Under Heaven (36 page)

She listens to his breathing, feels his touch through her clothing. They are alone in the world. The Weaver Maid, alone as well, is shining in the west. Li-Mei realizes that her heartbeat has steadied after all, though she is aware of something new within herself.
She thinks she understands more now. It calms her, it always has. It makes such a difference. And
Shandai
was, after all, the first word he'd spoken to her. The name.
She says, softly, "Thank you. I think I will sleep now. You will wake me when it is time to ride?"
She shifts position, onto her side, and then up on her knees. He stands. She looks up at him against the stars. She cannot see his eyes. The wolves are invisible. She knows they are not far.
Still on her knees, she bows to him, her hands touching the earth.
She says, "I thank you for many things, son of Hurok. For my unworthy self, in my father's name, and in the name of my brother Shen Tai whom you are honouring by ... in the way you guard me." She does not say more. Some things cannot be made explicit, even in the dark.
Night breeze. He says nothing, but she sees him nod his head once. He walks off, not far but far enough, nearer the horses. Li-Mei lies down again, closes her eyes. She feels the wind, hears animal sounds in the grass and from the waters of the pond. She becomes aware, with surprise, that she is crying, for the first time since the cave. Eventually, she sleeps.

Spring Rain has not thought of herself by the name her mother gave her since she left Sardia years ago.
She had come to Kitai as part of a small company of musicians and dancers sent as tribute to Taizu, the Son of Heaven. The Sardians were a careful people, offering annual gifts to Kitai and Tagur, and even to the emerging powers west of them. When your small home-land lay in a fertile valley between mountains, that was what you needed to do. Sometimes (not always) it sufficed.
She wasn't enslaved, and she wasn't abducted, but she hadn't had a great deal of
choice
in the matter. You woke up one morning and were told by the leader of your troupe that you were leaving your home forever. She'd been fifteen years old, singled out for her appearance already, and for skill in singing and on the
pipa
, all twenty-eight tunings of it in the Kitan fashion, which may have been why she was chosen.
She remained with that troupe for two years in Xinan, all twelve of them coming to terms with the fact that the great and glorious emperor had twenty thousand musicians. They all lived in a vast ward east of the palace--it was like a city in itself, larger than any in Sardia.
In two years they had been summoned to play three times, twice for minor court weddings, once at a banquet to welcome southern emissaries. On neither occasion was the Son of Heaven present.
You might be green-eyed and yellow-haired, lovely and lithe and genuinely skilled in music, and still see your life disappearing down the years. You could be invisible and unheard among the Ta-Ming Palace entertainers.
To the court, perhaps, but not to those on watch for a particular sort of woman. Rain had been noticed at that second wedding, apparently. She'd been seventeen by then. It was time to begin achieving something, she'd thought. A life, if nothing else.
She accepted an invitation to enter the pleasure district and be trained in one of the best houses there--trained in many things, and on terms that were (she knew by then, having paid attention) better than most girls received. Green eyes and yellow hair made a difference, after all. Her ability to leave the musicians' district was a matter of bribing the eunuchs who controlled the Ta-Ming entertainers. It happened all the time.
She was to become a courtesan, and was under no illusions about what that meant. She was taught to be a mistress of the table, the highest rank among the pleasure district women. They were the ones hired to perform at banquets by aristocrats or high mandarins. To perform, also, more privately and in other ways after the feasting had ended.
And when there were no wealthy courtiers on a given evening or afternoon in the Pavilion of Moonlight, there were always the students studying for the examinations--or not actually studying (not if they were in the North District) but aspiring to the rank that would come with passing the exams.
Spring Rain tended to like the students more than the courtiers, which wasn't the cleverest way for a girl to be. But their enthusiasms, their dreaming, spoke to something in her that the extravagance and hauteur of Ta-Ming aristocrats didn't touch--and they made her laugh sometimes.
The palace guests gave better gifts.
