My Last Empress

by Da Chen

  “So what good are you, ocean tutor?” Wang asked, after much nodding at the conclusion of Q’s tale. “You foreigners are outstanding in getting what you want and forsaking what you desire not.”

  “I am merely here to plead for her safety,” I said stiffly.

  “And not your own?”

  “Never. How dare you question my motive!”

  “The motive of an ocean man.” He chuckled. “It’s always beyond reproach, isn’t it? You took her as surety to keep your own life in flight.”

  Had he not been so sickly a sight, I would have shown him the potency of my pugilist fist, but calm I kept, if not for propriety’s sake, then for my suddenly curt Q.

  “Where is my Annie? Where is she?” the old man inquired, craning his thin neck to look beyond us. “Is she hiding in the back trying to fool this old man’s weak heart? Where is she?” There was such playfulness. Utterly unbecoming!

  “She is dead,” I said.

  Wang was incredulous. “Dead? How?”

  Q nudged my back with her sharp fist but I had to take this shot at the smug man, so I related the aromatic circumstances under which her and my life converged, our hearts colliding like stars, and colluded stealthily to the finality of the hay fire that ultimately claimed her, taking her away from me.

  “She cannot be dead!”

  “But dead she is,” I said pissily. I could not explain my agitation. The very thought that this man had preceded me in seniority and possibly in depth of intimacy with the one and only Annabelle leadened the day and moment beyond my reckoning.

  “One shining so bright shouldn’t have died so soon,” he murmured, frowning as if saddened. After a long pause, he added, “I have missed her every day since she left me.”

  That just about did it. The sordid, fraudulent philistine! I started to sputter but Wang waved me to silence and parted his robe, revealing a sunken chest covered with reddened sores and open wounds oozing with yellow exudate. In one, several maggots squirmed, feeding on his rotten flesh. I had heard of such archaic manner of healing by worm debridement but never imagined seeing such in practice. Wang gently picked the fattened ones up and placed them in his mouth, chewing them, replacing them with some thin, hungry ones from a nearby jar to continue the cleansing.

  Q’s jaw dropped and she hid behind me after seeing the spectacle.

  “Ailments and sickness: nothing new in this life or next,” Wang muttered. “Trials and tribulations—I have seen them all and yet more still come my way. Buddhists call this earthly life the ‘sea of bitter sorrows.’ I see it no differently. This is the old way of curing these cursed wounds. The larvae all come down to me from above to soak up my drippings.” He sighed and looked up to the sunlit dome of his chapel, wonderment in his eyes, a seeming gesture of thanksgiving to his god before returning his piercing gaze back to me. “Annie belongs up there, beholden to none, least of all you. But hardly can I blame you. We are all love’s fools.”

  “Lord Wang,” said Q. “Tell me if I am your daughter as the hospital record shows.”

  “I could not be your father,” Wang Dan said, his face stern and frowning.

  “What?”

  “Annie was seeded by another, not I.”

  “And you call yourself the Messiah.” I jabbed at the man bitterly.

  “But I am. It all started with my mother and the way I came to this earth. She was seeded not by my father but in a dream granted by God himself as the Virgin Mary was in that heavenly way. Mother was a maid working in the kitchen of a priest named Father Lafarge, the present cardinal of Quebec. Mother must have been touched by the holy spirit of that grand man.”

  She had surely been touched, and by more than holiness. God, these frauds! When would they cease such treachery?

  “My earthly father was just like Joseph, the husband of the Virgin Mary. My earthly father, a well-to-do scion of prosperity, was persuaded by Father Lafarge to wed my mother so that I, the begotten son, would have a home of warmth and wealth to be reared in. He brought me up without any complaints or bitterness, going on to bear no other sons or daughters of his own, devoting himself utterly to my well-being.”

  “This is a Catholic cathedral then?” I asked, looking about me.

  “No, not Catholic but one of my own faith. I am the only living truth, as Jesus, my brother, was to all Christendom.”

  “Have you thought of the possibility that you might have been tricked by that Canadian cardinal?”

