Ning was always entrusted with Dynlal at the end of a day’s ride. He tried not to let his pride show, but it probably did. He talked to the horse at night, waking and walking out from whatever space he shared with the other soldiers, bringing apples to the stable. Sometimes he’d sleep there.
Master Shen didn’t look at him much as they rode, or at any of them. He spoke occasionally with his Kanlin guard, more often with the poet who had joined them (another mystery). His preoccupation was with speed. None of the soldiers knew why, not even the one who acted as if he knew everything.
If Wei Song and the poet knew the reason, they weren’t telling. The poet’s name was Master Sima. The others said he was famous. Immortal, one of them declared. Ning knew nothing about that but he didn’t think anyone was immortal. Maybe the emperor.
What he did know was that Shen Tai was in a great hurry to get to Xinan.
Ning wasn’t, at all, but his own wishes and desires were as those of the silkworm that spins in subdued light amid a hush, and lives only to do that.
ON THE FIFTH DAY out of Chenyao, just before crossing an arched river bridge Tai had always loved, they’d come to a road branching south, running alongside the stream.
He had known it was coming, of course.
He’d been careful not to look down that road as they reached the junction, or to speed up his horse in feigned indifference as they went across the bridge above bright water. There were plum blossoms in the stream, he saw.
It was difficult. He knew that southern road as surely as he knew his own face in a bronze mirror. Every turn, every fall and rise. Knew the towns and hamlets you would pass, the fields and mulberry groves and silk farms. The one genuinely good wine shop, and the places to find a woman and a bed between the imperial road they were on and the home where he’d grown up, where his mothers and youngest brother were, and his father’s grave.
Not him. Not Liu. Not Li-Mei.
The three of them were in the world, entangled in it. In the dust and noise, jade-and-gold. After two years by the lake he didn’t know how he felt about that, he’d been moving east so fast he hadn’t had time to think about it. That was, he decided, a component of the dust and noise: never enough time.
For Li-Mei it would be worse. Tai remembered the dust storms of the north. Real ones, stinging, blinding, dangerous, not a poet’s imagery. There was so much anger when he thought of her.
He’d felt a tug within, a feeling nearly physical, as they passed the cut-off south. Two years and more since he’d been there, seen the gates in the stone wall, the worn-smooth statues beside it (to frighten demons away), the always-swept path, the goldfish ponds, the porch, garden, stream.
His father’s grave-marker would be raised by now, he thought. The allotted time had passed. His mother would have done things properly, she always did. But Tai hadn’t seen the headstone, hadn’t bowed before it, didn’t know what was inscribed, what verse had been chosen, what memorial words, who had been selected to do the calligraphy.
He’d been at Kuala Nor. And was going elsewhere now, riding past the road that would bring him home. There could be peace there at night, he thought, after two years of hearing the dead.
He knew that this speed was almost meaningless. It crossed into some showy gesture, a display of love for his sister, driving riders and horses hard towards Xinan, and to no point.
She’d already been gone when Sima Zian left the capital. He’d said so. The decision had been made before poor Yan had set out for Tai’s family estate, thinking to find him there, to tell him what was being done to her. There might have been enough time if he’d been home.
Too late now. So why was he pushing on so fiercely, all of them awake before sunrise, riding till nightfall? The days were longer now, too, approaching the summer festival.
No one complained, not by word or glance. The soldiers would not (would never!), but neither did Wei Song, who had given considerable evidence of a willingness to advise him as to correct conduct. And Sima Zian, older and presumably suffering most from their pace, did not seem to be suffering at all. The poet never spoke to Tai about their speed, the folly of it, the absence of proportion.
Perhaps, with a lifetime of observing men, he’d understood from the beginning what Tai only gradually came to grasp: he wasn’t thundering down this road on his glorious horse in a wild attempt to rescue his sister.
He was going to his brother.
Accepting that truth, acknowledging it, didn’t bring anything like the calm that resolving uncertainty was supposed to do. For one thing, there was too much anger in him. It seemed to find new channels with every
He didn’t talk about any of this with the poet, and certainly not with Song, though he had a sense they both knew something of what was troubling him. He didn’t enjoy the feeling of being understood so well, even by a new, dazzling friend, and certainly not by a Kanlin woman who was only here to guard him, and only because he’d made an impulsive decision at Iron Gate. He could have dismissed her by now. He had thirty soldiers.
He didn’t dismiss her. He remembered, instead, how she’d fought at sunrise, in a garden in Chenyao.
IT WAS LATE in the day. Tai felt it in his legs and back. The sun was behind them, a mild summer’s day, slight breeze. The imperial road was thronged with traffic. It was too crowded, too noisy, for any attempt to appreciate the beauty of late afternoon, the twilight to come.
They were three days past the cut-off to his home now, which meant less than two days from Xinan. They might even be there tomorrow, right around curfew. He knew this part of the road very well, had gone back and forth often enough through the years.
Even with the crowds they were going quickly. They used the middle of the three lanes, reserved for soldiers and imperial riders. A pair of imperial couriers, galloping even faster than they were, shouted for them to make room and they did, jostling some farm carts and laden peasants right off the road towards the drainage ditch. The couriers carried full saddlebags, obviously packed with more than message scrolls.
“Lychees for Wen Jian!” one of them shouted over his shoulder as the poet threw out a query.
Sima Zian laughed, then stopped laughing.
Tai thought about helping the farmers right their carts and goods, but there was too much urgency in him. They would help each other, he thought, and looking back saw that it was so. It was the way of life for country folk: they’d probably have been fearful and confused if soldiers had stopped to aid them.
He looked over at the poet. Zian’s horse was beside his. Dynlal could have outrun all the others easily; a foolish thing to do. It might not be as foolish in a day or so. Tai had been thinking about that, of making his way ahead, entering Xinan quietly, before the gates closed at dusk. He had someone to see, and it might be more possible after dark.
The other man’s expression was grave, as they watched the couriers disappear into dust ahead of them, carrying a delicacy for the Precious Consort. Lychees. The military post, wearing out horses with them.
“That is wrong. It is not …” Sima Zian began. He stopped.
Recklessly, Tai said, “Not proportionate?”
Zian looked around to ensure that no one else was near them. He nodded. “One word for it. I fear chaos, in the heavens, here on earth.”
Words that could have you beaten and exiled. Even killed. Tai flinched, sorry he’d spoken. The poet saw it and smiled. “My apologies. Shall we discuss the verses of Chan Du? Let us do that. It always brings me pleasure. I wonder if he’s in Xinan … I believe he is the best poet alive.”
Tai cleared his throat, followed the lead. “I believe I am riding with the best poet alive.”
Sima Zian laughed again, waved a hand dismissively. “We are very different men, Chan Du and I. Though he does enjoy his wine, I am happy to say.” A brief silence. “He wrote about Kuala Nor when he was younger. After your father’s campaign. Do you know them, those verses?”
Tai nodded his head. “Of course I do.” He had studied those poems.
Zian’s eyes were tiger-bright. “Did they send you there? To the lake?”
Tai thought about it. “No. My father’s sadness sent me there. One poem … may have given me a
