Under Heaven

spinning east with the current or being pulled upstream along the gorges. Birds wheeled, crying, above the water and the crags. Tigers lived among the trees and killed men in the dark, should they be foolish enough to be abroad at night.

It was easy to see a tiger in the wide eyes holding his, Tai thought. For all the wit and worldliness of the poet, there was also something feral, a link to the wilderness that lay outside the walled and guarded cities. Sima Zian had been a bandit, on rivers and roads, never entirely a part of court or courtesan district.

You could see it.

The poet smiled again, compassion in his face now. But tigers weren’t like that, Tai thought. They never looked kind. You are going to have to do better with your images, he told himself. There was too much complexity here for a jungle cat.

The other man said, gently, “You came here for a woman, I must imagine. It has to have been a long time, and that is not good for any man, let alone one with hard decisions to make. Go upstairs, Shen Tai. I will do the same. Make use of tonight, because you can. Let us meet here a little later. We will both be the better for it, then we can decide what we will do with what I have to tell you.”

What we will do.

Tai cleared his throat. “I … whatever this is, it is surely not your trouble, or task.”

The smile deepened. “Call it wisdom in the cup, if you like, which is not always wisdom, as we know. But I have lived my days making decisions this way and I am too old to change. Poetry, friendship, wine. The essence of a man’s life. And then there is …”

The poet rose, smoothly enough, but he swayed a little when upright.

He looked down at Tai. Spread his feet a little. Rumpled, food-stained, greying hair inadequately tied. The wide eyes afire, though. He said, “You will know the passage: There is another world / That is not the world of men.”

He looked around unsteadily for the girl they’d sent to carry the message. She was beside him already. She bent, took his sword, handed it to him. She said, with a slow smile of her own, “Though it is your other sword I want now, my lord, in all truth.”

Sima Zian laughed aloud, and went with her down the two steps and then from the room through the nearest of the curtained doorways.

Tai sat a moment longer, then stood, uncertainly, claiming his own sheathed sword as he rose.

A scent was beside him in that same moment, musk, ambergris. A slender hand at his waist again. He looked at her. Crimson silk.

Her hair was gathered with pins of ivory and jade, some of it artfully allowed to fall.

“I have been patient,” she murmured. “Not without distress.”

He gazed at her. She was as beautiful to him just then as moonlight on a high meadow, as the Weaver Maid herself, as everything he remembered about the grace and mystery of women, and she did not have golden hair.

“I may not be as patient,” he said, hearing the change in his voice. Her expression altered, a darker note in the dark eyes. “That will please me, too,” she said. His pulse responded. “Please honour my need and come upstairs, my lord.”

Pipa music, quiet singing, flutes. Laughter and talk in a carefully lit room fading behind him, behind them, as she led him up the stairs to a room with a very wide bed and lamps already burning, lit by servants, flickering light waiting for them (for whoever it was who came), incense on a brazier, a window open to catch the late-spring breeze. There was a pipa on a table.

“Shall I play for you, my lord?”

“After,” Tai said.

And took her in his arms with hunger and need, with fear beneath those, and an urgency that came from all of these and found its centre in the rich red of her mouth tasting his and the slipping down of silk as she let it fall and stood before him, jewelled at ears and throat, wrists and fingers and ankles, the lamplight playing with and over the beauty of her body.

He had a sense, even as she began to disrobe him and then drew him to her upon the bed, that after this, after he went back downstairs, his life would change yet again, as much as it had when the horses were given to him. And therein lay his fear.

She was skilled and clever, unhurried, intricately versed in what it was that women were to do here, and to know about men and their needs (hidden or otherwise), in a house this well appointed. She made him laugh, more than once, and catch his breath in quick surprise, and draw breath sharply (he saw her smile then), and cry aloud, both times she took him to, and through, the long-deferred crescendo of desire.

She washed him after, using water from a basin on the table. She murmured the words of a very old folk verse as she did, and her movements were languid, replete, slow as aftermath should be. And then she did play for him, quietly, upon the pipa left in the room, bringing him back with all of these, movement by movement, mouth, fingers, fingernails, with whispers in his ear of shocking things and subtle things and, finally, with music—back from Kuala Nor to the world.

At length, Tai made himself get up. He clothed himself again as she watched, still naked on the bed, posed artfully to let him see her to best effect in the muted light, breasts, belly, the dark, inviting place between her thighs. She would attend to herself, come downstairs after him, that was the way it was done properly.

He finished dressing, found his sword, bowed to her, which was something Chou Yan had initiated among their circle: a tribute to the woman, even when one didn’t know her name and might never see her again, if she had given of herself beyond expectation and reached to needs held deep within. He saw that she was surprised.

He went out of the room and down the stairs towards the next change of his life.

The poet was on the platform, same place, likely the same cup in his hand. The two girls were there again. He wondered idly if they’d both been with him upstairs. Probably, he thought.

The room was quiet now. It was late, and though the pleasure districts never really stopped in any city, the mood would change as night deepened. The best houses let some of the lanterns go out in their reception rooms, the ambience grow gentler, the music softer and sometimes even melancholy, for men could take a kind of pleasure in sadness, remembrance of loves long ago or the days of their youth. Someone was singing “The Windmill Above My Village,” which was only played late and made some listeners cry.

He placed his sword where it had been before, and sat opposite the poet again. The taller of the two girls came forward with a cup for him, poured wine, withdrew. Tai drank. He looked at the other man, waiting.

“It is about your sister,” said Sima Zian.

PART TWO

CHAPTER IX

Li-Mei has her own yurt, assembled every evening for her when their travels finish for the day, taken down in the morning when they rise to go on.

The sun is west now, near the end of their fourth day outside of Kitai. She has never been this far. She has never wanted to be this far. There are two ladies attendant on her from the court. She doesn’t know them, doesn’t