Читать книгу River of Stars - Guy Gavriel Kay - Страница 10

There were a great many men in the army of Kitai, but they were not good soldiers and they were not well led. Most of them were farmers, sons of farmers, desperately unhappy to be so far from home—and fighting in northern lands.

They knew millet and wheat, or two-crop rice, vegetable plots, orchard fruits, silk farms, growing and harvesting tea. A number of them worked the salt flats or the salt mines, and for these the army was a better life than the near-slavery and early death they’d known and expected.

Next to none of them had any idea why they were fighting Kislik barbarians, marching through a yellow wind and blowing sand that stung and cut whenever the wind grew strong. Tents and tent pegs blew away in that wind. The Kislik had horses, and they knew these lands, knew the terrain and the weather, could attack and retreat, kill you and be gone.

As far as most of the two hundred thousand men in the Imperial Pacification Army of the Northwest were concerned, the barbarians could keep this bitter place.

But their own sage and illustrious emperor, ruling in Hanjin with the mandate of heaven, had judged the Kislik to be presumptuous and arrogant, needing to be taught a stern lesson. His advisers had seen opportunities here: fame and power, rising within the court hierarchy. For some of them this war was also a test, a preparation for the true enemy, which was the even more presumptuous Xiaolu empire north of Kitai.

There was a treaty with the Xiaolu, had been for two hundred years (broken at intervals, never irreparably). By its terms the steppe people still held the Fourteen Prefectures they had taken, below the Long Wall of Kitai.

The glorious emperor’s father and grandfather had not been able to win them back, by diplomacy or threat of arms, though they had tried both. Not even an offered princess had sufficed. The Xiaolu knew what they had: by holding those hilly lands with their narrow passes they ensured that all the northern cities of Kitai were open to horsemen racing down a wide plain. They held what was left of the Long Wall. It meant nothing now, was only a ruined marker of what Kitai had once been.

To give this back for a princess?

There were seeds in all of this, if one looked closely, and thought about it, for what was coming. Not just in the larger sweep and tumble of time but, very specifically, for the soldiers in the northwest who were to march doggedly through blowing, shifting sands north towards Erighaya, capital city of the Kislik, on the far side of the desert that lay west of the Golden River’s bend.

Those troops would carry orders to besiege and destroy Erighaya, and bring Kislik leaders in chains to Hanjin. They were to claim steppe wives and daughters to service and assuage the army, and be slaves, and so humble the barbarians of the northwest before the gathered and glorious might of Kitai and its emperor.

They forgot something, though, heading north. They really did forget something.

In a springtime before that northern march took place, a girl was walking beside her father amid chaos and excitement in a very crowded city.

You could declare it madness, a collective fever, the way in which Yenling, second city of the empire, was transformed during the Peony Festival.

Every spring, for the two weeks when the king of flowers bloomed, it became nearly impossible to move along Yenling streets and lanes, or find a room at an inn.

Houses great and small were filled with returning family and guests from out of town. People offered space, three or four to a bed or a pallet on the floor, to strangers for considerable sums. A place to sleep for a delirious spring interlude, before normal life resumed.

There was nothing resembling normal life during the festival.

Long Life Temple Road all the way down to the principal western gate, and both sides of Moon Dike Road, were crowded with hastily erected tents and pavilions selling peonies.

Yao Yellows (affectionately called “The Palace Lady”) and Wei Reds cost thousands of cash for a single perfect blossom. Those were the most glorious graftings, the celebrated ones, and only the wealthiest could claim them.

But there were less extravagant varieties. Zuo Purple and Hidden Stream Scarlet, Sash Maroon, the Nine Petal Pearl, the exquisite, tiny petals of the Shuoun. Ninety different kinds of peony could be found in Yenling as the sun returned in spring, their blooming an occasion for joy, whatever else might be happening in the empire, on its borders, in the world.

When the first blossoms appeared a postal express began, racing east each morning along the reserved middle lane of the imperial road. There were six stations between Yenling and Hanjin. A fast relay of riders and horses could do it in a day and a night, carrying flowers, so that the Son of Heaven might share in the glorious splendour.

Yenling had been celebrated for its peonies for more than four hundred years, and the peony had been the imperial flower for longer than that.

It was derided by ascetic philosophers, declared to be artificial—peonies were grafted, constructed by man, not natural. It was disdained as gaudy and sensuous, too seductively feminine to justify exaltation, especially compared to the austere, masculine bamboo or flowering plum.

These views were known but they didn’t matter, not even at court. The peony obsession had become a supreme case of popular wisdom (or madness) overriding the reflections of sages.

Everyone who could came to Yenling at festival time.

People walked the streets with flowers pinned to their hats. Aristocrats were carried in their chairs, and so were high-ranking members of the civil service in their long robes. Simple tradesmen crowded the lanes, and farmers pushed into the city to see the flowers and the entertainment.

The more important gardens made a great deal of money for their owners as peonies were sold outside their gates or along the streets.

The Wei family, those artisans of the flower, charged ten cash just to enter their walled garden and take the small boat across to the island in the pond where their best peonies were grown. The family hired guards; you were beaten if you touched a blossom.

There was immense skill to the grafting of the flawless, redolent blossoms. People paid to walk along winding paths to see and smell the profligate profusion. They would line up for hours, then come back to see the changes from one day to the next.

Even women were among them, bright blossoms in their hair. This was a time of year, and a place—Yenling during the Peony Festival—when the increasing restrictions on women’s movements were superseded, simply because they could not be enforced.

It was springtime. There were loud, excited crowds and the heady scent of extravagantly coloured blossoms. There was flute music, singing, dancers in the streets, jugglers, storytellers, men with trained animals. Wine and food were sold in booths, throngs given over to merriment—and to undeniably immoral behaviour in courtyards and lanes and bedchambers (not only in the pleasure district) as twilight descended each day.

Another reason for philosophers to lament the folly and the flower.

WALKING BESIDE HER FATHER, Shan is dizzy with excitement and trying not to show it. That would be undignified, childlike.

She is concentrating on seeing everything, taking it in, registering details. Songs succeed (or fail) in the details, she believes. They are more than the pairing of words and music. It is the acuteness of observation that sets a work apart, makes it worth … worth anything, really.

She is seventeen years old this spring. Will be married by this same season next year. A distant thought still, mostly, but not a displeasing one.

