The Jingkang Incident — the winter two emperors were led north in chains

Transcript

Bram: The first thing is the cold, and it is not a weather cold, it is a cold with intent, a cold that has been told to do a job. It comes up through the soles of my feet from the thing I am walking on, and it takes me a long moment, with my head down and my breath freezing on the front of my own coat, to understand that the thing I am walking on is a river. We are on the ice. A whole line of us, hundreds, roped at the wrist to the person in front and the person behind, going out across a white flatness so wide I cannot see the far bank, and under the white there is a grey, and under the grey, moving, there is the Yellow River, which has frozen thick enough to carry an army and its carts. I can hear the carts. That is the sound under everything — wooden wheels on packed snow, a rumble and a scrape, a hundred of them, loaded, going north. I do the thing I always do, which is look at my hands to find out who I am, except that I cannot get to my hands, because they are tied, and the rope has rubbed the wrist raw, and the wrists are — I know these wrists. I have been in these wrists a long time already, I realise. There is old ink worked into the grain of the right forefinger and thumb, ink that no amount of this will scrub out, and there is a callus on the middle finger the exact shape of a brush shaft, and I know, the way you know a face, that these are hands that can do one thing better than almost anyone alive, and that the one thing is of no use to me at all out here. I count the people between me and the guard. Nine. I do not know why I count them; I have noticed I do it when I am frightened, in every century, as if a number were a kind of blanket. Nine, and then a man on a shaggy horse with the front of his head shaved and a long braid down his back, not looking at us, because we are not worth looking at. We are cargo. We are the part of the load that walks. There is one warm thing in the whole world and it is against my ribs, inside the coat, where I have kept it since — since before, since the part of my life that had a before — a small flat wooden box the size of my palm, with a sliding lid, and inside it, in little wells, the pigments. Ground by hand, some of them for days. There is a blue in there worth more than a horse. I have not opened it in weeks. I keep it because a man has to keep one thing. And I make the mistake of looking back. You are not supposed to look back on the ice, because it breaks your rhythm and the rope snatches your wrist, but I look back anyway, south, the way we came, for the city. And it is not there. I know exactly where on the horizon it should be — the towers, the smoke of a million cooking fires, the shape you could see a day's walk out. And there is nothing on the horizon but more white, and a smudge that might be weather, and I stand there for one second too long with the whole line dragging at my arm, understanding that a city I lived my entire life inside is now simply not a place you can see. So. Introductions. Let me tell you who I am, because I have only just worked it out myself, and it is the worst reveal this current has ever handed me. I am a painter. Not a house-painter. A master of the Hanlin Academy — the imperial painting academy, the finest that has ever existed anywhere — and until a season ago I painted birds and flowers on silk for the most refined court on the face of the earth, to a standard that took me thirty years to reach, and I was, in my small way, one of the most valuable men in the most valuable city in the world. And now I am on a list. I have seen the list. I am on it near the bottom, under a single word that covers me and about three thousand others, and the word is craftsmen, and beside my category on the Jin quartermaster's ledger there is a number, which is what we are worth, all of us together, weighed against the gold and the silver and the bronze on the carts — and the number is smaller than the number beside the box against my ribs. This is Chronicles — history, lived from the inside. Not the dates and the names cut into the monument, but the morning it actually happened, close enough to touch. We drop you into the room where the world turned, and we make you feel why it still matters now. And there's only one honest way in: to actually be there, in a body, on the day. So one traveller goes where the rest of us can't — the same soul, life after life, moving through all of history, waking inside someone who was really there. I'm the Traveller. Episode seventeen. The List of Everything — the winter the richest, cleverest empire on earth was written down, priced, and carried away. Right. Put that river down — I will bring you back to the ice, I promise you, and by the time I do you will understand every rope on it. But that morning stands three years further along the road than the place this story begins, and if I drop you into the middle of the worst of it you will spend the whole hour asking who did this and why, when the astonishing thing is that the answer is completely knowable, and it is sadder and stranger than anyone told you. So come back with me. Three years, and a whole world, to a city that at this exact moment is almost certainly the largest that has ever existed on the planet. It is called Kaifeng — the Song called it the Eastern Capital — and there are something like a million people inside and around its walls, which is a number no European city will touch for six hundred years. It sits on a grid of canals off the Yellow River, so that a barge can carry southern rice into the very middle of the capital, and it has done a thing no great city before it dared: it has knocked down the old walled wards and the curfew, and let the shops spill out onto the streets, all night. It is the first city in the world with a true night life — wine-houses five storeys high with a hundred private rooms, tea-houses, theatres, all-night markets, restaurants serving the dishes of every province, storytellers, acrobats, a permanent carnival of a million people who have decided that the point of being rich is to enjoy it. It runs on paper money — the first government-printed banknotes anywhere. Its printers