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Daniel Fox is a British writer who first went to Taiwan at the millennium and became obsessed, to the point of learning Mandarin and writing about the country in three different genres. The first novel, Dragon in Chains, is now out from Del Rey. Before this, he published a couple of dozen books and many hundreds of short stories, under a clutch of other names. He has also written award-winning poetry and plays.
Here, he offers a multi-layered story about the price of obsession, but also about the other side of that dark human experience: compassion and, ultimately, redemption.
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Any man, every man can find himself pinned by a moment, heart-stolen, abruptly turned around. The same is no doubt true of women also, but General Shu was not much concerned with women.
Nor, to be honest, had he been too much concerned with men before this, except as units in a calculation. Shu was no master commander, he had no gifts at warfare or leadership; his talents lay in provision, in negotiation, in anticipation of need. The army was such a size, the river was this broad: it could be crossed in two days, with this many boats brought from here and here. Shu knew. How and where the boats were likely to be hidden, that too. And he wouldn’t forget provender for the men during this delay, nor for the horses; neither would he forget to propitiate the river-gods, to ensure an easy crossing.
A spy captured, a ransom to be paid? Ask Shu, how much is reasonable. A city taken, a levy to be raised from its no doubt grateful citizens? Ask Shu, how much they can afford. A city not taken, its walls manned and its gates barricaded? Ask Shu whom to bribe and what to offer. This was his genius, and why he had to be a general. He would never win a battle, but he could make any battle winnable, if a well-fed and rested soldiery was enough to win it. If not, he was still the man to buy a victory, if someone on the other side was only prepared to sell.
He followed the army, rather than leading it. Necessarily, he followed close. This day, heavily astride an indignant horse not accustomed to the work, he huffed into the public courtyard of the provincial governor’s great house. The dignified comforts of his carriage were stuck in highly undignified mud a mile behind, and a succession of urgent messengers had only demonstrated how essential it was for him actually to be here. The governor was a fool, and twice a fool to be so swiftly overtaken by his follies; the more military generals, they were all fools too, by dint of long practice. If they were allowed their head—the governor’s head, in this instance, along with those of all his household—then the army’s forward march would be delayed by a month or more, while it lingered to pacify a restless and unreliable province.
Shu’s mount might be unexpected—he kept a saddle-horse for show, largely, the occasional brief parade—but his face and figure were not. A soldier ran to seize the horse’s bridle and haul it to a welcome halt; another brought a blessed mounting-stool, to save him the indignity of an ungainly slither to ground.
Fat men should not ride horses. That had been his overriding thought all this way, all the sway and jar of it, every bruised and aching measure of his flesh. Probably, fat men should not be soldiers at all. His bones were padded most unsoldierly, and he knew that he was mocked.
He patted vaguely at his distempered horse’s neck, because he was a decent man and truly bore no grudges. Then he had sweat-froth on his fingers, and had to wipe it on his skirts. Horses make poor plotters; their revenges are immediate, though some are lasting. He was sore now, and he would be more sore tomorrow.
No matter. A horse was a passing sorrow. What happened here would be enduring, whichever way it went.
As briskly as he could manage, Shu bustled through to the inner courtyard, where the generals would be sitting now in judgment.
In some respects at least, he was too late. There was a bamboo framework rigged up beyond the gateway, with a man hung from it. What was left of a man. Nothing clung to him except his blood, no vestige of an earthly rank, but still he was no doubt, no doubt at all, late governor of this province.
Well. Shu had not really expected to save him. If a man will stand, will declare his public allegiance to an emperor in fast retreat and close the gates of his cities against the horde that pursues, he cannot expect kind treatment from that horde when his own gates are broken, as broken they will be. What can withstand a horde?
One dead man was not a catastrophe, except perhaps to himself. His whole house was another matter. Trying to stride, Shu scuttled past that foul and dripping scaffold, to where the lords of men—his fellow generals, he reminded himself, and none of them blessed with the seal and authority of the generalissimo, as he was himself—sat in conclave in the shade of a pavilion.
