North along the river road they went, the one he’d travelled all his life. He knew each inn along the way, the mulberry groves and silk farms. They saw a fox once, at the side of the road.
They encountered one band of outlaws, but a party as large as theirs, heavily armed, was far too intimidating and the bandits melted back into the forest. Tai took note of where they were. He’d send soldiers up this road later. The people living here would be menaced by these men. You could grieve for what might drive men to be outlaws, but you couldn’t indulge it.
On the fifth day they reached the junction with the imperial road. There was a village to the west. East of here was the place where he’d sat in a carriage decorated with kingfisher feathers and spoken with An Li, who had brought destruction upon Kitai, and was dead now, leaving ruin and war all around.
Beyond that point along the road was the posting inn where he’d met Jian. One of Tai’s cavalry from Iron Gate—his name had been Wujen Ning—had died there, defending Dynlal.
Wei Song had been wounded, defending him.
They didn’t have to go that far. They were where they needed to be. The full moon would rise tonight. He waited, among a company of soldiers and two Kanlin Warriors. They ate a soldiers’ meal by the side of the road. He read her letter again.
I have learned from my father that he approves of my marriage. I have also received leave from the elders of my sanctuary to withdraw from the Kanlin Warriors, and have completed the rituals required for that. I will be riding south to your father’s home, if that is acceptable. I have sat beside open windows through autumn and winter, and have come to understand the poems about that better than I ever did. At times I have been angry with you, for causing me to feel this way. At other times I desire only to see you, and have my dust mingled with yours when I die. It would please me greatly, husband-to-be, if you were to meet me by the bridge across your stream, where it meets the imperial road between Xinan and the west. I will be there when spring’s second full moon rises. Perhaps you will escort me home from Cho-fu-Sa?
The moon rose as he looked east along the road.
And with it, exactly at moonrise, she came, riding along the imperial way with a dozen or so companions and guards. It took him a moment to recognize her: she no longer wore Kanlin black. He’d never seen her in any other clothing. She wore no elegant bridal garb. She’d been travelling, and they had a distance yet to ride. Wei Song had on brown leather riding trousers and a light-green tunic with a short, dark-green overtunic, for there was still a chill to the air. Her hair was carefully pinned, he saw.
He dismounted and walked away from his men.
He saw her speak to her escort and she, too, dismounted and came towards him, so that they met each other, alone, on the arched bridge.
“Thank you for coming, my lord,” she said. She bowed.
He bowed as well. “My heart outraced the both of us,” he quoted. “The winter was long without you. I have brought you a Sardian horse.”
Song smiled. “I will like that.”
He said, “How did you know the old name for this bridge?”
“Cho-fu-Sa?” She smiled again. “I asked. The elders at Kanlin sanctuaries are very wise.”
“I know that,” he said.
She said, “It is pleasing to me to see you, husband-to-be.”
“Do you want me to show you how pleased I am?” he asked.
She actually flushed, then shook her head. “We are not yet wed, Shen Tai, and others are watching us. I wish to make a proper appearance before your mother.”
“And my sister,” he said. “She is waiting as well.”
Song’s eyes grew wide. “What? How is …?”
“We have a few days to ride. I will tell you that tale.”
She hesitated, and then she bit her lip. “I am acceptable to you, like this? I feel strange, not wearing black. As if I have lost … protection.”
There was a swirl of wind. The water swirled below. Tai looked at her in the twilight. The wide-set eyes and the wide mouth. She was small, and lethal. He knew how gracefully she moved, and he knew her courage.
He said, “I have a few days of travelling to answer that, as well. To make you understand how pleasing you are in my sight.”
“Truly?” she asked.
He nodded. “You make me wish to be always at your side.”
She came and stood next to him on the arched bridge—at his side, in fact. She said, “Will you show me my new horse and take me home?”
They rode together under the moon, south along the river from Cho-fu-Sa.
Sometimes the one life we are allowed is enough.
Tales have many strands, smaller, larger. An incidental figure in one story is living through the drama and passion of his or her own life and death.
In that time of extreme upheaval in Kitai, of violence engendered by warfare and famine, a young Kanlin Warrior was travelling back that same spring from far-off Sardia with a tale to proudly tell, and carrying a letter from a woman to a man.
He survived his return journey through the deserts but was killed for his weapons and horse and saddle in an ambush northwest of Chenyao, on his way down from Jade Gate Fortress.
His saddlebags were rifled through, anything of value seized and divided by the bandits. They fought over his swords, which were magnificent. They also fought over whether to try to sell or to kill and eat the horse. In the event, it was eaten.
The letter was discarded, tumbling in dust and wind, and disappearing.
It might indeed have been thought that the death of Roshan would end the rebellion. This would have been a reasonable hope, but not an accurate one.
His son, An Rong, appeared to enjoy the idea of being an emperor. He continued to assert the will of the Tenth Dynasty in the east and northeast, with incursions south.
