My Last Empress

by Da Chen

  “I am honored, but I’m not doing this for my heirs. I see none coming.”

  “Nevertheless, the honor you shall carry. Go now, you two. At daybreak, a new sun shall rise, and we shall all breathe in fresh air. I am not unwell, as you two can see. I am just suffering from such anguish … unknowable anguish. I am about to be freed from all these accusations, all this coldness and neglect—”

  “No one neglects you,” Q said, embracing the emperor, holding him as a mother would her fretful child.

  “The bitter coldness from Grandpa. All because she thinks I am weak like a girl, that I am useless and powerless. That’s why Grandpa seeks to have me retired. I have been weak, but no longer. You two go and find proof of theft. With that one genuine thing, I can be proved right on all other matters. Grandpa will not think of me again as weak. That’s all I ask for. Go, you two.” He removed Q’s arms from around his shoulders and pushed her away. The exertion seemed to exhaust him, sending a shiver through his frame and rendering him to seek the only solace he knew.

  “Servant! Bring me the pipe.”

  The shadow of his servant swept in like a ghost and lit the emperor’s pipe. Such was our titular ruler. Such was the plight of this helpless soul, in which lay clarity and sweet innocence. Such was what bound me to him in ways I cannot describe, in ways that incite nostalgia, homesickness, and longing, a certain hollowness of one’s heart. Fondness for another being.

  Strength might be heroic, but frailty is darling, and utter fragility outright endearing, for in that weakness there is a certain strength that urged me to charge afore and lay myself down in his defense.

  Helplessness is a gift in and of itself.

  28

  Brushing this entry, how I wish I had a second chance to relive the events that followed. Had I the opportunity to live that night one more time, I might see the blinking signs of my undoing that marred the dark night.

  I had intended only to include Q in my effort to account for all the treasure piling under the roof of the Treasure Chamber, a stout building on the neglected western spur of the palace grounds. But the emperor instead sent an order to assemble a team of palace women and cursed eunuchs under the leadership of the very man about whom all these investigations were aimed. At once, this discreet act initiated by the new inspector was transformed into a full-blown affair.

  “Don’t worry, Li Liang will not be concerned by all this,” S answered when I rushed back to question him about that decision. His naïveté was alarming. “These servants all follow my orders.”

  “Wrong again, my sovereign. Haven’t you seen what this palace has been reduced to?” I wanted to shout at him. “What a den of thieves it has become? And you are but a parody of power, a ruler of ultimate foolishness and utter idiocy.”

  How I wished to wipe that smirk off his face, as if I were the blind one seeing nothing, fumbling my way around this foreign land and alien Court. And yet how my heart ached for this helpless lamb on the chopping block.

  Into the night came the firebugs and minions, the hidden and the ugly, mutually crowding the nocturnal chamber filled to the rafters with the annual gifts from far provinces and ocean nations, offerings by empires, foreign kings and queens. Q was regal, organizing the eunuchs and palace women into queues and circles in their respective tasks. The commingling of the two—the neglected palace concubines and feminized half-men—had long been the fodder of salacious novels: lone and lonely men without wherewithal, and their opposite fully equipped with their wiles and whistles. The haphazard fumbling and caressing is a given, given the nature of their existence. Little though the neuters had, they became peerless experts and authorities on pleasing a woman with what organs they had remaining. I had witnessed with my own eyes a young eunuch, a kitchen hand from the north, bending over an older palace woman, his face between her thighs, his agile tongue causing her to give out delighted cries.

  Night might be dark out on the palace grounds, but the chamber’s interior was well lit with rows of gigantic ceremonial candles giving off hisses of light and fragrant scent. The palace women, the engines of this stately household, moved the wares from shelf to shelf, inspecting their provenance, voicing their gift labels to the eunuchs recording the confirmations at hand, who in turn told other eunuchs to register them either as missing or intact. Such trigroupings repeated at length from aisle to aisle and hall to hall, seeking order amidst chaos. These halls might bear treasures, but signs of abandonment and neglect were everywhere: dust and spiderwebs, and worse, the haunts of theft and embezzlement.

