“Jiankang can go to the wolves! Who cares about Jiankang? The rightful seat of the Prince of Radiance and our restored Song Dynasty is Bianliang. Jiankang is nothing. You were only ever a pretender, Guo Tianxu. You only sat on a pretend throne.”
Right Minister Guo, wrestling himself free with the supernatural strength of a parent seeing his child in danger, threw himself flat into the dirt beneath the Prime Minister. “Your Excellency, forgive him! Forgive us! Excellency!”
Zhu could imagine the maniacal glitter in the Prime Minister’s eyes as he looked down at the groveling minister. Then he stepped back. “In the name of the Prince of Radiance, the traitor and pretender Guo Tianxu is sentenced to death.”
High above on his throne, the Prince of Radiance’s graceful smile never faltered. Reflected off the underside of his parasol, his light spilled over the stage and down onto the figures below, until they were drowned in an incarnadine sea. In that moment his child-self seemed to have been subsumed entirely. He was inhuman: the emanation of the dark radiance that was the will of Heaven.
On hearing his sentence, Little Guo bolted to his feet and ran. He made it a few steps before he was felled and dragged back to the stage, bleeding from a cut on his brow. “Father!” he cried, in fear and incomprehension. But instead of giving reassurance, Right Minister Guo seemed frozen with horror. He stared blankly as the Prime Minister beckoned from the stage and the men came forwards with the horses. They had been waiting there all along. This was always Little Guo’s fate, Zhu thought. There was never any escape.
From the beginning she had been aware of Ma Xiuying’s presence. Now she saw her in the crowd. There was space all around her, as though her association with the traitor had been enough for people to pull back from her. Her face was waxy with shock. For all Ma had feared the worst, Zhu saw she had never had any idea of what it would be like if it came true. Feeling a pang of that strange new tenderness, Zhu thought: She’s never seen life taken with intent. For all the inevitability of it, for some reason Zhu found herself sorrowing for the loss of Ma’s innocence.
Little Guo shouted and resisted as the men tied him to the five horses and then stood by. The Prime Minister, watching with the gleeful satisfaction of a paranoiac seeing the world made right, saw that they were ready. He raised his arm and let it drop. The whips cracked.
Zhu, watching Ma with an alien ache in her heart, saw the girl turn away at the critical moment. There was nobody to comfort her. She simply folded over onto herself in the middle of that empty bubble in the crowd, crying. Zhu felt a strong protective urge rise up in her at the sight. With alarm she realized it was a new desire, already rooted alongside that other desire that defined everything she was and did. It felt as dangerous as an arrowhead lodged in her body, as though at any moment it might work its way in deeper and cause some fatal injury.
The Prime Minister looked out over the crowd, his thin body vibrating. Left Minister Chen, smiling, ascended the stairs and stepped onto the stage. Bowing deeply to the Prime Minister, he said, “Your Excellency, well done.”
* * *
Ma, bursting into the temple, found Zhu sitting on his pallet in his reroofed annex, reading. On an ordinary day she would have considered it a private moment. He looked introspective and, when she came flying in, startled. She must look terrifying enough: hair loose like a ghost; face pale; her dress stained and torn. She was being improper. She didn’t care.
“I asked you to protect him!”
Zhu closed his book. Ma belatedly noticed he was only in his undershirt and trousers. He said, sounding uncharacteristically tired, “Maybe I could have, had Chen Youliang chosen another way.” The candles next to his pallet made faint popping sounds as dust and tiny insects entered the flames. “I suppose he thought it was too risky to take Right Minister Guo on directly. So he used the Prime Minister’s paranoia as his weapon. Didn’t you tell Little Guo yourself to never say anything against the Prime Minister? But he called Jiankang his own. In the end, that was all Chen Youliang needed.”
“Did you know this was going to happen?” Her rising voice broke. “You’re on Chen Youliang’s side; you must have known!”
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“You expect me to believe that?”
“Believe what you like.” Zhu gave a wearied shrug. “Does Chen Youliang trust me? Not entirely, I think. But either way, he didn’t need me. He already had Yi Jinkai in place.”