  Wang chuckled, looking only to Q, ignoring my eyes altogether. “Petty minds think pithy thoughts. I would not expect anything less from this ocean tutor. I have been called bastard by foreigners, but never by my own people.”

  “Because your Canadian father taught you his tricks of the trade?” I could not help jabbing, which readily begot Q’s assault, this time a nail-digging pinch of my leg.

  “My followers have the faith and conviction that you all lack. They see my white skin as a rarity, my blue eyes as windows to heaven, and my tall, straight nose as uncommon authority and esteem among them.”

  In Chinese belief, fair skin is regarded as a sign of wealth and exalted social station since commoners toiled under the unclenching sun, imbuing them with dark, leathery skin, and in a nation of flat-nosed citizenry, any unbroken nose of Caucasian extraction would be looked upon as indicative of leadership. It was, at best, a national bias rather than truth, from which this man was wringing every drop of superstitious credence to fool his gullible parishioners.

  So here we had the forsaken and bastardly seed of some salacious Quebecian fraud who had obviously fornicated upon Wang’s poor mother, the lurching kitchen maid—a shy virgin or a vile tease, no one would know—in some apron-over-her-head variety of coition that duly produced this child of ill fate, whose bastardry was concealed by the easy fallacy of a holy birth. I had seen and heard many improbable things in life, but never had I been more inflamed than by this brazen lie told by the one lied to. Was I to pity this man or despise him? I knew not which. The conviction in Wang Dan of his own life story was so complete that I could not help bending his way in the hope of gaining some truth from this contorted man.

  “I am heirless as my brother Jesus was, made so by our mutual Father in heaven,” continued the self-proclaimed messiah. “All potency remains with our Father, as you know, even though wives I have many.”

  “How many wives did you have when Annie came to you?” I asked.

  He shook his head, avoiding my eyes. “It makes no difference how many. I am without any heir. You, my empress, will never be my child, though given the chance I would give my heart to claim you as mine.

  “The battle I had with the Hawthorn Congregational Church started not with me but with them. Many of their parishioners came over to me, for their high tithing rendered the poor even poorer, and their strict canons and laws suffocated them to breathlessness. First they came to me by the dozens, then the hundreds. I was in no need of any more; I had thousands and thousands in this region, with thirteen sanctuaries to tend to. I had no need to fight to gain more followers, but they came to me like flocks to their shepherd.

  “Reverend Hawthorn armed his parishioners, and they stormed into my township demanding that his people be returned, but they did not want to go back, so Hawthorn’s soldiers beat them. That was when I came to their defense.

  “Once I became a foe of Hawthorn, then a foe I was to all colonists, for he was the leader of all foreign Christians—if he feared me, all feared me. Allied forces came to be organized among the French, Americans, English, and Portuguese; even the Japanese and Germans united in their goal to annihilate me. To survive, I had to arm my parishioners.

  “My victories soon gained the notice of the Royal Court, those imbecilic fools who have been beaten in every battle and nearly every war. Here I was defeating them all. The dowager approached with an offer to make us their army and fight in their name. My supplies by then were drained, with thirty thousand hungry and desperate men on the
verge of rebelling when the Court came knocking. So I bent, thinking that our aim and theirs were one. Of course the palace readily betrayed me.” He paused here and asked his maid to fill his pipe with opium, which she expertly did. After a few puffs, the man glowed with a faint rosiness that colored his wrinkled forehead and sagging cheeks. “My medicine, if you will.”

  I merely nodded.

  “Annie came to me to plead for peace. The day she came, she seemed to have brought a flock of butterflies with her. They flitted around her like a water lily framed by a beauteous pond. She stormed into my sanctuary, her skirt the purity of white, her face tender like silk; her cheeks were rosy, her breath fragrant, and smile charming; her strides were blithe and her voice sweet. My heart thumped at the sight of her. I almost mistook her as a heavenly vision.”

  Another puff.

