Guy Gavriel Kay – River of Stars (страница 25)
“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
He used
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.”
“
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 …
His wife took a step towards him. She bit her lip. She never did that inconsequentially. Alone or among others, it had a meaning.
Kai Zhen smiled, even as he felt his pulses change. “It will be all right,” he said. “It might take us a little time now, but we are not finished, wife.”
“Someone else is,” she said. “You must allow me a death.”
“Not the old man’s. I told you. It is too—”
“Not the old man.”
He waited.
“The girl. Her letter started this.”
He was startled, again. Stared at her.
“She is a disgrace,” Yu-lan went on. “An offence to decent women. She offered to teach our daughter to write poetry!”
“What? I did not know this.”
“They met at a banquet. Ti-yu told her that poetry was no proper thing for a woman. The other one, this Lin Shan, laughed at her.”
“I did not know this,” he said again.
“And now … now she writes a letter that sends catastrophe to us!”
That wasn’t entirely true, Kai Zhen thought, but his sleek, glittering wife had taken another step. Light fell upon her now.
“Indeed,” was all he managed to say.
“Leave this to me,” Yu-lan murmured. Meaning, he realized, many things.
With those words she had come right up to him, not so much smaller that it was difficult for her to draw his head down with her slender hands. She bit his lip, the way she often did when they began. Often, she drew blood.
“Here, wife? In our reception chamber?”
“Here. Now. Please, my lord,” whispered his wife in his ear. Her tongue touched him. Her hands became busy, with him, with his clothing.
KAI ZHEN WOKE. It was dark. He realized he’d fallen asleep among the scattered pillows. He tried to rouse himself. He felt languid, eased. He had scratches on one arm. He felt them on his back as well.
He heard a bird singing, a thin sound in the cold. The concubines were silent now. Yu-lan was gone. He knew what she had left him to do. She was making a mistake and he knew that, too. He just didn’t feel he could
He was an immensely assured man, competent, calculating, subtle. There were only two people alive he felt he could not control.
His wife, and an old, almost-blind man.
He stood up, adjusted his clothing. The room needed lamps lit. The one bird continued to sing, as if bravely denying the cold of the world. He heard a discreet cough from a doorway.
“Yes, enter,” he said. “Bring light.”
Three servants came in, carrying tapers. They would have been waiting outside the chamber. They’d have stood there all evening if necessary. He was—he had been—on the cusp of being the most powerful man in Kitai.
One of the servants, he saw it was his steward, was holding a lacquered tray, standing just inside the room. Kai Zhen nodded. The sorrows of the day descended upon him again, but he would not hide from them. He opened the sealed letter on the tray, read it by the light of a lamp, lit now, on his writing desk.
He closed his eyes. Opened them.
“Where is my lady wife?” he asked.
“In her chambers, my lord,” his steward said. “Shall I request her presence here?”
There was no point. He knew her. It was done by now.
Two people in the world. Yu-lan. And the old man who had written him this letter.
The day gone, the evening, the night to come. The bird outside, he thought, was not brave or gallant. It was foolish, beyond words. You couldn’t deny the coldness of the world just by singing.
CHAPTER VI
He didn’t know a great deal about them, they had been gone from the world for two hundred years or something like that, but Sun Shiwei often thought he’d have liked to be a Kanlin Warrior.
He’d have trained with them, wearing black, at their sanctuary on Stone Drum Mountain, now lost to Kitai, part of the surrendered Fourteen Prefectures.
He’d have done whatever rituals they did, slept with the women warriors among them (hard, lithe bodies!), been taught their secret ways of killing people.
He was good at that, killing people, but only a fool would believe there weren’t ways to be better, and from what he’d always understood, legend and story, the Kanlins had been the best. They’d been couriers, emissaries, witnesses to treaties, custodians of documents and treasures, guides and guards … many things.
The killing part was what he liked, though. A shame they were gone. A shame there were no proper records. They’d never written anything down, the Kanlins. That was part of what made something a secret. Stood to reason.
He’d have liked to be able to run right up a wall and onto a roof. Who wouldn’t like that? Leap down into a courtyard and knife someone who thought they were safe in their compound because the doors and windows were barred and the walls high. Then up another wall and gone before an alarm could even be raised.
“It was Sun Shiwei!” the terrified whispers would run. “Who else could have done this? The doors were locked!”
He’d have liked that.