He had inherited his father’s courage and appetites and matched him in savagery, but he had nowhere near the experience Roshan had in and around a court, nor did he know how to control his own soldiers and officers.
He couldn’t have had those skills at his age, coming to power as he did. But explanations only clarify, they do not offer a remedy. An Rong proved unable to achieve any discipline or coordination among the fragmenting rebel leadership.
This could have prepared the way for their defeat and a return of peace to Kitai, except that times of chaos often breed greater chaos, and An Li’s rebellion caused others to see opportunity in disruption.
A number of military governors, prefects, outlaw leaders, and certain peoples on the western and northern borders decided, independently of each other, that their own hour of glory had arrived—the moment to make more of themselves than had been possible in the decades of Kitan wealth and power under the Emperor Taizu.
Taizu was praying and mourning (it was said) in the southwest, beyond the Great River. His son was waging war in the north, summoning soldiers from border forts, negotiating for allies, and horses.
When the dragon is in the wild, wolves will emerge. When the wolves of war come out, hunger follows. The years of the rebellion—more accurately called the rebellions—led to starvation on a scale unmatched in the history of Kitai.
With all men, from beardless fourteen-year-olds to barely upright grandfathers, forcibly enlisted in one army or another across the empire there were no farmers left to sow or harvest millet, barley, corn, rice.
Disease was rampant. Almost no taxes on produce or land were able to be paid, however vicious enforcers became. Some regions, as warfare shifted back and forth across their land, found themselves facing taxation from two or even three different sets of overseers. And with armies needing to be fed—or they might rebel, themselves—what food could make its way to women and children left at home?
If there was a home left. Or children alive. In those years, children were sold for food, or sold as food. Hearts hardened, hearts broke.
One well-known lament, for the conscripted farmer-soldiers and their famili
es, was composed by a poet-mandarin who lived through those years. He was looking back at a black period, after he’d retired from court for the third and final time to one of his country estates.
He wasn’t judged to be among the very greatest Ninth Dynasty poets, but was acknowledged as skilled. He was known as a friend of Sima Zian, the Banished Immortal, and later, also, of the equally glorious Chan Du. He wrote:Courageous women try to manage a plough
But the rows of grain never come right.
In winter officials arrive in our villages
Fiercely demanding taxes be paid.
How under heaven can that be done
In a shattered land? Never have sons!
They will only grow up to die under distant skies.
In time, the rebellion ended. The truth, as historians learn and teach, is that most things end, eventually.
Still, the fact that this is so would not have found a placid acceptance in the burned-out, abandoned shells of farms and villages throughout Kitai in those years. The dead are not assuaged, or brought back, by a philosophic view of events.
The Emperor Shinzu retook Xinan, lost it briefly, then took it a second time and did not lose it. General Xu Bihai reoccupied Teng Pass against incursions from the east. The Ta-Ming Palace was restored, if not to what it had been before.
The emperor’s father died and was buried in his tomb near Ma-wai. The Precious Consort, whose name had been Jian, was already there, awaiting him. So was his empress.
People began to return to the capital and to their villages and farms, or to new ones, for with so very many dead there was much land unclaimed.
Trade slowly resumed, although not along the Silk Roads. They were too dangerous now, with the garrisons beyond Jade Gate abandoned.
As a result, no letters came from the west, from places such as Sardia. No dancers or singers came.
No lychee fruits were brought up from the far south, either, carried early in the season by military couriers on imperial roads. Not in those years.
An Rong himself was murdered, perhaps predictably, by two of his generals. These two divided the northeast between themselves, like warlords of old, abandoning any imperial ambitions. The Tenth Dynasty ended, faded away, never was.
The number ten became regarded as bad luck in Kitai for a long time afterwards, among generations that had no idea why this was so.
One of the two rebel generals accepted an offer of amnesty from the Emperor Shinzu in Xinan and turned on the other, joining with imperial armies in a triumphant battle below the Long Wall not far from Stone Drum Mountain. In this battle, two hundred cavalry, four duis, mounted on Sardian horses, played a devastating role, sweeping across the battlefield from left flank to right and back, with a speed and power other riders could only dream about.
Three men, two of them extremely tall, the third with only one hand, watched that fight from the northern edge of the summit of Stone Drum Mountain.
They were expressionless for the most part, except when one or the other would raise an arm and point to the Sardians racing along the lines, a glory amid carnage. When the three old men saw this, they would smile. Sometimes they’d laugh softly, in wonder.
“I would like one of those,” said the man with one hand.
“You don’t even ride any more,” said the tallest one.
“I’d look at it. I’d watch it run. It would bring me joy.”
“Why would he give you a Sardian horse?” said the other tall one.
The one with a single hand grinned at him. “He’s married my daughter, hasn’t he?”
“So I understand. A clever girl. Not dutiful enough, in my view. She’s better off having left us.”
“Perhaps. And he might give me a horse, don’t you think?”
“You could ask. It would be difficult for him to say no.”
The smaller man looked at one and then the other of his companions. He shook his head regretfully. “Too hard to say no. That’s why I can’t ask.” He looked down again at the battlefield. “This is over,” he said. “It was over before it began.”
