River of Stars Read online

  “Of course I thought about it. I decided they’d learned of my journey across the river. Maybe by way of birds from Shuquian. There was enough time for birds to go both ways. So I thought I was being invited to offer a second report from Xiaolu lands. Or perhaps a third or fourth. I don’t know.”

  This time it was the blind man and his son who looked startled.

  Of course. They hadn’t known of his journey.

  Daiyan smiled at the son, at ease again, or seeming so. Ziji had decided by now that the old man wasn’t completely blind. He might prefer to be thought so, any advantage he could find.

  Daiyan went on, not waiting for questions. “My lords, if you didn’t know I went north, how did you intend to have me admitted to that council? I assume that is what you want? Otherwise this is a great deal of effort to share wine with two soldiers.”

  Too much irony, Ziji thought. Daiyan was still young. You could forget, then be reminded.

  Question for question, from the old man: “What did you discover there? What do I need to know?”

  It was interesting, that Hang Dejin would put the question that way, on a remote estate far from power. But then, if you thought about it, perhaps he wasn’t so far.

  And Daiyan was answering. “My lord, the rumour is that the Eastern Capital has already fallen to the Altai. No one is certain where the Xiaolu emperor is.”

  Something else they hadn’t known, obviously.

  “You believe this? That the city has fallen?” It was Hsien this time.

  “It seems unlikely, so swiftly. But the story was widespread, and there is great uneasiness.”

  “That would be so whether the rumour is true or not.” The son again, a quiet, precise voice.

  Daiyan nodded. “I agree, my lord.”

  After a moment, the old man spoke, as if musing aloud. “You seem a useful sort of man, Ren Daiyan. You have initiative. I wish I had been able to make use of you years ago.”

  Daiyan smiled briefly. “I was an outlaw in the marsh, my lord. I believe you know this. Not much aid to the prime minister of Kitai. Besides, I am a very great admirer of Lu Chen.”

  “As am I. Our best poet.”

  “Even on Lingzhou Isle?” There was a challenge in the words.

  “He seems to have written some fine things there,” said the old man in a bland tone. “I did order him released.”

  “Only when Kai Zhen fell. And after how long?”

  “Ah, well. The wheels of the empire are sometimes slow to turn, regrettably.”

  “In the army, superiors take responsibility for errors by subordinates.”

  “Not always. As you know. It is a part,” said the old man, “of why you are here.” Hang Dejin turned in Ziji’s direction, eyes vacant, a milky whiteness. “Tell me, Deputy Commander Zhao, your thoughts on your commander’s mission across the river.”

  He was changing the subject, but also doing something else. Ziji cleared his throat. These moments did come: people trying to take his measure. He could seek refuge in a soldier’s mumbling discretion. He didn’t feel like doing that.

  “I thought it foolish, and I told him so. He was nearly caught. He killed soldiers, stole two horses, caused a border disturbance. A member of the imperial clan was up there, he could have died. That would have forced a response. There is little to learn from a frontier garrison. Not so as to rely on, at any rate.”

  “You allow him to speak this way of you?”

  Hsien was looking at Daiyan. The captain of the guards, the one who had led the ambush, had an expression that suggested the same question was in his mind.

  “He is my friend,” Daiyan said.

  The old man was nodding his head. “Friends are good. I have had few I trusted. My son now, only.”

  And so, of course, Daiyan had to open his mouth and say, “Then why is he not prime minister?”

  Ziji winced, tried to hide it. Oh, Daiyan, he thought.

  Hsien’s expression went from startled to angry. The old man’s remained bland, nothing more than thoughtfulness to be seen.

  “Easy enough,” he said. “Because he will better serve Kitai as the next prime minister, if we go to war now and it ends badly.”

  So much for discretion, Ziji thought. He was trying to understand why Daiyan and the old man were being so direct with each other. He couldn’t. He couldn’t sort it out.

  “If it goes wrong, someone must be blamed?” Daiyan said.