Uninvited, unexpected—they had no doubt been counting on the mud to keep him out of their councils, out of their hair—he sat himself among them, sweaty and disordered and utterly disagreeable. Whatever they wanted to decree, he was determined to disagree with it; and his voice carried more weight than all of theirs combined, for which they would never forgive him.
Not a man to haver or dissemble—not when so simple an act as sitting chafed his thighs, and it was their fault entirely for being so precipitate, for causing him to hurry—he said, “So: you have killed the governor, then. How many more?”
“None yet, but of course his family—”
“Of course his family must be let live,” Shu grunted, in a mockery of agreement. “If you slay his family, who had no hand in his folly, then you must slay all his councillors who were as guilty as he; and by the time you have slain their families too, and reached perhaps a little further towards the officers who carried out the governor’s orders, then the whole province will be in terror of you, for who among them can be innocent where their masters are so guilty?”
“So they should be in terror,” said General Ho. “A rebel province deserves to cower before the blade. Yes, and feel its bite.”
Actually, of course, these men here were the rebels, but Shu forbore to say so. Instead, “Will you leave half your force behind, to impose this terror?”
“No, of course not. We pursue the emperor...”
“...With these people at your back, all churned about with hate and horror.”
“We do not fear peasants!”
“No? Perhaps you should. It’s these peasants who will feed you on the march and through the winter. Or not. Their mattocks have more power than your swords, in the end.”
A shrug from General Ho. “We have heard all this from you before, Shu.”
“You have. And I was right before, and I am right now, and you know it. You knew it before I came, or you would not have waited for me,” blithely ignoring the fact that they had not. “Half the late governor’s family would already be dangling from that scaffold in their blood, while you distributed his women among the soldiery, while you kept his daughters for yourselves.”
Which was to say, You are all my lap-dogs truly, and they knew that too, and resented it with a smoky fury that would bring grief soon enough to someone, but not to him.
A boy came with a tray, and squatted in the corner to prepare tea. Good. Tea was soothing for turbulent minds. He himself was hot and thirsty after the discomforts of his hurry. He would be glad of tea, and the chance it offered to speak of other matters. The army’s swift advance, the boy-emperor’s desperate retreat, the generalissimo’s sure success: all of these were proper subjects to be raised and praised over the perfumed pleasures of the tea-cup.
And meantime here was distraction for the eye too, no need to dwell further on the grisly horror in the courtyard. He could watch instead the boy’s slender grace over kettle and charcoal-pot in the wreathing steam and the shadows. Watch as his sleeve fell back as he reached for the tea-bowl, see how a glimpse of line and movement could define the perfection of a wrist....
The boy came forward on his knees to serve Ho and then the others, one by one. Now, watching, Shu was no longer distracted. He was snared, rather. In the grim light from the courtyard, the boy had a still-ethereal beauty, as though death and horror could not mark or mar him. There was no tremble or hesitancy in his fingers, no fear in his eyes, only the shy deference that was proper. His thick black hair was as tame as oil and fingers could achieve, not quite a porcelain smoothness; that privilege was owned by his skin, which was immaculate. Nothing about him was as coarse as his clothes. He was like polished jade, Shu thought, that could never be debased by the sacking it was wrapped in.
Shu shifted his stool a little at the table, to see the boy better when he retreated to his corner, to the kettle and the brew-things. Let the other generals argue between themselves; they could make all his own points for him anyway, and believe them better from their own lips than from his. Let them imagine he was listening, governing in silence. What he wanted was in his sight, more and far more than he had come for, more and far more than he had ever hoped to find here.
In truth, he had expected to find the generals dividing up the house and its treasures between themselves. Having forestalled that, prevented it, now he wanted one of its treasures for himself. A son of the house might have been difficult to claim, but a serving-boy? He could surely manage that, without giving Ho distemper...
He was, perhaps, more obvious than he thought, less subtle than he liked. General Ho was saying unusually little, being altogether too complaisant. Waiting, perhaps, for an opportunity to spring. Well, Shu would not give it him. If Shu knew one thing, he knew how to wait. He could ride away from here on that appalling horse, and send later for the boy....
