My Last Empress

by Da Chen

  Taking his lantern, I ran along the mute mural shining the light on the four walls seeking a hole, a dent, or a dimple, however narrow, to climb into or squeeze through.

  “Master Pi-Jin, we must go.”

  “No, I must …” I fell on my knees gazing intently into the portrait of the Viennese Duchess through which the iridescent insects had sought to nest.

  Were they the incendiary spirit of that encroaching ghost who had flown through my window, invading my dwelling? What was it the ghost aimed to impart? Was it tragedy to befall or good tidings to ensue?

  “Put out the light, Master Pi-Jin. We’ve got to run: night guards are here,” In-In warned, dashing to my side to blow out the lantern.

  “Why are they here?”

  “It’s the nightly ghost chasing so the palace will be calm. Our lantern must have alarmed them to come earlier.” With that he hauled me out a back window before a guard’s lantern could shine our way.

  Was this my gui su? My tomb where, should I die, my Annabelle would relive? She had all but utterly faded since I came to know the truth. Don’t ask me why. It could be the ill reasoning of this warped soul, an answer to an insufferable urge, an urge deserving death, for only death could end it all, without which I would pain forever. Or it could be that in the minuscule moment, while I was kneeling before the canvas of the Viennese countess, an ancient fragrance had infused my nostrils, permeating that inner tunnel, dizzying my head. What I sensed could be nauseating, a tad foul by a dull nose, yet dear and familiar it was to all my consciousness. It was a scent alike no ordinary scent, unique only to my Annabelle.

  24

  This day couldn’t have begun more crookedly. First I sent back a four-man sedan for my use to assume my new post as Internal Inspector of the Neiwufu, choosing to walk the four courtyards west from my abode. The vehicle’s sender was none other than the outfit’s bulbous governor, the dean of the thieves’ den—an unfair description for a helpless man at the helm of a hellish outpost. Yen Su, the governor, was a scholar in possession of two incongruous flaws: dedication and honesty. One could be afflicted safely with one or the other but not both.

  The governorship had always been a nominal role, an empty pocket as it was known, with little power and less authority. The system of graft and grease was an intricate and delicate one, a grinding mill running on its own wheel that one so posted is less to govern than to be governed by.

  Upon meeting Yen Su, bowing was the only formality I would stand for. Even a simple tea ceremony was refuted, pure and plain though it might be. Yen Su was a meek man with unsteady eyes, always searching, with a hunched back belaboring under an invisible weight. His diction was laborious and tone humble. His official costume was threadbare, his boots even showing traces of mending stitches. He was a man of frugality and timidity but futile and ill posted at best, the kind that immediately evoked my sympathy.

  “Long I awaited you,” was his sincere welcome. Profusely he apologized. All the while his eyes darted left and right as if minding the puppeteer shadow of his master behind a gauzy curtain. A man of his gutlessness should seek the serenity of an old temple rather than the business of ruling over the rulers.

  A glimpse into his dossier would later reveal the choice and deliberation of his appointment: a handpicked man with a ninth degree of familial relationship to the chief eunuch, a shadowy man of power. Yen Su was an agent lured in intentionally to calm all waters for the thieves of the dry-land piracy. But meek though he might seem, Yen Su would turn out to be that agent of change and a thorn in the iris of his dispatcher; the meek man’s revenge, one should say, for in the end that last grain of humanity, pride, always tips things over. Such was the case in point before us.

  The initial meeting was only to be tea for three—me, Yen Su, and Q—to look over records of inventories and outlays. But trying to intrude among us was the jarring presence of a middle-ranked eunuch, Gong Sing, who insisted on sitting in for the duration. When I sensed his steam of hostility and discharged him, the hippo-headed nonman dared spit in my direction before stomping off muttering curses. Then and there I effectuated the first missive of my officialdom: ten planks of bare-ass beating.

  Three days we spent reading files, cloistered within the suffocating archival chamber, elbow to elbow in utter absorption of our own perfumes; such heaving intimacy was a requisite to blindly deciphering the unintelligible scribbles done so as to mislead. One quickly concluded what was amiss. The palace, opulent as it might be, was running on empty, teetering on ruination, already drowning in insolvency.

