5
bronze statues now commonly known as the “Tang horses.” Her destiny will be as strange as that of her two older brothers. Indeed, Li-Mei and the other women of
“Under Heaven” are its most memorable characters. Wei Song obviously feels more for Tai than is proper to a disciplined Kan- lin warrior. The resolute Spring Rain risks everything for her former lover: “Why, and how, does one voice, one person, come to conjure vibrations in the soul, like an instrument tuned? Why a given man, and not another, or a third?”Why, indeed? “She hasn’t nearly enough wisdom to an- swer that. She isn’t sure if anyone does.” And then there’s Wen Jian. She dominates the page as she does any room she enters. Kay makes you feel the power and breathtaking seductiveness of this 21-year-old beauty, who can treat the brutal Roshan like a giant baby, who views the world as her plaything, who is con- vincingly the kind of woman for whom an ordinary man might sacrifice his life or for whom an emperor might throw away his kingdom. At one point, Wen Jian makes a surprise visit to Tai at an inn. An alterca- tion ensues. Wen Jian is not amused. “ ‘It was uncivilized. There was violence
in my presence, which is never permitted.’ She lifted her hand from his leg. ‘I have in- structed my under-steward to kill himself when we reach Ma-wai.’ “Tai blinked, wasn’t sure he had heard
GOÑI MONTES FICTION REVIEW BY MICHAEL DIRDA
reminiscent of films like “Crouching Ti- ger, Hidden Dragon” and depicts the un- imaginable consequences of a single gen- erous gift. Most important of all, it is the novel you’ll want for your summer vaca- tion. The young Shen Tai — lapsed scholar, discharged army officer, onetime acolyte of the Kanlin warrior priesthood — has spent two years burying the bones of the soldiers who fell at a great battle between Kitai (China) and the empire of Tagur (ap- parently Mongolia). His father command- ed the Kitai forces at Kuala Nor and died, broken in spirit by the immense loss of life, some 40,000 men. As an act of expia- tion and mourning, Tai lives among the howling ghosts and properly inters their bleached bones, making no distinction between those of his people and the Tag- urans. As a result, Cheng-wan — the White
Jade Princess and wife of the Tagur ruler — decides to honor this pious work by be- stowing on Tai a gift of 250 Sardian horses, the so-called Heavenly Horses, animals of unparalleled beauty, swiftness
Beware the gift horses G
UNDER HEAVEN By Guy Gavriel Kay Roc. 573 pp. $26.95
uy Gavriel Kay’s “Under Heav- en” isn’t quite historical fiction, nor is it quite fantasy. It’s set in a slightly reimagined Tang dy- nasty China, sometimes seems
and rarity. As they say, every blessing is also a
curse. Not even the Kitai Emperor — may he live forever — possesses such a herd of Sardians. To acquire them, men would kill, prostitute their daughters, betray their masters. Such horses, after all, could determine the fate of battles, or even em- pires. On the very evening Tai receives no- tice of the White Jade Princess’s unexpect- ed largesse, he is the object of an assassi- nation attempt. Almost immediately, Tai’s world, along with many of its established verities, be- gins to collapse, as the young man gradu- ally realizes that he is now at the center of subtle political machinations at the Kitai Imperial Court. There his calculating old- er brother serves the new and insecure prime minister, who is also the man who stole Tai’s beloved, the courtesan Spring Rain. There the hugely fat barbarian gen- eral, known as Roshan, lays his plans. There Wen Jian — the greatest beauty of the age — diverts the aged emperor, while playing dangerous games of her own. To insure his life, Tai makes it widely known that he has left the horses with a friend in Tagur and they will be released to no one but himself. In the meantime, he slowly makes his way back to Xinan, the silken capital city of Kitai. As in any epic fantasy, Tai makes friends along the way. Spring Rain sends a black-clad Kanlin warrior to protect him. Her name is Wei Song, and at one point she fights six men,
whirling silently in a courtyard, a sword in each hand. Tai meets The Banished Im- mortal, the poet Sima Zian (based on Li Bai, aka Li Po), always drunk, always wise in the ways of the world. These two and Spring Rain he can count on. Nobody else. The milieu presented in “Under Heav-
en” is, on the surface, one of the most ex- quisite beauty and courtesy. Honor, right- thinking, decorum count. “Let fall your weapon. Doing so offers you a small chance of living. Otherwise there is none.” But consummate graciousness may cloak the most immense cruelty. After would-be assassins are interrogated by a provincial general, Tai is told that the “two men, when encouraged to discuss their adven- turism tonight, suggested only one name of possible significance before they each succumbed, sadly, to the exacting nature of the conversation.” We later learn that one of these men “had been castrated, his organ stuffed in his mouth. His eyes had been carved out and they had cut off his hands.” Yet the world of “Under Heaven” is not only polite, Machiavellian and ruthless; it is also spooky. Ghosts can kill, female were-foxes seduce, shamans take control of a man’s soul or employ swans to search for enemies. The Kanlin can speak the language of the wolves. Pledged to be mar- ried to a barbarian prince, Tai’s sister Li- Mei finds herself taken to a cave by a zom- bie-like creature — half-man, half-wolf. There she undergoes a mystical experi- ence among what are clearly the ancient
correctly. “‘You ... he ...?’ “ ‘This morning,’ said the Beloved Com- panion, ‘did not proceed as I wished it to. It made me unhappy.’ Her mouth turned downward. “You could drown in this woman, Tai thought, and never be found again. The emperor was pursuing immortality in the palace, men said, using alchemists and the School of Unrestricted Night, where they studied the stars and asterisms in the sky for secrets of the world. Tai suddenly had a better understanding of that desire.” Guy Gavriel Kay is a much honored Ca-
nadian writer of historical fantasy, per- haps best known for the three-part “Fio- navar Tapestry” and for “Tigana” and “A Song for Arbonne.” As a young man, he as- sisted Christopher Tolkien in editing J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic “The Silmarillion.” For “Under Heaven” Kay has chosen a spare, slightly courtly style, but nonethe- less moves his plot along at a rapid clip. At the same time, he continually thickens his novel with appealing minor characters, thus adding to the story’s overall richness as well as suggesting that much else is go- ing on just outside our narrative field of vision. As Kay’s historian-like narrator ob- serves: “Every single tale carries within it many others, noted in passing, hinted at, entire- ly overlooked. Every life has moments when it branches, importantly (even if only for one person), and every one of those branches will have offered a differ- ent story.” “Under Heaven” ends where it began, among ghosts. Everything quietly, ineluc- tably fades into history, as into those mists one sees on Chinese scroll paintings. Be- sides, all these myriad wonders and strug- gles and heartbreaks occurred a long time ago, in a world that never actually existed — until now.
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THE WASHINGTON POST • BOOK WORLD • SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 2010
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