Spring of Favor

So the years flowed past like a river in spring. Lu Sheng governed well, or so it pleased men to say. He opened canals in the south, he pacified restless border tribes, he returned to the capital with a name that men spoke of with respect and a little envy.

His lady Cui bore him five sons. As each was born, the household grew louder and brighter. Boys crawled across the lacquered floors, and Lu Sheng would lift them, astonished at how quickly they outgrew their swaddling and their tears.

At court, his favor was like a sun that seemed, for a long season, never to set. The emperor granted him a hall of audience; he himself chose the officials who would serve under him. Petitions flowed to his desk like water, and he ruled upon them with a calm that men called wisdom.

Yet the higher he climbed, the thinner the air grew. There were other ministers, younger and hungrier, who watched him from across the table at banquets and smiled with eyes that did not smile. Lu Sheng felt their regard as one feels the first chill of autumn on the neck.

He remembered, sometimes, the young traveler who had sighed by the roadside, and he smiled to think how far that man had come. He drank wine with old friends and told them his story, and they laughed and called him fortunate. He believed them.

His sons grew into young men of ambition. They were presented at court, they took their own wives, they asked their father for estates and appointments. He gave them all he had, and still, in their eyes, he thought he saw the same hunger he had once carried himself.

The gardens he had planted came into their full glory. The peonies he had ordered from the south bloomed in impossible crimson; the koi he had set in the pond grew fat and golden. He would walk among them at dusk, a robe draped over his shoulders, and feel that he had built something that would outlast him.

It was in the autumn of his forty-eighth year that the first shadow fell. A memorial reached the throne, unsigned by any honest hand, accusing him of secret dealings with the border generals. The emperor, who had loved him the week before, read it in silence and did not look up.

Lu Sheng was dismissed from office before the week was out. His enemies did not shout; they were far too clever for shouting. They simply allowed the court to forget him, and the forgetting was swifter than any condemnation.

That night he sat alone in a room that suddenly felt too large, and for the first time in many years he thought of the old Taoist, and the cool porcelain pillow, and the small bright doorways that had first opened for him. He could not remember the old man's face.

Somewhere far below the surface of all this splendor, the millet had continued to simmer, and Lu Sheng had not once lifted his head to smell it.