Guy Kay - Under Heaven

The city was emptying out, in panic. His heart aching, Tai saw the imperial road thronged with the people of Xinan, pushing west in a tumultuous mass that spilled into the drainage ditches and across them into the clogged going of the summer fields beside the road.

People were struggling with their belongings on their backs, or pulling carts with children and the elderly and their goods. The noise was punishing. At times a scream or cry would rise above it, as someone was pushed into the ditch, or fell and was trampled. If you fell you were likely to die. Progress was agonizingly slow, Tai saw, and the mass of people stretched back east as far as he could see.

He couldn’t even see the city gates, they were too far away. But he could imagine them. All the gates. Word of disaster had arrived. Xinan’s inhabitants were not inclined, it seemed, to wait for Roshan to come to them.

“They will starve out here,” said Sima Zian softly. “And these are just this morning’s vanguard. Only the beginning.”

“Some will stay,” said Lu Chen. “Some always stay, for their homes, their families. They will keep their heads down and hope that bloodshed passes.”

“Eventually, it probably will,” said Tai. “He wants to rule, doesn’t he?”

“Eventually,” agreed Lu Chen. “But that can seem like forever.”

“Is it going to be forever, this war?”

Tai looked at Song, who had asked that, gazing down on the crawling-forward multitude on the road. She was biting her lower lip.

“No,” he said. “But much will change.”

“Everything?” she asked, looking at him.

“Much,” he said again. “Not everything.”

“Tai, we can’t get into the city.” It was Zian. “We must hope she received your warning and responded. But there’s no way to swim against this current.”

Tai looked at him, a bleakness in his heart. Then he shook his head. “Yes, we can. Swim is a good idea. We’ll get in through the canals.”

It was a good idea, but it didn’t matter. Sometimes that happens.

They spent the rest of the afternoon cutting overland across fields and along small roads again, forcing their way east. Even the back roads and rutted cart tracks had crowds by late in the day, all fleeing west. It became difficult to make any headway. People cursed the four of them on their horses. If it hadn’t been for the Kanlins, the respect and apprehension they engendered, they might even have been attacked. Tai fought anger and panic, aware that time was running against them.

When they finally reached a vantage point, forcing tiring horses up a ridge from which they could see Xinan’s walls, he heard a voice cursing, and realized it was his own.

In the evening light, Xinan, capital of the empire, glory of the world, was spread below them. The city looked like a hive with all the insects in flight from it, pouring out of every gate, along all roads. And within the walls, they could see smoke rising.

Roshan was days away, and already Xinan was burning.

“Look at the Ta-Ming,” Sima Zian said.

The palace was on fire.

“They’ll be looting it,” said Tai.

“Where are the guards?” Song cried.

“Looting it,” Tai said wearily.

Zian murmured, “They know the emperor has fled. What could the city understand from that, other than that he’s abandoned it? Abandoned them.”

“He left to regroup! To gather armies. The dynasty will fight!” Song’s tone revealed a great strain.

“We know that,” the poet answered, gently. “But how does that help those down there, with An Li coming for them?”

Tai was looking at the canals, where they flowed lazily into the city under arches in the walls, bearing firewood and lumber, marble and other stone and heavy goods and foodstuffs on any normal day. There were substantial punishments for being found in a canal; they were known to be a weakness in the city’s defences.

There were thousands of people, he saw, who had chosen to take the risk of a beating today. So many bodies were in the water, pushing, fighting their way through, bearing goods on their heads, children on their backs, or carrying nothing at all but terror and the need to get away.

People will drown , he thought.

Lu Chen lifted a hand and pointed. Tai saw a new tongue of flame within the Ta-Ming Palace.

The others sat their horses beside him on the ridge. They said nothing. They were honouring his sorrow, Tai knew, by letting him be the one to say it. To surrender the day’s hopeless quest. They had come with him, and stayed by him.

He sat astride Dynlal gazing at a nightmare, or the beginnings of a nightmare. The sun was setting, its long light falling upon Xinan, making the walls seem gold. He was thinking of Rain, of green eyes and yellow hair, and a mind shrewder than his own, even in the days when he’d been immersed in his studies, trying to understand ancient courts and long-dead sages and the forms and rhythms of poetry.

He was thinking of her singing for him, of her hands in his hair, the two of them on a bed in a lamplit room.

There were so many poems over so many hundreds of years about courtesans, young or not young any more, at upper windows above jade or marble stairs, at twilight time or by moonlight, waiting for lovers to return. The night comes, and the stars, the streets are lit by lanterns on stone walls. The nightingale cries in the garden. Still no sound of horse’s hooves beneath my open window …

“We can’t do this,” he said. “We have to go back. I am sorry.”

He was, for so many things, as a long summer day finally went down to the dark. They turned west again, leaving the fires behind.

IT TOOK MOST OF THE NIGHT to reach the inn on the Imperial road. The same one where he’d awakened on a morning in spring to find Song wounded and held by soldiers, and Wen Jian waiting to take him to Ma-wai.

Because they were riding, even on tired horses and off the main roads, eventually they outpaced the struggling, exhausted vanguard of refugees from Xinan. They’d made their way down to the highway. It lay open before them under moonlight, serene and beautiful.

The Kanlins from the sanctuary, sixty of them, as promised, were waiting when they reached the inn. Taizu was asleep, they reported.

Tai had Dynlal led away to be watered and rubbed down and fed. They all needed to rest, he knew it, but he was unable to sleep. He was bone-weary and heartsick.

Song and Lu Chen went off with the other Kanlins. He thought of inviting her to stay with him, he’d seen how distressed she was. He didn’t feel able to offer comfort. She’d be better off with the Warriors, he thought.

Or perhaps not. He didn’t know. He didn’t have that much clarity in him tonight. Ma-wai, what had happened there. And Xinan on fire, with Spring Rain inside the walls. Or perhaps trapped among tens of thousands on one road or another.

He didn’t know. He walked through the reception chamber of the inn. Saw frightened men standing there, unsure of what to say or think. They bowed to him. He went through into the courtyard, the garden.

A little later Zian came out and found him. Tai was sitting on a bench under a mulberry tree. The poet carried wine, and two cups. He sat down and poured and Tai drained a cup, then held it out again. Zian filled it a second time and Tai drank that, too.

The poet was a quiet, comforting presence. It felt illicit, somehow, to take comfort in anything tonight. Friendship, starlight. The night breeze.

Zian said, “You will need to rest.”

“I know.”

“You will leave in the morning?”

“Before sunrise. We should stay ahead of those fleeing the city.” Tai looked at the other man, a shadow beside him. The leaves above blocked the moonlight. “You are coming with us?”