River of Stars Read online

  They had passed the turn off to the imperial tombs yesterday, seeing them to the east, high mounds off the main road, overgrown paths leading to them. Five dynasties had laid their emperors to rest in mausoleums that vied with each other for preeminence. Their emperors, and one empress.

  Daiyan could remember his teacher speaking of her. Empress Hao was vilified in all official writings. You were supposed to spit if you named her. Teacher Tuan had laughed when one of the students had done that in the classroom.

  “Tell me,” Tuan Lung had asked, mildly, “how does an empress carry the burden of a rebellion one hundred and twenty years after she dies?”

  “She destroyed celestial harmony,” the spitting student had said. That was doctrine, they’d been reading it.

  “And seven emperors between her and the rebellion couldn’t shift it back?”

  Daiyan had never thought about that, not as a young man. You didn’t challenge what you read, you memorized it.

  “No,” Teacher Tuan had continued. “Empress Hao didn’t bring down her dynasty. Don’t let anyone make you think she did. If it is an examination question, write what they want to hear. Just don’t believe it.”

  Tuan Lung had been a bitter man, but he’d given them things to think about. Daiyan wondered what his teacher would have been like had he passed the jinshi examinations and risen in rank.

  Well, he wouldn’t have been travelling up and down the middle reaches of the Great River, with a donkey and a different boy each year. It was summer now. Tuan Lung would be along the river, doing what he did.

  It was possible for people to enter your life, play a role, and then be gone. Although if you could sit on a horse in a wood under dripping leaves years after and think about them, about things they’d said, were they really lost?

  There were disciples of the Cho Master who could probably offer learned answers to that. For Daiyan, if a man, or a woman, had been in your life but you never saw them again, they were gone. A memory of someone wasn’t the man. Or woman.

  Rain and solitude could do things to your thinking. He shifted the horse forward a little, leaning over its neck, peering at the sky. The clouds were lightening. This would be over soon. He decided he’d wait a few more moments. He felt curiously hesitant, in no hurry to go forward.

  He didn’t mind being alone. There wasn’t a lot of quiet in the army, not for a commander of five thousand men. Maybe that was why he was lingering now, branching off the road, heading for the pavilions of Ma-wai. The barracks held a lot of men. Xinan had people, as well. Not nearly so many as once, but—

  Daiyan’s head whipped left. The sword was drawn instinctively. But there was no threat, the horse was undisturbed, though it lifted its head at his own quick motion. He’d seen a flash of colour, a darting brightness, but close to the ground, too low to be a tiger, and it was gone. Tigers didn’t like rain, he reminded himself—at least that was the country wisdom in Szechen.

  That pulled forward a better thought. With normal courier time, his parents would probably know by now what had happened to their younger son, his rank, his reception at court. Bowing before the emperor. And they’d have received the money he’d sent.

  You had larger goals and smaller ones in life. He let himself imagine his father reading his letter about the emperor. He let that thought draw him from the trees and back onto the path to Ma-wai.

  THE BREEZE WAS in his face and the clouds were moving swiftly east. After a little while the sky was blue under a bright sun and it began to grow warm, though the storm had broken the worst of the heat. His hat and clothing dried as he went.

  He came to Ma-wai late in the day. There was no one here. There was no reason for anyone to be here. Whatever treasures this place had once held—and they were the subject of legend—would long ago have been stolen or destroyed.

  So who would come to a ruined imperial playground haunted by so many ghosts? He feared tigers and being buried alive, not ghosts.

  He rode in through an archway across the road. It was strange, even doing that. The arch still stood but the wall on either side had crumbled. You could step over it, ride through wide gaps. Stones would have been carted away to shore up farmhouses or make pasture walls. Long ago.

  Once through the arch, the path was wide, bending at intervals, the way they always did. There were trees on both sides, willows, paulownias, chestnuts. He saw a bamboo grove to the right, peaches and flowering plum on the other side. The grass and earth were overgrown, untended, wet from the rain. The buildings and pavilions lay ahead, with the lake beyond, flashing blue, ruffled in the breeze. It was quiet. His horse’s clopping hooves on the path, and birdsong.

