River of Stars

“Thank you,” he heard her say.

Then she said, leaning over, speaking directly to Shiwei, close to his bleeding head, “This is for my father. For what they tried to do to him. Know that.”

She straightened. He saw her shadow. Then the most appalling pain crashed over him, one foot then the other, struck full force this time, bones splintering, and he lost awareness of all things again.

CENTURIES BEFORE, the last Kanlin Warriors of Stone Drum Mountain had died on the wide, flat top of their holy mountain in the north. The Long Wall had earlier been breached in many places.

The last of them held out a considerable time, but eventually were overrun by barbarians—the emerging Xiaolu people.

The mountain sanctuary was plundered and burned.

The Kanlins on Stone Drum—about eighty of them, it was believed, at the very end—had elected to be slain there, to die fighting, rather than retreat south and surrender their sacred mountain to the steppe.

It was a complex incident in history and those who shaped and recorded the official doctrines in this Twelfth Dynasty had difficulty with it.

The black-clad Kanlins had been mystics with esoteric beliefs, and notoriously independent. They allowed women to train and fight and live freely among them. Many of their practices (not only concerning women) diverged from acceptable behaviour. They were also a military group as much as a religious one, and everyone knew what had happened in the Ninth because of military leaders. The Kanlin Warriors might have been permitted their secluded, untaxed sanctuaries back then, but this was a different era, a different world.

On the other hand, they had been honourable, loyal, and unquestionably brave, and the last ones on the summit of Stone Drum, men and women both, had died for Kitai in one of the lost and longed-for Fourteen Prefectures.

That had to be allowed to mean something.

It had been decided that no one would be punished or criticized for making reference to that last stand on Stone Drum Mountain—for writing a song or a poem or a street theatre performance about it. But the last defence of the mountain would not become an officially sanctioned mourning ritual of any kind. It was seen as preferable that the Kanlins slip quietly from history into folk tale, peasant belief, akin to fox-women or those spirit worlds said to be hidden under oak-tree roots in forests.

Good governance, in any time, required delicate decisions of just this sort.

SHE IS FINALLY ALONE. All the men have left: the one who’d come to kill her, the guards, the soldiers, the senior official from the Ministry of Rites (a bleak, cold man). The house is hers again. She tries to decide if it is the same house.

She is waiting for tea to be brought to her. No one is asleep. She is downstairs, in the small reception room—made smaller by bronzes they’ve collected.

Servants are cleaning her bedchamber, discarding the knife-shredded silks and pillow. They will light incense in burners, to take away the odour of so many men in a lady’s room, and the presence of so much violence.

Some of that violence had been hers. She is still not entirely certain why she’d been so insistent about that. It has to do with her father’s exile, she tells herself, and that is surely true, but it might not be all the truth. She’d used her husband’s second-favourite stick. It is heavy.

His favourite stick is with him now. He is away. She sits by a fire trying to decide if she is going to be able to forgive him for not being here tonight. Yes, he’d planned this journey some time ago. They had both been preparing to go west, towards Xinan and the hills above it, the burial mounds of long-ago emperors.

Then she’d received word about her father—his shocking, unspeakable exile to Lingzhou—and of course she wasn’t going anywhere at all.

Wai should not have gone either. It is hard for her to shake that thought. A husband, a son-in-law, he ought to have stayed to use whatever influence he had to help.

Problem was, he had no influence, and the hard truth was that if his father-in-law was named a treacherous member of an abhorred faction it was bad news for Qi Wai, and the smartest thing for him was to be as detached as possible from Lin Kuo’s banishment.

It had made sense for Wai to leave Hanjin.

That didn’t mean she had to forgive him for it.

She’d used his stick to strike the assassin as he strode to her bed and stabbed downwards (she might have been there, she might easily have been sleeping there). She’d been instructed not to hit him with all her strength, that he was to remain alive.

She’d hit him with all her strength.

He did remain alive. She’d thought he would, although she hadn’t greatly cared in the moment. That, by itself, is disturbing. That she can kill or not kill, with indifference as to which it might be.

The tea finally comes. Her principal maidservant is agitated, trembling. The servants have not had time to deal with this. Neither has she. She is still trying to understand, and accept, the feelings of rage that rose within her tonight, looking down at the man on the floor of her bedroom, his hands bound behind his back.

