The Long Exile

They sent him south, to a wet and mountainous place where the rain fell without end and the rice grew knee-deep in muddy fields. Lu Sheng went in a common cart, with no guard of honor, and the road that had once borne him in triumph now carried him out in disgrace.

He took his wife with him, and she did not complain. She had been a girl of the Cui clan, brought up in halls; now she mended his robes with her own hands and boiled the herbs that cured the fever of that place. He watched her do it, and understood, for the first time, how little of his greatness had ever been hers.

Years passed. The rivers flooded, and he, who had once governed provinces, was set to mending dikes with his own hands. His back ached; his hands grew rough. He learned the names of birds he had never heard of, and of herbs that healed, and of the slow, stubborn patience of people who had never expected anything from the court.

His sons wrote to him less and less. The eldest, whom he had loved best, married into a family that had no wish to be known as the sons of a disgraced man. The letters came once a season, then once a year, and then, one winter, not at all.

He grew old in that wet place. His hair, which had once been thick and black, thinned and turned. He knelt less easily; his eyes, keen as a boy's when he had first taken his degree, now needed the light of a candle to read the letters that no longer came.

And then, when he had almost forgotten what the capital looked like, a rider came up the muddy track with an edict. The old emperor was dead. The new throne had looked back over the years, and it had decided that the chancellor Lu Sheng had been wronged. He was recalled. He was restored. He was, once more, to be great.

He rode north through the passes, and the country changed with him. The mountains fell away; the plains opened; the capital rose from the dust of the road, its roofs the color of rusted gold. Men came out to meet him, bowing, and he saw that they were younger than he remembered, and that he was older than he had believed.

They gave him back his halls and his gardens. The peonies were gone — the gardeners had cut them down in his absence — but the koi were still there, or their descendants, fat and golden in the re-stocked pond. His sons returned to him, cheerful and attentive, and he received them as though they had never been away.

He was too old now for envy, and too tired for fear. He sat in the hall of audience and listened to petitions he no longer cared to rule upon. The honors rained down upon him; his title was lengthened until it filled a whole sheet of paper. He accepted them all, and felt nothing.

His strength left him quickly, as a river sinks in a dry summer. He took to his bed. Physicians came and went, their prescriptions changing like the weather. His wife sat by him, holding his hand, and he thought how she had been beautiful once, and how she was beautiful still, in the way of a candle near its end.

When he knew he would not rise again, he asked for a brush and paper. He wrote, with a hand that trembled, the story of his life: the road, the inn, the old man, the pillow. But the words would not come right. He seemed to be writing about another man.

And so, in the fullness of years, surrounded by all he had once desired, Lu Sheng closed his eyes. The dream, which had held him for so long, loosed its hold.