River of Stars Read online

  I think of friends far away and my heart aches.

  I drink wine with new companions.

  They have opened their gate to a stranger.

  Kindness is a brightly feathered bird on a branch.

  We listen to their bell as it rings.

  We drink and they refill our wine cups.

  I will count myself honoured and blessed

  Whatever becomes of my last days.

  He had written that in springtime on their wall, running hand, large letters, the wide brush quick. The poem emerging as if discovering itself. He was known for improvising in this way. It would seldom be one’s best writing but would have a different kind of value, created right there, in the moment, as the black ink defined the wall.

  They had been very happy, the clerics, entering the room after he was done, seeing his words. It would help them a great deal, once it became known that a poem by Lu Chen was on a wall in Lingzhou Isle.

  He did this for friends, he did it for joy. He’d lived poetry all his life: carefully revised or swiftly improvised, drunken or sober, dark night, moonlight, morning mist, from the heart of power or protesting against it, or exiled, finally, here.

  The clerics had stared at the wall, the words. They had touched his hands, bowing over and over. Two of them had wept. He had suggested drinking in celebration. Said he very much wanted wine, which was only truth. One of them had gone across the village and come back with Lu Mah.

  It had been a long evening and night of food and drink. Not the best wine, but that wasn’t always what mattered most. They had slept there, he and his son, on cots in a guest chamber, and been escorted home at sunrise.

  That was one of the times when he’d seen the ghost on their cottage roof.

  Then, a little later, that year’s rains had come, and the damp and drip had immediately begun to cause the letters on the wall to run and fade. The last time he’d been at the sanctuary, they’d been almost gone.

  They weren’t, any more, he now saw.

  The poem was back. It was strong and vivid on the temple wall, as if he’d brushed it on yesterday. He recognized his own hand. What man would not know his own brush? No other person had come in and written out his poem anew. No one could do that.

  His characters, which had faded towards a smeared incoherence, were simply here again, in the running hand of the poet Lu Chen, often proclaimed to be an equal to the giants of the Ninth.

  (Others said that, not him.)

  But he knew, as he stood in bewildered, humbled silence, looking at his own words, listening to the clerics murmuring urgent prayers and incantations, hearing the crowd behind them whispering in awe, as he looked at his son and their eyes met, he knew that something, someone, from the spirit world had been here, was here now, and that this was—perhaps at a life’s end?—a very great gift.

  Honoured and blessed, he had written.

  He wondered if this meant he was about to die. It could mean that.

  My last days, he had written.

  IT TOOK A LONG TIME, the distances and difficulty were extreme, but the message sent from Hanjin recalling him from the island, allowing him back as far as the estate where he and his brother had a farm, reached Lingzhou the next spring.

  There was a date on the letter (it was an imperial document) and so they knew it had been issued the same day the Miracle of the Poem was discovered on the temple wall.

  By then, travellers had begun arriving, come to see the words.

  They were able to start north—Lu Chen and his son and the servant girl who asked to come with them—before the rains arrived. They waited out the wet season in the town of Fujou near the southern mountain range, amid terraced rice fields.

  They crossed the mountains in autumn on high, twisting paths. Two of them reached his brother’s home and his own just after the New Year’s Festival, late on a mild winter’s day, with a moon rising.

  The girl had died one morning in Fujou.

  Lu Chen had seen another ghost that afternoon—he couldn’t swear it was the same one as on Lingzhou, but he thought it was, which was chilling and strange. He’d also seen a fox in the open, red-orange at twilight, staring back at him, on a walk the evening before.

  He would always believe, because of these things, that her death had been meant for him. That spirits had intervened, deflected a god’s arrow from him—to find her, since an immortal’s loosed arrow always had to strike somewhere.

  They buried her with formality and respect. Mah was grieving. Lu Chen offered prayers in her name for the rest of his days, along with those for his parents and his first wife and his dead children, and the one for the ghost, which might be hers now.

