Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay
Location 719:
Weary but content, he brought his small horse to a halt in front of the cabin. Shen Tai was in a white tunic for mourning, but his loose trousers and the tunic were sweat- and dirt-stained. He was unshaven, darkened, rough-skinned like a peasant, but he was staring at Yan in flattering disbelief. Yan felt like a hero. He was a hero. He’d had a nosebleed earlier, from the altitude, but you didn’t have to talk about that. He only wished his tidings weren’t so grave. But then he wouldn’t be here, would he, if they weren’t?
Location 1196:
It had occurred to Tai many years ago that one usually expected important decisions in life to emerge after long and complex thought. Sometimes this was so. But on other occasions one might wake in the morning (or finish drying one’s hands and face in a dusty border fort) with the abrupt, intense realization that a choice had already been made. All that was left was putting it into effect.
Location 1402:
Some men seemed able to slide in and out of society. This man appeared to be one of them. Lin Fong knew that he himself was not, and never would be; he had too great a need for security, routines, for such uncertainty. But Shen Tai did make him aware that there were, or might be, alternative ways to live. It probably did help, he thought, to have had a Left Side Commander for a father.
Location 2607:
In the teachings of the Path, beliefs to which he’d tried, erratically, to adhere, Tai knew that coincidence, the fortuitous encounter, was to be accepted with composure. If grim and unpleasant, such moments were properly understood as tasks, lessons one was meant to master. If benevolent, they were gifts to be humbly received.
Location 5044:
Full moon is falling through the sky. Cranes fly through clouds. Wolves howl. I cannot find rest Because I am powerless To amend a broken world.
Location 5046:
Sima Zian added, "I love the man who wrote that, I told you before, but there is so much burden in Chan Du. Duty, assuming all tasks, can betray arrogance. The idea we can know what must be done, and do it properly. We cannot know the future, my friend. It claims so much to imagine we can. And the world is not broken any more than it always, always is."
Location 9255:
He felt her nodding her head. "But I don’t believe the world will let you stay by that stream all your days." "It might not. But I do not want to be lost in the dust and noise. To be what Liu became. In the Ta-Ming." "If they even reclaim the Ta-Ming." "Yes." "Do you … do you think they will?" Tai lay in darkness, thinking about it. "Yes. It may take time, but the new emperor is wiser than Roshan, and I think Roshan will die soon. This is not the end of the Ninth Dynasty." "There will be changes." He ran a hand through her hair: the unimaginable gift of his being able to do so. "This is a change, Song." "I see. You prefer me this way? Obedient and submissive?" Her hand began moving again. "Submissive? Is that like the inexperience, before?" "I have much to learn," she murmured. "I know it." And she lifted her head from his shoulder and slipped down towards where her hand had gone. A little later, Tai managed, with some effort, to say, "Did they teach you that on Stone Drum Mountain?" "No," she said, from farther down the bed. And then, in a different voice, "But I’m not a concubine, Tai." "Hardly," he murmured. He felt her head lift. "What does that mean? I lack the skills you are accustomed to?" "You could possibly acquire them," he said judiciously. "With effort and time enough to—" He made a sharp, strangled sound. "I didn’t hear that last," she murmured sweetly. He made an effort to compose himself. "Oh, Song. Will I survive a life with you?" "If you are more cautious about what you say," she said, sounding meditative, "I see no reason why not. But I’m not a concubine, Shen Tai." "I said I know that," he protested. "Before you bit me." He cleared his throat. He felt amazingly sure of himself. Sure of the world, or this small part of it. He said, "It would be a great honour if, Mistress Wei Song, before you took my horses north, I were permitted to learn your father’s name, and your mother’s, and the location of their home, that my mother might correspond with them as to possibilities for the future." She stopped moving. He had a sense she was biting her lower lip. She said, "Your servant would be pleased if your honourable mother were willing to initiate such a correspondence." Which formality, given where she was just then, and what she now resumed doing, was remarkable. He reached down and drew her up (she was so small), and laid her upon her back, and shifted above her. She began, shortly thereafter, making small sounds, and then more urgent ones, and then, some time after, with the bird still singing outside, she said, halfway between a gasp and a cry, "Did you learn that in the North District?" "Yes," he said. "Good," she said. "I like it." And twisting her body the way he’d seen her do springing up a wall in Chenyao or fighting assassins alone with two swords, she was above him again. Her mouth found his, and she did something with her teeth that made him realize, suddenly, that it hadn’t been any fox-woman he’d been dreaming about so…
Location 9294:
Branching paths. The turning of days and seasons and years. Life offered you love sometimes, sorrow often. If you were very fortunate, true friendship. Sometimes war came. You did what you could to shape your own peace, before you crossed over to the night and left the world behind, as all men did, to be forgotten or remembered, as time or love allowed.
Location 9355:
When choosing a bow choose a strong one, If you shoot an arrow shoot a long one, To capture the enemy capture their leader, But carry within you the knowledge That war is brought to bring peace.
Location 9506:
They rode together under the moon, south along the river from Cho-fu-Sa. Sometimes the one life we are allowed is enough.
Updated: Sep 05, 2023
Amid the ten thousand noises and the jade-and-gold and the whirling dust of Xinan, he had often stayed awake all night among friends, drinking spiced wine in the North District with the courtesans. They would listen to flute or pipa music and declaim poetry, test each other with jibes and quotes, sometimes find a private room with a scented, silken woman, before weaving unsteadily home after the dawn drums sounded curfew’s end, to sleep away the day instead of studying. Here in the mountains, alone in hard, clear air by the waters of Kuala Nor, far to the west of the imperial city, beyond the borders of the empire, even, Tai was in a narrow bed by darkfall, under the first brilliant stars, and awake at sunrise.
There were too many. It was beyond hope to ever finish this: it was a task for gods descending from the nine heavens, not for one man. But if you couldn’t do everything, did that mean you did nothing? For two years now, Shen Tai had offered what passed for his own answer to that, in memory of his father’s voice asking quietly for another cup of wine, watching large, slow goldfish and drifting flowers in the pond.
It had been written by one teacher in the time of the First Dynasty, more than nine hundred years ago, that when a man was brought back alive from the tall doors of death, from the brink of crossing over to the dark, he had a burden laid upon him ever after: to conduct his granted life in such a manner as to be worthy of that return.
Shen Tai, the son of the late General Shen, was the sort of person Lin Fong would have wished to keep at Iron Gate for days or even weeks, such was the spark of the man’s thinking and the unusual pattern of his life. Their conversation over dinner had forced him to acknowledge, ruefully, how impoverished his daily routines and company were here.
Updated: Sep 06, 2023
You could grieve for what might drive men to be outlaws, but you couldn’t indulge it.
Song’s eyes grew wide. "What? How is …?" "We have a few days to ride. I will tell you that tale." She hesitated, and then she bit her lip. "I am acceptable to you, like this? I feel strange, not wearing black. As if I have lost … protection."