Elio’s Notes: The title comes from Liu Yong’s later Song-dynasty lyric Yi Di Jing, whose line 一夜长如岁 describes a sleepless night feeling as long as a year. The allusion postdates the novel’s tenth-century setting.
The elegant tones of gold-and-jade konghou rang without cease. Flying clouds seemed to halt in the sky and linger there, while orchids smiled, awaiting another year of fine seasons.
Seeing the imperial guards stationed outside the pavilion, Zhao Kuangyin finally remembered that in his fury during the day he had ordered Li Congjia completely confined. He opened his mouth, intending to have the guards withdrawn, but then remembered the way that man could wave a hand with perfect calm and seem capable of slaying gods and burning immortals. In the end, he could not risk even one more accident. Blame me this time if you must. No matter what, I have to keep you locked here.
He left the guards posted around the Sandalwood Pavilion.
Inside the pavilion lay only dim shadows. A single precious pearl cast too little light to fill the room, barely enough to make out the path beneath one’s feet. For the sake of Li Congjia’s eyes, no other lamps were dared lit. Liuzhu stood alone outside the door. When she saw His Majesty approaching with his attendants, she lowered her head and bowed.
Zhao Kuangyin lowered his voice and quietly asked her, “How is the Marquis of Disobedience feeling today?”
Without raising her head, Liuzhu answered, “The Prince of Jin came to visit. There is nothing wrong.” She had served Li Congjia for so long that she understood his temper better than anyone. If Zhao Kuangyin learned that Li Congjia had become angry and made himself this unwell, he would surely blame himself bitterly.
Zhao Kuangyin found that strange. “The Prince of Jin came here?”
“Yes.”
He carried the medicine inside. Li Congjia happened to be lying on the couch with his back turned, one side of the gauze curtain lowered.
After nightfall, the Sandalwood Pavilion looked darker still. Zhao Kuangyin was unused to it and needed a while for his eyes to adjust. “Congjia. It is time for your medicine.”
The figure on the couch did not move. Zhao Kuangyin thought he was probably still brooding over their quarrel during the day, so he went over to check on him himself. Reaching through the gauze, he laid a hand over his waist. “Get up and take your medicine.”
The body beneath his hand stayed cold and motionless. Zhao Kuangyin thought that at such an hour Li Congjia should not already be asleep. “Whatever happened during the day, let us leave it aside for now. You still have to drink the medicine.” By speaking first, he meant to dissolve their standoff and let Li Congjia relax, yet Li Congjia still did not move.
He could only set the medicine aside and come over to help him up. Just as his hand reached Li Congjia’s shoulder, Li Congjia suddenly spoke. “If I had not failed you again and again… if not for the Prince of Jin, would you truly have insisted on destroying Tang?”
Zhao Kuangyin sat beside him and let his hand fall. “I gave you my word. I would give you three thousand li of mountains and rivers, if only you were willing… Enough. I never wanted things to become like this. Zhao Kuangyin’s heart was carved plainly enough at Phoenix Terrace. Believe it or do not. Get up and take the medicine, and I will leave.”
He knew how difficult this was for him. Such a thin, elegant frame carried the hatred of a nation and the grief of countless families, a burden that would not leave. He could not sleep by day or night. And Zhao Kuangyin had shut him in here… It truly did amount to shutting him in.
How could he simply say he would let go and then let go? Li Congjia and Zhao Kuangyin now stood completely opposed, with no shore behind them to return to. The man on the couch suddenly trembled faintly. Zhao Kuangyin could not see clearly and assumed he had stirred his heart-fire again. “You cannot keep thinking about it. Take your medicine properly. I will watch you finish it and then leave. I will not say anything else. Once your eyes are better… I will let you go back.”
The strip of silk had been tied over Li Congjia’s eyes again, but he clutched the silver fox fur with all his strength, grief in his heart with nowhere to go. Zhao Guangyi had already told him: none of this had originally been Zhao Kuangyin’s intention…
It was not what you intended.
But after so many times misunderstanding and failing one another, neither of them could recover the final outcome. Whatever had been right or wrong along the way, the hatred born from the fall of his country could no longer be changed…
“Why…” he murmured as he turned over, slowly propped himself up, and accepted the warm medicine. “Why… could I not have known sooner… sooner? Or why could you… not have been so stubborn? Perhaps then we would both suffer less today…” He sighed faintly and drank the medicine one mouthful at a time, bitter to the extreme, yet strangely he felt none of the bitterness between his lips and teeth…
His heart was more bitter still.
