River of Stars

Shan loves her father without reserve or condition, though also without illusions as to his limitations.

She loves the world, too, this morning, equally without illus-ions—or so she proudly believes. She is very young.

She is wearing a crimson peony in her hair, carrying a yellow one, as they walk towards the home of the man her father has come to visit. They do have an invitation: Lin Kuo would not be going there without one.

Two and a half years have passed, on this bright morning, since the boy, Ren Daiyan, also young but without a similar belief that he understood the world (yet), walked into a forest east of his village, carrying a bow and bloodied arrows, and two swords from a man he’d killed.

THERE WAS NO FIGURE more respected in Kitai than Xi Wengao of Yenling. Craggy-faced and white-haired now (what was left of his hair), he knew his stature, was not above taking pride in it. You lived your life as honourably as you could, were rewarded, in some instances, with recognition in your lifetime.

He was a civil servant and a scholar, the official historian of the dynasty, a poet. He had even written songs when younger, had made the ci form almost acceptable among serious writers. (Others of his circle had followed, pushing the form even further.) He was renowned for his calligraphy, for advancing the careers of disciples at court. He was a celebrated lover of beauty (including the beauty of women) and had held just about every important office there was through the years, including prime minister to the last emperor and then, briefly, to the son who reigned now.

That “briefly” told its tale, of course.

In his garden, awaiting guests, he sipped Szechen tea from a green celadon cup—that gorgeous green, in honour of the season. One of those visiting this morning was a source of great sorrow, another promised to be a diversion. In late-morning light he thought about emperors and court factions and the arc of a man’s life. You could live too long, he thought, as well as not long enough.

Some lives didn’t actually have an arc, not in the eyes of the world. Yes, everyone could pass from tottering child to vigorous man and then become someone for whom a change in the weather or a walk as far as the gazebo in his garden brought an ache in knees and back, but that wasn’t a career arc. A farmer didn’t arc, he passed through good or bad years, depending on the weather, on locusts, on whether a son was drafted into the army and marched away to war at sowing time.

But a civil servant in Kitai could rise and fall—and rise and fall again, depending on the mood at court, on whether a battle had been lost in the west or a comet seen in the sky, frightening an emperor. He could even be exiled—a greater fall, like a celestial object hurtling to the earth.

That kind of fall could kill you if you were sent all the way south to the lands of sickness and decay.

He had friends down there now. If they were still alive. Letters came infrequently from towards the pearl divers’ sea. It was a grief. These were men he had loved. The world was a hard place. One needed to learn that.

He was exiled himself, of course, but only this far, only to Yenling, his family home. A distance from court, from influence, but not a hardship.

He was too well known, too widely admired for even Hang Dejin and his followers to ask the emperor to do more. Even a prime minister set on changing the ways of a thousand years knew better than to push too hard on that.

In fairness, it was unlikely that Prime Minister Hang wanted him dead. They had exchanged letters and even a poetry sequence once. Years ago, but still. They had debated policies with courtesy before the last emperor, though not in front of the son, the current one. Times changed. Arcs. His old rival Hang was … old now, too. It was said his eyesight was failing. There were others, younger, colder, near the throne now.

Still, he had only been ordered away from Hanjin, from palace and office. He was allowed his own house and garden, books and brush, ink stone and paper. He hadn’t been driven ten thousand li south to a place from which men did not return.

They didn’t execute out-of-favour civil servants in the Twelfth Dynasty of Kitai under the Emperor Wenzong. That, he thought wryly, would have been barbaric, and theirs was an emperor of exquisite cultivation. They just sent members of the disgraced faction away, sometimes so far that their ghosts couldn’t even return to threaten anyone.

One of the two men coming to him today was on his way to a savage exile: across the Great River and the rice-rich lands, over two mountain ranges, through thick, wet forests, all the way to the low-lying, poisonous island that was only nominally part of the empire.

Lingzhou was where the very worst political offenders were sent. They were expected to write their last letters or poems in the steaming heat and die.

He’d been a pupil once, the one going there now, a follower, though he’d moved far beyond that. Another man he loved. Perhaps (probably?) the one he’d loved most of all of them. It would be important today, Master Xi told himself sternly, to preserve equanimity. He would break a willow twig in farewell, the old custom, but he must not shame himself or weaken the other with an old man’s tears.

