Jian was already named by then in poems, and had been painted, as one of the Four Great Beauties of Kitai, going back to the First Dynasty and the Empress Jade Pearl, among the immortals now.
To Xu Bihai tonight, Tai had simply said that he would seek counsel from as many people as he could before deciding what he would do, and expressed a willingness to come back west and meet the governor here, drink and dine again—perhaps in the presence of his charming daughters.
One of them had giggled at that from by the door, not the one in green. That one had simply looked across at Tai, her expression suddenly difficult to read.
Thoughts of the two of them drew his mind back to the house in front of him. He wasn’t in the best condition, after so much saffron wine, to deal with matters of court and rival governors. Such issues could surely be deferred for a night? His first in a city after two years?
The doors of the house were wide open. He saw lights within. The attendant woman smiled from under two red lanterns. Of course she’d smile a welcome. It was her assignment here, and she would have just been informed that anything—anything—the young man wanted was to be offered to him, and charged to the governor.
The young man wanted more wine to start with, he decided. The sage in the cup, the poets said. The rest could follow as the spring night deepened and the late moon rose.
He heard a voice inside, speaking poetry.
He went up the wide, handsome steps, between lanterns, and entered the White Phoenix, giving a coin to the woman at the door.
CHAPTER VIII
The ridiculous Kitan adoration—and that feels like the right word!—of poetry and of declaiming, drunken poets is an endless mystery to Amber, and deeply annoying. Amber is from Sardia, has honey-gold hair, therefore her name. Not particularly inventive, but courtesan names never are.
She is beautiful (green eyes!). She’s long-legged, has perfect skin, is very young. Beauty has been enough to ensure her a stream of clients since arriving here, even infatuated ones, though she can’t sing or play one of their instruments, and poetry puts her to sleep.
Not every silk merchant or off-duty officer in need of a woman for a wintry afternoon or summer night wants the girl to discourse upon philosophy, or pluck “The Bandits of the Gorge” on a pipa before he takes her upstairs and throws her across a bed.
Amber makes a point of giggling when they do this to her. Men tend to be excited by that. She may not be educated, but she understands certain things.
In bed (or on the floor beside it) she knows exactly what she’s doing, has a talent, especially if the man is young and not offensive in manner or appearance.
A few of the women who have been here longer are constantly urging her to listen more carefully to the poetry, even memorize some of it, to practise harder at her music. They are always pointing out that the men with real money, the ones who leave additional sums for the girl (they are allowed to keep half of this), will usually be those with some worldliness. That’s just the way of things here in Kitai, even in a western market town.
Bright Amber (she likes the name they gave her, as it happens) doesn’t entirely disagree, but she also knows that a merchant just off the long road will be generous to a pretty girl with smooth legs and an easy laugh and green eyes, and that many of those men will be indifferent to (or bored by, as she is) obsessive distinctions between eight-line regulated verse and any other of the hopelessly contrived forms poetry takes here.
Poetry! In the name of the bull-god! You even need to be a poet to rise in the civil service here. Can there be a clearer sign of a culture that has lost its way? Amber doesn’t think there is, when she thinks about it at all, though she does concede the point Jade Flower makes: if Kitai has lost its way, why does it control so much of the world?
Maybe it would be different in a pleasure house in Xinan or Yenling, where the aristocrats are. Maybe she’d accept that it was worth her while to work on other skills. But Amber is happy in Chenyao, has thoughts already about one or two merchants and one extremely handsome officer of the Second District cavalry.
She’s perfectly content to spend a year or two in the White Phoenix and then cajole or induce the right man to buy her as his concubine. It is as good a life plan as any for a girl.
She is from a hard world, after all. Orphaned in a plague summer, sold at twelve by her oldest sister to a brothel-keeper, noticed there by a merchant heading east, bought by him to sell. Her good fortune, that, no doubting it. She is distinctive in Kitai, and the White Phoenix is the best house in Chenyao. She has food and a bed of her own, firesides in winter, two days a month to herself, and half the festival holidays. Life has not dealt badly with her.
Chenyao is as far into Kitai as Amber feels any desire to go. They recite more poetry in pleasure houses east, among other things. She’s been told that often enough. You need to pretend to listen and admire and understand it, strum accompaniment on your pipa, or else the men in fine silks of their own will laugh the wrong way, or ignore you entirely. A waste of a pretty girl, as far as Amber is concerned.
Let the older women, who need to spend time each day painting away lines, struggle to find ways to keep the attention of clients: clapping and smiling at drunken, mumbled verses, placing a pipa strategically in front of fallen breasts. Amber tends to find that standing a certain way, then just looking across the room at a man is enough.
At this particular moment of an almost-summer night, however, in the large, subtly lit reception room of the White Phoenix, crowded with a variety of men and a number of perfumed women, circumstances are otherwise.
No one is looking at Amber, though she’s positioned herself by her favourite lamp near an archway and knows her hair is beautiful tonight.
Even one of her regular clients, the cavalry officer she has thoughts about, is among those crowding the central platform. On that platform, a soft-bellied, badly groomed, considerably intoxicated man well past his middle years is reciting a verse about—as best Amber can tell—a wife and her absent husband.
