River of Stars Read online

  “Leave him alone,” said the leader. “We are honest men, and I don’t want a party lying in wait when we come home tomorrow!”

  There was a short silence.

  “Twenty-five cash for what’s left of that bucket!” Ziji’s magistrate cried suddenly. “I have it in my hand!”

  The boy turned to him. It was a ridiculous sum. It marked them as carrying more money than was safe, if they could be this extravagant.

  But Ziji was really very thirsty now and he had noticed something. It had been possible the second bucket was poisoned, the first one being a ruse, kept clean. But a man had just drunk from it and was standing in front of them, laughing, pleased with himself.

  “Yes, we’ll give you that,” Ziji said, making a decision.

  He didn’t want his own men killing him, and he really wanted a scoop or two of wine. He added, “And tomorrow you can carry two buckets to the silk farm and offer them for nothing instead of ten cash. They’ll forgive you, and you know it. And you get to turn back right now and go home.”

  The boy stared at him. Then he nodded. “All right. For twenty-five. Cash first.”

  Ziji’s men let out a cheer. First happy sound all day, he thought. The magistrate hastily reached inside his robe and counted out coins (showing too heavy a purse in the process). The others all stood up and were watching as he dropped the money into the wine seller’s palm.

  “Bucket’s yours,” the boy said. “Well, the wine is. I need the bucket.”

  One of Ziji’s soldiers picked it up and, showing more good sense than the other merchants had, carried it to their shade. Another rushed for two ladles from the gear on one of the donkeys. They crowded around the bucket.

  With a leader’s almost inhuman restraint, Ziji stayed where he was. “Save me two scoops at the end,” he called. He wondered if that would earn him any goodwill.

  He wondered if they’d save him the two scoops.

  The other party retreated across the roadway, chattering loudly and laughing—there had been an adventure here, and they’d drunk wine very fast. They would probably sleep now, Ziji thought.

  The wine seller moved away from both groups and found some shade, waiting for his bucket. His day had just been made easy. He could turn around and go home.

  Ziji watched his men around the wine, drinking too quickly. The magistrate, predictably, had just taken a third scoop. No one was going to gainsay him. Except Ziji, perhaps. Reluctantly, he stood up. He’d have been happier if they’d done it properly and carried the bucket over to their leader with the two last scoops.

  He sighed. Things were seldom done properly these days. It was a sad world in which they lived. He glanced across the road to the woods on the other side.

  All six merchants were walking into the roadway. Three carried swords. Two held their walking staffs as weapons now. The wine seller rose to his feet. He crossed towards the other merchants, not hurrying. One of them handed him a short bow and a quiver of arrows. The man was smiling.

  Ziji opened his mouth and shouted a warning.

  In that same moment the magistrate toppled heavily into the grass. An instant later another of Ziji’s men did the same. Then a third.

  In an alarmingly short interval they were all sprawled on the ground, as if drugged. Of course drugged, Zhao Ziji thought. He was facing seven men alone.

  “This isn’t worth dying for,” said the young wine seller gently.

  He seemed to have taken the lead here, improbably. His bow was trained on Ziji. He added, “Although, if you insist, or feel there is no reason to go on living, I will kill you.”

  “How ... ?” Ziji stammered.

  “With an arrow!” The clean-shaven man who had appeared to lead the merchants laughed.

  “No, Fang. He means how was it done. He is a thinking soldier. Some of them are.” The shirtless wine seller’s manner had changed. He didn’t seem so young any more.

  Ziji looked at them. He’d had none of the wine but felt lightheaded, dizzy with fear and dismay.

  The young one said, “Two ladles. Shanbao powder in the second one when Lao brought the bucket back and dipped it but I didn’t let him drink. Remember?”

  Ziji remembered.

  He said, “How ... how did you know?”

  The wine seller—who wasn’t really a wine seller—shook his head impatiently.

