River of Stars Read online

  He is talking to someone at a table under the tree, a man from the yamen, a clerk, from his clothing. He turns to her as she stops in front of him. He has a stubble of beard, but his clothing is clean. Maybe he has helped someone here in Dizeng and they have cleaned his robe for him, in gratitude?

  Or maybe he just paid money and had his things laundered at their stream! Why is she even thinking of such things?

  She is a frightened woman from a tiny village, and too far from home. She’ll have to stay overnight here, whatever happens now. Her younger daughter has been told what to say to Peng’s husband, who will be very angry when he comes home from the fields to a house empty except for one crying daughter, another possessed by a demon, and a boy confused and frightened all the time because of what has happened to his sister.

  Sima Peng reaches into her clothing and takes the jar from where it hangs, hidden at her waist (and has been banging her hip all the way). She kneels in the dust and extends it—everything in it—to the ritual master. When he reaches out and takes it she lowers her head and presses it to the earth before his feet. Then she brings her roughened hands forward and clasps his ankles in supplication, not speaking, not able to speak.

  He is her last hope, Zhi-li’s last hope.

  IN THE MORNING, on the road home with an utterly unexpected escort, Peng tries to understand how the world could bring a poor woman something like this.

  Two men had fallen into step with her on the far side of the market square in Dizeng as the sun was setting the day before. She had just left the ritual master all her money in a jar, with his promise to follow her in the morning back to her village. He had affairs to settle in Dizeng first, he’d told her, his voice low and kind, but he’d follow.

  Stumbling away in a daze, unable to believe she’d achieved what she’d come for, Peng had been unsure what to do next. It had crossed her mind, on the way here, to leave aside a small part of her money for food and a pallet somewhere, but she’d decided that would be bad luck. If the gods were to help her, she had to give everything she had for Zhi-li.

  She’d been thinking she’d try to find a stable, beg permission to bed down in straw, when two men fell in stride with her, one on each side.

  She’d been terrified, trembling, her eyes on the ground. This was what happened to women in market towns, she knew. But it was a public place, not yet dark. If she cried out, perhaps—

  “Mother Sima, will you permit us to help you?”

  The voice had been calm, and he knew her name. She’d looked up cautiously, had seen a young man with a neat beard, his hair pinned under a wide straw hat. His clothing was rough and that of his older companion was the same, but his voice was educated.

  She’d ducked her head again. “Hel ... help me?” she’d said.

  “I would guess you gave all your money in the world to the red hat just now.”

  “Yes!” Peng said quickly. “I have no money at all, honourable sirs. Nothing for you to—”

  “I did say help you, not rob you,” he said. “We heard you talking to him.” He’d seemed amused.

  Peng had been desperately confused. It was so crowded here. There were so many people in Dizeng. She knew there were even larger villages, and great cities, but it was difficult to imagine.

  The second man, on her right, had not spoken. He’d seemed alert, scanning the square.

  The younger one repeated, “I offered help. Truly, we will not harm you.”

  “Why?” Sima Peng said. Her lips were dry. “Please? Why?”

  She’d looked up again, hesitantly. His gaze was calm. You could call it a watchful face, but not a warm or friendly one.

  “We are men of the woods,” he said.

  Men of the woods was one term for outlaws, it was what they usually called themselves. Peng was afraid again, her hands shaking.

  “We often help the villagers,” he said. “You know that.”

  They sometimes did, yes. But sometimes it was otherwise. “The ... the red hat said he would help us.”

  “He might,” said the young man. The older one snorted with sudden amusement. She didn’t understand that, either. “And so will we,” said the one doing the talking. “Your village elder has assisted us at times. We don’t forget.”

  All villages, large and small, needed to make their peace with the men of the woods. The government was worse. She had always thought that, even before her brother died. She wondered if she should say this.