It really is about her father, she decides. The assassin wasn’t the one who’d ordered Lin Kuo exiled (of course he wasn’t!) but he was a part of that evil, and the only part she could see, reach, strike—break bones in his feet. She had felt them break.

She’d asked if he could be castrated. She’d wanted that.

It is frightening, how much anger can be inside a person.

He’d be dead by night’s end, the bleak man from the Ministry of Rites had told her. And the Lady Yu-lan was to be arrested in the morning. They were satisfied, he’d said before leaving, that this one had been the instrument of the lady, not her husband. The exile of her father was Kai Zhen’s doing, but not this.

She watches her servant pour the tea, without the ease she usually displays, willowy as she bends. Her husband likes this servant for her grace. Qi Wai likes that in women, his wife knows. She is not especially graceful herself, not trained that way, nor soothing and assuaging in her manner. He values her intelligence (she knows it), he likes having her with him on expeditions to hunt down scrolls, bronze tripods, weapons, wine cups, artifacts of distant dynasties, but she does not ease his spirit.

She doesn’t ease her own. That is not what she is. She has not yet decided what she is. She is someone who can speak of castrating an attacker, break bones in his feet.

He had come to kill her. And rape her. They had intended to send her father to Lingzhou Isle to die. The assassin’s screaming hadn’t distressed her. It might do so later, Shan thinks. She dismisses the servant, picks up her tea. She might hear those screams in her mind. She is afraid she will.

Her father will not be exiled now. She has a letter confirming that. It is on the desk across the room. The letter had warned that Lady Yu-lan might send someone with malevolent purpose to their house tonight. Guards would be provided. It had also informed her that the celestial emperor, in his supreme compassion, had himself rescinded the order of exile for Court Gentleman Lin Kuo. He was to be raised in rank, instead.

The serene and exalted emperor also wished to have conveyed his personal commendation to Lady Lin Shan for her well-formed brush strokes. She was commanded to attend upon him in the Genyue the following afternoon.

They are to discuss calligraphy and other matters.

Imperial guards would call for her, the letter advised. It was suggested by the writer that she might wish to bring some of her own songs, in her own hand, as gifts for the emperor.

The letter was signed by Hang Dejin, prime minister of Kitai.

The emperor wishes to see her. In his garden. She is to bring her songs. It is beyond belief. If she doesn’t understand her own nature, Lin Shan thinks, how can she possibly hope to understand the world?

She begins to cry. She dislikes that, but there is no one else in the room now, and so she permits herself this. It is the middle of the night. The moon is west. She drinks hot, scented tea from Szechen in an autumn room lit by three lamps, crowded with ancient bronze, and she watches her tears fall into the cup.

There might be a song in that, she thinks. She wonders where her husband is tonight, if he has reached Xinan.

She wonders if the assassin is dead yet.

SUN SHIWEI WOULD LOSE and regain consciousness, in considerable agony, throughout that night and into the first hours of the grey, windy morning that eventually came. He did, indeed, tell them what they wished to know. They did, indeed, ensure that he died accidentally under questioning.

LATER THAT MORNING, rain beginning to fall, eight members of the Imperial Palace Army presented themselves at the gates of the city mansion of disgraced Deputy Prime Minister Kai Zhen.

Seeing them, a small crowd gathered in the street. They backed away under orders from tense, irritated guards, but did not entirely disperse. Dogs paced and barked among them, hoping for scraps. Two of the dogs began to fight each other and were separated with curses and kicks. The rain continued.

Four of the guards went inside when the gates were opened. They emerged not long after. One spoke to their commander. It was obvious, even to those watching from a distance, that the leader was both angry and afraid. He could be seen slapping nervously at his thigh.

Eventually he barked orders, his voice thin in the thin rain. The same four guards went back in through the gates. When they came out again, two were carrying what appeared to be a body wrapped in linen. The leader continued to look unhappy. They marched away, in the best order they could manage, through a muddy street.

A story began to spread. That tended to happen in Hanjin. They had come to arrest Yu-lan, the wife of the deputy prime minister. She had apparently sent an assassin into the imperial clan compound the night before. This was deeply shocking. It was unclear why she had done so. The man had been captured and questioned in the night. He had named Lady Yu-lan before dying.