It was a life--while a woman was young, at any rate. A better life, most likely--though no one could ever say this for certain--than she'd have had back home. Xinan, under Emperor Taizu, was the centre of the world. She did sometimes wonder if the centre of the world was always the best place to be.
She can remember the moment, years before, as they'd passed through Jade Gate Fortress into Kitai, when she'd made the decision to leave her name behind.
The girl born to that name was gone, she'd decided. She was almost certainly never coming back--to home, family, the view of the mountains north of them, range upon range, to heaven. The girl travelling east would leave her name with her memories.
At fifteen, it had felt like a way to go forward, to survive.
But if her birth name is long since gone, that does not mean she must accept, in her mind, the one Wen Zhou has chosen for her, as if selecting among fabrics or polo horses.
She answers in the compound to Lin Chang because she must, and does so smiling, effortlessly gracious, but that is as far as she will go. The surface of a lake.
He cannot see what she is thinking or feeling. She has a talent for deceiving men by now. She's had time to learn. It is a skill like any other a woman can teach herself: music, conversation, lovemaking, simulating yearning and the tumult of desire.
She ought to be more grateful, she tells herself many times a day, or lying at night, alone or beside him. Hers is a destiny, thanks to Zhou, that marks, like a banner, the highest summit of the dreams of every courtesan in the North District.
He is the second most powerful man in the empire--which means in the world, really. She lives in a vast compound with servants at her whim and call. She entertains his guests with music or witty talk, watches him play polo in the Deer Park, shares his pillow many nights. She knows his moods, some of his fears. She wears silks of the finest weaving, and jewellery that sets off her eyes or dazzles by lamplight at her ears, in her golden hair.
He can dismiss her at any moment, of course. Cast her out, with or without any resources to survive--that, too, happens all the time to concubines when they age. When skilful use of masicot, onycha, indigo sticks for beauty marks, sweet basil, plucked eyebrows and painted ones, powder and perfume and exquisitely adorned hair are no longer enough to sustain necessary beauty.
It is her task to ensure that he has no cause to send her from his presence, now, or when that day comes when the mirror of men's eyes tells a darker tale.
In which case, she has not been acting prudently at all. Kanlin Warriors hired secretly. Listening on porticoes.
She has been distracted and disturbed the last few days, is afraid that it might show. There are other eyes besides his in this compound. His wife is famously inattentive to the women, her gaze turned towards the heavens and alchemical mysteries, but the other concubines are not her friends, and each of the important ones has servants devoted to her.
A household like this can be a battleground. There are poets who have seen this, lived it, written of it.
Events seem to be moving faster now. Late this morning a messenger came from Ma-wai. Wen Zhou and his wife left the compound by carriage not long after. Zhou was swearing, flushed and angry, through the flurry of preparations.
His cousin had evidently requested their presence for the afternoon and evening. Short of the absolute dictates of warfare or crisis, this is not an invitation that may be declined, even by the prime minister.
He holds office because of her, after all.
A case could be made, and she knows Zhou wishes he could do it, that they
are
in a time of crisis, but the growing tensions with Roshan are not the sort of matter he can use as an excuse to offer his regrets to Jian. Not until he's ready to reveal this, raise it with the emperor, and Rain knows he isn't. Not yet.
There are too many dangers, and they need working through.
He has already sent word to his principal adviser. Liu will follow to Ma-wai in his own carriage. Zhou always wants him nearby when there is any likelihood they might see the emperor, and in Ma-wai there is a good chance.
The first minister is increasingly dependent on Liu. Everyone in the compound knows it.
What Rain does
not
yet know, though she has done her best to find out, is whether Liu was privy to, or even the agent of, certain instructions given with respect to a man coming back now (it seems) from the far west, having escaped attempts upon his life.
Escaped them, possibly, because of her.
That, of course, is how she's been most reckless. Zhou would kill her and she knows it. At least one man in Xinan has already died in this affair in the past few days: Xin Lun, after word of Tai's journeying had come.
