He held up his hand, with the ring. “I know all too well how supremely generous to his least-deserving servant our beloved emperor can be, may he live and rule a thousand years.”
There was a short silence.
“May it be the will of heaven,” said that emperor’s son and heir. Zhou said nothing.
Tai turned to Shinzu. “My lord prince, do you wish me to take men and go west for the horses? I am at the service of the court. They are being held across the border from Hsien.”
“So we understand.”
“I am prepared to leave immediately.”
The prince shook his head. Zhou was still on his feet, Tai saw. He faced the first minister, down the length of the council space in a vast and echoing chamber. If Zhou had somehow obtained the horses, Tai thought, there would have been nothing to stop him from having a certain second son killed. Nothing at all.
The prince said, “As it happens, the prime minister is correct in one respect. You cannot leave Xinan while awaiting an audience. Your name has been put forward.”
Tai stared at him. “I would rather serve the emperor, as best I can, than seek an appearance at court.”
Shinzu smiled. He had an effortless charm. It might have been, Tai thought, one of the things that had kept him alive all this time. That, and a reputation—disappearing moment by moment—for indifference to imperial affairs.
The prince shook his head again. “Events must flow as they are decreed under nine heavens, Master Shen. The palace and the empire will spin into disarray if they do not. When the periphery is unstable, as the Cho Master taught, the centre must be firm. My father will receive you. You will be given honours that—because they must—will exceed those given by Sangrama in Rygyal. This is the way the world unfolds. And then, if it should be the desire of the Phoenix Throne, you may be asked to ride for your horses.”
“My lord, time might matter.”
“Which is why I sent for them!” interjected Wen Zhou.
“Is it?” asked Prince Shinzu. The prince looked at Tai. “Time always matters. But order, right conduct, right thinking have always mattered more. It is our way.”
Tai lowered his head. He felt self-conscious now, standing so conspicuously. “I do understand, my lord. But if that is so, why am I here? You said you asked for me …”
A flicker of amusement in Shinzu’s eyes. This was, Tai suddenly thought, the son of a man renowned for intelligence and command. If the emperor had grown old and weary (thoughts not to be spoken), it did not take away from the lineage.
The prince said, “I asked for your attendance as soon as we learned of those riders sent for the horses. Those men would have been rejected at the border. We all know it, or should have known it. Your presence will be required there, and then the horses will be required by the empire, if you are good enough, of course, to make them available. Accordingly, I have asked you here, in the presence of the first minister, because we have need of his great power.”
Tai blinked. He looked at Zhou.
And only now did Shinzu turn that way. “First minister, I would dedicate myself and my own limited abilities to protecting this man, for the sake of Kitai and my father, but the times are dangerous and my own resources are meagre. I ask you, in the presence of this council, to pledge your office and life to guarding him for us. Only someone with your wisdom and power can ensure his safety in troubled times, and we know Roshan is aware of those horses.”
The expression on Zhou’s face was genuinely interesting. Defeat was there, unmistakably, but behind it Tai thought he saw an amused, aristocratic flicker of irony: acknowledgement of a game well played, as if this had been a match on a polo field, and the ball had just been elegantly struck into his goal.
He agreed, of course.
THERE WAS NO WAY, Sima Zian said, over Salmon River wine that evening, that he could have failed to agree.
The moon, past full, was overhead. They were on a curved stone bench under lanterns in the garden of Tai’s home. The garden was nowhere near the size or intricacy of Wen Zhou’s, but it had a small pond, a bamboo grove, winding paths, an orchard. The scent of flowers was around them.
“The prince,” said Tai. “He’s changed.”
Zian thought about it. “He is letting people see now what he has always been.”
“He was hiding it?”
Zian nodded.
“Why now?”
“Perhaps it is time.”
Tai’s turn to think about it. “Is he in danger because he’s doing this?”
“Shinzu?”
“Yes.”
The poet drank his wine. A servant filled his cup, and withdrew. “Perhaps. But no more than any of us. There are a quarter of a million soldiers moving on Yenling.”
He looked at Tai, and then away, and murmured:Bitter wind blows battle smoke.
Wild geese and cranes fly.
Later, moon’s disk in the water.
Plum blossoms mirrored in the river,
Until they fall.
He’d written that himself, during the last Taguran war. Tai’s father’s war.
Tai was silent a while, then said, “The first minister seems to think it will be over quickly. That the northeast will not accept Roshan’s ambitions, will rise up behind him, and the Sixth Army will cut his supply lines.”
Sima Zian’s enormous tiger-eyes met Tai’s. “We must hope,” he murmured, “that the first minister is correct.”
TAI DREAMED THAT NIGHT that he was back in the north. By that cabin beyond the steppe, watching men burned and devoured beside a jewel-bright blue lake. It wasn’t a dream that came often any more, but the memory was never entirely absent, either.
Smoke was drifting, and through it leering faces surged, bare-chested Bogü looming close, waving severed limbs of human beings in his face, offering them as if they were gifts, then drifting away. Blood dripped from arms and from hacked-off slices of thigh. The cabin burned with a roaring sound. Tai felt terror, and an overwhelming grief. He had a sense that he was crying aloud, in the dream, and in Xinan.