turn out books, thousands of copies at a time, of everything: the classics, medical manuals, almanacs, Buddhist scriptures. Its kilns fire the most beautiful ceramics that have ever been made or ever will be — the pale, crackled, blue-grey Ru ware commissioned by the emperor himself, pieces that today sit behind glass and change hands for the price of a house. There is a hand-scroll being painted in these very years, five metres of it, of this exact riverfront — every boatman and camel-driver and dumpling-seller alive on the page — and it survives, that scroll, while the city it shows does not. It is one of the two or three highest points human civilisation has ever reached. And it is a year from the ropes. And I want you to have the specifics, because "advanced" is a word that slides off. This is the age of true porcelain — the Ru and Jun and Ding wares, fired in kilns whose exact glaze chemistry we are still trying to reproduce. Its shipwrights are building ocean-going junks with watertight bulkheads and a magnetic compass to sail them by, centuries before any European puts a needle to a card. Its clerks add sums on a device you would recognise instantly — an abacus. Its arsenals make gunpowder bombs and fire-lances, real ones, the ones you are about to hear go off. And its restaurants — I have to keep coming back to the restaurants — serve you a menu, in a private room, of dishes from provinces a thousand miles apart, brought up a canal on ice. Do not picture anything austere or medieval. Picture the most crowded, most delicious, most inventive place a human being had ever been able to stand. That is what is a year from the ropes. And here is the man on the throne of it, because you are about to meet him. His name is Huizong, and he is, without much competition, the most gifted artist ever to be a king anywhere. He invented a style of calligraphy so distinctive it has its own name — the Slender Gold — thin and sharp and gorgeous, and you can still read a poem in his own hand. He painted birds and flowers to a standard that professional painters studied for centuries. He ran the imperial painting academy personally, and he graded it on things like whether the light in a bird's eye was observed or merely drawn. He was also a catastrophe as a ruler, and I want to be fair to him, because the lazy version of this story is that a silly aesthete fiddled while it burned, and that is not what happened. He genuinely believed the state could be run by good men he appointed and then need not think about, so he handed the actual governing to favourites and gave himself to the studio, to Daoist mysticism, and to a vast artificial pleasure-mountain of rare rocks he had shipped, at ruinous expense, from across the empire. The refinement was not the cause of the fall. But it was the terrible irony of it — a court that could grade the eyelid of a finch, and could not, when the time came, do the one thing a state exists to do. And because you were taught your history sideways, let me plant a flag you can see from home. The year the horsemen come over the river is 1126. In the West, that is deep in what you were taught to call the Middle Ages. The First Crusade took Jerusalem a generation ago. Paris and London are muddy towns of a few tens of thousands of people, unlit at night, no paper money, no printing, no compass, no public clock; the grandest thing Norman Europe is attempting is a stone cathedral that will take a hundred years. And on the other side of the world, the most populous, richest, most literate, most technologically advanced state the planet has yet produced is about to be destroyed, in eighteen months, by its own cleverness — and almost nobody in the West will ever hear a word of it. So let me take you inside it while it still stands. Into a quiet room, off the grandest court on earth, where a man is painting a very small bird — and I am the man, and I have never been so pleased with a pair of hands in my life. The first thing is the smell, and the smell is money, though it takes me a second to place it — ink, and sized silk, and the particular mineral dust of ground pigment, and under it a thread of aloeswood from a burner in the next room, and further off, through a lattice window, the whole roaring city faint as surf. I am kneeling at a low table with a length of white silk stretched on a frame, and the light is coming in flat and north-facing and perfect, and these hands — these hands — are holding a brush the way you would hold a sleeping bird. And I look at what they have been doing, and I have to put the brush down for a second, because it is a finch. Half-finished. A little grey-and-rust finch on a sprig of winter plum, and it is not drawn, it is there — the weight of it on the twig is real, the cock of the head is real, and the eye is a single dot of black ink with one speck of the silk left bare inside it for the light, and that speck is the difference between a dead bird and a live one, and this body put it there this morning without my help and I am, frankly, thrilled to be him. I take an inventory, the way I do. I am about fifty. My knees have been kneeling on academy floors for thirty years and they let me know it. There is a box against my ribs, a little wooden thing with pigments in it, my own, ground by my own hand, and there is a blue in it — I open the lid just to look at it — that came as raw stone from two thousand miles up a trade road and cost more than the men who carried it. I am, and I say this with the appropriate awe, one of the most expensively trained pairs of eyes on the surface of the earth. My job is to see things exactly. Hold on to that. It is going to matter more than anything. The comedy of my situation arrives on schedule. There is a junior — a boy of about fifteen, an apprentice — and he is regrinding cinnabar in a dish, and he is watching me the way you watch a man you've been warned is important, and I realise the whole academy is very quietly tense, and it is tense because His Majesty is in the building. And I understand, from the way this body's heart lifts rather than sinks at that, that I love His Majesty, in the specific way you love a person who takes the one thing you can do more seriously than you do.

