River of Stars Read online

  The direct succession to office they’d both envisaged (though never spoken about) was impossible after the conference in the palace this afternoon: their gathering having moved from the garden after an assassin had appeared near the southern gate.

  Surely Hsien could see it? His father stood firmly against allying with these new barbarians, the Altai. If the emperor chose, nonetheless, to explore such an alliance, and Hang Dejin used that imperial decision as his excuse to finally step aside, how could the prime minister’s son, the extension of his arm, take the highest office?

  Beyond that, Dejin said (for a second time), sipping tea at night, his view of the Altai alliance was a real one, not shaped by court intrigue.

  The first reports of a steppe rebellion had suggested to some that this northeastern tribe might be the tool to push the Xiaolu out of the Fourteen Prefectures. Those same reports conveyed an entirely different message to an old prime minister.

  The peace on the border, despite forays and incursions, had lasted two hundred years. That was a long time. A long time, Dejin repeated, unnecessarily. His son knew these things.

  The Xiaolu were a known factor. Understandable, predictable. Their desires could be addressed. They wanted trade and order, were building an empire of their own in the steppe lands. Conflict with Kitai would damage them at least as much as it would their “elder brothers.” And Kitan money (gift or tribute) funded their bureaucracy, their city-building, and riders to control the other tribes.

  Trade was what kept both empires intact. That and the absence of war. It had been the key to policy for Hang Dejin. Privately—though it was not a thing he could ever say—the prime minister was entirely willing to let those Fourteen Prefectures remain lost.

  Let them be the subject of songs and drunken laments and boasting. His goal had been peace, along with the centralizing of power. If his family had grown extremely wealthy in the process, that was also good, of course.

  The sad, sloppy war against the Kislik had been the initiative of others, playing upon the emperor’s desire to honour his father. The prime minister had made that clear, over and again, as the campaign failed dismally (and savagely), dwindling towards a treaty that left the border almost exactly where it had been before so many people died and so much money was wasted.

  Kai Zhen had been exiled for that war, among other failings. That, of course, was what made it so hard for his son to accept that it was that same Kai Zhen being invited back to assume the prime minister’s office.

  It had been meant to go to Hsien, and when Zhen had been exiled the path had seemed very straight. Of course, in Kitai it was known that paths had to bend and curve, or turn at angles, to prevent evil spirits from following them.

  The prime minister sipped again. The tea was good, he knew, properly prepared, but he didn’t taste things any more. Another loss to the years. Good wine was wasted on him, as well, except in memory: the recollection of taste. Did you truly taste anything later in life, have any experiences at all, except through the memory of other times, sometimes long ago?

  Lu Chen, the poet, lifelong foe, would have views on this. An unexpected thought. Chen’s exile now was just across the Great River. His brother had been summoned to be the emissary to these Altai. That, too, had been someone else’s idea, but Dejin approved: Lu Chao was astringent, precise, not likely to offer an opinion to curry favour. If he didn’t approve of the alliance he would say so.

  The rivalry, enmity, the bitter faction wars? Well, they were old men now. Could that be made to matter? Perhaps he and the poet might exchange letters, poems. Discuss the rush and burden of their time. With the wars at court so long past, maybe it was possible.

  He saw a shape against lantern light. Hsien came to fill his cup with tea off the brazier. The wind blew outside. Autumn. They had two fires lit.

  Dejin said, “When this new campaign fails, if it happens at all, when the emperor sees we were right, Kai Zhen will be gone again. That will be your time.”

  “Yes, Father,” said his son, with a restraint that was painful to hear. He had often wondered if he’d made his boy too deferential. A prime minister needed controlled passion, coldness, even anger to deal with those around him—who would have these traits. There were wars around the Dragon Throne. He remembered his battles with Xi Wengao, the Lu brothers. Lives and families had been ruined for a decade before he’d won.

  Was his son fierce enough, was he hard enough to have battled through those times and come out triumphant? He didn’t know.

