The Dragon Men

by Steven Harper

  Nothing in common? Truly? An icy finger of doubt slid around her thoughts. Gavin was a clockworker, and clockworkers always went mad. Always. Al-Noor was just further along than Gavin. How would she react if—when—Gavin decided her life was worth less than some new bit of technology?

  Her voice faltered. “The blood is . . . is . . . ,” she said, trailing off, tried again, and failed to come up with a single thing to say. All she could see was Gavin’s face superimposed over al-Noor’s. The squid men, bereft of further orders, remained in place, holding the stunned Phipps upright and keeping Alice in their cold grip. She considered scratching the one on her left with her spider, but that would mean the poor creature’s death, and she couldn’t bring herself to do it, even to free herself.

  Al-Noor looked up. His attention had only been barely diverted, and when Alice stopped chanting, he lost interest in the blood.

  “Very good, Lady,” he said. “You have shown yourself more dangerous than I knew. You will die now.”

  He aimed the pistol at Alice. The last thing Alice heard was the pistol’s high-pitched whine.

  Chapter Three

  Peking was burning. The flames lit the night sky with phoenix wings, and smells of smoke and gunpowder stung Cixi’s nose, even here at the Mountain Palace for Avoiding Heat, far from the Forbidden City in Peking. Behind her in the spidery palanquin, her maids hid their painted faces in their sleeves and wept. Cixi, the Lady Yehenara, kept a carefully mild expression, as if she were out enjoying an evening ride, though inside she was weeping just like the maids. For a second time the British barbarians had invaded Peking, and now they were doing what they did best—destroy. Automatically she reached down to her lap to stroke one of her dogs for comfort, forgetting that her lap was empty. During the hasty evacuation of the Forbidden City, the eunuchs had thrown all her dear little lion-faced dogs down the well so the barbarians wouldn’t be able to touch them. She wondered if any of them were still alive, struggling to stay afloat in the cold water and begging for someone to take them out.

  The spider palanquin came to a halt. Its legs lowered it to the ground, stirring the silk curtains that preserved the privacy of the riders. Li Liyang, her chief eunuch, personally helped her out and guided her toward the steps of the Pavilion of a Thousand Silver Stars, her own residence within the palace. The palace wasn’t a single building but was actually a compound that took up most of the little town of Chengde. Dozens of pavilions and temples and bridges and palaces lay scattered artfully about the lush lawns and gardens of perfumed flowers chosen for their complementary scents. Cixi, who pronounced her imperial name kee-shee in the Manchu fashion, paused at the top of the steps to look at the too-bright sky again. The city was dying as slowly and steadily as her dogs.

  “My lady, we should not remain outdoors,” said Liyang in his high-pitched lilt. “It is too upsetting for a delicate constitution.”

  “Where is my son?” she asked as she mounted the steps.

  “He is safe,” Liyang replied. His head was shaved, and he wore a conical hat of gold silk that matched the elaborate geometric designs on his gold robe. Like most eunuchs, he smelled vaguely of urine—the knife that stripped away a boy’s three preciouses took with it the ability to control the bladder, a problem that remained through adulthood and led to the saying “smelly as a eunuch.” At his belt, Liyang carried a pouch with a small jar in it. The jar held his preciouses preserved in oil, and when he died, they would be buried with him so he could join the ancestors as a full man. Cixi thought of her dogs again and wondered how long it would be before such a thing happened to Liyang.

  “Safe does not tell me where he is, Liyang,” she said. “Bring him to me immediately.”

  “My lady—”

  “You have disobeyed me, Liyang. Fortunately, you are my favorite eunuch, and these are trying times. Therefore I will not have you beaten for disobedience—if my son Zaichun is at my side by the time I reach the front door.”

  Liyang scurried away. To be nice to him, Cixi took her time with the steps, pausing to allow her maids to smooth the wrinkles from her silken split-front robe and straighten the wide trousers beneath. Cixi was beautiful and knew it, but in the Imperial Court, beauty was common and cheap. Cixi’s lustrous hair, fine features, and smooth skin had gotten her chosen as a concubine of the fifth rank when she was sixteen, but poise, wit, and her skill in the bedroom had caught the emperor’s fancy, and by age twenty-two, Cixi had spun that fancy into a pregnancy and finally her current rank as Imperial Concubine. Beauty had its uses, and it had to be maintained, but it was nothing without a mind behind it.