He became aware, as if in fog and mist, half asleep, of a voice soothing him. He was trying to see. He looked for yellow hair. A hand brushed his forehead, or so it seemed to him. Someone beside his curtained, canopied bed in the dead black of night. He felt himself struggling to wake, then surrendered and slipped back into sleep—an easier sleep, without the horrifying images of memory.
In the morning, waking at sunrise, he said nothing about his night, and no one else did, either.
NINE DAYS AFTER THIS, the Second Son of General Shen Gao was summoned to the Ta-Ming Palace and received in the Hall of Brilliance by the Emperor Taizu in the presence of the most illustrious members of his court, including the Precious Consort.
Tai, clad by his steward in white for the occasion, approached the Phoenix Throne, making the triple obeisance three times, as instructed. He stopped the stipulated distance from the imperial presence, his eyes cast down, also as required.
He was then presented, by an admiring and grateful empire, with an estate in the Mingzhen Hills, the aristocracy’s hunting and riding playground north of Xinan. He received another estate and considerable land in the south, near the Great River, once the property of a minister convicted of stealing from the Treasury.
The corrupt minister had been executed, his property confiscated. It now went to the brave man who had lived among the ghosts of Kuala Nor, laying them to rest.
He was further presented with a staggeringly large sum of money, ceremonial artifacts, jade, coral, pearls, ivory, and precious gems, and two ceremonial swords that had belonged to an emperor of the Fifth Dynasty.
Not speaking (speech was forbidden), Tai rose at a tall eunuch’s discreet hand signal and bowed again, nine times, as he backed slowly away from the throne.
Outside, light-headed, but breathing in a sunlit courtyard, he fully expected that orders would now come for him to set out immediately to claim his horses. It did not happen that w
ay. Events intervened.
Word came that same afternoon that Yenling, second city of the empire, east of them on the far side of Teng Pass, had surrendered to Roshan. He had declared it the capital of his Tenth Dynasty.
His soldiers had, it was reported, left the general population substantially unharmed, but they were butchering every civil servant and soldier who had not managed to flee when the rebels appeared before the walls.
More ghosts, Tai thought. More to come.
CHAPTER XXII
It is not one of the things she’s ever thought about, but Li-Mei has never been on a mountain. She never even climbed the hills east of their home. Women didn’t do that. She remembers dreaming about seeing the sea. A different sort of thought.
In her first days here, with no tasks, no need to rise in darkness and ride anywhere, clutching the unimaginable luxury of time to herself, she walks the broad, flat top of the mountain and the green terraces below. There isn’t even anyone escorting her. Not here, there is no need.
Stone Drum, one of the Five Holy Mountains, stands out vividly because of where it is, above mostly level land in all directions. The top looks as if some god had taken a sword and sliced, creating the level summit. She can see a long way, whichever direction she looks. Sometimes she imagines she can even see the Wall, but she knows that is an illusion.
She has no restrictions, can wander anywhere. She wears the grey robes of a Kanlin acolyte, though she isn’t one. She watches them training in combat, or with the bow, or practising movements that seem nearer to dance than fighting. She watches men and women run up walls, spring back across open space, and down a different wall, and then do it again.
She hears the bells that summon the Kanlins to prayer and she drifts that way, among grey and black figures on a green mountain.
She loves the sound of bells in this high place. She stands at the back of a temple, watching the rites, tall candles burning, hearing the chants rise and fall, feeling more peace than she can remember.
It is the same at twilight, when she finds a quiet place on one of the terraces and watches the sky grow dark and the stars appear.
She has to deal with some guilt. Slipping into peace at this moment is surely selfish, even shameful. They know by now why the Long Wall and the garrisons beyond have been emptied out. They know where the armies of Roshan have gone, are going.
Even so—or perhaps, more honestly, because of this—by the evening of her third day on Stone Drum, Li-Mei has decided she wishes to remain on the Mountain all her life, training to be a Kanlin, or simply serving them.
Early the following morning, summoned before the trio of elders who govern the sanctuary, she learns that she will not be allowed to do this. She is to leave almost immediately, in fact.
They do not look like men inclined to alter any decision made, she thinks, standing before them. Their faces are austere. Two are very tall, the third has only one hand. They wear the unadorned black of all the Kanlins she has ever seen. They sit on cushions on platform couches in a pavilion open to light and wind. The sun is rising.
She has questions.
She sinks to her knees. Isn’t sure if that is the proper thing to do, but it feels correct. She says, looking from one to the other, “Am I so unsuited to becoming a Kanlin?”
Unexpectedly, the elder in the centre, the one with a single hand, laughs aloud, a high-pitched, merry sound. He isn’t so remote, after all, she thinks. Neither are the others: they are smiling.
“Unsuited? Hopelessly so!” says the laughing one, rocking back and forth in mirth. “Just as your brother was!”
She stares. “You knew my brother?”
