Daiyan is in a prison assigned to him alone. Such an honour, she thinks bitterly. She feels helpless and enraged.
When her father was ordered to Lingzhou she’d pushed herself to actions deemed unfitting for a woman. She wrote to the court. She remembers how many times she revised that letter so the characters might be perfect.
And she saved her father’s life. She also remembers waiting in the dark for the assassin they’d had warning might come. She can recall, relive, the anger driving her as she struck the man herself. She had been his target. Her body, her life. No judicial officer would strike those first blows for her.
If it was not proper conduct for a woman, she would live with that, although she is not happy remembering how satisfying the assassin’s cries of pain had been. There are places in the self, Shan thinks, where it might sometimes be better not to look.
But now, each day dawns with him still imprisoned. How do you live a life when someone at the heart’s core of your existence is where Daiyan is now?
Everyone is kind to her but she doesn’t want kindness! She wants to be able to change what is happening, change the world, this part of it. Perhaps—after all—she is more like the long-dead poet than she’d realized. Perhaps, like Chan Du, she, too, wants to amend a broken world?
But only one small break, where a man lies at night behind bars in Shantong. She wants to break those bars. She wants him here.
Lu Chao, returning weeks ago, had had little comfort to offer. The magistrates being assigned were unhappy with their task, he said. Two had withdrawn. There was, if one valued justice at all, no way to find or fashion treason in anything Daiyan had done. He’d defeated an enemy and followed a fleeing army to destroy it.
How was that treasonous? What orders had he defied on the way north? There were no orders given! And when they came, when the terrible command to retreat had come, Ren Daiyan had retreated, and presented himself to his emperor.
Shan does the one thing she can think to do, even if it marks betraying a confidence. Sometimes you needed to do that.
Daiyan had shown her a poem on his last night at East Slope. He’d said—as he had said before—“I am not a poet. This is for you only, Shan.”
She read it, twice. She’d said, “You keep saying that, and this makes a liar of you. I would like to show it to Lu Chen and—”
“No!” he’d said, clearly anguished by the very thought. “Not to him. Or anyone! I would feel humiliated. Who am I to write words that he is forced to read?”
She remembers tugging at his unbound hair, hard.
“My mother used to do that,” he’d said. He’d told her that once before.
“You probably deserved it!” she replied.
“No,” he murmured. “I think she only ever did it out of love.”
She kissed him on the lips, and shortly after he’d fallen asleep in weariness.
Now she betrays him. Shows the poem to both Lu brothers. And then there is more. They send it to Fuyin in Jingxian. He knows a man who runs a printing press, one of the newest kind. His own books on the duties of magistrates have been printed there.
Copies of Daiyan’s poem are made, secretly. Some are posted on walls in Jingxian at night. Some are sent elsewhere. They begin appearing in Shantong.
Soon there are many more than they have printed themselves, and the whole world seems to know that the words, the heroic, honourable words, were written by Commander Ren Daiyan, who lies a prisoner of the new emperor and his prime minister.
Let us restore Kitai’s glory of old,
Recover our rivers and mountains,
Then offer loyal tribute to the glorious emperor.
Such an obvious traitor, men say mockingly, over wine, over tea, walking in the streets.
Mockery can be, the poet says at East Slope, a weapon at a time like this. His brother, who has been in Shantong, cautions both of them: “They have negotiated their peace. If Daiyan’s fate is entangled in that ...”
If it is, Shan understands, then poetry is no weapon. There are none to hand. No bows and arrows in the gazebo in the winter of the garden.
On the morning of the New Year’s eve celebration she walks with the poet to the stream and across the bridge to the temple of the Path. The bell is ringing as they approach. She has heard it often from the house, when the wind is from the east, carrying the sound. Lu Chen has never brought her here before. Women are not usually welcome at temples. He is saying something, bringing her to the clerics here, his friends.
They are shy and gracious. She drinks a glass of wine with them, and they all salute the coming year and offer prayers for the dead and for the future of Kitai.
A year ago today, Shan thinks, she had been in Hanjin, knowing disaster was coming, preparing to escape, with Daiyan. She had gone to find her husband, outside the warehouse that held their collection.
He’d refused to come. She had urged him to do so. She had truly wanted him to come. They had bowed to each other, then she’d walked away in twilight amid the snow. She has her cup refilled with just a little more wine and she drinks to Wai’s memory, to his name.
Returning to East Slope the poet refuses to let her take his arm in support, though she tries to mask the gesture as her own need. They pause on the bridge, looking down to see if there are fish. Sometimes the men of East Slope or the clerics fish from this bridge, he says. Sometimes they are fortunate.
Nothing to be seen today. It is a cold, dry afternoon, pale winter sunlight. The water runs clear. She imagines how cold it would be to touch, to taste. There is almost a thought for a song in this. She feels a kind of traitor for even having images come into her mind. She knows Lu Chen would upbraid her for that self-reproach. She knows he would be right.
Approaching the farm they pass through the gate and there, standing on the walk, looking at the main house between bare trees, with the pines set farther back, Shan sees two ghosts on the roof in the late-day light.
