Читать книгу River of Stars - Guy Gavriel Kay - Страница 14

He didn’t know a great deal about them, they had been gone from the world for two hundred years or something like that, but Sun Shiwei often thought he’d have liked to be a Kanlin Warrior.

He’d have trained with them, wearing black, at their sanctuary on Stone Drum Mountain, now lost to Kitai, part of the surrendered Fourteen Prefectures.

He’d have done whatever rituals they did, slept with the women warriors among them (hard, lithe bodies!), been taught their secret ways of killing people.

He was good at that, killing people, but only a fool would believe there weren’t ways to be better, and from what he’d always understood, legend and story, the Kanlins had been the best. They’d been couriers, emissaries, witnesses to treaties, custodians of documents and treasures, guides and guards … many things.

The killing part was what he liked, though. A shame they were gone. A shame there were no proper records. They’d never written anything down, the Kanlins. That was part of what made something a secret. Stood to reason.

He’d have liked to be able to run right up a wall and onto a roof. Who wouldn’t like that? Leap down into a courtyard and knife someone who thought they were safe in their compound because the doors and windows were barred and the walls high. Then up another wall and gone before an alarm could even be raised.

“It was Sun Shiwei!” the terrified whispers would run. “Who else could have done this? The doors were locked!”

He’d have liked that.

It was necessary to stop these drifting thoughts. He was on a mission, he had a task.

It was dark inside the compound of the imperial clan. The compound might be big, but it was also crowded. Everyone complained in here. It wasn’t Sun Shiwei’s task (or his inclination) to assess the living conditions of the emperor’s kin, but it did help him that many people continued to mill about between individual residences and courtyards in here, even after darkfall.

They went in and out, too. None of the compound gates was closed yet. Mostly it was younger men slipping out. It was formally forbidden but generally allowed, except when there had been trouble. They went in search of wine and girls, mostly. Sometimes to dinner parties at the houses of friends in the city. Women were brought in here, and musicians. The guards at the four gates weren’t especially concerned, as long as their share of whatever coins were changing hands was forthcoming.

All the better for him, of course. He’d come in with a group of giggling girls. Had even managed to feel up one or two of them. Got a saucy laugh from one. He couldn’t afford those women, of course—not the kind that got invited here. For the Sun Shiweis of the world, a squeeze through silk was as good as it got with courtesans of this class.

He’d been in the imperial compound before, knew his way around. He’d escorted his employer and her daughter to women’s gatherings, remained inside to take them back. He’d used the opportunities to get his bearings, in case he ever needed them. In case this evening ever came. He was skilled, even if he couldn’t scale walls on the run or do some sacred, mystical spinning movement that killed four people at once. He could probably manage three if he had a wall at his back, Shiwei thought. He wouldn’t have kept his job if he wasn’t good. His employer was exacting. She was hard and cold, chary with anything resembling praise, and disturbingly desirable.

He’d had many nights awake, truth of it, imagining her coming to him in the dark, slipping inside, closing the door quietly behind her, her scent in his own small room … There was fire inside her, he was sure of it. Some things a man could see.

Man could also get himself cut in half, sharing that sort of thought anywhere.

His thoughts seemed to be running away again. What happened when you had to wait in shadows for too long. He was in a covered passage between courtyards, dressed for a chilly night (part of being good at your job), and had an excuse prepared if anyone stopped to ask. They were unlikely to do that here. People came and went. The imperial clan was honoured, after a fashion, sequestered and kept track of, but ignored in almost every other way—unless they made trouble. In that case they were often killed.

Far as Shiwei was concerned, not that anyone had ever asked, they could all be drowned or used for archery practice, and Kitai would be better off. The clan cost the empire a huge amount of money every year, everyone knew it. Some of the women he’d keep, maybe. Aristocratic women had their own way of being, and he liked it, what he’d seen.

“You. What are you doing here?”

Shiwei kept his expression bland. The guard had a torch, was only doing routine rounds. He was chubby and his cloak was awry.

“Waiting for some girls. Take them back.” He stayed in shadow.

“You’ll wait a long time.”

Shiwei offered a chuckle. “Usually do.”

The torch was lifted. He saw the guard’s round face. The round-faced guard saw him.

