She Who Became the Sun

by Shelley Parker-Chan

  He crouched and looked Zhu in the eye where she knelt. His drooping skin was held taut on the inside by a thrumming vibrance: the ferocious, irreligious joy of a man who has willingly cast aside any chance of nirvana for the sake of his attachment to life. And Zhu, staring at him in a daze, saw in him a reflection of herself.

  “I remember you, you know. You were the one who waited outside the monastery. Four days without eating, in the cold! So I always knew you had a strong will. But what’s unusual about you is that most strong-willed people never understand that will alone isn’t enough to guarantee their survival. They don’t realize that even more so than will, survival depends upon an understanding of people and power. Prefect Fang certainly didn’t lack will! But it was you who realized that it was possible to turn a greater power against him, and who did so without hesitation.

  “You think about how the world works, Novice Zhu, and that—that interests me.”

  He was looking at her as intently as anyone had ever looked at her. She shuddered under it, her fear as present as a raptor’s shadow. Even as his interest seemed to offer a way out of expulsion, it felt dangerous beyond belief that someone should see something of her. The only part of Zhu Chongba that had ever been uniquely hers: the determination to live.

  The Abbot said contemplatively, “Outside our walls, chaos and violence are increasing. As time goes on, it grows harder and harder for us to maintain our position between the rebels and the Mongols. Why do you think I’m so determined for my monks be educated? It isn’t strength, but knowledge, that will be our best tool for surviving these difficult times ahead. Our task will be to secure our wealth and our position in the world. For that, I need monks who have the intellect and the desire to understand how the world works, and the disposition to manipulate it to our advantage. Monks who can do what needs to be done.”

  He stood and looked down at her. “Few monks have this kind of character. But you, Novice Zhu: you have potential. Why don’t you come work for me until your ordination? I’ll teach you everything you wouldn’t learn from whichever pious monk I’ll choose to replace Prefect Fang. Learn from me how the world really works.” A knowing smile creased the Abbot’s massive features. “If that’s something you want.”

  Will alone isn’t enough to guarantee survival. With the existential fear of her encounter with Prefect Fang still in her bones, Zhu didn’t need to think twice about her answer.

  This time she didn’t grovel, and her voice didn’t shake. Looking up at the Abbot, she cried out, “This undeserving one offers his gratitude for whatever knowledge the Esteemed Abbot deigns to bestow upon him. He promises to do whatever needs to be done!”

  The Abbot laughed and went back to his desk. “Ah, Novice Zhu. Don’t promise yet, before you know what that might be.”

  1354, NINTH MONTH

  It was still dark, no later than the Tiger hour, when Zhu woke to a fumbling at the door of her small room in the sacristy. After a moment Xu Da came in and sat on the edge of her pallet.

  “I can’t believe they’re letting you sleep the night before your ordination,” he said severely. “Prefect Fang made us meditate all night.”

  Zhu sat up and laughed. “Well, Prefect Fang is gone. And why do you always act like your own ordination was so long ago? You’re only twenty-three!” Technically Zhu was nineteen—still a year shy of ordination age—but as with most differences between herself and the Zhu Chongba who would have been twenty, she avoided thinking about it too much. More than two uneventful years since the incident with Prefect Fang, she still felt uneasy that any acknowledgment of difference, even within her own mind, might be enough to alert Heaven that not all was as it should be. After a moment Zhu’s eyes adjusted and she made out Xu Da’s straw hat and traveling shawl. “But are you going already? You weren’t back for long.”

  His smile was a crescent in the dark. “Some business has come up. Prefect Wen is involved in the ordinations, so he asked me to handle it. Actually: Can I ask your opinion? One of the tenant villages is refusing to pay their rents. They said the rebels just came and took a tax to support the rebellion, so they’re short. Should we insist on payment, or waive it?” Xu Da, like the rest of the monks, knew that Zhu’s closeness to the Abbot made her almost as good a source of guidance about the monastery’s interests as the Abbot himself.