But right now she’s in Yenling with her father amid the morning crowds of the festival. Sight, sound, smell (flowers everywhere and a heavy crush of bodies; the glory and the assault, she thinks). She is hardly the only woman here, but she’s aware of people looking at her as she and her father make their way back up Long Life Temple Road from the city wall.

People had begun looking at her about two years ago. One would have to be in love or a poet to name her beautiful, but there seems to be something about the way she walks or stands, the way her gaze moves and then settles on objects or on people, that draws the attention of others back to her. She has wide-set eyes, a long nose, long fingers. She is tall for a woman. She gets the height from her father.

Lin Kuo is an extremely long-limbed man, but so self-effacing he has stood with a slight stoop for as long as his daughter can remember—as if denying any proud assertion of height, or endlessly ready to bow respectfully.

He had passed the jinshi examinations on his third attempt (perfectly honourable) but has never received a posting, even to the provinces. There are many men like that, graduates without a position. He wears the robes and belt of a civil servant and carries the title of court gentleman, which just means he is without office. He claims the monthly salary attached to that title. He writes with perfectly acceptable calligraphy, and has just completed (and had printed) a small book on gardens in Yenling, which is why they are here.

He has no obvious enemies—important these days—and seems to be unaware that he’s considered a figure of amusement by some. His daughter, more observant perhaps, has registered this, however.

He is instinctively kind, a little afraid of the world. His only expression of adventurousness lies in the fact that he has educated his one living child as if she were a boy. Not a trivial decision, not without consequence, if one thinks of individual lives as important.

Shan has read the classics and the poets, major and minor, back to the beginnings of writing in Kitai. She has a very good running hand and an even better formal one. She sings, of course, can play a pipa—most women from good families can do that—but she also writes songs, the new ci form emerging in this Twelfth Dynasty, words grafted (like peonies! she suddenly thinks) to well-known melodies of the countryside or the pleasure districts.

Her father has even had bows made for each of them, with a supply of arrows. They’ve taken lessons together from a retired archer he found, another quiet reaction against the customs of the day, where all well-bred men (let alone their daughters!) loftily disdain all military traditions.

It is not proper for a girl to do any of this, of course. In music they are to pluck a pipa fetchingly, and sing the words men write. The women doing such singing tend to be entertainers and courtesans. It has always been so.

Lin Kuo has betrothed his daughter this past winter, taking care and thought, to a man he believes will accept what she is, and be happy in that. It is more than any daughter can expect.

Shan loves her father without reserve or condition, though also without illusions as to his limitations.

She loves the world, too, this morning, equally without illus-ions—or so she proudly believes. She is very young.

She is wearing a crimson peony in her hair, carrying a yellow one, as they walk towards the home of the man her father has come to visit. They do have an invitation: Lin Kuo would not be going there without one.

Two and a half years have passed, on this bright morning, since the boy, Ren Daiyan, also young but without a similar belief that he understood the world (yet), walked into a forest east of his village, carrying a bow and bloodied arrows, and two swords from a man he’d killed.

THERE WAS NO FIGURE more respected in Kitai than Xi Wengao of Yenling. Craggy-faced and white-haired now (what was left of his hair), he knew his stature, was not above taking pride in it. You lived your life as honourably as you could, were rewarded, in some instances, with recognition in your lifetime.

He was a civil servant and a scholar, the official historian of the dynasty, a poet. He had even written songs when younger, had made the ci form almost acceptable among serious writers. (Others of his circle had followed, pushing the form even further.) He was renowned for his calligraphy, for advancing the careers of disciples at court. He was a celebrated lover of beauty (including the beauty of women) and had held just about every important office there was through the years, including prime minister to the last emperor and then, briefly, to the son who reigned now.

That “briefly” told its tale, of course.

In his garden, awaiting guests, he sipped Szechen tea from a green celadon cup—that gorgeous green, in honour of the season. One of those visiting this morning was a source of great sorrow, another promised to be a diversion. In late-morning light he thought about emperors and court factions and the arc of a man’s life. You could live too long, he thought, as well as not long enough.

Some lives didn’t actually have an arc, not in the eyes of the world. Yes, everyone could pass from tottering child to vigorous man and then become someone for whom a change in the weather or a walk as far as the gazebo in his garden brought an ache in knees and back, but that wasn’t a career arc. A farmer didn’t arc, he passed through good or bad years, depending on the weather, on locusts, on whether a son was drafted into the army and marched away to war at sowing time.

But a civil servant in Kitai could rise and fall—and rise and fall again, depending on the mood at court, on whether a battle had been lost in the west or a comet seen in the sky, frightening an emperor. He could even be exiled—a greater fall, like a celestial object hurtling to the earth.

That kind of fall could kill you if you were sent all the way south to the lands of sickness and decay.

He had friends down there now. If they were still alive. Letters came infrequently from towards the pearl divers’ sea. It was a grief. These were men he had loved. The world was a hard place. One needed to learn that.

He was exiled himself, of course, but only this far, only to Yenling, his family home. A distance from court, from influence, but not a hardship.

He was too well known, too widely admired for even Hang Dejin and his followers to ask the emperor to do more. Even a prime minister set on changing the ways of a thousand years knew better than to push too hard on that.

In fairness, it was unlikely that Prime Minister Hang wanted him dead. They had exchanged letters and even a poetry sequence once. Years ago, but still. They had debated policies with courtesy before the last emperor, though not in front of the son, the current one. Times changed. Arcs. His old rival Hang was … old now, too. It was said his eyesight was failing. There were others, younger, colder, near the throne now.

Still, he had only been ordered away from Hanjin, from palace and office. He was allowed his own house and garden, books and brush, ink stone and paper. He hadn’t been driven ten thousand li south to a place from which men did not return.

They didn’t execute out-of-favour civil servants in the Twelfth Dynasty of Kitai under the Emperor Wenzong. That, he thought wryly, would have been barbaric, and theirs was an emperor of exquisite cultivation. They just sent members of the disgraced faction away, sometimes so far that their ghosts couldn’t even return to threaten anyone.

One of the two men coming to him today was on his way to a savage exile: across the Great River and the rice-rich lands, over two mountain ranges, through thick, wet forests, all the way to the low-lying, poisonous island that was only nominally part of the empire.

Lingzhou was where the very worst political offenders were sent. They were expected to write their last letters or poems in the steaming heat and die.

He’d been a pupil once, the one going there now, a follower, though he’d moved far beyond that. Another man he loved. Perhaps (probably?) the one he’d loved most of all of them. It would be important today, Master Xi told himself sternly, to preserve equanimity. He would break a willow twig in farewell, the old custom, but he must not shame himself or weaken the other with an old man’s tears.

