by Megan Bannen
“Let us move on to the subject of the succession,” my father says.
“He’s going to kill us,” I whisper to Weiji.
“Not if we don’t get caught.”
“But what if he does catch us?”
“He won’t if you shut up,” Weiji hisses back. “You’re the one who insisted on tagging along. Now be quiet, will you?”
I cling to my branch as the voices from within continue to waft up to us.
“. . . assumed that any sons produced from the happy union will be considered eligible heirs to the Son of the Eternal Blue Sky,” says an unfamiliar voice.
“Son of the Sky?” says the emperor of the Song, my cousin Bing. “Is that the same thing as the Son of Heaven? I thought I was the Son of Heaven.”
Bing is sweet, but he’s six years old and has no clue what’s going on.
My father, who is the prince regent, sallies forth: “The Son of Heaven assumes that before any children are produced from this happy union, Prince Weiji would be the likely heir.”
“Let us hope for the best, sir. I do not think we should plan on such an event.”
“But if—”
“But if the Great Khan passes before a son is born, we shall deal with that when the time comes,” that new voice answers with a steely grace. I can’t believe anyone would have the temerity to interrupt Father.
Weiji curses in apparent agreement.
“Perhaps we should discuss the bridal gifts,” says my father.
A courtier drones on about bolts of silk, gold jewelry, and the provision of a wardrobe.
“This is a lot less interesting than I thought it was going to be,” I whisper to my brother.
“Shh! It’s starting to get good,” Weiji answers as the stranger’s voice pipes up again.
“Turandokht Khatun, as the daughter of the Great Khan, will live in the beating heart of the Mongol Empire in Khanbalik. The home is the realm of the Mongol woman. It is for the man to come and live with her in her home, not for the woman to trot off to the hinterlands to live with her husband.”
“Are we to understand,” says my father, “that a son of the eternal house of the Song Dynasty is to act as a subservient to a woman?”
“Are we to understand that you dislike the offer of peace from the Son of the Eternal Blue Sky, the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire?” says that smooth, unfamiliar voice.
“Of course not, sir,” my father answers, his voice tumbling awkwardly over his words. “You misunderstand me.”
Weiji curses again.
I’m sitting on a low chair with a high, carved back in the grand palatial hall of the Song emperor. The other women and I stay out of sight behind a large screen the vibrant green of a kingfisher. I always feel so small and stupid in such a crush of people, but there is to be a poetry reading tonight meant to impress the Mongol entourage, and I am very fond of poetry. A scholar, probably dressed above his station for this occasion, reads a Tang Dynasty poem with great fervor at the front of the room. I perch on my seat, listening attentively.
It’s the story of a woman’s life, each stanza capturing a decade. As a girl, she is as lovely and delicate as a tree’s blossoms in the rain. By the time she is twenty, her parents have arranged her marriage, and the groom carries her away like a goddess in a myth. But the woman’s worth deteriorates as the poem continues. She may still be attractive at thirty, but by age fifty, her husband’s affection diminishes as her beauty fades. Year by year, her skin wrinkles and her joints crack. She goes deaf and blind. At ninety, she is all alone, ailing in her solitary bed. By the time the scholar reads the last stanza, I feel wrung out.
At a hundred, like a cliff crumbling in the wind,
For her body it is the moment to become dust.
Children and grandchildren will perform sacrifices to her spirit,
And clear moonlight will forever illuminate her patch of earth.
A smattering of polite applause meets the end of the poem, but it seems an insufficient response to the depth of the poem’s message. To everyone else, it was only a collection of words, prettily told. To me, it was an arrow shot through the heart, a hard truth I had never been able to articulate to myself before. I feel almost naked sitting here in a room full of people who either didn’t understand the poem or didn’t care enough to try.
There’s to be music next, but I rise from my seat in the intermission and cross the opulent hall, stepping on several toes and tiny, bound feet in the process. I make my way outdoors into one of many imperial gardens even as I sense my mother’s sharp eyes boring into the back of my head, warning me of my impropriety.