  “How I adored hearing her read the Bible and sing her hymns to me. After she left, how I craved to see again her bare limbs, blue eyes, golden hair, and sweet lips. She answered my yearning by returning once more. We made love. She even shed her virgin’s blood. Petite she was, just like you.” His dead oyster eyes lingered on Q, the tip of his tongue licking his dry lips.

  “How can you say I am not your child?” exclaimed Q. “My mother’s virgin blood you spilled!”

  “Youth is so impatient. Your mother was just as rosy as you,” Lord Wang observed, reaching a shaky hand out to pinch Q’s left cheek. “Like summer days, love invites thunder and storms. Her surreptitious visits were soon discovered by Hawthorn’s spies. One night when she returned to her father’s house, the devil ambushed her. Despicable evil awaited her.”

  “What happened?” asked Q, attentive like a schoolgirl.

  “She did not come back. After the first month passed, I sent an envoy to inquire the cause. He was robbed of his horse and returned to me bloody and beaten with no word of what had befallen my Annie. What loneliness I felt.”

  “Didn’t your other wives keep you warm and your pillow soft during these lonely days?” I snidely asked.

  Lord Wang ignored my question. “Annie was a jewel. Hundreds of others would not be her equal. I breached the truce negotiated by Annie and led my army toward Reverend Hawthorn’s camp in good faith to ask for Annie’s hand in marriage, but they met me with nothing but cannon shells and bullets, no matter that we made our peaceful intentions known. Fortunately she escaped the confinement her father had placed her in and came to me, fearless in the midst of battle. I carried her away to safety. That night she told me that new life grew inside her but that it was not my child planted within her.”

  “Who else’s could it be then?” asked Q.

  Wang only shook his head and resumed his tale. “Much pain and sickness she suffered. She could not return to her home, for her father had threatened to cut the infant out of her womb, but your mother never once swayed on her conviction to keep you. Then one day in April she fell ill and began to bleed. I had to seek audience with the dowager to gain Annie admission into Union Hospital, the one and only way to save you and her both. The palace saw this as an opportunity for peace and me as a sacrificial lamb. No sooner had I surrendered your mother to the hospital than I was taken to serve a three-year sentence imposed not by my own emperor but by the American legation by will of Reverend Hawthorn.” He paused, shaking his head. “But I did not suffer in vain. I pleaded that you, the child, be kept alive on the promise that I would not mobilize my far-flung army to riot against them, which I could have done even from behind iron bars. So a bargain was forged and your life kept.”

  Q seemed stunned, tears glistening her slanting eyes.

  “A wonderful tale,” I said, “but you still refuse to acknowledge fatherhood and to provide protection for the empress’s safety.”

  He pondered the weight of my words for a second before saying firmly, “I will show you the truth, and then you must be on your way.”

  “What truth?” I asked belligerently.

  “Scientific truth.” Wang gestured toward the foyer. “Come to my wash chamber. Just you.”

  I followed the hunched, limping man to the near chamber, which contained a wooden bucket and a face basin. Without much ado, he lifted up the front of his gown showing me what seemed a suitable case of pseudo-hermaphroditism—a fully formed vagina, lipped and layered, upon which protruded an atypical genital organ that was larger than a clitoris but smaller than a normal penis, less than a pinkie in size and length.

  “See for yourself,” Wang Dan said, his chin up and tone full of pride. “This is what God has given me.”

  I was utterly unprepared for his revelation. The sight overwhelmed me, rushing instant hot tears into my cold eyes of judgment. It was a long lull before I could speak again. “But how …?”

  “How, indeed? I can pleasure and be pleasured, but no child can ever be obtained from my matings.”

  This was the first time I glimpsed this abnormality with my own eyes. The pictorial depictions of such were hardly as shocking, what I had perused in the journals and encyclopedias I had scouted. Some African tribes were known to hack away the dwarfish penises on young female children after stroking the abnormal organ to its fullest hardness, which was then burned to ashes and mixed in with wine so the child could drink the cocktail to rid herself of any residual masculinity. The child would then be sold off as a prized bride to a tribal chief. It was said, when excited, that the stem, that residual node, would still harden, giving the male lover added pleasure.

