River of Stars Read online

  The hesitation, Shan thinks, isn’t uncertainty. It is something else.

  LATER, AFTER THEIR GUESTS have gone, she lies in bed watching the moon, not even close to sleep. She is reliving the conversation from the moment the two men walked into her reception room.

  She is thinking about how a man still young, only a guard commander for the magistrate, not carrying any army rank at all, had said those last quiet words—and they hadn’t sounded vainglorious, or absurd.

  They’d sounded, she thinks (being a poet, after all), like a Fifth Dynasty temple bell ringing far off, somewhere unseen, hidden beyond a bamboo grove, a stream, green hills.

  If one walked or was borne west through the courtyards of the imperial clan compound, and then allowed through a guarded door at the very end, one would enter the central corridor of a new building in the palace complex.

  In this handsome structure could be found, in rooms on either side of the hallway, the imperial calligraphers: those whose training and discipline allowed them to produce notices, commendations, proclamations for steles, as if in the emperor’s own hand.

  In the evening these rooms were empty unless something extreme and urgent was underway. One could go down the silent corridor, past three more pairs of guards, and come out through larger, double doors into a courtyard of the palace grounds.

  At night, as now, it would be quiet. The open space was torchlit so the crooked paths were visible for the occasional civil servant working late, crossing from one wing to another, and so that intruders were easily detected by the considerable number of guards.

  On the far side of this open space one room was so brightly lit that night it seemed to be on fire. Fire was an endless fear in the capital, in all cities. On the upturned roof gables of every building in the palace complex there were an odd number of ornamental decorations. Odd numbers symbolized water, even ones fire. You took what measures were possible.

  In that one large room fifty lanterns were burning, with all the windows open lest the heat overwhelm. The brilliance was dazzling. In that luminous chamber the nearly blind prime minister of Kitai was sitting at his writing table, crafting a late-night letter to his emperor, his last official document.

  Brush, ink, ink stone, paper. The hand as steady as he could make it for this farewell. What would follow in Kitai, at court, would not be his task or burden, for better or for worse.

  He had laboured a long time here. Had done some good, he knew—and some evil. If an emperor was to be free to devote himself to paintings and a garden and the pursuit of immortality, others had to make hard and harsh decisions.

  Sometimes they would be correct in these, sometimes they would not be. But it was time now, past time, to withdraw. Some here would celebrate, some would mourn, some would curse his name until he died, and after. Sometimes bodies were uprooted from graves or tombs. Revenge could follow you past the doors of death.

  He wondered, as those who have known great power sometimes do, what history would make of him and his works. Thinking so, about being judged, he lowered his brush to the ink, to the paper.

  He wrote slowly, and with pride. He had been a scholar before the progression of civil servant, minister, prime minister.

  When he was finished, he let himself sink back with a sigh onto a cushion. His back was a difficulty, among many. Brush down, he allowed his mind to turn and drift, to imagine his home in the countryside west of Yenling, the quiet at Little Gold Hill. The seasons as they changed, leaves appearing, leaves falling.

  Around him in the room, at a signal from his son, servants began putting out and carrying away lanterns ... letting the fierce brightness fade. The prime minister of Kitai smiled to himself at the thought: too easy an image for a poem, given that he was leaving.

  You wanted to do better than that.

  Eventually there were only a handful of lamps left, and the two fires on a chilly night. The servants were gone, his son remained. His son always remained.

  He listened to the wind outside, in the night.

  “Take it across now,” he said, gesturing to the letter he had written. “He will not be asleep.”

  “You are certain of this, Father?” his son asked quietly, respectfully.

  He’d known Hsien would ask.

  “I am always certain,” said Hang Dejin. “I have had to be.”

  There are skills shared between outlaws and soldiers. One of these is the ability to fall asleep. A brief rest on horseback or under a hedge, a quick slumber in a barracks. There would be times when it was not possible. One needed to be able to sleep whenever it was allowed.

