River of Stars

Naturally Kai Zhen went straight to his knees again. Quite close to the gardener, in fact. He pressed his forehead to the gravel of the path.

“My life is yours, celestial lord!” he cried.

“We know this,” said Wenzong.

He could be impressive, Dejin thought, when moved to engage with his power. It rarely happened. You could sometimes regret that.

The emperor said, “Remain as you are, and advise us where General Wu Tong is, your chosen commander in the northwest. Explain why he has not been brought to court to tell us what happened in the Kislik war. We have learned this morning, for the first time, from a gardener, what the whole of Hanjin seems to know!”

He did not trouble (he was the emperor) to hide his anger.

And here, of course, was the true and deadly menace of the morning. Kai Zhen would be realizing it, Dejin thought. His heart would be hammering, sweat would be on his body, his bowels would probably be clenching and releasing with fear.

He would be aware that he could lose all power and rank, could even die today. Or be exiled to Lingzhou Isle.

On the isle that same day—south and south away, beyond peaks and rivers, rice fields and marshes and jungles, across a white-waved, wind-chopped strait, barely even within the world of Kitai—morning prayers and thanks were once more being offered that the summer rains had ended.

The rains arrived at Lingzhou with the west wind in the third month and lasted into autumn. The downpour, the steaming damp and the heat, and the diseases they brought were what tended to kill people, mostly those from the north.

Those born south of the coastal mountains, and the natives of Lingzhou itself, were better able to deal with the illness and enervation that came with a sodden summer in a place seen by many as lying adjacent to the afterworld.

There were giant snakes. They were not legends. They slithered through muddy village lanes, or stretched themselves along dripping branches in the dark-leaved forest.

There were poisonous spiders, many different kinds. Some so small they could hardly be seen as they killed you. You never, ever put on boots or shoes without shaking them out first, prepared to jump back.

There were tigers unique to the south. Their roaring could sometimes fill the thick nights of the isle under clouds or stars. The sound was said to paralyze a man if he heard it from too near. They killed many people each year. Being cautious wasn’t enough if the tiger god named you.

There were ghosts, but there were ghosts everywhere.

Wondrous flowers grew enormous blossoms, brilliantly coloured, dizzying perfumes. But it was dangerous to go walking out to see them in meadows or by the forest’s edge, and during summer downpours it was impossible.

Even indoors, in the worst of rain and wind, life became precarious. Lanterns would swing wildly and blow out. Candles on altars could be knocked over. There were fires in huts while rain slammed outside and thunder boomed the anger of gods. One might sit in a sudden midday blackness, shaping poems in one’s head, or speaking them aloud, voice pitched above the crashing and the drum of the rain, to the loyal son who had come to the end of the world as a companion.

When it grew calm, and it was possible to write, Lu Chen took brush and paper, ground his ink, and busied himself with descriptions in poems, and in letters north.

He offered in his correspondence a resolute, defiant good humour. He had no idea if the letters would reach their destinations (they were mostly to his brother Chao, some to his wife, both living on the farm south of the Great River) but there was little for him to do here but write, and it had always been the essence of his soul.

Poetry, essays, letters, memoranda to the court. A habitation built in the mind. He had some books with him, damaged by the damp after several years now. He had the Cho classics committed pretty much to memory, however, and a great deal of poetry. He had written once, long ago, that he truly believed he could find contentment anywhere. That belief was being tested. Along with his ability to laugh, or make others laugh.

Paper was hard to come by. There was one temple housing six clerics of the Path at the edge of the village, and the current elder admired Lu Chen, knew his poetry. Chen walked over there most days, watchful on the muddy path near the forest. They drank the harsh, yellow-tinted island wine and talked. He liked to talk to intelligent men. He liked to talk to anyone.

At intervals, one of the clerics would make the crossing—dangerous in the rainy season—to the mainland for news and supplies, and arrange to obtain paper for him. Thus far the administrators here (the new one was very young, very unhappy, not surprisingly) had not stopped this, though they were aware of it, of course.

