Where She Goes, Act Four: The Night Banquet at Chang'an and the Prisoner of Daming Palace

4.1 The Tang official at the end of the seals

In the eleventh month after leaving Sasanian Persia, you finally walk into Chang’an.

The Chang’an of the sixth year of Zhenguan is a golden city standing at the eastern end of the world.

On the day the cinnabar goes onto your papers and you step through the gate, you understand at last what the Tang really is, a splendour beside which every description in any book goes dull.

Wall after wall, towered gates rising, red doors with gold studs shining in the sun, streets wide enough for several files of carriages abreast; the ward walls cut the whole city into neat divisions, and markets, offices, temples and mansions each keep to their own order.

You have come all the way from the west and seen far too many old cities hollowed out by blown sand, too many passes and oases that changed masters in a night. Chang’an is not like that. It is not a city struggling to live in a waste. It is the essence of all the cities of the world grown together. Every road under heaven gathers here and grows out again, putting its branches out to no end at all. It is where everything begins, and where everything ends.

There are people from Silla, Sogdians, Turks, monks from India, Persian merchants, all to be seen on the street; foreign caps, brocade robes, monks’ cloth, armour and coarse short coats crowded in together; camel bells, foreign speech, Chinese, the smell of incense drugs, of charcoal, of meat steaming out of a wine shop, all mixed and somehow not oppressive — instead it gives an impression of peace, of all quarters coming to court.

Standing in a city on this scale, you discover that your own great caravan was in fact one very fine thread woven into this noise and colour.

Once you are properly inside the city, the train breaks up quickly.

The first to go are the merchants who only came east on the strength of your name. After them, a few officials fleeing the west with what they own. Some of them meet old acquaintances at the Western Market; some hear of a trading house that will take them on; some hear that even Persians and Sogdians can make a living here, and immediately want to stay.

The blown sand and the blood you brought from the west, coming in here, are swallowed at once by all this eastern splendour. Once the crowd scatters, the camels, the carts and the crates look thinner still. You stand under the gallery of the guest quarters and watch cartload after cartload counted, carried and put away, and you feel suddenly that this mission you have been guarding all this way can also shrink like this — ice dropped into boiling water, gone in a moment.

And you still want to try. The breath in you has not yet been let out.

The name your father gave you, you have carried all this way. Pei Xinggong, Vice Minister of the Court of State Ceremonial.

The Court of State Ceremonial is exactly the office that handles guest ritual, court audiences and the reception of envoys from the four quarters, and a Vice Minister is one of its deputies.

He does not treat you lightly.

Tea, charcoal, a place to sit, nothing lacking. And you see very soon that this courtesy stops outside the ceremony itself. He lets you warm your hands, lets you sit, lets you speak, and his face stays level throughout.

Only when you have settled and drunk the first cup does he say, “It has been a hard road.”

At first you still hold a last piece of hope.

You speak of the queen’s line asking the east for help; you say there are old officials in Persia who have not scattered; you say that if the Tang would put out a hand, perhaps there might still be—

At that point Pei Xinggong lifts his eyes at last.

“There will not be,” he says.

Three words, and everything you were going to say is cut off.

He does not say it heavily; his tone is even mild.

“The Tang will not send soldiers for a Persian queen who is already dead. The road is too long and the situation too disordered; by the time news goes and comes back the moment is missed. The court will accept an envoy’s gifts, will house you, and will consider whether the documents you have brought are worth putting in front of the Son of Heaven. But there is no possibility whatever of the Tang sending an army.”

Your face goes white and you hold yourself steady with an effort.

So he takes it one layer further.

“The channel by which the queen’s line sought help in the east was cut off a long time ago.”

He pushes a letter on the desk gently across to you. There are a few marks of the brush on the paper; you know at a glance that this is how your father writes.

He says, “That you were able to get this far already makes you the last of them. Nobody after you will come. And if they did, they might not get through this door.”

In that moment something in you drops hard.

If he did not send you to ask for help, then what… And suddenly you remember that Aide on the road at Dunhuang and his offhand sentence, and the look in the Samarkand matron’s eyes after she touched the cord, and that quick, steady, almost unwilling way your father drew his hand back before you set out.

Pei Xinggong looks at you, and lifts the last layer too.

