Under Heaven (19 page)

were
here for him.
He looked back at the poet. "I don't know them."
Sima Zian said, "They know you." The poet gestured to the girl whose turn it was with their wine. "Sweet joy, are those two often here?" he asked, indicating with his chin. "Are they ever here?"
She was a composed young woman. Would have stature among the girls, to have been chosen to serve the poet. Her glance towards the door was brief, appraising. She poured the wine and murmured, "I have never seen them." She made a disapproving face. "They are not dressed suitably."
"Not at all," Zian agreed cheerfully. He looked at Tai, a brightness in those eyes now. He stretched, like a big cat. "I wouldn't mind a fight. Shall we kill them together?"
"I could ask the mistress to have them escorted out," said the girl, quickly, "if they distress you, my lord."
The proper thing to say. Fights were bad for a pleasure house. Killing was, obviously, worse. The poet made a face, but nodded reluctantly, was in the process of agreeing, when Tai spoke.
He heard the anger in his own voice, sharp, like the spikes of an assault ram breaking through a gate. He was
tired
of being acted upon: threatened, attacked, treated as an object of malice--or even apparent benevolence--with no resources of his own. No chance to shape his own course. He did have resources in Chenyao tonight, and not just his sword.
"No," he said. "Be so good as to go out to the governor's sedan chair in front. Advise the soldiers there that two men are inside with ill intent towards me, and that this threatens the Second Military District, the governor's authority, and the security of the empire. I would like them detained and questioned. I wish to know who sent them. I will await the governor's answer later tonight at my inn. Can you do that?"
The girl smiled. It was a slightly cruel smile. She set down the wine flask on a low table. "Of course I can, my lord," she murmured. She bowed to him, withdrawing. "Please excuse a brief absence."
She walked down the two steps and crossed to the entrance. They watched her go. Her movements were graceful, unhurried.
"I believe," said Sima Zian thoughtfully, "that one would make a memorable companion."
Tai found himself nodding.
"Do you know the military governor yet? Xu Bihai will not be gentle with them," said the poet.
"I met him tonight," Tai said. "Not by my own choice. And so I believe you. I need to know these things, however." He hesitated.
"The assassin who came to the lake? She killed the friend of mine she guided west under the pretext of serving him. I buried him at Kuala Nor."
"A soldier?" asked Sima Zian.
Anger still, sorrow returning.
"Nothing like. A scholar taking the examinations with me. A man without harm in him."
The poet shook his head. "I am sorry to learn of it. We live in troubled times."
Tai said, "He was coming to tell me something. Came all that way to do it. She killed him before he could."
A clattering from near the doorway. They turned. Six soldiers entered the White Phoenix.
There was a stir, but not an unduly disruptive one. The room was crowded and large. Men came in and went out all the time. The girl, who had come back with the soldiers, pointed to the two men Zian had noted.
They were approached. A brief, intense conversation ensued. One of the two went--foolishly--for his sword.
He was carried out a moment later, unconscious. The other man was hustled through the doorway between soldiers. It had only taken a moment. The music and laughter from the other side of the room hadn't even paused. Two girls were dancing, a flute was being played.
This, Tai thought grimly, was the way of life in cities. An assault could occur in a public place and not even be noticed. He needed to remember this, relearn it. Xinan would be more of the same, and infinitely worse. The dust of the world.
Sima Zian had turned back to look at him.
"I'd have enjoyed a fight," the poet said.
"I believe you." Tai forced a smile.
"It is unlikely those two can tell them anything. You do know that?"
"Because?"
"If this is from Xinan, from power, there will be many people between the order and those sent to execute it."
Tai shook his head. He was still angry. Too much wine, too much helplessness, and the memory, the image, of Chou Yan.
"Perhaps," he said. "Perhaps not so many people, if this is being kept quiet for whatever reason."
Zian grinned happily. "For someone without any rank and two years away from the world, you know more about such things than you should."
Tai shrugged. "My father. And my older brother advises the prime minister, as you noted."
"He does do that, doesn't he?" said the poet thoughtfully. "An honour for your family."
"A great honour."
He knew his voice didn't match the words, and that the other man would hear it.
Sima Zian said, softly, "If these two are in Chenyao looking for you, they'll have been given their orders some time ago. To watch for you coming back east. Probably in the event the assassin by the lake should have failed."
The voice of his own thought.
He stared at the other man. "I still don't know why anyone would have wanted me dead. Before the horses."
The poet did not smile. "I do," he said.
