Startled, Zhu remembered the desperate, animal need to survive that had driven her to claim Zhu Chongba’s life. Even now she could feel it inside her. She had never before connected it to the desire that was the subject of the Dharma Master’s lectures. For a moment she felt the burn of that old coal of resentment. It didn’t seem fair that while others earned their suffering for pleasure, she should earn hers for nothing more than wanting to live.
Beneath them there was a sudden torrent of noise and light and color. Dozens of soldiers were streaming into the main courtyard, the standard-bearers lofting sky-blue pennants. The soldiers’ armor shone, scattering light like water. Zhu had a flash of memory: that dark, sparkling river flowing over the dusty Zhongli hillside, a lifetime ago. The Abbot, distinctive in his red robe, had appeared on the steps of the Great Shrine Hall and was waiting with his hands clasped placidly before him.
“The Prince of Henan and his sons decided to drop by on their way home for summer,” Xu Da said, coming over to sit by Zhu on the edge of the roof. Being older, he usually had the better monastery gossip. “Did you know the Hu can’t campaign in the summer because they’re cold-blooded, like snakes?” He used the term that most Nanren—the people of the south, the lowest of the Great Yuan’s four castes—used to refer to their Mongol overlords. Barbarians.
“Don’t snakes like warmth?” Zhu countered. “When was the last time you saw a snake in the snow?”
“Well, it’s what the monks say.”
The wind picked up the soldiers’ capes, snapping them backwards over their gleaming shoulders. Their rows of round-cheeked faces stared ahead impassively. Compared to the soft monks, the Mongols seemed a breed apart. Not the horse-headed monsters Zhu had imagined long ago upon hearing her father’s stories, or even the brutal conquerors of the accounts of Nanren scholars, but shining and inhuman like the offspring of dragons.
A flute note sounded. The Prince of Henan swept across the courtyard and up the steps of the Great Shrine Hall. The lush fur of his cape rippled and flexed like a live animal. A plume of white horsehair bucked at his helmet. He was trailed by three radiant youths. Bareheaded, their alien braids tossed in the wind. Two wore armor, and the third a gown of such gloriously shimmering magnolia purple that Zhu’s first thought was that it was made of butterfly wings.
“That must be the Prince’s heir, Lord Esen,” Xu Da said, of the taller armored figure. “So the one in purple is Lord Wang, the younger son.”
Princes and lords: people from the stories, made real. Representatives of the world beyond the monastery, which up until now Zhu had thought of as names on a map. A world in which greatness exists, she thought suddenly. When she had stolen Chongba’s name and stepped into the discarded shell of his life, her only consideration had been the certainty that he would have survived. After securing that survival for herself, she had all but forgotten the fate Chongba was to have achieved with that life. Greatness. In the context of Chongba the word was still as nonsensical as when Zhu had heard it the first time in the light of the fortune-teller’s candle. But now as she stared down at those majestic figures, the word “greatness” on her tongue, Zhu was surprised by a jolt of something that vanished the moment she recognized it: the queasy curiosity that people get when they stand in a high place and wonder what it would be like to jump.
Below, the Abbot gestured the Prince and his two sons into the Great Shrine Hall. The Abbot was all smiles until his eyes landed on their companion, the third youth. He recoiled in disgust, and said something in a carrying voice. Zhu and Xu Da watched with interest as an argument started between him and Lord Esen. After a moment the Prince, displeased, barked a command. Then he and his sons together with the Abbot swept into the dark maw of the hall. The doors swung shut. Their companion was left outside, his straight back facing the rows of watching soldiers. Standing there alone in a dazzling sea of pale stone, the sun blazing from his armor, he seemed as cold and remote as the moon. When he finally turned away from the hall—a proud, arrogant movement—Zhu gasped.
The warrior was a girl. Her face, as bright and delicate as a polished abalone shell, brought to life every description of beauty that Zhu had ever read in poetry. And yet—even as Zhu saw beauty, she felt the lack of something the eye wanted. There was no femininity in that lovely face at all. Instead there was only the hard, haughty superiority that was somehow unmistakably that of a young man. Zhu stared in confusion, trying to find something comprehensible in that visage that was neither one thing nor the other.
