Chapter 44

Before Zhuo Siheng could speak, Gao Yongqing had already bowed deeply to him, his voice low with shame: "Elder Brother, Yongqing was rude; I dare not hope for your forgiveness, only to speak with you again of the ten years' friendship we've not renewed. Having met you this once, when Yongqing lies buried in the Yellow Springs hereafter, I'll have the face to go before my father."

His gaunt, broken frame bent low, but was caught halfway by a pair of hands and set upright again.

Gao Yongqing looked up at Zhuo Siheng's face — strange and familiar at once — and a hundred feelings mingled in his heart, past all words; through more than ten years of solitary drifting and hardship, he felt the man before him hadn't changed the least from the boy who'd stood before the labor camp in Shuozhou's spring snow that year — time, in the growing up, hadn't stripped that gentle, clear calm from his brows and eyes.

"It's our fathers' souls in Heaven, letting you and me take the zhuangyuan one after the other and meet again; let's worship and console the two of them together, and let them rest in peace." Zhuo Siheng strove to make his smile less bitter and desolate; yet as he said it he knew the living's longing can never, in the end, reach the far shore of the Yellow Springs — but only so could the two of them find a little calm and comfort.

This must surely be the wish of Uncle Gao and his own father too.

Gao Yongqing's eyes had already reddened faintly; unable to speak, he could only nod.

It was as if they'd returned to that day of setting out — each heading for his own bright future, and yet a shadow chasing behind every child; only one as free-spirited as the Hermit Taibai could say "the day of yesterday cannot be kept" — but the road the two of them had walked was all "what troubles my heart, this day, is full of care."

After kowtowing and worshipping the blessing-lamps, Zhuo Siheng rose first; he borrowed from the abbot the meditation cell he'd once lived in, and led Gao Yongqing to the quiet, little-frequented back wing to talk.

Here no incense-pilgrim ever set foot, and few novices trod; only the silent green forest, its words carrying to no other ear — at last they could have a proper talk.

The boy before him was now nearly his own height; but for looking somewhat thin and pale, in every way a firm, upright young man. Gao Yongqing greatly resembled his father: the clean, upright looks of a gentleman, spirited eyes, a bearing that outdid the tall bamboo — only, he lacked that gentle, kindly, level air Uncle Gao's brows and expression had kept even through hardship.

"Do you really know what you're doing?" This was what Zhuo Siheng had most wanted to say to Gao Yongqing all this while, and now at last he could: "You've been an attendant, and so have I; what sort of temper the reigning sovereign has, you and I needn't say again. But knowing it, why do you still cut off your own retreat? You and I deeply inherit our fathers' aims — to stand at court and save the age and repay the country is what we ought to do; but you dance the sword on the wild edge — is that truly the right road of this path?"

Hearing it out, Gao Yongqing instead showed a smile; he was no lover of smiles, and even a trace of one was precious — the more so now, his brows and eyes eased, the gloom and cold cruelty gone, and he was truly a bright young man.

"Only Elder Brother would speak such heartfelt words to me."

"This isn't a pointer, it's a warning; I'm willing to say it, but are you willing to hear it?" Zhuo Siheng hadn't been this earnestly persuasive even with his own siblings. Strange to say — after one meeting with Gao Yongqing ten years ago they'd parted, and with all those earlier misunderstandings, at their reunion there wasn't the least strangeness or distance; he said whatever came to mind.

Perhaps because they'd been introduced by their fathers back then, both old men still living, and a promise binding the two of them — for years an image had stayed in his heart as a hope, turning over and over, and in those ten empty years a vast brotherly bond had grown, as if this moment were fulfilling, for their fathers, a lifelong wish of comrades made brothers, a life-and-death reunion across the Yellow Springs and the blue heavens.

Gao Yongqing lowered his head and smiled: "I am not the same as Elder Brother. You and I may share the ambition to serve the age with clear judgment and not fail our lifelong learning, and our wish — not to seek fame but to seek the peace and joy of all under Heaven — has never diverged; but I've chosen a road with no turning back, and though now I walk alone in the dark, I firmly believe there's light ahead. Elder Brother's official path isn't smooth either, but you walk the upright, observing, world-ordering, practical road of a minister for all the ages... the road our fathers taught us a subject should truly walk. Your road must be the right one, but mine isn't necessarily wrong; it's still early — let the two of us each prove it hereafter."

Zhuo Siheng heard that his heart was set, and knowing the present court situation couldn't be reversed, could only let him be; he reckoned that a chess-piece the emperor had laid down with such hidden cunning wouldn't be spent soon, and that if Gao Yongqing met danger in future, he himself would have time to grasp power and act, to work some means to save him. Thinking thus, he didn't notice an ambition rise in his heart such as he'd never had before, and the force of his words unwittingly grew stronger too: "We haven't met in years, but I still remember how stubborn you were as a boy — you'd even have me coax you to put on a coat. These days seeing you before the throne, I've not seen you changed a whit, so I won't press you further; but in all things there's a measure — doing your utmost is right, and seeking to preserve yourself isn't necessarily wrong either."

