My Last Empress

by Da Chen

  She halted briefly, her swan neck tilting adoringly, blond pigtail swinging over one shoulder blade. Then she hopped over the threshold, running through my hallow atrium, her gait lithe like a deer’s, before flinging herself into my trembling ape arms. Wretchedly she weakened me with her parched lips and quivering hot tongue.

  In broken murmurs, she uttered, “You horrible big, big wolf,” as she wolfed me down. Mutely I held her, my treacherous hands caressing her nymph buttocks, my desperate fingernails unable to help digging deep into her taut and silky skin. She stood barely to my chest, her hair smelling of summer crushed weeds and morning fresh leaves. Her neck tasted of stale sweat and coarse fragrance.

  Carefully I lifted Q up, leaning her face over my shoulder as a father would of his napping child. My toes kicked up my squeaky stairs, my footfalls, lithe like a thief’s, echoing faintly along the empty villa … In-In had bargained for a leave to tend an aging, ill servant of his village. Gently I put her down on my bare bed, enshrining her within the white mosquito net.

  I was about to fetch tea when she gripped my hand and asked, “You do love me, don’t you?”

  “You have no idea,” I whispered, my voice trembling.

  “Then don’t leave.” She pulled my pajamas off, discarding them at my feet, and imbibed my scepter in her quivering mouth.

  22

  My imperial pupil donned a green suit, Q’s wedding gift to the groom two barren years back. It was of Austrian tailoring, with a broad chest and pinched waist and a short collar, making him look the part of a Continental esquire, complete with wingtip shoes.

  “I have important matters to discuss. Can we have lunch in your study?” was all he said before our class in geometry. It was one of S’s favorite lessons, after the “Introductory Parliamentary Politics” course, which had only been allowed after a lengthy array of approval and disapproval among many an invisible imperial adviser, and after three changes of course title.

  The emperor was quite excited when I showed him the drawings I had rendered in my spare time of a circular lily pond, bricked squares, triangles of curvy roofs, and the octagonal Taoist compass, linking learning to reality. He rubbed his hands, as if seeing these objects for the first time. “You mean to say that all these sciences are inherent in what surrounds me right here under my roof?”

  “And more. Your ancestors excelled in making things that have long been imitated and mimicked by all abroad.”

  “Name one such mimicry.”

  “Cannons derive from the basis of Chinese fireworks. Also compasses, which came from China, now needle north on all ships. There are many other things.”

  “Such as?” S’s eyes shone with an intense light so typical of youth, the kind of light only possible when the early morning sun was shining at its best.

  “Noodles, what the Romans had borrowed and remade into pasta.”

  “Yes, yes, the trade of that monk named Marco Polo. Qiu Rong gave me pamphlets explaining his exploits, her very first present to me among the many she brought from the ocean lands of her father’s diplomatic tour. That Marco fellow, though much noted, I found to be a self-grandiosing trumpeter of sort, who touted himself as a friend of the Court though there were no traces of his presence or record of his involvement in any of our Court proceedings. I have searched all over, spending days in the Treasure Wing myself, searching for proof of his claims, any which would have pleased me so, but there is none. A fraud he must be then, writing books about land he possibly never set his Roman foot upon, telling tales he must have heard from those who made them up in drunken stupors on ships that once docked far off our land. Fairytales they all are. He is, for my worth, a fraud. Now what do you say about those noodles?”

  “I, too, have read his writing in his original Roman language.”

  “And you are impressed by him?”

  “Not at all. I, too, have found him to be stretching things a bit, only for the purpose of making others believe.”

  “Stretching things a bit.” My pupil laughed rather shrewdly. “You mean like those noodles he had purported to have imported into his land, which anyone with flour could think of making? No one, even the most foolish of men, would eat the wheat or barley raw rather than making them into some shape, some form. All I am saying is this man is a fraud: Romans had no need to learn noodle making from our ancestors, as our ancestors had no need to learn such from another land, another race.”

  “I am sorry that I brought him up.”

