River of Stars Page 18

  “They’ll be circling the whole town,” Pan said, confidently. “I heard them say.”

  “Two hundred aren’t enough to ring Chunyu,” Daiyan said. “Not with some of them also searching houses.” He thought for a moment, then explained what he wanted done ...

  They opened the door a crack and Pan was out. Even knowing he was there, the boy was barely visible, a shadow in the yard, then vaulting the wooden fence (not opening the gate) and gone in the night.

  “He’s quick,” said Ziji.

  “He’s impossible,” said his sister.

  The two men looked at each other.

  “I have no wine,” she said brusquely. Her posture had changed, she sat straighter, hands clasped in front of her.

  Daiyan said softly, “We don’t need wine. If soldiers come, we’ll be out the back. You will not be linked to us. You need not fear ... in any way.”

  “What do you know of what I need to fear?”

  No good answer to that.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  A belated realization coming home to him. These two—both of them—were sharp, clever, not the children of a watchman. “What did ... has your father always been at the mine?”

  She seemed to struggle with herself. Ziji was at the window, watching the street beyond the small front garden.

  “He was a teacher,” she said. “They dismissed him and branded him when my brother went to the forest.”

  “The soldiers?”

  She nodded, a barely visible movement.

  “Why did your brother go?”

  “He was recruited for the Flowers and Rocks. He fought the men who came to get him, broke the arm of one, and fled.”

  “And they punished his father?” Ziji asked, from the window.

  “Of course they did,” she said. “Branded his forehead in the town square. Father of a criminal.”

  Daiyan said, “Your ... your little brother said you like the soldiers.”

  She sighed. Her name was Bian, he remembered.

  “He doesn’t have to feed us,” she said. “He’s a child. I talk to some of them at the market. Sometimes we get tea or rice from one or another.” She looked at Daiyan, added, “I don’t do anything else for it.”

  He cleared his throat. He was wishing for wine now, actually. He sat down on the stool.

  “I only asked because you, both of you are very ... are ...”

  “We are not terrified peasants? Thank you so much,” she said. He heard Ziji laugh softly.

  He cleared his throat again. The silence grew uncomfortable. He said, “I’ve heard the horses from Sardia were the best in the world in the old days.”

  “So you said. How interesting. I shall make certain to tell my father when he comes home after walking twenty li, before he falls asleep.”

  “Soldiers!” said Ziji.

  Daiyan stood quickly. “All right. We go out the back. Bian, you’ll have to bolt the gate behind us. Thank you for trying.”

  “Stay where you are,” she said. “They won’t be searching houses in the middle of the night. Keep quiet,” she added.

  Then she went to the door, opened it, and stepped outside.

  “What’s all this?” she called out. “What’s happening?”

  “Shao Bian? Is that you?”

  “Who else would it be, Dou Yan? What is happening?”

  Daiyan and Ziji could see nothing, out of sight towards the back of the room.

  “Two outlaws of the marsh!” the soldier shouted. “We’re hunting them down!”

  “An adventure,” Bian said dryly.

  “Miss Bian,” another voice called, “shall we come visit with you instead?” Daiyan heard laughter.

  “Of course!” she called back. “All of you, bring friends. Bring the outlaws, too!”

  More laughter, a different tone.

  “She can handle them,” Ziji murmured.

  “Dou Yan, listen,” they heard her saying. “My brother is out there somewhere, chasing excitement. If you find him, beat him and send him back to me.”

  “Find that one? Better chase a cat in a tree,” a different soldier called. Laughter again, perhaps four or five of them, then a snapped order from a distance. They heard the soldiers swear and begin moving on.

  Bian stayed outside the open door. A moment later both men startled as a shadow slipped past her like a ghost.

  “See?” said Pan. “She told them to beat me!”

  His sister followed him in and closed the door.

  “I think she gave them a reason why you might be out there,” Ziji said prosaically.

  “You don’t understand a thing about her!” Pan sniffed.