She was crying then. Harsh, hiccuping sobs. She felt like she’d been crying for days. “Why do we have to play these awful games? What for?”
For a moment the changing candlelight made him seem to waver, as if his small body were only a container for something more terrible. “What does anyone want but to be on top, untouchable?”
“I don’t want it!”
“No,” he said. His black eyes were sad. “You don’t. But others do, and it’s for their sake that this game will continue until it’s over. Who’s next between Chen Youliang and the top? Right Minister Guo. So Chen Youliang’s next move will be against him.” After a brief silence he added gravely, “You should think about yourself, Ma Xiuying. If Chen Youliang destroys the Guo household, he’ll find you a useful reward for the commander who pleased him best.”
Perhaps she would have been horrified if it were a surprise. But even as Ma heard the words, she knew: it was just another part of the pattern of a woman’s life. It still hurt, but instead of fresh pain it was the same unbearable heaviness she had felt upon learning of her impending marriage to Little Guo. For all that she had suffered watching Little Guo’s death, it had changed exactly nothing.
His expression was solemn, as if he knew what she was thinking. “Will you let that happen, or can you finally let yourself want something different?”
“I can’t!” Her own shriek startled her. “Who do you think I am, to think I can make anything happen in my own life? I’m a woman. My life was in my father’s hands, then it was in Little Guo’s, and now it’s in someone else’s. Stop speaking as if I could want anything different! It’s impossible—” How could it seem like he understood, when he couldn’t understand this? To her mortification a sob burst out.
After a moment he said, “I know you don’t want that life. A different one isn’t impossible.”
“Then how!” she cried.
“Join me.”
She managed to glare. “Join your side? You mean Chen Youliang’s side.”
“Not his side,” he said steadily. “My side.”
It took her a moment to realize what he meant. When she did, the betrayal hit her as hard as a slap. “Join you,” she ground out. “Marry you.” She saw a vision of that awful pattern, as rigid as a coffin: marriage, children, duty. What room was there in it for her own desire? She’d thought Zhu was different—she had wanted to believe it—but he was just the same as the rest. Little Guo’s death had simply given him an opportunity to take something he wanted. Sickened, she heard Sun Meng: He looks at you like a man. The cruelty of it took her breath away. Zhu desired, and he had spoken to her as if it was something she could do too, but he had never meant any of it.
And oh, at that moment she did want. She wanted to hurt him.
He caught her look of fury. But instead of triggering an outburst of the usual masculine rage, to her bewilderment his expression only softened. “Yes. Marry me. But not like it would have been with Little Guo. I want to listen to you, Ma Xiuying. You have something I don’t: you feel for others, even the ones you don’t like.” A flash of self-castigation, almost too fast to see. “People who play this game will do whatever’s needed to get themselves to the top, regardless of others. All my life I’ve believed I have to be like that to get what I want. And I do want my fate. I want it more than anything. But what kind of world will we have if everyone in it is like Chen Youliang? A world of terror and cruelty? I don’t want that either, not if there’s another way. But I can’t see that other way by myself. So join me, Ma Xiuying. Show m
e.”
Her anger was punctured by his unexpected honesty. Or what seems like honesty. With a flash of pain she realized she wanted to believe it. She wanted to believe he was different; that he was the kind of man who saw his own flaws, and who needed her as much as she needed him. “You want me to believe you’re different,” she said, and to her shame her voice cracked. “That you can give me something different. But how can I trust that? I can’t.”
To her surprise a wrenching look passed over Zhu’s face. Vulnerability and a shadow of fear, something she had never seen in him before, and it unmoored her more than anything else that had passed between them. “I can see how it would be hard to trust,” he said. His voice had that odd inflection of understanding in it again, and Ma had absolutely no idea what it meant.
