The White Mountain (23 page)

It was quieter inside. While her uncle crouched at the
k'ang
, preparing ch'a, she looked about her. Most of the floor was taken up by three bedrolls, made neatly, tidily. To her left, beside the door panel, was a small table containing holos and 2-Ds of the family. In a saucer in front of them was the stub of a burnt candle. The room smelled of cheap incense.

‘Where's mother?'

Her uncle looked round at her and smiled. ‘At market. With Su Chen.'

‘Su Chen?'

He looked away, embarrassed. ‘My wife,' he said. ‘Didn't you hear?'

She almost laughed. Hear? How would she hear? For years she hadn't known a thing. Had lived in fear of anyone finding out anything about them. But she had never stopped thinking of them. Wondering how they were.

‘And how is she?'

‘Older,' he answered distractedly, then grunted his satisfaction at getting the
k'ang
to work. Ywe Hao could see he did little here. There was a vid unit in the corner, but it was dead. She looked at it, then back at him, wondering how he filled his days.

She had been right to get out. It was like death here. Like slow suffocation. The thought brought back the memory of the last time she had been here. The argument. She turned her face away, gritting her teeth.

The tiny silver fish hung on a chain about her neck, resting between her breasts, its metal cool against her flesh. It was like a talisman against this place; the promise of something better.

Her uncle finished pottering about and sat back on the edge of the nearest bedroll. ‘So how are you?' His eyes looked her up and down. Weak, watery eyes, watching her from an old man's face. He had been younger, stronger, when she'd last seen him, but the expression in the eyes was no different. They wanted things.

He was a weak man, and his weakness made him spiteful. She had lived out her childhood avoiding his spitefulness; avoiding the wanting in his eyes. From his pettiness she had forged her inner strength.

‘I'm fine,' she said. And what else? That she was an expert killer now? One of the most wanted people in the City?

‘No man? No children, then?'

Again she wanted to laugh at him. He had never understood.

‘No. No man. No children,' she said, after a moment. ‘Only myself.'

She crouched beside the table, studying the small collection of portraits. There was one of her, much younger, there beside her dead brother.

‘I thought mother didn't need this.'

‘She gets comfort from it. You'd not deny her that?'

There was a holo of her father; one she had never seen before. No doubt her mother had bought the image from the public records. There was a file date at the foot of it that told her that the holo had been made almost eight years before she had been born. He would have been – what? – twenty. She shivered and straightened up, then turned, looking down at her uncle. ‘Do you need money?'

She saw at once that she had been too direct. He avoided her eyes, but there was a curious tenseness in him that told her he had been thinking of little else. But to admit it… that was something different. He was still her uncle. In his head she was still a little girl, dependent on him. He shrugged, not meeting her eyes. ‘Maybe… It would be nice to get a few things.'

She was about to say something more when the panel behind her slid back and her mother stepped into the room. ‘Chang, I…'

The old woman paused, then turned to face Ywe Hao, confused. At first it didn't register, then her face lit up. She dropped the package she was carrying and opened her arms wide. ‘Hao! My little Hao!'

Ywe Hao laughed and hugged her mother tightly, stooping to do so. She had forgotten how small her mother was. ‘Mama…' she said, looking into her eyes and laughing again. ‘How have you been?'

‘How have I been?' The old lady shook her head. Her eyes were brimming with tears and she was trembling with emotion. ‘Oh, dear gods, Hao, it's so good to see you. All these years…' There was a little sob, then, with another laugh and a sniff, she pointed to the beds. ‘Sit down. I'll cook you something. You must be hungry.'

Ywe Hao laughed, but did as she was told, squatting beside her uncle on the bedroll. From the doorway Su Chen, unintroduced, looked on bewildered. But no one thought to explain things to her. After a while she pulled
the door closed and sat on the far side of her husband. Meanwhile, the old lady pottered at the
k'ang
, turning every now and then to glance at her daughter, wiping her eyes before turning back, laughing softly to herself.

Later, after eating, they sat and talked, and for a time, it seemed almost as though the long years of parting had not happened; that this day and the last were stitched together like points on a folded cloth. But when, finally, she left them, she knew at last that there was no returning. She had gone beyond this, to a place where even a mother's love could not keep her.

