Under Heaven

“Of course! This was a home belonging to the emperor, may he live a thousand years. They will be waiting for you, my lord. And they will be honoured and grateful, as … as I am, to serve you.”

Tai scowled. “Good,” he said. “I will see you in Xinan.”

The steward took the extended key, bowed, turned, went hurrying down the hallway. A man with a clear, shining purpose again, in a life he’d thought was over.

“His name is Ye Lao,” said Song. “You neglected to ask.”

He looked at her. The neat, calm figure in black. Her intense features. She had killed for Tai, had been wounded again this morning.

“Ye Lao. Thank you. Would you prefer him dead?”

She hadn’t expected that. She shook her head.

“No.” She hesitated. “This is a different world,” she said. She wasn’t as calm as she seemed, he realized.

He nodded. “It is. It will be.”

She looked up at him. He saw her smile, the wide mouth. “And you will have your thighs torn raw, my lord, if you try to ride to Xinan on a Sardian horse while wearing liao silk. Have you riding clothes?”

He looked to the window and then the wall. His two women were still there, looking fearful and proud.

“Have I riding clothes?” he asked.

They hurried (gracefully) past him into the room. He heard them opening a chest, heard rustling sounds, giggling.

He went in a moment later. He did, it seemed, have riding clothes, exactly fitted, and his own boots had been cleaned. He changed. Neither woman looked away, he noted.

He kept the ring and, for no very good reason, the lychee fruit. He went back out, joined Song and the other Kanlins assigned to him. They led him to the stables, to Dynlal and horses for all of them, and they rode out from Ma-wai near the end of the day, towards the city of dust and noise, of two million souls, where lights would be shining by the time they arrived, and would shine all through the night.

No one ever rests in Xinan, his brother Liu had just said, in a poem.

And Rain had been told he was coming.

CHAPTER XIX

There is a rosewood gazebo near the back wall of the compound. It is set among fruit trees and flower beds, a long way beyond the artificial lake and the island set within it, past the grassy space for entertaining guests, and the bamboo grove with its laid-out paths, and the open area where Wen Zhou’s guards practise swordsmanship and archery.

For Rain, the gazebo is a favourite place. She has many reasons. Rosewood is named not for its colour, but for its scent, which she loves. The wood itself is dark, with lines running through it as if trying to reach the surface, to break through. You can see that, imagine that, in daylight. Rosewood comes to Xinan from forests in the far south. It is imported overland and then along rivers and up the Great Canal, at a cost that does not bear thinking about.

There are nightingales here sometimes, this far back from the rooms and pavilions of the compound. (The street beyond the wall is quiet at night in a sedate, very wealthy ward.) They can be heard most often in summer; it is early in the year to expect one tonight.

She has meandered back this way, carrying her pipa, plucking it as she walked through the twilight. She has noticed that when she carries the instrument people don’t look at her as closely, as if she’s part of the setting, not a woman to be observed. Or carefully watched.

It is dark now. She’d had Hwan, the servant who loves her a little too much, light one of the gazebo’s lanterns for her, and then she’d dismissed him. She doesn’t want it to appear as if she’s hiding: see, there is a light. Although you’d need to come a long way back and look through trees to see it. Earlier, in the afternoon, Hwan had run a different errand for her outside the compound. She has done what she can do, and is here.

Rain plays a few notes of an old song about the moon as messenger between parted lovers. Then she decides that’s the wrong music to be thinking about tonight.

She is alone here. She’s confident of that. Her maidservants have been dismissed for the night. One will remain in the suite of rooms against her mistress’s return, but Rain has stayed out late in the garden with her pipa before. A mild eccentricity, usefully established.

And Wen Zhou doesn’t spy on his women. His mind doesn’t run that way. He can’t actually conceive, Rain believes, that they would not be devoted and compliant. Where, and how, could they have a better life? No, his fears are cast, like a shadow, outside these walls.

He and his wife have been gone all day. Summoned to Ma-wai, no warning. He wasn’t happy about the suddenness. On the other hand, there was never a great deal anyone could prudently do in the way of resisting when Jian wanted them. Rain sees fireflies among the trees, watches them for a time. Moths flutter around the lantern.

The compound has been quiet since the master left this morning, or at least since the arrival of the second message from Ma-wai. The one sent to her. Not all windows above jade stairs need be seen through tears.

No jade stairs here. Neither real jade nor a poet’s symbol-shaped imagining. She sits on a bench with her instrument in a rosewood gazebo, roofed, but open to the night on all sides.

The scent of the wood, scent of the air. Nearly summer now. No jade, and no tears, Rain decides, although she knows it would be possible to make herself weep. She isn’t going to do that. She is thinking too hard.

Mostly about Wen Jian.

NO ONE KNOWS this mountain where I dwell.

Tai found it ironic, in an over-elaborate way, that when the nearness of Xinan first announced itself—a wide, diffused glow on the southern horizon—the phrase that came to him was from a poem about solitude.

Yan would have had a remark about that, he thought.

So would Xin Lun, actually. The one man gentle, amused, the other wittily astringent. Both were dead. And the memories he was conjuring were more than two years old.

So was the memory, rich as the emerald he carried (but didn’t wear), of the woman he was riding through the night to see.

He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t put on the ring. He wasn’t ready yet, he decided, for people to look at him the way one looked at a man with so much wealth on display. He didn’t want Rain seeing him like that, though he couldn’t say why. It wasn’t as if she would be unused to opulence in the first minister’s house.

Even in the Pavilion of Moonlight, she had moved through a world that included extravagantly wealthy men. It had never seemed to touch her. She’d been as happy—or had made them think she was—among the students, singing for them, teasing, listening to late-night philosophy and verse and plans to remake the world.

That was what a skilled courtesan did, of course: induce every man to think he was the one she’d choose, had she only the freedom to pursue that innermost desire.

But he knew, Tai knew, that to think that way about her was to deny a deeper truth about the golden-haired woman behind the walls (so many of them). Xinan’s walls loomed now in the middle distance beyond the bridge they were clattering across. The bridge had bright lanterns, and soldiers guarding it.

Two years ago, Rain had told him—had warned him—that the stylish southern aristocrat Wen Zhou, cousin to the emperor’s beloved, might be minded to take her away from the North District.

Both of them had seen it happen many times. Mostly, it was a dream for a courtesan that this might occur. A doorway opening on a better life.