‘You do not think he was a bad man to have done this?’
‘It was the only thing he could have done,’ Iloh said.
‘He had gained power,’ one of the other pupils, a sallow-faced boy named Tang, said slowly. ‘And he could not afford to let those others go free. Power can be lost as easily as it can be gained. All it takes is a single betrayal…’
‘Power corrupts,’ Yanzi said, her eyes cast down.
‘Corrupts what?’ the headmaster asked.
‘Principles,’ Yanzi said. ‘Ideals. Character. Power changes people.’
‘Wait,’ said Sihuai, ‘wasn’t that the Phoenix Emperor? Didn’t he turn aside a famine? He gave from his own table, shared the Imperial reserves of grain when the country starved. He saved a lot of people.’
‘But at what cost?’ Yanzi said, her voice passionate. ‘The principles…’
‘High principles carry too high a price if people are starving,’ Iloh said. ‘The emperor did away with the threats that could have been a danger to his rule. He then…ruled. If he was a good ruler…if he fed a starving people…how then could this be bad?’
‘He bought the people,’ Yanzi said obstinately. ‘They kiss the hand that feeds them, no matter how black the heart that rules it.’
‘When people have nothing in the food bowl,’ Iloh said, ‘they are unlikely to think about morality. They do what they need to do. And power is given to those who are not afraid to use it.’
A silence descended at those words. It took Iloh a moment, and every ounce of the strength of his developing convictions, to lift his head and meet the eyes of everyone else in that class – ending with Yanzi herself, who did not hold his gaze long before letting her own luminous eyes fall back to rest on the gracefully folded hands in her lap.
‘Very interesting,’ the headmaster said, throwing the words into the silence like pebbles into a still pond. ‘I would like you all to write an essay on the use of power, please. By the end of the week. You may all go now.’
Iloh, his blood still stirred in the aftermath of the discussion, hesitated briefly at the door of the headmaster’s study and turned once, briefly, to look back. He had just a glimpse of Yanzi standing there in the middle of the room, looking straight back at him, with eyes that were steady, sad, and perhaps a little afraid.
Iloh and Sihuai were sharing a room at the school before Iloh’s second year there came to a close. Sihuai was a particularly neat and almost obsessively tidy boy. Iloh, by contrast, took up every inch of available – and sometimes even not so available – space. When he worked at his desk it always overflowed with papers, sheets of smudged calligraphy, trails of spilled ink, glue, discarded pens, dog-eared books with sometimes deeply outlandish objects used as bookmarks, and half-eaten meals with remnants of rice that were acquiring the consistency of cement or in the process of giving birth to entirely new and hitherto unknown species of mould. There was even the occasional broken shoe, bent belt-buckle or torn quilted jacket that he had been in the process of repairing, straightening or patching, and which had been simply discarded as a fresh idea occurred to him and he swept all else aside to set it down on paper.
‘For someone who thinks that it’s his fate to save the world,’ Sihuai would mutter in a long-suffering tone of voice as he picked up three of Iloh’s books off his bed or a sheaf of Iloh’s notes from his own immaculately tidy desk, ‘you can’t seem to keep your own nest tidy.’
‘The world needs saving, and how!’ Iloh would reply, with a self-mocking grin. ‘I wasn’t really planning on doing anything about it until after graduation, Sihuai…but if I were to start thinking about cleaning up the universe, sweeping rooms seems an awfully parochial way of going about it.’
They were very different, but they got along well for all that – and they were quickly joined by Tang, who was a sort of bridge between the two of them, himself half Sihuai and half Iloh. He could understand both Sihuai’s aristocratic dignity and Iloh’s down-to-earth zeal with equal pragmatism – and it was he who launched the idea of a shared adventure in the summer of Iloh’s third year at the school.
‘A beggar’s holiday,’ he said. ‘We take nothing except a change of clothes and a towel and a notebook to write a journal in. And we wander where the roads take us, and we live on what we are given by the people we meet.’
‘But what would be the purpose of such a journey?’ Sihuai asked, considering the idea with doubt and not a little distaste.
‘Consider it a test of your ideas,’ Tang said. ‘You and Iloh, you have such different ideas about people. Why not prove which of you is right? And besides – it is a study of power. You know what the old saying is – only a beggar knows what true liberty is. Give a man a chance to live free of obligation or responsibility, and I suspect few would choose even to be emperor, after.’
‘I’m in,’ Iloh said, with his usual immediate and fiery enthusiasm at an idea that caught his imagination.
‘So am I,’ Sihuai said after a hesitation. He was still in two minds, but he could not allow himself to lose face by admitting his misgivings about the propriety of such an adventure to his friends.
The three of them met up at the school’s gate the day classes broke for the summer, dressed in old clothes and comfortable sandals, each carrying a bundle into which were folded the items that Tang had decreed they might bring. They wore their beggar’s garb with a sense of shining pride as they set out – but, inevitably, they were young scholars and they could not quite leave school behind. The discussion about power and the essays that they had written on the subject were still on their minds.
‘Remember the ancient poet – “I did not see those who came before me, and I will not know those who will follow” – a man can only be responsible for the days of his own life,’ Sihuai argued as they walked, their bundles slung jauntily on their shoulders.
‘If a man takes responsibility for others, then that is not true,’ Iloh said. ‘Then he needs to know those who will follow. Look at Shiqai. He held it all in the palm of his hand and then he let it all shatter.’
‘But that was in times of turmoil,’ Tang said.
‘Not so very long ago,’ Iloh replied thoughtfully. ‘It was only a few years before I was born.’
‘The problem is that he tried to make new things with old tools,’ Sihuai said. ‘He was part of the court, and then he went over to Baba Sung and his party when the republic was proclaimed and made the emperor resign, and then he made Baba Sung resign and tried to be emperor himself. And after that, there was none strong enough to be any kind of leader at all – not of the whole country. Even we, here, have a lord who rules with an iron fist over this single province – and raises taxes for himself and not for any government in Linh-an. He took three times the usual annual taxes from my father last year, and there is nothing my father can do about it.’
‘Mine, too,’ Iloh murmured. There had been letters from home. Things were not going well on the ancestral farm.
‘A new force is needed,’ Tang said. ‘Something to change each individual. Something strong enough to pass from one man to another, to spread through the people, like a thought, like a touch of the hand. To make them believe something. Together. And then the power of many people, believing that one thing…under a strong leader.’
‘You are thinking people are like a flock of sheep,’ Sihuai said.
‘But that is right,’ Iloh said. ‘People