“I don’t think so, Liu.”
A superior smile, well remembered. “You did until now.”
“I know. My error. I request forgiveness.”
His brother glanced away, then shrugged again. “I forgive you. What I did for our family, Li-Mei made a princess, I would do again. Tai, it was a master stroke.”
Tai said nothing. His brother looked at him, then away towards the courtyard.
“So was Kuala Nor,” Liu added softly.
It was suddenly difficult to speak.
“I didn’t think of it that way.”
“I know you didn’t,” said Liu. “If you can, have me buried beside father in the orchard.” Another thin smile as he glanced back. “You are skilled at quieting ghosts, are you not?”
And with that, he went down the steps to the sunlit yard, drawing a jewelled court blade from the sleeve of his robe.
Tai saw him approach Jian and bow to her. The dui commander was the only one near them, and now he withdrew, backing away a dozen steps, as if to, belatedly, distance himself from this.
Tai saw his brother say something to Jian, too softly for anyone to hear. But he saw her smile, as if surprised, and pleased, by what she heard. She murmured something to Liu, and he bowed again.
He spoke one more time, and after a motionless instant she nodded her head. She made a dancer’s spinning movement, a last one, the sort that ends a performance and releases the audience’s approval and applause.
She ended it with her back to Liu, to the posting station. She faced south (her people had come from the south), towards the cypress trees lining the road and the summer fields beyond them, bright in morning light, and Tai’s brother placed his left hand around her waist, to steady the both of them, and he thrust his knife cleanly into her, between ribs, into the heart, from behind.
Liu held her, gently, carefully, as she died. And then he held her a little longer, and then he laid her down on her back in the dust of that yard, because there was nothing else he could do.
He knelt beside her a moment, arranging her clothing. One of her hairpins had come loose. Tai watched his brother fix it in place again. Then Liu set down his jewelled blade and stood up and he moved a distance away from her, towards the archers of the Second Army. He stopped.
“Do it,” he said. Making it his command. And was standing very straight as they sent half a dozen arrows into him.
Tai had no way of knowing if his brother’s eyes were open or closed before he died. He did become aware, after a time, that Sima Zian was beside him, saying nothing, but present.
He looked out into the yard. At Liu, face down, and at Jian on her back, the blue robe spread about her, and it seemed to him that sunlight was wrong for what the moment was, what it would always be now, even as it receded. This morning brightness, the birds rising and darting, their singing.
He said that, to the poet. “Should there be birdsong?”
Zian said, “No, and yes. We do what we do, and the world continues. Somewhere, a child is being born and the parents are tasting a joy they never imagined.”
“I know that,” said Tai. “But here? Should there be so much light here?”
“No,” said Sima Zian, after a moment. “Not here.”
“My lords?” It was Song. Tai turned to her. He had never seen her looking as she did now. “My lords, we request your permission,” she said. “We wish to kill two of them later. The commander and the first archer, the small one. Only two. But it must be done.” She wiped at her cheeks.
“You have mine,” said Zian, eyes gazing out upon the courtyard.
“You have mine,” said Tai.
The star-cloud of her hair,
Flower-petal of her cheek,
Gold-and-jade of her jewels
When she danced …
A different poet, younger, would write that. Part of a very long verse, one that would be remembered, among all the (deservedly) forgotten ones about that morning at Ma-wai.
ON THE POSTING STATION PORCH, shaded from sunlight, two men came out a little later to stand before the soldiers.
The older one, his hands trembling, holding himself not nearly as upright as before, formally presented the younger one, his son, with the phoenix ring, in public this time, making him emperor of Kitai.
The soldiers, all of them, the posting inn servants, the Kanlins on the porch, Shen Tai, the older of the surviving sons of Shen Gao, and the poet Sima Zian, all knelt, faces to inn yard dust or wooden porch, and so became the first to pay homage to the Glorious and Exalted Emperor Shinzu of the Ninth Dynasty of Kitai, in the first year of the An Li Rebellion, just before Xinan fell.
