Guy Gavriel Kay - Under Heaven

They stood by the lake. The air was very clear, they could see crags on the mountains, cranes on the isle, in the ruined fortress there.

“Always.”

“A storm in the pass five nights ago. You get it down here?”

Tai shook his head. “Some rain. Must have blown off east.”

Bytsan bent and picked up a handful of stones. He began throwing them at birds.

“Sun’s hot,” he said eventually. “I can see why you wear that thing on your head, though it makes you look like an old man and a peasant.”

“Both?”

The Taguran grinned. “Both.” He threw another stone. He said, “You’ll be leaving?”

“Soon. Midsummer moon ends our mourning period.”

Bytsan nodded. “That’s what I wrote them.”

“Wrote them?”

“Court. In Rygyal.”

Tai stared at him. “They know about me?”

Bytsan nodded again. “They know from me. Of course they do.”

Tai thought about it. “I don’t think Iron Gate’s sending messages back that someone’s burying the dead at Kuala Nor, but I may be wrong.”

The other man shrugged. “You probably are. Everything’s tracked and weighed these days. Peacetime’s for the calculating ones at any court. There were some at Rygyal who saw your coming here as Kitan arrogance. They wanted you killed.”

That, Tai hadn’t known either. “Like that fellow back there?”

The two axes were chopping steadily, each one a thin, clean sound in the distance. “Gnam? He’s just young. Wants to make a name.”

“Kill an enemy right away?”

“Get it over with. Like your first woman.”

The two of them exchanged a brief smile. Both were relatively young men, still. Neither felt that way.

Bytsan said, after a moment, “I was instructed that you were not to be killed.”

Tai snorted. “I am grateful to hear it.”

Bytsan cleared his throat. He seemed awkward suddenly. “There is a gift, instead, a recognition.”

Tai stared again. “A gift? From the Taguran court?”

“No, from the rabbit in the moon.” Bytsan grimaced. “Yes, of course, from the court. Well, from one person there, with permission.”

“Permission?”

The grimace became a grin. The Taguran was sunburned, square-jawed, had one missing lower tooth. “You are slow this morning.”

Tai said, “This is unexpected, that’s all. What person?”

“See for yourself. I have a letter.”

Bytsan reached into a pocket in his tunic and retrieved a pale-yellow scroll. Tai saw the Taguran royal seal: a lion’s head, in red.

He broke the wax, unrolled the letter, read the contents, which were not lengthy, and so learned what they were giving to him and doing to him, for his time here among the dead.

It became something of an exercise to breathe.

Thoughts began arriving too swiftly, uncontrolled, disconnected, a swirling like a sandstorm. This could define his life—or have him killed before he ever got home to the family estate, let alone to Xinan.

He swallowed hard. Looked away at the mountains ranged and piled around them, rising up and farther up, the blue lake ringed in majesty. In the teachings of the Path, mountains meant compassion, water was wisdom. The peaks didn’t alter, Tai thought.

What men did beneath their gaze could change more swiftly than one could ever hope to understand.

He said it. “I don’t understand.”

Bytsan made no reply. Tai looked down at the letter and read the name at the bottom again.

One person there, with permission.

One person. The White Jade Princess Cheng-wan: seventeenth daughter of the revered and exalted Emperor Taizu. Sent west to a foreign land twenty years ago from her own bright, glittering world. Sent with her pipa and flute, a handful of attendants and escorts, and a Taguran honour guard, to become the first imperial bride ever granted by Kitai to Tagur, to be one of the wives of Sangrama the Lion, in his high, holy city of Rygyal.

She had been part of the treaty that followed the last campaign here at Kuala Nor. An emblem in her young person (she’d been fourteen that year) of how savage—and inconclusive—the fighting had been, and how important it was that it end. A slender, graceful token of peace enduring between two empires. As if it would endure, as if it ever had, as if one girl’s body and life could ensure such a thing.

There had been a fall of poems like flower petals in Kitai that autumn, pitying her in parallel lines and rhyme: married to a distant horizon, fallen from heaven, lost to the civilized world (of parallel lines and rhyme) beyond snowbound mountain barriers, among barbarians on their harsh plateau.

It had been the literary fashion for that time, an easy theme, until one poet was arrested and beaten with the heavy rod in the square before the palace—and nearly died of it—for a verse suggesting this was not only lamentable, but a wrong done to her.

You didn’t say that .

Sorrow was one thing—polite, cultured regret for a young life changing as she left the glory of the world—but you never offered the view that anything the Ta-Ming Palace did, ever, might be mistaken. That was a denial of the rightly fulfilled, fully compassed mandate of heaven. Princesses were coinage in the world, what else could they be? How else serve the empire, justify their birth?

Tai was still staring at the words on the pale-yellow paper, struggling to bring spiralling thoughts to what one might call order. Bytsan was quiet, allowing him to deal with this, or try.

You gave a man one of the Sardian horses to reward him greatly. You gave him four or five of those glories to exalt him above his fellows, propel him towards rank—and earn him the jealousy, possibly mortal, of those who rode the smaller horses of the steppes.

The Princess Cheng-wan, a royal consort of Tagur now through twenty years of peace, had just bestowed upon him, with permission , two hundred and fifty of the dragon horses.

That was the number. Tai read it one more time.

It was in the scroll he held, recorded in Kitan, in a Taguran scribe’s thin but careful calligraphy. Two hundred and fifty Heavenly Horses. Given him in his own right, and to no one else. Not a gift for the Ta-Ming Palace, the emperor. Not that. Presented to Shen Tai, second son of the General Shen Gao, once Left Side Commander of the Pacified West.

His own, to use or dispose of as he judged best, the letter read, in royal recognition from Rygyal of courage and piety, and honour done the dead of Kuala Nor.

“You know what this says?” His own voice sounded odd to Tai.

The captain nodded.

“They will kill me for these,” Tai said. “They will tear me apart to claim those horses before I get near the court.”

“I know,” said Bytsan calmly.

Tai looked at him. The other man’s dark-brown eyes were impossible to read. “You know ?”

“Well, it seems likely enough. It is a large gift.”

A large gift.

Tai laughed, a little breathlessly. He shook his head in disbelief. “In the name of all nine heavens, I can’t just ride through Iron Gate Pass with two hundred and fifty—”

“I know,” the Taguran interrupted. “I know you can’t. I made some suggestions when they told me what they wished to do.”

“You did?”

Bytsan nodded. “Hardly a gift if you’re…accidentally killed on the way east and the horses are dispersed, or claimed by someone else.”

“No, it isn’t, is it? Hardly a gift!” Tai heard his voice rising. Such a simple life he’d been living, until moments ago. “And the Ta-Ming was a brawl of factions when I left. I am sure it is worse now!”

“I am sure you are right.”

“Oh? Really? What do you know about it?” The other man, he decided, seemed irritatingly at ease.