Under Heaven Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY GUY GAVRIEL KAY

  The Fionavar Tapestry:

  The Summer Tree

  The Wandering Fire

  The Darkest Road

  Tigana

  A Song for Arbonne

  The Lions of Al-Rassan

  The Sarantine Mosaic:

  Sailing to Sarantium

  Lord of Emperors

  The Last Light of the Sun

  Ysabel

  Beyond This Dark House

  (poetry)

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,

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  Previously published in a Viking Canada edition.

  First ROC Printing, May 2010

  Copyright © Guy Gavriel Kay, 2010

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18700-5

  Map copyright © Martin Springett, 2010

  All rights reserved

  Excerpt by Robert Lowell from “Waking Early Sunday Morning,”

  published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965.

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  PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  The Imperial Family, and Ta-Ming Palace mandarins

  Taizu, the Son of Heaven, emperor of Kitai

  Shinzu, his third son, and heir

  Xue, his thirty-first daughter

  Wen Jian, the Precious Consort, also called the Beloved Companion

  Chin Hai, formerly first minister, now deceased

  Wen Zhou, first minister of Kitai, cousin to Wen Jian

  The Shen Family

  General Shen Gao, deceased, once Left Side Commander of the Pacified West

  Shen Liu, his oldest son, principal adviser to the first minister

  Shen Tai, his second son

  Shen Chao, his third son

  Shen Li-Mei, his daughter

  The Army

  An Li (“Roshan”), military governor of the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Districts

  An Rong, his oldest son

  An Tsao, a younger son

  Xu Bihai, military governor of the Second and Third Districts, in Chenyao

  Xu Liang, his older daughter

  Lin Fong, commander of Iron Gate Fortress

  Wujen Ning, a soldier at Iron Gate

  Tazek Karad, an officer on the Long Wall

  Kanlin Warriors

  Wan-si

  Wei Song

  Lu Chen

  Ssu Tan

  Zhong Ma

  Artists

  Sima Zian, a poet, the Banished Immortal

  Chan Du, a poet

  In Xinan, the capital

  Spring Rain, a courtesan in the North District, later named Lin Chang

  Feng, a guard in the employ of Wen Zhou

  Hwan, a servant of Wen Zhou

  Pei Qin, a beggar in the street

  Ye Lao, a steward

  Beyond the borders of Kitai

  West

  Sangrama the Lion, ruling the Empire of Tagur

  Cheng-wan, the White Jade Princess, one of his wives, seventeenth daughter of Emperor Taizu

  Bytsan sri Nespo, a Taguran army officer

  Nespo sri Mgar, his father, a senior officer

  North

  Dulan, kaghan of the Bogü people of the steppe

  Hurok, his sister’s husband, later kaghan

  Meshag, Hurok’s older son

  Tarduk, Hurok’s second son

  With bronze as a mirror one can correct one’s

  appearance; with history as a mirror, one can

  understand the rise and fall of a state; with good

  men as a mirror, one can distinguish right from wrong.

  —LI SHIMIN, TANG EMPEROR TAIZONG

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER I

  Amid the ten thousand noises and the jade-and-gold and the whirling dust of Xinan, he had often stayed awake all night among friends, drinking spiced wine in the North District with the courtesans.

  They would listen to flute or pipa music and declaim poetry, test each other with jibes and quotes, sometimes find a private room with a scented, silken woman, before weaving unsteadily home after th
e dawn drums sounded curfew’s end, to sleep away the day instead of studying.

  Here in the mountains, alone in hard, clear air by the waters of Kuala Nor, far to the west of the imperial city, beyond the borders of the empire, even, Tai was in a narrow bed by darkfall, under the first brilliant stars, and awake at sunrise.

  In spring and summer the birds woke him. This was a place where thousands upon thousands nested noisily: fishhawks and cormorants, wild geese and cranes. The geese made him think of friends far away. Wild geese were a symbol of absence: in poetry, in life. Cranes were fidelity, another matter.

