Tai allowed himself to glance cautiously up and look, heart pounding, mind askew. The steward bowed three times then walked slowly across to the curtained chair as if towards his own beheading.
Tai watched the man listen to whatever was being said to him from within. The steward stepped aside, bowed again, expressionless. The hand reappeared through yellow silk and beckoned a second time, exactly the same way, two fingers, but this time to Tai.
Everything had changed. She was here herself, after all.
Tai stood. Offered the same triple bow the steward had. He said, quietly, to Song and Zian, “Stay with me if you possibly can. We won’t be going quickly in that. I’ll do my best to ensure your safety, and the soldiers’.”
“We aren’t in danger,” Sima Zian said, still kneeling. “We’ll be at Ma-wai, one way or another.”
“Master Shen,” he heard his Kanlin say. Her expression was odd, looking up at him. “Be careful. She is more dangerous than a fox-woman.”
He knew she was. Tai took the steps down from the portico, crossed the dusty courtyard through a crowd of kneeling people, and found himself beside the curtained sedan chair.
He said loudly, looking at the steward, and at the captain of the imperial escort beside him, “I give my companions into your protection. If my horse is missing or harmed I lay that upon you both.” The officer nodded, standing straight as a banner pole. The steward was pale.
Tai looked at the closed curtain. His mouth was dry. The captain gestured at Tai’s swords and boots. He removed them. The steward pulled the curtain back, just enough. Tai entered. The curtain of the sedan chair fell closed with a rustling sound. He found himself enveloped by scent in a softened, silk-filtered light that seemed to not be entirely of the world he’d just left.
It wasn’t, of course. It wasn’t the same world in here.
He looked at her. At Wen Jian.
He had known lovely women in his life, some of them very recently. The false Kanlin who’d come to kill him by the lake had been icily beautiful, cold as Kuala Nor. The daughters of Xu Bihai were exquisite, the older one even more than that. Spring Rain was golden and glorious, celebrated for it. The preferred courtesans in the best houses in the North District were lovely as flowers: the students wrote poems for them, listened to their singing, watched them dance, followed them up jade stairs.
None of these women, none of them, were what this one was in the brightness of what she offered. And she wasn’t even dancing now. She sat opposite, leaning upon cushions, gazing at Tai appraisingly, enormous eyes beneath shaped eyebrows.
He had seen her from a distance, in Long Lake Park, at festival ceremonies with the emperor and court in their elevated place on a Ta-Ming balcony, removed from ordinary men and women, above them, nearer heaven.
She wasn’t removed from him here, she was annihilatingly close, and they were alone. And one small, bare, high-arched foot seemed to be touching the outside of his thigh very lightly, as if it had drifted there, all unawares.
Tai swallowed hard. Jian smiled, took her time assessing him, utterly at ease.
An entire courtyard of people at an imperial posting station had seen him enter this sedan chair. A man could be killed for being alone with the emperor’s beloved. Unless that man was a eunuch, or—an abrupt thought—was made into one as an alternative to having his throat cut. Tai tried to find a safe place to rest his gaze. Light came gently through silk.
She said, “I am pleased. You are handsome enough. It is better when men are pleasant to look upon, don’t you agree?”
He said nothing. What did you say to this? He lowered his head. Her foot moved against his thigh, as if idly, a restlessness. She curled her toes. He felt it. Desire was within him. He worked fiercely to suppress it. Head down, avoiding those eyes, he saw that her toenails were painted a deep red, almost purple. There was nowhere safe to look. And with every breath he caught the scent she wore.
He made himself look up. Her mouth was full and wide, her face heart-shaped, skin flawless, and the silk of her thin blue summer gown, patterned in a soft yellow like the curtains, was cut low. He saw an ivory pendant in the shape of a tiger between the rich curves of her breasts.
She was twenty-one years old, from a well-known family in the south. Had come to Xinan to be married at sixteen to a prince of the imperial family, the eighteenth son.
Then the ever-glorious Emperor Taizu, her husband’s father, had seen her dance one night in the palace to the music of a flute (the story was very well known) and the course of her life and the empire’s course had been altered forever by the time the music and the dancing stopped.
The pious had declared (quietly) that what followed was a profanation of marriage and family. The eighteenth son accepted a larger mansion, another wife, and exquisite concubines. Time passed at court, pleasantly. There was music in the palace and at Ma-wai and a woman danced for the emperor. Poets began to write of four great beauties.
The empress was invited to follow her own clear inclination towards devotion and withdraw to a retreat outside Xinan and the palace, to enfold her life in prayer.
Tai’s sister had gone with her. He used that quick image of Li-Mei—brave and bright—to bring him back from what felt, truly, like intoxication. There was, he thought, no wine in the world like the presence of this woman. There might be a poem in that, it occurred to him.
Someone had probably written it.
He said, as the chair was lifted and they began to move, “My lady, your servant is too greatly honoured by this.”
She laughed. “Of course you are. You won’t be killed for being here, if you are thinking about that. I told the emperor last night I intended to come and bring you myself. Will you take a lychee? I can peel it for you, Master Shen Tai. We could even share it. Do you know the most enjoyable way to share lychee fruit?”
