The Empress of Salt and Fortune

by Nghi Vo

  History will say that she was an ugly woman, but that is not true. She had a foreigner’s beauty, like a language we do not know how to read. She was barely taller than I was at ten, and built like an ox drover’s daughter. Her two long braids hung over her shoulders as black as ink, and her face was as flat as a dish and almost perfectly round. Pearl-faced, they call it where she came from, but piggish is what they called it here.

  She walked past with her spine like one of these birch trees, and she wore this dress, which is as white today as it was then.

  The seal that the dress was made from was killed by her brother on his first hunt. Patient as the unending ice itself, he had stalked it for days at the breathing holes where they come up, and when it rose, it was as large as a man. The toggle is one of its teeth, carved by her uncle. Her brother and uncle, whose names are now only spoken in the mortuary halls of Ingrusk, were killed just a year before, at the battle of Ko-anam Fords.

  She would bring with her a wealth of salt, bushels of pearls, and enough whale oil to keep the palace alight for twenty years or more, one of the finest dowries ever to come to an emperor of Anh, but that was still a week away. When she first came to the Palace of Gleaming Light, In-yo was alone and empty-handed, wearing a splendid seal-fur dress that the ladies of the women’s quarters could only call strange and barbaric.

  She never wore this dress again in the palace, but when the emperor sent her into exile, she asked me to pack it carefully. I was thirteen then, and it was my job to look after it. I packaged it so carefully between layers and layers of crisp paper, and every ten days I brought it out to brush away any possible moth eggs or larvae.

  Even though there was a fashion for seal fur in the capital when In-yo became the empress in truth, there never was a dress like this one again. There could never be. It is beautiful, but every stitch bites into her history, the deaths she left behind her, and the home she could not return to.

  Do you understand?

  * * *

  “I am not sure I do, grandmother, but I listen, and Almost Brilliant will remember.”

  Rabbit flinched a little, as if she had forgotten herself. For a single faraway moment, she looked like something other than a simple servant woman, but it was there and gone so fast that Chih could not say for sure what it was.

  “That is your calling, isn’t it? To remember and to mark down.”

  “It is. Sometimes the things we see do not make sense until many years have gone by. Sometimes it takes generations. We are taught to be content with that.”

  Rabbit tilted her head, looking at Chih carefully.

  “Are you? Content with that, I mean?”

  “After my novitiate, they sent me to the kingdom of Sen, where Almost Brilliant and I were to take an account of their summer water festival. We were just meant to be there to record populations, dances, fireworks, things like that, but on the ninth day of the festival, a brown carp cleared the final gate of the city’s dams and became a calico dragon. It twisted over the city, bringing down a month of holy rain, and then it was gone. Grandmother, I am very content.”

  Rabbit smiled, standing to pick up the dishes and to offer Almost Brilliant a gentle stroke along her crest.

  “Good.”

  That night Chih dreamed of a man in a field of blinding white, waiting at a breathing hole with the patience of the damned for a seal to come up. In their dream, the man heard a call and then, with a smile on his round face, he turned and walked away, leaving his spear behind.

  Chapter Three

  Cup. Polished mahogany inlaid with silver. A silver spider is inlaid into the bottom of the cup.

  Five cubed dice. Bone and gold. The figures inscribed in silver on each side include the moon, a woman, a fish, a cat, a ship, and a needle.

  Game board. Pale wood and gold paint. Drawn in six circles are the moon, a woman, a fish, a cat, a ship, and a needle.

  Chih smiled faintly at the game they’d pulled from underneath a sleeping platform, tucked among dusty extra bedding and a half-dozen pairs of extra slippers, all alike. They tumbled the dice into the cup, rattling them to make a hollow sound.

  Rabbit glanced over from where she was pulling out long lengths of yellow silk from a compartment in the floor, banners that were designed to show when the emperor was in residence. As far as Chih knew, no emperor had ever come to Thriving Fortune.

  “Do you play?”