It was a reason he’d invited the second visitor. To change the tone and mood. Impose the restraint that preserved dignity, the illusion that this was not a final meeting. He was old, his friend was banished. Truth was, they were never going to climb again to a high place on the Ninth of Ninth Festival and celebrate friendship with too much wine.

It was important not to think about that.

Old men wept too easily.

He saw one of his woman servants, the young one, coming from the house and through the garden. He preferred messages to be brought by the women, not his steward. It was unusual, but he was in his own home, could devise his own protocols, and he so much enjoyed the sight of this one—in blue silk today, her hair elegantly pinned (both things also unusual, she was only a servant)—as she approached along the curved pathway to the gazebo where he sat. He had curved all the paths when he designed his small garden, just as they were curved or angled at court. Demons could only travel a straight line.

She bowed twice, announced his first visitor. The amusing one, as it turned out. He wasn’t really in a mood for that, but he didn’t want to be desperately sad when the other one came. There were too many memories, called back by a springtime morning.

Then he saw that Lin Kuo had someone with him, and his mood did change a little. It was a source of immediate inward wryness. He had always been able to laugh at himself. A saving feature in a powerful man. But how was it that even today, at his age, the sight of a very young girl, fresh-faced to face the world, graceful and awkward at the same time (she was tall for a woman, he saw), poised on the threshold of life, could still enchant him so much?

Once, a long time ago—another memory, a different kind—his enemies had tried to drive him from power by claiming he’d incestuously seduced a young cousin. There had been a trial. The accusation had been a lie and they had failed, but they’d been clever with it, and there was an interval when his friends had feared for him. This had been in the years when the faction ugliness at court had begun to claim lives.

His accusers had presented a song at the trial, purporting to be something he’d written to her. It was even a good song. You needed to respect your foes at this court. But the real cleverness had been that they’d chosen to attack him this way, given his well-known love of women.

All his life. His too-long life.

That sweet, shy cousin had died years ago, a wife and mother. His own wives had died, both of them. He’d liked the second one better. Two concubines were gone, and mourned. He hadn’t taken another. Two sons were dead. Three emperors he’d known. Too many friends (too many enemies) to name or number.

And still the girl approaching beside the long, eager figure of Lin Kuo caused him to set down his green cup and rise (despite his knees) to greet the two of them on his feet. It was a good thing, he told himself. You could be dead while alive, lose all taste for life, and he didn’t want to do that.

He had strong opinions on where Hang Dejin and his followers were leading the emperor with their New Policies, and he was vain enough to believe his views might matter, even now. He loathed the long, foolish war against the Kislik, for one thing.

Lin Kuo bowed three times, stopping and advancing, which was flattering but excessive from another jinshi scholar and an invited guest. His daughter stayed a proper two steps behind and performed a proper two bows. Then, after hesitating, she offered a third.

Xi Wengao stroked his narrow beard and kept a smile from his face: she was matching her father’s manners, out of respect, to be in step with him, but clearly she had been inclined to stop after the proper level of salutation.

Not a word spoken, already an interesting girl. Not formally beautiful, he noted, but an alert, curious face. He saw her glance at his celadon teacup and the lacquered tray, take in details of the gazebo. He’d had the upper panels painted by San Tsai in the style of Chang Shao of the Seventh Dynasty.

Tsai was also dead. Last year. Another friend gone.

“Councillor, it is a very great honour to see you again,” said Lin Kuo. He had a light, pleasant voice. Wengao wasn’t an imperial councillor any more, but he didn’t mind being called one.

“The honour is surely mine,” he said formally, “that you grace a sad exile’s home with your esteemed presence. And bringing …?”

“My daughter, councillor. Her name is Shan. I have long wished to show her the Peony Festival, and have presumed to bring her with me to meet your excellence.”

“No presumption at all. You are welcome, child.” He smiled this time.

She didn’t smile back; a watchful face. “It is a privilege for me, sir, to be in the presence of the man instrumental in elevating the status of written songs in our time. I have read your essay on the ci form, with profit and illumination.”

