He moves a shoulder, the awkward shrug. “Far too many questions. You are always asking. Not proper for women.”
She looks away. Then back. “Then I need to thank you again, and be grateful I am not going to him, don’t I? Will they catch us now? Where are we riding? What have you decided to do?”
They are a test of sorts, these swift, immediate inquiries. She is the way she is.
She sees the expression she has decided to call a smile.
There are ways of beating back fear, strangeness, the sense of being profoundly lost in the world.
THEY HAVE RIDDEN until darkness has almost gathered the land, eating cold meat in the saddle and the remains of the fruit. The waning moon has set. Li-Mei, in real discomfort, has continued to remain silent about it. They will be pursued now. He is trying to save her. This is no springtime ride in the Deer Park to see animals feeding or drinking at twilight.
He brings her to water again. She isn’t certain how, this far from Bogü lands. It is the wolves, she decides.
He tells her they can rest only a short while, that she is to sleep right away. They will ride in darkness now, will do this every night. But then, after staring towards her in the almost-lost gloaming, his features difficult to see, he orders her to lie face down on the short grass by the pond.
She obeys. Now it begins, she thinks, her heart beginning to race against her will. (How does one control a heartbeat?)
But she is wrong, again. He comes to her, yes, but not in need, or hunger. He kneels beside her and begins to work the muscles of her back, his fingers mingling pain with the easing of pain. When she tenses, wincing, he slaps her lightly, the way you might slap a restive horse. She tries to decide if she’s offended. Then makes herself settle into his hands. She is going to be riding again soon, this is no time or place to carry pride. What can offended mean here? His movements remain stiff, but very strong. She cries out once, apologizes. He says nothing.
She wonders abruptly—perhaps an illumination?—if his physical restraint, this indifference to her being a woman, is caused by what happened to him those years ago. Could it be he has been rendered incapable of desire, or the accomplishment of it?
She knows so little about this, but it is possible, surely. And it would explain …
Then, at one point, as his hands slow, and then slow again, and linger near her hips, she becomes aware that his breathing has changed. She cannot see anything by then, is face down in the grass, can only be aware of him as a presence, touching her.
And though Shen Li-Mei, only daughter of an honourable house, has never shared a bed or couch with any man, or explored very far along even the first pathways of lovemaking, she knows—with instinctive certainty—that this man is not indifferent to her as a woman in the dark with him, and alone. Which means, if he is holding himself back it is not because he cannot feel—
And in that moment she understands another part of what is happening. Now, and since he came for her between the campfires, back west. She closes her eyes. Draws her own slow breath.
His is, in truth, a gesture, from a largeness of spirit she’s not been prepared for. These are barbarians. Everyone living outside the borders of Kitai is a barbarian. You didn’t expect … grace from them. You couldn’t, could you?
She listens to his breathing, feels his touch through her clothing. They are alone in the world. The Weaver Maid, alone as well, is shining in the west. Li-Mei realizes that her heartbeat has steadied after all, though she is aware of something new within herself.
She thinks she understands more now. It calms her, it always has. It makes such a difference. And Shandai was, after all, the first word he’d spoken to her. The name.
She says, softly, “Thank you. I think I will sleep now. You will wake me when it is time to ride?”
She shifts position, onto her side, and then up on her knees. He stands. She looks up at him against the stars. She cannot see his eyes. The wolves are invisible. She knows they are not far.
Still on her knees, she bows to him, her hands touching the earth.
She says, “I thank you for many things, son of Hurok. For my unworthy self, in my father’s name, and in the name of my brother Shen Tai whom you are honouring by … in the way you guard me.” She does not say more. Some things cannot be made explicit, even in the dark.
Night breeze. He says nothing, but she sees him nod his head once. He walks off, not far but far enough, nearer the horses. Li-Mei lies down again, closes her eyes. She feels the wind, hears animal sounds in the grass and from the waters of the pond. She becomes aware, with surprise, that she is crying, for the first time since the cave. Eventually, she sleeps.
