River of Stars

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  Or a slave to a conquering horseman. She dreams, when she does sleep, of grassland in all directions, emptiness.

  Negotiations have begun as to the valuation of men and women to be given over to the Altai. They want craftsmen, it seems, and men with skill in numbers. They want women. She tries to imagine the recording of these assessments, out by the yurts. Younger women are valued more, so are aristocrats. She is the daughter of a court gentleman. She is of the imperial clan. She is still young. She dreams of the steppe, wakes in the cold nights.

  The New Year is almost upon them.

  Her father is dead. She lights his candle each morning, leaves a (small) dish of cooked rice on the altar at evening, and each afternoon she writes out a line of poetry, or words from the Cho Master, folds the paper carefully, and leaves that on the altar, too.

  She has heard that some animals burrow deep and curl themselves tightly around their own heart to sleep through the winter, barely alive.

  She feels that way. She doesn’t expect springtime will be an awakening. She remembers the teachings concerning when it is judged virtuous for a woman to take her own life rather than accept some levels or degrees of shame.

  She discovers that she is too angry to do that. She wants to kill someone else, not herself. She wants to live to help undo what this has become, or see it undone by others, since she is only a woman and has no sword.

  She learns one morning, as word reaches the compound, that Prime Minister Kai Zhen has been strangled in the night by order of the emperor. The new emperor.

  This is also the fate of four other principal advisers, it seems. The “Five Felons” the students had named them, shouting and protesting in front of the palace. The Altai had wanted the prime minister alive, it is said. There has been, it seems, a kind of compromise: his body has been sent out to them, to do with as they wish. There is shame here, too.

  The students who had been demanding these deaths have now dispersed. She no longer hears them from over the compound wall. She wonders if they feel satisfaction. Shan had expected to feel some kind of pleasure at this news, a vengeance achieved for her father, justice done.

  She does not, wrapped around her heart in the cold. She thinks of that crumbling, dangerous tower in Xinan, near the garden where the court and the people of the city had gathered in springtime long ago, ladies riding with feathers in their hair, poets watching them.

  Late afternoon of the day before New Year’s eve, a message comes from Daiyan.

  In his own hand it instructs her to be with Qi Wai outside the Never-Ending Riches Tea House by the western city gate at sundown tomorrow. They are to dress as warmly as they can and carry nothing. The last character is stressed. They are to be ready for a journey. She is to burn this letter.

  She stares at the characters a long time. She burns the letter. She goes to find her husband. He is not in his rooms. She puts on her layers of clothing and her undignified hat and finds him in front of their warehouse on the far side of the compound. It is a grey afternoon, not as cold as some have been. There will be snow before night, she thinks, looking at the sky.

  Wai is pacing back and forth before the locked doors of the storage building. There is no one else in the square. She sees an old sword propped against the wall and she sees the mark above the door that has protected it to this point. Nothing will protect it if the Altai enter the city.

  She bows. She says, “Greetings, husband. We have been offered help in escaping tomorrow night. One of the commanders, the one who saved me in the Genyue. We need to make ourselves ready.”

  His eyes have become strange, quick, darting, on her then past her, as if fearing attackers rushing across the square or into it from either side. It is as if this siege—all the dying, awareness of what might come next, negotiations for human lives—all of it has undone him. He is not alone in this, Shan thinks. She’s nothing near what she’d have called her own self. No one is, surely. How could you be?

  He says, “I cannot leave, Shan. There is no one to guard it.”

  She feels pity, reaching in through the cold of her heart. “Wai, you cannot guard it. You know this. You must know it.”

  “I do not know such a thing! It would only be street thieves. My father says—”

  “Your father said the horsemen would go away. They are not going away. It is not street thieves, Wai. Our court officials are outside the walls setting a price on members of the imperial clan. On me, on you. On your father and mother, Wai. On everyone they think worth anything.”

  “Worth? What am I worth?” he cries, anguished. “To them?”

  “Not as much as me,” she says, and regrets it, seeing his face.

  He takes a breath. His head bobs up and down. “Yes. You must go,” her husband says. “I know this. They want our women. You must not stay if there is any chance to get out. How? How is this man to do this?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, because she doesn’t. “Husband, you must come too. We are being given a chance, past when we had any right to hope for one. We ... you can build another collection. You know you can.”

  He shakes his head. “My life is inside this storehouse.”

  Simple words, and she knows them to be true. She is not his life, no one is. Bronze bells and tripods are, stone plinths, court seals, fragments of bowls and vases, a sculpted figure for an emperor’s tomb ... a record of what Kitai has been.

  “Then you must start again,” she says. “If we survive. You need to build it up again, so that others might know.”

  “I cannot,” Qi Wai says. “Shan, wife, I cannot. You go. I will follow south if I survive this. If ... if I do not and you do live, to honour me please look after Lizhen if you can. And ... see that Kou Yao is all right.”

  She looks at him. Feels the first soft flakes of snow beginning to fall. She looks up. Snow on her cheeks. She feels no anger. Only sorrow.

  “Wai—” she begins.

