River of Stars Read online

  He did stop breathing for a moment. The late sunlight was upon her. Heart-shaped face, pale skin, utterly smooth, long neck, wide, black eyes, long hair to her waist, blue-black, unbound. Her lips were, yes, red. Her fingernails were long and red. Her dress was red as he had known it would be. It was gauzy silk, moved by the wind, shaping to her body, showing it to him as she had said, and yes, she was aroused, he could see. She looked very young. She was not.

  She smiled. Her teeth were small and white. She said, “No pity, but I will know your needs more surely than anyone ever has. Trust me in this, Ren Daiyan.”

  Anchor turning to shield, or to spar of wood, bobbing on river rapids or amid the huge, dark tumult of the sea (which he had never seen).

  He said, clinging to that spar, desperately mortal, “My needs I have told you. Kill me if you must, but I will remain who I am as I die. I am sworn to one thing.”

  “And that is?” Her voice changed again; you could hear something not-human in it. She wore golden sandals, jewelled, open-toed. The wind swirled silk against her legs, gathered it at her thighs.

  She was a river or the sea, he could end here.

  He said, “To never forget our rivers and mountains lost. To bring them back.”

  One thing in his life, he’d just said. Almost true. It had been entirely true when he walked down to this shore. But now there was another thing, from the springtime, remembered. Spar in a storm.

  The daiji, more beautiful than the heart could hold, smiled. “Bring them back? And a hundred years from now? Two hundred years? It matters where a border lies?”

  Bit by bit, he was becoming aware he could stand here, before her. He said, slowly, “Daiji, I can only live in my own time. I cannot speak for those who come after, or what the world will be. We are not made that way.”

  She did not move. The wind moved, lifted her hair. He could not measure time here, with her. He was nearly lost in the red of her lips, the white teeth, the hard swell of her body, offering itself to him under silk, promising him, for as near to forever as the world allowed.

  Nearly lost, but holding. She wore nothing under silk. Her eyes were so large. He could take a single step and kiss them shut. He could brush her lips with his. She would ...

  As in a dream he heard her say, “This is not pity. I do not know what that is. I am curious, though. And can be patient. You may see me again or you may not. Go, Ren Daiyan, before I decide otherwise. You are being foolish, may leave this place for a cold, bitter life, but I will let you taste it.”

  He seemed to be trembling again, after all.

  “Do you ... do you know the future, daiji?”

  She shook her head. Her hair in the wind. Her earrings made a music with the motion. “I am not a goddess,” she said. “Go.”

  Halfway to his horse, walking along the path, not looking back, with the lake and the daiji and the wind behind him, he felt a sudden, searing pain, white as a sword from the sun. He cried out, felt himself falling, unable to stop.

  “A gift,” he heard her calling down the path. “Remember me.” Then he lost all awareness of the world.

  CHAPTER XVI

  She is still trying to decide what she most feels about Xinan: anxiety or heartbreak. There is something lost about the city. Ordinary life seems insignificant when people appear in sparse, scattered numbers—like islands, each one—on an avenue as wide as the imperial way. The scale of it mocks them, she thinks.

  The Gate of Glory by the western wall, where she’s gone several times now to drink tea under willow trees, is a magnificent reproach. There is too much irony in the name, in the ruin of the tower that once crowned the gates.

  There have been efforts made by emperors to resettle Xinan over the years, she knows, urging people to move back, offering incentives. They have borne little fruit, and bitter. Few, it appears, want to live among so many ghosts. It was never the wisest choice for a capital in the first place, so far from the Grand Canal, a challenge to feed in times of drought. Xinan became what it was because the earliest emperors came from this region. This was the heartland. Many of them are buried nearby, in the great tombs.

  It would be entirely possible, Shan thinks, to begin to hate the Ninth Dynasty if you spent time here. There is something oppressive, humiliating about how glorious it once was.

