There are nightingales here sometimes, this far back from the rooms and pavilions of the compound. (The street beyond the wall is quiet at night in a sedate, very wealthy ward.) They can be heard most often in summer; it is early in the year to expect one tonight.
She has meandered back this way, carrying her pipa, plucking it as she walked through the twilight. She has noticed that when she carries the instrument people don’t look at her as closely, as if she’s part of the setting, not a woman to be observed. Or carefully watched.
It is dark now. She’d had Hwan, the servant who loves her a little too much, light one of the gazebo’s lanterns for her, and then she’d dismissed him. She doesn’t want it to appear as if she’s hiding: see, there is a light. Although you’d need to come a long way back and look through trees to see it. Earlier, in the afternoon, Hwan had run a different errand for her outside the compound. She has done what she can do, and is here.
Rain plays a few notes of an old song about the moon as messenger between parted lovers. Then she decides that’s the wrong music to be thinking about tonight.
She is alone here. She’s confident of that. Her maidservants have been dismissed for the night. One will remain in the suite of rooms against her mistress’s return, but Rain has stayed out late in the garden with her pipa before. A mild eccentricity, usefully established.
And Wen Zhou doesn’t spy on his women. His mind doesn’t run that way. He can’t actually conceive, Rain believes, that they would not be devoted and compliant. Where, and how, could they have a better life? No, his fears are cast, like a shadow, outside these walls.
He and his wife have been gone all day. Summoned to Ma-wai, no warning. He wasn’t happy about the suddenness. On the other hand, there was never a great deal anyone could prudently do in the way of resisting when Jian wanted them. Rain sees fireflies among the trees, watches them for a time. Moths flutter around the lantern.
The compound has been quiet since the master left this morning, or at least since the arrival of the second message from Ma-wai. The one sent to her. Not all windows above jade stairs need be seen through tears.
No jade stairs here. Neither real jade nor a poet’s symbol-shaped imagining. She sits on a bench with her instrument in a rosewood gazebo, roofed, but open to the night on all sides.
The scent of the wood, scent of the air. Nearly summer now. No jade, and no tears, Rain decides, although she knows it would be possible to make herself weep. She isn’t going to do that. She is thinking too hard.
Mostly about Wen Jian.
NO ONE KNOWS this mountain where I dwell.
Tai found it ironic, in an over-elaborate way, that when the nearness of Xinan first announced itself—a wide, diffused glow on the southern horizon—the phrase that came to him was from a poem about solitude.
Yan would have had a remark about that, he thought.
So would Xin Lun, actually. The one man gentle, amused, the other wittily astringent. Both were dead. And the memories he was conjuring were more than two years old.
So was the memory, rich as the emerald he carried (but didn’t wear), of the woman he was riding through the night to see.
He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t put on the ring. He wasn’t ready yet, he decided, for people to look at him the way one looked at a man with so much wealth on display. He didn’t want Rain seeing him like that, though he couldn’t say why. It wasn’t as if she would be unused to opulence in the first minister’s house.
Even in the Pavilion of Moonlight, she had moved through a world that included extravagantly wealthy men. It had never seemed to touch her. She’d been as happy—or had made them think she was—among the students, singing for them, teasing, listening to late-night philosophy and verse and plans to remake the world.
That was what a skilled courtesan did, of course: induce every man to think he was the one she’d choose, had she only the freedom to pursue that innermost desire.
But he knew, Tai knew, that to think that way about her was to deny a deeper truth about the golden-haired woman behind the walls (so many of them). Xinan’s walls loomed now in the middle distance beyond the bridge they were clattering across. The bridge had bright lanterns, and soldiers guarding it.
Two years ago, Rain had told him—had warned him—that the stylish southern aristocrat Wen Zhou, cousin to the emperor’s beloved, might be minded to take her away from the North District.
Both of them had seen it happen many times. Mostly, it was a dream for a courtesan that this might occur. A doorway opening on a better life.
Tai, immersed in his studies and friendships, trying to decide what his own idea of a properly lived life should be, had been painfully aware that what she said might be true, but there was nothing a student preparing for the examinations, the second son of a retired general, could do if an aristocrat with wealth and connections wanted a North District woman for his own.
And then his father had died.
He was thinking of her, green eyes and yellow hair and the voice late at night, as they came to the city walls. Tai looked up at the enormous, many-storeyed tower above the gates. There were lights now, hiding the stars. The gates were locked, of course. It was after darkfall.
That didn’t seem to matter: Jian had sent word ahead of them.
The leader of his Kanlin escort (not Wei Song, there was a more senior figure now) handed a scroll through a small sliding window, and a moment later the Gold Bird Guards manning this entrance through the northern wall opened for them, with a shout.
Then, as he and his Kanlins rode through, the city guards—those on the ground and those in the tower and on the nearby walls—all bowed twice, to Tai.
He truly wasn’t prepared for this. He looked at Song, who had stayed close through the hours of this ride. She didn’t meet his glance, was staring straight ahead, hood up, watchful and alert. She’d been wounded this morning. Seemed to show no signs of it.
