Читать книгу River of Stars - Guy Gavriel Kay - Страница 12

She has made herself wait before trying again, striving for inner harmony, sitting very still at her writing desk. The first three attempts at the letter have been unsatisfactory. She is aware that tension, fear, the importance of what she is writing are affecting her brush.

That must not be permitted. She breathes deeply, eyes on a lotus tree she’s always liked in the courtyard. It is very early morning, autumn. Outside her window the compound is quiet, even with the extreme crowding in the space assigned the imperial family members.

She is alone in their house. Her husband is away, north, in search of steles to buy or transcribe, bronzes, artifacts for their collection. It is a collection now; they are becoming known for it.

Qi Wai is travelling near the border again, towards the lands possessed (for a long time now) by the Xiaolu. It ought to be all right. They are at peace—a peace they buy each year. Her husband’s father has told them that most of their silver comes back in trade at the authorized border trading towns. He approves of the payments, though if he did not he wouldn’t say so. Members of the imperial family live watched, careful lives.

In dealings with the Xiaolu, the Kitan emperor is still the “uncle,” the emperor of the Xiaolu is his “nephew.” The uncle kindly gives “gifts” to the nephew. It is a fiction, a courtly lie, but lies can be important in the world, Lin Shan has come to understand.

The world is a terrible place.

She chides herself, inwardly. Bitter thoughts will not bring calm. She ruined her first attempt at the letter not only with an anxious brush but with a tear that fell on the page, making the strokes for the word councillor blur and run.

On the desk are the Four Treasures of the Room of Literature: ink stone, ink stick, paper, brushes. Her husband brought her back a red ink stone, offered it as a gift at the New Year’s Festival. It is beautiful, old, Fourth Dynasty, he thinks.

For this letter, though, she is using her own first ink stone, from childhood. The one her father gave her. There might be, she thinks, some magic residing in it, a spiritual power to make the ink it grinds more persuasive.

She needs it to be, or her heart will break.

She takes up her stick again, pours water from the beaker into the ink stone’s hollow. Gestures she has performed all her life, rituals by now. She grinds the black ink stick into the stone, using her left hand as she has been taught (by her father).

She knows exactly what she wants to say in this letter, how many characters, how much ink she needs. You always grind a little more than you need, she has been taught (by her father). If you are forced to grind again, in order to finish, the texture at the end of your writing will be different from the beginning, a flaw.

She sets the ink stick down. Lifts the brush in her right hand. Dips it in the ink. She is using the rabbit’s-hair brush for this letter: it makes the most precise characters. Sheep’s hair is more bold, but though she needs the letter to seem confident of its virtue, it is still a plea.

She sits as she must sit. She adopts the Pillowed-Wrist Position, left hand under right wrist, supporting it. Her characters are to be small, exact, not large and assertive (for which she’d have used Raised-Wrist Position). The letter will be in formal hand. Of course it will.

A writer’s brush is a warrior’s bow, the letters it shapes are arrows that must hit the mark on the page. The calligrapher is an archer, or a general on a battlefield. Someone wrote that long ago. She feels that way this morning. She is at war.

Her brush is directly above the paper, vertical. Each finger plays a part. Her grip is firm; the strength of arm and wrist must be controlled and sure.

Controlled and sure. It is imperative that she not weep. She looks out the window again. A single servant has appeared, is sweeping the courtyard in morning light. Another brush, a broom.

She begins.

His eyesight had become the important difficulty. He didn’t sleep easily these nights, and he didn’t walk as he used to, but what old man did? Too much wine gave him headaches, beginning while he drank, not even waiting politely for morning. Such sad things were part of what time did to men when the hair turned white and the sword arm failed, as a poet had written.

The prime minister of Kitai had never had a sword arm. The very idea was, briefly, amusing. And senior court officials didn’t walk very much (or at all) within the palace or outside it. He had a cushioned, covered, ornately gilded chair and bearers to carry him where he needed to go.

And he could destroy people without touching a blade.

No, the infirmity that mattered was his sight. It was reading letters, tax records, prefectural documents, memoranda, reports from informants that had become a challenge. There was a cloudiness at the edge of each eye now, creeping inwards like mist over water, approaching the land. You could make that image a symbol for a poem, but only if you wanted to let others know this was happening, and he didn’t. It wasn’t safe.

His son helped him. Hsien seldom left his side, and they had tricks to conceal his trouble. It was important at this court not to be seen as so aged and frail one couldn’t even read the morning’s civil service documents.

He half believed that some of those who’d be happier if he was gone had taken to using deliberately small calligraphy, to show up his difficulty. It would be clever if they were doing that, the sort of thing he might have done himself once. He lived under few illusions. Emperors were capricious, unstable. Power was not a dependable condition.

Hang Dejin, still prime minister to the sage and illustrious Emperor Wenzong, often thought of retiring.

