He could hear—he could feel, as a good leader should be able to do—the relief that swept through his army. He felt it in himself, with a secret shame. There would be deaths ahead for that shame, he vowed then. There were a great many Kitan between them and the imperial city that was theirs now.
And just then, in that instant, a thought came to him, another small moment. They so often are, or begin that way: the ideas that ripple and ripple through the world.
Before they left they burned their boats, that the Kitan might not have any joy of the labours here. Then they killed the captives who had built the boats, the ones who did not manage to flee in the evening darkness. There was a message to leave behind, and warfare is, after all, about such messages.
They started north in the morning.
Many lives were saved by this decision beside the river. Many lives were lost. A storyteller, guessing at or finding certainty within, can offer the thoughts of a war-leader as he ordered a retreat after ordering an advance. Honourable historians record events as best they can and, often challenging each other, suggest the consequences. There is a difference.
That army that reached the Great River marked the farthest the Altai would ever come into Kitai. That day on the river was important. Some days are.
SOME DEATHS MIGHT not appear important. Their ripples seem limited, as if in a rain pond, reaching only a family, a farm, village, temple. The imagined pond being small, hidden, a few lotus petals briefly disturbed, bobbing, settling again.
But sometimes a too-early death stops a life from flowering late. The plum tree blossoms at the beginning of spring, the peach is later in the season. There are lives that begin slowly, for many reasons. Lu Mah, the great poet’s son, had never been permitted to take the examinations, coming of age during his father’s and uncle’s early exiles, then insisting on accompanying his father into his last exile, the one that had been expected to kill him.
We cannot know with anything like certainty how someone might have grown. We reflect, surmise, grieve. Not every hero or leader shows promise young, some come late into glory. Sometimes a brilliant father and uncle might show a path, but their accomplishments might also stand in the path for a long time.
Lu Mah was kind and honourable, respectful, brave beyond words, had increasing wisdom and a loving heart. He was diligent, his humour sly, his learning acquired by listening. His generosity, if initially known only to those nearest to him (the pond, the lotus flowers bobbing), was large and defining. He had gone south with his father. He’d gone north with his uncle. He wasn’t a poet, not everyone is.
He died too young in a war in which too many died.
We cannot know, being trapped in time, how events might have been altered if the dead had not died. We cannot know tomorrow, let alone a distant future. A shaman might claim to see ahead in mist but most of them (most of them) cannot truly do this: they go into the spirit world to find answers for today. Why is this person sick? Where will we find water for the herds? What spirit is angry with our tribe?
But sometimes storytellers want to inhabit certainty. They assume more than mortals ought. A tale-spinner by a hearth fire or gathering a crowd in a market square or putting brush to paper in a quiet room, deep into his story, the lives he’s chronicling, will deceive himself into believing he has the otherworldly knowledge of a fox spirit, a river spirit, a ghost, a god.
He will say or write such things as, “The boy killed in the Altai attack on the Jeni encampment was likely to have become a great leader of his people, one who could have changed the north.”
Or, “Lu Mah, the poet’s son, was one whose personal desire would have kept him living quietly, but his sense of duty and his great and growing wisdom would have drawn him to the court. He was lost to Kitai, and that made a difference.”
However boldly someone says this, or writes it, it remains a thought, a wish, desire, longing spun of sorrow. We cannot know.
We can say Mah’s was a death too soon, as with O-Yan of the Jeni, their kaghan’s little brother, slain in the first attack of a grassland rising. And we can think about ripples and currents, and wonder at the strangeness of patterns found—or made. A first death in the north and the death farthest south in the Altai invasion, in the years of the Twelfth Dynasty when the maps were redrawn.
But then, maps are always being redrawn. The Long Wall had once been the forbidding, fiercely guarded border of a great empire. We look back and we look ahead, but we live in the time we are allowed.
THEY BURIED LU MAH in the family cemetery on an elevated part of the property at East Slope, for it was known that high ground was best for the spirits of the dead. The graves there were shaded by cypress trees and by a sweet-pear, because of the old, old poem:
The sweet-pear tree—
Never cut a twig of it.
Never hew it down.
Under it, Shao lies at rest.
That ground overlooked the stream to the east, and, on a clear day up there among the dead, one could sometimes see the line of the Great River to the north.
Following tradition at the burial, an ancient fear of the spirit world, all family members but one dutifully turned their backs as the farm workers lowered Lu Mah’s body into his grave.
It was seen, however, that his father did not turn away, but stood watching his son go down into the earth. He later said he did not fear Mah’s ghost at all. And a storyteller might say: Why should he have done so? Why should he ever fear his son’s spirit in any way until the end of his own days?
CHAPTER XXVIII
The new prime minister of Kitai, serving the new emperor in his new imperial city of Shantong by the sea, often wondered if they were all being governed and guided by a dead man. His father, specifically.
Hang Hsien sometimes imagined that even the ways in which his approach to the court differed from his father’s might have been a deliberate shaping. The old man had been subtle enough for that: to make his son sufficiently independent to think he was forming his own views, but to have those views be infused with the father’s will, and his lifetime of experience.