  One of his most beloved late poems was about a woman’s soul in the shape of a grey heron, lost on a mountainside far from home.

  The other poem, the one on the wall at Lingzhou, never again faded for as long as the temple stood. It was there, drawing visitors, while the dynasty lasted, and after it ended, and after the next one ended. It survived all rains that fell, all thunderstorms, floods, calamities, until the building itself burned down one moonless winter night long afterwards, when an acolyte fell asleep tending the night fire and a wind rose up.

  There was never again a spirit seen on the roof or anywhere near the cottage where Lu Chen, the celebrated Twelfth Dynasty poet, was said to have lived in the time of his exile on the island, long ago.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER VII

  No real poet would claim originality for an image of streams becoming rivers over distance and time: how even those that can destroy farmlands with their flooding, or thunder through gorges and over falls, begin as rivulets in the rocks of mountains, or as underground waters that find the surface and begin to flow across the land to find the sea.

  Nor could the idea that rivers come together to make a single force be asserted as distinctive. The test is always in the words—and the brush strokes shaping them. There are only so many ideas, so many patterns in the world.

  Rivers do usually begin in almost imperceptible ways. The great events and changes of the world under heaven also frequently start that way, their origins recognized only by those troubling themselves to look back.

  Another idea everyone knows—historians, poets, farmers, even emperors: how much more clearly we see, looking back. One of the customs of the steppe—no one knew how long ago it had begun—was for kaghans of tribes offering submission to a greater one to dance for the stronger leader at the ceremonies where tribute and homage were paid.

  Dancing was an act performed by women—servants, slaves, hired performers, courtesans—or by subjugated men displaying their ritual abasement for all to see.

  TE-KUAN, FOURTEENTH EMPEROR of the Xiaolu, was a proud man and a dangerous one, particularly when he’d been drinking. He was equally comfortable with killing people himself or having others do it for him.

  He could not read or write but he had officials who could do both, and that was the nature of an emperor, in his view, certainly on the steppe. As leader of his people, of their empire, he was required to be strong enough to control his horsemen and their commanders, subdue or neutralize neighbouring tribes and peoples, compel their tribute, and ensure that the Kitan to the south, numerous as they might be, were sufficiently fearful to make their own very large payment north in silver and silk.

  Te-kuan had no problem with the Kitan naming that payment a gift. They were the people for whom words mattered, not the Xiaolu. On the steppe you had other things to think about.

  Older brother, younger brother were now the Kitan terms for the two emperors. Until two years ago it had been uncle and nephew .

  Te-kuan’s advisers had accomplished that change. He didn’t greatly care, himself, though he understood that when you dealt with the Kitan it made sense to press in ways that mattered to them, force them to bow down lower, and lower. So now he was a younger brother receiving an older one’s gifts from emissaries each spring.

  H
e knew, the whole world knew, that what he really was, was a warrior leader accepting tribute from a terrified empire. An empire whose armies couldn’t even defeat the Kislik in their desert to the northwest.

  The Kislik, Te-kuan thought, were nothing! He could destroy them any time he wanted, but better—his advisers had persuaded him—to let them have their harsh, bleak land and pay him tribute as well.

  That had become the problem, of course. The Kislik resented paying both the Xiaolu and the Kitan for the right to survive. They’d decided to resist the one they judged weaker, if more numerous. Te-kuan had smiled, hearing of it. He’d smiled again, learning of the Kitan disaster below Erighaya.

  Seventy thousand soldiers? A waste of lives so appalling it stopped the mind from thinking about it. The Xiaolu didn’t have so many riders to lose, but theirs knew how to fight. When you could afford to lose so many of your soldiers, it meant you didn’t take care of them. That was what Te-kuan thought.

  The war had drained the Kislik, too, weakening both empires that bordered him. The two of them had made a peace this year, finally. They were trading again. He didn’t care, so long as both kept paying the Xiaolu.