The boy was coming forward with fresh tea: a forward boy. He was kneeling at Shu’s side, his bare wrist brushing Shu’s: a careless boy, except that the gesture had been entirely careful. As was the catch of their eyes together, the boy’s dark and luminous, enticing, pleading. An importunate boy. And an alert one, seeing Shu’s interest and responding to it, seeing something for himself therein. In all of this, a desirable boy; and more, seen closer, still a beautiful boy.
Shu said—no. Shu tried to speak and had no voice, and had to pause and clear his throat before he could say, a little thickly, “Boy. Who rules this house, with your master dead?”
“His sons are gone, lord,” fled, the boy must mean, which might perhaps be another reason why the governor hung alone on his scaffold there, “so my mistress, I suppose. If you do not?”
A grunt, and, “Perhaps I do. Smart boy. Where may I find your mistress?”
The boy told him but wouldn’t show him, wouldn’t follow into the women’s quarters. A whole boy, then, and keen to stay that way. Shu sent him instead to wait in the outer courtyard, with the abominable horse; and let the weight of his own authority carry him crushingly over all tradition, into another man’s harem.
A dead man’s, and Shu made a kinder invasion than it would have faced without him. Which perhaps they knew, these frightened women and their eunuch servants; word travels swiftly, incomprehensibly, through a house that stands under pain of destruction. They welcomed him as best they could, better than he should have expected. No shrieking, no cowering, only silent and rapid conduct to the new widow in her grief.
She was genuinely grieving, he saw, though perhaps not for her husband. She had closed the shutters, against any view of his dangling body; that was just as well, though nothing could have shut out his screaming. He must, Shu thought, have screamed. Perhaps a lot, perhaps for a long time.
“...A kitchen boy?” she repeated, bewildered.
“His name is Shen.” A cautious boy, a deep boy.
“Is it?” She waved a hand vaguely. “Of course, take what you want...” meaning, You will anyway; you have already taken my husband, my life. And then she said what she really meant, what she really mourned, “My sons...?”
“They are gone,” he said, “which was wisdom, and may have saved their lives. They will not be pursued, and perhaps they have not gone far. They may send a message,” if they were not too wise to be so careless. “If you have the chance to reply,” if they hadn’t ridden far and far, beyond all telling, “tell them to lie low until the last of the army has moved on. Whomever we leave here as governor, he will have instructions; they should be safe to return, if my word has any weight behind it.”
And he patted his great comfortable pillow of a stomach, to show her that it did.
~o0o~
There would be no second journey on the atrocious horse; Shu waited until his carriage came eventually to collect him.
His brother generals were gone by then, long gone in pursuit of the endlessly-running emperor. Shu might have waited indoors, in comfort, with his boy, but the house was too much troubled already. The last thing its mistress needed was a late-lingering and most unwelcome guest.
Instead, he put the boy to the horse’s bridle and led them both out onto the road. Here there were no comfortable benches or blossom-trees to give a perfumed shade, no fish rising in drowsy pools, no gods in niches, watching: only the road, endless and empty. But there was at least a wall at their backs, to screen them from the house and vice versa; there was a post to hitch the horse to, freeing the boy to attend to his new master.
Who was stranded suddenly, his mouth opening and closing like a stranded fish, as he approached and backed away from saying various variously stupid things.
He was master here, he told himself sternly, and he could simply look if he wanted to, if he chose. He did want, but he chose not. He chose to gloss his looking with speech, as if he could draw the lad into an easy, natural conversation, as if a general and a kitchen-boy could ever match mind to mind in comfort. By the side of a weary road, say, after a bad morning, while they waited with a thread-thin patience for a carriage that was tediously slow in coming.
As if he had ever had the skills of common discourse, as if charm and subtlety and insight came to hand, to mind as readily as tonnage and mileage and usage, as if words were numbers and could all be made to march in line....
