My Last Empress

by Da Chen

  “With this we’ll singe the entire rotten Neiwufu,” I declared. “Let’s return to the palace so we can seal and search the Treasure Chamber immediately.”

  “Why the hurry?”

  “Once the word is out, they will try to cover their traces.”

  Q produced an expedient dagger and cut the hanging rope, letting the dead man fall. “Never leave a hanged man hanging. His ghost will haunt us all.”

  The sun was setting, and the city of Peking was all gray shadows, urging onward the throng of people heading south before the city gate closed. The punctuality of the gate closure was notorious. Those locked within would be torturously inspected and put away in the night jail as thieves or rioters. Such stringency made no exception for Court workers or royal affiliates. Even the dean of the potent Neiwufu was not exempt, riding his sedan bent on the path home. It was under the Valor Gate that we detected his sedan and intercepted him. The scholarly dean was not the least stirred by the death of his inferior. All he cared for was beating the closing gong: the first strike was for warning, the second strike announced the gate’s closing, and the third and last strike marked its locking; then night ensued with the city sequestered.

  Unwittingly I ordered him to return to the palace to hunt for the killer.

  “Killer?” He learned toward me, frowning. “What killer?”

  “The man who ordered him hanged.”

  His anger was sudden and surprising. “How dare you utter this ugly inflammatory word in my face? Here is the key to the Documents Chamber, a thing that I have always kept close to my chest: something you should be careful not to misuse. You have one night and one night only to clear this matter or indict the dead man; then all ugly and unsubstantiated talk of murder shall cease when I return in the morning.”

  Onward the harried man vanished, dusk in his wake.

  25

  It surprised me not at all that word of the death had outrun our feet. By the time we reached the Neiwufu’s outer gate, a pair of Court marshals were waiting for us, their hands clutching an order from Grandpa herself demanding our presence in her chamber immediately.

  Grandpa was bent over her writing desk, brush-painting calligraphy onto a rolling scroll, accompanied by her ink man, Li Liang, the chief eunuch. Having risen from the modest rank of palace woman—over five hundred of them—she was uncharacteristically known to have mastered the high art of ink and brush, having a special penchant for painting such characters as longevity and harmony, gifts that she doled out generously to admirers and visitors alike. The brush painting was, to her and others, a mental tai chi one does for relaxing tense nerves and sore bones, akin to a warm cup of rice wine or a doleful puff of opium.

  Without stopping the brushing at hand, she said in her thin-throated piercing voice, “I heard of that official’s hanging. You need not burden me with the details. It’s unfortunate he has done himself in. I heard that you have been poking around the Neiwufu’s offices and chambers and that was the cause that drove the man to his unfortunate death. Do you know what you are doing?”

  When Q asked to be allowed to reply, she was duly hushed by Grandpa, who cast her slanting gaze at me and continued, “Tell me, what are you trying to do? To disturb the nests of all the birds here?”

  “We are merely acting on our great ruler’s direction,” said Q rather timidly.

  “I heard of that too. You know his words are not to be relied on. He has his good days and bad—you should know better. When I first met you, you were far wiser, taking my advice to aid him, acting as a bridge between me and his Court. That’s why I made you an empress, hoping you would give me a roomful of heirs. But no, you changed your colors like a chameleon, leaning on your own whims that at first seemed rather charming to all. Then you began to mislead him, knowing him to be gullible and foolish. Did I blame you? No, I let you do what you two wished. I can only watch and hope, praying to my ancestors for wisdom and enlightenment.” She dipped her brush in the inkwell, then returned back to the scroll, crafting a perfect dot to end the stanza of Tang Dynasty poetry she was copying.

  “But that man did not kill himself,” Q persisted.

  “See?” Grandpa uttered with annoyance. “There you go again with your foreign tongue when I’m not done talking. Didn’t your adoptive father teach you anything at all in those barbaric ocean lands?”

  “Yes, Grandpa, he did.”