“You think peace will follow now?”
“Up here perhaps. Not everywhere. We may not live to see peace in Kitai.”
“You cannot know that,” admonished the tallest one.
“I am pleased, at the least,” said the third, “that I lived long enough to have an answer about the wolf. It was honourable of him to send us word. Unexpected.”
“You thought he’d die himself when the wolf died?”
“I did. And now he is sending messages to us. It shows we can be wrong. The need for humility.”
The small one looked up at him and laughed. “It shows you can be wrong,” he said.
The others laughed as well. It is entirely possible, the teachings of the Kanlins suggest, to laugh while the heart is breaking for mankind.
They turned and walked away from the view of the battlefield.
THE REBEL GENERAL who’d accepted the offer of amnesty from Xinan might have expected treachery, might even have been resigned to it, but with the empire so desperately spent it was decided by the new advisers of the new emperor that the offered amnesty should be honoured. The general and his soldiers were allowed to live, and resume their posts defending Kitai.
Soldiers were urgently needed on the Long Wall and in the west and south, before all borders collapsed inwards under waves of barbarian incursions.
Weariness, sometimes more than anything else, can bring an end to war.
It was said to be the case that the emperor’s favourite wife, regarded by some later historians as dangerously subtle and too influential, played a role in encouraging him to keep that agreement—with a view to securing Kitai’s boundaries.
The first treaty negotiated and signed was with the Tagurans.
The second was with the Bogü. Their new kaghan, Hurok’s successor, was a man his people called the Wolf. It wasn’t clear why, then or later, but how would civilized people understand the names, let alone the rituals, of barbarians?
There were stories told that the same imperial princess, who was also Shinzu’s second wife, understood more than she ought to have about this matter of the Bogü, but the details of this—the documents so vital to a historian—were lost.
Some even said this had been deliberate, but in truth the disruptions of those years, the burnings of cities and market towns, movements of people and armies, emergence of bandits, warlords, disease, and death, were so very great, it was hardly necessary to imagine or assume a purpose on anyone’s part if records disappeared.
And it is always difficult, even with the best will in the world, to look back a long way and see anything resembling the truth.
Seasons tumble and pass, so do human lives and ruling dynasties. Men and women live and are remembered—or falsely remembered—for so many different reasons that the recording of these would take seasons of its own.
Every single tale carries within it many others, noted in passing, hinted at, entirely overlooked. Every life has moments when it branches, importantly (even if only for one person), and every one of those branches will have offered a different story.
Even mountains alter given enough time, why should not empires? How should poets and their words not become dust? Does not the true wonder emerge when something actually survives?
At Kuala Nor the seasons turned with sun and stars, and the moon lit green grass or made silver the snow and a frozen lake. For a number of years following the events recounted here (however incompletely, as with all such tellings) two men met there each spring, sharing a cabin by the lake, and labouring together to lay to rest the dead.
Birds cried in the mornings, wheeling above the water, the ghosts cried at night. Sometimes a voice fell silent. Both men knew why that was.
Then there came a spring when only one of the two arrived by the shores of the lake. This one worked alone that season, and the next spring, and then the next, but the following springtime no one ca
me to Kuala Nor.
The ghosts remained. They cried at night under a cold moon or stars, winter, spring, summer, fall.
Time passed, in sweeping arcs of years.
And, finally, because not even the dead can grieve forever, forgotten, there came a moonlit night when there was no lost spirit crying at Kuala Nor, and there was no one by the lake to hear the last one’s final cry. It drifted into that night, within the ring of mountains, above the lake, rising there, and gone.
… peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war—until the end of time …
—ROBERT LOWELL
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I find writing these acknowledgements both an opportunity and a challenge. This is true for every book, but perhaps even more so this time, since I’ve been living with Under Heaven for so many years.
There are individuals who have helped in many different ways, and a number of books and essays played roles in shaping this variation upon themes of the Tang. Too many names listed becomes cumbersome and (I fear) risks seeming over-elaborate or pretentious. Leaving people out feels worse.
I’m going to begin where many of these notes end: this is a work of fiction spun out of and through history. No one named here bears the remotest responsibility for what the author has done with the time, the place, and his story. Other people have sparked my thinking and my imagination, however, and my gratitude is considerable.
On brightweavings.com I have posted essays and speeches that offer (I hope) some clarity as to why I use the prism of the fantastic to treat the matter of history. Those interested will find some answers at that site.
My gateway to Tang China was by way of the master poets of the dynasty: Du Fu, Li Bai (the “Banished Immortal”), Wang Wei, Bai Juyi, and so many others. I read their works (and biographies) in English in many versions and the first acknowledgement I want to record here is to the poets and their translators. I am indebted to, among others: David Hawkes, Burton Watson, Arthur Waley, David Young, Red Pine, and Arthur Cooper. There are dozens of renderings of Tang poetry that I have read and profited from, but these names need to be cited.