He had asked the emperor for permission to do so many times over the years, but those had been ploys, a public stand in the face of opposition at court. If the emperor in his wisdom thinks his servant is misguided, I beg leave to withdraw in shame.

He’d have been shocked if any of those requests had been accepted.

Lately, he had begun to wonder what would happen if he offered again. Times changed, men changed. The long Kislik war was going badly. The emperor still didn’t know the extent of that. If and when he learned, there could—there would—be consequences. That needed managing. It could be done, there were ways, but Dejin knew he wasn’t the man he had been even three years ago.

If blame for the fighting fell to him—and it could—that would almost certainly mean disgrace and departure (or worse). In that case, the deputy prime minister, Kai Zhen, would surely succeed him. And would dominate Kitai, given an emperor with a preference for painting, calligraphy (his own was widely seen as the most elegant in the world), and the extravagant garden he was building north and east of this palace.

The garden (the Genyue), and the Flowers and Rocks Network to supply it, had been Kai Zhen’s idea. A brilliant one, in so many ways. Dejin had approved of it originally, and reaped the benefit of the emperor’s distraction for some time. There might now be a price to be paid.

The question was, who would do the paying?

Deputy Minister Kai probably believed he was ruling now, Dejin thought wryly. After all, there was only an old, almost-blind man between him and the emperor, and though Zhen might speak of honouring his superior for initiating the reform policies, there was little doubt in Hang Dejin’s mind that the younger man saw the older one as weak now, trammelled in old ways of doing things.

Old ways, such as restraint, courtesy, respect, Dejin thought, still wryly. He had grown wealthy in power, accustomed to his stature and to being feared, but he hadn’t sought rank with the intent of acquiring wealth.

He had seen his differences with Xi Wengao and the other conservatives as a battle for what Kitai should be, needed to be, for the good of the empire and its people. It was a pious, self-indulgent thought, and he was aware of that, but it was also, Hang Dejin told himself, true.

He shook his head. His son glanced at him, a blurred, moving shape, then turned back to his own pile of documents. Bitterness wasn’t a useful state of mind, Dejin reminded himself. You made mistakes if that was what drove you. You spoke without proper contemplation words you could be made to regret. He had often provoked such rashness in rivals. He knew how to make use of anger, passion, outrage in others.

The light was good in their working room today, here on the western side of the palace’s main courtyard. Back in the Ninth Dynasty, in Xinan before it fell to ruins, the civil servants had had an entire palace building to themselves: the Purple Myrtle Court.

Here in Hanjin, splendid as it was, there simply wasn’t enough space for that. Space was part of what they’d lost all through the empire, and not just in a crowded capital. They’d lost land in the north, in the northwest, lost the protection of the Long Wall, lost tribute, lost access to (control of!) the trade routes to the west and the wealth they’d brought, year over year.

Hanjin had more than a million souls living within or beside its walls—in an area only a fraction of what Xinan had enclosed three hundred years ago.

If you went to the ruins of the old capital, walked in through smashed gates, stood among weeds and grass and broken stone, heard the calling of birds or saw animals loping along the vastness of what had once been the imperial way, almost five hundred paces wide … you could be forgiven for thinking that Hanjin’s main thoroughfare, running from this palace to the southern gates was …

Well, it was eighty paces across, to be precise.

He’d had it measured, not long after arriving at court, all those years ago. Eighty paces was a very wide street, entirely suitable for processions and festivals. But it wasn’t Xinan, was it?

And Kitai wasn’t what Kitai had been.

What of it? he’d thought then, and still thought, most of the time. Were they to bow their heads in shame because of what had happened centuries before any of them were born? Tear out what was left of greying hair? Surrender to the barbarians? Give their women to them? Their children as slaves?

The prime minister grunted in dismissal of such a thought. The world came to you as it came, you dealt with what you had.

He saw his son lift his head again from the papers he was working through. Dejin made a gesture: nothing of importance, he signalled to Hsien, carry on.

There were two communications on his own desk. They had been handed to him by his son without comment. He had read them both in the good light. Excellent calligraphy in each case, one familiar (and celebrated), the other new to him.

The letters were a part of what had made him bitter and nostalgic on a bright morning in autumn. Autumn was a good season in Hanjin, summer’s heat and the yellow dust receding, winter winds not yet come. The plum trees flowering late. A bright string of festivals ahead. He wasn’t a man for watching street dancing or revellers carrying coloured lanterns but he liked his wine as well as the next person, and he enjoyed festival food, though he needed to be careful what he ate and drank now.

The letters were addressed to him personally, one written in the voice of long—if difficult—acquaintance, the other with extreme deference and formality. Both were supplications in the same matter. They made him angry with what they revealed, since it was new to him and should not have been.

It wasn’t as if the fate of every single member of the opposing faction needed to be reviewed by the prime minister of Kitai. There were far too many of them, he had more important tasks and burdens.

