Imperial Woman (3 page)

A murmur fluttered over the group of waiting virgins. Someone had caught a whisper from the Audience Hall. The F’ei were already dismissed. Sakota had been chosen from among them to be the first Imperial concubine. The P’in were few in number. Another hour—

Before the hour was ended the Chief Eunuch returned. “It is now the time for the Kuei Jen,” he announced. “Arrange yourselves, young ladies. The Emperor grows weary.”

The virgins arranged themselves in procession and the tiring women put the last touches on hair and lips and eyebrows. Silence fell upon all and laughter ceased. One girl leaned fainting upon a serving woman, who pinched her arms and the lobes of her ears to restore her. Inside the Audience Hall, the Chief Eunuch was already calling their names and ages, and each must enter at the sound of her name and her age. One by one they passed before the Emperor and the Dowager Mother. But Yehonala, the last, drifted away from her place, as though forgetfully, to pet a small palace dog who had come running through an open door. The creature was a sleeve dog, one of those minute beasts that Court ladies keep half starved in puppyhood and dwarfed enough to hide within a wide embroidered sleeve. At the door the Chief Eunuch waited.

“Yehonala!” he called.

The tiring women had already scattered and she was left alone, playing with the dog. She had almost deceived herself that indeed she had forgotten where she was and why. She held back the dog’s long ears and laughed into the wrinkled face no larger than the palm of her own hand. She had heard of these little dogs that looked like lions, but no commoner was allowed to keep them, and she had never seen one until now.

“Yehonala!” An Teh-hai’s voice roared into her ears and she stood up quickly.

He rushed at her and seized her arm. “Have you forgotten ? Are you mad? The Emperor waits! He waits, I tell you—why, you deserve to die for this—”

She wrenched herself loose and he hurried to the door and shouted out her name again. “Yehonala, daughter of the Bannerman Chao, now deceased, niece of Muyanga, of Pewter Lane! Her age, seventeen years, three months and two days—”

She entered without noise or affectation, and walked slowly down the length of the immense hall, her long Manchu coat of rose-red satin touching the tip of her embroidered Manchu shoes, set high on white soles and center heels. Her narrow beautiful hands she held folded at her waist, and she did not turn her head toward the Throne as she passed slowly by.

“Let her pass again,” the Emperor said.

The Dowager Mother stared at Yehonala with unwilling admiration. “I warn you,” she said, “this girl has a fierce temper. I see it in her face. She is too strong for a woman.”

“She is beautiful,” the Emperor said.

Still Yehonala did not turn her head. The voices fell disembodied upon her ears.

“What does it matter if she has a temper?” the Emperor now inquired. “She can scarcely be angry with me.”

He had a youthful petulant voice, thin and boyish in its quality. His mother’s voice answering him was full and slow, wise with age.

“It is better not to choose a strong woman who is also beautiful,” she reasoned. “There is that other one, P’ou Yu, whom you have seen, in the class of P’in. A sensible face, good looks, but—”

“A coarse skin,” the Emperor said rebelliously. “Doubtless she had smallpox as a child. In spite of the powder on her face, I saw its marks.”

Yehonala was now directly in front of him. “Stay,” he commanded her. She stopped, her face and body in profile, her head lifted, her eyes gazing into distance as though her heart were somewhere else.

“Turn your face to me,” he commanded.

Slowly, as though indifferent, she obeyed. In decency, in modesty, in all that she had been taught, a virgin does not fix her eyes higher than a man’s breast. Upon the Emperor she should not look higher than his knees. But Yehonala looked full into his face and with such concentration that she saw the Emperor’s eyes, shallowly set beneath youthful scanty eyebrows, and through her own eyes she poured into his the power of her will. He sat immobile for a long instant. Then he spoke.

“This one I choose.”

“If you are chosen by the Son of Heaven,” her mother had said, “serve first his mother, the Dowager Mother. Let her believe that you think of her day and night. Learn what she enjoys, seek out her comfort, never try to escape her. She has not many years to live. There will be plenty of years left for you.”