The_apprentice: Master — is it true he can tell whose hand ground a pigment just by looking at the colour? They say he sent a whole tray of azurite back to the workshop last week, for being ground by a tired man.

Bram: And the appalling thing, which I do not tell the boy, is that it is almost certainly true, and that on a good day I would have sent the tray back myself. And then he is in the doorway, and the room does that thing where everyone becomes very busy and very still at once, and I keep my head down over the finch because that is correct, and he crosses the room in soft shoes, and he kneels — the emperor kneels, on the floor, beside a craftsman — and he looks at the bird. He is a tall, thin, fastidious man of forty-odd with a scholar's soft cap and a thin cultivated beard and the longest, most careful fingers I have ever seen on a man, and when he looks at the finch he goes completely still and half-absent, the way I go still, and I know in that moment that whatever else is true about him, this part is not a performance. He reaches out one finger, not touching, and traces the air just above the eye, and for a moment he says nothing at all, and then he says the thing that will keep me warm for a year.

Huizong: You have caught the fear in it. Look — the little creature knows it is being watched. That is the hardest thing there is to put on silk, and you have it in three strokes.

Bram: And then his eye moves half an inch, and everything changes.

Huizong: The light in the eye is in the wrong place.

Bram: And my stomach drops, because he is right. He is right and I did not see it and he saw it from the doorway. The speck of bare silk in the eye is catching a light that would come from the left, and the plum branch throws its shadow to the right, so the bird is lit by two different suns. It is the kind of mistake that no one on earth but this man would have caught, and he caught it kneeling, in three seconds, on his way to somewhere else.

Huizong: Everything else is correct. Do the eye again. — It is a very good bird.

