A thousand other poets, over centuries, did take those events as a subject, beginning with the death of Wen Zhou. Poets, like historians, have many reasons for varying or amending what might have taken place. Often they simply do not know the truth.
Before the prime minister fell, there were five arrows in him.
The bowmen of the Second Army would not let one of their number carry the burden of this deed alone.
By the time the poems of lament were in full spate, like a river, some versifiers had twenty-five arrows (with night-black feathers) protruding from the first minister’s back as he lay in his red blood upon the porch: poets straining for pathos and power, oblivious to the excesses of their images.
Tai stepped forward. His swords remained sheathed. His hands were shaking.
“No, my lord!” cried Song. “Shen Tai, please. Hold!”
And, “Hold!” echoed the dui commander below, eyeing him narrowly, visibly afraid. Frightened men were dangerous.
Tai saw that the man’s hands were also trembling. The commander stood alone now, exposed in the dusty inn yard. The archer was no longer beside him, nor his officer. They had withdrawn, blending back in with their fellows. Tai was quite sure he could recognize the archer, the man who’d fired first.
The bowmen in the yard all had arrows to string. So, he saw, glancing back, did Song and the other Kanlins. They stepped forward to surround him. They would be killed before he was.
“This must stop!” he cried, a little desperately.
He pushed forward, past Song. He looked down at the dui commander. “You know, surely you know it must stop.”
“You know what he did,” said the commander. His voice was harsh with strain. “He sent all those men—an army!—to their deaths, left Xinan open to ruin, and only because he feared for himself if the officers in the pass decided he’d caused this rebellion.”
“We can’t know that!” cried Tai. He felt weary and sick. And afraid. There was a dead man beside him, and the emperor was inside.
“There was no reason for our army to leave the pass! That one there sent the order in the middle of the night, with the half-seal. He gave it himself! Ask those who escorted you here.”
“How do you know this?” cried Tai. “How would they know?”
And the officer in the inn yard below, not a young man, said then, quietly, “Ask the prince you came here with.”
Tai closed his eyes, hearing that. He felt suddenly as if he might fall. Because it fit. It made a terrible, bitter kind of sense. The prince would be readying himself to take command now, with a full-fledged war upon them and his father so frail. And if the prime minister was the one who had created this sudden nightmare …
They had seen Shinzu ride ahead in the darkness on the road, to join the escort from the Second Army, speak with them.
A man’s actions could have unexpected consequences, sometimes; they could come back to haunt you, even if you were a prime minister of Kitai. Also, perhaps, if you were a prince of Kitai.
Tai opened his eyes, found himself unable to speak just then. And so, instead, he heard, in that bright, clear morning light near Ma-wai and its blue lake, another man do so, from among the gathered soldiers, lifting his voice. “One more must die now, or we will all be killed.”
Tai didn’t understand, not at first. His immediate thought was, You are all going to die, in any case.
He didn’t say it. He was too shaken to speak. Very near him, blood slowly spreading on the wooden porch, lay Wen Zhou.
“Oh, please, no,” said Sima Zian, barely a breath. “Not this.”
Tai remembered that, too. That it was the poet who realized first what was happening.
He turned quickly to look at the other man, then wheeled back to the courtyard.
And with a sorrow that never left him, that lay in memory, in his days forever after, as powerful, in its way, as the terrible images of the Bogü by the northern lake, Tai saw the soldiers step forward, together, well trained, and he heard the one who had just spoken speak again, and this man—whose face Tai never properly saw, among seventy or so of them—said, very clearly, “He was prime minister for only one reason. All Kitai knows it! We will be slain in vengeance—by her. She destroyed the emperor’s will with her dark power and has brought us all to this, through her cousin. She must come out to us, or this cannot end.”
Dancer to the music. Bright as morning light. Lovely as green leaves after rain, or green jade, or the Weaver Maid’s star in the sky when the sun goes down.
