“Let the Prince go,” Ouyang ordered as soon as Lord Wang left. He looked out at that dry red lake, and the shimmering silver mystery beyond, and felt a receding tide carrying him away from his pain. Without turning, he said distantly, “More of them than I thought stayed loyal to you.”
There was a long silence. Eventually Esen said, his voice cracking, “Why are you doing this?”
Involuntarily, as if the foreign sound in Esen’s voice summoned the response out of him, Ouyang looked at him. And the instant he saw the depth of hurt and betrayal in someone he loved, he knew he would never survive this. The pain rushed back into him, and it was so great that he felt himself consumed by the white-hot fire of it. When he tried to speak, nothing came out.
“Why?” Esen stepped forwards ignoring how Shao and Zhang tensed on either side of him, and suddenly cried out with a vehemence that made Ouyang shudder, “Why?”
Ouyang forced his voice out, and heard it break. And then he was speaking and couldn’t stop; it was that same awful momentum that powered everything he had put into motion and couldn’t have stopped even if he had wanted to.
“Why? Do you want me to tell you why? I was nearly twenty years by your side, Esen, and for all that time did you think I’d forgotten how your father slaughtered my family, and his men cut me like an animal and made me your slave? Do you think for a moment I forgot? Did you think I wasn’t even man enough to care? Think me a coward who would dishonor my family and ancestors for the sake of staying alive like this? I may have lost everything important to a man, I may live in shame. But I am still a son. I will do my filial duty; I will avenge my brothers and uncles and cousins who died at the hands of your family; I will avenge my father’s death. You look at me now and see a traitor. You scorn me as the lowest form of human being. But I chose the only way left to me.”
Esen’s face was full of grief, open like a wound. “It was you. You killed my father. You let me think it was Baoxiang.”
“I did what I had to do.”
“And now you’ll kill me. I have no sons; my father’s line will be extinguished. You’ll have your revenge.”
Ouyang’s cracking voice sounded like someone else’s. “Our fates were sealed a long time ago. From the moment your father killed my family. The times and means of our deaths have always been fixed, and this is yours.”
“Why now?” The pain on Esen’s face was the sum of all their memories; it was a palimpsest of every intimacy they had ever shared. “When you could have done it any time before?”
“I need an army to take me to Khanbaliq.”
Esen was silent. When he finally spoke, it was laden with sorrow. “You’ll die.”
“Yes.” Ouyang tried to laugh. It stuck in his throat like a salty sea urchin. “This is your death. That is mine. We’re fixed, Esen.” The saltiness was choking him. “We always have been.”
Esen was coming apart; he was spilling grief and agony and anger, like the invisible radiance of the sun. “And will you stand and kill me stone-faced with nothing but duty in your heart? I loved you! You were even closer to me than my own brother. I would have given you anything! Do I mean no more to you than those thousands I’ve watched you kill in my name?”
Ouyang cried out. It sounded like a stranger’s sound of grief. “Then fight me, Esen. Fight me one last time.”
Esen glanced at his sword, lying where Shao had flung it.
Ouyang said viciously, “Give him his sword.”
Shao, picking it up, hesitated.
“Do it!”
Esen took his sword from Shao. His face, downturned, was hidden behind the fall of his unraveled hair.
Ouyang said, “Fight me!”
Esen raised his head and looked squarely at Ouyang. His eyes had always been beautiful, the smooth shape of them balancing the masculine angles of his jaw. In all their long relationship, Ouyang had never known Esen to feel fear. Neither was he afraid now. Strands of hair clung to the wetness on his face, like seaweed draped over a drowned man. Slowly, deliberately, Esen raised his arm and let the sword fall. “No.”
Without breaking eye contact, he reached up to unlace his cuirass. When it was unlaced he pulled it over his head and threw it aside without looking to see where it fell, and walked towards Ouyang.
Ouyang met him halfway. The sword, going directly into Esen’s chest, held them together. As Esen staggered, Ouyang wrapped his free arm around him to keep him up. They stood there chest to chest, in that cruel parody of an embrace, as Esen gasped. When his knees buckled, Ouyang sank down with him, cradling him, pushing his hair out of the blood coming from his nose and mouth.
