River of Stars

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  Or sit upon it.

  Every dynasty, every single one, had been founded by a soldier, even this Twelfth, which feared its army so much and had fallen.

  It could come back, of course. They could fight the riders and win. He believed he could do that, he knew he could do that.

  Or they could try to shape a peace lasting long enough to let children be born who knew nothing of war, whose fathers knew nothing of war, who never went to bed at night fearing hoofbeats hammering the dark, and then fire.

  He stood there, looking west. The sun went down. There were other stars now. He wondered if he’d ever see his father again.

  He walked back to the other two and he told Ziji to order their army to make ready to start south in the morning. They had received orders from the emperor. Honour and duty bound them to obey.

  A CLEAR NIGHT, AUTUMN. The river of stars overhead, both blurred and bright, dividing heaven in two. Whatever might happen on earth among men and women—living and dying, glory and gladness, sorrow and sorrow’s end—the stars did not change. Unless one counted the occasional tail-star that appeared, sometimes very bright for a little while, and then dimming, and then gone.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  It is turning colder, there have been frosts at night. The leaves are gone from the paulownias beside the path and from the elm and oak trees. Some of the leaves are brightly coloured in the meadow, blowing across. The children have pushed them into piles and they play in them, leaping and laughing. Shan has a fire in her room in the mornings to cut the chill when she rises from under the duckand-drake quilt.

  There is still no rhythm or order to mealtimes at East Slope, but she makes an effort to have morning tea with Lu Chen if he’s spent the night at home and not across the stream.

  She goes from the women’s quarters to the main house on awakening, performs her invocations at the altar, then waits in the library, listening for signs of him, and she walks into the dining room at the same time he does. She knows he isn’t deceived by these accidental encounters; she also knows he’s pleased to see her.

  She can divert and engage him a little. They argue about the ci form: her belief he’s denying its nature, trying to make it more like formal verse. He points out this is the first thing she ever said to him. As if she needs reminding, she says.

  This morning she asks about the Kingdom of Chu, briefly rising in the west before the emergence of their own dynasty—one of many small, warring kingdoms absorbed into the Twelfth. In the library here she’s read historians blaming the last king of Chu (and his advisers, of course) for allowing poets and musicians too much influence at court, making it dissolute and doomed to fall. There is a song from Chu she loves ... When the music was still playing grief came upon us. She wants to know what Lu Chen thinks of all this.

  He sips his tea, is beginning an answer when one of the older farm workers, Long Pei, appears in the doorway. Protocols at East Slope are relaxed, but this is unusual.

  It seems there is a man up among their graves this morning. Pei does not know who it is. No, he has not accosted or questioned the intruder. He has come straight here.

  The man carries a sword.

  She knows it has to be Daiyan, and it is. There is no way she should be so certain of this, no way he can be here (alone!) when he’s commanding their forces in the north. Rumour from the court has been about a possible truce and treaty, no details yet.

  The poet goes up the slope beside her under leafless trees. She walks at his pace, forcing herself to slow down. A bright, clear morning with a breeze. An arrow of wild geese overhead. Several household men follow them, carrying whatever weapons they have found. Pei did say a sword, and Shan has said nothing, though her heart is pounding.

  She sees him standing by Lu Mah’s grave under the cypress tree. He turns as they approach. He bows to the poet, then to her. They both do the same.

  “I crossed the river at night. I feared I might wake the household, coming so early, so I thought I would pay my respects here first.”

  “We are an early-rising house,” says Lu Chen. “You are most welcome, Commander Ren. Will you honour us by entering East Slope? There is food, and morning tea, or wine if you prefer.”

  Daiyan looks tired. He looks different. He says, “I am sorry about your son. I still feel it was my—”

  “You are not permitted to feel that,” the poet interrupts firmly. Then adds, “It is his father saying this.”

  There is a silence. The men behind them are no longer tense, seeing who this is.

