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HERAKLES: What good does grief do?
ADMENTOS: None. But longing compels me.
Alkestis (926-927), trans. Anne Carson
In the fifth year and final month of the Taishi emperor's reign, Gu Yun woke before the sun. He had been absolutely blind and absolutely deaf for the past nine months, but Gu Yun could feel Chang Geng stroking his hair. After a while, he stopped, and Gu Yun touched his mouth to be sure he wasn’t speaking. He wasn’t.
A moment later, Chang Geng's chest sunk with an exhale, and didn’t move again.
The venerated Son of Heaven had no last words.
After the funeral, Gu Yun went and got plastered. Ostensibly, it was to take care of the headache his medicine had left behind, but really it was to make a fool of himself on the steps to the Imperial Palace. Luckily, this retired Marquis of Anding was still also considered a venerated citizen of Great Liang, so the palace servants turned a blind eye (ha ha) to his blasphemy. It really was no secret what he and the Emperor had been to each other, sexual deviancy aside.
The winter covered the palace with a layer of frost and snow, and Gu Yun was happily becoming one with it. He'd spread his white robes all around, and he knew his hair had long been streaked with silver. Besides the flush on his cheeks, his skin was otherwise pale as bone. It seemed that all the blood had drained from his body, leaving behind a ghostly impression of the great and vicious Marshal Gu. The eunuch in charge of sweeping the palace steps had graciously cleaned around him with his little horsetail broom.
Shen Yi's glowering face suddenly appeared above his. He crouched beside Gu Yun on the stairs and attempted, unsuccessfully, to pry the wine jug out of his hands.
Gu Yun frowned. "You're blocking my sun."
"Fuck your sun," Shen Yi said. "Are you done sulking?"
“Jiping,” he said. Gu Yun's voice was steady and deep, no different than he sounded in the everyday, and his eyes were terribly clear. “The weather’s good. Sit with me for a while.”
Shen Yi looked down at him. Good weather, his ass, he thought, but didn’t say it aloud. The idiot would’ve pretended his hearing had gone again.
So Shen Yi sat. And Gu Yun put the wine jug in his hand, curling Shen Yi’s fingers around its neck to be sure he wouldn’t crack it open against his head.
"You know," Gu Yun said, rather conversationally, as he turned his eyes back to the sky. “Whoever said my name was cursed was definitely dropped on their head as a child."
Shen Yi sighed. He took a swing of the wine and laid himself down on the steps too, pillowing his head against the stone with his cloak. All the signs pointed to the fact that it would be a long night. They were old, and he was tired.
Gu Yun closed his eyes very slowly. “Do you know how many Emperors I’ve outlived?” he asked. He scrubbed a hand over his face and kept it there. A line of something wet slipped toward his temples. “The bastard didn’t even leave a string of white silk behind.”
To hang himself with.
“Good," Shen Yi said, vindictively. He took another swing of the wine. It burned like a knife down his throat. "Your big head wouldn't fit anyway."
“Ha!” Gu Yun laughed, and found himself with a mouthful of snow in retribution.
He didn’t say anything for the rest of the night.
If it was illness, not even Chen Qingxu could say so. Perhaps it had been the strain of fighting the wu’ergu, or having it removed, or living without it. Or the years of fighting in the kingdom’s wars while wrangling a court into order from his springtime youth to the short years of his reign. Or maybe he’d gotten tired—even though he had always been tired—and simply given up. Gu Yun despises that theory the most. Not because it was an insult to the Heaven-blessed body of His Majesty Tai Shi, but because it was the only thing he knew to be true.
He didn’t say that, of course.
After his eyesight was restored, Gu Yun went to their rooms, just to look. He stood beside the bed for a while. He didn’t know how long. A maid had come and done up the pillows, smoothed out the sheets. Everything was fresh. Gu Yun could smell the soap on the blankets with just a hint of Chang Geng underneath. The rest had been bleached away by the sun.
Gu Yun was not in the habit of regret. If he stopped to ruminate on everything he’d liked to do over, he would’ve driven himself mad years ago. But his days of idleness that Chang Geng had filled had suddenly emptied, and he needed something to do. Absence was a word, only. You couldn’t touch it, see it, fight it. Where was the war? Great Liang was prospering in a peacetime which had lasted five years and looked to last for another ten.
