Guy Kay - Under Heaven

“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 families, 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:

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.