She Who Became the Sun

by Shelley Parker-Chan

  “No!” Rice Bucket Zhang laughed. “No, indeed.” To the girls he called, “More wine!” and several came and clustered around him like butterflies on a flower, pouring wine and giggling.

  Ouyang was forced to sit there in a state of exquisite dislike while Rice Bucket Zhang fondled and leered at the girls as they sang and recited poetry, and poured drink after drink. After what felt like an eternity, Rice Bucket Zhang finally excused himself and rose stumbling, leaning on the girls who tittered and led him away.

  * * *

  Ouyang, returning to his rooms well past the third watch, found the long corridors dim. All down their length the servants sat asleep on stools outside their masters’ rooms, their candles burnt down.

  Not far from Ouyang’s rooms a single door stood ajar, issuing a faint light. The stool outside was empty. As he passed, movement from within caught his eye. He glanced casually inside. Then stopped.

  On the bed a naked man lay braced atop a woman. General Zhang’s hair, as gracefully masculine as it had been in Hichetu, was still caught in its golden clasp and hairpins. Muscles shifted in his back as he moved, and the light slid in and out of the hollows of his lean brown flanks.

  Under him was Rice Bucket Zhang’s wife. Framed by her gleaming hair ornaments, pearl flakes winking from her cheeks, her face showed lazy performance. The man seeking his pleasure could have been anyone. To Ouyang it seemed there was no difference between her coy smiles and carefully timed whispers in her lover’s ear than the faces of the whores his soldiers fucked. He watched the rhythmic bounce of her flesh, the growing sheen of sweat on General Zhang’s back, and felt a flush of contempt.

  General Zhang finished and rolled off. He pushed up on one elbow and looked down at the woman with unguarded fondness. Her revealed body was as delicate as a sheaf of white silk, finished with tiny scarlet bed-slippers that struck Ouyang’s eye with the violence of opened flesh. She gave General Zhang a coy glance and took his free hand. Laughing lightly, she said something and tapped a fingernail in the middle of his palm. General Zhang’s look softened further. Then, to Ouyang’s surprise, light flared between their bodies: General Zhang was holding an orange flame on his palm. It had been as sudden as an entertainer’s trick. The flame burned strong and steady, its strange orange light stealing the color from the room so the two people’s bared skin turned gray and the woman’s painted lips as black as charcoal.

  Ouyang remembered the spurt of weak blue flame from between the Great Khan’s knuckles. The Mandate of Heaven. It made sense. The Mongols were losing the Mandate, so someone else had gained it. It was clear what it meant for the Great Yuan’s future. But although it was a future, it wasn’t his future, so Ouyang’s sadness was abstract and impersonal: nothing more than the sense of an ending.

  There was a sound, and a lady’s maid turned the corner into the corridor with a washbasin and lantern upon a tray. Ouyang hurried on. His footsteps were silent, but the candles along the corridor bent slightly with his passing.

  * * *

  Though it was the depths of winter, the dull rags of last year’s foliage still hung on the branches of Rice Bucket Zhang’s orchard. It gave the trees an ugly in-betweenness that reminded Ouyang of molting animals. Not long past the appointed hour he saw her: swaying slowly down the path towards him on her tiny useless feet, her silk sleeves floating away from her body like birds in flight. He found it surprisingly hard to reconcile the image with the knowledge that she was the true power behind an empire, albeit a commercial one. He could have put his hands around her throat and ended her in an instant.

  “General Ouyang.” Madam Zhang inclined her head in greeting. Seeing her face closely for the first time, he noticed her low cheekbones gave her appearance a slight fleshiness. The white face powder failed to fully conceal the irregularities beneath; her perfume was distastefully strong. On her red-lacquered mouth he could see a reflected dot of the sun.

  She said, “Your reputation has you as beautiful as the Prince of Lanling, and even more ferocious in battle. In daylight, I see even more clearly that the former, at least, is true.”

