Empress
Beauty is not happiness. The secret flavor that wet my appetite had disappeared. The inner light that gives people their soul, the city its color, the rain its sweet melancholy, and the monotone days their serenity—that light had been extinguished.
I lost my faithful companions Ruby and Emerald that year. Despite her perseverance, the Princess of Gold proved unable to seduce Time. Death interrupted her futile gabbling and juvenile laughter. Her perfume dissipated; her name was no longer whispered. The very day after her burial, she was forgotten.
I could not bear anyone to use the words “old” or “tired,” and I exiled every official who dared advise me to retire. I flew into a rage whenever my ministers broached the subject of the succession. “I am not senile yet,” I would reply coolly to anyone who tried to imply that I must appoint a Supreme Son. I would wake with new aches and pains and go to bed with a little more despair. The world may well have recognized me as a goddess, but I was no less human for it. My slide into decline proved that my fate would be as miserable as a commoner’s: I was condemned to die.
The accusations leveled at Miracle began to accumulate, but I could not make up my mind to eliminate the last of my sons. My nephew Piety made one appeal after another: His impatient ambition was almost usurpation in itself. My nights were haunted by terrible nightmares. Sometimes I would see Piety crowned, exterminating Miracle, Moon, and Future. All my grandchildren whose legitimacy challenged his were reduced to bloodied flesh and severed heads borne aloft on iron pikes. Sometimes I saw Miracle as emperor, weak and easily influenced, becoming a puppet to his concubines and eunuchs. As a powerless sovereign, an impotent lord, he would be besieged by Future coming out of exile at the head of a rebellious army and demanding his birthright. The Forbidden City would burn; my nephews would revolt. Piety would ascend to the throne only to be supplanted by Spirit, and he in turn would be assassinated by some other power. The Empire would shatter into a thousand rival kingdoms. Armies of mercenaries would trample the fields, burn villages, massacre the population, and ransack towns. Luoyang, Long Peace, Jinzhou, Bingzhou, and Yangzhou would be strewn with corpses and reduced to ruins and cemeteries. I would wake with my forehead covered with sweat. Peace on Earth was fragile, and prosperity precarious. Every dynasty was destined to perish.
At night my bed was frozen. As I lay in the darkness, I knew that the music I missed was the music of love. How I longed for that blissful drug that could allow me to escape from my desperate aloneness! I would sometimes dream of a silhouette, a smile, a combination of Little Phoenix and Little Treasure. This stranger would heal my anguished soul, and I would forget the tragedy of being an emperor without a successor. The bitter solace would vanish when I woke. I had not known how to love, and now it was too late.
The precious flavor had been wasted; the light had dimmed. I would occasionally savor a boy or a young girl, sent to me secretly by the eunuchs to fortify me. Not one of them could save me from the river in which I was slowly drowning. My flesh was weary, my heart impervious. I was turning into a deep sea monster, guardian of an illusory world.
GRIM DAYS ALTERNATED with moments of exultant happiness. Determined to conquer my mood, I threw myself into extensive building projects. The excitement on the huge construction sites drowned my despair. Thousand year-old trees groaned and crashed to the ground, furnaces taller than the hills blazed, and the streams of red-hot bronze set the sky alight. The constant din of hammering and the hiss of metal plunged into water reverberated around the four corners of the kingdom.
The workmen’s skills meant I could realize the most outlandish dreams. The ramparts were fortified and built up all round the Imperial Capital. The avenues were widened to accommodate nine giant tripods, monsters molded out of 560,000 jins20 of bronze and decorated in bas-relief with landscapes from our nine regions. They were drawn by 100,000 soldiers and countless oxen and imperial elephants and taken to the foot of the new Temple of Ten Thousand Elements. A celestial temple was built behind the sacred sanctuary, standing two stories taller than it. This new temple housed the largest Buddha in the world, big enough to sit ten people on just one toenail. The imperial path was adorned with seven gold statues: the Wheel, the Elephant, the Celestial Girl, the Winged Horse, the Pearl of Intelligence, and the Divine Servants. By the Southern Gate of the Forbidden City stood the Celestial Pivot.21 This extraordinary monument, offered by three barbarian kings, conversed with the clouds, and overlooked the entire city from its dizzying height. It was a column of bronze covered with magical inscriptions, sacred drawings, and celebratory poems, and at its highest point, four golden dragons reared up to the sky bearing the Pearl of Fire that lit up the Empire with its eternal flames.