  “Daiyan, why are you here?” Shan asks. She has been looking at his eyes. “What has happened?” She is an impatient person, always has been. Some things change as you grow older, some do not.

  He tells them, standing in the East Slope graveyard in the morning’s light. A complexity of hope and fear rises in Shan. His words seem to confirm the rumours there will be peace now. It is almost beyond belief, but Daiyan’s eyes say there is more.

  “Everything down to the Wai?” the poet asks quietly.

  Daiyan nods. “So we were told.”

  “That is a great many people we are surrendering.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you would have ... ?”

  Anguish in his face, as if he cannot hold it back. But what he says is, formally, “I would only do what my emperor and his councillors order me to do.”

  The poet looks at him for a long time. “You were outside Hanjin? When they ordered you back?”

  “I was.”

  Lu Chen’s expression is compassionate now, more than anything. “Come,” he says finally. “Please join us, commander. Are you able to stay a while before going to Shantong?”

  “I believe I can,” Daiyan says. “I would like to stay. Thank you. I am very tired.”

  There is still something else. Shan can feel it. Something he isn’t saying.

  IT IS UNLIKELY, she finds herself thinking that evening, that there is a room with more intelligence in it throughout Kitai (what seems to be left of it) than any room at East Slope when both brothers are present. It is an extravagant thought, a conceit, but she’s allowed some of those, isn’t she?

  It is Chao who says, over wine after the meal, “There was an emissary to the court at summer’s end, came by sea.”

  “We know this,” says his older brother.

  “But now we also know,” says Chao, “what he will have said in private, to shape this truce.”

  “Ah. Yes, we do,” says the poet. “Someone among the Altai is clever.”

  “I don’t,” says Shan. “I don’t know what we know. Tell me?”

  East Slope, she has often thought, would have been her father’s haven, too. She can see his alert, curious face turning from one speaker to another, immersed in the joy of lucid conversation.

  Chao looks around. Only the four of them in the room now, the other women have withdrawn, and his own sons. The women of East Slope have accepted that Shan is a special case. Mah would have been here.

  Chao says, “Lady Lin, they hold the father-emperor and the son who succeeded him. So, if they release them both ... ?”

  He takes up his cup, drinks, leaves time for Shan to work this out. Candles flicker on the table.

  It takes her a moment. Why would the Altai release hostages? Why would that be clever? Weren’t the imperial prisoners a weapon? A way to threaten Kitai and the new emperor? Wasn’t Emperor Zhizeng bound to do all he could to ...

  “Oh,” she says. And then, “Who is properly emperor if Chizu comes back? Is that it?”

  These are words that can have someone killed, speaking them or even hearing them.

  Lu Chao nods. “Indeed, it is,” he murmurs. “And we know the answer to that question. So does Zhizeng.”

  Daiyan is silent but she can see he’s grasped all this. Probably from the beginning, then thinking it through on the long way south from Hanjin. He hasn’t travelled alone, of course. Only crossed the river himself by ferry in the night to come here.
His escort had arrived later in the day. Ziji is not with him. He is commanding the army, which is—as ordered by the emperor—now on this side of the Wai.

  Everything north of it is being surrendered. Or betrayed?

  She thinks she understands the look in Daiyan’s face now. He had been, it seems, about to take Hanjin. He’d said they were prepared to go north after, carry the war to the Altai.

  More fighting, more deaths of soldiers, and of people caught between soldiers. But he’d wanted to shatter the horsemen, the threat of them, let Kitai be again what once it had been. Be more than it had been in their time.

  HE COMES TO HER LATER, discreetly, although by now there is no shame, or secrecy required. Not at East Slope.

  He is weary and weighted. Their lovemaking is tender and slow. It is as if he’s traversing her body, making a map of it for himself. A way to get back? A dark thought. Shan pushes it away.

  He is above her just then. She tightens her fingers in his hair and kisses him as deeply as she can, draws him into her body, into everything she is.

  After, lying beside her, a hand on her belly, he says, “I could see you in pearls and kingfisher feathers.”

