River of Stars Read online

  There are those here who think the emperor ought to step aside for this son, be released to think only about his art and his garden. Chizu says nothing, of course. Shan has never heard him speak. Some of the younger princes, appearing in the clan compound for feasts (or private encounters), are more bold, but the heir, in Kitai, needs to be cautious.

  She is thinking of words to describe all these tense, duelling voices in a ci when the emperor arrives. Hang Dejin is helped to his feet to offer his greeting. He has long been excused the three salutations. Shan performs them with the court, forehead to earth, greeting the lord of Kitai, of the Five Directions, ruling under heaven with the blessing of the gods. The soldiers who escorted each of the guests here remain at a distance, Shan’s guard among them.

  The singer is also here now. She emerges from her sedan chair, with assistance. She is dressed in green-and-gold liao silk, cut lower than court fashion allows, and with wider sleeves. Her scent as she passes is rich, disturbing. She is small, astonishingly beautiful.

  Shan, the only other woman present, is in dark blue to her ankles, high to her neck, slim-fitted, narrow sleeves, no adornments save her mother’s ring and one her husband gave her years ago. She wears no scent. In this, she does not rebel against the constraints upon well-bred women, how restrained they are expected to appear when in public.

  She has thought about fighting this, but there are so many marks against her name that to add another just for the sake of doing so feels wearying. Besides that, her link to the emperor is too hugely important to risk his displeasure carelessly. For one thing, with the prime minister so evidently failing in health ... who and what will follow? She has her father’s security to think of, even her husband’s. Her position here, undefined as it is, is some assurance for all of them in an unsure court these autumn days.

  Her newest song is to be sung now, for the first time, and that is a different kind of test. She had frightened herself writing it, but not enough to hold it back. I may not be such a clever person after all, she’d thought, walking here with the guard (another new one, they change often) sent to escort her.

  They are gathered not far from the colossal rock-mountain that has already been moved once to be more aesthetically harmonious, align more precisely with auspices and the emperor’s desire.

  According to a report sent some time ago, but never presented to Wenzong, one hundred and twelve men had died bringing that rock here, hundreds more were injured, some cripplingly. Animals also died, pulling it on rollers or carrying heavy equipment, their carcasses left where they fell. Fields were trampled, gouged deep, crops ruined. The bridges of twelve cities were destroyed along the Grand Canal to allow the barge bearing the rock to pass through them and bring it to Hanjin.

  The singer, seated now on a stone bench, changes her position gracefully, tunes her pipa, looks politely at Shan and smiles, a small salute. She is breathtaking.

  The music is very old. The words are by Lin Shan, the woman receiving such favour from the emperor, only child of amusing, inconsequential Court Gentleman Lin Kuo (who wanders freely in the Genyue, writing about it, with permission). She is married to the equally eccentric Qi Wai of the imperial clan. They know all about her. It is important to know about people invited to court, to the garden.

  It is the general view that there is no good reason to be found, either in lineage or marriage, for her to be summoned here so often, receive such largesse from the Dragon Throne. Writing ci that please the emperor, wielding a competent writing brush ... are these avenues to access now? For a woman?

  Possibly so, though there is no evidence yet that this one has aspirations, and the father is harmless. The husband is away much of the time, collecting old writings, bells, bowls, suchlike. He has an entire storehouse of these things.

  He has also, word is, become smitten by a very young girl. Has apparently purchased her from her pleasure house and set her up in a house in Yenling. Not unusual, and no wonder, really, with the wife so unnatural. There are no children. If the emperor had not so manifestly favoured her, odds are Qi Wai would have put her aside by now. Such is the talk.

  It has also been established—because such things matter—that the emperor has not bedded her. She can be considered comely, this Lin Shan, though hardly proper in her deportment, at ease among so many men, and she is too tall for Twelfth Dynasty taste.

  The singer, by contrast, in green and gold, with her exquisitely shaped eyebrows and her scent ...