Lun was killed to preserve a secret. If Tai chooses to reveal it, the prime minister will be exposed. She's made her peace with that. Any loyalty to the man who brought her here stops short of this attempted assassination. A woman, as much as a man, is surely allowed her own sense of right conduct in the world.
No, her real fear right now is of herself.
Word has come by courier from Chenyao. That was days ago. Travelling at any normal speed, a horseman from that city could be here tomorrow, or even tonight. And Tai is riding, if the tale is to be believed, a Sardian steed. A Heavenly Horse, from her home.
Rain is too self-possessed, too controlled (always has been), to attach meaning or weight to that last. Nor is she a poet, as some of the courtesans are. She sings the songs others have written. But still ... Sardian horses?
And he is alive, very nearly here. After two years.
The morning passes, a midday meal, a rest in her rooms, a walk in the gardens by the bamboo grove. Time crawls at a pace that kills.
It occurs to her, sitting on a stone bench by the artificial lake, shaded from the sun by sandalwood leaves, that if Zhou has been summoned to Ma-wai for this afternoon, and a banquet after, he will not be home tonight.
It is just about then that the second messenger arrives. The household steward stalks into the garden to find Mistress Lin. She doesn't think he likes her, but he doesn't like anyone so it isn't significant.
It seems there is another message from Ma-wai, this one sent to her. That has never happened before. She wonders if she's being summoned to play for them ... but no, it would be too late by now. And there is hardly a deficiency of performers at Ma-wai.
The courier is escorted through the sequence of public rooms and courtyards back through the garden, preceded by the steward and a warning to her that someone is coming--so that she can be properly seated and composed on one of the benches. She is, or presents herself as such.
The courier bows. She is, after all, the newly favoured concubine of First Minister Wen. There can be power in that for women. He hands her a scroll. She opens it, breaking the seal.
This message is also from Wen Jian, the Precious Consort. It is very short.
Do not retire early tonight, unless you are excessively fatigued. Not all windows above jade stairs need be seen through tears.
The second line is derived from a celebrated poem about a woman left alone too long. Jian has changed three words. You can imagine her smiling as she wrote or dictated that.
Actually, that isn't quite true: it is difficult to imagine that woman. She eludes too easily, and frightens because of that.
You can begin to feel your own heartbeat going too fast, however, as you consider those words on the scroll, dismiss the courier with a grave expression, give instructions that he be offered food and drink before starting back to Ma-wai.
For one thing, how does Wen Jian even know of her existence? For another, why would she be disposed to assist Rain in anything, if indeed she is doing that? If this is not some trap, or test?
Rain feels like a child, overwhelmed by complexities.
The steward leads the courier past pagoda trees. Her maidservant lingers, ready if called. Rain sits alone, looks across the water at the island he'd had made in the lake he'd had made. The light breeze ruffles leaves overhead, touches her skin and hair.
She'd liked amber and apricots and music, very young. Horses a little later, but only to look at them. They'd frightened her. Her eyes had drawn attention, very young. Her mother had named her
Saira
when she was born. A sweet name left behind, many years ago.

CHAPTER XVII

"I
should like," said Wen Jian, "to be entertained. Cousin, will you offer a poem for me?"
Her cousin, the first minister, smiled. He was as Tai remembered him in the North District, or glimpsed in Long Lake Park ... a big man, handsome and aware of it. He wore blue silk with dragons in silver. There was a lapis lazuli ring on his left hand.
A breeze entered through unshuttered windows, rippling pennons outside. It was late afternoon. They were in Ma-wai, where the hot springs had eased imperial weariness for centuries, and where the decadent games of various courts had been notorious for as long. Just north of here, not far away, were the tombs of the Ninth Dynasty.
Poets had written of this conjunction of symbols, though doing so carried risks and one needed to use care.
Tai wasn't feeling careful just now, which was unwise and he knew it. He was tense as a drawn bowstring. Wen Zhou was here and Tai's brother was here.
They didn't know he was in the room.