It was a reason he’d invited the second visitor. To change the tone and mood. Impose the restraint that preserved dignity, the illusion that this was not a final meeting. He was old, his friend was banished. Truth was, they were never going to climb again to a high place on the Ninth of Ninth Festival and celebrate friendship with too much wine.

It was important not to think about that.

Old men wept too easily.

He saw one of his woman servants, the young one, coming from the house and through the garden. He preferred messages to be brought by the women, not his steward. It was unusual, but he was in his own home, could devise his own protocols, and he so much enjoyed the sight of this one—in blue silk today, her hair elegantly pinned (both things also unusual, she was only a servant)—as she approached along the curved pathway to the gazebo where he sat. He had curved all the paths when he designed his small garden, just as they were curved or angled at court. Demons could only travel a straight line.

She bowed twice, announced his first visitor. The amusing one, as it turned out. He wasn’t really in a mood for that, but he didn’t want to be desperately sad when the other one came. There were too many memories, called back by a springtime morning.

Then he saw that Lin Kuo had someone with him, and his mood did change a little. It was a source of immediate inward wryness. He had always been able to laugh at himself. A saving feature in a powerful man. But how was it that even today, at his age, the sight of a very young girl, fresh-faced to face the world, graceful and awkward at the same time (she was tall for a woman, he saw), poised on the threshold of life, could still enchant him so much?

Once, a long time ago—another memory, a different kind—his enemies had tried to drive him from power by claiming he’d incestuously seduced a young cousin. There had been a trial. The accusation had been a lie and they had failed, but they’d been clever with it, and there was an interval when his friends had feared for him. This had been in the years when the faction ugliness at court had begun to claim lives.

His accusers had presented a song at the trial, purporting to be something he’d written to her. It was even a good song. You needed to respect your foes at this court. But the real cleverness had been that they’d chosen to attack him this way, given his well-known love of women.

All his life. His too-long life.

That sweet, shy cousin had died years ago, a wife and mother. His own wives had died, both of them. He’d liked the second one better. Two concubines were gone, and mourned. He hadn’t taken another. Two sons were dead. Three emperors he’d known. Too many friends (too many enemies) to name or number.

And still the girl approaching beside the long, eager figure of Lin Kuo caused him to set down his green cup and rise (despite his knees) to greet the two of them on his feet. It was a good thing, he told himself. You could be dead while alive, lose all taste for life, and he didn’t want to do that.

He had strong opinions on where Hang Dejin and his followers were leading the emperor with their New Policies, and he was vain enough to believe his views might matter, even now. He loathed the long, foolish war against the Kislik, for one thing.

Lin Kuo bowed three times, stopping and advancing, which was flattering but excessive from another jinshi scholar and an invited guest. His daughter stayed a proper two steps behind and performed a proper two bows. Then, after hesitating, she offered a third.

Xi Wengao stroked his narrow beard and kept a smile from his face: she was matching her father’s manners, out of respect, to be in step with him, but clearly she had been inclined to stop after the proper level of salutation.

Not a word spoken, already an interesting girl. Not formally beautiful, he noted, but an alert, curious face. He saw her glance at his celadon teacup and the lacquered tray, take in details of the gazebo. He’d had the upper panels painted by San Tsai in the style of Chang Shao of the Seventh Dynasty.

Tsai was also dead. Last year. Another friend gone.

“Councillor, it is a very great honour to see you again,” said Lin Kuo. He had a light, pleasant voice. Wengao wasn’t an imperial councillor any more, but he didn’t mind being called one.

“The honour is surely mine,” he said formally, “that you grace a sad exile’s home with your esteemed presence. And bringing …?”

“My daughter, councillor. Her name is Shan. I have long wished to show her the Peony Festival, and have presumed to bring her with me to meet your excellence.”

“No presumption at all. You are welcome, child.” He smiled this time.

She didn’t smile back; a watchful face. “It is a privilege for me, sir, to be in the presence of the man instrumental in elevating the status of written songs in our time. I have read your essay on the ci form, with profit and illumination.”

Xi Wengao blinked. This is a good thing, he told himself again. Something to be cherished. That life could still surprise you.

Even from a man, the words would have been assured, a supremely confident thing to say as a first remark. This was, of course, a girl. A young woman, obviously unmarried, a peony in her hair, another in her hand, and she stood in his garden, specifying that among all he’d done …

He sat down, motioned Lin Kuo to a chair. The tall man sat with another bow. The daughter remained standing, moving a little behind him. Wengao looked at her. “I will confess that essay is not what I normally expect to be saluted for.”

Lin Kuo laughed, indulgently. “She writes ci herself, councillor. I suspect she has wanted to say this to you for some time.”

The daughter flushed. Parents could create awkwardness for their children, but Kuo had spoken with a vivid, appealing pride. And Xi Wengao, for many reasons, had never subscribed to the more extreme limitations proposed by Cho teachers on the freedom allowed women in their time.

He knew too much about the past, for one thing. He loved women too much, for another. The ripple of voices, dance of eyes, their hands, their scent. The way some of them could read a gathering in an instant, and then guide it. He had known women like that. He had loved some of them.

“I shall enjoy reading or hearing her own ci, then,” he said, looking from daughter to seated father. Then he offered a gift, a kindness: “But come, come, let me see it! You wrote of having completed your book. Is it true, Master Lin?”

The father’s turn to flush. “Hardly a book! A mere essay, an exercise in a style, commentaries on a few gardens here. Including, of course, your own serene refuge.”

“Serene? This ill-tended space? You can hardly even call it a proper garden. I have no peonies, for one thing.” He meant it as a jest.

“Why not, sir, if I may ask?”

The girl had wide-set eyes and that direct gaze. She held a yellow peony in her left hand. She had slipped it into and out of the sleeve of her robe when she’d bowed with arms folded. He was a man who noticed things like that. She was dressed in green for spring, a shade very like that of his teacups.

He said, “I would dishonour them, Miss Lin. I lack the skill and patience to grow and graft the king of flowers, and have no gardener with those gifts. It seemed to me wise for an aged scholar to plan a garden around reserve, simplicity. Peonies are too passionate for me now.”

“Your writings are your flowers,” said Lin Kuo, which was certainly graceful enough. One could, Wengao thought, underestimate the fellow. For one thing, for a man to bring up a daughter able to speak as she just had suggested complexity.