  Liyang was lucky that beauty requirements for Manchu women such as Cixi did not extend to binding their feet as some of the concubines did. Otherwise someone would have carried her up the steps in an instant and she would have been forced to have Liyang beaten with bamboo rods regardless of how she felt about him. She supposed she could order it done with the thicker ones that broke bones and left bruises instead of the thinner ones that split skin and laid flesh open. But that might show too much favoritism, even for Liyang, and when things were chaotic, people craved order. It wouldn’t do to go back on the rules for any reason. No, if Liyang didn’t produce her son within the allotted time, she would have to have the Imperial Master of a Hundred Cries mete out a severe beating with no intervention from Cixi. It would make everyone feel better.

  She reached the top of the steps. The Pavilion of a Thousand Silver Stars was three stories tall, bright and airy even in the night. Lacquered pillars held up the portico, which looked out over the serene waters of a lotus pond. She had ordered the pavilion painted a soft pink, the exact shade of an orchid, because her girlhood name had been Little Orchid. Cixi was the name given her on the day she had been chosen as an Imperial Concubine. A year after the birth of her son—so far the emperor’s only son—Cixi had been promoted to the position of Noble Consort, which put her second only to the empress. This meant she had the emperor’s ear and could do things such as build pink pavilions in the Mountain Palace for Avoiding Heat.

  Cixi glanced at the fiery sky again. Last year, just before the signing of the awful Treaty of Tientsin—the treaty that granted the British power to travel within China and sell their filthy opium—a fleet of British ships carrying diplomats, envoys, and thousands of soldiers sailed up the Peiho River near the fortress at Taku. The emperor and his generals didn’t want an armed force coming so close to Taku, and so the emperor sent a message asking them to anchor at a harbor farther north. Although the request was perfectly reasonable and not even inconvenient, the English envoy Wright Frederick—or Frederick Wright, as Cixi supposed the barbarians put the name—ordered the fleet to attack Taku to teach the Chinese a lesson. No doubt to the great surprise of the English, the fortress at Taku had turned out to be more heavily fortified than expected. The automatons and soldiers at Taku had turned back the English forces with little effort. The easy victory emboldened the emperor to declare the entire Treaty of Tientsin in abeyance and the borders closed.

  Now, a year later, the English responded in force. They fought their way up the river all the way to Peking, despite the best efforts of the emperor’s generals. Emperor Xianfeng had been forced to flee to the Mountain Palace for his own safety. A difficult thing it had been, too, with hundreds of soldiers, slaves, and eunuchs, and an equal number of mechanical carts filled with their minimal possessions and treasures, preceded by fifty spiders to sweep the road ahead of the emperor’s palanquin and strew the stones with rose petals.

  Cixi reached the pavilion doors, gridded with flawless glass, and her maids hurried to slide them open. She glanced about. No sign of Liyang or Zaichun. Ah well. Cixi raised her foot, clad in a bejeweled slipper, to step over the threshold.

  “Honored mother!” Her son Zaichun dashed up the steps, his dark eyes sparkling beneath his round cap. He was not quite six, and to him this was a grand adventure that kept him up well past his normal bedtime. Behind him came
an entourage of eunuchs and his wet nurse, all of them carrying any toys, foodstuffs, and articles of clothing the boy might need. The servants looked frazzled, and their clothes were in disarray. Cixi made a mental note to have a sharp word with Liyang about that. Servants in the presence of the emperor’s son and the Imperial Concubine had no place to appear less than respectable. Disarray led to fear, fear led to panic, and right now, no one could afford to panic.

  “You wished to see me, Mother?” Zaichun continued.

  “I did, Little Cricket.” She touched his hair, careful not to the let the long jade coverings on her nails jab his face. “I wanted to see for myself that you were safe.”

  “I am. I spoke with Father, too. He even let me ride behind his palanquin so I could watch for invaders!”