“What you brought is not only a request for help,” he says. “There are seals, a register of the old queen’s party, identifiable family marks, and several sealed letters that were not written on the surface. They were always meant to be delivered here.”

The room goes quiet, and for a moment nobody speaks. You sit there, and you understand everything at once.

Your father did not send you to ask for help.

The throne has already fallen, and the soldiers of Chang’an will never cross the Pamirs to wade into a Persian mess. Go on holding that old banner up and the whole family would only end as meat under a new master’s knife. Your father had already gone over to the people who brought the queen’s power down — or at the very least had decided not to sink with her line. So he reckoned the cost exactly, cleared away whatever might obstruct it, and turned to serve the new power.

And the largest obstruction was you, whose heart was with the queen.

It hardly even counts as betrayal. It is only a very ugly instinct for survival in an old bureaucrat.

It is a long while before you can ask: “Did he leave any word for me?”

Pei Xinggong looks at you a moment before he says, “He did.”

The heart in you, already ash, tightens very slightly.

“He said that if you arrived, the court should be asked to house you according to ceremony.” He says it calmly. “As for the rest, there is no need to ask.”

That is what the Sasanians, and the family, and your father have left you at the end.

Pei Xinggong pushes part of the papers on the desk back to you and keeps only what ought to be kept.

At the end, he still gives you your dignity.

He says he will report your arrival to the court, will arrange housing for you, will enter you in the register of received envoys, and will protect your remaining people and goods for the time being.

But when you try to mention an audience with the emperor he leaves no room at all, and shakes his head lightly.

“I shall memorialise it,” he says. “Whether you see the Son of Heaven is not for you to decide, and not for me.”

Your feet are a little unsteady as you leave the guest quarters.

It is still light outside, and the noise of Chang’an sounds as if it were behind glass. Fire Feather has been following you all this time and has not asked anything. When you get back to the quarters given to the mission, a good many people have already gathered in the yard. The master, the interpreters, the merchants, the servants, the stablemen, all the remnant of the mission that came this far with you, are in the front court waiting for news.

Somebody has already caught wind of it, and when they see you come back every head turns.

You stand in front of them and say what can be said. “The Court of State Ceremonial will house us according to ceremony. Since the court has accepted the documents, we shall not be stinted for food, clothing or lodging.”

It ought to be good news.

And the yard is quiet for a moment; nobody lets out a breath.

At last somebody speaks. “Is the queen really dead?”

Another picks it up. “If Boran really is dead, what are we going back for?”

Once it starts it cannot be held. Somebody says that Boran dying is hardly strange; Azarmidokht died under an assassin’s knife in her day too. Somebody swears quietly that in Persia the King of Kings changes faster than a card turns, never a moment’s peace. And somebody puts it plainly: “The Tang is this good. We want to stay.”

At that, everything goes quieter still.

“I want to stay in the Tang.” It is one of the interpreters, who has been with you a long time, and he does not dare look at you. “We’ve asked around. There are Zoroastrians here too. They say there are priests who brought the fire, who have set up altars. I’m a Persian, but if the soil of Persia won’t let me live, there’s no need to stay on it.”

Somebody nods. Somebody says nothing, and their face has already said it.

You look at them and for a moment you cannot find anything to say against it.

Of the people who came this far and are still alive, hardly any still simply believe in the words going home. And Chang’an is so large: wards and markets, temples, trading houses, foreign shops, guilds, everything. For them, it is a foreign country where a person can still get a footing. In the west there is no queen, no reliable house to serve, no order worth spending a life to protect. Why should they not stay in the Tang?

You do not lose your temper and you do not agree either. You only feel yourself standing in a yard where the sky and the earth are wide open, and no wind moves — as if you were back in the close silence of that cave at the Thousand Buddhas.

And at that moment something Pei Xinggong said in passing at the door comes back to you.

He had walked you to the gate and let his eyes rest on your face, as if examining an unusual foreign article. “There is a Lady of Talent in the palace just now,” he said, “also from your part of the world. Her looks and her languages are quite out of the ordinary, and she is accomplished in dance, music and perfumery. The Sage Emperor is very fond of her.”

He did not say it lightly, and the look in his eyes made you extremely uncomfortable.