  She hadn’t. She wasn’t a woman accustomed to talking and that day had been so far out of the pattern of her life it was impossible to know what to do, how to act. You wove silk, you washed clothing in the stream, you fed a husband and children and your widowed father (when there was food to offer), you honoured your ancestors. You didn’t have conversations with outlaws far from home.

  They led her to an inn on the western edge of the village. They paid for a room and an evening meal for her. Peng had been afraid there, too. There were tales of women accosted, murdered in their beds in such inns by men who came to find them in the dark, or by ghosts.

  “I will be outside your door tonight,” the older outlaw had said, as if he’d heard her thoughts. The first words he’d spoken. He had a deep voice. “You need fear nothing, here, or on the road home tomorrow. You are a good woman, Mother Sima. You bring honour to your family and Kitai.”

  She will remember that. It was not the sort of thing you expected to hear a bandit—or anyone—say to you. Later, much later, she will tell people about it, all the time. By then she will be more accustomed to talking (old women seemed to be), and this will be a story she often tells.

  The younger outlaw went away somewhere, the older one stayed. He even sat with her and ate with her, so she would not be alone and fearful in a large, loud dining room at an inn. She had never stayed at an inn before.

  His name was Zhao Ziji, he told her. He had been in the army, but he wasn’t now. He asked her questions, gently, and Peng had found herself telling him about what happened to her daughter, and then also about her brother, how the Flowers and Rocks people killed him for a rock. He told her it was a sorrow and a crime and was happening all over Kitai.

  He walked her up the stairs to her room, gave her the key to lock the door from inside, and repeated that he would be outside all night, she was not to fear anything. She had never been in a house with a stairway before.

  In the night, once, she had heard footsteps approaching, and then the deep voice of Zhao Ziji, speaking softly, too softly for her to make out the words, but the footsteps went quickly back the way they’d come, and then the sound of them faded away.

  Peng had lain until sunrise, sleeping and waking at intervals, in a proper bed for the first time in her life, away from her village for the first time in her life, hearing dogs bark outside, dogs she didn’t know, while the same moon rose that always rose.

  THE RITUAL MASTER, under his favourite mulberry tree in the bright morning, was dealing with a considerable headache after a liquid last night in Dizeng. He’d have preferred a cloudy sky.

  He treated his head with more wine (not spiced) and a breakfast pastry from the cookshop on the near side of the square. His friend from the yamen was working—he did do that sometimes—so the red hat found himself alone, contemplating departure with mild regret.

  Dizeng had been a pleasant last stop at the end of summer, as it had been the year before. He’d made decent coinage here, and hadn’t spent all of it in the two singing girl houses. A fair bit, yes, but not all. He had enough from his season along the river to make it worth carrying on east now to Jingxian, to deposit what he had at the large, walled Cho sanctuary south of the city.

  They took a fee, of course, to guard a man’s savings, but the priests were honest, and the simple truth was that you had to pay money to keep money in a hard world. He wouldn’t have placed his earnings at a temple of the Path, mind you—far too much tension between ritual masters such as himself, and them. It grew tricky when y
ellow and red hats mixed together.

  Tricky, meaning dangerous. He kept out of the larger cities, except to place his money in Jingxian and enjoy some civilized life before moving on east into autumn. He wintered in towns towards the sea, and he never did spirit work anywhere a yellow-hatted arcane priest might be. And of course the yellow hats disdained the villages where ritual masters plied the same trade.

  In the villages the danger came from the local mediums, who resented (with cause, he had to admit) red hats coming through, educated, offering rites from scrolls and books, charging more than the mediums could, taking away business.

  He always left money for the mediums anywhere he’d done a lot of work. They might still think violent thoughts, but they could be made less inclined to be murderous.

  It was a delicate path he’d walked these days and years by the Great River, but it seemed to be feeding him, which was more than could be said for what he’d been doing before he discovered he had a gift for healing those afflicted from the spirit world.

  An education could teach you a few things beyond classic texts and poetry and writing a decent hand.