  Daiyan was aware that morning would find him at court for the first time, and he’d need to be alert, vigilant, extremely careful.

  He knew he should be sleeping and he knew it was impossible. Too much roiling through his mind, expected, unexpected. So he was walking the streets again, alone this time, and thinking of his father.

  A quiet life in the west, Szechen province, Honglin prefecture, Shengdu Village. Beyond barricading mountains, close to the Great River gorges. An obscure, honourable, dignified existence. Pursued in accordance with Cho Master principles, though with a quiet evading of those aspects of interpretation that had seemed to Ren Yuan to be unduly harsh—on women, children, human frailty.

  Every morning, except on stipulated holidays, he had presented himself at the yamen and set about his tasks for whichever sub-prefect or magistrate or sheriff was there giving commands, behaving in a manner arrogant or courteous, thoughtful or foolish or greedy. It didn’t matter to Ren Yuan, one’s duty was to Kitai, and to one’s family.

  It had been a very long time since his son had seen him. But Daiyan knew with certainty that if his father was alive and healthy, he was doing this as he always had. He’d be at the yamen this morning.

  He would have received a letter from home, he thought, if things were otherwise. They knew where he was now. He’d written when Wang Fuyin had been promoted to Hanjin and taken them with him, as planned. Commander of the guard of the chief magistrate of Hanjin; a father and mother could take real pride in that. It was rising very high.

  And this morning he would be presented at court.

  His father’s pleasure would be so great (but so quiet) to know that a son of his would actually appear before the Celestial Emperor to perform the obeisances.

  By the teachings of the Master, Daiyan knew, this was his truest task in life: to bring his father and mother the pride, and security, that came from a child doing well, acting honourably.

  He’d failed in that for a long time. An outlaw of the marsh did not allow pride. Even now, he asked himself, if his father were to learn that Daiyan’s appearance before the emperor was the consequence of a deception, would he still be proud?

  Walking without awareness of destination, wrapped again in his cloak, Daiyan heard the warning cries of night soil gatherers ahead of him, and was briefly disoriented: they were forbidden to work until extremely late, near dawn. Then he realized it was extremely late. Hanjin, in the cold hours before the sun, was still crowded. It was astonishing how many people found reason to be abroad. The moon had long since set and the stars had changed, wheeling west.

  He realized he was hungry. He bought a warm meat pie from an all-night vendor, ate it as he walked. It was dog meat, which he normally disliked, but another thing you learned as a soldier (or an outlaw): you took food and drink as it came to you, because it might not always come.

  The soldiers retreating from Erighaya had mostly died of starvation and thirst, not in battle. It was long ago now, the Kislik war, that retreat, but it obsessed him still. In certain moods—alone, awake at night—he couldn’t pull his mind from the images it brought.

  He had wanted to fight there once. To do heroic deeds.

  He bought himself a cup of tea and drank it, standing by the cart and brazier with others. Some shifted away from him: an armed guardsman. Not all people abroad at this hour were in the street for reasons they would
wish investigated.

  He handed back the cup, moved on. His thoughts were everywhere tonight, it seemed, and nowhere useful at all.

  He had been absurdly happy, a child passing a test at school, to recognize that Fifth Dynasty bell in her reception room. Why had that mattered? What did it signify to a man aiming for military rank and a northern war that he knew the poet whose words were on a bronze that a woman (and her husband) had found?

  Yes, Tuan Lung would have been pleased his pupil knew this, but Lung himself wasn’t even a teacher now. He was working up and down the Great River. Doing some good, perhaps, but also deceiving some people out of money they needed, at times.

  The world didn’t allow you clean, clear judgments very often, it seemed to Daiyan. He envied those who thought otherwise, who lived otherwise.

  A woman called to him from a doorway. He wasn’t in the pleasure district, but there were women like this at night all through Hanjin. She moved into the lantern light and he saw that she was actually pretty. She sang a fragment of an old song: Alone on my balcony, and the north wind takes my tears ...