He could neither explain nor name what he felt. He simply wanted… to try letting go once.
Watching Li Congjia slowly drink the medicine on his own, Zhao Kuangyin finally relaxed. Ordinarily he had to coax him repeatedly and think of every possible method before he could get him to take it, but today it went unusually smoothly. “Good. This medicine will certainly work. Rest well. I am going back.”
The Prince of Jin truly is more ruthless than you… Telling me everything now hurts far more than leaving me ignorant and allowing me to keep hating you.
Because knowing changes nothing about the result.
He truly is… far more ruthless than you… so how could he be that child? The child you once described as gentle and timid, who followed you with his whole heart.
The bitterness of that bowl of medicine suddenly stirred a thousand thoughts in Li Congjia’s heart. With the silk over his eyes, everything around him was darkness. Hearing the man beside him about to rise and leave, he suddenly reached out and caught him.
Zhao Kuangyin froze. For the first time, the first time, Li Congjia had chosen to stop him from leaving.
Even his voice would not stay steady. “What is it?”
“You…” Li Congjia’s fingertips were still icy, still holding a measure of distance. Yet now, with unusual certainty, he opened his hand, traced it down the sleeve of the dragon robe, and slowly clasped Zhao Kuangyin’s hand.
He raised his head slightly. The pale face was half hidden behind the strip of silk. Under the dim pearl-light, his beauty was uncanny beyond words.
Zhao Kuangyin nearly stopped breathing at the sight of him. “Congjia… if you do this… then I will not be able to leave…” Music continued faintly beyond the window, drifting near and far and tugging at the heart. A qin bore a phoenix-head ornament; beyond the Xiang bamboo, the song continued: “The boat stirs the lake’s shimmering autumn light; entranced by a young man, she lets the boat drift. For no reason, across the water she tosses lotus seeds…”
Elio’s Notes: The lotus-seed lines are from Tang poet Huangfu Song’s Picking Lotus Seeds, where a young woman lets her boat drift while watching a handsome youth and impulsively tosses lotus seeds across the water.
His hand did not let go. Long hair slipped cold and dark from the silver fur, spilling across the couch and trailing in tangled strands all the way to the bluestone floor. The konghou sounded again. In the darkness, the one taut thread quietly snapped. “Then… do not go.”
A sudden rush of ringing notes flew upward.
Strings of Wu silk and Shu paulownia stretch beneath the high autumn sky; over empty mountains, gathered clouds droop and cease to move.
Elio’s Notes: This and the later konghou imagery in the chapter come from Li He’s Song of Li Ping Playing the Konghou, famous for turning music into extravagant images of shattered jade, crying phoenixes, dancing dragons, and celestial sound.
Silver powder lay at the musician’s temples, circled with gold thread. A gold-and-jade konghou rose in her hands as her dancing robes swayed.
Someone turned, caught that peerlessly elegant wrist, and pressed it back against the soft couch without the slightest hesitation. “Hurting others and hurting yourself… stop tormenting me, Li Congjia…”
The distant figure in silver-white, his eyes covered by a pale ribbon, smiled desolately. Suddenly he pushed himself up and silenced that low, hoarse voice with his own. “Zhao Kuangyin…” A faint smile curved his lips. As they moved, the hanging gauze fluttered down and left the pearl-light glowing beyond it. “That flowering peach tree in the side garden… I remember. Shengding House… the sword marks on Phoenix Terrace… I remember all of it.” The man who was usually so frighteningly indifferent suddenly wrapped his arms around the sword-browed man and pulled him backward onto the couch.
Zhao Kuangyin’s hands began to tremble. Beneath the silver fur, the brocade still carried a chill, its dense texture resisting as layers shifted and loosened. Faint floral paths wound downward. Behind the silk, Li Congjia saw only darkness. He buried his face against Zhao Kuangyin’s neck and kept murmuring, “I believe you… I have always believed you… but…” The silver fur slipped from his shoulders and opened like a lotus in Zhao Kuangyin’s suddenly narrowed gaze. With one movement it fell away into Li Congjia’s supporting hand. The soft touch drew another cry from the strings. Zhao Kuangyin bit down at his throat, both hands holding Li Congjia’s wrists.