  “Really? There’s a party from Hsiang on this road every summer, heading for the capital. Kai Zhen’s gifts. You don’t think country people are smart enough to realize that? That they might let us know when you set out, how many, how you are dressed? For a small share of what we take? And to get at the minister who created the Flowers and Rocks program that is killing people and destroying the countryside to build a garden in Hanjin?”

  So much for disguises, Ziji thought. He tried to think of a threat that would mean anything to these men. He took a moment, but nothing came to him.

  “You might as well kill me,” he said.

  The men in the road grew quiet. They hadn’t expected that.

  “Truly?” said the wine seller.

  Ziji nodded towards the magistrate. “I assume they are drugged, not dying? That one will blame me when he wakes up. The prefect will believe him. He’s a ranking civil servant. I’m just—”

  “A soldier,” said the young man. He looked thoughtful now. “He doesn’t have to wake up.”

  He swung his bow over and trained an arrow on the magistrate in the grass.

  Ziji shook his head. “Don’t. He did nothing wrong. This was my error. We don’t drink that wine, you wouldn’t have attacked twelve with seven.”

  “Yes, we would,” the man with the bow said. “Half of you dead with arrows before we’d fight, and that half would all be soldiers. The others are useless and you know it. Tell me, do you want him dead?”

  Ziji shook his head. “It does nothing for me, and he’s only greedy, not evil.”

  “They’re all evil,” said one of the outlaws. He spat. The wine seller said nothing.

  “Besides,” Ziji added, “any of them will tell the same story, and it was my job to stop them from drinking that wine.”

  “We can kill them all.” Not the wine seller, one of the others.

  “No,” said Ziji. “Just me. My price to pay. I might be executed if I go back, anyhow. May I have a moment to pray?”

  The wine seller had an odd expression on his face. He looked young again. He was young. “We don’t need to kill you,” he said. “Join us.”

  Ziji stared.

  “Think about it,” the young one went on. “If you are right, you have no future in that prefecture, or in the army, and you may be executed. There’s at least a life with us.”

  “I don’t like it,” said one of the others.

  “Why?” said the young one, his eyes still on Ziji. “This is how I joined you, back when. And how did you come to be one of the Marsh Outlaws, Kui? Wandering through villages asking for honest work?”

  There was laughter.

  At least he knew who these were now, Ziji thought. The Outlaws of the Marsh were the largest bandit group in Kitai south of the Great River. Every year there were urgent requests to Hanjin to send an army to deal with them. Every year these were ignored. There was a war being fought: the southern prefectures were expected to deal with local bandits themselves.

  It was all true, Ziji thought: he had no life left at the barracks. Either because he’d be executed, or beaten and jailed by an enraged prefect, or simply because he’d never be promoted now. He’d probably be sent to the war.

  He said that. “I could go fight the Kislik.”

  The other man nodded. “They’ll likely send you there. They need soldiers. You did hear about the disaster?”

  Everyone had heard. It wasn’t a new story. A deep thrust ordered north through the desert, aimed at Erighaya, horses and foot soldiers, far into enemy lands, then halted outside the walled Kislik city because—amazingly—they hadn’t brought siege engines
. They’d forgotten them. No one had checked. It was madness, an utterly improbable tale, and it was true.

  What sort of army could do that? Ziji had wondered when the news reached their barracks. Kitai had ruled and subjugated the whole world once. Rulers from all over had sent them gifts, horses, women, slaves.

  Their northwestern army’s supply lines had been severed behind them. Over half their soldiers had died on the retreat from Erighaya. Almost seventy thousand men, Ziji had heard. A terrifying number. They had killed their commanders on the way south, it was reported. Eaten them, some said. Starving men in a desert, far from home.

  And Deputy Prime Minister Kai Zhen, in overall command of that campaign, was receiving birthday gifts from all over Kitai, timed to arrive at court this autumn.

  “Don’t go back,” said the young man with the bow. “We can use good men. The emperor needs to be made aware his servants and policies are evil and incompetent.”

