Or perhaps not. He didn’t know. He didn’t have that much clarity in him tonight. Ma-wai, what had happened there. And Xinan on fire, with Spring Rain inside the walls. Or perhaps trapped among tens of thousands on one road or another.
He didn’t know. He walked through the reception chamber of the inn. Saw frightened men standing there, unsure of what to say or think. They bowed to him. He went through into the courtyard, the garden.
A little later Zian came out and found him. Tai was sitting on a bench under a mulberry tree. The poet carried wine, and two cups. He sat down and poured and Tai drained a cup, then held it out again. Zian filled it a second time and Tai drank that, too.
The poet was a quiet, comforting presence. It felt illicit, somehow, to take comfort in anything tonight. Friendship, starlight. The night breeze.
Zian said, “You will need to rest.”
“I know.”
“You will leave in the morning?”
“Before sunrise. We should stay ahead of those fleeing the city.” Tai looked at the other man, a shadow beside him. The leaves above blocked the moonlight. “You are coming with us?”
A short silence. Then Zian shook his head. “It may be arrogant of me, a delusion, but I believe I can do more good with the emperor. The … father-emperor.”
“Taizu can’t keep up with us.”
“Of course not. But he will be grieving, and he has only that fool of an alchemist with him, and soldiers. He has a long way to go and the roads are hard. Heaven’s way is bent like a bow now. Perhaps an old poet can help.”
“You aren’t old.”
“Tonight I am.”
There was a silence in the garden, and then Tai heard the poet speak again, offering him a gift:Together our spirits soared to nine heavens
But soon we will scatter like stars before rain.
I follow a fading dragon over hills and rivers.
You must journey to far borders.
Perhaps one day you will go home, my friend,
Crossing a last bridge over the River Wai.
Tai said nothing for a time. He was moved, and very tired. The wine, the words, the stillness. “I will see you again?”
“If heaven allows. I will hope so. We’ll drink good wine in another garden, listening to pipa music.”
Tai drew a breath. “I will hope so. Where … where will you be?”
“I don’t know. Where will you be, Shen Tai?”
“I don’t know.”
CHAPTER XXVI
Ye Lao, once under-steward to the Beloved Companion Wen Jian, was now principal household steward to the honourable and distinguished Master Shen Tai (son of the famous general). This meant, of course, that he was burdened with formal responsibility for Master Shen’s quite substantial compound in Xinan in extremely uncertain times. Household stewards, without exception, preferred certainty.
Ye Lao had never endured a major rebellion or the arrival of angry soldiers in any city or palace he’d known. You heard tales about such times, you didn’t live through them—if the gods in the nine heavens were kind.
They weren’t always kind, of course.
Being quite good at his job, and priding himself on it, Lao refused to allow himself to be unduly frightened or flustered (and, most definitely, did not permit the household servants to see a hint of such feelings in him) until the army of An Li was actually sighted at the eastern gates of the city, seven days after the emperor and a handful of the court had fled.
At that point, as rebel soldiers began pouring into Xinan, and reports of shocking conduct reached Master Shen’s compound, Ye Lao found himself becoming slightly perturbed. The jackals were in the city, someone quoted, the dragons were in the wild.
Xinan was left open for Roshan, of course: only fools would close city gates when there were no soldiers to defend them. But this courtesy had not induced any immediate limiting of violence.
One expected, in the usual way of soldiers arriving in a civilized place, a certain amount of intoxication, destruction, looting, even killing, unnecessary though it was.
It was undoubtedly wisest to keep women out of sight, and hope the poor girls in the pleasure districts proved equal to the task of assuaging a drunken army.
About half a million citizens of Xinan had, if widespread reports were accurate, chosen to flee ahead of the rebels. They’d streamed out in all directions, trampling each other in their haste. Some had even gone east, right into the approaching storm, probably towards country homes and family, hoping to scurry north and south around the advancing army and get back to their farmland roots.
Most of those escaping went west or south. A certain number were reported to be making their way north, once word arrived that the new emperor, Shinzu (it was a difficult idea, a new emperor), was rallying the Ninth Dynasty there.
In Ye Lao’s view, most of the people in flight were making a mistake.
Unless they had family in the country with room for them, an actual place to go, starvation outside Xinan was a real possibility. In fact, with so many on the move it was hard to imagine how they could all be sheltered and fed, even with family waiting.
It was assumed by those who stayed that An Li and his sons intended to establish themselves in the Ta-Ming Palace, and would therefore act in a manner befitting a self-proclaimed new dynasty.
There would be some measure of undisciplined behaviour, but that would surely be brought under control, and life in the capital would resume in acceptable fashion.
With this underlying thought in Xinan, one that he shared, it was profoundly shocking for Ye Lao to learn of wanton slaughter in the palace from the first hours, and continuing.
There were public executions in the square before the Ta-Ming’s walls. It was reported that the hearts of dead members of the imperial family were being ripped out and offered as a sacrifice to the ghost of An Li’s slain son. It was said that some were executed by having the tops of their heads ripped off with iron claws.