They’d had, to this point, no instructions in the matter. Those might yet come. The hatreds of the faction years could reach this far. He was here, wasn’t he? He was proof of hatred. He did think (though never said) that it might have been a woman who had wanted him sent here to die. No way to be sure, but the thought was there. He had decided, from the start, to be difficult about dying.

The clerics took his letters across the strait as well, entrusted them to others journeying over the mountain barrier, through narrow, crumbling passes above chasms, amid the shrieking of gibbons. That was how letters travelled back into the world from this far away.

In exchange for their kindnesses he had written a poem on a wall of their temple.

He was so well known that when word reached the mainland people might come, even to Lingzhou, to see Lu Chen’s writing here. They’d make offerings at the temple. Stay a night or two, pay for that. That was how such matters tended to unfold. He had done wall poems before. His presence here might be a benefit to some.

The brush strokes of the poem, written last spring, were already disappearing in the dampness, though. They hadn’t survived a single summer’s rains. There was a lesson in that, he supposed, about the aspirations of men to do something that would endure. He tried to find it amusing. He was usually able to find amusement in the world.

He had written on the wall about the human spirit, resilience, friendship, red and yellow flowers at the forest’s edge, and ghosts.

There was a ghost lingering by their cabin.

He had seen her twice for certain on the roof: once at sunrise as he walked out, once as he returned at twilight. It did not seem malevolent. It was not a personal ghost, he was sure of that, not one that had followed them here. It was a ghost of the village, the island, of this cottage. No one he asked knew anything about her. There was no name given him.

He’d seen her hair, unbound. It hid her face. There was a phrase, often used in poetry, about the cloud of a courtesan’s hair. The ghost’s was more like smoke, he thought.

He added a candle for her on their altar. They spoke the prayers and made offerings, invoking rest for her unquiet soul. It was likely she had never been buried. That could happen to a person, or to thousands on a battlefield.

He was worried about his son. Beginning this past summer, Lu Mah coughed at night when he lay down, and through the night hours. It seemed to be easing as the dry season finally came, but he was aware this might be his hope as a father, not the truth of things.

It was early morning now, not raining and not yet too hot. Time, soon, to rise from bed. He and Mah were doing exercises each morning whenever it was possible—to the amusement of the villagers, who often gathered to watch them. Twirling and stretching, they used staffs to mock-fight in front of the cottage, holding them like swords at times. “I will be a bandit yet!” he’d cry (and had written of this to his brother, mocking himself). “I will bring back the memory of young Sima Zian!”

His son laughed. That was good.

It was interesting, Lu Chen thought, how many of the references a man made reached specifically to the Ninth. It was as if they were all marked (scarred? diminished?) by glory achieved four hundred years ago, and by the rebellion and the fall.

Sima Zian, one of the master poets, had lived (mostly) before the rebellion. A chasm in the world, another poet had called the civil war that had ensued. The world, Lu Chen thought, exiled on Lingzhou Isle, confronted you with chasms—or jagged peaks—all the time.

He was trying to decide how to persuade Mah to leave. He was the one exiled. Children might have their lives undone by a father’s disgrace but there were precedents for rising above that, given the passage of time and changes at court.

Problem was, he was certain the boy would not go. For one thing, he wasn’t a boy any more. Lu Mah was of an age to take the jinshi examinations (he wouldn’t be allowed to now) and certainly to make his own decisions. He would never defy a direct order from his father, but Chen wasn’t ready to break his son’s heart that way, instructing him to leave.

He could remember travelling to the capital with his own father (long gone, dearly missed) and his brother. He’d been twenty-three years old. Three months’ journey to Hanjin, to prepare for and take the examinations. He had come first in their year; Chao, two years younger, had come third. They launched you into life like an arrow, results like that—and sometimes you landed in strange places. Arrows could go astray.

There came a time, he thought, lying in his cot-bed, when the years you had lived, your memories, stretched too much further behind than the years you could imagine in front of you.

