Empress (36 page)

News of my lover reached me: The master monk was sowing terror in Luoyang. His disciples trawled the streets all day picking fights. They broke down the doors of foreign temples and destroyed their unfamiliar idols. For Buddha’s anniversary celebrations, the monk secretly arranged to have a pond dug out in front of his monastery. He stood up on a stage in public and cut his own thigh, then he unveiled the huge hole filled with the blood of an ox he had had slaughtered the day before. Claiming that it was his own blood, he said he would commission a divine portrait of me in this crimson paint.

Word of his clashes echoed through the Court. Some said he had gone mad; others called for him to be punished. His cries of despair tore me apart, but I brushed aside my own weakness by asking the judges to disarm his monastery. Delighted to be free to attack the imperial favorite, the Court raised an army and surrounded the estate. The monks were surprised and surrendered immediately. They were chained, thrown into prison, and then exiled. After a brief morning in custody, Scribe of Loyalty received my edict granting him grace and was freed from prison. He headed for the Palace and asked to speak with me, but I refused.

One night two months later, I woke with a start. There was an acrid smell in my pavilion. I asked for the door to be opened: Outside the sky was lit up like a brazier and seemed to be rippling. A column of smoke rose up from the Temple of Ten Thousand Elements where clusters of giant flames were blooming like monstrous flowers and spitting out showers of sparks.

Gentleness ran to me in tears. “Majesty, it’s the temple. Heaven is angry!”

My eunuchs arrived with a litter. They wanted to take me to a palace beside the river, but I refused to move.

Swarms of birds wheeled in the darkness screeching in fear. In the courtyard outside women fell to their knees, joined their hands and recited prayers. The fires rose up and dropped back down in time to their chanting. I was overwhelmed by a dark premonition and stood rooted to the spot. The macabre dance of the flames fell on my retinas, beneath the vault of my head, within my bleeding soul.

My ministers were silent during the morning salutation the following day. They feared my rage, but what they feared most was that the blaze might have been a warning from Heaven, a harbinger of imminent catastrophe. To calm the mood of anxiety spreading through the Empire, I decided to sacrifice myself. I published an imperial edict in which I asked my people and officials to lay the blame on me. Libations were made in the Eternal Temple. Taking the Ancestors as my witnesses, I prayed that the punishment of the gods might be visited on me alone.

I decided to have the Temple of Ten Thousand Elements rebuilt, and Scribe of Loyalty was appointed to oversee the work. But the master monk seemed to take a long time to come and thank me for this appointment. Gripped with indescribable anguish, I cancelled my evening ride and waited for him. A few days later, I was told that a beggar child claimed to have a message for me from Scribe of Loyalty. I received him. The boy was so awestruck that he shook from head to toe and could not answer my questions. I nevertheless managed to tear a crumpled letter from his hand. The paper seemed unbearably fine to me. My heart felt heavy in my breast, and my body froze under the effects of an unspeakable fear. I took a long time unfolding that piece of rice paper. My lover’s terrible handwriting leapt off the page at me: “Heavenlight, you shall never grow old. Tonight I shall be your sacrifice to Heaven.”

Near the Southern Gate of the Forbidden City, tens of thousands of workmen were toiling to evacuate melted bronze statues, charred wood, and ashes that were still glowing hot. One official reading through the Sacred Writings found a verse which said that the bodhisattva Maitreya had become Buddha of the Future after sacrificing himself by fire. This reading triggered a new religious fervor and restored hope among the people.

The world was borne on a wave of renewed enthusiasm that I pretended to share. As I watched the new temple reaching toward the skies, taller and more sumptuous than its predecessor, I saw Little Treasure’s smile, red on white. I sometimes dreamed of him, this man whose imposing statue was now silhouetted against the sky. With his phallus in my belly, he would lean over me and say, “Heavenlight, you misunderstood me.”

I had not realized that he loved me. I had thought he was acting out of self-interested ambition. I had been afraid he would rob me of my throne.

I had destroyed my own immortal remedy.

Had I become a senile tyrant?

