I bought this a little earlier than I wanted after reading Under Heaven due to Amazon’s tricksy 1-Click system but never mind, I would have bought it eventually anyway. This book is set in the same fictionalized version of China as the first one but several hundred years later. The characters from the first book have passed into legend and though the empire of Kitai persists, it is now much weaker as strong generals are looked on with suspicion and so Kitai is forced to treat with the northern barbarian tribes as equals.

Ren Daiyan is the son of a lowly village clerk and teaches himself the sword and the bow in the hopes of one day helping to reclaim Kitai’s past glory. One day he is assigned to guard a travelling magistrate despite being too young for the duty. They are waylaid by bandits and Daiyan summarily dispatches them with his bow. Realizing that his skill at combat is truly superior and that he has no future in a Kitai that hamstrings its own warriors, he walks off into the bush to be a bandit himself. Meanwhile Lin Shan is the daughter of a court gentleman who chooses to educate her as if she were a son. As a result, she is a poet and is treated as an equal by the learned men of the era even though that is somewhat improper. Eventually she comes to the attention of Emperor Wenzong himself, who is a calligrapher and painter of great skill. I won’t try to summarize more than this suffice to say that their paths eventually cross when Daiyan turns around to become a soldier and Lin Shan is a frequent guest of the emperor in his beloved garden.

This isn’t a short book but it covers such a long span of time across so many characters that it often feels like it’s not long enough. Even so it covers what ground it can by being very episodic, only describing the major formative events in the lives of the characters while months or years pass in between scenes. It works but I have to say that it ends up being too disjointed to feel much like a novel. I also came to dislike the literary device that is repeatedly invoked throughout the entire book: how fate is fickle and how momentous events in history can turn on tiny, seemingly insignificant events. The ‘for what of a nail’ sentiment might be appropriate but it seems a little obvious and the book belabors the point so much that it gets annoying.

These stylistic issues aside, I certainly enjoyed the writing and the plot. I love how Lin Shan is a protagonist with as much agency as Ren Daiyan even if the society of the era only allows her to do less with that agency. It helps too that I can actually recognize more of the real history behind these characters and storylines. Daiyan’s tattooed back makes him a dead-ringer for Yue Fei even to someone who knows as little Chinese history as I do and of course how could I fail to recognize stories from the Water Margin? I’ve never heard of Yue Fei being associated with the infamous Outlaws of the Marsh and indeed never realized until now that they must have been contemporary to each other but it’s a brilliant way of condensing the legends of the age. Reading this certainly inspired me to make an effort to understand the circumstances behind the loss of effectively half of China and the formation of the Southern Song dynasty. I mean I’ve always vaguely known about this but it took reading this book to really have those events come to life for me.

Given the shape of the events covered, you can expect that the most amazing exploits in here are Daiyan’s prowess in both personal combat and success as a general. But just as in the case of the previous book, I was more impressed by the political intrigues between the contenders for the post of Prime Minister in vying for the favor of the Emperor. The foresight of the nearly blind Hang Dejin is a worthy Xanatos Gambit even as his policies advocating for a peaceful coexistence with the barbarians is opposed to that of Daiyan. The military successes of the Altai, first by overthrowing the Xiaolu who are their feudal overlords and then walking all over Kitai itself is no less impressive but the book doesn’t really go into detail in describing how they do it. One problem here is that the Altai conquest of Kitai takes place way too quickly which the author does acknowledge in the ending notes. They basically blitzkrieg their way through northern Kitai, taking out armies and major cities in less than a year. This extreme speed and peril also greatly exaggerates how Daiyan is the sole Kitan general of any worth whatsoever. It’s not remotely realistic but I guess those are among the simplifications needed to keep this down to a single volume.

I do like the character of Lin Shan, especially as she grouses about how women in songs and poetry are always depicted pining for men on balconies and windows, yet finds herself doing the same for Daiyan. I also the appreciate cycle of how Kitai, having long disdained martial prowess and accordingly lost their military superiority, exults art and culture as proof of their superior civilization. But the emperor’s lavish garden is the perfect example of this indulgence brought to the extreme as the massive amount of resources it consumes drains the strength of the country and fuels widespread resentment. As Daiyan observes, the founder of every dynasty is invariably a great warrior yet the means by which he ascends to the throne causes him to be fearful of other warriors and so he later seeks to disempower them, and so the cycle repeats itself. I suppose it’s not a terribly original insight but it is put well here.

Unfortunately while I learned a lot from this book, possibly even more than I did from the first one, and Daiyan is certainly not the harem protagonist that Shen Tai seemed to be, I have to say that I enjoyed this less. The stories are so episodic and feels so disassociated that it’s hard to inhabit the mindset of the characters. It tries to cover too many characters over too long a span of time that it doesn’t feel much like a novel anymore. Combined with how the book keeps going on about destiny, Daiyan feels more like a figure of myth than a being of flesh and blood and towards the end his fate, and that of Kitai, seems inevitable. I still like this book a fair bit and I think I will check out author Guy Gavriel Kay’s other books in other historical settings but I think I’ll also have to be more choosy about which specific settings I’m interested in.