  Who would want to live traversing the two colossal, almostempty market spaces, each larger than many good-sized towns? The vendors and occasional entertainers and beggars seem adrift in the vastness. Scale and distance make you feel insignificant, your cherished life a pale, bitter thing, as if you were already another ghost.

  Not her usual way of thinking. She is aware of feeling restless, on edge. It is hot, there have been thunderstorms all week. Her songs betray her mood. She throws most of them away. She has been thinking about leaving, going back to Yenling, or home to Hanjin, although the capital in summer is even hotter than this. She can leave a message here for Wai, he’ll follow when he comes back south. She isn’t certain why she lingers.

  The inn where she’s staying is good. The innkeeper has a bad leg, uses a stick to move about. His wife is sweet-natured, attentive to Shan, soft and pretty. Her husband looks at her with affection whenever they are in the same room. Interestingly, she looks at him the same way. They don’t act or speak as if being in Xinan makes them feel diminished. Perhaps their expectations of the world haven’t led them that way. Perhaps, Shan thinks, they have each other.

  She has gone several times to a temple of the Path in the southeastern quadrant, seventy-first ward once, though that means nothing now with the ward gates gone and Xinan an open city, as they all are these days. No one is locked into a ward at night in the Twelfth Dynasty. Maybe they are better than the Ninth in this way, though when she reads of what women were allowed to do and be back then the thought frays at the edges.

  She has made a generous donation to the temple and been granted access to their documents, scrolls going back four hundred years, at least, in no order at all, never sorted through. Tossed in chests, on shelves, piled on the floor in one room. Mice and insects have gotten to some of them. She combs through these scrolls without energy or enthusiasm, listless as a bored servant brushing her mistress’s hair on a hot afternoon.

  They are records of gifts to the temple, offered or requested prayers, itemized shipments of supplies: Four kegs of Salmon River saffron wine, and the price paid.

  She does find a journal, from the years of the great rebellion when the city was looted and burned: an unnamed steward’s chronicle of his efforts to keep a distinguished house safe in the back and forth of rebels and court. It describes the summer when the Tagurans had used a time of chaos to strike far into Kitai, looting Xinan—what was left of it—before retreating to their mountain plateau.

  It is a taste of the past, a voice from across a chasm. She offers another gift and buys this one for the collection. It would have excited her once, doing so. She’d have waited eagerly for Wai to come back so she could show it to him, then they would take turns reading it to each other over tea or wine. Perhaps decide to find out more about this steward, what happened to him and that house. How the scroll came to be in the temple. There are so many stories, she thinks, and most of them end up lost.

  SHE WRITES A LETTER to Lu Chen, makes the finding of the journal a part of it. The poet is alive and safe, his exile reduced to a family property near the Great River. She had sent him a song in spring, the one she wrote about him—sung by the girl with bound feet, in the Genyue, on the afternoon an arrow flew down from above.

  That had been a complex day and evening, she thinks.

  Lu Chen writes back now, to whatever she sends him. He honours her, doing so. He admires her ci, he says. He writes his own, sends them to her. She still tells him he is abusing the form, trying to erode the simpler themes of the song form, turning it into an extension of formal verse. She’d said that to him as a girl, the first day they met, in Xi Wengao’s garden. It frightens her, h
ow long ago that is.

  It is clear the poet enjoys when she engages with him like this. He teases her with sly verses, inviting laughter. Shan wants him to challenge her. He keeps doing what he’s doing—offering courtesy, wit, attention.

  He has invited her—with her husband—to visit East Slope. She would like to be there now, Shan thinks in the vastness of Xinan. She imagines harmony, civility, discourse under shade trees, laughter.

  Master Lu’s brother and son are in the far north, or perhaps already back in Hanjin. Lu Chao had been named imperial emissary to some tribe in revolt against the Xiaolu. That uprising is being assessed, she knows, as an opportunity. Lu Chao, summoned from exile, had been an unusual choice for the mission—unless they wanted him dead, she remembers thinking.

