The first Kanlin smiled. He seemed amused. “It had been arranged,” he said. “It is not hard to watch for riders from places along the Wall.”
Well, fuck your by-the-hour mother, Tazek wanted to say. “You learn anything about the garrison soldiers? The ones who came through?”
“Seventh and Eighth Armies,” the Kanlin said, promptly. “They are all moving south. Do you have enough people to deal with this stretch of the Wall?”
“Course I do!” snapped Tazek. As if he was going to admit anything to a black-robe.
“Good,” the man said equably. “Be generous enough to let our horses through? And please accept, for you and your soldiers, some rice wine we have brought as a humble offering to those who defend us here. It might be better than what you have.”
Might be better? It couldn’t help but be better, because the accursed soldiers of the Seventh, the ones posted here before, the ones who’d gone away south, had taken all the wine and most of the food stores with them.
He had sent word about the stores as soon as they’d arrived. He was expecting provisions from the west, as soon as tomorrow, with luck. On the other hand, the sun was going down and a dry night stretched ahead.
He nodded to the three in the black robes, and then to the soldier beside him. The man barked the orders.
The gate bars were pulled back. The heavy gates swung inward, slowly. The Bogü father and son waited, then rode through with their horses. Three of the horses were, Tazek saw, smaller ones.
He still didn’t know how the Kanlin had gotten a message, a request for horses, through the Wall to Bogü exiles. That part didn’t make sense. He was trying to decide if it mattered.
He decided it didn’t. Not his problem.
He looked down and saw that the three Kanlins had dismounted and were shifting flasks from their pack horse into the extremely eager hands of his own soldiers.
“Hold off opening those till I get down!” he shouted.
He’d need to count and estimate, figure out how to do this. But rice wine meant that at least one good thing had happened today. Pretty much the only good thing.
He was turning to go down the steps when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a grey shape streak through the gate.
“The fuck was that?” he roared.
“A wolf, I think,” the Kanlin leader said, looking up.
“It just went through my Wall!” Tazek shouted.
The Kanlin shrugged. “They do go back and forth. We’ll shoot it for you if we see it. Is there a bounty this spring?”
There sometimes was, it depended how many there were. Tazek had just arrived here. He was short of men, of food, of water and wine, and he had no idea what had happened with the Seventh and Eighth.
“No,” he said sourly. There might well have been a bounty for all he knew, but he felt like saying no to someone. “Shoot it anyhow.”
The Kanlin nodded, and turned. The five of them rode off, the extra horses trailing after the big, bare-chested Bogü.
Tazek watched them for a while, discontented. Something was still bothering him, a thought teasing at the edge of his mind. Then he remembered the wine and went quickly down the stairs. He never did chase down that stray thought.
When a party of Bogü riders appeared the next morning he ordered his men to begin shooting as soon as the riders were in arrow range. He was undermanned; he did not want the nomads to get close enough to realize it.
They were chasing the horse-thieves, obviously. Well, he’d made his decision to let those two pass through. An officer in the Kitan army didn’t show uncertainty or doubt to barbarians, or his men. You didn’t get promoted that way, and your soldiers would lose faith in you. They were allowed to hate you, they just couldn’t worry about your competence.
He watched the Bogü withdraw out of range and linger there, arguing amongst each other. They had wolfhounds with them, he saw. He had no idea what the quarrel was about. He didn’t care. He watched—with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had done his assigned task well—until they turned and rode off.
Two swans appeared, flying towards the Wall. Tazek let his men amuse themselves shooting at them. They brought one down.
The other wheeled away, higher, and went back towards the steppes.
She is in Kitai again. The Kanlins, silent, courteous, bring them to an inn as darkness falls. Li-Mei sees torchlight and lanterns, hears music. She is shown by bowing servants to a room with walls and a bed, and she bathes in a brazier-heated bath chamber, with hot water, and servants to attend her, and she weeps as they wash her hair.
Her hands are shaking. The girls make pitying sounds when they see her nails and fingers, and one of them spends a long time with brush and file, doing the best she can with them. Li-Mei weeps through this, as well.
They tease her gently, trying to make her smile. They tell her they cannot paint her eyebrows or cheeks if she will insist on crying. She shakes her head, and they leave her face unpainted for this first night. She hears the wind outside, and the knowledge that it will be outside tonight, that she will sleep sheltered, sinks into her like a promise, like warm wine.
She goes downstairs, unadorned, but in clean robes and sandals, and sits with the Kanlin Warriors in the dining pavilion. They speak politely and gracefully. One addresses her by name.
They know who she is.
Fear, for a swift, shattering moment, until she understands that if they were going to expose her, reveal her identity, they’d have done so at the Wall.
“You are taking me to Stone Drum Mountain?” she asks.
The leader, an older man, nods his head. “Both of you,” he says. “My lady.”
“How do you know who I am?”
The briefest hesitation. “We were told,” he says.
“Do you know who is with me? Who he is?”
A nod. “They wish to see him at Stone Drum, as well.”
Li-Mei realizes that there is wine in front of her. She sips, carefully. It has been a long time since she drank rice wine.