THE NEW EMPEROR’S COMMANDS were exact, measured, appropriate. There were three dead people here. The Kanlins were asked to attend to them, with assistance from their sanctuary.
Jian would be carried to the imperial family tombs, close by. The oldest son of General Shen Gao was, after a consultation with his brother, also given to the Kanlins, with the request that his body be preserved and taken to his family’s estate for burial. Word would go ahead to the family.
The body of the former first minister, Wen Zhou, was to be burned by the Kanlins on a pyre at their sanctuary, duly shrouded and with rites, but not with courtly honours. The ashes would be scattered, not preserved. The absence of ceremony was obviously—and cleverly—designed to allay the fears of the soldiers who had killed him.
The father-emperor, Taizu, who had awakened in the middle of this night as ruler of Kitai, frail-seeming, grieving and bewildered in the bright day, was to be escorted to safety in the far southwest, beyond the Great River.
In due course, it was hoped, he would recover his strength and purpose, and be brought back, with dignity, to his son’s renewed court in Xinan.
The Emperor Shinzu himself would go north. He would make Shuquian, in the loop of the Golden River, his base. It had served that purpose before in Kitai. Xinan could not be held, but it could be retaken.
There was no hint of concession to the rebels in the new emperor, no flicker of doubt or surrender. An error had been made by a minister. The man (and his adviser) were dead, as required, here this morning.
The woman lying in the dust might be considered a source of regret, now and afterwards, but no one judging the matter with clarity of mind could deny that her family was at the root of this disaster. Just as women in Kitai could reap the benefit of the deeds of the men they knew, they could not be immune when those men fell.
One small incident, noted by only a handful of people in that inn yard, occurred just before Taizu re-entered his coach to be escorted from Ma-wai. An alchemist, a lean cleric of the Sacred Path, emerged cautiously from the second coach, where he had evidently remained through the violent events of the morning. He approached Taizu, bearing what was—evidently—the morning’s elixir, designed to help pursue immortality.
The emperor, the former emperor, waved this man away.
Shortly afterwards, Master Shen Tai, a person of some importance now, was summoned by the new emperor into the posting station. He knelt there and was presented with another ring, pale jade—the first gift offered by Shinzu as emperor of Kitai.
Shen Tai was instructed to leave with the retired emperor for the posting station on the imperial road to Chenyao. From there, as soon as his sixty Kanlin Warriors arrived from their sanctuary, he was to proceed swiftly to Hsien, on the border with Tagur, to claim his horses and bring them safely back to Shuquian. The emperor formally requested that the Sardians be made available to the empire. Shen Tai formally acceded to this, expressing great happiness at being able to be of use to Kitai.
XINAN WAS ABOUT TO BE one of the most terrible places on earth. Tai had realized it at some point on the night ride to Ma-wai, and then his brother Liu had said the same thing to him, and his brother Liu was someone who was—who had been—brilliantly clever about courts and armies and the world.
And if this was so, if a red violence was approaching f
rom the east, dust rising even now beneath an army’s marching tread and their horses’ hooves, there was a woman to be taken from the city.
Especially since that woman had been the concubine of the man who would surely be the most hated in Xinan, even before the rebels came. Vengeance could give birth to horrors not to be spoken aloud. So could fear.
One woman who had given all of them music (and more) was dead this morning, in her youth and grace. Tai wasn’t ready to lose another now because of Wen Zhou.
He had always known that actions could have unintended consequences, any man’s actions, of whatever rank. But sometimes events could also be shaped. Words had been spoken to soldiers by the imperial heir, on their ride from the palace. Consequences had followed.
Wen Zhou. Jian. Tai’s brother. And the emperor yielding the throne that same morning to his son. Tai had knelt before the Serene and Exalted Emperor Shinzu, ruling now with the mandate of heaven, and realized he didn’t know how much had been foreseen, or intended, by this man.
