In Ink and In Blood

[WP] Those who lives by the sword dies by the sword. A rather simple and merciful death. It's the scholars, who live by ink and paper, that face a truly tragic and brutal fate.

*****

It was night again. Library-quiet, in a home that used to ring with snores. But the scholar Ren Daiyan was awake tonight, and the children had been taken down to the lake by their nursemaid and Daiyan’s manservant.

Shan was gone, off to see a friend. She'd left the capital before the prime minister died. It was possible that even now she didn't know. That they traded poems and songs over cups of tea, while musicians played behind a paper screen. Sheer black outlines, in the candlelight of her friend’s sitting room.

Like the man sent to kill him, a shadow against Daiyan’s bedroom wall.

“Had the Emperor desired my life,” Daiyan said, “he needed only to ask.”

The shadow nodded, stepped closer. He was a big man. Moonlight glanced off the blade in his hand. “Ah, but asking is so public,” said the man.

Now Daiyan nodded, he knew the voice, knew the shape of the man, knew the blade. Anyone would, even by moonlight.

Silk rustled as Wan’yen, once a chieftain in the barbarous north, now a killer in the Emperor’s court, sat down on Daiyan’s bed. He laid the blade across his knees, and Daiyan had to struggle not to look at it. A short, slightly curving sword, its pommel would be worked into a horse’s head, the guards a pair of wild tails.

But the sword was not the threat today.

“It’s over then?” Daiyan said.

Wan’yen reached into the pocket of his long, dark robe and drew out a folded piece of paper, handed it to Daiyan. The calligraphy was exquisite. Slanting and slender, each stroke an incisive statement— one could almost believe it came directly from the Emperor’s hand.

It couldn't have, of course. There were too many of these going out across the city. Wan’yen would not be the only killer in the streets tonight. On some level, Daiyan knew he should be flattered. That they’d sent a man like Wan’yen to him was a mark of respect. Not for any martial status of course, but because Daiyan, in his time, had mattered. He’d had thoughts that shaped the course of nations. A letter from his hand had stayed executions, his essays had ended wars— or begun them. The last Prime Minister, whose sudden death had so upset the balance of power at court, had called him an advisor. Towards the end, he’d called Daiyan a friend.

Friends of Prime Ministers got men like Wan’yen, even if Wan’yen couldn’t read the exquisite character written on the paper he’d handed over.

It said, “Forget.” That was it. Struggling over sentences, over fragments, Shan had always said that a single word could strive for all the heavens' powers. They’d laid awake at night in the aftermath of love, sheets scattered across the foot of their bed while the nightingales sang in the garden, and she’d talked about finding the perfect tone; that single word that could break a man’s heart. Or, she’d said, laughing as she tapped out the beat of his heart in the recess of his collarbone, “A woman’s.” When the nightingales sang, Shan had often argued that a woman’s heart was harder to break.

Daiyan hoped that it was true. Here, now, was a word that broke his heart. Forget, it said. The Emperor’s calligraphy. Forget.

Forget.

Forget.

Already, they would be burning his books.

Wan’yen looked up at him. Daiyan couldn’t remember standing. The moonlight shone on the man’s shaved head, and on the long black braid that trailed down his back to rest upon the bed. There’d been a story in the tea houses that Wan’yen had once strangled a man with that braid. There were other stories about the blade, about what he could do with his hands, or the twisted northern games he might play with a man and a pair of horses and a rope.

Forget was worse, even if it meant Daiyan would live.

"Three days. At court, the men who write these things say ‘We are not barbarians.'" Wan'yen shifted. That long braid, the blade and its pommel. "You understand? You’re to go to Lingzhou Isle.”

“My family?” Daiyan whispered.

“Forget,” Wan’yen said.

A nightingale began to sing. So soft, so tender; it broke Daiyan’s heart again. Nightingales were from the south, before the gibbons ruled the jungle and there were tigers even in the villages. He’d hear them on the road to Lingzhou Isle, where the Emperor sent men into exile, and from which so few ever returned.

There were tigers on the isle too. Gibbons. But no nightingales, no family. And here in the city, they’d be burning all his books, all his essays, all his correspondences, even any prayers he might have written, and hidden in trees or shrines along the lake and river.

