The Middle Kingdom (85 page)

He shuddered and
moved away, bringing his hand back from her face; looking down at it
a moment, as if it wasn't his. Then, recollecting himself, he offered
her the silk.

Her smile, her
answer, made him burn. "Keep it. Put it with its twin."

He swallowed,
then smiled and gave a small bow of thanks.

On the terrace
she stood there, her hands on the balcony, looking out across the
lake. "Do you still want to ride?"

He looked away,
a faint color in his cheeks, remembering what Pearl Heart had said.

"What is
it?" she asked, touching his shoulder gently.

"Nothing,"
he said, then laughed and changed the subject. "Do you remember
that day here, on the far side of the lake? The day of the
reception?"

She looked
across and nodded, her mouth opening slightly, showing her perfect
white teeth. "The day I let Han beat me at archery."

They were silent
a moment, a strange mix of emotions in the air between them. Then she
turned back to him, smiling.

"Let's go
across. I'm not in the mood for riding. Let's walk, and talk of old
times, eh, Yuan?"

He looked up
shyly at her, then smiled. "Yes. I'd like that. I'd like that
very much."

FOR A LONG TIME
after Li Yuan had gone, Fei Yen stood there at the edge of the lake,
staring out across the water, deep in thought.

She had thought
it would be amusing to play an ancient game: to flirt with him and
maybe afterward, in some secret place away from prying eyes,
introduce him to pleasures finer than those his maids could offer.
But Li Yuan had wanted more than that. Much more, despite the
impossibility of it.

She could still
hear his voice echoing in her head.

"Your son
will be T'ang."

Had he seen her
surprise? Had he seen how unprepared she was for that? Her laughter
had been designed to put him off; to make him think she thought it
all a joke, when she could see from his eyes how serious he was.

"Impossible,"
she had said when he repeated it. "You know the law, Li Yuan."

"You slept
with him? Is that what you're saying?"

"What?"
She had turned, flustered, shocked by his impropriety. "What do
you mean?"

He seemed
obsessed with it; insistent. "Did you sleep with him? Before the
wedding? It is important, Fei Yen. Did you or didn't you?"

She swallowed
and looked down, flushing deeply at the neck. "No! How could I
have done? There was never an opportunity. And then . . ."

Her tears made
him relent. But in the breathing space they earned her, she began to
understand. The law said that a man could not marry his brother's
wife. But was a wife really a wife until the marriage had been
consummated?

She had looked
up at him, wide eyed: astonished both that he wanted her and that he
was prepared to challenge the law itself to have her.

"You
understand me, then, Fei Yen?" he had said, and she had nodded,
her whole being silenced by the enormity of what he was suggesting to
her. His wife. He wanted her to be his wife. But they had had the
chance to say no more than that, for then the old servant had come
and brought the summons from his father, and he, suddenly more
flustered than she, had bowed and gone at once, leaving things
unresolved.

Your son will
be T'ang.

Yes, she
thought, tears of joy coming suddenly to her eyes. So it shall pass.
As it was always meant to be.

HIS FATHER'S
Chancellor, Chung Hu-yan, met him before the doors to the Hall of
Eternal Truth. The huge doors were closed and guarded, the great
wheel of the
Ywe Lung
towering over the man as he bowed to the
boy.

"What is
it, Hu-yan? What does my father want?"

But Chung Hu-yan
was not his normal smiling self. He looked at Li Yuan strangely,
almost sternly, then removed the boy's riding hat and turned him
about full circle, inspecting him.

"I was
going riding . . ." Li Yuan began to explain, but the Chancellor
shook his head, as if to say,
Be silent
,
boy.

Yuan swallowed.
What had happened? Why was Hu-yan so stern and formal? Was it the
business with the maids? Oh, gods, was it that?

Satisfied, Chung
Hu-yan stepped back and signaled to the guards.

Two bells
sounded, the first sweet and clear, the second deep and resonant.
Slowly, noiselessly, the great doors swung back.

Yuan stared down
the aisle of the Great Hall and shivered. What was going on? Why did
his father not meet with him in his rooms, as he had always done? Why
all this sudden ritual?

Li Shai Tung sat
on his throne atop the Presence Dais at the far end of the Hall.