  Here is the simple arithmetic. The overgrown household, numbering a staggering ten thousand, was outspending its income by the ratio of one to ten. At such a rate the golden tiles up on the palatial roofs would have to be plowed down for auction just to survive another season of mindless consumption.

  The left-hand side of the ledger, assets—perennial taxes and levies—seemed daunting, figured in millions of tael of silver and hoards of rare jewelry. But going down the same column, one detected numerous deductions at various ranks and levels of the empire: skimming by various and gubernatorial fiefdoms, which were all explained vaguely in more volumes of notations and annotations and charges with archaic references of debts owed and loans accumulated, which were buttressed further by boxes and boxes of loan agreements and debt pledges all readily signed off with the emperor’s own seal. One searching for any clue and inkling was to cease at this regal point, and many before me probably did, but not this ocean man, who bore no affinity to the sacredness to this symbol of supremacy. Browsing through the yellowed and certified loan contracts, I quickly discovered the traces of trickery: the closing pages with the emperor’s seal never matched the preceding pages of the said documents in color or in texture. It was certain that the majority of contracts had been falsified and fortified, with the pages bearing S’s seal from utterly unrelated matters that the young ruler signed daily in the discharge of normal court business. The old practice of numbering those pages bearing the seals had long been abandoned. There was no telling what other mighty duties and authorities had been signed away in this manner. One shudders at such dereliction and treachery.

  Inevitably, the intake would reduce itself into a trickle like an exhausted river, roaring initially but drying itself up traversing the deserts that drain the plains. One gazing at the dwindling course would only nod, not in agreement of such variance but in pity of the taxing length and rotting bends. But that was only the one-sided folly; the other was no less sinister.

  The right-hand column listed outlays and procurements. The number had outgrown its counterpart of income by such a margin that it should have toppled over, head-heavy, long ago. The superfluous entries were sloppy and the falsehoods apparent, singularly prominent being the item succinctly labeled as a “legacy fee” additional to the price of products procured.

  A verbal inquiry to Yen Su was tactfully referred to be answered by the head of procurement, a womanly eunuch with round shoulders and meaty lips who claimed that such a fee had preceded the current reign, thus was beyond the spur of inquiry or probe. Hence I ordered another round of plank beatings, which this hippy hippo bore silently, though blood seeped down his sockless ankles and bent toes.

  Per the Court’s procedural manuals, such refusal could be followed only by a written inquiry, which Q drafted and I duly certified and registered with the Neiwufu’s Documents Chamber, an act that consumed three hours, no less. Three more days went by without a slip of explanation or affirmation. When I stormed into the chamber’s courtyard, the door was shut with a notice hanging on the doorknob noting the incumbent having gone to greet the ruler, a cause that no man could question or doubt, for doubting such would be like doubting the pious, and doubting the pious was heresy to the sanctuary of this heavenly court thatched on this earth.

  Q, my pigtailed empress, who always coiffed herself this way whenever passionately absorbed in matters demanding her full attention, ran this reported e
rrand to the Court historian’s chamber, finding no name of this document’s officer at or near the emperor’s chamber for daily briefing or court events. She found a terse note, however, from the Court’s tool house indicating said official’s use of a ten-foot-long fishing boat with fishing rods and nets on board.

  The man had all but gone fishing, per order of Li Liang, the chief eunuch.