In the dense, canopied forests along the Great River, gibbons swung and shrieked at the boats bobbing and spinning east with the current or being pulled upstream along the gorges. Birds wheeled, crying, above the water and the crags. Tigers lived among the trees and killed men in the dark, should they be foolish enough to be abroad at night.
It was easy to see a tiger in the wide eyes holding his, Tai thought. For all the wit and worldliness of the poet, there was also something feral, a link to the wilderness that lay outside the walled and guarded cities. Sima Zian had been a bandit, on rivers and roads, never entirely a part of court or courtesan district.
You could see it.
The poet smiled again, compassion in his face now. But tigers weren't like that, Tai thought. They never looked kind.
You are going to have to do better with your images
, he told himself. There was too much complexity here for a jungle cat.
The other man said, gently, "You came here for a woman, I must imagine. It has to have been a long time, and that is not good for any man, let alone one with hard decisions to make. Go upstairs, Shen Tai. I will do the same. Make use of tonight, because you can. Let us meet here a little later. We will both be the better for it, then we can decide what we will do with what I have to tell you."
What we will do.
Tai cleared his throat. "I ... whatever this is, it is surely not your trouble, or task."
The smile deepened. "Call it wisdom in the cup, if you like, which is not always wisdom, as we know. But I have lived my days making decisions this way and I am too old to change. Poetry, friendship, wine. The essence of a man's life. And then there is ..."
The poet rose, smoothly enough, but he swayed a little when upright.
He looked down at Tai. Spread his feet a little. Rumpled, food-stained, greying hair inadequately tied. The wide eyes afire, though. He said, "You will know the passage:
There is another world / That is not the world of men
."
He looked around unsteadily for the girl they'd sent to carry the message. She was beside him already. She bent, took his sword, handed it to him. She said, with a slow smile of her own, "Though it is your other sword I want now, my lord, in all truth."
Sima Zian laughed aloud, and went with her down the two steps and then from the room through the nearest of the curtained doorways.
Tai sat a moment longer, then stood, uncertainly, claiming his own sheathed sword as he rose.
A scent was beside him in that same moment, musk, ambergris. A slender hand at his waist again. He looked at her. Crimson silk.
Her hair was gathered with pins of ivory and jade, some of it artfully allowed to fall.
"I have been patient," she murmured. "Not without distress."
He gazed at her. She was as beautiful to him just then as moonlight on a high meadow, as the Weaver Maid herself, as everything he remembered about the grace and mystery of women, and she did not have golden hair.
"I may not be as patient," he said, hearing the change in his voice. Her expression altered, a darker note in the dark eyes. "That will please me, too," she said. His pulse responded. "Please honour my need and come upstairs, my lord."
Pipa
music, quiet singing, flutes. Laughter and talk in a carefully lit room fading behind him, behind them, as she led him up the stairs to a room with a very wide bed and lamps already burning, lit by servants, flickering light waiting for them (for whoever it was who came), incense on a brazier, a window open to catch the late-spring breeze. There was a
pipa
on a table.
"Shall I play for you, my lord?"
"After," Tai said.
And took her in his arms with hunger and need, with fear beneath those, and an urgency that came from all of these and found its centre in the rich red of her mouth tasting his and the slipping down of silk as she let it fall and stood before him, jewelled at ears and throat, wrists and fingers and ankles, the lamplight playing with and over the beauty of her body.
He had a sense, even as she began to disrobe him and then drew him to her upon the bed, that after this, after he went back downstairs, his life would change yet again, as much as it had when the horses were given to him. And therein lay his fear.
She was skilled and clever, unhurried, intricately versed in what it was that women were to do here, and to know about men and their needs (hidden or otherwise), in a house this well appointed. She made him laugh, more than once, and catch his breath in quick surprise, and draw breath sharply (he saw her smile then), and cry aloud, both times she took him to, and through, the long-deferred crescendo of desire.
She washed him after, using water from a basin on the table. She murmured the words of a very old folk verse as she did, and her movements were languid, replete, slow as aftermath should be. And then she did play for him, quietly, upon the
pipa
left in the room, bringing him back with all of these, movement by movement, mouth, fingers, fingernails, with whispers in his ear of shocking things and subtle things and, finally, with music--back from Kuala Nor to the world.
At length, Tai made himself get up. He clothed himself again as she watched, still naked on the bed, posed artfully to let him see her to best effect in the muted light, breasts, belly, the dark, inviting place between her thighs. She would attend to herself, come downstairs after him, that was the way it was done properly.