  “Talk,” said Daiyan. “What did you see?”

  The one-time teacher who now guarded a mine at night had raised remarkable children, he was thinking. It wasn’t their concern, however. He and Ziji needed to get out of Chunyu, and then they needed to ...

  And it was in that instant that he realized what else he needed to do. It was, in the strangest way, as clear and compelled as the moment he’d left a path in the far west, near home, and walked into the forest.

  He would be able to name this moment, later, with precision: a night-dark springtime house in a north-of-the-river town, standing beside a clever, red-headed young woman and a quick, wild child, and Ziji.

  WITH ADVANCE SCOUTING, which is what Pan had given them, it was easy enough to know where to break through. It was too easy, Daiyan kept thinking, all through the stages of that night. The army of Kitai, even those down here away from war, ought to have been better at something so straightforward as trapping outlaws inside a town.

  They killed one man each, with the knives. With a need for absolute silence they had no real choice but to kill. The soldiers had been forced to spread out, as he’d guessed, fifteen paces apart, and more in places. With men diverted to searching the streets (too noisily, too easily seen in moonlight) the ring around Chunyu was inadequate to its purpose. One kill each, the bodies dragged into darkness, army clothing put on over their own, soldiers’ weapons claimed.

  They slipped into the line, stood on guard for a time, then simply stepped backwards, silently, away, and away, and out.

  They were on the north side of town but it didn’t matter, once beyond the ring. They went farther north before cutting east and finding, towards morning, the wood where they’d hidden their weapons. They kept the two extra swords. There was always a need for weapons in the marsh.

  “Your names?” the girl, Bian, had asked, as they’d waited for Pan’s signal it was safe to go through the yard and across the street.

  “Better you don’t know,” Daiyan said, which was true.

  “Zhao Ziji,” Ziji said.

  She looked at him. Ziji added, “If we survive this, we will send something to you. That is a promise. Trust the innkeeper. We ... we may be able to help Pan. A better life for him. Maybe.”

  “Only him?” she asked.

  Daiyan would remember that.

  HE DID NOT WRITE his father. He had no idea what he could say.

  Once free of Chunyu, they lingered another few days on the north side of the river. They heard a story in a hamlet west of Dizeng—a major expedition planned by the Flowers and Rocks people. There was a huge rock in a lake nearby, they wanted it brought up, taken to Hanjin for the emperor’s garden.

  It would be a massive undertaking, according to what they heard.

  Daiyan gave money to the chief elder in that small village. The marsh outlaws always did that, it went to ease tax burdens, and to secure their welcome should they need to return.

  The elder confirmed something else: the new chief magistrate in Jingxian city, east along the river, was indeed Wang Fuyin, appointed a year ago. He hadn’t really doubted it, after his father’s letter.

  It was interesting, triggered memories. Daiyan wondered what the man was like now. He had no idea what to do with this knowledge. Perhaps if he wer
e captured near Jingxian, he’d be allowed a cleaner death?

  They went back to the river and crossed with the same ferryman, this time at night—they had to wait on the north bank for a wind to die down. You needed to trust your ferryman. The stars at night, with the moon waning, were hard, bright, multitudinous.

  Waiting by the riverbank they glimpsed a fox. Ziji was afraid of foxes. Something in his family history—a great-uncle destroyed by a fox-woman. Some men joked about sleeping with a daiji, the legendary wildness of that lovemaking. Ziji never joined in those jests. He had even been initially unsettled by the red hair of the girl in Chunyu, Daiyan knew, though he didn’t tease about that. Some things a man was allowed to keep to himself, even with friends.

  They returned to the marsh and the arrival of spring.

  Some time in that interval, watching cranes, rabbits, more wild geese passing as winter eased its grip, hearing the first orioles, Ren Daiyan understood that if he’d reached an awareness in Chunyu it meant nothing if it wasn’t acted upon. That would be harder than it had seemed in that dark house on the north shore.

