River of Stars

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  He had made it clear to his son as autumn drew to a close: he would end his own life with his own hand—after proper prayers honouring his ancestors—rather than leave this farm and flee through winter, slowing all the others down, likely succumbing on the way to their southern estates.

  “There comes a time,” he’d told Hsien, “when a man needs to stop. I am stopping here. If the barbarians withdraw and the farm remains, come back to me. I do not intend to die but I am at ease if it happens.”

  “I am not,” his son had said.

  He had turned out to be a surprisingly emotional boy. He was a man of past forty years. It appeared he loved his father, beyond simply honouring him. Philosophers said that honouring a parent was mandatory. But it didn’t always happen. Declaring something to be imperative didn’t make it so. Philosophers overlooked that. Sometimes prime ministers did.

  “Do you know,” he’d said to his son (their last conversation), “the barbarians have a set of beliefs about the afterworld.”

  Hsien had been silent, waiting. His son was just a blurred shape in a room by then. He kept his rooms well lit or he’d have been entirely locked in darkness.

  He said, “It seems they believe that in the afterworld everything is backwards. Colours become their opposites. Black creatures are white, light ones dark. The rising of sun and moon are at the opposite end of the sky. The river of stars runs the other way. And so, my son, perhaps in the afterworld, when I cross over, I will see you clearly again. And be young.”

  He had permitted Hsien to embrace him before he went away, leading the others south to where the rest of the family was. It had been awkward, the son stooping, trying for self-control, the seated father lifting his head vaguely for a kiss. He did give his blessing. It was deserved, had been earned, even if not among snakes on Lingzhou Isle. And the old man still had hopes (diminished, it was true, by present events) for the future of their line.

  That had been autumn, after harvest. The Altai had ridden from Xinan, later in the season. As winter came they came, he thought; cold enemies in cold days. He had no one to dictate poems to now. He ought to have kept back one man who knew how to hold a brush, grind ink, write words dictated to him. Mistakes had been made.

  Little Gold Hill was set well back among rising and falling countryside, hidden in a valley, not easily found from the imperial road, which ran like a ribbon of civilization from Hanjin, past Yenling, past Xinan, towards the lost places of the west. The lands of the Silk Roads. Names like bronze bells ringing.

  He had wanted to see those places once. Long ago. Now he sat in darkness on a farm in winter. He had food and wine and firewood. He couldn’t read, there was no one to sing to him. He had thoughts, and memories. He heard owls hunting at night.

  One of those remaining was a young guardsman. He sent this one back and forth to try to ascertain what was happening beyond the valley’s winter stillness. He urged caution. There was no pressing need for him to know what was taking place in the world, there was nothing he could do, but habits of a lifetime were not easily set aside when one grew old.

  This was how he learned that some of the Kitan army in Yenling had smashed through the horsemen surrounding the city and had gone offeast.

  They would be looking to find other Kitan soldiers, the old man thought. To create danger and disturbances for the barbarians, so far from their grassland home. To make them want to leave. He wasn’t trained or versed in the craft of warfare, but some things an intelligent man could work out, with time to think.

  He sent the guardsman around to nearby farms. Some of them, more exposed, more easily found from off the road, had been burned. People were dead, his guard reported, emotionally. He had seen things ...

  “I need you to find me someone who knows how to write properly,” Hang Dejin said. “I feel as if my hand has been cut off.”

  The guardsman went out the next morning, looking for an educated man among the snowy hills west of Yenling. Not an easy task.

  THE ALTAI RIDER-GROUP LEADER, foraging again with his twenty men, was angry and unhappy. All of the horsemen were, in truth. His riders didn’t particularly fear him (an added source of displeasure) but any Kitan they found had cause to do so.

  This siege of Yenling had gone on too long, without any of the rewards that had accompanied the easy taking of that other city to the west. Commanders needed to ensure their horsemen received a due share of pleasures and treasures, especially if they were keeping the riders far from home in winter.

  It wasn’t the cold—it was colder where they came from, the wind howling, driving from the north across vastness.

  No, the problem here was the distance from everything they knew, the alien, enclosing quality of these rising and falling, farmed and irrigated, marked-off fields. Forests everywhere. Ditches and canals and hedgerows and lines of trees: all hard to ride across. The sky was too close here. Did the Lord of the Sky even come this far south? A disturbing thought. Some of the horsemen had wondered if you would cross properly to the afterworld if you died down here in Kitai.

  Add hunger and the boredom of a siege. Men fought each other in their camps over nothing. Add that the commander in Yenling, one of those who’d defeated them (a shocking event), was unnaturally skilled at sorties and ambushes. The Altai were losing men as well as patience here. Note all of this, and for good measure add that his superior officers had made it clear they were displeased with the results of his forays west.

  Any wonder he’d hacked the arms from the first two farmers they’d encountered this time out? Done it himself. Blood in the snow. Screams before they were silent. But that meant they couldn’t use their interpreter to question those two about farms and food in these twisty, evil hills and valleys (he hated hills and valleys).