The gates swung closed behind them. He turned in the saddle and watched, patting Dynlal absently. Tai wondered why he wasn’t exhausted. They had been travelling most of the day, except for an interlude at Ma-wai that was likely to change his life.
He was in Xinan again. Heart of the world.
He still didn’t know why Jian was doing this. His best guess was that it was a small part of the endless balancing act she performed in the palace: Wen Zhou and Roshan, ambitious mandarins, the heir, other governors, the eunuchs, other princes (and their mothers) …
And now one more man, arrived from the west. The brother of an influential adviser and of a newly named princess. A man with an absurd number of Sardian horses in his control.
To a woman in Jian’s position, it would only make sense to assert a claim to such a man. And so, when it had emerged, through routine inquiry, that he’d had a relationship with a singing girl in the North District, a girl who might even be the reason Jian’s cousin had sought to have him killed …
Well, you might undertake certain things in such a circumstance, set them in motion, if you were a clever woman dealing with a fiendishly difficult court. And with an aging emperor, tired of protocols and conflicts and finance and barbarians, obsessed with you, and with living forever, while shaping the most opulent tomb ever built, should that second dream not come to pass because the gods did not wish it so.
Gates had been opened for Tai, not just symbolically, as in a verse, but real ones, massive and intimidating, looming by torch and lantern light.
He had never done this: enter the city after dark.
If you approached Xinan towards day’s end you found an inn, or a farmhouse with a barn (if you were a student, watching your money), and listened from outside the walls to the long ceremony of drums that closed the gates. Then you entered with the market crowd in the morning amid the chaos of another day among two million souls.
Not now. Now, the gates had just swung wide. Four of the Gold Bird Guards even came with them, to preclude the necessity of showing their scroll all
the way through the city.
The streets were eerily quiet. Within the lanes and alleys of some of the wards there would be raucous, violent life even now, Tai knew, but not along the main roads. They turned east immediately inside the gate, passing in front of the vast palace complex until they turned south down the central avenue. The widest street in the world, running from the Ta-Ming to the southern gate, straight as a dream of virtue.
She had pressed her fingers to his mouth, their last night, to stop him from being clever, he recalled. He had once been a man who prided himself on being clever. He remembered her scent, her palm against his face. He remembered kissing her hand.
He looked around him. He had never done this either, ride a horse right down the central avenue, after dark. He didn’t like being in the middle of the wide street. It felt too much as if he were laying claim to something. He wasn’t. He’d have liked to claim a cup of wine in the Pavilion of Moonlight, if she had still been there.
“Over more, please,” he said quietly to Song. “Too much of a procession, where we are.”
She looked quickly at him. They were near a guard station, with lanterns. He saw concern in her eyes, then they moved from the light and he couldn’t see her face any more. Song twitched her horse’s reins, moved ahead, and spoke to the man leading them. They began angling southeast across the vast, open space, to continue along the roadway, nearer one side now.
There were only a handful of people abroad on the street, and no group so large as theirs. Those on the far side, west, were so distant as to be almost invisible. There were guard stations at intervals, large ones at the major intersections, all the way down the centre of the road. He saw a sedan chair being carried north. The bearers stopped as their company passed by. A hand pulled a curtain back, to see who they were. Tai glimpsed a woman’s face.
They carried on, ten Kanlin Warriors, four of the Gold Bird Guards, and the second son of General Shen Gao, down the principal avenue of Xinan, under stars.
All journeys come to an end, one way or another. They reached the gate of the fifty-seventh ward.
HE HAD BEEN BORN in the south, beyond the Great River, in lands that knew tigers and the shrieking of gibbons. His family were farm labourers for generations, going back further than any of them could have counted. He, himself—his name was Pei Qin—had been the youngest of seven, a small child, clever.
When he was six years old his father had brought him to the under-steward of one of the Wen estates. There were three branches of the Wen family, controlling most of the land (and the rice and salt) around. There was always a need for capable servants to be trained. Qin had been accepted by the steward to be raised and educated. That had been thirty-seven years ago.
He had become a trusted, unobtrusive household servant. When the eldest son of the family decided to make his way to Xinan and the courtly world not quite four years ago (observing the useful, astonishing rise of his young cousin), Qin was one of the servants he’d taken north to help select and teach those they would hire in the capital.
Qin had done that, capably and quietly. He’d been a quiet child, was unchanged as a man. Never married. He had been one of the three servants entrusted with laying out clothing for the master, with preparing his rooms, with warming his wine or tea. Had he been asked at any time, he’d have said that his was a privileged life, since he knew the conditions in which his siblings lived, among the rice and salt.
One evening—the wrong evening, for reasons heaven decreed—he had been distracted by the inadequately supervised presence in the compound of a dozen girls from the pleasure district. They were being fitted with costumes for a pageant Zhou was hosting on his lake. (The lake was new then.)
Hearing their uninhibited laughter, worrying about who was watching them, Qin had overheated the master’s evening wine.
The wine had, evidently, burned Wen Zhou’s tongue.
Thirty-five years with the family had been as nothing, Qin would think, after. Decades of service had been less than nothing.