Xi Wengao blinked. This is a good thing, he told himself again. Something to be cherished. That life could still surprise you.

Even from a man, the words would have been assured, a supremely confident thing to say as a first remark. This was, of course, a girl. A young woman, obviously unmarried, a peony in her hair, another in her hand, and she stood in his garden, specifying that among all he’d done …

He sat down, motioned Lin Kuo to a chair. The tall man sat with another bow. The daughter remained standing, moving a little behind him. Wengao looked at her. “I will confess that essay is not what I normally expect to be saluted for.”

Lin Kuo laughed, indulgently. “She writes ci herself, councillor. I suspect she has wanted to say this to you for some time.”

The daughter flushed. Parents could create awkwardness for their children, but Kuo had spoken with a vivid, appealing pride. And Xi Wengao, for many reasons, had never subscribed to the more extreme limitations proposed by Cho teachers on the freedom allowed women in their time.

He knew too much about the past, for one thing. He loved women too much, for another. The ripple of voices, dance of eyes, their hands, their scent. The way some of them could read a gathering in an instant, and then guide it. He had known women like that. He had loved some of them.

“I shall enjoy reading or hearing her own ci, then,” he said, looking from daughter to seated father. Then he offered a gift, a kindness: “But come, come, let me see it! You wrote of having completed your book. Is it true, Master Lin?”

The father’s turn to flush. “Hardly a book! A mere essay, an exercise in a style, commentaries on a few gardens here. Including, of course, your own serene refuge.”

“Serene? This ill-tended space? You can hardly even call it a proper garden. I have no peonies, for one thing.” He meant it as a jest.

“Why not, sir, if I may ask?”

The girl had wide-set eyes and that direct gaze. She held a yellow peony in her left hand. She had slipped it into and out of the sleeve of her robe when she’d bowed with arms folded. He was a man who noticed things like that. She was dressed in green for spring, a shade very like that of his teacups.

He said, “I would dishonour them, Miss Lin. I lack the skill and patience to grow and graft the king of flowers, and have no gardener with those gifts. It seemed to me wise for an aged scholar to plan a garden around reserve, simplicity. Peonies are too passionate for me now.”

“Your writings are your flowers,” said Lin Kuo, which was certainly graceful enough. One could, Wengao thought, underestimate the fellow. For one thing, for a man to bring up a daughter able to speak as she just had suggested complexity.

Complexity. Xi Wengao had lived a life torn between the seductive lure of that and a hunger for simplicity. The palace, deadly battles there, and then solitude where he could take up his brush and write.

Had he chosen to be here it would have been one thing. But he had not, and Hang Dejin was still prime minister, implementing his New Policies with an increasingly vicious group of younger associates.

Kitai was at war under their guidance—foolish, futile war—and the government of a distracted emperor was vulgarly engaged in trade and commerce, even in loans to farmers (whether they wanted them or not). And now came word of a revision of the jinshi examination system that he, Wengao, had put in place himself.

So he wasn’t happy to be exiled just now, no.

He heard a sound from towards the house, quickly turned. Saw Lu Chen—the familiar, dearly loved face. He had come.

His protégé, his friend, was smiling—as always, it seemed—as he walked up behind the girl in blue. He was on his way, escorted by guards, to what was meant to be his death.

A lesson here, a bitter poem: you could enjoy the unexpected arrival of a young girl on a spring morning, but you couldn’t hide from heartbreak behind her slender form.

Chen had lost weight, he saw. Not surprising, in his present circumstances. A brown hemp traveller’s robe hung loosely upon him. His manner, though, as he approached the gazebo and bowed, was as it always was: genial, open, pleased by the world, ready to be engaged or amused by it. You would never know by looking at the man that he was as profound a thinker as the world had today, the acknowledged master poet of their age. Celebrated as belonging with the giants of the Third and Ninth.

He also shared, Wengao knew, some of those earlier poets’ legendary appreciation for good wine (or less-than-good wine, when occasion required).

Wengao stood up again, so did Lin Kuo, very quickly. For his own mild amusement, he had not alerted the court gentleman that there was another guest arriving, and obviously not who it was.

But every man with a connection to the literary or the political world knew Lu Chen—and his current fate. He wondered for a moment if the daughter would, then he saw the expression on her face.

