by Shan Sa
The moon was waning in the sky. Soon it would perish only to be born again. I discovered that Talented One Xu would be received in the imperial bed. A peculiar emotion paralyzed my body like a poison. I scarcely listened to the rumors that claimed the selection had been rigged. As soon as she had arrived at the Palace, Talented One Xu had been under the wing of the Great Chamberlain who came from the same province. This eunuch, who enjoyed the sovereign’s complete trust, had engineered for all the names to be erased from the roll-call so that only his candidate was taken to the Palace of Precious Dew.
The new favorite left the Side Court where the living conditions were no longer in keeping with her rank, and she moved into the Middle Court. Something in me had died. I discovered Taoist texts that told of the purification of mind and body, of men who had become immortal, and of union with the celestial breath. I went back to my daily routine of prayers to Buddha, which had stopped when I arrived in the Palace. The world was an illusion, and all desire a source of suffering. How could I have forgotten the teachings of the Great One?
Like the moon, I would be reborn of annihilation.
THE PAVILION OF Celestial Breath closed its doors, and my young companions dispersed, each to her official duties.
The everyday life of a lady at Court was filled with banquets, dancing, and concerts; with the sequence of seasons that required changes of wardrobe; with constant trips between summer palaces and winter residences; with futile events and serious ones; and with light-hearted ceremonies and imposing ones.
The six ministries and twenty-four departments of the imperial gynaeceum had been created during the ancient Zhou dynasty, and each had a share in organizing festivities. There were pavilions that served as offices to the Great Lady Intendants, who directed countless female officials. All of them worked to make our life harmonious and pleasant. In the absence of an Empress, the Precious Wife reigned over our kingdom. She was a weak, gentle character and felt happier entrusting command to her favorite eunuch, General Intendant, in her palace. According to the rules, the four wives of the first rank were responsible for how the women behaved. Not one of these ladies deigned to be soiled by such involvement, and all of them delegated their power.
The duties of a Talented One were to keep records of feasting and days of rest, as well as ensuring that the silk worms were reared satisfactorily. Even though they were paltry tasks, I relied on these occupations to escape boredom. On the very first day, Governess informed me that she would free me from such minor concerns and explained that, from the fifth rank up, it was a woman’s duty to be at leisure.
Painted beams, gilded partitions, and fragrant powders entwined us like ivy around trees. This dull, slow life stifled our youth. The freshness and vivacity drained from my companions and me without our knowing when or how. The Court had a liking for fat women, so my companions crammed themselves with food. Their transparent white skin quivered over ample folds of fat. They spent their days perfecting their hair and makeup. Their daily walk through the Northern Gardens was becoming a ritual, and they would spend this time comparing their beauty and exchanging gossip. To escape the loneliness and monotony, some had pet cats and dogs, while others formed friendships and called each other “sister.”
There were women everywhere in the Side Court. They trod softly along the galleries, appeared and disappeared behind screens, and let their silhouettes linger on the partitions covered in rice paper. The servants observed a respectful silence, but the mistresses needed to chatter constantly to kill their boredom. A closed door or a secured shutter was tantamount to some inadmissible act, so all the bedrooms had to remain open for impromptu visits. Throughout the day, groups of Court ladies would appear from nowhere, expecting me to offer them tea and to listen to their chattering.
I found refuge in the Inner Institute of Letters where learned eunuchs gave lessons in literature, philosophy, history, geography, astrology, and mathematics to the few students who voluntarily attended their lectures. Books became wings that bore me far away from the Palace. The annals of former dynasties tore me from the immobility of the present. I lived in those vanished kingdoms and I took part in plots, galloped across battlefields, and shared in the rise and fall of heroes.