Complexity. Xi Wengao had lived a life torn between the seductive lure of that and a hunger for simplicity. The palace, deadly battles there, and then solitude where he could take up his brush and write.

Had he chosen to be here it would have been one thing. But he had not, and Hang Dejin was still prime minister, implementing his New Policies with an increasingly vicious group of younger associates.

Kitai was at war under their guidance—foolish, futile war—and the government of a distracted emperor was vulgarly engaged in trade and commerce, even in loans to farmers (whether they wanted them or not). And now came word of a revision of the jinshi examination system that he, Wengao, had put in place himself.

So he wasn’t happy to be exiled just now, no.

He heard a sound from towards the house, quickly turned. Saw Lu Chen—the familiar, dearly loved face. He had come.

His protégé, his friend, was smiling—as always, it seemed—as he walked up behind the girl in blue. He was on his way, escorted by guards, to what was meant to be his death.

A lesson here, a bitter poem: you could enjoy the unexpected arrival of a young girl on a spring morning, but you couldn’t hide from heartbreak behind her slender form.

Chen had lost weight, he saw. Not surprising, in his present circumstances. A brown hemp traveller’s robe hung loosely upon him. His manner, though, as he approached the gazebo and bowed, was as it always was: genial, open, pleased by the world, ready to be engaged or amused by it. You would never know by looking at the man that he was as profound a thinker as the world had today, the acknowledged master poet of their age. Celebrated as belonging with the giants of the Third and Ninth.

He also shared, Wengao knew, some of those earlier poets’ legendary appreciation for good wine (or less-than-good wine, when occasion required).

Wengao stood up again, so did Lin Kuo, very quickly. For his own mild amusement, he had not alerted the court gentleman that there was another guest arriving, and obviously not who it was.

But every man with a connection to the literary or the political world knew Lu Chen—and his current fate. He wondered for a moment if the daughter would, then he saw the expression on her face.

He felt a flicker of envy, like a long tongue from an old fire. She hadn’t looked at him that way. But he was old, really old. Could barely stand from a chair without wincing. Chen wasn’t a young man—his hair under the black felt hat and his narrow, neat beard were both greying—but he didn’t have knees that made walking an ambitious exercise. He was straight-backed, still a handsome man, if thinner-faced than he ought to be, and seeming tired now, if you knew him and looked closely.

And he was the man who had written “Lines On the Cold Food Festival” and the “Red Cliff” poems, among others.

Wengao was properly (if judiciously) proud of his own poetry over the years, but he was also a good reader and a sound judge, and he knew whose lines deserved to be remembered. Who deserved the look a young girl offered now.

“You are drinking tea, my dear friend?” Chen exclaimed, in mock dismay. “I was relying on your spiced wine!”

“It will be brought for you,” Wengao replied gravely. “My doctors have advised that tea will serve me better at this hour of the day. I sometimes pretend to heed them.” He glanced briefly at his girl. She nodded, and headed back towards the house.

“Probably serve me better too.” Chen laughed. He turned. “I believe this is Court Gentleman Lin Kuo? Your late wife was a distant kinswoman of mine.”

“She was, honourable sir. You are gracious to recall it and to know me.”

“Hardly so!” Chen laughed again. “They were the better family in Szechen. We were the poor-but-earnest scholars in training.”

Not true about his family, Wengao knew, but typical of Chen. He made the other introduction himself.

“And here is Miss Lin Shan, daughter of Master Lin and his late wife. He has brought her to see the peonies.”

“As well he should,” said Chen. “The splendour of the flowers needs no further adornment, but we cannot have too much of beauty.”

The father looked amusingly happy. The daughter …

“You are too kind, Master Lu. It counts as a poet’s lie to suggest I have any beauty to add to Yenling in springtime.”

Chen’s smile became radiant, his delight manifestly unfeigned. “So you think poets are liars, Miss Lin?”

“I believe we have to be. Life and history must be adapted to the needs of our verses and songs. A poem is not a chronicle like a historian’s.” She looked at Xi Wengao with that last, and allowed herself—for the first time—a shy smile.

We. Our.

Wengao looked at her. He was wishing, again, that he was younger. He could remember being younger. His knees ached. So did his back, standing. He moved to sit again, carefully.

Lu Chen strode to the chair and helped the older man. He made it seem a gesture of respect, courtesy to a mentor, not a response to need. Wengao smiled up at him and gestured for the other two men to sit. There were only three chairs, he hadn’t known the girl was coming.

The girl was astonishing.

He asked, because he couldn’t help himself, though it was too quick, “Old friend, how much time do we have with you?”

Chen didn’t let his smile fade at all. “Ah! That depends on how good the wine proves to be when it arrives.”

Wengao shook his head. “Tell me.”

There were no secrets here. The two Lins would know—everyone knew—that Chen had been banished to Lingzhou Isle. It was said that the deputy prime minister, Kai Zhen—a man Wengao despised—was in charge of these matters now, as the prime minister aged.

Wengao had heard it said there were a dozen kinds of spiders and snakes on Lingzhou that could kill you, and that the evening wind carried disease. There were tigers.

Chen said quietly, “I imagine I can stay one or two nights. There are four guards accompanying me, but as long as I mostly keep moving south, and offer them food and wine, I believe I’ll be permitted some stops to visit friends.”

“And your brother?”

The younger brother, also a jinshi scholar, had also been exiled (families seldom escaped), but not so far, not to where he’d be expected to die.

“Chao’s with his family at the farm by the Great River. I’ll go that way. My wife is with them, and will stay. We have land, he can farm it. They may eat chestnuts some winters but …”

He left the thought unfinished. Lu Chao, the younger brother, had a wife and six children. He had passed the examinations startlingly young, ranked third in the year his older brother was first. Had received the honours that came with that, held very high office, served twice as an emissary to the Xiaolu in the north.

He had also remonstrated steadily, speaking out at court and in written memoranda against the New Policies of Hang Dejin, arguing carefully and well, with passion.

You paid a price for that. Dissent and opposition were no longer acceptable. But the younger brother wasn’t the poet and thinker who had shaped the intellectual climate of their day. So he had been exiled, yes, but would be permitted to try to survive. Like Wengao himself, here in his own garden in his own city. Undoubtedly, Kai Zhen would congratulate himself on being a compassionate man, a judicious servant of the emperor, attentive to the teachings of the Masters.