The words carried something you did not like, as though he were taking your measure, as though he were reminding you which side of a foreign woman is easiest to see in a place like this.

At the time you only felt uncomfortable.

And now, that sentence suddenly wakes you up.

She is Sasanian-born too, only a Lady of Talent in the palace, with a rank so light it makes no difference at all to any serious question. But she can get inside, and the Son of Heaven can see her; so perhaps there is a crack left for you in the palace, and it can be levered once more.

The thing in you that had nearly gone out gives one more flare.

Very small.

But it is not out yet.

4.2 The quarrel before the fire dance

After the winter comes in, you settle in Chang’an.

You live in a side court allotted by the Court of State Ceremonial, the walls not high, and there is always somebody at the gate.

Monks sweeping snow with their heads down, servants bringing charcoal and water, light on their feet and quiet in their speech. And you only have to go out, and before long the same face appears at the corner of the street or by the ward gate. Pei Xinggong has not locked you up. As long as you stay quiet nobody minds; take one step further and his people know at once.

Not many of your people are left.

The caravan has more or less scattered. Of those who came as far as Chang’an with you, some have gone to relatives at the Western Market, some have stayed where the foreign merchants gather, and some have simply changed their names and are getting ready to live here.

In the end there are only a few old servants. It is not loyalty; they are old, and they have no relatives and no connections in Chang’an, and away from you they might not live any better. As for Fire Feather, she has stayed too.

You ask her why she has not gone, and the reason she gives is blunt.

“These little ones can’t be handed over to Tang grooms.” She means the tribute animals; those men have never seen such creatures, and if they are handed over, within a month they will certainly be ruined.

When she says it she is already in cleaner, tidier clothes, her hair tied up neatly, a small knife and a bag of fire powder at her waist. Without a close look she is hardly different from the foreign women who go up and down the streets and wards of Chang’an.

She fits in quickly, and learned the rules of living in Chang’an earlier than you did. The old servants’ legs are not what they were, so it is she who runs about buying things, haggling, dealing with other people’s slights and jokes; she even knows which alley has the cheapest wine and which apothecary will buy western perfumery.

And you are still guarding what you brought along the road.

The seal bag, the old documents, the amulet, all of them kept within reach. You look at them before you sleep and touch them when you get up, as though while they are there the matter is not entirely finished.

You have not stopped either.

All these days you have been asking about quietly, and putting money about everywhere.

Money, spices, a little western jewellery and medicinal powder: you scatter your family’s property piece by piece, and at last you get the name of the Sasanian woman in the palace.

Her Chinese name is Yuezhen.

Her old name is Mihran.

Persian-born, and not far in age from Fire Feather. Scattered by war as a girl, she lived with a caravan, and later came into the palace at Chang’an. She is only a low-ranking Lady of Talent, nothing distinguished, and yet the emperor seems lately to be very fond of her. Fond of her cleverness, fond of the several languages she speaks, fond of the fact that she knows dance and music and perfumery, and fond of that air about her that is at once familiar and strange.

This, you think, may be the crack.

Pei Xinggong will not let you see the emperor. The door of the Court of State Ceremonial will not open for you — then you will go round it.

A low Lady of Talent, a palace consort, whatever she is: as long as she is Sasanian-born, as long as she still remembers where she came from, she may be willing to pass a word for you.

If you could see her, if you could talk her into putting Queen Boran’s old documents into the Son of Heaven’s hands, there might still be a way. The Tang is so strong; if it were willing to act, perhaps something of the old officials, of the old land, of the ashes of the old country could still be protected.

You begin to reckon up favours, connections, timing. Who can carry a word into the palace; who can get you to Yuezhen without alerting Pei Xinggong; and once you are there, what to say first — the queen, or the old officials; the register, or that gold seal which can still prove where you came from.

There is so much to think of, so much to arrange.

When you slip past the watchers and get back, the ward gates are about to close; the snow in the lane has hardened and creaks underfoot. You push the gate open carrying the cold in your clothes, and you have only got under the gallery when you see Fire Feather standing by the door. She has not lit a lamp; she is looking at you by the little light that leaks out of the room, as though she has been waiting there a long time.

“You’ve been asking about her again,” she says.

You do not deny it; you only take off your hood. “Move.”

She does not move.

