River of Stars

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.

Old ways, such as restraint, courtesy, respect, Dejin thought, still wryly. He had grown wealthy in power, accustomed to his stature and to being feared, but he hadn’t sought rank with the intent of acquiring wealth.

He had seen his differences with Xi Wengao and the other conservatives as a battle for what Kitai should be, needed to be, for the good of the empire and its people. It was a pious, self-indulgent thought, and he was aware of that, but it was also, Hang Dejin told himself, true.

He shook his head. His son glanced at him, a blurred, moving shape, then turned back to his own pile of documents. Bitterness wasn’t a useful state of mind, Dejin reminded himself. You made mistakes if that was what drove you. You spoke without proper contemplation words you could be made to regret. He had often provoked such rashness in rivals. He knew how to make use of anger, passion, outrage in others.

The light was good in their working room today, here on the western side of the palace’s main courtyard. Back in the Ninth Dynasty, in Xinan before it fell to ruins, the civil servants had had an entire palace building to themselves: the Purple Myrtle Court.

Here in Hanjin, splendid as it was, there simply wasn’t enough space for that. Space was part of what they’d lost all through the empire, and not just in a crowded capital. They’d lost land in the north, in the northwest, lost the protection of the Long Wall, lost tribute, lost access to (control of!) the trade routes to the west and the wealth they’d brought, year over year.

Hanjin had more than a million souls living within or beside its walls—in an area only a fraction of what Xinan had enclosed three hundred years ago.

If you went to the ruins of the old capital, walked in through smashed gates, stood among weeds and grass and broken stone, heard the calling of birds or saw animals loping along the vastness of what had once been the imperial way, almost five hundred paces wide … you could be forgiven for thinking that Hanjin’s main thoroughfare, running from this palace to the southern gates was …

Well, it was eighty paces across, to be precise.

He’d had it measured, not long after arriving at court, all those years ago. Eighty paces was a very wide street, entirely suitable for processions and festivals. But it wasn’t Xinan, was it?

And Kitai wasn’t what Kitai had been.

What of it? he’d thought then, and still thought, most of the time. Were they to bow their heads in shame because of what had happened centuries before any of them were born? Tear out what was left of greying hair? Surrender to the barbarians? Give their women to them? Their children as slaves?

The prime minister grunted in dismissal of such a thought. The world came to you as it came, you dealt with what you had.

He saw his son lift his head again from the papers he was working through. Dejin made a gesture: nothing of importance, he signalled to Hsien, carry on.

There were two communications on his own desk. They had been handed to him by his son without comment. He had read them both in the good light. Excellent calligraphy in each case, one familiar (and celebrated), the other new to him.

The letters were a part of what had made him bitter and nostalgic on a bright morning in autumn. Autumn was a good season in Hanjin, summer’s heat and the yellow dust receding, winter winds not yet come. The plum trees flowering late. A bright string of festivals ahead. He wasn’t a man for watching street dancing or revellers carrying coloured lanterns but he liked his wine as well as the next person, and he enjoyed festival food, though he needed to be careful what he ate and drank now.

The letters were addressed to him personally, one written in the voice of long—if difficult—acquaintance, the other with extreme deference and formality. Both were supplications in the same matter. They made him angry with what they revealed, since it was new to him and should not have been.

It wasn’t as if the fate of every single member of the opposing faction needed to be reviewed by the prime minister of Kitai. There were far too many of them, he had more important tasks and burdens.

He had set in motion, himself, the process of disgracing and exiling the ousted faction over twenty-five years ago, without doubting himself for a moment. There had been carved steles, copied from the new young emperor’s own hand, his exquisite Slender Gold calligraphy, naming the banished. The steles had been placed in front of every prefectural yamen in the empire. Eighty-seven names the first time, one hundred and twenty-nine a year later. He remembered the numbers. Those names he had reviewed himself, or selected.