“Why?” she asks.
The Kanlins exchange glances. The woman is very pretty, Li-Mei thinks. She has silver hairpins, for the evening.
The older man says, “You will be told when you are there. Questions will be answered. But you do know your brother was among us, once.”
So it is Tai, she thinks. It is Tai again, even so far away. One brother had exiled her, another is drawing her home.
“He told us that when he left Stone Drum, some of you … some were not …”
“Some were not happy, no,” the Kanlin leader says. He smiles.
“Not everyone who comes to the Mountain becomes a Warrior,” the woman says. She sips her wine. Fills three cups. She gestures with the flask to Li-Mei, who shakes her head.
“Where is Meshag?” she asks.
He’s outside, of course. Wooden walls, a wooden roof, a room full of people, Kitan people. He’ll be out in the night he knows, although the land is no longer known. A thought occurs to her.
“You mustn’t kill the wolf,” she says.
“We know that,” says the Kanlin leader. “The wolves are why they want to speak with him at the Mountain.”
She looks at him, a thought forms. “It was a wolf that brought you word of our coming, wasn’t it? You weren’t looking out from the Wall for us.”
It sounds impossible, even as she says it. But he nods his head. “You are very like your brother,” he says.
She begins to cry again. “You knew him?”
“I taught Shen Tai for a time. I sorrowed when he left us. I asked to be one of those sent to bring his sister.”
She is not a woman who cries. They wait, patient, even amused. She wipes her eyes with her sleeve.
She says, looking at the leader, “What has happened? The armies have all left the garrisons, the Wall. Why?”
Again they look at each other. The older one says, “I think it is better if you are told this at the Mountain.”
>
“There is something to tell?”
He nods his head.
She asks no more questions. She eats with them, and there is a singer (not very skilled, but they are in a remote place), and then Li-Mei goes to her chamber and sleeps in a bed and dreams of wolves.
There are three more nights’ travelling. Meshag stays with them. She wasn’t certain he would do that. He keeps to himself, sleeps outside each night. She never sees the wolf, though she’d watched him burst through the gate at the Wall.
On the second day she sees Stone Drum Mountain for the first time, rising from tableland, magnificently alone, green slopes like jade in the sun, one of the Five Holy Mountains.
On the fourth afternoon they reach it. The Kanlins lead them up a slow switchback path along the forested slope, until finally they come to the flat summit that gives the Mountain its name, where the sanctuary is, and she is welcomed there with courtesy, because of her brother. And that evening she is told, as promised, what has happened—by the Wall, and elsewhere—and what it means for the empire and the times into which they have been born.
At least three historians of a later dynasty, working within the Hall of Records (after it had been rebuilt), expressed the view that tens of millions of people might have been spared famine, war, displacement, and death if someone had stopped the kingfisher-feathered carriage of Governor An Li as it sped northeast that spring, returning to his own territories. And his armies.
The soldiers of the command posts that carriage passed had no reason to do so, the historians agreed. They were not attaching censure to the officers and men who watched it go by, rolling heavily through mild days and nights along the roads of Kitai.
They were only observing a truth, the historians wrote.
Others, from the same period and later, dissented. These writers suggested that truth when examining events and records of the past was always precarious, uncertain. No man could say for certain how the river of time would have flowed, cresting or receding, bringing floods or gently watering fields, had a single event, or even many, unfolded differently.
It is in the nature of existence under heaven, the dissenting scholars wrote, that we cannot know these things with clarity. We cannot live twice, or watch as moments of the past unfurl, like a courtesan’s silk fan. The river flows, the dancers finish their dance. If the music starts again it is starting anew, not repeating itself.
Having noted this, having made the countervailing argument as carefully (and in one case as lyrically) as possible, these historians, without exception, appeared to join in accepting the number of forty million lives as a reasonable figure for the consequences of the An Li Rebellion.
CHAPTER XXI
An Tsao, second son of General An Li, resided in the Ta-Ming Palace and had done so for three years, enjoying the many pleasures of courtly life and the honours appropriate to a son of a distinguished father.
He had formal rank as a commander of one thousand in the Flying Dragon Palace Guard, but—along with most other officers in a largely symbolic army—his days were spent hunting in the Deer Park or farther afield, playing polo, or riding abroad in pursuit of diversion, with sons of aristocrats, mandarins, and senior officers of the army.
His nights were given over to pleasure, in various houses of the North District, or among sleek, lithe women invited to city mansions or the palace itself to entertain the wealthy and empowered with their music and their bodies.
On the same day word reached the Ta-Ming of his father’s rebellion in the northeast, Roshan proclaiming himself emperor of Kitai and founder of the Tenth Dynasty, An Tsao was decapitated in a garden of the palace.
The engraved sword that did this was wielded by the first minister, Wen Zhou, himself. A big man, skilled with a blade, somewhat impulsive.
This action was widely considered among senior mandarins to have been a mistake, even at the time. The son had been useful alive, as a hostage or an earnest of good faith in negotiating peace. Dead, he was worthless, and possibly worse than that, if the father proved vengeful.
