Chapter 9

Emperor Xiaozong reigned twenty-three years in all, and in the second month of spring of his very last year of life, he deposed the heir apparent Liu Zhen, who had held the position of crown prince for a full twenty-two years.

Even now people often bring the matter up in private talk; Zhu Tong had touched on it once, chatting, when he came back to the village to visit Zhuo Yan. Zhuo Siheng still remembered that Zhu Tong had no love for this treasonous heir. He said that back when the prince came to inspect the armaments at the Yanhe Army command, he'd been all meek yeses with not a scrap of manhood to him; when the soldiers drew up their ranks and gave a few shouts, he'd flinched with fright. Zhu Tong had seen it clearly from a distance and despised him for it, and when word reached the army that the heir had been deposed, most of the men thought it served him right — if war ever came, they didn't want to lay down their lives following a spineless good-for-nothing like that.

At the time Zhuo Yan had only sighed softly and said, "Emperor Xiaozong governed with a strong hand and great decisiveness. His throne had been named to him by Emperor Shizu, on his deathbed, before all his sons and the assembled ministers, and he came to it in the prime of his years — no danger of a contested succession above him, no hobbling regents below. He was forceful all his life and never held in check, carrying all before him. How could he understand the hardship of an heir who spent twenty-odd years as crown prince in peaceful times?"

Even now, with only his own son listening quietly at his knee, his judgment was the same: "The heir was soft by nature, but he was not without virtue. Your grandfather was his teacher for twenty years, and more than once he told us brothers that once the heir took the throne, if there were some grave matter of state, we must remonstrate with him plainly and firmly and on no account let him waver and hang back. The heir was timid, but he understood reason and the ways of things; a proposal that truly served the country and the people he would never turn a blind eye to... Actually, thinking it over carefully now, with a father-emperor like Xiaozong, had the heir been rigid and fierce by nature, he'd likely not have lasted even twenty years as crown prince."

Zhuo Siheng thought his father was right, but after some thought he still spoke his own reading of it: "Uncle Zhu the Fifth told me the army didn't like the heir — not just the rank and file, the officers too disdained him for being soft. So even if he'd taken the throne smoothly, chances are he couldn't have kept a grip on the generals and the military nobility, and with so many strong imperial brothers eyeing it from below, he probably wouldn't have sat that throne for long."

Zhuo Yan looked at his son, seemingly not having expected him to see that far, and nodded despite himself. "The heir was afraid of rousing his father's suspicion, so he kept as far from military power as he could; and in time the bad name of knowing nothing of soldiering was one he had to carry and couldn't shake off."

"Did Grandfather... really believe the heir was certain to take the throne without trouble?"

Recalling his old father's face and voice, Zhuo Yan looked grieved, and only after a while said, "Your grandfather was a man of lofty character. Toward the heir he had both a subject's loyalty to his lord and a father's tender care for a son... People aren't made of wood and grass. If a small child follows you from his first lessons, learning his characters and his books through twenty hard years at the window, by the time he's grown you'd feel the same. It's almost funny — Father was so busy with official work that none of us three brothers got our schooling from him, while he spent far more time each day with the heir than with us. Your third uncle, when he was little, felt the unfairness of it, and Father punished him hard for it — made him copy out the 'Yan Yuan' chapter of the Analects fifty times."

"Let the ruler be a ruler, the subject a subject, the father a father, the son a son..." Zhuo Siheng blurted out one line of it — surely the reason his grandfather had chosen that chapter for his third uncle to copy.

Zhuo Yan nodded. "I bore Father some resentment myself back then. Now that I'm a father, I understand how far ahead his heart was planning for his sons."

"But it seems Xiaozong hadn't that kind of patience with his own son," Zhuo Siheng said with a smile.

"Fathers and sons of the imperial house are hardly the same as common folk." Zhuo Yan said slowly, "In his late years the one Xiaozong loved best was his second son — the late Emperor Jingzong, born of the same empress as the heir."

Here at last was the chief culprit behind the family's fall to this state.

"Emperor Jingzong was clever from a young age, driving to win at everything, forever measuring himself against his own elder brother; and the heir always gave way and drew back to avoid his edge. Over time everyone came to think the heir weak and Jingzong strong. In Xiaozong's last year on the throne, his body was like a candle guttering in the wind — again and again he lay sleepless with alarm, and he often complained to his close ministers how he feared the realm would be ruined in the heir's hands. On top of that, Jingzong and his faction had a grip on court affairs and all the correspondence going in and out during Xiaozong's illness, so it was hard indeed for the heir even to speak in his own defense..."