The empire, the court, the world under heaven had needed clarity and direction after a turbulent time. Though there might once have been merit to cacophony at court, the back and forth of factions in favour and out, Hang Dejin had been sure of his virtue and the wisdom of his policies. He’d regarded those who disagreed with him as not just wrong, but dangerous—destructive of peace and order and the changes Kitai required.

The empire needed these men silenced and gone.

Besides, they had started it! The conservatives had been in power between the last emperor’s death and the coming of age of the current one, in the years when the dowager empress reigned. They had reversed everything and initiated the exiling of Hang Dejin’s New Policies faction.

Dejin had spent several years writing poetry and letters from his country estate near Yenling, banned from court, power, influence. He’d remained wealthy (power brought wealth, it was a law of nature), never tasted again the hardship he’d left behind when he’d passed the jinshi examinations, but he’d been very far from the corridors of the palace.

Then Emperor Wenzong took the throne. Wenzong had summoned back to court the sage, Hang Dejin, who had been his tutor. Restored as prime minister, Dejin had extended to the conservatives the fate they’d imposed on him and his own people. Some of those he exiled were men he had admired, even in their battles. You couldn’t let that guide you, not with so much at stake.

They were sent away. Across rivers, over mountains. Sometimes they died. Reform would always have opponents, men clinging fiercely to the old ways, whether out of genuine belief or because those old ways had made their family fortunes.

It didn’t matter which. That was what he’d come to understand. When you were reshaping an empire you couldn’t be looking over your shoulder for intrigue, cunning opposition, worrying if a tail-star seen one spring or summer might send a panicky emperor hurrying to perform appeasing rituals—and straight back to the old ways.

You needed a cleared field before you and no danger behind. Comets had put him out of power twice in his early years, once under the late emperor, once with Wenzong. Being unpredictable was the prerogative of those who sat the Dragon Throne. Their loyal advisers needed to limit the consequences.

That was why Kai Zhen’s idea of an imperial garden had been so brilliant. Dejin had allocated considerable funds and resources to the newly created Flowers and Rocks Network. Not enough, in the event, not nearly enough. The sums grew. The Genyue had taken on a life of its own. All gardens did that, but …

The human labour required throughout the empire and the level of taxation demanded had begun to be overwhelming. And with the emperor enraptured by the Genyue, it was too late to stop or scale back, despite rebellion stirring in the south and west and growing outlaw bands in forests and marshes.

The emperor knew what he wanted for his garden, and you couldn’t tell an emperor he wasn’t going to get it. He wanted Szechen nightingales, for example, hundreds of them. Boys and men went hunting there, stripping the forests of songbirds. Wenzong wanted a mountain brought, as a symbol of the Five Holy Mountains. He wanted cedarwood and sandalwood from the south, a bridge, entirely of gold, leading to an island with pavilions of marble and onyx and rosewood, set in an artificial lake. He wanted trees on the island made of silver, among the real ones.

Sometimes you set events in motion, like a river, and if it flooded, or grew engorged …

It was possible that some of what he’d done or permitted through the years had been less than perfectly judged and implemented. What man alive (or ever living) would claim perfection?

The prime minister of Kitai adjusted his black, fur-trimmed robe. There was a breeze coming through the window and he caught a chill too easily these days.

For diversion he had tried, not long ago, to think of a good thing about growing old. He’d thought he might write (or dictate) an essay about it. The best he’d been able to come up with was that you might be less at the mercy of the desires of your body.

No one would send a woman to seduce him from his purposes now. Not any more. He read the second letter again, on that thought.

Then he summoned his bearers and went looking for the emperor.

THE EMPEROR OF KITAI was walking in his garden.

It pleased him to do this on any day that was fair, and this one was, a mild morning in autumn, approaching the Ninth of Ninth Festival. The emperor knew there were some among his court who felt he should never walk out of doors. He found them deficient in proper understanding. How could one appreciate, and amend, the paths and byways and the vistas of a garden if one did not walk them oneself?

Although, to call where he strolled a “garden” was to stretch the word almost out of recognition. The enclosed space here was so extravagant, yet so cunningly landscaped, that it was impossible, unless one went right to the walled edges, to know where it ended.

