[h1]Xinjian[/h1]
[h2]Somewhere on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert[/h2]

	A brisk wind blew across the court yard. On a harsh day,captured by the walls it'd turn back and fold over onto itself. On these days it would maul a man from the front and back. It could wrap up an entire well-fitted man and plunge him into a numbing abyss. His skin would turn ghastly white. All feeling would evaporate and stepping back inside he'd feel in discomfort as his pores lit up with a precise hot pain.

	It was cold again, but not insufferable in the exercise yard. On some far side a large body of prisoners dressed in gray practiced Tai Chi. On another side some cloistered together in a dense quiet gathering. A weary bespectacled man stood in the middle, starring up into the clear pale-blue sky. His arms held crossing his chest and finger-less gloves tucked under his arm pits. He had lost track of the days, but he was sure it was sometime in early or mid spring.

	He was an aging man, middle aged. He had turned 54 this passed February. Related to the Jurchin tribes of north-eastern China his face defined by a flat nose and bulbous lips. His once fine black hair was thinning and graying He had the composure of a man who had surrendered to his circumstances. Though he slouched under the oppressive weight of his world he kept his shoulders straight in the confidence he was not forgotten in the world. While the outside had forgot him, he was remembered as he was in finer times inside the prison walls.

	A reverential distance held between he and the other prisoners. While they had scattered backgrounds from before the civil war the respect and admiration for one of a rare family of livings relics held their quiet tacit respect. It was not out of fear for him that when they came out to the yard they kept their distance, they simply respected his space. They knew what this meant to him. It was a last fragment of an ancient ritual kept for him as a last gift.

	His confinement to this prison some five years ago, but he had been incarcerated for the better part of seventeen years. From behind bars he watched the closing of the Revolution. In the old mountain cell he watched foreign prisoners of war be released to their country of origin or their foreign-bound families as part of a peace process. Each passing moment in those days was spent in the tense seas of hope that he would follow. But he had not been part of such a process. Those who had been his benefactors had ignored him. He had hoped in those early days he would be released in the next few years. That perhaps his prison wardens would feel secure as his legacy was slowly erased, or that the influence of his family subsumed by the new power structure. This hope was all he had left in time. But it never came to fruition

	He was not kept in his cage all the time. From time to time like a tame song bird he was let out and brought between all the courts of power and sung before them. They asked for the Japanese, and he told them all about the Japanese. He spilled and confessed all he could then they put him back. Some time later they would bring him out again and ask him to sing again, and he'd sing of the Japanese again. For hours he'd stand before the masses of heads of national state and give testimony on all the Japanese had done to the country. First what he knew, then simply confirming what they told him had happened. He learned quick, knew exactly what the many men wanted to hear.

	It became regular to go before them and speak. It was like clockwork. Every month or every other month he would stand to open questioning by a collective so immense that after he would muse to himself, “My, so powerless these individuals.”

	Congress baffled him.

	And they'd return him his cell. The wardens would give him a few books, and feed him two or three small meals of rice a day. As the testimonies fell by the way-side and his days began to blur the books he was given became more important. This is when he began practicing and studying religion more severely than he had in the past. It started first as a ritual to pass the days away. A regular schedule with regular duties made the long, immortal sentence more tolerable.

	Over time he wanted more books, new material to read and study. He surprised himself when he asked a guard for some books on the subject of faith and surprised when weeks later he had his book. He had not specified which and looked down to find they had passed him a copy of the Tao Te Ching. Apparently, he had not specified. He imagined some great mass of men somewhere arguing which book to let the man read to keep him happy. This short piece of scripture was what they could come to agree to in the end. The conclusion seemed illogical, but so was the situation: to ask a communist for religion.

	He read the Tao Te Ching though, and when he finished and went to exchange it with the guards he had asked more specifically, “May I read some of the Buddhist Sutras?”

	The guard had answered that he would look into it, and a month passed before he had results. An old of collection of sutras had been found with a cracked spine and he set to read them. Though he did not complete the miscellaneous collection before turning it back it; thinking he would explore his hypothesis further. “May I read the Quran?” he asked on returning of the book.

	The guard had no response to this request, and took the book and grumbled at him. He took it that he would. But as weeks turned to a month and he went a month in a half without a book he believed that perhaps he found the end of the road. By the second month he had been given a Hui version of the Quran, but he had lost interest in the thought and simply wanted the experiment to continue. He went through some of the suras until he could exchange his book in for a new one and never got more than a quarter of the way through.

	This time he asked for the Bible and was flatly denied. He was stunned. He changed course and asked for Confucian commentaries but this too was denied. He mumbled, and the guard impatient changed out the Quran with an on-hand copy of a selection of Hou Tsai Tang's essays.

