Guy Kay - Under Heaven

Only then did he read the words his mothers (or perhaps his brother Chao, not so young now) had put there.

It was not, it really was not so great a coincidence that they’d have selected lines by Sima Zian. The Banished Immortal was the pre-eminent poet of their age. Of course they’d have considered his words in choosing an inscription. But even so …

Tai read:

Sometimes, Tai thought, there were too many things within you at once. You couldn’t even begin to sort through them, do more than feel the fullness in your heart.

“It is well chosen, isn’t it?” someone behind him said.

The fullness in your heart.

He turned.

“It was Chao who decided on the inscription. I’m proud of him,” said his sister.

Fullness could overflow, like a river in springtime. Seeing her, hearing the remembered voice, Tai began to weep.

Li-Mei stepped forward. “Brother, do not, or I will, too!”

She already was, he saw. Speechless, he drew her into his arms. She was clad in Kanlin robes, which he could not understand, any more than he could grasp that she was here to be enfolded.

His sister laid her head against his chest and her arms came around him, and they stood like that together by their father’s grave and stone.

SHE WAS WEARING Kanlin black for safety. She had travelled that way. It was too soon to make her presence more widely known. The family knew her and the household servants, but the village understood only that some Kanlins had come from the east to the Shen estate, and then others had arrived bearing the body of Eldest Son for burial, and one of the Warriors, a woman, had remained behind as a guard.

There were three more Kanlins now, they had come with Tai from the border.

“You saved my life,” Li-Mei said.

First words, when they moved to the stone bench by the stream (Shen Gao’s favourite place on earth) and sat together.

She told him the tale, and the wonder of how the world was devised felt overwhelming to Tai, listening.

“He had me place my handprint on a horse painted on the wall in a cave,” she said.

And, “Tai, I killed a man there.”

And, “Meshag is half a wolf, but he did what he did because of you.”

(As of earlier that same morning, he was no longer half a wolf.)

And then, towards the end, “I wanted to stay on Stone Drum Mountain, but they refused me, for the same reason they said they rejected you.”

“I wasn’t rejected, I left!”

She laughed aloud. The sound of her laughter, here at home, healed a wound in the world.

He said, “Li-Mei, I have chosen a woman. A wife.”

“What? What? Where is she?”

“Taking my horses to the emperor.”

“I don’t—”

“She’s a Kanlin. She’s taking them north with sixty other guards.”

“North? Through this? And you let her do that?”

Tai shook his head ruefully. “That isn’t the right way to describe it. When you meet her you’ll understand. Li-Mei, she is … she may even be a match for you.”

His sister sniffed dismissively, in a way he knew very well. Then she smiled. “Is she a match for you?”

“She is,” he said. “Listen, I will tell you a story now.”

He started at Kuala Nor. While he was talking, the sun crossed the sky, passing behind and emerging from white clouds. A servant came, unable to stop smiling, to say that his two mothers and his brother were back from Hangdu, and Tai stood up and went to them in the principal courtyard and knelt, and stood, and was welcomed home.

WATCHING, A LITTLE APART because she’s already had her moments with him and her own homecoming, Li-Mei is annoyed to find herself crying again.

Tai has already told her he intends to stay here, not go to the new emperor. She understands this, of course she does: there is a long tradition in Kitai, all the way back to the Cho Master himself, of a strong man striving to balance the desire to be of service, part of the court, “in the current” … and the opposite yearning for quiet, for rivers and mountains and contemplation, away from the chaos of the palace.

She knows this, understands her brother, realizes that some of what Tai is feeling has to do with Liu.

But she has a sense—already, that first day when he’s come home—that her own needs go the other way. The empire is too much larger than this quiet estate by the stream. She has even been beyond the borders now. And she has too deep a hunger for knowing things, for the thrust and dazzle of the world.

In time, Li-Mei tells herself. She is not in a hurry.

There are steps and stages involved in this, traps to be avoided. But the man who is their emperor now, glorious and exalted Shinzu, had once trailed a hand down her back while watching a dance in the Ta-Ming Palace. She wonders if he remembers. If he can be caused to remember.

She looks around, sees the servants weeping and smiling, and finds herself unexpectedly remembering another dance: this is the courtyard where she’d tried once, very young, to offer a performance for her father, and had fallen into leaves because of the wind.

Tai had suggested that was why she fell. Liu had … Liu had told her never to let the performance stop, even if you made a mistake. To carry on, as if you’d never failed at all, as if you couldn’t imagine failing.

She still hasn’t poured a libation for her oldest brother. She isn’t sure if she ever will.

Many years later she does do that—pour an offering for Shen Liu—but only after the immediate past had become the distant past. How we remember changes how we have lived.

Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives.

Autumn came. The paulownia leaves fell one night, were on the ground when they woke. They left them on the path for a day, a family tradition, then the leaves were swept away by all of them together the morning following.

In winter, a message came from the court of the Emperor Shinzu, from his temporary court in Shuquian.

The glorious and exalted emperor acknowledged receiving a communication from his trusted servant, Shen Tai. He confirmed the arrival at Shuquian of nearly two hundred and fifty Sardian horses, a gift to Kitai from the same loyal servant of the empire.

It was understood by the compassionate emperor that after his labours in the west, and disruptions within his family, Master Shen might wish to spend an interval with his mother, attending to affairs at his family estate. The emperor approved such devoted impulses.

It was expected that Master Shen would agree that all loyal and capable men were needed by Kitai in times so vexed as the current ones, and his presence at the court, wherever it was, would be welcomed by his emperor in due course.

In confirmation of this imperial benignity, and in recognition of services performed, the emperor saw fit to extend a grant of lands in the south and east beyond those already given by the revered father-emperor to Shen Tai. Documents were attached. The emperor was also pleased to graciously accede to Master Shen’s request for seven of the Sardians. The emperor went so far as to express the personal view (this was unusual) that, under the circumstances, it was a modest number. These seven horses would be arriving, under escort, soon, if the gods willed it so.

Tai drew a series of very deep breaths, reading this and then rereading it. He had succeeded, it seemed.