  His second-in-command had muttered a query when he’d used his sword on a third captured peasant, but he’d needed to do something to get rid of the sour, stale feeling of inactivity. Blood did help. Kumiss wasn’t enough and they didn’t have enough kumiss any more.

  Killing men sent a message, he told himself. Fear was useful. Although there weren’t many Kitan who needed that message any more. They hadn’t found even one woman, for example, in weeks of riding out. Some of his foraging party forced Kitan men for their pleasure, but the captain found that undignified.

  He grunted, but with a degree of approval, when one of those he’d sent north of the road came back to report they’d spotted a man on horseback, tracks in snow, moving cautiously.

  They tracked him to a small farm, marked where it was, and continued following him when he left. It was easy to follow a man in country such as this, with tracks in snow.

  They marked the two other farms this Kitan visited. They left them alone for now, followed the solitary figure back, later in the day, to a larger, hidden farm in a valley well north of the road, shielded on two sides by woods. They’d have continued to miss it, the group leader thought, looking happily down on hearth smoke. There were many buildings. There might be women.

  There weren’t, although there was a satisfying amount of food in granaries and storehouses and there were cows and chickens and a dozen pigs. Three horses. Only a handful of men, the rest had fled. People were always fleeing. They found the guard they’d tracked, five servants, and then an old, blind man in a room blazing with light.

  The old man was sitting in a handsome chair and the room was filled with the sorts of treasures the Kitan valued. The Altai captain thought these were items of immense triviality, except for the precious metals and gems, of course. Still, orders had come that they were to collect and ship home to the Eastern Capital anything found. He’d be well served by this discovery, and ought to be able to keep back a few things for himself. The day had become a good one, after all.

  The old man spoke a few words in his own tongue. His voice was unexpectedly forceful, arrogantly so, the captain felt. Their interpreter replied, the old man spoke again.

  “What is he saying?” the captain
rasped.

  The Kitan interpreter, properly subservient, said, “He asked if I was the scribe he had sent for. I told him not so. He asked if you were Altai with me. I said yes, I am interpreter. He asked my family name and I told him. He says ... that he can smell you. He calls me a traitor, and instructs me to say he despises you as barbarians.”

  As the interpreter spoke, the old man calmly drank from a wine cup at his elbow, reaching out carefully with his hand to find it.

  The Altai captain listened to it all, gave a bark of laughter. “Does he say such things? Shall he live?”

  The old man asked a question, head turned towards the interpreter’s voice. The interpreter spoke to him.

  “He says?”

  “I tell him your words. He says Kitai will live whether he does so or not and that he has lived long enough if barbarians are in his home.”

  That was enough defiance, the captain thought. Words like that could undermine his standing. He drew his sword. A little late, in the event. The old man’s head stiffened. It flexed backwards then came forward heavily, all the way down, as if his spine had been severed.

  The wine, of course. The old man had been prepared.

  He looked at one of his riders. The man strode forward and confirmed what was obvious. After a long, angry moment, feeling deprived and insulted, the captain turned to the interpreter. He urgently wanted to kill him, for the words that had left his mouth, but the worm was necessary still. He could be cut apart later, when they left to go home.

  He assigned men to begin gathering food supplies on whatever carts were here, and arranging to herd the animals back to camp. He permitted them to do whatever they wanted with the servants.

  It was still a good day, he told himself, but the encounter had left him unhappy. It was as if the old man had escaped him, crossing into death. They cut his hands off and left him there, in his chair, unburied, unburned. Let him rot, let animals feed on him.

  That didn’t happen. After the riders left in the morning, having spent the night at Little Gold Hill, men slipped down from the hills and came to the farm. The Altai would be returning, of course, possibly even today, with carts to carry away plunder from the estate. Working quickly, the Kitan gathered as much as they could of food and valuables. They burned, in haste but with honour, the slain servants and the two guardsmen.

  The body of the former prime minister was carried away from Little Gold Hill, his last home. They retrieved his severed hands and wrapped them in cloth.

  In a valley not far away, Hang Dejin was buried, properly, with great respect, though without the ceremony a better, brighter time might have allowed. Snow was falling. The winter ground was hard. But he had been a great man, a leader of Kitai for many years, and there was no stinting in the labour. The gravesite was marked with certain signs that might allow him to be found, should that brighter time ever come.

  There was no immediate way to send word to his family in the south, but they did find out, eventually, the manner of his passing.

  The interpreter, an educated man, survived, fleeing some months later across fields and into the woods from the Altai camp, enduring in the forest because the weather was warming by then and because the steppe riders moved on from Yenling. Because of this, because he lived, and wrote down his recollections of that day, men came to know what Hang Dejin’s last words had been—or the words attributed to him.

  There were peonies in Yenling when spring came, even in that year. Flowers grow, whether or not men and women are able to celebrate them, wear them in their hair.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  Court Gentleman Lin Kuo died that winter, not long before the New Year.

  He wasn’t particularly old, but had suffered from a breathing difficulty for a number of years, and he caught a chill and fever in the bitter cold, with the shortage of firewood. He succumbed not long after taking to his bed. It could be called mercifully swift. A physician had been summoned, and actually attended—unusual in that time, but this was still the imperial clan compound. He’d tried two different decoctions, and essayed moxibustion on the court gentleman’s chest, but was unable to avert the end. There were so many deaths in a bleak time. What could be said about one more? What words to close a life?