  “Who in the empire doesn’t? My mother put the dice in my hand on my fifth New Year. The board was paper and the dice only stone, but it was the same.”

  “I wondered more if your vows prevent it, but here.”

  Rabbit came to kneel across from Chih, passing them a handful of pebbles. “Go on.”

  After a moment, Chih placed all of their pebbles on the lady, elegant, smiling, and dressed in the clothing of the doomed Ku Dynasty. Rabbit pulled up her sleeve to reveal a ropy scarred arm, and she shook the cup high and low before tumbling out the dice with an exhalation of “dah!” like a professional dealer.

  The dice tumbled across the board, coming up fish, ship, and moon.

  “Ah, unlucky,” Rabbit said, sweeping the pebbles towards her. “You should never put all your money on one thing.”

  “I like doing it my way,” Chih said with a smile and a shrug. “Was that how the empress played as well?”

  “The empress . . . Well. She first saw the game after she had been living in the women’s quarters for almost a month.”

  * * *

  The new empress was like a ghost. At first, we were all afraid of her, because the women of the north were all thought to be witches and sorceresses. Then they discovered her great secret, that she was only a heartbroken and lonely girl, and she became of no account at all.

  There were almost three dozen accessory wives in the women’s quarters at that time, but the most important by far was Kaofan, the daughter of the Kang clan of the east. Until she was banished south to live with the gravestone cutters and charcoal burners, she was more the empress than the empress, and she loved to play Moon Lady Ship.

  One day, in the Chrysanthemum Room, where all the paper screens are filigreed with pale orange chrysanthemum petals, they were playing just as we played now, and Kaofan sat with one sleeve off her shoulder like a dealer in the water and flower district.

  I was there, mending a robe that had torn along the sleeve, and so I noticed the empress just a few seconds before Kaofan did.

  She stood in the doorway, her head tilted and her hands dangling by her sides. Her hair had been brushed and braided because the emperor had roared he was tired of seeing it in tangles, and there were great dark circles under her eyes.

  “What are you playing?”

  I am not sure any of us had heard her speak before this. Her voice was soft and deep, and it felt as if it came from a great distance away. For a moment, I was afraid that Kaofan would be cruel to her, as she so often was to the junior wives, but instead she smiled.

  “Come here, and I’ll show you.”

  She explained the game to the new empress with exaggerated courtesy, sending sly glances to her especial friends. She showed her how the pictures matched the images on the dice and how to place her stake on each picture.

  “What are we playing for?” asked the empress.

  “Oh, we were playing for jeweled buttons, but if you don’t have a stake . . .”

  Silently, her face as still as a pond, the empress reached in her pocket to pull out buttons of jade set in jet. They were obviously of imperial make, and we were all reminded that whatsoever she chose to do with them, she was still the empress.

  Do I need to tell you she won? It’s not a game of skill, not really. That’s why we teach it to little children at New Year’s, to give them a taste for winning and to give the old gamblers a reminder that they are, after all, only mortal. She won, and won, and won, and in the end, she had a small mountain of jeweled buttons in front of her, and Kaofan had empty hands.

  “I�
��ll give these all back to you,” she said after a meditative moment, “if you tell me where you got this board from.”

  Kaofan smiled, and In-yo dropped a fortune back into her hands as if they were no more valuable than pebbles she’d picked up off the street.

  “There’s a woman who comes with games sometimes. She travels up and down the coast to bring us back entertainment and games and fortunes. Would you like to see another game she brought us?”

  In-yo looked at her, and when I look back, I still cannot tell what she saw when she looked at the most beautiful of all the emperor’s wives. I wonder if she looked ahead to when Kaofan would end her life covered in charcoal and grit, or whether she saw the contempt that Kaofan had for her, and yes, even then, some of the fear as well.

  I know very well, though, that In-yo never hated Kaofan. She may have pitied her, or been angry with her, or simply found her irritating or foolish or unfashionable. Hate, however, was reserved for equals, and as far as In-yo was concerned, she had no equals in all the empire.

