Under Heaven (22 page)

Tai looked across the raised platform at the poet, and then away towards a lamp and its shadow on the wall. His eyes were open, but seeing nothing more than shapes.
Sima Zian had finished the tale, what he knew. What was, he'd said, beginning to be known among people with links to court or civil service.
It was a story that could easily have reached the scholars-in-waiting, come to the ears of Tai's friends: two princesses to be sent as wives to the Bogu in exchange for urgently needed horses for stock breeding and the cavalry, and increased numbers of the nomads to serve for pay in the Kitan army. One of the princesses a true daughter of the imperial family, the other, in the old, sly trick ...
It is about your sister
, the poet had said.
A great deal had become clear in this softly lit reception chamber of a courtesan house, late at night in a provincial town far from the centre of power. From where Tai's older brother, trusted confidant and principal adviser to First Minister Wen Zhou, had achieved ... what people would regard as something brilliant, spectacular, a gift to their entire family, not just himself.
Tai, looking towards shadow, had a sudden image of a little girl sitting on his shoulders, reaching up to pick apricots in the--
No. He pushed that away. He could not let himself be so cheaply sentimental. Such maudlin thoughts were for slack poets improvising at a rural prefect's banquet, for students struggling with an assigned verse on an examination.
He would conjure, instead, mornings when General Shen Gao had been home from campaigning, images of the wilful girl who had listened at a doorway--letting herself be seen or heard, so they could dismiss her if they chose--when Tai spoke of the world with their father.
Or, later, after the general had retired to his estate, to fishing in the stream, and sorrow, when Tai had been the one coming home: from the far north, from Stone Drum Mountain, or visiting at festivals from studying in Xinan.
Li-Mei was not some earnest, round-faced little girl. She had been away from home, serving the empress at court for three years, had been readying herself to be married before their father died.
Another image: northern lake, cabin aflame, fires burning. Smell of charred flesh, men doing unspeakable things to the dead, and to those not yet dead.
Memories he would have liked to have left behind by now.
He became aware that he was clenching his fists. He forced himself to stop. He hated being obvious, transparent, it rendered a man vulnerable. It was, in fact, Eldest Brother Liu who had taught him that.
He saw Sima Zian looking at him, at his hands, compassion in the other man's face.
"I want to kill someone," Tai said.
A pause to consider this. "I am familiar with the desire. It is sometimes effective. Not invariably."
"My brother,
her
brother, did this," Tai said.
The women had withdrawn, they were alone on the platform.
The poet nodded. "This seems obvious. Will he expect you to praise him for it?"
Tai stared. "No," he said.
"Really? He might have done so. Considering what this does for your family."
"No," Tai said again. He looked away. "He will have done this through the first minister. He'll have had to."
Sima Zian nodded. "Of course." He poured himself more wine, gestured towards Tai's cup.
Tai shook his head. He said, the words rushing out, "I have also learned that First Minister Wen has claimed for himself the woman I ... my own favoured courtesan in the North District."
The other man smiled. "As tightly spun as a regulated verse! He'd be another man you'll want to kill?"
Tai flushed, aware of how banal this must seem to someone as worldly as the poet. Fighting over a courtesan now. A student and a high government official! To the death! They performed this sort of shallow tale with puppets for gaping farmers in market squares.
He was too angry, and he knew it.
He reached over and poured another cup after all. He looked around the room again. Only a dozen or so people still awake. It was very late. He'd been riding since daybreak this morning.
His sister was gone. Yan was dead by the lake. His father was dead. His brother ... his brother ...
"There are," said Sima Zian gravely, "a number of people in Xinan, and elsewhere, who might wish the prime minister ... to be no longer among the living. He will be taking precautions. The imperial city is murderously dangerous right now, Shen Tai."
"I'll fit in well then, won't I?"
The poet didn't smile. "I don't think so. I think you'll disturb people, shift balances. Someone doesn't want you arriving, obviously."
Obviously.
It was difficult, despite everything, to picture his brother selecting an assassin. It was painful as a blow. It was a crack, a crevasse, in the world.
Tai shook his head slowly.
"It might not have been your brother," said the poet, as if reading his thoughts. The Kanlin woman, Wei Song, had done the same thing a few nights ago. Tai didn't like it.
"Of course it was him!" he said harshly. There was a dark place beneath the words. "He would know how I'd feel about what he did to Li-Mei."
"Would he expect you to kill him for it?"
Tai slowed the black drumming of his thoughts. The poet held his gaze with those wide-set eyes.
At length, Tai shrugged his shoulders. "No. He wouldn't."
Sima Zian smiled. "So I thought. Incidentally, there's someone on the portico, keeps crossing back and forth, looking in at us. Small person. Wearing black. It may be another Kanlin sent after you ..."