  In another mood, perhaps. Not tonight.

  He heard a shout and a terse reply, then the sound of clashing weapons. He considered going over that way. In this mood, it might help to draw a sword. But if one man killed another in the dark, well, that happened every single night, and he had—didn’t he?—a larger goal, a greater purpose.

  He was still astonished at himself for the directness with which he’d spoken of that to the woman and her father. What must they have thought of him? The arrogance, the deluded folly.

  But there came a point, perhaps, when you needed to make clear, or clearer, what you intended with your life, or you might never do it. You could be in shadows forever, Daiyan thought. Perhaps at court that was a way to power, but he was a soldier. Or he would be one later this day.

  The north wind takes my tears ...

  There were several million Kitan living in the north, ruled by the Xiaolu, farming for them, paying taxes, subjugated. Under the savage yoke.

  He didn’t like that last, well-worn phrase. Tuan Lung had taught them how lazy poets tried to elicit a reader’s response with words designed to tug at the heart.

  Truth was, most likely the Kitan farmers and villagers in the Fourteen Prefectures didn’t much care who governed them. They’d have to pay taxes either way. Be subject to the yellow dust off the steppe in summer, and snow and bitter cold when winter came. Drought afflicted them whichever empire claimed their farms.

  If the Golden River flooded, no emperor was likely to save their land or lives. If a daughter disgraced herself or a son died of fever, or hunting wolves, did it matter who ruled over you?

  Even so, Ren Daiyan thought. Even so, Kitai was so much less than it had been, so much smaller. And you didn’t, or you shouldn’t, turn your back on history. That farmer whose thoughts he was imagining could be wrong. No steppe emperor would store grain against flood or drought for his Kitan farmers, but emperors in Xinan had done so since the Third Dynasty. There were granaries in the west right now.

  The emperor of Kitai ruled with the sufferance of the gods under heaven, and the sanctity of his reign did turn on his compassion for his people. The man on the Dragon Throne could be led astray by bad advisers. He could be weak, foolish, self-indulgent, he could fail. But he could also be helped and guided back to glory.

  The sounds of the street fight receded as he walked on. You couldn’t address everything the world presented you to heal or amend. He was a soldier, not a poet. He was going to try. To amend. Maybe that was the difference between the two, though he was probably wrong in that. Too easy a thought. And soldiers could break the world.

  She’d had a deadly hold over them, that woman, Lin Shan, because she knew about the arrow.

  He couldn’t believe a woman in fear for her life had been able to comprehend what was happening in the garden. The one thing they hadn’t accounted for ...

  He could have tried to dissemble, deny. He’d been aware of the dismay on Ziji’s features when Daiyan admitted she was right.

  But she knew. She knew. Her gaze had been one of those looks that goes into you. Not many people were like that, not in his experience, and never a woman. Challenges in a look, yes, from a drunken outlaw or soldier, even a sober one once or twice, gauging his chances in a fight.

  Those he’d known and dealt with. He was strong and clever, quick, knew how to kill a man.

  He probably should have gone to where that street fight was. Or maybe go back and claim that woman, the unexpectedly pretty one under the lantern. Sometimes your thoughts could be a trap, and you needed to quiet them somehow. Wine, a brawl, a woman, music.

  Maybe all of those, he thought, which made him smile in the dark. He walked between the lanterns of food stalls open late and the lights lining the canal, meant to prevent drunken men from falling in and drowning. You could put up lights, but you couldn’t always save men from themselves.

  He felt a change in the wind. Dawn coming. He’d be going to his emperor without having slept. It was time to go back to the barracks. He’d need to clean himself up, and change again. Fuyin had arranged proper clothing for Daiyan today, being presented at court. He turned to double back, and almost bumped into someone walking too close behind. He knew that trick.