He set aside the book and rose, and started to untie his shirt. It was so bizarre that Ma found herself watching with a floating feeling that seemed half paralysis and half acceptance, as if she were a dreamer borne along by the strangeness of the dream. It was only when Zhu’s bare shoulders slid into view that she came back to life with a jolt of embarrassment. She jerked her face away. It was hardly the first male skin she’d seen, but for some reason her face was burning. She heard his clothes fall.
Then his cool fingers were on her face, turning it back. He said, “Look.”
Their bodies were so close, the clothed and the unclothed, and with that same sense of dreamlike acceptance Ma saw in the other her own reflection as seen waveringly in a bowl of water.
Zhu watched her look. Her face had a flayed vulnerability, something so raw and terrible that Ma flinched to see it. It made her think of someone baring a mortal wound they dared not look at themselves, for fear of the reality of it undoing them in an instant.
Zhu spoke calmly, but beneath the surface Ma sensed a shivering horror. “Ma Xiuying. Do you see something you want?”
I’m a woman, Ma had cried to Zhu in despair. Now, as she looked at the person standing before her in a body like her own, she saw someone who seemed neither male nor female, but another substance entirely: something wholly and powerfully of its own kind. The promise of difference, made real. With a sensation of vertiginous terror, Ma felt the rigid pattern of her future falling away, until all that was left was the blankness of pure possibility.
She took Zhu’s small, calloused hand and felt its warmth flow into her until the hollow space of her chest blazed with everything she’d never let herself feel. She was yielding to it, being consumed by it, and it was the most beautiful and frightening thing she’d ever felt. She wanted. She wanted everything Zhu was offering with that promise of difference. Freedom, and desire, and her life to make her own. And if the price of all of that was suffering, why did it matter when she would suffer no matter what she chose?
She said, “Yes.”
15
ANYANG, SUMMER
Anyang was still and gray on their return from Hichetu. The long corridors lay empty; the courtyards were bare. Walking through those echoing spaces gave Esen the feeling of being the only person left in the world. Even Ouyang lingered too far behind for comfort: a shadow that had somehow become detached. Esen came to his father’s residence and stood at the entrance to the courtyard, and saw them there. All the households of his family, his wives and daughters, the officials and servants all arrayed in white, bowing silently in unison. As he walked through them their ceaseless waves of motion were like a thousand snow orchids opening and closing. Their mourning clothes sighed. He wanted to scream for them to stop, to leave, that this was not their place and this was not his; that his father was not dead. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. He ascended the steps of his father’s residence and turned to face them, and as he did so a single voice rose up, “All praise the Prince of Henan!”
“Praise upon the Prince of Henan!”
And as Esen stood there he knew that it was all different; it would never be the same again.
The following long, hot days were full of the ceremonies. Dressed in his hempen mourning robe, Esen entered the cool halls of the family temple. Its dark wood smelled of ash and incense. Statues loomed deep within. He had the sudden eerie vision of someone doing this for him in the future. His children, then his grandchildren doing this for his children. His ancestral line with its accumulating dead: always more who were dead than were ever alive at any moment, to mourn them.
He knelt in front of the Buddha and laid his hands on the gilded box of sutras. He tried to keep his father in mind as he prayed. Warrior, true Mongol, the Great Khan’s most loyal. But the temple’s stale smell distracted him. He couldn’t fix his mind to the prayers, couldn’t seem to inhabit them properly to give them meaning. In his mouth they were empty words that did nothing for his father’s spirit as it waited in that dark underground for its reincarnation.
Behind him, a door opened. A shadow cut through the cast square of light. Esen could feel his brother’s presence like a brand. That shining insincerity; the empty performance. An insult rendered with his very being. As the days passed after Baoxiang had dropped Chaghan to his death, the emotions Esen felt towards his brother had sharpened. Now he thought it was perhaps the only thing that made sense right now: that clarity of hate.
He said sharply to the temple attendant, “I said nobody was to enter.”
The attendant said, hesitating, “Lord—I mean, Esteemed Prince, it’s—”
“I know who it is! Escort him out.”
