“Do you, my ancestors, guide the spirits of the earth and sky towards whatever doom they may purpose for me, for I have failed my father and my father’s father, and from me no fame has come to the house of Peng.
“Do you, my ancestors, give me some sign that the end may not be far off, that shame shall not always smear my name and through me the name of my family, and that the end, again, may be near. Give me a sign.”
Outside, the stillness was broken by the hoofs of horses, and the doorway into the Hall became suddenly bright and then dark again.
Ah Lai said, as he stood there: “I am going. I thought that you would be here. How straight the smoke goes up.”
She replied: “Are you my sign? Are you the sign that I was praying for?”
“Your ancestors must have heard you,” he said. “I did not know that I was an answer to your prayer, since for long, it seems, you have not looked at me as once you looked. But if prayers bring me, here I stand, about to go again.”
She cried, still kneeling: “Can I believe the sign?” The smoke wavered, became again a ruled line to the dimness above. “Can I believe? It matters nothing if the past has been cruel, if I can believe.”
Ah Lai moved towards her as a voice called from outside: “They are going!”
Winter Cherry said, very softly: “If you were not going . . .”
He cried: “Believe the sign.”
Then the door opened and closed a second time, and Winter Cherry was alone before the tablet of her great-grandfather.
She cried, noiselessly.
The Lady of the Tapestry sent a messenger to recall her son from the village, now that Yang Kuei-fei was dead.
As when the players, masked and posturing, have reached a climax in their play by death, disaster or incongruity, and the main agents of this climax leave the stage to a subsidiary character whose outpourings of verse serve to sooth the tried nerves of the audience, so then the sweet succession of the season brought relief to the family of Peng. The millet was garnered, the granary floors stood deep once more in their coloured grain, and the activities which lead directly to the hoped and following spring engaged the minds as well as the bodies of those who had witnessed the passage of an event.
The men of An Lu-shan passed in pursuit, taking with them nothing but more grain in little bags at their saddle-bows. Returning messengers brought tales of the ever further retreat into Shu in the west, and ever continuing pursuit by the men of An Lu-shan. He, report had it, filled the court at Chang-an with tall Northerners from his own province and Borderers from the deep, cold hills of the North. Rumour had it, too, that his mind was not wholly concerned with the pursuit and destruction of that Emperor whose throne he now held, but that the usurper troubled himself greatly with the fate of that companion of his youth who had (so it was reported) fled with the bright Emperor towards the unprobeable and misty valleys where magic seemed so much more likely than in the prosaic and cultivated plains around the old capital city.
It was on the eighteenth day of the seventh moon that the Emperor and his party reached Cheng-tu, Ah Lai, who had been used hitherto only to the inadequate organisation of a poet’s household, was immediately astonished at the manner in which efficiency overrode expected fatigue and the various members of the party were accommodated in houses, while the soldiery tested further the capacity of the barracks.
For several days, it appeared, there would be no particular need for his services, and when he had largely exhausted the pleasure of acquainting himself with the geography of Cheng-tu, he began to realise why officials in general kept bright the armoury of their poetic imagination and often, towards the fall of the sun, would relax in putting on paper their impressions of the day that had gone.
But when he had collected paper and brush and prepared his ink, he found that his creative faculties were under a cloud which he could not explain. Rhymes were tardy, words seemed to lack by a narrow margin that precision which is any poet’s aim, and even the titles which he had managed to project did not comfortably fit any poem which he was likely to write. Images, indeed, arrived, but they were images with loose edges, images not only unrelated to each other and individually incapable of extension into a poem, but images whose reality, even whose possibility, seemed outside normal experience.