  “It can’t actually have been the rebels,” Zhu commented. “They’ve been engaged with the Great Yuan’s forces since the start of the month. But probably something did happen: it’s a good harvest year, so I don’t see why they’d suddenly start pushing back against the rents. Maybe it was bandits pretending to be rebels.” The word “bandits” tugged at her memory; she ignored it. “Offer to let them defer payment until next harvest. They should still have enough to plant in spring, if we don’t overextend them now. Charge interest, but half the usual rate. You can’t expect them to refuse a rebel army, but if they’d had a militia they could have done well enough against bandits. Charging interest should motivate them to put something together.”

  “They’d have to be braver than me to face bandits,” Xu Da said wryly. “Poor fools. But that all makes sense. Thanks.” He embraced her warmly before he rose to leave. “I’m sad to miss your ordination, though. Good luck! When we meet again, we’ll both be monks.”

  When he had gone Zhu lit a candle from the hallway lantern and did her ablutions. Her room, usually reserved for an ordained monk holding the position of the Abbot’s personal secretary, adjoined the Abbot’s. She knocked lightly on his door and, hearing his reply, went in.

  The Abbot was standing by the open doors to the terrace. “Novice Zhu,” he greeted. “It’s early yet. Couldn’t sleep?”

  “Monk Xu woke me before he left.”

  “Ah. It’s a pity he couldn’t be here for your big day.”

  It was growing light. Birds trilled, and an expansive autumn coolness breathed across the terrace, sharp with the silvery smell of dew on trees. Past the dark valley a line of clouds came in like a wave. In the far distance, a dark blotch marred the expanse of the plain. “Lord Esen is pushing deep into rebel territory this year,” Zhu observed. It had been a few years since the aging Prince of Henan had passed command of his army to his eldest son. “Why’s he so eager?”

  The Abbot gazed pensively at the distant army. “I haven’t told you this yet; I only just found out myself. I imagine the Great Yuan is reacting to the news that the Prince of Radiance has been found. By the rebels.” He added, “The Red Turbans. That’s what they’re calling themselves now.”

  Zhu stared at him, shocked. The Prince of Radiance, the herald of the beginning of the new. His arrival meant a change was coming: something so monumental that it would leave the world transformed. All around the Abbot’s room the candles bent under the influence of something even she couldn’t see, and she shivered.

  “He’s only a child,” the Abbot said. “But he was witnessed selecting the items belonging to his last incarnation, so his identity isn’t in question. No wonder the Mongols are afraid. What else can his presence mean but the end of the Great Yuan? By all reports the Emperor’s Mandate of Heaven shines no brighter than a drowning lamp flame, and that’s from the last time he dared show it in public. He could have lost it entirely by now. But even if he no longer has the Mandate, he’ll hardly give up power. He’ll have ordered the Prince of Henan to do everything he can to put down the rebellion this year. And with the Red Turbans made bold by having the Prince of Radiance—the chaos outside will surely worsen before it improves.” The strengthening dawn light lit his features powerfully from beneath. He was a man facing a difficult future not with despair, but the bullish confidence of someone who has met headfirst everything that came before, and survived. “Undoubtedly, chaos brings danger,” the Abbot continued. “But there will be opportunities, too. After all, it’s due to chaos that we’re living through a moment in which even ordinary men can aspire to greatness. What are those Red Turban leaders other than ord
inary? But they believe they can oppose princes and lords—and now for the first time in centuries, it’s true.”

  Greatness. The word kindled Zhu’s dried memories. Feelings rushed into her, hot and alive: the thrill and wonder of her first glimpse of greatness in the majestic figures of the Prince of Henan and his sons, tiny beneath her in the monastery’s courtyard. And from an even older memory—a memory from a candlelit room in a village she tried hard to forget—her confusion and sadness upon hearing the word “greatness” for the first time, and knowing that it belonged to a world of emperors and kings and generals that she would never touch.

