Guy Kay - Under Heaven

Tai turned to Sima Zian. The poet’s face was stricken. Tai wondered how he looked himself. He heard Wen Zhou again. “This encounter is over. Soldiers! Take custody of these three men. Your dui commander is relieved of his post. Bind them and hold them for execution when we come out. Kitai will fall if such chaos is permitted! Soldiers of the Second Army, do as you are ordered.”

No man moved in the inn yard.

A flurry of wind stirring the dust. Birdsong again, and always.

“No. You must answer us,” said the archer. His voice had altered. Tai heard Song draw a breath behind him. He saw Wen Zhou look down into the inn yard with the withering, lifelong contempt a man such as he would have for those below. He turned, to go back inside.

And so the arrow that killed him struck from behind.

Sima Zian, the Banished Immortal, master poet of the age, who was there that day at the Ma-wai posting inn, never wrote a word about that morning.

A thousand other poets, over centuries, did take those events as a subject, beginning with the death of Wen Zhou. Poets, like historians, have many reasons for varying or amending what might have taken place. Often they simply do not know the truth.

Before the prime minister fell, there were five arrows in him.

The bowmen of the Second Army would not let one of their number carry the burden of this deed alone.

By the time the poems of lament were in full spate, like a river, some versifiers had twenty-five arrows (with night-black feathers) protruding from the first minister’s back as he lay in his red blood upon the porch: poets straining for pathos and power, oblivious to the excesses of their images.

Tai stepped forward. His swords remained sheathed. His hands were shaking.

“No, my lord!” cried Song. “Shen Tai, please. Hold!”

And, “ Hold! ” echoed the dui commander below, eyeing him narrowly, visibly afraid. Frightened men were dangerous.

Tai saw that the man’s hands were also trembling. The commander stood alone now, exposed in the dusty inn yard. The archer was no longer beside him, nor his officer. They had withdrawn, blending back in with their fellows. Tai was quite sure he could recognize the archer, the man who’d fired first.

The bowmen in the yard all had arrows to string. So, he saw, glancing back, did Song and the other Kanlins. They stepped forward to surround him. They would be killed before he was.

“This must stop!” he cried, a little desperately.

He pushed forward, past Song. He looked down at the dui commander. “You know, surely you know it must stop.”

“You know what he did,” said the commander. His voice was harsh with strain. “He sent all those men—an army!—to their deaths, left Xinan open to ruin, and only because he feared for himself if the officers in the pass decided he’d caused this rebellion.”

“We can’t know that!” cried Tai. He felt weary and sick. And afraid. There was a dead man beside him, and the emperor was inside.

“There was no reason for our army to leave the pass! That one there sent the order in the middle of the night, with the half-seal. He gave it himself! Ask those who escorted you here.”

“How do you know this?” cried Tai. “How would they know?”

And the officer in the inn yard below, not a young man, said then, quietly, “Ask the prince you came here with.”

Tai closed his eyes, hearing that. He felt suddenly as if he might fall. Because it fit. It made a terrible, bitter kind of sense. The prince would be readying himself to take command now, with a full-fledged war upon them and his father so frail. And if the prime minister was the one who had created this sudden nightmare …

They had seen Shinzu ride ahead in the darkness on the road, to join the escort from the Second Army, speak with them.

A man’s actions could have unexpected consequences, sometimes; they could come back to haunt you, even if you were a prime minister of Kitai. Also, perhaps, if you were a prince of Kitai.

Tai opened his eyes, found himself unable to speak just then. And so, instead, he heard, in that bright, clear morning light near Ma-wai and its blue lake, another man do so, from among the gathered soldiers, lifting his voice. “One more must die now, or we will all be killed.”

Tai didn’t understand, not at first. His immediate thought was, You are all going to die, in any case .

He didn’t say it. He was too shaken to speak. Very near him, blood slowly spreading on the wooden porch, lay Wen Zhou.

“Oh, please, no,” said Sima Zian, barely a breath. “Not this.”

Tai remembered that, too. That it was the poet who realized first what was happening.

He turned quickly to look at the other man, then wheeled back to the courtyard.

And with a sorrow that never left him, that lay in memory, in his days forever after, as powerful, in its way, as the terrible images of the Bogü by the northern lake, Tai saw the soldiers step forward, together, well trained, and he heard the one who had just spoken speak again, and this man—whose face Tai never properly saw, among seventy or so of them—said, very clearly, “He was prime minister for only one reason. All Kitai knows it! We will be slain in vengeance—by her. She destroyed the emperor’s will with her dark power and has brought us all to this, through her cousin. She must come out to us, or this cannot end.”

Dancer to the music. Bright as morning light. Lovely as green leaves after rain, or green jade, or the Weaver Maid’s star in the sky when the sun goes down.

“This will not happen!” said Tai.

He said it as forcefully as he could, feeling a frantic need to push back against where the morning had now gone.

A trickle of perspiration slid down his side. Fear was in him, a twisting thing. He said, “She was working to control her cousin. Wen Zhou had even tried to kill me, at Kuala Nor. She was gathering information on that. Against him!”

He felt ashamed, telling soldiers this, but the moment was surely beyond shame, or privacy.

Hidden among the others, the archer (he would remember the voice) shouted, “This family has destroyed Kitai, driven us to civil war! As long as she lives they will poison us!”

That was clever, a part of Tai was thinking. A moment ago it had been about their own safety, those who had killed Wen Zhou—now it was something else.

“Bring her out,” said the dui commander.

Tai felt like cursing him. He held back. This was not a time to let anger overwhelm. He said, as calmly as he could, “I am not going to allow another death. Commander, control your men.”

The man shook his head. “I will. But after the Wen family poison is purged from among us. Our companions were sent out from Teng Pass. Will you measure two against so many? You have been a soldier. You know how many men are dead there. Does not the Ta-Ming invoke execution when someone in power has erred so greatly?”

“She is only a woman. A dancer.” He was dissembling now, but desperate.

“And women have never shaped power in Kitai?”

Tai opened his mouth and closed it. He stared at the man below.

A twist of the officer’s mouth. “I sat the examinations twice,” he said. “Studied eight years before accepting that I would never pass them. I know some things about the court, my lord.”

Tai would wonder about this later, too. If the world as it went forward from that day might have been otherwise had another leader and his fifty men been shifted to the northern route from the congested highway to Xinan.

There are always branches along paths.

“I will not permit this,” Tai said again, as coldly as he could.