Under Heaven

brothers, the sons of Shen Gao, each offer you a poem.”

Tai winced. Jian clapped her hands in delight. “How very clever of you! Of course that is what we will do! And who better to offer the subjects than our Banished Immortal? I insist upon it! You choose, General Shen’s sons improvise for us. I am happy again! Does everyone have wine?”

His brother, Tai knew, had passed the imperial examinations in the top three of his year. He had been preparing for them all his life. His poetry was immaculate, precise, accomplished. It always had been.

Tai had spent two years at Kuala Nor trying to make himself a poet in a solitary cabin at night, with little success, in his own estimation.

He told himself that this was just an entertainment, an afternoon’s diversion at Ma-wai where they liked to play, not a competition that signified anything. He felt like cursing the poet. What was Zian doing to him?

He saw Liu bow to Jian, grave, unsmiling. He never smiles, she’d said in the sedan chair. Tai also bowed, and managed a wry smile. It probably looked apprehensive, he thought.

Sima Zian said, “Xinan, and this night’s moon. Any verse format you choose.”

The prince chuckled. “Master Sima, did we even have to wonder? Do you always choose the moon?”

Zian grinned, in great good humour. “Often enough, my lord. I have followed it all my days. I expect to die by moonlight.”

“Many years from now, we hope,” said the prince, graciously.

Tai was wondering, amid all else, how everyone had been so wrong about this man. He did have an answer, or part of one: it had been fatally dangerous through the years for an imperial heir to show signs of ambition, and those signs might all too easily be thought to include competence, intelligence, perception. It was safer to drink a great deal, and enjoy the company of women.

Which did raise a different question: what was Shinzu doing now?

Zian murmured, “Do you know … well, no, you can’t possibly know, since I have never told anyone … but I have sometimes dreamed of a second moon to write about. Wouldn’t that be a gift?”

“I’d like a gift like that,” said the Beloved Companion, quietly. She was, Tai remembered (it needed remembering sometimes), very young. She was younger than his sister.

Jian turned to look at him, and then at Liu. “The First Son must surely go first, whatever other protocols we are abandoning.”

Wen Zhou had stepped back as this new game began. He smiled thinly at this, however. Tai felt as if his senses had become unnaturally sharp, as if he was seeing and hearing more than he ever had. Was this what life at court was like? What the dance involved?

Liu folded his hands carefully in his full black sleeves. He had been doing this all his life, Tai knew, preparing for such moments as this. Xinan, and tonight’s moon, he reminded himself. It was customary in such contests to pair two images.

Liu said, looking at no one, measuring stresses:

No one ever rests in Xinan.
Under a full moon, or the hook moon of tonight
As springtime turns a pale face to summer.
A place for winning renown, if deserved,
And gems and trappings of great worth.
The city is alive all night and even more
From the drumming-open of the great gates
As the white sun rises dispelling mist.
Here the Son of Heaven
Shines forth his Jade Countenance
Upon his beloved people, and so
Here the world is all the world may be.

There was a kind of pain in Tai’s chest, shaped by and entangled with memory. This was his brother, they were at the heart of the court, the heart of empire, and Liu could do this, effortlessly. All the world may be.

But what else had he done, what else could he do, as easily?

Everyone in the room seemed to be looking at Tai. There had been no response at all to Liu’s exquisite offering: that, too, was proper. When two or more people had been set a verse challenge you waited until the last one was done. They did these in the North District, often very drunk, often very late.

Tai sipped his wine. He was impossibly sober. He thought of Yan, of his sister. He looked across at Liu.

“If deserved,” he murmured. “I like that.”

His brother’s mouth tightened. Tai hadn’t expected a reaction. Nor had he expected to have to compose a poem in this setting. This was the court, not a pleasure house among fellow students. He took another drink. He had only one thing to bring to this room, he realized, that these elegant dancers would not have.

He looked at Zian. The poet’s face was attentive. It would be, Tai thought, when poetry was concerned. This was his life, air and water.

Tai thought of a first phrase, and then—quite suddenly—of a conclusion, a contrast to his brother’s, and he began, speaking slowly, picking his way, as through a moonlit wood. And as the words came, so, too, did images he’d lived with:

South of us Xinan lies under a sickle moon.
Lanterns will soon be bright in the spring night.
Laughter and music and rich wine poured.
Far to the west where all roads end
Cold stars shine on white bones
Beside the stone shores of a lake.
Thousands of li stretch empty from there
To east and west and mountains rise.
Birds wheel when the sun goes down
And grieving ghosts are heard in the dark.
How may we live a proper life?
Where is the balance the soul must find?

He looked at Liu first, in the silence that came when he was done, a stillness coming into the room like the breeze from outside. He’d spent so much of his childhood looking to his brother for approval. Liu turned away, reflexively, and then—it must have been difficult, Tai thought—back to his younger brother.

“A bright loom,” he said. Old phrase. Poetry and silk.

“It is more than that,” said Sima Zian, softly.

Laughter was heard. “Well. That didn’t take long, did it?” said Wen Zhou, caustically. “Only a few moments out from hiding, and Shen Tai hastens to remind us of his so-heroic time in the west.”

Tai looked across at him. And he realized two things in that moment. That he could do this, could dance to at least some of the music here if he chose—and that someone else in the room had even more anger than he did.

He stared at the handsome figure of the prime minister. This was the man who had taken Rain. Had killed Yan.

Tai took his time. They would wait for him, he realized. He said, “There were past a hundred thousand unburied there. Half of them were ours. I wouldn’t have thought you’d need reminding, first minister of Kitai.”