River of Stars

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  They set their men to rounding up horses and dragging boats on shore. They would need to cross back north, or head downstream—depending on what tidings came from the east.

  The ambush had worked as if the Queen Mother of the West, peering down from her pavilions, had decided Kitai deserved something this morning as a small redress for all that had happened.

  “Other bank?” he asked. “Their riders who didn’t embark?”

  “We should have word soon,” Daiyan said.

  There were dead men all around them in the mud, and the wounded were crying. They had soldiers dealing with their own and killing the enemy where they lay. They were not taking prisoners. A small group of guards stayed by the two of them, making sure none of the riders could suddenly rise from feigning death and strike down the man leading them here, leading them on from here.

  Daiyan would say the two men, but it wasn’t true.

  Over on the north bank, near where the Altai had launched their boats, Daiyan had positioned another contingent of soldiers. They had crossed the river north two weeks ago, hiding, waiting.

  If all went well, those soldiers would have fallen upon the remaining Altai after the majority of the riders were in boats and away and the horses were swimming. They should have been able to pound the enemy between the high ground and the water.

  As they had done here. In their battle above Yenling last autumn they had wreaked havoc with two-handed swords and concealed archers. This morning’s victory was, as best Ziji could tell, an even more comprehensive triumph. They’d taken so many horses it was a wonder. He looked up. The rain was a drizzle now, the clouds moving. They’d see the sun soon.

  The next important moment, Daiyan had said, would be when Wan’yen of the Altai was informed of this defeat—what he did with his army downstream on the far bank. He might decide, in fury, to push across. He had his boats, they’d been building them for weeks.

  Daiyan—Commander Ren—had said he had dreamed at night, and prayed, that the Altai war-leader would do that: try to cross the Great River and land in the face of massed archers and foot soldiers, with Daiyan and Ziji and the boats coming downstream with their men.

  Ziji knew they had a capable man commanding opposite the Altai. He would know how to kill riders in boats, approaching in daylight.

  He became aware that Daiyan’s expression had changed.

  “What is it?”

  “Thought of something. Will any of them have been able to flee, escape around you?”

  “I’m sure some did. But they’ll be alone, or in very small numbers, cut off from ...”

  He stopped. He felt cold.

  “Dai, I’ll go myself,” he said.

  “No. I will. Get me a horse!” Daiyan snapped to one of their guards. The man looked startled, then ran.

  Ziji shook his head. “You can’t! You need to be here to command. You may be crossing the river, or going downstream. We don’t know!”

  “No, I have to—”

  “Dai!” said Ziji. “I’m going. Right now. As quickly as I can ride. I promise you!”

  Daiyan stared at him, his mouth a thin line. He took a breath. “Please,” he said, then repeated it.

  Ziji assembled a dozen men, found horses. They started east, riding fast, but it was late in the morning by then.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  Shan had awakened thinking of her husband. She’d been crying, emerging from a strange, slow dream: she and Wai in a vast tomb, alive, among terracotta soldiers guarding a long-dead emperor. Wai looking and looking and looking at the wonders around them, then turning to her, and his face ...

  Word had come a few weeks ago in response to a query from Lu Chao, who had sources still in the ruined north. Hanjin was no longer burning, was being rebuilt—Kitan labour, of course. The conquerors were allowing burials, insisting on them now. They wanted life resuming, taxes and tribute paid. The clerics were doing what they could to name and number the dead.

  The bodies of Qi Wai and his parents had been identified. The letter did not say more than that, which was probably just as well, given some of the stories being told.

  With permission, she’s added a candle for her husband beside the one for her parents, to the altar at East Slope. It seems to be her home now, this farm. An undeserved gift, she thinks.

  The poet had been with her when she’d done her first rituals at the altar. He’d offered his own prayer, then stayed quietly, leaning on his stick, to honour her dead. There had been one candle, set a little apart from the others, that she’d seen him lighting last. She didn’t ask.