A man and a woman, very close to each other, though not touching. They are smoke and shadow, as if they could drift away if the wind grew stronger. They seem to be looking down at them, at her.
Shan makes a small, involuntary sound. The poet turns to her. He follows her gaze. He smiles.
“I don’t see them this time. Are there two?”
She only nods, staring up at the roof.
“That is Mah,” his father says. “And the girl from Lingzhou.”
“I have never seen spirits,” she whispers. “I am afraid.”
“They mean us no harm,” the poet says gently. “How could they mean us harm?”
“I know that,” she says. Her hands are shaking. “But I am afraid.”
This time he does take her arm as they walk into the house.
HOUSES DO HAVE GHOSTS, and they change—the houses do, over time, who lives in them, and the spirits also change. East Slope was no different in this regard, although the home of the Lu brothers remained a refuge for a long time for many different people, a place like a light shining softly in the night through trees.
In due course, Commander Zhao Ziji came to leave his position in the emperor’s army. He withdrew from all public life and service. He made his way to East Slope and he was welcomed, and he lived there all the rest of his days.
Early on he took a wife. Her name was Shao Bian, from a town called Chunyu, farther west, on the other side of the Great River, across from the marshes he had known for so long.
She had strange red hair, Shao Bian—ancestors from beyond the borders and deserts, it was said. Ziji also brought to East Slope her aged father, once a teacher, but rendered infirm by a hard life as a watchman in the mines after a son became an outlaw. That son was dead, as far as anyone could discover.
For his wife’s younger brother, whose name was Pan, Ziji arranged an education and then training as an officer in the cavalry of Kitai.
His wife was said to be extremely clever, as well as unusual in her beauty. She was taught calligraphy and
other learned skills by the poet Lin Shan, in the time when she, too, still lived at East Slope.
In her turn, Zhao Ziji’s wife, with his approval, had their own daughter taught those same skills. Their daughter married a jinshi graduate, bringing honour to their family. Their sons became soldiers, both of them, and then withdrew from military service, with high rank and honourably, after many years.
Zhao Ziji was buried when his time came in the graveyard on the high ground above the farm, within sight of the stream, and the river on clear days. He lay under a cypress tree near the brothers Lu Chen and Lu Chao, who were close by each other, as was judged only proper, for they had been together all their days, whenever it was allowed.
There also with all of them was the poet’s son, Lu Mah, whose name had already become a byword for loyalty and a son’s love.
Above the poet’s grave his own words were written:
Bury me high up on the green hill
And in night rain grieve for me alone.
Let us be brothers in lives and lives to come
Mending then the bonds that this world breaks.
In the year of her husband’s passing Zhao Ziji’s wife and his sons were offered a gift from the second emperor of the Southern Twelfth Dynasty, and they accepted this. They were granted a good-sized estate not far away, in exchange for East Slope.
From that time on East Slope became a place of homage and pilgrimage, people coming from far away, bringing flowers and sorrow. The estate was maintained by Kitai, by succeeding courts, to honour the Lu brothers lying there, and the poet’s beloved son, and it endured as such for years upon years while the rivers flowed.
After both brothers were gone, the two ghosts, a young man and a young woman, were no longer seen by anyone. Not up on the main house roof at twilight, nor in the meadow or the fruit tree orchards, nor above the farm in the cypress trees or the sweet-pear tree of the graveyard. It was said that they had gone to wherever it is they go, wherever we go, when we cross over and find rest.
Daiyan still stood up on the bench sometimes to look out through the bars in the high, small window. He didn’t know if this was foolish, and it didn’t matter if it was, to him. He had done his share of foolish things. But he felt a need at times to see out and down, to the lake, the city. He couldn’t quite see the sea from here, but some nights he could hear it.
Not tonight. It was New Year’s eve, and Shantong was loud and joyous below the palace hill. That was proper, he thought. Life continued, a year closed, a year began, men and women needed to acknowledge they had lived through that turning.
He was recalling other New Year’s eves, not only the one a year ago in Hanjin. You couldn’t linger in just one time, one memory. He remembered fireworks at home, sub-prefects through the years supervising guardsmen setting them off in the yamen square. He remembered being small enough to be afraid of the brilliant colours bursting in the night, standing close to his mother, reassured only when he saw his father smiling at green and red and silver in the moonless sky.
He remembered his father’s smile astonishingly well. Some things, Daiyan thought, endure as long as we do. The rivers flow endlessly east, their currents carry everyone, but in some way we are still in the distant west, and some of us are at home.
There were magnificent fireworks here, in patterns that could make a watcher feel like a child again. He saw a red peony bloom in the sky and he laughed at the artistry. He wondered at how a man standing where he was could laugh at anything. What did it mean or say, that he could be made happy, even briefly, by craftsmen playing with light and fire outside these bars?
The cracks of the fireworks were steady now and came from many places. There were some here on the palace grounds, others down by West Lake, from boats on the water. The night was loud and bright. People knew there was a peace now. Life not death, perhaps, in the year ahead? But what man could truly know that?
