River of Stars

She interrupts him deliberately. She has a model for this. She has been in his household three years. She is skilled with flute and pipa. She is tall and thin and extremely clever. She has smooth skin, often commented upon.

She is also ambitious, more than she could (or would ever in her life) tell. The wife, the dead and gone wife, had often interrupted him when they were together, thinking they were unobserved.

“It is … it is gentle of you to—”

“Gentle?” she says. And takes two small steps nearer. This, too, she has observed done by the wife. The dead wife. It was like a dance, she remembers thinking, a kind of ritual between them. Affairs of men and women often are, she has found.

He straightens his shoulders, turns fully to her, away from the desk.

“When tigers come together in the forests,” she says, “is it meant to be gentle?”

“Tigers?” he says.

But his voice has changed. She knows men, knows this man.

She doesn’t speak again. Only comes up to him, those small steps, as if gliding. She is wearing a scent taken from the mansion when they left. It had belonged to the wife (the dead wife). That is another risk, but risks do need to be taken, if you want anything of life.

She reaches up, both hands, draws his head down to hers.

Bites him on a corner of the lower lip. Not gently. She has never done that, has only seen it, unobserved.

Then she moves her mouth to his ear and whispers words she has been thinking about, devising, for days and days as they travelled.

She feels him respond, his breath catching, his sex hardening against her body. Her satisfaction in having been right is deeply arousing.

She services him that night on the chair by the desk, on the floor, the bed, and takes her own (real) pleasure more intensely than she ever has before, when she was only one concubine among many, terrified she might be overlooked, disappear into the wasted, empty years of a life.

Those fears are over by the time morning comes.

It is said, at the country estate where they settle, and more widely, later, that she is in some terrifying way the ghost of Yu-lan—never permitted burial—come back into the world.

He marries her in springtime. You didn’t have to observe full mourning rites for someone declared a criminal. His sons are unhappy but say nothing. What are sons going to say?

She has two of the women whipped with bamboo rods that winter for whispering about her, and one pretty, too-intelligent younger concubine is branded—on the face—and dismissed.

She doesn’t mind the ghost idea being cast abroad, in furtive murmurs or wine talk. It gives her another kind of power: association with a dangerous spirit. Power over him, over all of them.

Her name is Tan Ming and she matters. She is determined that everyone will know this before the end, whenever, however that comes. She lights a candle and prays every morning, without fail, for Yu-lan. Her husband thinks she is being virtuous.

Even after all these years, even with another summer over, the heat of Lingzhou still caught him like a blow each day. It seemed impossible to have the knowledge of it prepare you for the next day, if you came from the north.

And it wasn’t as if he was from the farthest north, the starting places of Kitai. He was Szechen-born. The Lu family came from humid, hot weather: rain, thunderstorms, forests of dripping leaves, fog, mist rising from the ground. They understood it. Or, he’d thought he understood, before he came to the island.

Lingzhou was a different world.

It was harder on Mah. His son had been born in Shantong, on the coast, during Chen’s time as prefect there. Those had been the best years, the poet thought. A sophisticated city, between the sea and the serene wonder of West Lake. The man-made lake had been Chen’s joy: pleasure boats drifting, music drifting, all day and at night, hills framing it on the inland side, singing girl houses on the shore close to the city. Elegant, well-funded religious retreats for Cho and Sacred Path dotting the northern shoreline, green roofs and yellow, the upswept curves, bells ringing the hours for prayer, the sound crossing the water.

There were fireworks on the lake at festivals, and music from pleasure boats all through the night, lanterns floating on the water …

Not a place that would prepare you for Lingzhou Isle. Here, you needed to take any exercise in the earliest hour, before the heat battered you into torpor, lassitude, fitful daytime naps in a sweat-soaked bed.

They were doing their dawn routine, father and son, his usual frivolity that they were assailing some evil fortress, when a cleric came running up (running!) from the temple at the end of the village.

It seemed, if the man was to be believed (and understood: he was stammering with shock), that something miraculous had transpired. Honourable Lu Chen and his honourable son were entreated to come see.

The usual cluster of villagers had gathered to watch them exercise. The elder Lu, the poet, was famous and amusing, both; it was worth coming to see them. That same group trailed them west through the village, and others joined them as they went, past the yamen (not yet opened for the day, there was never a need for administrative haste here) and along the path—carefully, watching for snakes—to the temple.

Eventful moments, let alone loudly declared miracles, were not the daily coinage of the isle.

Red and yellow flowers, wet and heavy.

Forest’s edge, the path in rain.

I remember peonies in Yenling

But this south is very different from the north.

Can an angry ghost travel this far?

Cross the strait, afflict an exile’s life?

Or does Lingzhou hold only its own dead

Wherever they might have been born?

In the rainy season we lose the stars.

We do not lose friendship and loyalty,

Good talk, courtesy, the virtues of this time

As they are of any age ever in Kitai.

I think of friends far away and my heart aches.

I drink wine with new companions.

They have opened their gate to a stranger.

Kindness is a brightly feathered bird on a branch.

We listen to their bell as it rings.

We drink and they refill our wine cups.

I will count myself honoured and blessed

Whatever becomes of my last days.