Ah Lai said: “I can see that I shall not need to leave my own house for entertainment. No—no; you need not start so hurriedly to protect yourself against the chill of the morning. You did not do so until I spoke to you. It is absurdly early: come back here. Many a husband has wisely sent his wife back to her parents because she woke him too early. I am still quite sleepy. You have put some charcoal in the k’ang? Then come and keep me warm.”
She protested: “But you have to be up early, to go on your duty. Oh! Do not look at me like that!”
He laughed: “Why not? But if you prefer it, you can have this fur rug and pretend to be a bear, and then I shall look at you differently. If you stay out there like that, you will be so cold that I shall not welcome you back here. Come, let us agree under more comfortable circumstances.”
“Fetch me,” she answered, and when he had done so and they were both warm again she said: “You are not in the least like what I expected.”
He said: “Well, what did you expect? Were you judging me by a high standard, or a low? I did not marry you in order to be compared to someone else. A husband must be incomparable.” He patted her. “There! I did not mean to be cruel. A life with a poet uncle has unfitted me for the more considerate sort of sincerity.”
She snuggled down under the rugs. “I am defenceless now,” she told him. “Before, I did not mind what people said to me, for the people themselves did not matter to me. But now you . . .”
“I?” he said. “I matter very much. Listen, if you are not too busy. A girl once told me the tale of the man whose wife was too imaginative. Do you want to hear it, you there, under the rug?”
There was an affirmative movement.
He went on: “It happened in the winter, in the North, where the snow can be very thick and the cold very bitter. The husband had come in after his work and, when he had eaten the evening meal which his wife had cooked for him, they went to bed. Now she had prepared against the cold by making a larger fire than usual under their k’ang, and he was tired enough to go to sleep at once without noticing the added comfort. Since she followed him, she had no means of knowing what was happening, and soon slept also. In the morning, when they woke . . . Are you listening?”
There was no reply. He, too, retired further under the rugs and shut his eyes. Outside the window the dawn climbed.
Dawn lit the swiftly moving clouds, dappled salmon and cinnamon. The Great Gate opened and the Emperor came out with Han Im. Two servants carried the box and set it down outside the gates. Then they went in and the main gates closed. Father Peng came out of the left hand, smaller gate, dressed in his last official robes, and waited. A carriage drove up along the outer wall and the driver, getting down, pulled the box up into it. The carriage turned and went back the way it had come, to the lower ground on the right which was not yet fully lit.
As the sun came up, its first rays touched the bright tip of the Dragon Banner which hung at its post in front of the cavalry on the left of the line. In the centre the infantry waited; on the right the archers, their bows of mulberry slung, reached out of the lower ground into the growing light.
The Emperor started walking up the slope. Han Im, following, wondered how many of the cavalry were the same men who, not long ago, had galloped in line across and across the ground in front of them, to which the Emperor was leading. How many remembered that day?
The Emperor walked on towards the spot.
So did times, seasons, and events repeat themselves. For, after all, life was but an endless repetition of the life of one’s fathers, and historians, writing in the centuries to be, would not know what filled the thoughts of this man as he paced slowly towards the spot which had been for him almost the end of living.
“This was the place,” Han Im said.
The Emperor stood motionless with lowered head.
Beside them other figures had come now, officials who had fled on that fatal morning with the Emperor and who now shared the Emperor’s thoughts. Their eyes were wet.
Then the Emperor raised his head and looked at the ridge, where Han Im, too, could see the figure of the priest motionless against the moving clouds. The Emperor bowed, looked once again at the ground, and said to Han Im: “Let us go.”
The Emperor’s carriage and those of the few who had stood with him came, halted, then wheeled back to their places in line. Han Im mounted the horse which had been brought for him. In the now level rays of the full sun the ranks broke into ordered movement down towards the road for Chang-an.
Han Im suddenly remembered what he had forgotten. He galloped down towards Father Peng, dismounted and bowed.
“It is the Emperor’s command,” he said, “that your grandson-in-law, Keun Ah Lai, be instructed to report at the Palace tomorrow, not today.”
Father Peng bowed and replied: “It shall be as you say. The child is strong, like his father. He was feeding just before I came out.”
They bowed again to each other and Han Im rejoined his company.
As the sun rose higher and lemon came to take the place of pink, and then that lemon turned to a misty white, Father Peng saw the last of the Emperor’s force turn the corner and pass from sight.
He made the full nine-fold kotow, dusted his knees and went back through the gate.
The tenth day of the first moon, new style.
Winderton.