He felt a flicker of envy, like a long tongue from an old fire. She hadn’t looked at him that way. But he was old, really old. Could barely stand from a chair without wincing. Chen wasn’t a young man—his hair under the black felt hat and his narrow, neat beard were both greying—but he didn’t have knees that made walking an ambitious exercise. He was straight-backed, still a handsome man, if thinner-faced than he ought to be, and seeming tired now, if you knew him and looked closely.

And he was the man who had written “Lines On the Cold Food Festival” and the “Red Cliff” poems, among others.

Wengao was properly (if judiciously) proud of his own poetry over the years, but he was also a good reader and a sound judge, and he knew whose lines deserved to be remembered. Who deserved the look a young girl offered now.

“You are drinking tea, my dear friend?” Chen exclaimed, in mock dismay. “I was relying on your spiced wine!”

“It will be brought for you,” Wengao replied gravely. “My doctors have advised that tea will serve me better at this hour of the day. I sometimes pretend to heed them.” He glanced briefly at his girl. She nodded, and headed back towards the house.

“Probably serve me better too.” Chen laughed. He turned. “I believe this is Court Gentleman Lin Kuo? Your late wife was a distant kinswoman of mine.”

“She was, honourable sir. You are gracious to recall it and to know me.”

“Hardly so!” Chen laughed again. “They were the better family in Szechen. We were the poor-but-earnest scholars in training.”

Not true about his family, Wengao knew, but typical of Chen. He made the other introduction himself.

“And here is Miss Lin Shan, daughter of Master Lin and his late wife. He has brought her to see the peonies.”

“As well he should,” said Chen. “The splendour of the flowers needs no further adornment, but we cannot have too much of beauty.”

The father looked amusingly happy. The daughter …

“You are too kind, Master Lu. It counts as a poet’s lie to suggest I have any beauty to add to Yenling in springtime.”

Chen’s smile became radiant, his delight manifestly unfeigned. “So you think poets are liars, Miss Lin?”

“I believe we have to be. Life and history must be adapted to the needs of our verses and songs. A poem is not a chronicle like a historian’s.” She looked at Xi Wengao with that last, and allowed herself—for the first time—a shy smile.

We. Our.

Wengao looked at her. He was wishing, again, that he was younger. He could remember being younger. His knees ached. So did his back, standing. He moved to sit again, carefully.

Lu Chen strode to the chair and helped the older man. He made it seem a gesture of respect, courtesy to a mentor, not a response to need. Wengao smiled up at him and gestured for the other two men to sit. There were only three chairs, he hadn’t known the girl was coming.

The girl was astonishing.

He asked, because he couldn’t help himself, though it was too quick, “Old friend, how much time do we have with you?”

Chen didn’t let his smile fade at all. “Ah! That depends on how good the wine proves to be when it arrives.”

Wengao shook his head. “Tell me.”

There were no secrets here. The two Lins would know—everyone knew—that Chen had been banished to Lingzhou Isle. It was said that the deputy prime minister, Kai Zhen—a man Wengao despised—was in charge of these matters now, as the prime minister aged.

Wengao had heard it said there were a dozen kinds of spiders and snakes on Lingzhou that could kill you, and that the evening wind carried disease. There were tigers.

Chen said quietly, “I imagine I can stay one or two nights. There are four guards accompanying me, but as long as I mostly keep moving south, and offer them food and wine, I believe I’ll be permitted some stops to visit friends.”

“And your brother?”

The younger brother, also a jinshi scholar, had also been exiled (families seldom escaped), but not so far, not to where he’d be expected to die.

“Chao’s with his family at the farm by the Great River. I’ll go that way. My wife is with them, and will stay. We have land, he can farm it. They may eat chestnuts some winters but …”

He left the thought unfinished. Lu Chao, the younger brother, had a wife and six children. He had passed the examinations startlingly young, ranked third in the year his older brother was first. Had received the honours that came with that, held very high office, served twice as an emissary to the Xiaolu in the north.

He had also remonstrated steadily, speaking out at court and in written memoranda against the New Policies of Hang Dejin, arguing carefully and well, with passion.