  The roads could make a man weary but the life wasn’t dull or predictable. He was known now in the places he kept coming back to along the river’s middle stretch, and so far no one seemed to truly hate him, or anything so dramatic. He didn’t stay anywhere long enough for that to happen. You learned, among other things, how to explain failures (frequent, given the nature of the business) and to make sure your successes were sounded up and down the river—or at least this part of its long course from the western mountains to the sea.

  Sitting in morning light, shifting his chair to hold the shade as the sun rose, he’d not have said he was unhappy with how his life was unfolding. Aside from the headache, of course, which was his own doing. Or perhaps the fault of a particularly affectionate girl last night. He managed a faint smile, remembering. She’d be something he’d regret leaving behind.

  Someone took the chair next to him, pulled it up to the small round table, uninvited, placing a cup of tea down with a grunt.

  The ritual master glanced over, bemused—there were unoccupied tables all around the square.

  The stranger, a wide straw farmer’s hat pulled down to shade his face, said, “Best get moving, don’t you think? You’ve a long walk west to make it before darkfall. Or were you going to hire a donkey this morning?”

  The ritual master looked at him, more sharply now.

  “I’m going east this morning.”

  “No you aren’t.” The voice was quiet, but flat with certainty. “You took a woman’s money yesterday and promised to go to her daughter.”

  He stared at this stranger with the hat brim down. “It is bad manners to listen to a private conversation.” He let anger slip into his voice.

  “You are right. Forgive me. What is it to steal money with a lie?”

  “I don’t think I need to answer to you, whoever you are. I know the officers at this yamen very well, by the way. If you are trying to extort—”

  “Let’s go talk to them. Shall we? The prefecture’s chief magistrate is here in Dizeng now, as well.”

  The ritual master smiled thinly. “He is, indeed. I happen to know the magistrate from Jingxian.”

  “So do I. Met with him yesterday. I told him who did the scythe murder he’s come to investigate. Also told him I was taking you west this morning, and that I’d come back here and do what he and I agreed.”

  A feeling of unease descended upon the ritual master.

  “I think you are lying,” he said. “I think you are simply an outlaw trying to lure me from my path and my hired guards.”

  “Your guards. Yes. Them. They left last night, in haste. They weren’t good men. You’d have been at risk.”

  He’d wondered about that when he hired them. But this was—

  “What do you mean they left? I paid them half in advance! I paid them—”

  He stopped, because the other man was laughing at him.

  He felt himself flushing. He said, “Listen to me, whoever you are. The money she gave me will be given to feed the poor at the Southern Cho Temple of Preserved Sanctity in Jingxian. You can come see it done. I’ll even pay you to guard me there! That woman would not accept it back from me yesterday, and I cannot go west now. This is the end of my season. I need to get to Jingxian, guarded. I will even pay to have them pray for her daughter at the temple.”

  “I am sure many prayers have been spoken,” said the other man quietly. He sipped from his tea, his face still shaded by the hat. “They don’t appear to have succeeded. Are you truly able to deal with spirits, or are you completely dishonest? Should I say as much to Chief Magistrate Wang? He’s a much-changed man, isn’t he?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, really, Teacher Tuan, you were the one who said—outside of class—that he was pompous and soft. Remember?”

  A prickling of the skin.

  “How do you know what I ... ?”

  The straw hat was pushed back.

  And even after many years and the changes imposed by life—on himself, on the other one—he knew who this was. He found himself uncharacteristically unable to speak at first. Then he just said the name.

  The other man smiled. He had been a boy, last time seen.

  LATER THAT MORNING, still not entirely sure how it had come to be, Tuan Lung, once a teacher in his own academy west of the river’s gorges, now an itinerant ritual master, found himself on the road with Ren Daiyan, his one-time student in Shengdu.

  His strings of cash had been left for safekeeping in the yamen in Dizeng Village after being counted out carefully and recorded in duplicate.

