“If your Majesty wishes it,” she answered. “But could I not come in myself, without being carried, as I have come now? Besides you speak as if you were looking on at the Emperor and me. Why do you speak of the Emperor as if he were someone else? You . . .”
The door opened, and Han Im, the sword still belted on, brought in Winter Cherry.
Han Im said: “This girl was trying to get herself killed in place of Kuei-fei. She did not know that Kuei-fei had hanged herself with a bowstring. Fortunately I was in time. But you had better get up and prepare to ride, Ah Lai, for we move on. News has come that the rebels are moving after us from Chang-an. Is this the girl’s sister? Then she can look after her while you get ready to ride with the Emperor. Your duties must be considered before your pleasures.” He went out.
Peng Mooi-tsai said: “So you are not the Emperor? Of course, I can see you now that the light is better. I would not have spoken so if I had known how young you were. You should have told me at once. And how did you know all that about girls carried being in to the Emperor?”
Winter Cherry took Mooi-tsai by the hand and led her out.
Ah Lai dressed himself with care, for not only was he to ride into the far west in the Emperor’s train, but it was still possible that, in the interval before their going, he would have the chance to explain to Winter Cherry why he had been innocently deceiving her sister. It was of no use now, but he might manage to see her alone.
Winter Cherry knelt before the tablet of her great-grandfather in the Hall of Ancestors. It was quiet here, and a thin column of smoke rose straight into the still air from the little pile of sandalwood which she had put in the burner.
“Do you, my ancestors, make of me and my desires what is best for the honour of our family. I have been honoured in the bed of the Emperor, and now the Emperor flees before his rebel enemies. I have been honoured in the declared love of Ah Lai, and now Ah Lai rides to his death in the Emperor’s service against these rebels. I have tried to save the life of the Emperor’s beloved, the Lady Yang Kuei-fei, but in vain, for she is now crushed beneath the feet of the horses, her garments are stained with blood and dust, her kingfisher pins are trampled underfoot, and the glory in the Emperor’s eyes has gone, leaving an empty space.
“Do you, my ancestors, guide the spirits of the earth and sky towards whatever doom they may purpose for me, for I have failed my father and my father’s father, and from me no fame has come to the house of Peng.
“Do you, my ancestors, give me some sign that the end may not be far off, that shame shall not always smear my name and through me the name of my family, and that the end, again, may be near. Give me a sign.”
Outside, the stillness was broken by the hoofs of horses, and the doorway into the Hall became suddenly bright and then dark again.
Ah Lai said, as he stood there: “I am going. I thought that you would be here. How straight the smoke goes up.”
She replied: “Are you my sign? Are you the sign that I was praying for?”
“Your ancestors must have heard you,” he said. “I did not know that I was an answer to your prayer, since for long, it seems, you have not looked at me as once you looked. But if prayers bring me, here I stand, about to go again.”
She cried, still kneeling: “Can I believe the sign?” The smoke wavered, became again a ruled line to the dimness above. “Can I believe? It matters nothing if the past has been cruel, if I can believe.”
Ah Lai moved towards her as a voice called from outside: “They are going!”
Winter Cherry said, very softly: “If you were not going . . .”
He cried: “Believe the sign.”
Then the door opened and closed a second time, and Winter Cherry was alone before the tablet of her great-grandfather.
She cried, noiselessly.
The Lady of the Tapestry sent a messenger to recall her son from the village, now that Yang Kuei-fei was dead.
PART THREE
As when the players, masked and posturing, have reached a climax in their play by death, disaster or incongruity, and the main agents of this climax leave the stage to a subsidiary character whose outpourings of verse serve to sooth the tried nerves of the audience, so then the sweet succession of the season brought relief to the family of Peng. The millet was garnered, the granary floors stood deep once more in their coloured grain, and the activities which lead directly to the hoped and following spring engaged the minds as well as the bodies of those who had witnessed the passage of an event.
The men of An Lu-shan passed in pursuit, taking with them nothing but more grain in little bags at their saddle-bows. Returning messengers brought tales of the ever further retreat into Shu in the west, and ever continuing pursuit by the men of An Lu-shan. He, report had it, filled the court at Chang-an with tall Northerners from his own province and Borderers from the deep, cold hills of the North. Rumour had it, too, that his mind was not wholly concerned with the pursuit and destruction of that Emperor whose throne he now held, but that the usurper troubled himself greatly with the fate of that companion of his youth who had (so it was reported) fled with the bright Emperor towards the unprobeable and misty valleys where magic seemed so much more likely than in the prosaic and cultivated plains around the old capital city.
It was on the eighteenth day of the seventh moon that the Emperor and his party reached Cheng-tu, Ah Lai, who had been used hitherto only to the inadequate organisation of a poet’s household, was immediately astonished at the manner in which efficiency overrode expected fatigue and the various members of the party were accommodated in houses, while the soldiery tested further the capacity of the barracks.
For several days, it appeared, there would be no particular need for his services, and when he had largely exhausted the pleasure of acquainting himself with the geography of Cheng-tu, he began to realise why officials in general kept bright the armoury of their poetic imagination and often, towards the fall of the sun, would relax in putting on paper their impressions of the day that had gone.
But when he had collected paper and brush and prepared his ink, he found that his creative faculties were under a cloud which he could not explain. Rhymes were tardy, words seemed to lack by a narrow margin that precision which is any poet’s aim, and even the titles which he had managed to project did not comfortably fit any poem which he was likely to write. Images, indeed, arrived, but they were images with loose edges, images not only unrelated to each other and individually incapable of extension into a poem, but images whose reality, even whose possibility, seemed outside normal experience.
He was, therefore, grateful for the interruption when, at the hour of the goat (an unheard-of time for an audience) he was summoned to the Governor’s yamen, where the Bright Emperor had been installed with a poor semblance of the grandeur which he had left at Chang-an. Yet even here formality overlaid necessity, and when Ah Lai had come past the armed, statuesque guards at the gates, to the entrance of the Great Hall, he found there all the unexpressed official hindrances and supercilious condescensions which are a part of any court, however rural—hindrances to which Ah Lai had not yet had time to become accustomed.