The garden is lit with paper lanterns, casting a gold light against a man-made hillock and a twisted pine tree. A brook plashes under a nearby wooden bridge. I lean against a post that holds up the awning above me, my left arm wrapped around it as if the carved wood could offer affection.
“Dreadfully hot in there.” A heavyset man in a lavish green robe steps out into the garden and drifts across the porch to lean against the post opposite me. His skin is pale and delicate, his mustaches as thin and smooth as the handles of two fine paintbrushes.
Alarmed, I draw my arm up to my eyes so that my long sleeve covers my face. A concubine might be seen, a dancer, a servant, a slave. But a princess? Absolutely not.
“Forgive me,” says the man, indicating his own face, a reflection of my gesture. “It’s been so long since I’ve lived among my own people, I forget some of these niceties.”
I recognize his voice as the one Weiji and I overheard earlier that day, when we eavesdropped on the wedding arrangements. One or the other of us should step away immediately, but he seems disinclined. This man is clearly from the Song, but he’s with the Mongol entourage, and as I understand it, the Mongol court allows noblewomen to mingle freely with men despite the clear vulgarity of it. I drop my arm away from my face and offer the stranger a half bow, hoping I haven’t blundered.
“Tell me, did you like that poem just now?” he asks, unconcerned by my decorum or possible lack thereof.
I shudder to think what my mother would say if she caught me having this conversation. My eyes shift to each side before asking, “Me?”
“Yes, you.” He looks amused, and now I feel awkward and stupid.
“I don’t know.” As a general rule, no one asks for my opinion or cares what I think about anything. This man may be the first human being who has expressed any interest in what transpires inside my head.
“Do you know what I think?” he asks.
I shake my head, marveling at the fact that this conversation is happening.
“I think you liked it. I think you liked it a great deal. Tell me why.”
I finger the carvings on the post. “Because it’s true,” I answer before I clamp my lips shut, worried that I’ve said more than I ought, shown too much of who I am on the inside.
“Is it?”
“I think so,” I whisper, my eyes downcast.
“How so?”
I rub the tips of my fingers along the twin moles that dot my neck, that sit there like two burping frogs on a lily pad. In a fit of reckless bravery, I reply, “Because it seems to me that a woman’s beauty is everything. And when she loses it—if she ever had it to begin with—she no longer has value in the world.”
“And yet her beauty isn’t her only source of happiness,” the man counters, speaking as if he takes his conversation partner seriously. “She has her husband, her children, the industry of her hands, and in death she has the prayers and sacrifices of her family.”
“But the poem is about change and sorrow,” I soldier on, meeting his eyes this time. He gazes back at me attentively. “At twenty, her husband carries her away as if she were a treasure. But by fifty, as her beauty dissolves, so does her husband’s love for her. And her children bring her sadness and worry, too. When they’re young, they give her trouble, and when they’re grown, the sons make poor marriages and the daughters leave her to start
households of their own. She’s left to die alone.”
My bravery leaves me breathless. The man’s eyes narrow, but he doesn’t seem angry or offended. If anything, he seems pleased with my response.
“It’s a Buddhist concept with which you may not be familiar, Princess. It is Princess Jinghua, yes?”
I nod, wondering how he knows who I am when he’s never seen me. He gives me a gracious, handsome bow. “I am Zhang, chancellor of the empire of the Eternal Blue Sky. I am pleased to make your acquaintance, most pleased. Now, as I was saying, it is the idea that life, like happiness, is fleeting. The woman’s life, then, is a metaphor, a representation of a spiritual idea.”
“But it’s also a man’s concept of what it means to be a woman.” I glance toward the open doorway into the splendor of the great hall. What if someone sees me talking to the chancellor or hears me speaking so boldly? Is there no end to my shame?
