River of Stars Read online

  A stubborn, determined streak had often served Qi Wai of the imperial clan well. Most men didn’t like to push back when you pushed. He knew he was regarded as eccentric and was content with that. It could be useful. It helped that he had stature, by way of his family, and also by way of his wife, lately, though that aspect of things was somewhat complex.

  The soldier confronting Wai from horseback was a man of strong build, not especially young. He was a deputy commander of five thousand, evidently, which was a respectable rank. One that entitled him to converse with Qi Wai, but certainly not to give orders to a member of the imperial clan.

  The man had addressed him with acceptable deference. It appeared he had actually been inside their house in Hanjin: accompanying the one who’d saved Shan’s life in the Genyue last autumn. This was very unexpected.

  Not that it mattered, in terms of what he intended to do. He hadn’t come all this way to get up and go on some soldier’s orders.

  He wasn’t sure what this officer was even doing here, northwest of Shuquian, on the weedy, overgrown grounds of a long-abandoned Cho temple. On the other hand, it wasn’t really of interest to him. No civilized man concerned himself with the comings and goings of soldiers.

  And he had a ceremonial vessel to dig out from where his experience and intuition had—correctly!—told him something might be found. And if there was one magnificent bronze there were almost certainly going to be other artifacts. He wanted engraved ceremonial cups. He was lacking in those, especially from the Fourth and further back. A dream, always, was to unearth a chest with preserved scrolls. He’d done that once. The memory could trigger a man’s hopes of doing so again. A kind of desire.

  He glared up at the officer sitting astride what—even to Qi Wai’s unpractised eye—seemed a remarkably broken-down horse. The man looked back at him with an expression that could only be described, startlingly, as amused.

  “I will not give you orders, of course,” the soldier said gravely.

  “Of course, indeed!” snapped Qi Wai of the imperial clan.

  “But I will do so to your labourers.”

  There was a pause as Wai considered that.

  “If you stay here, you stay alone, sir. And I must commandeer the cart and get it into the city. We have our instructions. The Xiaolu are going to be crossing the river today, it’s just about certain, and they will be unhappy. We are to leave nothing of value for them. And I trust you enough, my lord, to believe the objects in this cart have value.”

  “Of course they do! Great value!”

  Qi Wai began, uneasily, to feel as if the encounter wasn’t going quite the way he needed it to.

  “As you say.” The officer nodded calmly.

  He turned and spoke commands over his shoulder to the five men accompanying him. In turn, they moved towards the hole in the ground where Wai’s men were digging (not very diligently just now) around the partially excavated bronze.

  “What are they doing?” Wai demanded, summoning all the authority he could.

  “Telling your men that Xiaolu riders are likely to be here before the end of today. The same thing I am telling you, my lord.”

  “We have a peace treaty with them!” Qi Wai snapped.

  “We do, indeed. We may have breached it last night. A smuggler from our side. Stolen horses. It is possible there were casualties on the north side of the river. We do not want casualties on this side. We especially don’t want one of them to be a member of the imperial clan.”

  “They would not dare!”

  “Forgive me, but they would. Perhaps a Xiaolu diplomat would be properly aware of your lordship’s importance, but an angry soldier is less likely to be cautious.”

  “Then you and your men will stay and defend me! I ... I order you to do so!”

  The officer’s expression was no longer amused. “Sir, it would give me great pleasure to kill Xiaolu in your defence, but I have instructions otherwise, and I know of no way that you can override those. I am sorry, my lord. As I said, I must bring your men. If you stay, you stay alone. If it makes you feel better, your death will probably cost me my own life, for leaving you here.”

  He trotted the old horse gingerly over towards Wai’s hired labourers. These, Wai saw, were already climbing with unseemly haste out of the hole around the massive bronze.

  “Stay where you are!” he shouted. They looked at him, but didn’t stop climbing out.

  “I will have you all beaten!”