He finished dressing, found his sword, bowed to her, which was something Chou Yan had initiated among their circle: a tribute to the woman, even when one didn't know her name and might never see her again, if she had given of herself beyond expectation and reached to needs held deep within. He saw that she was surprised.
He went out of the room and down the stairs towards the next change of his life.
The poet was on the platform, same place, likely the same cup in his hand. The two girls were there again. He wondered idly if they'd both been with him upstairs. Probably, he thought.
The room was quiet now. It was late, and though the pleasure districts never really stopped in any city, the mood would change as night deepened. The best houses let some of the lanterns go out in their reception rooms, the ambience grow gentler, the music softer and sometimes even melancholy, for men could take a kind of pleasure in sadness, remembrance of loves long ago or the days of their youth. Someone was singing "The Windmill Above My Village," which was only played late and made some listeners cry.
He placed his sword where it had been before, and sat opposite the poet again. The taller of the two girls came forward with a cup for him, poured wine, withdrew. Tai drank. He looked at the other man, waiting.
"It is about your sister," said Sima Zian.

PART TWO

CHAPTER IX

L
i-Mei has her own yurt, assembled every evening for her when their travels finish for the day, taken down in the morning when they rise to go on.
The sun is west now, near the end of their fourth day outside of Kitai. She has never been this far. She has never wanted to be this far. There are two ladies attendant on her from the court. She doesn't know them, doesn't like either of them. They cry all the time. She is aware that they resent serving her instead of the real princess.
She's a princess now. Or, they call her one. They made her royal before this journey north started from Xinan. There was a ceremony in the Ta-Ming Palace. Li-Mei, in red-and-gold silk with a too-heavy headdress decorated with white jade, and tortoiseshells and pearls from the south, had paid little attention. She'd been too angry. Her brother had been standing behind the prime minister. She'd stared at him the whole time, never looking away. Making certain that he knew exactly how she felt, as if that would mean anything to Liu at all.
She is still more angry than anything else, though she is aware that this could be a way to hide fear from herself, and from others. It is anger that stops her from being gentler with the two women who are hers now. They are afraid. Of course they are. She could be gentler. None of this is their fault.
There's no shame to their grief, she thinks. Or their terror, which has grown worse, predictably, since they left Shuquian behind--the last major city north of Xinan--and then reached the Golden River's great bend and the Wall.
Shuquian had been many days back. They'd passed through the Wall and entered wilderness four days ago. Soldiers saluted from above as their party went through.
Li-Mei is counting, keeping track of time as best she can. A habit of mind. Her father used to say he liked it in her. Her father is dead, or this would not be happening.
The leader of their imperial escort had bowed three times to the princesses, and then he and the Flying Dragon Army from Xinan had turned back at the heavy gates in the Long Wall--back towards the civilized world. Li-Mei had left her sedan chair to stand in a yellow-dragon wind to watch them go. She saw the gates of the world swing shut.
The nomads, the barbarians, had taken custody of two Kitan brides, negotiated--traded--for furs and camels and amber, but mainly for horses and military support.
This is the first time the Bogu have aimed so high, or been given so much.
The actual princess, thirty-first daughter of the Glorious Emperor Taizu (may he live and reign forever, under heaven), will become the newest wife, in whatever ceremony they use on the grasslands, of Hurok, the ruling kaghan, lord of the steppes, or this part of them, loyal (for the most part) ally of Kitai.
It has been duly judged, by the clacking, black-garbed crows who serve the Imperial Throne as advisers, that with a momentarily overextended military, and issues as to both army costs and the supply of horses, it is a sage and prudent time to allow the
kumiss
-drinking steppe-barbarians this otherwise unthinkable honour.
Li-Mei should not be here, does not want--the gods know it!--to be a princess. Had her father not died, putting a two-year halt to all family ceremonies and celebrations, she'd surely have been married by now, and safe. Her mother and Second Mother had been working on that marriage, through the proper channels.
She is not remotely a true member of royalty, only an attendant to the aging, exiled-to-the-countryside empress. But Li-Mei is also the sister of an ambitious, brilliantly positioned brother, and because of that she is about to become, soon now, the whatever-the-number wife of Hurok Kaghan's second son, Tarduk, currently his heir.
Not that there is anything certain about remaining an heir on these steppes, if you've listened to the stories. Li-Mei is someone who does listen to what is said around her, always has been, from childhood--and her second brother, Tai, had come home from the north with a tale, years ago.