  This had been a retreat for court and aristocrats for a long time, as far back as the Fifth Dynasty, when Xinan had first become the capital. The hot springs here had been an imperial refuge in all seasons. Music and luxury, exquisite women, sumptuous feasts, healing waters rising from underground into the bathing pools. It had reached a peak of elaborate decadence in the Ninth, as so many things had. Wen Jian, the emperor’s Beloved Companion, had ruled here and died not far away, still young.

  It seemed to Daiyan that his people had known true glory and great power in the Third Dynasty and in the Ninth. Before the Third and after the Ninth and between the two of them had been violent internal wars, chaos, famine, and hardship. Although the two times of splendour had also ended in war, hadn’t they? (Tuan Lung’s voice again. Did you always hear your teacher’s voice?)

  And now? Their own time? It depended, he thought, on what happened next. Didn’t it always depend on that?

  He dismounted in the shade of an oak tree, forced a spike into the ground with his boot, then looped the horse’s lead through the eye and tied it so the animal could graze.

  He walked towards the nearest building, long, very large, low to the ground, wings going north-south. It was open, the doors were missing. The steps up were marble. He wondered briefly why no one had broken these and carted them away.

  The corridor he entered was empty of decoration or artifact. No sign of burning. It was just ... abandoned. There would have been silk screens for the long row of windows once; now the afternoon breeze came in, stirring dust on the floor.

  Daiyan opened doors at random. None of them were locked, many were gone. He walked into a dining hall. There was a platform couch against one wall. The legs were sandalwood. Someone ought to have taken those, he thought.

  He passed the branching corridors, kept going, though aimlessly. He had no purpose here. He opened the last door at the far end of the hallway. A bedchamber, very large. At this western end the wind was stronger, blowing off the lake. The bed frame remained, four strong, carved posts. Daiyan saw two once-hidden doors in the panelled wall. They were broken, hanging awry, leading to some inner corridor.

  This had been a palace for play, by night as well as by day.

  He didn’t bother looking into the hidden passageway. Whatever had once been here wasn’t any more. He imagined music, lantern light gleaming off gold and jade, women dancing to music.

  He turned back and took the southern hallway this time. It led him, eventually, outside. He looked left and saw his horse, far away, under the tree. He followed another uneven path and entered a large, round, enclosed pavilion.

  One of the springs was here. He wondered why he was surprised. It wasn’t as if looters could carry away hot springs. He supposed he’d thought it might have been blocked up.

  There was a medicinal smell, sulphur and something else. He walked over and knelt and dipped a hand. The water was very hot. He smelled his fingers. Yes, sulphur. There were two broken marble benches around the perimeter of the room. There would have been many of those once. He saw a dais on the far side. For musicians, he guessed. They would play dutifully while naked men and women of the court took the healing waters, or lay with each other beside them. He could picture that, too. Probably the musicians had been behind a screen.

  On the walls he saw fresc
oes, their colours faded. The light was good since the windows here had no coverings either. He walked over and looked. Men riding horses, playing polo. One of them was an emperor, you could tell from what he wore. Another panel showed a single horse with its handler. If the man was not a dwarf, this stallion was so large it made Daiyan’s steppe horse look like a child’s pony. He read the characters written beside the horse: Great Crimson. That was a famous name. The Emperor Taizu’s Heavenly Horse from the farthest west.

  Ren Daiyan looked more closely, being the new rider of a good horse. He doubted it had really been crimson. Reddish, maybe. It was a magnificent animal, looking alive on the wall after centuries. The painter had been very skilled.

  The next panel showed more riders: a woman followed by two others, all richly clothed. The first of them was exquisite. She had gems in her hairpins, at her ears, about her throat. Wen Jian herself, it had to be. Behind the women were hills, and Daiyan realized they were the hills north of Ma-wai. North of here.