  “If it goes wrong, someone should be blamed,” said the old man. He had wine at his elbow. He reached for it carefully and sipped. “You know the Cho Master’s words: the sage is not found ahead of the people leading them to the future, he comes along after, picking up treasures that have been lost or left behind.”

  “We still need leaders,” said Daiyan.

  “We do. Not always the same as a sage.”

  “No. But we still need them.” Daiyan hesitated, and Ziji suddenly knew what was coming. “My lord, I have always ... from very young I have known I was to play a role in fighting for our rivers and mountains.”

  “The Fourteen?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  The old man smiled kindly. “Many boys dream such things.”

  Daiyan shook his head. “No. I was, and I am, certain of it, my lord. I believe I am marked for this.”

  Here it is, thought Ziji.

  “Marked?” said Hang Hsien.

  “My lords, I ask permission to remove my tunic before you. There is a reason.”

  Two pairs of raised eyebrows, then the old man nodded.

  So Daiyan showed them the tattoo on his back, the writing placed there in the emperor’s hand, and told them how it had come to be. The son described the characters to the father. His voice was awed.

  Daiyan put on his tunic again. In the silence, the first voice was Hang Hsien’s.

  “Where do you come by such certainty? All your life, you said?”

  It was an urgent question, Ziji thought. Perhaps because Hsien lacked that sureness?

  He saw his friend trying for an answer. Daiyan said, “I do not know. I should not be like this, if that is what you are asking. Is it possible ... can a man be born into the world to be something, for something?”

  “Yes,” said the old man. “But even if he is, it doesn’t always happen. Too much can intervene. The world does what it does. Our dreams, our certainties, crash into each other.”

  “Like swords?” Daiyan said.

  The old man shrugged. “Like swords, like ambitions at court.”

  “Which brings us back to this meeting in the palace?” Daiyan said.

  “It can,” said Hang Dejin. He smiled.

  “I asked you before. How did you intend for us to be admitted to that room? And why? If it pleases you, my lord.”

  So the old man finally told them about the tree.

  Did so while they drank apple wine and ate from small plates of food on a summer afternoon in his garden. Again, as with the arrow in the Genyue, it seemed their interests were not identical but could be made to march together. And the old man, moving pieces on a game board, might even now be the one who saw farther than anyone else.

  Ziji, listening, found himself thinking back to the marsh, to days when their ambitions extended to no more than finding food, surviving cold nights, ambushing a party of merchants, maybe a Flowers and Rocks company.

  He remembered the day—swift image of another summer—when he himself had been tricked by Daiyan while carrying a birthday gift meant for Kai Zhen, who had been deputy prime minister then. Life could circle and loop, he thought, in ways that might even persuade you there was a pattern to it.

  They had been carrying nightingales in jewelled cages. Ziji had insisted on opening the cage doors himself, setting the birds free. A long time ago. He had joined his destiny to Daiyan’s that day.

  He’d never regretted it. He didn’t live or think that way. You made your choices, they gave you a path to walk, closed others off. But he did feel, more
than ever now, that arrows were being loosed and they were arcing very high.

  Shan has arranged with the gate guards at the northern wall to send word to the inn when her husband enters Xinan. She wants to greet him, she has explained.

  It is true, and for more than one reason.

  When a messenger does come riding, she is in the courtyard of the inn beside the fountain under shade, late morning. The fountain is flowing again. Shan has given money, a gift to the innkeeper and his wife, to unblock it. They had always feared it would be a major task, require digging up the courtyard and perhaps under their wall to the street, but in fact it is a blockage in the pipes just below, easily addressed. The music of water, the play of it under sunlight, is in the courtyard again.

  She goes to dress and adorn herself. Qi Wai has several slow, heavy wagons, the messenger reports, so there is time. She arranges for the man to be paid.

  When she’s ready, she has herself carried to the imperial way, to wait by the entrance to their ward. There were heavy gates here once, she can see where they’d been set into the walls.