Bram: And he gets up and goes, and I sit there with my heart going like the apprentice's grinding-stone, having been, in one sentence, humiliated and made for the year. And I love him. I want to be honest about that with you, because of what he is going to do, and because you are going to want to hate him and I am telling you from inside the room that it was not that simple: I knelt next to the man and he was not a fool and he was not cruel, he was the single best pair of eyes in a city built to reward exactly that, in the wrong chair, at the worst possible moment in four hundred years. Here is the whole of my world, this morning. A finch's eye. The blue in the box. The city out the window being, hands down, both the most beautiful and — the gutters are a genuine public health emergency, nobody tells you that about the summit of civilisation — the most fragrant place I have ever lived. A boy regrinding cinnabar. And a man who kneels on floors to look at birds. And then a functionary comes in — soft-footed, apologetic — and sets down a sealed report on the side table by the door, a report from the northern frontier, and nobody picks it up, because the light is good and there is work to do, and it sits there through the whole afternoon while I do the eye again. And I, who can see the speck of light in a bird's eye from across a room, do not look at it once. Let him do the eye. I want to take you out of that lovely room, because that unopened report on the side table is the whole story, and to understand it you have to understand a bet the Song had made a few years before — a bet so clever, and so catastrophic, that everything else in this hour is simply that bet coming due. Start with a wound. For a hundred and eighty years, the Song had lived next to another empire in the north — the Liao, ruled by a steppe people called the Khitan — and the Liao held a strip of sixteen walled prefectures across the top of the north China plain that the Song had never controlled and desperately wanted, including the town of Yanjing, which you would today call Beijing. The Song had bought peace with the Liao for a century, paying them an annual tribute in silver and silk, and it worked — but a certain kind of proud Song patriot found paying-for-peace unbearable, and dreamed of getting the sixteen prefectures back. Then, on the far side of the Liao, a subject people rose in revolt. And this is the second thing you need. They were called the Jurchen. Forest-and-river tribes from the Manchurian north-east — hunters, fishers, falconers, horse-people, who bred the famous gyrfalcons the Liao court demanded as tribute and resented handing over. Until about ten years before our story they did not have a state at all; they had clans, and a grievance, and an astonishing chieftain of the Wanyan clan named Aguda, who unified them, declared himself emperor of a brand-new dynasty he called the Jin — the word means "Gold" — and began tearing the Liao apart with a speed that frankly stunned everyone who watched it. A subject tribe with no cities, no bureaucracy, no written history as a power, was eating a two-hundred-year-old empire alive in a decade. And I want you to hold, hard, against the word "barbarian," because it is going to do you a disservice all hour: these were not a mindless steppe wave. They were a young, disciplined, superbly led state — and that discipline, not their ferocity, was the most dangerous thing in this entire story. They fought in tight, drilled units of mounted archers who could ride and shoot from childhood; they learned siege-craft from the Chinese engineers they captured, and turned it around within a season; and they were led by commanders who thought several moves ahead. A decade from the forest, they had already out-organised the two oldest empires in Asia. So the Song court looked at the Jin smashing the Liao, and had its clever idea. It sent embassies across the Bohai Sea to the Jurchen — the negotiations are actually remembered as the Alliance Conducted at Sea — and proposed a joint war: the Jin would destroy the Liao from the north, the Song would sweep up its sixteen prefectures from the south, and the tribute the Song had paid the Liao would simply be redirected to the Jin. Ride the rising predator to recover a lost inheritance, and stop it at the fence afterward. And the bet was lost at the very moment it looked won. Because when the Song armies marched on Yanjing to take their share, they were beaten — twice — by the dying Liao. They could not do it. In the end the Jin had to take the city and hand it over, stripped and depopulated, for an extra fee. The Jurchen had come to the fence to collect their ally's portion, and found the fence undefended, and the richest country on earth on the other side of it, unable to fight. A predator does not un-know a thing like that. So they finished the Liao. They ran its last emperor down and captured him in 1125. And then there was nothing at all between the Jin and the softest, wealthiest target in the world — a target that had, with its own hand, armed the hunter and shown it exactly how weak the prey was. That report on the emperor's side table was the fence coming down. And I want you to meet the people it came down on — from the other side first, from a cold saddle, because if you only ever see this from inside the burning house you will make the mistake the Song made, and think the fire had no mind. New body, and the first thing this one tells me is that it is warm — properly warm, greased and furred and well-fed, in a cold that would kill the painter in an afternoon — and the second thing is that it is up high, swaying, and the sway is a horse. I am on a horse. I, who have never in a hundred lifetimes learned to ride, am apparently excellent at it, because this body has been on horseback since before it could walk. I take the inventory fast, because there is a lot of it. Shaved forehead, a long braid I can feel against my neck, a short powerful bow cased at the knee, and a contentment in the gut that I have to sit with for a second because it is so unlike the painter: this body is winning, and knows it, and is not troubled by anything. I am a Jurchen. I am one of the horsemen who came over the river. And out there in front of me, in the grey morning, is the city — from the outside this time, the walls of it going on further than I can see, and beyond the walls the roofs, thousands of them, and smoke, so much smoke, so many fires, so many people. And what I feel, looking at it, is not fear and not even greed exactly. It is the feeling of a hunter who has walked over a rise and seen a valley full of fat, slow, unguarded animals. There is a war-drum going somewhere down the line — a deep barrel drum, patient, keeping the whole host at one pulse — and I sit my horse and look at the greatest city in the world the way you would look at a herd, and I feel the men around me feeling the same thing, and it is the most frightening emotion I have ever been loaned, because there is nothing cruel in it. It is appetite, disciplined and calm. There are two princes commanding us — brothers of the emperor. One quick and boastful and hungry for the fast glittering win; and the other older, quieter, a still man with a face that gives nothing away, who listens far longer than he speaks and weighs a thing the way a merchant weighs metal. The whole camp is a little afraid of the second one, and I understand why: the first one wants the ransom, and the second one, you can feel it, wants the whole future — not the gold, but the people who make the gold, the cleverness itself. And my job this morning is to guard a hostage. The Song have sent us a prince — a real one, a son of their emperor, as surety while they scrape together the ransom — and I am one of the men set to watch him, and I have been told he is soft, and I am ready to despise him. And I cannot. That is the thing that happens to me this morning, and it happens slowly. The boy is nineteen, maybe twenty, and he is standing in a Jurchen camp a thousand miles from home, surrounded by the men who are about to swallow his country, and he is not afraid. Not pretending not to be afraid — I know pretending, I have watched a hundred brave men do it. He is genuinely, evenly calm. They put a bow in his hands to test him and he shoots well and hands it back. He watches everything. He says almost nothing, and what he says is exactly correct and gives nothing away, and he watches us the way our quiet prince watches everything, and I find, to my discomfort, that I cannot tell what he is thinking, and I am the one holding the rope. One of the officers asks him, through an interpreter, whether he is afraid. And the boy considers it — actually considers it, the way you would consider a question about a stranger — and answers, level, giving away nothing.

Prince_of_kang: A hostage who shows fear is of no use to anyone. I intend to be of use, and then to go home. Beyond that I have no thoughts you would find worth the interpreter's trouble.

A_jin_officer: That is no prince. A real Song princeling would be weeping in the dirt. They have sent us a soldier in a prince's coat — a decoy.