Spring Rain has not thought of herself by the name her mother gave her since she left Sardia years ago.
She had come to Kitai as part of a small company of musicians and dancers sent as tribute to Taizu, the Son of Heaven. The Sardians were a careful people, offering annual gifts to Kitai and Tagur, and even to the emerging powers west of them. When your small home-land lay in a fertile valley between mountains, that was what you needed to do. Sometimes (not always) it sufficed.
She wasn’t enslaved, and she wasn’t abducted, but she hadn’t had a great deal of choice in the matter. You woke up one morning and were told by the leader of your troupe that you were leaving your home forever. She’d been fifteen years old, singled out for her appearance already, and for skill in singing and on the pipa, all twenty-eight tunings of it in the Kitan fashion, which may have been why she was chosen.
She remained with that troupe for two years in Xinan, all twelve of them coming to terms with the fact that the great and glorious emperor had twenty thousand musicians. They all lived in a vast ward east of the palace—it was like a city in itself, larger than any in Sardia.
In two years they had been summoned to play three times, twice for minor court weddings, once at a banquet to welcome southern emissaries. On neither occasion was the Son of Heaven present.
You might be green-eyed and yellow-haired, lovely and lithe and genuinely skilled in music, and still see your life disappearing down the years. You could be invisible and unheard among the Ta-Ming Palace entertainers.
To the court, perhaps, but not to those on watch for a particular sort of woman. Rain had been noticed at that second wedding, apparently. She’d been seventeen by then. It was time to begin achieving something, she’d thought. A life, if nothing else.
She accepted an invitation to enter the pleasure district and be trained in one of the best houses there—trained in many things, and on terms that were (she knew by then, having paid attention) better than most girls received. Green eyes and yellow hair made a difference, after all. Her ability to leave the musicians’ district was a matter of bribing the eunuchs who controlled the Ta-Ming entertainers. It happened all the time.
She was to become a courtesan, and was under no illusions about what that meant. She was taught to be a mistress of the table, the highest rank among the pleasure district women. They were the ones hired to perform at banquets by aristocrats or high mandarins. To perform, also, more privately and in other ways after the feasting had ended.
And when there were no wealthy courtiers on a given evening or afternoon in the Pavilion of Moonlight, there were always the students studying for the examinations—or not actually studying (not if they were in the North District) but aspiring to the rank that would come with passing the exams.
Spring Rain tended to like the students more than the courtiers, which wasn’t the cleverest way for a girl to be. But their enthusiasms, their dreaming, spoke to something in her that the extravagance and hauteur of Ta-Ming aristocrats didn’t touch—and they made her laugh sometimes.
The palace guests gave better gifts.
It was a life—while a woman was young, at any rate. A better life, most likely—though no one could ever say this for certain—than she’d have had back home. Xinan, under Emperor Taizu, was the centre of the world. She did sometimes wonder if the centre of th
e world was always the best place to be.
She can remember the moment, years before, as they’d passed through Jade Gate Fortress into Kitai, when she’d made the decision to leave her name behind.
The girl born to that name was gone, she’d decided. She was almost certainly never coming back—to home, family, the view of the mountains north of them, range upon range, to heaven. The girl travelling east would leave her name with her memories.
At fifteen, it had felt like a way to go forward, to survive.
But if her birth name is long since gone, that does not mean she must accept, in her mind, the one Wen Zhou has chosen for her, as if selecting among fabrics or polo horses.
She answers in the compound to Lin Chang because she must, and does so smiling, effortlessly gracious, but that is as far as she will go. The surface of a lake.
He cannot see what she is thinking or feeling. She has a talent for deceiving men by now. She’s had time to learn. It is a skill like any other a woman can teach herself: music, conversation, lovemaking, simulating yearning and the tumult of desire.