CHAPTER XXV
“This will not happen!” said Tai.
He said it as forcefully as he could, feeling a frantic need to push back against where the morning had now gone.
A trickle of perspiration slid down his side. Fear was in him, a twisting thing. He said, “She was working to control her cousin. Wen Zhou had even tried to kill me, at Kuala Nor. She was gathering information on that. Against him!”
He felt ashamed, telling soldiers this, but the moment was surely beyond shame, or privacy.
Hidden among the others, the archer (he would remember the voice) shouted, “This family has destroyed Kitai, driven us to civil war! As long as she lives they will poison us!”
That was clever, a part of Tai was thinking. A moment ago it had been about their own safety, those who had killed Wen Zhou—now it was something else.
“Bring her out,” said the dui commander.
Tai felt like cursing him. He held back. This was not a time to let anger overwhelm. He said, as calmly as he could, “I am not going to allow another death. Commander, control your men.”
The man shook his head. “I will. But after the Wen family poison is purged from among us. Our companions were sent out from Teng Pass. Will you measure two against so many? You have been a soldier. You know how many men are dead there. Does not the Ta-Ming invoke execution when someone in power has erred so greatly?”
“She is only a woman. A dancer.” He was dissembling now, but desperate.
“And women have never shaped power in Kitai?”
Tai opened his mouth and closed it. He stared at the man below.
A twist of the officer’s mouth. “I sat the examinations twice,” he said. “Studied eight years before accepting that I would never pass them. I know some things about the court, my lord.”
Tai would wonder about this later, too. If the world as it went forward from that day might have been otherwise had another leader and his fifty men been shifted to the northern route from the congested highway to Xinan.
There are always branches along paths.
“I will not permit this,” Tai said again, as coldly as he could.
The commander gazed up at him. He didn’t look triumphant or vengeful, Tai thought. The man said, almost regretfully, “There are … eight of you? We have better than seventy men. Why would you wish to kill your Kanlins, or yourself? Do you not have tasks in the war upon us now?”
Tai shook his head, aware again of anger. He fought it. The man was telling only truth. Tai could kill a great many people with the wrong thing said or done here. Even so: “I have no task greater than stopping this. If you wish to move into that posting station, you will have to kill me and my guards, and deprive Kitai of two hundred and fifty Sardian horses.”
He was willing to play that card, too.
There was a short silence.
“If we must,” said the dui commander. “Eight more deaths will not change what is to come, along with however many of us fall, including myself. I don’t matter. I know enough to know that. And the horses are your duty, not ours. Stand aside, my lord. I am asking you.”
“Tai,” said Sima Zian softly, at his elbow, “they are not going to stop for you.”
“Nor I for them,” said Tai. “There comes a point when life is not worth enduring if one steps back.”
“I agree, Master Shen.”
A woman’s voice, from the open doorway to the posting station.
She had come out.
Tai turned and he looked at her. Their eyes met. He knelt, near the blood of her cousin where it was spreading on the porch. And, with a shiver, he saw that not only did his Kanlins also kneel, and the poet, but every soldier in the inn yard did the same.
The moment passed. The soldiers stood up. And Tai saw that the archers still held their bows, arrows to strings. It was only then that he accepted that this was going to happen and he could not stop it.
In part, because he saw in her eyes that she willed it to be so.
“Poet,” she said, looking at Zian with the mocking smile Tai remembered, “I still grieve that you chose to be ironic with your last verse about me.”
“Not more than I do, illustrious lady,” said Sima Zian, and Tai saw that he had not risen from his knees, and there were tears on his face. “You brought a shining to our time.”
Her smile deepened. She looked pleased, and young.
Tai stood up. He said, “Will the emperor not come? He can stop this, surely.”
She looked at him for what seemed a long time. Those in the courtyard were waiting, motionless. The posting station of Ma-wai felt to Tai as if it were the centre of the empire, of the world. All else, everyone else, suspended around it, unknowing.