  He could not do anything without speaking with Ziji. Their closeness, from the time the soldier had joined them years ago, demanded as much.

  He did speak, on patrol together one morning. Ziji named five others in their hundred, men he thought would be of the same mind, prepared to take the same risk. Daiyan was reluctant at first, then decided that if he was doing this he ought to be thinking in terms of other good men.

  They spoke to them, one by one. All five agreed to come.

  They went back across the river at the beginning of autumn. The plum blossoms had long since come and gone, then peach blossoms and peaches and summer’s crabapples. They moved alertly, the autumn tax collectors were abroad. Sometimes the taxmen were adequately defended. Not always. But they weren’t planning an attack. Not now.

  Daiyan had told the other leaders in the marsh he was going north to get information again and that he wanted enough men to harass a particular Flowers and Rocks group, if it was still near a village he knew. He was told, routinely, to be careful.

  He went away. Crossed the Great River again, same ferryman, a mild night this time, waves, different stars, leaving that part of his life behind, like a strange, flat dream of mist and marsh fires and men without women.

  CHAPTER IX

  Sima Peng’s father has always claimed that they are descended, in some way he’s never explained clearly, from a famed poet named Sima Zian.

  Peng doesn’t know, one way or another. It seems unlikely to her, and her husband takes the same view. Her father enjoys wine too much and is inclined to outrageous statements, and not only when drunk. People laugh at him, but he is good-natured and has never had enemies—not that any of them know about.

  Both of the village’s spirit mediums had asked that question, separately, when the family’s troubles began.

  Peng doesn’t know much about her supposed ancestor. There are few books in the village, and she can’t read. Poetry means little to her. She does like when people sing in their small temple of the Path, with its pretty green-tiled roof, or at festivals, or the women washing clothing in the stream. She isn’t a good singer and she forgets the words too often, but she joins in on washing days. It helps the time go by.

  Her older daughter had been a singer with a clear, bright voice. Like a temple bell, it was often said by the stream. Peng remembers that. A dutiful, pleasing girl—before a demon possessed her and their lives became bad.

  Now the good family from Dizeng Village that had agreed to marry her to their older son has withdrawn from the agreement. It is possible that Zhi-li and her younger sister might never marry now.

  Sima Peng cries herself to sleep most nights, often weeps during the day when she is alone. Her husband walks the village and fields with heavy shoulders and a face like stony ground. He has beaten her for keeping him awake at night, and beaten Zhi-li, in grief and fear.

  Perhaps he has been trying to drive the demon out of her.

  Zhi-li laughs whenever her father strikes her. It is a terrifying sound. Sima Peng’s legs lost all their strength the first time she heard it.

  Neither of the village mediums had been able to drive the evil spirit from her body, or explain what might have caused a blameless girl, on the eve of a good marriage and her departure for Dizeng, to be possessed by something so dark. A spirit that made her walk abroad with hair unbound and garments shamelessly loose, and say terrible things to her mother and to villagers who asked after her health.

  They had been forced to lock her up. She laughs aloud in the dead of night (neighbours hear it!) and has lost her appetite, even for river trout and fish cakes, once her favourites. Her eyes are strange and her colour bad.

  Peng fears that her daughter might die, even kill herself.

  She would never have declared herself a clever woman or a brave one, she is one of those of whom it is said their eyes are always downcast. But this was her daughter’s life, and so when word came to their marketplace that a ritual master had arrived at Dizeng Village and had been performing rites and exorcisms there, Peng woke early the very next morning, before the sun, and set out to walk the long way east to Dizeng (most of an autumn day) to speak with him.

  You brought a child into the world, fed her with your milk, clothed her and prayed for her, watched her grow in sunlight and rain. You did not turn away when a spirit from the other side set out to destroy her.

