A silence.
“Oh,” said Song. And then she said it again.
The poet was looking at Tai. “Are you prepared for this?” A real question, the large eyes grave. “You may not have any more time to decide what you wish. He cannot be ignored, my friend.”
Tai managed a thin smile. “I wouldn’t dream of doing that,” he said.
He urged Dynlal forward, towards a tight cluster of forty or fifty soldiers surrounding an enormous, sumptuously extravagant carriage. A carriage so big he wondered how they’d got it across the small bridge that carried the roadside ditch. Maybe, he thought, one of the bridges was larger, farther east? At a crossroads?
It didn’t matter. The mind, he decided, could be peculiar at times like this with what it chose to dwell upon or ponder.
He heard hoofbeats. Looked back. He wasn’t alone, after all: rumpled poet, small, fierce, black-clad Kanlin.
He reined up, looked across the ditch at the carriage. Kingfisher feathers decorating it, as the poet had pointed out. In the strict code of such things, these were reserved for the imperial household, but some, near enough to the throne, in high favour, might display that favour by using them.
He reminded himself that those in the palace—in all the different factions—would be wanting to enlist him to their cause if they could, not end his life.
He moved Dynlal across the roadway to the grass beside the ditch.
The door of the carriage was opened from the inside. A voice, unexpectedly light, slightly foreign, used to commanding, said bluntly, “Master Shen Tai? We will talk in here. Come now.”
Tai drew another breath. Let it out. He bowed.
He said, “I will be honoured to converse with you, illustrious lord. Shall we speak at the posting station east of us? Your servant must attend to the needs of his soldiers and friends. They have been riding all day.”
“No,” said the man in the carriage.
Flat, absolute. Tai still couldn’t see the speaker, not from where he was beside the road astride Dynlal. The voice added, “I wish not to be seen and known.”
Tai cleared his throat. “My lord,” he said, “there can be no one on this road who matters who does not know who is in this carriage. I will meet you at the posting inn. Perhaps we can dine together. It would be a great honour for me.”
A face appeared in the window of the carriage. Enormous, round as a moon, under a black hat.
“No,” repeated An Li, usually called Roshan, governor of three districts, adopted son of the Precious Consort. “Get in or I will have your soldiers killed and your friend decapitated and have you brought in here anyway.”
It was surprising, given how crowded the road had been, but a space seemed to have somehow been shaped where they were, in both directions, east and west. Tai looked ahead, then over his shoulder, saw that other travellers were holding back. It was quiet, suddenly.
It matters, he told himself. It matters what I do now.
So he said, speaking very clearly, “Sima Zian, it is a grief to me, as it will surely be to the empire, that our friendship may end your illustrious life, but I must trust you to understand why this is so.”
“Of course I do,” said the poet. “What is friendship if it comes only when the wine cups are readily filled?”
Tai nodded. He turned to the Kanlin. “Wei Song, be good enough to ride back and advise Governor Xu’s escort that they must prepare to be attacked by cavalry of the—” he glanced over at the horsemen by the carriage—“is it your Eighth or Ninth Army, honourable governor?”
From within the carriage there came no reply.
The man would be thinking hard. Tai had just said something, perhaps two things, that would register. He was pleased to note that his voice had remained level, as if he did this sort of thing every day.
“I believe it is the Ninth,” said the poet.
“I obey, my lord,” said Song, in the same moment.
He heard her galloping back to their cavalry. He didn’t turn to watch. He looked at the carriage, at the round, silent moon-face within, just visible.
He said, quietly, “My lord, I am—honorary though the commission may be—an officer of the Second Military District, commanding cavalry, some of them assigned to me by Governor Xu himself. Regulations must shape my actions more than inclination. I carry important information for the court. I believe you know this. I believe that is why you have done me the honour of being here. I am not in a position to follow my desires and accept the privilege of hidden converse with you. There is too much embodied by that, with so many watching a carriage that bears kingfisher feathers. I am certain you will agree.”