“Can you read, boy?” It was how he was accustomed to deal with the world, by means of questions, answers, facts.
“No, lord.”
“Ah.” He had, to be frank, small use for a kitchen boy. He had no kitchen, nor any immediate prospect of a house to put it in. He might have found legitimate employment for a secretary. Clutching at straws, “You can be taught, perhaps, if you are quick to learn. Are you—?”
A smile, small and quiet, enough to break the heart. “I am told so, lord.”
“Good. That’s good.”
Even so, he could never be quick enough. The sharpest mind needed years to learn its characters; Shu would not have years to justify his boy. Not months, even. He would have no time at all. As soon as the news was out, as soon as the boy was seen in his shadow....
Well. His brother generals had their personal servants, their body-slaves and favourites. He was entitled too. They would laugh only because they always laughed, as people always had. There was no harm in that.
At last, young eyes conjured what they waited for. “Is that your carriage, lord?”
“Is it?” He saw, perhaps, something breast the rise; yes, certainly, a shape coming down, lit by occasional sparks within its own shadow. “I expect so. I hope so. What can you see?”
“It is, it’s a carriage. It looks mighty large, lord: wheels higher than my head. And drawn by, drawn by...” He hesitated, shaded his eyes with his hand, looked again, looked around for startled confirmation. “Drawn by fire-horses?”
Shu chuckled. “Not quite,” though the boy earned credit for the attempt, and for his courage too. Likely this was his first brush with the spirit world outside of gutter-magic, a fire-spell or a murky potion. Nine boys out of ten would have been running by now.
This boy stood and stared, and now it did feel entirely natural and easy for Shu to let his big blunt hand with its missing finger rest on that slender neck, to feel bones and tendons and the surge and suck of young blood beneath soft and supple skin.
To grip tight enough for reassurance, to shake him gently as a sign of adult authority in this new world, to let him know where he belonged now, here at Shu’s side; to murmur, “Don’t be afraid, Shen. That is your home now,” this is your home now, beneath my hand, “and no matter if demon-cattle draw it forward day by day. Only the view changes. You’ll learn.”
“Yes, lord.”
“You should perhaps begin by learning to call me master,” as he was not a soldier and couldn’t be a scribe, could only be, what, a house-boy in this curious snail-shell house....
“Yes, lord,” he said complacently, twisting in Shu’s grip to press a daring cheek against his arm. Unless it was the defiance that was daring, and the cheek that was complacent. Shu couldn’t tell; he had no experience, nothing to draw on. This world was abruptly just as new to him, implicit with things stranger and far stranger than a carriage drawn by unearthly creatures.
It reached them at last, a vast square block of a wagon hauled by six great black beasts with fire in their bones and smoke beneath their hide. Sometimes he thought they were only fire and smoke, and their physical shape was pure illusion. But it was an illusion that held good, mile by mile and month by month; that was solid wrought iron that muzzled and yoked them and linked them to the traces, and those were very real hollows that their hooves left, bitten deep into the road.
Shu had paid his price to have them, and still thought them a bargain. He’d bargained with a demon for a herd to draw the wagon-train, to keep up with the army in its chase; that deal had been made with prisoners’ blood. But then he’d needed six more for himself, not to be left behind, and the cost of those of course had come to him.
There were those who thought he’d lost his finger in the war, on his climb to rank. He’d never seen any reason to disabuse them, but actually he’d spent it on the war, which was a very different thing.
~o0o~
Shu had designed this carriage himself, though he had never needed to be so coarse as to say so. Screens folded out from the walls, to divide the interior into separate small rooms: a reception chamber, a place of work, a bedroom.
No kitchen.
With the screens folded back and his things packed away for travel, it seemed bleak enough, a poor space to offer to a boy even for his own use, let alone as an expression of his master. Shen seemed delighted even so, finding his way swiftly from the clever hinges in the walls to the challenge of the chests, how some of them opened out to make furniture while they still contained Shu’s papers and scrolls, his brushes and inks, his clothes and cushions and bedding.