  “That was kind of him. I hope you remembered to give him your thanks.”

  “Of course, Mother. I heard him talking to General Su Shun about how well-mannered I was when we entered the palace.”

  “That is good to hear, my son, and I am glad to see that you are safe, but perhaps you should sleep in my pavilion tonight.”

  “I can sleep in my own pavilion,” he said sulkily, betraying his earlier good manners. “It’s bigger. And I’m not sleepy.”

  “Mother has had a trying day. She hopes her son won’t make things more difficult.”

  “I don’t like pink. It’s for girls.”

  “Your words are very interesting.” Cixi’s tone remained mild, but her hand dropped to his shoulder, and the points of her nail covers dug into his flesh. He gasped. “But I’m sure you would rather spend the night here, where it’s safer. Is that not true?” She tightened her grasp.

  “Yes, Mother.” He was struggling not to show the pain, and she was proud that he didn’t do so, though she didn’t loosen her grip.

  “It would be good if the eunuchs knew.”

  He cleared his throat. “I believe I will spend the night in my honored mother’s pavilion. See to it.”

  The eunuchs bowed and swarmed into the pavilion through a series of side entrances—no one but Cixi and her guests used the main door.

  “You are a well-mannered boy. Perhaps you would like to run along now.” She released him, and he fled into the pavilion.

  She held out her hand and said, “Tea.” A porcelain cup was placed in it, and she let the warm drink wash the road dust from her throat as she strolled across the threshold. Inside the pavilion, a maid carrying a heavy feather bed froze as she realized whose presence she was in. She tried to bow and keep the precious feather bed from touching the floor all at once, though she didn’t dare flee without permission. Cixi dropped the cup—a spider caught it before it hit the ground—and was about to enter the pavilion fully when she changed her mind and paused in the doorway again. The bowing maid holding the heavy feather bed bit her lip, and sweat was making her makeup run. A bit of down worked its way out of the feather bed and, caught on a draft, drifted out the open door and away to the east, toward the place known as the Cool Hall on the Misty Lake, the emperor’s residence. Cixi watched it go. The fear she had been keeping firmly at bay gave way to a new nervousness she couldn’t name. The feather vanished into the darkness.

  “Liyang!” she said.

  Liyang came to her side. “My lady?”

  “What is the latest news of Peking?”

  “The Army of a Thousand Tigers continues to fight the English north of Peking, my lady, while Su Shun and the Dragon Men use the Machines of Wind and Thunder in the south.”

  “But who is winning?”

  Liyang hesitated. “The Tiger Army is . . . rather . . . it is encountering quite a challenge, one worthy of its fighting prowess. The Machines of Wind and Thunder fight bravely under Prince Kung and will do so until nothing is left but a pile of melted brass.”

  “I see.” They were losing, but Liyang couldn’t say such a dreadful thing to the Imperial Consort. She kept her face calm with effort. “How is the emperor?”

  The arms of the bowed maid were now trembling with the effort of holding up the bulky feather bed. Letting the silk cover touch the floor would mean her death. Liyang shot her a glance and said quickly, “I am told he is resting very comfortably.”

  Resting comfortably was Liyang’s way of saying Xianfeng had taken a great deal of rice wine. Very comfortably meant he had used his opium pipe as well. Cixi knew she shouldn’t be surprised. The man had turned thirty only last month, and already he had smoked more opium and drunk more wine than any four emperors before him. Small wonder he had produced only one child, and how lucky for Cixi it had been her son. The maid was panting now, and one corner of the bed drooped toward the floor. Another feather floated away to the east, drawing Cixi’s eye with it. The nervousness wouldn’t leave her alone. Two feathers in a row. A sign?

  “I heard him talking to General Su Shun about how well-mannered I was when we entered the palace.”

  Two drifting feathers. Rice wine and opium. Strange. If Xianfeng had been drinking and smoking long enough to be “resting very comfortably,” how could he have been coherent enough to comment on his son’s manners?

  “I believe I will call on the emperor,” Cixi said, then remembered herself and coughed to cover her lapse. “Rather, please let the emperor know the Imperial Concubine would be pleased and honored to find herself summoned to his heavenly presence.”