Bodies were piled in the square and it was forbidden to claim them for burial. Huge bonfires were built and men and women were burned with black, choking smoke rising, and an appalling stench. It was barbarous, in Ye Lao’s view.
All mandarins found, even newly graduated lowly officials, were killed within the Purple Myrtle Court, if they hadn’t had the foresight to discard their robes and belts and hide themselves in the city, or flee.
The women of the palace were, report had it, being fearfully abused. Many of Taizu’s concubines and musicians were being shipped in wagons, as slaves, back towards Yenling and the rebel soldiers left behind there. Roshan knew what needed doing, to keep an army happy.
There was a widespread smashing-in of private gates, almost at random, as inebriated soldiers crashed through, spilling destruction and death. Not all of Xinan’s wives and daughters—or younger boys—were successfully hidden.
There were fires everywhere in those first days.
You risked your life walking the streets in search of food. The markets were closed. Bodies lay among refuse and wild animals, smoke and yellow dust, and the smell of burning.
Word was conveyed by military heralds moving through the city that anyone offering to the new dynasty’s illustrious leaders the whereabouts of children or grandchildren of Taizu—once emperor, now unmasked as a coward and having lost the mandate of heaven—any such information would be met with a reward and formal assurances of household safety.
What followed was ugly, as the hiding places of Taizu’s many offspring and their children (often very young) were promptly reported, their disguises revealed. These helpless, hapless princes and princesses were, every one of them, brought to the bonfires before the Ta-Ming walls and beheaded.
Steward Ye Lao’s distaste for such conduct was beyond his capacity to express. This man, An Li, had proclaimed himself an emperor? Successor to nine dynasties of glory in Kitai? Men, Lao thought grimly, were no better than beasts, they were wolves or tigers.
H
e kept his head up and his ears open, gathered what information he could, and ensured that the household of Master Shen remained as orderly as possible, under trying conditions. Some of the staff had fled in the first days but most had nowhere to go and had stayed, fearfully.
There was a private well in the second right-side courtyard of the compound, a pleasing indication of its importance. Lao arranged for every bucket and pail on the property to be filled and kept in readiness, should the fires one could see everywhere now reach them. He had linens soaked in water every morning.
Food was a difficult matter, but not yet impossible. After ten days Roshan allowed the markets to reopen, for those brave enough to venture forth, either to sell or to buy.
Some farmers began hesitantly coming in after that, with milk and eggs, vegetables and poultry, millet and barley, picking their way past dead bodies, and crying, abandoned children, and smouldering ruins.
Prices were high. You could call them outrageous, except that you really couldn’t, under the circumstances. Ye Lao expected them to go higher.
He took thought one morning and an idea came to him, a recollection: hadn’t Master Shen had an encounter with Roshan himself, on his way back to Xinan from the west? If memory served, it had been the day before Ye Lao himself (and his former mistress) had encountered Shen Tai at the posting inn on the imperial road.
He didn’t know any details, and no one in the compound knew more (he asked), but on impulse—a steward’s instinct based on his master’s nature—Ye Lao composed a brief, careful note and had it conveyed by a terrified under-servant (one he judged expendable) to the Ta-Ming, once Roshan had ordered the killing there to stop. He was occupying the palace himself, and had probably realized he needed some people to run it.
(An experienced steward could have told him that, from the outset.)
Word was that the Phoenix Throne itself had been smashed to fragments, and the gemstones embedded in it removed, by some members of the imperial family before they’d fled. This to prevent a barbarian usurper from placing his gross body on that throne.
Ye Lao approved, quietly.
He never did learn if his note was received. There was no reply. In it he’d simply advised the palace, all who might be there serving the Revered and August Emperor An Li of the Tenth Dynasty, who owned this particular property.
He did note in the days and weeks that followed, allowing himself a small measure of satisfaction, that no soldiers came to their gates, no one smashed them open, to do what they were doing elsewhere.
It was disturbing to learn, as they did learn, what had been done to the household of the late first minister within his city compound, not far away at all, in this same ward.
As if those poor men and women had had any role in the crimes attributed to Wen Zhou. The first minister was dead, a ghost, denied honourable burial. Why would anyone feel a need to take brutal, blood-drenched vengeance on household servants, concubines, stewards?
Ye Lao was angry, a disturbing feeling for a man who prided himself on a trained steward’s composure.
He continued to manage the compound as best he could through the late summer (which was hot that year, and dry, increasing the risk of fires). As the days passed, the city was slowly brought under control. Bodies were removed from the streets; a subdued, hesitant rhythm returned to the capital. The sunrise drums, the evening drums. Most of the rebel soldiers left for battlefields north and south. Shinzu appeared to be rallying the Ninth Dynasty forces against them.
In Xinan, the killings and looting diminished, if they never entirely stopped. Some of it by now was pure thievery, Lao knew, criminals using chaos for their own purposes. Every so often another member of Taizu’s family would be discovered in hiding, and killed.