  In the sedan chair, through a lifted-back curtain, she finally sees carts coming south along the imperial way. Small children are running beside them. Her husband is at the head of this party, riding a horse. Wai isn’t a bad rider for a man who never had any practice young, and given how such skills are despised by the court and civil service. He has forced himself to become adequate on horseback during the travels undertaken for his collection. Their collection.

  Shan steps from her chair and stands in the road, dressed in green-and-blue silk, hair coiled and pinned. She wears silver bracelets and hairpins, has her mother’s lapis earrings in her ears, a perfume sachet about her neck. She sees Wai smile as he approaches.

  He pulls up, proud on his horse. She says, “I would have come out to greet you as far as Cho-fu-Sa, as in the poem, but it is entirely the wrong way.”

  “We’d have missed each other.” He chuckles.

  “Welcome back, husband,” she says, casting her eyes down. “You bring new discoveries.”

  “A great many!” Wai says, as she looks up. He really is happy, she sees. “Shan, I found a warrior figure kept back from the first emperor’s tomb for some reason. The workshop was there!”

  This is enormous news. “Will they let us keep it?”

  “Maybe not, but I will still be the one who found it for the emperor. And now we know what they look like. Because of our digging up north.”

  “You will show me, I hope.”

  “I always do,” he says. This was true once, not so readily of late, but he is in such a pleased state right now.

  “Let me escort you to the inn,” she murmurs. “I have ordered a bath prepared, and a change of clothing set out. After you eat and drink, perhaps you will be kind enough ...”

  “I hope you will dine with me,” he says.

  She smiles.

  She gives him three cups of strong wine when they reach the inn.

  For the first time since the ritual New Year’s coupling, they make love in his chamber after he bathes, before the meal awaiting them downstairs. It is important, of course, but she enjoys it, and sees signs that he does, as well.

  What have I become? she thinks. The paths life offers, where they take you, what you find along the way, as you go.

  After, also before they eat, he takes her out to the guarded stable yard and shows her what he’s found, shifting packing straw in the carts, opening strongboxes. Scrolls, a stone plinth in fragments to be reassembled, tripod wine holders, a bronze drinking vessel with two owls, back to back, on the lid. Stones with imperial inscriptions and memorials, ceremonial bowls in very good condition, one from the Second Dynasty, he thinks. A ritual axe from even further back, with a tiger on it if you look closely. He shows it to her, traces the outline.

  And there is the warrior. Terracotta, half a man’s size, beautifully rendered, wearing arms and armour. Almost perfectly preserved—only one hand broken away where it would have rested on the hilt of a sheathed sword. Shan looks at it in wonder. She sees her husband’s pride. She understands it.

  Historians have recorded that guardian figures were buried with the first emperor, thousands of them, but not one has ever been seen, and the tomb is hidden underground. Now they have one, and Wai will take it to the court.

  She brings him her own discovery from the tower here, the unnamed steward’s record of a distinguished house in the terrible years of the Ninth’s rebellion. Qi Wai praises her, adds it to the other treasures. They will catalogue it all at home, he says.

  She bows and smiles. Looks again at the small warrior he’s brought back, thinking of how long time can be. Later, in her own room, her own bed, listening to the fountain again, she finds herself weeping.

  It is soundless, but the tears won’t stop. He is too far away already, and marked by a daiji with the words of his fate.

  Sometimes you could choose a road and it might lead to a laneway and then a quiet place where you could make a home. But Ren Daiyan’s path is not like that, and she can see it, acknowledge it in the dark.

  His life’s dream did not lead to a countryside where birds might wake you in the morning and you could walk under leaves to a pond, perhaps see lotus petals floating on the water, goldfish swimming below. He is not, Shan realizes during a long night in Xinan, a safe man to love, his life could not be safe. And so she weeps. Hears the fountain outside.

  This flower will not be like any other, she had written here. But it isn’t entirely true. Isn’t she just another woman above a courtyard under moonlight, her heart too far away, and in the wrong place?

  Several days later, on the road back east, approaching Yenling, her time of month comes, quite normally.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Lu Mah, the son of the great poet, who had accompanied his father to Lingzhou Isle, had a night cough and recurring fevers that never left him after his time on the isle.