  They were going west. He really hadn’t intended to do that.

  They had two donkeys. Daiyan said they’d need them after wasting so much of the morning at the yamen. He carried a bow, a quiver of arrows, and a single sword on his back. He was muscled, lean, taller, with a short beard and a thin scar above it on his left cheek.

  An hour outside Dizeng, the boy Lung had used for his rituals this year stepped out from the trees. He was escorted by four men leading five donkeys.

  He didn’t look happy, the boy. (He hadn’t been the most cheerful assistant Lung had employed, but he’d been good at what he had to do, worth what he’d been paid.)

  Lung hadn’t arranged for or expected the boy’s appearance. He’d expected to be heading east this morning, had dismissed the boy, paid him off.

  “You need him, don’t you?” Ren Daiyan said. “Isn’t that how you do what you do? Honestly or otherwise?”

  He tended to speak quietly, Lung realized, but people listened. Daiyan was a little intimidating, in truth. Not exactly a big man, but he carried himself like one, and the others appeared to accept his authority.

  “Are you going to explain any of this to me?” Lung demanded. “Why are you interfering with my life?”

  Daiyan shook his head. “Explain? No, not now. If you save the girl, maybe on the road back. We’ll all be coming back, if you save the girl.”

  “Ren Daiyan,” he said—you couldn’t call this man Little Dai—“you know I have not seen her, that the rituals are difficult and uncertain.”

  “I do know that,” Daiyan agreed placidly. “If you had simply awakened this morning and come this way with your boy, it wouldn’t have been a concern for me if you cured her or not. But now ... if you don’t succeed in that village, Teacher Tuan, I might kill you. Just so you know.”

  Tuan Lung swallowed. “I ... I was your teacher. I taught you poetry. I gave you your first bow!”

  “I thank you for all of that, honourable teacher,” said the man Ren Daiyan had become. And he bowed. He said nothing more until they overtook the peasant woman trudging along with another bandit as her escort.

  It was late in the day by then, not far from the accursed hamlet from which she’d come to mar his life. Daiyan spoke to her kindly, offered food and drink. She
never even looked up from staring fixedly at the road. They tended to be like that, the peasants, when faced with something they didn’t understand, which happened often.

  Tuan Lung didn’t really understand either. How could a man do his best work in something as dangerous and difficult as a demon exorcism when afraid for his own life for other reasons? He wanted to say that to Daiyan. And what about real gratitude to a teacher? And respect? Not just words spoken. He wanted to say that, too.

  They came to the village at twilight.

  It was barely a village, really, which was why he hadn’t stopped here on the way east. The evening star was ahead of them, following the sun down. Lung heard a nightingale. He was surprised no one had captured it for the Flowers and Rocks Network. They were paying good money for nightingales.

  Their party was observed by those still working in the fields. Well, of course they were! Eight men and a boy, most of them riding, accompanying a woman from this village? That woman on a donkey, not stumping along the road, the leader of the party striding beside her, heavily armed?

  They would talk about this all fall and winter, thought Tuan Lung bitterly. He looked at Ren Daiyan, who looked back at him and grinned.

  That easy smile, at sunset by a tiny village, first star shining in the west, told him, finally, how far this man had come from the boy Lung had known all those years ago. He pulled up his donkey.

  “The boy and I need to stop,” he said. “We’ll follow you in.”

  He expected an argument, was prepared to insist, but Daiyan only nodded his head. “Ziji, I’ll stay with these two, take the others and Mother Sima into town. We’ll join you. We eat our own food tonight or pay for anything we’re given.”

  “Of course,” said another of the outlaws, the one who had been with Sima Peng when they’d overtaken them. This one led their party forward. Men from the fields were straggling in to follow them.

  Lung looked at his former student. He had given this one his first weapon. Was he going to regret it? He said, “There are some arcane things that must be done. It is dangerous for you to—”