River of Stars Read online

  “You need to plant bones under a tree. I will stand watch and make sure you aren’t seen. I saw an oak not far back, north of the road.”

  Lung had seen it too. He looked at the other man. It wasn’t full dark yet.

  He said, “You understand that—”

  “I understand that sometimes people need to believe certain things to be healed and that sometimes they are healed. You are all watched more often than you know, on the roads, in the villages. Come, bury what you have to bury. No one will see you. That’s my task.”

  Lung shook his head in wonder. Then, somehow, the humour of the situation finally struck him. He had never been, at heart, an angry man. He said, “Do you remember anything I taught you? Any poetry? Chan Du? Sima Zian?”

  “I do. I buy books when I can. I’ll wager they claim Master Sima as an ancestor, this family here.”

  “I won’t take that wager,” said Lung, fighting a smile.

  They did what they needed to do by the tree. The boy remained unhappy, but Lung saw Daiyan give him a coin (it looked to be silver, but the light was fading) and his mood changed. On the way back to the village—which was called Gongzhu, he learned—Daiyan told him what the other outlaw, Ziji, had learned from the woman about the girl and the family. Such things mattered in the rites.

  The surprise was that Daiyan knew they did.

  Tuan Lung took the lead when they reached the village. He went down the one main street to the afflicted household. It was easy to find: there was a crowd by the gate. The woman, Peng, was waiting in front of the open door, beside a terrified-looking husband and an older man (her father, most likely). The two men looked befuddled and afraid. Bats were darting in twilight trees. He saw fireflies. Late in the year for them.

  He greeted the family formally. He adjusted his red hat and went inside with his boy—no one else allowed, except the mother, for propriety—to see if he could save the life of a girl pushed up against the doors of death by a demon possessing her. It would be a battle, he told the family and the villagers assembled in the growing dark.

  It always was.

  PENG NEVER TELLS THE STORY, never does speak of what she saw that night in her own small home, in front of the ancestral altar. The night that power and ritual magic were invoked in her presence.

  She had made a decision. For Zhi-li’s sake, that summer’s affliction needed to be forgotten. Once, she overheard her father (whom she did love and honour) talking of the ritual to another man—though he’d seen nothing, had been outside with the others. That evening she’d put an herb in his soup that gave him violent, ongoing cramps in the night.

  Perhaps, she’d said to him in the morning, seeing him pale and exhausted, he had somehow offended a demon, speaking of the spirit world. Matters best not discussed by simple people such as they were, lest troubles descend again.

  Over time, her memories of that evening had blurred and shifted, the way the forms of her daughter and the ritual master and the strange boy had shifted in their house after the candles were lit.

  She remembers the master saying, low-voiced and intense to Zhi-li, that he would drive the spirit from her, she would be healed, but that it was almost certain she’d not be able to marry away from the village now, ever leave Gongzhu, and she would have to accept that.

  Peng had begun crying then. The master said that if he or anyone were forced to try this a second time, ever, Zhi-li would almost surely die.

  Then he began his invocations. The boy started to gasp and wail almost immediately, in a high voice. Peng had barely been able to look, so afraid was she.

  She remembers (thinks she remembers) her daughter becoming very still even as the boy began to writhe in pain. There had been a cord attached by the master to the left wrist of each of them—she remembers that. There were three red ribbons tied along it, the same colour as his hat.

  Zhi-li had been unexpectedly docile and calm from the moment she was released from the back room and brought before the master. Peng had feared she would be violent and obscene, the way she often was since her affliction began. She remembers the master instructing her to be very quiet herself and keep to a corner of the room.

  As if she’d have any intention of doing anything else!

  He had placed his hands over the largest candle and the colour of its flame miraculously (terrifyingly!) changed to green. The boy twisted suddenly away from that, almost pulling Zhi-li from the stool where she’d been placed before the altar.

  The master continued chanting, his voice strong and deep, his hands moving in suddenly scented air. Peng didn’t recognize the smell. It was sweet and heavy. Her heart had been pounding. To the end of her life she will never be certain that she didn’t lose consciousness at some point in the house that night.

  But she was watching and aware when Zhi-li, too, began to cry out in a strained voice (but her own voice!). With that, the boy fell to his knees on their dirt floor, echoing the cries harshly, as if he was feeling the same pain—or anger.

  The ritual master had taken hold of the cord between the two of them with his left hand and raised his voice in a commanding shout, words Peng could not understand.

  She had been covering her face with her hands then, peeking out between fingers, then looking down, so as not to see what dread darkness was being summoned into her own home.

  From her own child.

  The master shouted again, words she understood this time: “Demon, I invoke you! I compel you by the Fivefold Thunder! Why have you consumed this girl?”

  Zhi-li had closed her eyes, her head falling back, limbs trembling so much her mother feared she’d injure herself. She wanted to go forward and clasp her child in her arms, but she stayed in her corner, as ordered, watching through the fingers of her hands before her eyes.

  It was the boy who answered, a voice so deep suddenly it seemed hardly possible it came from one so young. What he said Peng could not understand, the words were contorted, broken, angry.