He had set in motion, himself, the process of disgracing and exiling the ousted faction over twenty-five years ago, without doubting himself for a moment. There had been carved steles, copied from the new young emperor’s own hand, his exquisite Slender Gold calligraphy, naming the banished. The steles had been placed in front of every prefectural yamen in the empire. Eighty-seven names the first time, one hundred and twenty-nine a year later. He remembered the numbers. Those names he had reviewed himself, or selected.

The empire, the court, the world under heaven had needed clarity and direction after a turbulent time. Though there might once have been merit to cacophony at court, the back and forth of factions in favour and out, Hang Dejin had been sure of his virtue and the wisdom of his policies. He’d regarded those who disagreed with him as not just wrong, but dangerous—destructive of peace and order and the changes Kitai required.

The empire needed these men silenced and gone.

Besides, they had started it! The conservatives had been in power between the last emperor’s death and the coming of age of the current one, in the years when the dowager empress reigned. They had reversed everything and initiated the exiling of Hang Dejin’s New Policies faction.

Dejin had spent several years writing poetry and letters from his country estate near Yenling, banned from court, power, influence. He’d remained wealthy (power brought wealth, it was a law of nature), never tasted again the hardship he’d left behind when he’d passed the jinshi examinations, but he’d been very far from the corridors of the palace.

Then Emperor Wenzong took the throne. Wenzong had summoned back to court the sage, Hang Dejin, who had been his tutor. Restored as prime minister, Dejin had extended to the conservatives the fate they’d imposed on him and his own people. Some of those he exiled were men he had admired, even in their battles. You couldn’t let that guide you, not with so much at stake.

They were sent away. Across rivers, over mountains. Sometimes they died. Reform would always have opponents, men clinging fiercely to the old ways, whether out of genuine belief or because those old ways had made their family fortunes.

It didn’t matter which. That was what he’d come to understand. When you were reshaping an empire you couldn’t be looking over your shoulder for intrigue, cunning opposition, worrying if a tail-star seen one spring or summer might send a panicky emperor hurrying to perform appeasing rituals—and straight back to the old ways.

You needed a cleared field before you and no danger behind. Comets had put him out of power twice in his early years, once under the late emperor, once with Wenzong. Being unpredictable was the prerogative of those who sat the Dragon Throne. Their loyal advisers needed to limit the consequences.

That was why Kai Zhen’s idea of an imperial garden had been so brilliant. Dejin had allocated considerable funds and resources to the newly created Flowers and Rocks Network. Not enough, in the event, not nearly enough. The sums grew. The Genyue had taken on a life of its own. All gardens did that, but …

The human labour required throughout the empire and the level of taxation demanded had begun to be overwhelming. And with the emperor enraptured by the Genyue, it was too late to stop or scale back, despite rebellion stirring in the south and west and growing outlaw bands in forests and marshes.

The emperor knew what he wanted for his garden, and you couldn’t tell an emperor he wasn’t going to get it. He wanted Szechen nightingales, for example, hundreds of them. Boys and men went hunting there, stripping the forests of songbirds. Wenzong wanted a mountain brought, as a symbol of the Five Holy Mountains. He wanted cedarwood and sandalwood from the south, a bridge, entirely of gold, leading to an island with pavilions of marble and onyx and rosewood, set in an artificial lake. He wanted trees on the island made of silver, among the real ones.

Sometimes you set events in motion, like a river, and if it flooded, or grew engorged …

It was possible that some of what he’d done or permitted through the years had been less than perfectly judged and implemented. What man alive (or ever living) would claim perfection?

The prime minister of Kitai adjusted his black, fur-trimmed robe. There was a breeze coming through the window and he caught a chill too easily these days.

For diversion he had tried, not long ago, to think of a good thing about growing old. He’d thought he might write (or dictate) an essay about it. The best he’d been able to come up with was that you might be less at the mercy of the desires of your body.

No one would send a woman to seduce him from his purposes now. Not any more. He read the second letter again, on that thought.

Then he summoned his bearers and went looking for the emperor.

THE EMPEROR OF KITAI was walking in his garden.

It pleased him to do this on any day that was fair, and this one was, a mild morning in autumn, approaching the Ninth of Ninth Festival. The emperor knew there were some among his court who felt he should never walk out of doors. He found them deficient in proper understanding. How could one appreciate, and amend, the paths and byways and the vistas of a garden if one did not walk them oneself?

Although, to call where he strolled a “garden” was to stretch the word almost out of recognition. The enclosed space here was so extravagant, yet so cunningly landscaped, that it was impossible, unless one went right to the walled edges, to know where it ended.

Even at the margins, trees had been densely planted to obscure where the Hanjin city wall began. The palace guard patrolled outside, where the garden’s gates led into the city, or to the palace and its courtyards to the west. You couldn’t see them from within the Genyue.