  There are easier ways to kill a man. Her father had explained it to her: Prime Minister Hang Dejin, since retired to an estate near Yenling, almost certainly had not wanted to send the army north. By dispatching Lu Chao, famously independent, he’d addressed his concern. If Chao urged a treaty and military action with this tribe, it would be an honest view from an experienced man. If he came home arguing against an alliance, it could not possibly be said to be a coerced or dishonest position.

  The new prime minister, Kai Zhen, had arrived back at court and immediately begun talking of the glorious opportunity presented to them. It would take a brave man to speak against the prime minister, her father wrote Shan.

  The Lu brothers are nothing if not courageous. That much is obvious, has been for a long time. From Lu Chen’s letters, it seems sometimes as if the poet has decided that, having survived Lingzhou, there is nothing more in life he needs to fear.

  She’d memorized—and promptly burned—the last poem he sent before she left home to come here, a reply to her song from the imperial garden. She doubts hers was the only copy of the verse, however. Burning it protects her but not him.

  When a child is born

  The family prays it will be intelligent.

  Intelligence having ruined my life,

  I only hope the baby will grow up

  Ignorant and foolish.

  Then he’ll be successful all his days

  And be recalled to court as prime minister!

  Shan remembers blood rushing to her face as she read the words. She can flush recalling them now. A kind of awe. Who dared write this way? Even as she’d laughed in breathless astonishment, she’d looked around to be sure she was alone. The paper had felt hot in her hands, the characters of the poem were flames. She’d sent them to the fireplace, turned them to ash.

  SHE’D DECIDED TO GO to Long Lake Park this morning but the innkeeper’s wife had urged her to wait—another storm was coming, she said. The morning sky had been clear, but Shan wasn’t feeling assertive or emphatic about anything, and she’d agreed to stay close to the inn.

  She’s written to the poet, then her father. Just before midday the storm strikes. The sky grows so wild and black she can’t even write in her room. She stands near the window and watches the lightning, listens to thunder boom and crack over Xinan.

  After it passes she moves out onto the wet balcony. Already she can feel a sweet coolness to the air. It won’t last, but the rain has settled the summer dust and Shan hears birdsong. There is rainwater in the stopped-up fountain in the courtyard below. The leaves of the pear trees glisten.

  She tells one of her girls to summon the litter-bearers and her guards and she heads for Long Lake Park. It is midsummer, the days are long, she will be back before dark, even in a city so vast.

  She smiles at the innkeeper’s wife when she goes downstairs. “Thank you for the warning,” she says. The woman looks pleased, glances down and away. Shan misses her father suddenly. Maybe she will go home after all.

  I want a child, she thinks, out of nowhere like the storm, startling herself. I want a child.

  Long Lake Park is in the farthest southeastern sector of the city, by the wall. It had been the people’s park, unlike the imperial one behind the palace, where the feral dogs had frightened her.

  This sector is also the highest in Xinan. From here the city is laid out before you, neat in its symmetry, appalling in its ruin. You can see as far as the palace in the north and the Gate of Glory to the west, with its broken tower.

  There is another tower here, an important Cho sanctuary once, ten storeys high. It still stands but isn’t safe, her guards tell her—the stairways are crumbling and the floors above the third level are uncertain. There are marks of fire on the outside walls, she sees. It is probably going to fall soon, the taller of the two guards tells her. He’s the one who looks at her for longer than he should when he speaks.

  She thinks about climbing it, at least partway, but there is a line between independence and foolishness. If she is injured, the four men with her will suffer for it.

  There are paths through the park, overgrown with weeds and coarse grass and wildflowers. It is possible to imagine what this place was like, however: sunlight, bright boats on the water, horsemen and horsewomen, a polo game, music, the green grass groomed, and the flower beds. Fruit trees and locust trees and willows near the water. Chan Du, most moving of all poets, had been here one day, had written a famous poem:

  ... the lady with jade pins in cloud-coiled hair,

  Wearing the scent only she is permitted.

  She rides past the drifted snow of willow catkins

  And flowers bend towards her.

