by Natsu Hyuuga
He doesn’t come across like a eunuch.
Many eunuchs became effeminate, because their biological yang had been forcibly removed. They grew minimal body hair, had gentle personalities, and a disposition to obesity as their sexual appetites were replaced by culinary ones.
The quack doctor was the most obvious example. He looked like any other middle-aged man, but his speech made him sound like the mistress of some well-to-do merchant household. Gaoshun, for his part, didn’t have much body hair, but what was there was thick and black, and if he hadn’t lived in the rear palace it would have been easy to take him for a military official.
I wonder what brought him to choose this path. Wonder she might, but even Maomao understood that actually asking would be beyond the pale. She simply nodded in silence and went with him.
Gaoshun led the way, holding a lantern in one hand. The moon was only half full, but it was a cloudless night, and all its light reached them.
Maomao had never been out in the rear palace so late at night: it was like a different world. Once in a while she thought she heard rustling, and maybe some moaning, from the bushes here or there, but she determined to ignore it. The Emperor was the only proper man allowed in the rear palace, so it wasn’t the ladies’ fault if romantic encounters here started to take on less typical forms.
“Mistress Maomao,” Gaoshun began, but Maomao felt some compunction at the polite mode of address.
“Please, you needn’t call me that,” she said. “Your station is so far above mine, Master Gaoshun.”
Gaoshun ran his hand along his chin as he considered this. Finally he said, “Xiao Mao, then,” a diminutive form of her name that was very much the polar opposite of “Miss Maomao.”
That’s maybe a little too familiar, Maomao thought, realizing that perhaps Gaoshun had a lighter heart than first appeared, but nonetheless she nodded.
“Perhaps,” Gaoshun ventured now, “I might ask you to stop regarding Master Jinshi in the same manner in which you might look at a worm.”
Damn. They noticed.
Her reactions had been growing too automatic recently; her poker face could no longer hide them. She didn’t expect to be beheaded for it on the spot or anything, but she would have to control herself. From the perspective of these notables, it was Maomao who was the worm.
“Why, today he reported to me that you gazed at him as though he were a slug.”
Well, he certainly seemed especially slimy.
The fact that he informed Gaoshun of Maomao’s every disparaging glance, she thought, spoke to both his tenacity and his sliminess. It didn’t say much for him as a man... or former man, perhaps.
“He smiled so broadly as he told me, his eyes brimming and his whole body trembling. Truly, I have never seen joy so singularly expressed.”
Maomao greeted Gaoshun’s description (surely he knew it could only possibly cause misunderstanding?) with total seriousness. As a matter of fact, she was privately demoting Jinshi from worm to filth as she replied: “I’ll be more mindful in the future.”
“Thank you. Those with no immunity do tend to swoon at a glance. It’s quite an effort to keep on top of it.” The sigh with which Gaoshun accompanied this remark carried an unmistakable note of frustration. Maomao surmised that this was not the first time he’d had to clean up after Jinshi. Having a superior who was too pure was its own kind of difficulty.
The course of this tiring conversation brought them to the gate on the east side. The walls were about four times as tall as Maomao. The great deep moat on the other side necessitated a bridge be lowered when provisions or supplies were brought in, or at the occasional changes of serving girls. In short, to flee the rear palace was to face the ultimate punishment.
The entry was a double gate with a guardhouse on both sides, and the gate was always guarded. Two eunuchs on the inside, two soldiers on the outside. The drawbridge was too heavy to raise or lower by manpower alone, so two head of oxen were on hand to do the job. Maomao was seized by the desire to go into the nearby pine forest to look for ingredients, but with Gaoshun there she had to restrain herself. Instead she sat down in the open-air pavilion in the garden.
And then, there in the light of the half-moon, she appeared.
“There she is,” Gaoshun said, pointing. Maomao looked and saw something unbelievable: the figure of a pale woman almost floating through the air. Her long dress trailed behind her, her feet moving gracefully atop the wall as if in a dance. She shivered, and her clothing rippled as if it were alive. Her long black hair shimmered in the dark, lending her a sort of faint halo. She was so beautiful she seemed almost unreal. It was like something out of a fantasy, as though they had wandered into the legendary peach village.
“Like a hibiscus under the stars,” Maomao said suddenly. Gaoshun looked surprised, but then murmured, “You’re a quick study.”
The woman’s name was Fuyou, “hibiscus,” and she was a middle-ranked consort. And the next month, she was to be given in marriage to a certain official, as a reward for his fine work.
Chapter 11: The Unsettling Matter of the Spirit (Part Two)
Somnambulism was a most mysterious condition. It caused one to move around as though awake, even when one was asleep. The cause could be some sort of disturbance in the heart, something no amount or type of medicine could cure. For there was no medicine to soothe a troubled spirit.
Maomao knew of a courtesan who had suffered from the condition. She had been of sunny disposition, a good singer, and one man had even been talking about buying her out of prostitution. But the negotiations fell through, for every night she would wander the brothel like a woman possessed. Ugly rumors began to dog her. When the madam tried to restrain her to stop her from walking around one night, the woman scratched her so badly she bled.