He was certain, in fact, of the opposite, but if he had any hope of remaining free in his own alignment, his decisions, surely he needed to—
From within, coldly, An Li said, “This is truly that drunken poet beside you? The one they call Immortal?”
Tai inclined his head. “The Banished Immortal, yes. I have the honour of his companionship and counsel.”
Sima Zian, on his horse next to Tai’s, sketched his bow. He was smiling, Tai saw, amazed. That drunken poet.
From within the carriage, a moment later, came a string of oaths startling in their crudeness, even to someone who had been a soldier.
In the silence that followed, the poet’s smile deepened. “Are those formal requests of me, my lord? I admit I would find some of them difficult, at my age.”
Roshan stared out at them both. The general’s eyes were nearly lost in the creased folds of his face. It was hard to see them to get any reading of his thoughts. He was, Tai realized, even more frightening because of that.
It was said that once, fighting in the northeast, he had defeated an army of Shuoki tribesmen beyond the Wall, part of a border insurgency. He had ordered his soldiers and their Bogü allies to cut off one foot from each man captured, then he and his army had ridden off, taking the enemy horses, leaving the Shuoki to die in the grass, or survive, somehow, maimed.
There were other stories.
Now, in that oddly high, accented voice he said, “Don’t be clever, poet. I have little patience for cleverness.”
“My apologies,” said Sima Zian, and Tai had a sense he might mean it.
“Your being here limits my actions.”
“For that,” said the poet, calmly, “I must decline to apologize, my lord, if your actions were to be as you suggested.”
Roshan leaned back in his seat. They couldn’t see him any more. Tai looked to his right. The sun was setting, he had to squint. Wei Song was arranging their men in a defensive alignment. They had not yet drawn their weapons. Traffic had come to a halt. The tale of this encounter, he knew, would race ahead of them now. It would be in Xinan before him.
That was the reason he was acting as he was. But there was a risk of dying here, of others dying for him. If a celebrated poet had not been with them …
From within the carriage he heard, “Son of Shen Gao, accept my sympathy for the passing of your honourable father. I knew of him, of course. I have journeyed two days from my own route to speak with you. I will not, for my own reasons, go back to that posting inn. They are not reasons you require to know. But if you enter my carriage, if you … honour me by doing so … I will begin by telling you what happened to a man you will be looking for, and show you a letter.”
Tai registered the changed tone. He said, carefully, “That man would be?”
“His name is Xin Lun.”
Tai felt his heart thump.
“Lun?” he repeated.
“Yes. He arranged for the assassins sent to kill you.”
Tai swallowed hard. His mouth was dry. “How do you know this?”
“He told me himself.”
“When did he … what did happen to him?”
A mistake, perhaps, asking this. It created an obligation of courtesy if the other man answered.
The other man answered. “He was killed some nights ago.”
&nbs
p; “Oh,” said Tai.
“The same night word came that you were on your way to Xinan, and the news of the White Jade Princess’s gift. The horses. Your own is magnificent, by the way. I assume you will not sell him?”
“The same night?” Tai said, a little stupidly.
The vast, incongruous face reappeared in the carriage window like the moon from behind clouds. “I said that. He sent me an urgent request for sanctuary, explaining why. I offered it. He was murdered on his way from the Ta-Ming to my house.” A fat finger appeared, pointed at Tai. “Master Shen, you know your trouble isn’t with me. It is with the first minister. Your life depends on realizing that. It is Wen Zhou who is trying to kill you. You need friends.”
Tai was badly shaken. Lun was dead. Drinking companion, fellow student—a man he’d intended to kill himself, in Yan’s name. Discharging an obligation to another ghost.
One less obligation now? Was that good? Did it free him?
It didn’t feel that way. There was a letter. It might tell him the other thing he needed to know—and feared to learn.
“Get in,” said Roshan. Impatience in the voice, but not anger.
