River of Stars

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  LATER STILL, the moon west by then, there is a footfall on her balcony. The door swings outward, sound of wind and leaves, and Daiyan is there.

  Shan sits up in bed, her heart beating hard. How is it she has almost expected him? How does that happen?

  “I fear I am making a habit of this,” he says, closing the balcony door quietly, stopping halfway into the room.

  “Not enough of one,” she says. “You are welcome beyond words. You heard the news? The emperor?”

  He nods.

  “Will you hold me?” she asks.

  “For as long as I am allowed,” he says.

  Many days later a letter came to East Slope. They paid the courier, offered him a meal and a bed. He was going on to Shantong in the morning with other letters for other officials.

  This one was addressed to the younger brother, not the poet. Lu Chao was no longer an exile after his service as envoy, and though he had declined a position at court, he had been rewarded handsomely and had friends there again. It was permitted to befriend him.

  The letter informed him first that future communication would become precarious or impossible, and his correspondent apologized for that. The Altai were expected very soon. Hanjin would be surrounded, besieged. What would follow was not known. Countless numbers had fled the capital, were roaming the countryside looking for haven. Xinan had been taken. Reports were grim. Yenling had not yet fallen.

  Then the letter told about the emperors. The one who had stepped aside, the one on the throne now. His son.

  Lu Chao went looking for his brother.

  Chen was in his writing room, a fire lit. He looked up from his desk, saw his younger brother’s expression. He read the letter. He began to weep. Chao was unsure why he was not doing so himself. He looked out the window. Trees, some stripped of leaves, some evergreen. Their gate and wall. Sun, clouds. Ordinary sun, ordinary clouds.

  Later, they gathered wives and children, servants, and shared what they had learned. Lu Mah, who had changed since the journey north, who was more confident and more questioning, asked, “Father, uncle, who is responsible for this?”

  The brothers looked at each other. His father, dry-eyed now but uncharacteristically subdued, said, “It goes back too far. We might as well blame the river of stars, or heaven.”

  “Not the prime minister?” Lu Mah asked.

  A short silence.

  “If you like,” his father said, still quietly.

  “Not the emperor?”

  An anxious murmur from his stepmother and some of his cousins.

  “If you like,” his uncle said.

  CHAPTER XXI

  Wan’yen, war-leader of the Altai, struggled at times with the disturbing thought that his younger brother was a better man than he was. Or a harder one, which was much the same thing in their world.

  Wan’yen and their kaghan, Yan’po, were both still trying to find air to breathe in the rapidity of change through the past year and more—since the night they had taken the Jeni camp and begun their move out into the world.

  His brother had no such difficulty.

  Until Bai’ji had persuaded him to see things otherwise, the kaghan had resisted the idea of naming himself an emperor. He’d been unhappy with abandoning tribal traditions. A court, councillors, walled rooms, walled cities? Taxation, and Kitan servants from the taken prefectures to administer granaries and building works, as they had done for the Xiaolu? It did not please Yan’po.

  Wan’yen understood this feeling. It was not the way of the grasslands. And though there was hardship to remember if you thought back to their homelands by the Black River, and the bitterness of existence there, it had been hardship they understood and their fathers and grandfathers had known it too.

  It made men stronger, that life. They took pride in things that deserved pride. There was nothing appealing, to his mind, about a house, however large, inside walls, however high. And Wan’yen had little taste for the luxuries that came if you were an emperor, or his war-leader.

  Women, yes, but he had never lacked for the company of women. You won them in the tribe with your prowess, or outside it with your sword. Not lying on cushions, drinking kumiss (or the dreadful Kitan rice wine) and having them brought to you by others.

  Wan’yen liked warfare. He liked riding across the steppe at speed, then seeing the terror in others’ eyes when the Altai suddenly appeared against a long horizon. That was how a man claimed a woman—and his own pride. He liked nights under stars, listening to the wind and the wolves. He had a gift for the work of blade and horse and bow, and leading other men into such work.

