Willow catkins drift into the boat as it travels on; reclining, I pluck water-caltrop blossoms and let the green current bear me where it will. I hear the scenery is lovely all along the Yangzi. When the sky clears, we will climb the Tower of Longing for Home together.
Elio’s Notes: The opening verse is Li Yi’s Traveling by Boat (《行舟》), a Tang poem whose river scenery carries an undercurrent of longing for home. The novel places it directly after Zhao Kuangyin’s departure, sharpening the sense of distance and separation.
What did it matter if one hand could prop up Heaven itself? Zhao Kuangyin, even you could not win against him.
＊
“The Rainbow Skirt and Feathered Robe Dance. I kept it on you all along.” Zhao Kuangyin sighed. He stood alone at the bow until Li Congjia had vanished entirely from sight, then turned and entered the cabin. “Only because you said you wanted it. Even without asking why you wanted it.”
＊
Others might have noticed nothing unusual, but Li Congjia understood at once. The handkerchief was plainly an old thing, its embroidery aged, yet the needlework upon it was extraordinarily fine. It was unmistakably a musical score.
In the side courtyard, Li Congjia had said he wanted to find that score, and Zhao Kuangyin had taken the thought to heart. He had forced Li Congjia to wear the bracelet, saying only that one life would be exchanged for another, that Li Congjia was not permitted to die by anyone else’s hand.
And so Li Congjia had agreed. He would live.
＊
Then what of things now?
Li Congjia rose and clenched the square of embroidered silk until his fingers hurt. The bracelet is broken. You found the score for me as promised. Is this your way of persuading me to take it home, to live from now on with Ehuang as a pair of mandarin ducks in brocade, happily together until old age?
Nothing more than settling accounts between them.
＊
Enough.
River wind caught his robes and sent them billowing.
Before him, everyone knelt across the deck, not knowing what else they could do, not knowing what had happened. Li Congjia smiled faintly and opened both arms. In an instant the wind passed through him and his hair streamed wildly across the sky.
He was beginning to believe this truly was a calamity written into his fate.
＊
“Prince of Wu…”
“Get up.” He looked at the river one final time, then turned abruptly. “We are going back. It is over.”
“But… His Majesty…”
“This has nothing to do with any of you. Tomorrow I will enter the palace and ask forgiveness myself.”
＊
The party had to pass Flower Row Street on its way back to the Eastern Palace. By the time Li Congjia returned there, the fire had still not gone out. Yamen officers had surrounded Shengding House, and for the moment the carriage could go no farther.
The driver was at a loss and was about to climb down to investigate, but Li Congjia stopped him with a wave and descended himself.
＊
Many townspeople had gathered beyond the barriers where it was still safe, talking in astonishment among themselves. Li Congjia walked straight toward them. A yamen runner came forward impatiently to stop him, then raised his eyes, saw Li Congjia’s gaze, and dropped to his knees in alarm.
“Let me through.”
In summer, once a wooden building caught fire it was extremely difficult to extinguish. Buckets of water were everywhere. The yamen runner hurried to block the barricade. “Your Highness, absolutely not. Shengding House is built entirely of timber and may collapse at any moment. You must not go near it.”
Li Congjia shook his head. “Move aside. I only want to look.” The rough fellow scratched his head. He could not outargue him and did not dare offend him. At last he waved helplessly and opened the barrier.
Li Congjia lowered his head slightly and went in.
Everything from that dream turned to ash in a single night. Black smoke rolled upward. Before Shengding House stood one solitary figure in blue-green robes, while whispers drifted through the wind around him. “Who is he?”
Yes. Who am I?
＊
He gave the building, still struggling stubbornly against the wind, a faint smile. It was like his own reflection. Even now it strained to preserve the remnant dream of a flourishing age, an illusion built from nothing but splendor and vanity.
Let it go.
Why cling to it?
He sighed softly. With a thunderous crash, the high roof before him gave way, the whole structure collapsing as easily as dry wood. The guards rushed forward and flanked him on both sides.
Li Congjia did not so much as start. His gaze remained quiet, as though he were watching sunrise or sunset, and he watched steadily until the building became ash and smoke before his eyes.
Screams rose on every side amid the clamor of the mortal world. To everyone else, it was only the astonishing destruction of a building. Li Congjia alone saw, with painful clarity, his own exhausted surrender.