Sometimes it was difficult to escape bitterness. They were living, Wengao thought, schooling his features, in a terrible time.

His guest said, changing the mood, turning to the girl, “As to poets and lies, you may be right, Miss Lin, but would you not agree that even if we alter details we may aspire to deeper truth, not only offer falsehoods?”

She flushed again, so directly addressed. She held her head high, though. She was the only one standing, again behind her father’s chair. She said, “Some poets, perhaps. But tell me, what man has written verses about courtesans or palace women happy in themselves, not wasting away or shedding tears on balconies in sorrow for vanished lovers? Does anyone think this is the only truth for their lives?”

Lu Chen thought about it, giving her his full attention. “Does that mean it is not a truth at all? If someone writes of a particular woman, must he intend her to stand for every single one?”

His voice in debate was as remembered, crisp and emphatic. Delighted to be engaged, even by a girl. Thrust and counter-thrust, as with a sword. No one at court knew how to use a sword any more. Kitai had changed; men had changed. This was a woman debating with Chen, however. You had to remind yourself it was a girl, listening to her.

She said, “But if only the one tale is told, over and over, no others at all, what will readers decide is true?” She hesitated, and Wengao caught what must—really?—be mischief in her eyes. “If a great poet tells us he is at the Red Cliff of a legendary battle, and he is, in fact, fifty or a hundred li upriver, what will travellers in a later day think when they come to that place?”

She lowered her gaze and clasped her hands demurely.

Wengao burst out laughing. He clapped in approval, rocking back and forth. It was well known that Lu Chen had indeed mistaken where he was, boating on the Great River with friends on a full moon night. He’d decided he and his companions had drifted under the cliffs of the famous Third Dynasty battle … and he’d been wrong.

Chen was grinning at the girl. He was a man who could be moved to passionate fury, but not by a conversation such as this. Here, playing with words and thoughts, he was in his element, and joyous. You could almost forget where he was going.

One or two nights he’d said he could stay.

Chen turned to the father, who was also smiling, though cautiously. Lin Kuo would be ready to beat a retreat. But Chen bowed to him, and said, “I honour the father of such a daughter. You will be careful in how she is wed, Court Gentleman?”

“I have been, I believe,” the other man said. “She is betrothed to Qi Wai, the son of Qi Lao. They will be wed after the New Year.”

“The Qi family? The imperial clan? What degree of relationship?”

“Sixth degree. So it is all right,” said the father.

Within five degrees of kinship to the emperor, imperial clan members could marry only with permission of the court office in charge of them. Outside that degree, they led a more normal life, though could never hold office, or take the examinations, and they were all required to live in the clan compound in Hanjin beside the palace.

Imperial kin had always been a problem for emperors, especially those not entirely secure on the Dragon Throne. Once, the nearer males in line might have been killed (many times they had been, in wide, bloody reapings), but Twelfth Dynasty Kitai prided itself on being civilized.

Of course it did, Wengao thought, looking at his friend. These days the clan was simply locked away from the world, each of them given a monthly stipend, dowries for the women, the cost of burial rites—all of which was a serious budgetary concern, because there were so many of them now.

“Qi Wai?” he said. “I don’t know him. I believe I have met the father. The son is an intelligent man, may I hope?”

“He is a young historian, a collector of antiquities.”

It was the girl, speaking up for herself, for her husband-to-be. This was inappropriate, of course. Xi Wengao had already decided he didn’t care. He was a little in love. He wanted her to speak.

“That sounds promising,” said Chen.

“I would not inflict my unruly daughter on a man I felt incapable of accepting her nature,” the father said. “I beg forgiveness for her impertinence.” Again, despite the words, you could hear pride.

“As well you should!” cried Lu Chen. “She has just reminded me of one of my most grievous errors in verse!”

A short silence, as the father tried to decide if Chen was truly offended.

“The poems are wonderful,” the girl said, eyes downcast again. “I have them committed to memory.”

Chen grinned at her. “And thus, so easily, I am assuaged. Men,” he added, “are too readily placated by a clever woman.”

“Women,” she murmured, “have too little choice but to placate.”

They heard a sound. None of them had seen the servant approaching again in her blue silk. Xi Wengao knew this girl very well (she spent some nights warming him). She wasn’t happy just now. That, too, was predictable, if unacceptable.

The wine would be good. His people knew which wines to offer guests, and Lu Chen was known to be his favourite.

Wengao and the girl (of course) had tea. Lin Kuo joined Chen in drinking the spiced wine, doing it as a courtesy to the poet, Wengao decided. Food was brought. They lingered in morning light, listening to birdsong in his garden, in a gazebo decorated with paintings by San Tsai, done in a style of long ago.

SHE IS AWARE that the servant girl from the garden this morning doesn’t like her, though a servant (even a favoured one) ought not to let that show.

The girl probably thinks she isn’t revealing it, Shan decides. But there are ways for a servant to stand, or respond just a little slowly to requests or orders. There are even ways of unpacking a guest’s belongings in the chamber offered her for the night, and messages can be read in such things.

She is used to this. For some time it has been true of almost every woman she meets, of whatever rank or status. Men tend to be made uneasy, or sometimes amused, by Shan. Women dislike her.

It is not at all certain, to this point in her life, if her father has really given her a gift with how he’s chosen to educate her.

Some gifts are complex, she has long ago decided. Small things can change a life, a poet had written, and that is true, but the equally obvious truth is that large things can do the same. Her brother’s death had been a large thing, in their family if not in the world.

In the years that followed it, the only other child, the thin, clever daughter, had received, slowly at first, as an experiment—the way an Arcane Path alchemist might gradually heat liquid in a flask—and then more decisively, the education a boy was offered if he intended to try for the jinshi examinations and a civil servant’s robe.

She wasn’t, of course, going to write any examinations, or wear robes with the belt of any rank at all, but her father had given her the learning to do so. And he had made her perfect her writing skills and the brush strokes of her calligraphy.

The songs, the ci, she had discovered on her own.

By now, her brush strokes are more confident than his. If it is true, as some said and wrote, that the innermost nature of a person shows in their calligraphy, then her father’s caution and diffidence are there to be seen in his neat, straight, formal hand. Only when he’d travelled and written letters home in a running hand (no one but Shan and her mother had ever seen that hand) did his passion for life show through. From the world Lin Kuo hides this, in his writing, in his lanky, agreeable, slightly stooped form.

Her own hand, in both formal and running scripts, is bolder, stronger. Too much so for a woman, she knows. Everything about her life is like that.

