for clothes. He’d been given a goat for milk, and then a second one from the other side, and an eccentric-looking but very warm Taguran hat with flaps for the ears and a tie for knotting under his chin, the first autumn. The Iron Gate soldiers had built a small shed for his small horse.
He’d tried to stop this, but hadn’t come close to persuading anyone, and eventually he’d understood: it wasn’t about kindness to the madman, or even entirely about besting each other. The less time he spent on food, firewood, maintaining the cabin, the more he could devote to his task, which no one had ever done before, and which seemed—once they’d accepted why he was here—to matter to the Tagurans as much as to his own people.
You could find irony in this, Tai often thought. They might goad and kill each other, even now, if they chanced to arrive at the same time, and only a genuine fool would think the battles in the west were over for good, but the two empires would honour his laying the dead to rest—until there were newer ones.
In bed on a mild night he listened to the wind and the ghosts, awakened not by either of them (not any more) but by the brilliant white of the moon shining. He couldn’t see the star of the Weaver Maid now, exiled from her mortal lover on the far side of the Sky River. It had been bright enough to show clearly in the window before, even with a full moon. He remembered a poem he’d liked when he was younger, built around an image of the moon carrying messages between the lovers across the River.
If he considered it now it seemed contrived, a showy conceit. Many celebrated verses from early in this Ninth Dynasty were like that if you looked closely at their elaborate verbal brocades. There was some sadness in how that could happen, Tai thought: falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had? But if you didn’t change at least a little, where were the passages of a life? Didn’t learning, changing, sometimes mean letting go of what had once been seen as true?
It was very bright in the room. Almost enough to pull him from bed to window to look out on the tall grass, at what silver did to green, but he was tired. He was always tired at the end of a day, and he never went out from the cabin at night. He didn’t fear the ghosts any more—they saw him as an emissary by now, he’d decided, not an intruder from the living—but he left them the world after the sun went down.
In winter he had to swing the rebuilt shutters closed, block chinks in the walls as best he could with cloth and sheepskin against the winds and snow. The cabin would become smoky, lit by the fire and candles, or one of his two lamps if he was struggling to write poetry. He warmed wine on a brazier (this, also, from the Tagurans).
When spring came he opened the shutters, let in the sun, or starlight and the moon, and then the sound of birds at dawn.
On first awakening tonight he had been disoriented, confused, tangled in a last dream. He’d thought it was still winter, that the brilliant silver he saw was ice or frost gleaming. He had smiled after a moment, returning to awareness, wry and amused. He had a friend in Xinan who would have cherished this moment. It wasn’t often that you lived the imagery of well-known lines.
Before my bed the light is so bright
it looks like a layer of frost.
Lifting my head I gaze at the moon,
lying back down I think of home.
But maybe he was wrong. Maybe if a poem was true enough then sooner or later some of those who read it would live the image just as he was living it now. Or maybe some readers had the image before they even came to the poem and found it waiting for them there, an affirmation? The poet offering words for thoughts they’d held already.
And sometimes poetry gave you new, dangerous ideas. Sometimes men were exiled, or killed, for what they wrote. You could mask a dangerous comment by setting a poem in the First or Third Dynasty, hundreds of years ago. Sometimes that convention worked, but not always. The senior mandarins of the civil service were not fools.
Lying back down I think of home. Home was the property near the Wai, where his father was buried in their orchard with both his parents and the three children who had not survived to adulthood. Where Tai’s mother and Shen Gao’s concubine, the woman they called Second Mother, still lived, where his two brothers were also nearing the end of mourning—the older one would be returning to the capital soon.
He wasn’t sure where his sister was. Women had only ninety days of mourning. Li-Mei was probably back with the empress, wherever she was. The empress might not be at court. Her time in the Ta-Ming had been rumoured to be ending, even two years ago. Someone else was in the palace now with Emperor Taizu. Someone shining like a gem.
There were many who disapproved. There was no one, as far as Tai knew, who had said as much, openly, before Tai had left to go home and then come here.
He found his thoughts drifting back to Xinan, from memories of the family compound by the stream, where the paulownia leaves fell along the path from the front gate all at once, in one autumn night each year. Where peaches and plums and apricots grew in the orchard (flowers red in spring), and you could smell the charcoal burning at the forest’s edge, see smoke from village hearths beyond the chestnut and mulberry trees.
No, now he was remembering the capital instead: all glitter and colour and noise, where violent life, in all its world-dust and worldfury, was happening, unfolding, would be erupting, even now, in the middle of night, assaulting the senses moment by moment. Two million people. The centre of the world, under heaven.
It wouldn’t be dark there. Not in Xinan. The lights of men could almost hide moonlight. There would be torches and lanterns, fixed, or carried in bamboo frames, or suspended from the litters borne through the streets, carrying the high-born and the powerful. There’d be red candles in upper windows, and lamps hanging from flowerdecked balconies in the North District. White lights in the palace and wide, shallow oil lamps on pillars twice the height of a man in courtyards there, burning all night long.
There would be music and glory, heartbreak and heart’s ease, and knives or swords drawn sometimes in the lanes and alleys. And come morning, power and passion and death all over again, jostling each other in the two great, deafening markets, in wine shops and study halls, twisted streets (shaped for furtive love, or murder) and stunningly wide ones. In bedrooms and courtyards, elaborate private gardens and flower-filled public parks where willows drooped over streams and the deep-dredged artificial lakes.
He remembered Long Lake Park, south of the rammed-earth city walls, remembered with whom he’d been there last, in peach-blossom time, before his father died, on one of the three days each month she was allowed out of the North District. Eighth, eighteenth, twenty-eighth. She was a long way off.
Wild geese were the emblems of separation.
He thought of the Ta-Ming, the whole palace complex north of the city walls, of the Son of Heaven, no longer young, and of those with him and around him there: eunuchs, and nine ranks of mandarins, Tai’s older brother one of them, princes and alchemists and army leaders, and the one almost surely lying with him tonight under this moon, who was young, and almost unbearably beautiful, and had changed the empire.
Tai had aspired to be one of those civil servants with access to palace and court, swimming “within the current,” as the phrase went. He had studied a full year in the capital (between encounters with courtesans and wine-cup friends), had been on the brink of writing the three-day exams for the imperial service, the test that determined your future.
Then his father had died by their quiet stream, and two and a half years of official mourning came, and went from you like a rainwind down a river.
A man was lashed—twenty with the heavy rod—for failing to perform the withdrawal and rituals due to parents when they died.
You could say (some would say) he had failed in the rites by being here in the mountains and not at home, but he’d spoken with the sub-prefect before riding this long way west, and had received permission. He was also—overwhelmingly—still withdrawn from society, from anything that could be called ambition or worldliness.