  In winter the cold was savage, it could take the breath away. The north wind when it blew was an assault, outdoors, and even through the cabin walls. He slept under layers of fur and sheepskin, and no birds woke him at dawn from the icebound nesting grounds on the far side of the lake.

  The ghosts were outside in all seasons, moonlit nights and dark, as soon as the sun went down.

  Tai knew some of their voices now, the angry ones and the lost ones, and those in whose thin, stretched crying there was only pain.

  They didn’t frighten him, not any more. He’d thought he might die of terror in the beginning, alone in those first nights here with the dead.

  He would look out through an unshuttered window on a spring or summer or autumn night, but he never went outside. Under moon or stars the world by the lake belonged to the ghosts, or so he had come to understand.

  He had set himself a routine from the start, to deal with solitude and fear, and the enormity of where he was. Some holy men and hermits in their mountains and forests might deliberately act otherwise, going through days like leaves blown, defined by the absence of will or desire, but his was a different nature, and he wasn’t holy.

  He did begin each morning with the prayers for his father. He was still in the formal mourning period and his self-imposed task by this distant lake had everything to do with respect for his father’s memory.

  After the invocations, which he assumed his brothers were also performing in the home where they’d all been born, Tai would go out into the mountain meadow (shades of green dotted with wildflowers, or crunching underfoot with ice and snow) and—unless there was a storm—he would do his Kanlin exercises. No sword, then one sword, then both.

  He would look at the cold waters of the lake, with the small isle in the middle of it, then up at the surrounding, snow-draped, stupefying mountains piled upon each other. Beyond the northern peaks the land sloped downwards for hundreds of li towards the long dunes of the killing deserts, with the Silk Roads running around either side of them, bringing so much wealth to the court, to the empire of Kitai. To his people.

  In winter he fed and watered his small, shaggy horse in the shed built against his cabin. When the weather turned and the grass returned, he’d let the horse graze during the day. It was placid, wasn’t about to run away. There was nowhere to run.

  After his exercises, he would try to let stillness enter into him, a shedding of the chaos of life, ambition and aspiration: to make himself worthy of this chosen labour.

  And then he would set to work burying the dead.

  He’d never, from first arrival here, made any effort to separate Kitan from Taguran soldiers. They were tangled together, strewn or piled, skulls and white bones. Flesh gone to earth or to animals and carrion birds long since, or—for those of the most recent campaign—not so very long ago.

  It had been a triumph, that last conflict, though bitterly hard-won. Forty thousand dead in one battle, almost as many Kitan as Taguran.

  His father had been in that war, a general, honoured afterwards with a proud title, Left Side Commander of the Pacified West. Rewarded handsomely by the Son of Heaven for victory: a personal audience in the Hall of Brilliance in the Ta-Ming Palace when he returned back east, the purple sash presented, words of commendation spoken directly, a jade gift extended from the emperor’s hand, only one intermediary.

  His family were undeniably beneficiaries of what had happened by this lake. Tai’s mother and Second Mother had burnt incense together, lit candles of thanksgiving to ancestors and gods.

  But for General Shen Gao, the memory of the fighting here had been, until he’d died two years ago, a source of pride and sorrow intermingled, marking him forever after.

  Too many men had lost their lives for a lake on the border of nowhere, one that would not, in the event, be held by either empire.

  The treaty that had followed—affirmed with elaborate exchanges and rituals and, for the first time, a Kitan princess for the Taguran king—had established as much.

  Hearing the number from that battle—forty thousand dead—Tai, when young, had been unable to even picture what it must have been like. That wasn’t the case any more.

  The lake and meadow lay between lonely forts, watched by both empires from days away—to the south for Tagur, east for Kitai. It was always silent here now, save for the sound of wind, the crying of birds in season, and the ghosts.