Li Congjia yielded with a trace of confusion, half reclining against the couch and lifting his face toward Zhao Kuangyin, yet still stubbornly needing to confirm something. “You did not truly want this, did you…? You never wanted me to be nothing more than Li Yu, the ruler who lost his country, did you?”
“I did not want to see you like this… not as you are today… It is only that I… Congjia, from the first moment I saw you, you were never ordinary. I thought you had gone back on everything…”
“You never wanted to destroy everything I had… but now I…” Zhao Kuangyin’s hand followed that fine wrist into the sleeve and moved upward. The rising heat stopped Li Congjia’s words. He hesitated and instinctively drew back, but Zhao Kuangyin would not release his wrist. The pale figure amid the loosened white robes finally relaxed as kisses fell along his shoulder bones and at last drew a tremor with some warmth in it. “Li Yu has nothing… even Tianshui Blue no longer suits him…”
Jade shattered and mountains collapsed; strings surged and the fou drums answered.
Kunshan jade breaks, phoenixes cry; lotus blossoms weep dew, fragrant orchids smile.
Cold light melts before the twelve gates; twenty-three strings stir the Purple Sovereign.
“Then do not be Li Yu… become Li Congjia again, for me…”
The fire in Zhao Kuangyin’s palms blinded the heart. He stopped hesitating. Layer upon layer of elaborate clothing slipped into shifting shadow and disappeared beneath spreading ink-dark light.
Li Congjia’s lips were so vividly red that Zhao Kuangyin truly could not pull himself away. Yet beneath the bitterness of medicine, something made fear strike him without warning. Li Congjia shivered badly when cold air touched him. Zhao Kuangyin bent over him at once, shielding his whole body. His elegant bones were frighteningly thin. Zhao Kuangyin snatched up the white garment lying to one side, and under the pearl-light… scattered spots of demonic red seemed almost to bloom.
“You became angry again today, did you not…?” Zhao Kuangyin had never known he could be this frightened. He remembered their bitter quarrel during the day. Li Congjia was not truly some god or demon. He must have worn himself down again afterward. “You are not allowed to keep thinking wildly… Li Congjia! Li Congjia!” His voice came close to a growl. Amid desperate kisses, faded dark-red lotuslike marks showed over Li Congjia’s shoulder bones. Li Congjia frowned from the discomfort and turned his face away, only to be held still again. “What did you say? What did you promise me? You said you would not die, did you not!”
The cuckoo cried blood, withered lotus wept dew, and the fou drums beat in song, measure after measure refusing to release them, every inch seeming to seize body and soul.
The elegant music in the distance did not fade. Instead strings and flutes climbed until their sound roared upward.
The frame of the fou drums was made of pure gold, its jade ornaments and jeweled tassels trembling with light.
“I… ah…” His cry was swallowed. A sudden spasm ran through his hands, and tears fell beyond his control. “I will not die… I promised…”
“If you keep tormenting yourself, your body will not be able to endure it… You cannot see your own blood… you do not know…” The cold wetness on Li Congjia’s face was no longer only his own tears. “Let me beg you, all right…? You refuse to show weakness. You never will. Then let me beg you instead… Do not become angry again. Otherwise I am afraid you will… Just take it as me begging you…” Zhao Kuangyin’s voice had truly been worn down until there was nothing left he could do. The plea was real, desperate and earnest.
Through the pain, Li Congjia smiled with an almost reckless abandon. His eyes were covered by silk as he gasped, leaving only the desolation of pale, elegant bones beneath it. Suddenly, in retaliation, he tore at the bright-yellow dragon robe. It was only clothing, worth nothing at all. With a sharp rip born of their struggling strength, he destroyed the supreme dignity of the Son of Heaven’s nine dragons presenting the pearl.
His laughter was stifled beside Zhao Kuangyin’s ear. “Can you bear to lose it?”
Zhao Kuangyin answered him more fiercely, and immediately Li Congjia gave a rare, nearly sobbing struggle.