I visited the library regularly, and I sometimes would run into Talented One Xu, who had already been promoted to the rank of Delicate Concubine of the second imperial rank. I now had to give her a deep curtsey, and she replied with a condescending nod. Her body had thickened, her expression darkened. Her face had lost its poetic naiveté. When she smiled at me, I could see a vague melancholy on her lips that seemed to express resentment and resignation. I longed to ask her questions but did not dare. A Delicate Concubine would never confide in a Talented One of inferior rank.
Was she not happy on the other side of the wall?
In the Side Court, I may have struggled to be like a perfect lady, but in the exercise quarters, I abandoned all civility. On horseback, with a bow in my hand, I forgot how time passed one slow drip after another, and I became one with my speeding mount and embraced the power of my arrows as they reached their target.
After each training session, I would linger a while at the stables. The eunuch grooms had become my friends: I would recite to them the poems I had read that morning, and they taught me to school foals and told me what was going on in the Palace.
That was how I discovered that, in the days when the sovereign was still only King of Qin, he had set an ambush for his older brothers at the Northern Gate, not far from the stables. The imperial heir and the King of Qi had been killed, and the Emperor Lordly Forebear had been forced to abdicate in his favor. Our sovereign had usurped the throne! Heroes seemed to attach little importance to filial devotion! I was shattered by this revelation.
And in her latest letter Mother told me that Little Sister had succumbed to an epidemic. Poorly tended by the clan, she had died. I lost my appetite; I loathed the dresses, the perfumes, the gardens. The beauty of that Palace was a screen hiding corpses and lies.
I grew thinner while all around me girls reveled in their flesh. I had grown tall and slender, a bundle of muscles on a strong frame.
ONE DAY SHE appeared. Her face was white as snow, like a perfectly circular mirror fashioned by the most adept craftsmen. Her mouth was a crimson cherry, ready to drop from the tree. Her eyes, like the long leaves of the willow, disappeared into the black hair that swept over her temples, and they glittered with a strange light. Seeing her, I forgot my own sorrow, the Side Court, and my sister’s decomposing body. I forgot that the world existed, and I understood what eternal friendship meant.
“Are you the girl who loves horses?” her clear, haughty voice woke me from my torpor. “Do you not greet the Gracious Wife?”
I bent my knees and leaned right down to the ground. When I stood back up, she looked me straight in the eye. The other women’s eyes were water, ice, fire, and rock; she alone had eyes full of mists and vapors.
“My little cousin, I have heard stories of you,” she said, pronouncing each word carefully. Her lips were two petals of red grenadine. “I shall take care of your instruction, my little, wild one.”
A mysterious smile appeared in the corners of her mouth, and she left me where I stood: Followed by a dozen servants and ladies-in-waiting, she disappeared into the trees.
That evening I could still see her smooth face; so pure it was almost childlike, her dresses of layered silk and muslin in exquisitely subtle shades. She wore her hair in the shape of a butterfly adorned with the most beautiful jewels I had ever seen. How old was she? I did not know. In the Inner Palace, ladies were careful to hide their age. She was timeless.
We were related through my mother’s family. But, in the Side Court, everyone knew that Father had been an ennobled commoner, a wood merchant who had become a dignitary. Was it a mark of respect or out of irony that she had called me cousin? But she too had a dark stain on her past. She had been a concubine to the King of Qi, the third so
n of the Emperor Lordly Forebear, who was killed at the Northern Gate and stripped of his princely title. Along with the other women in his retinue, she had come into the Side Court as a slave. The new sovereign had taken her to his bed, she had delivered a boy child, and he had offered her the title of wife.
