Everything Under the Heavens (Silk and Song) Read Free

Temur came to power.
    Full of plans to open a new route to the pearl merchants of Cipangu, it was, shamefully, a full day before he noticed that Shu Lin and Shu Ming were missing. It took another day and making good on a threat to have his majordomo stripped to the waist and whipped before the assembled members of the family before he could discover where they were. He went straight to Bayan, the new emperor’s chief minister.
    By then, Shu Lin was dead.

    Bayan did Wu Hai the courtesy of summoning him to his house to deliver the news in person. “Almost before the Great Khan breathed his last, the Mandarins and the Mongols were at each other’s throats. Both factions were determined to remove any obstacles to their acquisition of power, as indeed was Temur Khan. Any favorites of the old Khan were suspect, and subject to immediate…removal.”
    “I understand,” Wu Hai said, rigid with suppressed fury and guilt. “Marco, his father and his uncle were beyond their reach. His wife and child were not.”
    Bayan cleared his throat and dropped his eyes. “It may be that there was an informer who directed attention their way.”
    Wu Hai stood motionless, absorbing this. What Bayan was too tactful to say was that very probably someone in Wu Hai’s own household had sold Shu Lin and Shu Ming in exchange for favor at the new court. His first wife had never liked Wu Hai’s association with the foreign traders who brought him the goods he sold, that had made his fortune, that had provided the substantial roof over her head, the silks on her back and the dainties on her table.
    “They were thrown into the cells below the palace,” Bayan said. “From what I can discover, Shu Lin sold herself to the guards in exchange for Shu Ming’s safety.”
    There was a brief, charged silence as both men remembered the delicate features and graceful form of the dead woman, and both flinched away from images of what she must have endured before her death.
    There was shame in Bayan’s face at his failure to protect his friend’s wife and child. He had gravely underestimated the lengths to which desperate courtiers would go to curry favor with the new khan, and he admitted it now before a man who had also failed in his duty to a friend.
    In a subdued voice, Wu Hai said, “And Shu Ming?”
    Bayan’s face lightened. “Alive. The doctors say she has suffered no harm. No physical harm.” Bayan nodded at the open door of his study, and Wu Hai went through into the garden, where once again the plum trees were in bloom.
    Shu Ming sat with her back to one of the trees, surrounded by fallen petals, a tiny figure in white silk embroidered with more plum blossoms. Of course, he thought, Bayan’s people would have dressed her in mourning. He stopped some distance away, so that she would not be frightened.
    It was unfortunate that she looked more like her father than her mother, long-limbed, hair an odd color somewhere between gold plate and turned earth, eyes an even odder color, somewhere between gray and blue, and, most condemning, round in shape, untilted, foldless. Her foreignness hit one like a blow, he thought ruefully. It would be all too easy to pick her out of any household in Everything Under the Heavens, and given the provincial and xenophobic nature of the native population, she would always be a target simply by virtue of breathing in and breathing out.
    And now, her mother dead, her father gone beyond the horizon, she had no status in the community, no rights, no power. Her father had left them both well provided for, and Wu Hai had secured those funds, had, he thought bitterly, taken better care of their funds than he had of their persons. But money would not be not enough to buy her acceptance in Cambaluc.
    The tiny figure had not moved, sitting cross-legged, her hands laying loosely in her lap, her eyes fixed on the middle distance. Her hair had been ruthlessly shorn, no doubt to rid her of the lice that infested every prison, and