"Does Elder Brother fear I'll become a Zhang Tang or a Zhou Yun?"

"Zhang Tang and Zhou Yun didn't end the same — don't lump them together." Zhuo Siheng at once seized the flaw in Gao Yongqing's words: the two were both cruel officials of the Han, but one was driven to suicide and one lived to old age — a vast difference!

Gao Yongqing laughed helplessly: "My reading's not fine; don't mock me, Elder Brother."

"You did it on purpose — don't think to fob me off." Zhuo Siheng brought out a censor's no-grit-in-the-eye rigor to school his younger brother, then soon couldn't help worrying: "If your studies were only middling, I don't suppose Tang Qifei at the Jiangxiang Academy would have made you such a thorn in his eye, a splinter in his flesh."

But at these words, Gao Yongqing, who'd been steeped all this while in the happiness of a heart-baring reunion, suddenly went cold of face, his pupils deepening to a denser black.

Seeing him so, Zhuo Siheng ached within and thought: it must be that bastard Tang Qifei who campus-bullied my worthy brother Yongqing.

"Great-house sons like Tang Qifei I've seen plenty of — overbearing, vulgar, utterly gutless; verbal insults and everyday malice toward me I'd never take to heart at all. What I've hated to this day is what their Tang family did five years ago." Gao Yongqing walked to the window and stood with hands clasped behind him, so his face couldn't be seen.

"Five years ago my father knew his illness was beyond cure, and wanted only to see me once more before he went... I was far from my father for my studies, and he, hampered by his convict status, couldn't well travel; gravely ill, he got someone to arrange a travel-pass and hurriedly set out, sending me a letter before he left, saying he knew his days were few, and so would come down from the north while I went up from the south, hoping only that we might meet on the road..."

...

"Tang Qifei and the other great-house sons were forever at their petty scheming, always secretly tripping me up; learning I had an urgent letter, they got the clerk drunk and stole it, read it, and though they knew perfectly well what it held was the most vital matter of a son and father's bond, the deepest feeling between men, they deliberately hid it and never told me..."

Zhuo Siheng's eyes all but split with grief, his heart near tearing apart; only to think, had it been himself meeting such a thing, he'd surely have had it in him to break the net and die with the fish.

Gao Yongqing's voice seemed to come from far off, faint and powerless: "Not until the academy's routine year-end assessment did they return the letter; shocked, grieved, anxious and hating, with no time to sit the exam and no time for revenge, I set out in haste, and only on reaching Wuli Slope in Jinling Commandery, Bianzhou, learned that my father had died there a month before."

After a long silence, Gao Yongqing whirled around, strode swiftly up to Zhuo Siheng, gripped both his arms, and rasped: "Elder Brother... Big Brother! Twenty li on past Wuli Slope was Qingzhou, where I was!"

Zhuo Siheng turned his hand to grip Gao Yongqing's cold ones, and only then saw that his own fingertips too had, at some point, begun trembling without cease.

"I claimed my father's body at the charity morgue; my family had long since been struck from the Gao clan register, and Father had no home village or ancestral grave to be buried in, so I simply burned him, to bury after I returned to the capital — for here, after all, was the place Father most wished to return to. Having arranged this, I went back to the academy and told the warden and the supervisor; who'd have known the Jiangxiang Academy, a gentleman's blessed land of study and worth on the surface, was within a filthy nest of vile petty men. The supervisor was a Wanyang Tang clansman, by generation Tang Qifei's clan-uncle, and the warden feared the Tang clan's power; add that Tang Lingxi, learning of it, stepped in himself — no telling what interests they traded — and the warden did whatever he was told. They pinned the matter on classmates' horseplay, had Tang Qifei write a confession-letter as an apology, and Tang Lingxi even hypocritically said the Tang family would bear the cost of my father's funeral. Ludicrous! I was enraged on the spot, resolved to report it to the prefectural yamen and charge Tang Qifei with destroying filial duty, betraying virtue, casting a man into unfiliality; who'd have known the warden, to block me, actually used my studies as a threat — that if I went to law, he'd strike off my enrollment token, leave me without the credentials to sit the academy exam, and so unable to take the provincial exam!" Gao Yongqing's tears fell at last, only a few — the rest he forced down by main strength.

"In that time, I felt Heaven and earth were pitch-black, in broad day the same, my eyes open to darkness everywhere; wanting to hear my father's voice again, I could only put my ear to the earthen jar of his ashes and shake it a couple of times, and then it was quiet, quiet again... In that time I thought of you. I thought — at worst I'll go to Shuozhou and find you; Uncle Zhuo wouldn't turn me away; studying with you needn't be worse than here. But for the Tang family to have the academy hold back my enrollment token was child's play; my person could go back to Shuozhou, but my livelihood and my life could not."