	He slowly read through these over the course of the next several months, mostly keeping it tucked under the pillow of his cot in his cell. But the book did little but remind him of the world that was lost to him when the Civil War. This caused him to meditate on recent history.

	Before, he could tell the sway of leadership in China based on the general who walked into his palace proclaiming themselves the head of state of China. The situation was more frequent than should be expected even with elections being the legal path to power. But as it so happened the nascent Republic was conducted more through coup and warlordism, and elections were ignored and trivial. Through his young life he could mark the peaks and valleys of modernism through whoever came before him and told him. That was up until he was thrown out, and then he was in the command of the Japanese. They returned him some power, only for it to be taken permanently from him by Hou. And since then he had no palace, he had no one to come before him announcing the ebs and flows of politics. He was shut off from the wider world and forced into a hermitage.

	Aisin-Gioro Puyi had been cut off from history, and the world was moving on without him. The bitterness of that revelation had only lasted for so long before it turned into final resignation. He had a powerful life, a privileged child hood. Perhaps more than any man in Asia deserved, and it was all he could ask for now. Some prisoners had asked him why he did not call for a revolt, he had the respect. They might even take the prison. “What would be the use?” he'd answer them. There was nothing more to say on the topic after.

	“Your honor.” a voice said alongside the former Emperor, and Puyi turned to a man alongside him. He was shorter and darker skinned, his shoulders slouched as he starred up into the sky alongside Puyi with the sort of resigned expression many prisoners here held. They were not beaten - at least not that Puyi knew - but simple left to wait out the currents of time and watch the world move on so far ahead of them they no longer recognized the river that it was from the distant rock that were placed.

	“Naoko.” Puyi responded. Naoko was a pilot that had been shot down and captured at the end of the war. He may have been presumed dead, Japan never sought to reclaim him. And new China was unwilling to set him free. So he was retained, an even more forgotten relic than Puyi was.

	“Who is winning the race?” the Japanese pilot asked, referring to the tussling hawks flying somewhere beyond the prison walls. They were clearly pursuing a smaller bird through the desert skies.

	“I would say it is perhaps Golden Lily.” Puyi smiled and nodded. No normal man would have figured out which bird was which, but somehow the two of them had figured it out. As they might both say: one was imperceptibly smaller than the other, except to the trained eye. Naoko was a natural at this, having piloted in the war and had trained Puyi in this obscure skill.

	“It is the wing injury she sustained which is holding back the Tiger.” Naoko announced.

	Puyi nodded. He had much the same analysis as his friend. The two stood in the silence, interrupted by only the heavy breaths of distant prisoners practicing Tai Chi in a far corner of the prison yard.

	The larger hawk caught the smaller bird and an aerial skirmish ensued before the other peeled away. The two men let out a relieved sigh and turned from the games.

	“Have you ever thought about the outside?” Puyi asked, turning to walk across the yard.

	“I have tried, and I only see home as it was when I left it.” Naoko said, “I can not imagine what Japan is like now. When I left my youngest was barely on his own two feet. He would be nearly a man by now.”

	Puyi nodded, “I never managed children.” he said, “Or rather...” he stopped, letting the words hang.

	“Or rather, what?” Naoko asked.

	“It's nothing.” he answered him, “All times well passed.”

	Naoko nodded, and changed the subject, “You've been out plenty though in the years following your people's revolution.”

	“I have.”

	“What's changed? What do you think has changed?”

	Puyi shrugged, “I saw it all through the small windows of armored cars and dark basements. They never did let me see much. But between what little I saw I'd say they rebuilt quick and capable after the war. I must admire them for this, they worked faster than any past emperor ever has. The Communists now have the Mandate of Heaven.” as hesitant as Puyi was in admitting that, deep down he knew it was true. Below the outer conflict for his heart and mind about the Communists he believed he had to humble himself before their capabilities and admit they had done much.

	“I wonder if they will ever let me out if my homeland slips into their revolution.” Naoko admitted, “But with each passing day I doubt it more. Even if Japan were to overthrow the holy Emperor would I be an enemy still? Would I still have a reason to live.”

	“You are already dead.” Puyi pointedly informed him.

	“But even dead how can I feel so alive still? I awake every morning into a dreary cell, but my heart still beats and I still draw breath. I am not in the next world, I know I am still a man among men. So how can I be alive?”

	“Yet, your self from the past is dead. You are no longer a warrior.” Puyi took on the tone to guide the Japanese pilot along. He had stricken two things from his life and he was leaving it up to him to see what he meant, to see if he could clue into what he had come to realize in time. What the anger and surrender had burned from Puyi.

	But Naoko did not answer. The two sauntered across the prison yard to the solid doors of the cell block itself. A pair of armed guards stood alongside the entrance shooting them with heavy cold expressions. When finally Puyi realized Naoko would probably never answer he gave up waiting and the two stepped inside to where it was at least slightly warmer.