  He’d been somewhat respected, somewhat a figure of amusement. A gentle man, stepping carefully, inconsequential in almost all ways that might be said to matter. Intelligent, obviously. He had passed the examinations on only his second effort, which was noteworthy, but had done nothing with his jinshi status, never agitated for or held a position at court or in the provinces. Had seemed content with his stipend as a graduate. Not a man of ambition.

  He’d enjoyed good wine and food, thoughtful company. Spoke wittily, but in a soft voice, and many times his comments went unheard in a loud gathering. He didn’t seem to mind. He laughed when others said clever things. He recorded these in journals or letters. He read widely. He wrote to many people. He kept friendships on both sides of the faction wars that dominated his youth and continued into his later years. He showed courage in this, but did so quietly. It might be said that his declining to pursue a court position was a declining to take sides.

  His one encounter with the greater sweep of events came later in life. He was sentenced to exile on the orders of the deputy prime minister, all the way to Lingzhou Isle, which would undoubtedly have killed a man with breathing difficulties. The sentence had been reversed by the emperor himself, in circumstances of drama and consequence.

  He’d been a notably tall man, Lin Kuo, slightly stooped as if apologizing for that. His formal calligraphy was clear, very straight along a page, not memorable. His running hand, which few ever saw, was different: intense, energetic.

  Gardens were a passion, and he travelled widely to observe and record (with permission) the properties of members of the court and various country estates of those who had withdrawn from Hanjin. He crafted an essay about Emperor Wenzong’s beloved Genyue. His writing style in these little pieces was perhaps too much enthused or flattering, and this caused some later historians to dismiss his essay on the imperial garden. They judged that no earthly garden, even an emperor’s, could ever have been as Lin Kuo described the Genyue before it was destroyed. His was, in fact, the only detailed record of it that endured.

  There is an element of the random, the accidental in what survives. It isn’t always a matter of fame or prominence. There were poets of the Third and Fifth Dynasties, and even among the giants of the Ninth, of whom little was left but the praise of their peers, and their names. The same was true of painters, calligraphers. Their work endured, often, only in copies made of originals, if it did so at all. There are poems about paintings, but the paintings are lost.

  Lin Kuo’s little book on the Genyue survived because he sent copies, with modest personal inscriptions, to some distinguished figures in the provinces, some of them south of the Great River—which was where copies were later found.

  He married once, not long after passing the examinations, and never remarried when his wife died, or even took a concubine, which was unusual. It was said, by those who had bothered to take note of it, that theirs had been a love match. He had one daughter.

  Nonetheless, if there is a value to a quiet life, there may be said to have been value to Lin Kuo’s. Not every man or woman sailing down the river will be a figure of force or significance. Some are merely in the boat with all of us.

  An emperor had written long ago that in the presence of a good man he was given—as in a bronze mirror—a reflection of how to live a virtuous life.

  Lin Kuo himself would have said that his legacy was his daughter. Or no. He’d have believed that, but never voiced the thought, for fear of putting a burden of such weight upon her shoulders, which would be an improper thing to do to anyone, let alone a child so dearly loved from the beginning of her days to the end of his.

  They are eating maggot-infested rice in the clan compound now, and the well is guarded all the time, each f
amily limited to three small containers a day.

  They collect their rice and water each morning. Cooking the rice is a difficulty. They are all dismantling interior walls and floors in upper rooms for firewood. Houses are dangerous, people have fallen and died.

  Shan has taken one of her husband’s old hats and stitched hers inside it, for warmth. She looks, she thinks, like a market performer, making children and farmers laugh for coins dropped in a box.

  The markets are empty. There is nothing to sell. People mostly keep indoors, out of the wind. Those abroad in Hanjin are often looking for access to the houses or shops of the dead—for wood, for scraps of food. For anything. They have eaten all the cats and dogs. The city guards and the soldiers, Daiyan’s soldiers, are patrolling. They have instructions to kill those found looting. They have done so. Order, or the illusion of order.

  She goes herself each morning to the main square of the compound to get their food. She takes two of the four women who have remained. The others had all fled before the gates were locked. They line up, bundled against the cold. She finds that she hardly feels it. Grief is a deeper cold.

  Qi Wai has been properly sympathetic; he’d honoured her father. Her husband is a haunted man these days. She hears him go out at night sometimes. She knows where he goes.

  He is terrified that the strange safeguarding of their warehouse will be rescinded and the collection taken away. She knows who has ordered this, he does not. It bars him from sleep or rest, this fear. He can’t understand why the collection remains undisturbed though almost all else of value in the city has been gathered—and sent out in wagons through the northern gate a week before.

  So he guards the warehouse. In the cold dark alone, or by daylight after the weak sun rises. He is exhausted, haggard, his beard unkempt. One morning, catching him before he goes out, as she returns with their rice, the servants carrying the water, Shan makes him sit down and she trims his beard, acting as a servant might.