“Don’t,” she says. “Stop.”

You look up at her, and your voice goes cold too. “It is not for you to stop what I do.”

“That woman can’t help you.” Fire Feather will not let it go. “The palace gates are harder to get through than a frontier fort. Go on like this and the first person it goes wrong for is you.”

“You don’t understand,” you say.

“No, I don’t. But I understand staying alive.” She comes a step forward, and her tone is urgent for the first time. “The queen’s dead and you’re still going to throw yourself in as well? Do you really think you can go through that gate and say a few words and call something back that’s been dead two years?”

Two years? But the vague news that the queen was dead only came a few months ago. You raise your voice at once.

“What do you know?”

Fire Feather looks at you, and her throat moves, as though she has been pushed at last to the point where she has to say it.

“I knew before you did,” she says. “I knew in Samarkand.”

The yard goes silent.

The wind comes down the gallery, and inside you something seems to move on its foundations. You stand there, as though you had not understood.

“What did you say?”

Fire Feather looks at you without evading it in the least. It is that steadiness that makes it colder.

“The matron’s people told me,” she says. “They said the queen was already gone before you set out. Your family knew. The rebels’ couriers travelled faster than you did. While you were carrying a gold seal and papers east, the news of her death was already ahead of you.”

You feel as if something had struck you in the face.

So she knew all along.

So from Sogdiana onwards she already knew everything. She watched you run on carrying that attachment, watched you cut open by one sentence at Dunhuang, watched you go on trying in Chang’an, refusing to give it up, and never said one word.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Your voice has changed. “Why didn’t you tell me!”

Fire Feather does not answer.

Almost by instinct, you reach for the short whip against the wall. It is the whip for driving animals. You grip it, the back of your hand tight, and all the resentment, the pain, the shame and the giddiness of having been made a fool of, which have been pressed down far too long, come up at once, until you can hardly breathe.

“You watched me walk all the way here like an idiot—”

The whip is already up.

Fire Feather stands there. She does not dodge, and she does not even lift a hand to block. She only keeps her head down, her shoulders and back drawn tight, and on that hard cold face of hers there is, for the first time, something you have never seen.

Not fear, not stubbornness. Despair. As if she already knows that if the whip comes down it does not break only her, and not only the little there was between you that was already barely standing, but something earlier than that: the blood-coloured night she has never managed to walk out of.

Your hand stops in the air.

The wind comes in under the gallery; the end of the whip shivers, and does not fall.

At last Fire Feather speaks, in a voice as low as a thread about to snap.

“Don’t go.”

Those amber eyes are looking at you.

“Don’t be like my sister,” she says. “Don’t go and die.”

That sentence seems to take all the wind out of the yard, and everything goes still.

You look at her, and understand something suddenly.

She will never understand you. It is not that she is not clever enough, and not that she cannot read a face. It is that she comes from that kind of family — players in the oases, who make things lively in peaceful years, and in a broken age are the first to be suspected, the first to be squeezed, the first to be used up and thrown away. She has seen too many endings like that; she has seen people who knew perfectly well they would be hurt, knew perfectly well they would die, and still had to step out, still had to save somebody, fall one after another in front of her.

Of course she does not believe in empires, in legitimate lines, in glory. Those things never sheltered her; they only ever demeaned her, only ever ground her down.

But you are not the same.

You grew up under documents, gold seals and crowns. The order of the empire, the queens’ eyes, the legitimacy of royal blood were cut into your bones a long time ago. You already know that the Sasanian house is nearly finished, and you still walk into that festival in your dreams, where the two queens are standing, where you can see the lowered eyes in the outer court, hear the herald calling the titles aloud, see the priests light the sacred fire high. That is the King of Kings; that is what you were taught from childhood to revere, to guard, to give everything for. Fire Feather will never understand that for you, turning your back on it is not as simple as staying alive.

You lower your hand slowly.

The whip slides out of your fingers and hits the ground with a dull sound.

“Go,” you say.

Fire Feather starts.

You do not look at her again; you only look at the whip on the ground, and your voice is light and nearly cold. “You are not my servant, and you have nothing to do with this place any more. You are free to go wherever you like.”

After that night, Fire Feather does not come back.

Not the next day. Not the third day. Not the fourth, or the fifth.