“Good,” he says. “Yes, that’s quite good. Go on.”
His approval opens like a flowering bud inside me, pushing aside my reticence. I say, “In a man’s view, a woman is something to be valued, like a silk painting or an ornate vase, until she becomes dingy with time and utterly without value. It’s not how a woman sees herself.”
He runs the right half of his mustache through his thumb and forefinger before saying, “Do you know, I had not thought of it quite that way before, Princess.”
My heart races. I try to keep a pleased smile from spreading across my face in an unseemly manner. How exciting to be heard. How dangerous and thrilling to be understood.
“Perhaps when next we meet, it would be interesting to examine a poem that explores the sorrows of a man’s life,” he offers.
“Perhaps,” I answer shyly.
“If you don’t mind my saying so, you have a good mind, my lady.”
An adult’s approval is as rare as a pearl for me. I give Chancellor Zhang a genuine and truly indelicate smile.
28
FOR ALL THE EXCITEMENT GOING ON with the wedding arrangements these days, I’m incredibly bored, sitting here in the inner chambers. I have too much time on my hands, which means that I have nothing better to do than think about the conversation I had with Chancellor Zhang and the fact that I should not have had that conversation and that I wish I could talk to him again anyway.
I’m seated at a lacquered desk, reading the Analects in self-imposed penance. My heart isn’t in it, though, and eventually, I rise and walk over to the courtyard window. From my home’s situation on Phoenix Hill, I can see the West Lake in all its perfection below, bordered by lotus blossoms and crossed by ornate bridges. To the south lies the imperial palace with Lin’an glittering at its feet. The city and the mist-shrouded hills that surround it are framed by the window like a picture hung on a wall.
“Princess Jinghua?” says voice from the next room.
A male voice.
“Princess Jinghua, are you there?”
I look around, frantic that no one see or hear this, the scandal of a man calling to me inside the women’s quarters. Thankfully, nobody is about. I hurry into the next room, where I see Chancellor Zhang’s head poking around the side of the red curtain that separates the inner and outer chambers of my home. My arm is up, my sleeve covering my face.
Zhang tsk-tsks. “Oh, not all this again. I have spent considerable time in the presence of ladies, you know.”
Embarrassment floods me from toe to head, like someone filling a cup of wine to the brim, but I let my arm fall to my side.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I whisper, standing just on the other side of the curtain now.
“But I’ve come to pay a call on your father, and what a dishonorable wretch I should be if I didn’t deliver that poem I promised you.”
I glance behind me, terrified that a servant or, worse, my mother will come in at any moment and see this exchange.
But I want that poem.
“All right,” I say, still whispering as I hold out my hand. “But then you have to leave.”
He tilts his head and gives me that amused expression from the night before. “You misunderstand me, Princess Jinghua. A poem is not an object to give the hand but a treasure to give the mind. Observe.”
To my utter bewilderment, he draws back the curtain even farther, revealing his round figure. He gestures elegantly as he recites his poem. It’s one I know well enough, a piece from The Book of Songs. My panic gives way to the timbre of the words, the sorrow of the tone as the poem describes a soldier’s life, a man taken from his wife, restless, living at the whim of his lord.
Are we buffaloes, are we tigers
That our home should be these desolate wilds?
In my world, the soldier is a sort of man I have neither seen nor contemplated. The men of my sphere live in a world of words and ideas, art and scholarship. I have barely been beyond the red curtain that hangs halfway between me and Chancellor Zhang, but if I close my eyes, I see a world of tall grass through which men must push themselves like spare, hungry foxes.
When his voice drifts away, I open my eyes. My heart yearns for something I can’t identify.
“So what do you say to the condition of men, Princess Jinghua?” he asks me.
“I think we should pity the poor soldier,” I reply, but my answer seems inadequate.
“His lot does seem reasonably pitiable,” Zhang agrees.
“Do you sympathize with him, Chancellor?”
“I do, yes.”