  The court might be floating legless in clouds of inertia and the palace full of dereliction, but it lacked not scribes nor bards to record what tiny events took place in all the rat-holes of officialdom. It was the mandate that the palace be roamed with scribes, highly educated scholars who spent their days putting to paper whatever transpired. Powerless they might seem to be and prickly though they all were, that scholarly something prevailed no matter the locality. Partially it was their duty, a duty of allowing the world to see through their brushes—recording such for posterity and perpetuity, knowing well that no sane man would ever get to see what needed to be seen—and partially it was pure scholarship. They might be shadowy figures, slow moving, lurching along the foot of the wall, carrying a satchel over their shoulder containing the four treasures of gentlemanly study—brushes, an inkwell, rolls of rice paper, and a weighty ink ingot, which an ink boy would grind to the purest satisfaction—but they were the only creatures here with any self-respect and dignity. They were men of words upon whose honesty and truthfulness the empire lay. Such men were often threatened with beatings by those who wished a certain recording erased or a certain course of events posthumously altered, yet such beatings, or threats of such, rarely daunted this class of thin-framed men. Little doubt, such was the case from the first dynastical history when it was always the poets and philosophers who were said to possess the liver and gall, not the mercenary generals or dictatorial rulers, heavenly though they might be.

  Why the sudden ode? I am merely one of them, brush in hand, truth at heart. Always the truth: it’s what endures, what lasts.

  That little footwork of Q’s led us to take an excursion to a puny pond where the document official was said to be fishing this drizzling day. The northerly pond claimed a calm boat but not the derelict fisherman. A lesser man would have ceased once the trail grew cold, but the stirred gossamer only added fuel to my burning stove.

  There were wet footprints fanning off the shore, and some trampled weeds, dandelions, and forget-me-nots, pointing mute fingers at a mystery to unfold. It would surprise no one that he had been killed one way or another, but to drown in this lake wouldn’t be a wise choice. Grandpa wouldn’t care much for that. More would have to die for the pall it would cast; therefore no one dared die within the Forbidden City. Someone was playing a game here.

  By noon I had eased up to the office of Yen Su, the dean of nothing, an officialdom of nil, and found him asleep, snoring in his armchair, much tea drinking wasted on the dozing man. I meant to yank his moustache, waking him, but his eunuch took a step ahead of me and rocked the frail man to his senses. Yen Su’s ignorance was unmatched, failing even to recall the name of that absent inferior, though he did aid me by obtaining the address of the official’s residence in Tartar City.

  The door to the documents office could be smashed. Q suggested such—we were quite a pair, Beauty and her odious ogre. But what was locked couldn’t be unlocked through oak or mahogany: it was his mouth that we must unclench so secrecy could be spilled and frauds traced.

  I sought a rickshaw off the obscure western gate, sharing the ride with my courteous Q. The rickshaw boy, head shaven and bare-chested, mistook us for an envoy belonging to the legation boulevard and bargained for double fare: an ocean man was a devil’s man deserving to pay a devil’s due in this metropolis. To be here was to endure. Double fare I paid, and in return I urged the boy for a speedier run not by the broad streets but via the venous lanes and meandering fareways among dilapidation and ruination that abounded in this city of decay.

  Tartar City was the residential enclave of Manchurian nobles. Each avenue was lined with mansions surrounded by tall walls, hawthorn trees, and poplars. The residence of my current pursuit was an object of beauty and grandeur. North Road 13 was located three houses down a leafy lane across from the residence of a French artillery merchant, a Monsieur de Segur, which Q recognized from a prior visit, bachelor Segur being the heart of gaiety for all occasions among the condensed expatriate crowd.

  Balefully I eyed the document official’s house. What bountiful reward for employment that paid an annual wage of three hundred tael of silver, which, while a substantial amount, would barely put the roof on this estate. The wall was made of green stone from far mountains, and the arch gate featured two prominent columns, formerly the trunks of some ancient redwoods, flanked by two sedate stone lions carved with the most exquisite craftsmanship and liveliness. The green wall of secrecy allowed one to see a glimpse of some garden peonies in bloom and a partial view of a pond floating with lotus flowers. A knock on the door begot no reply.

  The rickshaw was stepped on as a ladder and the wall climbed. A tree connived nearby, and with a nimble lunge and hop I was on the ground, noiseless as a neighbor’s cat. Rare was the sight of a mansion without a fashionable Indian servant, turbaned and stiff; even rarer was the silence of the manse, no servants charging forward or barking dogs afoot.