He tried to concentrate on the ritual prostrations, on the crinkle of the foil sutras as they were unrolled, but his awareness stayed with the servant’s whisper, the withdrawal of the shadow and the dimming brightness as the doors closed. His prayers were worse than empty. Useless, ruined words, nothing better than the facile speech of traitors who moved their mouths while holding nothing in their hearts.
He stood abruptly, casting the sutras to the floor. A sacrilegious clatter that broke the head monk’s recitations. He could feel the attendants’ shock like an external pressure, all of them willing him to submit to the rituals, to finish.
“This isn’t a true remembrance of my father,” he said. “These words.” His heart pounded; he could feel the truth of it rushing within him as furiously as his blood. “I’ll remember and honor him the way he would have wanted. The way he deserves.”
He strode to the doors and flung them open, stepping out into the diffuse brightness of the hot pearl sky. The empty courtyard echoed with the memory of those hundreds of people in white. But today there was only the one figure there. From a distance Wang Baoxiang’s elaborate white drapery and drained face had all the humanity of a piece of carved jade.
Ouyang came from where he’d been waiting, and Esen managed to wrench his eyes away from his brother. As much as Baoxiang’s presence was agonizing, Ouyang’s was comforting: it was all the order and rightness in the world.
Esen felt his inner turmoil slow. He said, “I wish you’d been able to come in with me. I shouldn’t have had to do it alone.”
A shadow crossed Ouyang’s face. There was a peculiar distance in his voice as he said, “It’s a son’s role to honor his father and ancestors. Your father’s spirit needs only your devotions.”
“Let me make an offering on your behalf.”
“You’re confusing your own opinion of me for your father’s. I don’t think his spirit particularly wants to hear from me.”
“He thought highly of you,” Esen said stubbornly. “My father didn’t suffer fools. Would he have allowed you as my choice of general if he didn’t believe in your capabilities? The reputation of the armies of Henan would be nothing if not for you. Of course he wants your respect.” Then he realized, “My father was a warrior. If we want to honor him and bring merit to his spirit—it won’t be via some temple.”
Ouyang raised his eyebrows.
“We’ll win the war. You and me together, my general. Our armies of Henan will restore the strength of the Great Yuan; it will be the longest rule this land b
etween the four oceans has ever known. Our house will be remembered forever as defenders of empire. Is that not the best honor my father could possibly ask for?”
The corner of Ouyang’s mouth moved, more brittle than a smile. The shadow across his face was too transparent to mask pain. Esen thought: He mourns too.
Ouyang said, “The thing your father wanted most in this world was always your success, and the pride you bring to the ancestral line.”
Esen thought of his father, and for the first time felt something bright amidst the pain. Not enough to supersede the pain yet, but the seed of something that could grow. I am the Prince of Henan, the defender of the Great Yuan, as my father and my father’s father were before me. It was a purpose and a destiny, ringing inside him as clearly as the high note of a qin. Esen saw Ouyang’s face, and knew he felt it as strongly as Esen did. It warmed him to know that despite everything, he would always have Ouyang.
* * *
Ouyang’s arrow thunked into the target. After his betrayal in Hichetu, his plan had been to keep his distance from Esen. Esen’s grief and anger were unbearable: they gave Ouyang a gnawing pain that was like having sharkskin rubbed over every tender place of his body. What he hadn’t counted on was Esen’s new desire to keep Ouyang closer to his side than when Ouyang had been his slave. It was understandable; he supposed he should have anticipated it. He has been orphaned. He curses his brother’s name. All he has now is me—
His next arrow flew wide.
Beside him, Esen loosed his own arrow. “To take Jiankang, only to abandon it—” His arrow met the target neatly. Despite being busy in the role of Prince of Henan, he had adopted the new habit of playing archery in the mornings before taking to his desk—which invariably meant Ouyang had to accompany him.
“Internal struggles,” Ouyang said, collecting himself. His next arrow landed a finger-width from Esen’s. “According to the intelligence, they have two factions fighting for control of the movement. The newest reports suggest Liu Futong may have put their young General Guo to death. We should have confirmation in a few days.”
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