  SHAN CANNOT LOOK for long at the other woman without glancing away. The singer is gifted (of course she is, to be here) with both her instrument and her voice, and her beauty dazzles. But every time Shan looks she sees the woman’s feet, bound in the newest fashion for pleasure girls.

  The mincing, hobbled gait with which the singer had made her way from her litter to the pavilion, assisted up the three steps by a man at each elbow, feels like an assault to Shan, seeing it.

  And it may not remain confined to the pleasure districts, this ... innovation in beauty. She has heard women talking in the clan compound about this, most dismissing it with disdain as proper only to courtesans, but others suggesting it might become a way for daughters to gain attention, using their bound feet as an expression of their commitment to being beautiful—and properly submissive.

  She has spoken of her revulsion to her husband, who was unusually silent, and then to her father.

  Lin Kuo, with a third cup of saffron wine (she’d also had three cups, that night), had said, “Daughter, if the men of our time forget how to ride and hunt, and are carried by bearers wherever they go, even to the house next door, how do they ensure women are even more diminished? This. This is what happens now.”

  Her father, universally seen as ingratiating and bland, has never grown the fingernail of a little finger as a symbol of contempt for martial skills and arts. True, he cannot draw a large bow, but he knows how it is done (and has taught his daughter how, defying tradition again), and the two of them can—and do—often go on foot about Hanjin, or ride into the countryside. Shan has vivid memories of quick-stepping to keep up with him, as a child.

  The woman playing here, singing Shan’s own dangerous words set to “Butterflies and Flowers,” will not be able to step down from this pavilion when she is done. Not without leaning, all helpless, scented fragility, upon a man.

  She is singing now, poised and alluring, curved over the instrument, her voice offering the much-loved tune, with the words of Shan’s song ... for that is what a ci is, new words to old music. From where she stands, Shan watches the emperor. It is always wise to watch the emperor.

  Tears slide down my face to fall

  On the silk of my gown.

  I sing over and again

  Sima Zian’s song of parting from a friend.

  “West of Iron Gate Pass ...”

  They say mountains can go on forever,

  And mountains keep you from us now.

  Alone in the house I hear the sound

  Of rain falling in the courtyard.

  Partings disturb the heart.

  I cannot remember

  If we drank wine in farewell

  From cups deep or shallow.

  It is so long ago that you left.

  Ask the wild geese to carry your words

  North again to us.

  Hanjin is not so far as the spirit realm,

  Lying out in the dark sea on another island.

  It is dangerously direct, this song. Much more than a song can safely be, especially about this man, and with that last line.

  She is aware that she might have been foolish, and that others may suffer with her. She can’t entirely understand the impulses that lead her this way. They have to do with facing her fears, she knows that.

  The singer ends with the last notes from her pipa, then looks around, smiling brightly upon all of them. Shan wonders if she’s understood what she was singing. Probably not, she thinks, then wonders if she’s being ungracious. There is
a quick, chilly murmuring as soon as the singer stops. Then an abrupt silence, as those making disapproving sounds realize that the emperor is smiling. (It is always wise to watch the emperor.)

  He is doing so not at the singer, but at the other woman, the one who’d written those reckless words. The courtiers feel trapped suddenly. Shan sees it: they are caught in their too-quick disapproval. That won’t make them like her any more, but they wouldn’t have, anyhow. She might as well have worn perfume, she thinks, inconsequentially.

  Amid the slide and rustle of autumn leaves in the garden, the emperor of Kitai looks at her. He says, his clear, quiet voice, “Clever, Lady Lin, not to finish the line from Master Sima.”

  He is, in many ways, an extraordinary man. She lowers her eyes. “Thank you, gracious lord, for noticing. It would not fit the music, and I judged that everyone knows the words.”

  “Good poetry is like that,” he says. “We do not forget it.”

  “Yes, my lord,” she says. Her heart is beating fast.