He lay there a little longer, thinking of his dead wife and his living one, and women he had loved. There was a girl here who tended to their cottage. He did not lie with her. His son did, when Chen was with the clerics at the temple. It was better that way. His thoughts drifted to another girl, the one in Wengao’s home in Yenling. His last visit there.

She had offered herself to him, a spring night during the Peony Festival, standing in the corridor outside her room in a spill of light. He had looked back (vivid memory!) at the youngness of her. And had realized what she was doing. An illumination, like a lamp.

He had bowed to her, and shaken his head. “My everlasting thanks,” he’d said. “But I cannot accept such a gift.”

She’d be married now, for years. Perhaps with children. She’d been offering him her innocence that night, in sorrow: for strength on a terrible journey, and on Lingzhou.

She had been remarkably clever, Chen remembered, for someone so young. Over and above the fact that this had been a woman, a girl. He had encountered clever women, after all.

Too great a gift she’d been offering. He was, he thought, a man easier with giving gifts than accepting them. Nor did he follow Arcane Path teachings in the matter of lovemaking. (The emperor did, everyone knew.) You did not spend a night with a woman, Lu Chen had always believed, for whatever mystical strength you might gain from her.

You did it for pleasures you could share.

He wasn’t a good observer of doctrines. He would admit to that. He’d said it to the clerics here, his first visit, when they rang their one tall bell and prayed. He offered prayers with them, sincerely, but after his own fashion. His own doctrines were about compassion, the brush strokes of words, painting, conversation, enduring friendship, family. Laughter. Music. Service to the empire. Wine. The beauty of women and of rivers under stars. Even if you thought you were at the Red Cliffs of legend and you weren’t.

You needed to be able to laugh at yourself, too.

Watching the light in the east, he smiled. It was a good memory, that corridor in Xi Wengao’s house many springs ago. She had been generous, he had been virtuous. You could hold to such moments, hold them up to morning’s light.

It was time to rise, before the heat grew stupefying. He dressed in his hemp robe, worn through, too big for him now with the weight he’d lost. He put on his hat, as always, pinned thinning hair. He didn’t look at mirrors any more. He lit candles, poured out three cups of wine, prayed for his parents’ souls, and his wife’s, at the small altar they had made here at world’s end. He prayed for the ghost-woman. That whatever had denied her rest might ease and pass, be forgiven or forgotten.

Mah had been up earlier, as always. He had rice and chestnuts on the fire in the front room, and yellow wine warmed for his father.

“I think we’ll see the sun again today,” Lu Chen pronounced. “I propose we rally our wild bandit company and storm the fortress of the evil district overlord.”

“We did that yesterday,” his son said, smiling back at him.

His concubines were wailing in the women’s quarters like unburied ghosts. Kai Zhen, deputy prime minister of Kitai—until this morning—could hear them across the courtyard. Their voices twined and clashed unmelodiously. He had a large house (he had several large houses) but they were making a great deal of noise in their lamenting.

He felt like wailing himself, in truth. Or killing someone. He paced his principal reception room, window, wall, window, then back again, too agitated to sit, to eat, take wine, compose letters. What letters could he write?

His world had just ended. It had exploded like one of those new devices that launched fire-arrows over the walls of cities under siege.

Wu Tong, his protégé, his ally in the Flowers and Rocks Network and a shared ascent to power, hadn’t taken siege weapons north against the Kislik capital.

Sometimes the known, verified truth remained impossible to believe.

Had the eunuch and his commanders been driven mad by desert winds? Tormented to that state by some malign spirit intending their destruction? Intending Kai Zhen’s even more?

How did you forget siege weapons on your way to take a city?

This morning’s business of the court gentleman—that insignificant garden-book writer whose name he could barely recall—was trivial, it was nothing! Or it should have been. What were the chances the emperor, obsessed with the ideal placement of a new Szechen rock, or aligning a row of pagoda trees, would pause to read a letter, or care about a meaningless figure’s exile?