Yehonala remembered these words. On that first night after she had been chosen she lay in her own small bedroom, within the three rooms given her to use. An old tiring woman was appointed by the Chief Eunuch to be her servant. Here she must live alone except when the Emperor sent for her. That might be often or never. Sometimes a concubine lived within the four walls of this imperial city, virgin until she died, forgotten by the Emperor unless she had means to bribe the eunuchs to mention her name before him. But she, Yehonala, would not be forgotten. When he was weary of Sakota, to whom indeed he owed a duty, he might, he must, think of her. Yet would he remember? He was accustomed to beauty, and even though their eyes had met, could she be sure that the Son of Heaven would remember?

She lay upon the brick bed, made soft by three mattresses, and considered. Day by day she must now plan her life and not one day could be wasted, else she might live solitary, a virgin forgotten. She must be clever, she must be careful, and the Imperial Mother must be her means. She would be useful to the Dowager Empress, affectionate, unfailing in small and constant attentions. And now beyond this she would ask to be taught by tutors. She knew already how to read and write, thanks to her uncle’s goodness, but her thirst for real learning was never satisfied. Books of history and poetry, music and painting, the arts of eye and ear, these she would ask to be taught. For the first time since she could remember she had time to possess for her own, leisure in which to train her mind. She would care for her body, too, eat the best meats, rub her hands soft with mutton fat, perfume herself with dried oranges and musk, bid her serving woman brush her hair twice daily after her bath. These she would do for her body, that the Emperor might be pleased. But her mind she would shape to please herself, and to please herself she would learn how to brush characters as scholars do and to paint landscapes as artists do, and she would read many books.

The satin of her bedquilt caught on the roughened skin of her hands and she thought, “I shall never wash clothes again, or fetch hot water, or grind meal. Is this not happiness?”

Two nights she had not slept. In the last night in their home, when she and Sakota had lain awake talking and dreaming and she comforting the gentle one, and again in the last night with the waiting virgins, who could sleep? But tonight all fears were over. She was chosen and here in these three rooms was her little home. They were small but luxurious, the walls hung with scrolls, the chair seats covered with red satin cushions, the tables made of blackwood and the beams overhead painted in bright design. The floors were smoothly tiled and the latticed windows opened into a court and upon a round pool where goldfish shone under the sun. Her woman servant slept on a bamboo couch outside her door. She had no one to fear.

No one? The narrow evil face of the young eunuch Li Lien-ying appeared suddenly against the darkness. Ah, the eunuchs, her wise mother had warned her of the eunuchs—

“They are neither men nor women. They destroy themselves as men before they are allowed to enter into the Forbidden City. Their maleness, stemmed and denied, turns evil in them. It becomes malice and bitterness and cruelty and all things vile. Avoid the eunuchs from the highest to the lowest. Pay them money when you must. Never let them see that you fear them.”

“I will not fear you,” she said to the dark face of Li Lien-ying.

And suddenly, because she was afraid, she thought of her kinsman, Jung Lu. She had not seen him since she entered the palace. Then, always bold, she had moved aside the curtain of her sedan chair an inch or two as it approached the great vermilion gates. Before them the imperial guardsmen stood in yellow tunics, their broad swords drawn and held upright before them. At the right, next to the central gate, Jung Lu stood tallest among them all. He gazed straight ahead into the swarming crowds of the street and not by the slightest sign did he let her know that to him one sedan was different from another. Nor could she make a sign. Half wounded, she had put him out of mind. No, and she would not think of him, even now. Neither she nor he could know when they might meet again. Within the walls of this Forbidden City a man and a woman might live out their lives and never meet.

Yet why had she thought of him suddenly when she remembered the dark face of the eunuch? She sighed and wept a few tears, surprised that she did, and she would not inquire into herself to know the cause of her tears. Then being young and very weary, she slept.

The vast old palace library was cool even in midsummer. At noon the doors were closed against the outdoor heat and the glittering sun shone dimly through the shell lattices. No sound disturbed the stillness except the low murmur of Yehonala’s voice as she read aloud to the aged eunuch who was her tutor.