  It was possible to see him as deserving great rewards in life for filial devotion on the largest scale, although some believed a man’s destiny was like the random fall of tiles in a celestial game played with mortal lives.

  Whatever the truth of that, Mah would never forget that time beyond the world. He dreamed of it, woke in the nights from those dreams. He had expected to die, or to bury his father there. His father always said his life was a gift of the girl who had left Lingzhou with them and died south of the mountains. Mah remembered her very well. He thought he’d been in love with her, for gentleness in a terrible place. They lit candles for her.

  If asked for the most vivid day in his life, he’d have said that it was the great conference at the court, when he and his uncle returned from the steppe and were summoned to report.

  It was the first time—and was to be the only time—he ever stood thus, in the presence of the august Emperor Wenzong, guardian of all his people under heaven.

  A great many distinguished men assembled that morning, elaborately dressed, the mighty of Kitai, taut as drawn bowstrings. Lu Mah would have found himself trembling with fear, but his uncle’s presence was a rock, and standing beside him as they waited he drew strength from that.

  Lu Chao, tall and lean, betrayed nothing with his expression or posture in the moments before he was summoned to speak. He had done this before, Mah reminded himself. His uncle knew this court.

  Prime Minister Kai Zhen was addressing the emperor. He was an enemy of their family from a long time back. They were not to show any sign of that, Lu Mah knew.

  As the prime minister spoke, Mah’s uncle looked straight ahead and, in a practised manner, lips barely moving, told his nephew the names of those gathered that morning. He didn’t know them all. He, too, had been exiled for many years.

  Even the reception hall intimidated Mah, though his uncle had warned him about this. Lu Mah had never been in a chamber remotely like it. Marble columns in six rows, sheathed in bands of green jade, disappearing into shadow at the far en
d beyond the throne. There were ivory sconces and alabaster pillars for candles and lamps. The ceiling was so high, and there was more jade there, in swirling patterns.

  The emperor, wearing the blue soft crown of ceremony, sat on the Dragon Throne, on a dais in the centre, three steps up. The throne was wide, intricately carved, magnificent, a symbol in itself, brought forth for occasions of significance. This was one of those. They were to learn—to decide—whether Kitai was going to war.

  The prime minister appeared to be finishing his remarks. He was congratulating the emperor on being alert to all opportunities on behalf of his people and his noble ancestors.

  Near him, another tall man—the eunuch Wu Tong, whom Mah’s father and uncle despised—stood quietly, hands folded in sleeves, a picture of grave, agreeable serenity. Beside the throne, a little behind, was a man of about Mah’s own age, the imperial heir, Chizu. Mah’s uncle had said he was clever, and spent his life hiding it.

  There was a feeling, a vibration in the air like an almostheard pipa string. Despite his uncle’s presence, he felt afraid, after all. They had enemies here, and what his uncle was about to say ...

  Then it seemed to be time to say it. The prime minister turned towards them, offering a smile that had nothing in it of welcome or warmth to go with the ritual words of appreciation.

  Lu Chao bowed, still expressionless, and stepped forward as he was named, leaving Mah alone, no one beside him. He felt an urgent need to cough, his nervous cough, and fought it. His eyes went around the room. His gaze met those of a uniformed military officer, about his own age as well, among those standing to the left. The officer was looking at him. He nodded at Mah, and smiled. A real smile.

  His uncle hadn’t named this one. He was standing with the chief magistrate of Hanjin, whose name Lu Chao had offered: Wang Fuyin. Mah’s uncle had said he was ambitious, and shrewd, of undetermined allegiance.

  Everyone here seemed to be ambitious and shrewd. Lu Mah had long ago decided that this was not a life for him: sorting through, let alone shaping, moments such as this.

  He missed East Slope. He had done so from the morning they’d left. He wasn’t his father, he wasn’t his uncle, had no desire to be. He was content to honour and love them both, serve them with devotion, serve the gods and his ancestors. It was his hope that this would be acceptable as the course of a man’s life.