All Ouyang’s life he had believed he was suffering, but in that instant he knew the truth that every past moment had been a candle flame compared to this blaze of pain. It was suffering that was lit around without shadow, the purest thing under Heaven. He was no longer a thinking being that could curse the universe, or imagine how it could have gone differently, but a single point of blind agony that would go on unending. He had done what he had to do, and in doing so he had destroyed the world.
He pressed his forehead to Esen’s and cried. Underneath them the blood pooled, then ran out across the marble bridge and off the side into the red ground.
* * *
Ouyang stood on the palace steps above his army. The bodies had been cleared, but the white stone of the parade ground was still covered in blood. Here there was no camouflaging earth: it spread in great blotches and streaks, smeared under the men’s boots. Above, the white overcast sky was the same color as the stone.
Ouyang was soaked in blood. His sleeves were heavy with it, his hands gloved in it. He felt exsanguinated, as cold and still inside as ice.
To the grim-faced, silent crowd of Nanren faces, he said, “We have been subjugated, enslaved in our own country, forced to watch barbarian masters bring our great civilization to ruins. But now we fight for our own cause. Let our lives be the currency by which the honor of our people will be avenged!”
It was what they wanted to hear; it was the only thing that would have ever motivated them to follow someone like him. As he spoke to them in Han’er, he realized he might never speak Mongolian again. But his native language held no comfort. It felt like a cold leather glove that had been prised from a corpse. His Mongol self was dead, but there was no other to take its place, only a hungry ghost containing the singular purpose of revenge, and the inevitability of its own death.
He said, “We march to Dadu to kill the Emperor.”
23
ANFENG, THIRD MONTH
The news about Bianliang reached Ma in a letter, from Zhu but written in Xu Da’s hand. The letter spoke of Chen’s defeat (“regrettably overcome by the superior combination of General Ouyang of the Yuan, and the forces of the merchant Zhang Shicheng”) and Prime Minister Liu’s death (“an unfortunate accident in his flight to safety”). Prior to his death Liu had received the Buddha’s blessings for having saved the Prince of Radiance, whom he had passed into Zhu’s own protection. Zhu trusted that his loyal and honorable wife, Ma Xiuying, could make the preparations for a suitable welcome for the Prince of Radiance on his imminent return to Anfeng.
It was the first time Ma had received a letter from Zhu. Her relief at Zhu’s triumph was tinged with a peculiar sorrow. The formal language of letters captured nothing of Zhu’s voice; it could have been written by a stranger. Any man providing instructions to his dutiful wife. Erased by the literary phrases was not only the truth of what had happened at Bianliang, but some truth of Zhu herself. Ma had never minded before that the public saw Zhu as a normal man. What other way could there be? But Zhu had promised to be different with Ma, and the loss of that difference in private correspondence hurt more than Ma could have anticipated. It felt like a betrayal.
Ma made the arrangements. Dutifully. But she felt no need to be among the throngs from all over the countryside that pressed into the center of Anfeng to watch the Prince of Radiance’s return. She stood at the upstair
s window of the Prime Minister’s mansion—Zhu’s, now—and looked onto that field that had seen so much carnage. It was dusk as the Prince of Radiance’s gleaming palanquin was borne in, flanked by Zhu and Xu Da. Neither of them seemed changed. Zhu still wore her usual armor over her monk’s robe. Ma knew exactly what that modest appearance was for: she was taking every care not to look like a usurper. By accepting the power granted to her by the Prince of Radiance with grace and humility, Zhu could cement the ordinary people’s impression that she was the legitimate leader of not just the Red Turbans—but the entire Nanren movement against the Mongols.
The Prince of Radiance ascended the stage and took his throne. Ma watched Zhu kneel to receive the benediction of that small outstretched hand. The red light of his Mandate flowed from his fingertips into Zhu, consuming her kneeling figure in a corona of dark fire. Ma shuddered. For a terrible moment she thought it might not be the leadership that the Prince of Radiance was bestowing, but a death sentence. In her mind’s eye she saw Prime Minister Liu wreathed in that same fire. Like Zhu, he had desired and been ambitious—and despite his best efforts, he still hadn’t been able to keep control of that unearthly power that was the basis of his leadership. How could Zhu avoid the same fate?