It was a world he was making here. Hills and lakes shaped to careful design (and then reshaped, whatever the cost, after consulting geomancers). Spiralling paths up mountains that had been raised for him, with waterfalls that could be activated at his desire. There were gazebos and pavilions hidden deep in groves for summer coolness, or situated where sunlight might fall on an autumn or spring day. Each of these was provided with the tools of painting or writing. The emperor might be moved to take up his brush at any moment.

There was also a new magnificence, a central, defining object now in the Genyue. A rock so wide and high (the height of fifteen tall soldiers!), so magnificently pitted and scarred (it had been brought up from a lake, the emperor understood, he had no idea how) that it could truly be said to constitute an image of one of the Five Holy Mountains. A young sub-prefect posted nearby had learned of it—and made his fortune by alerting the administrators of the Flowers and Rocks Network.

It had taken, apparently, a year to claim it from the depths and bring it to Hanjin, overland and then along the Great River and canal. The emperor imagined there must have been some degree of labour and expense involved with something so massive. He didn’t attend to such details, of course.

He had been very attentive as to where the colossal mountain-rock was situated once it arrived. There had been, he understood, some unfortunate deaths in the Genyue itself during the process of moving it into the precisely proper spot. He had first wanted it to surmount and emerge from a hill (a hill they’d made), for greatest effect, but then it had to be shifted after consultation with his geomancers of the Arcane Path and learning their calculations as to auspices.

He probably ought to have consulted them before the first positioning. Ah, well. Decisions in the garden were so complex. He was trying to mirror Kitai, after all, provide a spiritual centre for his realm, ground it securely in the goodwill of heaven. That was part of an emperor’s duty to his people, after all.

But now … now it was where he needed it. He sat in one of his pavilions, this one mostly of ivory, with green jade inlays, and he looked up at his mighty rock with a glad heart.

The Emperor Wenzong was famously compassionate: word of those labourers’ deaths—right here in his garden—had grieved him. He wasn’t supposed to have learned about them, he knew. His advisers were zealous in protecting him from sorrows that might burden the too-generous imperial heart. The Genyue was meant to be a place of calm for him, a refuge from the cares the world brought to those burdened with responsibility.

In his famed calligraphy style, Slender Gold, the emperor had recently devised a clever way of shaping the thirteen brush strokes of the word garden to suggest something beyond what was ordinarily meant, when referring to his own garden.

It was a measure of imperial subtlety, one of his closest advisers had said, that the august emperor had done this, instead of devising or demanding an entirely new word for what was being built here under his wise and benevolent eye.

Kai Zhen, the deputy prime minister, was quite astute in his observations, Emperor Wenzong felt. It had been Minister Kai, of course, along with the eunuch Wu Tong (most recently commanding the Pacification Army against the Kislik in the northwest) who had devised the Flowers and Rocks Network which had allowed the shaping of this garden. The emperor was not a man to forget such loyalty.

There were even nightingales here, you heard them in the evenings. Some had, sadly, died last winter. They were going to try to keep them alive, indoors, this winter, and Minister Kai had assured him that more were on their way even now from warmer climes to grace his groves with their music of the south.

A fine phrase, the emperor had thought.

Prime Minister Hang Dejin, his childhood tutor, his father’s and his own long-time adviser, was growing old. A melancholy, autumnal reflection. Another sorrow for the imperial heart. But it was also the way of life under heaven, as the Cho Master had taught them all. What man could avoid his end?

Well, there were ways to try. The emperor was following in another imperial tradition, taking a sequence of elixirs prepared for him each day by his occult masters of the Arcane Path. Kai Zhen had frequently and eloquently expressed his hope that these might prove efficacious.

There had also been sessions by candlelight wherein the leader of these same clerics (Kai Zhen had introduced him to the palace) invoked the spirit of Wenzong’s revered father to pronounce his approval of measures being undertaken for the governance of the realm, including the Genyue and the new music being devised for the performance of imperial rites.

Tuning the ritual instruments in a manner derived from the measured lengths of the middle, ring, and little fingers of the emperor’s left hand had been, the spirit of his father declared, a celestially harmonious idea.

Emperor Wenzong had taken this deeply to heart. He remembered being near to tears that night.

His own talents were not, truthfully, those of a man inclined to weigh matters of taxation and village administration, whether the army was made up of hired soldiers or a rural militia, how leaders were chosen in the countryside, or loans arranged for farmers—and repayment enforced.

He did pay attention to the examination questions for jinshi candidates, had even devised some of these himself. And he enjoyed presiding over the final testing days in his yellow robes of ceremony.

He’d been a painter and a calligrapher, from early in life. Noted for both, exalted for both, well before he’d taken the throne. He knew what he was, hadn’t ever pretended to be otherwise. He had wanted the Dragon Throne because it was there, and properly his, but his passions lay in another realm.