  It was said the Prince of Lanling’s face had been that of a beautiful woman’s, so he had worn a demonic mask into battle to strike the proper fear into the hearts of his enemies. Ouyang said, “Do you doubt the latter?”

  The arch knowingness in her expression filled him with dislike. “Is the most effective general the one who fights best?”

  “Perhaps you choose your generals for their effectiveness in other arenas.”

  Her painted eyebrows flew upwards. “I love that you don’t disappoint! Eunuchs really are as petty as they say. He would be sad to hear you speak so; he has a certain respect for you.”

  “Had I not respect for him, I would never be meeting you.”

  “You’re bad at these games, General. I imagine I’m not the first to tell you so. A cleverer man would make it less obvious that women disgust him.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself to know me.”

  “Tell me: Who did you desire, when you watched? Him or me?”

  Shame flushed through him. He said furiously, “You whore.”

  She gave him an appraising look, like a prospective horse-buyer. “It’s true there are bitten-peach men who naturally prefer other men. I wondered if that was the case with you. But, no: I think you desire men because women remind you of everything you hate about yourself. That no matter what you do, what you achieve, you’ll always be seen as more of a woman than a man. Weak. Lacking.” She laughed lightly. “Isn’t that right? How tragic.”

  His private truth, on her lips. For a moment he was stunned. When the pain finally bloomed, it became a nucleus for his anger, like the imperfection in the base of a cup from which the bubbles rise. He hissed, “I thought the tragedy would be knowing that even a male child half strangled at birth has better qualifications than you do to rule. That no matter what you do, no matter what you achieve, you’ll never receive the Mandate of Heaven, because you’re a woman.”

  Her composure was as immaculate as the glaze on a vase taken straight from the kiln. “The Mandate. Do you know orange is the color of burning salt? That’s why the true color of fire is orange. Not blue or red. Salt is fire, and salt is life, and without it: even an empire falls to nothing.” Ouyang’s failure to produce a single crack in her veneer left him filled with impotent violence. “I may lack the qualifications to rule. But all I need is a man who has them. And as you’ve seen, I already have one of those.” When she smiled, it was as sly as a stalking fox. “I have everything I need. Whereas you, General—you still need me.”

  19

  ANFENG, ELEVENTH MONTH

  Zhu came to. It happened so slowly and painfully that she had the feeling of being reconstituted out of nothingness. Even before she realized she was in Anfeng, in her own familiar bed, she was struck by the miracle of herself. She said, raspy with pain and astonishment, “I’m alive.”

  Ma was leaning over her in an instant, her face so drawn that it looked like she hadn’t slept in a month. For all Zhu knew, it had been that much and more since the Grand Canal. “Ma Xiuying!” she said in delight. “I’m alive.”

  Ma greeted this statement with a furious look. She seemed tempted to strangle Zhu back to death. “How easily you say it! Do you even have any idea how close you came to not being alive? What we had to do—how many times we thought—”

  She broke off, glaring, then to Zhu’s surprise burst into tears. She said, weeping, “I’m sorry. I’m just so tired. We were so worried. We thought you were going to die! He might have spared your army, but he took it all out on you—” She had the sick, pasty look of someone whose heart was breaking to see another’s suffering. Despite all the pain in her body, for one confused moment Zhu thought: But I’m not suffering.

  Memories spooled through her like falling ribbon. Single moments, flickering faster and faster until they ran together into a nightmare version of reality. She saw the plain, and the dark fo
rest of the Yuan army’s spears. General Ouyang before her, as merciless as jade and ice. The flash of light from his sword; the banners frozen against the duck-egg dome of that winter sky. The silent, painless impact followed by the horror of reaching down and feeling the place where they joined. Her hand closing around the edges of his blade, as if that could somehow stop it from being inside her. Her hand—

  When the world turns its face from you, remember it was because of me.

  For those first few moments since awakening, Zhu had only been happy to be alive. Now, slowly and deliberately, she brought her consciousness to bear on her right arm. For an instant she thought she must have dreamt it, because it was still there. She was in pain, and all that pain was in her arm. She was wearing a glove of liquid fire. It ate through her skin, her flesh, until all that was left was her bones, outlined in white-hot agony.