The bonfires and drums roared all night long. It was the voice of the end of the world—or perhaps the new one, already come.
* * *
A knock at the door awakened Ma from a disturbed sleep. The drums were still pounding. A rosy glow, brighter than the Mandate, poured through the open window: firelight rolling over the underside of low clouds.
Xu Da was standing in the hallway with the Prince of Radiance beside him. Xu Da inclined his head to Ma and said with odd formality, “Commander Zhu requests your assistance.” Behind him Ma saw other figures recessed in the darkness. Guards. Zhu had never bothered with guards before, being of the opinion that she had little to interest anyone. But possession of the Prince of Radiance changed everything. She saw that Xu Da’s eyes were warm, even as he maintained the expected propriety: “I’ll see that you’re safe, so please take your rest. The commander will come when he can.”
The Prince of Radiance stepped in. Xu Da shut the door, and Ma heard him issuing directions outside. A shuffle of booted feet in response. They were guarding an asset, not a person. For the first time, Ma looked closely at the Prince of Radiance. Lit dimly by the window, his round-cheeked face had the unearthly quality of a bodhisattva: serene and not quite present. Ma’s skin crawled. It was the look of someone who remembered every one of his past lives: ten thousand years or more of unbroken history. How could anyone bear all that pain and suffering? Even in this one life, he had surely seen too much in the Prime Minister’s keeping.
Ma found tongs and the pot of coals for lighting the lamp. As she picked up a coal, the Prince of Radiance looked out the window and commented, “So many ghosts tonight.”
Ma jumped, losing the coal. Hearing him speak was as unnerving as if a statue had bent down to touch her as she knelt before it. “What?”
“They came to watch the ceremony.”
A cold finger of dread traced Ma’s spine. She imagined the space between the stage and the crowd filled with ghosts: their hungry eyes fixed upon Zhu as she burned.
The Prince of Radiance’s otherworldly gaze drifted back to her. As if knowing the question on her tongue, he said, “Those with the Mandate of Heaven are more attuned than others to the threads that connect all things and make up the pattern of the universe.” Adult words, from a child’s mouth. “The dead awaiting their rebirths are no less a part of that pattern than the living. To us the spirit world is as visible as the human world.”
Us. He must mean himself and the Emperor—but with shock, Ma remembered something she had dismissed as a dream. Zhu’s voice, fractured and distorted through the lens of fever: I can see them coming.
She couldn’t handle the implication; it was too big. It felt like staring into the sun. Rather than dwell on it she fumbled with the tongs and managed to light the lamp. The scent of the warming oil mingled with the scorch and sulfur of spent fireworks from outside. The child watched her lid the coal pot and stow it under the table. In the same conversational way he had spoken of things beyond normal comprehension, he said, “Liu Futong was never going to rule.”
Ma froze. If what he said was true, and he could see the pattern of the world, could he read their fates as easily as someone else might read a book? She said uneasily, “Then who? Is it Zhu Chongba?” A wash of foreboding changed her mind. “Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.”
The Prince of Radiance regarded her. “Even the most shining future, if desired, will have suffering as its heart.”
Ma’s newly lit lamp flame shrank and turned blue, and drowned in the pool of its own oil. It was only that the wick had been too short—but as she stared at the stream of smoke rising in the dark, all the hairs on her arms stood up. She saw the faces of all the ones she had loved and lost. How much more suffering was even possible?
Since there didn’t seem to be anything else to do, she put the child to bed and lay next to him. When it seemed he had fallen asleep, she glanced across at him. She was surprised to see his serenity had transformed into the perfectly ordinary sweetness of a sleeping child. Ma looked at his round cheeks and small parted lips, and felt an unexpected push of tenderness. She had forgotten that despite being a bodhisattva, he was still human.
She didn’t think she had slept, but then someone was leaning over her in the darkness.
“Move over,” Zhu said. Her familiar voice slid over Ma as warmly as a blanket. “Isn’t there room for me? You two are taking up all the space.”