Neither released the other. The sword-browed man was drunk on the roomful of red sandalwood fragrance. Li Congjia’s body still carried that faint sandalwood scent, as though it had truly seeped into bone and blood, making him beautiful beyond ordinary humanity. Hearing the dragon robe tear, Zhao Kuangyin gripped his waist still harder. Each movement sent ripples through the lotus boat. In the midst of a fall that seemed to burn through his very bones, Li Congjia wept without stopping, yet his smile remained dazzlingly beautiful.
Zhao Kuangyin remembered that when he had first entered the pavilion, this man had already coughed blood and gone weak enough to be unable to move. Only after forcing himself to recover had he swallowed the medicine without hesitation, using its bitterness to hide the taste of blood.
“Why do you torment yourself like this… only now do you…” Trapped in Zhao Kuangyin’s arms with nowhere to turn, Li Congjia hovered again and again at the edge of collapse, the konghou’s singing strings pulling him back toward the mortal world each time. At last, braced against Zhao Kuangyin’s arm and unable to struggle free, he said, “Only now are you finally willing to put down that pride of yours… During the day… you did it on purpose! You deliberately angered me, did you not…”
Zhao Kuangyin did not answer. He bit along Li Congjia’s arm, lightly and then deeply, while his fingers found the faded scar across Li Congjia’s abdomen. “Fan Ruoshui dared hurt you. I should have exterminated his nine clans long ago…”
“You!” Li Congjia immediately became angry again. “What right do you have to decide who lives or dies for me? Do you think I am some possession belonging to Zhao Kuangyin, or someone who needs you to avenge and protect him… ah! He is my subject… he is a man of Jiangnan…” His stubborn temper rose again. Zhao Kuangyin decided not to argue over it and did not stop moving. The silver fox fur had fallen aside and dampness showed in Li Congjia’s dark hair. At those words, the sword-browed man’s imposing air sharpened, yet he pressed closer with deliberate teasing. “They are all… my people.”
In dreams one enters the sacred mountain and teaches the divine maiden; old fish leap from the waves and lean flood-dragons dance.
Wu Zhi, sleepless, leans against the cassia tree; slanting dew descends and wets the cold rabbit. Chime-stones, fangxiang, and jilou drums rose at once from every direction, voices waxing and waning as they entered the room. Jewels flashed beside purple-gold drums, and after three circling turns came the sound of jade flutes.
“Zhao Kuangyin!” The words that followed vanished at once, trapped in his throat until nothing remained but breath at the edge of breaking.
“This year at Qixi… on your birthday…” Zhao Kuangyin’s breathing was heavy, every beat striking the heart like a bell, stone splitting the heavens as frost poured over ten thousand li. “Will you let me take you back to Jiangnan to see it again…?”
In the darkness Li Congjia suddenly went rigid. After a long time he shook his head, cold and quiet. “No.”
“You do not miss Jiangnan?”
“It was still like the old days, touring the imperial gardens, carriages flowing like water and horses like dragons, blossoms and moonlight in the spring breeze… There is no going back. From the day I followed you north, Li Congjia no longer had the face to look back upon the homeland of Jiangnan…” His voice spread like a net tightening around Zhao Kuangyin’s heart. “You made me betray too much… I cannot go back…”
Elio’s Notes: These lines are Li Yu’s own Wang Jiangnan beginning 多少恨, written after the fall of Southern Tang and remembering the lost splendor of the old imperial gardens.
Zhao Kuangyin’s teeth sank against his flesh. Li Congjia’s breath caught under what he could barely endure, but he swallowed the sound hard. Yes. Zhao Kuangyin had already made him abandon too much. Outside the Jinling imperial palace that day, Li Congjia had spoken the single word surrender with such lightness, casting it into the air with almost unbearable calm. Zhao Kuangyin had lost five hundred thousand troops, while Li Congjia… from that moment onward had lost his entire life. He had buried every part of his past, every painted landscape of this lifetime, in the soil and waters of Jiangnan. Only a heart of impossible strength could have upheld the promise not to die and carried him all the way to Bianjing.
Tears slipped soundlessly from Zhao Kuangyin as well, beyond his control. But he too had no choice… he could not let go.
A silver bottle suddenly shatters and water bursts forth; armored cavalry surges out with the clash of swords and spears.
At the end of the piece, the plectrum cuts across the heart of the strings; all four strings cry out at once like tearing silk.