Ye Lao awaited instructions of any kind, though without any real confidence that they’d come. He had no idea if Master Shen was even alive. He knew he’d left the city—he’d watched him go, in the middle of a night. He did think, perhaps too trustingly, that they’d have heard if he were dead, even with the empire fractured by war. They’d learned of other deaths, for example—including that of the first minister and the Lady Wen Jian.
That news had come right at the outset, after the emperor fled, well before Roshan’s arrival. To Ye Lao, the tidings had, for many reasons, brought great sadness.
Over time he heard that there were poems being written about her passing. A brightness fallen from the world, a star returning to the heavens, words to such effect.
Ye Lao had no ear for poetry. On the other hand, later in what turned out to be a very long life, he would tell stories about her, warming himself on winter nights with the glow in people’s eyes when they understood that he’d served Wen Jian, that he’d knelt before her, been spoken to, kissed the hem of her robe.
She had passed into legend by then.
Back in that summer when the rebels came, his task, as he came to understand it, was straightforward: to preserve order in one small place, one household, in a world that had lost all sense of order or claim to being civilized.
He didn’t give it a great deal of thought, caught up in his day-today tasks, but one morning, in autumn, it suddenly came to him that the men and women here in Master Shen Tai’s compound trusted him completely, relied upon him, were doing whatever he ordered, for reasons that went beyond rank or deference.
He was keeping them alive.
Most nights now Rain awakens afraid, disturbed by sounds that turn out to be nothing at all, whether they are in some small inn on the road or a larger one in a city, as now.
She doesn’t like being so fearful, it isn’t how she thinks of herself, but the times are very dangerous, and she knows she isn’t the only one feeling this way.
She is alive to feel anything at all—and she’s acutely aware of this—only because of a note sent in the middle of the night, and because two men turned out to be loyal beyond anything she might have expected.
And because of the Kanlins, of course.
Perhaps, also, her own decisiveness, but when she looks back at that night it doesn’t seem to her that she’d felt decisive. She had been panicked as much as anything, acted on impulse, instinct. Fear.
Small things, a difference in her own mood that night, a message not sent, or lost, or not delivered until morning (by which time it would have been impossible to get away). Smallest differences: living or dying. Such thoughts could keep you awake at night.
They now know, here in Chenyao to the west, a little of what happened in Xinan after they left. The two Kanlins, still with her, have ways of discovering information even in wartime. A time when letters go astray, when posting inn horses are all claimed by the army, when news of any kind is worth a fortune.
In particular, they have learned what took place in the city compound of the recently deceased first minister, Wen Zhou, when the rebel army arrived in the capital.
Is it so surprising, really, if she startles awake at alarming sounds in the dark, or never even falls asleep?
It is the narrowness of survival, of her being here and alive, that unsettles as much as anything. That, and the awareness of how many are dead, and how savagely. She knows names, remembers faces. It is impossible not to think about what would have been done to her, as favoured concubine. There are sickening stories, worse than anything ever heard about the barbarians beyond Kitai’s borders.
She is from beyond those borders. Sardia is a beleaguered little kingdom that has always known warfare and contended with invasion. Even so, Rain has never heard tales such as those that come to them from Xinan.
Xinan, which lies behind her only because Tai sent a note in the middle of the night. He’d been summoned to the palace—she understands that from the Kanlins. Wen Zhou had been sent for as well.
That was what had put her on edge that night. He’d been with her when the message came. Sitting up in bed, watching him read it by the light of a quickly lit lamp, Rain had understood that this wasn’t any routine summo
ns to the Ta-Ming. Those didn’t come at this hour, and they didn’t shake him so profoundly.
He’d dressed in haste and left immediately with guards, saying nothing—nothing—to her, to anyone. Also disturbing. He’d burned the note, or she’d have retrieved it and read it as soon as she was alone.
Some time later—the passage of time that night is blurred—Hwan had come with another message, this one addressed to her.
He might so easily have waited until morning. That would have made all the difference. Or the note might not have reached her at all.
It had been carried by Qin, the crippled beggar in the street.
She understood, and it humbled her even now, that he had entrusted it to no one. Had paid coins to a drunken tradesman (and why had he been in the street, passing by, so late?) to carry him—carry him—all the long way around to the front gates of the compound. And he’d stayed there, painfully on his feet, banging at the gates and shouting, until someone had sleepily, angrily come.
And then he’d demanded, loudly, fiercely, without backing down, that Hwan be brought to him, and no one else but Hwan.
And, improbably (another source of fear in her imagining those moments), they hadn’t beaten him and turned him away. Hwan, awake since the master had ridden out, had come to see what the disturbance was.
The disturbance.
He had accepted the note, hand passing it to hand, and brought it to her. Immediately, not waiting for morning. Perhaps he’d known she’d be awake. Perhaps he’d been frightened. She’s never asked, though he’s been with her all the way here, to Chenyao.
So has Qin.
She can’t say with certainty why she kept them with her, but it had seemed proper, it had seemed … needful. As she’d read Tai’s note, Rain felt some inner imperative overtaking her.
Possible danger. Be very alert, he’d written.