Hsien did know, because it had been explicitly laid out for him, that the appointment of Kai Zhen as prime minister in the time before the Calamity of Hanjin had been a stratagem in itself.
The old blind man had sensed a catastrophe coming, and didn’t want his son to follow him and face the consequences. Hsien had been sent away south before the Altai reached Yenling and Little Gold Hill. Before his father died there.
Hsien hadn’t wanted to go, had protested. But being south, right here in Shantong when the prince arrived, he had been positioned with precision. A piece on a game board.
He’d been invited to court, before it really was a court, and asked to assume the office he now held. To undertake a new reign with the august and exalted Emperor Zhizeng—who had been called Prince Jen by the people, after a hero from a distant time.
People were easily deceived. Everyone liked legends. Hsien didn’t think this emperor was heroic, although he wondered if any prime minister ever thought that about an emperor he served. On the other hand, he didn’t imagine himself a hero, either. Wouldn’t he have stayed (and died) at Little Gold Hill with his father if he were?
Still, he would do what he could, he was doing what he could, to stitch the torn fabric of an empire together. There were difficulties, you could say. Huge swaths of land had been savaged in the north, with famine widespread. The Altai had raided all the way to the Great River before being turned back in a wondrous, unexpected triumph.
There were bandits everywhere, often soldiers of their own armies who had turned outlaw and predator rather than fight the horsemen. Hungry men, displaced from farms and burnt-out villages, with their families starving, could be wolves to each other. It was recorded in chronicles of earlier dark times—and they were living through it now.
They had no tax base of any stability, no ready sources of revenue. Hsien was deeply concerned about taxation a
nd revenues, he always had been. You could call it a passion. Even the government monopolies—tea, salt, medicines—needed to be built up again. Kitai was all about trade, and how did you restore trade in times like this?
They had lost control of the north, but the barbarians didn’t have control there either, dealing with unrest and anger and starving people roaming the countryside. That was no help to Hang Hsien in trying to finance an empire and shape an imperial policy here. It was hard, what he was trying to do.
He also had challenges he didn’t think any other imperial adviser had faced. He certainly couldn’t find records to parallel his dilemma. Nor could he talk to anyone about it. This particular circumstance was, as best he could tell, unique. It didn’t make him feel fortunate, being unique.
But the truth was, his emperor, exalted Zhizeng, was ruling here, governing what men were already calling the Southern Twelfth Dynasty, sitting on a newly fashioned Dragon Throne, and his father and brother were alive.
Was he truly an emperor, if so? Or only a regent, a guardian of this new throne, bound in duty to family and heaven’s mandate to ransom his brother and father in any way he could, at any cost? And if he did that (or his prime minister found a way to do it) what happened to him? And would that prime minister be appreciated for his achievement? Or executed?
It was known by everyone who mattered that Zhizeng and his brother Chizu had shared very little love—to put it delicately, as a principal adviser ought, even in his private thoughts.
Hsien often talked with his father in those thoughts. Often he found answers to questions by imagining the brisk, remembered tones, but not to this.
Zhizeng clearly liked being emperor of Kitai. Had no evident desire to cease being so. A younger son, overlooked, ignored, regarded in the end as disposable—he’d been sent out to the Altai as a hostage, hadn’t he?
He spoke from his throne of endless grief concerning the sad fates in exile of his father and brother—and the rest of his family, of course. He led prayers and rituals with exemplary piety. Kitai, he declared to his court, had wandered too far from right conduct. He wondered aloud in the throne room in Shantong, in tones of sorrow, if his beloved father and brother were even alive.
His prime minister, very well trained, understood this. All of it. He understood more, given private conversations of an oblique but unmistakable nature.
“In my heart,” the emperor might say to him when they were alone in a chamber or on an evening terrace overlooking West Lake, “in my heart I fear they are dead, Minister Hang. How could a civilized society expect otherwise from barbarians? They were taken so far! Beyond our reach. Do you know what the barbarians named them?”
“I do, illustrious lord,” Hsien would say, each time. Everyone knew.
“Lord of Muddled Virtue! Doubly Muddled Virtue!” the emperor would exclaim (each time), with an odd intensity, as if tasting, Hsien thought, the texture of the terrible names.
And, invariably, at some point in these conversations, Emperor Zhizeng would say, “Prime minister, we need to be very careful with our army in the north. Armies and their commanders are dangerous.”
“Indeed, serene lord,” Hang Hsien would say.
Their army and commander were, as it happened, winning battles.
They had swept so far on captured Altai horses they were said to be approaching Hanjin itself, by the last report they’d had. That last letter from Commander Ren Daiyan, leading their forces above the River Wai, had invited Emperor Zhizeng—saluting him with all proper respect—to begin planning to move his court back to Hanjin as soon as it was retaken.
Amazingly, they expected to do that before autumn ended. Ren Daiyan wrote this, sending word by messenger birds in a long southern relay of flight. They would then move on, he added, to the barbarians’ Southern Capital, the one Kitai had failed to take before, setting in motion the calamity that followed.