The servant has withdrawn at her command, again just a little too slowly. And she’s left the door not quite fully closed on the dark corridor. Shan thinks of calling her back, but doesn’t.

The room is at the back of the house, nearest the garden. Master Xi’s home is too deliberately modest to have a separate wing for women, let alone a building, but the men are at the front. She isn’t sure if their host and the poet have gone to bed. Her father has. Father and daughter had withdrawn from the dining room together, to leave the two old friends time alone by lamplight, with wine. It wasn’t an action that needed to be discussed. So much sadness here, Shan thinks, however much Xi Wengao has tried to hide it.

There are noises in the garden at night. A flap of wings, cry of an owl, crickets, wind in leaves, wind chimes, faintly. Shan sees that their host has left two books for her in the room. A lamp with a long wick is lit to read by if she wants. One text is a scroll, the other a printed book, beautifully stitched binding. There is a desk, a single chair. The bed is large, curtained, a curved blue ceramic pillow with a painting of white plum blossoms.

Master Xi is old enough to simply enjoy what she is, not be disturbed by it. He appears to find her learning amusing. Not necessarily the response she wants. But she is seventeen, and a girl. What response did one expect?

Perhaps, inwardly—not for speaking aloud—what she really wants is for the songs, the ci she labours to craft, to be read or heard, and considered for their merits—or lack of them. She isn’t vain, she knows how much she doesn’t know yet.

Lu Chen had said at dinner that he’d like to hear them sung.

He is, in many ways, the master of all men of their day, the poets and thinkers, at any rate. Yet he smiled easily, laughed with abandonment, jesting through the meal, pulling the three of them in that direction, scattering toasts (even to her!) from a steadily refilled wine cup. Forcing the mood towards lightness. Towards it, but not really arriving there.

He is going to Lingzhou Isle. The expectation is that he will die. That is what happens there. There is a weight of pain, almost of panic inside Shan when she thinks about it. And something else she can’t identify. Bereavement? The bitter wine of loss-to-come? She feels a strangeness, almost wants to weep.

Men broke willow twigs when parting from friends, a gesture of farewell, entreating heaven for a return. But could you break a twig for someone going where Lu Chen was going? With so many rivers and mountains between?

She had been too bold in those first moments this morning. She knows it, knew it as she spoke. She’d felt awed by his arrival, overwhelmed—but fiercely determined not to yield to that or show it. Sometimes, Shan is aware, she feels so strong a need to be seen and heard that she forces an encounter, declaring her presence.

Look at me! she can hear herself crying. And no one wants to be ordered to do that.

In a way, she is too much the opposite of her father, who stands among others as if ready to take a step backwards, saying with his posture, his clasped hands, I am not even here if you don’t wish me to be.

She loves him, honours him, wants to protect him, wants him to be properly seen as well, even if he is happier withdrawing towards shadows. There are only the two of them in the world. Until she weds and leaves the house.

It is too easy to dismiss Lin Kuo, his daughter thinks for the hundredth time or more. Even his small book on the gardens here, presented to Master Xi today. Of course it isn’t an important work, but it is carefully, wittily done, offers observations that might last: a portrait in words of Yenling, a part of it, in these years of the dynasty under Emperor Wenzong, may he reign a thousand years upon the Dragon Throne.

It is called the Dragon Throne again. She must be tired, or overtired, her thoughts are drifting. Shan knows why it has that name once more. She has learned such things because of her father. They are there for her, in her mind. Can you unlearn? Go back to being something else? A girl like all the others?

At their dynasty’s founding, the court sages and philosophers had decreed that one reason for the fall of the glorious Ninth had been their deviation from right behaviour—an overindulgence in the ways and symbols of women. And foremost of these had been renaming the imperial throne the Phoenix Throne.

The phoenix is the female principle, the dragon is male.

Empress Hao of the early Ninth made that change while ruling as regent for her young son, and then ruling in spite of him when he grew older and wanted—in vain—to govern in his own name.

He died, instead. It is generally believed he was poisoned. The title and decoration of the Ninth Dynasty throne was not changed back after Empress Hao herself passed to the gods. And then, at the height of that dynasty’s glory, came General An Li, accursed in Kitai and in heaven, bringing terrible rebellion.

Even after peace was finally restored, glory was never the same. Everything changed. Even the poetry. You couldn’t write or think the same way after eight years of death and savagery and all they’d lost.

The lion in the wild, wolves in the cities.

And then, years later, that diminished dynasty finally crumbled away, so that still more chaos and war came to blood-soaked Kitai, through a hundred years of brief, failed dynasties and fragmented kingdoms.

Until the Twelfth rose, their own, a new glory.

A more limited glory, mind you, with the Long Wall lost and crumbling, barbarians south of it, the Silk Roads no longer Kitai’s, the Fourteen Prefectures lost.

But they called the throne the Dragon Throne again, and told cautionary tales about ceding too much influence to women. In the palace, in the home. Women are to remain in their inner quarters, to offer no opinions on matters of … on anything, really. They dress more soberly now. No long, wide sleeves, no bright colours, low-cut gowns, intoxicating scents at court or in a garden.

Shan lives these realities, and she knows their origins: the theories and writings, disputes and interpretations. She knows the great names and their works and deeds. She’s steeped in poetry, has memorized verses from the Third and Seventh, the Ninth, before and after the rebellion.

Some lines were remembered through everything that happened.

But who knew what words or deeds would last? Who made these decisions? Was surviving down the years a matter of accident as much as excellence?

She stands by the desk and lamp, suddenly weary, without even the energy to cross the room and close the door the servant has left ajar. It has been an intense day.

She is seventeen, and will be wed next year. She doesn’t think (though she might be wrong) that either of the men here fully grasped her father’s careful choice of a husband for her from the imperial clan.

A daughter-in-law in Kitai is the servant of her husband’s parents. She leaves her home and becomes a lesser figure in theirs. The parents can even send her back (and keep her dowry) if she is judged insufficiently respectful. Her father has spared her that, knowing what she is (what he has caused her to be).

The imperial clan have all the servants any of them will ever need, paid for by the court office that administers the clan. They have doctors assigned, and entertainers and alchemists and cooks. Astrologers, though only by daylight and with permission. They have sedan chairs, single or double, at their disposal when they wish to (again with permission) leave the compound by the palace, where they are expected to live forever.

