Tai, immersed in his studies and friendships, trying to decide what his own idea of a properly lived life should be, had been painfully aware that what she said might be true, but there was nothing a student preparing for the examinations, the second son of a retired general, could do if an aristocrat with wealth and connections wanted a North District woman for his own.
And then his father had died.
He was thinking of her, green eyes and yellow hair and the voice late at night, as they came to the city walls. Tai looked up at the enormous, many-storeyed tower above the gates. There were lights now, hiding the stars. The gates were locked, of course. It was after darkfall.
That didn’t seem to matter: Jian had sent word ahead of them.
The leader of his Kanlin escort (not Wei Song, there was a more senior figure now) handed a scroll through a small sliding window, and a moment later the Gold Bird Guards manning this entrance through the northern wall opened for them, with a shout.
Then, as he and his Kanlins rode through, the city guards—those on the ground and those in the tower and on the nearby walls—all bowed twice, to Tai.
He truly wasn’t prepared for this. He looked at Song, who had stayed close through the hours of this ride. She didn’t meet his glance, was staring straight ahead, hood up, watchful and alert. She’d been wounded this morning. Seemed to show no signs of it.
The gates swung closed behind them. He turned in the saddle and watched, patting Dynlal absently. Tai wondered why he wasn’t exhausted. They had been travelling most of the day, except for an interlude at Ma-wai that was likely to change his life.
He was in Xinan again. Heart of the world.
He still didn’t know why Jian was doing this. His best guess was that it was a small part of the endless balancing act she performed in the palace: Wen Zhou and Roshan, ambitious mandarins, the heir, other governors, the eunuchs, other princes (and their mothers) …
And now one more man, arrived from the west. The brother of an influential adviser and of a newly named princess. A man with an absurd number of Sardian horses in his control.
To a woman in Jian’s position, it would only make sense to assert a claim to such a man. And so, when it had emerged, through routine inquiry, that he’d had a relationship with a singing girl in the North District, a girl who might even be the reason Jian’s cousin had sought to have him killed …
Well, you might undertake certain things in such a circumstance, set them in motion, if you were a clever woman dealing with a fiendishly difficult court. And with an aging emperor, tired of protocols and conflicts and finance and barbarians, obsessed with you, and with living forever, while shaping the most opulent tomb ever built, should that second dream not come to pass because the gods did not wish it so.
Gates had been opened for Tai, not just symbolically, as in a verse, but real ones, massive and intimidating, looming by torch and lantern light.
He had never done this: enter the city after dark.
If you approached Xinan towards day’s end you found an inn, or a farmhouse with a barn (if you were a student, watching your money), and listened from outside the walls to the long ceremony of drums that closed the gates. Then you entered with the market crowd in the morning amid the chaos of another day among two million souls.
Not now. Now, the gates had just swung wide. Four of the Gold Bird Guards even came with them, to preclude the necessity of showing their scroll all the way through the city.
The streets were eerily quiet. Within the lanes and alleys of some of the wards there would be raucous, violent life even now, Tai knew, but not along the main roads. They turned east immediately inside the gate, passing in front of the vast palace complex until they turned south down the central avenue. The widest street in the world, running from the Ta-Ming to the southern gate, straight as a dream of virtue.
She had pressed her fingers to his mouth, their last night, to stop him from being clever, he recalled. He had once been a man who prided himself on being clever. He remembered her scent, her palm against his face. He remembered kissing her hand.
He looked around him. He had never done this either, ride a horse right down the central avenue, after dark. He didn’t like being in the middle of the wide street. It felt too much as if he were laying claim to something. He wasn’t. He’d have liked to claim a cup of wine in the Pavilion of Moonlight, if she had still been there.
“Over more, please,” he said quietly to Song. “Too much of a procession, where we are.”
She looked quickly at him. They were near a guard station, with lanterns. He saw concern in her eyes, then they moved from the light and he couldn’t see her face any more. Song twitched her horse’s reins, moved ahead, and spoke to the man leading them. They began angling southeast across the vast, open space, to continue along the roadway, nearer one side now.
There were only a handful of people abroad on the street, and no group so large as theirs. Those on the far side, west, were so distant as to be almost invisible. There were guard stations at intervals, large ones at the major intersections, all the way down the centre of the road. He saw a sedan chair being carried north. The bearers stopped as their company passed by. A hand pulled a curtain back, to see who they were. Tai glimpsed a woman’s face.
They carried on, ten Kanlin Warriors, four of the Gold Bird Guards, and the second son of General Shen Gao, down the principal avenue of Xinan, under stars.
All journeys come to an end, one way or another. They reached the gate of the fifty-seventh ward.
HE HAD BEEN BORN in the south, beyond the Great River, in lands that knew tigers and the shrieking of gibbons. His family were farm labourers for generations, going back further than any of them could have counted. He, himself—his name was Pei Qin—had been the youngest of seven, a small child, clever.
When he was six years old his father had brought him to the under-steward of one of the Wen estates. There were three branches of the Wen family, controlling most of the land (and the rice and salt) around. There was always a need for capable servants to be trained. Qin had been accepted by the steward to be raised and educated. That had been thirty-seven years ago.
He had become a trusted, unobtrusive household servant. When the eldest son of the family decided to make his way to Xinan and the courtly world not quite four years ago (observing the useful, astonishing rise of his young cousin), Qin was one of the servants he’d taken north to help select and teach those they would hire in the capital.
Qin had done that, capably and quietly. He’d been a quiet child, was unchanged as a man. Never married. He had been one of the three servants entrusted with laying out clothing for the master, with preparing his rooms, with warming his wine or tea. Had he been asked at any time, he’d have said that his was a privileged life, since he knew the conditions in which his siblings lived, among the rice and salt.
One evening—the wrong evening, for reasons heaven decreed—he had been distracted by the inadequately supervised presence in the compound of a dozen girls from the pleasure district. They were being fitted with costumes for a pageant Zhou was hosting on his lake. (The lake was new then.)
Hearing their uninhibited laughter, worrying about who was watching them, Qin had overheated the master’s evening wine.
The wine had, evidently, burned Wen Zhou’s tongue.
Thirty-five years with the family had been as nothing, Qin would think, after. Decades of service had been less than nothing.
He was beaten. In itself, not unusual. The life of a servant included such things, and a senior retainer could be required to perform the beating of a lesser one. Qin had done that. The world was not a gentle place. No one who’d seen a brother mauled by a tiger would ever think that. And a short time in Xinan could make a man realize there were tigers here, too, even if they might not have stripes or pad through forests and fields after dark.
The thing was, Wen Zhou had ordered sixty strokes with the heavy rod for Qin. His tongue must have been
Or something else had greatly distressed the master that night. It didn’t matter. Sixty strokes of the rod could kill a man.
Two and a half years ago, that was, in the days just before the Cold Food Festival. Qin did not die, but it was a near thing.