  The officer looked back at him. His expression this time was displeasing—you would have to call it contemptuous.

  “No call for that, sir,” he said. “They are doing this under military orders.”

  “What is your name, you accursed fool?”

  “Zhao Ziji, sir. Serving under Commander Ren Daiyan at the Xinan barracks. You may find me there, sir, if you wish. And you can certainly file a complaint with a magistrate up here or in Xinan.”

  He turned away again. His men were organizing Wai’s labourers. They were taking the cart with the artifacts that had already been unearthed.

  Wai watched as they started across the trampled ground towards the dirt road that would intersect the larger one leading to Shuquian’s walls.

  He became unpleasantly aware of two things. A solitary bird was singing in a tree behind him, and he was about to be equally alone in the ruins of the temple.

  He watched the receding party. He looked around. The river was out of sight, but not far away. The bird continued to sing with an irritating persistence. The group of men was proceeding steadily, with the cart.

  Xiaolu riders, that soldier had said.

  “I need a horse, then!” he shouted. “Give me a horse!”

  They stopped. The officer looked back.

  They put him in the cart. He bounced and jostled painfully all the way to Shuquian, which they reached late in the day. He held one of the ceramic bowls in his lap, cradled in both hands. They were going too fast, it was almost certain to break if he didn’t protect it.

  Behind them, it was later learned, thirty Xiaolu horsemen forded the Golden River that same day and ranged through the countryside, looking for two of their own horses and the man who’d taken them.

  They were careful at first to damage only property, not seriously injure anyone. But then one farmer was rather too insistent in resisting their desire to look inside his barn. A Xiaolu rider, not understanding the shouted words but seeing a scythe waving in the farmer’s hands, decided this was sufficient to justify his desire to kill someone.

  One of the four dead soldiers two nights ago had been his brother. The rider was reprimanded by his leader. The two horses weren’t in the barn. For want of anything better to do, they set fire to it.

  Shan has been in Xinan only once before, and not for nearly so long as this. It is the strangest place she’s ever known.

  The contrasts are inescapable: between past and present, glory and ruin, pride and ... whatever came when pride went away.

  There had been two million people here at the city’s peak; there are less than a tenth of that now. But the walls and gates, where they still stand, enclose the same vast spaces as before. The central north-south avenue, the imperial way, is humbling, it is overwhelming. You feel, she thinks, as if those who built this, who lived here, were more than you could ever dream of being.

  The untended parks and gardens are enormous. Much as she hates being carried in a litter, it is impossible to deal with Xinan otherwise. The imperial way alone is more than five hundred paces across. She finds it difficult to believe what she is seeing, what it says about the past.

  Chan Du wrote a poem about Long Lake Park at the southeastern edge of the city, about court ladies in silken finery (kingfisher feathers in their hair) arriving on horseback to watch a polo match. How the air was changed and brightened by their presence and their laughter.

  The charred and looted palace is full of echoes and ghosts. It seems to Shan, carried there one morning, that she can smell
burning, hundreds of years after. She walks (insists on walking) in the walled palace park through which the emperor had fled on the eve of the rebellion in the Ninth, when everything came crashing down.

  As well as her litter-bearers, she’s had two men guarding her, at the appalled insistence of the city’s chief magistrate, a fastidious, anxious man. A good thing, that morning in the palace: wild dogs appeared, and backed away only when one of them was killed.

  She hadn’t intended to be in Xinan at all. She’d insisted on coming with Wai on the usual summer journey west. He hadn’t wanted her to. She’d had a secret thought that she might try to glimpse his concubine in Yenling, the one he wouldn’t bring into their home the way a decent man should.

  But when they’d arrived in Yenling Shan had felt a revulsion against her own thoughts. It was too humiliating—not just the presence of an allegedly very young girl here, but the distorting image of herself, spying on her. Was this what she’d become?