She had killed herself in her own house, rather than be taken away.

An understandable decision, in the circumstances. She might have hoped to be allowed burial in the family’s gravesite in the south. This was not to be. She was burned near the palace grounds and her ashes thrown into one of the canals.

The Cho teachings and those of the Sacred Path agreed that even if this created an unquiet spirit, it was not only permitted, it was necessary. Otherwise, how could the state truly punish (and deter) evildoers deserving of death? You needed to send that punishment beyond, into the spirit world. The souls of such criminals should not be granted rest.

Kai Zhen, disgraced and exiled, set forth from Hanjin two weeks later with his household (greatly reduced).

It was accepted that he’d had no part in what his wife had done, or tried to do. His exile was not unduly harsh, south of the Great River to the countryside near Shantong where he had a home among silk farms.

He lost his income and civil service rank, of course. Also, the many ways of supplementing wealth that had come with his position. But he’d had years in power, would be assured of a comfortable exile.

Journeying south, he wore mourning, left his hair unwashed and unbound, ate alone and sparingly, was seen to weep. He avoided his children, his concubines, any friends or followers who tried to see him as the family travelled into late, wet autumn and the weather began to turn colder. His grief for his wife was evident. Some declared it commendable after a long marriage; others that he was being excessive, deviating from right behaviour, proper restraint; still others that he was linking himself too closely with a murderous criminal, over and above his own errors.

LATE ONE COLD NIGHT, in a market town five days from the Great River, one of his concubines—not the youngest, but still young—takes upon herself what has to be considered a risk. She has been giving it thought for some time.

She goes from the women’s quarters of the house they have occupied and crosses in darkness, shivering in the courtyard, to where the men are sleeping. She goes to the doorway of the room Kai Zhen occupies. Taking a breath, she knocks softly, but then opens the door and enters without waiting for a response.

He is alone inside. There is a fire lit. She had seen light, knew he was not asleep. She would have gone in even if he was. He is at a desk, in a lined night robe, writing by lamplight. She doesn’t know what. She doesn’t care. He turns, surprised.

She forces herself not to bow. Standing very straight, she says what she has rehearsed. “You are the great man of our time. We are honoured to serve you, to be near you. It is a grief to me to see you this way.”

Saying to me is the important, dangerous, presumptuous part. She knows it. He will know it.

He stands up, setting down his brush. “Well,” he says, “just now, greatness does not seem to be part of my—”

“Greatness is within you.”

She interrupts him deliberately. She has a model for this. She has been in his household three years. She is skilled with flute and pipa. She is tall and thin and extremely clever. She has smooth skin, often commented upon.

She is also ambitious, more than she could (or would ever in her life) tell. The wife, the dead and gone wife, had often interrupted him when they were together, thinking they were unobserved.

“It is … it is gentle of you to—”

“Gentle?” she says. And takes two small steps nearer. This, too, she has observed done by the wife. The dead wife. It was like a dance, she remembers thinking, a kind of ritual between them. Affairs of men and women often are, she has found.

He straightens his shoulders, turns fully to her, away from the desk.

“When tigers come together in the forests,” she says, “is it meant to be gentle?”

“Tigers?” he says.

But his voice has changed. She knows men, knows this man.

She doesn’t speak again. Only comes up to him, those small steps, as if gliding. She is wearing a scent taken from the mansion when they left. It had belonged to the wife (the dead wife). That is another risk, but risks do need to be taken, if you want anything of life.

She reaches up, both hands, draws his head down to hers.

Bites him on a corner of the lower lip. Not gently. She has never done that, has only seen it, unobserved.

Then she moves her mouth to his ear and whispers words she has been thinking about, devising, for days and days as they travelled.

She feels him respond, his breath catching, his sex hardening against her body. Her satisfaction in having been right is deeply arousing.

She services him that night on the chair by the desk, on the floor, the bed, and takes her own (real) pleasure more intensely than she ever has before, when she was only one concubine among many, terrified she might be overlooked, disappear into the wasted, empty years of a life.

Those fears are over by the time morning comes.

It is said, at the country estate where they settle, and more widely, later, that she is in some terrifying way the ghost of Yu-lan—never permitted burial—come back into the world.