He didn’t ever expect to know for certain.
He would do his duty. Kitai was an empire at war now, beset from within. But the Kanlins from the sanctuary could not be at the imperial highway inn before nightfall, at best. So he had a little time, though he’d have to move at speed, and probably through the night again, depending upon what he found in Xinan.
As ordered, he started from the inn yard with his own Kanlins, Taizu’s carriage, and the soldiers who’d escorted their party from the palace in the night.
The other fifty men of the Second Army were going north with the new emperor. It was a great honour. Their dui commander had them standing in rigid, disciplined order in the courtyard, awaiting the command to set out.
Tai had watched Wei Song observing this. He thought about the idea that these men were being honoured. He said nothing. Sometimes it was better not to know the details of what might come. And he had his own task to attend to now.
A short distance from Ma-wai he reined Dynlal to a halt and in the middle of the roadway told Song and Zian and Lu Chen his intention. He didn’t present it as a matter for discussion.
They all came with him. His other Kanlins stayed with Taizu and the soldiers. They’d wait at the inn for the sixty riders from the sanctuary.
Tai and three companions set out across the fields, cutting south to intersect the imperial highway. They rode through a late-summer morning and then an afternoon that ought to have registered as beautiful. High white clouds and a breeze from the west.
He was thinking of death. Behind them and at Teng Pass, and increasingly, as they rode, with a cold awareness of more to come in the days ahead.
The road system near Xinan was exceptionally good. It was rare that riders had to cross farmland or skirt the edges of what small bamboo forests remained. They found a track leading east, then another running off it south towards the highway, passing through village after village, a blurred progression.
People came out to watch them gallop through, or stopped in whatever they were doing. Riders moving so fast was unusual. Something to talk about on a quiet day. Dynlal was a glory, running easily. The other three had changed mounts at the station. Even so, he could have outstripped them had he chosen to. He almost did make that choice, but he knew he’d need them when he entered the city.
He never entered the city. He never came close to doing so.
They heard the noise, like a heavy storm or a waterfall, before they saw anything: a roar of sound as they raced up a rise in their small roadway near the highway. Then they crested that rise and saw what was happening below.
The city was emptying out, in panic. His heart aching, Tai saw the imperial road thronged with the people of Xinan, pushing west in a tumultuous mass that spilled into the drainage ditches and across them into the clogged going of the summer fields beside the road.
People were struggling with their belongings on their backs, or pulling carts with children and the elderly and their goods. The noise was punishing. At times a scream or cry would rise above it, as someone was pushed into the ditch, or fell and was trampled. If you fell you were likely to die. Progress was agonizingly slow, Tai saw, and the mass of people stretched back east as far as he could see.
He couldn’t even see the city gates, they were too far away. But he could imagine them. All the gates. Word of disaster had arrived. Xinan’s inhabitants were not inclined, it seemed, to wait for Roshan to come to them.
“They will starve out here,” said Sima Zian softly. “And these are just this morning’s vanguard. Only the beginning.”
“Some will stay,” said Lu Chen. “Some always stay, for their homes, their families. They will keep their heads down and hope that bloodshed passes.”
“Eventually, it probably will,” said Tai. “He wants to rule, doesn’t he?”
“Eventually,” agreed Lu Chen. “But that can seem like forever.”
“Is it going to be forever, this war?”
Tai looked at Song, who had asked that, gazing down on the crawling-forward multitude on the road. She was biting her lower lip.
“No,” he said. “But much will change.”
“Everything?” she asked, looking at him.
“Much,” he said again. “Not everything.”
“Tai, we can’t get into the city.” It was Zian. “We must hope she received your warning and responded. But there’s no way to swim against this current.”
Tai looked at him, a bleakness in his heart. Then he shook his head. “Yes, we can. Swim is a good idea. We’ll get in through the canals.”
It was a good idea, but it didn’t matter. Sometimes that happens.