“I know you,” the man said. Which was unfortunate. “You work for the deputy prime minister, not the pleasure district. Saw you with his wife here when—”

When you had to kill you did, and you needed to know when such a moment came. Couldn’t leave this one alive: he’d report later, could identify Shiwei. It was unexpected, an irritation. And it changed his timing, too.

He pulled his knife from the guard’s chest slowly, holding the man upright against him, shielded by the arch. He kept talking quietly, meaningless words, in case anyone passed close. He’d grabbed the torch from the dead man before he could drop it. A fallen, flaring torch would, sure as spirits flew at night, get attention. Fire was the enemy, everywhere.

Shiwei had picked his spot carefully. Edge of the courtyard where the house he wanted stood. Under cover, with a recessed space farther into the passageway where he could drag a dead man and lay him down, mostly out of sight.

Mostly was the best he was going to get. And that meant he had to move now instead of waiting for the crowd to thin and people in the compound to generally be asleep—including those in the house across the way, where he was going.

He didn’t regret killing the guard. He regretted the complications it caused. They might still be awake in that house. The woman he was here to kill might be.

He knew the house, he was just about certain he knew the room. That was why he’d come early, instead of waiting until dark. He’d pretended to deliver an empty letter to their door, after getting directions from a guard other than the ones who’d watched him come through with the singing girls.

Eventually he’d seen her come into the courtyard and cross it to her home, walking with a servant, no husband in sight. She’d been out without her husband, home at twilight, brazen as you please. There were no morals left among women in the world, Sun Shiwei had often thought.

The houses were mostly similar in the compound. Variations depended on status and degree of closeness to the emperor. A few were extremely large, more than one courtyard inside their walls, but not this one.

The bedroom she’d use—or they’d use, if the absent husband ever went in to indulge himself with her—would be on the women’s side, to the right at the back. Shiwei had intended to get over the wall into their courtyard then climb up to her room. He had even worked out his hand- and foot-holds for the wall, waiting here.

Couldn’t do it that way now. Too many people around for a man to safely climb a wall, even at night. They might think he was just a lover, and leave it alone, or they might not. There was a moon, too, almost full. He wouldn’t have picked a night with a moon, but he didn’t get to do the choosing in these things, did he?

He’d been told to make this look like an assault on the woman—some vicious predator in the clan compound having his hard way with a girl, then killing her. He could deal with that part. She’d have to be dead, first, for silence and safety, but he’d done that before.

He stepped out from the archway and began crossing the courtyard, not hurrying. Timed and angled it so he wouldn’t pass close to anyone, but he made sure not to seem obvious about that. He’d have liked to be wearing black. Kanlin Warriors had always worn black. It would have been pleasing to appear to victims that way: a dark apparition, a cold spirit, appearing in the night to destroy them.

But black would have been too noticeable. This wasn’t the old days. He couldn’t safely be distinctive. He was dressed the way an escort for musicians and singing girls would be: brown and green, tunic and trousers, a soft dark hat, no visible weapon (you didn’t carry visible weapons into the clan compound unless you were an idiot). There was blood on his cloak now, but it was night and the fabric was dark.

And there wasn’t anything he could do about it, was there?

He couldn’t climb the wall and risk being seen. He wondered if a high-level Kanlin would have known how to do that, be invisible for long enough, or sense the precise moment when no one was looking. He wondered if their training taught them that. The thought made him almost sad.

But there were other ways of doing what he was here to do. He went straight for the door of her house. The doorway was recessed, under a lintel (they all were), and it was dark there. They weren’t expecting guests, had no exterior torches lit. He pretended to knock, in case anyone passing looked over, but he made no sound. He wasn’t a fool. He fished from his inner pocket the tool he used for doors. He tried the handle first.

It moved with a small click. There might be fools here, but they lived inside the compound, inside this house, they weren’t standing in Sun Shiwei’s boots tonight.

The imperial clan would all have valuable objects in their homes, but they lived in such sublime assurance of favour and protection that they didn’t even lock their doors. He wondered, briefly, what kind of life could lead you to see the world that way.

He pushed the door open onto a dark hallway. Lifted a hand, as if greeting someone within. Stepped inside, closed the door silently behind him, not rushing at all. Inside, he drew a breath. It would be easy now. He was out of sight, and where he needed to be.