What did jade towers, carved railings, and painted halls matter? They could not withstand one fire from him.
Then, without warning, everything fell silent.
＊
When Li Congjia turned, he saw that many bold onlookers were still crowded into the corners. A stone wall directly opposite Shengding House had clearly drawn every eye. A moment ago they had been staring in alarm at the collapsing building; now every face had turned toward that wall.
It was an abandoned wall ordinarily used for public notices. In the firelight, traces of torn paper and old postings were still visible across its disorderly surface.
Li Congjia looked once and froze. No matter how the guards urged him, he neither spoke nor moved.
＊
There was more than the usual scattering of notices upon the wall. A painting had appeared there from nowhere. Flames still towered above Shengding House, and while it burned no one had spared attention for anything around it. Now that the building had collapsed into dead ash and charred timber, the painting abruptly became the center of every gaze.
Ignoring everything else, Li Congjia strode toward the scroll. The attendants who had followed the Prince of Wu for years were startled. Never had they seen him lose composure like this. A gold-lacquered, brocade-draped carriage had suddenly appeared before Shengding House, and the black-maned horse with snow-white hooves was enough to draw attention by itself, much less the person within, whose status was plainly anything but ordinary.
The painting showed a man.
A man painted in the palest, most beautiful strokes, with colors that seemed almost impossible to name. Several street vendors who had glimpsed the picture from afar had simply stared, struck speechless. He was, truly, peerless in his purity.
All sound vanished. Only the crack of splintering timber remained in the wind.
Everyone watched the figure in blue-green walk straight toward the wall and stop before the painting. Before their eyes, the painted man seemed to come alive. Reflected in the firelight, the image looked almost as though it might truly burn a person to death.
A sword had been driven through the scroll and deep into the stone wall, pinning the painting fast. Its point split the empty place where the painted man’s eye should have been. The double-pupiled eye had been nailed dead with a single thrust.
Li Congjia knew that sword. Zhao Kuangyin had always worn it at his side and never let it stray far even in sleep.
Heaven and earth seemed to rage. The baleful breath over Jinling broke open; mountains and ground might as well have split apart. A suffocating pressure filled Li Congjia’s chest, and grief surged from every bone and limb with enough force to shatter everything. Yet the closer a person came to such a moment, the less completely he could lose reason. Clear-mindedness, it seemed, was the fate that had condemned him to remain awake for this man all his life. Li Congjia stood there coldly and looked at the painting.
Zhao Kuangyin, you could not burn Jinling, but you burned me to death. This one fire has scorched heaven and earth and burned away the final hope left in my life.
＊
“Your Highness!” The guards kept urging him to leave. Li Congjia heard them and suddenly turned. At once every commoner around them fell silent. From that day onward, some of them would begin to believe that there were things in this boundless world time could never carry away, such as the splendor of that one turn of his body.
Li Congjia stood precisely before the painting. The painted man lifted one fine wrist, peerlessly beautiful even with his eyes missing. Li Congjia himself turned toward the ash filling the sky, and suddenly the legend within the painting had its answer. Shock passed through the crowd. Who was he? He was the man in the painting.
Li Congjia looked back along the long road before him. He searched for words and found none.
He had entered the painting.
In that instant, how many hearts, women’s and children’s alike, were branded by the sight? They saw his grace, but could they know his suffering? A hundred years later, after spring flowers had bloomed and faded countless times and crimson leaves still drifted beside the Qinhuai, why would that one soul of Jiangnan refuse, life after life, to disappear? Not for birds clamoring over spring islets or flowers crowding fragrant fields, not for dawn clouds rising from the sea or plum and willow carrying spring across the river, but only for the peach-blossom calamity the heart could never relinquish.
The heart within the calamity would remember for a lifetime.
＊
Li Congjia wanted to take down the scroll. He reached for the sword and only then truly felt how hopelessly ruthless Zhao Kuangyin had been when he struck. The force behind it was so great that Li Congjia could not pull the weapon free no matter what he did. The more it resisted, the more stubborn he became. He would take it down. “You said you were returning it to me. Fine. I will humor you and accept it!” He yanked at it wildly. The sword point did not move, but the paper could bear no more. With a ripping sound, the painting tore straight through the middle.
The slender painted figure slid downward, split in two and ruined beyond repair.
Li Congjia began to laugh. For a moment no one around him dared approach. He watched the torn scroll fall through empty air and laughed with reckless mockery. “You wanted to destroy me. At last you have what you wanted.”