He shouldn't have let Chang Geng convince him to stop taking his medicine. Maybe Gu Yun could've saved him, or found a way to. He sat on the edge of the mattress and imagined how Chang Geng looked in those last few minutes. He'd been laying on his side, Qingxu said, face turned towards Gu Yun's. A smile touched both edges of his mouth, and his eyes were resting half-open, as if he couldn’t look away. Chang Geng's familiar, lovely face that the Flower of the Northwest couldn’t see.
Three Emperors, Gu Yun thought.
All those hard-won titles were worthless in the end.
An emperor’s funeral lasted seven days. The mourning period a year. To Gu Yun, a lifetime.
On the seventh day of the last month of the fifth year of Emperor Tai Shi’s reign, Gu Yun prostrated himself in the snow outside the royal funeral parlour. He technically wasn’t allowed to perform the rites as an elder, so he situated himself in a place where he could see the edge of his elaborate coffin and entertained himself that way.
Shen Yi joined him for the better part of the morning. Chen Qingxu came and held an umbrella over their heads. Later, Cao Chunhua pulled Ge Chen away from the Institute. They entered the parlour to burn incense for their brother.
Only when the sun of the next day came and went did Gu Yun kowtow thrice, and rise, then found his feet carrying him indoors, trailing a line of snow behind him. Gu Yun cast his eyes down at the coffin, which was lidded and tightly shut. A corner of its covering had slipped askew in the wind, so Gu Yun reached out and straightened its edges, as if it really was Chang Geng under there, and not his body.
“What’s all this, kid?” The ever-blasphemous Marshal Gu hitched a leg up on the corner of the coffin and pressed his fingers against the stone. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine the warmth of Chang Geng’s skin underneath. “How’d I lose you too?”
His emperor was silent.
“If only you'd let this country rot,” Gu Yun sighed. "It's always the good ones that go first."
Chang Geng knew this, of course. And Gu Yun knew that he knew. And Chang Geng knew that too. What a pair they made.
Only after another hour of lamenting did this blasphemous Marshal Gu step outside, only to find that the snow was coming down again. In a moment of temporary insanity, he turned up the mink-fur trim of his white cloak—which made no secret what he’d been to the emperor—and shielded his face against the wind. So, so, so. Even dead, Chang Geng emerged victorious. He'd gotten his little yifu to wear something appropriate for the weather.
Gu Yun left, refusing to look over his shoulder. He was young enough when his father drilled into him how not to, and there was that saying about old dogs and new tricks.
The snow fell heavier as the day turned to night. It was the longest winter the Great Liang had seen in a century.
Gu Yun thought it was a sign of the declining times that his social circle had shrank to the point where he was voluntarily trekking all the way up to temple to spend time in the presence of donkeys and monks. At the very least, he managed to choke out a thanks to the man for performing the funeral rites before snatching his hand away. That was, of course, the only reason Gu Yun put his monocle on, to keep from being touched.
One mute and another deaf-blind. Who the hell was writing this story?
Gu Yun blinked his eye open to find that Liao Ran was still as bald as they came, and felt vindicated for it. He felt less vindicated when the man opened their conversation by digging his fingers into the Chang Geng shaped chinks in his armor.
Elegant strokes, dark ink on yellow paper. Liao Ran wrote, without much preamble: “There had been no one else.”
Gu Yun had been stabbed in ways that hurt less.
“I was expecting a lecture," he said miserably.
Liao Ran fixed his soft eyes on Gu Yun. “About what?”
“How your Buddha,” he stopped. "And maybe he was right." He stopped again. “Or something nasty about the burden of worldly attachments, and so on." Gu Yun threw back his tea to buy himself some time between embarrassments. It burned his tongue on the way down. He stared blurrily at the bottom of his cup. “It wasn’t enough to make him stay, in the end."
"He gave you five years," Liao Ran wrote.
The stabbing got worse.
And—"It was enough to make you stay," his brush continued. "So it did matter, to him."
Winter curled into a late spring and a mild summer. Its peak found Gu Yun standing beside the imperial throne, another coronation, and one, he hoped, would be his last; he really was getting bored of these things. The transition was peaceful enough, but Gu Yun felt like he was burning up from the inside. He couldn’t stop seeing Chang Geng everywhere—the throne he once occupied, his yellow cloak coming through the doors, the private smile he'd forever thrown Gu Yun's way.