A thread of excitement prickled along his blood. He suppressed it. Not yet, he told himself. She needed killing first, and there would be servants down here, or even upstairs. She might even be in bed with one of them, with the husband gone. Maybe with another woman. They were said to be like that, the wives of the imperial clan.

No light on this level, no sound of movement as he listened. It was just late enough that they might be asleep after all. He moved quietly to where he knew the stairway would be, and then up, testing each stair. One creaked slightly under light pressure and he double-stepped his way over it. You learned the tricks, doing this sort of thing long enough.

He took out his knife, already bloodied. He ought to have cleaned it, but there hadn’t been time. He preferred a clean knife. It felt … well, cleaner. Top of the stairs. Hallways ran left and right, elbow-bends to corridors each way. Women’s quarters would be on the right. Still no servants, no lights. They were asleep.

He went right, his eyes adjusting, saw calligraphy scrolls hanging on the inner wall, moved carefully around over-large tables with what looked like bronze vessels on them. He slowed down. If he banged into one of those the noise would rouse someone, bring men running from downstairs, people from outside, and everything would be marred.

He didn’t bump anything. He prided himself on seeing well in the dark, a skill in his profession. He turned at the long corridor towards the back of the house. It was open on his right side here, a waist-high railing above their small courtyard. There was moonlight. He saw more bronzes below, outside, and what looked liked a funerary stele in the centre.

He had no idea what these people were doing with such things, but why would he expect to have an idea, or care? He was a weapon, they were targets. Or she was. He had been told the husband didn’t matter. It was the wife who had offended. He didn’t know how. It wasn’t his job to know.

The corridor jogged left and then right again to where her room lay, at the back. She was on the right, over the courtyard. She’d have a balcony. He stopped and listened again. Creaks and groans of a night house. Sounds from the public spaces behind him. There was a shout back there and he stiffened, but it was an amused cry, followed by another, even more lively. Men coming back, or heading out—it wasn’t too late for that. It was never too late for the pleasure districts. He might go that way himself after, he thought.

Would have to change clothing first. And he might well be satiated. The thought set his pulses going again. He was close enough for that to be all right. You worked best when you were mostly calm, but also alert, excited enough to be quicker than otherwise.

He opened the door to her room. Moonlight fell through the far window, enough for him to see the sleeping shape in the canopied bed, under coverlets. More bronzes in here. Two of them, either side of the balcony. The silk window coverings were down but let in enough light for him. There was a breeze. She was obviously not afraid of the chill of an autumn night. Or of a man coming in from her balcony.

He wasn’t coming that way. He was already here. It was two long strides to the bed, and she needed to die before he enjoyed himself in the certainty of silence and night. Not that the knife wasn’t another kind of enjoyment. He crossed the floor, blade in hand. He chopped downward, hard and fast. Once, twice—

A crashing, thunderous pain at the back of his head. The onset of black, then black.

THERE WERE LAMPS LIT. The light wobbled and swayed, so did the room. He was face down on the floor. His hands were bound behind his back, expertly. His boots had been removed.

He knew that last, shockingly, because he was cracked on the sole of one foot with some sort of stick. He shouted with pain.

“As I thought,” came a woman’s voice, behind and above him. “I told you I wouldn’t kill him.”

“You might have,” a man said. Not angry, more an observation. “And we do need to ask our questions.”

“And you will kill him after?” she asked.

“That isn’t for me to say,” said the man.

Sun Shiwei twisted his head but he couldn’t see anyone. He had a sense there were several people in the room. The woman with the stick, at least three men. He could see the bed to his right. He had stabbed into cushions placed under coverings. One of them had fallen on the floor beside him, ripped open.

He didn’t know where his knife was. He wasn’t about to get it back. And if his boots were gone so was his second blade.

Through extreme pain and a pounding head an awareness emerged, took form: his coming here had been completely anticipated. He grunted, spat awkwardly, given his position. It dribbled on his chin.

He said, “I will join the army!”

Another hard blow, his other foot. He yelped again.

“Indeed?” he heard the woman say. “And why would the imperial army want an assassin?” She paused, then added, “A bad question. Why would they want an assassin with broken feet?”