  Zhao Ziji looked at him. A life, he thought, could change quickly. It could turn like a water wheel on some isolated hilltop in summer heat.

  “That’s what you are doing?” he said, perhaps too wryly for someone facing an arrow. “Sending memoranda to the emperor?”

  “Some go into the woods for money. Food. Some for a life of freedom. Some like to kill. I’m ... some of us are also trying to say something, yes. Enough voices, we might be heard.”

  Ziji looked at him.

  “What is your name?” He wasn’t sure why he asked.

  “Ren Daiyan,” said the other, promptly. “They call me Little Dai.”

  “You aren’t so little.”

  The other man grinned. “I was young when I started, west of here. And besides, I have a small cock.”

  The others burst into laughter. Ziji blinked. A strange sensation came over him.

  “Is that so?” he said.

  “Of course not!” one of the outlaws cried. Someone made a loud, crude jest, the kind Ziji knew from soldiers in barracks too long without women.

  Something altered inside him, as if a key had turned in a lock. “I’m Zhao Ziji,” he said. And, for the first time in his life, added, “They call me Ziji Shortcock.”

  “Truly? Ho! We were born to be companions then!” cried the man named Ren Daiyan. “To seek women and wine and live forever!” Words from a very old song.

  In the laughter that followed, Zhao Ziji stepped into the roadway and became an outlaw.

  He felt, astonishingly, as if he were coming home. He looked at the young man—Ren Daiyan was surely ten years younger than him—and knew, in that same moment, that he would follow this man all his life, until one or the other or both of them died.

  CHAPTER IV

  She has made herself wait before trying again, striving for inner harmony, sitting very still at her writing desk. The first three attempts at the letter have been unsatisfactory. She is aware that tension, fear, the importance of what she is writing are affecting her brush.

  That must not be permitted. She breathes deeply, eyes on a lotus tree she’s always liked in the courtyard. It is very early morning, autumn. Outside her window the compound is quiet, even with the extreme crowding in the space assigned the imperial family members.

  She is alone in their house. Her husband is away, north, in search of steles to buy or transcribe, bronzes, artifacts for their collection. It is a collection now; they are becoming known for it.

  Qi Wai is travelling near the border again, towards the lands possessed (for a long time now) by the Xiaolu. It ought to be all right. They are at peace—a peace they buy each year. Her husband’s father has told them that most of their silver comes back in trade at the authorized border trading towns. He approves of the payments, though if he did not he wouldn’t say so. Members of the imperial family live watched, careful lives.

  In dealings with the Xiaolu, the Kitan emperor is still the “uncle,” the emperor of the Xiaolu is his “nephew.” The uncle kindly gives “gifts” to the nephew. It is a fiction, a courtly lie, but lies can be important in the world, Lin Shan has come to understand.

  The world is a terrible place.

  She chides herself, inwardly. Bitter thoughts will not bring calm. She ruined her first attempt at the letter not only with an anxious brush but with a tear that fell on the page, making the strokes for the word councillor blur and run.

  On the desk are the Four Treasures of the Room of Literature: ink stone, ink stick, paper, brushes. Her husband brought her back a red ink stone, offered it as a gift at the New Year’s Festival. It is beautiful, old, Fourth Dynasty, he thinks.

  For this letter, though, she is using her own first ink stone, from childhood. The one her father gave her. There might be, she thinks, some magic residing in it, a spiritual power to make the ink it grinds more persuasive.

  She needs it to be, or her heart will break.

  She takes up her stick again, pours water from the beaker into the ink stone’s hollow. Gestures she has performed all her life, rituals by now. She grinds the black ink stick into the stone, using her left hand as she has been taught (by her father).

  She knows exactly what she wants to say in this letter, how many characters, how much ink she needs. You always grind a little more than you need, she has been taught (by her father). If you are forced to grind again, in order to finish, the texture at the end of your writing will be different from the beginning, a flaw.

