springs ago. She had been generous, he had been virtuous. You could hold to such moments, hold them up to morning’s light.
It was time to rise, before the heat grew stupefying. He dressed in his hemp robe, worn through, too big for him now with the weight he’d lost. He put on his hat, as always, pinned thinning hair. He didn’t look at mirrors any more. He lit candles, poured out three cups of wine, prayed for his parents’ souls, and his wife’s, at the small altar they had made here at world’s end. He prayed for the ghost-woman. That whatever had denied her rest might ease and pass, be forgiven or forgotten.
Mah had been up earlier, as always. He had rice and chestnuts on the fire in the front room, and yellow wine warmed for his father.
“I think we’ll see the sun again today,” Lu Chen pronounced. “I propose we rally our wild bandit company and storm the fortress of the evil district overlord.”
“We did that yesterday,” his son said, smiling back at him.
His concubines were wailing in the women’s quarters like unburied ghosts. Kai Zhen, deputy prime minister of Kitai—until this morning—could hear them across the courtyard. Their voices twined and clashed unmelodiously. He had a large house (he had several large houses) but they were making a great deal of noise in their lamenting.
He felt like wailing himself, in truth. Or killing someone. He paced his principal reception room, window, wall, window, then back again, too agitated to sit, to eat, take wine, compose letters. What letters could he write?
His world had just ended. It had exploded like one of those new devices that launched fire-arrows over the walls of cities under siege.
Wu Tong, his protégé, his ally in the Flowers and Rocks Network and a shared ascent to power, hadn’t taken siege weapons north against the Kislik capital.
Sometimes the known, verified truth remained impossible to believe.
Had the eunuch and his commanders been driven mad by desert winds? Tormented to that state by some malign spirit intending their destruction? Intending Kai Zhen’s even more?
How did you forget siege weapons on your way to take a city?
This morning’s business of the court gentleman—that insignificant garden-book writer whose name he could barely recall—was trivial, it was nothing! Or it should have been. What were the chances the emperor, obsessed with the ideal placement of a new Szechen rock, or aligning a row of pagoda trees, would pause to read a letter, or care about a meaningless figure’s exile?
Even if he did, even if the accursed blind one brought it to him for his own black reasons, it should have been a simple matter to prostrate oneself, express bottomless contrition, and reverse the order of exile, explaining it away as a matter of zeal in the service of the emperor. He couldn’t even remember what had been irritating him the day he decreed Lingzhou Isle for a nonentity. He could barely remember doing it.
How could such a man matter in the unfolding of the world? He didn’t. That was the point! Even with an apparently well-crafted letter from his unnatural daughter—her life a smear on the proper conduct of a woman—Wenzong would have done no more than raise an imperial eyebrow from under his hat and suggest the exile might be made less onerous.
If it hadn’t been for the army, the disastrous retreat through the desert from Erighaya’s walls, the lack of siege engines, the death of seventy thousand …
The eating of officers, drinking their blood, as they retreated south.
And even with that, if it hadn’t been for some nameless, unknown, impossible-even-to-imagine gardener (the outrageousness threatened to choke Kai Zhen) weeping near the emperor …
How had he even dared? It was unjust beyond words! Kai Zhen had been dazzlingly close, brilliantly so, to having all he needed, wanted, had ever aspired to have.
Almost all his wife needed, as well. Though she would always want more. It was embedded in her being, that wanting. They never said it aloud, but he knew she thought about an empress’s headdress.
The thought made him look quickly over his shoulder. By now he had a sort of intuition when she might be in a room, though her movements were utterly quiet, no brushing of a robe along the floor, no slap of slippers, sound of breathing, of keys or fan at her waist.
His wife was a silent creature when she moved, and terrifying.
They were alone in the chamber. It was richly decorated. Bronzes from the Fifth, porcelain, south sea coral, sandalwood chairs, wall panels with ivory inlays, a rosewood writing desk, poems in his own (exceptional) calligraphy hanging on the walls.
Kai Zhen had good taste, a discerning eye. He was also a very wealthy man, his fortune growing swiftly after he and Wu Tong conceived of the Flowers and Rocks. The two of them had met through that idea and risen together with it, as if from a deep lake, to transcendent heights.
Kai Zhen had come to Hanjin and the court the way one of his magnificent rocks or trees had come.
He was closer to the emperor now than the prime minister, had been for two years, he’d judged. He did that particular assessment often. It had only required patience, as the old man’s eyes failed him a little more, and then again more, and his weariness under the weight of office grew …
It had all been coming to him.
He looked across the room at his wife. His heart quailed before the agate-black fury he read in Yu-lan’s eyes. Her capacity for rage was vast. Her eyes were enormous, it seemed to him. They looked as if they could swallow the room—and him—draw all down into black oblivion there.
His concubines could wail and moan. They were still doing so in the women’s quarters, shrill as gibbons. His coiled, slim wife would gather venom like a snake, in deathly anger, then strike.
She had always frightened him. From the morning they’d first met and were formally engaged. Then their wedding night, which he would remember until he died; the things she had done, shockingly, the things she’d said. From that night to this day, Yu-lan had aroused in him the most intense desire he had ever known, even as he feared her. Perhaps because he feared.
A sad thing for a man, if his passion was greater, even now, for a wife of many years than for ripe and youthful concubines or courtesans, urgently anxious to please in whatever ways imagination could devise.
She drew a breath, his wife. He watched her. She wore dark-red liao silk, belted in linked gold, straight fitted in the fashion for well-bred women, high at the throat. She wore golden slippers on her feet. She held herself very still.
Snakes did that, Kai Zhen thought, staring at her. It was said that some northern snakes made a rattling sound like gamblers’ dice before they struck.
“Why is the prime minister not dead?” she asked.
Her voice made him think of winter sometimes. Ice, wind, bones in snow.
He saw, belatedly, that her hands were trembling. Unlike her, a measure of how far lost to rage she was. Not fear. She would not fear, his wife. She would hate, and endlessly aspire, be filled with fury she could not (it seemed) entirely control, but she would not be fearful.
He would be. He was now, remembering events in the garden this morning. Such a little time ago, yet they seemed to lie on the far side of a wide river with no ferry to carry him back across. He was seeing what lay before him on this shore, knowing it as ruin.
There had been a stele raised in his honour in the city where he’d been born. He pictured it toppled, smashed, overgrown by weeds, the inscribed words of commendation lost to time and the world’s memory.
He looked at his wife, heard his women crying with undiminished fervour across the courtyard.
He said, “You want me to have killed him in the Genyue? Beside the emperor, with guards standing by?” He