Even at the margins, trees had been densely planted to obscure where the Hanjin city wall began. The palace guard patrolled outside, where the garden’s gates led into the city, or to the palace and its courtyards to the west. You couldn’t see them from within the Genyue.

It was a world he was making here. Hills and lakes shaped to careful design (and then reshaped, whatever the cost, after consulting geomancers). Spiralling paths up mountains that had been raised for him, with waterfalls that could be activated at his desire. There were gazebos and pavilions hidden deep in groves for summer coolness, or situated where sunlight might fall on an autumn or spring day. Each of these was provided with the tools of painting or writing. The emperor might be moved to take up his brush at any moment.

There was also a new magnificence, a central, defining object now in the Genyue. A rock so wide and high (the height of fifteen tall soldiers!), so magnificently pitted and scarred (it had been brought up from a lake, the emperor understood, he had no idea how) that it could truly be said to constitute an image of one of the Five Holy Mountains. A young sub-prefect posted nearby had learned of it—and made his fortune by alerting the administrators of the Flowers and Rocks Network.

It had taken, apparently, a year to claim it from the depths and bring it to Hanjin, overland and then along the Great River and canal. The emperor imagined there must have been some degree of labour and expense involved with something so massive. He didn’t attend to such details, of course.

He had been very attentive as to where the colossal mountain-rock was situated once it arrived. There had been, he understood, some unfortunate deaths in the Genyue itself during the process of moving it into the precisely proper spot. He had first wanted it to surmount and emerge from a hill (a hill they’d made), for greatest effect, but then it had to be shifted after consultation with his geomancers of the Arcane Path and learning their calculations as to auspices.

He probably ought to have consulted them before the first positioning. Ah, well. Decisions in the garden were so complex. He was trying to mirror Kitai, after all, provide a spiritual centre for his realm, ground it securely in the goodwill of heaven. That was part of an emperor’s duty to his people, after all.

But now … now it was where he needed it. He sat in one of his pavilions, this one mostly of ivory, with green jade inlays, and he looked up at his mighty rock with a glad heart.

The Emperor Wenzong was famously compassionate: word of those labourers’ deaths—right here in his garden—had grieved him. He wasn’t supposed to have learned about them, he knew. His advisers were zealous in protecting him from sorrows that might burden the too-generous imperial heart. The Genyue was meant to be a place of calm for him, a refuge from the cares the world brought to those burdened with responsibility.

In his famed calligraphy style, Slender Gold, the emperor had recently devised a clever way of shaping the thirteen brush strokes of the word garden to suggest something beyond what was ordinarily meant, when referring to his own garden.

It was a measure of imperial subtlety, one of his closest advisers had said, that the august emperor had done this, instead of devising or demanding an entirely new word for what was being built here under his wise and benevolent eye.

Kai Zhen, the deputy prime minister, was quite astute in his observations, Emperor Wenzong felt. It had been Minister Kai, of course, along with the eunuch Wu Tong (most recently commanding the Pacification Army against the Kislik in the northwest) who had devised the Flowers and Rocks Network which had allowed the shaping of this garden. The emperor was not a man to forget such loyalty.

There were even nightingales here, you heard them in the evenings. Some had, sadly, died last winter. They were going to try to keep them alive, indoors, this winter, and Minister Kai had assured him that more were on their way even now from warmer climes to grace his groves with their music of the south.

A fine phrase, the emperor had thought.

Prime Minister Hang Dejin, his childhood tutor, his father’s and his own long-time adviser, was growing old. A melancholy, autumnal reflection. Another sorrow for the imperial heart. But it was also the way of life under heaven, as the Cho Master had taught them all. What man could avoid his end?

Well, there were ways to try. The emperor was following in another imperial tradition, taking a sequence of elixirs prepared for him each day by his occult masters of the Arcane Path. Kai Zhen had frequently and eloquently expressed his hope that these might prove efficacious.