  “I would not say so. Now tell me, why would anyone want to kill that cursed man? And why would you try and blame someone else when no ground was found for your assertion?”

  “He left no note about killing himself, and the door of his house was left ajar. There was also blood under his nails though no scratches were found on his person, hinting at a struggle with those who concocted to have him killed.”

  “Nonsense, you fool!” Grandpa set her brush down and pounded the desk with her fragile fist, making the inkwell and rice paper leap. “How did you come up with such absurdity? First, you accuse the entire Neiwufu of stealing. Now you call them murderers? No one is a killer here except you two. Your inquiry pushed him to his death. You two are the murderers! A man can endure only so much. You gave him no way out.”

  “We only asked to see the files and ledgers.”

  “Files and ledgers? Don’t you know those files and ledgers contain essential palace secrets? How can we let this mere ocean man see such contents of confidence? The world would soon know.” Grandpa cast a cold glare in my direction.

  She did not mince words, that old witch!

  “He is acting only upon our ruler’s order, checking on the Neiwufu to sort out the reason for this great deficit. This palace is running on empty, far outspending its intake. I was schooled in Austria in the science of mathematics and was involved in the bookkeeping at my father’s embassy. I want to help our emperor account for things that may or may not be the fault of anyone so that this palace might have a healthier fiscal well-being.”

  “Gibberish! Your foreign schooling may have been good, but you have put it to the wrong use. Our young emperor is not better off because of your education. I would say he is worse off because of your wild influence. As for the deficit within this Court, much of it has to do with your free spending: your horses and foreign motor bikes. The blame should start from the very top. You should put a stop on your expenditure. You used to give me gifts of things you fancy. Now you don’t even think of this old lady who championed for your admission into the palace.”

  “It was your sour words of criticism that have driven me away.”

  “Sour words are only words that are true. They are sour and biting because I speak wisdom that glided by your eardrums unheeded, which failure for certain would have you endure the bitterness of my wrath. Don’t you know the emperor is, after all, my son? That soft-hearted deviant of mine wasn’t even weaned off my breasts of wisdom yet, and there you came along taking him away from me while I had wished to bring him closer to me.”

  “I shall do my best to right the wrong,” Q said, stricken.

  “So you have said many a time. You break all pledges easily, shaming yourself again and again. I have my eyes and ears—your trip to the Union Hospital and other things. I am watching you two; you had better be careful.”

  “Yes, Grandpa.” Q bowed deferentially.

  “You must cease this investigation this very moment,” Grandpa said, resuming her writing.

  “But what about the death of this man? Someone killed him!”

  “Self-killing is a way of peace and resolution. It’s nothing new. Talk of ‘murder’ will stop immediately. I am giving his family a sum to soothe them and a plaque of honor for eternity. He died not in vain but for the palace. It is an honorable death, self-imposed or not, a worthy death—something that you have yet to learn or understand. This is called devotion, utter devotion. Now I need to retire. You are excused. No more probing until further words from this chamber.”

  “But here, look at this.” Q presented the scroll confis
cated from the dead man’s house. “This is the most precious scroll handed down from the Emperor Yong-Le. It was hanging on the bare wall of this eunuch’s residence, who you said had taken his own life.”

  “Now you see? He did have reason to hang himself. He was a thief.”

  “Thieves are everywhere here. Can’t you see?”

  “Cease on this matter. Such is my order.” She waved her wide sleeves, and the chief eunuch saw us off with his cold, unblinking eyes, a de facto husband to the old and frail dowager, trusted to the point of impunity, giving the man, or rather, the partial man, utter license for abuse and misuse. His words became her thoughts, her urges his action.