“This is my choice,” she said. “I told him he must not.” She hesitated, holding Tai’s gaze. “He is no longer emperor, in any case. He gave the ring to Shinzu. It is … the right thing to do. There will be a hard war, and my beloved is no longer young.”
“You are,” said Tai. “It is too soon, my lady. Do not take this brightness away.”
“Others are taking it. Some will remember the brightness.” She gestured, a dancer. “Shen Tai, I remember sharing lychees with you on this road. I thank you for it. And for … standing here now.”
She wore blue, with small golden peonies (royalty of flowers) embroidered on the silk. Her hairpins were decorated with lapis lazuli and two of her rings were also of lapis, he saw. She wore no earrings that morning. Her slippers were silk, and golden, with pearls. He was near enough to tell that she had not left the Ta-Ming in the middle of the night without the scent she always wore.
Nor had she left without considering the Sardian horses at the border, and sending a messenger through the night city for the only man who could claim them for Kitai.
“You must let me go,” Jian said softly. “All of you.”
He let her go. He dreamed of it, and saw it in his mind’s eye waking, all the rest of his days.
He watched her turn, poised, unhurried, stepping lightly past her fallen cousin who had brought them all to this. She went down the steps alone—lifting her robe so it might not catch—and into the yard, and she went forward there, in morning sunlight now, to stand before the soldiers who had called her out to kill her. It was a dusty inn yard, filled with fighting men, not a place for silk.
They knelt. They knelt down again before her.
She is too young, Tai thought. In the room she had left, an old emperor and a new one remained out of sight. Tai wondered if they were watching. If they could see.
With mild surprise, he saw tears on Song’s face, too. She was wiping at them, angrily. He didn’t think she’d ever trusted or liked Jian.
Perhaps liking was without importance sometimes, with some people. The dancers, like summer stars. You didn’t say you liked a star in the sky.
He moved to the top of the steps leading down. He had no idea what he was doing, he was living inside sorrow.
Jian said, clear as a temple bell sounding across fields, “I have a request, dui commander.”
The officer was still kneeling. He looked up for an instant, then lowered his head again. “My lady?” he said.
“I would not like to die as my cousin did, to have arrows disfigure my body, or perhaps my face. Is there a man here kind enough to kill me without marring me? With … with a knife, perhaps?”
That faltering, her first since coming out.
The commander looked up again, but not directly at her. “My lady, such a man would be too clearly marked for death. It is not proper for me to name anyone in my company to that.”
Jian seemed to consider it. “No,” she said. “I understand. I am sorry to have troubled you with such a request. It was … childish of me. Do as you must, dui commander.”
Childish. Tai heard a footfall behind him. Then a voice by his side.
“I will do it,” said the voice. “I am marked in any case.”
The tone was precise. Not beautiful as a temple bell, but firm, no uncertainty.
Tai looked at his brother.
Liu was gazing at the commander in the yard, his posture and expression defining authority, a man accustomed to being heard without raising his voice. He wore his mandarin’s robe and a soft hat, and the belt and key of his rank, as always. The man he had served was lying in blood at his feet.
That was it, of course. Add Wen Zhou’s death to the emperor’s abdication, a new emperor for Kitai. Consider Liu’s position as the first minister’s principal adviser, and …
And you had this, Tai thought. Added to the other moments unfolding here one by one, a morning tale.
The dui commander nodded his head jerkily. He seemed, for the first time, overawed by what they’d set in motion. Not so as to falter (his soldiers would not allow it by now), but by the weight, the resonance of this.
Liu lifted a hand in a practised gesture. “One moment, then, dui commander, and I will be with you.” Jian had turned, was looking up at the two brothers. “My lady,” said Liu, and bowed to her.
Then he turned to Tai. “This needs to happen,” he said crisply, quietly. “I was the prime minister’s man. There is a price to be paid for a failure such as this.”