FOR MY BIRTHDAY I ordered that feasts be offered to the people in every town for a period of nine days. Within the Palace I summoned only members of my family and a few favorite ministers to a banquet set up in the Pavilion of Flying Snow.

That evening I missed Scribe of Loyalty’s voice. The night had not come yet, and snowflakes fell against the window, gray forms wriggling down on a translucent screen. I sat with pride in the heart of the palace, with my back to the north, looking southward. Serving women stood behind me holding round or square fans on long handles, symbols of my imperial splendor; Gentleness and my Court ladies brought ink, paper, flowers, incense, handkerchiefs, and vases. They were all dressed as men. My son and his twenty children were lined up on my right, on the eastern side. His large family still seemed tiny compared to my thirteen nephews and the spreading mass of scores of great nephews and great nieces in the opposite wing. Further away from me, closer to the door, I had put my relations from my mother’s family and the ministers, indistinct silhouettes merging in the candlelight.

I had had the year of my birth erased from every register in the Forbidden City: No one knew how old I was, but this was a bitter secret that filled me with piercing melancholy. When the Empire paid homage to my eternal youth, I pretended I too believed in it.

The Emperor of China had just turned seventy, a figure that terrified me. The Ancients said that, at the age of seventy, certainty opens the door to wisdom. Yet, on that evening, watching the sun set and the light fade, my doubts flooded in with the darkness.

My dynasty still did not have a legitimate heir. I was torn between a son who bore the blood of the overthrown dynasty and a nephew descended from a brother I had loathed. My gaze came to rest on Miracle to my right. Music meant nothing to him, and here, at this jubilant gathering, he drank incessantly and concentrated on his food. His drawn features afforded a glimpse of the weariness and boredom in his soul. Since he had reached adulthood, I had never seen him smile or express anger. Miracle was an aesthete with no ideals. Life flowed through his body like an unruffled river. He never made any decisions, never voiced an opinion. He was shut away in his own world pervaded by the purity of calligraphy and the voluptuous delights offered by his concubines, and he bowed to every current. Recently yet another group of conspirators had made use of his ambiguous status. When they were arrested by Lai Jun Chen, they claimed that Miracle had given them orders to reinstate the Tang dynasty. The prosecutor urged me to punish the unworthy prince, but I was satisfied with merely moving him to a guarded residence. I really could not exile the last of my four sons!

I caught the eye of his wife, Lady Liu, who had been Empress for a few years. I had never liked her round face with its thin lips. I stared at her. Her gaze wavered, and she looked away.

The two county princes, Happy Success and Prosperous Inheritance, rose to their feet behind her and threw themselves at my feet. They asked for my permission to dance. How old were these boys? I did not know. With their crimson lips and pink cheeks, they had the proud bearing of childrenof highbirth.Ontheir invitation,the little princesses stepped forward, bowed to me, and began to play various musical instruments. The boys imitated adults’ solemn movements and swirled their sleeves, singing: “Ten thousand springs for the Sacred Emperor, the ownership of ten thousand kingdoms.”

They twirled with their arms in the air like butterflies struggling in a rainstorm. These innocent creatures could not know that they would be struck down by misfortune. Before the banquet, a serving woman had come to denounce their mothers to me. Lady Liu and the Favorite Duo had set up an occult altar in a secret alcove within their palace. With their evil incantations, they had called forth the souls of my two rivals, the deposed Empress Wang and the disgraced concubine Xiao, and had ordered them to destroy me. Anyone who practiced sorcery was condemned to death by law, but I would not give Lai Jun Chen the pleasure of spreading a family scandal. That evening, neither Lady Liu nor the Favorite Duo, who was sitting in the shadows, would return home. My eunuchs had received orders to keep them back at the end of the meal. They would help them to commit suicide.

I could almost hear the orphans weeping, but I felt no pity. The following day an imperial decree would order my grandsons to abandon their residences and come to live in an enclosed wing of my palace. By holding his heirs hostage, I would find it easier to watch over Miracle, whom I could not punish.