  In its midst were vases from Versailles, clocks from Colón, little engines from the English Court, porcelain from Poland, gems from Germany—in sum and to wit, the rarities from the far corners of this earth, valuables from the high mountains to the deep seas.

  In it all was Q, my queen bee, inspecting room to room, advising aisle to aisle. A creature of the arts, native or foreign, she possessed a sharp eye for paintings, particularly of the Baroque era, and a taste for North Soong Dynasty watercolors. It owed much to the fact that her adoptive father had been a premier collector of that period’s art, from porcelain jars to poetry scrolls and silk and satin tapestry, much of which adorned the walls of Q’s private study.

  What ensued next I should have perceived had I possession of that illusive third eye. The mystical firebugs of that long ago night must have invaded my aura without my detection, flooding through unlocked doors and released window latches of those dusty rooms, creating a gale that gained passage behind a scroll hanging crookedly on the western wall and causing a nearby candle flame to elongate and stretch, nipping first at the sleeves of a busy palace woman’s gown. She flailed her hand frantically, aiming to douse the fire, and her arm caught the edges of the volume in a eunuch’s hands. The volume, with its thin and fragile pages, was instantly aflame, sending its sparks to fly in a radius within which a silk tapestry was hung, that in turn burned quickly upward, leading the fire to squirm like some sly snake all the way to the ceiling rafter, igniting the wooden roof into a canopy of heat and dancing flames.

  I was marveling at a marble sculpture of Venus when the heat wave sliced the dense air, piercing the spiderwebs as quick and palpable as lightning. The age-old rafters gave off sizzling fury as they were engulfed in flame, which soon gave way to panic. Eunuchs threw away their record books, adding fuel to the growing fire; palace women screeched, batting at the flames lighting up their dresses, their sleeves, their hair. Some ran for the door, others squatted down in confusion. A burning chunk of wood breaking off from the ceiling beam hit my shoulder. Sparks quickly nipped at my scalp, burning a few strands of my hair, dying quickly under my smothering palm.

  Looking from the other side of this slippery truth, one could argue that the chamber fire had nothing to do with imagined firebugs: there had never been those flying creatures, neither in the autumn meadows of New England nor in the July air of Peking. In-In was but a liar with the sweetness of spirit to conform to his pitiful master, and their flight, nocturnal, was an astral vision by a misguided, crazed man of inborn or acquired madness. Perhaps the following was what had actually occurred.

  Only a moment ago, I had a glimpse of that particular palace woman letting go of the vase she was holding, thereby toppling a giant candle toward her sleeves, which a second ago had been pushed aside by the fleeting hand of a particular eunuch with a square face and jutting chin, the kind that defies authority, the kind most liable to rebel, the kind that is ambitious beyond his means. He had not merely pushed the giant wooden candle stand but had duly kicked the stand off its support—amazing how one’s memory could withhold all these truths only to be revealed later. While he concocted these sequences, his muddy eyes had darted toward me at the very second when Q ran over in excitement, a scroll half open in her hand, to tell me about a rare find, the original of a legendary poet who had hidden the answer to a riddle in another scroll, the one that she possessed.

  Just a split second after, a sh
adow lurched behind her, one that shut closed the heavy door with a clacking noise associated with certain clinking of a heavy lock, the kind requiring two keys to open. The candle tilted, falling and alarming the palace woman, so on and so forth.

  The scenario was simple. All had been well thought out, with a commanding choreographer silently mastering every single step and move within. Maybe Q’s find had been planted by the same invisible master, leading her to run into the same room I was in. We had positioned ourselves in separate rooms so that two set of eyes could keep the servitude honest and diligent.

  My first instinct was to fling myself toward Q, catching her in my arms as she glimpsed the fire burning the palace woman. Her move to render aid was impeded by the rush of palace women, who abandoned the wares and treasures at hand and rushed to the door. The first one to reach it yanked at the inner door knob. It didn’t budge. The second one leaped over her, pulling at the latch, but the door seemed stuck. The look on their faces was telling—frightened and anguished. Together, they aimed their shoulders at the door, giving it a mighty slam. The door stood firmly as it was so meant.