  The death of the documents official didn’t stir our emperor a bit, though the news did cause a wincing tic on his left cheek. He fumbled for his sea-tree smoking pipe, and a pinch of opium was produced from the velvet bag that he kept at his bedside. Only after a puff was drawn deep into his lungs did he look up to gaze at us with a thoughtful stare through tusks of fortifying smoke. “Don’t stop now,” he said, “or death will come our way. You have the night to look through the books. For sure, it’ll all be sealed off by daybreak tomorrow.” Another puff down his throat and he continued. “You know what I found out?” he asked whimsically. “A cousin of mine is secretly being groomed. Another court is being set up, a shadow palace. Just a simple cut of my throat, and it will all be theirs. Every bit of my existence will be destroyed.” He sighed, sucking in another mouthful. “Find proof for me: proof of siphoning from all the tributes and attributes to me … to this throne. Then we will cleanse the evil from our ranks, one by one. You know that I am not her son. This is all but an illusion, a house of matchsticks that could easily be torched and reduced to ashes.”

  “But Grandpa has forbidden us to do any more searching.”

  “Grandpa.” The emperor’s eyes blazed with heated emotion. “That old witch! She had the documents man hanged. She will have you wiped off the face of this earth. If you hesitate, falter for even one minor step, we are finished.”

  “You are acting like a lunatic! What’s gotten into you?”

  “This.” The emperor pulled a silk scroll from under his pillow and let it fall onto the floor. Black letters were inscribed onto its whiteness.

  It was an advisory order from the chamber of his adoptive mother, officially called the Curtain Cabinet, imposed in reigns when the emperors were young. Such devices were described in poetic terms as having a hidden cabinet behind a draped curtain in back of the throne whereby the emperor’s mother could, sight unseen, whisper her cares and concerns to the leaning ears of her young son. It was under such an administrative arrangement that this present Court was established in the wake of the untimely death of Grandpa’s late emperor husband. The dowager’s whispers bore constitutional heft and were entered into the Court record as having the potency of sovereign law.

  This particular directive dictated that the young emperor, due to his waning spirit and lowering temperament, had been advised to receive a series of visitations by prominent doctors in the course of the coming moon cycle, a time that was determined to be healing and curative due to astrological calculations by Court priests. The order was given upon advisement of faithful Court counselors and ministers. The emperor was to take no exception to it. The physicians were to be chosen and invited only by an exclusive committee headed by his adoptive mother, in whose loving heart lay dear concern for her son, the sole and supreme ruler under the sun.

  “A few doctors’ visits? Why should you be worried about this?” Q said, tossing the silk order back to her husband.

  “You tell her.” S tilted his head my way.

  Clearing my throat, I gave her this grave explanation. “Each time an advisory is given, a prelude to a coup is set in motion. One day you are seeing a doctor, the next day you are given the requisite herbal treatment. The day after, you are sent to the nut house. Such was the case of a minor reign I read about in the otherwise glorious Tang Dynasty when a young emperor under the Curtain Cabinet administration was jailed in a bloodless coup, not as a prisoner in name but as a patient under his mother’s care.”

  “Why would Grandpa encourage this? Is it because of me?” Q asked, sitting on the edge of his bed.

  The ruler shook his head and sucked another potent mouthful, which seemed to aid the flow of his words. “It is I, always, from the very beginning. I still remember the first time she slapped her coarse palm across my cheeks; it was the first night after I was ‘adopted.’ She, as you know, had borne a son but lost him when he was fourteen from a weak constitution, as they say. Not even a day after her own son’s death, I was taken from my mother’s nursing bosom. Late at night, when I craved another feeding and called out my mother’s name, she slapped me hard and cruel. My lips were swollen for days afterward. Each time I cried for my birth mother, she would threaten to never let me see her again, and I never did see her again. She was said to have caught a cursed wind, and she died at the age of twenty-three. When I threatened to kill myself upon hearing this, Grandpa had me guarded for the longest time. When she caught me painting red color on my lips, she called me a girl, accused me of possessing womanly attributes, and had me savagely beaten so I would be cured of the weakling disease. She called me unfit for the future she had fostered for me and threatened to rid me of my testicles, making me a eunuch. It would have freed me. What I crave, what I yearn for, she aimed to have me cured by having you and others marry me.” He leaned forward to kiss Q on her left cheek. “And you did cure me for a while. How I adore you. But what is in me is incurable, as incurable as my love for you. And you only made worse what she feared the most: tearing this palace apart, poking and disturbing the secret order here. But it is the only way I can rule this Court, this empire, by cleansing the dirt, the graft, the embezzlement. I have received letters through my own secret envoys that taxes and levies on the provincial levels have been increasing by leaps and bounds, but here, at my end, the figures have been dwindling. I warned Grandpa of this discrepancy, but she paid no heed to my finding. On the contrary, she accused me of setting up my own shadow governing cabinet to undo hers. But what I am doing is for the health of this empire and for her. She doesn’t know that, for she is misinformed by those thieving minions headed by Chief Eunuch Li. Now she issued this to me. You have to hurry or death will come our way soon.”