The next day, the other women confronted her about her behavior, but the courtesan said cheerfully, “My goodness, ladies, what are you talking about?”
The woman remembered nothing, but her bare feet were covered with mud and scratches.
⭘⬤⭘
“And what happened to her?” Jinshi asked. He, Maomao, and Gaoshun were in the sitting room together, along with Consort Gyokuyou. Hongniang was looking after the little princess.
“Nothing,” Maomao said curtly. “When the discussions of her emancipation ended, so did her wandering around.”
“Was it that the discussions upset her, then?” Gyokuyou asked with a puzzled look.
Maomao nodded. “It seems likely. The suitor was the head of a large business, but he was a man with not only a wife and children already, but even grandchildren. The woman’s contract was going to be up with another year’s work, anyway.” Perhaps she found the idea of working another year better than being married off to a man she had no interest in. In the end, the woman had worked out the remainder of her contract with no further offers to buy her out.
“Exceptional emotional agitation commonly results in wandering like this, so we tried to give her perfumes and medicines that might help calm her down. They relaxed her a little, but didn’t do much more.” Maomao had always been the one to mix the concoctions, not her father.
“Hmm,” Jinshi said with more than a touch of boredom. “And that’s really all there is to that story?”
“That’s all.” Maomao struggled not to sneer at Jinshi’s languid look. Gaoshun sat beside him, silently encouraging her in this effort. “If that’s all you need, I must get back to work,” Maomao said. Then she bowed and left the room.
Let’s turn back the clock a bit. The day after she had witnessed the spirit, Maomao had gone to see her favorite chatterbox, Xiaolan. Xiaolan was forever trying to pry information about Gyokuyou out of Maomao, so this time Maomao fed her some innocuous tidbits in exchange for what she knew about the ghost.
The trouble had begun about two weeks before. The spirit had first been spotted in the northern quarter. Shortly after that, it had begun to be seen in the eastern quarter, and started to ap
pear every night. The guards, frightened by the entire situation, did nothing about it. But as the situation didn’t seem to be causing any harm, no one punished them for their inaction.
It seemed that the deep moat, the high walls, and the overall impenetrability of the rear palace had left the guards susceptible to such fears. Worthless for security.
Next, Maomao had headed to see the quack. His loose lips told her something new—about Princess Fuyou, how she had been unwell lately. She was the third princess of a vassal state so small it could have been flicked away with a finger; though she was given the title “Princess,” she was really little more than a highly ranked concubine. She had a building in the northern quarter. She liked to dance, but she was nervous and high-strung, and had once made a mistake while dancing for His Majesty. The other consorts in attendance had laughed at her, and since then she had refused to come out of her room. A sensitive soul, one might say.
Princess Fuyou had no conspicuous qualities other than her dancing, and it was said that in the two years since she had come to the rear palace, His Majesty had not spent the night with her once. Now she was to be given in marriage to a military official, an old friend of hers, and one hoped, might be happy.
Father always said not to say anything based on assumptions, Maomao thought.
And so she resolved not to.
The princess, pale and demure, was blushing as she passed through the central gate. She was not uncommonly beautiful, but her palpable happiness excited cries of admiration from the onlookers. A collective expectant gaze turned on the gate.
If one was going to be given in marriage, this was the ideal. This was how it should look.
“Surely you can at least tell me?” Consort Gyokuyou said with a lustrous smile. Though she was already the mother of a little girl, she was in fact not quite twenty years old, and the smile had a hoydenish quality about it.
What should I do? Maomao thought. Consort Gyokuyou had fixed her with her best stare and wasn’t letting up, and at length Maomao gave in. “If you understand that what I’m going to say is ultimately just speculation,” she said with a sigh. “And if you promise not to get angry.”
“Of course I won’t get angry. I was the one who asked.”
Hrrrm. It was looking like she had no choice but to talk. Maomao braced herself. “And you won’t tell anyone else.”
“My lips are sealed.” Gyokuyou sounded almost flippant, but Maomao decided to trust her. Then she told the consort the story of the sleepwalking courtesan. Not the one she had told Jinshi and the rest of them the day before. A different story.
Just like the other courtesan, the condition had first manifested when a suitor proposed to buy her out of her contract. The talks fell through—this much was the same as the other story. But this woman didn’t stop sleepwalking, and the perfumes and medicines that had given the first courtesan some relief didn’t help this one at all.
Then someone else offered to buy the woman out of her contract. The madam said she couldn’t foist a sick person off that way, but the suitor insisted they were still interested. And so the agreement was sealed, at half the price in silver of the first man’s offer.
“We learned later that it had been a con all along.”
“A con?”
The first man who had come with an offer was a friend of the second. Knowing that the woman would feign illness, he then broke off the negotiations. Then his friend swooped in and got her for half the price.
“This courtesan still had a substantial amount of time left on her contract, and the silver the man paid for her wasn’t enough to cover it.”
“And you’re suggesting these women and Princess Fuyou have something in common?”
