"I am going to Xinan?"
"And had best leave soon. Darkness will find you on the road."
"I ... what am I ...?"
"My cousin," said Jian, with a smile that could undo a man's control over his limbs, "is here with me tonight, and with others tomorrow morning, in discussions about Roshan."
"I see," said Tai, although he didn't.
"She has been told you are coming," said Wen Jian.
Tai swallowed. Found that he could say nothing at all.
"This is my gift. Your Kanlin knows where your horse is stabled. And you have a steward now, for the city home the emperor has just presented you. You will need a steward."
"A steward?" Tai repeated, stupidly.
"He was mine this morning. I have reconsidered a decision taken. He owes you his life. I expect he will serve you well."
The smile deepened. There was no woman on earth, Tai thought, who looked the way this one did.
But there
was
another woman, in Xinan, with golden hair. Who had put her life at risk for him, who had warned him, more than once, of what might happen if he went away.
She had also told him, Tai remembered, that he was going to need to be much more subtle, if he had the smallest hope of surviving in the world of the court.
"They will send word when you are summoned," said Wen Jian. "There will be an audience, and then, of course, you will need to go back west to bring your horses."
"Of course, gracious lady," said Tai.
"You have promised me ten of them," she reminded him.
"I have," he said. "For dancing?"
"For dancing," she agreed. "One more gift." She turned and laid something down on the bed and then went out through the doors in the wall. Someone closed them. The room was as it had been. It was still light outside.
On the bed lay a heavy key. Beside it was a ring, set with an emerald larger than any Tai had ever seen in his life.
There was a third object as well, he saw.
A lychee, not yet peeled.
He took the fruit, he took the key--it would be for the house in Xinan. He placed them in a pocket of his robe. He took the ring and put it on the ring finger of his left hand. He looked at it there for a moment, thinking of his father and mother. Then he took it off and placed it in his pocket, as well.
He drew a strained breath, let it out. For no good reason he removed his hat.
He crossed to the door and opened it.
"I am happy to see you," he said to Wei Song. She stood there, straight, small, unsmiling, fierce as a grassland wolf.
She made a face. Said nothing. Did incline her head, mind you. Behind her were, as promised, other Kanlins, black-clad.
Beside Song, kneeling, was the steward from this morning at the inn. The man who'd been ordered by Jian to kill himself when they reached Ma-wai.
I have reconsidered a decision.
"Please stand," said Tai. The steward stood up. There were, embarrassingly, tears on his cheeks. Tai pretended not to see them. He took out the key. "I will assume you have been told which gateway, which house in Xinan, this will unlock?"
"I have, gracious lord," said the steward. "It is in the fifty-seventh ward, the very best. A handsome property. It is even close to the mansion of the first minister!" He looked proud, saying this.
Tai blinked. He could almost hear Jian's laughter.
He said, "I wish you to take horse or carriage, whichever is easier for you, and prepare this house for me tonight. There will be servants there?"
"Of course! This was a home belonging to the emperor, may he live a thousand years. They will be waiting for you, my lord. And they will be honoured and grateful, as ... as I am, to serve you."
Tai scowled. "Good," he said. "I will see you in Xinan."
The steward took the extended key, bowed, turned, went hurrying down the hallway. A man with a clear, shining purpose again, in a life he'd thought was over.
"His name is Ye Lao," said Song. "You neglected to ask."
He looked at her. The neat, calm figure in black. Her intense features. She had killed for Tai, had been wounded again this morning.
"Ye Lao. Thank you. Would you prefer him dead?"
She hadn't expected that. She shook her head.
"No." She hesitated. "This is a different world," she said. She wasn't as calm as she seemed, he realized.
He nodded. "It is. It will be."
She looked up at him. He saw her smile, the wide mouth. "And you will have your thighs torn raw, my lord, if you try to ride to Xinan on a Sardian horse while wearing
liao
silk. Have you riding clothes?"
He looked to the window and then the wall. His two women were still there, looking fearful and proud.
"Have I riding clothes?" he asked.
They hurried (gracefully) past him into the room. He heard them opening a chest, heard rustling sounds, giggling.
He went in a moment later. He did, it seemed, have riding clothes, exactly fitted, and his own boots had been cleaned. He changed. Neither woman looked away, he noted.
