River of Stars Read online

  Unless you could somehow propose that educating a daughter as he had constituted courage—and he didn’t see it that way. He had come to regard it as an act of selfishness. He’d wanted a child who could share aspects of the world that moved and engaged him, and though the child that remained to him happened to be a girl, he simply hadn’t allowed that to alter this desire.

  No, Lin Kuo held to his belief: apprehension and the longing to mitigate it was what drove most men and women. People feared the future and based that on the past, or false tales of it.

  Strangers in your village were bad because a traveller had once robbed your wife’s cousin while passing through. A crane had been seen flying south the night your grandfather died; cranes became an omen in your family. A pretty wife was a risk because someone’s pretty wife had betrayed him with a soldier. And soldiers? All of them, especially high-ranking officers, were feared ... because of what had happened hundreds of years ago.

  Shan had had lamps lit in their reception room. The fire was built up, the windows shuttered against the autumn chill and wind.

  In these years of the Twelfth, Lin Kuo often thought (though he had never written it down, he wasn’t a brave man) that they had built ideas of the world and its proper ordering upon the ruins of long-ago chaos.

  They had shaped a vision of court and civil service holding mastery over the military—accepting a weakened army because of that. A price paid for controlling their commanders. The Kitan army was vast, it was punishingly expensive—and it had no leaders halfway worthy of the name.

  A commander who could create loyalty and inspire soldiers to victories ... such a man could do what had been done all those years ago: bring an empire crashing down in fire and blood and desperate starvation.

  Such was the fear, Lin Kuo thought. And perhaps it was because of this that Kitai wasn’t what it once had been. On the other hand—and there was another way to see this—they lived today in peace. The recent war had been their own decision, a folly of the emperor’s, spurred by ambitious civil servants. Peace was theirs if they wanted it.

  Their emperor was unpredictable. Lost to painting and his garden and arcane rituals of the Path, then suddenly emerging with speeches about ancestors and the need to pay fealty to their memory.

  His understanding tonight was that they might be once more devising schemes in the palace, weighing a new alliance, aiming dreams north again.

  Lin Kuo stood in a handsome room decorated with antiquities his son-in-law had collected. He was waiting with his daughter for a visitor on an autumn evening in the capital. He was uneasy about this encounter. He didn’t understand the invitation.

  He looked at Shan. An arrow had been loosed to kill her today. Why should a young woman be the target—twice, now!—of someone wanting her dead? How did the world encompass such a thing?

  She sat in her favourite chair, composed, straight-backed, dressed in blue silk with silver birds along the border of her robe, a cup of wine at her elbow.

  He thought of her mother, dead too long, lost to both of them. Their look was very different, his two women. Shan was taller, taking after his own family. Her walk was stronger. His doing, that, years of striding unfashionably through the city together, even outside the walls. Her eyebrows were finer, her eyes more wide-set, if memory could be trusted after so many years. Her body was more angular, her fingers longer.

  Her voice was different from what her mother’s had been, more bold. His doing, again. He had unleashed these things in her, allowed them licence to emerge. But they had been in Shan, within her. He hadn’t created them. He did believe that.

  What the women he’d loved did share, Lin Kuo thought, was the quiet certainty he saw in his daughter now. When his wife had believed she was right about something the world could be beset by flood and earthquake, torrential rains or killing drought, a tail-star falling in the sky, and she would not change her mind.

  Shan was like that.

  It made him uneasy. How could mortal men or women feel such certainty in the world? About the world? He didn’t know what his daughter was doing, she hadn’t told him, but someone had tried to kill her today.

  She’d ascended so high into the emperor’s dragon world that the height itself frightened her father. You could fall from heights. People did. A quieter life was surely better. It left you free. He’d lived in that belief.

  She had told him that word in the compound this afternoon was that the prime minister was stepping aside, going home to retirement.

  Kai Zhen was being brought back.

  It was Kai Zhen who had ordered him exiled to Lingzhou.

