Chung Kuo. The words mean "Middle Kingdom," and since 221 B.C., when the first emperor, Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, unified the seven Warring States, it is what the "black-haired people," the Han, or Chinese, have called their great country. The Middle Kingdom—for them it was the whole world; a world bounded by great mountain chains to the north and west, by the sea to east and south. Beyond was only desert and barbarism. So it was for two thousand years and through sixteen great dynasties. Chung Kuo was the Middle Kingdom, the very center of the human world, and its emperor the "Son of Heaven," the "One Man." But in the eighteenth century that world was invaded by the young and aggressive Western powers with their superior weaponry and their unshakable belief in progress. It was, to the surprise of the Han, an unequal contest and China's myth of supreme strength and self-sufficiency was shattered. By the early twentieth century, China—Chung Kuo—was the sick old man of the East: "a carefully preserved mummy in a hermetically sealed coffin," as Karl Marx called it. But from the disastrous ravages of that century grew a giant of a nation, capable of competing with the West and with its own Eastern rivals, Japan and Korea, from a position of incomparable strength. The twenty-first century, "the Pacific Century," as it was known even before it began, saw China become once more a world unto itself, but this time its only boundary was space.
"A new sound from the old keys."
Keep away from sharp swords
Don't go near a lovely woman.
A sharp sword too close will wound your hand,
Woman's beauty too close will wound your life.
The danger of the road is not in the distance,
Ten yards is far enough to break a wheel.
The peril of love is not in loving too often,
A single evening can leave its wound in the soul.
—MENG CHIAO , Impromptu, eighth century A.D.
PROLOGUE I SUMMER 2205
The Sound of Jade
At rise of day we sacrificed to the Wind God,
When darkly, darkly, dawn glimmered in the sky.
Officers followed, horsemen led the way;
They brought us out to the wastes beyond the town,
Where river mists fall heavier than rain,
And the fires on the hill leap higher than the stars.
Suddenly I remembered the early levees at Court
When you and I galloped to the Purple Yard.
As we walked our horses up Dragon Tail Way
We turned and gazed at the green of the Southern Hills.
Since we parted, both of us have been growing old;
And our minds have been vexed by many anxious cares;
Yet even now I fancy my ears are full
Of the sound of jade tinkling on your bridle-straps.
—po chu-i, To Li Chien (a.a 819)
IT WAS NIGHT and the moon lay like a blinded eye upon the satin darkness of the Nile. From where he stood, on the balcony high above the river, Wang Hsien could feel the slow, warm movement of the air like the breath of a sleeping woman against his cheek. He sighed and laid his
hands upon the cool stone of the balustrade, looking out to his right, to the north, where in the distance the great lighthouse threw its long sweeping arm of light across the delta. For a while he watched it, feeling as empty as the air through which it moved; then he turned back, looking up at the moon itself. So clear the nights were here. And the stars. He shivered, the bitterness flooding back. The stars . . .
A voice broke into his reverie. "Chieh Hsia? Are you ready for us?"
It was Sun Li Hua, Master of the Inner Chamber. He stood just inside the doorway, his head bowed, his two assistants a respectful distance behind him, their heads lowered. Wang Hsien turned and made a brief gesture, signifying that they should begin; then he turned back, staring up at the stars.
He remembered being with his two eldest sons, Chang Ye and Lieh Tsu, on the coast of Mozambique in summer. A late summer night with the bright stars filling the heavens overhead. They had sat there around an open fire, the three of them, naming the stars and their constellations, watching the Dipper move across the black velvet of the sky until the fire was ash and the day was come again. It was the last time he had been with them alone. Their last holiday together.
And now they were dead. Both of them lying in their coffins, still and cold beneath the earth. And where were their spirits now? Up there? Among the eternal stars? Or was there only one soul, the hun, trapped and rotting in the ground? He gritted his teeth, fighting against his sense of bitterness and loss, hardening himself against it. But the bitterness remained. Was it so? he asked himself. Did the spirit soul—the p'o—rise up to Heaven as they said, or was there only this? This earth, this sky, and Man between them? He shuddered. Best not ask. Best keep such thoughts at bay, lest the darkness answer you.
He shivered, his hands gripping the stone balustrade fiercely. Gods, but he missed them! Missed them beyond the power of words to say. He filled his hours, keeping his mind busy with the myriad affairs of state. Even so, he could not keep himself from thinking of them. Where are you? he would ask himself on waking. Where are you, Chang Ye, who smiled so sweetly? And you, Lieh Tsu, my ying too, my baby peach, always my favorite? Where are you now?
Murdered, a brutal voice in him insisted. And only ash and bitterness remain.
He turned savagely, angry with himself. Now he would not sleep. Bone-tired as he was, he would lie there, sleepless, impotent against the thousand bittersweet images that would come.
"Sun Li Hua!" he called impatiently, moving the diaphanous curtain aside with one hand. "Bring me something to make me sleep! Ho yeh, perhaps, or tou chi."
"At once, Chieh Hsia."
The Master of the Inner Chamber bowed low; then went to do as he was bid. Wang Hsien watched him go; then turned to look across at the huge low bed at the far end of the chamber. The servants were almost finished. The silken sheets were turned back, the flowers at the bedside changed, his sleeping robes laid out, ready for the maids.
The headboard seemed to fill the end wall, the circle of the Ywe Lung—the Moon Dragon, symbol of the Seven—carved deep into the wood. The seven dragons formed a great wheel, their regal snouts meeting at the hub, their lithe, powerful bodies forming the spokes, their tails the rim. Wang Hsien stared at it for a while; then nodded to himself as if satisfied. But deeper, at some dark, unarticu-lated level, he felt a sense of unease. The War, the murder of his sons—these things had made him far less certain than he'd been. He could no longer look at the Ywe Lung without questioning what had been done in the name of the Seven these last five years.
He looked down sharply. Five years. Was that all? Only five short years? So it was. Yet it felt as though a whole cycle of sixty years had passed since the New Hope had been blasted from the heavens and war declared. He sighed and put his hand up to his brow, remembering. It had been a nasty, vicious war; a war of little trust— where friend and enemy had worn the same smiling face. They had won, but their victory had failed to set things right. The struggle had changed the nature—the very essence—of Chung Kuo. Nothing would ever be the same again.
He waited until the servants left, backing away, bowed low, their eyes averted from their lord's face. Then he went across and stood before the wall-length mirror.
"You are an old man, Wang Hsien," he told himself softly, noting the deep lines about his eyes and mouth, the ivory yellow of his eyes, the loose roughness of his skin. "Moon-faced, they call you. Maybe so. But this moon has waxed and waned a thousand times and still I see no clearer by its light. Who are you, Wang Hsien? What kind of man are you?"