The snow piles up slowly. The ward walls, the roof ridges, the corners of the yard: every day a little more of the world’s colour is wiped out.

New Year’s Day is coming, and Chang’an is already busy getting ready for it: new peachwood charms on the doors, spiced wine in the taverns, crowds everywhere laying in goods. You gradually get used to the days without her. The rare animals still have to be fed, the old servants still have to be set to work, the connections outside still have to be asked about.

Only at night you always look a moment longer into the yard, and then make yourself look away.

And then, in the middle of this day-by-day grind, you hear a great piece of news.

That around New Year’s Eve there is to be a banquet in the palace. That a goddess from the Western Regions is to perform for the Son of Heaven.

4.3 Fire Feather at the night banquet, and the dark way through the palace walls

Chang’an on New Year’s Eve is like a whole city held up on lamplight.

Ward gates, street drums, taverns, coloured awnings, red-painted towers, layer on layer in the dark. The great roads run straight, the snow polished by carriages and horses, and on both sides the lamp wheels hang high and edge the eaves, the banners and the roof ridges with gold. The Western Market has not managed to open fully yet, and already the warmth and the smell of wine are pouring out along the streets; foreign caps, head cloths, monks’ robes and brocade press together under the lamps, and accents and laughter from every corner of the earth run together.

If it is this bright in the city, it can only be brighter inside the palace. To greet the year, to present auspicious things to the Son of Heaven, the music offices, the acrobats, the players, the dancers from foreign lands go out one troupe after another; fireworks, lanterns, pipa, drums and flutes, strings and bells, gold thread and splendid clothes, rare birds and strange beasts — all of it has to be piled to its highest tonight.

And you are already inside the palace.

Not as an envoy, and not as an old Sasanian noble.

You are standing behind a side hall in a player’s costume. The stuff is too light, the waist is bound too tight, there are too many coloured streamers and gold bells at the shoulders and the back; take a step and something jingles.

These last days you have been trying to get used to this outfit, and tonight, now it is here, nothing is right. Your back is awkward, your cuffs get in the way, even your breathing feels as though somebody had drawn a line tight across your ribs.

You are pulling at the sash that will not lie properly when a hand comes from behind you and gives it one gentle tug and straightens out the length you had twisted.

“Don’t be nervous.”

Fire Feather’s breath is against the back of your ear, low, a little warm.

“Tonight the one they’re watching is me, not you.”

And your heart beats faster.

Outside, the performance is already half through. First there was the music and dance of the entertainment office, then miscellaneous pieces and foreign performers; before you there is still a drum-stamping act and a fire-swallower. When they come off, one more turn and it is your two.

You turn, and Fire Feather comes wholly into your sight.

You hardly know her.

The only thing you know is the red.

Not an ordinary red: the brightest gold-red at the tip of a flame when it takes.

At first glance the feather coat she is wearing looks like gold thread and light gauze; look closer and the outer layer is set piece by piece with feathers dyed to an intense colour, pressed down along the line of the shoulder and the waist, so that when she moves it turns over like tongues of flame. Her hair is dressed high with gold foil and fine beads worked into the plaits, and there are light ornaments at her ears, her neck, her arms that throw off scattered light at the slightest movement. Over her face is a layer of very fine gauze hanging from the brow and covering half of it, letting only the amber eyes through.

The gauze is yours.

It was only an old thing at the bottom of your case, with a little faded scent still in it. Laid over her face, it has turned her mysterious and far away. With the coarse player’s costume gone, you see clearly for the first time that she really does look like a goddess out of a story, walking out of the fire.

You look at her, and your memory turns back half a month.

That day when she reappeared in front of you she had people from the palace with her carrying a message, and a Zoroastrian priest as well, not a young man, his beard trimmed very neatly, a faint smell of ash and frankincense in his sleeves.

That day too, Fire Feather came in this feather coat.

She came through the door and picked out several of your tribute animals.

“These,” she said. “And the people who can handle them. I want all of it.”

Everybody in the yard was startled: the old servants, the stablemen, the few attendants, even the men Pei Xinggong had sent to watch you looked twice. She behaved as if she had not seen any of it, and only spoke to the people who had come to choose.