You paid a price for that. Dissent and opposition were no longer acceptable. But the younger brother wasn’t the poet and thinker who had shaped the intellectual climate of their day. So he had been exiled, yes, but would be permitted to try to survive. Like Wengao himself, here in his own garden in his own city. Undoubtedly, Kai Zhen would congratulate himself on being a compassionate man, a judicious servant of the emperor, attentive to the teachings of the Masters.

Sometimes it was difficult to escape bitterness. They were living, Wengao thought, schooling his features, in a terrible time.

His guest said, changing the mood, turning to the girl, “As to poets and lies, you may be right, Miss Lin, but would you not agree that even if we alter details we may aspire to deeper truth, not only offer falsehoods?”

She flushed again, so directly addressed. She held her head high, though. She was the only one standing, again behind her father’s chair. She said, “Some poets, perhaps. But tell me, what man has written verses about courtesans or palace women happy in themselves, not wasting away or shedding tears on balconies in sorrow for vanished lovers? Does anyone think this is the only truth for their lives?”

Lu Chen thought about it, giving her his full attention. “Does that mean it is not a truth at all? If someone writes of a particular woman, must he intend her to stand for every single one?”

His voice in debate was as remembered, crisp and emphatic. Delighted to be engaged, even by a girl. Thrust and counter-thrust, as with a sword. No one at court knew how to use a sword any more. Kitai had changed; men had changed. This was a woman debating with Chen, however. You had to remind yourself it was a girl, listening to her.

She said, “But if only the one tale is told, over and over, no others at all, what will readers decide is true?” She hesitated, and Wengao caught what must—really?—be mischief in her eyes. “If a great poet tells us he is at the Red Cliff of a legendary battle, and he is, in fact, fifty or a hundred li upriver, what will travellers in a later day think when they come to that place?”

She lowered her gaze and clasped her hands demurely.

Wengao burst out laughing. He clapped in approval, rocking back and forth. It was well known that Lu Chen had indeed mistaken where he was, boating on the Great River with friends on a full moon night. He’d decided he and his companions had drifted under the cliffs of the famous Third Dynasty battle … and he’d been wrong.

Chen was grinning at the girl. He was a man who could be moved to passionate fury, but not by a conversation such as this. Here, playing with words and thoughts, he was in his element, and joyous. You could almost forget where he was going.

One or two nights he’d said he could stay.

Chen turned to the father, who was also smiling, though cautiously. Lin Kuo would be ready to beat a retreat. But Chen bowed to him, and said, “I honour the father of such a daughter. You will be careful in how she is wed, Court Gentleman?”

“I have been, I believe,” the other man said. “She is betrothed to Qi Wai, the son of Qi Lao. They will be wed after the New Year.”

“The Qi family? The imperial clan? What degree of relationship?”

“Sixth degree. So it is all right,” said the father.

Within five degrees of kinship to the emperor, imperial clan members could marry only with permission of the court office in charge of them. Outside that degree, they led a more normal life, though could never hold office, or take the examinations, and they were all required to live in the clan compound in Hanjin beside the palace.

Imperial kin had always been a problem for emperors, especially those not entirely secure on the Dragon Throne. Once, the nearer males in line might have been killed (many times they had been, in wide, bloody reapings), but Twelfth Dynasty Kitai prided itself on being civilized.

Of course it did, Wengao thought, looking at his friend. These days the clan was simply locked away from the world, each of them given a monthly stipend, dowries for the women, the cost of burial rites—all of which was a serious budgetary concern, because there were so many of them now.

“Qi Wai?” he said. “I don’t know him. I believe I have met the father. The son is an intelligent man, may I hope?”

“He is a young historian, a collector of antiquities.”

It was the girl, speaking up for herself, for her husband-to-be. This was inappropriate, of course. Xi Wengao had already decided he didn’t care. He was a little in love. He wanted her to speak.

“That sounds promising,” said Chen.

“I would not inflict my unruly daughter on a man I felt incapable of accepting her nature,” the father said. “I beg forgiveness for her impertinence.” Again, despite the words, you could hear pride.

“As well you should!” cried Lu Chen. “She has just reminded me of one of my most grievous errors in verse!”