"Prostrate
yourself, Li Yuan," Ghung Hu-yan whispered, and Yuan did as he
was bid, making the full
k'o t'ou
to his father for the first
time since the day of the reception—the day of the archery
contest.

He stood slowly,
the cold touch of the tiles lingering like a ghostly presence against
his brow. Then, with the briefest glance at Chung Hu-yan, he moved
forward, between the pillars, approaching his father.

Halfway down the
aisle he noticed the stranger who stood to one side of the Presence
Dais at the bottom of the steps. A tall, thin Han with a shaven head,
who wore the sienna robes of a scholar, but on whose chest was a
patch of office.

He stopped at
the foot of the steps and made his obeisance once again, then stood
and looked up at the T'ang.

"You asked
for me, Father?"

His father was
dressed in the formal robe he normally wore only for ministerial
audiences, the bright yellow cloth edged in black and decorated with
fierce golden dragons. The high-tiered court crown made him seem even
taller than he was; more dignified, if that was possible. When Li
Yuan addressed him he gave the barest nod of recognition, his face,
like Chung Hu-yan's, curiously stem, uncompromising. This was not how
he usually greeted his son.

Li Shai Tung
studied his son a moment, then leaned forward and pointed to the Han
who stood below the steps.

"This is
Ssu Lu Shan. He has something to tell you about the world. Go with
him, Li Yuan."

Li Yuan turned
to the man and gently inclined his head, showing his respect. At once
the scholar bowed low, acknowledging Li Yuan's status as a prince. Li
Yuan turned back, facing his father, waiting, expecting more, then
understood the audience was at an end. He made his
k'o t'ou
a
third and final time, then backed away, puzzled and deeply troubled
by the strict formality of his father's greeting, the oddness of his
instruction.

Outside, Li Yuan
turned and faced the stranger, studying him. He had the thin, pinched
face of a New Confucian official; a face made longer by the bareness
of the scalp. His eyes, however, were hard and practical. They met Li
Yuan's examination unflinchingly.

"Tell me,
Ssu Lu Shan. What ministry is it that you wear the patch of?"

Ssu Lu Shan
bowed. "It is The Ministry, Prince Yuan." From another it
might have seemed cryptic, but Li Yuan understood at once that there
was nothing elusive in the man's answer.

"The
Ministry?"

"So it is
known, Excellency."

Li Yuan walked
on, Ssu Lu Shan keeping up with him, several paces behind, as
protocol demanded.

At the doorway
to his suite of rooms, Li Yuan stopped and turned to face the man
again.

"Do we need
privacy for our meeting, Ssu Lu Shan?"

The man bowed.
"It would be best, Excellency. What I have to say is for your
ears only. I would prefer it if the doors were locked and the windows
closed while I am talking."

Li Yuan
hesitated, feeling a vague unease. But this was what his father
wanted; what his father had ordered him to do. And if his father had
ordered it, he must trust this man and accommodate him.

When the doors
were locked and the windows closed, Ssu Lu Shan turned, facing him.
Li Yuan sat in a tall chair by the window overlooking the gardens
while the scholar—if that was what he was—stood on the
far side of the room, breathing deeply, calmly, preparing himself.

Dust motes
floated slowly in the still warm air of the room as Ssu Lu Shan
began, his voice deep, authoritative, and clear as polished jade,
telling the history of Chung Kuo—the true history—beginning
with Pan Chao's arrival on the shores of the Caspian Sea in A. D. 94
and his subsequent withdrawal, leaving Europe to the Ta Ts'in, the
Roman Empire.

Hours passed and
still Ssu Lu Shan spoke on, telling of a Europe Li Yuan had never
dreamed existed—a Europe racked by Dark Ages and damned by
religious bigotry, enlightened by the Renaissance, then torn again by
wars of theology, ideology, and nationalism; a Europe swept up,
finally, by the false ideal of technological progress, born of the
Industrial Revolution; an ideal fueled by the concept of evolution
and fanned by population pressures into the fire of Change—Change
at any price.

And what had
Chung Kuo done meanwhile but enclose itself behind great walls? Like
a bloated maggot it had fed upon itself until, when the West had
come, it had found the Han Empire weak, corrupt, and ripe for
conquest.