He swung open the carriage door again.
Tai took a breath. Sometimes you just went with the way the wind was blowing. He dismounted. He handed Dynlal’s reins up to the poet, who said nothing. Tai jumped down into the ditch, and accepted the hand of an officer of the Ninth District to climb to the other side.
He entered the carriage, closed the door himself.
IT WAS A RESPONSE to the realities of the main imperial roads that in most of the posting inns along them the stables were larger than the accommodations available for travellers.
Civil service messengers and military couriers, the most regular users of the staging inns, were constantly wearing out and changing horses, often not lingering for the night. A meal, back in the saddle. The whole point was to ride through the darkness down the middle of the road, not to seek out a feathered bed, let alone wine and a girl. Time mattered in a far-flung empire.
There were merchants and army officers on the roads, aristocrats going to and from country estates, moving with rather less urgency, and there were civil servants travelling to or returning from postings to various prefectures, or on tours of inspection there. For these, of course, rooms and adequate food were required.
The inns nearest to Xinan tended to be different. Their wine was generally excellent, and so were the girls and music. High-ranking mandarins making short journeys from the capital didn’t need their carriage horses changed but did demand a better quality of chamber and meal if, for example, they wished to time a return to the city for the hours before curfew fell.
The Mulberry Grove Rest House, not far from Xinan, qualified as one of the more elaborately appointed places to spend a night on the main east-west road.
Mulberry trees were long gone from the environs of the inn, as were the silk farms associated with them. The inn’s name evoked quieter days many hundred years ago, before Xinan had grown into what it now was. There was a plaque in the main courtyard, inscribed in the Fifth Dynasty: a verse extolling the serenity of the inn and its countryside.
It made for some irony. By the time Tai and his company rode into the inn yard, well after darkfall, it was as noisy and crowded as the road had been. Two riders had been sent ahead to arrange their stay, or finding rooms would have been doubtful.
Torches were lit in the inn yard. The night had been starry as they approached, the Sky River showing, a sliver of moon. These were lost in the smoky, clattering chaos of the main courtyard.
Tai’s horsemen were bunched around him. On guard, aggressively alert. He imagined Song had given the orders. Issues of rank in their company had been worked out; his Kanlin Warrior could speak for him. The soldiers might hate her for it, but that would have always been the case with a woman. In any event, Song didn’t seem inclined to worry about being well liked by soldiers.
Tai was too preoccupied as they rode in to be unhappy about how protective they were. In fact, with some ruefulness, he realized that he didn’t even mind it any more. He’d been frightened in that carriage by the road, and was still disturbed.
The two advance riders they’d sent reported to Song and their captain. Their company had three rooms, seven or eight to a room. There was a chamber for Tai and Sima Zian to share. The other soldiers would sleep in the stable. There were to be guards posted tonight, Tai learned, listening without much concentration to orders being given in his name. He ought to be paying closer attention, probably. He found it difficult.
He had no problem sharing a room with the poet. For one thing, Zian hadn’t made it to their chamber from the pleasure pavilions in the other inns where this had happened. This was a man who had earned legendary status in diverse ways. Tai could never have sustained the hours and the drinking the poet managed—and Sima Zian had to be twenty years older than Tai was.
They dismounted in a clatter of weapons and armour and the stamp and snort of tired, hungry horses. Servants ran in every direction through the courtyard. It would not, Tai thought, be difficult to kill him here. One suborned servant, one assassin with a knife or on a rooftop with a bow. He looked up. Smoke from torches. He was very tired.
He forced himself to stop thinking about it. Held to the core truth underlying all of this: killing him now, with word of the Sardian horses already in Xinan, represented a reckless, possibly suicidal act for anyone.
Even an enormous, and enormously powerful, military governor of three districts. Even the first minister of Kitai.
He looked around, trying to bring himself into the present, not let his thoughts run too far ahead, or linger behind. Song was at his elbow. So, until a moment ago when Tai dismounted, had been the gap-toothed soldier from Iron Gate.