“Be careful.” The same man’s voice again. “We need him to talk. And depending on what he says …”

“You’d let him live? Really?”

There was no reply. The man might have nodded his head or shaken it—there was no way to tell. Sun Shiwei seized on this, though, through pain in his head and both feet.

“I will fight for Kitai!” he rasped. “I will go to the northwestern war!”

You could escape from the army, you could rise in it, you would be alive!

“Might he be castrated?” the woman asked, musingly. “That might be acceptable.” She didn’t sound like Lady Yu-lan, but she didn’t sound the way a woman should, either.

“For others to decide, gracious lady. A magistrate is on his way. Maybe others of rank. I am not certain.”

There came a sound from the corridor. Footsteps stopping at the doorway, a shadow across one lamp’s light.

“There’s a dead guard across the courtyard, sir. Someone found the body. Stabbed, probably a knife.”

Inwardly, Sun Shiwei swore viciously. He took a ragged breath, trying to think through pain and panic. You needed to be loyal to those who paid you, but if you were dead, loyalty didn’t help much on the far side, did it?

“Ah. That’s why he came in so early.” The woman again! How was she so assured, and how would she know that? She added, “That body is what will prove he isn’t just an angry drunk looking to rape a woman while her husband is away.”

He’d been planning to say that! No one had been killed, no one even harmed. Put me in the army, he’d say again. The army needed soldiers, any soldiers.

Harder now, with the dead guard out there. In fact, it became impossible.

“Mind you,” the woman added thoughtfully, “we did know what he was really doing. You will allow my husband and me to thank the prime minister, later, I hope? He saved my life.”

“You did much of that yourself, Lady Lin.” The unseen man’s voice was respectful. Shiwei still couldn’t see any of them. He’d been—it was now clear—deceived and knocked unconscious by a woman.

“Only with your warning,” she said. “I grieve for the guard. That will have been unintended. It forced this one to change his plans.”

Exactly! thought Shiwei. It did!

“He’d have intended no other harm, only to kill me, then rape me after,” the woman went on. She was unnaturally composed.

“After?” said the man.

“To ensure silence. The indignity to my body would have been to hide the reason for my death.”

Fuck you, thought Sun Shiwei. Fuck you and your gelded husband!

Though that last thought brought him back to his present circumstance, and words just spoken, about castration.

“I will tell everything,” he muttered, still trying to look around enough to see what he was dealing with.

“Of course you will,” said the man behind him. “Everyone does under questioning.”

Shiwei felt as if he was about to choke on what was suddenly lodged in his throat. His heart was pounding. His head hurt. He said, urgently, “It was the deputy prime minister! It was Kai Zhen who—”

He screamed. She’d slashed him across the back of the calves.

“A lie. You are the wife’s instrument, not his,” she said. “Kai Zhen is many things, but not this foolish. Not the same day he is exiled.”

“You’ll tell us the truth later,” said another person, speaking for the first time. A colourless voice. A civil service figure? The court, someone with rank?

“I … I can tell you right now! What do you need me to say?”

The man laughed. He laughed.

“You don’t need to torture me! I will tell. Yes, it was the wife. Lady Yu-lan. It was. You don’t need torture!”

A longer silence. The woman, for once, said nothing. It was the third person who spoke again, finally.

“Of course we do,” he said gravely. “No one will believe a confession if there isn’t any torture. And then you will probably die. Under interrogation, a regrettable accident, the usual way. This was all extremely foolish, as Lady Lin says. And too predictable.”

He sounded almost regretful, Sun Shiwei thought. Not for the torture to come, but as if for the folly of men and women in the world.

The woman said, “If that is the case … if he is not going to be gelded and sent to the army, may I be permitted to strike him again? I am afraid I do feel angry. It may also be foolish, but …”

Sun Shiwei squeezed his eyes shut. The cold-voiced man spoke, judiciously. “He was here to destroy your honour and end your life. I think it can be permitted, gracious lady.”

“Thank you,” he heard her say.

Then she said, leaning over, speaking directly to Shiwei, close to his bleeding head, “This is for my father. For what they tried to do to him. Know that.”