  “But the emperor is resting— Yes, my lady,” Liyang said. He snapped his fingers, and one of his apprentices, a eunuch of perhaps six or seven, rushed up, clutching at the jar at his own belt. “Run to the Cool Hall on the Misty Lake and deliver the lady’s message.”

  The boy dashed away. Cixi turned to follow more sedately, and her maids slid the doors shut on the relieved face of the maid with the feather bed.

  The palanquin delivered Cixi, her maids, and her eunuchs to the Cool Hall on the Misty Lake, the emperor’s residence at the palace. The palanquin skittered faster than the little apprentice eunuch could run, and he would actually not have been able to deliver the message yet, something Cixi was counting on. Cixi swept toward the main doors of the Hall, and the startled eunuchs on duty hurried to slide it open. Again, she halted in the doorway. Why was she here, ahead of the messenger she herself had sent? Foolishness. This was a strange day, and she was on a strange errand. But her instincts told her to continue, and she had learned to trust her instincts.

  “The back of the mind is wiser than the front,” her mother liked to say.

  “I wish to proceed completely alone,” she announced, and continued inside.

  For the Imperial Concubine, completely alone meant her, four maids (one for each sacred direction), Liyang, his three assistants, and a spider to run ahead with a lantern. At one time, the Hall had been fitted for electric lights, with each lightbulb personally designed and blown by one of the Dragon Men at great effort and expense. The lights were an artistic triumph, each one a delicate work of art that captured the sun itself. But the moment Xianfeng entered his new apartments, he fell victim to a headache that lasted three days. The chief eunuch declared electricity was the cause, and he ordered all the wiring pulled out and every bulb smashed. The Dragon Man had drowned himself in a fishpond, and no electric light had been allowed in the Hall since.

  Cixi strode through the dark corridors, following the spider. She could tell the place was bustling with activity as frightened servants rushed about, finding places to store the clothing and treasures brought out of the Forbidden City, but this was merely a sense she had, a change in the night and feeling of tensions. She actually saw nothing—everyone cleared the way for Cixi, and she walked through empty hallways, alone but for her spider, maids, and eunuchs, and eventually she came to Xianfeng’s chambers. Outside the sliding door stood twelve muscled guards with swords, armor, and pistols. All of them sported metal limbs or partially armored skin, as was proper for a soldier and taboo for nobility.

  Cixi hesitated. Something was wrong here. The soldiers’ builds weren�
��t soft and flabby like those of eunuchs. Only a few highly trusted male advisers were allowed to enter the Forbidden City back in Peking, and not one of them was allowed to remain inside after nightfall, not even in the most dire emergencies, because the integrity of the emperor’s wife and concubines had to be protected. Even one man left on the grounds overnight meant the origin of any baby born to a wife or concubine later might not be the emperor’s. Yet here stood a dozen powerful, virile men. True, some rules were bent at the Mountain Palace, but never this one. Cixi’s own integrity could be called into question by just standing in their presence. Why would—

  Then Cixi noticed the corner of a bandage sticking out from the waist joint of the armor of one of the guards, and she understood with great relief. These men had only recently been castrated, probably in the last day or two, when it became clear the emperor would have to evacuate the Forbidden City and would need strong guards. She wondered where their jars were.

  “I wish for the emperor to know I am here,” she said to one of the guards. “You know who I am?”

  “Yes, great lady.” The guards bowed and looked at one another uncertainly. It occurred to Cixi that these guards were unschooled in proper etiquette. A flabby eunuch would have politely enquired about her business, or more likely have long been aware she was coming and admitted her immediately or turned her aside in such a way as to make it seem that leaving were her idea.

  “You are honorable men who are guarding the emperor’s heavenly presence during these trying times,” she said. “I am sure he appreciates your service.” And boldly she stepped forward to reach for the door. Horrified, two of her maids leaped forward to whip it open, their fear of the guards overcome by the idea that the Imperial Concubine might touch a door for herself. Cixi sailed through as if she had done nothing at all unusual, and before the guards could decide what to do, her maids and eunuchs also boiled through and the doors snapped shut. The chaos of the evacuation worked in her favor.