Under Heaven (59 page)

Autumn came. The paulownia leaves fell one night, were on the ground when they woke. They left them on the path for a day, a family tradition, then the leaves were swept away by all of them together the morning following.
In winter, a message came from the court of the Emperor Shinzu, from his temporary court in Shuquian.
The glorious and exalted emperor acknowledged receiving a communication from his trusted servant, Shen Tai. He confirmed the arrival at Shuquian of nearly two hundred and fifty Sardian horses, a gift to Kitai from the same loyal servant of the empire.
It was understood by the compassionate emperor that after his labours in the west, and disruptions within his family, Master Shen might wish to spend an interval with his mother, attending to affairs at his family estate. The emperor approved such devoted impulses.
It was expected that Master Shen would agree that all loyal and capable men were needed by Kitai in times so vexed as the current ones, and his presence at the court, wherever it was, would be welcomed by his emperor in due course.
In confirmation of this imperial benignity, and in recognition of services performed, the emperor saw fit to extend a grant of lands in the south and east beyond those already given by the revered father-emperor to Shen Tai. Documents were attached. The emperor was also pleased to graciously accede to Master Shen's request for seven of the Sardians. The emperor went so far as to express the personal view (this was unusual) that, under the circumstances, it was a modest number. These seven horses would be arriving, under escort, soon, if the gods willed it so.
Tai drew a series of very deep breaths, reading this and then rereading it. He had succeeded, it seemed.
The land wasn't really the emperor's to give, he thought. There was too much uncertainty in the east. Still, the documents were his, Tai held them in his hands, and fortune might one day smile upon Kitai and the Ninth Dynasty again. The important thing was that his absence from court was accepted. Or it appeared that way.
Seven horses were coming back to him. It was a number he'd chosen very simply: he'd promised ten to Jian (she'd wanted to train them to dance); he had left three with Bytsan, seven remained. Besides two for himself, he had people for whom he wanted horses.
His younger brother, his sister. A fortress commander at Iron Gate. A poet, if he ever saw him again. The woman he loved, as a wedding gift.
If he ever saw her again.
The horses did indeed come, not long after the letter, escorted by twenty soldiers of the Fifth Military District. The new soldiers stayed and were garrisoned at Hangdu. They were reassigned to the Fourteenth Army, based here, but more specifically to Tai himself. They arrived with documents making him a senior officer of the Fourteenth Cavalry, carrying responsibilities for good order in Hangdu and the surrounding countryside. He reported directly to the governor.
It was suggested he call on the governor and the prefect as soon as circumstances permitted.
He'd had his mother write Song's parents. It had caused him a day of reflection when he'd learned who her father was. In the end, perhaps to honour the man as much as anything, Tai had ended up in laughter, by the stream. It did make sense, who she was. He told Li-Mei, tried to make her see why it was amusing, but she didn't laugh, only looked thoughtful.
A reply came back, addressed to his mother, offering the formal acceptance by Wei Song's father of the Shen family's proposal of honourable marriage to his daughter.
The letter communicated personal admiration for General Shen Gao, but also noted that Kanlin women, by the code of the order, always had the right to decline such offers in order to remain among the Warriors. Her father would convey to Wei Song his own approval, but the decision would be hers.
Through the winter, which was blessedly mild in their region, given other torments unfolding, Tai dedicated himself to tasks in the prefecture.
Warfare had not yet reached the district, but fleeing people had, and there was hardship. Outlaws, whether from need or a seized opportunity, became a problem, and the soldiers of the Fourteenth were busy dealing with them.
Tai also made a decision (not a difficult one) and began doling out supplies of grain from Liu's hidden granary. He put his brother Chao in charge of that, assisted by Pang, the man in Hangdu.
Their family had assets enough. Liu's own wealth had been mostly in Xinan and was probably forfeit after his death, because of his connection to Wen Zhou. It was too soon to explore this, but Tai was wealthy now himself, and Li-Mei had been given considerable gifts when made a princess. These had made their way here, since she had been expected never to see Kitai again.
Tai gave a horse to her and another to Chao.
In the evenings when he wasn't out with his cavalry on patrol, he drank wine, wrote poetry, read.