He marries her in springtime. You didn’t have to observe full mourning rites for someone declared a criminal. His sons are unhappy but say nothing. What are sons going to say?

She has two of the women whipped with bamboo rods that winter for whispering about her, and one pretty, too-intelligent younger concubine is branded—on the face—and dismissed.

She doesn’t mind the ghost idea being cast abroad, in furtive murmurs or wine talk. It gives her another kind of power: association with a dangerous spirit. Power over him, over all of them.

Her name is Tan Ming and she matters. She is determined that everyone will know this before the end, whenever, however that comes. She lights a candle and prays every morning, without fail, for Yu-lan. Her husband thinks she is being virtuous.

Even after all these years, even with another summer over, the heat of Lingzhou still caught him like a blow each day. It seemed impossible to have the knowledge of it prepare you for the next day, if you came from the north.

And it wasn’t as if he was from the farthest north, the starting places of Kitai. He was Szechen-born. The Lu family came from humid, hot weather: rain, thunderstorms, forests of dripping leaves, fog, mist rising from the ground. They understood it. Or, he’d thought he understood, before he came to the island.

Lingzhou was a different world.

It was harder on Mah. His son had been born in Shantong, on the coast, during Chen’s time as prefect there. Those had been the best years, the poet thought. A sophisticated city, between the sea and the serene wonder of West Lake. The man-made lake had been Chen’s joy: pleasure boats drifting, music drifting, all day and at night, hills framing it on the inland side, singing girl houses on the shore close to the city. Elegant, well-funded religious retreats for Cho and Sacred Path dotting the northern shoreline, green roofs and yellow, the upswept curves, bells ringing the hours for prayer, the sound crossing the water.

There were fireworks on the lake at festivals, and music from pleasure boats all through the night, lanterns floating on the water …

Not a place that would prepare you for Lingzhou Isle. Here, you needed to take any exercise in the earliest hour, before the heat battered you into torpor, lassitude, fitful daytime naps in a sweat-soaked bed.

They were doing their dawn routine, father and son, his usual frivolity that they were assailing some evil fortress, when a cleric came running up (running!) from the temple at the end of the village.

It seemed, if the man was to be believed (and understood: he was stammering with shock), that something miraculous had transpired. Honourable Lu Chen and his honourable son were entreated to come see.

The usual cluster of villagers had gathered to watch them exercise. The elder Lu, the poet, was famous and amusing, both; it was worth coming to see them. That same group trailed them west through the village, and others joined them as they went, past the yamen (not yet opened for the day, there was never a need for administrative haste here) and along the path—carefully, watching for snakes—to the temple.

Eventful moments, let alone loudly declared miracles, were not the daily coinage of the isle.

Red and yellow flowers, wet and heavy.

Forest’s edge, the path in rain.

I remember peonies in Yenling

But this south is very different from the north.

Can an angry ghost travel this far?

Cross the strait, afflict an exile’s life?

Or does Lingzhou hold only its own dead

Wherever they might have been born?

In the rainy season we lose the stars.

We do not lose friendship and loyalty,

Good talk, courtesy, the virtues of this time

As they are of any age ever in Kitai.

I think of friends far away and my heart aches.

I drink wine with new companions.

They have opened their gate to a stranger.

Kindness is a brightly feathered bird on a branch.

We listen to their bell as it rings.

We drink and they refill our wine cups.

I will count myself honoured and blessed

Whatever becomes of my last days.

He had written that in springtime on their wall, running hand, large letters, the wide brush quick. The poem emerging as if discovering itself. He was known for improvising in this way. It would seldom be one’s best writing but would have a different kind of value, created right there, in the moment, as the black ink defined the wall.

They had been very happy, the clerics, entering the room after he was done, seeing his words. It would help them a great deal, once it became known that a poem by Lu Chen was on a wall in Lingzhou Isle.

He did this for friends, he did it for joy. He’d lived poetry all his life: carefully revised or swiftly improvised, drunken or sober, dark night, moonlight, morning mist, from the heart of power or protesting against it, or exiled, finally, here.

The clerics had stared at the wall, the words. They had touched his hands, bowing over and over. Two of them had wept. He had suggested drinking in celebration. Said he very much wanted wine, which was only truth. One of them had gone across the village and come back with Lu Mah.

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