Han Im replied: “I regret that I am the only one of your palace eunuchs to be here.”
“Then let the others be fetched, together with a ten or so of silken cords, that they may have the doubtful privilege of death!” the Emperor cried. “And bring wine. Am I, the Son of Heaven, to stand here in a draughty, unwarmed room, pacing a wretched mat like any one of my subjects. . . .”
Han Im took his courage in both hands.
“Sire,” he observed, “the great Emperor, Tang the Completer, said: ‘The peoples’ faults are mine, and mine the peoples’.”
The Emperor said, more quietly: “I used to listen to the wisdom of the past. Perhaps if I had listened more willingly—go and find out.”
Han Im breathed again and went to speak with General Tung. The two met in the passage.
Tung said: “She went with the boy. At least, one of my men saw a girl go with him, and as the other three girls are here, it must have been the Lady Yang. Can you think why she should do that?”
Han Im replied, after thought: “She went because she feared that the soldiers would do to her as has been done to her family. I think it would be better if she had left a message. What message did she leave?”
“No message,” the General said, raising his eyebrows.
Han Im shook his head. “I think she said that she would meet his Imperial Majesty at the next halt. It would be far better for her to have said so to your man—the one who saw her. I should recommend you to go in and tell this message to the Emperor.”
General Tung answered: “If you think it better, I will do so. But I shall blame you if he finds that no message was actually left. We start in half an hour. It will be a slow progress, with so many of my men on foot. He will be impatient.”
He went to calm the Emperor.
Liu Shen-hsu woke, and with difficulty held together the two sides of his splitting head. As he sat up, Peng Yeh came into the room.
“They are going to my estate in the time it takes to harness a horse,” he told the poet. “May I extend a similar invitation to you?”
Liu demanded: “Who are going, and why?”
Peng Yeh told him. Liu’s headache appeared to be passing.
“No,” he answered. “Let us call it Invitation on Waking, an impromptu after the manner of Master Li Po.
“Then you will forgive me if I make my own arrangements,” Peng told him. He regarded poets with disquiet.
The two-horse carriage rolled noisily onward under the pale lavender dawn. Behind, the great mass of Chung-nan Mountain grew less menacing: before them ridges and spurs lay in an unbroken sequence.
Ah Lai said: “I am not very sure of the road. If Winter Cherry were with us, she could set my mind at rest.”
Yan Kuei-fei replied: “Whoever Winter Cherry may be, I am sure that she would resent the mere duty of setting your mind at rest. Women are apt to aim at higher purposes than serving as guides.”
A golden pheasant rose from a slope to their right.
“That is a sentence of the Master’s which no one has ever understood,” the boy said. “You remember? ‘Thrice it smelt him, and then rose’. Have you ever heard any explanation of it?”
She smiled. “A golden pheasant,” she said, “serves as a neat direction to our conversation. You were speaking of a girl called Winter Cherry. Now, thanks to the bird, we speak of Confucius and matters literary. ‘The good man,’ you remember, ‘speaks seldom, hut always to the point.’ It seems either that the point irks you, or that you are not what the Master would have styled a good man.”
“I did not change the conversation,” he objected. “It was the pheasant. But, as you wish to speak of Winter Cherry, I will explain that she knows the road well, having travelled it before, under conditions which she is not likely to forget.”
“And which I cannot forget either,” she said, “since I do not know them. As to your pheasant, the line answers for itself. ‘Thrice it smelt him,’ uncertain as to his purposes—to watch, to shoot, to trap, to seek its eggs—‘and then’—having made up its mind that all men are unreliable—‘it rose’. So anything with a bird’s wildness will flee what it does not understand. So, also, your mind and your tongue flee conversation about anything more interesting than pheasants.”
They turned a corner on the breast of a hill.
Ah Lai observed: “It would be easy to amuse oneself by inventing sayings which one could attribute to the Master. But, of course, it is always likely that what one says has been said before, by someone. So almost anything might be a quotation from somebody.”
“Mo Ti was my favourite,” she replied. “His idea that almost everything which one could do made the situation worse, appeals to some laziness in me. It is a very easy doctrine to justify, superficially at least. Here we are in comparative discomfort, jolting towards doubtful safety, while I might so easily be lying untidily in my own palace gardens after a short instant of knowledge—the knowledge of the reality of a steel blade.”
“There are other deaths which rebels give to favourites,” he said. “And Mo Ti did not so much, my uncle says, urge doing nothing as he urged that everything was, however disguisedly, good. Besides, Mencius put Mo Ti in a very small place, so far as philosophy is concerned. So let us speak no more of Mo Ti, but of yourself, for it is not every day that I drive with you.”
She looked away, into the quickening light.
“I am a poor excuse,” she said. “But for me, this trouble would not have come on my country or my Emperor. I know—indeed I know—that with me he forgot statecraft and preparation for wars. Through silken curtains the war gongs do not sound. My Pear Garden Players performed many a play about Emperors and favourites, but never one like this. Do you think he will come quickly enough? I do not trust the troops.”
Ah Lai countered: “If you think that I am doing this service for General Tung, without being certain that General Tung will take advantage of it, you think wrong. No: all will be well—we shall go into the distant mountains and, with fresh, loyal troops return to strike the heads from traitors. Do not concern yourself with strategy: you are a woman, and a woman’s strategy is different from the strategy of men. You are fitted to be what you are, and therefore safe from dangers which afflict us. As they say, a hunchback has many advantages: he can earn a living by washing without noticing his bent back, and he is safe from the army.”
“You compare me to a hunchback?” she laughed. “Your uncle would have made no such mistake.”
He answered: “I did not mean to compare you, and that you know well.”
They drove on. The countryside was less barren now.
Later, she asked him: “This girl of yours, Winter Cherry, why have you left her behind you?”
“You would not understand,” he replied. “To you, who have always had whatever you desired, it is impossible to explain how lovers may separate without quarrels, in order to meet later.”