They spent the rest of the afternoon cutting overland across fields and along small roads again, forcing their way east. Even the back roads and rutted cart tracks had crowds by late in the day, all fleeing west. It became difficult to make any headway. People cursed the four of them on their horses. If it hadn’t been for the Kanlins, the respect and apprehension they engendered, they might even have been attacked. Tai fought anger and panic, aware that time was running against them.
When they finally reached a vantage point, forcing tiring horses up a ridge from which they could see Xinan’s walls, he heard a voice cursing, and realized it was his own.
In the evening light, Xinan, capital of the empire, glory of the world, was spread below them. The city looked like a hive with all the insects in flight from it, pouring out of every gate, along all roads. And within the walls, they could see smoke rising.
Roshan was days away, and already Xinan was burning.
“Look at the Ta-Ming,” Sima Zian said.
The palace was on fire.
“They’ll be looting it,” said Tai.
“Where are the guards?” Song cried.
“Looting it,” Tai said wearily.
Zian murmured, “They know the emperor has fled. What could the city understand from that, other than that he’s abandoned it? Abandoned them.”
“He left to regroup! To gather armies. The dynasty will fight!” Song’s tone revealed a great strain.
“We know that,” the poet answered, gently. “But how does that help those down there, with An Li coming for them?”
Tai was looking at the canals, where they flowed lazily into the city under arches in the walls, bearing firewood and lumber, marble and other stone and heavy goods and foodstuffs on any normal day. There were substantial punishments for being found in a canal; they were known to be a weakness in the city’s defences.
There were thousands of people, he saw, who had chosen to take the risk of a beating today. So many bodies were in the water, pushing, fighting their way through, bearing goods on their heads, children on their backs, or carrying nothing at all but terror and the need to get away.
People will drown, he thought.
Lu Chen lifted a hand and pointed. Tai saw a new tongue of flame within the Ta-Ming Palace.
The others sat their horses beside him on
the ridge. They said nothing. They were honouring his sorrow, Tai knew, by letting him be the one to say it. To surrender the day’s hopeless quest. They had come with him, and stayed by him.
He sat astride Dynlal gazing at a nightmare, or the beginnings of a nightmare. The sun was setting, its long light falling upon Xinan, making the walls seem gold. He was thinking of Rain, of green eyes and yellow hair, and a mind shrewder than his own, even in the days when he’d been immersed in his studies, trying to understand ancient courts and long-dead sages and the forms and rhythms of poetry.
He was thinking of her singing for him, of her hands in his hair, the two of them on a bed in a lamplit room.
There were so many poems over so many hundreds of years about courtesans, young or not young any more, at upper windows above jade or marble stairs, at twilight time or by moonlight, waiting for lovers to return. The night comes, and the stars, the streets are lit by lanterns on stone walls. The nightingale cries in the garden. Still no sound of horse’s hooves beneath my open window …
“We can’t do this,” he said. “We have to go back. I am sorry.”
He was, for so many things, as a long summer day finally went down to the dark. They turned west again, leaving the fires behind.
IT TOOK MOST OF THE NIGHT to reach the inn on the Imperial road. The same one where he’d awakened on a morning in spring to find Song wounded and held by soldiers, and Wen Jian waiting to take him to Ma-wai.
Because they were riding, even on tired horses and off the main roads, eventually they outpaced the struggling, exhausted vanguard of refugees from Xinan. They’d made their way down to the highway. It lay open before them under moonlight, serene and beautiful.
The Kanlins from the sanctuary, sixty of them, as promised, were waiting when they reached the inn. Taizu was asleep, they reported.
Tai had Dynlal led away to be watered and rubbed down and fed. They all needed to rest, he knew it, but he was unable to sleep. He was bone-weary and heartsick.
Song and Lu Chen went off with the other Kanlins. He thought of inviting her to stay with him, he’d seen how distressed she was. He didn’t feel able to offer comfort. She’d be better off with the Warriors, he thought.