He kept the ring and, for no very good reason, the lychee fruit. He went back out, joined Song and the other Kanlins assigned to him. They led him to the stables, to Dynlal and horses for all of them, and they rode out from Ma-wai near the end of the day, towards the city of dust and noise, of two million souls, where lights would be shining by the time they arrived, and would shine all through the night.
No one ever rests in Xinan
, his brother Liu had just said, in a poem.
And Rain had been told he was coming.
CHAPTER XIX
T
here is a rosewood gazebo near the back wall of the compound. It is set among fruit trees and flower beds, a long way beyond the artificial lake and the island set within it, past the grassy space for entertaining guests, and the bamboo grove with its laid-out paths, and the open area where Wen Zhou's guards practise swordsmanship and archery.
For Rain, the gazebo is a favourite place. She has many reasons. Rosewood is named not for its colour, but for its scent, which she loves. The wood itself is dark, with lines running through it as if trying to reach the surface, to break through. You can see that, imagine that, in daylight. Rosewood comes to Xinan from forests in the far south. It is imported overland and then along rivers and up the Great Canal, at a cost that does not bear thinking about.
There are nightingales here sometimes, this far back from the rooms and pavilions of the compound. (The street beyond the wall is quiet at night in a sedate, very wealthy ward.) They can be heard most often in summer; it is early in the year to expect one tonight.
She has meandered back this way, carrying her
pipa
, plucking it as she walked through the twilight. She has noticed that when she carries the instrument people don't look at her as closely, as if she's part of the setting, not a woman to be observed. Or carefully watched.
It is dark now. She'd had Hwan, the servant who loves her a little too much, light one of the gazebo's lanterns for her, and then she'd dismissed him. She doesn't want it to appear as if she's hiding: see, there is a light. Although you'd need to come a long way back and look through trees to see it. Earlier, in the afternoon, Hwan had run a different errand for her outside the compound. She has done what she can do, and is here.
Rain plays a few notes of an old song about the moon as messenger between parted lovers. Then she decides that's the wrong music to be thinking about tonight.
She is alone here. She's confident of that. Her maidservants have been dismissed for the night. One will remain in the suite of rooms against her mistress's return, but Rain has stayed out late in the garden with her
pipa
before. A mild eccentricity, usefully established.
And Wen Zhou doesn't spy on his women. His mind doesn't run that way. He can't actually conceive, Rain believes, that they would not be devoted and compliant. Where, and how, could they have a better life? No, his fears are cast, like a shadow, outside these walls.
He and his wife have been gone all day. Summoned to Ma-wai, no warning. He wasn't happy about the suddenness. On the other hand, there was never a great deal anyone could prudently do in the way of resisting when Jian wanted them. Rain sees fireflies among the trees, watches them for a time. Moths flutter around the lantern.
The compound has been quiet since the master left this morning, or at least since the arrival of the second message from Ma-wai. The one sent to her.
Not all windows above jade stairs need be seen through tears.
No jade stairs here. Neither real jade nor a poet's symbol-shaped imagining. She sits on a bench with her instrument in a rosewood gazebo, roofed, but open to the night on all sides.
The scent of the wood, scent of the air. Nearly summer now. No jade, and no tears, Rain decides, although she knows it would be possible to make herself weep. She isn't going to do that. She is thinking too hard.
Mostly about Wen Jian.
NO ONE KNOWS this mountain where I dwell.
Tai found it ironic, in an over-elaborate way, that when the nearness of Xinan first announced itself--a wide, diffused glow on the southern horizon--the phrase that came to him was from a poem about solitude.
Yan would have had a remark about that, he thought.
So would Xin Lun, actually. The one man gentle, amused, the other wittily astringent. Both were dead. And the memories he was conjuring were more than two years old.
So was the memory, rich as the emerald he carried (but didn't wear), of the woman he was riding through the night to see.
He wasn't sure why he hadn't put on the ring. He wasn't ready yet, he decided, for people to look at him the way one looked at a man with so much wealth on display. He didn't want Rain seeing him like that, though he couldn't say why. It wasn't as if she would be unused to opulence in the first minister's house.
