He went to bed.
A little later, drifting towards sleep as to the shore of another country, he suddenly sat up in the nearly black room and swore aloud. He half expected to hear Song from the portico asking what was wrong, but she wouldn’t be back from the governor’s mansion yet.
They couldn’t leave at sunrise. He’d just realized it.
It was not possible. Not in the empire of the Ninth Dynasty.
He had to visit the prefect tomorrow morning. Had to. They were to take a morning meal together. It had been arranged. If he didn’t attend, if he simply rode off, it would bring lasting shame upon himself, and upon his father’s memory.
Neither the poet nor the Kanlin would say a word to refute this. They wouldn’t even think to try. It was a truth of their world, for good or ill. As much a part of it—this ritualized, unyielding, defining formality—as poetry was, or silk, or sculpted jade, palace intrigues, students and courtesans, Heavenly Horses, pipa music, or unburied tens of thousands upon a battlefield.
CHAPTER XII
They are walking east in the night, around the shore of the small lake, then ascending the slopes of the hills that frame it on the far side. No one has followed them. The wind is from the north.
Li-Mei looks back. The campfires glow. They seem fragile, precarious, in the vastness stretching in all directions. The firelit presence of men—some women are down there, but not her, not her any more—surrounded by all of night and the world.
It is cold in the wind. Swiftly moving clouds, then stars. Deerskin riding boots are better than jewelled slippers, but are not adequate to this steady walking. The wolves keep pace on either side. She is still trying not to look at them.
The man has not said a word since they walked out of the camp.
She hasn’t seen him clearly yet. She needs more light. His strides are long, ground-covering, though somehow awkward, stiff. She wonders if it is because he’s accustomed to riding. Most of the Bogü are. He walks in front, not bothering to see if she is keeping pace or has tried to run away. He doesn’t need to do that. He has the wolves.
She has no idea where they are going or why he is doing this. Why he has come for her, and not the real princess. It is possible that this is a mistake on his part, one that their guards permitted, encouraged, to protect the bride of the kaghan.
Loyalty, Li-Mei thinks, requires that she continue the deception, let the princess get as far away as possible. She doesn’t think he intends to kill her. He could have done so by now if that was why he was here. Nor does this feel like someone seeing a chance of wealth, kidnapping Kitan royalty. That had been her thought, waiting in the yurt, holding a knife in the blackness. Kidnapping isn’t uncommon back home, in the wild country along the Great River gorges, certainly. But she doesn’t think this is a man looking for money.
He may … he may want her body. Difficult to shield that thought. The allure of a Kitan woman, the exciting mystery of strangeness. This might be that sort of abduction. But again, she doesn’t think it is. He has hardly even looked at her.
No, this is different: because of the wolves and the silence of the wolfhounds when he came for her. There is something else happening here. Li-Mei has prided herself all her life (had been praised by her father for it, if ruefully) on being more curious and thoughtful than most women. More than most men, he’d added once. She has remembered that moment: where they were, how he looked at her, saying it.
She is skilled at grasping new situations and changing ones, the nuances of men and women in veiled, elusive exchanges. She’d even developed a sense of the court, of manoeuvrings for power in her time with the empress, before they were exiled and it stopped mattering.
Her father hadn’t been this way. She has the trait, very likely, from whatever source her oldest brother does. Though she doesn’t want to think about Liu, acknowledge any kinship, any sharing, with him.
She wants him dead.
What she also wants, what she needs, is a rest just now, and to be warmer. The wind, since they have climbed higher—skirting the steepest of the hills, but still ascending—is numbing her. She is not dressed for a night walk on the steppe and she has carried nothing with her at all, except a small knife in her sleeve.
She makes a decision. Inwardly, she shrugs. There are many ways to die. As many, the teachings tell, as there are ways to live. She’d never thought about being torn apart by wolves, or ripped open in some Bogü sacrifice on the plain, but …
“Stop!” she says, not loudly, but very clearly.