  A servant entered, quick, small steps, hands clasped, eyes downcast, to report that two men had come to call, what should be done?

  You couldn’t always live long enough, Lin Kuo was thinking, standing near his daughter, his wine still untouched, to outrun what you feared. Indeed, it was possible to live too long, so that terror had time to catch up with you on the path through light and shadow.

  HE IS DRESSED DIFFERENTLY, of course. Formal officer’s uniform, not a working guard’s outfit. A dark cloak against the chill, one sword. The other man, a fellow officer, she has never seen. They bow twice to her father, once to her.

  The man who was guarding her today—his name is Ren Daiyan—is to be honoured tomorrow morning by the emperor. For quick thinking and proper action, saving the life of an imperial favourite, preventing a desecration of the Genyue’s harmonies.

  The second thing more important than the first. She could find this amusing, but she needs to know more now, to deal with the fear she’s hiding.

  She lets her father speak. She is watching this Ren Daiyan. He is of above average height, light on his feet, still young. You couldn’t call him a handsome man, but his eyes are arresting: observant, intense. He looks at her briefly, then concentrates on Lin Kuo.

  “You are welcome, officers,” her father says. He is anxious, she knows it, she can’t help him with that yet. “Will you honour us by sitting to take wine?”

  “We are on duty, still,” says Ren Daiyan. His voice is courteous, educated. He had been shouting orders, conveying rapid information to other soldiers this morning. The tone had been very different. “All soldiers and guards in Hanjin are considered to be on duty tonight,” he adds.

  “Because of me?” Shan asks, keeping her voice light, letting it sound overawed, trying out that tone.

  “And other matters, my lady,” he says, politely.

  The second man, heavier, broad-shouldered, has remained a step behind him. That one looks uneasy, Shan decides, but she must not read too much into it. He would be anxious just being summoned after dark to a large home in the clan compound. He might be worried about holding a wine cup the wrong way. She sips her own wine. Her hand is steady.

  “What other matters?” she asks, giving up on the awed voice. It isn’t the approach she needs, and she isn’t good at it, in any case.

  They are going to realize, soon enough, that this evening’s invitation was from her, not her father, improper as that may be. They might as well learn it now.

  “We have not been informed,” says Ren Daiyan.

  “Really?” Shan says, raising her eyebrows. “Might it be the prime minister’s declared intention to resign?”

  She is watching closely, and so sees how he registers this change in tone, absorbs it—and shifts his attention to her. It takes no time at all. He is a ... forceful presence, she decides, for want of a readier phrase. His hands are relaxed, she sees. Not a man who fidgets or betrays himself.

  The other one, whose name they do not yet know, looks even more alarmed. Just wait, Shan thinks. But she’s too tightly wound to enjoy this; there is danger here.

  Ren Daiyan says, “We have not heard anything of that, Lady Lin. It is beyond us. We are only guards, officers attached to the chief magis—”

  “Really?” Shan says, again, interrupting this time. Women don’t do that, of course. Nor do women say, a
s she now does, “And will the chief magistrate be aware there was no real attempt on my life today?”

  Silence. She is aware of her father, his astonishment.

  “My lady,” says Ren Daiyan. “What are you saying?”

  She smiles. “I haven’t, yet.”

  “Most honourable lady, I fear I ... I do not ...”

  She lets his voice dwindle away. Allows a pause in her reception room, among the artifacts of antiquity. A poet employs pauses more than a songwriter does, but she knows they are there to be used.

  She says, “Is your companion the man who loosed the arrow this morning? That would make sense, that he would be the one you’d bring.”

  “I do not understand,” says Ren Daiyan. His voice is impressively calm.

  She says, “Guard Officer Ren, I saw the arrow flying. I saw how you blocked it and then turned your shield to the right. I saw you point right, not left when others came running. You sent them the wrong way. Tell me,” she asks, sweetly, turning to the second man, “did you have enough time to get away without trouble? Discard the bow? You’d have had to do that, of course.”