After endless reshuffling, I succeeded in putting together a well-proportioned government where strengths balanced out weaknesses in a harmonious structure. I gave my steadfast ministers complete freedom to reprimand wrongdoers and suggest changes. My nephew kings ensured my authority went unchallenged. The prosecutor Lai Jun Chen and his collaborators terrified the disloyal. I granted closely supervised autonomy to the provinces. Our social hierarchy was consolidated: Every caste had its own symbols, its constraints and privileges. But gone were the intransigent segregation and the fatal lack of social mobility. Every eventuality was permitted. Every talent must be allowed to flourish.
The equitable statutes of the former regime were respected, and ancient rites and forgotten traditions were unearthed and restored. I had created a new culture while respecting the continuity of dynasties. With the favor granted to me by the gods, the Empire’s prosperity was like a galloping charger: Controlling it was now just a question of balance, breathing, and concentration.
I had a burning desire to realize my husband’s unfulfilled dream, to perform the Sanctification of Heaven at the top of Mount Song. I was impatient to be the unique woman in the world who leads the supreme ceremony awarded to the greatest sovereign. The preparations soothed away the boredom that gnawed at me constantly. I raised the imperial parade, accompanied by my Court and our foreign vassals. The procession was wider than the River Luo and filled entire plains and valleys. As I observed the rites of purification, I felt a weight lift from my body and my spirits. Despite my seventy-one years, I reached the snowy peak of Mount Song. After carrying out the libations, I dismissed my attendants and stood alone in the sacred enclosure at the very top of an altar-hill built as a sequence of terraces in five different colors of Earth. There prostrated, I recited the prayers of invocation.
Somewhere in the distance, musicians were striking their bronze bells and their sounding stones. The peak was shrouded by the wind and snow. In the darkness, I searched in vain for a light, a sign from the Supreme Being. I could see nothing. The god was deaf to my prayers. He who turned the wheel of destiny knew that I had falsified the stone with the inscription “Divine Mother, who graces the earth, through her, let the Emperor’s reign prosper” and thrown it into Luo River. He knew that I had dictated to the monk, Clarity of Law, the passage concerning a Celestial Daughter called Purity of Heavenlight when he was translating the Sutra of the Great Cloud. I had fashioned the divine will to take the reigns from men’s hands. But God had not appointed a woman to rule the world. I was just a usurper, and this was why I had no heir!
I wept in silence. Suddenly, the sun sprang out of the darkness and poured out a thin stream of red that swelled to tumbling waves in an ocean of mist. In those brightly colored undulating clouds, I could see celestial horses galloping toward me. Suddenly the miracle I had waited for all my life came to pass: The glowing disc of the sun drew closer, grew larger and larger like a silk sheet unfurling, then it filled space in its entirety. Its countless rays were like sharpened arrows hurtling toward my flesh, and the pain as they burned me became the sweetest pleasure. God was there; God appeared to me! With my forehead to the ground and my eyes closed, I let his incandescence embrace me bodily. I did not have time to ask him whether I was his beloved daughter, nor wha
t death was, nor who would be my heir. I forgot to beg his protection for my dynasty or my people. I forgot my dream of an eternal reign. The questions that had always tormented me ebbed away. I was burning. I was turning into a ball of fire revolving slowly on itself. I could feel myself dissolving in a sea of light. I suddenly saw my own body prostrating itself at the top of a mountain, surrounded by the snow. I saw the world below, beneath the clouds, in the depths of the abyss.
Rivers scour through the earth and run toward the ocean. The snows fall, and trees cover themselves with leaves. Palaces crumble, paths disappear, wheat sprouts up and transforms deserts into fields. God is the source of all movement, inexhaustible life, eternal energy. God had made me and sent me here to demonstrate his might: He creates and destroys, erases and renews. Even at the heights to which I had risen, I remained dust in the palm of his hand.
THE JOURNEY BACK to Luoyang was gloomy. I lay huddled in fur coats inside my carriage surrounded by fires crackling in braziers, but still shivering with cold. The strength was being drawn out of me like an ebbing tide. My ears were filled with a buzzing sound. My eyesight became hazy, and I ordered my officials to write their political reports in larger characters. Once I had dictated the commemorative hymn that would be engraved on the stela erected at the top of Mount Song, I accepted the idea of dying.
One evening the prosecutor Lai Jun Chen asked to speak to me in secret. He was brought to the palace along an underground passageway. As he threw himself at my feet, I noticed a feverish red flush on his pale cheeks. His wolf-like eyes glowed with something akin to joy. My wildcats seemed to have picked up the scent of blood on him; they roared and paced agitatedly. The judge was surrounded by dogs and leopards, but he showed no fear. He took from his sleeve a scroll of paper and held it aloft in both his hands to offer it to me. I unrolled it in the candlelight to reveal a diagram in which the First Magistrate had traced the networks of conspirators from the time of Wu Ji, Shang Guan Yi, and Pei Yan right up to the present. There were hundreds of names, all written in large characters and connected to form a tree whose branches reached as far as provincial governments and the encampments of those who had been banished. Every enemy of the State was inscribed there: The dead were ringed with red ink, the exiled with blue, and prisoners in green, and there were black circles hovering threateningly around those who were still free. At the very end of the scroll, I found Miracle, Moon, Future, Piety, and Spirit.