Tai didn't bother to look. "No. That one is mine. Kanlin, yes. I hired a guard at Iron Gate. A Warrior who'd been sent by someone in Xinan to stop the assassin."
"You trust him?"
He thought of Wei Song in the laneway tonight, when the governor's men had come for him. He did trust her, he realized.
Once it would have irritated him, to have someone post herself so visibly on guard: the loss of privacy, the assumption that he couldn't take care of himself. Now, with what he'd learned, it was different. He was going to need to think that through, as well.
Not tonight. He was too tired, and he couldn't stop his thoughts from going to Li-Mei. And then to Liu. First Son, elder brother. They had shared a room for years.
He pushed that away, too. More sentimentality. They were not children any more.
"It is a woman," he said. "The Kanlin. She'll have seen the governor's soldiers leave with their prisoners, decided someone needed to be on watch. She can be difficult."
"They all can. Women, Kanlin Warriors. Put them in one ..." The poet laughed. Then asked, as Tai had half expected, "Who is the
someone in Xinan
who sent her?"
He had decided to trust this man, too, hadn't he?
"The courtesan I mentioned. Wen Zhou's concubine."
This time the poet blinked. After a moment, he said, "She risked that? For someone who's been away two years? Shen Tai, you are ..." He left the thought unfinished. "But if it is the first minister who wants you dead, even costing the empire your horses might not change his mind."
Tai shook his head. "Killing me
now
, after word of the horses has arrived, Zhou or my brother runs the risk of someone--you, Xu Bihai, even the commander at Iron Gate--linking it to him. The loss of so many Sardian horses would make my death important. His enemies could bring him down with that."
The poet considered it. "Then what is this about? There was nothing you could do for your sister from Kuala Nor, was there? You were much too far, it was already too late, but an assassin was sent. Was this about eliminating a new enemy before he returned?" He hesitated. "Perhaps a rival?"
There was that.
Her hair by lamplight.
And if someone should take me from here when you are gone?
He said, "It might be."
"You are going on to Xinan?"
Tai smiled, first time since coming back down the stairs. Mirthlessly, he said, "I must, surely? I have sent word. I will be anxiously awaited!"
No answering smile, not this time. "Awaited on the road, it might also be. Shen Tai, you will accept an unworthy friend and companion?"
Tai swallowed. He hadn't expected this. "Why? It would be foolishly dangerous for you to put yourself ..."
"You helped me remember a poem," said the one called the Banished Immortal.
"That's no reason to--"
"And you buried the dead at Kuala Nor for two years."
Another silence. This man was, Tai thought, all about pauses, the spaces between words as much as the words themselves.
Across the room someone had begun plucking quietly at a
pipa
, the notes drifting through lamplight and shadow, leaves on a moonlit stream.
"Xinan is changed. You will need someone who knows the city as it has become since you left. Knows it better than some Kanlin pacing back and forth." Sima Zian grinned, and then he laughed, amusing himself with a thought he elected not to share.
The poet's hand, Tai saw, reached out to touch his sword.
Friend
was the word he had used.

A journey does not end when it ends.
The well-worn thought comes to her in the chill of night as she waits in her yurt alone. Li-Mei is not asleep, nor under the sheepskin blankets they lay out for her at night. It can grow cold on the steppe under stars. It is black as a tomb inside, with the flap closed. She cannot even see her hands. She is sitting on the pallet, fully clothed, holding a small knife.
She is trembling, and unhappy about that, even though no one is here to see her weakness.
The doctrines of the Sacred Path use the phrase about journeys and destinations to teach, in part, that death does not end one's travelling through time and the worlds.
She does not know, there is no way she could know, but Bogu belief lies near to the same thought. The soul returns to the Sky Father, the body goes to earth and continues in another form, and then another, and another, until the wheel is broken.
Li-Mei understands something else tonight. She
knows
something else. And this was so in the moment she saw the wolves on the slope and the man with them, and watched the nomads behind her hurled into chaos and panic--these hard, fierce men of the steppe whose very being demands they show no fear to anyone, or to themselves.
Something is about to happen. A journey, one sort of journey,
will
end, possibly right here.
She is awake and clothed, waiting. With a knife.
So when the first wolf howls she is unsurprised. Even with that, she is unable to keep from jerking spasmodically at the lost, wild sound of it, or stop her hands from beginning to shake even more. You can be brave, and be afraid. She fears she'll cut herself with the blade and she puts it aside on the pallet.
A lead wolf by itself at first, then others with it, filling the wide night with their sound. But the nomads' dogs--the great wolfhounds--are silent, as they have been since the first wolf sighting towards sundown.
That, as much as anything else, is why she is so certain something strange is happening. The dogs should have gone wild at the sight of the wolves before, and hearing them now.
Nothing. Nothing at all from them.