  That was the world of greatness, out there on that distant plain. As Zhu gazed at it, she felt a pull in her middle. It was different from the feeling she’d had as a child of twelve—the abstract curiosity of what it would feel like to jump. This was the feeling of having jumped. After the jump, but before the fall: the moment the world gripped your body in preparation for bringing it back to where it belonged. It was the feel of a force that couldn’t be overcome by will, that belonged to the world itself. Fate, Zhu thought abruptly. She had the unsettled feeling of encountering something beyond her abilities to interpret. It was a pull from a fate in the outside world, where greatness was made.

  “How all you young monks chafe for adventure!” said the Abbot, noticing the intensity of her gaze. “Loath as I am to lose your assistance, I can probably give you a year or so of freedom. But I think we can find work more suited to your skills than what your brother Monk Xu does. What do you think: After your ordination, shall I make you Wuhuang Monastery’s first emissary to the outside world?”

  The pull became stronger; it was a leaching heaviness in her belly. Was it possible that in living as Zhu Chongba for so many years, in having subsumed her every difference until even Heaven believed they were a single person, her fate had changed? But even as the thought came, Zhu knew it was wrong. That heaviness was a promise of the inevitable—and what it stirred wasn’t hope, but fear. She looked down from the height of the monastery into that faraway world where chaos and violence boiled under the tidy patterns of green and brown, and knew that as much as that world contained the promise of greatness, it contained the promise of nothingness.

  “Esteemed Abbot, are you so willing to curse me with an interesting life?” she said with false lightness, hoping with all her might that Heaven wasn’t listening. “I don’t need adventure. If you’re loath to let me go, why don’t you keep me next to you in the sacristy, where I can be of most use?”

  The Abbot smiled, pleased. “Ah, that’s why you’re my favorite, Novice Zhu. Don’t fear that a life on this mountain will disappoint! Together we’ll weather these changes and guide this monastery into the era of the Prince of Radiance, and afterward the pleasures of peace and prosperity will be ours to enjoy.” He added, casually, “And when my time has passed, I’ll make it such that you succeed me as the next abbot of Wuhuang Monastery.”

  Zhu caught her breath. That was a promise indeed. In her mind’s eye, she saw the microcosm of the monastery: the administration monks strolling to the business office, the great sandal-shuffling herd of meditation monks, the laughing novices in the valley’s freshly turned fields. The rising green-tiled roofs and the tilted mountain, all contained under the dome of the golden sky. A small, safe world. It wasn’t something she wanted so much as it was an escape from what she feared. But it was something she knew, and would have power over, and would never have to leave.

  She gave a last glance at the outside world. The white bolt of the sun had risen slantwise to stand atop the tallest peak of the distant southern mountains, masking the land beneath in formless dazzle. As she turned away, the bright traces still dancing in her eyes, she thought:

  If you jump, you die.

  * * *

  The Hall of Guardian Kings’ four immense statues glared down at the line of kneeling novices. Behind them, the monks murmured the two hundred and fifty precepts of the monastic oath. Zhu’s sinuses throbbed from the fog of incense smoke that darkened the already dim hall, and her knees were exploding with pain; they had been kneeling for hours. Choked sounds of a different kind of pain came along the line of novices toward her as one after another was ordained.

  Then the Abbot was in front of her, a special knowingness in his expression for just the two of them. “Novice Zhu.” He laid cool, restraining hands on either side of her face as the other monks placed the twelve incense cones upon her head. Smoke cascaded around her face, its familiar fragrance mixed with something new: the smell of her own seared flesh. The pain was like being crowned with burning stars. A grid of light, burned directly into her brain. As the pain went on it changed and became transporting. She felt as if she were hovering in an emptiness in the center of the world, her body’s every quiver of life coming to her from across some vast distance.

  “Zhu Chongba, always the different one. You didn’t even scream.” The Abbot regarded her with amusement as the monks pulled her up, supporting her as her legs buckled. Her head glowed with agony. She was wearing only her short inner robe and trousers, and now the Abbot draped the seven-panel robe over her shoulders. It was heavier than the novice robes; the weight of it turned her into someone else. “Monk Zhu—”

  “Esteemed Abbot!” They all jumped as a young monk burst in, sweating. As the Abbot turned an incredulous look upon him, the monk threw himself into a reverence and blurted hastily, “A thousand apologies. But—the general of the Prince of Henan’s forces is come!”

