“What is it like not to fear me?” the Emperor asked.
The priest replied: “It is like listening to a sick child. Yet even Confucius told us that if we hear the Way of Tao in the morning, it matters little if we should die at night. Perhaps he did not mean the Way of Tao, but his own Way. But you should not fear death, you of all men, for to you above all others is granted the continuity of family, of succession, of a tended tomb. We are they whom history passes by.”
Han Im observed again: “Sui-yang, Your Majesty?”
“Tell the boy,” the Emperor answered.
Han Im said: “His Imperial Majesty has decreed that to you, Ah Lai, should be given the honour of a mission. Instructions and authority are written here, on this paper. Guard them with your life.”
Ah Lai stepped forward and walked up the interminable floor. In front of the throne he kotowed. But before his forehead had reached the floor for the second time, the Emperor said with a kindly note in his voice: “Stop. Rise. You helped me once. Do not imagine that I forget so easily.”
The priest had moved up noiselessly beside Ah Lai.
“Does the lad desire to undertake this mission?” he asked. “Why did he help you before? Was it for your own sake, or for another’s? Do not in one breath thank him and ask for more favours. He may not want to go on this mission.”
Han Im asked, scandalised: “Shall he be removed?”
The Emperor shook his head. A gem in his headdress turned from green to red, then apricot, as he moved. “The priest is right,” he said. “I talk much of the sorrow of my people, but I have not yet learned to consider their desires. I am old to learn. Boy, do you wish to do me this service?”
Ah Lai answered: “If I must be honest, as this priest is honesty I must say that, when I served before in taking the Lady Yang to Ma Wei with General Tung’s orders for the reception of his troops, I did so because I wanted adventure. Further, there was a girl who was better left alone for a space. So I went to Ma Wei. But now to travel to Sui-yang, for whatever cause, seems to be but to place a greater distance between myself and this girl.”
Han Im said: “She would wish you to go. Further, if you write a letter, it can be carried by another, through the lines of the enemy. You must serve your Emperor.”
The priest said: “Must? All the ills of the world lie in that word. Even Confucius said he would have no ‘must’ in his ideal State.”
The Emperor rose to his feet, impatiently waving aside the bearers of the fans. “The whole of my Empire is bathed in blood because men give orders and other men obey them,” he cried. “And now the loyalty of Sui-yang is to stand as a bastion against the enemy’s forces, and again there will be blood everywhere. I will issue no more orders. Han Im, come.”
The priest and Ah Lai were left alone in the great hall. The fan-bearers vanished through another door. The sunbeam was more level now, but the motes still danced.
Ah Lai said: “I thought that to oppose the Bright Emperor, or even to query an order, was to die. But you are not dead. I am not dead. Life is strange now. Before, we knew what to expect.”
The priest replied: “He is whimsical. Also he is sad because of the Lady Yang, whose family have ruined the State, if ever there were any so simple first cause. Come, let us go to your lodgings. Read the orders which you were given. Maybe they fit with your own desires. It is always easier to take the line of least resistance.”
Later, when Ah Lai had read the Emperor’s orders in his room, he said to the priest: “I should wish to go to Sui-yang. But . . .”
The priest told him: “If you have read your histories as I expect you to have done, you will have sensed that when any such great events as these thrust themselves on man’s consciousness, he says with convinced optimism: ‘Now, after this, it is impossible for anything to be ever again the same. We start afresh from now. No longer shall we make the same mistakes, for we are wiser.’ And then he goes out and marries a wife or buys a horse or writes a poem, just as he would have done had no great events come to hinder him.”
Ah Lai replied: “Yes, it is as you say. But you have spoken of commonplace actions which we men do in spite of the great events which pass over our heads. I, too, am concerned with those commonplace actions, or at least with one of them, for in the stress of the Emperor’s service I have left behind me in the Capital (or, rather, near it) a girl for whom I have an affection.”
The priest said: “Fevers and the worship of women come upon us unawares, and even wise men cannot avoid them.”