After the little prince Li Zheng ascended to the throne, a sturdy autumn followed. But Huo Dan, who had been healthy as an ox, left not long afterwards. On his deathbed, he promised to greet Chang Geng in Gu Yun's place.
He passed another birthday, attended a few more. Behind closed doors, the court joked that the former Marquis of Anding had wasted his fortune on his emperors, leaving himself with all the bad luck.
Qingxu had her second child, whom Shen Yi turned around and named him the godfather of. Gu Yun nearly drowned him in the imperial fishpond in recompense.
Occasionally, he wandered his way into the Institute. Ge Chen led him around by the arm, babbling in his ear about something or the other, often forgetting how deaf Gu Yun had become. When Ge Chen was busy, or unconscious, Cao Chunhua kept him company instead, though they spent most of their time together fretting over Gu Yun’s health and not much else.
He attended so many funerals the cloak Chang Geng had given him could no longer be scrubbed clean. It would've been nice if any of the Ten Magistrates stuck him some award for meritorious service; he was doing far more of their work than he cared to.
Eventually, his internal injuries could no longer be managed. Gu Yun's spine had given way years ago, deformed from the weight of his armor. Even with medicine and monocle both, he struggled to see farther than arm’s length ahead. He couldn’t lift his right arm past shoulder-height—the consequence, he was told, of overusing a windslasher—and refused to use a cane, so it would take him several tries to get out of bed, or a chair, if he wanted to stand. Chang Geng wasn’t there to make sure otherwise.
Gu Yun slept erratically, sometimes for days at a time and sometimes not at all, a condition that finally let him retire him from court, as he was no longer capable of maintaining a proper schedule. Chen Qingxu put him under loose, but constant care, should he go and expire in his bed like his useless husband.
It took him so fucking long to die.
It wasn't because Chen Qingxu was a physician, or even his physician, that she found out before the others. The realization came over her the moment she reached for the acupoint on his wrist, only for Gu Yun to pull away before her fingers made contact. She was surprised that he'd taken his medicine before she arrived. Now she knew why.
Her eyes flicked to his in silent question.
He hemmed and hawed for a while. “A few more months,” he said. “Maybe a year.”
Enough time to make preparations for leaving the kingdom and its young emperor behind.
Chen Qingxu returned her hands to her lap. “I see."
They fell quiet. The wind brushed its hand through the trees. A carriage was pulled through a distant courtyard; Qingxu heard the horses at the gate. One of the guards barked an order—voice raised, but unintelligible. Gu Yun turned his face into the sun, which stained a deep yellow everything it touched. Spring was coming along the capital.
“What would you like me to prepare, when the time comes?” she asked, breaking the silence.
The edge of Gu Yun’s mouth curled upwards. “Something for my eyes, I think,” he said. “The journey won't be long."
Qingxu nodded. She wasn’t bothered by his vagaries, not that she ever necessarily was; she’d grown into her mildness over the years. Two lines of gray touched her hair at the temples. Her posture was as upright as ever.
“I’ve not surprised you,” Gu Yun said.
Now it was Qingxu’s turn to smile. “In my line of work," she said. "It’s just as necessary to know which lives should be kept, and which ones should be let go.”
“Of which included my layabout husband,” Gu Yun said, “Who rushed there before any of us?”
“Yes,” she said. She stood, brushing the wrinkles from her skirt. “Of which included your layabout husband who rushed there before any of us.”
She bent to gather her things. Gu Yun didn’t get up to help. He couldn’t, and they both knew it. “It will take me a few weeks to refine the medicines,” she said.
Gu Yun nodded. "I understand."
Chen Qingxu headed out the door, only to turn at the last moment. Strange, from a woman who didn’t see the merit of bidding others farewell.
"Take a cloak with you, when you leave the capital," she said. "It'll be cold on your way to the next life."
The tenth day of the eighth month of the first year of Emperor Li Zheng’s reign, five days before the Mid-Autumn Festival, the capital was flooded with preparations. Lanterns hung from every eave in the city. Imperial servants ran between courtyards. Kitchen fires burned from dawn to dawn. Within the Lingshu Institute, nearly a hundred artificers were plating Great Liang’s kites with gold.