  It took recklessness to try to snip or lift the purse of a guardsman. He grinned at the man’s horrified expression. He let him scurry away. There were, Daiyan thought, many different ways of being brave. And as many of being foolish beyond words.

  She had released them from the hold she’d had. But with the old man, the prime minister, a part of what they’d done, she’d been in a difficult position. Denounce them, and under the torture that would follow one of them would probably name Hang Dejin, and her own security against the new prime minister would disappear. And her father’s. Daiyan had watched her, eyes on her eyes, as she worked it through.

  At the end, in that room among bells and bowls, porcelains and a black ceramic horse, old scrolls on tables, and one enormous urn from a thousand years ago, she’d nodded.

  “I see it,” Lin Shan had said. “Our fate is tied to yours. In this, at least.”

  Daiyan had bowed. To her first, this time, and then to the father, who reminded him of his own.

  It was possible, he thought now, to be living your slowly unfolding life, or thinking you were doing that, and come to a moment when so much changed you realized that it was really just starting. Right then.

  Everything to this point, this night, felt to him to have become a prelude, like notes played on a pipa to tune it, ensure it was ready for the song yet to come.

  He stopped walking and looked around. And realized that he was back in front of the clan compound, standing before one of the gates. They would let him in, he could identify himself, he was in his uniform.

  He stood there a long time, then turned to walk back to the barracks in a rising wind.

  IN BED SHAN HEARS the wind beginning to blow towards dawn. She gets up to go to the window and look out. There is no reason for her to do this. It is cold, but she lingers. The moon is long since gone. Stars and ragged, moving clouds.

  There are, Shan thinks, too many poems about women at windows, their tumbling, cloud-like hair, their scent and jewellery, the jade stairs leading up to them, and their sorrow, waiting for someone who does not come.

  She looks out upon the world they have been given in the time they are allowed.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER XIII

  It was all difficult, and in so many different ways.

  Kai Zhen, once deputy prime minister of Kitai, was not a man who had ever sought out the harmonies of the countryside. He was a different sort of man.

  He’d experienced this life, of course—this wasn’t his first exile. The tedium of the last time had driven him to do all he could to end it, and the result had been a very great change in his life.

  Exiled south
many years ago, he’d first encountered Wu Tong, and he and the clever eunuch had devised a strategy to claim the attention (and trust) of the emperor.

  With word reaching them of Wenzong’s intention to create a garden in Hanjin to mirror the empire, align it with celestial forces, they’d begun sending rare plants and trees and arrestingly pitted rocks for the Genyue, along with Kai Zhen’s poems and essays. Never on political subjects, of course. He was still in exile, and he wasn’t a fool.

  The Flowers and Rocks Network was born of this, and had become what it was—which included being the avenue, wide and graciously shaded, for Kai Zhen’s return to court, bringing the eunuch with him.

  He owed what he had become to rocks, sandalwood trees, birds, and gibbons, he sometimes said. He hated gibbons.

  He hated the isolation here. A sense of being hopelessly cut off from everything that mattered, the feeling that time was running, passing, disappearing.

  When you were exiled, a majority of the people with any claim to significance wanted nothing to do with you. They didn’t even reply to letters sent—and most of them were people who owed him greatly. When you fell in Kitai, you could fall a long way.

  Among other things, once out of power he’d lost the river of income that came with high office. All of his homes, except this one, had been forfeited.

  He wasn’t poor, of course. This estate was good-sized, successfully farmed by his people. But neither was it the case that he could ignore matters of domestic finance.

  He had surrendered two of his concubines. Luxuries he could no longer justify. They were pretty girls, talented. He’d sold them to men attached to the yamen in Shantong. Neither woman had been entirely sincere, to his mind, in her protestations of grief when the news was conveyed to them.

  Not that he could blame them too greatly, if he made an effort to see things clearly. Life here on the Kai family’s ancestral estate was dull, not especially comfortable, and being a lesser woman in a household dominated by his second wife was ... well, harmonious was not a word one would apply.