  “No, I apologize. I meant no offense.”

  “We are having an academic debate.”

  “Then noodles we should have for lunch to end this debate.”

  His anger, as it turned out, wasn’t triggered by any hearsay about the secret trip to the hospital with Q, which I had little doubt was within his knowing. What I knew about him was that he picked his battles, as dictated by his moods and fancies.

  While waiting for the meal, I wrote a poem for Q, whom I missed, whom I craved.

  Pond is dry

  Save for its tears.

  Tree is dead

  Save for its roots.

  Dripping …

  Rotting …

  Dying …

  Wishing …

  A little North Soong Dynasty verse, pensive and nearly feminine, but every bit Pickens, dripping with foolishness.

  When ready, the team of chefs and servers who, as usual, accompanied His Augustness for the sumptuous lunch, were sent away. Lunch customarily encompassed one hundred traditional Manchurian dishes and plates symbolic of status, mostly serving as sacrificial food, as if he were a deity needful of daily prayers and offerings. All such dishes—fatty goose, fried pigskin, leaping carp, et cetera—were to be made fresh, and the uneaten or half-eaten portions were to be ladled out to this servant or that official as gifts that cannot be refused and must be eaten, giving the receiver an unspoken ranking of favor to be gauged by the day and seen by all since such list of giving is routinely recorded in the Daily Gazette, the Court daily.

  After sending away the traditional retinue, all we were left with was the service of In-In, who carried a tray out with two bowls of ginger noodles garnished with two pieces of fatty duck breast swimming in chicken broth.

  Among the slurping sound of consumption, S began, “There has been an enormous deficit in our coffers that I was informed of by the palace Neiwufu, which is their way of spurring me to increase provincial taxes and terrestrial levies. But knowing of the famine going on in my ancestral Manchurian land, and the plague sickening the south, and the floods drowning half the farmlands along the southern coast, and the warring southwestern regions bordering Burma and Laos, how can I?” He twirled his lengthy noodles around his chopsticks before feeding himself such, swallowing quite delicately with his mouth closed. A burp was suppressed to impart his next sentence. “I need to augment your duty to supervise over the Neiwufu, that den of thieves, with an increase of this sum of wages.” He shoved over a piece of writing authenticated with a red seal. The sum of six thousand tael in total. Sufficient for a ministerial secretarial post at Court, bearing the second degree in authority, namely, the rank of Mu Yan.

  Anyone under the sun, the Manchurian sun, that is, would have forfeited his firstborn for such a salacious fortune, whether he was of the elite literati and someone who had jumped hurdle after stringent hurdle to prominence, or he was just an everyman with a litter of ten to feed … but not this bloke. The duty to supervise such a group of imbeciles would be tantamount to suicide. I remembered the story of the concubine, with her body violated and her baby cut from her bleeding body. If the Neiwufu didn’t kill you, you would soon wish yourself dead; just being near the Neiwufu, who made their living on ways of deceit and trickery, would make any sane person fill with suspicion and doubt.

  A selfless official had previously vanished from his home only thirteen days after his assumption of such supervisory duty. Another had died of fatigue and inexplicable ailments, coupled with advanced age
. But the emperor made no mention of such.

  When I pointed this out, he explained it away as follows.

  “You are different. You are not one of us. You don’t have much to lose”—Besides my life?—“in the way any subject of mine could be subject to.”

  “How am I different?”

  “You are an ocean man, with your legation only a wall beyond.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel safer.”

  “You will have as many guarding you as you deem proper.”

  “I haven’t come for this—”

  “But you have come, and I am in need of your service.”

  “I will have to think about it.”

  “You will have plenary power,” he added.

  “Power isn’t—”

  “It’s an order, sir,” S said in a firm voice. After a pause, he added, “And you shall have Qiu Rong at your disposal to aid you.”

  I lowered myself to my knees, taking the honor few deserved or desired.