Even in the Pavilion of Moonlight, she had moved through a world that included extravagantly wealthy men. It had never seemed to touch her. She'd been as happy--or had made them think she was--among the students, singing for them, teasing, listening to late-night philosophy and verse and plans to remake the world.
That was what a skilled courtesan did
,
of course: induce every man to think he was the one she'd choose, had she only the freedom to pursue that innermost desire.
But he knew, Tai
knew
, that to think that way about her was to deny a deeper truth about the golden-haired woman behind the walls (so many of them). Xinan's walls loomed now in the middle distance beyond the bridge they were clattering across. The bridge had bright lanterns, and soldiers guarding it.
Two years ago, Rain had told him--had
warned
him--that the stylish southern aristocrat Wen Zhou, cousin to the emperor's beloved, might be minded to take her away from the North District.
Both of them had seen it happen many times. Mostly, it was a dream for a courtesan that this might occur. A doorway opening on a better life.
Tai, immersed in his studies and friendships, trying to decide what his own idea of a properly lived life should be, had been painfully aware that what she said might be true, but there was nothing a student preparing for the examinations, the second son of a retired general, could do if an aristocrat with wealth and connections wanted a North District woman for his own.
And then his father had died.
He was thinking of her, green eyes and yellow hair and the voice late at night, as they came to the city walls. Tai looked up at the enormous, many-storeyed tower above the gates. There were lights now, hiding the stars. The gates were locked, of course. It was after darkfall.
That didn't seem to matter: Jian had sent word ahead of them.
The leader of his Kanlin escort (not Wei Song, there was a more senior figure now) handed a scroll through a small sliding window, and a moment later the Gold Bird Guards manning this entrance through the northern wall opened for them, with a shout.
Then, as he and his Kanlins rode through, the city guards--those on the ground and those in the tower and on the nearby walls--all bowed twice, to Tai.
He truly wasn't prepared for this. He looked at Song, who had stayed close through the hours of this ride. She didn't meet his glance, was staring straight ahead, hood up, watchful and alert. She'd been wounded this morning. Seemed to show no signs of it.
The gates swung closed behind them. He turned in the saddle and watched, patting Dynlal absently. Tai wondered why he wasn't exhausted. They had been travelling most of the day, except for an interlude at Ma-wai that was likely to change his life.
He was in Xinan again. Heart of the world.
He still didn't know why Jian was doing this. His best guess was that it was a small part of the endless balancing act she performed in the palace: Wen Zhou and Roshan, ambitious mandarins, the heir, other governors, the eunuchs, other princes (and their mothers) ...
And now one more man, arrived from the west. The brother of an influential adviser and of a newly named princess. A man with an absurd number of Sardian horses in his control.
To a woman in Jian's position, it would only make sense to assert a claim to such a man. And so, when it had emerged, through routine inquiry, that he'd had a relationship with a singing girl in the North District, a girl who might even be the reason Jian's cousin had sought to have him killed ...
Well, you might undertake certain things in such a circumstance, set them in motion, if you were a clever woman dealing with a fiendishly difficult court. And with an aging emperor, tired of protocols and conflicts and finance and barbarians, obsessed with you, and with living forever, while shaping the most opulent tomb ever built, should that second dream not come to pass because the gods did not wish it so.
Gates had been opened for Tai, not just symbolically, as in a verse, but real ones, massive and intimidating, looming by torch and lantern light.
He had never done this: enter the city after dark.
If you approached Xinan towards day's end you found an inn, or a farmhouse with a barn (if you were a student, watching your money), and listened from outside the walls to the long ceremony of drums that closed the gates. Then you entered with the market crowd in the morning amid the chaos of another day among two million souls.
Not now. Now, the gates had just swung wide. Four of the Gold Bird Guards even came with them, to preclude the necessity of showing their scroll all the way through the city.
The streets were eerily quiet. Within the lanes and alleys of some of the wards there would be raucous, violent life even now, Tai knew, but not along the main roads. They turned east immediately inside the gate, passing in front of the vast palace complex until they turned south down the central avenue. The widest street in the world, running from the Ta-Ming to the southern gate, straight as a dream of virtue.
She had pressed her fingers to his mouth, their last night, to stop him from being clever, he recalled. He had once been a man who prided himself on being clever. He remembered her scent, her palm against his face. He remembered kissing her hand.