He had certainly done his duty as emperor. He’d fathered sons (many of them) and had them taught the ways of the Path and the Cho Master. He satisfied the imperial women, one each morning, two at night, according to the sequence presented to him by the Inner Quarters Registrar, dutifully denying himself a climax except (upon being advised) with the most innocent and youthful of his women. In this way, according to his arcane advisers, the female essence of his wives and concubines would bolster his essence, not drain it away.

This, too, was a burden and responsibility. His strength was the strength of Kitai. His virtue was the virtue of an empire.

He performed all the imperial rites, faithfully.

He’d returned to his father’s course of governance, after the unfortunate period when his mother ruled. Because it had been his father’s dream (as explained to him), he’d initiated war against the ungrateful Kislik in the northwest—and he did ask about it now and again. But it was important for an emperor to have trustworthy and diligent advisers so the imperial spirit could be allowed to flower and flourish … in the great garden of the world under nine heavens. Beyond all his duties, the emperor’s well-being, the soaring of his spirit, affected the well-being, the spirit of all Kitai.

Kai Zhen had put it that way just a few days ago in this very pavilion, which was Wenzong’s favourite now, with its view of the new rock-mountain.

The emperor intended to make Minister Kai a gift: a small painting he’d made here, a springtime landscape with flowering bamboo, an oriole, blue hills. The deputy prime minister had admired it, eloquently.

The emperor’s paintings were the most desired gift in Kitai.

It was a great shame, they had agreed, looking at it together, that Prime Minister Hang would not be able to see the details clearly any more. He was suffering the afflictions of age, Kai Zhen had suggested, in much the way autumn and winter succeed a brilliant spring. A garden like the Genyue could teach lessons like that.

This garden was—everyone said it—the heart-stopping wonder of the world. It was a mirror of Kitai in miniature, which was its purpose. Just as the emperor’s well-being and right behaviour were integral to preserving the mandate of heaven, so, too, it had been decided by his advisers, would an imperial garden designed to encompass the scope and balance of Kitai act to preserve that scope and balance.

It made so much sense.

His passion for this stupendous accomplishment wasn’t an affectation, an avoiding of tasks and cares. No. His labours here, his personal instructions to landscapers and architects, were at the heart—the very heart—of his duty to his people!

So the emperor of Kitai thought, sitting in an autumn pavilion in the sunlight of morning, with a view of his new mountain. He was contemplating making a painting, at ease in heart and mind, when he heard a strange sound from along the path where a gardener had moved out of sight sweeping leaves. The emperor looked at his guards. They stared straight ahead, expressionless. He heard the sound again.

The gardener was, if the emperor was not mistaken, crying.

PRIME MINISTER HANG DEJIN found the emperor, as expected, in the pavilion before the mountain. What he saw, however, was unexpected in the extreme. He thought, at first, that his weakened eyes were failing him again, but when he stepped carefully from his chair onto the groomed path, he realized they were not.

The emperor was standing at the edge of his pavilion. He was not writing, or painting, or gazing at his rock-mountain. He was looking down at a man prostrate on the path below him.

The man on the ground was trembling with terror. Given that he was—very obviously—a simple palace gardener (his rake lay beside him) in the actual, immediate presence of the emperor of Kitai, that fear was readily understood. The imperial guards had edged close. All were motionless, hands to swords, faces like stone warriors.

The emperor’s face was also cold, Dejin saw as he came near enough. It was not a customary expression for Wenzong. He could be demanding or inattentive, but seldom appeared angry. He did now.

Later, Hang Dejin would be caused to think (and even write a letter to an old friend) about how accidents of timing could have so great an impact on the way the world unfolded. You could decide this was the working of heaven, that such moments were not accidents at all, or you could see them as indicators of the limits placed by the gods on what mortal men could control, even if they were wise.

Dejin took the second view.

Had he not come looking for the emperor this morning with two letters in his robe, had the deputy prime minister been with Wenzong when the gardener was summoned into the imperial presence, significant matters would have proceeded otherwise than they did. He wrote that in his letter.

He made a formal obeisance. Emperor Wenzong had graciously stipulated that his senior councillors need not observe full court protocol when they were with him in his garden, but instinct suggested to Hang Dejin that this was a moment of importance and he offered all three prostrations. His mind was working quickly, however stiff his body was. He did not understand what had happened here and he needed to do so.

“Principal Councillor,” the emperor said, “we are pleased to see you. We would have sent for you to come to us. Approach.” Very formal, including the old title. There were meanings in everything, for those who knew how to find them.

“I am honoured to anticipate the emperor’s desire,” Dejin said, rising and coming forward. “Has something disturbed imperial tranquility?”

Of course something had, but it needed to be asked, to elicit a response—and a chance to sort this out.

“This man, this … gardener has done so,” Wenzong said.