  23

  I was ensconced inside my silken quilt, nursing intimate thoughts of just and reasoned encounters with Q for the days to come when a bedside candle flickered without any trace of a breeze, its flame imminently snuffed as if some stealthy fingers had intruded pinching it dead.

  In the darkness, my hand was suddenly twisted as if a mighty claw wrenched my palm; another yanked at my digits, giving me excruciating pain.

  “For heaven’s sake!” I rolled off my bed in a haphazard manner, trying to untangle myself from this invisible invader, tossing around the floor, cursing and pleading all at the same time as if there were a genuine foe. Such disturbance inevitably awoke my faithful servant, who dashed up the stairs with lantern in hand, inquiring, “What has befallen you, Master Pi-Jin?”

  I yelped, shaking my right hand, the one still caught by this invisible strength. “Let go of me, you cursed devil.”

  “Is it a ghost you see?” In-In asked. Undaunted, he shone his lantern around the chamber while spitting my way and stomping his feet, his spittle cool on my skin. “Go away, ghost. Go away or I will burn you to death.” He swung the lantern wildly at me while spitting another wet mouthful my way, landing its stickiness on my forehead so that it hung on the cliff of my eyebrow.

  The pain only worsened as the unseen hand bent my arm behind my back, thrusting me to a kneeling position while the other invisible hand savagely slapped my buttocks with a bony and cold palm, throwing me left and right like a pitiable altar boy.

  My pleading ceased. The cold hand had done it right in front of my boy eunuch. What affront!

  “Whatever you are, I fear you not, you devilish ghost.” I uttered those agitated words while being swayed impishly and slapped limp, but my boy, In-In, wasn’t in the least afraid. He went to do what, in his finest judgment, would be the ablest thing. Pulling up the hem of his maroon robe, with feet apart, he let loose a squirt of hot urine, dashing it all over me and my floor.

  My invisible foe uttered, “Cloud onto your path,” then fled, traceless, whipping out the window.

  “Your urine?” I asked, lying limp, gasping gratefully.

  “The village monk taught me so. The purest to douse out utmost evil.” In the process of tying up his robe, he gave a glimpse of his undone manhood. No tree, just a field, plain and yielding.

  “Did you hear her voice?” I inquired.

  “No. What voice?” Laying down his lantern, In-In picked up a blanket to wipe me clean.

  “A woman’s voice. She spoke in Mandarin.”

  “Did she?” In-In asked calmly. “It must be Empress Jen, the one who comes off the wall painting within the Tenderness Chamber. She hanged herself with her silk sash.” In-In swept a glance around my chamber as if seeing her trace. “The one whose appearance always carries ill foreboding. The last time she appeared, our oldest stone bridge collapsed over Willow Pond, Grandpa’s favorite of all Summer Palace bridges. The tragedy wasn’t the collapsing bridge but the ten young eunuchs crushed and drowned to death while passing beneath it in a boat.”

  “Take me to the mural. I must see her face.”

  “But it is nighttime.”

  “We must go while her trail is still hot. Hurry.” I clothed myself in a rush. I could still sniff a certain foulness or decay, a certain otherworldliness as if some raw corpse had been exhumed, not intentionally but by hands of theft; a certain dankness, thick with ghostly urge and degradation.

  Two steps at a time I ran downstairs, following In-In’s boyish figure made ghostly by his dim lantern. The darkness was complete: occasional lightning far off the palace wall charged the sky with fright; dogs barked as if joining a capacious earthbound symphony, dark and deepening in an earth devoid of melodic frogs, insomniac cicadas, and rancorous nightingales. We passed a peach grove, leafy with spiderwebs, entered a bamboo forest dampened from night fog, surpassed some squeakily perturbed pond-dwelling bridges, then ran along meandering cobbled paths.

  “Where is this ghost chamber?” I asked, between shortening breaths.

  “The back palace,” In-In confided. “Don’t you see the threads?”

  “What threads?”

  “It’s trailing the ghost.”