Looking back at Main, she saw the changes everywhere. Time had injured this place, and there seemed no way to heal it. Best then to tear it down. Level by level. Maybe then they would have a chance. Once they had rid themselves of Cities.

Shivering, more alone now than she had been for many years, she turned from it and stepped into the transit, going up, away from her past.

The dark, heart-shaped rock was embedded deep into the earth beneath the pool, like the last tooth in an ancient's jaw. Its surface was scored and pitted, darker in places than in others, its long flank, where it faced the Pavilion, smoother than those that faced away; like a dark, polished glass, misted by the spray from the tiny falls. At its foot the cold, clear waters of the pool swirled lazily over an uneven surface of rock, converting the white-water turbulence of the two rivers' convergence into a single, placid flow.

From the rock one could see the two figures in the Pavilion; might note their gestures and hear the murmur of their words beneath the hiss and rush of the falling water. Tsu Ma was talking now, his hand moving to his mouth every so often, a thin thread of dark smoke rising in the air. He seemed intensely agitated, angered even, and his voice rose momentarily, carrying over the sound of the falls.

‘It is all very well
knowing
, Yuan, but how will you get proof? If this is true, it is most serious. Wang Sau-leyan must be called to account for this. His conduct is outrageous!'

Li Yuan turned to face his fellow T'ang. ‘No, Cousin Ma. Think what damage it would do to confront Wang openly. At best he might be forced to abdicate, and that would leave us with the problem of a successor – a problem that would make the GenSyn inheritance question a mere trifle,
and the gods know that is proving hard enough! At worst he might defy us. If he did, and Hou Tung-po and Chi Hsing backed him, we could find ourselves at war among ourselves.'

‘That cannot be.'

‘No. But for once the threat to expose Wang might prove more potent than the actuality. If so, we might still use this to our benefit.'

‘You mean, as a bargaining counter?'

Li Yuan laughed; a hard, clear laughter. ‘Nothing so subtle. I mean we blackmail the bastard. Force him to give us what we want.'

‘And if he won't?'

‘He will. Like us all, he enjoys being a T'ang. Besides, he knows he is too weak, his friends in Council unprepared for such a war. Oh, he will fight if we push him to it, but only if he must. Meanwhile he plays his games and bides his time, hoping to profit from our failures. But this once he has overstretched himself. This once we have him.'

‘Good. But how do you plan to use this knowledge?'

Li Yuan looked outward. ‘First we must let things take their course. Hsiang Shao-erh meets with our cousin Wang on his estate in Tao Yuan an hour from now. My friend in Wang's household will be there at that meeting. By tonight I will know what transpired. And tomorrow, after Council, we can confront Wang with what we know. That is, if we need to. If we haven't already achieved what we want by other, more direct means.'

‘And your…
friend?
Will he be safe? Don't you think Wang might suspect there is a spy in his household?'

Li Yuan laughed. ‘That is the clever part. I have arranged to have Hsiang Shao-erh arrested on his return home. It will seem as if he had…
volunteered
the information. As, indeed, he will.'

Tsu Ma nodded thoughtfully. ‘Good. Then let us get back. All this talking has given me an appetite.'

Li Yuan smiled, then looked about him, conscious once more of the beauty of the shadowed gorge, the harmony of tree and rock and water. And yet that beauty was somehow insufficient.

He grasped the smooth wood of the rail, looking out at the great, heart-shaped rock that rested, so solid and substantial, at the centre of the flow, and felt a tiny tremor pass through him. This place, the morning light, gave him a sense of great peace, of oneness with things, and yet, at the same time,
he was filled with a seething mass of fears and expectations and hopes. And these, coursing like twin streams in his blood, made him feel odd, distanced from himself. To be so at rest and yet to feel such impatience, was that not strange? And yet, was that not the condition of all things? Was that not what the great Tao taught? Maybe, but it was rare to feel it so intensely in the blood.

Like a dragonfly hovering above the surface of a stream.

Tsu Ma was watching him from the bridge. ‘Yuan? Are you coming?'

