered that she had been very closely linked to Ren Daiyan, and he was from the west.
The details of her life slipped from the knowledge of the world. That did happen for those living quietly, but still ... it made a person think, didn’t it? Her poems and songs remained, were collected, widely printed, widely sung, were loved and they endured, a different kind of immortality.
Lin Shan, of course, is the one who wrote the song “River of Stars” that mothers sang to send their babies off to sleep, that children learned in school and men sang behind the water buffalo and the plough, that courtesans offered to a pipa’s music in rooms behind red lanterns, that women sang to themselves on balconies above fountains, or lovers to each other in the darkness of a garden, vowing that the sad fate in the song would never be theirs.
There were also tales about a son. We have our longings.
The village of Shengdu in the west, past the river gorges and the gibbons, also became a shrine, a place of journeying, for that is where Ren Daiyan, loyal to the last, had been born. There one could find his father’s tended grave, and his mother’s.
Rivers and mountains can be lost, regained, lost once more. Mostly, they endure.
We are not gods. We make mistakes. We do not live very long.
Sometimes someone grinds ink, mixes it with water, arranges paper, takes up a brush to record our time, our days, and we are given another life in those words.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
River of Stars is a work shaped by themes, characters, and events associated with China’s Northern Song Dynasty before and after the fall of Kaifeng. It is an increasingly well-chronicled period, although causes and elements are—predictably—a matter of dispute.
I have, as often in my fiction, compressed the timeline. Although several of the characters are inspired by real men and women, the personal interactions in the novel are inventions. I have written and spoken extensively as to why I find this melding of history and fantasy to be both ethically and creatively liberating.
Among other things, I am significantly more at home shaping thoughts and desires for Lin Shan and Ren Daiyan, or developing the characters of my two Lu brothers, than I would be imposing needs and reflections (and relationships) on their inspirations: Li Qingzhao, the best-known female poet in China’s history, General Yue Fei, or the magnificent Su Shi and his gifted younger brother. Not to mention other figures at the court (including Emperor Huizong himself) in the time leading up to and through the dynasty’s fall.
There is a standard disclaimer to the effect that academics whose writings or personal communications have been of assistance to an author are not to be held responsible for what is done in a work of fiction. I have used this, but find it slightly disconcerting. Who would ever hold scholars accountable for what a novelist does in using their work?
Nonetheless, I do anchor myself in reading widely and by asking many questions. I am indebted to a number of people, and especially to those whose patience with private queries, and support for what I was doing has been considerable.
Anna M. Shields, author of Crafting a Collection, was generous, not only with her knowledge of both culture and history, but also in going back and forth on theories that emerged from my reading of others. I am grateful to acknowledge also assistance given by Ari Daniel Levine, whose expertise very much includes the period and events considered in River of Stars, and who sent me a number of monographs by other scholars.
My translator in China, Bai Wenge, shared a great deal of information. My old friend Andy Patton, deeply engaged with Song culture himself, was an ongoing source of support and challenging discussion.
As for the texts, I’ll begin with poetry, which I come to through translation. Of course so much is lost. At the same time, the creativity and passion offered by many translators of the great Song poets is inspirational.
The poems in the novel are largely variations—sometimes cleaving near to an actual work, sometimes veering away. There is, as one example, a poem allegedly written by Yue Fei, the source for my Ren Daiyan. It is almost certainly a later creation, part of the legend-building process (which is a theme of the novel), but I have used it as the basis of the verse I give to Daiyan late in the book.
I have read the work of too many translators to cite them all without seeming overzealous, but I’ll be indulged, I hope, if I mention my admiration for Stephen Owen and Burton Watson, two of the giants of the field. The intelligence and craft of their work aided me greatly.
Su Shi’s life and writing (including his exile to the far south) have been usefully examined by Lin Yutang. The remarkable Li Qingzhao’s work was brought over into English by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung (using the poet’s name-form Li Ch’ing Chao), and more recently, with a very personal approach, by Wei Djao.
For the history of the Song Dynasty the best concise overview, to my mind, is Dieter Kuhn’s The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China. Beyond that lies the massive Cambridge History of China, volume 5, part 1. That volume was, for my purposes, anchored by Ari Daniel Levine’s two chapters on events leading up to the fall of Kaifeng and the calamity itself. The dynasty’s move to the south, in its early stages, is chronicled in a chapter
by Tao Jing-Shen.
F. W. Mote’s Imperial China 900–1800 has an almost booklength section on the Song, and he’s especially good on the steppe people and their own challenges and inner pressures. Morris Rossabi edited a volume entitled China Among Equals, which seeks to place the Song in a larger context, beyond merely dealing with “barbarians at the gate.” The great French historian Jacques Gernet wrote a small, engaging book called Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion. I permitted myself to extrapolate backwards in making use of some of his details.
I was aided by Stephen West’s and James Hargett’s articles on the imperial garden (Genyue), by Suzanne Cahill’s on sex and the supernatural, and by Peter J. Golas on rural life in the Song.
I was much engaged by the work of Patricia Buckley Ebrey. Her The Inner Quarters, on the lives of women in the Song, is fascinating, including a hypothesis on the origins of foot-binding. With Maggie Bickford, Ebrey edited a collection of essays on the reign of the emperor who loved his garden so much, whose calligraphy and painting were wonders of the age, and who ruled over a dynasty’s fall: Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China. The contributors assembled are not far from being a who’s who of major scholars in the field.
One of them, John W. Chaffee, has written on the change in access to power (through the examination system) in The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China, and also on the imperial clan and its ambiguous, expensive status in Branches of Heaven. Two distinguished figures wrote books I found illuminating and exciting: Ronald C. Egan’s Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi examines that astonishing writer and man; Egan’s The Problem of Beauty is a look at the aesthetic thought and ideals of the dynasty. “This Culture of Ours” by Peter K. Bol is a major work on the intellectual and cultural transition from the Tang Dynasty (the inspiration for Under Heaven) through several hundred years to the Song ... and that shift is an underlying aspect of this novel.
Brian E. McKnight’s The Washing Away of Wrongs (wonderful title!) is an annotated-and-introduced translation of a Song Dynasty magistrate’s treatise on forensic medicine, and his Village and Bureaucracy in Southern Sung China (the spelling of the dynasty’s name varies in English) was also helpful.