  I strained my neck, quickened my feet, and caught a glimpse of a firebug-like drawing, as if the tentative hand of an aged and freckled watercolorist had sprinkled bright hues diluted by night. It encircled the roofs of the back palace, that dwelling of palace rejects: hundreds of chosen palace concubines who were to prime and perish within the walls where they squandered their short lives awaiting succinct days of glory when the lordly emperor, in name and in law a husband to them all, would be pleased by their womanly ways enough to salvage them away from misery by the gift of a son through their dark wombs. Some did indeed have their moment in the sun, noticed by a flippant emperor, but the shine of such attention could be a double-bladed sword causing them to die by way of poison or hanging rope: poison concocted by a devious empress; the rope noosed by a conniving eunuch’s hands—the servile superiors outranking even the earthly lord himself in subtle power.

  In pursuit of that flock of elusive firebugs, I scaled a stout wall after In-In’s bidding lantern. Bugs and mosquitoes fenced the ill abode. Along the ivy-covered wall, In-In led me by the hand, passing one window after another until a doorway was found and its lock undone with a ready key hanging among others from his waistband.

  The swollen door grudgingly opened into a tea chamber. A cloud of chilling air nipped at our toes like a multitude of hissing tongues, and the train of illusory firebugs broke into chaos, scattering and scaling over dank murals, curtained windows, and pale watercolors in scrolls and hangings. Suddenly the insects regathered themselves, this time onto the oil painting, canvassed and framed, forming themselves into the shape of the mistress portrayed and then vanishing into her, traceless and noiseless. In the shine of In-In’s lantern, the canvas returned to a portrait depicting a gaunt mistress of ocean origin, toothy and mirthless.

  “The Duchess of Vienna. A gift from Empress Qiu Rong to the dowager from her childhood days in that ocean land,” In-In intoned.

  “Why is the painting here in this chamber?”

  “The dowager abhorred it and dispatched it here to be viewed by the palace women.”

  “Why did the bugs all vanish into this frame?” I asked.

  “Look up.” The boy servant raised the lantern. There, under an arching roof, was a ceiling beam with ferocious symbols of phoenixes and riling dragons. “See the groove?”

  It was like a scar, roughened and chafed along the girth of the beam.

  “The Hanging Beam, it is called. Three hangings in the four years I have been here in the same spot nearly always at night in spring: some sort of angst, beauties faded and glory ignored. Years in and years out, the only way of escaping palace life is to step onto the chairs stacked atop that tea table. All it takes is one kick …” His voice trailed off as if eulogizing his own end.

  “What does it all have
to do with this ghost? This chasing? The firebugs?”

  “The dead here are truly undead, some living through the muralist’s strokes on the wall, others crying through the cracks along the tiles; still others on the Tomb Sweeping Festival have been seen swinging from this beam like frolicking children on a swing.” He shone his lantern along the length of the wall.

  Murals wrapping the chamber depicted a daily scene within the back palace of palace women in all manners of domesticity: bending over needlework, cleansing crockery, minding stone grinding, brush-painting scrolls making wishes of longevity and good health, and in one, feeding an infantile sovereign, the only child face drawn. Outwardly the faces were all content and their postures without peril; inwardly there was ennui and death.

  “Their ghostly spirits have all sought solace through the painted figures. By coincidence each of the dead possesses a striking resemblance to a matched face in the mural, which was said to be cursed from the outset. They say it seeks those resembling living to die one by one in this very chamber. No one knows how many more are to die under this roof.”

  “A chamber of ghosts?” I said with soft query.

  “Though bothersome, none dare suggest having the chamber torn down or the wall recovered with other wallpaper.”

  Tenderly I touched the yellowed paper with my fingertips.

  “What is intended is destined. It is better to let evil find its way, venting the path.”

  “Who taught you to be such a seer, young man?” I asked.

  “I was born with the gift. It would have made me a fine fortune-teller or a monk, but palace life suits me just fine: one lives in shadows. But this firebug vanishing was the first I encountered. Ghosts have come out of their respective portrait but never as outward creatures.”

  “Is there a way to go inside this painting like the firebugs?” I inquired.