So they came to
the Century of Change, to the Great Wars, to the long years of
revolution in Chung Kuo, and finally to the Pacific Century and the
decline and fall of the American Empire, ending in the chaos of the
Years of Blood.

This, the
closest to the present, was, for Li Yuan, the worst of it, and as if
he sensed this, Ssu Lu Shan's voice grew softer as he told of the
tyrant Tsao Ch'un and his "Crusade of Purity," of the
building of the City and, finally, of The Ministry and the burning of
the books, the burial of the past.

"As you
know, Prince Yuan, Tsao Ch'un wished to create a Utopia that would
last ten thousand years—to bring into being the world beyond
the peach-blossom river, as we Han have traditionally known it. But
the price of its attainment was high."

Ssu Lu Shan
paused, his eyes momentarily dark with the pain of what he had
witnessed on ancient newsreels. Then, slowly, he began again.

"In 2062
Japan, Chung Kuo's chief rival in the East, was the first victim of
Tsao Ch'un's barbaric methods when, without warning—after
Japanese complaints about Han incursions in Korea—the Han
leader bombed Honshu, concentrating his nuclear devices on the major
population centers of Tokyo and Kyoto. Over the next eight years
three great Han armies swept the smaller islands of Kyushu and
Shikoku, destroying everything and killing every Japanese they found,
while the rest of Japan was blockaded by sea and air. Over the
following twenty years they did the same with the islands of Honshu
and Hokkaido, turning the 'islands of the gods' into a wasteland.

"While this
was happening, the crumbling Western nation states were looking
elsewhere, obsessed with their own seemingly insuperable problems.
Chung Kuo alone of all the Earth's nations remained stable, and, as
the years passed, grew quickly at the expense of others.

"The
eradication of Japan taught Tsao Ch'un many lessons, yet only one
other time was he to use similar methods. In future he sought, in his
famous phrase, 'not to destroy but to exclude'—though his
definition of
exclusion
often made it a synonym for
destruction. As he built his great City—the huge machines
moving slowly outward from Pei Ching, building the living sections—so
he peopled it, choosing carefully who was to live within its walls.
His criteria, like his methods, were not merely crude but
idiosyncratic, reflecting not merely his wish to make his great City
free of all those human troubles that had plagued previous social
experiments, but also his deeply held hatred of the black and
aboriginal races."

Noting Li Yuan's
surprise, Ssu Lu Shan nodded soberly. "Yes, Prince Yuan, there
were once whole races of black men. Men no more different from
ourselves than the Hung
Mao.
Billions of them."

He lowered his
eyes, then continued. "Well, as the City grew so his men went
out, questioning, searching among the Hung Mao for those who were
free from physical disability, political dissidence, religious
bigotry, and intellectual pride. And where he encountered organized
opposition he enlisted the aid of groups sympathetic to his aims. In
southern Africa and North America, in Europe and in the People's
Democracy of Russia, huge popular movements grew up among the Hung
Mao supporting Tsao Ch'un and welcoming his stability after decades
of bitter suffering. Many of them were only too pleased to share in
his crusade of intolerance—his 'Policy of Purity.' In the
so-called 'civilized' West, particularly, Tsao Ch'un often found that
his work had been done for him long before his officials arrived.

"Only the
Middle East proved problematic. There a great jihad was launched
against the Han, Moslem and Jew casting off millennia of enmity to
fight against a common threat. Tsao Ch'un answered them harshly, as
he had answered Japan. The Middle East and large parts of the Indian
subcontinent were swiftly reduced to the wilderness they remain to
this day. But it was in Africa that Tsao Ch'un's policies were
most nakedly displayed. There the native peoples were moved on before
the encroaching City, and, like cattle in a desert, they starved or
died from exhaustion, driven on relentlessly by a brutal Han army.

"Tsao
Ch'un's ideal was, he believed, a high one. He sought to eradicate
the root causes of human dissidence and fulfill all material needs.
Yet in terms of human suffering, his pacification of the Earth was
unprecedented. It was a grotesquely flawed ideal, and more than three
billion people died as a direct result of his policies."