The princes stepped back, and my nephew Piety came forward. He prostrated himself energetically and called loudly for me to have ten thousand years of good health. He had barely returned to his seat when the musicians began to play the
Melody of Long Life.
The doors of the Palace were drawn open, and one hundred dancing girls streamed onto the vermillion carpet of silk and wool threaded with gold. They wore black scholars’ caps, mauve tunics lined with yellow, emerald colored belts, and gray trains, and they performed a dance devised for my birthday by Piety.

My eldest nephew sat in the half light smiling and clapping in time to the music. He was now over fifty and had a curly beard, thick eyebrows, a hooked nose, and eyes that blazed with ambition-a curious mixture of features inherited from my Father and the latter’s first wife who had some Tatar blood. Everything about my son Miracle and my nephew Piety was different. The first, an imperial prince, had grown up surrounded by silk and velvet; the second, son of my commoner brother who had been scorned and exiled, had lived in contempt and poverty. Miracle had been given the title of king when he was four years old; Piety had become king when he was fifty. Miracle, the fervent Buddhist, refused to kill game; Piety, the cannibal, beheaded his enemies without a moment’s hesitation. Miracle, the poet, felt only distaste for command; Piety, the banished, longed for revenge.

My nephews’ rise had shadowed my sons’ fall. Ever since Splendor’s death, Wisdom’s suicide, and Future’s exile, Piety-now head of the Wu clan-had adapted to his good fortune and done everything he could to improve his position. He may have looked coarse, but he did understand the subtleties of human relations. He had defended my legitimacy, he had supported the magistrates in their persecution of the conspirators, and he had organized the personality cult surrounding me. When my own sons had tried to revolt against my authority, he had urged officials to sign the petition calling for my accession. It was also him, with his feverish imagination, who had invented all the emphatic titles that the Court was so eager to give me.

The blood of a wood merchant flowed in our veins. Piety, who was not unlike me, had inherited from Father an infallible calculating mind. The very day after my coronation, he had set to work on having himself recognized as heir to the throne. The fact that my sons were descended from the overthrown household did, indeed, throw some doubt over the legitimacy of my reign. If Miracle came to the throne, he would reinstate his father’s dynasty. If Piety, my nephew, were appointed as successor, he would more likely ensure the eternal sovereignty of our Wu clan.

Opinion was divided in Court. Some of the ministers saw my reign as a glorious extension of my husband’s; these were men who consented to grant me their loyalty so long as my son Miracle continued to represent a moral guarantee for the future. But there were countless young officials united behind Piety and my nephews, determined to replace the former dynasty’s dignitaries. They called for a break with the past and insisted we have a radical and bloody revolution.

That evening, once again, I looked back and forth between my son and my nephew. I had no strong ties of affection with either of them. Both were yoked to me by blood. I was hurt by Miracle’s indifference and put on my guard by Piety’s ardor. If Miracle were Emperor after my death, he would probably remember the mother who had brought him into the world whereas, if Piety were sovereign, he would surely be eager to honor his father, the brother I loathed, and his mother, the sister-in-law I despised. Even if I had forgiven the Wu clan for humiliating my mother and assassinating Little Sister, my nephews would always remember the period of exile that had robbed them of their youth. Even though I had brought our ancestors into the Eternal Temple, even though I had handed out provincial kingdoms to my nephews and the seals of county princes to their sons, this generosity was only a display of reconciliation. The clan had been both my torturer and my victim. The magnificence of the present could not erase the past, the Wu village with its small dark rooms. There was only a self-interested kind of solidarity between my nephews and myself. They gave me political leverage, and I held their future in my hands.

GENTLENESS WOKE ME from my reverie. The music was growing louder, bonze bells were ringing, and thousands of birds were singing. The dancing girls knelt on the ground and then flipped over backward, their faces disappearing in a ripple of sleeves. A giant peony opened up one petal at a time, and in the heart of this great flower, I read the characters, “Ten thousand years to the Sacred Emperor.” I ordered for a glass of wine to be taken to Piety to congratulate him for his creation. Proud and gratified, he prostrated himself toward me and downed the entire glass. Miracle sat facing him, his bored expression unchanged.

Not far from him, Spirit, my eldest brother’s son, suppressed a grimace and forced himself to smile at his cousin.