  She would not allow it to be so. So when Wai suggested she stay there while he continued west and then north to Shuquian, she’d said she’d go as far as Xinan. He hadn’t refused. Probably happy to have her out of Yenling, she thought.

  She didn’t go north with him. Once, it would have simply been what they did together. They’d have gone about the countryside, searching. They’d have spoken to village elders and temple clerics, dug up or purchased artifacts, made drawings and notes of the things they couldn’t move or buy, for their collection.

  The collection, she thinks, isn’t theirs any longer. She loves the bronzes, porcelain, scrolls, steles they have, but she isn’t passionate about claiming these any more. Not as she had been once.

  Life can change people, Shan thinks. She makes a face at the banality of the thought. She is sipping tea, late afternoon, at a tea house just outside the principal western gate of the city. This is where, in the days when Xinan was the centre of the world, friends would break willow twigs at parting, in the hope they’d meet again.

  The guards and her litter-bearers are waiting outside. She wonders what the four men think of her. She decides that she doesn’t care. As usual, that isn’t entirely true.

  Once, the collection was another way in which she—and her marriage—were different from the way the world tried to make you be. That’s gone now, she thinks. She is losing a battle to the world, the weight of it.

  She writes a song one morning, before it grows too hot to concentrate. Sets it to the music of “Late Night on a Balcony.” There had been a time when she’d hated that song, all the songs and poems like that one, about abandoned courtesans, their disordered silk and scented cheeks, but the words to the tune are her own now, and different.

  When she is finished she puts down her brush and looks at her inked characters, what is said and half said on the paper. Suddenly she feels afraid, not knowing from where this came, who the woman in this song really is—or the woman at the desk, writing and then reading the words:

  Yesterday, I sat by the city gate

  And looked away west as far as I could.

  No one coming along the imperial road,

  Only ghosts and the summer wind.

  I am not perfect like Wen Jian was,

  Jade pins aslant in her hair,

  For whose love an emperor drifted from his throne.

  Walking in gardens among weeds

  Where chrysanthemums once grew,

  I feel the gaze of those who think this is immodest,

  As improper as Cho Masters find peonies.

  Today, by a dry fountain in a courtyard,

  I ask for endless cups of tea.

  I would like to drink saffron wine, cup after cup,

  Listening to wind chimes in the trees.

  No, I will not refuse to drink with you.

  This flower will not be like any other.

  Late one afternoon, the ship carrying Lu Chao, honourable emissary of the emperor of Kitai, back from his encounter with the Altai tribe of the steppe was caught in a storm.

  They had only a little warning, but the mariners were capable, if terrified. The pleated sail was folded and lashed to the deck. The passengers, including their most illustrious one, had ropes tied to their waists to keep them from being swept overboard. Of course, if the vessel broke up or overturned this would achieve nothing.

  The sky went from blue to streaked purple to black. Thunder boomed. The ship was tossed and then spun completely around by the wind and waves. All those aboard believed their time had come to cross over to the greater dark. Those who die at sea cannot have proper burial. Their spirits never rest.

  Chao fought his way, crawling and staggering, to where his nephew clung to one of the wooden wheel-blocks on the deck. His own rope was just long enough to let him do this. He dropped down beside Mah. They looked at each other, faces streaming with rain and salt sea water. It was too loud in the storm to speak. They were together, though. If this was the end, they would cross together. He loved his brother’s son as he loved his own.

  Below deck, in a metal casket with a heavy lock, were his memoranda and recommendations from his meeting with the war-leader of the Altai. If the ship went down, they would never be known.

  Farther east, and south, beyond the storm—in a place where there were never storms—lay the island of the gods, Peng-lai. A haven for the souls of those whose lives had been truly virtuous. Lu Chao did not imagine his spirit going there. His nephew’s might, he thought, rain whipping his face. His nephew had gone to Lingzhou, to care for his father. There was a lifetime’s worth of virtue in having done that. Lu Chao could pray it might be rewarded. He did that, soaked through, clinging. Lightning filled the whole of the western sky for a vivid moment, then the land was lost in blackness and waves. He gripped the wood as tightly as he could.