He snatched up the ruined painting, turned, and threw it into the sea of fire.
Once, Zhao Kuangyin had shielded Li Congjia’s likeness from a blade with his own life rather than let the image be harmed.
＊
Li Congjia swept his sleeves and walked away, never once looking back as the flames leapt higher behind him. Night rain may dye cloth Tianshui Blue, but how could it withstand the power of heaven and earth? Even all your splendid mountains and rivers could not buy back one quiet life spent side by side. From this day forward, let no one speak to him of legends again.
They were nothing but lies passed from mouth to mouth. Believe them, and you had already lost.
The wound on his wrist, newly freed from the wooden splinters, had not yet closed. His struggling had torn it open again, leaving it mottled with blood. In the same mild voice as ever, he said, “Back to the Eastern Palace.”
In all his life, that was the last time he ever went mad.
＊
The road vanished into white clouds; the far horizon stretched away, and birds cried overhead.
One tower stood lonely in evening mist and rain. Flower Row Street, the alley mouth, Shengding House, and… the old residence of the Duke of Anding… He wanted desperately to go back and look, yet did not dare truly return.
The carriage had already entered Imperial Street, but in the end it turned around.
The old Duke of Anding’s residence was desolate now. Who still cared about it? The Eastern Palace was where glory gathered. Once, so many eyes had watched this place with fierce calculation. Whether he disappeared or Li Hongji did, there had only ever been two possible outcomes. Had it really been worth so much scrutiny?
Li Congjia walked slowly inside. A few servants had remained behind and still tended the grounds each day. The trees and plants were unchanged, though no longer trimmed with the old care. Instead they had grown more vigorous, vines climbing around the corridor pillars in the season of their greatest abundance.
Year after year, withering and flourishing took each other’s place. Li Congjia brushed his fingertips across a leaf and looked at the strong veins running through it with sudden envy. People were easily frightened by things that flourished too fiercely. The richer the bloom, the more complete the eventual decay. Yet when flowers and leaves failed, they could at least wait for another season.
When a human heart died, not even a trace of ash remained.
Fallen blossoms are not unfeeling things; turned to spring mud, they nourish the flowers all the more. But once the flower of the heart had died, there would be no more foolish longing.
Elio’s Notes: “Fallen blossoms are not unfeeling things; turned to spring mud, they nourish the flowers all the more” comes from Gong Zizhen’s nineteenth-century poem Miscellaneous Poems of the Year Jihai, No. 5. Like several other passages in MR, the novel deliberately borrows a much later literary line for its emotional resonance.
Alone, step by step, he walked again through his own memories, searching over and over for everything that had once existed. Years ago, in the heedlessness of youth, when he said he would leave he could simply take a few scrolls, put on a rain cape and bamboo hat, and walk openly out the gate. He had found an empty mountain and spent his days listening to birds, unwilling to look again upon the smoke and fire of the human world. When annoyed or tired, he simply let go and refused to trouble himself. Thinking back now, he realized he had always been accustomed to indolence. No wonder people said he did not understand worldly affairs. That year, Li Congjia in the mountains had not cared whether someone had carried a true heart all the way to his door. He had broken a guqin string and left.
Later still, one startling piece played on a Shaocao pipa had broken through the music of the Rainbow Skirts. One glance beneath a corridor, and he had believed he had found where this life would end.
He did not want to speak of a word like love.
Even now he was unwilling to face it directly. Li Congjia had always felt that love and its absence were not things ordinary mortals could so easily put into words. He was no sage either. He did not know what, in the end, should truly be called love.
She had once startled his eyes. In youth, she had been the first person to teach him the taste of longing. Li Congjia, too, had once sincerely wanted to possess someone. A smile beneath falling gauze. Remembering it now, he was still grateful. Perhaps if the years had simply turned on, he would have gone through life with that same faint smile, sometimes careless and sometimes earnest, following the old track until he and she grew old together.
To envy only the mandarin ducks and not the immortals. What a beautiful life that should have been. Yet fate’s turning had contained nothing grand or earthshaking. On an ordinary night, he had merely left a palace banquet early and walked slowly, looking slowly around him, for reasons no one knew. Then he had stumbled into another person’s path.
That person, if not for that one exact coincidence, was someone he would have been fated never to cross paths with in this life.