“I taught him! We tried. He tried.” He calms himself, wipes his eyes with his sleeve. He looks more thoughtfully at her. “His was not a spirit meant to grow within a larger group, a shared belief. Neither is yours, daughter of Shen Gao.” His voice is actually kind. “This is not to be seen as a failure.”
“It feels that way,” she says.
“But it is not so. Your brother had too strong a feeling of what he was, within. So do you. It is a nature, not a flaw.”
“I don’t want to leave.” She is afraid of sounding like a child.
“You love the Mountain because you have come through peril and it is peaceful here. Of course you want to linger.”
“I cannot? Even as a servant?”
One of the tall ones stirs. He is still amused, she sees. He murmurs, “You are a princess of Kitai, my lady. Circumstances have now changed in the world, and it is nearly certain you will not go back north. You cannot be a servant. It shames the Ta-Ming Palace, and us, too many people will know who you are.”
“I didn’t ask to be made a princess.”
This time all three of them laugh, although it is gentle enough.
“Who chooses their fate?” It is the third one, the tallest. “Who asks to be born into the times that are theirs?”
“Well, who accepts the world only as it comes to them?” she says, too quickly.
They grow quiet. “I do not know that passage,” the one in the centre says. “Is it from a disciple of the Cho Master?”
She says, not fighting a ripple of pride, “It is not. It is from General Shen Gao. My father said that to all his children.” She remembers him saying it directly to her, his daughter, more than once. It was not something she’d only overheard.
The three men exchange glances. The tallest inclines his head. “It is a challenging thought, and places burdens on those who heed it. But, forgive me, it only makes more clear why you are not meant to be a Kanlin. We are of many minds, and natures, but our way is to find fulfilment and harmony in the larger identity. You know this.”
She wants to fight, but finds it difficult. “My brother could not do that?”
“No more than he could find harmony in the ranks of the army,” says the one on the right. “It seems your father succeeded in shaping independence in his children.”
“Kanlins cannot be independent?”
“Of course they can!” It was the small one again, in the centre. “But only in some measure and only after acceptance of the self as gathered into our robes and the duties they bring.”
She feels foolish, young. These are things they might have expected her to know. She says, “Why are you helping me, then?”
They look surprised. The one in the centre—he appears to be the leader—gestures with his one hand. “For your brother, of course.”
“Because he was here?”
Three smiles. The tall one on the left says, “Not that. No. Certainly not that. It is because of Kuala Nor, my lady.”
And so she asks, having never learned what it was that Tai had done after he left home and went west in the mourning period.
They tell her, on a far-off mountain. They explain about the horses, and the attempts upon his life, one by a woman disguising herself as a Kanlin—trained here, in fact, before leaving the order, though still wearing the black robes, deceiving people. Something they deeply regret, the tallest one says. A burden they feel.
It is a great deal to absorb.
Li-Mei has the sensation that the world she left behind when she departed from Xinan in a litter, travelling north to the Bogü, is coming back in a rush of words and thoughts.
“Why would anyone have wanted to kill him?” The first question that comes.
They shake their heads. Do not answer. Choose not to answer.
“Is he all right?” she asks.
“He is in Xinan, we are told. And guarded. By Kanlins, which is as it should be. The horses will be even more important now, and they are his. It is a good assurance,” the tallest says. They are not smiling now, she sees.
A good assurance. She shakes her head.
It is all so strange, enough to change the way you understand everything. But it seems as if her second brother has done something astonishing, and that, even so far away, he has been with her, has protected her, after all. Here on Stone Drum
, and before that, on the grasslands, because of—
“What about Meshag?” she asks suddenly. “The one who brought me. Will he be allowed to stay? Can you do anything for him? Do you understand what has happened to him?”
The one on her left answers this time. “Our teachings and our understanding do not go so far into the north.”
She stares at him. They have been nothing but kind to her. Still, she dislikes being told something untrue. They are right, of course: hers is not a Kanlin nature. These are elders, wise and revered.
She says, “Forgive me, but that is not correct, is it? Someone here understood a wolf messenger. Isn’t that how three of you came to meet us by the Wall?”
She has had several days to think about it.
“Kitan do not like wolves,” the one in the centre says. The one who had been Tai’s teacher here. It is not an answer.
She says, “He’s bound to the lead wolf, isn’t he? Meshag. That is what happened to him? His life ends when the wolf dies?” She’s had time to think about this, too.
“Perhaps,” says the elder on her right. “But it would be a presumption for us, for anyone, to believe we understand this.”
For anyone. That means her. And here, again, she knows what he says is true. How could what happened by that far northern lake be grasped?
“You won’t let him stay.” She doesn’t ask it as a question.
“He has no wish to stay,” the one in the middle corrects her, gently.
She hasn’t seen Meshag—or the wolf—since the evening they arrived. Surely, she thinks, he would say farewell before going back. It isn’t necessarily a well-founded belief. She has no … good assurances.
She tells herself it must not be allowed to matter. The world came to you, and you tried to make of it what you wanted it to be. If you broke upon rocks, as the seas did in room screen paintings she’d seen at court, you broke with your pride.
But no one was allowed to choose the times into which they were born. Her father was right, and the elders were. There was no true contradiction in the teachings.