  Third silence. Voices can be heard from outside, faintly. Silence has many different shadings and tones, she thinks. Can be such varied things, far beyond mere absence of sound.

  The second man spreads his hands, almost helplessly, a mute denial. Ren Daiyan is staring at her now. She is aware of being seen this time, assessed. She looks straight back at him.

  She says, “I have sent two letters under seal. One to the Imperial Censorate, and one to a man my father and I trust, by courier, this evening. If harm befalls us they will be opened. Otherwise they remain sealed. The letters are quite detailed as to the events of this morning.” She sips her wine. “I thought I should tell you that. Are you sure you won’t take wine?”

  What follows is not what she expected. She can’t say what she’d thought would be his response, but it wasn’t laughter she’d been ready for.

  “Oh, well done, my lady!” says Ren Daiyan after some moments, regaining his composure. He grins, the smile changes his features. “I had heard stories about you, I admit it, but none of them were even near to truth.”

  “Daiyan!” the other man mutters, awkwardly trying to be discreet—as if every word spoken or whispered cannot be heard in a quiet room.

  “We will gladly take wine,” says Ren Daiyan. “It will be an honour.”

  Shan manages a smile of her own, though she has been unsettled by his amusement. She stands to pour for them, as is proper. The second guardsman looks, she thinks, as if he’s in water some distance out in a lake, searching for the shore.

  Ren Daiyan accepts a cup. “Tell me, honourable sir,” he says, turning to her father, “where did you find these Fifth Dynasty bells? They are among the best I have seen.”

  Shan carefully pays attention to the wine, pouring for the other man. She puts the beaker back on the brazier.

  “My son-in-law and my daughter are the collectors,” her father says. He will not be feeling calm at all, but he won’t let her down.

  “We found these two near the burial grounds by Xinan,” she says. She walks to the other man and hands him a cup. She smiles at him, turns to Daiyan. “I’d not have expected a guardsman to know Fifth Dynasty bronze.”

  “And you’d be right in that,” he says. He walks over and examines a temple bell more closely. It is the prize object of all things in this room. Her husband’s joy. “Whose hand is the inscription? I know the lines, of course.”

  Of course?

  “Duan Ting’s calligraphy, we believe,” she says. This exchange has become astonishing. “He was an adviser to the last emperor of the Fifth.”

  It is still considered bad luck to name that last emperor.

  “And the words are Lu Lung’s, am I right?”

  “You are,” she says.

  He turns, grinning widely. “My teacher would be proud.”

  Shan says, resolutely, “Would he be proud of your deception today?”

  She wants more wine, herself, but fears to take her cup, lest her hand be seen to tremble now.

  “I believe he would,” says Ren Daiyan. He has an odd expression on his face as he says it.

  “Daiyan!” the other man rasps again. “What are you—?”

  Ren Daiyan lifts a hand. It is almost gentle, a soothing gesture.

  He says, looking from Shan to her father, still beside the bronze bell, “It was judged that a curb might be needed for Kai Zhen, coming back to power. You two were the reason, in part, he was exiled. It seemed to make sense as a stratagem. You can see that?”

  Shan takes a deep breath, then she does walk to her chair and reach for the cup. If her hand’s unsteady, so be it. She stands by the table. There is a very fine bowl on it, Third Dynasty. And a ritual axe, a tiger on the handle, also from the Third.

  “I think I understand. The prime minister ... he is part of this, then?”

  She probably should not be asking that, she thinks. It may be better not to know.

  But Ren Daiyan is nodding. “Of course he is. Are we fools? To do this ourselves? In the Genyue?”

  She manages a shrug. “Fools? I wouldn’t have been able to answer, before tonight.”

  “And now?” he asks, and she sees amusement in those eyes again. He is so far from what she’d expected it makes her feel strange.

  “I doubt the chief magistrate is foolish. And you won’t be,” she says. “What are you, then?”