Jian, amusing herself (or perhaps not so), had arranged for Tai to enter before her guests, and to seat himself on an ivory bench behind one of two painted room screens (cranes flying, a wide river, mountains rising, the tiny figure of a fisherman in his boat).
He hadn't wanted to do this. It felt too passive, acquiescent. But he didn't know, on the other hand, what he did want here. He had arrived. This was the court. He had decisions to make, alignments to choose or reject. It would also be useful, he thought wryly, to remain alive. One person here had been trying to kill him.
At least one person.
For the moment he would accede to what the Beloved Companion wished of him. He could start that way, at least. Jian's women had bathed him when their party arrived, and washed his hair (gravely, with propriety, no hint of rumoured immorality). After, in a chamber overlooking the lake, they had laid out silks more fine than any he'd ever worn in his life.
Liao
silk: compared to ordinary weaving once, in a poem, as what a glistening waterfall was to a muddy stream dried out in summer heat.
He remembered that image as he dressed. His robe was a shimmering, textured flicker of greens, the colours of a bamboo grove in changing light. His slippers and belt and soft hat were black, with pale-yellow dragons on them. His hatpin had an emerald.
Two women had led him, silently, hands in full sleeves, eyes downcast, along corridors of marble and jade, then across a courtyard and down more corridors to the chamber where Wen Jian evidently purposed to receive certain guests.
Tai had not seen her since they'd arrived. She had told him in the sedan chair that she had a plan for this afternoon. He had no notion of what this might be, or of his own role in it.
At Kuala Nor each night, watching the stars set and rise, or the moon, he'd known his task at every moment. What he was there to do. Here, he was one of many dancers, and he didn't know the dance.
He wished Zian were with him. Wei Song he'd released for the afternoon, to report to her own Kanlin sanctuary farther along the shore. It had crossed his mind that now that they'd arrived, her duties, her employment, could be considered over. He'd felt oddly exposed when she'd bowed and gone away.
The poet was somewhere in Ma-wai. He'd been a guest here before. They hadn't had a chance to speak before being led in different directions. Zian was almost certainly sampling some celebrated wine. Tai wondered if the women were as proper with the Banished Immortal as they had been with him.
His two escorts had led him into this audience chamber, showed him the room screens (the paintings were by Wang Shao) and the low seat behind one of them. They'd invited him, prettily, to sit. He could have refused. But he didn't know what he'd achieve by doing so. It seemed wisest, for the moment, to see what Jian was doing. What she was playing at--if it was a game.
He discovered he could see quite well through tiny holes in the screen. He hadn't noticed them from the painted side. He was entirely certain the viewing holes, his ability to observe the room unseen, were not accidental. The ceiling, he saw, looking up in wonder, was of beaten gold. There were lotus flowers and cranes worked upon it. The walls were sandalwood, the floor was marble.
Jian smiled at his screen when she walked in with her steward--a different man from the one this morning. (The one this morning was probably dead by now.) It was not, Tai thought, the smile she'd offered when they were alone on the road.
He'd asked, just before getting out to ride Dynlal the rest of the way, if she'd help him here at court.
I don't know
, she had said.
This wasn't about helping him, he decided. He might be wrong, but it didn't feel that way. He felt cowardly sitting here. He wanted to confront Wen Zhou and his brother. He had a quick, clean image of drawing swords with them. Liu was hopeless with a blade. Zhou was likely a match for Tai, or more than that. It was an idle thought: no weapons were allowed here. He'd been made to surrender his when they arrived.
Seen through the screen, Jian looked very different: cooler, more serene, with a gravity that had not existed (could not exist) while she reclined in a perfumed sedan chair, peeling lychees, curving a bare foot against his thigh.
She was in green as well, with imperial phoenixes in the same pale yellow as his own dragons. He wondered if that meant something. Her hair was as before: the widely imitated, side-slipping style. It could do things to a man, looking at her.