“This one? What does this do,” poking and prodding with delicate ineffectual fingers, “how does this unfold...?”
“That one,” laughingly, reaching to pull him to his feet where he came lightly, easy to the touch, “that one is just a chest....”
~o0o~
No kitchen, but it didn’t seem to matter. When the light failed, when the carriage stopped, Shen made tea over a charcoal fire outside. Shu drank it at his desk, reading the reports that were already coming back to him from the vanguard. He made calculations, made notes, wrote instructions in swift clear characters on thin strips of paper. By the time those had been rolled and slipped into bamboo tubes, sealed and sent away with runners, there was food: jewelled rice with egg, hot and spicy and delightful, neatly and delightfully served.
At length—when the bowl was empty, essentially—he remembered to ask, “Have you eaten too?”
“Oh yes, lord. With the men.” And, in response to a blankish frown, “I made congee for the guards. After so much work, digging this out of the mud, they needed something hot.”
Of course they did. Another day, any other day, Shu would have known it, would have seen to it himself. Today— well, today he nodded, but said, “In the future, feed them, certainly, but take your own meals with me.” And, when the boy seemed likely to protest, “It is an order.”
“Yes, lord.”
And then the boy was clearing away the empty dishes, and Shu need only sit back and watch him move in the lamplight; and he thought this might almost be all he wanted, just to see beauty in action, in private, and know it to be his own.
But there was more, inevitably, more to come: a time when the bed had been laid out and all the lamps dimmed bar one, and in that depth of shadow he could watch as Shen slipped the coarse tunic off his shoulders and let it fall, revealing himself to be entirely the boy, entirely the body beautiful.
And then that same implausible boy—unlooked-for ever, unexpected utterly, irresistible now—stepped forward and put his slim fingers and his urgent attention to undressing Shu. It was a more complicated procedure, with buttons and sashes and lacings to be addressed, but there seemed to be an astonishingly short time—and that to Shu, who was the acknowledged expert in the study of time and work—between those firm, determined hands easing off his slippers and those same hands unknotting his breech-cloth and setting it aside.
And then returning to his body, impertinent, imperious; and if Shu were aware of the contrast at all—the great sagging ageing bulk that was himself, against the lithe slender subtle ivories of youth—it could have been only for a minute, before any notion of himself as a separate creature, a mockable man, was stripped away entirely in the hot damp bewildering wonder that the boy made of his bed.
~o0o~
Messengers came, continued to come all night, as ever, and were for once delayed till morning. At some time in the night, the wagon-train that followed the army caught up and overtook. This was commonplace, Shu’s own order. He liked to bring the demon-cattle through on night-roads where he could, not to alarm the peasantry. The men could rest just as easily by day, and the cattle saw perfectly well in the dark.
What was unusual was his being in his bed but yet awake to hear the creaking of ropes and axles, the hot breath and stamping of the beasts, the low calls of the men who worked them.
In bed and awake and not solitary, that was unheard-of. He would have resented sleep this night, that might snatch away a moment’s understanding of slender bones and solid flesh, skin pressed stickily against his skin, a weight sprawled uncomfortably across his legs and a head nestled into his shoulder.
A head that stirred, that lifted, although he would have sworn he had not uttered a sound or twitched a muscle; a body that shifted itself as though reading his discomforts, settling more snugly against his side; a voice that murmured, “Lord?”
“Did the wagon-train wake you? It’s nothing, it’ll pass by and be gone,” as this night would, and all the world be new in the morning.
“My lord was awake,” Shen said, as though he had read it in his sleep and so roused as a good boy ought.
“It doesn’t matter.” Indeed it had been a quiet joy, a treasure to be held against uncertainty, the possibility of loss.
“No, lord,” a kiss to his chest, an interlinking chain of kisses, “but now we are both awake,” a hint of teeth at his breast, at his nipple, “and it would seem a shame to waste that happy chance....”
Time was a wagon-train, a series of moments, passing by and gone.