  “Daiyan, stop it. I am no goddess.”

  He smiles. He says, “This house is surely the best place in the world for you.”

  It frightens her, his tone. She says, “It is, except for any place in the world where you are.”

  He turns his head, looks at her from very close. She’s left a lamp lit, to see him by. He says, “I don’t deserve such a thought. I’m only ...”

  “Stop it,” she says again. “Have you ever seen how your friends and your soldiers look at you? How Chen looks at you? Lu Chen, Daiyan!”

  He is quiet for a time. Shifts position to lay his head on her breast. “He is too generous. I don’t know what any of them are seeing in me.”

  She tugs his hair then, hard. “Stop it,” she says a third time. “Daiyan, they are seeing virtue like a lantern, and Kitai’s honour. And there isn’t enough of either in the world.”

  He doesn’t reply this time. She moves a little and wraps her arms around him. “Sorry if I hurt you,” she says, meaning his hair. “I know you are delicate as silk.”

  He laughs a little.

  “My mother used to do that,” he says. Then, quiet as a breath, “I was close, when Fuyin brought me the order to retreat. I was very close, Shan.”

  “To what?” she asks.

  He tells her.

  “Not so much honour in a commander rebelling against the throne, is there?” he says. She hears the bitterness. And then, “I still could, Shan. I could get up right now and ride to the Wai, claim my army and lead it south. To the court. Another military leader’s uprising in Kitai! Wouldn’t that be a lantern of virtue?”

  She finds she cannot speak.

  He says, “And it is so wrong, that we let the horsemen go, that we are surrendering so much. Yes, for peace, yes. But not shaped this way—for this reason!”

  Her heart is pounding. There is fear in the room now, in her, and she finally understands (she thinks) what she’s been seeing in his face since morning.

  She isn’t quite there yet, however.

  I BELIEVE I CAN. I would like to stay , he’d said, up by the graves. He was wrong, it seemed.

  Twenty men were waiting outside the gate and fence, when he woke in the chilly morning and left the room, leaving Shan asleep. Walking out to them alone, past the frost-silvered grass and flower beds, he recognized their livery, then he recognized one of them.

  Daiyan came up to the gate. The one he knew, their leader, bowed on the other side. He said, “Commander Ren, we have been sent to escort you to Shantong. My hope is that this is acceptable to you. Prime Minister Hang Hsien sends his respects.”

  “How did you know I would be here?”

  “We were told you would likely come here.”

  A little amusing, a little unsettling. Daiyan saw Junwen and two others, armed, hurrying over, a little too briskly. He lifted a hand to slow them.

  “I know you,” he said to the guard leader. “You served Hang Dejin at Little Gold Hill.”

  “I did.”

  “It is a sorrow, how he died.”

  The man lifted his head. “It is.”

  “You serve his son now? At court?”

  “I am honoured to do so.”

  “He is fortunate. I gather your presence means I am not to be allowed to linger here at all?”

  An awkward hesitation. It was, Daiyan thought, an unfair question. “Never mind,” he said. “I will say my farewells and join you. I take it my men can ride with us?”

  “Of course,” said the guard.

  Daiyan suddenly had the name. “Thank you, Guard Officer Dun,” he said.

  The man flushed. “You are good to remember, commander,” he said. The man hesitated again. He opened his mouth, then closed it.

  “Go ahead,” Daiyan said.

  Dun Yanlu flushed. Then said, “Is it true? You were outside Hanjin?”

  “We were.”

  “And could have taken it?”

  Daiyan hesitated. “I should not speak of these matters.”

  Dun Yanlu, an older man, a little stocky, grey in his beard, nodded. Then, as if impelled, “But ... could you have? Taken the city? Killed them there?”

  There was discretion, and there was something else. What people needed to know about their empire, their army, themselves. It did have to do with virtue, pride. A lantern, Shan had said.

  “Of course we would have,” he said quietly. “The city was ours. They were trapped and dead.”