  He didn’t particularly want to live in what had been the Xiaolu’s Central Capital now that it was theirs, and neither did the kaghan.

  On the other hand, if Wan’yen listened to his brother’s private words, the kaghan—the emperor now—would concern them for only a little longer.

  Yan’po had aged since their sweep out of the east had begun. He was angry, bewildered, not a triumphant leader. He was a figure of the past, Bai’ji said to his brother—exactly as the Xiaolu emperor had been before the Altai leaders had sat cross-legged on the grass and watched fire ants turn him, screaming, into a skull.

  They wouldn’t do that to their kaghan, of course, Bai’ji had said. There were quieter ways of sending a man from this side of the doors of death, letting him begin his passage through the spirit world where everything was inverted and the Lord of the Sky awaited the souls of men.

  At that point in the conversation, Wan’yen had asserted himself. He’d had to do it firmly, since Bai’ji was stubborn in his views. The kaghan, the emperor, was not to be harmed in any way, Wan’yen made clear. Whatever the sky decreed as his fate would come to pass without intervention. Did his brother understand? Did Bai’ji accept this?

  Bai’ji eventually did, or said so. There was now a different thought in the older brother’s mind, however. If the younger was a harder man, and perhaps saw himself as a better one, why stop with Yan’po, with removing only the old man as an obstacle to his own ascent? Why not carry that same design as far as a brother less likely to die naturally any time soon? Bai’ji seemed to have no difficulty with cities and walls and an empire. He appeared to enjoy having captured women brought to him.

  Wan’yen’s own thoughts were simple. In most ways the steppe was a simple place. A leader was as strong as his largesse. If riders were rewarded in ways that mattered to them, the leader was secure. You could say he was loved, but that would be foolishness. You didn’t live long if you thought your horsemen carried affection for you that would last when they were hungry, or felt insufficiently assuaged with the spoils of conquest.

  So he had started south, in the wake of the absurd, arrogant Kitan demand for all their surrendered northern lands, even after their abject military failure against the Xiaolu. They were going to teach Kitai a very expensive lesson—carry back north more treasure than any steppe army ever had.

  Wasn’t that ambition enough? A triumph to be sung around campfires? More than any riders had ever claimed. From the Kitan capital itself!

  No. It was not enough, it appeared, for his brother. From where Bai’ji sat his horse, on Wan’yen’s left side, where he always was, it was only a beginning.

  “We demand a tribute that will destroy them,” Bai’ji had said on their way to Hanjin. A Kitan army was broken behind them, tens of thousands killed, the rest in flight, all directions.

  “Yes,” Wan’yen had said.

  “They humiliate themselves to gather it for us. They kill each other in Hanjin to seize silver and gold to bring into our camp.”

  “I agree.”

  “And then we say it is not enough.”

  “What does that mean?”

  His brother had shaken his head, with the smile Wan’yen had never liked. Bai’ji was smaller, Wan’yen had always been able to beat him in a fight when they were young. But his brother’s eyes were cold, and he had that smile.

  “D
on’t you see? We require a sum that is beyond them.”

  “And they can’t do it, but we take everything they gather. Yes. I agree.”

  “No,” said his brother, too bluntly. “No! We take all of that when they bring it to us, and then we say it does not meet what they agreed to give. And then we take Hanjin, brother. Make it ours. As a start.”

  “A start?” Wan’yen had asked.

  This conversation had been yesterday evening, last ride of the day before making camp. A cold night coming, but they’d known colder in the north.

  “Kitai is ours, my brother, once their emperor and all his heirs are captive. We hold the capital, we hold Yenling. Xinan is empty, it doesn’t matter. We can burn it or leave it for the wolves. Brother, we rule Kitai, through men we choose. Their farmers pay us their taxes, they bring us their grain. We choose among their women, brother. Their officials serve us the same way they have served this fool emperor—or they starve like animals in winter.”

  “You want to stay here? Not go home?”