"If Emperor Xiaozong was as wise and formidable as you say, Father, could he really not have known what Jingzong was up to?" Zhuo Siheng had studied only one year of high-school history before the arts-sciences split, but even so he felt this wasn't how it really went. "Maybe it was Xiaozong's own hints and encouragement and quiet nod that let Jingzong go so utterly unchecked."

"Don't presume to guess at the sage's mind." Zhuo Yan both hoped Zhuo Siheng would come to understand the arts of an emperor's heart and so not repeat the family's disaster, and worried that too great a mastery of such things was not the proper path of a subject, so he cut the talk off quickly. "In his final year Xiaozong deposed the heir on twelve great charges, but he set up no new heir; before he died he left a testamentary edict passing the throne to Jingzong."

"The first thing Jingzong did after taking the throne was to kill the heir and his partisans..." The rest of it, Zhuo Siheng had heard something of.

Jingzong moved like a thunderclap, cruel of heart. He dug out the twelve charges his own father had laid against his own brother, meaning first to kill the treasonous heir as a blood-offering to the ancestors, and dressed it up grandly: that before his passing his father-emperor, out of tenderness between father and son, had been unwilling to put the heir to death as the law required, and that in doing it now he was only being filial — helping his father-emperor accomplish his last wish, preserving for him the bond of father and son and his name in the eyes of later ages, and taking the blame upon himself.

So dutiful a son it just about killed Zhuo Siheng.

Not even he was fooled by that line, let alone the hand-picked old foxes of court and country.

Every morning when Emperor Jingzong rose — whether to hear governance and summon his officials or to hold the grand audience — he could hear people outside the Linde and Tianzhang halls crying out to plead their case, knocking their heads on the ground, bitterly denouncing him, wailing and keening as if at a funeral. The ministers took turns going at it. He watched it a month and was cursed at for a month, until at last he couldn't hold out, and agreed that he wouldn't kill the deposed heir's whole family — but the deposed heir himself was beyond pardon, and no one who came could move him on it.

So most of the court officials quit their protest, taking the win while they could, and only a few were left putting up a last-ditch fight.

Among them was Zhuo Siheng's grandfather — Zhuo Yan's father — the former Supervisor of the Household of the Heir Apparent and Grand Academician of Shugu Hall, Master Zhuo Wenjun.

In this dynasty there were a great many Grand Academician titles, and whether one was honorable depended on the hall or pavilion name in front of it. A Pavilion Academician of such-and-such was a plush title got up specially for a minister the emperor favored, even if the man's rank and seniority might be nothing much. A Grand Academician of such-and-such Hall, on the other hand, was without fail a man of vast learning and the finest official reputation, who had aided the throne to good effect and once held key posts; certain of the hall-named Grand Academician titles were granted only to chancellors and to officials who had exercised a chancellor's powers — the Grand Academician of Zhaowen Hall and the Grand Academician of Jixian Hall, for instance. The Hanlin Academician, carrying no hall or pavilion name before it, was a peculiar case, reserved for the emperor's secret secretaries and brush-hands, not to be touched by any but his innermost confidential ministers.

The title of Grand Academician of Shugu Hall was generally conferred on ministers who had compiled histories. In the early days of this dynasty Zhuo Wenjun had done the collation and annotation for the official history of the previous dynasty, correcting many errors of his predecessors, and so had earned this honor. In his early years Xiaozong too had prized his learning and ability, and for that reason had entrusted the heir to him to raise and educate.

The heir's scholarship was very good; but a great many things can't be solved by teaching scholarship.

This was how the Zhuo family came to offend the new emperor. In the end, every official who kept up the fight to save the heir was taken down household and all — those who had knelt were killed, their wives and children exiled, not one spared.

"Your Uncle Gao was my father's student, and had much of my father's character in the way he carried himself. When he learned his teacher had been condemned, he paid no mind to his own safety and submitted a memorial of blunt remonstrance, every line of it striking where it hurt the new emperor. He wasn't put to death, but he still came to the pass he's in now... I wonder how he's faring at this moment, whether he's been reunited with his son yet..." When Zhuo Yan told of things long past, his voice always seemed to come from far off, the last of each phrase carrying a trace of a sigh, there and not there.