Bram: And that is the joke the whole future turns on, though none of us can hear it yet: the boy is so composed that we decide he must be a fake, and we send him back. We send the real one home because he did not cry. The Song themselves will tell this story for centuries, once he is emperor — how his nerve fooled the Jin — and they will make it a sign from Heaven. From inside the saddle it does not feel like Heaven. It feels like a young man who learned, very early and very completely, that the way to survive is to let no one see the inside of you. Remember him. He is the one who gets out. He is going to matter more than the two emperors on the list. Come off the horse. Two things happened while you were in that saddle that you need, and the first one is the most cold-blooded act in the whole hour, and it happens at breakfast. When the Jin came over the frozen Yellow River — essentially unopposed, the border folding like wet paper — the emperor Huizong, my finch-grading emperor, the man who knelt on the floor, did a thing. He panicked. And he abdicated. On the eighteenth of January, 1126, he passed the throne, the war, and the entire reckoning to his appalled eldest son, who took it weeping, actually weeping, and became the emperor Qinzong — and then Huizong fled south, toward the Yangtze, with his favourites, officially to "pray at the temples." A sovereign was told the barbarians were at the river and made himself a retired private gentleman by breakfast, and left his son to be besieged. Hold that against the man who knelt to fix a bird's eye. Both are true. That is the whole problem with him. And the second thing is the deep one — the answer to the question you have been shouting since the walls: how is the richest, cleverest state on earth this bad at defending itself? And the answer is that it was on purpose. The Song dynasty had been founded, a hundred and sixty years earlier, out of the wreckage of the previous age, when China had shattered into warlord states because ambitious generals kept seizing the throne. The founder of the Song looked at that and made a deliberate, permanent decision: never again would soldiers be allowed to threaten the state. So he subordinated the entire military to the civil service. Generals were rotated so they could never build loyal armies. The scholar-official — the man who passed the examinations, who could write poetry and administer a province — was exalted above the soldier at every turn. Armies were kept deliberately weak, deliberately divided, deliberately led by civilians and eunuchs. The best horse-country had been lost with the sixteen prefectures, so the Song had almost no cavalry worth the name against enemies who were born on horseback. Command was fractured on purpose, so that no general could ever grow strong enough to be a threat — which meant, on the day, that no general was ever strong enough to be a defence either. A soldier ranked below a clerk; the saying went that you do not waste good iron making nails, and you do not waste good men making soldiers. And it worked, for a hundred and sixty years. It gave the Song the longest internal peace and the greatest flowering of civilisation the world had seen — the printing, the paper money, the porcelain, the poetry, all of it. The refinement and the weakness came out of the same decision. They had built a paradise that could not defend its own gate, and they had done it on purpose, and for a century and a half the bill never came. And now it is coming, and it is going to be paid by a fishmonger. Because when a paradise like that finally has to fight, it does not fight with its scholars. It grabs whoever is standing in the street and puts a weapon in his hands he has never held, and sends him up onto the wall. Come and stand on the wall with him. It is the one moment in this whole story where the Song very nearly save themselves — and I want you to feel how close it was, and who did it. The first thing is that my hands stink of fish and I am holding a tube of gunpowder. Those two facts arrive together and neither of them makes sense with the other, and there is no time to sort it out because there is a sound coming across the frozen moat toward me that I have never heard and my whole body has decided to hate — a low, huge, thudding concussion, over and over, the Jin siege engines and the thunderclap bombs going off against the base of the wall, and I can feel each one come up through the rammed earth into the soles of my feet. I am on the rampart. Top of the great wall of Kaifeng, on a timber hoarding slick with ice, in the dark and the cold, and I am — the inventory comes in useless flashes between the concussions — I am a fishmonger. A month ago I was selling carp off a canal-boat in the eastern wards. My hands know the exact resistance of a fish's belly to a knife. And this week someone put a fire-lance in them, which is a bamboo tube packed with gunpowder and scrap iron lashed to a spear, and told me to point it over the parapet and touch the fuse, and I have used it twice and both times I was more frightened of it than of the enemy. There is a man beside me on the hoarding, another conscript, older, and we have said almost nothing to each other all night, but he leans over once, close, in a lull, and gives me the whole of the training he was given.

An_older_conscript: Point it away from your own face, lad. That's the whole of it. Away from your face, toward theirs, and count to three before you light it, or you'll take yourself off this wall before they do.

Bram: And a stone comes over — you do not see them in the dark, you only hear the whistle and then the crack of the impact — and it takes the hoarding apart six feet to my left, and when I look he is not there any more. He has gone off the inner edge. I hear him land in the ward below, on the roofs. And I do not go to look, because a hand grabs the back of my coat and hauls me back to the parapet, and it is an officer, and he is screaming a word at me and the word is now.

An_officer: The lance! Point it and light it — you are no use to me praying! There is a man on the ladder and in three heartbeats he is over the wall and in the city, so — NOW!

Bram: So I count. One — two — I have started counting the fuse, three seconds from the touch to the flame, because the counting is the only thing between me and running, and on three I point the fire-lance over the wall into the dark where the ladders are and I touch it and it goes off like the end of the world, a roaring gout of flame and iron six feet long, and for one second I can see them — the Jin, on the ladders, faces upturned, close, so close, real men — and then the flame eats the dark again and I am blind and shaking and alive, and the wall, somehow, is holding. And down below me, on the inside of the wall, in the torchlight, there is a man in the dark robes of a scholar — not armour, robes — walking the base of the rampart, and he is the reason any of us are still here. He is a civil official named Li Gang, a mid-ranking bureaucrat with no military record whatsoever, who three weeks ago argued in council against the whole court's plan to run, and got handed the defence of the capital almost by accident, as a kind of dare — and then did not run, and did not break, and organised amateurs and fishmongers into a wall that a professional army could not take.

Li_gang: Hold the hoarding. Feed the crews. They cannot come over a wall that is still manned — so the only way you lose this wall is to leave it. So do not leave it.

