The expression on Zhou’s face was genuinely interesting. Defeat was there, unmistakably, but behind it Tai thought he saw an amused, aristocratic flicker of irony: acknowledgement of a game well played, as if this had been a match on a polo field, and the ball had just been elegantly struck into his goal.
He agreed, of course.
THERE WAS NO WAY, Sima Zian said, over Salmon River wine that evening, that he could have failed to agree.
The moon, past full, was overhead. They were on a curved stone bench under lanterns in the garden of Tai’s home. The garden was nowhere near the size or intricacy of Wen Zhou’s, but it had a small pond, a bamboo grove, winding paths, an orchard. The scent of flowers was around them.
“The prince,” said Tai. “He’s changed.”
Zian thought about it. “He is letting people see now what he has always been.”
“He was hiding it?”
Zian nodded.
“Why now?”
“Perhaps it is time.”
Tai’s turn to think about it. “Is he in danger because he’s doing this?”
“Shinzu?”
“Yes.”
The poet drank his wine. A servant filled his cup, and withdrew. “Perhaps. But no more than any of us. There are a quarter of a million soldiers moving on Yenling.”
He looked at Tai, and then away, and murmured:
He’d written that himself, during the last Taguran war. Tai’s father’s war.
Tai was silent a while, then said, “The first minister seems to think it will be over quickly. That the northeast will not accept Roshan’s ambitions, will rise up behind him, and the Sixth Army will cut his supply lines.”
Sima Zian’s enormous tiger-eyes met Tai’s. “We must hope,” he murmured, “that the first minister is correct.”
TAI DREAMED THAT NIGHT that he was back in the north. By that cabin beyond the steppe, watching men burned and devoured beside a jewel-bright blue lake. It wasn’t a dream that came often any more, but the memory was never entirely absent, either.
Smoke was drifting, and through it leering faces surged, bare-chested Bogu looming close, waving severed limbs of human beings in his face, offering them as if they were gifts, then drifting away. Blood dripped from arms and from hacked-off slices of thigh. The cabin burned with a roaring sound. Tai felt terror, and an overwhelming grief. He had a sense that he was crying aloud, in the dream, and in Xinan.
He became aware, as if in fog and mist, half asleep, of a voice soothing him. He was trying to see. He looked for yellow hair. A hand brushed his forehead, or so it seemed to him. Someone beside his curtained, canopied bed in the dead black of night. He felt himself struggling to wake, then surrendered and slipped back into sleep—an easier sleep, without the horrifying images of memory.
In the morning, waking at sunrise, he said nothing about his night, and no one else did, either.
NINE DAYS AFTER THIS, the Second Son of General Shen Gao was summoned to the Ta-Ming Palace and received in the Hall of Brilliance by the Emperor Taizu in the presence of the most illustrious members of his court, including the Precious Consort.
Tai, clad by his steward in white for the occasion, approached the Phoenix Throne, making the triple obeisance three times, as instructed. He stopped the stipulated distance from the imperial presence, his eyes cast down, also as required.
He was then presented, by an admiring and grateful empire, with an estate in the Mingzhen Hills, the aristocracy’s hunting and riding playground north of Xinan. He received another estate and considerable land in the south, near the Great River, once the property of a minister convicted of stealing from the Treasury.
The corrupt minister had been executed, his property confiscated. It now went to the brave man who had lived among the ghosts of Kuala Nor, laying them to rest.
He was further presented with a staggeringly large sum of money, ceremonial artifacts, jade, coral, pearls, ivory, and precious gems, and two ceremonial swords that had belonged to an emperor of the Fifth Dynasty.
Not speaking (speech was forbidden), Tai rose at a tall eunuch’s discreet hand signal and bowed again, nine times, as he backed slowly away from the throne.
Outside, light-headed, but breathing in a sunlit courtyard, he fully expected that orders would now come for him to set out immediately to claim his horses. It did not happen that way. Events intervened.
Word came that same afternoon that Yenling, second city of the empire, east of them on the far side of Teng Pass, had surrendered to Roshan. He had declared it the capital of his Tenth Dynasty.
His soldiers had, it was reported, left the general population substantially unharmed, but they were butchering every civil servant and soldier who had not managed to flee when the rebels appeared before the walls.
More ghosts, Tai thought. More to come.
CHAPTER XXII
It is not one of the things she’s ever thought about, but Li-Mei has never been on a mountain. She never even climbed the hills east of their home. Women didn’t do that. She remembers dreaming about seeing the sea. A different sort of thought.
In her first days here, with no tasks, no need to rise in darkness and ride anywhere, clutching the unimaginable luxury of time to herself, she walks the broad, flat top of the mountain and the green terraces below. There isn’t even anyone escorting her. Not here, there is no need.
Stone Drum, one of the Five Holy Mountains, stands out vividly because of where it is, above mostly level land in all directions. The top looks as if some god had taken a sword and sliced, creating the level summit. She can see a long way, whichever direction she looks. Sometimes she imagines she can even see the Wall, but she knows that is an illusion.
She has no restrictions, can wander anywhere. She wears the grey robes of a Kanlin acolyte, though she isn’t one. She watches them training in combat, or with the bow, or practising movements that seem nearer to dance than fighting. She watches men and women run up walls, spring back across open space, and down a different wall, and then do it again.
She hears the bells that summon the Kanlins to prayer and she drifts that way, among grey and black figures on a green mountain.
She loves the sound of bells in this high place. She stands at the back of a temple, watching the rites, tall candles burning, hearing the chants rise and fall, feeling more peace than she can remember.