Given two more nights in autumn, with a new moon like tonight’s, he would have taken Hanjin back.
The sounds outside were loud, but he had lived this long as an outlaw, then a soldier, in part because his hearing was very good, so he did hear the footfall in the corridor behind him. He was down off the bench and waiting when the door was unlocked and opened.
The prime minister of Kitai walked in alone.
Without speaking, Hang Hsien set down a tray with a brazier on the small table in the middle of the room. He had carried it himself. A flask of wine rested on the tray, being warmed. There were two dark-red cups.
The prime minister bowed to Daiyan, who did the same to him. The door, Daiyan saw, had been left ajar. He thought about that.
Sounds outside. The crack and snap, then lights bursting.
“I apologize,” he said, “for the cold, my lord. I have no fire, I fear.”
“I think they believe it might be unsafe,” the prime minister said.
“Likely so,” Daiyan agreed.
“The food has been acceptable?”
“Yes, thank you. Better than soldiers often eat. And they send clean clothing, and a barber, to shave me, as you see. He has not slit my throat, either.”
“As I see.”
“Will you sit, my lord?”
“Thank you, commander.”
Hang Hsien took the stool. Daiyan shifted the bench so they were opposite each other at his table.
“I brought wine,” the prime minister said.
“Thank you. Is it poisoned?”
“I will drink with you,” Hang Hsien said, undisturbed.
Daiyan shrugged. He said, “Why are you here? Why am I here?”
The room was not well lit. One lamp only. It was difficult to read the other man’s face. Hang Dejin’s son would be skilled at hiding his thoughts. He would have learned how to do that.
The prime minister poured two cups before answering. He left them on the table. He said, very calmly, “You are here because the Altai demanded your death as part of the price of peace.”
And so it was spoken, finally.
He had known, in a way, all along. It was different, though, knowing something in your thoughts, and then hearing it confirmed, made real, planted in the world like a tree.
“And the emperor accepted this?”
Hsien was no coward. He met Daiyan’s gaze. He said, “He did. In exchange he demanded of the barbarians that his father and brother be kept in the north forever, whatever formal demands he might make for their release.”
Daiyan closed his eyes. A loud crack came from behind him, outside, in the world.
“Why are you telling me these things?”
“Because you have been an honourable servant of Kitai,” said Hang Hsien. “And because I know it.”
Daiyan laughed, a little breathlessly.
“I am aware,” added Hsien, “that this might sound strange, given where we are.”
“It does,” Daiyan agreed. “You aren’t afraid to be alone with me?”
“That you will do me harm? Try to escape?” The prime minister shook his head. “If you had wanted to, you could have had your army here by now, threatening us with rebellion unless you were freed.”
Your army. “How would I have sent a message?”
“Not difficult. I am quite certain you instructed them to stay where they were. They may not have wanted to, but your soldiers will follow your orders.”
Daiyan looked at him by the light of the one lamp. “The emperor is fortunate,” he said, “in his prime minister.”
Hsien shrugged. “My hope is that Kitai is.”
Daiyan was still staring across the table. “Was it difficult, being your father’s son?”
An unexpected question, he saw.
“Trained to think in this way?”
Daiyan nodded.
“Perhaps. It is just the nature of the task. The way a soldier needs to be ready to go into battle, I suppose.”
Daiyan nodded again. He said, softly, “What you’ve just said suggests you don’t
expect me to be able to tell anyone what I have heard.”
A silence. The prime minister sipped from his wine cup. He said, in an easy voice, as if conversing of the weather or the price of winter rice, “My father had us both gradually rendered immune to the more common poisons, in doses that would kill another man.”
Daiyan looked at him. He nodded. “I knew that.”
Hsien’s turn to stare. “You did? How ... ?”
“Wang Fuyin. He is even cleverer than you know. It would be wise to make use of him as much as you can. You should bring him here.” He made no movement towards his wine. “You want me to make this easier for you?”
A longer silence. Then Hang Hsien said, “Commander, they broke into my father’s room and his life ended there. They violated his body and left him for beasts. They didn’t know people would come to bury him. It is not how he should have ended his days. So please understand that none of this will ever be easy for me.”
After a moment he added, looking past Daiyan at the bars, “No soldiers are with me, the guards outside have been dismissed to join the celebration, and both doors are open—this one and the one to the outside.”
And now Daiyan was startled. Men could do that to you (women, too) however much you thought you were prepared, however much you thought you knew the world.
“Why?” he asked.
Hang Hsien looked across the table at him. He was still a young man, Daiyan thought. His father had died blind and alone. Hsien said, “I had a thought when you stood here before the emperor.”
Daiyan waited.
“I believe you decided that day that it might be necessary for you to die.”
“Why would I do that?” He felt uneasy, exposed.
“Because you concluded, Ren Daiyan, that Kitai needed an example of a commander whose loyalty led him all the way to his death rather than resist the state.”
And this, too, he had never thought to hear spoken aloud, by anyone. He hadn’t even framed it in his mind (or heart) so clearly. It was very difficult, hearing it now, brought into the world with words.
“I would have to be a very arrogant man.”