It does sound too much like a command, in the huge silence of the night. It is mostly fear, infusing her voice.
He ignores her, keeps moving. So, after a few steps to consider that, Li-Mei stops walking.
Being ignored is not something she’s ever been inclined to accept, from girlhood. They are on a ridge. The lake lies to their left and below, the moon shows it to her. There is beauty here for a landscape painter. Not for her, not now.
The nearest wolf also stops.
He pads towards her. He looks directly at Li-Mei, the eyes glowing the way they do in tales. One of the things that is true, she thinks. His jaws open, teeth showing. He takes two more silent steps nearer. Too near. This is a wolf. She is alone.
She does not weep. The wind is making her eyes tear, but that is an entirely different thing. She will not cry unless driven to a deeper abyss than this.
She resumes walking, moving past the animal. She does close her eyes in that moment. The wolf could shred her flesh with a twist of his head. The man has slowed, she sees, to let her and the animal catch up again. He still has not looked back. He seems to know what has happened, however.
She doesn’t know anything, and it can be called intolerable.
Li-Mei takes a deep breath. She stops again. So, beside her, does the wolf. She will not look at it. She calls out, “If you intend to kill me, do it now.”
No reply. But he stops this time. He does do that. Does this mean he understands her? She says, “I am very cold, and I have no idea where you intend to walk like this, how far. I will not willingly go farther unless you tell me what this is. Am I being abducted for money?”
He turns around.
She has achieved that much, she thinks.
For a long moment they stand like that in the night, ten paces apart. She still cannot make out his features, the moon is not enough. Does it matter? she thinks. He is a big man for a Bogü, long arms. He is bare-chested, even in this wind, his loose hair whipped around his face by it. He will not be sympathetic, Li-Mei thinks, to a claim of being cold. He is gazing at her. She cannot see his eyes.
“Shandai,” he says. She is shocked. The fact of speech. “You follow. Shelter. Horse.” He says this in Kitan. Awkwardly, but in her tongue.
He has already turned away again, as if this terse handful of words is all he feels capable of saying, or inclined to say. A man unused to speech, explaining himself. Well, he would be, she thinks, glancing at the wolves.
“Shandai?” she repeats. “That is … where we are going?” She had not looked at any maps before they set out. Regrets it now.
He stops again. Turns, slowly. She can see the stiffness in his posture. He shakes his head impatiently. “Shandai!” he says again, more forcefully. “Why this. Why you. Come! Bogü will follow. Shaman.”
She knows what a shaman is. She’d thought he might be one.
He starts walking again, and she does the same. She is working on it, puzzling it out. She doesn’t feel as cold now, or even tired, with a thought to pursue. He doesn’t want to be caught by a shaman. That seems reasonably clear. Her guards had had none, and feared him. A shaman … will not?
Some time later, directly ahead, she sees the first grey begin to soften the sky, then there is a pale band, and pink. Morning. She looks around. Mist, rising. A rolling away of grass in all directions, between them and every horizon.
Married to a distant horizon.
Perhaps not. Perhaps a
different tale?
Just before the sun rose in front of them, making bright the tall grass and the world, under heaven, she understood the word he’d spoken to her.
The imperial way, running utterly straight for eighteen li through the exact centre of Xinan, from the main gate of the Ta-Ming Palace to the southern walls, was four hundred and ninety paces wide.
There was no thoroughfare so broad and magnificent in the empire or the world. It had been designed to overawe and intimidate, proclaim majesty and power on a scale worthy of the emperors ruling here in glory with the mandate of the gods, and as a reasonably effective firebreak.
It was also difficult for anyone to cross, after curfew, without being seen by one of the Gold Bird Guards stationed at every intersection.
You had to run a long way, without any hint of concealment.