  The ritual master’s hair had come unpinned, she saw; it was loose down his back. He pulled sharply at the cord so that the boy toppled towards Zhi-li, on the ground beside her stool.

  The master shouted again, sounding even more angry than the spirit-voice. “The marriage? It is over! She will not wed him! What else has brought you to harm an innocent family? Why bring evil to this village? Who are you?”

  Peng saw the boy on the ground, at Zhi-li’s feet, pain and rage on his features in the strange light. He cried aloud again in words she could not understand.

  Then he was silent, and still.

  It was suddenly very quiet in their home.

  And then, “Ah!” said the ritual master softly. “I see.”

  The green hue of the candle’s flame went away without warning. There was normal light in their home, and the strange scent was gone.

  The ritual master rubbed at his face with both hands, wearily. He took a deep breath. He untied the cord that bound her daughter and his boy. The boy lay on the ground, Peng saw. His eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving.

  The master left him there. He gave Zhi-li a cup with a drink he had prepared. She looked up at him from the stool, wide-eyed. She took it from his hand, docile, still trembling, and drank.

  The master looked over at Peng in her corner.

  He was drenched in perspiration, she saw; his eyes and his long hair looked wild. The boy was still unconscious on the floor, limbs splayed. Peng looked at him. She brought down her hands. She had still been holding them to her face.

  “Is he ... is he dead?” she remembers asking, her voice quavering.

  The master shook his head tiredly. “He will sleep. So will Zhi-li soon. And after, she will be all right. It is over. The spirit identified itself to me, and will be gone when we do one needful thing.”

  It is over.

  Sima Peng began to weep, slow tears forced from her eyes, down seamed cheeks. She clasped her hands together tightly. She looked at her daughter by candlelight, and it seeme
d to her that she saw her again. She knew that expression, those eyes. Zhi-li, too, started to cry.

  “Mother?” she said.

  There had never been a word she’d so longed to hear.

  Peng left her corner and gathered her child in her arms. Her child who was herself again, returned to them.

  SHE SPEAKS OF NONE OF THIS, not through the years of her life, not through the changes in their world.

  Some things happen east of the village later that same night, and others know of them and share them, but no one knows what took place in that room with the green light and the heavy scent, and the commands and cries.

  The ritual master binds up his hair and goes out her door. Many men, including her husband and father and the bandits who helped them, go with him out of town along the road in the night, bearing torches. Zhi-li sleeps, as he’d said she would. The boy remains on the floor in the house. Peng stays with both of them.

  The villagers find the tree that the boy, consumed by Zhi-li’s demon for the space and time of the rite, had told them to find. They dig by torchlight under stars and a half moon and there are bones lying there.

  A girl cruelly murdered long ago, on the eve of her wedding, the master told them, and never found, never properly laid to rest. Her spirit had entered into Zhi-li on the eve of her own marriage and passage into womanhood.

  So he explained the next morning, in sunlight, when fears recede with the arrival of day.

  They buried the bones. There were only a few—wild creatures had carried off the rest, so shallow had been the grave where her murderer had hidden her. They perform the rituals, though they never knew her name, her family, where she was from, when she had died. It had to have been long ago.

  Sima Peng offers candles and prayers for this unknown girl on the day of the Cold Food Festival from that time onwards.

  She had taken over Zhi-li’s body in pain and rage, in her own soul’s unresting torment, and then left her—left her whole—when the ritual master, whose name Peng will praise until she dies, came to them and brought release in a green light.

  Zhi-li will never marry, never leave their village. She goes to serve in the temple of the Sacred Path not long after that night of power, when late-season fireflies had gathered (perhaps the scent?) by their house, and torches smoked on the one long village street and then over unearthed bones along the river road. She is happy there, Zhi-li, is eventually initiated among the priestesses, is not just a servant.

  Her younger sister marries well, into a village north of them. She dies bearing her first child, not long after greater troubles have begun to afflict their world. The child, a boy, survives a very little time then also dies. Peng has no grandchildren from her daughters or her son, who is called into the army at seventeen and marches away north. They never see him again after the dust of his company’s going settles on the road. Her husband isn’t the same man, after. She remembers that day, seeing her son recede from her. She sees it at night, in the quiet.

  There is only so much a woman can do to help her children through the hard, dark, spinning sorrows of time and the world.

  CHAPTER X

  In summer the Jeni tribe of the steppe, in the northeast, were even farther north, near the source of the Black River, which marked the boundary of their traditional grazing lands. The river ran east from there, in hill-and-forest country, before tracking to find the sea.

  The summer had been dry but not dangerously so, and the herds had found decent grazing. The Jeni’s young kaghan was beginning to think about the trek south and west they would make when autumn arrived. By winter they would be a fair distance away, though never far enough to entirely avoid the knife of the north wind and the snows that came, with wolf packs starving and bold in the savage nights.

  It was a hard life. It was the only life they knew.

  In summer, now, the wolves remained a menace, but summer offered them ways to feed without risking encounters with men, and the wolves of these steppes were the most intelligent—and therefore dangerous—on earth. There were so many tales, including how they could, at times, cross the space between animal and human. Or how men could go the other way, becoming wolflike. Shamans bridged that divide, not always benevolently.