Forget was the most complete punishment that there was, in the world under heaven, and under the exquisitely civilized, cultivated leadership of the Emperor who had modeled that calligraphy. They killed soldiers like Wan’yen with a stroke of the sword, but they did nothing to the strokes of those soldiers pens, if there were any. Their ideas were not excised root and branch, like eunuchs when a city fell. Worse than eunuchs even, because afterward they might be seen, they might be known. Men might speak their names. Children born before their father's fall might still carry their true names. But Daiyan’s sons, Ren Tzu and Ren Tuan, what of them? Whose names would they take now? Who would take them? The sons of a man sent to Lingzhou Isle. A known man, a scholar, an advisor, a friend to a Prime Minister who had fallen out of favor and then fallen onto his own blade. What would Shan have to do, when he was gone?

“My wife,” said Daiyan.

“A woman with two young sons, she’ll forget before the sun rises. Besides, a woman gone at night?” The big man smiled, and it was a terrible thing, a record of years and battles in those chipped and missing teeth.

“She’s forgotten you already,” Wan’yen said. “Tell me, is she very beautiful?”

Shan. Daiyan hoped she didn’t know. Not tonight. The news would be all over the city by sunrise, shouted on street corners, a thousand different, creative ways to avoid saying a condemned man’s name. Let her have one more sunrise. Perhaps later a servant would bring the news in. Perhaps it would be her friend’s husband. Perhaps the Emperor had sent a man for her, although Daiyan doubted it. Shan had struggled all her life to be something more than seen, and the world had struggled just as hard not to let her. A strange irony in that. It might save her life.

That hope was all that saved Daiyan’s, staring into Wan’yen’s smile. Despite the blade across his knees, despite his braid and those gnarled, neck-breaking hands, Daiyan wanted to try to kill him.

Instead, Daiyan folded up the paper and placed it on his desk beside the candle and the letter he’d been writing. A letter, no doubt, that Wan’yen would soon take. He stared at the paper for a moment, then Daiyan went to get his traveling coat, and he slipped the paper into its pocket. Whatever it was, the calligraphy was exquisite. That mattered, even now. Daiyan had founded his life upon things like that mattering.

Wan’yen grunted. He touched the blade. "In the city, they are cutting off men's hands. But then, I heard their orders given, and mine were just the paper, and a word. Tell me, scholar, will you ever write again?"

“No,” Daiyan said.

Wan'yen's fingers wrapped around the pommel. He was a hard man with hard, searching eyes. "If you break your oath--”

“My word matters,” Daiyan said.

A faint sound, as Wan'yen released the blade. He nodded, accepting that. The nightingales sang again. In the moonlight, in the quiet, something came over Wan’yen then. He was looking right at Ren Daiyan, their eyes met, just for a moment, and the northerner stood, towering over the scholar.

“I have left a home,” Wan’yen said, his voice a low, thoughtful rumble. “In my own way, I came south. There’s a life on Lingzhou Isle. Especially if you keep your hands.”

“I might grow another garden,” Daiyan said.

“Or love another woman.”

“No,” the scholar said.

The birds stopped singing. A man screamed in the city, the sort of scream that could only mean a death, but in the city, men died all the time. Another voice lost in the night, a soul forgotten down some alley, snatched away over a purse or a woman.

“You’d rather have died,” Wan’yen said suddenly.

“Perhaps.”

The man raised a bushy eyebrow. “All these years, and I think I’ll never understand your people.”

“All these years,” Daiyan said, “and I thought, vainly, that I did."

Shan. A shape against the bedroom wall, a candlelight flicker. Fading.

“Cheer up,” Wan’yen said, clapping Daiyan across the shoulders, “it’s a scholar’s death, but at least you weren’t a poet.”

And then Wan’yen took the letter. He took the candle, the papers in Daiyan’s desk, the latest manuscript he’d poured his soul into. He took the calligraphy that Daiyan had been working on for his sons.

Wan'yen burned them in the garden, beneath the trees where the nightingales sang, where they would sing no longer. In a city where men screamed at night and were forgotten, in a time where Shan sang songs unknown, and struggled over single words in her friend’s sitting room, over tea, or pastries, or perhaps a glass of watered wine.

The sun rose on embers, in a quiet house above the lake.

*****

THE END