It was suddenly difficult to speak.
“I didn’t think of it that way.”
“I know you didn’t,” said Liu. “If you can, have me buried beside father in the orchard.” Another thin smile as he glanced back. “You are skilled at quieting ghosts, are you not?”
And with that, he went down the steps to the sunlit yard, drawing a jewelled court blade from the sleeve of his robe.
Tai saw him approach Jian and bow to her. The
Tai saw his brother say something to Jian, too softly for anyone to hear. But he saw her smile, as if surprised, and pleased, by what she heard. She murmured something to Liu, and he bowed again.
He spoke one more time, and after a motionless instant she nodded her head. She made a dancer’s spinning movement, a last one, the sort that ends a performance and releases the audience’s approval and applause.
She ended it with her back to Liu, to the posting station. She faced south (her people had come from the south), towards the cypress trees lining the road and the summer fields beyond them, bright in morning light, and Tai’s brother placed his left hand around her waist, to steady the both of them, and he thrust his knife cleanly into her, between ribs, into the heart, from behind.
Liu held her, gently, carefully, as she died. And then he held her a little longer, and then he laid her down on her back in the dust of that yard, because there was nothing else he could do.
He knelt beside her a moment, arranging her clothing. One of her hairpins had come loose. Tai watched his brother fix it in place again. Then Liu set down his jewelled blade and stood up and he moved a distance away from her, towards the archers of the Second Army. He stopped.
“Do it,” he said. Making it his command. And was standing very straight as they sent half a dozen arrows into him.
Tai had no way of knowing if his brother’s eyes were open or closed before he died. He did become aware, after a time, that Sima Zian was beside him, saying nothing, but present.
He looked out into the yard. At Liu, face down, and at Jian on her back, the blue robe spread about her, and it seemed to him that sunlight was wrong for what the moment was, what it would always be now, even as it receded. This morning brightness, the birds rising and darting, their singing.
He said that, to the poet. “Should there be birdsong?”
Zian said, “No, and yes. We do what we do, and the world continues. Somewhere, a child is being born and the parents are tasting a joy they never imagined.”
“I know that,” said Tai. “But
“No,” said Sima Zian, after a moment. “Not here.”
“My lords?” It was Song. Tai turned to her. He had never seen her looking as she did now. “My lords, we request your permission,” she said. “We wish to kill two of them later. The commander and the first archer, the small one. Only two. But it must be done.” She wiped at her cheeks.
“You have mine,” said Zian, eyes gazing out upon the courtyard.
“You have mine,” said Tai.
A different poet, younger, would write that. Part of a very long verse, one that would be remembered, among all the (deservedly) forgotten ones about that morning at Ma-wai.
ON THE POSTING STATION PORCH, shaded from sunlight, two men came out a little later to stand before the soldiers.
The older one, his hands trembling, holding himself not nearly as upright as before, formally presented the younger one, his son, with the phoenix ring, in public this time, making him emperor of Kitai.
The soldiers, all of them, the posting inn servants, the Kanlins on the porch, Shen Tai, the older of the surviving sons of Shen Gao, and the poet Sima Zian, all knelt, faces to inn yard dust or wooden porch, and so became the first to pay homage to the Glorious and Exalted Emperor Shinzu of the Ninth Dynasty of Kitai, in the first year of the An Li Rebellion, just before Xinan fell.
THE NEW EMPEROR’S COMMANDS were exact, measured, appropriate. There were three dead people here. The Kanlins were asked to attend to them, with assistance from their sanctuary.
Jian would be carried to the imperial family tombs, close by. The oldest son of General Shen Gao was, after a consultation with his brother, also given to the Kanlins, with the request that his body be preserved and taken to his family’s estate for burial. Word would go ahead to the family.
The body of the former first minister, Wen Zhou, was to be burned by the Kanlins on a pyre at their sanctuary, duly shrouded and with rites, but not with courtly honours. The ashes would be scattered, not preserved. The absence of ceremony was obviously—and cleverly—designed to allay the fears of the soldiers who had killed him.
The father-emperor, Taizu, who had awakened in the middle of this night as ruler of Kitai, frail-seeming, grieving and bewildered in the bright day, was to be escorted to safety in the far southwest, beyond the Great River.
In due course, it was hoped, he would recover his strength and purpose, and be brought back, with dignity, to his son’s renewed court in Xinan.
The Emperor Shinzu himself would go north. He would make Shuquian, in the loop of the Golden River, his base. It had served that purpose before in Kitai. Xinan could not be held, but it could be retaken.
There was no hint of concession to the rebels in the new emperor, no flicker of doubt or surrender. An error had been made by a minister. The man (and his adviser) were dead, as required, here this morning.
The woman lying in the dust might be considered a source of regret, now and afterwards, but no one judging the matter with clarity of mind could deny that her family was at the root of this disaster. Just as women in Kitai could reap the benefit of the deeds of the men they knew, they could not be immune when those men fell.
One small incident, noted by only a handful of people in that inn yard, occurred just before Taizu re-entered his coach to be escorted from Ma-wai. An alchemist, a lean cleric of the Sacred Path, emerged cautiously from the second coach, where he had evidently remained through the violent events of the morning. He approached Taizu, bearing what was—evidently—the morning’s elixir, designed to help pursue immortality.
The emperor, the former emperor, waved this man away.
Shortly afterwards, Master Shen Tai, a person of some importance now, was summoned by the new emperor into the posting station. He knelt there and was presented with another ring, pale jade—the first gift offered by Shinzu as emperor of Kitai.
Shen Tai was instructed to leave with the retired emperor for the posting station on the imperial road to Chenyao. From there, as soon as his sixty Kanlin Warriors arrived from their sanctuary, he was to proceed swiftly to Hsien, on the border with Tagur, to claim his horses and bring them safely back to Shuquian. The emperor formally requested that the Sardians be made available to the empire. Shen Tai formally acceded to this, expressing great happiness at being able to be of use to Kitai.
XINAN WAS ABOUT TO BE one of the most terrible places on earth. Tai had realized it at some point on the night ride to Ma-wai, and then his brother Liu had said the same thing to him, and his brother Liu was someone who was—who had been—brilliantly clever about courts and armies and the world.
And if this was so, if a red violence was approaching from the east, dust rising even now beneath an