It is, she feels strongly, insulting.
The poet is proceeding slowly—in part, because he stops to take a drink every few lines. This poem is not (alas!) one of their brief, formal things. This one, he declared (his voice is not deep but it carries), is a ballad, whatever that is.
Well, Amber knows one cursed thing it is: long.
She makes herself smile with that. No one notices. One of the other girls, looking as if she was on the cresting edge of extreme desire, had breathed the word immortal when the poet came in some little time ago.
The Banished Immortal.
It is laughable. Amber wants to laugh but knows she’d be in trouble if she did. Where she comes from, an immortal, exiled from heaven for whatever reason, would have to look a great deal more as if he knew how to use the sword that lies beside the poet now, and would surely have the dignity to not be so obviously unable to stop himself from drinking cup after cup of their best grape wine.
It hasn’t happened yet, but she expects his voice to start slurring soon—if he even manages to remain upright. This one isn’t going to be much use to himself or the girl he takes upstairs, Amber thinks. Sometimes, if the man is too drunk to use you properly he leaves a larger sum, to have a girl keep quiet about his embarrassment.
She doesn’t think this one, this immortal in his dusty, wine-stained clothing, is likely to care.
He is still reciting to an unnaturally silent room, and still drinking another cup every few lines. He’s impressive in that, at least, Amber concedes. Two of the girls, hovering by the platform, visibly excited, hasten to refill his cup, taking turns. Amber wonders if their nipples are hard. She is tempted to have a coughing fit or cause a lamp to topple, so annoyed is she by this spectacle. No one is looking at her, no one is talking or even whispering to anyone else, no one is taking any of the women to another room, and the owner doesn’t look as if she cares in the least.
Incredulously, Amber realizes that
some of the girls—and many of the men—have tears in their eyes. Tears! Bright Amber is from a land famed for horses and women, and for men who fight bare-chested with knives, priding themselves on their scars.
She is seventeen and a half years old, has been in the White Phoenix for a little more than two years now. But honestly, she thinks, she could live among these Kitan till she was dried up like an end-of-autumn grape, bent like an ox-cart wheel, and she’d never understand them, or how the Celestial Empire dominates the world they know.
She is thinking this, outraged and aggrieved, when another man steps quietly into the room, following Lotus through the open doorway. Lotus just watches at the entrance now, greets arrivals, too old to ever be asked to go to a room with a man any more. Her hands are twisted, painful in rain and wind, she can’t even play the pipa properly. Apparently she was the best of all of them, once.
Amber sees Lotus bow to this man, as low as she can, twice, as she backs out to the portico. That—of course—is the usual sign to all of them: this one is important, has money.
No one but Amber is even looking.
She runs a quick hand to her bright hair, checking the pins that hold it in place. Prepares her smile for when his gaze finds her beside the lamp.
It doesn’t. He stops where he stands. His mouth opens. He stares—it is too upsetting—at the poet on his raised platform. The new arrival’s expression is awed, disbelieving.
He has money to spend, Lotus has signalled it. He’s young, presentable. You might even call this one handsome (unusual, deep-set eyes). Amber wants him to look at her with that dazzled expression, as she unbinds her golden hair and slowly, teasingly, discards silken clothing in a private room and kneels gracefully to attend to him.
She swears, not quietly enough. Two of the older women turn back to glare at her. Amber offers the response that makes the most sense at this particular moment: she sticks out her tongue.
In the teachings of the Path, beliefs to which he’d tried, erratically, to adhere, Tai knew that coincidence, the fortuitous encounter, was to be accepted with composure.
If grim and unpleasant, such moments were properly understood as tasks, lessons one was meant to master. If benevolent, they were gifts to be humbly received.
Sometimes there was no obvious tilt towards one side or other of that balancing, there was simply a moment, an event, that startled in its unexpectedness.
Regarding these, there was a dispute among teachers. Some said the wayfarer’s task was to interpret the meaning of the moment as best he could, and respond appropriately. Others taught that there were moments in a life that did not admit of understanding until long after. At such times, they counselled, one was merely to experience, and strive towards comprehension in the fullness of time.
That Sima Zian, the Banished Immortal, most beloved poet of the empire, should be in the reception hall of the White Phoenix Pleasure House of Chenyao, declaiming one of the poems Tai loved most in the world, felt—immediately—to be one of those moments that could not possibly be grasped.
There was no point even trying. Be in the room, Tai told himself. Be aware of all of this. Gather it.
Before anything else, however, it made sense to close his mouth, which was hanging open like that of a child watching fireworks at the Chrysanthemum Festival.
He took a few cautious steps forward. The women, their silks in many colours, like butterflies or flowers, were exquisitely trained in an expensive house. Perfumed deliciously, they made way for him, lingering close in subtle and less-subtle ways to read how he responded, what he liked.
Girls like these, and the wine they offered, and their flute and pipa music, had been what he’d dreamed about for two years. They almost didn’t matter now.
He moved forward a little more, among other men around the platform. Merchants and soldiers, provincial bureaucrats in their belted gowns. No students, not in a border town, or a house this expensive.