On New Year’s Eve they must present auspicious things, must present a fire dance, must present the good omen of a Western phoenix rising in flame, and that cannot be done without live animals and without people who know their work. She said it perfectly seriously, as though it were all quite real.

You stood there and it was a long while before you came back to yourself.

When everyone had gone you asked her, “What exactly have you done?”

Fire Feather could not keep the corner of her mouth from turning up.

“Found the Zoroastrian people,” she said. “The ones who came into Chang’an years ago, who keep the fire for the foreigners, hand down the scriptures, manage the rites. They knew the old incense I brought them, and they knew the tricks I can do. The palace wants something new this year, so I got in.”

She gave the feather coat a tug as she spoke, and the feathers rustled.

“As for this — a phoenix’s clothes.”

When she said phoenix she nearly laughed at it herself.

“Pheasant feathers, dyed. The red’s madder and mineral powder. The shine is oil.”

In that moment, looking at her, you felt the whole thing was slapdash from top to bottom, cobbled together, careless to the point of being funny. It was exactly the way of the oasis players: whatever is missing gets patched, and when there is no miracle you put craft in its place, and when there is no way in you build a stage first, even if it only stands for one night.

And her next sentence pinned you where you stood.

“You change too,” she said. “Come in with me.”

You looked at her and still did not understand.

So Fire Feather put it more plainly. “On New Year’s Eve everyone is watching what’s at the front. You dress as one of the troupe and come into the palace with me, and when I go on, you go to the back.”

That is what she said.

“Go and see that Lady of Talent. Go and save your country.”

She is a player out of the desert; she is a woman who has eaten your salt and your bread. And in the end she still has not let go of you.

Outside the door, gongs and strings come up together with the long note of the chime bells, and the cheering goes round again. It looks as though this New Year’s Eve Chang’an will be a city that does not sleep.

Fire Feather straightens the last length of your sash and smooths down the ends of your hair where they have turned up.

“Have you got the way through the palace by heart?” she asks.

You nod.

“The moment I go on I’ll have everybody looking at me, and you go towards the inner palace. Past the first gallery, turn left, and when you see the lamp with the blue gauze on it, turn in there.”

“And if somebody stops me—”

“Say you’re a performer from the Western Regions.” Fire Feather answers for you. “Lost, can’t find the way out. Don’t say much. Keep your head down and walk.”

She gives her instructions quickly. She is about to go on stage in a moment, and what she is worrying about is you.

Outside, the drumming thickens; the waves of sound come like something that cannot be put off.

Through the hanging you can already hear the talk at the banquet, the laughter, the music and the clapping of time all laid over one another, beating against the back hall like a tide. It cannot be long now before they call you. And Fire Feather is still going over your sash, your head cloth and the soft boots on your feet, again and again.

You look at her, and suddenly you put your arms round her and hold on.

She probably did not expect it; she goes quite still. You had meant to say thank you, and when you open your mouth there is only one sentence left:

“Aren’t you afraid?”

Fire Feather is quiet a moment, and then says softly, “What I’m going to dance out there is the fire dance.”

You freeze, and want to ask, and your head is empty.

“My sister danced it too,” she says. “In front of a woman commander who killed without blinking. Her dance held the commander and the soldiers, and she took everybody else’s lives back out of it… After she died, I’m the only one left who can dance it.”

She stops a moment, and lifts her arms and holds you too, hard.

“I am afraid,” she says.

Fire Feather’s mouth is against your ear, and her breathing is very light.

“What I’m afraid of isn’t fire, and it isn’t knives.” She holds you tighter. “What I’m afraid of is losing someone again.”

As that lands, a long drawn-out order comes from outside.

It is the attendants calling the turn.

The drumbeat has changed. You are more nervous, and less able to let go. At last Fire Feather releases you and presses a hand hard against your back, as though to share out her strength and her courage to you.

“Go,” she says quietly.

“Don’t look back.”

4.4 Don’t look back

What starts the front of the house is the foreign music.

One pluck of a string, high and clear, like a knife point opening the night cleanly; then a lower note out of the depth of the instrument, rolling out of the wooden body with the smell of sand and leather and fire in it. Then the strings come one by one, fine and close like running water, and then like a fast wind through a wood. A Qiang flute comes in after them, the key turns, and there is all the desolation of the Western Regions in it. The hand drum comes down last, one beat, one beat, like a heart moving in a chest. That is the music you heard as a small child from behind the hangings in the high hall of the royal city; it is the sound of camel bells and sacred fire and ointments and good wine and armour all mixed together.