  She had felt, that end-of-winter morning, a sense of wonder that she was alive, that Lu Chen was alive, that they were standing here. She had placed her mother’s earrings on the altar, again glancing at him for permission.

  If the mornings are at all pleasant now, she likes to take a long walk around the grounds after eating. Meals at East Slope are odd, there are many people here, but only the farm workers eat a morning meal together. Sometimes Lu Mah joins them, sometimes the steward does. Then Mah goes to his workroom and attends to the records of the farm, managing it. Everyone seems to have their own rhythm here, only occasionally intersecting. She’s never been in a household like this.

  Some nights the poet doesn’t come home. No one seems concerned. Usually, she’s learned, he’ll be sleeping in the temple in the village across the stream. He likes to talk with the clerics there. He brings them wine.

  His brother writes and reads letters all day long, urgently seeking information. He sends memoranda to the new court. Lu Chao is still a court official in his soul, wishing to serve what remains of Kitai. He hasn’t been summoned by Emperor Zhizeng and his new prime minister. Shan thinks he is torn between duty and a longing to remain here in whatever peace can be found.

  How did you find peace in a time like this? Was it even a proper desire? Desire, even the word, makes her think of Daiyan.

  It is raining this morning. In bed she listens to it, and the wind. The dream of Qi Wai fades. She feels guilt, sorrow, though more of the second thing. He had left her, truly, long before the end. She has come to understand that. But memories of a time when they shared much more than a husband and wife normally would ... these memories deserve sorrow.

  She has with her the last catalogue they’d assembled of the collection. She thinks one day she might do something with it, write an introduction, tell their story.

  If she lives. If Kitai survives. The Altai are encamped at the river downstream, on the other bank. It is spring. They are building boats, Lu Chao has learned. They mean to cross.

  She had written her own letter west in winter. A sense of duty moving her brush. She sent it with soldiers going that way. The courier service is disrupted. People are on the move all over, the ones not dying. There are reports of bandits everywhere, soldiers turned outlaws, starvation.

  She’s had an answer back, however, a reply that found her here. Everyone knows East Slope. Everyone knows Lu Chen the poet lives here. He is, she thinks, a beacon fire for what Kitai has been.

  Can one man be the soul of an empire? Isn’t the emperor supposed to be that? She doesn’t know this young emperor at all, remembers seeing him only once or twice in the Genyue. No words had been exchanged between them on their flight south.

  The mandate of heaven falls where it falls—and can be withdrawn. But the poet here, Shan thinks, his words, courage, humour, tenderness, and anger—he might be what people want the time before the fall to be remembered for, whatever comes next.

  The steward, Kou Yao, Wai’s last lover (his only one?), has written that he and the child are safely with Qi Wai’s mother’s family, well to the south. They’d arrived with a letter and the document confirming that Lizhen had been adopted as Wai’s daughter. Family honour will require she be sheltered there, Shan knows, brought up as a girl from a good family should be. If they survive. They are a long way off. Surely they will?

  She has thought, some mornings when
she wakes, that she should have the child brought to her, she is her mother, formally. But it is a foolish, dangerous thought. Wai hadn’t even wanted her to know of the girl’s existence, afraid she might lure the child into her own path.

  She wouldn’t have. She knows too well how hard this is. But she has decided she must honour Wai’s choice. She will wish only good things to the child he saved, but she has no home to bring her to. She’s a guest here. A welcome one, honoured, accepted even by the brothers’ wives who rule the women’s quarters, but this is not her own home.

  She hasn’t started thinking about that yet. Where could one go, in any case? Nowhere now, with armies on the river. One stayed here, looking out the window at a rainy morning, and thought of a father and a husband, dead, and of a man dearly, astonishingly loved, fighting for Kitai. Was he on the river, too?

  He was, as it happened.

  She is restless. Feels trapped by the steady rain. Tries, at her desk, to shape words for a song about the way war broke through to the smallest parts of a life, but it feels overwrought, forced. She doesn’t see herself as large enough to write about this war, Hanjin’s fall, the scale of suffering.