Beside her, Xu Da said in a tone of mixed fascination and revulsion, “The monks said Lord Esen owns a eunuch he treasures even more than his own brother. That must be him.”
Zhu remembered those old stories, gilded with the patina of myth. Even more than warrior kings, the noble and traitorous eunuchs had seemed creatures of another age. It hadn’t occurred to her that they might still exist. But now before her, she saw the flesh and blood of him. As she stared, a peculiar vibration started in her liver and spread outwards, as though she were a string sounding in response to its twin being plucked somewhere else in the room. She knew it as instinctually as one knows the sensation of heat, or pressure, or falling. It was the feeling of two like substances coming into contact.
And as soon as she knew it, she felt a cold disquiet. To resonate in likeness to a eunuch, whose substance was neither male nor female—it was nothing less than a reminder from the world itself of what she tried so hard to deny: that she wasn’t made of the same pure male substance as Zhu Chongba. She had a different substance. A different fate. She shivered.
“Can you even imagine?” Xu Da was saying. “I heard they don’t even have that thing anymore.” He clutched his own organ through his trousers as if to reassure himself that it was still there. “The Hu don’t make many of them, not like our old dynasties used to. They hate the idea of mutilation. For them it’s a punishment, one of the worst they ever give.”
Monks found mutilation equally abhorrent. On days when the Great Shrine Hall was open to the public, its steps were always crowded with the excluded impure: beggars with faces eaten by disease; men with missing hands. Twisted children; women who bled. Like the women, the young eunuch’s particular disqualification was hidden, but his face bore the indelible stamp of his shame.
“The Abbot may like to stay on everyone’s good side,” Xu Da said. “But I think he also likes reminding them that we have power, too. Even rebel leaders and Hu princes have to respect the monasteries, unless they want to come back in their next lives as ants.”
Zhu gazed down at the eunuch’s cold, beautiful face. Without knowing how she knew, she said, “I don’t think he likes being the reminder very much.”
A movement caught her eye. To her surprise, ghosts were flowing through the stationary ranks of the Mongol soldiers. Her hackles rose with unease. Since entering the monastery she had become more accustomed to ghosts—if not exactly comfortable around them—but ghosts were yin. They belonged to night and the monastery’s dark places, not full daylight where yang was at its strongest. Seeing them out of place was disturbing. In the clear mountain sunshine their white-clad forms were translucent. Like water finding its lowest point, the ghosts moved smoothly across the courtyard, up the steps of the Great Shrine Hall, and drew around the young eunuch. He showed no sign of knowing they were there.
It was one of the eeriest things Zhu had ever seen. Her observations of the spirit world had taught her that hungry ghosts drifted aimlessly without interacting with the living, and only moved with intent if food was offered. They didn’t follow people. She’d never seen so many ghosts all together in the same place. And still they came, until the eunuch was surrounded.
She watched him standing there for a long time, alone amongst that unseen crowd, his head held high.
1352, SEVENTH MONTH
“Why can I never get it right?” Xu Da said to Zhu. “Help!” Flushed and laughing, he was wrestling with a half-made lantern that looked more
like an onion than the lotus flower it was supposed to be. Already twenty-one, he had matured into a strapping young man whose shaved head only highlighted the clean planes of his face. His ordination last autumn was still recent enough that Zhu found it odd to see him in a fully ordained monk’s seven-panel robe instead of the simpler novice robes, his scalp marked with ordination scars. He and a few of the other young monks had invited themselves into the novice dormitory—ostensibly to help make the lotus lanterns that would be launched on the river to guide the spirits back to the underworld after their time on earth during Ghost Month. In reality, the young monks’ visit had far more to do with the illicit wine that Zhu had made from windfall plums and which was being passed around with much guilty giggling.
After a while Xu Da gave up and leaned on Zhu’s shoulder. Looking at her collection of finished lanterns, he said in mock despondency, “All yours look like flowers.”