  “Who then could have impregnated our Annie?” I demanded.

  “Not your Annie—mine.”

  Such stubbornness.

  “I will tell you if you promise to confide this to no other, especially the empress,” he said grimly.

  “Fine,” I agreed.

  “It was her father, the Reverend Hawthorn himself. Annie told me so.”

  I was struck mute as if by clapping thunder right overhead.

  “But why?” I asked.

  “To rid her of my supposed seed in a moment of madness.”

  This left me quiet and somber for a long while.

  Poor Annabelle! My poor darling nymphet love! What a foul fate God had struck you with. What tragedy! Never in my maddest moments would I have ever conjectured this truth. My poor lamb, to have hoarded such ugly and slanderous shame.

  Had she, in all my encounters, ever uttered or proffered the echoes of her pain? Had all her joyousness been but a disguise to conceal her sorrow, a way to cleanse the tarnished stain of her past?

  Why hadn’t God struck her father down with his thunderous wrath? Why hadn’t providence been more plentiful in blessing her, the wronged one, instead of cutting short her young life in punishment for the despicable deeds of another?

  How had she penetrated through all the lies, coming to the truth that her child had survived her? How could she have known to guide me this far, searching for her living child?

  Whatever the answer, the road ahead was straightened for me, and the path clear of all clouds and mist, disguises and camouflage.

  Silent I must remain. Promise I must keep.

  When inquired and probed by a frustrated Q, all I could offer her was a foul and disquieted mood. All I uttered to her regarding her birth and this trickery of a man was the comment, “He cannot have fathered you. He cannot father any child.”

  For the next two hours, when supper was served and banal pleasantry exchanged between our host and Q, I stayed silent and moody. Our coughing lord gazed at me with certain smugness, content with having defeated my glibness.

  At the conclusion of the meal, he rasped, “Now it is time for you to be gone from my township, royal tutor, but she can stay.” His lewd eyes darted to Q.

  I was about to agree to this manly pact when Q stood up. “If my companion cannot stay, then I shall leave as well.”

  I would have fought her, but something in her eyes warned otherwise. She was, after all, more like her mother than not, unwilling to discard me in service of hersel
f. What grace, what providence!

  One could feel Wang Dan’s anger rise in his heaving chest, then in his reddening neck. But that was that. The road might be crooked ahead and tomorrow utterly uncertain, but sure was my heart, rhyming the same beat with Q, my beauteous queen.

  Farewell we bid our host, and off we walked away from the sanctuary of Wang Dan with the moon over our shoulder, a light breeze fluttering the hem of summer night. A carriage was dispatched for our use until we reached Tianjin, a token of kindness that I readily accepted. Crossing the pull-bridge, I looked back at the golden sanctuary to see a flock of butterflies suddenly emerge chasing after us in sweeping plumes of colorful clouds.

  “Why didn’t you stay and take that man’s offering?” I asked as the carriage jolted into motion.

  “You said he was not my father,” she replied. Leaning against me, eyes half-closed, she asked, “What are we to do after we arrive in Tianjin?”

  “We will go to America.”

  “But this is my land, my father’s land.”

  “Your adoptive father’s land from which we are being driven away.”

  “Who will look after me?”

  “I shall, and if not I, then your very own grandparents.”

  “My grandparents? But I am an empress. I cannot leave my husband. We are bound forever in life and death.”

  “He is probably already onto his next life if Grandpa has her way. The slaughtering has already begun, with your adoptive father being the first to go.”

  She covered her mouth and sobbed. “I am fatherless, now and forever.”

  I could not answer her. Some truths were best left untold.

  She cried all the way through the frigid night as we journeyed along the pitted road.

  35

  When they came upon me, after I left Q at the modest lodging near Tianjin Wharf, it was not hard to conjecture the culprit behind the betrayal. I had, the previous day, paid a visit to the American consulate there to inquire about certain rights given not just to current citizens as I was but also to one born of an American mother.