There was a small, discreet door behind him. He could get up right now and walk out--if the door wasn't barred. He wondered if it was. He wondered if there was a door behind the other painted screen, set diagonally to this one against the same wall, the two of them framing a space for Wen Jian and her friends, at Ma-wai, in springtime.
He stopped wondering about such things when Jian seated herself on a platform in the centre of the chamber, accepted a cup from the steward, and gestured for her guests to be admitted.
Tall doors opened. A number of men came in, no women. Jian was the only woman in the room. Even the servants, pouring wine into jade cups, were men. There were no musicians.
Among the arrivals was Sima Zian. A surprise. The poet was properly dressed and groomed, with a dark hat and his hair neatly pinned. His expression was alert, amused, as ever. Tai registered this, but didn't look at him for long. His attention was pulled away. Not to the first minister, though Wen Zhou had also entered the room.
Hidden, silent, afraid, and fighting anger, Tai looked at his older brother for the first time in two years.
Liu had gained weight, it showed in his face, but he was otherwise unchanged. Smaller than Tai, softer. In a mandarin's rich, sober black silk, with the dark-red belt of highest rank and symbolic key at his waist, he entered discreetly, bowed formally, took a place behind Wen Zhou, a little to one side.
Tai was staring at him. He couldn't stop. Fear, and fury.
He recognized another of those who entered: the imperial heir. Another surprise, if Jian intended anything serious today. Prince Shinzu was notorious for sensuous luxury, though seldom seen in the city, and never in the North District.
Women were brought to him. He didn't go to them. He was an even bigger man than the first minister, affecting a short beard, but wider than the mandarin fashion. He already carried a cup of wine, Tai saw. Scanning the room, from a position he took near an open window, the prince smiled at Zian, who bowed, and smiled cheerfully back.
Jian waited until her guests had wine, then spoke her first words to her cousin: inviting a poem, entertainment.
From behind his screen, Tai saw Zhou offer his confident, lazy smile. "We retain people to offer poetry, cousin. You ask the one man here whose effort would surely not amuse you."
"But surely he will make an effort? If only to please me?" Tai could hear the sly smile in her words.
"I love you too much for that," said Zhou. One man laughed appreciatively. Tai couldn't see who it was. Wen Zhou added, "And we seem to have, for some reason or other, a poet among us. Let
him
divert you, cousin. Is he here for any other purpose?"
A fair question: the poet had left the city under one of his usual clouds and it had to do with Jian and a poem. The Banished Immortal, as in heaven so on earth. That was the way the stories ran.
Jian only smiled. She had, Tai was realizing, more than a dozen ways of smiling. This one was closer to the cat with a mouse he'd sensed in the sedan chair. It occurred to him that she wasn't really pursuing amusement here. He wondered if Zhou knew that yet.
He shivered suddenly. Wasn't sure why. In the tales his nursemaid used to tell, you shivered that way when someone was walking across the ground where your grave would one day lie. If you never shivered so, she used to say, you were doomed to die in water, or lie unburied.
His brother knew those same stories from the same source. Liu knew the same orchard fruits, the same tree-swing in the farthest garden, stream for fishing or swimming, paulownia leaves on the path all at once in autumn, the same teachers, sunsets, birds returning at winter's end, the same lightning-riven summer storms of childhood in a room they'd shared, listening for thunder.
"I am afraid to have Master Sima offer any lines after the last ones he gave us in the Ta-Ming," said the Precious Consort. "A poem about an ancient emperor and his beloved." She looked at the poet, and did not smile.
"It is a grief to my soul, and will last all my days, if anything your servant has ever written brings you or the Son of Heaven other than pleasure," Sima Zian said earnestly.
"Well," said the prime minister, grinning, "a number of them have failed to bring
me
pleasure, I can tell you that." Another laugh from someone, probably the same person.
Zian looked at him. He bowed again. "Some griefs," he murmured, "we learn to expect in life."
It was Jian who laughed this time. She clapped her hands. "Cousin, cousin," she cried, "never play at words with a poet! Don't you know that?"