  He knew Kai Zhen was. The man had a curious weakness concerning his long-time ally, the eunuch Wu Tong, and he was vulnerable to women of a certain kind, but at court he would be merciless.

  Zhen would see this alliance through with the Altai. He would do it because the emperor seemed to have decided again that it was his duty to his father to regain the lost prefectures, and that this insurrection in the north was a pathway to that.

  It would mean breaking the treaty with the Xiaolu, sending their army against a far more formidable foe than the Kislik had been (and they hadn’t defeated the Kislik). It would involve coordinating attacks with barbarians they knew nothing about, then hoping ancestors and fortune and the will of heaven came together to achieve a proper result.

  Hang Dejin did not see that happening. He saw danger. In fact, though he did not say this even to his son, he feared disaster. So not only could Hsien not follow him into office now, with his own position staked out against this plan, he didn’t want Hsien carrying the responsibility for what might come.

  He himself would be with their ancestors soon enough, crossing to the other side, but duty to family did not end with one’s life. That was what the Cho Master taught.

  That was why, for example, he had taken measures, working through the newly appointed, quite clever chief magistrate of Hanjin, to place Kai Zhen under constraints, even before he received the summons to return. It was possible, it was necessary, to anticipate events. That was how you shaped them.

  Even now, after decades in power—fighting for it, losing it, regaining, awake late on many nights like this, various moons in various windows—he could still feel a pleasure almost sensual in the deftness of intrigue, moving pieces on a game board, seeing, even nearly blind, so much further than everyone else.

  Everyone else had been happy. Wang Fuyin, settling in to his position as chief magistrate in Hanjin, had received a note from the prime minister expressing “satisfaction” with his efforts.

  Given that the message had come late this afternoon—after the arrow attack—there was no uncertainty about what was meant.

  Fuyin had told them as much, and had poured an exceptional wine. During the course of their time with the magistrate, Daiyan had begun learning to judge wine, among other things.

  Even Ziji, normally cautious, had been cheerful in the aftermath of what they’d done. Earlier, in the garden, he’d broken the bow in two, tossed the pieces into the stream above the waterfall, at two different places along the rushing water. He had also broken and discarded his second arrow. They’d allowed themselves two; if he’d missed twice there would have been no time for a third. Ziji was, even more uncharacteristically, visibly pleased with the result of his arrow’s flight, loosed at exactly the right moment—when Daiyan and the woman were ten steps past the big rock.

  Daiyan might be the best archer, whether as an outlaw or now as leader of the magistrate’s guard, but Ziji had been with him long enough and worked hard enough to be a clear second.

  His arrow had arced a very long way to hit the shield Daiyan had thrust in front of the woman they were supposed to be trying to kill.

  The rest of the day had also gone as planned.

  Until a second message came just before sundown. Which was why Daiyan was not entirely at ease as he and Ziji made their way through the city in response to a request that amounted to a summons. Not to the palace—that honour was tomorrow’s—but to the compound beside it where the imperial clan
resided.

  The woman’s father had asked him to visit this evening. So that he might express his gratitude, he’d written.

  Problem was, Daiyan wasn’t certain it was the father’s initiative. He couldn’t have explained this to the others. It was an intuition, vague, unsettling. They wouldn’t have understood. The other two hadn’t been walking with and then kneeling in front of the woman, meeting a startlingly calm gaze as shouting and running had begun in the Genyue.

  Daiyan had been the one to look away. There had been something too observant in that glance. It was unsettling him still as he and Ziji walked, cloaked against the chill, through the bright, crowded evening streets of Hanjin.

  It was always bright in the capital, and the streets were always crowded. Vendors and performers, night markets, men or women calling from outside restaurants and pleasure houses. A throng of people among the sounds and smells, out to amuse themselves, push away the night, make money. There were pickpockets. There were games of chance at busy corners, scribes writing letters, fortune tellers promising to speak with dead ancestors or advise on decisions to be made. A small man from the deep south had a tropical bird on his shoulder. The bird would say a line of poetry for a copper coin. The moon was up, nearing full.