  Their own rival village mediums are united in only one thing—hatred of the ritual masters—but Peng had decided in the night that she didn’t care. Let them be angry, let her husband be angry when he woke and found her gone. Let her father be puzzled and silent and drink more wine. Both mediums had tried their possession ceremonies, and Zhi-li was unchanged.

  She had used foul words and gestures in the presence of her little brother yesterday evening, standing right in front of the ancestral altar. Peng doesn’t even understand how Zhi-li knew such words.

  She has a little money saved from her silk-spinning, hidden in a jar beneath a floorboard in the henhouse (or it would have been turned to wine, long ago). She has brought it with her. That is dangerous, of course. Their hamlet and the road are close to the Great River and outlaws are on both banks. She relies on how desperately poor she looks to save her from these.

  The outlaws tend to ally themselves with the poorer villagers. In return, they are given warnings of soldiers sent after them, word of merchants on the roads, and sometimes shelter, though that is risky.

  In Sima Peng’s humble view, the outlaws from the marshlands across the river and the bands on this side are less of a menace than taxation officers from the yamen in Dizeng, or the army claiming husbands and sons. And they are less deadly than those from the Flowers and Rocks, hounding them for brutal labour, beating those who hesitate or try to hide.

  Her brother had died this past spring, still a young man, dropping dead in a meadow while helping to pull a massive boulder from their lake for the emperor’s pleasure garden in far-off-Hanjin.

  No sorrow expressed, no compensation offered. A government official came with the body, told the family what had occurred, then turned his horse and went looking for more men (he had soldiers with him).

  In the days that followed they’d claimed even more workers from their hamlet, down to small boys, until they got the accursed rock out of the lake and mounted it on logs to roll towards the river and a waiting boat. The journey to the river, too, had been a savage task, lasting through summer. Men were beaten, maimed. Five more died, and a boy. Planted fields and their crops were crushed by the passage, farms and homes flattened ahead of their progress.

  For a rock. An ugly, pitted rock that destroyed lives.

  Peng’s husband and her father and brother had all gotten along, worked together in their shared fields. The death was a calamity.

  Peng will never forget the afternoon the government rider came to tell them. She had
bowed down, forehead to the beaten earth before their gate, never looking up as the official spoke from horseback above the wrapped body of her brother on the ground beside her. She’d bowed to the man as if he honoured the family by coming to tell her they had killed her brother.

  You could grow to hate yourself, or the people who had done this and caused you to make obeisance in fear. Or you could accept that there were those born to suffer, under heaven, and you were among them. She had done that last, mostly, all her life.

  Not for her daughter, though; she won’t accept it for her child.

  Outlaws are better than the Flowers and Rocks officials, Peng thinks, approaching Dizeng late in the day (farthest she’s ever travelled in her life). She doesn’t understand much about the world, but that much she thinks she knows.

  She has been afraid she’ll see the family that has broken off their engagement, but it has been a market day here and there is still a crowd. Peng walks among them in the square before the yamen. Stalls had been set up and are being taken down.

  She has also feared she’ll have to speak to some stranger, ask where the ritual master can be found, has been anxious about that all along the road. But she’d forgotten something about them, and in fact she sees the man right away. He is drinking at a table under a mulberry tree at the edge of the square, in the shade.

  They always wear red hats, the ritual masters. Village mediums wear black on their heads. Peng has heard that arcane priests, the lordly ones who do rites and exorcisms for vast sums of money in big cities and at court, wear yellow hats, but she has no way of knowing if this is true, and it doesn’t matter, does it?

  She takes a deep breath, afraid, after all, now that she has come. She still can’t believe she has done this, that she is doing this. She spits into the dust to get a bad taste from her mouth. She walks sturdily through the crowd in the closing-up market—smells of cooked food, animals, fruit, spilled wine—and comes to where the ritual master sits.

  He is younger than she expected, a good-looking man. She thinks he might be drunk, but that may be his power, his aura, whatever lets him deal with the spirit world. She is an ignorant peasant woman, isn’t she?