"Then... what about that Vice-Prefect Zhou we saw in Shuozhou?" Zhuo Siheng asked.

Zhuo Yan's face darkened, and he said in a low voice, "His Honor Zhou was my father's student too, and from the start of his career he served in the Eastern Palace — but then he became Jingzong's man on the inside, gathering up all sorts of petty matters about the heir day to day and presenting them to Xiaozong on Jingzong's behalf, dressed up with a slanted, damning twist of the brush over things that never happened. A pity that for all his scheming... he never reckoned it would be the deposed heir's son who became the new emperor. By his merits and seniority a vice-minister in one of the Six Ministries would have been well within his reach; instead he's sunk to being a lowly vice-prefect in Shuozhou."

It was now the third year of Zhenyuan; times had shifted and the world with them — truly, winter gone and spring come.

Zhuo Siheng thought: every reign has its own court and its own ministers. He hoped the new emperor would prove reasonably long-lasting and hard-wearing — so that by the time he'd passed the exams and entered the court as an official, the emperor would still remember that his family had once wept in open court for the man's crown-prince father, heedless of their own safety and fate.

That way he'd still have a chance to restore the old honors and favor to his grandfather and father, and to the whole family.

Seeing that Zhuo Siheng kept his head down, turning the words over, Zhuo Yan gave his son's shoulder a firm pat and said, "I tell you all this not so you'll weigh gain and loss cautiously in future, still less so you'll throw your life away at the drop of a hat for the sake of principle — but so that even as an upright and loyal minister you'll keep your own counsel and your own reckoning. The court is a place of treacherous, shifting winds. Child, if you enter it as an official, remember this: even in the direst moment you must never trade away the true heart of a scholar for glory and rank. But short of a matter of life and death, where there's room to maneuver there's room to act; guard against rash, hot-blooded courage — a little give and turn is no betrayal of the way of a minister."

Zhuo Siheng admired Zhuo Yan. Through so much tragedy and pain, he still held to the principles in his heart and taught them to his son, drawing lessons from it all — setting a bottom line that kept a gentleman's integrity, yet leaving room to plan and to improvise, for himself to weigh and decide in future.

Moved inside, he put on an entirely guileless smile and said, "Well now... 'Take the small rod, but run from the big one' — I don't need to copy out 'let the ruler be a ruler, the subject a subject, the father a father, the son a son' fifty times like my third uncle to understand that."

It was a clever and delightful thing to say — talking of fathers and sons yet arguing rulers and subjects — and Zhuo Yan roared with laughter, startling the waterbirds hidden in the reeds into a scattering flight, and the fish that had been lingering greedily after the bait vanished who knew where. By the time the villager drove the cart up to the spot, father and son hadn't caught a single fish between them.

---

It was the middle of the night when they got back to the village. The moment she saw them, Ciheng went to take the heaviest bundle from her father; Huiheng washed some freshly picked melon and fruit; and Xiheng obediently took his brother's things from him.

What Zhuo Yan worried about most was Huiheng's health, and no sooner was he home than he heard her coughing again. Tired as he was from the journey, he still saw to it himself, dissolving in water the medicine pills he'd brought back from Ningshuo and watching his daughter swallow them and grow a little better before he was easy. Then he checked over Ciheng's and Xiheng's studies, and was much gladdened to see the two children hadn't let their lessons slide these few days. The whole family sat happily together on the kang, handing round the gifts and telling what they'd seen, and shared the good news that Zhuo Siheng had passed the qualifying examination.

"Then does Elder Brother start getting ready for the prefectural examination?" Huiheng was much better after taking the medicine, and there was strength in her voice again, and it brimmed with delight.

Zhuo Yan said with a smile, "An examination was held in the first year of Zhenyuan; it's the third year now, and the autumn examination will open before long — your brother won't make that one. He's only thirteen, there's no hurry. The examination three years from now is when he'll show what he can do. In the meantime he must keep his brush busy and study hard, and on no account let it go to waste."

The whole family believed that three years on would be the start of Zhuo Siheng's flight of ten thousand li.

But heaven had other reckonings. So much so that when Zhuo Siheng later looked back on this night in the third year of Zhenyuan, he could no longer feel the least of the joy and warmth that had filled his heart then — only four words, the world is ever-changing, wound through his thoughts and hung over them, to this day.