“But you aren’t a soldier, I think.”
He still holds back the curtain, and the red silk clashes with the bright violet and gold of his elaborate jacket. It’s strange to see a man wearing so much color.
“Certainly not,” he says. “I have lived a privileged life. I am a scholar and statesman. Does that mean I cannot feel empathy for the plight of the common man?”
“Not all soldiers are common, though. For the Mongols, their greatest warriors are also their greatest men, like Genghis Khan.”
“But a great warrior does not necessarily a good leader make. The Great Khan is no warrior. His grandfather, Genghis Khan, might be the exception rather than the rule.”
“And my father, too. He has been a great general, and now as prince regent he is a great leader, too.”
“Of course,” Zhang agrees with a gracious nod.
“Chancellor?”
“Yes, Princess?”
“May I ask you something?”
“I believe you just did,” he quips.
“You’re from the Song, aren’t you?”
“As you see.”
“But you live in Khanbalik, and you work for the Mongols.”
“Yes.”
“But . . . how?” I stammer, looking behind me into the women’s quarters and then beyond Zhang into the outer chambers to make sure we remain unseen. “Why?”
I suddenly feel as if I’m speaking with a mouth full of stones. I have no business asking him something so personal, and yet I badly want to know how an eloquent, educated man ended up in the imperial court of the backwater Mongols.
He leans against the doorframe, less formal than he was a moment ago, and rests his free hand over his belly, his elegant nails long and white and clean.
“Forgive me, Chancellor,” I say in a rush. “I should not have asked that.”
“No, no. It’s quite all right. Do you really want to know?”
I nod.
He gazes wistfully into the distance. “Like so many young men of the Song court, I had passed the examinations and earned a place in our beautiful bureaucracy. When I was sent on a diplomatic mission to Kaifeng, the Mongols chose to hold me captive rather than treat with the Song Empire.” He pulls his gaze out of the past and grins at me. “They appreciate usefulness, the Mongols, and apparently they found me useful. Turandokht Khatun had many tutors, but none of them were Song. As a general rule, the Song are not allowed into the imperial court, as you know, but the Great Khan thought his daughter ought
not to be ignorant of the people she might one day rule. And so I was brought to Khanbalik to be her tutor.”
“And you were glad?” I ask, relieved that I don’t seem to have offended him.
“Oh no, not at first. At the time, I thought I’d sunk as low as a man can sink. But then I met her. And as the years passed, I began to understand the gift that heaven was kind enough to bestow upon me.”
“What gift is that?”
“That ‘gift’ is an extraordinarily apt student. In all my years at the academy, I never met a man who could compare to Turandokht in intelligence and learning. In teaching her, I have had to learn just to keep up with her. She has made me a better scholar and a better man.”
“And so you are loyal to her.”
“I am. I would gladly fall on my sword for her—well, if I had a sword to begin with.” He strokes his elegant mustache thoughtfully. “But a person—especially a woman—of that intellect is often lonely. And despite her learning and her position in the world, I do often wonder if she would do better to have a companion of her own rank and intelligence at her side.”
He smiles at me, and my lips turn up sympathetically.
“I should be off,” he says. “Sadly, I have come to Lin’an for matters that have little to do with poetry. Until we meet again, Princess.”
He gives me a stately bow and finally releases the curtain, but not before I see, to my utter horror, my brother coming up behind him. The red silk is still shifting into place as they greet each other on the other side.
“Prince Weiji.”
“Chancellor Zhang.” I can hear the evil glee welling up in Weiji’s mouth with each syllable, and I know I’m about to be teased mercilessly. A moment later, he sticks his head into the room with a sly grin plastered across his handsome face.
“Well, Jinghua, it’s nice to see you getting friendly with boys.”
“Be quiet,” I retort, glancing around furiously to make sure no one overheard him. “It isn’t like that.”
“I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high if I were you. He’s probably three times your age. You wouldn’t find that very fun.”