  His people lived in a hard, open-to-the-heavens world. They were children of steppe and sky. Wind and drought defined them, and their herds. Here, you were judged by what you did, not by words painted with a brush. What the Kitan emperor did was send two hundred thousand units each of silver and silk to him every year.

  Who was really the elder brother? You could laugh at their vain pretense, or grow angry at times, if you were drinking.

  Te-kuan ruled over a large number of Kitan people in his own southern territories, what they still called the Fourteen Prefectures in Hanjin where his “brother” Wenzong had his court. Wenzong was said to enjoy being given his meals from the fingers of his women (sometimes chewed by them first, rumour had it!) and to need two young ones to sing him to sleep each night and remain with him in case he woke, afraid, in the dark.

  The disputed lands, the Fourteen Prefectures, were still Xiaolu, in their empire, after all this time. Was it a surprise to anyone? His Kitan paid taxes, laboured, farmed fields. They were useful to him. If some were occasionally troublesome, that was what his horsemen were for. To keep order, doing whatever was necessary.

  It occurred to Te-kuan, riding east in autumn for the annual ceremony with subject tribes, that he might be accused of dwelling upon words himself, if he valued being an emperor more than a kaghan.

  Someone could say this. They would be wrong. It wasn’t only words. It had to do with what the Xiaolu had now become.

  A kaghan ruled a tribe wandering the sweep of the steppe, following their herds of cattle, sheep, goats, horses (always horses) with the seasons, battling wolves and hunger, living in yurts they carried with them, never at rest until they were left out on the grass under the sky when they died.

  An empire ... an empire had cities, walls, markets for trade. There were five Xiaolu capital cities now, in each of the four directions and one in the centre. An empire had farms and granaries and taxation, and men who knew how to manage such things. That was why his Kitan subjects mattered so much. In a good year they could nearly feed the Xiaolu with their harvest. In a less good one his officials bought grain and rice from Kitai—with silver the Kitan had given them in tribute!

  Empires also had subjects acknowledging their mastery. Those were the tribes that still called their leaders kaghan, Te-kuan thought.

  Empires had scribes and courts and a civil service. They had builders of wooden and stone structures to set down upon the land. They knew how to divert streams, dredge canals, irrigate fields. And now there was even a Xiaolu script, a calligraphy of their own. A Kitan had invented it for them, yes, but he was a subject of Emperor Te-kuan, served at his court.

  An emperor ruled many kinds of people, not just his ancestral tribe, with their memories of wandering.

  The leaders of three subject tribes were meeting him now at the gathering place by the Black River. They would pay tribute in horses, in silver and amber and furs, sometimes in gold, always in women.

  Te-kuan preferred the horses and gold. He had enough women, you could never have enough horses.

  He’d have preferred to send one of his sons on this journey by now. It was a long way to ride, and autumn was still hot and dry, with winds, and insects plaguing them whenever the wind died down. But he understood that it was necessary for the tribes to see him—their emperor—to acknowledge his power. Te-kuan had three thousand horsemen with him. The tribes needed to understand that he could easily be among them with an army, that there were reasons why they paid him tribute, called him lord.

  Why they danced for him at night, by torchlight, after feasting.

  BACK IN THE THIRD DYNASTY of Kitai, a thousand years ago, a fashion had begun of grouping things by fours. The Kitan liked order, numbering, symmetry, and they also enjoyed the debates that ensued.

  So they had the Four Great Beauties (ending with Wen Jian of the Ninth, still), the Four Great Battles, the Four Deadliest Floods of the Golden River, Four Worst Betrayals, Four Greatest Calligraphers ...

  In the Twelfth Dynasty, with so many clever, indolent jinshi graduates, grouping by fours was sometimes a source of amusement. The witty—as opposed to the wise—need to mock. They proposed the Four Loudest Belches, the Four Worst Tea Rooms in Hanjin, even silliness like the Four First Numbers. After enough wine, and in trusted company, someone might propose the Four Worst Ministers, but name only three, leaving room ...