  His brother had smiled again. Bai’ji was a handsome man.

  “There is a sea to the south,” he’d said. “We have heard of it, yes? I think you and I should ride our horses into the shallows of that sea, brother. And lay claim to everything between the Black River and those waters.”

  “Why?” Wan’yen had asked. His brother had turned away, almost quickly enough to hide the expression on his face.

  People began dying in the city when winter came. The first ones were buried properly, their families observing rites. But when the numbers began to grow large, Ren Daiyan, sorrowing, ordered that the dead be collected and burned by soldiers, with all respect possible.

  Food was in short supply but not at starvation levels yet, in part because so many had fled the city, but the very young and the elderly were vulnerable to the cold when firewood gave out. The Altai controlled the capital’s Great Canal port, of course. They had the city surrounded. There was no way of supplying Hanjin.

  Daiyan had made it in just before the gates were closed against the arrival of the steppe riders. He remembered the morning they had awakened to see horsemen outside the walls in a winter dawn. They had come in the night, to be here, filling the plain, when Hanjin awakened.

  There was horror in that, and a driving, besetting anger, but also a feeling of overwhelming strangeness. He thought of the daiji at Ma-wai. Barbarians here felt nearly as unnatural, as if this, too, came from a world that was not their own. On clear nights he looked up at the stars and wondered.

  He was one of the three commanders charged with the defence of Hanjin. Daiyan was the one who suggested opening the inward gates of the Genyue when it turned bitterly cold, allowing ordinary people into the glory of the emperor’s garden—to chop down trees and break up the wooden structures there. He had proposed it, and approval had come from the palace that same day. There was a different emperor ruling now. Not the one who’d built that garden.

  He had thought he might feel some satisfaction dismantling the extravagance of the Flowers and Rocks Network. He didn’t. He couldn’t find that feeling in himself, watching men and women, wrapped in whatever clothing they could find, take awkward axes to trees that had been lovingly placed in a garden meant to mirror the world.

  They would burn, carefully rationed, in fireplaces throughout Hanjin. There was no mirror any more.

  After a short time the Genyue was a wasteland. Groves annihilated to stumps, great cypresses, oak stands, cedars, birches, the orchards ...

  The animals had been killed some time ago to feed the court. They’d eaten nightingales.

  Walking in the nakedness of the Genyue, alone towards sundown on a knife-sharp day, snow beginning to fall from a blank sky, Daiyan had another idea. You could be sorrowful, thinking about the end of beauty (however it had been achieved), but you still had a task, and the city was besieged.

  He rode back to his barracks through muffled streets and summoned their senior engineers, the men who built and armed their catapults, and he had them set men to smashing mountains and rocks in the garden. Some of these had been brought up from the bottom of lakes, killing men in the process, destroying bridges and buildings along the canal to get them here for the emperor’s delight.

  Two days later the first heavy projectiles began flying from the heights of the Genyue, to crash at sunrise among the tents and horse pens of the Altai north of them. They wreaked damage on a dramatic scale, causing shouts of alarm from men and screams from dying horses.

  One pen was smashed open, Daiyan saw, watching from on the wall (he was exposed, but he did that deliberately, to be seen by both sides). The horses broke free, causing chaos as they bolted wildly through the Altai camp. A fire started.

  It was satisfying to watch, but it wasn’t about to break a siege, however unhappy the riders might be out there. It was colder where they came from, and they had no children or aged among them to begin the dying.

  It was a short-term blow, no more than that. A boost to morale, unsettling the enemy. One more clever idea for Commander Ren Daiyan. They hated him by name now, the Altai. They knew who had destroyed their army above Yenling.

  They still hadn’t taken Yenling. Ziji and most of Daiyan’s army were defending it. He had raced here along the imperial road with half of his cavalry but there weren’t nearly enough of them. Not to break out and engage in the open. And not to defend the city if it came to that.

  He half expected his own execution or surrender to be one of the Altai demands. He had thoughts about what was really happening here.