* * *
Ma awoke to daylight showing through the window-paper. The Prince of Radiance, to all appearances an ordinary child, was still asleep on her side of the bed. On her other side Zhu lay drowsing with her head on Ma’s arm. Sometime on the way back from Bianliang she had stopped shaving her head. The dense regrowth made her look surprisingly young. The ends ruffled softly against Ma’s fingertips. She stroked again, feeling lulled. In the space between those two trusting bodies, the edges of the world felt warm and rounded.
“Mmm,” said Zhu. “I don’t think anyone’s ever done that to me before.” She roused and rubbed her head against Ma’s stroking fingers. “It’s nice. When my hair’s longer, you’ll have to do my topknot for me.” Her stump, dressed in a fresh bandage, lay on top of the quilt.
“Touch-starved?” Ma teased. It was unusual; Zhu always seemed as self-contained as a geode. “Are you telling me you didn’t pick up any concubines along the way to pleasure you?”
“I was sharing a tent…” Zhu rolled onto her back and stretched.
“With Xu Da,” Ma said. “The most notorious lover of women in half a province. He’d probably have aided and abetted. Found a girl you could share.” After a moment of staring longingly at the curve of Zhu’s clothed breasts, she stroked them with a mildly guilty feeling. For all Zhu claimed not to mind being touched, Ma had always thought she was making some conscious effort not to tense. But now to Ma’s surprise, Zhu accepted the caress with every impression of relaxation. Comfortable in her body, for the first time since Ma had known her. Something had changed.
“Jealous as everyone is of the fact that I’ve seen Xu Da naked,” said Zhu, amused, “I’m happy to go the rest of my life without it happening again. Even apart from that, I wouldn’t; you’d mind.”
“You can do what you like.”
Zhu gave her a knowing smile. “Don’t worry, Yingzi. I’ll ask first before I take a concubine.”
“Oh, so you are planning on one?”
“You might like it. Someone else to sleep with. Novelty.”
“I don’t want to sleep with your concubine,” Ma said, refusing to explore why the idea felt so distasteful.
“Ah, it’s true: she’d probably prefer men. I suppose she could always take a lover.” Zhu turned her head to grin at M
a. “You know, Yingzi, I wasn’t planning on getting married. You were an accident. But as it happens—I’m glad of it.”
Zhu reached over and they held hands, left and left, chaste because of the child.
After a while Zhu released Ma’s hand and said, “Just so you know, I’m not going to be around for long. I want to retake Jiankang.”
It hadn’t even been half a day. How quickly Ma had allowed herself to fall back into the comfortable illusion of intimacy. Now she regretted it. “You won’t stay awhile?”
“This is my opportunity.” Zhu sounded honestly regretful. “I have uncontested leadership of the Red Turbans, and popular support thanks to the Prince of Radiance’s blessing. I have Anfeng. It has to be Jiankang next. Little Guo wasn’t wrong: we need it if we want to control the south. And if we don’t take it—Madam Zhang will.” Zhu made a face. “Should I be calling her the Queen of Salt now? What an odd title. Queen of Salt. I suppose I just have to get used to it. Queen of Salt.”
“Stop saying Queen of Salt!” Ma said, exasperated. “What do you mean, Queen of Salt?”
Zhu laughed. “Now you’re the one saying it. I suppose you haven’t heard. The Zhang family—Madam Zhang, in other words—supported General Ouyang’s move against the Prince of Henan. She wanted to strike a crippling blow to the Yuan before breaking away from it.” Zhu flung her arms out melodramatically, which made her abbreviated right arm stick out like the wing of a steamed chicken. “Quite the blow. Henan is completely destroyed as a military power. Now the Zhang family claims sovereignty over the entire eastern seaboard, and Rice Bucket Zhang is calling himself the founding ruler of the Kingdom of Salt.”
“So the Yuan—”
“Lost access to their salt, grain, silk, and everything else that travels along the Grand Canal, overnight. They’ll be furious,” Zhu said cheerfully. “They’ll have to send out their central army from Dadu to put her down. She’ll give them a run for their money. Especially since she has all the money.”
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