  Daiyan judged that half the men he saw were drunk, or headed there. Hanjin at night was not a quiet place. It had taken getting used to, when they’d arrived. He still wouldn’t say he was easy here. The capital was a way station but necessary. Where he needed to be.

  He knew that in the old capital of Xinan, far larger than this one was, the city and ward gates had been locked at sundown and people remained, with rare exceptions, in their wards until the dawn drums. Hanjin was different. You could go anywhere all day and night, you could go in and out. The city gates were never shut.

  He wasn’t sure if it was better this way or not. There was freedom for an ordinary man to be abroad after dark, but that meant less control, less discipline. A harder city in which to deal with crime, for example.

  Although that last would not be his concern much longer, if tomorrow’s promise held.

  He was still attached to the chief magistrate’s guards, but Fuyin had been as good as his word: Daiyan had been made a subcommander, then the commander, stepping smoothly up in rank. If he was promoted again now, after this morning’s heroism, and brought over into the army proper, he’d be entering as a commander of five thousand, possibly more.

  It was possible. He needed it to be so. Events were suddenly moving fast. If a war was being devised for next year, and it might be, he had to have a rank that made it possible for him to do something about the army.

  They would not succeed against the Xiaolu if they proceeded the way they had against the Kislik. The eunuch—Wu Tong—who had commanded there was still alive, blame shifted neatly onto others. He might even be coming back here since Kai Zhen was now set to return. Wu Tong had been the one, with Zhen, to begin the Flowers and Rocks Network. They were bound together by that.

  The magistrate was allied with the old prime minister in today’s affair. Fuyin was being permitted to know some things.

  For mostly unguessable reasons, Hang Dejin seemed ready to allow his disgraced deputy back into power, to the very highest rank, as he stepped away. But, it seemed, he also wanted Kai Zhen placed on notice, given a warning that he’d be watched. Today’s events had set both of these things in motion—the return and the warning—or so it seemed.

  “Are we being used by him?” Daiyan had asked the magistrate this afternoon.

  “Of course we are!” Fuyin had laughed. “He knows more than the rest of us together.”

  “Then why is he leaving?” Daiyan had persisted.

  Wang Fuyin had been silent a moment.

  “He grew old,” he finally said.

  Walking the streets, Daiyan was still thinking about this. What the prime minister was trying to do might run against Daiyan’s own desire. What Ren Daiyan wanted, for example, if this were all to happen, was to kill Wu Tong when he arrived at court: the man had shaped the disaster of Erighaya and the Flowers and Rocks. Both were marked against his name.

  It would do nothing to bring back the dead, but it might ease unburied ghosts, and the wounded hearts of those who survived them.

  The man who had swung a bamboo weapon in a bamboo grove was no longer young. He had been hardened, even more than he knew, by years in the marsh. He was bleakly determined to help Kitai avoid another defeat, and to regain the Fourteen. And serenely convinced that he was the person to do it.

  There are some men (and women) like that.

  This part of his nature had not changed. In the well-built, neatly bearded man striding through Hanjin, his father and mother would have recognized the determination and urgency they’d always seen in their younger son.

  If one was allowed hindsight, Ren Daiyan was never likely to have become a yamen clerk by the Great River gorges, near the rising lands that led in turn towards the mountains at the border of Kitai, where the Queen Mother of the West was said to dwell in glory on a summit near the stars.

  ZIJI WAS ALSO having difficulties.

  Everything this morning had gone as planned. Their coordination had been precise. It was, he’d said to Daiyan and the magistrate over one of the wines Fuyin was so proud of, too easy. They should not have been able to do what they’d done quite so smoothly. They might be very skilled, but even so ...

  Given such complete success, it was puzzling how strangely Daiyan had been behaving since receiving a perfectly proper invitation to the home of the man whose daughter they had saved.

