River of Stars

They were alone in the chamber. It was richly decorated. Bronzes from the Fifth, porcelain, south sea coral, sandalwood chairs, wall panels with ivory inlays, a rosewood writing desk, poems in his own (exceptional) calligraphy hanging on the walls.

Kai Zhen had good taste, a discerning eye. He was also a very wealthy man, his fortune growing swiftly after he and Wu Tong conceived of the Flowers and Rocks. The two of them had met through that idea and risen together with it, as if from a deep lake, to transcendent heights.

Kai Zhen had come to Hanjin and the court the way one of his magnificent rocks or trees had come.

He was closer to the emperor now than the prime minister, had been for two years, he’d judged. He did that particular assessment often. It had only required patience, as the old man’s eyes failed him a little more, and then again more, and his weariness under the weight of office grew …

It had all been coming to him.

He looked across the room at his wife. His heart quailed before the agate-black fury he read in Yu-lan’s eyes. Her capacity for rage was vast. Her eyes were enormous, it seemed to him. They looked as if they could swallow the room—and him—draw all down into black oblivion there.

His concubines could wail and moan. They were still doing so in the women’s quarters, shrill as gibbons. His coiled, slim wife would gather venom like a snake, in deathly anger, then strike.

She had always frightened him. From the morning they’d first met and were formally engaged. Then their wedding night, which he would remember until he died; the things she had done, shockingly, the things she’d said. From that night to this day, Yu-lan had aroused in him the most intense desire he had ever known, even as he feared her. Perhaps because he feared.

A sad thing for a man, if his passion was greater, even now, for a wife of many years than for ripe and youthful concubines or courtesans, urgently anxious to please in whatever ways imagination could devise.

She drew a breath, his wife. He watched her. She wore dark-red liao silk, belted in linked gold, straight fitted in the fashion for well-bred women, high at the throat. She wore golden slippers on her feet. She held herself very still.

Snakes did that, Kai Zhen thought, staring at her. It was said that some northern snakes made a rattling sound like gamblers’ dice before they struck.

“Why is the prime minister not dead?” she asked.

Her voice made him think of winter sometimes. Ice, wind, bones in snow.

He saw, belatedly, that her hands were trembling. Unlike her, a measure of how far lost to rage she was. Not fear. She would not fear, his wife. She would hate, and endlessly aspire, be filled with fury she could not (it seemed) entirely control, but she would not be fearful.

He would be. He was now, remembering events in the garden this morning. Such a little time ago, yet they seemed to lie on the far side of a wide river with no ferry to carry him back across. He was seeing what lay before him on this shore, knowing it as ruin.

There had been a stele raised in his honour in the city where he’d been born. He pictured it toppled, smashed, overgrown by weeds, the inscribed words of commendation lost to time and the world’s memory.

He looked at his wife, heard his women crying with undiminished fervour across the courtyard.

He said, “You want me to have killed him in the Genyue? Beside the emperor, with guards standing by?” He was smooth with sarcasm and irony, but he didn’t feel at his best just now and he knew this wasn’t what she’d meant.

She lifted her head. “I wanted him poisoned a year ago. I said as much.”

She had. Kai Zhen was aware that of the two of them she could be called the more mannish, direct. He was inclined to subtlety, observation, indirect action. Too female, if one followed the Cho Masters. But he had always argued (and believed) that at this court, at any Kitan court, mastery usually fell to the most subtle.

Unless something like this morning happened.

“It was the army, wife. Once Wu Tong’s generals failed to—”

“No, husband! Once Wu Tong failed! And you were the one who placed the eunuch at the head of an army. I said that was a mistake.”

She had. It was distressing.

“He had won battles before! And is the most loyal ally I have. He owes me everything, will never have a family. Would you have preferred a commander who would claim all glory for himself? Come home seeking power?”

She laughed harshly. “I’d have preferred a commander who’d bring proper weapons to a siege!”

There was that.

He said, hating the note in his voice, “It was that gardener! If he hadn’t been—”

“It would have been someone else. You needed to denounce Wu Tong, husband! When we first heard of this. Before someone denounced you along with him.”

Which is what had just happened.

“And,” she added, the icy voice, “you needed to have the old man killed.”

“He was leaving!” Zhen exclaimed. “It was aligned. He wants to retire. He can hardly see! Why risk a killing when it was falling to us?”

He used us deliberately. He wasn’t capable of battling her in this mood. She was too fierce, he was too despairing. Sometimes a clash like this excited him, and her, and they would end up disrobed and entwined on the floor, or with her mounting and sheathing his sex while he leaned back in a sandalwood chair. Not today. She wasn’t going to make love to him today.

It occurred to him—blade of a thought—that he could kill himself. Perhaps leave a letter asking forgiveness and pardon for his young sons? They might yet be allowed a life in Hanjin, at court.

He didn’t want to do that. He wasn’t that kind of person. It crossed his mind that Yu-lan was. She could easily open her mouth right now, this moment, and tell him with her next words that he needed to die.

She did open her mouth. She said, “There may yet be time.”

He felt a weakness in his legs. “What do you mean?”

“If the old man dies right now the emperor will need a prime minister immediately, one he knows, one capable of governing. He might then decide to—”

It was occasionally a pleasure, a relief, something almost sexual, to see her err so greatly, be this far off the mark with the arrow of her thought.

“There are half a dozen such men in Hanjin, wife. And one of them is Hang Dejin’s son.”

“Hsien? That child?”

His turn to laugh, bitterly. “He is almost my age, woman.”

“He is still a child! Controlled by his father.”

Kai Zhen looked past her then, out the window at the courtyard trees. He said, quietly, “We have all been controlled by his father.”

He saw her hands clench into fists. “You are giving up? You are just going to go wherever they send you?”

He gestured. “It will not be harsh. I am almost certain of that. We may only be sent across the Great River, home. Men return from banishment. Hang Dejin did. Xi Wengao did for a time. We have been exiled before, wife. That is when I devised the Flowers and Rocks. You know it. Even Lu Chen has been ordered freed this morning from Lingzhou Isle.”

“What? No! He cannot …”

She stopped, clearly shaken. He had told her about events this morning, his banishment, but not about this. His wife hated the poet with a murderous intensity. He had never known why.

He grinned, mirthlessly. Strange, how it gave him pleasure to see her caught out. She was breathing hard. Not ice now. She was very desirable, suddenly, despite everything. It was his weakness. She was his weakness.

He could see her register, after a moment, a change in him, just as he’d seen it in her. They were a match this way, he thought. They had carried each other to the brink of ultimate power. And now …