There are funds for formal clothing and adornments for banquets or ceremonies when their presence is required. They are creatures to be displayed, symbols of the dynasty. They are buried in the clan graveyard—which is here in Yenling. There isn’t enough room in Hanjin. From one graveyard to another, someone had once said.

A woman marrying into the clan lives a different life. And it can be a good life, depending on the woman, on her husband, on the will of heaven.

She will have a husband, less than a year from now. She has met him. That, too, is unusual, though not forbidden—and such matters are conducted differently within the imperial clan. Her father’s jinshi degree, his status as a court gentleman, had given more than enough stature for him to address, through intermediaries, a family in the clan. Marrying into the imperial ranks isn’t universally desired. It is such a sequestered life, shaped by ceremony and regulation, so many living so closely together as their numbers grow.

But for Shan it offers a promise of sorts. Among these people, already marked apart, her own differences might blend, silk threads weaving with each other. It is possible.

And Wai—Qi Wai—is a student himself, her father had determined. A little different, too, it seems. A man (a boy, still, really) who has already travelled (with permission) to search out ancient steles and bronzes in the countryside, and brought them home to catalogue.

This wasn’t your usual son of the indolent imperial clan, pursuing wine and pleasure in the entertainment districts of Hanjin because there was no ambition possible for him. Sometimes, perhaps out of boredom as much as anything, some of them drifted into intrigues against the throne. They were executed for that.

Qi Wai had been stiff but courteous, sitting with his mother and her aunt on the one occasion they were together, taking tea, after the first negotiations had proceeded satisfactorily. Her father had made it clear to her (and to them, she believed): in his view the marriage turned on the two young people finding or anticipating an affinity.

Shan thought they had, at least potentially, that day.

He’d looked younger than her (was a year older). He was plump, had the wispy beginnings of a scholar’s chin beard. The attempt at dignity that implied was amusing at first, then endearing. He had small, smooth hands. His voice was low but clear. He’d be feeling shy, too, she remembers thinking.

She had taken pains with her appearance, which she didn’t always do, but her father had worked hard and carefully to arrange this meeting, and he deserved that much of her. Besides, it was all interesting. She’d worn blue liao silk in a sober cut, gold-and-lapis-lazuli hairpins. Her lapis earrings, too. They had been her mother’s.

She allowed Wai to see her mind working as they talked. He’d know about her eccentric education by now, but she didn’t push forward her manner of thinking the way she sometimes did, to provoke a response.

He spoke—this man, Qi Wai, who would, apparently, be her husband—of a rare Fifth Dynasty stele he’d found north of the capital, close to the border with the Xiaolu. She wondered if he had been trying to impress her with his bravery going up there, then decided he didn’t think that way. There was a long-established peace, trade, a treaty. He’d gone to where he’d heard there were antiquities to be found. The border hadn’t entered his mind.

He became animated talking about this funerary stele, the writing on it. The record of some long-dead civil servant’s life and deeds. She had to see it, he urged. Perhaps tomorrow?

Even at that first meeting it had occurred to Shan that she might have to become the practical one in this marriage.

She could manage that, she’d thought. Wai hadn’t recognized a quote from a poem she’d offered without emphasis, but it wasn’t a well-known line, and he’d seemed at ease discussing with a woman how objects from the past excited him. She’d decided there were worse passions to share with a husband.

The idea of sharing wasn’t usually a part of marriage. (Nor was passion, really.)

Her father had offered her another gift here, it seemed. If the boy was still a boy, a little eccentric and intense, he would grow (she would grow). The mother hadn’t seemed overwhelming, though the usual disapproval of Shan’s education was there. It was always there.

She’d bowed to her father, after, and told him she would be honoured to marry Qi Wai if the Qi family approved of her, and that she hoped to bring grandchildren one day for him to teach as he’d taught her. She holds to that. She can picture it.

This evening, however, listening to crickets in the night, she finds herself sad and restless, both. Part of this will be the adventure of where they are. Travel has not been a great part of her life. Yenling at festival time can make anyone overexcited. Not to mention the men she’s met today: the one in whose home they are sleeping, and the other one.

She ought never to have said what she’d said about his “Red Cliff” poems. What had she been thinking? He’d have decided, right then, in the gazebo, that she was a vain, presumptuous girl, evidence of the error of educating women. He had laughed, smiled, engaged in conversation with her, but men could do that and think very different thoughts.

She had told him she’d memorized the two poems. She hopes he’ll remember that, accept it for the apology it was (partly) meant to be.

It is dark outside the silk-paper windows. No moon tonight, the crickets continuing, wind, the birds quiet now. She glances at the bed. She isn’t sleepy any more. She is gazing at the books on the desk when she hears a footfall in the corridor.

She is not afraid. She has time to wonder at herself, that she seems to have not closed her door after all, when he steps inside.

“I saw the light,” he says, quietly.

Half a truth. His chamber is at the front, other side of the dining chamber. He had to have come this way in order to see her light. Her mind works like this. Her heart is racing, she notes. She is truly not fearful, though. Words are important. You don’t think or write afraid when it is the wrong word.

She is still wearing the blue jacket with gold buttons from dinner, there are phoenixes on it. Her hair is still pinned, though without the flower now, which is in a vase by the bed.

She bows to him. You can start with a bow.

He says, not smiling, “I shouldn’t be here.”

Of course he shouldn’t, Shan thinks. It is an offence against courtesy—to her, to her father, to their host.

She does not say that. She says, “I should not have left the door open.”

He looks at her. His eyes are grave above a long nose and the neat, grey-and-black chin beard. His own hair is also pinned, no hat, the men had removed their hats at dinner, a gesture meant to indicate freedom from restraint. There are lines at the corners of his eyes. She wonders how much he’s had to drink, how it affects him. The stories, widely shared, say it doesn’t, very much.

He says, “I’d have seen a light under the door. I could have knocked.”

“I would have opened it for you,” she says.

She hears herself say that and is amazed. But not afraid.

He is still beside the door, has not come farther in.

“Why?” he asks, still quietly. He has been cheerful all day, for the three of them. Not now. “Why would you have opened it? Because I am being sent away?”

She finds herself nodding. “That is also the reason you are here, isn’t it?”

She watches him consider it. Is pleased he hasn’t offered the too-easy, quick denial, flattering her. “One reason,” he murmurs.

“One reason for me, then, too,” she says, from where she stands by the desk, by the bed, near the lamp and two flowers.

Something shrieks from the garden, sudden and loud. Shan startles, catches herself. She is too much on edge, not that it is surprising. Something has just died outside.