  General Shen had spoken of sorrow and guilt only to his younger sons (never to the oldest). Such feelings in a commander could be seen as shameful, even treasonous, a denial of the emperor’s wisdom, ruling with the mandate of heaven, unfailing, unable to fail or his throne and the empire would be at risk.

  But the thoughts had been spoken, more than once, after Shen Gao’s retirement to the family property on their south-flowing stream near the Wai River, usually after wine on a quiet day, with leaves or lotus blossoms falling in the water to drift downstream. And the memory of those words was the principal reason his second son was here for the mourning period, instead of at home.

  You could argue that the general’s quiet sadness had been wrong, misplaced. That the battle here had been in necessary defence of the empire. It was important to remember that it hadn’t always been the armies of Kitai triumphing over the Tagurans. The kings of Tagur, on their distant, completely defended plateau, were hugely ambitious. Victory and savagery had gone both ways through a hundred and fifty years of fighting by Kuala Nor beyond Iron Gate Pass, which was, in itself, as isolated a fortress as the empire knew.

  “A thousand miles of moonlight falling, east of Iron,” Sima Zian, the Banished Immortal, had written. It wasn’t literally true, but anyone who had ever been at Iron Gate Fortress knew what the poet meant.

  And Tai was several days’ ride west of the fort, beyond that last outpost of empire, with the dead: with the lost crying at night and the bones of over a hundred thousand soldiers, lying white in falling moonlight or under the sun. Sometimes, in bed in the mountain dark, he would belatedly realize that a voice whose cadences he knew had fallen silent, and he would understand that he’d laid those bones to rest.

  There were too many. It was beyond hope to ever finish this: it was a task for gods descending from the nine heavens, not for one man. But if you couldn’t do everything, did that mean you did nothing?

  For two years now, Shen Tai had offered what passed for his own answer to that, in memory of his father’s voice asking quietly for another cup of wine, watching large, slow goldfish and drifting flowers in the pond.

  The dead were everywhere here, even on the isle. There had been a fort there, a small one, rubble now. He’d tried to imagine the fighting sweeping that way. Boats swiftly built on the pebbled shore with wood from the slopes, the desperate, trapped defenders of one army or the other, depending on the year, firing last arrows at implacable enemies bringing death across the lake to them.

  He had chosen to begin there two years ago, rowing the small craft he’d found and repaired; a spring day when the lake mirrored blue heaven and the mountains. The isle was a defined ground, limited, less overwhelming. In the mainland meadow and far into the pine woods the dead lay strewn as far as he could walk in a long day.

  For a little more than half the year under this high, fierce sky he was able to dig, bury broken, rusted weapons with the bones. It was brutally hard work. He grew leathery, muscled, callused, ach
ed at night, fell wearily into bed after washing in water warmed at his fire.

  From late fall, through the winter, into early spring, the ground was frozen, impossible. You could break your heart trying to dig a grave.

  In his first year the lake froze, he could walk across to the isle for a few weeks. The second winter was milder and it did not freeze over. Muffled in furs then, hooded and gloved in a white, hollow stillness, seeing the puffs of his mortal breath, feeling small against the towering, hostile vastness all around, Tai took the boat out on days when waves and weather allowed. He offered the dead to the dark waters with a prayer, that they might not lie lost any longer, unconsecrated, on wind-scoured ground here by Kuala Nor’s cold shore, among the wild animals and far from any home.

  WAR HAD NOT BEEN CONTINUOUS. It never was, anywhere, and particularly not in a mountain bowl so remote, so difficult for sustained supply lines from either country, however belligerent or ambitious kings and emperors might be.

  As a consequence, there had been cabins built by fishermen or by the herders who grazed sheep and goats in these high meadows, in the intervals when soldiers weren’t dying here. Most of the cabins had been destroyed, a few had not. Tai lived in one of them, set north against a pine-treed slope—shelter from the worst winds. The cabin was almost a hundred years old. He had set about repairing it as best he could when he’d first come: roof, door and window frames, shutters, the stone chimney for the fire.