And you are running.

Lamps fall away behind you one after another; pillars, palace walls, hangings and gilt door frames are dragged out into a blur of moving light. You run fast and put your feet down lightly, hardly daring to let the soles make a sound. Ahead of you the music gets louder, and the laughter, the cries, the applause, the clapping, the ring of cups come one wave over another.

You do not need to look back to know that she has begun. That drum, those strings, that sudden lift of the horns and the whole hall drawing breath together. Every pair of eyes has been taken by the woman dancing in fire at the front.

Just like that day.

On the day of the rising in Ctesiphon there was fire like this too, and a dance like this, and a woman in a gold-red feather coat with bare feet on the ground, walking over spilled wine cups, over spilled lamp oil, over one pool after another of blood that was still warm.

And she could still smile, still turn, still open her arms like a bird that really meant to fly. The mutinous soldiers with blood to the wrists watched it and forgot to kill. The eager ones threw down their knives and beat time on wooden buckets, and in that restless rhythm the woman came step by step up to the commander. The firelight made her look as though she would catch alight in the next moment. You were behind an awning then with your heart nearly splitting, and you could not take your eyes off her. First you forgot to cry; then you forgot to be afraid; and at the end you even forgot that you were living inside a dying empire.

And now you are running inside a drumbeat like that.

Past the first gallery, turn left. When you see the lamp with the blue gauze on it, turn in…

You have remembered what Fire Feather taught you the whole way.

You go along her road, step by step, further in. The palace tonight is so busy that even the small servants and attendants at the edge of the gallery cannot help looking towards the front, and the occasional patrol has its attention pulled away by the fireworks and the music. You really do get deeper into the palace.

It is like walking into an old dream.

Lamplight brings up the gilding and the painting; under the eaves the palace walls are clean and silent, and the layers of doors are deeper and stranger one after another. You look at these splendid, solid things that seem as if they will never change, and suddenly it is as if you were seeing Ctesiphon as it used to be.

You really did believe it then. Believed the truth the God of Light had promised you. Believed that the King of Kings of the empire was an undying sun; that there might be a dusk, and tomorrow it would rise anyway. It was not that you could not see the decline. It was that you always thought the decline was temporary — the way darkness comes, and the sacred fire is lit again, and the sun comes back to the earth.

The gold seal and the papers are against your ribs. One step to go. That turn you have imagined, that chance of making the sun come up again, may be only this one step away.

You look up, and here at last is the place you found out about.

The door is open and the lamps are lit, and there is nobody in the room.

No Lady of Talent. No palace women. Only an empty seat, and a lamp nearly burnt out.

In that instant it is as though something had struck you over the head. The last of the strength you carried here out of the yellow sand is cut through by some invisible knife and gives way where you stand.

And it is then that a voice behind you says, without emphasis:

“You look like a foreigner. Have you come looking for my elder sister Yuezhen?”

You turn sharply, on your guard.

A young woman comes out of the dark, plainly dressed, her face extraordinarily composed. She is turning something over in her fingers, slowly. When she looks at you there is no surprise in it, and she is in no hurry to call anyone; her eyes are sharp as a small knife and go from your face straight down to what you are carrying.

Your hand tightens on the gold seal and the papers.

They are your amulet.

She only laughs, lightly.

“She is a favourite,” she says, her tone as light as if she were stating something obvious. “On a night like this, why would she still be in the depths of the palace waiting for somebody to come and find her?”

She comes two steps closer.

The lamp reaches her face, and you see that she is young — even excessively young. And those eyes are extraordinarily cool, like a knife that could go through you and out the other side in one stroke.

She comes up in front of you and holds out a hand, and what she has been turning over is lying in her palm.

It is the amulet your mother handed you when you set out, that has followed you all the way here.

“You dropped this,” she says, smiling.

You stand frozen, and only now do you wake as if from a dream: your plan to get in is full of holes and frankly laughable. And this is how you meant to save your country, to save your King of Kings? You could curse yourself.