  Do you understand?

  * * *

  Chih thought for a moment before shaking their head.

  “I think I come a little closer, grandmother, but no. I do not understand. Not yet.”

  Rabbit smiled, showing off her strong, sharp teeth.

  “You are clever, aren’t you?”

  “So the clerics always thought, grandmother.”

  “Good. That is a good thing.”

  She went back to reeling out the yellow silk from the subfloor compartments and said nothing else that day.

  Chapter Four

  Bag of lychee fruit. Linen, ink, and lychee. Marked with a weight of 10 tan and a regional stamp for Ue County.

  Bag of hazelnuts. Linen, ink, and whole hazelnuts. Marked with a weight of 10 tan and a regional stamp from Tsu.

  Plum-sized mammoth. Gold, rubies, enamel, and iron. The mammoth is worked realistically rather than figuratively, every hair detailed and with rubies serving as eyes. The mammoth is caparisoned in blue enamel, and the mammoth’s tusks are capped with iron.

  The magery that had locked down the entire region around Lake Scarlet for fifty years had kept Thriving Fortune’s larder fresh. As they turned the golden mammoth over in their hand, Chih swiped a handful of lychee fruit from the bag. When they broke the paper-thin rind with their teeth, their mouth flooded with ridiculously sweet juice, a taste now more rare than rare with Ue County having declared sovereignty and closed its borders.

  “That’s too fine for the likes of you,” Almost Brilliant sniffed, but she did not turn away when Chih peeled two of the fruit and set them on the ground next to her. As the hoopoe ate, Chih went to find Rabbit, who was brewing a cup of herbal tea.

  “Oh, why, I’ve not seen that in years. We thought it lost.”

  Her mouth was soft as she turned the mammoth over in her hands. It was the symbol of the northern people as the lion was the symbol of the empire of Anh. All their life, Chih had seen the mammoth and the lion together. The twinned beasts stared out from the carvings and crests with a kind of weary patience. They had seen empires rise and fall, they seemed to say, and they would see this one do the same.

  Rabbit turned the mammoth upside down to show Chih what they had missed, a tiny maker’s mark stamped on one round foot. Chih squinted to read it, peripherally aware of Almost Brilliant fluttering into the room and nesting overhead in the rafters.

  “The characters for . . . elegant woman and . . . civet cat?”

  “Yes. It is the professional chop of Yan Lian, the great artist. She went to live as a nun at the Phan Kwai abbey, but she was once quite the favorite in the capital.”

  * * *

  The women’s quarters were decked in fertile black and lucky red. The court physician had confirmed that the empress was with child. The court women wondered how In-yo could tell, so stocky and round, but they walked more carefully around her. Those who bear children hold the keys to life and death, and their ill wishes are to be feared.

  After the announcement, the empress seemed to grow obsessed with fortune-telling of all kinds. She summoned fortune-tellers from town, from the borders, from faraway Ning and warlike Zhu. She entertained men who threw stones, women who dealt cards, even a person who was neither who had a horse that could tap out a number associated with the great holy book of the veiled peoples of the south.

  I was just returned from escorting a mystic from the west back to the gates when a messenger arrived just ahead of me.

  “The Emperor of Pine and Steel would honor you for housing the future prince.”

  He presented her with a package wrapped in silk, and she frowned when it came to light. It was a tablet of gold, soft enough to mark with a fingernail, heavy enough to thump against her chest if she wore it suspended from the gold chain it had come with.

  I saw a brief flicker of dislike pass over her face even as she thanked the emperor through the messenger. I turned to go as well, but she stopped me.

  “Tell me, would you wear this?”

  I mouthed the usual protestations, that I would be found for a thief and executed if such a thing ever sat on my filthy neck, but she shook her head.

  “Tell me the truth.”

  “No, I do not like chains around my neck.”

  “Neither do I. Now tell me, girl, who is the finest artist you know?”