“I don’t understand how you’re still so bad at it, after all these years. How can you not get even a little bit better?” Zhu said fondly. She exchanged her cup of wine for his sad onion lantern and started rearranging its petals.
“It’s not like anyone becomes a monk to fulfil some kind of artistic dream,” Xu Da said.
“Does anyone become a monk because they have a dream about never-ending study and manual labor?”
“Prefect Fang, maybe. The joy he gets from manual labor—”
“From seeing other people do manual labor,” Zhu corrected. She handed him back the fixed lantern. “I’m surprised he’s not here right now, counting the number of lanterns we’ve made.”
“Counting us, to make sure none of us have gone off to do anything scandalous with the nuns.” Nuns stayed at the monastery during the autumn ordinations, all the major festivals, and for the whole seventh month of rituals and dharma assemblies for the spirits of the dead. They were housed in the guest quarters, which were made strictly off-limits to monks, and its boundary was patrolled by Prefect Fang with a diligence verging on the obsessive.
“Given how much he likes to think about us drinking and fornicating, I bet he’s having more impure thoughts than all of us put together,” Zhu said. In a rather un-Buddhist-like tone she added, “He’ll give himself a heart attack.”
“Ha! Prefect Fang has a death grip on life. He’ll never die. He’ll just get more and more dried up, and happily torment every generation of novices until the reincarnation of the Prince of Radiance.” According to the Dharma Master, the reappearance of the Prince of Radiance—the material incarnation of light—would signal the beginning of a new era of peace and stability that would culminate in the descent from Heaven of the Buddha Who Is to Come.
“Better watch out for him, then,” Zhu said. “Since if anyone’s going to get into a scandal with the nuns, it’s you.”
“Why would this monk want a nun, those bony little fish?” Xu Da laughed. “This monk has all the girls he wants when he goes down to the villages.” Sometimes out of habit he fell into the self-deprecating speech that monks used in the outside world. After his ordination he had been assigned to the business office with the job of collecting rents from the tenant villages, and these days spent the majority of his time outside the monastery. Zhu, who had shared a sleeping pallet with him for almost six years, had been surprised to find she missed him.
Reverting back to normal speech, Xu Da said cockily, “Anyway, I’m a full monk now, what can Prefect Fang do to me? It’s only you novices who need to worry.”
The door opened, prompting everyone to shove their cups up their sleeves, but it was only one of the other novices. “You done yet? Those who want should come down to the river; the Dharma Master’s calling for the lanterns.”
For most novices, Ghost Month was the most enjoyable time of the year. The monastery was awash in food from laypeople’s offerings; the long midsummer days brought warmth into the frigid halls; and even solemn ceremonies such as the lantern launching gave novices the chance to play in the river the moment the monks headed back up to the monastery. It was different for Zhu, who could actually see the denizens of the spirit world. During Ghost Month the monastery swarmed with the dead. Ghosts loitered in every shady courtyard, under every tree, behind every statue. Their chill needled her until all she could think about was running outside to scour herself in sunshine, and the constant flickering in the corners of her eyes made her twitchy. The lantern launching ceremony wasn’t compulsory, but in Zhu’s first year of novicehood she had gone along out of interest. The sight of tens of thousands of blank-eyed ghosts streaming along the river had been enough to put her off for life—and that was even before she learned that the treat of post-ceremony playing in the water involved the loss of more clothes than she could safely countenance.
Somehow, Zhu thought with a sigh, she was always missing out on the fun parts of monastery life.
“Not joining?” one of the other novices asked, coming around to collect the lanterns.
Xu Da looked up with a smirk. “What, don’t you know Novice Zhu is afraid of water? He says he washes, but I’ve had my doubts—” Leaping up, he wrestled Zhu to the ground and pretended to look behind her ears. “Aiya, I knew it! Filthier than a peasant.”
As he lay on top of her, grinning, Zhu was reminded of her uncomfortable suspicion that Xu Da knew more about her than he let on. He’d always been remarkably prescient about herding the other novices out of the dormitory whenever she’d needed privacy.