  She sets the ink stick down. Lifts the brush in her right hand. Dips it in the ink. She is using the rabbit’s-hair brush for this letter: it makes the most precise characters. Sheep’s hair is more bold, but though she needs the letter to seem confident of its virtue, it is still a plea.

  She sits as she must sit. She adopts the Pillowed-Wrist Position, left hand under right wrist, supporting it. Her characters are to be small, exact, not large and assertive (for which she’d have used Raised-Wrist Position). The letter will be in formal hand. Of course it will.

  A writer’s brush is a warrior’s bow, the letters it shapes are arrows that must hit the mark on the page. The calligrapher is an archer, or a general on a battlefield. Someone wrote that long ago. She feels that way this morning. She is at war.

  Her brush is directly above the paper, vertical. Each finger plays a part. Her grip is firm; the strength of arm and wrist must be controlled and sure.

  Controlled and sure. It is imperative that she not weep. She looks out the window again. A single servant has appeared, is sweeping the courtyard in morning light. Another brush, a broom.

  She begins.

  His eyesight had become the important difficulty. He didn’t sleep easily these nights, and he didn’t walk as he used to, but what old man did? Too much wine gave him headaches, beginning while he drank, not even waiting politely for morning. Such sad things were part of what time did to men when the hair turned white and the sword arm failed, as a poet had written.

  The prime minister of Kitai had never had a sword arm. The very idea was, briefly, amusing. And senior court officials didn’t walk very much (or at all) within the palace or outside it. He had a cushioned, covered, ornately gilded chair and bearers to carry him where he needed to go.

  And he could destroy people without touching a blade.

  No, the infirmity that mattered was his sight. It was reading letters, tax records, prefectural documents, memoranda, reports from informants that had become a challenge. There was a cloudiness at the edge of each eye now, creeping inwards like mist over water, approaching the land. You could make that image a symbol for a poem, but only if you wanted to let others know this was happening, and he didn’t. It wasn’t safe.

  His son helped him. Hsien seldom left his side, and they had tricks to conceal his trouble. It was important at this court not to be seen as so aged and frail one couldn’t even read the morning’s civil service documents.

  He half believed that some of those who’d be happier if he was gone had taken to using deliberately small calligraphy, to show up his difficulty.
It would be clever if they were doing that, the sort of thing he might have done himself once. He lived under few illusions. Emperors were capricious, unstable. Power was not a dependable condition.

  Hang Dejin, still prime minister to the sage and illustrious Emperor Wenzong, often thought of retiring.

  He had asked the emperor for permission to do so many times over the years, but those had been ploys, a public stand in the face of opposition at court. If the emperor in his wisdom thinks his servant is misguided, I beg leave to withdraw in shame.

  He’d have been shocked if any of those requests had been accepted.

  Lately, he had begun to wonder what would happen if he offered again. Times changed, men changed. The long Kislik war was going badly. The emperor still didn’t know the extent of that. If and when he learned, there could—there would—be consequences. That needed managing. It could be done, there were ways, but Dejin knew he wasn’t the man he had been even three years ago.

  If blame for the fighting fell to him—and it could—that would almost certainly mean disgrace and departure (or worse). In that case, the deputy prime minister, Kai Zhen, would surely succeed him. And would dominate Kitai, given an emperor with a preference for painting, calligraphy (his own was widely seen as the most elegant in the world), and the extravagant garden he was building north and east of this palace.

  The garden (the Genyue), and the Flowers and Rocks Network to supply it, had been Kai Zhen’s idea. A brilliant one, in so many ways. Dejin had approved of it originally, and reaped the benefit of the emperor’s distraction for some time. There might now be a price to be paid.

  The question was, who would do the paying?

  Deputy Minister Kai probably believed he was ruling now, Dejin thought wryly. After all, there was only an old, almost-blind man between him and the emperor, and though Zhen might speak of honouring his superior for initiating the reform policies, there was little doubt in Hang Dejin’s mind that the younger man saw the older one as weak now, trammelled in old ways of doing things.