Dejin could see the emperor’s agitation, a hand moving up and down an ivory column, stroking it steadily.

“And your serene excellence permits him to live? This is yet another indication of the emperor’s benevolent—”

“No. Listen to us.”

The emperor had just interrupted him. It was astonishing. Hang Dejin folded his hands in his sleeves and lowered his head. And then, listening, he understood, and the prime minister of Kitai saw, as a shaft of sunlight slicing down through storm clouds, opportunity shining.

He had summoned the gardener into his presence, the emperor said, because of the distressing sound of his weeping. Inquiring directly, he had learned that the labourer’s tears were for his son, who had just been reported dead. The son, it seemed, had been in the Pacification Army, among the recruits sent against the Kislik capital in the northwest.

The gardener had just told him, the emperor said, what all of Hanjin apparently knew: that half the Kitan army had been destroyed some time ago, on a retreat from Erighaya. It seemed that they had been deficiently led and supplied.

Hang Dejin privately considered it remarkable (and very wrong) that the gardener was still alive, after speaking so many words to his emperor. It was unbearably presumptuous, deserving decapitation. Where had the world come, if garden servants could behave this way? At the same time, he felt a surge of warm feelings towards the man lying face down on the ground, sweating through his tunic. Sometimes it happened that you received aid, illumination, from the most unexpected sources.

“We have just had the leader of our guards here to confirm this disturbing information,” the emperor said.

Wenzong’s voice was thin, cold. He really was very angry. The guards stared straight ahead, still alert to the presence of the gardener. Dejin wasn’t sure which was their leader, the uniforms were identical. The faces even looked alike to his weak eyes. Wenzong preferred that in his guards, for the harmony.

It appeared that the leader—whichever one it was—had indeed echoed the story told by the gardener. It was not a new tale. The first word of disaster had reached Hanjin last year. Even servants had heard it by now.

The emperor had not.

Hang Dejin said, carefully, “My lord, it is a lamentable truth that the Pacification Army suffered terrible losses.”

The emperor of Kitai stared bleakly down at him. The emperor was a tall man and was standing three steps up, in the pavilion. His writing seat and desk were behind him. The rock-mountain that had destroyed fields and killed so many men (you didn’t say that) loomed beyond, sunlit, magnificent. There was a breeze.

“You knew of this, councillor?”

Opportunity, and the need for extreme care. But Hang Dejin had been in the palace for a long time, at the summit of all possible achievement. You didn’t arrive there and survive without knowing how to deal with moments such as this.

“I knew, because I was able to learn it through my own sources, celestial lord. The military reports went to the deputy prime minister. He has not presented them in council or at court yet. The emperor will recall that responsibility for the Pacification Army led by the eunuch Wu Tong was given directly to General Wu’s advocate and supporter, Minister Kai. This was done at Kai Zhen’s own request, which I did not oppose. It was therefore not my place to diminish the honourable Kai Zhen by speaking to the emperor of this tragedy before he … decided to do so himself.”

Decided to do so was good, Hang Dejin thought. So was diminish.

It was all true, what he’d said. It just wasn’t the heart of the truth. Of course Dejin had known what had happened as soon as word came, of course he hadn’t carried it to the emperor … but that had been a shared, tacit agreement among all who led Kitai at this court.

The disaster of Erighaya was one that could imperil them all if Wenzong took it in a certain way. They had all aligned themselves with this war, for various reasons. This nightmare could undo everything, the reforms, their own positions. It could bring back the conservatives! Xi Wengao! The Lu brothers!

Tidings of this sort could do that. A very large expeditionary army sent to take a barbarian capital city, but not securing its supply lines … and forgetting the siege equipment for when it arrived before the walls?

What did that demand, for those responsible? What form of execution was adequate, even if the general of that army was the much-loved Wu Tong, who had devised the network that had created this garden?

Wu Tong himself had evidently fled south ahead of his army. He was still in the west, keeping away from court. Still alive. Sending artifacts and trees for the Genyue.

What Dejin had heard, disturbingly, was that in the retreat through the desert, harassed by barbarians all the way south, the starving, thirst-maddened soldiers of Kitai had begun killing their officers and drinking their blood.

People in the countryside ate each other (and their children) in times of extreme famine; it was a sad truth of a hard world. But for the discipline of a Kitan army to break down so utterly? That was terrifying. It brought to mind all the histories of what armies—and their generals—could do if not firmly held in check, under control.

Better, in some ways, an incompetent, preening, greedy general like Wu Tong than some brilliant leader with the love of his soldiers. His soldiers. Not the emperor’s.

That choice between evils, thought Hang Dejin, had become part of this dynasty, and they were all involved in it here at court.

Your thoughts were your own. What he said, as the emperor gazed coldly down at him, was, “My humblest apologies, celestial lord. That the serenity of this garden should be marred by such tidings is a grief to me. Shall I have the gardener removed from the imperial presence? He must be punished, of course.”