  He’d said none of this to anyone. Not even Shan, though he had a sense sometimes that she knew. She had knowing eyes, and the endgame here would certainly involve the women.

  He wasn’t even supposed to be launching attacks with the catapults. Terms had been negotiated, after all. The Altai had promised to withdraw if Hanjin bought its way out of shame.

  The numbers could break your heart. They could break an empire. Two million units of gold. Ten million of silver. Twenty million strings of cash, or the equivalent in jade and gems. Two million bolts of silk. Ten thousand oxen. Twenty thousand horses—because of course they wanted all Daiyan’s horses. Now. From the city.

  It was simply impossible. They could stretch some way towards it if city and palace emptied out entirely, but they could never raise this much. Everyone knew it, on both sides.

  So Daiyan waited, and surely the court was waiting, for the next heavy footfall from outside the walls: the demand that was coming.

  Heartbreak, and a rage that threatened to choke him.

  And an awareness that they had brought this upon themselves. Demanding the return of all Fourteen Prefectures when they hadn’t taken the one isolated city tasked to them.

  The nine heavens and the gods knew Daiyan wanted that land back, but you needed to win your rivers and mountains, you didn’t send a messenger to a triumphant steppe army—when your own had done nothing—and demand concessions. Were they so truly lost in folly?

  He knew the answer. The answer was horsemen outside the walls and people dying inside. Smoke everywhere, fires for the dead, charred bones, no graves. A punishment, the riders were calling it, a lesson taught. It made him clench his jaw whenever he slowed enough to think about it. He wasn’t sleeping at night. Watchers on the walls would see Ren Daiyan come among them in the darkness, hear his voice asking if all was well.

  A lesson? To Kitai, from horsemen who scarcely had writing, who had been nothing even two years ago, a tribe barely known by name, in a wilderness halfway to the Koreini Peninsula.

  There was madness in such thoughts. The world could change too swiftly for men to address. Daiyan wasn’t a philosopher, he didn’t take a historian’s long view. He wanted to shape his own time with a bow and sword.

  Hanjin was cold and hungry and terrified. They were abusing their own people in the search for valuables.

  Soldiers had been ordered to go from house to house makin
g sure no one held back silver, jade, gems, coins, the least amount of gold. Women’s earrings and hairpins were seized from their inner quarters. Bracelets and necklaces. Hiding places were discovered. Most people were bad at hiding things.

  Servants had been offered a reward if they informed on their masters. Daiyan wanted to kill the bureaucrat who had come up with that idea. He knew, by now, something of how officials thought: the informing servants would be stripped of their rewards in the next wave of seizures.

  He was angry all the time, tangled in pain. Hurling rocks at the Altai from the city walls didn’t do anything to help. He needed to master this feeling. People were depending on him. There had to be survivors in Hanjin, and elsewhere. There had to be a next stage, a new page that could be written. Cities fell, empires didn’t have to. There could be—there would be—better words for historians to write and read in the scroll of this time.

  The abdicated emperor was now called the father-emperor. Wenzong kept to rooms in a wing of the palace. No one had seen him for some time. No one knew what he’d thought of the order to destroy his garden. Perhaps he approved? If the garden had mirrored the world and the world was chaos, falling like a star fell ... ?

  It was Chizu who now ruled, who had authorized the seizure of wealth all through the city. Who had negotiated—through Prime Minister Kai—terms for buying peace.

  One of Daiyan’s officers had suggested, only half in jest, that they use the throne for firewood in their barracks. In the square before the palace the students were still marching back and forth, in snow or slanting rain, demanding the heads of the “Five Felons”: Kai Zhen and his principal ministers. That might happen, Daiyan thought, but not yet. He understood this, too, now. He was learning. Men’s lives might be part of the negotiations. Women’s, too.

  You hated the terms the court had accepted, and you could anticipate what was coming next. But if you were a soldier, a military commander, what would you say to your emperor and his advisers if you strode into the throne room?