  Her right arm was under the blanket. She reached across her body with her left hand.

  “Don’t look!” Ma cried, lunging.

  But Zhu had already twitched the blanket aside. She looked as dispassionately as she could at the bandaged stump a handspan below her right elbow. The sight seemed oddly familiar. It made her think of undressing in her storeroom in the monastery, and how the changed and threatening body she had uncovered had always seemed to belong to someone else. But this invisible agony-hand was undeniably hers, and so was the stump. The eunuch general had taken his revenge. He had mutilated her.

  Her head spun. In all her years living someone else’s life, she’d believed she was already operating at the highest pinnacle of difficulty—that she was working as hard as humanly possible to survive. She could never have imagined how it might become even more difficult yet. It felt as though she’d climbed a mountain, only to realize that all she’d climbed were the foothills and the real peak lay far above. The thought filled her with such a deep exhaustion that for a moment it felt like despair.

  But as she stared at the rusty bandages, a thought wormed to the surface. However tired I am, however hard it is: I know I can keep going, because I’m alive.

  Alive. She grasped that one true fact, the most important fact in the world, and felt the warmth of it summoning her out of despair. He left me alive.

  What had he said, in that last awful moment? You’ll wish I’d killed you with honor. He’d given her the worst punishment he could imagine. The mutilation of one’s precious, ancestor-given body, and the knowledge of never again being able to hold a sword or lead men from the front line of battle: it was nothing less than the complete destruction of the pride and honor that made a man’s life worth living. The eunuch general had delivered to Zhu Chongba the fate that would have destroyed everything he was, even more certainly than death. It would have made him nothing.

  Zhu thought slowly: But I’m still here.

  The eunuch general hadn’t known he was acting on the body of someone who had never borne any ancestral expectations of pride or honor. Zhu remembered that terrible internal momentum: the feeling that she was diverging irremediably from Zhu Chongba, the person she had to be. She’d been so afraid of what it meant—that she wasn’t Zhu Chongba and never would be, and that the instant Heaven found out she would be returned to nothingness.

  Now she reeled with a realization that upended everything she’d believed about the world.

  I survived—because I’m not Zhu Chongba.

  “Why are you smiling?” Ma said, astonished.

  For half her life Zhu had believed she was pursuing a fate that belonged to Zhu Chongba. She’d considered her successes as stepping stones along a path that only he could travel, towards an ending of greatness and survival that only he could have. But now she had succeeded, and for the first time in her life it had nothing to do with Zhu Chongba.

  She thought of her mysterious ability to see the spirit world—the ability she’d had since the moment she stood beside her family’s grave and first gripped her desire to survive. The ability she shared with nobody else in the world except that unearthly child, the Prince of Radiance. Which meant they were, somehow, alike.

  As she’d done so many times before, she turned her attention inwards. She dived deep into the mutilated body that wasn’t Zhu Chongba’s body, but a different person’s body—a different substance entirely. She had always done this looking for something that felt foreign—for that seed of greatness that had been transplanted into her under the false understanding that she was someone else. But now when she looked, she saw what had been there all along. Not the red spark of the old Song emperors, but her own determination—her desire. Her desire that was so strong it overspilled the limits of her physical form and became entangled in the pulse and vibration of everything that surrounded her: the human world and the spirit world, both. Desire that burned white-hot. That shone. It shone with its own pure unceasing light, and for all that she knew it as intimately as any other part of herself, her realization of what it was stole her breath with joy. A white spark that would become a flame—

  And it belongs to me.

  * * *

  Zhu was sitting up in bed, drinking one of Ma’s medicinal soups by forgoing the spoon and drinking directly from the bowl balanced on her left palm, when there was a knock and Xu Da came in. He sat on the stool next to Zhu’s bed and looked at her, his face softening into naked relief. “Little brother, you look good. I was worried.”