“The gardener stays,” said Wenzong. Too bluntly. This remained an unbalanced moment. “His son has died. He will not be punished. He told us only truth.” He paused. “We have sent for Kai Zhen.”

Hearing that—just the name, without the title—it became an exercise in self-mastery for the prime minister not to smile.

For safety, he lowered his head as if in chastened acquiescence to the majesty of the imperial will. After a precisely timed pause, he murmured, “If the esteemed deputy prime minister is to be with us soon, perhaps my lord will be good enough to assist his servant by reviewing two letters I have received today. The calligraphy in both is exceptional.”

He handed up the second letter first, the one in which the brush strokes would not be familiar.

He still knew how to talk to Wenzong. Of course he did. He’d tutored him as a boy.

The emperor reached down and took the letter from his hand. He glanced at it casually, then looked more closely. He sat at the dark-green marble desk, and read.

He looked up. “This is a character-filled hand. A man of conviction and integrity.”

It had to be said quickly, lest the emperor feel he’d been deceived: “It is a woman writing, gracious lord. I, too, was greatly surprised.”

Wenzong’s expression would have been diverting at a less significant moment. The light was good and he was close enough—Dejin could still see.

The emperor’s mouth opened above the thin, dark beard, as if to exclaim aloud. Then it closed again as he turned back to the letter from Lady Lin Shan, daughter of Court Gentleman Lin Kuo.

There was an interval of stillness. Dejin heard the breeze in the leaves of trees, and autumn birdsong, and the frightened breathing of the gardener, still face down on the path, still trembling.

Hang Dejin watched his emperor read, saw him savouring brush strokes, saw him smile—then look startled and dismayed. In those two expressions, the one chasing the other across the imperial features, he knew he had won. There were pleasures left in life, small ones, larger ones.

Wenzong looked up. “Her strokes are both firm and graceful. We find this unexpected.”

Dejin had known that would be his first remark. Men were what they were, their passions showed through.

He nodded respectfully, saying nothing.

The emperor looked back to the letter, then at Dejin again. “And the second one? You mentioned two letters?”

“The second is from Xi Wengao, my lord. He adds his voice to her plea.”

“Your old enemy writes you letters?” A faint imperial smile.

“My old adversary, celestial lord. I have too much respect for him, as I know the emperor does, to name him an enemy.”

“He banished you when in power, and you exiled him in turn.”

“To his home, my lord. Away from court, where his agitations were doing the empire harm. But not—”

“Not all the way south.” The emperor lifted the letter. “Not to Lingzhou Isle. What did this man, Lin Kuo, do that this should be his fate?”

A gift, really. The world could hand you opportunities, and it was almost a disgrace not to pluck them like fruit.

“If we believe the daughter and Master Xi, and I will say that I do believe them, he visited Xi Wengao in Yenling to present to him a book he’d written about gardens.”

“Gardens?”

Part of the gift, of course, part of the fruit hanging from the plum tree of this autumn morning.

“Yes, my lord. But it happened to be on the day Lu Chen came to Yenling to bid farewell to his mentor before going to Lingzhou, to his own banishment. It was many years ago. The order of exile for Lin Kuo has just been given, however.”

“Lu Chen. Another enemy of yours.”

“Another man whose views I considered wrongly judged and dangerous. My lord, I have his poetry in my bedchamber.”

The emperor nodded. “And this Lin Kuo is now ordered to Lingzhou? For visiting Xi Wengao?”

“Years ago. At the wrong time. The emperor has read the letter. He was taking his young daughter to see the peonies. And bringing his garden book to present to Master Xi.”

“Ah! Yes. We remember now. We know that book,” said the emperor of Kitai.

Another plum, dropping into one’s hand.

“I did not know this, celestial lord.” (It was true.)

“He had it presented to us when it was completed. We looked through it. Pleasantly conceived, artfully bound. Not insightful about the spiritual nature of gardens, but a charming gift. I believe he mentioned Xi Wengao’s garden.”

“So I understand, my lord.”

“And went to present the book to him?”

“Perhaps also to introduce his daughter.”

Reminded, Wenzong looked again at the letter. “Extraordinary,” he said. He looked up. “Of course, it isn’t proper for a woman to write like this.”

“No, my lord. Of course not. It is, as you say, extraordinary. I believe the father taught her himself, then arranged for tutors.” (Xi Wengao’s letter had reported as much.)

“Indeed? Does that make him a subversive man?”

Unexpected. One needed to be alert, always. There were so many dangers here.

“It might, my lord. I rather think it makes him an attentive father.”

“He ought to have looked to marrying her, then.”

“She is wed, my lord. To Qi Wai, of the imperial clan. Sixth degree. Xi Wengao states as much.”