Elio’s Notes: These two lines are from Bai Juyi’s Song of the Pipa, where the music surges like a bursting silver bottle and ends with all four strings sounding like torn silk.
The pipa surged like water breaking over a jade plate. A long, absolute blankness nearly drowned them both within it, while the red sandalwood fragrance remained close and heavy, locking every thought inside the room.
Who was right, who was wrong; whose fault, whose innocence? In the secluded Sandalwood Pavilion, red sandalwood fragrance drifted. The jade-like beauty remained as before, enough to consume soul and bone, yet destined in this life to swim without shore. Zhao Kuangyin’s fingers gently combed through hair that had not been cut in so long it nearly brushed the floor, trailing like an ink painting of Jiangnan. He remembered Li Congjia’s calligraphy, forceful beneath its grace, strokes penetrating the paper. Gently he wiped the fine sweat from Li Congjia’s brow. “You are very tired, are you not?”
At last Li Congjia breathed out long in his arms and gave a quiet “Mm,” wearily rubbing against the softness of the brocade couch. Hearing that answer, Zhao Kuangyin lowered his head and lingered over the unevenness of his breathing. “Then from now on… give it all to me. I will bear the weight of your karmic debts and carry the judgment of a thousand autumns for you… The price is…”
Those exquisitely shaped shoulder blades moved faintly as Li Congjia clutched him with all his strength.
“The price is… Congjia, for my sake… learn to love and hate.”
It was as though someone had suddenly torn aside the splendid robes and exposed the desolation beneath them. Li Congjia struggled in sudden despair. “Let go… let go of me!”
But Zhao Kuangyin refused no matter what. He lifted Li Congjia’s upper body and soothed his hair, locking him tightly in his arms. “Joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure never entering the heart… all of that is a lie. Li Congjia, you are human. You are not a god.”
Li Congjia raised his face toward him. Though silk lay over his eyes, though everything was darkness and he could not see, in that fleeting instant Zhao Kuangyin felt as if Li Congjia’s gaze were exactly as it had been when they first met, deep with the red-sandalwood spirit that could never be dissolved.
The bells suddenly sank into a low, deep, distant register. Their final tones gradually faded, drawing out a whole night of moonlight broken across the ground.
Li Congjia suddenly bent over Zhao Kuangyin’s shoulder and burst into sobs.
Such weakness from him was so rare that Zhao Kuangyin almost doubted it was real. Li Congjia’s heart had always been simple. He had never understood the suffering of ordinary people, never understood beacon fires and smoke from war. The things he loved were like him, distant and refined, beautiful and graceful to their utmost. Zhao Kuangyin still remembered him once holding golden shears and carefully trimming thorns from peonies, ten fingers among flowers while night rain soaked his clothes. Now everything he had never known before had been forced into his heart, and still he could make himself smile lightly in daylight and listen to the wind. How could a person like this not be tired?
If it were possible, Zhao Kuangyin wanted to take his hand and rebuild for him an age of peace and splendor, where that jeweled beauty could drift in a boat with wine in hand and music fill the fields only for the flowers flying from his brush, one song between Heaven and the human world.
Raise that snow-white wrist, and all beneath Heaven would be given away.
Li Congjia should have been like that.
“Sleep…”
Holding him, Zhao Kuangyin felt at peace in a way he never had before. Exhausted, Li Congjia gradually fell asleep. Waking and dreaming near midnight, he murmured the same words again. The person beside him carefully tucked the blanket around him, warmth rising as Zhao Kuangyin sheltered him completely in his arms. At last Li Congjia slept soundly. “Returning home would break my heart… Qixi… Jinling…”
It was not that he did not want to return. He simply could never return again.
Zhao Kuangyin smiled faintly and lowered the gauze curtain. “All right… On your Qixi birthday, we will go back to Jiangnan together and look once more…”
The brilliance of sound faded away. Layered palace halls fell silent.
Carriages and horses never ceased before the Prince of Jin’s residence. Over the past several days, many people had entered Bianjing.
As dawn began to pale the sky, Meng Chang, ruler of Shu, suddenly died.
The mourning hall at the Prince of Jin’s residence had remained draped in white for days. A figure pushed open the door and entered. Yunjie… they will all pay the price. Next will be Lady Huarui…