Thirty of the guards were at all important crossroads (there were fourteen major east-west roads), five guards at the smaller ones. You faced thirty lashes with the medium rod if found on a major roadway after the drumbeats sounded to lock the ninety-one wards. The night guards were authorized to kill, if one ignored a command to halt.
Order in the capital was a priority of the court. With two million inhabitants, and vivid memories of famine and violent unrest, this was only sensible. Within the wards—each one enclosed by its own rammed-earth walls—one could be abroad after dark, of course, else taverns and pleasure houses and the local dining places, peddlers and snack wagons, men selling firewood and lamp oil and cooking oil, would have had no trade. They did their best business after the two huge city markets closed. You couldn’t slam a city shut at night, but you could control it. And defend it.
The massive outer walls were four times the height of a man. A hundred of the Gold Bird Guards manned the towers above every major gate, day and night, with twenty at the lesser ones. There were three very large gateways through the walls to east and south and west, and half a dozen to the north, four of them opening into the palace courtyards, the administrative offices attached, and the emperor’s vast Deer Park.
Four canals flowed into the city, diverted from the river to provide drinking and washing water, irrigate the city-gardens of the aristocracy (and create lakes for the larger gardens). One canal was assigned to floating in logs for the endless construction and repair and to carrying flat barges with coal and firewood. At the point where each canal came through the walls there were another hundred guards.
Being found in a canal was punished with sixty lashes if it happened after dark. If found in the water by daylight, without an acknowledged labour (such as shifting the logs if they piled up), the punishment was thirty. It was also recognized that men, drunk at sunrise after a long night, could fall into the water without ill intent. The Emperor Taizu, Lord of the Five Directions, was a merciful ruler, ever mindful of his subjects.
Less than thirty lashes with the rod seldom killed, or caused permanent incapacity.
Of course few of these rules and restrictions applied to aristocrats, to imperial couriers, or to the black-clad civil service mandarins from the Purple Myrtle Court—the crows—with their keys and seals of office. Ward gates would be opened or closed for them on command if they were abroad on horseback or in carried litters during the dark hours.
The North District, home to the best pleasure houses, was accustomed to late arrivals from the Ta-Ming and its administrative palaces: hard-working civil servants from the Censorate or the Ministry of Revenue, finally free of their memoranda and calligraphy, or elegantly attired noblemen exiting city mansions (or the palace itself), more than slightly drunk, seeing no compelling reason not to prolong an evening with music and silken girls.
Sometimes it might be a woman travelling one of the wide streets in a discreet sedan chair, curtains drawn, an anonymously clad officer of her household alongside to deal with the Gold Bird Guards and shield her assignation.
In Xinan, after darkfall, it was fair to say that someone on a main thoroughfare was—if not an officer of the guard—either at risk, or part of the court.
Prime Minister Wen Zhou normally took pleasure in riding his favourite grey horse down the very centre of the imperial way at night. It made him feel as if he owned Xinan, to be so conspicuously at ease, a powerful, handsome, richly dressed aristocrat proceeding south from the palace to his city mansion under moon or stars. He had guards with him, of course, but if they kept behind and to either side he could imagine himself alone in the imperial city.
The distant outer edges of the road had been planted with juniper and pagoda trees by the present emperor’s father, to hide the drainage ditches. There were beds of peonies—king of flowers—running between the lamplit guard stations, offering their scent to the night in springtime. There was beauty and a vast grandeur to the imperial way under the stars.
But this particular night, First Minister Wen found no pleasure in his night ride.
He’d been afflicted with such anxiety (he would not call it fear) this evening—after his cousin’s dance in that upper chamber of the Ta-Ming—that he’d felt an urgent need to remove himself from the palace lest one of the appallingly astute figures of court or civil service note apprehension in his features. That would not be acceptable. Not in a first minister (and president of seven ministries) in his first year of office.
He could have asked Shen Liu to come home with him, and Liu would have done that, but tonight he didn’t want even his principal adviser beside him. He didn’t want to look at that smooth, unforthcoming face, not when he felt his own features to be revealing depths of indecision.