An alert look. Emperors were attentive when the imperial clan was mentioned. “An honourable marriage.”

“Of course, my lord.”

Another pause. One still heard the gardener breathing raggedly. Dejin half wished the man were gone, but he knew he would be useful, any moment now.

The emperor said, “We find this appeal filial and persuasive, with evocative brush strokes.”

“Yes, celestial lord.”

“Why would our adviser send a simple man like this to Lingzhou Isle?”

It was as if he were biting into a plum through taut, firm skin, so vivid and sweet was the taste.

“Again, alas, I cannot answer. I am ashamed. I knew nothing of this until these letters this morning. I permitted Minister Kai to take command of dealing with remaining conservative faction members. He petitioned for that responsibility, and I was too kind-hearted to deny him. I confess it might have been an error.”

“But Lingzhou? For visiting someone whose garden he had described in a book? We are told … we understand it is a harsh place, Lingzhou Isle.”

“I also understand as much, my lord.”

Even as he said this, a thought came to Dejin. And then another, more profound, in its wake.

Before he could be cautious and stop himself, he spoke the first thought, “It might be regarded as a gesture of the celebrated imperial compassion if the poet Lu Chen were now permitted to leave the isle, august lord. He has been there some time.”

Wenzong looked at him. “That is where he is? Lu Chen?”

It was entirely possible the emperor had forgotten.

“It is, celestial lord.”

“He was a leader of that faction. With Xi Wengao. You exiled him yourself, did you not?”

He answered promptly. “I did the first time, yes. South of the Great River. But when his political poems continued to be written and circulated he was ordered farther away. He is … a challenging man.”

“Poets can be difficult,” said the emperor in a musing tone. He was pleased with his own observation. Dejin could hear it.

“I did not order him to Lingzhou, my lord. Across the mountains was what I suggested. Sending him to the isle was Councillor Kai’s decision. He also ordered his writings gathered and destroyed.”

“And yet you have some in your bedchamber.” The emperor smiled.

A careful pause. A rueful smile. “I do, my lord.”

“We do, as well. Perhaps,” said the emperor of Kitai, smiling even more, “we must be exiled, ourselves.”

One of the imperial guards would later remember that.

Wenzong added, “We recall his lines. Wise men fill the emperor’s court, so why do things get worse? / I’d have been better off dying, as bride to the river god. Do you know the poem?”

“I do, revered lord.” Of course he knew it. It had been an attack on him.

“That was during a flood of the Golden River, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

“We sent relief, did we not?”

“You did, my lord. Very generously.”

The emperor nodded.

They heard a sound. Dejin found it interesting how his hearing seemed to have improved as his eyesight failed. He turned. The figure of Kai Zhen could be seen approaching, on foot along the path from the palace gate. He was able to see the man hesitate as he took in Dejin’s presence and someone lying face down on the path before the emperor.

Only the briefest hesitation, however, barely a checked stride, you could miss it if you weren’t watching for it. The deputy prime minister was as smooth, as polished, as green jade made by the finest craftsmen in Kitai, masters of their trade, in a tradition going back a thousand years.

AFTERWARDS, BEING CARRIED back to the palace, Prime Minister Hang would take careful thought concerning what had just taken place. In his working room again, surrounded by papers and scrolls, with many lamps lit to make it easier for him to see, he would speak with his son and make arrangements for someone to be protected, and for the gardener to be found and executed.

The man had heard far too much, lying on the ground throughout the exchanges before and after Kai Zhen arrived at the pavilion. He would be uneducated but he wasn’t a mute, and the times were dangerous.

Some days later he would learn that the man had not been found. He wasn’t, evidently, a fool. It had proved extremely difficult even to establish his identity. None of them there that morning had asked his name, of course, and there were, Prime Minister Hang was informed, four thousand, six hundred men employed in the emperor’s garden.

Eventually they would determine, through the Genyue supervisors’ records, who he was—a man from the north. Guards sent to his residence would find it empty, with signs of a hasty departure. Well, they knew it had been a hasty departure. The gardener was gone, his wife and a child were gone. None of the neighbours knew where. He hadn’t been a talkative man. Northerners tended not to be.

There was a grown son living in a house outside the walls. He was interrogated. He did not know where his parents and young sister had gone, or so he would maintain right up until he died under questioning.

It was disappointing.

Holding high office (for so many years) meant that you had done, and would have to continue doing, unpleasant things at times. Actions inconsistent with philosophic ideals. It was necessary, at such moments, to remember that one’s duty was to the empire, that weakness in power could undermine peace and order.

Difficult as it was for a virtuous man to have someone killed merely for overhearing a conversation, it was even more difficult to discover that the order, once given, had not been carried out.

He would also give thought to the imperial guards who had been standing by that morning. They were trusted favourites of the emperor, always with him, not men one could order executed. Not without consequences. He had them promoted in rank, instead.

You did what you could.