  I should have said Chang Hai or someone like that, someone well-known at court for their flowers and their carefully sculpted peaches. Instead, I was so startled that I told her the truth.

  When she answered the imperial summons, Yan Lian seemed to me as tall as a tree and as wild as the boar that roamed the forests near the capital. Her hair was cropped close to her head like a nun’s, but she’d cut strange patterns into it, like sheared velvet, and her eyes were as narrow as her smile was wide. She wore men’s clothes in those days, and she swaggered into the women’s quarters as if everything in the world could be hers if she simply reached out and took it.

  Yan Lian weighed the golden tablet in her hand, and she spilled the chain through her fingers like water. She nodded when she could mark it with her fingernail, and turned back to the empress.

  “I can make you something beautiful with this gold, but surely, Empress, you know that nothing comes for free.”

  The wild artist put a special emphasis on the word free. I couldn’t know it then, and the empress certainly didn’t, but Yan Lian used the accent they use down in the water and flower districts, where every sensual pleasure commands a price and nothing is more embarrassing than getting a kiss for free, as if it were charity.

  The empress may not have known what Yan Lian was implying, but she heard something in the other woman’s voice and smiled.

  “Come sit with me in my chambers. We have many designs to discuss. You, girl. What’s your name?”

  “Rabbit, great empress.”

  “Well, then, Rabbit, come here and sit in front of the door to my quarters. Stay there and keep any eavesdroppers well away. I should not like to see my designs copied.”

  I assume that at some point they spoke of designs. At least the little gold mammoth is caparisoned the way the imperial mammoths are for war. I do not remember designs, though. I remember laughing, and sighing, maybe some crying, or perhaps it was only moans that grew more desperate as the night went on. I remember one indignant cry of pain that dissolved into giggles, and the slide of skin on silk and skin on wood. Some of my friends from the kitchens sneaked me some rice and pickles before scampering away. I ate the food gratefully, but I barely tasted it, intent instead on listening to the empress and the artist at their work.

  When dawn came, and I was just beginning to nod at my post, the door slid open. It was indecorous of me, but I glanced back into the empress’s chambers to see her sprawled on her back, half-covered with a stained robe, her dark hair an inky spill around her head. She snored slightly, but it was a satisfied sound, and Yan Lian shook her head. There was a vivid red
bite on her shoulder that she thumbed absently before she pulled her robe up to cover it.

  “I’ve had magistrates and bandits, courtesans and opera singers, but rabbit-toothed girl, I have never had anyone like that.”

  Maybe she said it about every man and woman she bedded, but I think there was something genuinely awed in her voice.

  Later on, when I brought In-yo her bathwater and perfume for her toilette, she told me to stay with her while she bathed. I watched as she rinsed her strong limbs, her dark skin coming up gleaming from the water. She was as little like a proper Anh lady as a wolf is like a lapdog, and when I caught her watching me out of the corner of her eye, I sat up very straight indeed.

  “I saw you that first day, didn’t I? You were the one who raised her face to me as I walked by.”

  I nodded, and then said timidly, “I had not seen that you noticed, Your Majesty.”

  She grinned at me, wrinkling her nose a little as she did so.

  “They teach us to look out of the corners of our eyes when we are very young in the north. Less movement to startle the things we hunt or to attract the attention of those who would hunt us. What did you see when you looked at me?”

  I thought about my answer carefully as I toweled her dry, spreading her cloak of black hair over a woolen cloth.

  “I thought that you looked very strange to my eye,” I said finally. “And very alone.”

  “I am alone,” she said, tying her robe herself. “But maybe I am less alone than I thought I was, hmm, Rabbit?”

  I blushed and ducked my head, murmuring something about duty and being honored to serve, but deep down, I thought she would never be alone again, not if I could help it. Being close to her was like being warmed by a bonfire, and I had been cold for a long time.

  Whatever deal they struck, two weeks later a little golden mammoth was returned to the palace wrapped in a twist of common cotton. In-yo looked at it and smiled, and I swear I had never seen anything so lovely.