  Dun Yanlu swore then, softly but at length and with some eloquence. “Forgive me,” he added.

  “No need,” said Daiyan.

  STANDING BY THE GATE between the brothers, she watches him ride away. An escort sent all the way from Shantong is a mark of honour, surely? It doesn’t feel that way.

  Lu Chao has said he is going to follow south. Many things are happening, are being decided. Matters of great importance. An honourable man has a duty to bring what talent he has to the service of the state, and Chao is, after all, the last emissary sent to the Altai. He has spoken with the war-leader himself! He will go, play whatever role he is allowed.

  There is, of course, no place for a woman in any of this.

  She lives between worlds, suspended. And Daiyan was right last night: there is nowhere in Kitai better for her, more a home, than East Slope.

  She watches him go away. Any place in the world where you are.

  It has been an agitated morning. Daiyan’s men, the Lu family, the escort waiting. Chao’s grandchildren were excited by so many guardsmen at East Slope. There has been no chance to be alone.

  Watching by the gate she realizes, aching, that she’d said nothing to him when they mounted up. She waits. He looks back, riding. She says everything she needs to say with her eyes. Or as close to everything as she can.

  The road bends south and down to find the bridge across the stream, and the riders are gone from sight.

  The honourable Wang Fuyin is one of those who will be granted a long life by the gods, and good health to the end (and who can fairly ask for more than that?). He is greatly respected for his achievements, both in serving the state and in his writings on the proper conduct of magistrates during criminal investigations.

  Fuyin would always say that among all the moments in his life, the autumn day Commander Ren Daiyan appeared before the emperor in Shantong might have been the one carved most vividly into memory, the way words can be carved into stone. Of course words in stone, if they are not destroyed, outlast the carver, and memories do die.

  Protocols in Shantong were less rigid than they had been in Hanjin, and vastly less so than in earlier dynasties, when a man summoned might wait a year before being received. It was a smaller court and a less opulent palace. Revenue was an issue, and so was security.

  The emperor spoke of security a great deal.
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br />   Fuyin had made what could only be considered a reckless decision. He had left Jingxian—his own city now, his place of responsibility—in the hands of his deputy governor. He had found a ship on the coast to carry him to Shantong, immediately after watching the army begin its withdrawal from the walls of Hanjin.

  He was acutely aware of how close Kitai had been to open rebellion.

  The problem for him was that he still didn’t know how he felt about that. About Ren Daiyan’s decision to accept the order he himself had carried north.

  Ambivalence was treasonous, of course, but thoughts would not kill you if no one knew your mind. If no one who mattered could see your face, read your eyes.

  It would have been infinitely more prudent to go straight back to Jingxian and stay there. Jingxian was well south of the border proposed. It was safely in the new Kitai, Southern Twelfth Dynasty. First year of the reign of the illustrious Emperor Zhizeng.

  He was not a bold man, Wang Fuyin, by his own assessment. He’d left Hanjin before the siege began, anticipating what might come.

  Yes, he’d worked with Daiyan and the old prime minister in a scheme aimed at Kai Zhen, but throwing in your lot with a master such as Hang Dejin had seemed a prudent, not a reckless thing to do, and this had proven to be so.

  This act, on the other hand, hastening south by ship to be at a nervous court, unsummoned, in the midst of its shaping a treaty with vast implications, then choosing to be present when he was known to be a friend of the commander summoned to defend his actions ... this counted as recklessness, by any measure one could propose.

  That boy he’d impulsively ordered to be one of his guards long ago had become a man who elicited behaviour such as this, such ... well, loyalty, in fact.

  His wife, busily furnishing the governor’s mansion in Jingxian to her evolving satisfaction, would not be happy if she knew any of this, so he hadn’t told her. That was easy enough. Nothing else was.

  GENERAL SHENWEI HUANG had commanded the Kitan forces defending the approach to Xinan in the west. He had not been leading the army sent to take the Xiaolu Southern Capital, and then defend the imperial city when the barbarians came down.