A short silence, as the father tried to decide if Chen was truly offended.

“The poems are wonderful,” the girl said, eyes downcast again. “I have them committed to memory.”

Chen grinned at her. “And thus, so easily, I am assuaged. Men,” he added, “are too readily placated by a clever woman.”

“Women,” she murmured, “have too little choice but to placate.”

They heard a sound. None of them had seen the servant approaching again in her blue silk. Xi Wengao knew this girl very well (she spent some nights warming him). She wasn’t happy just now. That, too, was predictable, if unacceptable.

The wine would be good. His people knew which wines to offer guests, and Lu Chen was known to be his favourite.

Wengao and the girl (of course) had tea. Lin Kuo joined Chen in drinking the spiced wine, doing it as a courtesy to the poet, Wengao decided. Food was brought. They lingered in morning light, listening to birdsong in his garden, in a gazebo decorated with paintings by San Tsai, done in a style of long ago.

SHE IS AWARE that the servant girl from the garden this morning doesn’t like her, though a servant (even a favoured one) ought not to let that show.

The girl probably thinks she isn’t revealing it, Shan decides. But there are ways for a servant to stand, or respond just a little slowly to requests or orders. There are even ways of unpacking a guest’s belongings in the chamber offered her for the night, and messages can be read in such things.

She is used to this. For some time it has been true of almost every woman she meets, of whatever rank or status. Men tend to be made uneasy, or sometimes amused, by Shan. Women dislike her.

It is not at all certain, to this point in her life, if her father has really given her a gift with how he’s chosen to educate her.

Some gifts are complex, she has long ago decided. Small things can change a life, a poet had written, and that is true, but the equally obvious truth is that large things can do the same. Her brother’s death had been a large thing, in their family if not in the world.

In the years that followed it, the only other child, the thin, clever daughter, had received, slowly at first, as an experiment—the way an Arcane Path alchemist might gradually heat liquid in a flask—and then more decisively, the education a boy was offered if he intended to try for the jinshi examinations and a civil servant’s robe.

She wasn’t, of course, going to write any examinations, or wear robes with the belt of any rank at all, but her father had given her the learning to do so. And he had made her perfect her writing skills and the brush strokes of her calligraphy.

The songs, the ci, she had discovered on her own.

By now, her brush strokes are more confident than his. If it is true, as some said and wrote, that the innermost nature of a person shows in their calligraphy, then her father’s caution and diffidence are there to be seen in his neat, straight, formal hand. Only when he’d travelled and written letters home in a running hand (no one but Shan and her mother had ever seen that hand) did his passion for life show through. From the world Lin Kuo hides this, in his writing, in his lanky, agreeable, slightly stooped form.

Her own hand, in both formal and running scripts, is bolder, stronger. Too much so for a woman, she knows. Everything about her life is like that.

The servant has withdrawn at her command, again just a little too slowly. And she’s left the door not quite fully closed on the dark corridor. Shan thinks of calling her back, but doesn’t.

The room is at the back of the house, nearest the garden. Master Xi’s home is too deliberately modest to have a separate wing for women, let alone a building, but the men are at the front. She isn’t sure if their host and the poet have gone to bed. Her father has. Father and daughter had withdrawn from the dining room together, to leave the two old friends time alone by lamplight, with wine. It wasn’t an action that needed to be discussed. So much sadness here, Shan thinks, however much Xi Wengao has tried to hide it.

There are noises in the garden at night. A flap of wings, cry of an owl, crickets, wind in leaves, wind chimes, faintly. Shan sees that their host has left two books for her in the room. A lamp with a long wick is lit to read by if she wants. One text is a scroll, the other a printed book, beautifully stitched binding. There is a desk, a single chair. The bed is large, curtained, a curved blue ceramic pillow with a painting of white plum blossoms.

Master Xi is old enough to simply enjoy what she is, not be disturbed by it. He appears to find her learning amusing. Not necessarily the response she wants. But she is seventeen, and a girl. What response did one expect?

Perhaps, inwardly—not for speaking aloud—what she really wants is for the songs, the ci she labours to craft, to be read or heard, and considered for their merits—or lack of them. She isn’t vain, she knows how much she doesn’t know yet.