Wen Zhou was also, of course, the proclaimed reason for General An’s treacherous rising: the need to free the empire from the reckless, incompetent stewardship of a corrupt first minister, whose presence in power proved that the aged emperor had lost his way—and the mandate of heaven.
That was the declaration sent in a letter to the Ta-Ming carried by a Kanlin courier. The Kanlins were important in times of conflict: they could be hired and trusted by either side.
Given this stated cause of revolt, the fact that Wen Zhou had killed the son himself was seen by many, with wringing of hands and shaking of heads, as worrisome.
It was noted by some, however, that judgments and reactions among the civil service in those first days of the rebellion could not be called calm or poised—or sound.
There was, in truth, panic in the palace and abroad.
An attempt to suppress news of the rebellion proved predictably unsuccessful. Xinan was not a place where tidings could readily be contained. And once word spread through the capital, it began running everywhere.
Someone said that a red fireball had been seen in the northern sky the week before. That this had been reported to the astrologers in the School of Unrestricted Night.
True or not, there was an army, a large one, in the north, and it appeared to be moving down towards the second city of the empire, the obvious initial target. Yenling was east of Xinan, nearer the Great Canal, on the far side of Teng Pass. Roshan’s advance put nearly a million of the emperor’s loving subjects in extreme peril behind those city walls.
They were likely to surrender.
A number of cities north of the Golden River had already done so, it appeared. Word came that Roshan was treating prefecture officials with courtesy, that many were crossing over to him. It was difficult to judge the truth of this.
Distances were great, communication became uncertain.
There were obvious truths: the armies to resist Roshan were south and west and northwest and could not possibly reach Yenling in time to defend it. The best they could do—and it became the immediate military plan—was to defend Teng Pass.
In making these decisions, it was agreed, First Minister Wen showed decisiveness and confidence. Amid military leaders and mandarins in various stages of terror and uncertainty, he expressed the steady view than An Li would falter soon, that turmoil behind him would stop his progress.
Kitai, he declared, would never accept or support an illiterate barbarian as emperor. As soon as people started to think this through events would take their course.
The Sixth Army was pulled back from the river’s bend and stations along the Wall and sent east to disrupt Roshan’s supply lines, put the northeast in play, force some of his rebel soldiers back that way.
The Second and Third and Fifth Armies were commanded to proceed as fast as they could to seize and hold Teng Pass. Five thousand of the Flying Dragon Palace Guard were sent there immediately from Xinan. These were hardly distinguished soldiers, but the Pass was narrow, famously so, and could be held for a time by even a small number if they had any courage at all and adequate commanders. It had happened this way many times in the history of Kitai.
Yenling was sent instructions to hold out as best it could. Delaying the rebels mattered.
The First and Fourth Armies were kept where they were, along the northwestern and western borders. Calamity would result if Kitai lost control of the Silk Road fortresses and the corridors there, and it was considered unwise to withdraw from the Tagurans at any time.
From the south would come three other armies, but messengers had a long way to go just to summon them and those forces would be some time in coming.
Wen Zhou predicted a short campaign.
Others were less certain. Roshan had command of the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth, and had merged them. These soldiers were the most battle-hardened in Kitai, and since General An had not been shifted from district to distric
t—once the rule for military governors—their loyalty to him was absolute. If the Golden River was crossed and Yenling besieged, they would have made their own commitment.
Roshan had also been the Imperial Stable-master for years, and had assigned to his own cavalry the best of the horses obtained from the Bogü at the river’s loop each spring.
In hindsight, not the wisest power to have given him, either.
Beyond all of this (as if this were not enough to make a civil servant panic), appeasing the northeast had always been a delicate matter for this dynasty. That region was the home of powerful families with intermarrying lineages that they claimed (truthfully or not) went back a thousand years, to the First Dynasty itself. There were many in the northeast who saw the Ninth Dynasty as ill-bred interlopers. Xinan’s measures to reform taxation and land ownership to the benefit of the farmers had not been well received in the northeast. The aristocracy there called themselves the Five Families, and their response to rebellion could not be known with certainty.
It was entirely possible that they might see a gross, illiterate general in precarious health as an improvement for their own purposes, because he would surely be transitory, and easily manipulated. Once change was set in motion, clever men could very well shape where it went.
And, as it happened, both Chin Hai, the first minister who had instituted the loathed reforms, and Wen Zhou, now, were from southern families, and therefore rivals.
It could matter, something like that.
Another element might also be important, someone pointed out in the Ta-Ming (it was the imperial heir who said this). Given the size of the empire, the vast distances that had to be dealt with for communication, and the always critical importance of cavalry, two hundred and fifty Sardian horses were suddenly even more important than before.
The second son of General Shen Gao was summoned to the palace.
The message from the court came at the end of two weeks of intense frustration, even before news of rebellion began to run through Xinan.
Tai had heard stories of how slowly the wheels of the Ta-Ming turned in matters such as audiences granted and decisions made within the multitude of layers in the civil service. There were one hundred and forty thousand mandarins in Xinan, through the nine degrees. Speed was not a strength.