Under Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page B

as Kitan arrogance. They wanted you killed."
That, Tai hadn't known either. "Like that fellow back there?"
The two axes were chopping steadily, each one a thin, clean sound in the distance. "Gnam? He's just young. Wants to make a name."
"Kill an enemy right away?"
"Get it over with. Like your first woman."
The two of them exchanged a brief smile. Both were relatively young men, still. Neither felt that way.
Bytsan said, after a moment, "I was instructed that you were not to be killed."
Tai snorted. "I am grateful to hear it."
Bytsan cleared his throat. He seemed awkward suddenly. "There is a gift, instead, a recognition."
Tai stared again. "A gift? From the Taguran court?"
"No, from the rabbit in the moon." Bytsan grimaced. "Yes, of course, from the court. Well, from one person there, with permission."
"Permission?"
The grimace became a grin. The Taguran was sunburned, square-jawed, had one missing lower tooth. "You are slow this morning."
Tai said, "This is unexpected, that's all. What person?"
"See for yourself. I have a letter."
Bytsan reached into a pocket in his tunic and retrieved a pale-yellow scroll. Tai saw the Taguran royal seal: a lion's head, in red.
He broke the wax, unrolled the letter, read the contents, which were not lengthy, and so learned what they were giving to him and doing to him, for his time here among the dead.
It became something of an exercise to breathe.
Thoughts began arriving too swiftly, uncontrolled, disconnected, a swirling like a sandstorm. This could define his life--or have him killed before he ever got home to the family estate, let alone to Xinan.
He swallowed hard. Looked away at the mountains ranged and piled around them, rising up and farther up, the blue lake ringed in majesty. In the teachings of the Path, mountains meant compassion, water was wisdom. The peaks didn't alter, Tai thought.
What men did beneath their gaze could change more swiftly than one could ever hope to understand.
He said it. "I don't understand."
Bytsan made no reply. Tai looked down at the letter and read the name at the bottom again.
One person there, with permission.
One person. The White Jade Princess Cheng-wan: seventeenth daughter of the revered and exalted Emperor Taizu. Sent west to a foreign land twenty years ago from her own bright, glittering world. Sent with her pipa and flute, a handful of attendants and escorts, and a Taguran honour guard, to become the first imperial bride ever granted by Kitai to Tagur, to be one of the wives of Sangrama the Lion, in his high, holy city of Rygyal.
She had been part of the treaty that followed the last campaign here at Kuala Nor. An emblem in her young person (she'd been fourteen that year) of how savage--and inconclusive--the fighting had been, and how important it was that it end. A slender, graceful token of peace enduring between two empires. As if it would endure, as if it ever had, as if one girl's body and life could ensure such a thing.
There had been a fall of poems like flower petals in Kitai that autumn, pitying her in parallel lines and rhyme: married to a distant horizon, fallen from heaven, lost to the civilized world (of parallel lines and rhyme) beyond snowbound mountain barriers, among barbarians on their harsh plateau.
It had been the literary fashion for that time, an easy theme, until one poet was arrested and beaten with the heavy rod in the square before the palace--and nearly died of it--for a verse suggesting this was not only lamentable, but a wrong done to her.
You didn't say that .
Sorrow was one thing--polite, cultured regret for a young life changing as she left the glory of the world--but you never offered the view that anything the Ta-Ming Palace did, ever, might be mistaken. That was a denial of the rightly fulfilled, fully compassed mandate of heaven. Princesses were coinage in the world, what else could they be? How else serve the empire, justify their birth?
Tai was still staring at the words on the pale-yellow paper, struggling