  Goodwill, kindness, safety, tranquility, these were not the coinage of the world here, whether by daylight under the high sky of the god or at night under his stars.

  Accordingly, the Jeni kept guards on watch, always. All the tribes did, across the vast swath of the steppe, running from the ridged and forested hills near here through thousands and thousands of li west to the deserts where no one could live and no one tried.

  Which is to say there were guards posted on a summer night.

  O-YAN, YOUNGEST AND MUCH-LOVED brother of the kaghan, was fourteen that summer, posted with other young ones on summer guard duty. Boys were eased into their responsibilities this way. Summer watch at the encampment by the river was easier than doing the same thing on a winter night when the wolves were bolder and the herds might be farther away from the body of the tribe.

  There was no reason to expect more danger here than an outcast wolf or sometimes a big cat, far from its usual range, drawn by the presence of so many animals, overcoming a fear of men. It would be an outcast, too, if so.

  O-Yan took his task seriously, aware that in time he would be expected to play a strong role in the tribe, helping his brother, all three of his older brothers. He was proud of his family, anxious to bring honour to them. He had spoken to the other boys on duty tonight, seven of them, about how wrong it was to be fearful, to startle at every sound from the animals.

  They looked to him as their leader, and not just because of his family. O-Yan’s manner, his calm, was already noted. He was reassuring by nature.

  A Jeni rider, he told them (and they would be full-fledged riders soon), knew how to tell a restless horse from a threat in a dark night.

  There was no moon tonight. O-Yan did admit to himself, if reluctantly, that he preferred when it was easier to see into the blackness of the steppe. But when had the world ever made things easy for men? Life was an endless series of tests. His brother, the kaghan, was fond of saying that. They didn’t live in slack and indolent ease like those far to the south. The Kitan down there were soft, lazy, hardly worthy of the gift of life the sky god had given to all men.

  A Kitan would die faced with the challenges of the steppe, O-Pang had told his youngest brother more than once. They’d die in a mild summer, let alone winter! And the Xiaolu, their overlords? They were growing soft, too, steppe people building cities, living in them!

  The Jeni and other tribes might acknowledge the power of the Xiaolu, offer tribute to an emperor for peace in the northeast (others did the same in the west), but they were still a proud people. Pride was coinage in the grasslands. If the price of peace in their grazing lands was an autumn tribute (and a night dance), that was a price a small tribe could agree to pay. No true leader should allow his own feelings to endanger his people.

  Our tribe is our family, O-Pang would say to his brothers.

  O-Yan, youngest, had listened gravely even at ten or eleven, a serious, watchful child, born into a shaman’s foretelling. The old man had cast the bones of a slaughtered lamb and drunk blood in his stone bowl the night O-Yan came crying into the world. He had predicted that the boy’s destiny might be as bright as any Jeni’s had been since the beginnings of the tribe.

  Prophecies were chancy things. You needed to survive so much—disease, famine, accidents, war—to come into your full growth as a man for any such future to unfold, or be allowed.

  O-Yan, schooling himself to be relaxed and alert—a difficult conjunction—heard a sound to his right, away from the horses. It could be many things. A small animal, a snake dislodging stones.

  He turned to look into the night. He took an arrow in the eye and died where he stood, brave and clever and too young. He fell with a faint clatter that might have been heard by anyone nearby listeni
ng. No one was nearby.

  No one but the man who killed him knew about the small sound O-Yan had heard, which had not been an error, of course, but intended to make the boy turn, present his face and body to the arrow that claimed his life.

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true, that only his killer heard it. In the beliefs of the steppe, the Lord of the Sky knew all, and the Lord of Death knew when someone was coming to him. It was also possible that someone, later, spinning a tale out of the old sorrow of a young man’s dying, might have added that sound to twist the hearts of listeners a little more. Storytellers do that sort of thing.

  The tribe’s shaman was a gifted one, a strong traveller in the spirit realm. His foretelling had not been wrong. O-Yan of the Jeni had greatness within him, largeness of soul, wisdom emerging, even young.

  But the boy was killed in a moonless summer dark under stars and wisps of cloud, and certain futures ended with him, just as others opened up because he died.

  This happens all the time. It is why men pray to their gods.

  THE ALTAI CAME DOWN, treacherously and without warning, thundering on horseback (always on horseback) out of the dark, having forded the river and waited through the day.

  The trouble with using boys as guards was that being prone to startle at sounds from their own animals could also make them more likely to miss the subtler hints (often from those same animals) of real danger.

  All the young guards posted around the camp were killed by bowmen sent ahead of the Altai riders. On the steppe, archers rarely missed, even by starlight, and though the Altai themselves lived in a different landscape, nearer to and among forests, they were known—they had long been known—as the hardest fighters of all, and the best horsemen among people who could all ride.

  There weren’t many of them—the harsh lands towards the Koreini Peninsula could not sustain numbers. That had always been the saving, soothing factor for the tribes around them. The Altai were short, bow-legged, black-hearted, dangerously arrogant, but they weren’t numerous, and that had tempered an inherent aggression.