He looked around him. He had never done this either, ride a horse right down the central avenue, after dark. He didn't like being in the middle of the wide street. It felt too much as if he were laying claim to something. He wasn't. He'd have liked to claim a cup of wine in the Pavilion of Moonlight, if she had still been there.
"Over more, please," he said quietly to Song. "Too much of a procession, where we are."
She looked quickly at him. They were near a guard station, with lanterns. He saw concern in her eyes, then they moved from the light and he couldn't see her face any more. Song twitched her horse's reins, moved ahead, and spoke to the man leading them. They began angling southeast across the vast, open space, to continue along the roadway, nearer one side now.
There were only a handful of people abroad on the street, and no group so large as theirs. Those on the far side, west, were so distant as to be almost invisible. There were guard stations at intervals, large ones at the major intersections, all the way down the centre of the road. He saw a sedan chair being carried north. The bearers stopped as their company passed by. A hand pulled a curtain back, to see who they were. Tai glimpsed a woman's face.
They carried on, ten Kanlin Warriors, four of the Gold Bird Guards, and the second son of General Shen Gao, down the principal avenue of Xinan, under stars.
All journeys come to an end, one way or another. They reached the gate of the fifty-seventh ward.
HE HAD BEEN BORN in the south, beyond the Great River, in lands that knew tigers and the shrieking of gibbons. His family were farm labourers for generations, going back further than any of them could have counted. He, himself--his name was Pei Qin--had been the youngest of seven, a small child, clever.
When he was six years old his father had brought him to the under-steward of one of the Wen estates. There were three branches of the Wen family, controlling most of the land (and the rice and salt) around. There was always a need for capable servants to be trained. Qin had been accepted by the steward to be raised and educated. That had been thirty-seven years ago.
He had become a trusted, unobtrusive household servant. When the eldest son of the family decided to make his way to Xinan and the courtly world not quite four years ago (observing the useful, astonishing rise of his young cousin), Qin was one of the servants he'd taken north to help select and teach those they would hire in the capital.
Qin had done that, capably and quietly. He'd been a quiet child, was unchanged as a man. Never married. He had been one of the three servants entrusted with laying out clothing for the master, with preparing his rooms, with warming his wine or tea. Had he been asked at any time, he'd have said that his was a privileged life, since he knew the conditions in which his siblings lived, among the rice and salt.
One evening--the wrong evening, for reasons heaven decreed--he had been distracted by the inadequately supervised presence in the compound of a dozen girls from the pleasure district. They were being fitted with costumes for a pageant Zhou was hosting on his lake. (The lake was new then.)
Hearing their uninhibited laughter, worrying about who was watching them, Qin had overheated the master's evening wine.
The wine had, evidently, burned Wen Zhou's tongue.
Thirty-five years with the family had been as nothing, Qin would think, after. Decades of service had been less than nothing.
He was beaten. In itself, not unusual. The life of a servant included such things, and a senior retainer could be required to perform the beating of a lesser one. Qin had done that. The world was not a gentle place. No one who'd seen a brother mauled by a tiger would ever think that. And a short time in Xinan could make a man realize there were tigers here, too, even if they might not have stripes or pad through forests and fields after dark.
The thing was, Wen Zhou had ordered sixty strokes with the heavy rod for Qin. His tongue must have been
quite
badly burned, one of the other servants said bitterly, afterwards.
Or something else had greatly distressed the master that night. It didn't matter. Sixty strokes of the rod could kill a man.
Two and a half years ago, that was, in the days just before the Cold Food Festival. Qin did not die, but it was a near thing.
The household steward (not a bad man, for a steward) arranged for two doctors to attend upon him, taking turns, day and night, in the small room where they'd brought him after the public beating in the Third Courtyard. (It was important for all the servants to see the consequences of carelessness.)
He survived, but never walked properly again. He couldn't lift his right arm. That side of his torso was twisted, like some trees above the Great River gorges that grow low to the slanting ground to stay out of the wind and suck moisture from sparse soil.
He was dismissed, of course. An aristocrat's compound was not a place for the unemployable. The other servants undertook to look after him. It was not something he'd expected, not something normally done. Usually a man as deformed as Qin would be taken to one of the markets and do what he could to survive by begging there.