She ought to be more grateful, she tells herself many times a day, or lying at night, alone or beside him. Hers is a destiny, thanks to Zhou, that marks, like a banner, the highest summit of the dreams of every courtesan in the North District.
He is the second most powerful man in the empire—which means in the world, really. She lives in a vast compound with servants at her whim and call. She entertains his guests with music or witty talk, watches him play polo in the Deer Park, shares his pillow many nights. She knows his moods, some of his fears. She wears silks of the finest weaving, and jewellery that sets off her eyes or dazzles by lamplight at her ears, in her golden hair.
He can dismiss her at any moment, of course. Cast her out, with or without any resources to survive—that, too, happens all the time to concubines when they age. When skilful use of masicot, onycha, indigo sticks for beauty marks, sweet basil, plucked eyebrows and painted ones, powder and perfume and exquisitely adorned hair are no longer enough to sustain necessary beauty.
It is her task to ensure that he has no cause to send her from his presence, now, or when that day comes when the mirror of men’s eyes tells a darker tale.
In which case, she has not been acting prudently at all. Kanlin Warriors hired secretly. Listening on porticoes.
She has been distracted and disturbed the last few days, is afraid that it might show. There are other eyes besides his in this compound. His wife is famously inattentive to the women, her gaze turned towards the heavens and alchemical mysteries, but the other concubines are not her friends, and each of the important ones has servants devoted to her.
A household like this can be a battleground. There are poets who have seen this, lived it, written of it.
Events seem to be moving faster now. Late this morning a messenger came from Ma-wai. Wen Zhou and his wife left the compound by carriage not long after. Zhou was swearing, flushed and angry, through the flurry of preparations.
His cousin had evidently requested their presence for the afternoon and evening. Short of the absolute dictates of warfare or crisis, this is not an invitation that may be declined, even by the prime minister.
He holds office because of her, after all.
A case could be made, and she knows Zhou wishes he could do it, that they are in a time of crisis, but the growing tensions with Roshan are not the sort of matter he can use as an excuse to offer his regrets to Jian. Not until he’s ready to reveal this, raise it with the emperor, and Rain knows he isn’t. Not yet.
There are too many dangers, and they need working through.
He has already sent word to his principal adviser. Liu will follow to Ma-wai in his own carriage. Zhou always wants him nearby when there is any likelihood they might see the emperor, and in Ma-wai there is a good chance.
The first minister is increasingly dependent on Liu. Everyone in the compound knows it.
What Rain does not yet know, though she has done her best to find out, is whether Liu was privy to, or even the agent of, certain instructions given with respect to a man coming back now (it seems) from the far west, having escaped attempts upon his life.
Escaped them, possibly, because of her.
That, of course, is how she’s been most reckless. Zhou would kill her and she knows it. At least one man in Xinan has already died in this affair in the past few days: Xin Lun, after word of Tai’s journeying had come.
Lun was killed to preserve a secret. If Tai chooses to reveal it, the prime minister will be exposed. She’s made her peace with that. Any loyalty to the man who brought her here stops short of this attempted assassination. A woman, as much as a man, is surely allowed her own sense of right conduct in the world.
No, her real fear right now is of herself.
Word has come by courier from Chenyao. That was days ago. Travelling at any normal speed, a horseman from that city could be here tomorrow, or even tonight. And Tai is riding, if the tale is to be believed, a Sardian steed. A Heavenly Horse, from her home.
Rain is too self-possessed, too controlled (always has been), to attach meaning or weight to that last. Nor is she a poet, as some of the courtesans are. She sings the songs others have written. But still … Sardian horses?
And he is alive, very nearly here. After two years.
The morning passes, a midday meal, a rest in her rooms, a walk in the gardens by the bamboo grove. Time crawls at a pace that kills.
It occurs to her, sitting on a stone bench by the artificial lake, shaded from the sun by sandalwood leaves, that if Zhou has been summoned to Ma-wai for this afternoon, and a banquet after, he will not be home tonight.
