Under Heaven

Tai shook his head. “I am listening to you. I retained you to protect me. Why hire a guard dog and bark yourself?”

Not calculated to appease her, but he didn’t exactly feel like doing that. It did occur to him to mildly regret hiring her. The soldiers from the fort would surely have been enough protection. But he hadn’t known that he’d be given a military escort.

There was more … person in her than he’d expected. She’d been chosen by Spring Rain, he needed to think about that. He had many things to think about, it seemed.

He said, “You never did tell me that night if Rain knows anything, or told you, about why someone sent a Kanlin to kill me.”

A weak question … he’d have been informed by now, if she knew. He expected a remark to that effect, didn’t get one. “A false Kanlin,” she reminded him, reflexively. Then added, “If the Lady Lin Chang knew, I do not. I don’t believe she did know. Your friend was bringing you tidings, and it seemed you weren’t to know them.”

“No.” Tai shook his head. “It is more than that. Or they’d have killed Yan before he reached me. It would have been easy to have him die along the way. They were alone.”

She looked at him. “I never thought of that.”

“They didn’t want me alive to act on whatever he was coming to tell me, if I found it out some other way.”

She was still staring. Tai grinned suddenly. “What? You are astonished I can think of something you didn’t?”

She shook her head, looked away. Watching her, Tai felt his mood darken. The joking felt shallow. He said, not sure why he was confiding, “He was a dear friend. Never harmed a soul in life that I know of. I am going to want to know why he died, and do something about it.”

She turned again to look at him. “You may not be able to do anything, depending on what you discover.”

Tai cleared his throat. “We had better choose a village soon, if you want to negotiate for shelter.”

Her turn to smile, as if to herself. “Look ahead.”

Tai did so. “Oh,” he said.

The land rose slightly before them. He saw that the road widened, three lanes now, the middle one reserved for imperial riders. In the distance, caught by the setting sun, he could just make out the walls of a fair- sized city, with banners flying.

Chenyao. They had arrived. And closer to them, beside the road, obviously waiting, Tai noticed a small group of men. They had horses but had dismounted, respectfully. One of them, formally dressed, lifted a hand in salute.

“You are being met outside the walls,” Wei Song murmured. “It is an honour. Iron Gate sent word of your coming, with the courier.”

“The horses,” Tai said.

“Well, of course,” Song replied. “You will probably have to meet with the military governor and the prefect, both, before you can go find a woman. So very sorry.”

He couldn’t think of a rejoinder.

He lifted a hand in a return salute to those waiting. They immediately bowed, all of them, as if pulled downwards by his gesture, like puppets in a street theatre.

Tai drew a breath and let it out. It was beginning.

CHAPTER VII

It might have been thought that the most beautiful and talented of the singing girls, the courtesans who could break a man’s heart or bring him to a climax in ways he had never imagined, would all be in Xinan, with its world-dazzling wealth and the palace by the northern walls.

That would have been a fair assumption, but not an accurate one. Market and canal-side towns could emerge as celebrated or notorious for a variety of reasons, and the grace and skill of their women was one. The south had its own traditions in the matter of lovemaking, as far back as the Fourth Dynasty, some of these sufficiently subversive to be discussed only in whispers or after too much wine.

The northeast was a wasteland in this regard, of course: soldiers and camp followers in the wind-scoured fortresses by the Long Wall, repressive cities (also wind-scoured) dominated by an ascetic aristocracy that saw the last three imperial dynasties as new arrivals, barely worth acknowledging.

Chenyao, however, was at the other end of the empire, and the Silk Road passed through it, becoming the imperial highway, bringing traders and trade goods into the market square and pleasure district of a prosperous, lively city.

Lying so far west, Chenyao also had a reputation for Sardian girls—the fair-haired, blue- or green-eyed goddesses from beyond the deserts, so very appealing in Ninth Dynasty Kitai.

One such woman was called Spring Rain, who was in Xinan, and whose name now appeared to be Lin Chang, and who belonged as a personal concubine to the new first minister of the empire.

There were a number of reasons, Tai decided, that it was past time for him to become extremely drunk.

One was a friend’s death. He kept reclaiming images of Yan: laughing until he spluttered and choked in a wine-cup game in the North District, or studying on a bench next to Tai, in ferocious concentration, chanting under his breath to memorize a passage, or the two of them climbing a tower outside the walls during the Festival of Chrysanthemums, which was about friendship. And now this friend was lying in a lakeside grave beside the assassin who had killed him. The second reason for needing wine (good wine, one might hope) was that someone had tried to kill him and he didn’t know who, or why.

The third was Rain.

She had foreseen her departure from the North District more than two years ago, had warned Tai about it. He hadn’t believed it could happen—or had denied it to himself. Not the same thing.

Against his will, he found himself remembering a night in the Pavilion of Moonlight, Rain and three other girls entertaining the students, laughter and music in the largest room.

A silence had fallen. Tai’s back had been to the doors.

He’d seen Rain glance over, and then—without the slightest hesitation—stand up and, carrying her pipa, walk away from them towards the man Tai saw in the doorway as he turned to watch her go.

Wen Zhou had not been first minister then. But he was wealthy, well-born … and a favourite cousin of the emperor’s favoured concubine, which mattered most of all. He was a big man, handsome and knowing it, elegantly dressed.

He could have had any woman in Xinan sent to him. He’d wanted Rain. It amused him to come to her in the city, and there was no question of scholars claiming any kind of priority once such a man arrived—the idea was laughable.

Tai remembered that night, though it wasn’t the only time. Zhou’s gaze had flicked over the party of students before turning to Rain, accepting her graceful homage. She’d led him out, towards a private room.

Tai tried to sort out why that memory was the one that had returned, and decided it was because Zhou’s gaze had actually held his a moment, a too-long moment, before looking away.

There was a poem by Chan Du about powerful men and women of the court enjoying a feast in Long Lake Park, suggesting that with certain men it was better if they never noticed you.

He’d been noticed that night.

He didn’t want a yellow-haired girl in Chenyao.

He did need a woman, after so much time alone. And, he decided, assorted ghosts and malign spirits could