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Tao had refused power, but surely others . . .
both Plato and Aristotle had tried to raise philosopher-kings, and what had
they gained? Plato nearly died in Syracuse of a bloodbath.
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Aristotle had tutored Alexander, whose battlefield had
Susan
Shujartz been Asia itself. It was dangerous for a ruler to be consumed by an
idea, and frequently deadly to those around him.
Had they come to Ch'ang-an only to be caught in a holy war?
"This is an ugly situation," she mused. "As for living in the palace, I
know-was
Li Shou rose so fast that his cup toppled and shattered as easily as his
hard-won composure. "You know nothing, nothing at all if you make that
suggestion. What I said to Lu Tsung was an excuse. I tell you, no more of
that!"
How dare you!
Alexandra started to demand.
"You, priest!" raged the prince. "You tell her what his words actually meant!"
The silk of his embroidered robes hissing and whistling about him, Li
Shou strode about the garden. Shards of porcelain crackled beneath his
slippers.
"Before we fall into worse problems," Alexandra spoke with deceptive
quietness, "I suggest you tell me what he means."
"Alchemy . . ."
"I know what alchemy is," she said, exaggerating her air of patience. "I know
that Taoists practice it in the hope of gaining immortality in this world.
That is not just heresy, it is blasphemy.
And if your Son of Heaven dabbles in blasphemy, then I shall pray for you. You
will need it.
What I do not know"-she turned back to the Nestorian priest-"is why Li Shou
became so outraged after he himself said that
I assisted him in his studies."
Father Basil hunched in on himself. "If we had come by way of Hind," he began,
swallowed, and began again. "In Hind, the Diamond Path is associated with ...
I have heard that fornication plays a part in their worship. There are temples
devoted to it, priests and priestesses ..."
Alexandra flushed scarlet and thanked God that the night was dark. "Though I
may have taken a few steps along the Diamond Path, I know nothing about this
silk roads and shadows
V-
other worship. In other words," she said in a voice that barely trembled,
"what Lu Tsung suggested was that
I go to this Emperor as a concubine."
Father Basil nodded wretchedly.
"Elder sister," Siddiqa spoke for the first time, "my mother told me of the
palace in which she was brought up. Many ladies pass their entire lives there
with never a glimpse of the Son of Heaven, much less . . . she was glad to
leave. But short of death, or a convent, there is no escape from it."
Alexandra was abruptly, absurdly furious.
She had entered a convent to escape marrying a
Frank, left Byzantium as much to avoid being married off as to steal silkworms
. . . no, that wasn't true. What had she sought in leaving
Byzantium for the East? Certainly, she meant to get those silkworms. But it
was the journey, the chance to see and learn, and to keep on going, free of
the cages of pragmatism and ceremony that had, once again, slammed down upon
her. Upon the road, she had been traveler, warrior, even-a few insane
times-magician. Now, once again, "they" saw only a female body to be awarded
to the highest-ranking man available. Had she really traveled to the End of
the World only to find that people and customs were no different?
Siddiqa's warning enraged her further, dealing as it did with only the
logistics of escaping the palace once she took the concubine's way in. But
then, Siddiqa was brought up to regard multiple adulteries as normal. What
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made it worse was that she had trusted Li Shou, and he had embarrassed her. He
had turned the magic she had learned in the
Pamirs and relied upon in the desert into a barracks joke, and she didn't know
if she could ever face him again. Ridiculous tears stung her eyelids, but she
restrained them.
"The prince himself first called me his assistant.
Let us hope that he meant it innocently. Or, instead of one enemy, he will
have two."
The soft silk of her robes caressed her body as she retreated to the rooms she
had been assigned.
The
Susan
Shwartz mirrors there showed her a stranger with flushed cheeks and blazing
eyes, very slim, but graceful, with subtle curves that the sheepskins and the
baggy riding clothes she had worn for months had concealed. She flung the
mirror down, struggled out of the whispering, offensively clinging silks,
tossed them aside, and wept for shame and disappointment. She had thought
better of them all, herself included.
As she admired the bell tower in the center of
Ch'ang-an, Alexandra felt like a bumpkin who scraped the manure off his boots
and lurched into Byzantium to gape. She was glad for the hat and veil that let
her blend into the crowd; twice already this morning, she had seen other
foreigners jeered at. A knot of loafers had actually pursued one portly Uighur
until guards caught sight of the potential riot. Alexandra thought they seemed
reluctant to stop it, but the loafers had fled anyway. They would be bolder
next time.
So the chaos was here, too. Again the ground trembled underfoot, and she
thought of Li Shou's stories of the
First Emperor.
Is it I who wake you, old man, or the chaos!
Stealing silkworms-that might mean disorder in Ch'in, harm to its trade. But
if she did not bring them back, then Byzantium might fall into worse chaos.
She was thinking in circles again.
Circles . . . abruptly, she thought of the paired circles
Susan Shwartz of snow mountains in the paintings of Shambhala. Beyond the
circles of the world might lie other circles. That was bad Plato and worse
doctrine, but if she were really that orthodox, she would not dream of
entering a
Buddhist shrine.
All her spies were out, Bryennius dispatched to the more discreet tea shops
(though Siddiqa had flown into a rage when he teased her, and had scratched
his face), the Greek soldiers and Varangians to the rowdier western market.
Father Basil had been only too happy to follow them to the Nestorian church
founded by the saintly Alopen. Alexandra slipped into the nearby Buddhist
temple. She was not the only woman standing by herself. Several others, both
veiled, and unveiled, meditated before immense statues like those in the caves
at Dunhuang, or attended the complex ritual.
But the temple felt wrong. Not because it was a pagan
shrine: The monastery where she first learned of
Shambhala had been steeped in holiness. That feeling of sanctity, even more
than the chants and the incense and the tales of the abbot, had made her
willing to believe that . . . she shook her head. This temple was far richer
than the monastery at the Roof of the World. It was lavish, even tawdry. The
statues and murals were newly painted and heavily gilded. Under the chanting
and the incense so heavy that two people had already swooned was a feeling
of... fever. One summer, there had been sickness in Byzantium.
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Alexandra had insisted on leaving her convent's library to help in its
infirmary. Even now she remembered how the air had quivered. The entire city
had seemed feverish, as if it were one single body, and that body feverish.
Though it was autumn in Ch'ang-an, that febrile energy quivered here.
She wandered away from the pudgy, chanting monks, searching the walls for
signs of Shambhala. Her footsteps echoed in the corridors as she moved away
from the crowd. Gradually, the noise subsided. Now she heard only her own
footsteps, and the padding of sandaled feet behind her.
When she stopped, those other steps stopped
* -
silk roads and shadows too. Wishing she had the abbot's sword, she reached
into her flowing silk sleeve for the dagger she carried, then turned around.
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