It is just about then that the second messenger arrives. The household steward stalks into the garden to find Mistress Lin. She doesn’t think he likes her, but he doesn’t like anyone so it isn’t significant.
It seems there is another message from Ma-wai, this one sent to her. That has never happened before. She wonders if she’s being summoned to play for them … but no, it would be too late by now. And there is hardly a deficiency of performers at Ma-wai.
The courier is escorted through the sequence of public rooms and courtyards back through the garden, preceded by the steward and a warning to her that someone is coming—so that she can be properly seated and composed on one of the benches. She is, or presents herself as such.
The courier bows. She is, after all, the newly favoured concubine of First Minister Wen. There can be power in that for women. He hands her a scroll. She opens it, breaking the seal.
This message is also from Wen Jian, the Precious Consort. It is very short. Do not retire early tonight, unless you are excessively fatigued. Not all windows above jade stairs need be seen through tears.
The second line is derived from a celebrated poem about a woman left alone too long. Jian has changed three words. You can imagine her smiling as she wrote or dictated that.
Actually, that isn’t quite true: it is difficult to imagine that woman. She eludes too easily, and frightens because of that.
You can begin to feel your own heartbeat going too fast, however, as you consider those words on the scroll, dismiss the courier with a grave expression, give instructions that he be offered food and drink before starting back to Ma-wai.
For one thing, how does Wen Jian even know of her existence? For another, why would she be disposed to assist Rain in anything, if indeed she is doing that? If this is not some trap, or test?
Rain feels like a child, overwhelmed by complexities.
The steward leads the courier past pagoda trees. Her maidservant lingers, ready if called. Rain sits alone, looks across the water at the island he’d had made in the lake he’d had made. The light breeze ruffles leaves overhead, touches her skin and hair.
She’d liked amber and apricots and music, very young. Horses a little later, but only to look at them. They’d frightened her. Her eyes had drawn attention, very young. Her mother had named h
er Saira when she was born. A sweet name left behind, many years ago.
CHAPTER XVII
“I should like,” said Wen Jian, “to be entertained. Cousin, will you offer a poem for me?”
Her cousin, the first minister, smiled. He was as Tai remembered him in the North District, or glimpsed in Long Lake Park … a big man, handsome and aware of it. He wore blue silk with dragons in silver. There was a lapis lazuli ring on his left hand.
A breeze entered through unshuttered windows, rippling pennons outside. It was late afternoon. They were in Ma-wai, where the hot springs had eased imperial weariness for centuries, and where the decadent games of various courts had been notorious for as long. Just north of here, not far away, were the tombs of the Ninth Dynasty.
Poets had written of this conjunction of symbols, though doing so carried risks and one needed to use care.
Tai wasn’t feeling careful just now, which was unwise and he knew it. He was tense as a drawn bowstring. Wen Zhou was here and Tai’s brother was here.
They didn’t know he was in the room.
Jian, amusing herself (or perhaps not so), had arranged for Tai to enter before her guests, and to seat himself on an ivory bench behind one of two painted room screens (cranes flying, a wide river, mountains rising, the tiny figure of a fisherman in his boat).
He hadn’t wanted to do this. It felt too passive, acquiescent. But he didn’t know, on the other hand, what he did want here. He had arrived. This was the court. He had decisions to make, alignments to choose or reject. It would also be useful, he thought wryly, to remain alive. One person here had been trying to kill him.
At least one person.
For the moment he would accede to what the Beloved Companion wished of him. He could start that way, at least. Jian’s women had bathed him when their party arrived, and washed his hair (gravely, with propriety, no hint of rumoured immorality). After, in a chamber overlooking the lake, they had laid out silks more fine than any he’d ever worn in his life. Liao silk: compared to ordinary weaving once, in a poem, as what a glistening waterfall was to a muddy stream dried out in summer heat.