You could never truly know, of course. Not in Xinan. Ministers were appointed and exiled, generals and military governors promoted, then demoted or ordered to kill themselves, and the court had been changing swiftly in the time before he’d left. But Tai hadn’t had a position yet. It wasn’t as if he’d risked anything in the way of office or rank. And he thought he could survive the whipping rod, if it came to that.
He tried to decide now, in a moonlit cabin, wrapped in solitude like a silkworm during its fourth sleep, how much he really missed the capital. If he was ready to go back, resume all as before. Or if it was time for yet another change.
He knew what people would say if he did make a change, what was already said about General Shen’s second son. First Son Liu was known and understood, his ambition and achievement fitting a pattern. The third son was still young, little more than a child. It was Tai, the second, who raised more questions than anything else.
Mourning would be formally over at the seventh month’s full moon. He would have completed the rites, in his own fashion. He could resume his studies, prepare for the next set of examinations. That was what men did. Scholars wrote the civil service tests five times, ten, more. Some died without ever passing them. Forty to sixty men succeeded each year, of the thousands who began the process with the preliminary tests in their own prefectures. The final examination was begun in the presence of the emperor himself, in his white robe and black hat and the yellow belt of highest ceremony: an elaborate passage of initiation—with bribery and corruption in the process, as always in Xinan. How could it be otherwise?
The capital seemed to have entered his silvered cabin now, driving sleep farther away with memories of a brawling, buffeting tumult that never wholly stopped at any hour. Vendors and buyers shouting in the markets, beggars and tumblers and fortune tellers, hired mourners following a funeral with their hair unbound, horses and carts rumbling through dark and day, the muscled bearers of sedan chairs screaming at pedestrians to make way, whipping them aside with bamboo rods. The Gold Bird Guards with their own whipping rods at every major intersection, clearing the streets when darkfall came.
Small shops in each ward, open all night long. The Night Soil Gatherers passing with their plaintive warning cry. Logs bumping and rolling through Xinan’s outer walls into the huge pond by the East Market where they were bought and sold at sunrise. Morning beatings and executions in the two market squares. More street performers after the decapitations, while good crowds were still gathered. Bells tolling the watch-hours by day and through the night, and the long roll of drums that locked the walls and all the ward gates at sundown and opened them at dawn. Spring flowers in the parks, summer fruit, autumn leaves, the yellow dust that was everywhere, blowing down from the steppes. The dust of the world. Jade-and-gold. Xinan.
He heard and saw and almost caught the smells of it, as a remembered chaos and cacophony of the soul, then he pushed it back and away in the moonlight, listening again to the ghosts outside, the crying he’d had to learn to live with here, or go mad.
In silver light he looked over at his low writing table, the ink-block and paper, the woven mat in front of it. His swords were against the wall beside it. The scent of the pine trees came through the open windows with the night wind. Cicadas whirring, a duet with the dead.
He had come to Kuala Nor on impulse, to honour his father’s sorrow. He had stayed for himself just as much, working every day to offer what release he could to however small a number of those unburied here. One man’s labour, not an immortal, not holy.
Two years had passed, seasons wheeling, and the stars. He didn’t know how he would feel when he returned to the crash and tumble of the capital. That was the honest thought.
He did know which people he had missed. He saw one of them in the eye of his mind, could almost hear her voice, too vividly to allow sleep to return, remembering the last time he’d lain with her.
“And if someone should take me from here when you are gone? If someone should ask me…should propose to make me his personal courtesan, or even a concubine?”
He’d known who someone was, of course.
He had taken her hand, with its long, gold-painted fingernails and jewelled rings, and placed it on his bare chest, so she could feel his heart.
She’d laughed, a little bitterly. “No! You always do this, Tai. Your heart never changes its beating. It tells me nothing.”
In the North District where they were—an upstairs room in the Pavilion of Moonlight Pleasure House—she was called Spring Rain. He didn’t know her real name. You never asked the real names. It was considered ill-bred.
Speaking slowly, because this was difficult, he’d said, “Two years is a long time, Rain. I know it. Much happens in the life of a man, or a woman. It is—”
She had moved her hand to cover his mouth, not gently. She wasn’t always gentle with him. “No, again. Listen to me. If you begin to speak of the Path, or the balanced wisdom of life’s long flowing, Tai, I will take a fruit knife to your manhood. I thought you might wish to know this before you went on.”
He remembered the silk of her voice, the devastating sweetness with which she could say such things. He had kissed the palm held against his mouth, then said, softly, as she moved it a little away, “You must do what seems best to you, for your life. I do not want you to be one of those women waiting at a window above jade stairs in the night. Let someone else live those poems. My intention is to go back to my family’s estate, observe the rites for my father, then return. I can tell you that.”
He had not lied. It had been his intention.
Things had fallen out otherwise. What man would dare believe that all he planned might come to pass? Not even the emperor, with the mandate of heaven, could make that so.
He had no idea what had happened to her, if someone had indeed taken her from the courtesans’ quarter, claimed her for his own behind the stone walls of an aristocrat’s city mansion in what was almost certainly a better life. No letters came west of Iron Gate Pass, because he had not written any.
It didn’t have to be a case of one extreme or the other, he finally thought: not Xinan set against this beyond-all-borders solitude. The Path’s long tale of wisdom taught balancing, did it not? The two halves of a man’s soul, of his inward life. You balanced couplets in a formal verse, elements in a painting—river, cliff, heron, fishing boat—thick and thin brush strokes in calligraphy, stones and trees and water in a garden, shifting patterns in your own days.
He could go back home to their stream, for example, instead of to the capital, when he left here. Could live there and write, marry someone his mother and Second Mother chose for him, cultivate their garden, the orchard—spring flowers, summer fruit—receive visitors and pay visits, grow old and white-bearded in calm but not solitude. Watch the paulownia leaves when they fell, the goldfish in the pond. Remember his father doing so. He might even, one day, be thought a sage. The idea made him smile, in moonlight.
He could travel, east down the Wai, or on the Great River itself through the gorges to the sea and then back: the boatmen poling against the current, or towing the boats west with thick ropes along slippery paths cut into the cliffs when they came to the wild gorges again.
He might go even farther south, where the empire became different and strange: lands where rice was grown in water and there were elephants and gibbons, mandrills, rosewood forests, camphor trees, pearls in the sea for those who could dive for them, and where tigers with yellow eyes killed men in the jungles of the dark.
He had an honoured lineage. His father’s name offered a doorway through which Tai could walk and find a welcome among prefects and taxation officers and even military governors throughout Kitai. In truth, First Brother’s name might be even more useful by now, though that had its own complexities.
But all of this was possible. He could travel