Up close, there was resistance as Tai tried to get nearer to the poet. He saw a willowy girl bend, her hair swept up stylishly, the curves of her perfect breasts showing, to pour for Sima Zian as he paused between verses. He waited for her, smiled, drank off the entire cup. He hesitated, resumed: I remember my careless maiden time.
I did not understand the world and its ways
Until I wed you, a man of the Great River.
Now on river sands I wait for the wind to change.
And when, as summer begins, the winds are fair
I think: husband, you will soon be here.
Autumn comes, the west wind whistles,
I know you cannot come to me.
Sima Zian paused again, lifted his cup. It was refilled from his other side, another girl, lissome as the first, her dark hair pleasingly disordered, brushing the great man’s shoulder.
He smiled at her and Tai saw—for the first time, so near—the poet’s notorious tiger-eyes, wide-set.
Dangerous, you might even say. Eyes that would know you, and the world. On the other hand …
The poet hiccupped, and then giggled. “Oh, dear,” he said. “I have friends in Xinan … I do still have friends in Xinan … who would be disappointed in me, that this small sampling of a good wine should cause me to lose the thread of my own verse. Will someone …?”
He looked around, optimistically.
Tai heard himself, before he was aware that he was speaking:But whether you go or come, it is always sorrow,
For when we meet you will be off again too soon.
You’ll make the river ford in how many days?
I dreamt last night I crossed the waves in wind
And joined you and we rode on grey horses
East to where the orchids are on the Immortals’ Isle.
We saw a drake and duck together in green reeds
As if they were painted on a silk-thread screen.
The crowd by the raised platform parted, turning to look at him. Tai moved forward, aware that he wasn’t entirely sober himself, light-headed with what he was doing, overwhelmed to be among this many people after so long alone, all these women. His gaze was met—and held—by tiger-eyes.
He stopped. Had reached the last verse.
Sima Zian smiled. No danger in it at all, only good-natured, inebriated delight.
“That was it!” he exclaimed. “Thank you, friend. And have you left the ending for me?”
Tai bowed, hand in fist; he didn’t trust himself to speak. He had loved the words of this man, and the legend of him, since he’d left childhood behind.
When he straightened, a tall girl in crimson silk attached herself to his side, hip against his, a long arm lightly around his waist, head tilted to rest on his shoulder. He breathed the scent of her, felt a surge of desire, over and above and through all else.
Sima Zian, the Banished Immortal, who had never held a single post in the imperial civil service, never even sat an examination, who had been banished from Xinan (as well as heaven!) three times that Tai knew about, who was reliably reported to have not been entirely sober in decades, who could nonetheless extemporize a poem, write it on the spot with immaculate brushwork, and break your heart, said softly, into the hush:Take pity upon me now. When I was fifteen years old
My face and body were ripe as a summer peach.
Why did I wed a merchant who travels the Great River?
Water is my grief … my grief is the wind.
There was a further silence. Surely there would always be, Tai thought, a silence after this, everywhere. The hand around his waist lingered. There was musk in her perfume, and ambergris. Both were expensive. This really was, he thought, the best house in Chenyao, if the girls wore such scents.
“Thank you, master,” he said.
Someone had to say it, he thought. Sima Zian didn’t turn his head at first. He lifted a hand, holding the empty cup. The first girl moved beside him and refilled it. The poet drank it off, held it up again. The second woman, refusing to yield her rights, came fo
rward this time.
The poet’s eyes, pale and brilliant in the lamplight, finally turned to look at Tai.
“Join me,” Sima Zian said, “if your mourning time is over. It must be, since you are among us. We can drink together.”
Tai opened his mouth, realized he had no idea what to say.
The girl beside him pressed her head briefly against his shoulder, a reminder of her presence, a promise, and withdrew. Tai stepped up to the platform, bowed, and slipped off his own sheathed sword, laying it near the poet’s. He sat opposite the other man, cross-legged. A cup was handed to him, wine was poured. He lifted the cup in salute. He decided to be careful how much he drank.
He had no idea how Sima Zian knew who he was.
The poet, seen close, was a bigger man than Tai had imagined. His long hair was mostly grey, tied at the back with a nondescript blue strip of cloth, no hairpins. His robe was stained. His face was remarkably unlined, round, flushed, and benign. The bright eyes were unsettling, however. His hands were steady, large, the fingers long.
He said, “I knew of your father, of course. His death was a loss. It has always seemed to me that the best military leaders are gentle in their souls, aware of what war means. I thought this might be true of Shen Gao.”
He lifted his cup and drank. Tai did the same, cautiously.
Tai cleared his throat. It was necessary to speak, or be thought simple-minded. The two girls had withdrawn down the two steps, leaving them a space of privacy on this platform. The evening activities of the chamber had resumed. He heard pipa music begin, then a flute, and laughter; saw men and women retiring through curtained doorways.
Tai wished he were sober. He said, “Our family is honoured, of course, that you even know who he was. Or … who I am.”
The pale eyes were briefly sharp, then amusement returned. “You have been long away,” said the poet. “I know your brother, as well. Shen Liu is too close to the first minister not to be known … and judged.”