She was reading from
The Book of Changes,
and absorbed in the cadences of its poetry, she did not notice that her tutor was silent too long. Then, glancing upward as she turned a page, she saw the old scholar asleep, his head sunk upon his breast, his fan slipping from the loosened fingers of his right hand. The corner of her mouth twitched in a half smile, and she read on steadily to herself. At her feet a little dog slept. It was her own, given her by the Imperial Keeper, when she sent her serving woman to beg for a pet to mend her loneliness.

Two months now she had been in the palace and she had received no summons from the Emperor. She had not seen her family, not even Sakota, nor had Jung Lu come near. Since she had not left the gates she had not passed him as he stood on duty. In this strange isolation she might have been unhappy except for her busy dreams of the days to come. Some day, some day, she might be Empress! And when she was Empress she would do as she liked. If she wished, she could summon her kinsman into her presence, for a purpose, any purpose, such as the bearing of a letter to her mother.

“I put this letter into your hands myself,” she would say, “and you are to bring back a letter from her in reply.”

And none but they two would know whether the letter was for her mother. But her dreams waited upon the Emperor and meanwhile she could only prepare herself. Here in the library she studied each day for five hours with her tutor, the eunuch who held the highest degrees of scholarship. In the years when he was still a man, he had been a famous writer of eight-legged essays and poems in the T’ang style. Then, because of his fame, he had been commanded to become a eunuch in order that he might teach the young prince, now the Emperor, and after him the ladies who were to become his concubines. Among these some would learn and some would not, and none, the old tutor declared, learned as Yehonala did. He boasted of her among the eunuchs and gave good reports of her to the Dowager Mother, so that one day, when Yehonala waited upon her, the Dowager Mother even commended her for industry.

“You do well to learn the books,” she said. “My son, the Emperor, wearies easily and when he is weak or restless you must be able to amuse him with poetry and with your painting.”

And Yehonala had inclined her head in obedience.

At this moment, while she mused upon a page, she felt a touch upon her shoulder, and turning her head she saw the end of a folded fan and a hand that she had come to know at sight, a large smooth powerful hand. It belonged to the young eunuch, Li Lien-ying. She was aware and had been aware for weeks that he was determined to be her servant. It was not his duty to be near her, he was only one among many of the lesser eunuchs, but he had become useful to her in many small ways. When she longed for fruits or sweets it was he who brought them to her and through him she heard the gossip of the many halls and passageways, the hundreds of courts of the Forbidden City. Gossip she must hear, for it was not enough for her to read books, she must know also every detail of intrigue and mishap and love within these walls. To know was to acquire power.

She lifted her head, her finger on her lips, her eyebrows raised in question. He motioned with his fan that she was to follow him into the pavilion outside the library. Silently, his cloth-soled shoes noiseless upon the tiles, he led the way and she followed until they were beyond danger of rousing the sleeping tutor. The little dog, waking, followed her without barking.

“I have news for you,” Li Lien-ying said. He towered above her, his shoulders immense, his head square and large, his features roughly shaped and coarse, a figure powerful and crude. She might have been afraid of him still except that now she allowed herself to be afraid of no one.

“What news?” she inquired.

“The young Empress has conceived!”

Sakota! She had not once seen her cousin since they entered the gates together. Sakota was Consort in her dead sister’s place, while she, Yehonala, was only a concubine. Sakota had been summoned to the Emperor’s bed, and she had fulfilled her duty. If Sakota bore a son, he would be heir to the Dragon Throne, and Sakota would be raised to the place of Empress Mother. And she, Yehonala, would still be only a concubine. For such small price would she have cast away her lover and her life? Her heart swelled and all but burst against her ribs.

“Is there proof of the conception?” she demanded.

“There is,” he replied. “Her waiting woman is in my pay. This month, for the second time, there was no show of blood.”

“Well?” she asked. Then her lifelong control took hold. No one could save her except herself. Upon herself alone she must now depend. But fate might be her savior. Sakota might give birth to a girl. There would still be no heir, until a son was born, whose mother would then be raised to Empress.

And I might be that mother, she thought. Upon the glimpse of sudden hope her brain grew calm, her heart grew still.