“A cat hunting,” he says. “Perhaps a fox. Even amid beauty and order, that happens.”

“And when there is no beauty, no order?”

She regrets that, even as she says it. She’s pushing again.

But he smiles. First time since entering. He says, “I am not going to the island intending to die, Miss Lin.”

She can’t think of what to say to that. Say nothing, for once, she tells herself. He is looking at her from across the room. She can’t read that gaze. She has brought only ordinary hairpins to travel, but wears her mother’s earrings.

He says, “People live on Lingzhou Isle, you know that. I just said the same thing to Wengao.”

People who have grown up there, she thinks. Who grow accustomed to (if they survive childhood) the diseases and the endless, steaming rainfall and the heat.

She says, “There are … there are spiders.”

He grins at that. She has meant for him to do so, wonders if he knows. “Enormous spiders, yes. The size of houses, they tell me.”

“And they eat men?”

“Poets, I am told. Twice a year a number of spiders come from the forests into the square of the one town and they must be fed a poet or they will not leave. There is a ceremony.”

She allows herself a brief smile. “A reason not to write poetry?”

“I am told they make prisoners at the yamen compose a verse in order to receive their meals.”

“How cruel. And that qualifies them as poets?”

“The spiders are not critical, I understand.”

He will be another kind of prisoner there. Not in a jail, but watched, forbidden to leave. This folly is not as amusing as he wants it to be, Shan thinks.

He seems to come to the same conclusion. “I asked if you would offer me one or two of your songs, if you remember?”

Remember? Men can say the strangest things. But she shakes her head. “Not now. Not like this.”

“Poetry suits a bedchamber. Songs even more.”

Stubbornly she shakes her head again, looking down.

“Why?” he asks gently.

She hasn’t expected gentleness. She meets his gaze across the room. “Because that is not why you came,” she says.

His turn to fall silent. Mostly silence outside now, as well, after that death in the garden. Wind in the plum trees. Spring night. And now, Shan realizes, she is afraid, after all.

It is not easy, she thinks, to make your way in the world while insisting on a new path. She has never been touched by a man. She is to be married early next year.

And this man is past her father’s age, has a son older than her, a first wife dead, a second living with his brother’s family, for Lu Chen will not bring her to the island with him—whatever he might say about not going south to die. He has had concubines, written poems for them and for pleasure-district courtesans. It is said that if he named a red-lantern girl in a poem, she could triple her rates. She doesn’t know if he is taking a woman south with him.

She doesn’t think he is. His son will be coming, to be a companion. And perhaps to bury his father one day, or bring the body north for burial, if that is allowed.

Lu Chen says, “I am not so vain, or unmannerly, to have imagined anything beyond talking here tonight.”

She draws a breath, and with it (with his words) her fear seems to have gone, as quickly as it had flowered within. She can even smile, carefully, looking down.

“Not even imagined?” she asks.

Hears him laugh, her reward. “I deserve that,” the poet says. “But, Miss Lin …” His tone has changed, she looks up. “We may imagine much, but not always allow these visions to enter the world. We all live this way.”

“Must we?” she asks.

“I think so. The world falls apart, otherwise. There are men I have imagined killing, for example.”

She can guess who one or two of those might be. She draws a breath, finding courage. “I think … I think you meant to honour me, coming here. Sharing these thoughts. I know how wide the space is between us, because of my sex, my age, my inexperience. I want only to tell you that I am not … that you need not …”

She is short of breath. Shakes her head impatiently. Pushes forwards. Says, “You need not assume I would be offended if you came into the room now, Master Chen.”

There. Said. And the world has not broken asunder. No other animal has screamed outside. Burning suns are not falling, shot down by arrows of legend.

And she will not, she will not live defined or controlled by what others think or say. Because this is the life, the path, hard and lonely, her father has put her on—never realizing it would be so, never intending this when he began to teach her and they discovered, together, that she was quicker and brighter and perhaps even deeper than almost any man they knew.

But not more so than this one. He is looking at her with a different expression now. But has not stepped forward, and whatever she is, however bold she might force herself to be, she cannot cross to him. It is beyond her.

He says, unexpectedly, “You might make me weep, Miss Lin. Thinking of your life.”

She blinks at that. “Not what I want to do.”

“I know that.” A faint smile. “The world is not going to allow you to be what you might be. You understand?”

She lifts her head. “It hasn’t allowed you to be. Why should it let—”

“Not the same. You know it.”

She does. Lowers her head.

“Nor need you challenge it with every breath, every encounter. You will break yourself, as if on rocks.”

“You did. You challenged. You’ve never held back from saying when you thought ministers or even the emperor were—”

“Again, not the same. I have been allowed to find my view of the world, and give voice to it. There are risks to doing so, changing times make for changing fortunes, but it is still not the same as what lies ahead of you.”

She feels chastened, and yet oddly reassured, sustained. He sees her. She makes herself meet his gaze. “Is this how you always respond when a woman offers you—”

A third time he stops her, a lifted hand this time. Not smiling. She is silent, waits.

He gives her (she will always remember it that way) a gift. “No woman, or man, has ever offered quite what you just have. I would destroy the gift by accepting it. It is necessary, for both of us, that I leave you now. Please believe I am honoured beyond words or deserving, and that I will be equally honoured to read your writing when you choose to send it to me.”

Shan swallows hard. Hears him say, “You are now another reason why I intend to survive Lingzhou and return. I would like to watch you live your life.”

“I don’t …” She is finding it difficult to speak. “I don’t think I will be so much worth watching.”

His smile, celebrated, harnessed to the intransigence of courage. “I think you will,” says Lu Chen.

He bows to her. Does it twice. Walks from the room.

Closes the door quietly behind him.

She stands where she has been standing. She is aware of her breathing, the beating of her heart, is conscious of her body in a new way. She sees the lamp, the books, flowers, the bed.

One difficult breath. Her mouth a thin line of determination. She will not live the life others choose for her.

She crosses the room, opens the door.

The hallway is dark but the light from her room spills into it. He turns at the sound, a figure in the corridor, halfway along. She steps into the hallway. She looks at his dark shape in the shadows the world offers her (offers all of them). But there is light. Behind her in the room, and sometimes there may even be light ahead. He has stopped. She can see he has turned to look at her. There will be light for him to see her, where she stands.

“Please?” she says.

And extends a hand, holding it out towards the shape of a good man, in the darkness of a house that is not hers, and a world that is.