There are--as with everything done in the Ta-Ming Palace--precedents for elevating lesser women to royalty for this purpose. It is a kind of sly trick played on the barbarians. All the subject peoples want, ever, is the ability to
claim
a link to Kitan royalty. If a woman is called a princess that is more than enough for the second or third member of a wedding party. For the foreign ruler (this has happened a handful of times, though never with the Bogu) a true princess is ... made available.
There are more than enough daughters, with this particular emperor, after forty years on the throne and ten thousand concubines from all over the known world.
Li-Mei has thought about the lives of these women, at times. Locked behind walls and gates and silk-paper windows in their wing of the palace, at the top of eunuch-guarded stairways. Most of them have grown old, or will, never having even been in a room with the emperor. Or any other man.
The true princess, the emperor's daughter, has not stopped having one of her attendant women (she has six of them) sing and play "Married to a Far Horizon" for her since they left Shuquian. They are weeping, day and night, Princess Xue and her women. Endless lamentation.
It is driving Li-Mei to distraction.
She wants a deeper calm around her in this wilderness, this wind, to nurture the fury within, ward off terror, think about her brother.
Both her brothers. The youngest, Chao, still at home by the stream, doesn't really count yet. Thinking of home--cascading images of it--is a bad thing to do right now, Li-Mei realizes.
She concentrates her mind, as best she can, on the brother she wants to kill, and on the one who ought, somehow, to have saved her from this.
Although, in fairness, there would have been nothing Tai could have done once Liu had--brilliantly, for his own purposes--proposed his sister as the second princess for the Bogu alliance and had that accepted. But why be fair? Why be
accepting
in this place of wolves and grass, when she is leaving everything she's ever known for empty spaces and primitive yurts, yellow-dust wind off the western desert, and a life among barbarians who will not even speak her language?
This would never have happened if her father were alive.
Eldest Son Liu has always been eloquent and persuasive, and daughters are tools. Many fathers would have acquiesced, seen the same family glory Liu did, but Li-Mei, only girl-child of her family, is almost certain that the general, even in retirement, would have stopped his first son from using a sister this way. Liu would have never dared propose it. Ambition for self and family was proper in a balanced man, but there were limits, which were part of balance.
She wants to think this, but has been with the court long enough--arriving the year before the empress's exile--to picture it otherwise. She can almost hear Liu's polished, reasonable voice: "What is so different from offering her as an attendant to the empress, in my proposing her elevation to a princess? Are they not both exaltations for our family? Has she any other duty, or role in life?"
It is difficult, even in the imagination, to shape a sufficiently crushing reply.
Tai might have done so, equally clever, in a different fashion. But her second brother is impossibly far away right now, west, among the ghosts. It is an absolute certainty that Liu took
that
absence into account, as well, when he shaped his plans. Nor could Li-Mei's sad, sweet empress, exiled from the palace, lost to endless prayers and a dwindling memory, do anything to shield her when the summons to the Hall of Brilliance came.
Li-Mei, being carried north, is beyond all borders herself now. The difference is, Tai--if he is alive--will be going home soon. She never will.
It is a hard thing to live with. She needs her anger.
"Married to a Far Horizon" starts up again, the worst
pipa
player of the six this time. They appear to be taking turns. Li-Mei allows herself to curse, in a very un-royal fashion. She
hates
the song by now. Lets that feeling help drive and shape the fury she requires.
She peeks out of her litter (they will not let her ride, of course). One of the Bogu is just then passing, riding towards the front. He is bare-chested, his hair loose, almost all the way down his back. He sits his horse in a way that no Kitan ever has. They all do, she's come to realize. The nomads
live
on their horses. He looks at her as he goes by. Their eyes meet for an instant before Li-Mei lets the curtain fall.
It takes her a few moments, but she decides that the expression in the rider's face was not conquest or triumph or even a man's lust, but pride.
She isn't sure what she wants to make of that.
After a time, she peers out again. No rider now, he's moved ahead. The landscape is hazy. The evening wind blows dust, as usual. It has done that for several days now. It stings her eyes. The sun is low, blurred above the endless grass. They have seen vast herds of gazelles the last two days. Heard wolves at night since leaving the Wall behind. The Kitan have a terror of wolves, part of the fear and strangeness these northern grasslands evoke. Those stationed in the garrisons past the Wall must hate it like death, she thinks.
