He didn’t say it. He was too shaken to speak. Very near him, blood slowly spreading on the wooden porch, lay Wen Zhou.
“Oh, please, no,” said Sima Zian, barely a breath. “Not this.”
Tai remembered that, too. That it was the poet who realized first what was happening.
He turned quickly to look at the other man, then wheeled back to the courtyard.
And with a sorrow that never left him, that lay in memory, in his days forever after, as powerful, in its way, as the terrible images of the Bogu by the northern lake, Tai saw the soldiers step forward, together, well trained, and he heard the one who had just spoken speak again, and this man—whose face Tai never properly saw, among seventy or so of them—said, very clearly, “He was prime minister for only one reason. All Kitai knows it! We will be slain in vengeance—by her. She destroyed the emperor’s will with her dark power and has brought us all to this, through her cousin. She must come out to us, or this cannot end.”
Dancer to the music. Bright as morning light. Lovely as green leaves after rain, or green jade, or the Weaver Maid’s star in the sky when the sun goes down.
CHAPTER XXV
“This will not happen!” said Tai.
He said it as forcefully as he could, feeling a frantic need to push back against where the morning had now gone.
A trickle of perspiration slid down his side. Fear was in him, a twisting thing. He said, “She was working to control her cousin. Wen Zhou had even tried to kill me, at Kuala Nor. She was gathering information on that. Against him!”
He felt ashamed, telling soldiers this, but the moment was surely beyond shame, or privacy.
Hidden among the others, the archer (he would remember the voice) shouted, “This family has destroyed Kitai, driven us to civil war! As long as she lives they will poison us!”
That was clever, a part of Tai was thinking. A moment ago it had been about their own safety, those who had killed Wen Zhou—now it was something else.
“Bring her out,” said the
Tai felt like cursing him. He held back. This was not a time to let anger overwhelm. He said, as calmly as he could, “I am not going to allow another death. Commander, control your men.”
The man shook his head. “I will. But after the Wen family poison is purged from among us. Our companions were sent out from Teng Pass. Will you measure two against so many? You have been a soldier. You know how many men are dead there. Does not the Ta-Ming invoke execution when someone in power has erred so greatly?”
“She is only a woman. A dancer.” He was dissembling now, but desperate.
“And women have never shaped power in Kitai?”
Tai opened his mouth and closed it. He stared at the man below.
A twist of the officer’s mouth. “I sat the examinations twice,” he said. “Studied eight years before accepting that I would never pass them. I know some things about the court, my lord.”
Tai would wonder about this later, too. If the world as it went forward from that day might have been otherwise had another leader and his fifty men been shifted to the northern route from the congested highway to Xinan.
There are always branches along paths.
“I will not permit this,” Tai said again, as coldly as he could.
The commander gazed up at him. He didn’t look triumphant or vengeful, Tai thought. The man said, almost regretfully, “There are … eight of you? We have better than seventy men. Why would you wish to kill your Kanlins, or yourself? Do you not have tasks in the war upon us now?”
Tai shook his head, aware again of anger. He fought it. The man was telling only truth. Tai could kill a great many people with the wrong thing said or done here. Even so: “I have no task greater than stopping this. If you wish to move into that posting station, you will have to kill me and my guards, and deprive Kitai of two hundred and fifty Sardian horses.”
He was willing to play that card, too.
There was a short silence.
“If we must,” said the
“Tai,” said Sima Zian softly, at his elbow, “they are not going to stop for you.”
“Nor I for them,” said Tai. “There comes a point when life is not worth enduring if one steps back.”
“I agree, Master Shen.”
A woman’s voice, from the open doorway to the posting station.
She had come out.
Tai turned and he looked at her. Their eyes met. He knelt, near the blood of her cousin where it was spreading on the porch. And, with a shiver, he saw that not only did his Kanlins also kneel, and the poet, but every soldier in the inn yard did the same.
The moment passed. The soldiers stood up. And Tai saw that the archers still held their bows, arrows to strings. It was only then that he accepted that this was going to happen and he could not stop it.
In part, because he saw in her eyes that she willed it to be so.
“Poet,” she said, looking at Zian with the mocking smile Tai remembered, “I still grieve that you chose to be ironic with your last verse about me.”
“Not more than I do, illustrious lady,” said Sima Zian, and Tai saw that he had not risen from his knees, and there were tears on his face. “You brought a shining to our time.”
Her smile deepened. She looked pleased, and young.
Tai stood up. He said, “Will the emperor not come? He can stop this, surely.”
She looked at him for what seemed a long time. Those in the courtyard were waiting, motionless. The posting station of Ma-wai felt to Tai as if it were the centre of the empire, of the world. All else, everyone else, suspended around it, unknowing.
“This is my choice,” she said. “I told him he must not.” She hesitated, holding Tai’s gaze. “He is no longer emperor, in any case. He gave the ring to Shinzu. It is … the right thing to do. There will be a hard war, and my beloved is no longer young.”
“You are,” said Tai. “It is too soon, my lady. Do not take this brightness away.”
“Others are taking it. Some will remember the brightness.” She gestured, a dancer. “Shen Tai, I remember sharing lychees with you on this road. I thank you for it. And for … standing here now.”
She wore blue, with small golden peonies (royalty of flowers) embroidered on the silk. Her hairpins were decorated with lapis lazuli and two of her rings were also of lapis, he saw. She wore no earrings that morning. Her slippers were silk, and golden, with pearls. He was near enough to tell that she had not left the Ta-Ming in the middle of the night without the scent she always wore.
Nor had she left without considering the Sardian horses at the border, and sending a messenger through the night city for the only man who could claim them for Kitai.
“You must let me go,” Jian said softly. “All of you.”
He let her go. He dreamed of it, and saw it in his mind’s eye waking, all the rest of his days.
He watched her turn, poised, unhurried, stepping lightly past her fallen cousin who had brought them all to this. She went down the steps alone—lifting her robe so it might not catch—and into the yard, and she went forward there, in morning sunlight now, to stand before the soldiers who had called her out to kill her. It was a dusty inn yard, filled with fighting men, not a place for silk.
They knelt. They knelt down again before her.