Another letter arrived one afternoon, brought by a courier from the southwest: Sima Zian sent greetings and love to his friend and reported that he was still with the father-emperor. There were tigers and gibbons where they were. The poet had travelled to the Great River gorges and remained of the view that there was no place in the world like them. He sent three short poems he'd written.
Word came that An Li had died.
There was a flickering of hope at this, but it didn't last long. The rebellion had taken on a life, or lives, that went too far beyond that of the man who'd started it.
It rained, the roads were muddy, as always in winter.
Nothing arrived from Wei Song until spring.
In that season, when the peach and apricot trees were flowering in the orchard, with magnolias in bloom and the paulownias growing new leaves and beginning to shade the path again, a letter finally came.
Tai read it and did calculations of distance and time. It was six days to the full moon. He left the next morning, with two of the remaining Kanlins and ten of his cavalry. He rode Dynlal, and they led a second Sardian horse, the smallest one.
North along the river road they went, the one he'd travelled all his life. He knew each inn along the way, the mulberry groves and silk farms. They saw a fox once, at the side of the road.
They encountered one band of outlaws, but a party as large as theirs, heavily armed, was far too intimidating and the bandits melted back into the forest. Tai took note of where they were. He'd send soldiers up this road later. The people living here would be menaced by these men. You could grieve for what might drive men to be outlaws, but you couldn't indulge it.
On the fifth day they reached the junction with the imperial road. There was a village to the west. East of here was the place where he'd sat in a carriage decorated with kingfisher feathers and spoken with An Li, who had brought destruction upon Kitai, and was dead now, leaving ruin and war all around.
Beyond that point along the road was the posting inn where he'd met Jian. One of Tai's cavalry from Iron Gate--his name had been Wujen Ning--had died there, defending Dynlal.
Wei Song had been wounded, defending him.
They didn't have to go that far. They were where they needed to be. The full moon would rise tonight. He waited, among a company of soldiers and two Kanlin Warriors. They ate a soldiers' meal by the side of the road. He read her letter again.
I have learned from my father that he approves of my marriage. I have also received leave from the elders of my sanctuary to withdraw from the Kanlin Warriors, and have completed the rituals required for that. I will be riding south to your father's home, if that is acceptable. I have sat beside open windows through autumn and winter, and have come to understand the poems about that better than I ever did. At times I have been angry with you, for causing me to feel this way. At other times I desire only to see you, and have my dust mingled with yours when I die. It would please me greatly, husband-to-be, if you were to meet me by the bridge across your stream, where it meets the imperial road between Xinan and the west. I will be there when spring's second full moon rises. Perhaps you will escort me home from Cho-fu-Sa?
The moon rose as he looked east along the road.
And with it, exactly at moonrise, she came, riding along the imperial way with a dozen or so companions and guards. It took him a moment to recognize her: she no longer wore Kanlin black. He'd never seen her in any other clothing. She wore no elegant bridal garb. She'd been travelling, and they had a distance yet to ride. Wei Song had on brown leather riding trousers and a light-green tunic with a short, dark-green overtunic, for there was still a chill to the air. Her hair was carefully pinned, he saw.
He dismounted and walked away from his men.
He saw her speak to her escort and she, too, dismounted and came towards him, so that they met each other, alone, on the arched bridge.
"Thank you for coming, my lord," she said. She bowed.
He bowed as well. "
My heart outraced the both of us
," he quoted. "The winter was long without you. I have brought you a Sardian horse."
Song smiled. "I will like that."
He said, "How did you know the old name for this bridge?"
"Cho-fu-Sa?" She smiled again. "I asked. The elders at Kanlin sanctuaries are very wise."
"I know that," he said.
She said, "It is pleasing to me to see you, husband-to-be."
"Do you want me to show you how pleased I am?" he asked.
She actually flushed, then shook her head. "We are not yet wed, Shen Tai, and others are watching us. I wish to make a proper appearance before your mother."
"And my sister," he said. "She is waiting as well."
Song's eyes grew wide. "What? How is ...?"
"We have a few days to ride. I will tell you that tale."
She hesitated, and then she bit her lip. "I am acceptable to you, like this? I feel strange, not wearing black. As if I have lost ... protection."
There was a swirl of wind. The water swirled below. Tai looked at her in the twilight. The wide-set eyes and the wide mouth. She was small, and lethal. He knew how gracefully she moved, and he knew her courage.