She straightened. He saw her shadow. Then the most appalling pain crashed over him, one foot then the other, struck full force this time, bones splintering, and he lost awareness of all things again.

CENTURIES BEFORE, the last Kanlin Warriors of Stone Drum Mountain had died on the wide, flat top of their holy mountain in the north. The Long Wall had earlier been breached in many places.

The last of them held out a considerable time, but eventually were overrun by barbarians—the emerging Xiaolu people.

The mountain sanctuary was plundered and burned.

The Kanlins on Stone Drum—about eighty of them, it was believed, at the very end—had elected to be slain there, to die fighting, rather than retreat south and surrender their sacred mountain to the steppe.

It was a complex incident in history and those who shaped and recorded the official doctrines in this Twelfth Dynasty had difficulty with it.

The black-clad Kanlins had been mystics with esoteric beliefs, and notoriously independent. They allowed women to train and fight and live freely among them. Many of their practices (not only concerning women) diverged from acceptable behaviour. They were also a military group as much as a religious one, and everyone knew what had happened in the Ninth because of military leaders. The Kanlin Warriors might have been permitted their secluded, untaxed sanctuaries back then, but this was a different era, a different world.

On the other hand, they had been honourable, loyal, and unquestionably brave, and the last ones on the summit of Stone Drum, men and women both, had died for Kitai in one of the lost and longed-for Fourteen Prefectures.

That had to be allowed to mean something.

It had been decided that no one would be punished or criticized for making reference to that last stand on Stone Drum Mountain—for writing a song or a poem or a street theatre performance about it. But the last defence of the mountain would not become an officially sanctioned mourning ritual of any kind. It was seen as preferable that the Kanlins slip quietly from history into folk tale, peasant belief, akin to fox-women or those spirit worlds said to be hidden under oak-tree roots in forests.

Good governance, in any time, required delicate decisions of just this sort.

SHE IS FINALLY ALONE. All the men have left: the one who’d come to kill her, the guards, the soldiers, the senior official from the Ministry of Rites (a bleak, cold man). The house is hers again. She tries to decide if it is the same house.

She is waiting for tea to be brought to her. No one is asleep. She is downstairs, in the small reception room—made smaller by bronzes they’ve collected.

Servants are cleaning her bedchamber, discarding the knife-shredded silks and pillow. They will light incense in burners, to take away the odour of so many men in a lady’s room, and the presence of so much violence.

Some of that violence had been hers. She is still not entirely certain why she’d been so insistent about that. It has to do with her father’s exile, she tells herself, and that is surely true, but it might not be all the truth. She’d used her husband’s second-favourite stick. It is heavy.

His favourite stick is with him now. He is away. She sits by a fire trying to decide if she is going to be able to forgive him for not being here tonight. Yes, he’d planned this journey some time ago. They had both been preparing to go west, towards Xinan and the hills above it, the burial mounds of long-ago emperors.

Then she’d received word about her father—his shocking, unspeakable exile to Lingzhou—and of course she wasn’t going anywhere at all.

Wai should not have gone either. It is hard for her to shake that thought. A husband, a son-in-law, he ought to have stayed to use whatever influence he had to help.

Problem was, he had no influence, and the hard truth was that if his father-in-law was named a treacherous member of an abhorred faction it was bad news for Qi Wai, and the smartest thing for him was to be as detached as possible from Lin Kuo’s banishment.

It had made sense for Wai to leave Hanjin.

That didn’t mean she had to forgive him for it.

She’d used his stick to strike the assassin as he strode to her bed and stabbed downwards (she might have been there, she might easily have been sleeping there). She’d been instructed not to hit him with all her strength, that he was to remain alive.

She’d hit him with all her strength.

He did remain alive. She’d thought he would, although she hadn’t greatly cared in the moment. That, by itself, is disturbing. That she can kill or not kill, with indifference as to which it might be.

The tea finally comes. Her principal maidservant is agitated, trembling. The servants have not had time to deal with this. Neither has she. She is still trying to understand, and accept, the feelings of rage that rose within her tonight, looking down at the man on the floor of her bedroom, his hands bound behind his back.

