Guy Gavriel Kay - River of Stars

He’d have been shocked if any of those requests had been accepted.

Lately, he had begun to wonder what would happen if he offered again. Times changed, men changed. The long Kislik war was going badly. The emperor still didn’t know the extent of that. If and when he learned, there could—there would —be consequences. That needed managing. It could be done, there were ways, but Dejin knew he wasn’t the man he had been even three years ago.

If blame for the fighting fell to him—and it could—that would almost certainly mean disgrace and departure (or worse). In that case, the deputy prime minister, Kai Zhen, would surely succeed him. And would dominate Kitai, given an emperor with a preference for painting, calligraphy (his own was widely seen as the most elegant in the world), and the extravagant garden he was building north and east of this palace.

The garden (the Genyue), and the Flowers and Rocks Network to supply it, had been Kai Zhen’s idea. A brilliant one, in so many ways. Dejin had approved of it originally, and reaped the benefit of the emperor’s distraction for some time. There might now be a price to be paid.

The question was, who would do the paying?

Deputy Minister Kai probably believed he was ruling now, Dejin thought wryly. After all, there was only an old, almost-blind man between him and the emperor, and though Zhen might speak of honouring his superior for initiating the reform policies, there was little doubt in Hang Dejin’s mind that the younger man saw the older one as weak now, trammelled in old ways of doing things.

Old ways, such as restraint, courtesy, respect, Dejin thought, still wryly. He had grown wealthy in power, accustomed to his stature and to being feared, but he hadn’t sought rank with the intent of acquiring wealth.

He had seen his differences with Xi Wengao and the other conservatives as a battle for what Kitai should be, needed to be, for the good of the empire and its people. It was a pious, self-indulgent thought, and he was aware of that, but it was also, Hang Dejin told himself, true .

He shook his head. His son glanced at him, a blurred, moving shape, then turned back to his own pile of documents. Bitterness wasn’t a useful state of mind, Dejin reminded himself. You made mistakes if that was what drove you. You spoke without proper contemplation words you could be made to regret. He had often provoked such rashness in rivals. He knew how to make use of anger, passion, outrage in others.

The light was good in their working room today, here on the western side of the palace’s main courtyard. Back in the Ninth Dynasty, in Xinan before it fell to ruins, the civil servants had had an entire palace building to themselves: the Purple Myrtle Court.

Here in Hanjin, splendid as it was, there simply wasn’t enough space for that. Space was part of what they’d lost all through the empire, and not just in a crowded capital. They’d lost land in the north, in the northwest, lost the protection of the Long Wall, lost tribute, lost access to (control of!) the trade routes to the west and the wealth they’d brought, year over year.

Hanjin had more than a million souls living within or beside its walls—in an area only a fraction of what Xinan had enclosed three hundred years ago.

If you went to the ruins of the old capital, walked in through smashed gates, stood among weeds and grass and broken stone, heard the calling of birds or saw animals loping along the vastness of what had once been the imperial way, almost five hundred paces wide … you could be forgiven for thinking that Hanjin’s main thoroughfare, running from this palace to the southern gates was …

Well, it was eighty paces across, to be precise.

He’d had it measured, not long after arriving at court, all those years ago. Eighty paces was a very wide street, entirely suitable for processions and festivals. But it wasn’t Xinan, was it?

And Kitai wasn’t what Kitai had been.

What of it? he’d thought then, and still thought, most of the time. Were they to bow their heads in shame because of what had happened centuries before any of them were born? Tear out what was left of greying hair? Surrender to the barbarians? Give their women to them? Their children as slaves?

The prime minister grunted in dismissal of such a thought. The world came to you as it came, you dealt with what you had.

He saw his son lift his head again from the papers he was working through. Dejin made a gesture: nothing of importance, he signalled to Hsien, carry on.

There were two communications on his own desk. They had been handed to him by his son without comment. He had read them both in the good light. Excellent calligraphy in each case, one familiar (and celebrated), the other new to him.

The letters were a part of what had made him bitter and nostalgic on a bright morning in autumn. Autumn was a good season in Hanjin, summer’s heat and the yellow dust receding, winter winds not yet come. The plum trees flowering late. A bright string of festivals ahead. He wasn’t a man for watching street dancing or revellers carrying coloured lanterns but he liked his wine as well as the next person, and he enjoyed festival food, though he needed to be careful what he ate and drank now.

The letters were addressed to him personally, one written in the voice of long—if difficult—acquaintance, the other with extreme deference and formality. Both were supplications in the same matter. They made him angry with what they revealed, since it was new to him and should not have been.

It wasn’t as if the fate of every single member of the opposing faction needed to be reviewed by the prime minister of Kitai. There were far too many of them, he had more important tasks and burdens.

He had set in motion, himself, the process of disgracing and exiling the ousted faction over twenty-five years ago, without doubting himself for a moment. There had been carved steles, copied from the new young emperor’s own hand, his exquisite Slender Gold calligraphy, naming the banished. The steles had been placed in front of every prefectural yamen in the empire. Eighty-seven names the first time, one hundred and twenty-nine a year later. He remembered the numbers. Those names he had reviewed himself, or selected .

The empire, the court, the world under heaven had needed clarity and direction after a turbulent time. Though there might once have been merit to cacophony at court, the back and forth of factions in favour and out, Hang Dejin had been sure of his virtue and the wisdom of his policies. He’d regarded those who disagreed with him as not just wrong, but dangerous—destructive of peace and order and the changes Kitai required.

The empire needed these men silenced and gone.

Besides, they had started it! The conservatives had been in power between the last emperor’s death and the coming of age of the current one, in the years when the dowager empress reigned. They had reversed everything and initiated the exiling of Hang Dejin’s New Policies faction.

Dejin had spent several years writing poetry and letters from his country estate near Yenling, banned from court, power, influence. He’d remained wealthy (power brought wealth, it was a law of nature), never tasted again the hardship he’d left behind when he’d passed the jinshi examinations, but he’d been very far from the corridors of the palace.

Then Emperor Wenzong took the throne. Wenzong had summoned back to court the sage, Hang Dejin, who had been his tutor. Restored as prime minister, Dejin had extended to the conservatives the fate they’d imposed on him and his own people. Some of those he exiled were men he had admired, even in their battles. You couldn’t let that guide you, not with so much at stake.