  The fire had by now flooded the room like a raging tide spitting up sparks and sparkles, turning the area into an instant pond of flames. The heat rose, stifling our noses and throats. I did my best to shield Q within my arms, holding her thin frame close to my chest into which her shouts and screams could be felt vibrating, muffled against my rib cage.

  Some palace women collapsed; others dashed from one corner to another, their clothes and hair aflame. A handful of eunuchs, all young and vital, were taking turns trying to break down the door with precious jars and statues. Nothing gave. The air turned denser, the heat rising, clawing at our skin, eyelashes, and hair.

  “Window? Is there a window in here?” I shouted, only to be muted by falling debris from above. The only one who heard me was my Q. She pushed herself away from my chest to leap on a stool partially aflame and quickly rip away a watercolor hanging on the eastern wall. There an ingenious window was revealed, barred by three iron rods.

  It would take three men, six eunuchs that is, to break out the iron rods. Q was the first to be pushed out the window. Following her, I crawled through the narrow passage, my boots nipped by ferocious flames. Only two other eunuchs made it out. The rest were all entombed within, burned to embers and ashes.

  29

  Let’s now borrow a passage or two from the palace record, which is so regularly wrong and fictive that at times it could not help itself being right. The Court historian hereby wrote:

  The perpetrator of this flame of sin is none other than the royal ocean tutor, the one and only outsider, employed to inspect the management of the age-old Royal Court. His doing, or rather undoing, has thus far caused havoc among us. Another case of suicide by rope is also said to be blamed on this intruder.

  As such, the august emperor himself has temporarily taken leave from the throne to tend to his ailments of holy body and sacred spirit. The ocean tutor is relieved from all his duties and chores, his digression and dereliction making null and void the employment contract formed at the outset of his arrival. This announcement takes effect immediately. Empress Qiu Rong, the fourth consort, is under house arrest for her greed and misconduct. Several priceless missing treasures have been found in her possession. She hence awaits demotion or other punishment.

  Fear shrinks a dwarf but only stirs a gallant. Only a fool would linger in the aftermath of the fire to read in this jaundiced publication his own fate and the condemnation of those involved. In the evening twilight, what little I had I packed up within a small trunk, and I headed out through a backyard grove of secretive bamboo. From there I was to make my way to a curtained rickshaw awaiting me outside the western gate, which In-In had summoned with two silver ingots to ensure his way. By then my house was already being watched by the eyes of a platoon that had to be fooled by the stage props of a lit lantern in my bedroom shining opaquely on a bulbous bed wherein lay, as my substitute, a stool covered snugly by a silk quilt.

  A hidden door allowed me to exit my damp vault into a garden of peonies now felled aground by their own heavy, dewy blooms. I crawled through the peony patch next to leaning bamboo trees following a mental topography mapped for this very circumstance. This route of evasion was to be best trampled in summer’s lush leaves and thick shrubbery while winter urgency would have dictated an alternate course. Next the rising hedges of stout pine bushes led me to a dock over an eel pond whereby I poled to shore a discreet boat from its moor under a bridge among swaying lotus stems, in a morass of turtles and rotting leaves near the garden of Q’s mansionette.

  All along, my guilt, my sorrow, was heavy with a certain pending premonition. My imagining eye could see a singular profile of Q, not supine or prone, but encircled by a casket of stillness, with summer heat chilled around her.

  Quickly I threw open her lacquered door. Her living chamber was empty, gray in twilight, no maids or servants in sight. I stormed next into the bedroom. I didn’t see her right away. On the wall was projected an elongated silhouette hung by a thin rope from a ceiling beam, her head bent in equanimity, her arms dangling in surrender.

  Sadness weakened my knees and my arms yet I leaped at her, lifting her feet up. The noose atop slackened around her neck, and she slumped over my fetching shoulder.