Commander Ren thought they might have four of the lost Fourteen Prefectures regained before the New Year’s celebrations. He closed with expressions of devotion to Kitai and the throne.
Hanjin? Before autumn ended! It was midsummer now. The nights would soon be growing longer. Hsien closed his eyes and imagined a strong and vengeful Kitan army moving by day, by night. It was a pleasing image. A man could feel pride.
On the other hand, Emperor Zhizeng, however respectfully saluted, was going to be profoundly disinclined to move his court. He wasn’t about to place himself any nearer to the Altai who had held him captive and then pursued him when he’d escaped. They’d even caught up to him, leading to a terrifying fight in a night swamp. That sort of experience could define a man.
Hsien could almost hear his father’s voice saying this.
The prime minister, in a judicious exercise of a senior adviser’s role, had not yet shown the emperor this most recent letter from his commander in the field.
Hsien had other concerns, almost certainly linked to these tidings. An Altai emissary was on his way here by ship along the coast, which was very unusual for them. The ship had put in to port twice, flying a white flag. The emissary would believe he was outstripping any report of his coming. He wasn’t, of course. The riders still didn’t know about the birds. It was, Hang Hsien thought, yet another reason they were barbarians, however deadly they might be when thundering across a countryside, burning helpless villages.
However savagely they behaved with old, blind men.
The prime minister of Kitai felt that his troubles were about to deepen in complexity. Their army was heading for Hanjin? Expecting to retake it? Ren Daiyan intended to go north from there?
It was extraordinary. Impressive. It was a problem. His father, he thought, would have known how to deal with this, negotiate the rapids of a rushing river, steer between rocks.
Those rocks became sharper, deadlier, when the Altai emissary and his translator arrived and requested a private audience with the emperor and his prime minister. This was granted. No one else was in the room except imperial guards out of hearing distance.
Certain things were said in that chamber, not discreetly. Barbarians were not discreet. Proposals were conveyed to the emperor of Kitai from Wan’yen, war-leader of the Altai.
The emissary was dismissed without reply but with adequate courtesy. The emperor and his principal adviser walked from the reception room onto a late-summer terrace. The emperor looked out.
He said, “It is very beautiful in Shantong. West Lake, the hills, the sea. We very much like the palace we are building here. It is suitable. We should do what we need to do.”
Only that. It was enough. Rocks sharp as swords.
There is no sense of danger at East Slope any more as summer ends, only sorrow and time passing. The poet has been so careful to keep his grief as private as he can, not to impose it on the rest of them. They all see it, nonetheless. How can they not? It seems to Shan that Lu Chen is moving more slowly now, but she is aware it could be her own feelings making her think that way.
He still walks most days with his brother to their bench above the stream, still writes in his writing room, spends some nights with the holy men on the other side of the stream. She can hear the temple bell when the wind is from the east.
Ziji’s soldiers had stayed for many weeks as spring became summer. They and others on patrol found and killed a number of Altai trapped on this side of the river, most of them without horses.
The ordinary people of Kitai hereabouts—not bandits, but farmers, villagers, clerics, silk weavers, even a spirit master and his boy—had joined in the hunt. The children of this district were happy to act as spies and scouts. It became a kind of game. Find the barbarians.
Some children died. Some farmers and their families were killed. In midsummer a dozen Altai tried to force their way across the river, coercing the ferryman at a crossing place. They were anticipated, the river was being watched there. The barbarians were cut down by fifty men. That time it was bandits who did so. The ferryman died, and tw
o of his sons.
They have been hearing stories from the north, where the Altai had run wild. Tales of horror from where Kitai began, in the flood plain of the Golden River. They had been a northern people, the Kitan. She wonders if that is about to change now.
She is restless in summer nights. She sees fireflies, smells night flowers, watches the phases of the moon. She writes to Daiyan, not knowing (she never knows) if letters can reach wherever he is, across rivers and a broken land:
The scent of red lotus has faded.
I look for a letter in the clouds.
Soon wild geese will be flying north,
They will form a character overhead: return.
The window of my room fills with the moon.
Blossoms drift in the pond.
The stream flows north to the river.
My body aches in this quiet place,
Wanting to be where you are.
My eyes close on moonlight,
But my heart flares like a fire.
It is impossible for them to besiege Hanjin.
Even with all those who fled before the Altai came last year, and all those who died, there were still more than half a million people in the city, along with thirty thousand steppe horsemen holding it.
Daiyan’s army was almost twice that size. He had archers, foot soldiers, and horses now, their own cavalry, after the victory by the river.
The Altai could try to break out. They would fail.
But the horrors of another siege running into winter, starvation upon starvation, would fall on their own people. The barbarians would claim all the food in Hanjin, then turn to cannibalism before they killed their horses. He forced himself to acknowledge this. It had happened before.
So he was unable to establish a siege, reverse what had happened here last year. Fortunately, they didn’t have to.
There were risks, and they’d have only the one chance, most likely. He needed to think it through, choose the right night, have people ready inside, got word to them. But it could be done: they could enter the city the same way they’d come out on New Year’s eve. There were two tunnels, and they could use both of them.
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