Bram: And we do not leave it. That is the thing I want you to have, the thing the Song themselves nearly forgot: on this wall, this week, the paradise-that-could-not-fight fought, and held, because one stubborn scholar refused to be afraid and a few thousand fishmongers counted their fuses and stayed. The Jin, deep in hostile country with a smaller force, decided the city was not worth the price and took a bargain instead — a ransom so enormous it beggars listing, gold and silver by the ten-million and three whole ceded prefectures — and they withdrew. We won. For about a month, we won. And then, with the danger past, the court dismissed Li Gang. To please the Jin, and to please the peace-party ministers who found his nerve more threatening than the siege. The one man who had saved the city was thrown away the instant the fright wore off, and when the people of the capital heard it, they did something a Chinese crowd almost never did — tens of thousands of them massed at the palace gate and shouted, students and citizens roaring for Li Gang to be reinstated, a wall of human noise demanding that the powerful keep the one man worth keeping.

A_student: Give us back Li Gang! He held the wall when you would have run — you do not throw away the one man who held the wall to please the men who are burning down our houses!

Bram: And I stood in that crowd, in the fishmonger's body, and I shouted with them, and it did no good at all, and that — that failure to keep faith with the man who kept faith with them — is the exact moment the Song sealed their own door. Come down off the wall. I have to tell you what the reprieve was spent on, because it is the single most extraordinary thing in the whole hour, and it is the hinge the entire catastrophe turns on. The Jin went away, and the Song wasted the gift. They could not actually pay the ransom — it was so vast the city was searched street by street and still fell short. They dismissed their one general. And they failed to hand over the three ceded prefectures, whose garrisons flatly refused to be sold. So the Jin came back, later that same year, both armies this time. And on the way, one of the great forgotten sieges of history: the city of Taiyuan held them off, alone, the entire spring and summer, its defenders eating their own saddles and their own armour before it finally fell in September. But once Taiyuan was gone, nothing at all stood on the road, and both Jin armies converged on Kaifeng for the second time. And inside the walls, the court, out of soldiers and out of hope, did the thing that I promise you is real, because you will not believe it. A junior officer named Guo Jing came forward and claimed he could save the city with magic. He said he commanded the Six-Jia Spirit Soldiers — troops raised and made invulnerable by Daoist ritual, whom no Jin arrow could touch. And the court — the most sophisticated government on the face of the earth, the court of paper money and printed books and the examined official — believed him. Out of sheer terminal desperation, they handed him a city gate and let him run its defence. The state that invented the civil service staked its capital, on the day, on a spell. And I was there for what he did with it, in a body I would give a great deal to give back. Come inside the doomed court with me. This is the fall. I am the painter again. I know the hands before I know anything else — the ink in the grain, the box against the ribs — and for one disorienting second I am glad, the way you are glad to see an old friend, and then I understand where and when I am, and the gladness curdles. It is a year later. The academy is cold; there is no fuel for the braziers. Half the silk is gone. And through the lattice window the sound of the city is wrong — no market, no surf of a million voices, just a war-drum somewhere and, under it, a held breath. And I am painting. That is the mad thing, that is the thing this body is doing: there is a commission, half-finished, a set of cranes, and my hands are finishing it, because it is the only thing they know how to do and because a man has to do something with his hands while he waits to find out if he is going to live, and so I am putting the light in a crane's eye while the city holds its breath. I am near the court — near enough to feel it — and the court is a place of pure panic held under a thin skin of ceremony. The young emperor, Qinzong, is somewhere in these halls, and everything I hear about him is the same shape: he cannot decide. He took the throne weeping; he backed the war party and then sacked it; and now, out of soldiers, he has done the last thing, the thing that costs him no hard choice — he has let the magician try. Because a spell asks nothing of him. It is hope that costs nothing, and it is the only kind he can still afford.

A_minister: Majesty — the wall cannot be held. Li Gang is dismissed, Taiyuan has fallen, the soldiers we had are spent. The officer Guo Jing offers Heaven's own soldiers, and asks only that the court put its trust in him. What does it cost the throne to let him try? What, now, is left to lose?

Qinzong: If the rite works, Heaven has not abandoned us. If it does not — then it was Heaven's will, and not mine. Let him try. What else is there? Tell me what else there is.

Bram: And the magician — I saw him once, in an outer court, and he had the bright, over-fluent manner of a man selling something, a ceaseless stream of star-lords and celestials, and he never once met a doubter's eye.

Guo_jing: The Six-Jia spirit soldiers will march before us, and no arrow of the north can touch a man they cover. Only — the rite is delicate. No unbeliever may look upon it, or the power breaks. Clear the wall. Order the men down off the wall, and trust the celestials, and by nightfall not one Jurchen will be left standing.