He shook his head, suddenly irritated. “What is the name of that one who always takes Dynlal?” He spotted the man, leading the horse towards the stables. “I should know it by now.”
Song tilted her head a little, as if surprised. “A border soldier? Not really. But he’s called Wujen. Wujen Ning.” He saw her teeth flash. “You’ll forget it again.”
“I will not!” Tai said, and swore under his breath. He took immediate steps to fix the name in memory. An association: Ning was the metalsmith in the village near their estate.
He looked at the woman in the flickering light. Torches were above them, over the portico. Other lights moved through the yard. Insects were out now after dark. Tai slapped at one on his arm. “We are less than a day from your sanctuary,” he murmured. “Do you wish to go home, Kanlin?”
He’d caught her by surprise, he saw. Wasn’t sure why, it was an obvious question.
“Do you wish to dismiss your servant, my lord?”
He cleared his throat. “I don’t think so. I have no cause to question your competence.”
“I am honoured by your trust,” she said formally.
Zian strode over from—predictably—the direction of the music, to the right of this first courtyard.
“I have arranged a table,” he said cheerfully, “and I have requested that their best saffron wine be heated, seeing as we have had a long, difficult day.” He grinned at Song. “I trust you will approve the expense?”
“I only carry the money,” she murmured. “I don’t approve the spending of it, except for the soldiers.”
“Make sure they have wine,” Tai said.
The poet gestured with one hand, and Tai went with him through the crowd. Song stayed beside them, her expression alert. It made him weary, this need for vigilance. It was not a life he’d ever wanted.
How many men were allowed the life they wanted?
Maybe this one, he thought, looking at the poet moving eagerly ahead of him towards where they could just hear a pipa being played, in a room beyond the courtyard noise. This one, or maybe my brother.
“YOUR BROTHER,” Roshan had said without preamble, as Tai closed the carriage door and s
at opposite him, “is not named in the letter. It was read to me several times. I do not,” he’d added, “read, myself.”
It was widely known. A source of derision among the aristocrats and the examination-trained mandarins. It was regarded as a principal reason why the endlessly subtle Chin Hai, once first minister, once feared everywhere, now gone to his ancestors, had allowed Roshan and other barbarian generals to acquire so much power on the borders. An illiterate had no chance of threatening him at the centre of his webs in the Ta-Ming, the way an aristocrat with an army could.
Such, at any rate, had been the view of the students taking the examinations, or preparing to. And, of course, whatever they agreed upon had to be true, did it not?
Settling into the carriage, Tai had immediately felt out of his depth. Which was, he was certain, the point of Roshan’s remark.
“Why would you imagine I’d consider that possible? That my brother could be accused of anything regarding me?”
He was delaying, trying to get his bearings. The governor leaned back against a profusion of cushions, eyeing him. An Li was, from this close, even more awesomely vast. A size that seemed mythic, a figure of legend.
He had, when not yet promoted to the rank of general, led three companies of Seventh District cavalry through five brutal days and nights of riding to turn the tide of battle against an incursion from the Koreini Peninsula. The Koreini of the far east, ambitious under their own emperor, had elected that spring to test the Kitan emperor’s commitment to the building of garrison forts beyond the Wall.
They had been given an answer, to their very great cost—but only because of Roshan. That was twenty years ago. Tai’s father had told him about that ride.
He had told Liu, as well, Tai remembered.
An Li shifted on his cushions again. “Your brother is principal counsellor to the first minister. Shen Liu has made his choice of paths. The letter—you may read it—indicates that Prime Minister Wen had his reasons for wishing you no longer among us, or in a dear woman’s thoughts. Or perhaps able to disrupt your brother’s plans for your sister. He does, after all, depend on Shen Liu for a great deal. It was the first minister who formally proposed your sister’s elevation to exalted status. You did know that?”