She leaned forward, as if inclined to show him right then. He said nothing. He had no words, no idea what to say.
She laughed at him again, the eyebrows arched. She regarded him another moment. Nodded her head, as if a thought was confirmed. “You reminded me of your brother when you held your hands up to my steward just now. Power hidden behind courtesy.”
Tai looked at her. “We are not very like, my lady. You believe he shows power?”
“Liu? Of course he does. But carefully,” said Wen Jian. She smiled. “You say you are greatly honoured. But you are also angry. Why are you angry with me, my lord?” She didn’t have to call him that. The foot moved again, unmistakably.
She would use her beauty, any man’s desire for her, as an agency, a weapon, he told himself. Her long neck was set off by golden earrings to her shoulders, set with pearls, the weight of the gold making her seem even more delicate. Her hair was coiled, but falling to one side, famously. Her own invented style, the “waterfall,” copied throughout the empire now. The hairpins were jewelled, variously, and he didn’t even know the names of all the gems he saw.
She laid a hand, as if carelessly, upon his calf. He caught his breath. She smiled again. She was measuring his responses, he realized.
“Why so angry?” she asked again in a voice suddenly like a child’s, grieving at being punished.
He said, carefully, “One of my soldiers was killed this morning, illustrious lady. I believe you heard. A soldier of the emperor. My Kanlin guard was wounded, and two of your own men. And my Sardian horse—”
“I know it. It was uncivilized. There was violence in my presence, which is never permitted.” She lifted her hand from his leg. “I have instructed my under-steward to kill himself when we reach Ma-wai.”
Tai blinked, wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.
“You … he …?”
“This morning,” said the Beloved Companion, “did not proceed as I wished it to. It made me unhappy.” Her mouth turned downwards.
You could drown in this woman, Tai thought, and never be found again. The emperor was pursuing immortality in the palace, men said, us
ing alchemists and the School of Unrestricted Night, where they studied the stars and asterisms in the sky for secrets of the world. Tai suddenly had a better understanding of that desire.
“Your brother,” she said, “doesn’t look like you.”
“No,” said Tai.
She was going to do this, he realized: change topics, make him keep up with her, test him that way.
“He advises my cousin,” she said.
“I know this, illustrious lady.”
“I don’t like him,” she said.
Tai was silent.
“Do you?” she asked.
“He is my brother,” Tai said.
“He has measuring eyes and he never smiles,” said Wen Jian. “Am I going to like you? Do you laugh?”
He took a breath, then answered more seriously than he’d thought he would. “Less often since my father died. Since going to Kuala Nor. But yes, your servant used to laugh, illustrious lady.”
“In the North District? I have been told as much. You and my cousin appear to have admired the same woman there.”
Treacherous ground, Tai thought. And she was doing it deliberately.
“Yes,” he said.
“He has her now.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how much he paid for her?”
“No, illustrious lady.” How would he have known?
“A very great sum. More than he needed to. He was making a declaration, about himself.”
“I see.”
“I have seen her since. She is … very lovely.”
He considered that pause.
He said, “There is no wine in Kitai or the world as intoxicating as the Lady Wen Jian.”
The smile that brought him was a gift. He could almost believe she was flattered, a girl reacting to a well-turned compliment.
Almost. She said, “You never answered about your brother, did you? Clever man. You might survive at court. They tried to kill you?”
They. Such a dangerous word.
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
“Twice?”
He nodded again. The palace would have known this several nights ago. Xu Bihai had written, the commander at Iron Gate had sent word. She would know what the Ta-Ming knew.
“Twice, that I know about,” he said.
“Was it Roshan?”
Terrifyingly direct. This was no girl-woman seduced by a turn of phrase. But he could sense apprehension, as she waited for his reply. There was, he thought, a reason she’d come to speak with him alone. This might be it.
“No,” said Tai. “I am certain it wasn’t.”
“He persuaded you of that yesterday?”
This had become a precise interrogation—amid silk and scent, with a bare foot against his thigh.
He had been certain that a report of yesterday’s encounter in the carriage by the road would reach the court, but the speed of it made him realize something, belatedly: she’d have had to travel half the night from Ma-wai to be here now. He calculated distances quickly. She’d have left almost as soon as word came of his meeting with An Li.
He didn’t know what to make of that. He had never been part of the court, never even near it. He was coming from two years of solitude beyond Iron Gate.
“He did persuade me, illustrious lady.”
“You believe what he told you was true?”
“I do.”
She sighed. He couldn’t interpret that. It might have been relief.
What he didn’t say, yet, was that he knew that what Roshan had told him was true because he’d already known who had tried to kill him in the west—Spring Rain had risked her life so he could know this.
He was going to need to see her.
Jian said, “Because An Li can order men killed without a thought.”
“I have no reason to doubt it, illustrious lady.” He chose his words carefully.
She smiled slightly, lips together, noting his caution. “But he still made you believe him.”
Tai nodded again. “Yes, my lady.”
He didn’t know if she wanted him to say more. It crossed his mind to consider that this questioning was being done here and in this way by a woman, the emperor’s dancer-love, his late-in-life dream of eternity.