  The Abbot frowned. “What? Why were we not informed of this visit in advance? Where is he now?”

  The young monk opened his mouth but a light, raspy voice said, “It’s been a long time, Esteemed Abbot.”

  The light dimmed as the general stepped through the great doors of the Hall of Guardian Kings, and the monks gasped in horror. They recoiled from his defiling presence in fear and anger and disgust, for the Yuan’s general was the eunuch Zhu had seen from the roof of the Dharma Hall all those years ago. He had been a youth then, probably younger than Zhu was now. Those years should have turned a youth into a man, but now Zhu had the impression of seeing an echo made flesh: someone as slight and beautiful as he had been all that time ago. Only his girl’s face had lost its pure loveliness to become something more unsettling: a sharp, eerie beauty held in as high a tension as the finest tempered steel.

  Instead of a normal soldier’s leather armor, the general wore metal. His circular chest plate was a darkly glimmering mirror. On each side of his head his hair was braided into the thin loops of a Mongol warrior. As he came closer Zhu saw he was actually of Nanren blood. But that made sense: no Mongol would have borne the humiliation of such a punishment, nor permitted it upon his own.

  “You trespass, General,” the Abbot said, impolitic with shock. In this, his own domain, he was king—and the blatant offense to his power, in front of his gathered monks, made him hard. “Let me remind you that even the Princes of the Blood are beholden to our rules when they set foot upon these grounds. It is not permitted for you to enter this place.”

  “Ah, that rule. I’d forgotten,” the eunuch general said as he approached. His face was so blank as to give the impression of someone with no inner life at all. “I apologize.” He spoke Han’er, the northern language often used by the monastery’s visitors, with a jarringly flat accent that Zhu had never heard before. Mongolian. Behind him the lamp flames sank, then sprang back in a flare of light, as the ghosts came slipping over the threshold. As he had remained the same, so had they. Zhu’s skin crawled. If anything, the sight of their pale forms massing around him was even stranger than it had been the first time. In all the years since—with all the people she had met—she had still never seen anything like it.

  As she stared at the eunuch standing there amidst his ghosts, she suddenly felt the half-forgotten twang of a string plucked deep within her. Like connecting to like. A searing awareness of her difference from the person she was supposed to b
e shot through her. But even as she recoiled in rejection of that connection, she felt understanding flowing through it. Like knows like. She remembered the eunuch’s humiliation at the Abbot’s hands those many years ago, and knew instinctively that his blankness concealed a sardonic feeling. He knew perfectly well how his presence distressed and insulted the monks. He was returning pain for pain; he had never forgotten.

  The eunuch’s gaze moved past the Abbot to the line of singed novices. “But I see I’m interrupting, so let me be brief. In light of recent concerning events, the Great Khan has commanded the empire’s defenders to redouble their actions against its enemies. The Prince of Henan desires the monasteries’ assurances that he has their support for his endeavor to restore stability to the south.” He spoke so neutrally that Zhu thought she was the only one who heard the underlying savage emotion as he added, “I’m sure this monastery, being a loyal subject of the Yuan, will not hesitate to cooperate to the fullest.”

  Recent concerning events. The Red Turban rebels’ discovery of the Prince of Radiance. The Great Yuan, feeling its Mandate of Heaven slipping, obviously feared enough for itself to take steps to remove any temptation for the monasteries to put their wealth and influence behind the Nanren rebels.

  The eunuch glanced around the hall, taking in the finely wrought woodwork of the beams and pillars, the golden statues, and the porcelain censers. “How this monastery has prospered since I was here last. Golden halls and roofs tiled with jade! Indeed, Heaven has been smiling upon you.” Returning his attention to the Abbot, he said, “The Prince of Henan bids me inform you that this monastery is to henceforth submit two-thirds of its annual revenue from its lands and all other sources directly to the provincial administrator for use in the Prince of Henan’s effort against the rebels.” He added, blandly, “Given that the aim of monks is to relinquish all earthly comforts, I’m sure this will be no hardship.”