He trusted Liu: the man owed everything to Wen Zhou, his own fate by now completely tied to the first minister’s. But that wasn’t always the point. Sometimes you didn’t want your counsellors to see too clearly into you, and Liu had a habit of appearing able to do that, while revealing next to nothing of himself.
The first minister had other advisers, of course, a vast bureaucratic army at his disposal. He had done his own investigations, had learned a good deal about Liu—and his family—some of it complex, some of it unexpected.
Liu’s subtlety made him enormously useful, because he could read others in the palace with acuity, but it also meant there were times when you were just as happy to arrange for morning attendance from the man, and spend the night with others.
Zhou had to decide if he wanted Spring Rain alone tonight or to pair her with one of his other women. He was angry and uneasy, that might affect what he needed. He reminded himself, again, not to use—even in his mind—her name from the North District. He was the one who had changed it, after all.
He looked around. Not far now from his ward gates.
His home in Xinan, provided by the emperor, was in the fifty-seventh ward, east of the imperial way, halfway down. There lay many of the most luxurious properties in the city.
Including, as of this same night’s proclamation by the emperor, the newest mansion of the military governor of the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Districts: An Li, widely known as Roshan.
Whom Wen Zhou hated and feared and wished dead—in all his bloated grossness—and consumed by eyeless, crawling creatures without names.
His hands tightened on the reins, and the high-strung horse reacted, pacing sideways restively. Zhou handled it easily. He was a superb rider, a polo player, enjoyed speed, and the most challenging horses. Enjoyed them more than, say, calligraphy displays or landscape painting or poetry improvised in a palace room. Dancing, he’d concede, was pleasant enough if the dancer was even nearly as skilled—or as stunningly desirable—as his cousin.
His cousin, who had changed the empire. Jian, to whom he owed everything he was now and everything he had. But who refused, capriciously, to be unequivocal in supporting him against a monstrous general’s obvious ambition. She’d even adopted Roshan as her child some months ago! What game—what possible woman’s game—was she playing at?
The obese barbarian had to be thirty years older than her. His o
dious sons were older than her! The adoption had been a frivolity, Zhou had to assume, meant to divert the court—and the emperor.
The first minister was among those who had not found it diverting. From the moment Chin Hai had died and Zhou had manoeuvred swiftly from his position as president of the Ministries of Revenue and Punishment to succeed him, he had been aware that An Li was his greatest danger—among many.
Roshan, with Chin Hai gone, was like a beast of the jungle uncaged. And why, why did the emperor and his exquisite concubine not see that, beneath the clownish act Roshan offered them?
Zhou forced himself to be calmer, if only for the horse. He looked up at stars, the waning moon, racing clouds. He was saluted by the next set of guards as he approached their station. He nodded vaguely to them, a straight-backed, broad-shouldered, impressive man.
It occurred to him, undermining any movement towards tranquility, that if he was—and he was—contemplating having his enemy ruined or killed, it was possible that Roshan was shaping similar thoughts about him.
These night rides from the palace might become less prudent, going forward. It was a consideration to be weighed. In fact … he gestured his guards in closer. Motioned one to ride ahead. They were nearly at their gate: someone would need to signal for admittance.
Even in the presence of the emperor, Roshan seemed to know no fear, inhibition, no idea of restraint—his very bulk suggested as much. He had been mortally afraid of Chin Hai, however, would break out in a sweat if Prime Minister Chin spoke to him, if they were even in the same room. Zhou had seen it, more than once.
No great surprise, that terror; everyone had feared Chin Hai.
Whatever any man might accuse Zhou of doing since accepting office—in the way of choosing persons for exile or elimination, with formal design, randomly, or for a personal reason—no one could honestly suggest that he was introducing this as a feature of government. Not after what Chin Hai had done for most of the emperor’s reign.