Wen Zhou flushed. Tai was fighting an impulse to grin.
"I'd have thought a disgraced poet without rank or office would be the one who needed to be careful," the first minister said coldly.
Tai looked instinctively to his brother. He had spent a good deal of his childhood looking at Liu, trying to read what he might be thinking. Liu's face was impassive but his watchful eyes went from the woman to the poet, then quickly to the man who--unexpectedly--broke the ensuing silence.
"There are many ways of measuring rank, as the Cho Master has taught," said Prince Shinzu quietly. "On the matter of taking care, as it happens, I have a question of my own for the first minister. Though I fear to interrupt our dear Jian's pleasures."
"You, of all men, need never fear doing so," said Wen Jian, prettily.
Tai had no idea how to interpret that. Or the manner of the prince, leaning against the wall by a window, a cup held so casually it almost spilled its wine. Shinzu's voice was more crisp than Tai had expected. He'd never actually heard the heir speak. He only knew the tales.
"I am, of course, at your service, illustrious lord." Wen Zhou bowed.
He had to, of course. Tai didn't think it pleased him. Already, from his place of concealment, he was exhausted trying to trace the lines of connection and tension here, read surface meaning, let alone what lay beneath.
"I am grateful," said the prince.
He sipped his wine. Gestured to a servant, waited for the cup to be refilled. The room waited with him. When the servant had withdrawn, Shinzu leaned back again, at ease. He looked at Wen Zhou.
"What have you been doing with An Li?" he asked.
Behind his screen, Tai found himself breathing carefully.
"My lord, you invite a discussion of state policy here?" Zhou looked pointedly at the poet and then at two or three other men in the room.
"I do," said Shinzu calmly. "Among other things, I would like to know what state policy
is
in this matter."
There was another silence. Did the emperor's heir have the right to demand this of a prime minister? Tai had no idea.
"Cousin ..." began Zhou, turning to the woman in the room. "Surely a pleasant springtime gathering is not--"
"In truth," Jian interrupted, gently enough, "I admit I should like to know, as well. About An Li. After all," she favoured the room with an exquisite smile, "he
is
my adopted child! A mother always has concerns, you know. Everlastingly."
The silence this time was almost painful. Zhou looked back over his shoulder at Liu. Tai's brother stepped forward a little (only a little). He bowed to Jian, then to the prince.
"My lord prince, illustrious lady, it is our understanding that Governor An has left the capital." Which was true, and Tai happened to know it, but wasn't an answer to anything.
"He did," said Shinzu promptly. "Three days ago, in the evening."
"And his eldest son left before that," added Jian. She wasn't smiling now. "An Rong rode northeast with a small company on good horses."
"Roshan went west, however," said Liu. His brother was shifting them away from whatever questions the prince had, Tai realized.
Not successfully.
"We know that," said the prince. "He met with your brother on the road to Chenyao."
Tai stopped breathing.
"With
my
brother?" said Liu.
He looked shaken, and this would not be an act. Liu was skilled at hiding feelings, not simulating them.
"With Shen Tai!" said the first minister in the same moment. "Why did he do that?"
"I'd imagine it was regarding the Sardian horses," said Shinzu carelessly. "But that isn't what I wish to discuss."
"It should be!" snapped the prime minister. "Roshan is obviously--"
"He is obviously interested in their disposition. He is commander of the Imperial Stables, among other offices. It is his duty to be interested, is it not?" The prince shifted himself off the wall. "No, my question is for you, first minister--and your adviser, of course, since he seems well informed. Why, pray tell me, have you been engaged in actions designed to drive him from the city, or worse?"
Tai swallowed hard, made himself breathe again, carefully.
"The Son of Heaven did invite him here, cousin. We all know that." Jian shook her head. "I even asked for him myself, he amuses me so whenever he comes to court."
It was only in that moment that Tai realized that she and the prince were working together, and it was not spontaneous at all.
"Drive him from the city?" Wen Zhou repeated. "How could I do that?"