River of Stars. Guy Gavriel Kay

faltered, seeing they were suddenly in a bad circumstance. Faltering wasn’t the best course of action. Daiyan shot the sixth man just as he broke stride and was starting to turn away to the woods. Not as precise an arrow; it caught the outlaw in the thigh. He went down screaming, high, oddly shrill.

      The last one was running back to the forest. He died at the edge of the trees.

      The whole thing lasted only moments. A blur and a flash, gibbons shrieking all through. The extreme strangeness of how time could be so slow that he could see (and would remember) individual gestures, expressions, and yet also be so impossibly fast.

      Daiyan assumed he had been breathing through it all—breathing was important in archery—but couldn’t say that he had been. Nor had he been aware of movement, anything at all, from the sub-prefect or the other guards. Not after Wang Fuyin’s first outraged, frightened cry. He’d put arrows in seven men, himself. But that was too easy a way to say it. Men had been living and were dead. He’d killed them. You could divide your own life with something like that, Ren Daiyan thought.

      You’d never killed anyone. Then you had.

      It is well known, inevitable, that legends take shape around the early lives of those who become celebrated or notorious. The stories can grow fanciful, gather luridly exaggerated details: that is what a legend is. A hundred men killed single-handedly. An enemy city, walls three times a man’s height, scaled by night, alone. An immortal poem written by a supernaturally gifted child with his father’s ink and brush. An imperial princess seduced in a courtyard of the palace beside a fountain, then pining away for love.

      In the matter of Ren Daiyan and his first encounter with outlaws on a path east of Shengdu one autumn day—the day he left home and changed his life—the tale retained considerable accuracy.

      That was because Sub-prefect Wang Fuyin, later to become a figure of note himself, recorded the incident in an official dispatch while reporting also his own successful investigation, arrest, and execution of a murderer in a nearby village.

      Sub-prefect Wang went into some detail as to how he had conducted this investigation. It was ingenious, and he was commended for it. That successful inquiry, in fact, would set Wang Fuyin on his own altered path. He became, by his own account, a changed man from that day, with new purpose and direction.

      He retold the story of the outlaws and Ren Daiyan in his late-in-life memoirs, drawing upon his early writings (copies carefully kept) from those days when he’d just begun his career, in remote Szechen.

      He was as particular and precise in old age as he had been when young, and he prided himself all his life on his strong prose (and calligraphy). The number of outlaws in his memoir remained seven. Ren Daiyan was always fifteen years of age (not twelve, as in some versions). Wang Fuyin even wrote that one of the bandits was only wounded by Daiyan. Another of their bowmen had leaped—dramatically—from his horse to dispatch that seventh man where he lay on the ground.

      Fuyin, white-haired at the time of this writing, allowed himself a hint of irony in describing that last “courageous” action. He was well known by then for wit, for clear exposition, for his books on judicial investigation (which had become texts for all magistrates in Kitai), and for being a survivor of the chaos of their time.

      There were not many such survivors among those who had been at or near the centre of power in those days. It had taken skill, tact, an ability to choose friends well, and a great deal of luck.

      Luck was always part of it, one way or another.

      DAIYAN WAS AWARE, immediately, that his life had just changed. What followed on that lonely path between forest and cliffs felt destined, necessary, not truly a matter of choosing. It was more as if the choice had been made for him, he was only the agency of its working.

      He got down from his horse. He walked over and took his arrows from the bodies of the slain men. The sun was west, shining along the path, under-lighting clouds. A wind was blowing. He remembered feeling chilled, and thinking that might be a reaction to what had just happened.

      You’d never killed anyone. Then you had.

      He took the arrows from the men behind them first. One of them right next to the trees. Then he went and pulled out four from the outlaws on the road ahead, the ones they’d seen first. Without giving it a great deal of thought, he turned over the body of the largest man and he took the two crossed swords and their leather scabbards from that man’s back.

      The swords felt very heavy. He’d been working with bamboo, after all. Earlier today. This same morning. A boy in a grove. He placed the twinned scabbards on his back, removing his quiver to do so then putting the quiver back on and adjusting it and the bow, finding positions for them, balancing himself with the new weight of the swords. It was going to take time to get used to this, he thought, standing in the roadway in the wind, the sun beginning to go down.

      Looking back, he realized that he’d already understood, by then, what had happened to him in that place, in those moments.

      It had something to do with how easy it had been. How effortless, intuitive: the decision made, then the sequence of movements. Understanding exactly where to shoot first, and next, and next. They were alive, and menacing, those men. They were dead. And how brief the time elapsed. That felt strange. How sharp a rent a handful of moments made in the fabric of a life. This—this world of bow and swords—this was meant to be his element, these moments had shown him that, and he needed to enter a place where he could pursue mastery. You had your dreams. A boy’s dreams, and then …

      Birdsong was resuming. The gibbons had never stopped.

      He looked back once, he remembered, towards Shengdu, to where his parents were, and then he left his life behind, walking into the woods, entering among the dark trees (darker than his own bamboo grove) exactly where the outlaws had emerged in front of them, so little time ago.

      CHAPTER II

      There were a great many men in the army of Kitai, but they were not good soldiers and they were not well led. Most of them were farmers, sons of farmers, desperately unhappy to be so far from home—and fighting in northern lands.

      They knew millet and wheat, or two-crop rice, vegetable plots, orchard fruits, silk farms, growing and harvesting tea. A number of them worked the salt flats or the salt mines, and for these the army was a better life than the near-slavery and early death they’d known and expected.

      Next to none of them had any idea why they were fighting Kislik barbarians, marching through a yellow wind and blowing sand that stung and cut whenever the wind grew strong. Tents and tent pegs blew away in that wind. The Kislik had horses, and they knew these lands, knew the terrain and the weather, could attack and retreat, kill you and be gone.

      As far as most of the two hundred thousand men in the Imperial Pacification Army of the Northwest were concerned, the barbarians could keep this bitter place.

      But their own sage and illustrious emperor, ruling in Hanjin with the mandate of heaven, had judged the Kislik to be presumptuous and arrogant, needing to be taught a stern lesson. His advisers had seen opportunities here: fame and power, rising within the court hierarchy. For some of them this war was also a test, a preparation for the true enemy, which was the even more presumptuous Xiaolu empire north of Kitai.

      There was a treaty with the Xiaolu, had been for two hundred years (broken at intervals, never irreparably). By its terms the steppe people still held the Fourteen Prefectures they had taken, below the Long Wall of Kitai.

      The glorious emperor’s father and grandfather had not been able to win them back, by diplomacy or threat of arms, though they had tried both. Not even an offered princess had sufficed. The Xiaolu knew what they had: by holding those hilly lands with their narrow passes they ensured that all the northern cities of Kitai were open to horsemen racing down a wide plain. They held what was left of the Long Wall. It meant nothing now, was only a ruined marker of what Kitai had once been.

      To give this back for a princess?

      There