  Next I reached for the handle of a boot-plunged knife and stepping on a chair gave the hanging rope quick slashes. It gave finally, and gently I laid her on a rumpled bed. Save for a garish cut beneath her petite larynx and some spittle smearing her lower lip and the corners of her mouth, she looked utterly unhurt, at peace in slumber. I sheathed the Arab knife and fished from my trouser pocket a tiny leather holder containing a pin-sharp silver toothpick, with which I would now perform that ancient art of the Needle Cure. One prick, needlewise, at a certain hot-blooded nerve point beneath a woman’s tender ankle and she would coil with rampant desire and contort for condign punishments. No province of carnal knowledge or precincts of fancy were beyond my reach.

  With the makeshift needle, I aimed at the vertical furrow above the upper lip. The philtrum, as it is otherwise known, had linear filaments running to the brain. To stir the tender groove was to awaken the life within.

  The sharp point pricked into her pale skin. A living man would leap in an unbearable pain, but in her it cajoled not a twitch or a wince, leaving me with one last resort: the tip of her digitus medius, or middle finger, a secret burrow to the ventricles of her heart. If this failed, I did not know what would become of me.

  I forced my slender tool inside the tenderness between her nail and flesh, at once inducing a bead of blood. My fingers went into frenzy, spinning its stem, stirring its tip deeper down in, trying to call forth that residual flame remnant in her. After only exerting the full length of my bloody toothpick did I finally make Q quiver.

  Maddeningly I kept on the task with my scepter of life whilst pasting my ear over the diamond of her chest, listening for her heartbeat. She jerked again, this time heaving up with a long-lodged sigh. Soon I sensed Q’s weak arteries pulsing and her fey bosom heaving, but she was still blue. Wiping the copious mucous from her face, I sealed my lips around her mouth, pinched shut her nose, and inflated her lungs. In four breaths she was pink. She then gurgled, as if some blockage had just given way, and opened her big eyes, looking puzzled.

  “What are you doing here, Big Man?” she inquired weakly, easing herself up with a haunted look on her face as if seeing ghosts. “Quick, Big Man, get me out of here. They tried to kill me!”

  “Who tried to kill you?”

  “The servants! Eunuchs. A band of them forced their way in. Did they try to kill you, too?” she asked, cupping my face with her cold hands.

  “Not yet.”

  “How did you know to come rescue me?”

  Carefully I caressed the bruise around her neck as tears rolled down her cheeks. “I only knew I had to come take you far away from this place.”
<
br />   “Where are we going?”

  “Wherever you wish to go.”

  “To my parents’ residence then.” She climbed off her bed, still weak but able.

  My Q, my innocent. Her purity jabbed my tender heart.

  I carried her out of the house across her garden into the bobbing boat. It was dead quiet. Such would be the case, with her unwatched and unguarded, giving her ample time to hang, limp and dead, while resident ghosts preyed on her, until the shocking discovery in the morn. A case of suicide would be made with evidence strewn all over her abode. A note of demise would be forwarded to her princely adoptive father, who would only be allowed to view her body at her burial, a hush-hush affair in the royal cemetery.

  What fallacy! But before we could pole away into safety, I had to do one more deed. Leaving Q alone on the stern of the boat, I trudged back into her home, picked up the shortened candle, and fed its waning flame to the hem of a curtain where some rude boot had stomped on its fringe. Slowly it caught with a sizzling crawl upward.

  By the time we reached the opposite bank of this palace pond, the tongues of fire were visible, squirming up other curtains and drapery. When I carried her, my delicate living ghost, into the carriage at the foot of that deserted western gate, the sound of gongs and the fury of shouts were faintly audible, just enough to distract the vigilance of the gate guard.

  To avoid easy pursuit, I told the rickshaw man to take a shortcut along a quiet moat away from the boulevards and streets to the American legation, a stopover to let Q heal her wounds and calm her fragile soul. But the asylum of ambassadorial protection was not to be had easily.