  The door to the main hall was ajar, the fragrance of incense seeping through. A soft nudge later I was in. Greeting me was a dead man hanging from an ornate roof beam, rope taut and slender. His tongue had slipped out and the rope had cut beneath his jowl. His blood was still fresh, dripping down his broken neck and white-shirted chest, but life had departed: there was serenity to death gained only through finality. Beneath his feet was a toppled chair and a ring of incense burning, ashes aground.

  It seemed like the parting rite of a man in despair: the circle of incense representing the cycle of lives, leaving one to reenter another in endless ripples and rings enlarging one’s soul. But such a rite would entail much forethought and surely requisite fasting, for one never was to enter passage to the beyond while intentionally carrying what was disdained and to be forsaken in one’s intestines and bowels. Our documents man seemed to have consumed a bellyful of meat for lunch or breakfast; some had upchucked onto his shirt, evidencing the residue of lamb sausage dotted with red pepper among the splashes of his own blood. The blood under his fingernails bore the signs of struggle, and that wincing door ajar confirmed my claim. No genuine suicide would be conducted with an unlatched door, giving way to a possible middeath foil. I would know: I had tried a handful of times.

  I had intended to shield my child away from the gore, but Q slipped by me. “He’s dead. Finally!” she said, circling the corpse.

  “Why ‘finally’?”

  She picked up the fallen chair, and stepping on it, leaned forward to examine the dead man’s eyes, squinting her own. “He was good at deducting my monthly stipend, stealing a tenth of my share. I had to threaten him with bodily harm to get my share back.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “They say a dead man’s eyes capture the image of the last person he sees.”

  “See anything?”

  She frowned, sticking out the tip of her tongue. “No, nothing.”

  “Who would want him killed?”

  “Many.” She spat on the ground. “This rope was never far from his neck.” Q spun him around like a slab of slaughterhouse meat and hopped off the chair. “He simply knew too much.”

  Being a eunuch was a lifelong devotion entailing one to serve his master until his last breath. Many did indeed accumulate much wealth and even mightier power, but rarely did they win the privilege to use it. They were the sacrificial lambs, chosen by their clan, and taken in upon the recommendation of a palace eunuch related by blood.

  I had once glimpsed a page from In-In’s diary tucked under his pillow in his absence to tend to an ailing servant, a distant uncle from his village. Therein he had jotted a line that illuminated it a
ll: “One pearl, a hundred acres of rich land; two pearls, an eternal glory to all but I.”

  Pearls, in this reference, pertained not to jewels but the treasures of men. In-In had, in rare revelation of a true self, boasted of having an uncle, his father’s youngish brother from the third wife of his octogenarian grandpapa, who had attained the rank of eighth grade officialdom in the basaltic country of his origin because of In-In’s Court service. Such, though, was to be dwarfed by the august post held by the cousin of the chief eunuch as an inspector general of salt trade within his province, salt being white gold from the endless sea that would reward the cousin with a staggering monthly income of ten thousand silver tael, of which three quarters entered his uncle’s pockets.

  A quick search around the dead man’s echoing chambers yielded the only piece of evidence that at first had eluded my eyes.

  “What fragrant theft this is!” Q asked, pointing at a silk scroll hanging on his bedroom wall, consigned not to the lowly official but to Yong-Le, the beloved early emperor of the Ming Dynasty, by four famous calligraphers.

  “They are still the only four styles to be imitated and copied by the most adamant of learners hundreds of years after their originators’ passing.” Jumping off the stool, Q carefully took the scroll down from a rusty nail. “It was dedicated to Emperor Yong-Le on the fourth anniversary of his ascendance, a fete much lorded in the annals of Court celebrations, shaming all that came afterward. Even Grandpa still mentions it as the yardstick to adhere to. ‘The fourth had this and had that,’ she would say, alluding to this event. Thousands of guests were invited, among whom were generals and officials, but more important, painters and calligraphers, poets, and even some poetesses. It was a fine autumnal day. Long stretches of desks were laid out on vast courtyards, and thousands were urged to wet their brushes and spread their rice paper putting their poetry to the scrolls. This scroll of four seasons, with each artist’s brushing in the characters of such, was the brightest gem from that day, and here it is in the soiled hands of a thief.”