I enjoyed imagining the King of Qi’s palace surrounded by his own brother’s army: In the gynaeceum eunuchs wailing lamentations, women fleeing to their rooms, and wet nurses hiding the king’s sons. Soon the clatter of weapons echoed around the palace, fierce-faced soldiers broke into the inner apartments where no man had dared tread before. They ransacked pavilions, strangled male children, looted treasure, and dragged concubines out by their hair. In all this furious assault, jostled, chained, and wracked with sobs of fear, my cousin was like pear blossom damaged by the rain and sullied in the mud. A feeling of intense suffering and, yet, nameless pleasure swept over me. I could see her face streaming with tears. I could picture her insulted and violated by the soldier’s crude and penetrating stares. They thought she was beautiful. They threw her at their master’s feet, at the feet of the future sovereign of the empire. He commanded her to expose her white bosom, her belly soft as a turtle dove; he ordered her to dance, writhe, and grovel at his feet. His hands, still warm with blood, caressed her, he sprayed her with his seed. Humiliated and violated, she had to smile, to love, to please.
My body was on fire. I let the full voluptuous pleasure of this poor tortured woman overcome me. Inch by inch, from my toes to the top of my head, my cousin devoured me, made me quiver, glided over my skin. I drank her as a child drinks milk.
THE GRACIOUS WIFE lived on the other side of the wall, in the Middle Court, in one of the palaces surrounded by purple walls with ancient acacias and cypress trees towering over them. She lived in a garden that a modest Talented One was forbidden to enter. For her, virgins picked the delicately colored clouds at dusk to weave with, and palace seamstresses cut out the finest of dresses. Embroiderers with needles of diamonds and threads of sunlight created enchanted images. The divine wife bathed in waters fragranced with extract of moonlight, and she inhaled the breath of the stars. Such a delicate, diaphanous goddess did not eat vulgar, earthly food. The bees offered her their honey, and fruits longed to be chosen to melt on her tongue. When she was thirsty, she moistened her lips on morning dew harvested on lily petals. When she smiled, flowers blanched in jealousy and leaves fell from the trees to kiss the tips of her feet.
She had told me that she would take care of my instruction. Even though she was a distant noble and even though I had no reason to, I believed her. She was the gift that the heavens had sent to console me in suffering. Her misty eyes and indolent voice would soothe the incandescent fires of my tortured life. In her I would find some protection, a screen of silk painted with fabulous landscapes to camouflage death and sorrow. She would teach me to be a woman, and I would offer her my arrogant pride on bended knee!
In fact my longing to see her again supplanted every other agony. Freed from the anguish of mourning, I was now enslaved by a new torment. I did not know this was being in love: Taut as an archer’s bow, my soul distended with expectation, my desire tightly coiled, my stomach tensed.
I started to take an interest in my appearance and in what girls wore. In the mornings, I would look at myself in the mirror with her eyes, with her words in my ear. “Do you like me like this?” I would whisper to her in my heart. At night, I lay down with her, in her arms, in the soft waves of her hair.
At the Inner Institute of Letters, I leafed through books trying to find a diagnosis for my illness. The ancient philosophers spoke only of virtue, wisdom, and immortality. I searched through the Annals in vain for similar anecdotes. The official literature in our vast library was filled with dry words, harsh thoughts, and moralizing pronouncements. Our ancestors had built a civilization where affection and tenderness were prohibited. Luckily there were the poets whose words traveled across time and poured limpid delight into my heart. I found my own desperate adoration expressed in their odes to mountain goddesses and water spirits.
When I drew an arrow, I hoped to dazzle her with my strength. I would have liked to give her every horse I schooled. An imperial decree ordered for a female polo team to be formed: I was quick to enlist in the hope that one day she would smile down at me from her imperial tribune. My loneliness was now like a velvet coat in which I wrapped myself so I could better devote my soul to her. I told her about my childhood and asked her a thousand questions. The answers I imagined for her made me feel less alone, not so sad. I needed to see her. My intuition could not be wrong: We would see each other again!
My cousin, the Gracious Wife, continued to be invisible as the air around me. The memory of her was like an old song that I obsessed over but whose notes were gradually melting away. Spring was drawing to an end. The cherry blossom scattered pink and mauve tears on the wind. She had sent me no messenger. Every day the image of her darkened a little more, and her snowy whiteness became a hazy shadow, but I still clung to it to breathe, to live, and to escape from the Side Court and its swarming women.