It really is about her father, she decides. The assassin wasn’t the one who’d ordered Lin Kuo exiled (of course he wasn’t!) but he was a part of that evil, and the only part she could see, reach, strike—break bones in his feet. She had felt them break.

She’d asked if he could be castrated. She’d wanted that.

It is frightening, how much anger can be inside a person.

He’d be dead by night’s end, the bleak man from the Ministry of Rites had told her. And the Lady Yu-lan was to be arrested in the morning. They were satisfied, he’d said before leaving, that this one had been the instrument of the lady, not her husband. The exile of her father was Kai Zhen’s doing, but not this.

She watches her servant pour the tea, without the ease she usually displays, willowy as she bends. Her husband likes this servant for her grace. Qi Wai likes that in women, his wife knows. She is not especially graceful herself, not trained that way, nor soothing and assuaging in her manner. He values her intelligence (she knows it), he likes having her with him on expeditions to hunt down scrolls, bronze tripods, weapons, wine cups, artifacts of distant dynasties, but she does not ease his spirit.

She doesn’t ease her own. That is not what she is. She has not yet decided what she is. She is someone who can speak of castrating an attacker, break bones in his feet.

He had come to kill her. And rape her. They had intended to send her father to Lingzhou Isle to die. The assassin’s screaming hadn’t distressed her. It might do so later, Shan thinks. She dismisses the servant, picks up her tea. She might hear those screams in her mind. She is afraid she will.

Her father will not be exiled now. She has a letter confirming that. It is on the desk across the room. The letter had warned that Lady Yu-lan might send someone with malevolent purpose to their house tonight. Guards would be provided. It had also informed her that the celestial emperor, in his supreme compassion, had himself rescinded the order of exile for Court Gentleman Lin Kuo. He was to be raised in rank, instead.

The serene and exalted emperor also wished to have conveyed his personal commendation to Lady Lin Shan for her well-formed brush strokes. She was commanded to attend upon him in the Genyue the following afternoon.

They are to discuss calligraphy and other matters.

Imperial guards would call for her, the letter advised. It was suggested by the writer that she might wish to bring some of her own songs, in her own hand, as gifts for the emperor.

The letter was signed by Hang Dejin, prime minister of Kitai.

The emperor wishes to see her. In his garden. She is to bring her songs. It is beyond belief. If she doesn’t understand her own nature, Lin Shan thinks, how can she possibly hope to understand the world?

She begins to cry. She dislikes that, but there is no one else in the room now, and so she permits herself this. It is the middle of the night. The moon is west. She drinks hot, scented tea from Szechen in an autumn room lit by three lamps, crowded with ancient bronze, and she watches her tears fall into the cup.

There might be a song in that, she thinks. She wonders where her husband is tonight, if he has reached Xinan.

She wonders if the assassin is dead yet.

SUN SHIWEI WOULD LOSE and regain consciousness, in considerable agony, throughout that night and into the first hours of the grey, windy morning that eventually came. He did, indeed, tell them what they wished to know. They did, indeed, ensure that he died accidentally under questioning.

LATER THAT MORNING, rain beginning to fall, eight members of the Imperial Palace Army presented themselves at the gates of the city mansion of disgraced Deputy Prime Minister Kai Zhen.

Seeing them, a small crowd gathered in the street. They backed away under orders from tense, irritated guards, but did not entirely disperse. Dogs paced and barked among them, hoping for scraps. Two of the dogs began to fight each other and were separated with curses and kicks. The rain continued.

Four of the guards went inside when the gates were opened. They emerged not long after. One spoke to their commander. It was obvious, even to those watching from a distance, that the leader was both angry and afraid. He could be seen slapping nervously at his thigh.

Eventually he barked orders, his voice thin in the thin rain. The same four guards went back in through the gates. When they came out again, two were carrying what appeared to be a body wrapped in linen. The leader continued to look unhappy. They marched away, in the best order they could manage, through a muddy street.

A story began to spread. That tended to happen in Hanjin. They had come to arrest Yu-lan, the wife of the deputy prime minister. She had apparently sent an assassin into the imperial clan compound the night before. This was deeply shocking. It was unclear why she had done so. The man had been captured and questioned in the night. He had named Lady Yu-lan before dying.

She had killed herself in her own house, rather than be taken away.