  He looked at the pool again. He thought—for the second time—that he heard music. Could a place hold the memory of the sounds it had known?

  He walked outside, filled with an unexpected sadness. He went towards the lake. It was bright in the sunlight, blue and white with waves in the wind. There were no boats, though he saw piers where they would have been moored. The lake was larger than he’d expected. To the southwest, he knew, it was skirted by a road that ran right down to the imperial road. A postal station inn along that shoreline had seen a great tragedy. He wondered if the inn was still standing, in use, or if it had been abandoned, burned, torn down as unlucky when the rebellion in the Ninth had finally ended.

  He saw a small island, treed, overgrown. He remembered reading that there had been pavilions of alabaster and rosewood here where musicians made music, flute and pipa and drum, as boats carried the court lazily across the lake, back and forth, back and forth, while candles floated on evening waters.

  He caught a scent of perfume from behind him. He ought not to have been able to do that. The wind was in his face.

  He would never know for certain what made him not turn. Maybe it was that—the direction of the wind, but catching that scent. Something unnatural. He ought to have turned, he ought to have drawn his sword.

  He shivered, a hard spasm. Then he remained very still, staring out over the water, but unseeing now, waiting. The hairs on the back of his neck rose up. He heard a footfall on the path. No sound of lost music any more. He didn’t know what it was, this perfume, but there was a woman here.

  He was afraid.

  She said, “I let you see me in the wood. I gave you a chance to turn, go among people. You came here instead, alone. That was a choosing. I like when a man does that.”

  Her voice was low, slow, impossibly seductive. His mouth went dry. Desire swept over him, a wave surge far greater than anything in the wind-whipped waters. He couldn’t speak.

  Daiji, he was thinking. Fox-woman.

  It was Ziji who feared all foxes, the tales of the daiji, who could change shape into a woman’s form and destroy a man.

  “I know your name,” she whispered, a breath.

  Her voice was a caress. It reached into him, around him, like sure fingers finding his manhood. And in it he heard, he was sure he heard, a threading of desire. Her own desire.

  He did not turn. They could not compel you, that was the tale. They could lure you, draw you. You went to them, shaped by longing. How could a man say no to this? To them? They were immortal, or nearly so. They broke you with lovemaking in a woman’s shape, endless, world-ending, leaving you a worn, wan husk of what you had been, returning to your village, city, farm, to find a hundred years or more had passed and everyone you knew was dead and the world changed.

  He heard another step. She was right behind him. Her breath on his neck now, warm as an invitation at summer twilight. He was trembling. He stared desperately out at the water, at the isle.

  She touched him. He closed his eyes. One finger, tracing a line down his back. She brought it up to his neck, and then slowly down again.

  Daiyan forced his eyes open. He continued facing west, the water, the setting summer sun, but he was nearly sightless. He was fiercely aroused, erect—a channel for need. He was going to turn to her. How did you not? He was lost. He was about to be lost.

  Her scent was all around him. He didn’t know what it was. He could almost taste it, her. Her touch excited him beyond any previous understanding of desire. It shaped something near madness, a hunger. They were alone here, by the lake waters of Ma-wai, where music and lovemaking had held sway for so long.

  He said, fighting hard for words, “Daiji, goddess, I have tasks in the world. In ... in this time.”

  She laughed, low in her throat.

  The sound of it unknit his strength. His legs were weak. He thought, I may fall down. She touched his hair, beneath the black, pinned cap he wore. She was here, right behind him, and he realized the scent was her, not perfume. He would turn, he would gather her so ferociously and—

  “Every man has tasks,” she said. “I have seen so many of you. I may even have seen you before. I am eight hundred and fifty years old. I have been in the far south and west. I have been by river waters and by mountains. Some men embrace their duties, some flee from them. It is not a thing that matters to me.”

  “Goddess, I do not want to flee from mine.”

  He felt her breath again on his neck. She said, as if musing, “I could allow you to return to those, after. I can do that.”