The military official, the old friend, might have been from the same vassal state, but he was nonetheless not really of high enough social standing to seek to marry a princess. He had hoped to perform enough valorous deeds that he might one day be able to ask for her hand. Politics intervened, and Fuyou found herself in the rear palace. Still longing for her official, the princess deliberately botched her otherwise accomplished dancing to ensure she would not draw the Emperor’s attention. Then she shut herself up in her room until she seemed no more than a shadow in the palace.
Just as she had intended, she was still pure at the end of two years, the Emperor never having visited once. The military official had performed his valorous deeds, and now when he was to receive Princess Fuyou in marriage, she began to manifest these mysterious wanderings. She was trying to ensure that His Majesty would have no cause to have second thoughts about sending her away, no reason to suddenly make her his bedfellow.
There are, after all, some unscrupulous men of power who cannot stand to see a woman go to someone else, even a woman they never valued. If His Majesty were to take Princess Fuyou into his bedchamber, she could not be married off until later. And Fuyou herself, fastidious about her chastity, would be unable to face her childhood friend after she had spent the night with the Emperor.
Then, too, perhaps her dancing by the eastern gate was in part a prayer for her friend’s safety on his expeditions.
“Again, I have to stress that this is just speculation,” Maomao said calmly.
“Well... I can’t say you’re wrong as far as His Majesty is concerned.”
The lusty emperor could conceivably find his interest kindled in someone that one of his subordinates obviously valued so much. He visited Gyokuyou once every few days, and some of the nights on which he did not visit could be accounted for by the need to attend to official business. But not all of them. One of His Majesty’s duties was to produce as many children as possible.
“I suppose it would make me the most awful person to say I felt jealous of Princess Fuyou.”
Maomao shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She was more or less convinced that she had things figured out correctly, but she felt no special impulse to tell Jinshi. All the women involved would be happier that way. His ignorance was their bliss. She wanted her smile to stay as soft and innocent as it was.
It seemed everything had been resolved...
But in fact, one mystery still remained.
“How did she get all the way up there?” Maomao asked, gazing up at a wall four times as tall as she was. Perhaps she would have to look into it sometime.
As she danced that night, Princess Fuyou had looked truly beautiful, like the heroine of one of the illustrated story scrolls the women so enjoyed. It was almost hard to believe she was the same woman as the stoic, reticent princess.
Maomao went back to the Jade Pavilion, but her thoughts were less elevated than this: if only she could bottle love. What a medicine it would be, that could make a woman so beautiful!
Chapter 12: The Threat
There was a crash. The porridge of boiled potatoes and grains went flying, along with the tea and the crushed fruits. Maomao, her clothes soaked in porridge, looked up at the person in front of her.
“You would dare serve this tripe to Lady Lihua? Make it again, and do it right this time!” A heavily made-up young woman was glaring at Maomao. One of Consort Lihua’s ladies-in-waiting.
Ugh, what a pain. Maomao sighed and started gathering the dishes and cleaning up the spilled food.
She was in the Crystal Pavilion, Lady Lihua’s residence. Unfriendly gazes surrounded her. Mocking looks, scornful eyes, and downright hostile expressions. For a servant of Consort Gyokuyou like Maomao, this was truly enemy territory, a bed of nails.
His Majesty had come to Gyokuyou’s chambers the night before. Maomao had tasted the food for poison, as she always did, and had been about to leave the room when the Emperor himself had spoken to her: “I have a request for the apothecary of whom I’ve heard so much.”
Wonder what exactly he’s heard.
The Emperor was a robust man and handsome, only in his mid-thirties. And he was the absolute ruler of this nation—no wonder he dazzled the women of the rear palace. Maomao was one of the few exce
ptions. Approximately the only thing she thought of the Emperor was: “That’s a really long beard. I wonder what it feels like to touch.”
Now she asked, “What might that be, Your Majesty?” with a deferential bow of the head. She knew that she was insignificant before the Emperor, that a breath from His Majesty could blow away her life, and she wanted to get out of the room before she accidentally breached etiquette somehow.
“Consort Lihua is feeling unwell. Perhaps you could look after her for a while.”
Well, there it was. And as Maomao wanted her head and her shoulders to maintain close relations for a long time to come, the only possible answer was, “Of course, sire.”
By look after her, Maomao understood His Majesty to mean make her better. The Emperor no longer favored Consort Lihua with his visits, but perhaps some vestige of his affection remained—or perhaps he simply knew he couldn’t neglect the daughter of a powerful man. It made no difference. If Maomao didn’t help her, she couldn’t expect to hold onto her head for very long. In a manner of speaking, she and Lihua would share the same fate.
The fact that the Emperor had asked this of a young girl like Maomao meant either that he knew perfectly well that the doctor of the rear palace could not be relied upon, or that he didn’t care if either or both of them died. In either case, it was a reckless request to make. The more time Maomao spent with these people who ruled in the Imperial Palace—who lived “above the clouds,” as the traditional expression went—the more she found herself thinking how much trouble their every command and desire caused.