An understandable decision, in the circumstances. She might have hoped to be allowed burial in the family’s gravesite in the south. This was not to be. She was burned near the palace grounds and her ashes thrown into one of the canals.

The Cho teachings and those of the Sacred Path agreed that even if this created an unquiet spirit, it was not only permitted, it was necessary. Otherwise, how could the state truly punish (and deter) evildoers deserving of death? You needed to send that punishment beyond, into the spirit world. The souls of such criminals should not be granted rest.

Kai Zhen, disgraced and exiled, set forth from Hanjin two weeks later with his household (greatly reduced).

It was accepted that he’d had no part in what his wife had done, or tried to do. His exile was not unduly harsh, south of the Great River to the countryside near Shantong where he had a home among silk farms.

He lost his income and civil service rank, of course. Also, the many ways of supplementing wealth that had come with his position. But he’d had years in power, would be assured of a comfortable exile.

Journeying south, he wore mourning, left his hair unwashed and unbound, ate alone and sparingly, was seen to weep. He avoided his children, his concubines, any friends or followers who tried to see him as the family travelled into late, wet autumn and the weather began to turn colder. His grief for his wife was evident. Some declared it commendable after a long marriage; others that he was being excessive, deviating from right behaviour, proper restraint; still others that he was linking himself too closely with a murderous criminal, over and above his own errors.

LATE ONE COLD NIGHT, in a market town five days from the Great River, one of his concubines—not the youngest, but still young—takes upon herself what has to be considered a risk. She has been giving it thought for some time.

She goes from the women’s quarters of the house they have occupied and crosses in darkness, shivering in the courtyard, to where the men are sleeping. She goes to the doorway of the room Kai Zhen occupies. Taking a breath, she knocks softly, but then opens the door and enters without waiting for a response.

He is alone inside. There is a fire lit. She had seen light, knew he was not asleep. She would have gone in even if he was. He is at a desk, in a lined night robe, writing by lamplight. She doesn’t know what. She doesn’t care. He turns, surprised.

She forces herself not to bow. Standing very straight, she says what she has rehearsed. “You are the great man of our time. We are honoured to serve you, to be near you. It is a grief to me to see you this way.”

Saying to me is the important, dangerous, presumptuous part. She knows it. He will know it.

He stands up, setting down his brush. “Well,” he says, “just now, greatness does not seem to be part of my—”

“Greatness is within you.”

She interrupts him deliberately. She has a model for this. She has been in his household three years. She is skilled with flute and pipa. She is tall and thin and extremely clever. She has smooth skin, often commented upon.

She is also ambitious, more than she could (or would ever in her life) tell. The wife, the dead and gone wife, had often interrupted him when they were together, thinking they were unobserved.

“It is … it is gentle of you to—”

“Gentle?” she says. And takes two small steps nearer. This, too, she has observed done by the wife. The dead wife. It was like a dance, she remembers thinking, a kind of ritual between them. Affairs of men and women often are, she has found.

He straightens his shoulders, turns fully to her, away from the desk.

“When tigers come together in the forests,” she says, “is it meant to be gentle?”

“Tigers?” he says.

But his voice has changed. She knows men, knows this man.

She doesn’t speak again. Only comes up to him, those small steps, as if gliding. She is wearing a scent taken from the mansion when they left. It had belonged to the wife (the dead wife). That is another risk, but risks do need to be taken, if you want anything of life.

She reaches up, both hands, draws his head down to hers.

Bites him on a corner of the lower lip. Not gently. She has never done that, has only seen it, unobserved.

Then she moves her mouth to his ear and whispers words she has been thinking about, devising, for days and days as they travelled.

She feels him respond, his breath catching, his sex hardening against her body. Her satisfaction in having been right is deeply arousing.

She services him that night on the chair by the desk, on the floor, the bed, and takes her own (real) pleasure more intensely than she ever has before, when she was only one concubine among many, terrified she might be overlooked, disappear into the wasted, empty years of a life.

Those fears are over by the time morning comes.

It is said, at the country estate where they settle, and more widely, later, that she is in some terrifying way the ghost of Yu-lan—never permitted burial—come back into the world.

He marries her in springtime. You didn’t have to observe full mourning rites for someone declared a criminal. His sons are unhappy but say nothing. What are sons going to say?