  “Or the poets,” Wenzong adds gravely. His smile has deepened, however. “We don’t forget them, either. He has not been on an island for a long time, Lady Lin. Unless I am misled”—a glance to where two of his principal councillors stand and the oldest sits, with permission—“Master Lu has land and a house. He has been permitted to write again. Indeed, I have some of his recent poems.”

  She risks it. “As have I, exalted lord. They are what put me in mind of him, and so I wrote a song. He is ... is he not still exiled from the shining forth of your countenance?”

  She is quoting another long-ago poem with the phrase, one that he will also know. She frames it as a question. She has been coming to him for some time now. She has learned a few needful things.

  There is another stir, anticipating an imperial rebuke, ready to seize upon it. Some of them would like the chance, Shan realizes, to tear her apart. They are hunting dogs. A pack, snarling at each other, attacking outsiders who seek to enter, to draw closer to the shining forth.

  She sees one man open his mouth. To be the first.

  The emperor laughs aloud, gently.

  “I don’t think Lu Chen wants to be here, Lady Lin, however bright my countenance might be. Picture him happy on his farm, writing poems, even trying out your own ci form, which he does do. He is better there than at my court. I am better with him there, writing. Kitai is better. We need not return to the old days in this.”

  The seated prime minister, Hang Dejin, lifts his head, a seamed, sunken face, and smiles thinly. Memories, Shan thinks, of old battles. The prime minister is not an enemy now, she thinks, though it is possible she is wrong.

  The emperor has been gentler than she deserves. She should leave it. She needs to bow, right now, to this man who can have her killed or exiled (and her father). Who, instead, speaks kindly to her, among these hunting dogs.

  Instead, she says, “He has spent his whole life serving Kitai, serene lord. He writes about that desire in the new poems. He also wrote about it long ago, as prefect in Shantong, when he fought famine there. Is this a man to withdraw from the world?”

  A flicker of disapproval in Wenzong’s face. The Shantong famine, twenty-five years ago, had been a difficult affair. Many had denied it was coming, denied its severity when it did arrive. Some still think it was exaggerated by Lu Chen, as part of the faction wars, to discredit opponents in power.

  There are limits to imperial patience, and she is a woman speaking too boldly about matters deemed beyond her. She lowers her head again. Were she a different person, perhaps she’d be clothed differently, entreating his kindness in other ways. Perhaps she’d even have her feet bound, she thinks bitterly, to elicit solicitude and care from all of them.

  “Sometimes,” says the emperor of Kitai, thoughtfully, “it is otherwise. Sometimes the world needs to withdraw from the man.”

  He rises, a very tall man. It is a dismissal, for most of them.

  She and the singer and a dozen others, including the heir, she sees, leave the pavilion and proceed, escorted, towards different gates along the swept-clean, curving paths of this garden that is a treasure of the world.

  There are matters of state the emperor must (briefly, distastefully) address.

  Her song, written with her most careful brush strokes, lies on the writing table inside the pavilion, beside a painting of a plum tree branch in autumn that the emperor has done himself. A better artist than an emperor, Shan heard someone say once, very drunk.

  She still doesn’t know if submitting her ci has been a mistake. It probably has.

  Escorted by a guard, Shan walks towards the gate nearest the clan compound. She has always insisted upon walking, though all the others leaving now have stepped into two-carrier chairs to be borne where they need to go. She is aware that this is seen as an affectation on her part, not remotely proper. Her father walks, however, so she does.

  She wonders, briefly, what the guard beside her thinks about these matters here. If he has any views they are probably about the indignity of her being on foot.

  The land rises ahead of them, built up into forested hills, the trees brought from far away. The path winds between these, as through a valley, towards the distant gate. She hears birdsong: a nightingale, even on a cool autumn afternoon. Far from home, she thinks. There is a grove of bamboo, then one of sandalwood trees from the south. Their scent is wonderful.