  “Go,” he says. “This is my proper place. Whatever the gods decree will happen.” He spreads his feet as if to steady himself.

  She lowers her head. “It is wrong for a wife to leave her husband in this way,” she says.

  He laughs suddenly. A sound from long ago when they’d been young, newly wed, travelling together, cataloguing what they found, holding objects up to sunlight or lamps lit after dark.

  “As your husband I command you,” he says.

  She looks up, sees that he is smiling, that he knows the words have nothing to do with them, what they have been in their time.

  Flakes of snow are on his hat and cloak, and on her own. It is growing dark. No one is abroad. Why would anyone be abroad? Tomorrow is the eve of the New Year, a time of celebration, red lanterns and dragons, fireworks. Not this year.

  She bows to him twice. He bows to her.

  She turns and leaves, crossing the empty square, muffled in falling snow, going up another darkening street towards home, in the winter of Hanjin’s fall.

  At sundown the next day, New Year’s eve, traditional beginning of two weeks of festivity, the northern gates of Hanjin were opened, as they had been for several evenings now, to allow their negotiators to come back in.

  It was to be a quiet night, no music, no fireworks. There would be prayers, rituals, invocations at cold temples. In the palace, the young emperor would beseech good fortune for the coming days and a renewal of his mandate from heaven. None of the customary celebrations were planned.

  None took place. The gates were never closed that night.

  The first Altai riders came in with the returning negotiators, in force and at speed. They killed the gate guards, then others flooded in, spreading through the city like a river bursting its banks, and the fall of Hanjin began that night.

  It seemed that someone in authority among the yurts had decided that this game, this back and forth of sums attached to courtiers and court ladies and hat-makers and musicians, had grown tiresome.

  There were riders to be assuaged, far from home an
d so long away, and the steppe celebrated the same New Year as Kitai, under the same new moon and stars, or under a grey-black sky and falling snow.

  Daiyan was aware it was a deadly undertaking, and his desire to live was intense enough to make him afraid. He was trying not to let Shan see that. He knew she was observant. It was in her way of being.

  He hated tunnels, being underground, always had. But it wasn’t their avenue of escape that was disturbing him, it was what came after, for him. The part he hadn’t told anyone about.

  He was waiting for a signal in the dark of New Year’s night. He was remembering (the way the mind worked) fireworks when he was a boy. The wonder and joy, light bursting in the sky then falling in showers of green and red and silver.

  They were out of sight near the principal western gate. Beyond it lay the Garden of the Chalcedony Grove, with its man-made lake where pageants and boat competitions had been performed for emperors in their splendour.

  Stars slipped in and out of clouds as he watched, and then were finally gone as a heavier bank of clouds rolled in from the north. It began to snow again. He turned to the woman he loved and might lose tonight. He said, “The snow is good for us. For this.”

  There were two men with them. His best officer in the city and another, chosen for a different skill. He’d had to choose. The other soldiers were likely to die here. Men he knew well, some of them. Leadership in war was a dark thing.

  Up by the northern gates, the Altai were coming in. Daiyan had gone over the wall alone two nights ago, before the rising of a waning moon. He had captured an Altai guard at his patrol post. They’d become careless out there, over time, contemptuous.

  He’d taken the man to an interpreter and had done what needed to be done to get information before he killed him. In any case, the defenders of Hanjin had been able to see what was happening from inside the walls: horses being readied, movement in the camps. You didn’t mobilize eighty thousand men and their horses without someone being able to understand.

  He ought to have been there by the northern gates. He ought to have ordered them shut, even if that meant barring their own people outside. Or he could have tried to stop the negotiators from going out this morning. He didn’t have that authority, and it wouldn’t have mattered. He knew the Altai had been weakening the city walls all this time. He knew his forces couldn’t hold those breaches. If the riders had wanted to enter Hanjin, they could have entered any time—or they could enter now. There came a point when you couldn’t stop what was coming.

  Sounds carried, muffled by the heavy night. Shouts, some screams. Looking back, he saw fire. He closed his eyes and then opened them. What he was doing he needed to do. He could die fighting at the northern gate or he could try to do something that might make a difference. It ached in him like a wound, though, not to be there right now. It could be frightening sometimes, the desire to kill.

  Beside him, Shan said, “Snow is good? Really? Is anything good tonight?”

  She was hearing the sounds, too. He couldn’t think of a reply that wouldn’t say too much. He didn’t want her to know what he intended to do. He heard an owl from outside the wall. It wasn’t an owl. It was time.

  The tunnels had been built more than two hundred years ago. Two of them, going out to south and west. They were almost unknown, closer to legend than anything else. It had been Wang Fuyin, the magistrate, his friend (where was his friend tonight in the south?), who had searched them out in the archives, records on brittle scrolls. And then they’d found them.

  Daiyan and Ziji had explored both tunnels in the springtime, sharing this with no one. He had dealt with his old fear, you had to do that all the time in life. They’d needed to pick locks to get in through doors beneath old buildings, but they’d been outlaws a long time and knew how to do that. Then through those doors and under the weight of the earth, carrying torches. Old beams and posts, skittering sounds, the lifelong fear of being crushed alive.