By chance, Zhao Kuangyin’s hand had closed around his throat. By chance, Li Congjia could not bear to watch someone die before his eyes.
＊
His steps stopped at the entrance to the remote side courtyard. Again, it had all been chance, and now Zhao Kuangyin had pushed everything far away. The bones and tendons of Li Congjia’s wrist were beginning to ache. Numbed at first by the severe injury, the pain had only now begun to awaken.
Li Congjia moved his arm gently. There was no serious damage. Was I still supposed to be grateful? Even in his fury, he remembered that he did not want to hurt me.
Perhaps that made it crueler still.
Li Congjia seemed to step across his entire life as he entered the side courtyard again. The wind gradually died. Gone was the intoxicating grace of that day when idle blossoms had fallen to the ground.
The peach trees, too, had passed their season. Peach blossoms were bitter; people more bitter still.
He pushed open the door to the room Zhao Kuangyin had once occupied. Such a small wooden door seemed to demand every bit of his strength. The black gauze curtains remained inside, and on the Eight Immortals table stood half a red candle that had never burned down. No one had lit it again after Zhao Kuangyin left. Li Congjia brushed a fingertip across the tabletop and found no dust. The servants, at least, had done their duty.
The daylight outside was bright, yet he stubbornly lit that remaining candle. Through its wavering light the whole inner room immediately became unreal. He could still hear the words from that day. He could still see the sword slash deep into Zhao Kuangyin’s arm. That day, too sorrowful to drink themselves into joy and facing a bitter parting, neither had cared about the blood staining the couch or whose body it fell from. They had only continued seeking one another through something like mutual torment. It had been neither violation nor helpless resignation. It had simply been something neither of them could restrain. Stubbornly, each had believed he could not be the only one forced to bear it. But however fiercely they struggled or clung, it had all passed now.
Only this last half-burned candle remained connected to Zhao Kuangyin.
Li Congjia stared blankly at the wavering flame. He had forbidden anyone to follow him inside. No human voice could be heard. Between heaven and earth, he seemed to be the only person left.
＊
Better to let the wind erase every trace completely. Better to leave nothing at all.
Li Congjia rose from the wooden chair beside the table and gave the darkness behind the black gauze one last, lingering look. Then he lifted the candlestick and threw it. Flame caught the gauze at once, roaring upward.
Li Congjia laughed softly and walked out with perfect composure. He even turned back and pulled the door shut behind him. When he reached the attendants outside, he said, “Let us go back. It is over.”
The party left the old residence.
They passed through the narrow lane and turned onto Imperial Street. Far behind them came shouts for water and cries of fire.
“Is it all over?” he murmured. No one answered.
Behind him the fire burned on without end. Beneath a dark-red sky moved one clear, pale wash of blue-green as Li Congjia left everything behind. At the end of the alley, the crooked tree had grown unchecked for years, twisting however it pleased. Li Congjia looked back at it one final time, not knowing whether it still remembered.
Perhaps in the end, only that tree could prove that anything had happened at all.
＊
After entering the Eastern Palace, he remained silent.
Ehuang came out to meet him. From afar she saw his blue-green robes and suddenly understood something, though she could neither say it nor ask. She saw that everyone accompanying him looked badly shaken. Li Congjia stopped before her when she approached.
Ehuang looked him up and down, then suddenly asked, “You did not wear court robes today?” Though she had not gone outside, she had heard enough. Flower Row Street had burned, but no one dared make too much of it. The arsonist was likely from the northern court. If Li Congjia had truly gone out because of urgent state affairs, he should have dressed accordingly. So who was the person he could meet wearing nothing but those quiet blue-green robes?
Besides, rumors had long said that the Prince of Wu had been astonishingly arrogant and negligent in his conduct this time, stirring resentment throughout the court.
He had acted as though nothing could touch him.
Ehuang ought to have asked what had happened outside, ought to have asked how the fire began. Yet when the words reached her lips, all of that suddenly seemed unimportant. What mattered was…
Whom had he gone to see?
Li Congjia looked back at her, ten thousand thoughts passing through him at once. Inside his sleeve, his hand closed tightly around the little square of musical notation. When she asked, he only shook his head. After a long while he looked into Ehuang’s eyes, filled with regret.
“Ehuang, next time you brew medicine, remember not to use a glazed bowl. It cools too easily.”
Ehuang froze. “Cools?”
