Father Peng said: “Take this sword. It was mine.” He put into Han Im’s hand a beautiful ivory-hiked weapon, sheathed. “Men have been talking outside my window. They are going to take the Emperor’s favourite on to the slope of Ma Wei hill and trample her under the horses. I am fearful that ill should come to his Majesty—the woman does not matter. You are younger and stronger than I, or I would offer my own services to him. Take this and use it. Not for the first time will it be drinking a rebel’s blood.” He crept away and left Han Im with the sword. Han Im belted it on and got to his feet. As he did so a slip of bamboo bearing rapid characters caught his attention. It had been lying by his head on the rough pillow, and he recognised Winter Cherry’s writing.
Han Im moved swiftly towards the room where Yang Kuei-fei was sleeping and opened the door. A single lamp was burning in a corner; by its light he saw, first, the two porcelain stools which had rolled to one side of the room. One had broken into three large pieces. On a little table lay Kuei-fei’s hair-comb, broken very deliberately into halves, side by side. Through the oiled paper window the faint light of early morning gleamed dully.
He took the sword from its sheath and touched the taut bowstring. It gave out a deep low note. He cut it, and the girl’s body fell to the floor. She must have broken her neck when she jumped from the stools, he thought, for Kuei-fei’s face was still beautiful in death, without the red, sullen flesh which Han Im had seen in the faces of others who had thus solved with a bow-string the problems which were too strong for them. He lifted her head and cut the gut of the bow-string where it touched her throat. The sharp sword cut also the fine skin of her neck, but no blood came out.
Han Im threw the girl’s body over his shoulder, put the sword back in its sheath and strode out into the light of the expected sun. Somewhere outside the farm walls he could hear the noise of horsemen in movement. In the courtyard a groom was adjusting the girth of the General’s horse. Han Im stepped up to him and put Kuei-fei’s body over the saddle. Then, as he put his own foot in the stirrup, the groom took him by the arm. Han Im swung himself into his seat behind the body, drew the sword and with one movement, from the height of the horse’s back, cut down through hair and skull. The groom fell, and Han Im, flogging the horse with the flat of his bloody sword, moved out of the open gateway on to the slope of Ma Wei. So, he thought, many an Emperor’s messenger had urged his horse. But this was no Emperor’s message. The world was in ruins. Han Im only knew that, somewhere out there, amidst the slowly wheeling mass of horsemen moving like ghosts in the dawn, Winter Cherry was trying to take the place of the girl whom she thought the Emperor loved.
Winter Cherry, gaudy in the robe which she had taken from the room of the sleeping Yang Kuei-fei early last night, wearing in her short hair the kingfisher hair-pins, walked on, towards the line of horsemen. It would be quick, she thought. One crash, and blackness. She hoped that they would not look too closely at her body afterwards, for some fool might see that they had killed the wrong girl. Still, the clothes and the famous hair-pins should convince men, if they did not look too closely. If Han Im could only keep Kuei-fei quiet at the farm until all this trouble had passed, until the Emperor, back from this journey into the further provinces, should, returning, meet her whom he loved. She remembered the Emperor’s face, at the time of their first meeting—pale, other-thoughtful, remote. Even later he had still seemed so, even when he had fallen asleep beside her and she had crept out to freedom and . . . to what else? Who was she, to alter the ways of the Gods?
Then she stopped walking, for from one flank of the horsemen a figure moved fast towards her, a figure somehow familiar, with a burden at his saddle-bow. At the same time another horseman, whom she recognised as the Captain of the Guard, rode more slowly towards her from the centre of the line of horsemen. He and Han Im met beside hen