Squinting towards the orange sunset, Li-Mei finds herself devising ways in which she might have killed her brother Liu before any of this happened, sent him over to the night.
The visions are briefly satisfying.
She's angry at Tai, as well, she's decided. She doesn't have to be fair to anyone in this wind. He had no business leaving them for two years, not with a father and husband buried. He was
needed
, if only as a counterweight to Liu. He ought to have known that, foreseen it.
She lets the curtain drop, leans back against pillows, thinking about the two of them, sliding towards memory.
Not necessarily a good thing. It means remembering about home again, but is she really going to be able to keep from doing that? It is, if nothing else, a way of
not
dwelling upon what is waiting for her when this journey from the bright world ends, wherever it does, in this emptiness.
SECOND MOTHER, their father's only concubine, was childless. A tragedy for her, cause of nighttime sorrows and sleeplessness, but--in the difficult way of truth sometimes--an advantage for the four Shen children, because she diverted all of her considerable affection to them, and the general's two women did not have competing children as a source of conflict.
Li-Mei was six years old, which means Liu was nineteen, preparing for the first round of examinations in their prefecture. Tai was two years younger than him, training in military arts, already bigger than his older brother. Chao, the baby, was toddling about the yard, falling happily into piled leaves that autumn. She remembers that.
Their father was home, end of a campaign season (another reason she knew it was autumn, that and the paulownia leaves). Li-Mei, who had been diligently studying dance all summer with a teacher arranged by her mothers, was to offer a performance for the family one bright, windy festival-day morning with everyone home.
She remembers the wind. To this day, she believes it was the wind that caused her problem. Were her life not shattered and lost right now she could manage to be amused that she still clings to this explanation for falling.
She
had
fallen. The only time she'd done that after at least a dozen rehearsals in the days before, for her teacher and her mother. But with both mothers, and father, and her older brothers watching, and the drummer hired to accompany her, she had spun too far halfway through her first dance, lost her balance, tried to regain it, wobbled the other way, and tumbled--ignominiously--into leaves at the edge of the courtyard, as if she were no older than the baby playing in them.
No one laughed. She remembers that.
Liu might have done so in a certain mood, but he didn't. Li-Mei sat up, covered in leaves, shocked, white-faced, and saw her father's immediate, gentle concern, and then his almost-masked amusement at his short-legged little girl-child.
And
that
made her scramble to her feet and run from the courtyard, weeping uncontrollably. She had wanted to show him--show them all--how she was growing up, that she wasn't an infant any more. And what she'd done was entirely the opposite. The humiliation welling within her was beyond enduring.
Liu found her first, in the orchard under her favourite peach tree at the farthest end of a row, by the stone wall. She was sprawled on the ground, ruining her dance costume, her face buried in her arms. She had cried herself out by then, but refused to look up when she heard him coming.
She'd expected Second Mother, or perhaps (less likely) her own mother. Hearing Eldest Brother's crisp voice speaking her name had startled her. Looking back, she has long since realized that Liu would have told the two women to leave her to him. By then they'd have listened to his instructions.
"Sit up!" he said. She heard him grunt, crouching beside her. He was already plump, it wasn't an effortless position for him.
It was simply not done, to ignore a direct instruction from a first brother. You could be whipped or starved in some other families for that.
Li-Mei sat up, faced him, remembered to bow her head respectfully, hands together, though she did not stand up to do it.
He let that pass. Perhaps her mud-stained face, the tracks of her tears caused him to be indulgent. You could never tell with Liu, even back then.
He said, "Here is what you will learn from this." His voice was controlled, precise--not the tone with which one addressed a child. She remembered that, after. He was quiet, but he made her pay attention.
He said, "We train to avoid mistakes, and we do not go before others unless we believe we have trained enough. That is the first thing. Do you understand?"
Li-Mei nodded, eyes wide on her oldest brother's round face. He had the beginnings of a moustache and beard that year.
He said, "Nonetheless, because we are not gods, or of the imperial family, we cannot ever be certain of being flawless. It is not given to ordinary men, and especially not women. Therefore, this is the second thing you will remember: if we are in public and we err, if we fall in the leaves, or stumble in a speech, or bow too many times or too few ...
we continue as if we had not done so
. Do you understand?"
She nodded again, her head bobbing.
Liu said, "If we stop, if we apologize, show dismay, run from a courtyard or a chamber, we force our audience to register our error and see that it has shamed us. If we carry on, we treat it as something that falls to the lot of men and women, and show that it has not mastered us. That it does not