Days went by, and I turned my entrails into a deep reservoir, collecting this new brand of suffering, drop by drop. My skin was smoother, my hair blacker, my hips more rounded. My breasts swelled beneath my tunic, and people watched me as I walked. More and more women paid court to me, but not one of them thrilled me in the same way, and I coolly rejected their friendship. How could these flitting fireflies touch me when I was promised to her, the motionless star?
A gloomy, gray summer began. The cicadas screeched furiously in the trees. The suffocating heat continued in the night. Tossing and turning on my bed of woven bamboo, I decided to forget her.
The emperor was leaving to spend the summer at his Residence of Nine Merits. All the pavilions started dismantling, packing, and wrapping. Every woman took her own animals, her furniture, her books, and her crockery. I leaned against the balustrade on the terrace and watched my governess scolding the servants. Birds fluttered in their cages, and eunuchs went back and forth to my room bringing out huge trunks. All the commotion seemed so far away.
A young valet in a robe of yellow brocade followed Emerald up the steps. He came over to me and bowed deeply: “The mistress of the Palace of Splendid Dawn, the Gracious Wife Yang, wishes to see you.”
My heart leapt: She was coming to me when I had stopped thinking of her. My cousin had asked to meet me the following morning in the Northern Garden, by the Pond of Pearls, to feed the goldfish. I stayed awake all night, unable to believe my happiness. I was terrified by the thought that I might not be beautiful enough, fragrant enough, intelligent enough. At dawn, when I had been dressed and made-up, I listened for the first morning bells announcing that the Side Gate would be open so that I could rush to my appointment.
The mist had not yet lifted in the Northern Garden. The first rays of sunlight infused between the sky and the land, a color wash of dancing pinks, ochres, mauves, and yellows. A pond emerged slowly from the darkness, a mirror of bronze. A long gallery zigzagged over its rippling waters, between the emerald leaves of the lotuses. Seeing my shadow over the water, the fish began to gather. These impatient creatures would have to learn to savor the waiting.
The sun burned off the mists, and a blue sky gradually revealed itself. At my feet, a great meadow of flowers sloped gently down to a new gallery around a raised pavilion. There were a few peonies still opening, the lilac bloomed with furious abandon, and the pomegranate trees were covered in crimson-colored buds. The morning dew quivered on leaves, adding its sparkle to the delight in my heart. The gardening women, dressed in orchid blue and pale pink, were beginning their work. The first concubines to rise came and went through the wood of weeping willows. A group of eunuchs came over to the pond. They scattered grain in the water. The heat was rising. I waved my fan with little effect: My brow was covered in sweat, and my dress was drenched. I stood scouring all four horizons, and my heart quak
ed at every movement. I thought of going back and changing my clothes, but the fear of missing my appointment nailed me to the spot.
Had she fallen ill? Perhaps, in my euphoria, I had the wrong day. Who had sent that eunuch? Was it a cruel joke?
Ruby woke me from my torpor when she came to tell me that lunch was served. That evening I discovered that the emperor had decided to leave with his favorites in the cool of first light.
THE STARS RIPPLED up above the mountains. Beneath the waves of the Silver River,8 pavilions, and pagodas, the women and the trees became fish. The summer palace was our aquarium. Despite the cool air and the scent of nocturnal flowers, I could not sleep. In the mountains, there was no archery training and no polo ground. My muscles jittered and maddened me. Ruby and Emerald lay on my doorstep chatting. Their muffled whispering drifted through the gauze curtain and filled the room.
In the Middle Court, the emperor had grown weary of capricious women, and he now cherished only Delicate Concubine Xu. The abandoned wives now waged a communal war against her. The poetess had just lost a boy child in the eighth month: Rumors abounded that she had been poisoned and that the blame lay with one of the jealous favorites. Since our missed appointment, I had had no news of the Gracious Wife. Caught as she was in the torments of intrigue, when would she have time to think of me?