Even if he did, even if the accursed blind one brought it to him for his own black reasons, it should have been a simple matter to prostrate oneself, express bottomless contrition, and reverse the order of exile, explaining it away as a matter of zeal in the service of the emperor. He couldn’t even remember what had been irritating him the day he decreed Lingzhou Isle for a nonentity. He could barely remember doing it.

How could such a man matter in the unfolding of the world? He didn’t. That was the point! Even with an apparently well-crafted letter from his unnatural daughter—her life a smear on the proper conduct of a woman—Wenzong would have done no more than raise an imperial eyebrow from under his hat and suggest the exile might be made less onerous.

If it hadn’t been for the army, the disastrous retreat through the desert from Erighaya’s walls, the lack of siege engines, the death of seventy thousand …

The eating of officers, drinking their blood, as they retreated south.

And even with that, if it hadn’t been for some nameless, unknown, impossible-even-to-imagine gardener (the outrageousness threatened to choke Kai Zhen) weeping near the emperor …

How had he even dared? It was unjust beyond words! Kai Zhen had been dazzlingly close, brilliantly so, to having all he needed, wanted, had ever aspired to have.

Almost all his wife needed, as well. Though she would always want more. It was embedded in her being, that wanting. They never said it aloud, but he knew she thought about an empress’s headdress.

The thought made him look quickly over his shoulder. By now he had a sort of intuition when she might be in a room, though her movements were utterly quiet, no brushing of a robe along the floor, no slap of slippers, sound of breathing, of keys or fan at her waist.

His wife was a silent creature when she moved, and terrifying.

They were alone in the chamber. It was richly decorated. Bronzes from the Fifth, porcelain, south sea coral, sandalwood chairs, wall panels with ivory inlays, a rosewood writing desk, poems in his own (exceptional) calligraphy hanging on the walls.

Kai Zhen had good taste, a discerning eye. He was also a very wealthy man, his fortune growing swiftly after he and Wu Tong conceived of the Flowers and Rocks. The two of them had met through that idea and risen together with it, as if from a deep lake, to transcendent heights.

Kai Zhen had come to Hanjin and the court the way one of his magnificent rocks or trees had come.

He was closer to the emperor now than the prime minister, had been for two years, he’d judged. He did that particular assessment often. It had only required patience, as the old man’s eyes failed him a little more, and then again more, and his weariness under the weight of office grew …

It had all been coming to him.

He looked across the room at his wife. His heart quailed before the agate-black fury he read in Yu-lan’s eyes. Her capacity for rage was vast. Her eyes were enormous, it seemed to him. They looked as if they could swallow the room—and him—draw all down into black oblivion there.

His concubines could wail and moan. They were still doing so in the women’s quarters, shrill as gibbons. His coiled, slim wife would gather venom like a snake, in deathly anger, then strike.

She had always frightened him. From the morning they’d first met and were formally engaged. Then their wedding night, which he would remember until he died; the things she had done, shockingly, the things she’d said. From that night to this day, Yu-lan had aroused in him the most intense desire he had ever known, even as he feared her. Perhaps because he feared.

A sad thing for a man, if his passion was greater, even now, for a wife of many years than for ripe and youthful concubines or courtesans, urgently anxious to please in whatever ways imagination could devise.

She drew a breath, his wife. He watched her. She wore dark-red liao silk, belted in linked gold, straight fitted in the fashion for well-bred women, high at the throat. She wore golden slippers on her feet. She held herself very still.

Snakes did that, Kai Zhen thought, staring at her. It was said that some northern snakes made a rattling sound like gamblers’ dice before they struck.

“Why is the prime minister not dead?” she asked.

Her voice made him think of winter sometimes. Ice, wind, bones in snow.

He saw, belatedly, that her hands were trembling. Unlike her, a measure of how far lost to rage she was. Not fear. She would not fear, his wife. She would hate, and endlessly aspire, be filled with fury she could not (it seemed) entirely control, but she would not be fearful.