  “He wants to thank you,” Ziji had said. “What is wrong with that?”

  “It isn’t his home,” was all Daiyan said.

  He’d been quiet as they dressed, and grim-faced as they went through the streets. It wasn’t like him. One of Daiyan’s skills lay in making others feel confident, better than they were. Ziji had seen him doing it for years. He didn’t feel that way now, walking beside his friend ... though he did like the city at night.

  Ziji had expected to be overawed by Hanjin. The magistrate had warned them when they’d come north from Jingxian. And the first days and weeks, trying to grasp that more than a million people lived within these walls or just outside them had been hard.

  But to his surprise, Ziji had discovered that he enjoyed the capital, the anonymity that came with the size of the city. A man could take a walk and a few steps down some street or lane no one would know who he was.

  There was a lake to the west, man-made, just beyond the New Zheng Gate; they called it the Reservoir of Lustre. There were pavilions all around it, some for the emperor and court but some for ordinary people, too, and it was open day or night (all night!), and there was music and wine. You could take a boat out on the water, be served drinks and food from another boat, hear singing, and the sound of flutes.

  There was a park south of this. The Garden of the Chalcedony Grove they called that one. It was enormous, wild in places, exquisitely groomed in others. Like the world , Ziji thought, walking there early one morning, surprising himself.

  Hanjin offered an odd kind of freedom. You didn’t stand out in any way among so many strangers. No one you knew would be there to laugh if you played a game of chance on a street corner and lost some money. He didn’t like losing money any more than the next man, but the games were amusing and the men who ran them were invariably sly and funny.

  There were thieves on the streets. Ziji’s training made them easy to spot. But he was a well-built man, and he carried a sword; he wasn’t concerned. He didn’t wear his uniform on these walks of his. The ones who ran the games would have folded their tables and disappeared if he’d come up to them dressed that way.

  He had the feeling they could be posted here for years and he’d still be finding new things: sellers of knives, birdcages, fans, flowers. There were wine bars, tea shops, theatres, public gardens, alleys to explore in privacy, alone. Someone had said th
ere were two hundred and thirty different kinds of rice dishes here.

  He’d spent his youth in a village where everyone knew everyone else’s business, or tried to, then years in one barracks or another, then he’d been among the men of the marsh. Life in Hanjin was so different it came to Ziji as a kind of intoxication.

  Still, underneath everything lay loyalty to Ren Daiyan. An awareness, near the centre of himself, that his role in life was to do what he could to assist the other man because Daiyan’s role in life felt ... well, it felt as if it mattered, and through that, Zhao Ziji’s existence in the world might come to matter too.

  Ren Daiyan made you feel that way. Usually it was an underthe-surface thing. Daiyan lived like the rest of them, could take a drink or three—or seven—same as anyone, and he certainly liked the singing girls.

  He wondered what Daiyan was like with courtesans. They had never shared two women and a room, though some of the others liked doing that. Daiyan was private that way, and Ziji supposed he was, too.

  But his friend didn’t tend to keep his mood, or the reasons for it, quite as dark as he was doing this evening under the moon, which was almost hidden by lantern light and smoke. You couldn’t see the stars very well in the streets of Hanjin.

  In silence they walked towards the palace but turned east just before it, to the clan compound. They identified themselves at the nearest of the gates. They were uniformed tonight, of course. The guard was respectful, but careful. One of the imperial clan women had been attacked this morning in the emperor’s garden, they were on notice.

  MOST OF US live with fear , Court Gentleman Lin Kuo was thinking as he waited with his daughter for their guest. His guest. With her husband away, Shan could not possibly invite a guardsman to their home. He had sent the invitation.

  What we fear can change, but it is always there.

  For a long time he had been trying to understand how his daughter, his only surviving child, had managed to be otherwise. It came from her mother, or her ancestors, but not from him, or he didn’t think so. He wasn’t a brave man.