“I didn’t realize. I would have invited you.” Ben smiled, his eyes never leaving Li Yuan’s face. “Then I’m glad you didn’t. I understand there’s a big hole where the imperial enclosure stood.”
Yuan nodded.
“So?” Ben looked away for the first time, his eyes like cameras, taking in everything—the pool, the tree, the tablet, and, beyond it, the sealed entrance to the tomb. He looked back. “You want to talk?” “I want... to clarify things.”
“Ah . . . clarity!” Ben laughed. “How much time have we? A vague muzziness we might just achieve, but clarity?” His smile was roguish. “You’ve made your decision, haven’t you, Yuan? You know what you have to do. But you want to feel easier about it. You want me to talk away your last nagging doubts. To make you feel good about it, neh?” That last word—not part of Ben’s natural vocabulary—made Yuan turn and look at him again.
“I have to live with myself. Men will die. ...”
“Men will die anyway, Li Yuan. You’re not God. You didn’t make Mankind. Nor did you fashion them into such nasty, quarrelsome creatures. It’s how they are. No, Yuan . . . what you are is a King. So let’s talk of kings, eh?”
Yuan stared at him, grateful. He hadn’t properly understood why he had asked for Ben, but now he knew.
“What do you feel?” Ben asked.
“Relief . . . that Kuei Jen and Tsu Ma survived . . . and Tseng-li.”
“And beyond that?”
Yuan hesitated, as if waiting for something, but nothing came. He
shrugged.
“No anger, then? No burning desire for revenge?” He shook his head. Strangely, he felt nothing. People were dead, his Palace had been attacked, and he felt . . . nothing. Now that things had come to a head he seemed beyond emotion. Not numb, simply dissociated from events.
Maybe he had suffered too much these past few years, or maybe he had outgrown such feelings—become inured to them. Whichever, it was as if a screen had fallen, distancing him from that side of himself. Ben turned and crouched, putting his hand down to the pool’s dark surface. “Master Nan said that you spoke of Wang almost admiringly earlier. That you laughed. He couldn’t understand it—how one could laugh after what Wang had tried to do to you. But I told him it was natural. Fear and laughter—they’re natural bedfellows.”
Yuan watched the ripples spread. “Did you know I am to be married again?” “Again?” Ben raised his eyebrows, then nodded. “That’s good, Yuan. A T’ang needs a wife. But not always in his bed. . . .” Yuan smiled. Again Ben had read things perfectly. Ben turned, looking up at him. “Do you miss your wives, Yuan? Do you think of them a lot?”
“I—I dream of them.”
He had told no one that. No one.
Ben nodded thoughtfully. “Dreams . . . you know, Yuan, sometimes I dream of being you.”
“Me?”
“Yes ... In the dream I’m sitting on a throne, a dozen Ministers knelt before me, awaiting my every word. And do you know what I do?” Yuan stared at him, mesmerized. “No . . .” Ben stood, then took up a pose, as if seated in a throne, his body suddenly stiff and regal. Yuan laughed.
“ ‘You!’ I say, pointing to one of them. ‘Bring me the imperial pot!’ And away he trots to fetch the imperial pot. I turn to another. You!’ I say, stepping down to where he’s kneeling, ‘Unfasten the imperial trousers!’ Li Yuan laughed. “And?”
“Well... as the fellow unbuckles me, his eyes averted, naturally, for to look upon the imperial ass is a crime warrariting execution, I stare imperiously about me. Then, when the first one brings back the imperial pot, I squat down on it”—Ben made the mime of squatting, his face creasing into the most excruciating grimace—“and squeeze out the most enormous turd.”
Li Yuan was giggling now, unable to stop himself. “Then, as I back away, I command them all to bow down before the imperial turd and, there and then, I appoint it my Chief Minister.” “A turd?” Li Yuan was doubled up in laughter. “And what happens then?” Ben straightened, his eyes twinkling. “They bow . . . with great dignity, of course, and swear allegiance to the turd, and then—then I wake up. And I realize I’m just a man and that my shit. . . well, it’s just shit.” Li Yuan took a long breath, then nodded. “I understand . . . and yet . . . well, to be a King ... it is different. What one does—how one behaves—affects a great many besides oneself.” “I do not doubt it, Yuan. Yet kings forget that they are also men. It’s when they try and act as gods, forgetting their mortality, that things go wrong. Take you, for instance.”
“Me?”
“Yes ... all these years you’ve been living by a set of godlike and impractical ideals, thinking the world was somehow awry when in fact it was you all along.”
Li Yuan stared at him, astonished.
“I’ve watched you, Yuan. It’s like you’ve been bound up inside a tight corset all your life. That whole business with Fei Yen—your belief that there could ever be one perfect, unflawed love—it’s the kind of nonsense only someone who’d never experienced a mother’s love could fall for. Not only that, but your refusal to believe the worst of people until your nose is rubbed into the shit...” Ben shrugged then stepped closer, his face shining palely in the moonlight. “Of themselves these are not bad things. In fact, they’re rather admirable traits—in an innocent or a fool—but for a grown man to hold them is . . . well, to be frank about it, Yuan, it’s pitiful, and for a King . . . why, it’s disastrous!” Li Yuan stared back at him, feeling hurt and resentful, his face hard. “Is that your counsel, then, Ben Shepherd? That I should be a bastard like my cousin Wang and make those close to me hate and despise me?” Ben looked up, studying the moon’s bright face. “Don’t mistake me, Yuan. I say none of this to insult you. You are a nice man, but niceness is no virtue in a King. You wish to be a good Confucian—you wish to do what is moral—but it’s been my experience that the moral and the political are rare bedfellows. If they lie down together it is usually only a marriage of convenience.” He looked back at Yuan, meeting his eyes. “The world is as it is, Yuan, not as we’d wish it.”
Li Yuan stared back at him awhile, then gave the briefest of nods. “You should have been the T’ang, Ben Shepherd, not I.” “Maybe so, but things are as they are. Wishing them otherwise will not help. What is must be the basis of all your policy from henceforth.” “What ought I to do, then?”
Ben smiled. “You must learn not to fear death. What’s more, you need to embrace the darkness, Li Yuan, to accept it—only then will you see clearly in it.”
Li Yuan stared back at him. “You speak as if you were well acquainted with the fellow.”
Ben laughed. “Some days I think that’s true. You know, I went into the Clay, Yuan. Right inside, into the dust-dry dark. And it was . . . well, it was incredible. The rawness . . . the purity of things down there!” Li Yuan nodded, then looked down. Since his wives’ deaths he had kept himself separate, distancing himself from the world. But Ben was right. As the world tumbled into darkness, so he must engage himself with it. It was simply not possible to go on as he had.
He sighed. So it was. So it had to be. And yet he was afraid— fearfully, dreadfully afraid—of what he might become. The first step seemed so simple. He had but to utter a word or two and it was done. There would be war. And yet ... once he had set his feet upon that path, where would it lead? Where end? Into what darkness would his feet be drawn? He looked down, staring intently at the moonlit whiteness of the Family Tablet, then shook his head.