~o0o~
In n the morning there was tea again, and congee for all in the open air around the conjured fire, even for Shu—“Eat, lord,” laughingly, “eat with us this morning, and this evening I will eat with you”—and so on, the everlasting haul along roads that unreeled like silk from a bobbin but never so smoothly.
Shu sat on his well-padded rump in his well-padded chair, jolted and bumped none the less. He read and scribbled charcoal notes and struggled to think clearly, and every hour called a halt so that he could write his orders properly and send them off via his tail of messengers, and the only unusual thing in that was the struggle, and the only unusual thing in his carriage was the boy, who was the cause of it all.
By day’s end they had overtaken the wagon-train again in a familiar game of leapfrog—Shu being happy enough to startle peasants with his own turnout, if it saved him the inconveniences of travelling at night—and all but caught up with the rear echelons of the army, stalled now at the same river that had delayed the emperor. Stalled, but not for so long; the emperor had no General Shu to organise boats fetched down from a lake on wagons that would themselves float like boats to carry troops across beside the bridge that other troops were mending with timbers cut from the woods that fringed that same lake and carried on those same wagons....
All day he had been arranging this and all that it implied. All day he had been talking softly to his illiterate boy, explaining every message received and every message sent, every consequence. It helped, he found, to keep things clear in his own head. Shen was a perfect audience, interested in everything, asking occasional pertinent questions, rolling and sealing Shu’s papers as he wrote them. If fingers occasionally brushed skin, if eyes more often brushed eyes, that was more than a perquisite, that was an incentive.
After two days, it was no longer a surprise to find someone else at his elbow, in his eyeline, in his bed.
In less than a week, it was already a habit to look around for him, those times, those few times that Shen wasn’t immediately there: as though something were wrong in the world, a little out of kilter, that needed a boy’s light body to rebalance it. He had never strayed far. He might be walking with the guards at the rear of the wagon, chewing ox-hide and listening to their tales of the war; he might be riding up front with the wagoners, learning to crack a firewhip and drive a team of hell-cattle. Boy-like, he wanted to be everywhere, but he always came back to Shu.
By the end of that first week, Shu still didn’t have a rank, a position to put to the boy or what he did, that curious mixture of the most intimate services and the most practical. “He is my servant,” he would grunt, knowing how inadequate that was, so general it seemed both meaningless and untrue, both at once. And a betrayal, that too.
~o0o~
The first time he heard someone else’s appraisal, it was one guard speaking to another: “Where’s he off to, then?”
“Who—oh, the general’s pillow-boy?”
“Who else?”
“Looking for a duck, he said. For the big man’s supper. Promised me the wings if I can find him fresh mushrooms for tomorrow. Not sure I trust him, but...”
But Shu knew for certain sure what he could expect for supper, tonight and tomorrow. And he understood a little more about his boy’s systems of supply and barter, and was impressed by how swiftly those systems had been set in place, knowing as he did a little about the subject. And he knew a lot more about how his boy was seen and spoken of.
He wanted to be angry, but that was difficult. Shen was more, so much more than a bed-warmer—but even to Shu, what counted for more? What did he treasure more than the nights, the long slow sleepless nights? The rest of it anyone could achieve, anyone trained to cook and run errands and care for a man’s small comforts on the road. The nights, though—well, no one else could suffice for that, because no one ever had.
Even so, Shu resented the phrase and would not countenance it. The first time one of his brother generals used it to his face, he was angry almost to the point of indiscretion. Only a lifetime’s training held his temper, schooled his face to its common neutrality, let the moment pass.
Shen himself cared not a whit what they called him. “Body-servant,” he said, rubbing oil lingeringly over that great edifice that was Shu’s body, “pillow-boy,” adjusting the pillow beneath Shu’s head, “catamite,” dipping his head just briefly to kiss Shu’s straining cock, “what difference? They are not here, they don’t know what I am to you, or you to me. They can call me what they like.”
“And me?” Shu managed, struggling a little for the air. “How should I call you, then?”
A bright smile, and, “You should call me Shen. And you should call me when you want me. I am here.”