It came to Tai that this was a part of why the Ninth Dynasty might be as precarious as it was dazzling. Why Sima Zian had said what he’d said yesterday: I feel chaos coming.
This matchless creature across from him, lovely as a legend, was the cousin of the first minister and the supporter (the adopting mother!) of the man who was his rival, and she had the trust and passion of an emperor who wanted to live forever because of her.
The balance of Kitai—of the known world—might be reclining across from him. It was, Tai thought, a great burden to lay upon slender shoulders.
He sat there, the sedan chair moving steadily along the road, breathing perfume in an enclosed, intimate place removed from the ten thousand noises of the world, and he waited for the next question. The one that could plunge him—all of them—into the chaos Zian feared.
It wasn’t Roshan? Who was it, then? she was going to ask him.
She never did. Either she knew already, or she was afraid to know, or to have it said aloud. Be brought into the world, compelling a response. Her hand lifted from his calf where it had been resting again. She selected a lychee from a bowl beside her, peeled it expertly.
She extended it towards him.
“Please,” said Wen Jian.
Tai took the ripe, slippery fruit from her fingers. It tasted like the south, and summer, like memories of sweetness lost.
That last, he realized, was what he was feeling. Something slipping away, almost gone. Yesterday’s encounter by the road and now this one. Both of them coming to meet him on the way. Entirely different encounters but also the same at their core. Power approaching, to know what he was going to do. Needing to know, because power always needed that—knowledge was how power preserved itself, or tried.
He had set out from a mountain bowl, the battleground his father had never left behind, determined to reach Xinan to do … to do what, precisely?
He had never decided, he’d been moving too fast.
Kill a man, he’d told the poet yesterday, as an answer for Yan’s death. But Xin Lun was dead already. No fault of Tai’s, no achievement of his, no credit to his name with Yan’s ghost by the lake. And Lun had only been an instrument.
What else? What else had he been racing here to do, straight down the imperial road past the cut-off south that could have taken him home? Deal with the horses, somehow, that life-claiming gift.
Life-claiming. The thought reverberated strangely in his mind. Tai hadn’t lived a life where enemies, on a murderous scale, had played any kind of role. But the first minister wanted him dead. On a whim, most likely. Because he could. Wen Zhou, who was this woman’s kin, holding office because of her.
He looked at Jian, across from him. She had peeled her own lychee and, as he gazed, placed it delicately between her front teeth and bit down. Tai shook his head, then smiled. He had to smile, she was so obviously playing with her own desirability.
“Oh, good!” she said. She licked her lips, glistening with the fruit. “This will be a tedious journey if you are serious all the time.”
The back and forth of it, he thought. Hard questions, ripe fruit bitten, a slow tongue tracing wet lips, a foot or fingers touching him, conjuring desire. Then the questions would come again.
In that moment, Tai arrived at a decision. It seemed obvious enough, and it had the virtue of simplicity. He’d only needed to finally grasp something: that he could never be subtle enough to match those waiting for him. He didn’t have time to know enough, or gain an awareness of relationships, at a level that would let him move with these men and women to their music. He wouldn’t even hear the notes they heard.
He wasn’t able to probe for what they knew or wanted, play the game of words spoken and unspoken
with the court and the higher civil servants and even some of the governors, in and around the Ta-Ming Palace and the emperor.
He would be among them today. And he couldn’t learn that rhythm, not in the time he had. So he wouldn’t even try. He’d go another way, like a holy wanderer of the Sacred Path choosing at a fork in the road, following his own truth, a hermit laughing in the mountains.
Tai drew a breath. He said, “I offered the horses to Governor An yesterday.”
She stared, sat up straighter. Carefully put down an unpeeled lychee she’d just picked from the bowl.
“All of them?”
He nodded. “But I had a condition, and he declined.”
“An Li rejected two hundred and fifty Sardian horses?”
“I said they were his if he brought my sister back from the Bogü. He said he could not do it. The horses are yours, illustrious lady, if you can do this.”
“All of them?”
He nodded again. She was clearly shaken. Roshan had been, as well.
“I don’t … Is she your lover, your sister?”
He could not allow himself to be offended. This was the court. Such thoughts would occur to people. He shook his head. “Nothing like that. This is to honour my father as much as anything. He would never have let my brother do this. In our mourning period, it was an act of disrespect.”
She was staring as if dazed. And the woman in this sedan chair was no simple concubine or dancer, however exquisite. This was someone who defined the life of the Ta-Ming now, who shaped and balanced it, in a dangerous time.
He was beginning to understand how dangerous, since yesterday and the thought he’d had: of the knife he carried, and committing murder in that carriage by the road.
“You are not suggesting it was wrong to give your sister to this marriage and send her north?”
He needed to be careful. “The Son of Heaven cannot be wrong.”
“No, he cannot.” Her voice was emphatic.
“This is a personal request, my lady, only that.”
“You do understand,” she said, her voice controlled now, “how much you can expect at court as the last hero of Kuala Nor and brother to a new princess? Have you considered that the emperor cannot be less generous than the Lion of Tagur or he is shamed? He must give you gifts that exceed those horses from Sangrama.”