As though she has read it in your face, she smiles again, lightly.

“Putting your hope in something you can’t touch,” she says, “is the laziest way to run away. Gods and buddhas, men, promises, tokens — they’re all the same.”

Her voice is not loud, and there is no room in it for argument. It is not a lecture and it is not mockery; it is as if, young as she is, she had already handled and weighed every illusion in this world and knew which of them were light and which were heavy.

“What actually brings the dead back, what turns a lost game round, isn’t prayer and isn’t the will of heaven. It’s the power you hold in your own hand, and the refusal to turn back.” And with that she pushes the amulet into your palm. “Go,” she says. “Don’t disturb the people outside. The cages here don’t need one more Persian bird.”

You stare at her.

She says nothing more; she only tips her head to listen to what is going on outside, and then walks out of the door. A patrolling guard happens to come up and ask, and from where you are you see that her face does not change in the least. She says, without emphasis:

“Nothing of any importance. A foreign performer who lost her way, and cannot even speak properly.”

The guard bows his head at once and says, “Yes, Lady Wu.”

And you stand where you are, as though you had blundered into a dream that should not exist.

Only when her back has disappeared at the end of the gallery do you come to yourself, and stumble out.

How you get back under the players’ stage you cannot afterwards remember.

The drums in front are still going. The cheering is louder than before, as if the whole palace had been drowned in it.

You lean against a pillar with your palms full of sweat, the amulet nearly crushed out of shape in your fist. It is a long time before you can open it with shaking hands.

There is no scripture inside, of the kind that is usually put in. No blessing written by a Zoroastrian priest. None of the empire, legitimacy, King of Kings that your father pushed into your ears over and over. Not one oath asking you to guard something, to die with it, to be buried in the ashes with the family name.

Only a small piece of yellowed silk.

On it, your mother’s hand, one short line, the strokes gentle:

My daughter, do not look back. The sand will bury the empire behind you. Be free.

You stare at that line and for a long while you do not move.

The tears come all at once — one first, falling on the edge of the silk and spreading a small wet point. Then a second, and a third…

All the way from Ctesiphon to Samarkand, from Dunhuang to Chang’an, you have never wept.

Your father gave you a false mission and sent you on a long road that nearly killed you halfway. Your mother hid what she really wanted to say in this small amulet, and guarded you with it the whole way, wanting you to live, wanting you to go far off, wanting you not to be buried with an empire that had to die. And you understand suddenly that all this way you wanted to save the empire, the legitimate line, the King of Kings…

And from beginning to end, the only thing your mother wanted to save was you.

Outside there is another, bigger cry of astonishment.

You lift your head.

Fire Feather is in the brightest of the light.

She moves on the drumbeat, the feather coat held up as if by fire; when she turns, red feathers and gold thread fly open together and take the whole body of firelight turning with her. She has brought out several dancing horses, their manes brushed to a shine, gold bells and coloured streamers at their necks.

The drum turns, and the hooves come down on the beat, stepping the dance out.

She turns, the feather coat flies, and the horses turn with her.

She whistles, and the horses follow the whistling, circling and circling round the fire.

The noise in the hall rises and rises, and the fire goes up as though the splendour of the whole Tang age had taken shape in that blaze.

The hall roars.

And now the Son of Heaven’s gift of wine arrives.

The cup is carried up in a horse’s teeth; Fire Feather turns across to it, the feather coat streaming, a fire bird about to fly and not yet flying, and bends her head and takes the rim of the cup in her mouth.

The wine flashes; she tips her head back and drinks it off.

In that instant the cheering is like thunder.

You stand in the dark and watch her.

She is still dancing, and her face and her voice are exactly the woman in the feather coat all those years ago, who walked through blood and made a god of slaughter put up a sword.

And this time you are no longer only a child hiding behind an awning, using somebody else’s dance to forget being afraid.

You look down and fold the silk again and put it back in the amulet.

When you look up, Fire Feather is coming out of the fire on the beat of the drum. She looks as though she really has set the night alight, and as though she really has pulled you out of that old empire the sand has buried, and forced a new breath into you.

You do not know where the gold seal and the papers have got to. But you know that your journey has not ended because they are gone.

After the fire dance a friendly hand will be held out to you, and it is time, at last, for you to go forward.