She does hear movements outside, the riders mounting up. They will be happier on horseback, she has come to realize that. But there are no shouts, commands, no warlike cries, and no dogs. It is unnatural.
The wolves again, nearer. The worst sound in the world, someone called their howling, in a long-ago poem. The Kitan fear wolves more than tigers. In legend, in life. They are coming down now. She closes her eyes in the dark.
Li-Mei wants to lie on her small pallet and draw the sheepskins over her head and wish this all away, into not-being-so.
There was a storyteller in the town nearest their estate who used to offer a marketplace tale, a fable, of a girl who could do this. She remembers extending to him a copper coin the first time, then realizing he was blind.
She wants so much to be there, to be
home
, in her own bedchamber, going back and forth on the garden swing, on a ladder in the orchard picking early-summer fruit, looking up to find the Weaver Maid in the known evening sky ...
She realizes there are tears on her face.
Impatiently, with a gesture at least one of her brothers would have recognized, she presses her lips together and wipes at her cheeks with the backs of both hands. In her own way, though she might wish to deny it, showing distress disturbs her as much as it would the nomads outside on their horses.
She forces herself to stand, makes certain she's steady on her feet. She's wearing riding boots. She'd made her two women find them in the baggage when she came back from that walk at sundown. She hesitates, then takes the knife again, drops it into an inside pocket of her tunic.
She might need it to end her life.
She draws a breath, lifts back the heavy flap of her yurt, and ducks outside. You have to be afraid for it to count as bravery. Her father had taught her that, a long time ago.
A wind is blowing. It is cold. She is aware of the hard brilliance of the stars, the band of the Sky River arcing across heaven, eternal symbol of one thing divided from another: the Weaver Maid from her mortal love, the living from the dead, the exile from home.
The man is standing before her yurt. She'd had a thought about him before, what he might be, but it turns out she is wrong. It is difficult to tell his age, especially in the night, but she can see that he's dressed as any other Bogu rider might be.
No bells, no mirrors, no drum.
He isn't a shaman. She had thought this might be why the horsemen were so afraid. She knew about these men because her brother had told her, years ago. Though, if truth was being demanded, Tai had told their father--and Li-Mei had listened nearby as father and Second Son talked.
Did it matter? Now? She knew some things. And they could have sent her away from the stream, or closed the door, if they'd wanted to. She hadn't worked very hard at remaining hidden.
The man in front of her yurt is the one from the lakeside slope. She has expected him to come. In fact, she knows more than that: she knows
she
is the reason he's here and that he is the cause of the dogs' silence--though wolves are with him in the camp now, half a dozen of them. She decides she will not look at them.
The Bogu riders are rigid, an almost formal stillness. They sit their horses at intervals around her yurt, but no one is moving, no one reacts to the intruder among them, or his wolves. They
are
his wolves, what else can they be? She sees no nocked arrows, no swords unsheathed. These men are here to escort the Kitan princesses to their kaghan, to defend them with their lives. This is not happening.
Stars, a waning moon, campfires burning between yurts, sparks snapping there, but no other movement. It is as if they have all been turned to moonlit statues, the man and his wolves, the horsemen and their horses and the dogs, as in some legend of dragon kings and sorcerers of long ago, or fox-women working magic in bamboo woods by the Great River gorges.
The Bogu look, Li-Mei thinks, as if they
could
not move.
Perhaps that is true. An actual truth, not a fable told. Perhaps they are frozen in place by something more than fear or awe.
It isn't so, she decides, looking around her in the firelit dark. One man twitches his reins. Another draws a nervous hand down his horse's mane. A dog stands up then sits quickly again.
Folk tales and legends are what we move away from when the adult world claims our life, she thinks.
For a brief, unstable moment, it crosses her mind to walk up to the man with the wolves and slap him across the face. She does not. This isn't the same as before. She doesn't understand enough. She doesn't understand any of it. Until she does, she can't act, can't put her stamp (however feeble) on events. She can only follow where the night leads, try to hold down terror, be prepared to die.
The knife is in a pocket of her robe.
The man has not spoken, nor does he now. Instead, looking straight at her, he lifts a hand and gestures, stiffly, to the east--towards the lake and the hills beyond it, invisible now in the dark. She decides she will treat it as an invitation, not a command.
Not that it makes a difference.
The wolves--six of them--immediately get up and begin loping that way. One passes close to her. She doesn't look at it. The man does not turn to watch them. He continues to face Li-Mei, waiting.
The riders do not move. They are not going to save her.
She takes a hesitant step, testing her steadiness. As she does, she hears a sigh from those on horseback: a sound like wind in a summer grove. She realizes, belatedly, that everyone has been waiting for her. That is what this stillness has been about.
It makes sense, as much as anything does in this wide night in an alien land.
He has come for her, after all.