River of Stars. Guy Gavriel Kay

you had to get to the river first, and they were, Military Officer Zhao judged, still two nights away. This evening they should be able to reach a village he knew. Tomorrow was likely to require camping out, a fire, rotating guards. He was driving his party hard, but if he didn’t it was going to be three nights, not two. Not a good idea.

      In both the last two years, the deputy prime minister’s birthday gifts from Hsiang Prefecture, where Kai Zhen had been posted for many years, had not reached illustrious Minister Kai, the honoured patron of the honourable prefect of Hsiang.

      Ziji had been frightening his party with threats of tigers and bandits and a rumour of ghosts and fox-spirits lurking on this trail after dark. (He was afraid of fox-spirits himself.)

      But some of their group were bureaucrats, not pleased about having been instructed by the prefect that they were to accept the command of a soldier all the way to Hanjin. Once there, the magistrate in the party would take control, but not until they were inside Hanjin’s walls. There had been no ambiguity in the orders when they’d departed. Ziji had made it a condition of his volunteering for the task. (No one else had wanted it, not after the last two years.)

      All of his party were wilting like spring flowers in summer drought. Well, he was suffering, too, Ziji thought. He wasn’t urging them along in this harsh white sunlight for his pleasure. He’d have happily travelled by night, but the danger was overwhelming.

      The moaning was constant. You’d have thought they’d be smart enough to save their energy. He had promised a midday rest, and it wasn’t midday yet. On the other hand, he thought, smelling his own sweat, feeling how it had soaked his armour under the tunic, it was getting close to it, and there were all those tales of party leaders murdered by their men. After which the story was always given out by the ones who survived that the leader had been drunk, incompetent, disrespectful of his prefect or even the emperor. One or two or all of those things.

      He’d heard those stories. He’d actually believed some of them in the past. He didn’t any more.

      “Rest stop on that rise ahead!” he suddenly called out.

      His voice was a cracked croak. He cleared his throat and said it again. “There should be shade, and we can see both ways up there. We’ll go double-quick when we start up again, though, to make the village for tonight. I am telling you all now!”

      They were too exhausted to cheer. Or too angry with him. As of yesterday the magistrate had insisted on riding one of the donkeys. He was older, it didn’t ruin their disguise, but he was the one the others kept approaching for low-voiced exchanges, with sidelong glances at Ziji. Did they think he couldn’t see those looks?

      On the whole, a rest was probably wise. It wouldn’t do his career any good if he was murdered by his own party. Ho, he thought. A joke! His ghost could torment them, but that wouldn’t help him much in the matter of a promotion and a wife one day.

      He’d remembered rightly from three trips to the river: there was a level spot at the top of this rise. The upward slope was long, but the promise of rest carried them there.

      From up here he could indeed see the dusty road both ways, north and south. There was a dense wood to the east and a smaller stand of oak trees on the west side of the roadway. Ziji sank down beneath one of those oaks, after guiding the donkeys into the shade. He liked animals, and he knew they were suffering.

      He’d heard a wandering holy man, one of those from the high plateaus of Tagur (which had once been an empire, some said), preaching back home to a ragged crowd that if a man behaved badly in life he would return as an animal of some kind, to make amends for his errors. Young Ziji didn’t exactly believe it, but he did recall the simple piety of that man in his dark-red robe, and he treated his animals as well as he could to this day. They didn’t mumble and plot against you, he thought.

      He remembered something. With an effort and a curse, he made himself get up and pull back the cloth from the three birdcages. The cages were made of beaten gold, studded with gems, far too valuable to be exposed, but there was no one up here to see, and the birds were at risk of dying under covers in this heat. They weren’t going to sing, not in cages at midday.

      Before going back to his tree past sprawled, exhausted men (some were already asleep, he saw) Ziji stepped into the road again, in the brutal sun, and looked both ways.

      He swore viciously. The magistrate glared at him, in mid-swig from a water flask. The very refined magistrate of Hsiang Prefecture didn’t like soldiers’ language. Well, fuck you with a shovel, Zhao Ziji thought. You don’t like the way soldiers talk, you try getting yourself to the river without them!

      And without dealing with the imminent arrival of another party from along the road behind them. They hadn’t been able to see them while on level ground. Up here they could. That was why a fucking soldier had waited until they’d reached this point to stop.

      He rasped an order for one of his men to cover the cages. Those coming up to the long slope, openly, on a midday road, were almost certainly another party of merchants, but merchants could whisper of gilded, gem-covered nightingale cages as readily as anyone.

      The other party showed a natural anxiety as they reached the point on the upward slant of the road where a dozen or so men could be seen sitting or lying among trees by the path.

      Ziji had gone back to sitting against an oak. His short sword was hidden beneath his long, loose tunic. He was aware that the other soldiers in their party, unhappy as they were, were also disinclined to be killed, and would be alert. But then the magistrate stood up, officious and foolish, and sketched a bow that proclaimed, for anyone who knew enough to recognize it, that he was no humble merchant on the road.

      “Greetings to your company. Have you any wine with you?” he asked.

      Ziji winced, barely restrained himself from swearing.

      “None!” exclaimed the leader of the other party. “None at all! We have nothing you might wish to steal! You would not kill men for water!”

      “It has happened.” The magistrate chuckled, thinking himself witty.

      “There’s a stream not far ahead!” cried one of the other party. “It hasn’t dried up! You need not—”

      “We mean you no harm,” Ziji said from where he sat.

      The other party, six men, country folk, were carrying their goods on their backs, not even a single donkey with them. Ziji added, “Take the other side of the road. There is shade enough for everyone. We’ll be on our way soon.”

      “Going to the river?” the other leader asked, less anxious now. He was neatly shaven, older than Ziji, spoke roughly but not rudely. Ziji hesitated. He didn’t want companions—it would be too easy for their deception to be revealed, and any talk of who they were or what they carried was dangerous.

      “We are,” said the magistrate officiously. He was irritated, clearly, that Ziji was the one addressed. “I believe it is two or three days from here,” he added.

      The other group had begun crossing to the far side of the road, into the shade there. Their leader lingered a moment, sweating, as they all were, his tunic blotchy. He spoke to Ziji again, not the magistrate. “We’re not going so far. We’ve hemp clothing for the village up a bit and the silk farm by it.”

      Peasant clothes. They wouldn’t get much for them, but in hard times you did what you could.

      “Those who spin silk wear hemp,” Ziji quoted.

      The other man spat in the roadway. “Truth there,” he said.

      He crossed to join his own party. Ziji saw his soldiers watching them closely. He was pleased with that. Fear of death could make a man sharper, even when he was dulled by heat and weariness.

      A little later, as Ziji was beginning to think of rousing his party and carrying on, they saw the next figure approaching along the slope.

      This one was alone. A young