In the Tortoise-and-Crane Garden at the Pan residence, the Zhishui poetry gathering had already reached its height.
The music struck up; slips of poem-paper passed from hand to hand, and the singing girls' light, clear voices chanted the best verses of the evening. The atmosphere here was a shade more solemn than at the Puyuan gathering — there were more heavyweights present — but the various performances still kept the mood lively without losing its antique refinement.
The Tortoise-and-Crane Garden was a finely laid-out, deeply old-fashioned garden of rockeries and water channels, corridors and courtyards, pavilions and terraces.
Painted lanterns, each bearing a riddle, had been set out all through it, and the company had spread their banquet tables among the scenery: the women on one side, the scholars on another, and the host together with the learned seniors of name and standing on a third.
No stage had been built, yet the song-and-dance turns that appeared here and there among the garden walks were utterly natural and left a deep impression; most of those who came to this gathering were famous top-billing performers, and clearly they had put a good deal of thought into it.
Naturally the gathering had its lantern riddles, its performances, its moon-viewing and the like, and no lack of addresses by great scholars. Pan Guangyan, as host, gave one, and at the very start even the prefect of Jiangning had come by and said a few words about how they were "the pillar talents of the realm."
That alone tells you the standing of the Zhishui poetry gathering. Of course, with a whole night of revelry ahead, the prefect was required by custom to sit watch at the yamen in case something went wrong in the city, so he could not stay long and left in a hurry.
When the talents at the gathering had a good piece, they usually rose and appraised it with the company; at intervals someone would send up several poems of sufficient quality, the slips would circulate from hand to hand, and if a poem was truly fine — or if someone took a different view of it — someone would rise to recite it and debate it with the rest. Pan Guangyan and the others would offer their judgments, naturally.
Old Qin sat to one side of the banquet, and beside him was Kang Xian, still dressed in quite lordly splendor — the very Old Kang who traded barbs with Ning Yi. His courtesy name was Mingyun, and so many people called him Minggong.
His background was a complicated one, and he was in no want of wealth, but even judging him purely on his attainments in letters and Confucian learning, he deserved the company's respectful "Minggong"; two or three of the several dozen talents present had studied under him and called him teacher.
Old Kang, though, was a severe man by nature, and everyone stood a little in awe of him. Tonight, however, he had not criticized anybody — in fact he was pleased with the quality of this Zhishui gathering.
For now he was chatting and laughing quietly with Old Qin off to one side. By this hour, as a rule, the genuinely fine poems had all come out, and the two of them were discussing them.
"At the autumn equinox it halts one night; / the dark moon-orb shines brightest then. / How good that it is born from the grey sea, / slowly watched as it crosses the deep dark. / The layered heavens seem washed of color; / ten thousand strange shapes fancy they hide their forms. / No other evening is like this one; / the dawn rooster must not be heard…"
Old Qin, Li Pin's 'Facing the Moon at Mid-Autumn' from the Lichuan gathering — the man simply overflows with talent. They say letters have no first place, but by my lights that poem will be the one to walk off with tonight's honors.
"Ghosts and monsters both — the man has taken a slantwise stroke at it, and yet it leaves a grand impression; it stirs the thoughts without the least whiff of the weird. There is a Tang aftertaste in this poem. Li Pin — Li Dexin — has truly taken his place among the masters. But Minggong, you have always held yourself to a strict standard — Zhishui has a few fine poems tonight as well, you know. Here, this one, for instance."
Smiling, Old Qin picked one up and read: "Blue sky like water, / the Silver River clear and shallow, / the golden ripples translucent. / One would think Heng'e has taken her jeweled mirror / and hung it high in the palaces of Guanghan." The opening question looked simple enough.
Letters flourished in this age, and poets inevitably chased after intricacy, exhausting every variation; some critics even argued that in a poem on the moon, the finest achievement was to keep the word "moon" from appearing at all.
Yet this ci opened with just such a question — when did the bright moon first appear? — and with the very next line the mood had already opened out of itself; by the time it reached the palaces of heaven, the conception had flowed on, natural and seamless, from a murmuring brook into high mountains and rushing water; and then the lines "I would ride the wind and return…" turned the whole upper stanza into the sweep of the Great River pouring into the sea, and yet kept it so ethereal, without a breath of the smoke and fire of the mortal world.
A few short lines, and one's heart was carried off into the clear air of an immortal palace.
In the several hundred years of poetry since the Tang, there had been many works of profound and grand conception; but by this time most verse had gone down the road of exhausting craft and multiplying variation. There were masters who could walk it back to plainness, of course — simple or ornate, each had its own strengths.
Yet very few reached the conception before them now: a conception that expanded with every turn of the verse and was yet handled with such ease, so utterly natural, that it resembled the soaring, unbridled, untrammeled yet always on-subject style of the writers of the early Tang at its height.
In the upper stanza alone, the masterly air of this Shui Diao Ge Tou was fully displayed. Pan Guangyan paused, raised his head to look at the crowd of talents below, and only then read out the second half.
"It rounds the red pavilion, / dips low through the latticed window, / shines on the sleepless. / It should bear no grudge — / why then is it always full when people part? / … People have their sorrow and joy, their parting and meeting; / the moon has its dimming and brightening, its waxing and waning. / Nothing in this has ever been perfect. / … May we live long, / and share the same moonlight a thousand li apart."
"…May we live long, and share the same moonlight a thousand li apart."
The lines were smooth on the tongue; when he had finished, Pan Guangyan murmured the last line over again, looked at the crowd, and nodded slightly again and again, and only after a long while let out a sigh: "…What a ci."
By then some in the garden were exchanging glances, some murmuring the lines to themselves; it was strangely quiet. Any other verse would have been another matter, but this Shui Diao Ge Tou truly had a charm that would not fade in a thousand years.
In the eyes of poets and ci-writers — later ages would even give it the verdict "For Mid-Autumn ci, from the moment the Shui Diao Ge Tou appeared, all other ci were void" — and everyone seated here lived by this craft, having studied poetry for decades, some of them for a lifetime; what they felt now, all at once, was perhaps something like that same force.
It was in just such an atmosphere that Old Kang reached over and took the slip. He read it through once, nodding slowly. A moment later, looking at it again, he seemed to notice something; he blinked in puzzlement and blurted, "Hm?" Then he frowned, turning something over in his mind, his face a picture. Noticing this, Old Qin, who was still savoring the lines, turned his head.
"What is it?"
"Heh… take a look for yourself."
He passed the slip over. Old Qin took it, narrowed his eyes, and read it character by character, from "When did the bright moon first appear" all the way to "a thousand li apart we share the same moonlight," and found nothing amiss; it really was a fine ci. He let out a breath, shook his head gently, then narrowed his eyes again and paused.
After the verses there were naturally a few more characters, but everyone was still feeling out the lines, and Pan Guangyan had not yet troubled to look at them.
In the lower left corner of the slip was a signature, seven characters, plain as day.
The Su residence.
Ning Yi.
Ning Liheng.
Old Qin was taken aback for a moment. Then he glanced at Old Kang, and after a while a silent laugh broke out of him.
"Ha…"
Up in the little tower of the Su residence, Ning Yi got up for a drink of water and suddenly let out a great sneeze, nearly choking on it. Groggy, he crawled back under the covers and pulled the quilt tight.
Ugh, my cold isn't getting worse again, is it…