“When medicine grows cold… it grows more bitter…” He turned toward the study and refused to say anything more.
＊
What she had put into the medicine did not matter. What mattered was that she had not trusted him.
What he had worn did not matter to her. What mattered was that he had lied to her.
Still smiling, he turned away. Almost with amusement, he remembered that bowl of medicine. Of course she had brought it herself. Had it been Liuzhu or another servant, none of them would have indulged Ehuang’s habitual extravagance by using so exquisitely wrought a glazed bowl.
Why go through all this? You only had to tell me.
Li Congjia sank wearily into a chair in the study and tossed the score onto the table. Then he thought about it and found himself ridiculous. Even if she had told him, he would still have gone out. Phoenix Terrace had already proved that.
So neither of them had any right to blame the other.
＊
He leaned against the desk and thought of the fire.
Everything had burned. Nothing remained. Back in the palace, all was silent. From now on, beneath the endless long night and blue-green roof tiles, glazed flames would bloom everywhere. Only then did Li Congjia begin to feel the throbbing pain left in his wrist.
He turned his hand over and examined it closely. The flesh had split in places, but there appeared to be no deeper injury. The old, incomplete score on the table still retained the curl of having been rolled for many years. It could almost close into a ring, fastening three people tightly together.
Zhao Kuangyin, you might as well have killed me.
He sighed over passing years and remembered passing years; white snow and frost-bright splendor were too painful to ask of Heaven. A thousand ages in the Great Void were nothing but a dream, and when all the rivers and mountains had been lamented away, in the end there remained only a song without sound.
What could possessing this score change now?
＊
The Buddha says: all that remains bound to affliction is suffering. Yet I say butterflies fly in pairs; I say swallows wheel two by two. Watching flower-souls and crane-shadows dance lightly, how can an ordinary heart help but yearn?
Elio’s Notes: 有漏皆苦 is a Buddhist formula meaning that all conditioned phenomena still bound to the “outflows” of affliction are suffering. Li Congjia immediately answers that doctrine with paired butterflies and swallows, setting renunciation against the ordinary heart’s longing for companionship.
＊
After heaven and earth had overturned, the winds and clouds of the northern realm went on unchanged.
That afternoon the sky abruptly darkened as though rain were coming. Zhao Guangyi, inside the Buddhist hall, noticed the change and rose to leave, intending to close the door behind him. When he opened it, however, he found someone sitting on the stone steps.
“Yunjie?”
She sat quietly before the door without making a sound. Zhao Guangyi calculated the time. He himself had been inside for at least two double-hours, yet he had no idea when she had arrived. He went over and sat beside her. Seeing nothing unusual in Yunjie’s complexion, he relaxed. “Nothing to do today?”
Elio’s Notes: The raw writes Zhao Kuangyin once in this paragraph, but the surrounding scene and the very next clause identify Zhao Guangyi. FD follows the intended character here.
She nodded and smiled faintly. “There was nothing to do in Autumn Pavilion either. I thought I would come see you, my lord, but then I saw you enter the Buddhist hall and did not wish to disturb you.”
“Why would that matter? It is only a habit of mine. Have you been sitting here long?”
Yunjie shook her head. “I only just arrived.”
Zhao Guangyi suddenly leaned closer to study her, then laughed. “Your eyes are obviously swollen…” Perhaps she herself had thought it unsightly and carefully covered them with a little pale rouge. Unless one looked closely, it was indeed difficult to tell. “Has Madam been giving you trouble again?”
“Only the same old things. I would not call it giving me trouble.” Yunjie looked a little embarrassed.
Zhao Guangyi nodded. “She simply does not want to see you suffer. That is only human.”
Yunjie felt that being understood at all was a kind of blessing. Each time she came to sit here, her heart grew much calmer. Her gaze settled on the bracelet. “Your elder brother cares deeply about you.”
Zhao Guangyi suddenly turned his face away. “Cares?”
Yunjie had been about to say that for years Zhao Kuangyin had never once given up searching for news of his whereabouts, but something suddenly caught her eye. Puzzled, she instinctively reached toward the bracelet. Just before touching it, she realized how improper that would be and hurriedly drew back her hand. Zhao Guangyi assumed she was merely curious and held his wrist toward her. “It is all right. Do you want to look?”
Yunjie fell silent. In that accidental glance, she had noticed something strange in the bracelet’s pattern.