It was inevitable, of course, that all the army knew he kept a boy. It was inevitable too—because he did not like it—that all the army would come to call Shen his pillow boy. He learned to live with it, as he learned to live with the boy: day by day, moment by raw new moment. When Shen’s physical presence was no longer startling to him, when indeed he took it almost—almost!—for granted, he could still be startled by something inside himself, an abstract of Shen, how the boy lay curled within his thoughts and deeper yet, in heart and head together.
Day by day, the boy made his life so much easier. So many little things he no longer had to think about or order: his clothes were washed and mended; whenever he was hungry, there was food; a hundred errands a week, he only had to ask and Shen would run them. A hundred more, he didn’t have to ask. The boy anticipated with all the discreet grace of a spirit servitor, sworn and bound.
In all the stories Shu had ever heard, true or otherwise, there was a price to be paid for such service. He had paid his own price for his demon hauliers; sometimes in the darkest reaches of the night, he would dread the day this new price fell due. And reach a heavy arm across the boy in hopes of protecting him, at least, when that day came. Hell is inexorable and debts are not forgiven, but it should not be the innocent who pay.
~o0o~
Here was a message for General Ho, where he should billet tonight, where his supply-wagons would be looking for him.
Here was a message for Captain Hao Cho, here one for Captain Lin, one for the quartermaster on the wagon-train.
There could be a dozen such at every stop, and the boy was illiterate. But he only needed telling once, which paper was to go to whom. He would roll them into their bamboo sleeves and seal them and hand them out to the waiting messengers with never a mistake. Shu didn’t trouble to check him any more. Perfect trust: it was a rare and a wonderful gift.
And, he was sure, must be paid for.
Sometimes he roused in the darkness and found himself alone, which was unexpected now, new now, terrifying, wrong.
There would be lamplight, though, beyond the bedroom screens. He would call softly, and Shen would come at once, with apologies. He had been sleepless, bitten by the night mare or roused by the wagons passing. Better to find something to do when he was wakeful, he would say, than to lie restless in the bed and risk waking his master. He had been grinding inkstone for the morning, perhaps; he was sorry if the noise of it had woken his lord, but he knew a way to make him sleep again....
Perfect trust.
~o0o~
General Ho broke the seal, unrolled the paper, read it and grunted discontentedly. He hated to lose even a day in this endless chase. Shu was right, though, Shu was always right: he was short on supplies, and the men would benefit from a rest. And be hotter on the trail thereafter, knowing that the emperor had gained a little, not enough....
He gave his orders, then, or Shu’s orders, rather:
“There is a dry river-bed ahead. We will drop down into that, and make our way along it to a certain point, described on this map here,” an enclosure in the bamboo. “Camp there, where the wagon-train will look to find us in the morning.”
And meantime the troops could sleep late, comfortable on soft dry silt; and if the emperor’s rear guard had left any spies behind, the chasing army would seem to have vanished from view. They would have no idea where the rebels were, or in what numbers, or where they might reappear....
~o0o~
Captain Hao Cho, Captain Lin: their orders had them marching their squads through the night, to meet up before dawn at a lakeside rendezvous.
This lake was artificial, made by the damming of a river long ago. It supplied the headwaters for a canal now, long and straight, navigable for a hundred miles, more.
The emperor had loaded all his supplies onto barges, Shu’s message said; these convenient waters were saving him days, saving his army the work of carrying and hauling.
Only break the dam, the orders said, and the lake will drain itself dry. The canal will have no water, and all the emperor’s goods will be stranded in a muddy bottom, all but inaccessible, irrecoverable. Men might work for days to break it, but each captain had a magician in his train. Those two together, working with the men, they should suffice....
~o0o~
The quartermaster’s orders also had him hurrying all night. Nothing unusual in that, except that the hurry was more pronounced. A hundred of his demon-cattle were needed urgently, as draft animals to clear a calamitous rockfall where the emperor’s retreating army had sabotaged the road.