Li Yuan turned, momentarily abstracted from the scene, then, with the vaguest nod, he moved from the rail, following his friend.

And maybe peace never came. Maybe, like life, it was all illusion, as the ancient Buddhists claimed. Or maybe it was himself. Maybe it was his own life that was out of balance. On the bridge he turned, looking back, seeing how the great swirl of white drifted out into the black, how its violent energy was stilled and channelled by the rock.

Then he turned back, walking on through the shadow of the trees, the dark image of the rock embedded at the centre of his thoughts.

It was midday and the sky over Northern Hunan was the cloudless blue of early spring. In the garden of the palace at Tao Yuan, Wang Sau-leyan sat on a tall throne, indolently picking from the bowls of delicacies on the table at his side while he listened to the man who stood, head bowed, before him.

The throne was mounted on an ancient sedan, the long arms carved like rearing dragons, the thick base shaped like a map of the ancient Middle Kingdom, back before the world had changed. Wang had had them set him down at the very heart of the garden, the elegant whiteness of the threetiered Pagoda of Profound Significance to his right, the stream, with its eight gently arching bridges, partly concealed beyond a stand of ancient junipers to his left.

To one side Sun Li Hua, newly promoted to Master of the Royal Household, stood in the shadow of the junipers, his arms folded into his powder-blue sleeves, his head lowered, waiting to do his master's bidding.

The man who stood before Wang was a tall, elegant-looking Han in his mid-fifties. His name was Hsiang Shao-erh and he was Head of the Hsiang family of City Europe, Li Yuan's bondsman – his blood vassal. But today
he was here, speaking to his master's enemy. Offering him friendship. And more…

For an hour Hsiang had prevaricated; had talked of many things, but never of the one thing he had come to raise. Now, tiring of his polite evasions, Wang Sau-leyan looked up, wiping his fingers on a square of bright red silk as he spoke.

‘Yes, cousin, but why are you here? What do you want from me?'

For the second time that day Hsiang was taken aback. Earlier, when Wang had invited him outdoors to talk, his mouth had flapped uselessly, trying to find the words that would not offend the T'ang; that might make clear this was a matter best discussed behind closed doors or not at all. But Wang had insisted and Hsiang had had to bow his head and follow, concealing his discomfort.

Now, however, Hsiang was feeling much more than simple discomfort. He glanced up, then looked away, troubled by Wang Sau-leyan's directness. For him this was a major step. Once taken, it could not be reversed. Even to be here today was a kind of betrayal. But this next…

With a tiny shudder, Hsiang came to the point.

‘Forgive me,
Chieh Hsia
, but I am here because I can do you a great service.' He lifted his head slightly, meeting Wang's eyes tentatively. ‘There is one we both… dislike immensely. One who has offended us gravely. He…'

Wang raised an eyebrow. ‘Go on, Hsiang Shao-erh…'

Hsiang looked down. ‘You know what happened,
Chieh Hsia
?'

Wang nodded, a faint smile on his lips. He did indeed. And, strangely enough, it was one of the few things he actually admired Li Yuan for. Faced with similar circumstances – with an outbreak of a deadly strain of syphilis – he would have acted exactly as Li Yuan had done, even to the point of offending his own Family Heads. But that was not the issue. Hsiang Shao-erh was here because – quite rightly – he assumed Wang hated Li Yuan as much as he did. But though Hsiang's loss of face before his peers had been a great thing, it was as nothing beside this act of betrayal.

Hsiang looked up, steeling himself, his voice hardening as he recalled his humiliation; his anger momentarily overcoming the fear he felt. ‘Then you understand why I am here,
Chieh Hsia
.'

Wang shook his head. ‘You will have to be less opaque, cousin. You talk
of one who has offended us both. Can you be more specific?'

Hsiang was staring at him now. But Wang merely turned aside, picking a lychee from one of the bowls and chewing leisurely at the soft, moist fruit before looking back at Hsiang.

‘Well?'

Hsiang shook his head slightly, as if waking, then stammered his answer. ‘Li Yuan. I mean Li Yuan.'

‘Ah…' Wang nodded. ‘But I still don't follow you, cousin. You said there was some great service you could do me.'