  Wen Jian, of course, had died young. One of the Four Great Beauties, the last of them. She wasn’t someone to envy. More a matter of thinking about what happened to women who shone too brightly. When the music was still playing, grief came upon us ...

  And that was a dark thought. Shan gives her men permission to take her home. They have been waiting for that, she knows. The sun is west and they’ve a long way to carry her.

  She is in bed early and surprises herself by falling asleep. She wakes in the night, though, she often does when travelling. It is very late. The inn is quiet. There are few guests this summer. She hears the sound of the water clock. She wraps her robe around herself and goes out on the balcony, looking at the eastern sky. The last quarter moon is up, hanging in the branches of a tall tree in the courtyard, half hidden by leaves. It is very beautiful. She watches it so long it frees itself and climbs above the leaves among the stars.

  Daiyan didn’t know how long he’d been lying on the path. He felt a strangeness to the air, and to the feel of his own body. He sat up, then stood, carefully. Started walking. No pain, but something had altered. To remember me, she’d said, the daiji. He didn’t know what that meant, but how would he have been likely to forget her? The memory could arouse him again.

  If he turned back? If he stood by the water (the wind calmer now) would she come to him again, hair drifting free? Poems sometimes described lovemaking as “clouds and rain.” He thought about that.

  Not a useful line of reflection. He came to his horse. He untethered it, mounted, left Ma-wai under the same archway through which he’d entered.

  He kicked the horse to a gallop. There was a need to be alert. It was late in the day, and the road could be dangerous, especially after darkfall, for a lone man riding. Bandits, animals, his horse could stumble and fall, break a leg. You could lose a road at night. Dangers, he thought, of ordinary life in the ordinary world. The moon was waning, would offer little brightness, and not until later.

  He rode. He still felt strange, shifting his shoulders as if something prickled, or as if he was being watched, from the woods, from the fields.

  He could so easily have been lost back there. To strange music, the spirit world, to beauty, desire, time. It seemed to Daiyan that if he closed his eyes he would see her, catch the scent that had come to him from the wrong side of the wind. Clouds and rain. The glory of her mouth, silk blown against and around her thighs. I know your name, she had said. Taste what I will give you.

  He shook his head, urged his horse onward, riding
down the raised centre of the road (reserved for the court or imperial couriers, once) at a speed that suggested he was fleeing something.

  Or racing to something else. There would be lights ahead, even in fire-scarred, ghost-haunted Xinan. The presence of people abroad. Or in the loud barracks outside the walls where his men would be. Or an inn. Yes, that. A place where he could drink a great deal of wine and think about the image that had come into his mind, that he had clung to inwardly, as he turned to look at the daiji, into those eyes, at her hair free of hairpins in the breeze.

  He was reckless with the horse, riding too fast as darkness fell on the empty road. It seemed to him, in a way that made no sense, that he could not possibly fall from a horse on this road and die, or be killed by thieves lying in wait. Not tonight, after what he had just encountered. The world could not unfold that way, he thought.

  It could, of course. He was wrong. Danger is not protection from danger. Tigers can follow fox-women, lightning follow lightning. But he did survive that ride as the sun went down and ushered the stars into the summer dark. His horse’s hooves drummed that ancient road and the Xiaolu stallion did not lose the way or stumble. Daiyan heard an owl hunting once as he went, from the woods to his left, and the sharp, cut-off-cry of whatever it was that starlight’s cold killer had been pursuing.

  Not him. Not tonight, at least.

  The moon was just rising when he saw the lights of Xinan ahead of him and came up to one of the northern gates, beside the empty palace’s burnt walls.

  Once, the city gates would have been locked at sunset, no entry without an imperial pass until the dawn drums sounded. You were beaten if you tried to get in after curfew—over the walls, swimming along the canals. Here, in this much-changed time, cities remained open, men came in and out after dark, moved freely, spent money, let noise and lanterns and music carry them through the night hours if they chose.