  Flickering darkness, uneven footing. Both tunnels went a long way past the city walls. Ziji had counted paces. Daiyan remembered those crouching walks, the anxious awareness that the exits might have been blocked up after so long, wondering what would happen if the torches went out.

  They’d emerged from the western one by pushing up together, hard, on a heavy wooden door, spilling earth. They had found themselves in a bamboo wood under a spring moon. They’d closed the door in the ground, covered it again carefully, walked back to Hanjin and through the city gate. The gates had still been open then, the world coming in and out, the nights a brightness equal to the days. Or so poets wrote, exaggerating. Women and food vendors had been calling to them, someone was breathing fire, someone had a gibbon trained to dance.

  The southern tunnel’s exit had proved to be more exposed—still distant, perhaps useful, but in the open. The magistrate had guessed there’d been woods that way, back when the tunnels were made.

  Now he led Shan up the steps and then inside the abandoned structure next to the tea house. It had been a singing girl house once. A valuable property, so near a major gate. They had already broken the lock on the front door. It was dark inside; one torch became three, each of the men carried one. They went towards the back and down a flight of stairs, carefully.

  “The step is broken here,” he said, and Shan put a hand on his arm and stepped down two at once. At the bottom they walked along a corridor, turned when it turned, and came to the doorway he and Ziji had found—not long after they’d first come to the capital, to Hanjin, the centre of the world.

  “It is a long way,” he told her, and the other two, who would not know this tunnel either. “It comes up well beyond the walls and the Chalcedony Grove. We will have to stoop at times, so watch your heads, but the air is all right. I have done this before.”

  “Who built this? When? How did you find it?” Shan asked, and he realized that he loved that she was asking, wanting to know.

  “I’ll tell you as we walk,” he said. “Ming Dun, bar the door on this side when we get in.” Dun was the man he knew was very good.

  He talked as they went. Sometimes men (or a woman) needed to hear a leader’s voice. There were different ways to lead, more ways to fail, he thought.

  He remembered Ziji counting, that first time. First times were the hardest for something like this. Now, he knew there was an ending to the tunnel. What he didn’t know was what they’d find when they came up.

  The owl call was some reassurance, but this was a night of chaos and violence, the ending of a world, and it was foolish to wish for certainty. He knew the Altai were above them, and there were fires in the city.

  He held her elbow for a time, then the tunnel narrowed and they had to go single file. He went first, still talking, Shan behind him, then the two soldiers.

  He was fleeing the sack of Hanjin, and he was one of the men who’d been given command here. He fought shame as best he could but it was difficult. If he’d been younger, he might have sworn oaths of vengeance and redress. He remembered vows before the family altar in Shengdu, when he’d been certain he was alone. Rivers and mountains, an oath to reclaim the lost. A boy talking to his ancestors, making sure his older brother didn’t hear.

  An oath was nothing, the doing was all. And you could fail. Men failed more often than otherwise, he thought.

  They had invited him to the palace some nights ago, to be the man who killed Kai Zhen.

  He had declined. When it came time, he’d discovered that such an act was not in him, not in this way. If the emperor of Kitai chose to execute his prime minister for evil counsel given to his father (pursuing the father’s desires) that was the emperor’s right, and duty. There were men paid to serve as executioners, using a sword, strangling, other means.

  He hadn’t grieved for the prime minister. Not that. He’d wondered who would follow Kai Zhen, and then he’d realized, bitterly, that it might not matter.

  He said, “I suppose two hundred years ago they were remembering rebellions. Th
ey wanted ways to get out.”

  “There are others like this?” Shan asked. Her voice was even. “One that we found. But it comes up exposed.”

  “And this one?”

  “You’ll see. Not much farther. I promise.”

  “I’m all right,” she said.

  They walked in silence.

  He cleared his throat. “Qi Wai would not come?”

  “He would not come. He’s defending the collection. He found a sword.”

  “He can’t do that. You know it.”

  “He knows it, too.” She paused. “He said it was his life.”

  “I see,” he said, although he really didn’t.

  She said, “Some losses we might not wish to live beyond.”

  He thought about that. “Our lives ...” he began, then stopped.

  “Go on,” said Shan.

  Their steps in a tunnel, torchlight on walls and beams. It was a certainty men had died building this. He wondered if she could hear the scurrying of rats under their voices. Probably, he decided.

  He drew a breath. “Our lives aren’t only ours.”

  She was silent behind him as they walked, then said, “Daiyan, what are you planning to do tonight?”

  She astonished him. She had, from that first evening in her home, among the bronzes and the porcelain.

  You know I love you, he wanted to say, but was too mindful of her reputation, with two men behind them. And if he said it, she’d be even more certain he had something dangerous in mind.

  The path started to slant upwards.

  “We are here,” he said, not answering her question, knowing she’d be aware of that.

  WHOEVER BUILT THIS TUNNEL, Shan thinks, had a planning sort of mind. There is a stone bench here at the end, to stand on, and even brackets in the reinforced earth walls for torches to rest in, to allow the men carrying them to put hands and shoulders to the door to the world above.