  He closed his eyes again. They were not to be trusted, daiji. They did not share the world of men, only intersected it at times, like roads meeting in a darkness.

  “Goddess, I am afraid.”

  “I am not a goddess, foolish man,” she murmured, laughing again.

  “To me you are,” Daiyan managed to say.

  “Am I? How do you know?” she whispered. He felt her touch him again. “You haven’t kissed my mouth. Haven’t looked into my eyes to see my need. Seen my body, what I am wearing for you, Ren Daiyan. Tasted what I will give you.”

  She would be wearing red. Daiji always did. Her fingernails would be red, her mouth would be ...

  He wasn’t able not to turn and take her to himself, for however long—years, decades, perhaps forever—she decreed it should be.

  My own need.

  It would end for him here. Weak with yearning, raw with it, he yet cursed his own folly. He ought to have carried on with his soldiers. He’d been among others, guarded by them. He ought to have understood that flash of colour in the wood in the rain. It had been orange. Like a tiger, yes, but also like a fox.

  Xinan was so near, only down the road, half a day’s ride on a good horse. The courts had gone back and forth so easily. And yet the city—the world—seemed unimaginably far away. Left behind when he’d left the road.

  That could happen. That was why you didn’t leave the road.

  He realized there weren’t any birds singing now. Had they stopped in the moment the daiji appeared, when he’d caught her scent behind him, on the wrong side of the wind? Birds would fear a fox, and sense the uncanny when it came.

  He was alone. In this place and in the world. No anchor to anywhere, to anyone, only a sense of duty, his foolish, vainglorious feeling of destiny since childhood. And what could that do or be against her, against this surge inside, when she was what she was and had come for him, here, today, beside these waters?

  He ought to have gone to Xinan. To the vast, shattered ruin of the old capital where there were still people to be among, noise, confusion, chaos, protection, where even now, today ...

  He took a breath.

  Where even now ...

  And so it was he found his anchor, amid the fever and force of the spirit world, amid such fierce desire, the waves that were upon him and inside him. Duty was not, it seemed, enough. You needed something more, however improbable—or unacceptable. You took your anchor to the mor
tal world where you found it, if you did.

  He said, “Daiji, you may kill me. My life was in your hands from the wood in the thunderstorm, it seems.”

  “In my hands,” she said, laughing again. “I like that.” He thought of a fox, hearing that sound, untamed, wild.

  He pushed on, fighting the ferocity of need. She would be beautiful beyond words or imagining. She could make herself so, if the tales were true. She was here, the tales were true.

  He said, “I will not plead for my life, but for the needs of Kitai, what I want to do for it. I don’t think ... I don’t know if that means anything to you.”

  “It doesn’t,” she said almost gently. “The needs of Kitai? How could it? But why would I kill you, Ren Daiyan? Fear a tiger, need me. I want your mouth and your touch, I want all that is you for as long as we wish, while the sun and stars and the moon circle and circle us.”

  Circle and circle.

  To what world, and when, would he return?

  Anchor. Find it again. An image, lamplight in an evening room. Something from the mortal world. To hold to. To hold him. He remained very still. He realized he could do this, he wasn’t trembling any more.

  He said, “You should kill me. Because I will not come to you willingly, daiji, not away from what I was born to do.”

  Amusement again in the low voice. “Why would I care if it is willingly, Ren Daiyan? Because I am here, you were born to come to me.”

  He shook his head. “I will not believe that to be true.”

  She laughed yet again, a different note. “It excites me that you resist. My body is telling us so. Turn and see. I am showing it. When you are inside me, when all we know in the world is that, it will be sweeter, deeper.”

  “No,” he said again. “I cannot be lost. I need to be in the world right now. Will you ... can you have pity, daiji?”

  “No,” she said simply. “It is not what I am.”

  He understood. She wasn’t human, and pity was. He took a breath and he turned around, after all.

  You faced the darkness when it came to you, or the light. You found your courage and your strength. He did not close his eyes.