  The great Chan Du, long ago, had written:

  ... I cannot find rest

  Because I am powerless

  To amend a broken world.

  Terrifying, that any man could carry such a weight within himself. She’d never imagine she—or anyone!—could have such power. Amending the world? That was for gods.

  She’s kept awake by longing some nights and by sorrow on others (sometimes the same night), but hers is not the task of remaking the world. Unless—she thinks on that rainy morning at East Slope—it is to alter the ways a woman might move through it, and she believes she’s failing in that.

  Lu Chen has written that the measuring of a life can only begin after it is over. She wonders, abruptly, how Daiyan’s will be measured. For a soldier, she imagines, it depends on whether he wins on his battlefields.

  The rain stops eventually. She hears water dripping from the eaves and the leaves. She sips her tea. Through the window she sees the brothers walking over the wet grass to the path leading to the stream.

  They have a favourite bench, under a very old tree. Chao is carrying the wine flask and cups. His brother leans on his stick, but moves briskly. Both wear hats and outer garments. It is not warm and there is a wind, but the sun seems as if it wants to appear. Shan smiles, seeing them talking animatedly already, thinking yet again of the gift she’s been granted, being here.

  Later, she puts on warm clothing and the doubled hat everyone teases her about and she goes from the women’s quarters towards the western orchard. She’ll leave the brothers their privacy, take her own walk, watch the clouds breaking up. The peach blossoms have not yet begun, but the first buds are appearing, she’s been watching for them.

  It is cold, even when the sun does break through. It is hidden again, returns, shadows chase the land. The wind threatens to pull her hat from her head. Shan holds it with one hand, imagines how she must look to anyone watching. Such an elegant lady of the court! An imperial favourite, familiar with the paths and gazebos of the Genyue.

  Those are gone.

  In the orchard at East Slope she looks up and sees green buds dreaming of being flowers. They have already had plum blossoms, a first sign of winter’s end, along with orioles and willow floss, and now (soon) there will be peach blossoms. Could you accept a simple lesson of renewal, she thinks, when so many people had died?

  Something catches her eye. She turns. She sees, astonished, a fox at the end of the orchard, edge of the meadow, bright orange, motionless, watching—not her, the other way.

  Shan turns her head then, among the trees, and sees an Altai rider dismount from his horse. She watches him draw a sword and slip over the fence west of the gate and the path to the main house.

  Everything seems to become extremely slow, though her mind is racing and her heart hammering. The farmhands will be west and north, working the fields. She can slip from the trees and run that way for help, but all the women are in the house, and the children. The brothers have gone the other way, towards the stream, and what could they do?

  She sees the man, his hair loose down his back, move towards the main house, the nearest one. She thinks it is empty. She needs it to be empty. But he will go on through, and the women’s quarters are the next building he’ll reach.

  Shan decides what has to happen now. It is the only thing she can even think to try, in a broken world. People are dying everywhere. No one can expect to be safe. She thinks of her father. She wonders where Daiyan is.

  She screams, as loudly and as frantically as she can. Once, and then a second time.

  Then she is running from the orchard into the open, away from the main house and the women’s quarters, towards the meadow at the back and the blue-and-green-painted gazebo there. Letting herself be heard and seen.

  One look back and yes, he is following. She is well ahead, chasing the only idea she’s had. A vain, foolish thought, an indication of how ill-adapted women are to moments such as this.

  But moments such as this are not supposed to be part of the world, she thinks. Barbarians at East Slope? Anger is in her then, usefully. This man and his people have been killing children. They burned and savaged Hanjin. They killed her husband. Through hunger and cold they killed her father. Who’d taught her, all her life, not by the imposed rules of the world, but according to what he saw in her, and with love.

  There are two bows in the gazebo.