  THEY DID NOT DROWN or die, not one man on board. The ship endured, the storm finally passed as evening came. It was very strange: afternoon blackness giving way to an evening brightness. Then it grew dark again. Lu Chao saw the star of the Weaver Maid as the clouds passed over them and away, thunder fading and gone, the last flashes of lightning.

  They pulled up the pleated sail. They carried on, in sight of the shoreline as mariners did whenever they could.

  He lived to return to Hanjin and the court. He presented his report and offered his views to the emperor and the honourable Prime Minister Kai Zhen, also returned from exile, installed in office by then.

  After Lu Chao concluded, he was thanked, graciously, for his efforts, and given a proper reward on behalf of the empire. He was not asked to do anything further in this matter, nor offered a position at court, or in any prefecture.

  Chao went home, therefore, travelling into autumn with his nephew to the farm by East Slope, to his brother and his family. He was home by the Ninth of Ninth, the Chrysanthemum Festival.

  The thoughts he’d shared before the Dragon Throne had been unequivocal, and urgently expressed.

  Small events can be important in the unfolding, like a pleated sail, of the world. The survival of an emissary, say, or his drowning on a ship in a sudden summer thunderstorm.

  But sometimes such moments do not signify in the sweep and flow of events, though obviously they will matter greatly to those who might have thought their lives were ending in rain and wind, and for those who love them dearly and would have grieved for their loss.

  A different storm, but with lightning and thunder as well, and a torrent of rain, caught Ren Daiyan near Xinan. He took refuge at the edge of a wood. You didn’t go under trees in the open (he’d seen men killed by lightning) but a forest was all right, kept you relatively dry, and this storm didn’t look as if it would last.

  He wasn’t in a hurry. He was off the main road already, though couldn’t have clearly explained why he was headed towards Ma-wai. Perhaps just because he’d never seen it, the fabled hot springs and the structures built around them, what would be left of those.

  He was alone. He’d collected six
of his soldiers back at Shuquian and ridden with them until this morning, when he’d sent them on to their barracks outside Xinan. Soldiers had been protection on the journey south, and they’d also masked him. A man alone riding a very good horse with another tied behind, in the days after the Xiaolu had almost certainly recorded a protest at the yamen in Shuquian about murder and horse theft, was not a good idea.

  He didn’t know what else the Xiaolu had done. There might have been violence. Probably had been. He’d been moving fast, outpacing any news. He’d hear it later at the barracks. Better to be there and settled in before tidings—and questions—emerged.

  He didn’t regret killing the first four barbarians of his life, but he wouldn’t proclaim it the most prudent thing he’d ever done. Made it harder, for one thing, to report the tidings he’d heard about the fall of the Eastern Capital.

  That mattered, if it was true, might change things. It needed to be assessed. The goal, after all, wasn’t to destroy the Xiaolu, or the Altai, or any other tribe. Someone had to rule the steppe. No, the goal was the Fourteen, and they needed to sort through how to achieve that.

  He didn’t have answers. He didn’t know enough. It was disturbing, how fast a Xiaolu city appeared to have fallen to a small tribe from the northeast, if the rumour was true.

  Under trees, he listened to the hammer of the rain. He kept his hand near his sword—he was in a wood he didn’t know. His horse was quiet, which reassured somewhat. The other horse he’d sent on, ridden by one of his soldiers. That one would be Ziji’s when his deputy commander came back south. Daiyan wouldn’t deny the pleasure of riding horses this good. They made you realize what you’d been missing. Could make you want to be a cavalry officer, he thought.

  The rain was steady, though the thunder had moved on. The wind made a sound in the leaves and the leaves dripped all around him. There was a smell of forest, earth and decay. There were flowers by the edge, where light could fall.