  The path bends to reveal another boulder on the right side, taller than Shan, as wide as it is tall, pitted and scarred as if by eternity or the gods. They walk past. She has stopped to gaze at it sometimes, but not today, she has too much to think about. Her guard glances at her. He wears a Hanjin city guard uniform, this one. They change. She doesn’t keep track. Fruit trees are ahead now, and flowers past their season. The wind is from the north, the hills above are thick with trees, leaves changing colour on some of them. It is a bright day.

  She is thinking about the poet, a memory of a corridor in Xi Wengao’s house, late night, Peony Festival, years and years ago. She’d been so young, excited to be among great men with her father, the promise of what life might offer.

  In the darkness of that corridor he had turned to look back when she called after him. She had wanted him to come to her. First time she’d ever wanted a man that way. He’d stood a moment, then turned and walked away, honourably.

  She is thinking about desire, and youth, and a rumour she has heard this morning about her husband, when the guard lays a hand on her arm, which is shocking, really.

  “Stop!” he says. Not a request.

  The hand on her arm tightens, then Shan is pushed downwards, hard, to her knees. The guard steps in front of her, unslinging a round shield from his back. Then he, too, kneels, screening her with his body. It is all happening very fast. He is looking upwards, she cannot see past him down the path.

  He swears aloud, crudely, lifts the shield.

  And an arrow thuds into it.

  Shan cries aloud in shock, the guard cries out, much more loudly. “Guards!” he roars. “Here! An assassin!”

  There are guards all over the Genyue, of course, the emperor is here. Several come running from behind them and from the direction of the southern gate. Her own guard remains where he is, protecting her with his shield, his body. Shan sees the shaft and feathers of the arrow, embedded in his shield.

  “What? Why?” she says. “Why would—?”

  “There!” her guard shouts, pointing up and to their right, into the built-up hills above the path. The trees there are pines, green. They will be green all winter. A shelter for anyone who wishes to hide in them.

  The other men react at speed. These are the imperial guardsmen. Those serving here will be the best the empire has, protecting the emperor.

  Shan sees them move off, running, fanning out as they climb the hill to their right. There are paths among the trees, these groves are groomed and tended.

  Her own guard remains in front of her. Two others now stand behind,
more protection. Others are running to the pavilion where the emperor is with his advisers, deciding matters of importance.

  There is shouting, the sound of agitated men. Shan feels the hard racing of her heart.

  And something else. She is looking up at the hills. She says nothing, obediently motionless, on her knees between tense, watchful men. Others run past, shouting excitedly. She has some thinking to do, she realizes.

  From the corner of her eye, past the body of her guard, she had caught a glimpse of that arrow’s flight, glinting in sunlight as it descended from trees. It had not come from the right side of the path.

  CHAPTER XII

  For the prime minister of Kitai, perhaps the worst part of a long and challenging day—and now night—was the awareness of what his son was feeling, in the chill of autumn with the moon in the window now.

  He couldn’t see Hsien’s face clearly, of course—that infirmity was part of why he was withdrawing from the court—but he knew his son, and he knew what he’d just done, himself. And though Hsien would be schooling his face with care (he always did that), there was a new feeling in this room where they had laboured together all these years.

  It had to be almost impossibly difficult to have spent a life assisting one’s father, dutiful and unobtrusive (though indispensable), with a tacit understanding of what one’s own future was to be—and then learn, in the course of a day of shocks and swift changes, that that future did not, after all, involve becoming prime minister after the father stepped aside, laden with honours and heading home.

  And what was almost worse, to learn who was now to be recalled, despite everything, to take the position Hsien had been training for (and waiting for) all these years.

  He was weary (he was almost always weary now), but he’d taken care to explain clearly, for he knew he was inflicting grief, and even shame. He wasn’t a man inclined towards love, didn’t entirely understand it, but his eldest son had been a comfort to him, an extension of his hand, even of his eyes, lately, and he wasn’t happy causing pain here. Besides which, a man’s most proper ambitions were always about family, and his son had children, there was a Hang family lineage.