Chapter 4

The four words of the Book of Changes — supreme, penetrating, advantageous, upright — correspond to spring, summer, autumn and winter. The new Emperor's reign name was Zhenyuan. Reign names are usually chosen to uphold the legitimate calendar, signal good omens and proclaim the ruler's virtue. These two characters carried the sense of winter departing, spring arriving — beautiful in its resonance and full of hope. You could read through the histories and scarcely find its like.

Most of all, the whole household was shaken that even the reign name answered to that one cast of the Qian hexagram, as if heaven really had a hand in it.

Three days after the accession edict reached Shuozhou, more decrees followed. The first proclaimed the numbers and batches to be amnestied and the corresponding cases, and the treasonous heir apparent's conspiracy case, which had brought down the Zhuo family, stood first on the list. The new Emperor had added a note: there had been many doubtful points in the case from the start, and a fresh investigation now would find no evidence. Whether to overturn the verdicts on those already executed could wait. The urgent business was to relieve the implicated households of a convict status inherited across generations, remove them from their places of exile, and restore them to commoner registration. Those released need not return to the capital or to their ancestral seats. They could go right on shining and radiating in Shuozhou.

Zhuo Siheng didn't understand. If it was an amnesty, why so many conditions? If everyone knew it was a miscarriage of justice, why be so roundabout? Never mind punishing the real culprits — surely they should at least get their old posts back? He'd just become emperor. Wasn't this exactly when you established authority and cleared out the old guard? Shouldn't this be his most decisive moment?

That was how the TV dramas played it, anyway.

He trusted his parents completely, so he spoke plainly and asked.

They looked at their beloved son rather as if looking at an idiot, worry all over both their faces. Song Liangyu came to herself first and said gently to her devastated husband, "The child has been suffering here with us since he was old enough to know anything. He's never read a proper book or seen an official with a rank. How could he be like you, who spent your boyhood at your father's side, watching him hold office and learning from it? Naturally you understand officialdom and what lies under the surface at court. We're not convicts now and the child can sit the examinations, so you'll simply have to teach him the depths of it, little by little."

"Siheng is the cleverest of them, I know that. That he's so ignorant of the world is my downfall's doing. It's not his fault. It's not his fault." Since the amnesty Zhuo Yan had felt there was hope of curing his wife and that his children's prospects were bright, and nothing could dampen him now. So he said to Zhuo Siheng with some relish, "What you've described is the kind of tale about emperors and generals that storytellers love. How could affairs at court ever be that blunt?"

Zhuo Siheng's curiosity was as strong as ever, and he listened closely.

"The case implicated a very wide circle. In the five years since we were condemned, the vacated posts have all been filled, the confiscated property has gone into the treasury, and the seized mansions have mostly been granted elsewhere. If His Majesty sent us back to the capital and restored our offices, where would the offices come from? What residences would there be to grant? And if he turned out the current holders, he'd have the whole court alarmed and resentful in his first days on the throne. The amnesty is already an act of grace. It's His Majesty saying he doesn't endorse the late Emperor's actions. That he's gone this far suggests he's an enlightened ruler. But reverence for heaven and the ancestors allows no reckless word, and over-correcting a wrong overshoots just as badly as falling short." He clapped his son's shoulder. "What's more, those of us convicted in that case were all officials in the deposed heir's circle. Your grandfather was his tutor. If the new Emperor gave men like us high office, he'd be brewing a quarrel between the old heir's faction and the late Emperor's trusted ministers with his own hands, and throwing the court into disorder himself. And the late Emperor's dignity matters. So does the perfect filial piety the new Emperor must model for the realm."

Zhuo Siheng understood the first part but not the rest. "Father, I heard from Uncle Zhu the Fifth that the new Emperor isn't the late Emperor's son at all. He's the son of the deposed heir Grandfather served. The late Emperor left no issue and no testamentary edict, so after the Empress Dowager and the ministers deliberated they hauled the new Emperor out of prison and put him on the throne. So why go to such lengths for the man who killed his father?"

In the capital Zhuo Yan would have hushed him for talking with so little sense of weight. But in Shuozhou the sky was high and the emperor far away, and there was no harm in setting it out plainly. It could even serve as his son's first schooling in how a court and an emperor's mind actually work. So he set his scruples aside, made sure there was nobody outside the door or window, and lowered his voice. "The new Emperor received the throne from the late Emperor, not from his own father, and in the ancestral temple he must be placed in succession to the late Emperor as well. He can't take the throne and immediately revile the very father he must bow to there. He has to be filial in the extreme. That's an emperor's difficulty, and the art of ruling. I've never seen the new Emperor and don't know his character. But the ministers put him forward, so he must be generous and forbearing. Otherwise why would the late Emperor's own ministers make trouble for themselves by finding an enemy's child? And if he's such a man, he'll be mindful of the great ministers who put him on the throne. Why offend the court before his foundations are secure, when he knows full well who the Yis and Huos are?"

The Yis and Huos meant Yi Yin and Huo Guang, two ministers of antiquity who had each removed a sovereign. Zhuo Siheng had heard the names and the stories from his father before, and with this explanation the crux of it ran clear, with no doubt left.