There had also been sessions by candlelight wherein the leader of these same clerics (Kai Zhen had introduced him to the palace) invoked the spirit of Wenzong’s revered father to pronounce his approval of measures being undertaken for the governance of the realm, including the Genyue and the new music being devised for the performance of imperial rites.

Tuning the ritual instruments in a manner derived from the measured lengths of the middle, ring, and little fingers of the emperor’s left hand had been, the spirit of his father declared, a celestially harmonious idea.

Emperor Wenzong had taken this deeply to heart. He remembered being near to tears that night.

His own talents were not, truthfully, those of a man inclined to weigh matters of taxation and village administration, whether the army was made up of hired soldiers or a rural militia, how leaders were chosen in the countryside, or loans arranged for farmers—and repayment enforced.

He did pay attention to the examination questions for jinshi candidates, had even devised some of these himself. And he enjoyed presiding over the final testing days in his yellow robes of ceremony.

He’d been a painter and a calligrapher, from early in life. Noted for both, exalted for both, well before he’d taken the throne. He knew what he was, hadn’t ever pretended to be otherwise. He had wanted the Dragon Throne because it was there, and properly his, but his passions lay in another realm.

He had certainly done his duty as emperor. He’d fathered sons (many of them) and had them taught the ways of the Path and the Cho Master. He satisfied the imperial women, one each morning, two at night, according to the sequence presented to him by the Inner Quarters Registrar, dutifully denying himself a climax except (upon being advised) with the most innocent and youthful of his women. In this way, according to his arcane advisers, the female essence of his wives and concubines would bolster his essence, not drain it away.

This, too, was a burden and responsibility. His strength was the strength of Kitai. His virtue was the virtue of an empire.

He performed all the imperial rites, faithfully.

He’d returned to his father’s course of governance, after the unfortunate period when his mother ruled. Because it had been his father’s dream (as explained to him), he’d initiated war against the ungrateful Kislik in the northwest—and he did ask about it now and again. But it was important for an emperor to have trustworthy and diligent advisers so the imperial spirit could be allowed to flower and flourish … in the great garden of the world under nine heavens. Beyond all his duties, the emperor’s well-being, the soaring of his spirit, affected the well-being, the spirit of all Kitai.

Kai Zhen had put it that way just a few days ago in this very pavilion, which was Wenzong’s favourite now, with its view of the new rock-mountain.

The emperor intended to make Minister Kai a gift: a small painting he’d made here, a springtime landscape with flowering bamboo, an oriole, blue hills. The deputy prime minister had admired it, eloquently.

The emperor’s paintings were the most desired gift in Kitai.

It was a great shame, they had agreed, looking at it together, that Prime Minister Hang would not be able to see the details clearly any more. He was suffering the afflictions of age, Kai Zhen had suggested, in much the way autumn and winter succeed a brilliant spring. A garden like the Genyue could teach lessons like that.

This garden was—everyone said it—the heart-stopping wonder of the world. It was a mirror of Kitai in miniature, which was its purpose. Just as the emperor’s well-being and right behaviour were integral to preserving the mandate of heaven, so, too, it had been decided by his advisers, would an imperial garden designed to encompass the scope and balance of Kitai act to preserve that scope and balance.

It made so much sense.

His passion for this stupendous accomplishment wasn’t an affectation, an avoiding of tasks and cares. No. His labours here, his personal instructions to landscapers and architects, were at the heart—the very heart—of his duty to his people!

So the emperor of Kitai thought, sitting in an autumn pavilion in the sunlight of morning, with a view of his new mountain. He was contemplating making a painting, at ease in heart and mind, when he heard a strange sound from along the path where a gardener had moved out of sight sweeping leaves. The emperor looked at his guards. They stared straight ahead, expressionless. He heard the sound again.

The gardener was, if the emperor was not mistaken, crying.

PRIME MINISTER HANG DEJIN found the emperor, as expected, in the pavilion before the mountain. What he saw, however, was unexpected in the extreme. He thought, at first, that his weakened eyes were failing him again, but when he stepped carefully from his chair onto the groomed path, he realized they were not.