He would be. He was now, remembering events in the garden this morning. Such a little time ago, yet they seemed to lie on the far side of a wide river with no ferry to carry him back across. He was seeing what lay before him on this shore, knowing it as ruin.

There had been a stele raised in his honour in the city where he’d been born. He pictured it toppled, smashed, overgrown by weeds, the inscribed words of commendation lost to time and the world’s memory.

He looked at his wife, heard his women crying with undiminished fervour across the courtyard.

He said, “You want me to have killed him in the Genyue? Beside the emperor, with guards standing by?” He was smooth with sarcasm and irony, but he didn’t feel at his best just now and he knew this wasn’t what she’d meant.

She lifted her head. “I wanted him poisoned a year ago. I said as much.”

She had. Kai Zhen was aware that of the two of them she could be called the more mannish, direct. He was inclined to subtlety, observation, indirect action. Too female, if one followed the Cho Masters. But he had always argued (and believed) that at this court, at any Kitan court, mastery usually fell to the most subtle.

Unless something like this morning happened.

“It was the army, wife. Once Wu Tong’s generals failed to—”

“No, husband! Once Wu Tong failed! And you were the one who placed the eunuch at the head of an army. I said that was a mistake.”

She had. It was distressing.

“He had won battles before! And is the most loyal ally I have. He owes me everything, will never have a family. Would you have preferred a commander who would claim all glory for himself? Come home seeking power?”

She laughed harshly. “I’d have preferred a commander who’d bring proper weapons to a siege!”

There was that.

He said, hating the note in his voice, “It was that gardener! If he hadn’t been—”

“It would have been someone else. You needed to denounce Wu Tong, husband! When we first heard of this. Before someone denounced you along with him.”

Which is what had just happened.

“And,” she added, the icy voice, “you needed to have the old man killed.”

“He was leaving!” Zhen exclaimed. “It was aligned. He wants to retire. He can hardly see! Why risk a killing when it was falling to us?”

He used us deliberately. He wasn’t capable of battling her in this mood. She was too fierce, he was too despairing. Sometimes a clash like this excited him, and her, and they would end up disrobed and entwined on the floor, or with her mounting and sheathing his sex while he leaned back in a sandalwood chair. Not today. She wasn’t going to make love to him today.

It occurred to him—blade of a thought—that he could kill himself. Perhaps leave a letter asking forgiveness and pardon for his young sons? They might yet be allowed a life in Hanjin, at court.

He didn’t want to do that. He wasn’t that kind of person. It crossed his mind that Yu-lan was. She could easily open her mouth right now, this moment, and tell him with her next words that he needed to die.

She did open her mouth. She said, “There may yet be time.”

He felt a weakness in his legs. “What do you mean?”

“If the old man dies right now the emperor will need a prime minister immediately, one he knows, one capable of governing. He might then decide to—”

It was occasionally a pleasure, a relief, something almost sexual, to see her err so greatly, be this far off the mark with the arrow of her thought.

“There are half a dozen such men in Hanjin, wife. And one of them is Hang Dejin’s son.”

“Hsien? That child?”

His turn to laugh, bitterly. “He is almost my age, woman.”

“He is still a child! Controlled by his father.”

Kai Zhen looked past her then, out the window at the courtyard trees. He said, quietly, “We have all been controlled by his father.”

He saw her hands clench into fists. “You are giving up? You are just going to go wherever they send you?”

He gestured. “It will not be harsh. I am almost certain of that. We may only be sent across the Great River, home. Men return from banishment. Hang Dejin did. Xi Wengao did for a time. We have been exiled before, wife. That is when I devised the Flowers and Rocks. You know it. Even Lu Chen has been ordered freed this morning from Lingzhou Isle.”

“What? No! He cannot …”

She stopped, clearly shaken. He had told her about events this morning, his banishment, but not about this. His wife hated the poet with a murderous intensity. He had never known why.

He grinned, mirthlessly. Strange, how it gave him pleasure to see her caught out. She was breathing hard. Not ice now. She was very desirable, suddenly, despite everything. It was his weakness. She was his weakness.