Bram: And I hear, secondhand, breathless, what the magician has done, and it is so stupid and so final that I put my brush down and do not pick it up again. On the day, Guo Jing marched his conscript "spirit soldiers" out of a city gate to perform the rite in the open — and, so that the defenders would not spoil the magic by watching, he ordered them off the wall. He emptied the wall. He opened a gate and cleared the rampart above it, in the middle of a siege, for a spell. And the Jin, who had been staring at that wall for weeks, simply walked through the gap. What comes next I will not dress up, because the point of the last hour was to make you able to feel it. The cavalry came into the streets I had lived in my whole life — hooves on the stone of wards where the night market used to be — and the city did not fall in a night, it was taken apart. I went to the door of the academy and I saw a ward alight down the hill, and I saw a man cut down on his own threshold for the crime of standing in his own doorway, and I saw a household's entire life — chests, scrolls, a loom, a child's things — carried out through a broken gate and set down in the street and weighed, on a scale, against a running tally, because the Jin did not loot the city in a frenzy. They administered it. There was a ledger. There was always, from the very first hour, a ledger. And I stood in the doorway of the finest painting academy that has ever existed, with a box of pigment against my ribs and a half-finished crane behind me, and I understood, the way the fishmonger understood the fire-lance, that everything I was — the thirty years, the eye, the blue stone from two thousand miles — was about to be entered in that ledger, in a column, with a number beside it. And the number would be true. That is the part that broke me. The number would be fair. Stay with me here, because this is the turn the whole episode is named for, and it is quiet, and it is worse than the fire. The Jin did not sack Kaifeng and leave. They kept the two emperors — Huizong, who had crept back into the net, and his weeping son Qinzong — in their camp, and they administered the city's destruction over months, issuing their demands through the captive emperors. And the demand was a ransom in gold and silver so vast that when the metal of an entire million-person city was searched out and melted down and it still fell short — and it did fall short — the Jin turned to the next thing on the ledger that had value. Which was people. The imperial treasury, the observatory's bronze instruments, the maps, the archives, the ritual vessels, the two great libraries, the printing blocks, the palace craftsmen — and the women. When the gold ran out, the women of the court were priced into the levy, entered on the ledger by the head, at a rate, against the shortfall. And then they took them all north. Not just the two emperors — the empresses and consorts, the princes and princesses, the infants of the imperial clan, the sons-in-law, the senior officials, and in their thousands the palace women, the musicians of the entire imperial academy, the physicians, the astronomers, the craftsmen. The personnel of a civilisation, roped into columns and marched into a Manchurian winter they were not dressed for. The captives' own registers — and they are the only count we have — put the rolls at upward of fourteen thousand people. Many did not survive the road. And the court women were sorted at the far end into a thing the Jin gave a flat, bureaucratic, unbearable name: the Laundry Office. A pool of enslaved court women. And I want you to feel the exact shape of this horror, because it is not the shape of a massacre. Nobody is counting bodies. The pre-modern world knew something worse than a massacre, and this is it: the reduction of the highest to the lowest, all the way down, on purpose and by the book. The Son of Heaven made a servant, the palace lady made a laundry-slave, the master painter made a line item under craftsmen. Not killed. Re-priced. Every single one of them still alive, and still on the ledger, and worth exactly what the ledger says. That is the fact. Now I have to make you feel it, which is a different thing, and the only honest way to do it is to stop counting in thousands and put you in one body, in the middle of the column, on the ice — and hand you the arithmetic that a woman on that road actually had to do. The cold first. Always the cold now, on this road — it gets into the bones and stays, and it is the same road the painter is on, the same ice, the same wooden wheels but this body is smaller and lower and colder, and the rope on this wrist has been on longer, and when I take the inventory I find hands that know a different thing: they know the strings of a pipa, they know the songs of a court that does not exist any more. I am a musician. I played for the palace women. And now I am one line further down the same list the painter is on. I am not going to be funny for a while. I want to tell you that plainly, because the persona you have been walking with makes jokes to keep his feet, and there is a place the jokes stop, and this is it, and it stays stopped until the end. There is a girl roped ahead of me — younger, fifteen, sixteen, a junior of the academy, and her whole body is one shiver, and I have made it my job to keep her from being noticed, because I know what being noticed means on this road. I have worked it out. Everyone in the column has worked it out. When we stop, there is a Jin quartermaster with a ledger — the same kind of ledger, the same patient administered ledger — and he sorts us. He prices us. He weighs a woman against a shortfall in silver, in his book, in a column, and some go to the officers' tents, and some go north to the thing with the laundry in its name, and the arithmetic of it is done out loud, without heat, the way you would sort fish.

A_jin_quartermaster: These hands — a weaver, or a player of some instrument; worth carrying, mark her for the north. That one, older, no particular skill in her — against the silver we are short, by the head. Keep them moving. We are behind on the count.

Bram: So here is the calculus I do, all day, every day, because it is the only power I have left. What can I trade. Whom can I shield. How do I keep the girl ahead of me unremarkable for one more sorting. What do I give up of my own to make myself worth less on his ledger, not more, because on this road being valued is the danger. I have stopped being a person with a future and become a person doing sums, and the sums are all about how much of myself I can keep by making myself worth carrying and nothing else. The girl ahead of me asks me the question, one night, in a whisper, the worst question there is, and I do not have an answer for her that is both true and bearable.