  Shan will remember that moment all her life. Her father will, too, as it happens, and so will Zhao Ziji.

  “I am the man who will take back the Fourteen Prefectures,” says Ren Daiyan.

  His is the shaped silence this time. Shan finds she has nothing to say. No words come. The sensation lasts. Words can leave you. She puts her cup down, carefully.

  “Shan,” her father says, “this has nothing to do with us. It is not ours to pursue, surely?” She shakes her head stubbornly. “But it is, because I have some conditions.”

  “Gracious lady?” says the second soldier, also looking shaken.

  Ren Daiyan is gazing at her from across the room, beside the bell. His expression is curious. She would like to understand it but she doesn’t.

  “This morning was a lie,” she says.

  “A deception that helps you!” Again it is the second soldier. Daiyan is waiting. Looking at her.

  “Or implicates us in a conspiracy,” she says. “Me and my father, both of us.”

  “That is unlikely,” says Ren Daiyan, finally speaking.

  “Not the most reassuring word,” she says.

  He smiles again.

  It angers her, suddenly, that amusement. “An arrow was loosed in a place where the emperor was present!”

  “It was,” he agrees. “But how are you helped by betraying us?”

  “Betraying?”

  He looks at her. Then murmurs, “You’d prefer a more reassuring word?”

  And, astonishingly, Shan hears her father’s laughter.

  Daiyan looks at Lin Kuo. “Our interests are not the same here, honourable sir, but we judged that they march together. You do need protection from Kai Zhen. He is a man known for a long memory. Your daughter’s exalted status might help, but it might also not be enough.”

  “And your interests?” her father asks, bravely. “Marching reassuringly with ours?”

  Daiyan smiles. His face really does change greatly when he does that, Shan thinks again, irrelevantly.

  “I would have been unlikely to achieve the rank I require, without something unexpected.”

  “Like this morning?” she asks.

  “Like this morning,” he agrees.

  “And the prime minister? His interests?”

  For the first time he looks rueful. “I would not presume to guess all that Prime Minister Hang is devising. Neither does the chief magistrate, my lady. The old one goes deeper than any of us.”

  “But if you were forced to gue
ss? By a woman who has sent letters unmasking you?”

  The other soldier is sweating beneath his hat, she sees. She feels little sympathy.

  Ren Daiyan reaches out and touches the bell, a caress. She watches him think. He says, “You do know, if there is any unmasking, it will include the prime minister, my lady. It is unlikely he’ll be pleased.”

  She is what she is, has already considered this.

  Shan feels an impulse, unexpected in the extreme, and yields to it. She says, “I lied about the letter to the Censorate. The other one I did send ... I will write again and ask him to destroy the first one.”

  He doesn’t look triumphant. He says, quietly, “Thank you for that trust.”

  “You were honest with me. Or so it seems.”

  He smiles. “I’m merely a guardsman. Not accustomed to intrigue.”

  “And I am so accustomed?”

  “It does appear so, gracious lady.”

  She is trying to decide whether to be angry. He adds, “Your question about the prime minister? I can guess two things. I am sure there are more. The emperor will now be reminded of Kai Zhen’s earlier attempt on your life. Minister Kai will need to be cautious—regarding you, but also in other ways. The prime minister, departing, has sent him a warning.”

  “I see that. And the second thing?”

  “We believe the prime minister does not approve of this new alliance in the steppe. I think he is content to have matters remain as they are in the north. If he leaves now, whatever follows is not his doing.”

  “Ah. So you set yourselves against him,” Shan says, thinking hard.

  “We would not do that,” Ren Daiyan says. “I am not so reckless. Or I hope I am not. But I will try to make any war a successful one this time.”

  “But you do want war,” Shan pursues. Her heart is beating fast, she isn’t sure why. She gazes at him, trying to read his face.

  Yet another silence. Another sound to silence.

  He says, “Yes, I do want it. We will not take back our rivers and mountains without fighting. And I ... I was born into the world to win them back.”