  Lu Chen and his son had taken to practising with weapons on Lingzhou Isle. They had done so at first light, as exercise and amusement. They’d kept on doing it here, to the amusement of all the others. She has watched them pretend to fight with swords, swearing dire imprecations at each other, sometimes rhyming, like figures in a puppet show.

  There is a straw wall set up behind the gazebo, a square blue target on it. They would practise archery there. When one of them hit the target, those in the house would hear mock shouts of triumph and valour.

  She reaches the gazebo. She draws breath and screams her warning one more time. Warning, and lure. She wants him following her, to give the others a chance to scatter. The men will be too far away to hear, unless someone is coming back to fetch their afternoon food and wine? A life could end or continue, turning on something like that.

  She darts up the three steps and inside, one more glance back. He isn’t running. He knows he has her trapped back here. He has a bow, he could shoot her. He hasn’t taken it, still holds the sword. He should be afraid, Shan thinks desperately. Her screams ought to make him know he’s been seen, has lost his surprise. He doesn’t look fearful. She knows why he doesn’t want her dead yet.

  She seizes the smaller bow, the poet’s, she grabs for arrows. Her hands are shaking. She hasn’t done this since she was a girl. She and her father, like Mah and his father here.

  She steps out from the gazebo, facing a steppe horseman. He stops for a moment when he sees the bow. She hears him laugh. He starts walking again, not hurrying at all. He says something. Of course she doesn’t understand.

  She tries to remember how to do this. She drops three arrows at her feet, keeps one, nocks it to the string. She’s too slow, her hands are shaking so much. A deep breath. Her father had read in a text on archery that this was what you did to steady yourself. Mornings in their garden, him explaining why it was wrong for Kitai that no one well-bred did this any more. No mention of her being only a woman. Except a tale told once, as if casually, about Wen Jian, an emperor’s beloved long ago, and her sisters, hunting with the court.

  She raises the bow. Deep breath, slow exhale. The rider is approaching, not hurrying, not even trying to forestall her. He laughs again. She releases.

  The arrow flies hopelessly off to the left. She always used to let fly left. Her father had been unable to find a text that explained this, had only urged her to make herself expect it, an
ticipate, adjust.

  She stoops quickly, takes another arrow. If he speeds up only a little, she’ll never—

  There comes a cry from the meadow behind the Altai warrior. He turns quickly, for it is a man’s voice this time. Beyond him, striding boldly over the grass, almost running, Shan sees Lu Mah, the poet’s son, with a sword in his hand.

  The intruder laughs again. And why not? Why should he fear a plump Kitan in a bunched-up green robe, clearly awkward with his blade, so obviously not a soldier?

  Mah shouts something, not just a cry this time. The Altai snarls in reply, and steps forward, balanced, to face Mah. He will kill the man first, of course. They are alone here, the three of them.

  Shan nocks her second arrow and begins to run towards them over the wet, bright meadow grass. The sun is shining. The wind continues. She needs to remember the wind, control her breathing, her hands, her drift to the left when she looses an arrow.

  She knows what else she needs to do, beyond all of that.

  Mah shouts again, defiantly. He and his father had wielded weapons on the isle. Perhaps he’d learned well, perhaps they’d had a teacher, another exile? Perhaps he can—

  Blades clash. A grinding of metal. Disengagement. Mah cuts. He is blocked, too easily. The Altai makes some sort of twisting motion, shifts his feet. Mah’s sword flies from his hand, away into the grass. As quickly as that.

  No pause, no exulting. With a soldier’s efficiency, with an indifferent ease that breaks Shan’s heart, running towards them, the man sweeps his blade flat and it takes Lu Mah, who had gone to Lingzhou Isle with his father and refused to leave him—takes him in the side under a lifted arm, cutting too deep for life.

  The Altai jerks the blade free and thrusts it into Mah’s chest, through the dark-green robe, and blood is suddenly everywhere, so much of it, and Mah is wavering, still on his feet for one terrible moment, and then not, a moment more terrible.

  The Altai turns then. Battle-trained. Red sword.