She has two of the women whipped with bamboo rods that winter for whispering about her, and one pretty, too-intelligent younger concubine is branded—on the face—and dismissed.

She doesn’t mind the ghost idea being cast abroad, in furtive murmurs or wine talk. It gives her another kind of power: association with a dangerous spirit. Power over him, over all of them.

Her name is Tan Ming and she matters. She is determined that everyone will know this before the end, whenever, however that comes. She lights a candle and prays every morning, without fail, for Yu-lan. Her husband thinks she is being virtuous.

Even after all these years, even with another summer over, the heat of Lingzhou still caught him like a blow each day. It seemed impossible to have the knowledge of it prepare you for the next day, if you came from the north.

And it wasn’t as if he was from the farthest north, the starting places of Kitai. He was Szechen-born. The Lu family came from humid, hot weather: rain, thunderstorms, forests of dripping leaves, fog, mist rising from the ground. They understood it. Or, he’d thought he understood, before he came to the island.

Lingzhou was a different world.

It was harder on Mah. His son had been born in Shantong, on the coast, during Chen’s time as prefect there. Those had been the best years, the poet thought. A sophisticated city, between the sea and the serene wonder of West Lake. The man-made lake had been Chen’s joy: pleasure boats drifting, music drifting, all day and at night, hills framing it on the inland side, singing girl houses on the shore close to the city. Elegant, well-funded religious retreats for Cho and Sacred Path dotting the northern shoreline, green roofs and yellow, the upswept curves, bells ringing the hours for prayer, the sound crossing the water.

There were fireworks on the lake at festivals, and music from pleasure boats all through the night, lanterns floating on the water …

Not a place that would prepare you for Lingzhou Isle. Here, you needed to take any exercise in the earliest hour, before the heat battered you into torpor, lassitude, fitful daytime naps in a sweat-soaked bed.

They were doing their dawn routine, father and son, his usual frivolity that they were assailing some evil fortress, when a cleric came running up (running!) from the temple at the end of the village.

It seemed, if the man was to be believed (and understood: he was stammering with shock), that something miraculous had transpired. Honourable Lu Chen and his honourable son were entreated to come see.

The usual cluster of villagers had gathered to watch them exercise. The elder Lu, the poet, was famous and amusing, both; it was worth coming to see them. That same group trailed them west through the village, and others joined them as they went, past the yamen (not yet opened for the day, there was never a need for administrative haste here) and along the path—carefully, watching for snakes—to the temple.

Eventful moments, let alone loudly declared miracles, were not the daily coinage of the isle.

Red and yellow flowers, wet and heavy.

Forest’s edge, the path in rain.

I remember peonies in Yenling

But this south is very different from the north.

Can an angry ghost travel this far?

Cross the strait, afflict an exile’s life?

Or does Lingzhou hold only its own dead

Wherever they might have been born?

In the rainy season we lose the stars.

We do not lose friendship and loyalty,

Good talk, courtesy, the virtues of this time

As they are of any age ever in Kitai.

I think of friends far away and my heart aches.

I drink wine with new companions.

They have opened their gate to a stranger.

Kindness is a brightly feathered bird on a branch.

We listen to their bell as it rings.

We drink and they refill our wine cups.

I will count myself honoured and blessed

Whatever becomes of my last days.

He had written that in springtime on their wall, running hand, large letters, the wide brush quick. The poem emerging as if discovering itself. He was known for improvising in this way. It would seldom be one’s best writing but would have a different kind of value, created right there, in the moment, as the black ink defined the wall.

They had been very happy, the clerics, entering the room after he was done, seeing his words. It would help them a great deal, once it became known that a poem by Lu Chen was on a wall in Lingzhou Isle.

He did this for friends, he did it for joy. He’d lived poetry all his life: carefully revised or swiftly improvised, drunken or sober, dark night, moonlight, morning mist, from the heart of power or protesting against it, or exiled, finally, here.

The clerics had stared at the wall, the words. They had touched his hands, bowing over and over. Two of them had wept. He had suggested drinking in celebration. Said he very much wanted wine, which was only truth. One of them had gone across the village and come back with Lu Mah.