Refusing to investigate the thought further, Zhu shoved at him. “You’re squashing the lanterns, you clumsy ox!”
Xu Da rolled off, laughing, while the others watched tolerantly: they were all familiar with their fraternal squabbles. As he shepherded the novices out, he called over his shoulder, “At least Prefect Fang doesn’t have to worry about you getting into trouble with the nuns. They’d get one whiff and run—”
“Run from me?” Zhu said, outraged. “We’ve just seen how bad you are with your hands. Any reasonable woman would overlook honest sweat for someone who can actually give satisfaction!”
Xu Da paused at the door and gave her a betrayed look.
Zhu said meanly, “Enjoy!”
* * *
Zhu scratched her flaky scalp as she finished the lanterns. Xu Da hadn’t exactly been wrong: the summer months made her as sweaty as anyone else, and her bathhouse ban meant she had fewer opportunities to do anything about it. But now at least half the monks were down by the river, and those who weren’t were probably at the Buddha Altar doing one last recitation for the spirits. It was a hot day. It might be nice to get clean for once.
Years ago Zhu had commandeered a small abandoned storeroom on one of the lower terraces for her infrequent scrubs. A single window, set high in the wall, looked out onto the adjacent courtyard at ankle level. When Zhu had first found the room the window-paper had been missing, but once she’d replaced it she had all the privacy she needed.
She carried the slopping washbasin to the storeroom, feeling a mild dislike at the sight of a few nuns climbing the stairs towards the guest quarters. As she stripped to wash, she was struck by the unpleasant thought that she probably bore more than a passing resemblance to those little bald women. Fully grown at sixteen, she’d turned out on the short side (for a man), and underneath her formless robes her body had changed shape and grown small breasts that she was forced to bind flat. A year ago her body had even started bleeding every month. She might be the novice monk Zhu Chongba, but her body kept the score of the years according to its own inviolable mechanism—an ever-present reminder of the fact that the person living that life wasn’t who Heaven thought he was.
As she scrubbed, discomfited, she heard barking. It was the pack of dogs that roamed the monastery, their numbers always increasing because the precept against killing meant the monks couldn’t get rid of them in the most effective way. Zhu wasn’t sure if animals could actually see ghosts, but they could sense them: the dogs were always in a state of high excitement du
ring Ghost Month, and occasionally during the rest of the year she would see a dog yipping cheerfully in the direction of a passing ghost. Outside, the pack came charging into the courtyard. There was a burst of enthusiastic baying; the sound of claws skittering across the flagstones; and then a dog burst through the paper window and landed directly on top of her.
Zhu howled and flailed. The dog did the same, and arrested its fall by scrabbling its claws over the wriggling body beneath it. Yelling with redoubled energy, Zhu threw the dog off, ran to the door and slammed it open, and when the dog lunged in her direction gave it a kick that sent it caroming out the door, still howling. She shut the door, breathing hard and crossly aware of smelling even worse than she had before: mud and fur and what was almost certainly dog piss.
And then the light dimmed, and she looked up to see Prefect Fang crouched down and peering through the torn window, a look of incredulous outrage on his face.
* * *
Prefect Fang vanished. Zhu fumbled her clothes on with hands suddenly numb with cold, her breath and heartbeat roaring, and tied her outer robe just as Prefect Fang rounded the corner and wrenched the unlocked door open with such ferocity that it banged on its hinges like a thunderclap. As he dragged her outside by the ear, Zhu recognized the dreadful touch of the fate she had been running from, and felt fear swallow her whole. Her mind flew frantically. If she fled the monastery, she would have nothing but what was on her back. And without ordination scars or a full monk’s robe to prove her monkhood, she would never be accepted into another monastery—and that was even if she survived the journey there—
Prefect Fang pulled her ear. Old monks had no fear of treating novices roughly; it never occurred to them that a boy might resist. He dragged Zhu along the corridor of storerooms, yanking on every door as they passed, a violent preoccupation swelling his features. When they reached the end of the corridor and there were no more doors, he pressed his face up against Zhu’s and screamed, “Where is she?”
She Who Became the Sun Page 5