It was on this dawn—at the time fifteen-year-old Chang Geng would sit in the courtyard of the Gu estate, awaiting his godfather’s lectures—that a fast horse departed from the inner gates of the palace. It bore a single rider clad in a suit of light-pelt armor. They drove their horse forward with a practiced surge, speeding past parapets patrolled by several soldiers of the Black Iron Battalion. The eyes of one such recruit grew wide when he caught sight of that legendary profile. Even from such a distance, Gu Yun's cinnabar moles blazed with light.
Later, when interrogated by an unyielding Shen Yi, the boy could only stammer out a brief description of what he’d seen. Yes, he was sure it was the former Marquis of Anding who rode out of the capital. He was wearing a white cloak with a mink-trimmed collar. He had on silver armor underneath, but had forgone the helmet, so his hair streamed wildly in the wind. A jade flute clanged at his hip, and he'd slung an aged longbow across his back. He was drinking steadily from a wine gourd. He wasn’t wearing any kind of looking glass. The recruit couldn’t discern the emotion on the Marquis’ face, and could only call it peculiar.
Shen Yi sighed. He hadn’t bothered to ask the boy which direction the horse had gone. It would’ve been a waste of breath, and he knew the answer, anyway.
“Thank you,” he said. He clapped him on the shoulder and left him standing at attention in the middle of the barracks.
Shen Yi traced his way back to Gu Yun’s old courtyard, feeling suddenly aged. He managed to snag a servant along the way and ask for two cups and a jug of wine. The servant rematerialized as Shen Yi lowered himself onto a bench which sat at the rim of the fishpond Gu Yun once attempted to drown him in. Shen Yi dismissed the servant and uncorked the jar himself, generously filling both cups to the brim. He took one in hand and left the other across the table.
So?
Gu Yun would have to forgive the trembling of his hand as he clinked his cup against the other; it wasn’t every day Shen Yi's oldest friend set off to die.
“Bastard,” he muttered.
A breeze came and rippled the surface of the other cup, as if to have a taste. Shen Yi knew it would never be raised again.
Though it was late into the tenth month, on the sixteenth day, the temperature had yet to fall very far. A group of three figures reached the small border town of Yanhui, a town that could be considered the place their lives had truly begun.
In the town, there was a hill known as General’s Slope. Despite its majestic name, it was, in reality, nothing more than a small mound of earth. Those three, with their long necks, could easily see over its crest.
The General’s Slope was barren, excepting two objects planted at its peak like a pair of funeral chopsticks. One was an outdated model of a Black Iron Battalion greatbow—so outdated that it would pain any artificer of the Lingshu Institute to look at—and in fact, that Institute's director, Ge Pangxiao, actually was among the approaching party. Tears sprung to his eyes at the sight.
The second object was a jade flute, which was perhaps the most well-traveled instrument in all of the Great Liang, as it had been dragged to every campaign the Marquis of Anding oversaw during his illustrious career, bearing countless chips and scars as proof. Tears sprang to Shen Yi's eyes for an entirely different reason; his ears were viciously assaulted with the memory of the music its master had once forced it to play.
In Ge Pangxiao and Cao Niangzi's youth, it was said that no matter what seeds one sowed on the Slope, nothing would grow. That even weeds refused to thrive, and consequently, there wasn’t even any brush behind which those who wished to carry on clandestine love affairs might hide. Such a bald patch of dirt was completely useless.
But sometime in the intervening years, a few flowers had begun to grow, their petals and stems straining determinedly towards the sun. Several hands of grass were speckled across the mound, a few nearly long enough to be considered stripes of hair upon a head.
The wind kissed the greenery, bending those long stems aside, and brought the objects fully into view. Upon the flute was etched the character Chang and upon the bow was etched the character Gu, and one could assume they were the names of their respective masters.
The wind blew once more. The sky was darkening. The straining flowers and hands of grass ruffled in the breeze and, once again, bent their heads together to obscure the characters from view.
十年生死两茫茫，不思量，自难忘。
千里孤坟，无处话凄凉。
纵使相逢应不识，尘满面，鬓如霜。
夜来幽梦忽还乡，小轩窗，正梳妆。
相顾无言，惟有泪千行。
料得年年肠断处，明月夜，短松冈
江城子 • 记梦