He was beaten. In itself, not unusual. The life of a servant included such things, and a senior retainer could be required to perform the beating of a lesser one. Qin had done that. The world was not a gentle place. No one who’d seen a brother mauled by a tiger would ever think that. And a short time in Xinan could make a man realize there were tigers here, too, even if they might not have stripes or pad through forests and fields after dark.
The thing was, Wen Zhou had ordered sixty strokes with the heavy rod for Qin. His tongue must have been quite badly burned, one of the other servants said bitterly, afterwards.
Or something else had greatly distressed the master that night. It didn’t matter. Sixty strokes of the rod could kill a man.
Two and a half years ago, that was, in the days just before the Cold Food Festival. Qin did not die, but it was a near thing.
The household steward (not a bad man, for a steward) arranged for two doctors to attend upon him, taking turns, day and night, in the small room where they’d brought him after the public beating in the Third Courtyard. (It was important for all the servants to see the consequences of carelessness.)
He survived, but never walked properly again. He couldn’t lift his right arm. That side of his torso was twisted, like some trees above the Great River gorges that grow low to the slanting ground to stay out of the wind and suck moisture from sparse soil.
He was dismissed, of course. An aristocrat’s compound was not a place for the unemployable. The other servants undertook to look after him. It was not something he’d expected, not something normally done. Usually a man as deformed as Qin would be taken to one of the markets and do what he could to survive by begging there.
It might have helped if he could have sung, or told tales, or even served as a scribe … but he had no singing voice, was a small, shy man, and his writing hand (he’d been taught by Wen Zhou’s father’s steward how to write) was the one that was twisted and useless after the beating.
He’d have been better off dying, Qin thought for a long time. He shaped such thoughts in the street behind Wen’s compound, where the other servants had placed him after he was dismissed. It was not a busy thoroughfare, not a good place for a beggar, but the others had said they’d look after him, and they had done so.
Qin would limp on his crutch to the shady side of the street in summer and then cross as the sun moved, or huddle in an alcove in rain or winter winds. Begging brought little, but from the compound each morning and many evenings food and rice wine came out for him. If his garments grew threadbare, he would find that one day the person bringing his meal would be carrying new clothes. In winter they gave him a hooded cloak, and he even had boots. He became skilful with the crutch at beating off dogs or rats eyeing his provisions.
Last autumn his life had even changed for the better, which was not something Pei Qin had thought was possible any more.
One cold, clear morning, four of the household servants, walking the long distance around from the south-facing front doors, had come along the street towards where Qin kept his station against the compound wall. They carried wood and nails and tools, and set about building a discreet shelter for him, set in a space between an oak tree and the stone wall, not easily seen from the street, not likely to offend.
He asked, and they told him that the new concubine, Lin Chang, had heard Qin’s story from one of Zhou’s other women—apparently meant as a cautionary tale. She had made inquiries and learned where he was.
She had given instructions that he be provided with a shelter, and his food rations became more substantial after that. It appeared that she had assumed responsibility for him, freeing the servants from the need to feed him out of their own allocation.
He never saw her. They told him she was beautiful, and on five occasions (he remembered them perfectly) he heard her play the pipa towards the back of the garden. He knew it was her, even before they confirmed for him that it was Mistress Lin, of all the women, who playe
d and sang best, and who liked to come alone to the gazebo.
Qin had decided she was playing for him.
He would have killed, or died for her, by then. Hwan, the servant who most often brought his food or clothing, clearly felt the same way. It was Hwan who told him she’d been bought from the North District, and that her name there had been Spring Rain. He also told Qin what the master had paid for her (it was a source of pride). Qin thought it an unimaginable sum, and also not enough.
It was Hwan who had told him, at the beginning of spring, that a Kanlin Warrior would be coming to meet privately with Mistress Lin.
Hwan—speaking for the lady, he made clear—asked Qin to show this Kanlin how to get over the wall using his own shelter-tree, and to give her directions to the gazebo from there (it was a distance back west in the compound).
It brought intense joy to Qin’s battered body and beating heart to be trusted with such a service for her. He told Hwan as much, begged him to say so to Mistress Lin, and to bow three times in Qin’s name.
The Kanlin came that night (a woman, which he hadn’t expected, but it made no difference). She looked for Qin in the darkness, carrying no torch. She’d have had trouble seeing him, had he not been watching for her. He called to her, showed her the way over the wall, told her where the gazebo was. It was a cold night, he remembered. The woman climbed with an ease Qin would never have matched even when he had his legs and a straight back. But Kanlin were chosen for their aptitude in these things, and trained.
Qin had been chosen for intelligence, but had overheated wine one night.
You might call the world an unjust place, or make of life what you could. He was grateful to the servants, in love with a woman he would never see, and he intended to live long enough to celebrate the death of Wen Zhou.
He watched the Kanlin woman disappear over the wall and saw her come back some time later. She gave him a coin—silver, which was generous. He was saving it for an extravagance. Lychees would be in season now in the south, where he’d been born. The court might have them already, the Xinan marketplaces would see them soon. Qin intended to ask someone to buy him a basket, as a way of remembering childhood.
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