Even while enjoying the satisfaction of knowing, he thought with some regret that if their province's top humanities scorer had transmigrated instead, that person would never have asked a question so devoid of political literacy. They'd have studied history and politics, with the case studies and the theory in place. Put theory next to practice and they'd have got the right answer in a moment, and might even have added a couple of pointed remarks on the failings of the age.

A pity it was him. If the edict had been about the refractive index of a prism or the thermogravimetric curve of a compound, he'd have understood it on the spot.

The road really was long and hard. Taking the examinations, entering office, changing his life so he could reach a higher sky and a wider world — that would take work.

Then his father sighed and said slowly, "Besides, even if we went back to the capital, our family has no ground left to stand on."

"Do we really not have a single relative left?" Huiheng, who had been listening quietly, spoke for the first time. She was perceptive, and understood at once what lay behind that lost look.

Zhuo Yan stroked her soft hair. "We are the Zhuo of Hanchuan in Xuanzhou. Our ancestors can be traced to the Spring and Autumn period, and in every dynasty since, our descendants have held office. Not every generation left its name in the histories as the first ones did, and we couldn't compare with those great houses where every man wears vermilion and purple. But we were a family of standing, generations of scholarship with deep roots of our own. A clan like that has many branches, and in the old days the uncles and cousins and nephews back home were always coming and going with us, keeping the ties warm."

"Father, I know. After Grandfather was condemned, the relatives all vanished, didn't they?" Ciheng had been half asleep until the talk turned to the family, and she caught this. She wasn't yet seven, but she had a hard streak already, and having watched the truth about human warmth and coldness in Shuozhou any number of times, she guessed the reason at once. Contempt showed on her face.

In the old household he would have reminded her sternly not to show her edges and her likes and dislikes so openly. Now a child's clear eyes were a kind of wealth ground out of a hard life. He gathered his indignant younger daughter in and said quietly, "You're all growing up, and it's right that you should know something of the family's past. Your eldest brother is steady and clever, your second sister is fine and bright. But you, Ci'er, have been indulged by your mother and me since you were small, and you speak your mind straight out. Remember that family matters may be discussed at home. Outside, say nothing more than you must."

Zhuo Ciheng nodded, half understanding.

Since she was sensible enough, he went on. "In fact it goes further. To avoid being implicated, the Zhuo clan has struck our line from the genealogy."

All three children were aghast.

Even Zhuo Siheng, an outsider, knew that in an age where lineage counted this much, it was a fair match for the stripping of political rights that came with convict status. But once the shock passed, a thought turned over in him, and he decided relatives like that could be done without.

Through their exile the only person who had sent anything was his mother's sister, his aunt. Most of it had passed through many hands on the road and been skimmed away, but some old clothes and pills for common ailments survived, and they had relieved a great many pressing needs. To protect her husband's family his aunt was careful and never left a note or a letter. But their mother had pointed it out to them all: on the lining of every old garment was a tiny embroidered duck, and that was her greeting.

Years ago, before the two sisters reached the age of the hairpin, their favorite thing was playing in water. Their grandfather doted on them and let them do as they liked, but feared an accident, so he had a shallow pond fed by running water dug in front of the sisters' little courtyard, purely for splashing about in. They had ducklings bought and raised in it, and chasing the ducks made for a very happy stretch of childhood. When their mother saw the little ducks she understood her sister's concern and the affection behind it, and wept a long while, saying only that she was unworthy of being the elder sister. How her sister was faring now, whether she had children, none of it was known, and yet she was the one spending money and worrying on their behalf.

It was true that a great clan must cut where cutting is called for, to preserve the whole. Zhuo Siheng understood the logic. But as the one who had been cut off, sympathizing with the other side was rather too much to ask.

His aunt, though. Once the family got back, she'd have to be repaid.

Seeing the children fall silent, his parents said nothing either. When Zhuo Siheng's thoughts came back and he saw the mood in the room, his chest filled with a sudden boldness, and he lifted his head. "Father, Mother, don't grieve over it. If the clan doesn't want us, we'll found a house of our own."

Words that startling fell on everyone's ears like thunder, and both parents turned to look at their son in disbelief.

"The Zhuo family of Hanchuan is behind us. Heaven leaves no man without a road, and for us this should be a rebirth. So what if we cast off what came before? We'll found our own house and start again. Our registration falls in Shuozhou, so we are the Zhuo family of Youbei. I'll study hard and not fail your teaching or what fate has made of us. And when our whole family returns to the capital one day, I want to see which is the finer and which leaves the better name — the Zhuo of Youbei or the Zhuo of Hanchuan — and who wears the vermilion and purple, and who becomes the ridgepole of the state."

"Good! My son has great ambition! I fall short of him myself!" Zhuo Yan was nearly in tears. "The roc's flight of ten thousand li — how could a flock of common birds fathom its will? A man ought to speak such words. Only then has he not wasted his one turn through the world."

Song Liangyu went from astonishment to comfort to grateful tears, brushing them from her eyes over and over. But soon she began to cough, a heavy feverish flush surfacing through the pallor of her face, as if a hand were around her throat and she couldn't draw breath. The family was thrown into a flurry — water, medicine, someone running for a physician — and the room filled with anxious grief again.