The_girl: If I let them see I can play — if they know I am a musician of the academy — will they keep me whole, to play? Is it better to be worth something to them, or better to be worth nothing at all?

Bram: And there is a woman two ropes ahead who sits down. On the ice. She just — stops, and sits, the way you sit when the arithmetic has come out to zero, and the line does not stop for her, the line cannot stop, and I watch the gap where she was close up, over the space of about a minute, from behind, as the rope that joined her to the column goes slack and then is untied and she is simply left, a shape on the ice getting smaller, and the wheels keep going and the wind takes the sound of anything she might be saying, and the line closes over the gap she was, and by the next rise it is as if there was never a woman there at all. That is what the road does. It does not kill you in a way you can point at. It just makes it easier, each day, to sit down. And here is who I meet on this road, roped a few places up, in the same borrowed sheepskin as the rest of us, her headdress and her rank and her palace all gone: a young woman, an empress. Qinzong's own empress, Zhu — she is about twenty-four — and she is the reason I am telling you all of this from down here instead of up on a throne. Because she has a stillness that is not calm; it is control held by main force, her hands folded and her back exactly straight, and she does the same arithmetic I do, but for the women around her instead of herself, spending what little she has left to shield the lower and the younger, and keeping — you can see her keeping — one thing back, one last thing, that she has not decided yet what to do with.

Empress_zhu: Keep the girl between us. Walk her in the middle. They take the ones at the edges of the line.

Bram: And I do. And we walk her in the middle. And I hold on to the one useless-beautiful thing that any of us have left — for the painter it was a box of blue; for me it is a memory of a tune I will never play again — and I carry it north, into the cold, doing my sums, keeping the girl unnoticed, and watching the one woman on the ice who has decided she is not a number, and waiting, without knowing I am waiting, for the day she proves it. Let the column go north for a moment. Because a thousand miles to the south, at the very moment the ice is taking the court, one thread got out of the net — and the whole rest of history hangs off it. When the Jin declared the Song dynasty formally ended — they deposed the imperial house and set up a puppet, a former official named Zhang Bangchang, to govern the ruins in their name — there was exactly one imperial prince who was not in the bag. You have met him. He is the boy from the Jin camp, the one who would not weep, Huizong's ninth son, the Prince of Kang, Zhao Gou. He had been sent north as a hostage-envoy during the first siege and, by that run of nerve and luck, never ended up in the final net; when the capital fell he was out in the north-eastern country raising troops. And on the twelfth of June, 1127, the surviving officials gathered around him at a provisional court in a town called Yingtianfu, and proclaimed him emperor. He is remembered as Gaozong, and his reign is the beginning of what we call the Southern Song. And I want you to be in the room for it, because it is the strangest coronation I have ever attended — a dynasty declaring that it continues, unbroken, holder of the Mandate of all under Heaven, in a borrowed hall, while its actual last two emperors are alive and roped on the ice going the other way. Two claims to one Mandate. Come and hear the thing he does not say. This body is warm and indoors and I am grateful for it after the ice, and then I notice the quiet, and the quiet is wrong. I am a clerk — I know it from the ink on the fingers and the way my hand has already reached for a brush — a clerk of the court, in a plain provincial hall in a town that was never meant to hold a court, and I am copying out a proclamation, and the proclamation says that the dynasty continues and that Heaven's Mandate rests, unbroken, on a new emperor. And there is no music. That is the wrongness. A Song court is a place of gong and bell and the zither of the scholar-court and here there is none of it, only the scratch of my own brush, because the musicians are all on the ice, in a column, going north. I am inaugurating a dynasty in a silence, and the silence is made of the people who should be playing. The senior official — there are only a handful of them, grey and hollowed-out, men who have ridden here from a fallen world — stands and reads the case for it aloud, and it is a strange case, because it is a case for a thing every man in the room needs to be true and privately cannot be sure of.

An_official: The two Sons of Heaven are taken, but the line is not broken while one of the blood remains. Heaven does not leave all under Heaven without a father. Therefore the Prince of Kang, ninth son of the Retired Emperor, ascends, and the Great Song continues, unbroken, this day.

Bram: And here is the new emperor, and it is him — the boy from the Jin camp, older now by a year and a hardness, the same evenness, the same watching. He reads the proclamation I have copied, and he does not change his face, and I have the strange thought that this is a man who has never once, in his life, let anyone see the inside of him, and that this is exactly why he is alive to be crowned while his brother is not. And there is a thing in the room that nobody says, and I, the clerk, hear it in the shape of the silence around it. His father is alive. His elder brother is alive. Both of them are emperors — real ones, the last ones — and both of them are in chains a thousand miles north, and every man in this room knows that the day either of them comes home, this new emperor is no longer an emperor. His legitimacy, the thing I am copying…