He said, "I have a few days of travelling to answer that, as well. To make you understand how pleasing you are in my sight."
"Truly?" she asked.
He nodded. "You make me wish to be always at your side."
She came and stood next to him on the arched bridge--at his side, in fact. She said, "Will you show me my new horse and take me home?"
They rode together under the moon, south along the river from Cho-fu-Sa.
Sometimes the one life we are allowed is enough.

Tales have many strands, smaller, larger. An incidental figure in one story is living through the drama and passion of his or her own life and death.
In that time of extreme upheaval in Kitai, of violence engendered by warfare and famine, a young Kanlin Warrior was travelling back that same spring from far-off Sardia with a tale to proudly tell, and carrying a letter from a woman to a man.
He survived his return journey through the deserts but was killed for his weapons and horse and saddle in an ambush northwest of Chenyao, on his way down from Jade Gate Fortress.
His saddlebags were rifled through, anything of value seized and divided by the bandits. They fought over his swords, which were magnificent. They also fought over whether to try to sell or to kill and eat the horse. In the event, it was eaten.
The letter was discarded, tumbling in dust and wind, and disappearing.

It might indeed have been thought that the death of Roshan would end the rebellion. This would have been a reasonable hope, but not an accurate one.
His son, An Rong, appeared to enjoy the idea of being an emperor. He continued to assert the will of the Tenth Dynasty in the east and northeast, with incursions south.
He had inherited his father's courage and appetites and matched him in savagery, but he had nowhere near the experience Roshan had in and around a court, nor did he know how to control his own soldiers and officers.
He couldn't have had those skills at his age, coming to power as he did. But explanations only clarify, they do not offer a remedy. An Rong proved unable to achieve any discipline or coordination among the fragmenting rebel leadership.
This could have prepared the way for their defeat and a return of peace to Kitai, except that times of chaos often breed greater chaos, and An Li's rebellion caused others to see opportunity in disruption.
A number of military governors, prefects, outlaw leaders, and certain peoples on the western and northern borders decided, independently of each other, that their own hour of glory had arrived--the moment to make more of themselves than had been possible in the decades of Kitan wealth and power under the Emperor Taizu.
Taizu was praying and mourning (it was said) in the southwest, beyond the Great River. His son was waging war in the north, summoning soldiers from border forts, negotiating for allies, and horses.
When the dragon is in the wild, wolves will emerge. When the wolves of war come out, hunger follows. The years of the rebellion--more accurately called the rebellions--led to starvation on a scale unmatched in the history of Kitai.
With all men, from beardless fourteen-year-olds to barely upright grandfathers, forcibly enlisted in one army or another across the empire there were no farmers left to sow or harvest millet, barley, corn, rice.
Disease was rampant. Almost no taxes on produce or land were able to be paid, however vicious enforcers became. Some regions, as warfare shifted back and forth across their land, found themselves facing taxation from two or even three different sets of overseers. And with armies needing to be fed--or they might rebel, themselves--what food could make its way to women and children left at home?
If there was a home left. Or children alive. In those years, children were sold for food, or sold as food. Hearts hardened, hearts broke.
One well-known lament, for the conscripted farmer-soldiers and their families, was composed by a poet-mandarin who lived through those years. He was looking back at a black period, after he'd retired from court for the third and final time to one of his country estates.
He wasn't judged to be among the very greatest Ninth Dynasty poets, but was acknowledged as skilled. He was known as a friend of Sima Zian, the Banished Immortal, and later, also, of the equally glorious Chan Du. He wrote:
Courageous women try to manage a plough
But the rows of grain never come right.
In winter officials arrive in our villages
Fiercely demanding taxes be paid.
How under heaven can that be done
In a shattered land? Never have sons!
They will only grow up to die under distant skies.
In time, the rebellion ended. The truth, as historians learn and teach, is that most things end, eventually.
Still, the fact that this is so would not have found a placid acceptance in the burned-out, abandoned shells of farms and villages throughout Kitai in those years. The dead are not assuaged, or brought back, by a philosophic view of events.
The Emperor Shinzu retook Xinan, lost it briefly, then took it a second time and did not lose it. General Xu Bihai reoccupied Teng Pass against incursions from the east. The Ta-Ming Palace was restored, if not to what it had been before.