His quickest way to deliver them would be to feed them into a certain dry riverbed here—the point marked on the map enclosed—and have men drive them hard with firewhips, stampede them up. The banks were too steep to climb; the animals would have nowhere to go but exactly where they were needed, faster than they could possibly be herded....
~o0o~
It was in the morning, then, when General Ho was looking out for his supplies, that instead he heard first the confused cries of his men and then a dull and rising roar.
When he saw it, dark and thunderous, it was hard to understand: a wall that moved so fast, that engulfed so much, whatever it met it seized.
Men tried to scramble up the banks, and fell back as the soft soil crumbled beneath their weight, and were swept up in the flood of filthy brutal water. Nothing could stem it, nothing avoid it.
A few, a hopeful few leapt onto horses and tried to outrace it. The general was among them, for certainly he should survive this, he who had survived wars and revolutions, a dynasty and its fall.
They might, perhaps, have been lucky, but they met another wall coming the other way: a wall of smoke and fire and hoof and hide, strange flesh, a black stampede.
And hauled their horses cruelly to a halt, and turned to face the flood; and saw hopelessness and death, and turned again. And tried to charge the bank, tried to mount it by sheer force of will and spurs and fury, terror too.
And failed, and fell back, and were consumed.
~o0o~
Shu heard the news perhaps even sooner than the generalissimo himself. People needed to be told what to do and they were accustomed to have Shu tell them.
Also, therefore, he heard the reasons for the catastrophe and deduced the causes, more or less.
And closed his carriage door, and sat down with the boy Shen face to face, with a blade between them as the price that must be paid; and said, “It will come back to me, you know. Of course it will.” In all its ugliness and confusion, with a slow and brutal death to follow.
“No, lord. The writing of the orders is...conspicuously not yours.”
“To you, then. It will come back to you,” in much the same tone of voice, all doom.
Shen was almost smiling as he shook his head. “You had a fall in the carriage here, my poor fat lord, and hurt your hand,” and the bewitching boy’s fingers took Shu’s hand and laid it out flat and open on the low table, parallel to that lethal knife; and he set his own hand on Shu’s forearm so that they sat slender wrist to fat wrist, pulse to pulse, “and all the world knows I am illiterate, no use to you at all in your work. It was a scribe wrote those orders for you, and not at all what you told him to write; he was a wicked man, suborned by a captain with a grudge. They should both have died for it, by now. Orders have been sent. Conspicuously your own orders, justice in due measure.”
Shu shivered a little at the meticulous care of his planning, but it could still not be careful enough. “The generalissimo will have his magicians test this, they will ask questions in hell—”
“And will learn nothing to the contrary. I have a promise. And have paid for it.”
There was a bandage, a clotted wound on his arm. Shu said, “You told me your knife slipped, slicing bitter melons.”
“Yes, lord. Forgive me, I lied to you.”
Now, at last, he might allow himself the callous rush of relief, that it must be someone else and not himself—or Shen!—on the cruel scaffold. And then, overwhelmed, appalled, “What are you, boy?” Ghost, devil, what...?
“I was,” Shen said, still careful, measuring his words, “I was my father’s youngest son.”
And suddenly—after all these days, all these long miles of looking at him—Shu could see the widow’s lineaments picked out in his face, and knew then who his father was and how thorough this deception, how entire this revenge.
And there was a pot of tea on the table, which the boy had freshly made; and Shu gazed at it and said, “Do I need to be careful what I drink, from your hands?”
“No, lord. Never.”
He believed him, immediately and completely. But one thought leads to another, one new image to one that came before. Shu said, “You had us all in the one place, around one table, on that day. You served us all. You could have killed us all.”
“Yes, lord, but I had no poison for the tea. And you were there,” added gallantly, and perhaps a fraction late.
“Gods,” with a shudder. And then, again, “What are you?”
And here after all was the price to be paid, and not after all Shu who had to pay it. The boy lifted those glorious eyes and looked at him, while his slim hand stayed clamped lightly around Shu’s arm; and he said, “I am Shen, the pillow boy of my lord the general Shu. That is all I am, and all I will ever be.”