  Zhu took her face out of the bowl and put it down, which was aggravatingly hard to do without spillage. She smiled at him. She owed him her life, but that went without saying. She said instead, “Ma Xiuying said that after the eunuch general withdrew, you carried me all the way back to Anfeng by yourself.”

  “Carried? In my arms? That’s a romantic image. What I did do was sit in a wagon beside your corpse-like body for six hundred li, praying for it to keep breathing. You’re lucky I spent all my formative years in praying school.” He spoke lightly, but sorrow rested on his face: he was remembering. Zhu realized how hard it must have been for him. For him and Ma Xiuying, both: the two people who loved her.

  “You barely studied!” she said sternly. “It’s a miracle the Dharma Master let you be ordained. But I guess you must have done something right, if Heaven couldn’t refuse you.”

  “It wasn’t just prayers that saved you.” In the manner of a confession, he said, “I thought you were going to die.”

  “Seems a reasonable assumption, from what everyone’s told me.”

  “I thought I could handle it until you got the fever. But I needed help—”

  Zhu said calmly, “Who?”

  “Jiao Yu. And he did help: he poked you full of needles and gave you medicine, and you pulled through,” Xu Da said. He paused. “But now he knows. About you.”

  Zhu lay back gingerly. Her pain ballooned and throbbed. “Aiya. First you, then Ma Xiuying, and now Jiao Yu. Haven’t you heard it only takes three people to tell of a tiger before everyone believes it?”

  Xu Da had an ashen look. “I’ll kill him, if you need me to,” he said, low.

  Zhu knew he would, just as she knew it would be the worst thing he had ever done. His other killings had no doubt earned him repercussions for his future lives, but the betrayal and murder of one of their own was something Zhu knew would haunt him in this life. The thought of his suffering sent a surge of angry protectiveness through her. She said, “He’s still here?”

  “As of this morning.”

  “Then he hasn’t run, even though knowing my secret risks his life. It means he knows how important he is to my success. He thinks it’s enough to protect him.”

  For all Jiao was valuable, her first instinct was to erase him. Years ago she had hesitated to do the same to Prefect Fang, but that was before she’d had blood on her hands. She could kill Jiao easily enough, and she doubted it would haunt her.

  But the situation was different than it had been with Prefect Fang. Oh, Jiao’s knowledge still made her skin crawl; it still felt like a violation. The wider release of
that knowledge would still change her life in ways she couldn’t imagine. But it no longer threatened what had been her greatest fear: that Heaven would find out that she wasn’t Zhu Chongba and deliver her into nothingness. That fear was gone. She had faced nothingness, and lived when Zhu Chongba had been destroyed, and been seen by Heaven as nothing other than herself.

  That meant Jiao’s knowledge was only a matter of people, rather than fate and Heaven, and that meant it was something she could control.

  She said grimly, “Leave him to me.”

  * * *

  Even though Zhu only had two injuries (or three, if you counted the exit hole of the stab wound), the pain seemed to come from anywhere and everywhere. Worse, it was never the same pain: some days it gnawed, other days it throbbed and twisted. The only constant was her arm. That always burned. With her mind she traced the searing outline of that phantom limb. For some reason she could still feel her ghost fingers clenched around Ouyang’s sword. Live like your hand is on fire, she thought wryly.

  Ma came into the room with a bowl of medicinal paste and unwrapped Zhu’s stump. Her hands were gentle, but the paste— “That smells awful,” Zhu exclaimed, outraged. It had amused her to realize that Ma was sublimating all her worries and anger into making the healing process as uncomfortable as possible. It was a chastisement that took the form of increasingly pungent pastes, toxic soups, and pills that had grown as large as marbles. Since it made Ma happy, Zhu played her part by complaining. “Are you trying to kill me or heal me?”

  “You should be grateful you’re getting any treatment at all,” Ma said, looking satisfied. When she finished with the stump she changed the rice-paper plasters over the wounds on Zhu’s belly and back. Miraculously, she had been skewered without any of her vital organs being hit. Or perhaps not so miraculously: General Ouyang had wanted Zhu Chongba to live, after all.