The emperor's father died and was buried in his tomb near Ma-wai. The Precious Consort, whose name had been Jian, was already there, awaiting him. So was his empress.
People began to return to the capital and to their villages and farms, or to new ones, for with so very many dead there was much land unclaimed.
Trade slowly resumed, although not along the Silk Roads. They were too dangerous now, with the garrisons beyond Jade Gate abandoned.
As a result, no letters came from the west, from places such as Sardia. No dancers or singers came.
No lychee fruits were brought up from the far south, either, carried early in the season by military couriers on imperial roads. Not in those years.
An Rong himself was murdered, perhaps predictably, by two of his generals. These two divided the northeast between themselves, like warlords of old, abandoning any imperial ambitions. The Tenth Dynasty ended, faded away, never was.
The number ten became regarded as bad luck in Kitai for a long time afterwards, among generations that had no idea why this was so.
One of the two rebel generals accepted an offer of amnesty from the Emperor Shinzu in Xinan and turned on the other, joining with imperial armies in a triumphant battle below the Long Wall not far from Stone Drum Mountain. In this battle, two hundred cavalry, four
duis,
mounted on Sardian horses, played a devastating role, sweeping across the battlefield from left flank to right and back, with a speed and power other riders could only dream about.
Three men, two of them extremely tall, the third with only one hand, watched that fight from the northern edge of the summit of Stone Drum Mountain.
They were expressionless for the most part, except when one or the other would raise an arm and point to the Sardians racing along the lines, a glory amid carnage. When the three old men saw this, they would smile. Sometimes they'd laugh softly, in wonder.
"I would like one of those," said the man with one hand.
"You don't even ride any more," said the tallest one.
"I'd look at it. I'd watch it run. It would bring me joy."
"Why would he give you a Sardian horse?" said the other tall one.
The one with a single hand grinned at him. "He's married my daughter, hasn't he?"
"So I understand. A clever girl. Not dutiful enough, in my view. She's better off having left us."
"Perhaps. And he might give me a horse, don't you think?"
"You could ask. It would be difficult for him to say no."
The smaller man looked at one and then the other of his companions. He shook his head regretfully. "Too hard to say no. That's why I can't ask." He looked down again at the battlefield. "This is over," he said. "It was over before it began."
"You think peace will follow now?"
"Up here perhaps. Not everywhere. We may not live to see peace in Kitai."
"You cannot know that," admonished the tallest one.
"I am pleased, at the least," said the third, "that I lived long enough to have an answer about the wolf. It was honourable of him to send us word. Unexpected."
"You thought he'd die himself when the wolf died?"
"I did. And now he is sending messages to us. It shows we can be wrong. The need for humility."
The small one looked up at him and laughed. "It shows
you
can be wrong," he said.
The others laughed as well. It is entirely possible, the teachings of the Kanlins suggest, to laugh while the heart is breaking for mankind.
They turned and walked away from the view of the battlefield.
THE REBEL GENERAL who'd accepted the offer of amnesty from Xinan might have expected treachery, might even have been resigned to it, but with the empire so desperately spent it was decided by the new advisers of the new emperor that the offered amnesty should be honoured. The general and his soldiers were allowed to live, and resume their posts defending Kitai.
Soldiers were urgently needed on the Long Wall and in the west and south, before all borders collapsed inwards under waves of barbarian incursions.
Weariness, sometimes more than anything else, can bring an end to war.
It was said to be the case that the emperor's favourite wife, regarded by some later historians as dangerously subtle and too influential, played a role in encouraging him to keep that agreement--with a view to securing Kitai's boundaries.
The first treaty negotiated and signed was with the Tagurans.
The second was with the Bogu. Their new kaghan, Hurok's successor, was a man his people called the Wolf. It wasn't clear why, then or later, but how would civilized people understand the names, let alone the rituals, of barbarians?
There
were
stories told that the same imperial princess, who was also Shinzu's second wife, understood more than she ought to have about this matter of the Bogu, but the details of this--the documents so vital to a historian--were lost.
Some even said this had been deliberate, but in truth the disruptions of those years, the burnings of cities and market towns, movements of people and armies, emergence of bandits, warlords, disease, and death, were so very great, it was hardly necessary to imagine or assume a purpose on anyone's part if records disappeared.
And it is always difficult, even with the best will in the world, to look back a long way and see anything resembling the truth.