Gao Yongqing smiled at himself, stopped Zhuo Siheng from speaking, and went on: "I had to keep walking the road my father hoped I'd walk — I couldn't turn back. So I promised the warden I wouldn't pursue it, that I'd study quietly; they took it that I'd learned my lesson tasting the might of power for the first time, and thought no more of it. I failed my father — but if I were not to fail his hopes, this was the only road I could take..."

The fourth-month swallows under the eaves chirped and played merry, a whole family flying in and out; within the room only the crisp, sweet birdcalls could be heard, and the bright sun of a high-skied, thin-clouded day poured in unhurried, shrinking the two facing figures to two pale-grey dots.

"Big Brother, you see — the roads I could choose have always been very few." In the end it was Gao Yongqing who spoke first: "So the Tang family isn't wrong to say I have a blood-feud with them; nor did I mean to hide it — better they say it themselves, the more convenient for what I do."

He stopped in time, not wanting Zhuo Siheng to know more of his reckonings with the emperor; Zhuo Siheng knew he was protecting himself this way, and, a hundred feelings mingling, could only grip his shoulder and arm the harder, and nodded: "Now that you and I are both at court, we need never fear such petty men again."

Knowing this, he would by no means stand idle.

But Gao Yongqing turned instead to comfort him: "Big Brother, truly the hardest time is already past; now that I've become a thorn in the eye of the man who's made himself lord of all under Heaven, I know I didn't choose the wrong road. You're the clearest, most limpid man in a turbid age; if only for my father's friendship with Uncle Zhuo, I cannot drag you into the water."

"Good brother, since your mind is so clear, you should know some things can't be fled and shouldn't be fled; and besides, how do you know the Tang family doesn't see me as a boil that must be lanced?" Zhuo Siheng had no fear in his heart, nor on his face, his tone the more firm and steady now: "And what's more, though you and I are of different surnames, we're friends before our fathers' memory; if even the two of us can't join hearts and hands, would there be any wagtail's brotherly troth left between Heaven and earth? You needn't worry about my being drawn in — the emperor has already chosen a role for each of us; and though these few years may not see the good play open, who's to say that on the day you and I hold the court in our hands, Heaven and earth won't change color and countenance for the two of us!"

Gao Yongqing stared blankly at Zhuo Siheng: a man who never spoke grand, high-flown words had said something to blanch at; Gao Yongqing felt of a sudden that this Big Brother before him both steadied the heart and awed it.

Then, the Zhuo Siheng who a moment before had uttered such wild, bold words instantly became a fretful, over-worrying elder brother, pulling, in every variety, banknotes and letters from his sleeve, and nagging on like sending an under-age little brother off on a long journey: "Little brother... a poor home but a rich road — take the silver, arrange your journey well along the way; past Lingzhou don't go by water — the currents there are fierce, and even where there's a ferry, plenty make their living stopping the boat mid-river to shake the passengers down for money; you mustn't be careless. The land road's slow, but safety first! Oh, and this is a letter for my cousin Fan Xiliang — he's magistrate of Tongtai County, Xiangyi Commandery, Lingzhou; take it to him when you pass through, and have him arrange some guides who know the place, and resupply you a little — he's the most careful and caring! And I've noted some important post-stations for this trip in another letter I'm leaving you; I know that once you go we won't meet again till the reports-on-duty three years hence, and you a county lieutenant may not even come, so I've written all my charges into it — take it out and read it now and then. Rest well and eat well on the road, carry more dry rations and eat little at wild inns, don't push on greedily for speed at night, keep a firm hand on your retinue, have them stay well alert — but don't be too harsh either..."

Gao Yongqing was astonished — he couldn't tell how Zhuo Siheng switched, from a proud, forceful "after my flower blooms, the hundred flowers die," straight to a mother-hen fussing over her chick, nag nag nag nag...

Zhuo Siheng, wholly unaware, chattered on, from daily dress and diet to guarding against fire and theft, not a trace left of the cosmic bearing and thunderous force.

Gao Yongqing hadn't received such delicate care in a long time; moved, yet with a helplessness at being treated like a child — he wanted to say, Big Brother, I entered court a year before you; by seniority you should call me elder; and I've held a posting away, so of course I know how to manage. But he'd long craved the warmth of being cared for, and now for a long while wouldn't speak, only listening and nodding, as meek and earnest as could be.

Listening on, Gao Yongqing felt that Zhuo Siheng in these ten years seemed changed and yet not wholly changed — still the same fusspot; recalling those earlier words, and what he'd seen before at court, the two seemed one and the same. Big Brother Zhuo's character was truly odd and interesting, he thought; this, perhaps, was what's meant by the great skill that looks unworked, in the being of a man.