  He drew another lungful of opium before sagging back onto his bed. “Go now. I need to rest … ready myself for tomorrow.”

  26

  Samples of grease and graft were numerous, yet all would pale against the tale of a fat goat. On the meticulous ledgers, a young fat goat would leave its bucolic grazing meadow, in this case a farm at the foot of the Western Mountains. The initial price for this goat, three months or thereabouts in age as appearing in the annotated lengthy appendix attached to copious ledgers, was a mere three copper coins, which already was twice the price for an average goat of same age, but the quote was reasonably heightened, for this goat was from no ordinary stock. This particular breed of goat, short-legged and furry, boasted unique layers of fat along its belly and around its hips. Its soupy brain and marrow, when sucked raw, was said to enhance the essence of men, prolonging life. Fable or truth, the myth persisted. But the fattening of this price had only just begun.

  This innocuous goat had to be fleeced pricewise by first the farmer merchant governing the land upon which this goat had grazed, adding one copper coin to the original price of three coppers. Another copper coin was collected by the market master, the man who set the daily prices in everything from rice to rubies. Then another mysterious middle man acting as an agent for the Court would add on, at this time, two more copper coins for the same goat before another three coins were to be added as the entrance fee collected by the agency specialized in scrutinizing every item coming through the gates of the palace.

  Right before our goat set its gingerly hooves upon the brick ground of the royal kitchen, another fee was aga
in exacted by the royal butcher for his special rite of dressing, attuned to the flow of blood and spirit. This fee partially was necessitated because the service of a Taoist priest was needed to bless the goat.

  All fees and charges along this crooked vine were manifested with ready proof of handwritten and dated receipts, the perfection of which only managed to trigger suspicion in this auditor. It’s fair to say that the dead accountant had tried a tad too hard. After a night of poring over these falsified records, it became clear what the next step must be. A necessary visit had to be paid to those imprudent merchants daring to charge the Royal Court more, and not less, for the privilege of serving the mighty emperor. Logic would demand that they charge a reduced amount for the honor and steadiness of this daily business.

  Figures and numbers don’t lie, but accountants do. To see beyond their spidery veil one must put in legwork. Sometimes truth is only a thin paper away, as thin as the paper whence forgery is done.

  Leaving Q to accompany her spouse for the compulsory consultation with the physicians lining up in his chamber, I made several short sojourns to the markets to spot-check the accuracy in the books and ledgers.

  The Western Mountain goat farm was my first stop. The hilly road was rutted and the carriage ride arduous, consuming the better part of the morning. The thin proprietor of the fat goats was perturbed and stiff at first sight of this ocean man, but he quickly turned pliant upon my introduction as a buying agent for the foreigners in the city in search of safe meat. The Boxer Rebellion had destined all food supply for foreigners to be old and tainted, if not outright poisoned. Two Shanghai-dwelling Frenchmen had perished after consuming some local escargots, and another five had been poisoned after dining on some innocuous frogs.

  The proprietor was a man of practicality. He offered undisturbed delivery right to the door of the legation’s kitchens without the meddling fingers of the city’s middlemen, thusly ensuring the quality of his goods.