“Did you have anything to do with that order? Teng Pass?”
Liu looked contemptuous. Tai knew that look. “Am I such a fool in your eyes?”
“He never spoke of it?”
“He stopped seeking my counsel on some things from the time you returned to Xinan, Second Brother.” Liu’s thin, superior smile. “You might say your return caused all this.”
“You mean my failure to die at Kuala Nor?”
“Or Chenyao, if I understand it rightly.”
Tai blinked. Stared. Anger slipped away.
Liu’s smile also faded. They looked at each other, the sons of Shen Gao. “You didn’t truly think I had anything to do with that?”
The sensation was so strange. Relief like a wave, and then another wave, of sorrow.
“I wondered,” Tai said. “We knew it came from Wen Zhou.”
Liu shook his head. “It would have made no sense. I knew how far away you were, if you were still alive. You could do nothing about Li-Mei even if you were foolish enough to want to. Why would I need you dead?”
“Why would he?” Tai looked down at the dead man beside them.
“He didn’t. Which is one reason he never told me about it. It was nothing but arrogance. He did it because of the woman, and because he could.”
“And Teng Pass?”
“He was afraid of Xu Bihai. Afraid the general would decide the rebellion was Zhou’s fault and come to an arrangement with the rebels. I think he feared all soldiers.” A slight smile. “Makes this morning amusing, doesn’t it?”
Tai said, “That wouldn’t be my word for it.”
Liu flicked his fingers dismissively. “You have,” he said, “no sense of irony. Listen now, and carefully.” He waited for Tai to nod, an instructor confirming a student’s attention.
Liu said, “The horses will save your life. Let it be said abroad—by the Kanlins, if you can do it—that I did try to have you killed. They won’t lie, you must make them think you believe it.”
“Why? Why do I need to—?”
The familiar, impatient look. “Because Shinzu is more clever than any of us suspected, and if he thinks you are linked to me …”
“I am linked to you, First Brother!”
Liu’s expression was impatient again. “Think. In this imperial family, brotherhood can mean hatred and murder as easily as anything else. Shinzu will know that. Tai, there is a clear path to power for you, for our family. He honours you already. He will have need of advisers, his own men, over and above your bringing the horses.”
Tai said nothing. Liu didn’t wait for him to speak.
“Also, the lands given you, by the Great River. A very good property, but not safe for the next while. I have no idea which way Roshan will go, but he might move south. After they take Xinan and finish killing there.”
“He will allow killing in the city?”
A small headshake, as if it pained Liu that someone might not see these things. “Of course he will. Wen Zhou slew his son, and the rebel soldiers are hard men, more than half of them barbarians. Almost all of the imperial family are still in the city. They are dead when he finds them. Xinan will be a bad place for the rest of this summer at least. People will be leaving in panic. As soon as today.” His voice was brisk, low, no one else could hear. The soldiers were waiting. Jian, Tai thought, was waiting.
Liu seemed to come to the same awareness. “I cannot linger to teach you,” he said. “Our own estate will likely be safe for our mothers, but have an eye to them, wherever you are. Keep Shinzu content, stay as close to him as you can. If this rebellion lasts a long time, and I think it will now, there is a man in Hangdu, near our property. His name is Pang, he has only one leg, you cannot miss finding him at the market. He has been buying and storing grain for me, for our family, in a hidden barn I had built some time ago. He needs to be paid three thousand a month, the middle of every month. You are wealthy now, but there will be shortages of food. Try to keep buying. These things are yours now to look after. Do you understand, Second Brother?”
Tai swallowed. “I understand,” he said. “Pang, in Hangdu.”
Liu looked at him. No affection, no fear, not much of anything to be read in the soft, smooth face.
Tai said, “I am sorry for this, brother. I am … pleased to know you did not send the assassins.”
Liu shrugged. “I might have, if I had thought it prudent for any reason.”