  That was a dangerous game. Wine led men into error, and trusted company was a shifting, ambiguous concept. Better to nurse one’s cup and remain quiet even among those assumed to be friends. There were spies, for one thing, employed by the old prime minister and his followers—and the followers, the younger generation, were known to be worse than Minister Hang.

  A small number of ironic men mocking a tradition doesn’t end it. Those who jested in this way were implicitly acknowledging the power of the form. And so it was that some years after these events, one well-known list was the Four Most Calamitous Mistakes.

  Among these, routinely included, was a decision made by the fourteenth emperor of the Xiaolu one autumn night, among his eastern subjects.

  It was remarkable that this came to be included in a Kitan list: the Xiaolu were barbarians, and the incident in question involved their dealings with another tribe. A people the Kitan had scarcely even heard of at the time.

  That obscurity underlay everything, of course. The world could change (it did change) with a swiftness beyond belief.

  THE CUPS of kumiss remained, and the urns from which they were steadily refilled. The food and bowls had been taken away by the men assigned to serve. They were from the three tribute-giving tribes. Normally slaves would do this, or women would clear, then serve in other ways, in tents or out in the darkness on the autumn grass, but there were meanings attached to everything at these gatherings. There were no women here, other than the ones being given to the Xiaolu emperor as tribute.

  There were no shamans either. Shamans were dangerous. The emperor’s food was separately prepared by his own people. A eunuch tasted it. He had adopted the use of eunuchs from Kitai, their court. Not everything they did in the south was folly. Some of the castrates were intelligent, useful to him. Others ... tasted his food for poison.

  Men with no family to protect or advance would align themselves with the leader they served. It made sense to Te-kuan. Family demands, ambitious wives, could lead a man astray. The steppe was filled from rim to rim with such stories.

  Torches had been planted on poles as the sun went down and were now burning in the space before the yurts. The labour had been done by the three tribute-paying tribes: Khashin, Jeni, Altai.

  They had arrived at the Black River before the emperor, as was proper. They had waited for Te-kuan. They were his subjects. They paid him tribute. They danced for him.

  He would go home soon
with his three thousand warriors, new horses, a sizable tribute, and allegiances affirmed in the east. You could find your way to a better state of mind, Te-kuan thought, considering all of this.

  The kaghan of the Khashin tribe was named Paiya. He was a big man, but not good with kumiss. He was drunk already, amusingly. A leader needed to be able to drink with his riders to keep their respect. Paiya stood, wavered. He lifted his cup to Te-kuan, and drank it off. He threw the cup into the fire in the centre of the circle.

  Then he danced around that fire before his emperor. Sparks leaped, torches burned black smoke, hiding the stars where the wind carried it, then those stars could be seen again. Paiya danced well for a man far gone in drink. Perhaps because he was far gone in drink, Te-kuan thought. It would be difficult to dance like this before another man, before your own people, if you were hard-eyed and sober and had pride.

  A thought. He watched the large, shambling leader of the Khashin circle the fire, saw a spark land on his clothing, then another. Te-kuan drank, held up his cup. A tall eunuch hastily refilled it. He drank again, still thinking.

  Paiya finished his dance. It had lasted long enough, no sign of resentment (though Paiya must feel it if he was half a man). He lifted a hand, palm out, in salute. The tribes of the steppe did not bow. The Xiaolu expected bowing only when Kitan emissaries came.

  Under autumn stars, the kaghan of the Jeni now rose. He was new, young. The Jeni had been restive in the days of Te-kuan’s father. There had been a large force sent this way, restiveness had ended. Te-kuan watched the young kaghan carefully. He saw that the man (he forgot his name, it didn’t matter) was more sober than Paiya of the Khashin had been.

  He danced, however. Jumping across the fire and then back, leaping high, hands outflung, heels kicking back. There was laughter and even approval. Te-kuan allowed himself to be seen smiling. Let a tribal leader find his pride and approval in dancing well for his emperor. He was a good-looking man, this one. The Jeni were a handsome people. Te-kuan wondered about the women they had brought for him, his first such thought.