Under Heaven

inclined to worry about being well liked by soldiers.

Tai was too preoccupied as they rode in to be unhappy about how protective they were. In fact, with some ruefulness, he realized that he didn’t even mind it any more. He’d been frightened in that carriage by the road, and was still disturbed.

The two advance riders they’d sent reported to Song and their captain. Their company had three rooms, seven or eight to a room. There was a chamber for Tai and Sima Zian to share. The other soldiers would sleep in the stable. There were to be guards posted tonight, Tai learned, listening without much concentration to orders being given in his name. He ought to be paying closer attention, probably. He found it difficult.

He had no problem sharing a room with the poet. For one thing, Zian hadn’t made it to their chamber from the pleasure pavilions in the other inns where this had happened. This was a man who had earned legendary status in diverse ways. Tai could never have sustained the hours and the drinking the poet managed—and Sima Zian had to be twenty years older than Tai was.

They dismounted in a clatter of weapons and armour and the stamp and snort of tired, hungry horses. Servants ran in every direction through the courtyard. It would not, Tai thought, be difficult to kill him here. One suborned servant, one assassin with a knife or on a rooftop with a bow. He looked up. Smoke from torches. He was very tired.

He forced himself to stop thinking about it. Held to the core truth underlying all of this: killing him now, with word of the Sardian horses already in Xinan, represented a reckless, possibly suicidal act for anyone.

Even an enormous, and enormously powerful, military governor of three districts. Even the first minister of Kitai.

He looked around, trying to bring himself into the present, not let his thoughts run too far ahead, or linger behind. Song was at his elbow. So, until a moment ago when Tai dismounted, had been the gap-toothed soldier from Iron Gate.

He shook his head, suddenly irritated. “What is the name of that one who always takes Dynlal?” He spotted the man, leading the horse towards the stables. “I should know it by now.”

Song tilted her head a little, as if surprised. “A border soldier? Not really. But he’s called Wujen. Wujen Ning.” He saw her teeth flash. “You’ll forget it again.”

“I will not!” Tai said, and swore under his breath. He took immediate steps to fix the name in memory. An association: Ning was the metalsmith in the village near their estate.

He looked at the woman in the flickering light. Torches were above them, over the portico. Other lights moved through the yard. Insects were out now after dark. Tai slapped at one on his arm. “We are less than a day from your sanctuary,” he murmured. “Do you wish to go home, Kanlin?”

He’d caught her by surprise, he saw. Wasn’t sure why, it was an obvious question.

“Do you wish to dismiss your servant, my lord?”

He cleared his throat. “I don’t think so. I have no cause to question your competence.”

“I am honoured by your trust,” she said formally.

Zian strode over from—predictably—the direction of the music, to the right of this first courtyard.

“I have arranged a table,” he said cheerfully, “and I have requested that their best saffron wine be heated, seeing as we have had a long, difficult day.” He grinned at Song. “I trust you will approve the expense?”

“I only carry the money,” she murmured. “I don’t approve the spending of it, except for the soldiers.”

“Make sure they have wine,” Tai said.

The poet gestured with one hand, and Tai went with him through the crowd. Song stayed beside them, her expression alert. It made him weary, this need for vigilance. It was not a life he’d ever wanted.

How many men were allowed the life they wanted?

Maybe this one, he thought, looking at the poet moving eagerly ahead of him towards where they could just hear a pipa being played, in a room beyond the courtyard noise. This one, or maybe my brother.

“YOUR BROTHER,” Roshan had said without preamble, as Tai closed the carriage door and sat opposite him, “is not named in the letter. It was read to me several times. I do not,” he’d added, “read, myself.”

It was widely known. A source of derision among the aristocrats and the examination-trained mandarins. It was regarded as a principal reason why the endlessly subtle Chin Hai, once first minister, once feared everywhere, now gone to his ancestors, had allowed Roshan and other barbarian generals to acquire so much power on the borders. An illiterate had no chance of threatening him at the centre of his webs in the Ta-Ming, the way an aristocrat with an army could.

Such, at any rate, had been the view of the students taking the examinations, or preparing to. And, of course, whatever they agreed upon had to be true, did it not?

Settling into the carriage, Tai had immediately felt out of his depth. Which was, he was certain, the point of Roshan’s remark.

“Why would you imagine I’d consider that possible? That my brother could be accused of anything regarding me?”

He was delaying, trying to get his bearings. The governor leaned back against a profusion of cushions, eyeing him. An Li was, from this close, even more awesomely vast. A size that seemed mythic, a figure of legend.

He had, when not yet promoted to the rank of general, led three companies of Seventh District cavalry through five brutal days and nights of riding to turn the tide of battle against an incursion from the Koreini Peninsula. The Koreini of the far east, ambitious under their own emperor, had elected that spring to test the Kitan emperor’s commitment to the building of garrison forts beyond the Wall.

They had been given an answer, to their very great cost—but only because of Roshan. That was twenty years ago. Tai’s father had told him about that ride.

He had told Liu, as well, Tai remembered.

An Li shifted on his cushions again. “Your brother is principal counsellor to the first minister. Shen Liu has made his choice of paths. The letter—you may read it—indicates that Prime Minister Wen had his reasons for wishing you no longer among us, or in a dear woman’s thoughts. Or perhaps able to disrupt your brother’s plans for your sister. He does, after all, depend on Shen Liu for a great deal. It was the first minister who formally proposed your sister’s elevation to exalted status. You did know that?”

Tai shook his head. He hadn’t, but it made sense.

The governor sighed, fluttered a hand. His fingers were unexpectedly long. He wore a sweet, floral scent, it filled the carriage. He said, “Spring Rain? Is that the charming creature’s name? It will puzzle me until I draw my last breath how men can be so undone by women.” He paused, then added, thoughtfully, “Not even the highest among us are immune to the folly of that.”

Nothing he says is unplanned, Tai told himself. And that last remark was treason, since the highest among us could only mean the emperor.

Tai said, possibly making a mistake, “I might risk such a course myself for a woman.”

“Indeed? I had thought you might be different. This Lin Chang—that is her name now?—is she so very appealing? I confess I grow curious.”

“I never knew that name. We called her Rain. But I am not speaking of her, my lord. You have mentioned two women.”

Roshan’s eyes were slits. Tai wondered how well the man could even see. The governor waited. He shifted in his seat again.

Tai said, “If you can bring my sister back from the Bogu lands before she is married there, I will claim and then assign all of my Sardian horses to the armies of the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Districts.”

He hadn’t known he was going to say that.

An Li made a small, involuntary movement of one hand. Tai realized he’d startled the other man. The general said as much: “You are more direct than your brother, aren’t you?”

“We have little in common,” Tai said.

“A sister?” the other man murmured.

“And a father of distinction, as you were gracious enough to mention. But we see different paths to extending the family honour. I have made you a formal proposal, Governor An.”