Lai Jun Chen’s voice quavered slightly. Miracle, the Emperor who had resigned; Future, the deposed emperor; Piety, the King of Wei; Spirit, the King of Liang; Moon, the Princess of Eternal Peace; and her husband, Tranquility, the King of Jian Chang were secretly planning a coup and preparing to share the kingdom between them.
“Lord Lai,” I sighed, “I have taken note of your observations. You may leave.”
“Majesty,” he said, edging forward on his knees, “the King of Wei has been restless the whole time you have delayed appointing an heir. He is weary of waiting; he is preparing to resort to force and will call on his cousins who command your guards regiments. The Princess of Eternal Peace is secretly scheming to establish an agreement between her brothers and her husband’s clan. Majesty, the time has come, an uprising in the Court is imminent!”
“Let me think!” I said, silencing the prosecutor with a wave. He disappeared through the partition. Lai Jun Chen had an acute sense of smell like an animal, which meant that he could identify the ideas that people were harboring and the longings they themselves had not yet formulated. While other judges were happy simply examining the facts, he projected himself into the future. The plot he was imagining was one I had already lived in my nightmares. Men’s strengths go hand in hand with their weaknesses. That is why there is no such thing as an invincible warrior, and why heroes die.
Two days later during the morning audience Piety, King of Wei, asked to speak. His powerful voice reverberated around the hall: He charged the magistrate Lai Jun Chen with corruption, exploiting his influential position, and attempting to usurp power. My Great Ministers and my nephews Spirit and Tranquility stepped forward and unanimously upheld his charges. In keeping with Palace codes, Lai Jun Chen had risen from his seat and prostrated himself as soon as his name was mentioned. I was surprised by this violent attack and remained silent. Someone had betrayed the prosecutor by warning the King of Wei, who had responded with an adroit riposte: Piety had pointed the finger at Lai Jun Chen for the crimes of which he himself was accused. The entire government had joined him and was declaring war on the most feared man in the Empire. How was it that the prosecutor, who saw plots in every direction, had been unaware of this one, like a soothsayer blind to his own fate?
I silenced my own irritation while my ministers pressed me for a response, and Lai Jun Chen asked to speak. Either I would hand the magistrate over to the Court, or I would let him explain himself. He would denounce the conspiracy: With one hundred members of both my families in prison or condemned to death, I would become the laughing stock of the entire world. I would be the senile emperor sinking the very ship on which she sails. What authority would I have left to reign? Who would be heir to the throne? Piety had played his part very cleverly. On the chessboard of the Forbidden City, he had just checkmated his opponent. I did not grant the judge the right to defend himself, but pretended to be furious and ordered that his cap and official’s tablet be removed and that he be thrown in prison.
A wave of hatred rippled through the Court. I created a special court made up of high-ranking magistrates and Great Ministers, and while they were deliberating the charges brought against the accused man, the kings and dignitaries and the Princess of Eternal Peace filed past me begging me to apply the law. A stack of thirty scrolls, listing 1,500 charges, was laid before me. A petition bearing hundreds of signatures was brought to me. The entire Court was asking for this torturer to be put to death. Ten years earlier, I would have firmly defended Lai Jun Chen. But now my soul, which had embraced God himself, was weary of human quarrels, and my policies were restricted to engineering compromises. A sovereign is never entirely master of his kingdom. I was constrained to abandon thoughts of exiling him and to concede that he should be put to death.
The wind picked up, and the mountains whispered. Migratory birds crossed the sky with anguished cries. The chrysanthemums in the Imperial Park exhaled their bitter fragrance and dropped their petals into the River Luo. I watched the moon wax: It would soon be the mid-autumn full moon, the date set by the ancestors for public executions.
The night before the fateful day, I tossed and turned in bed before falling asleep. In my dreams, I climbed up to the observatory. The Forbidden City at my feet steeped in shadows, like a cemetery where the red lanterns of night watchmen on their rounds danced like will-o’-the-wisps.
All of a sudden someone stepped out of the darkness and threw himself to the ground.
“I have come to prostrate myself at your feet one last time,” Lai Jun Chen told me, his voice echoing as if from the depths of a well and his iron chains rattling. “Before leaving this world, I wanted to tell you that all the accusations are false. I have never betrayed Your Majesty’s trust.”
“Lord Lai, you made only one mistake: You criticized my family.”
“Majesty, they are plotting against you!”
“I am tired. I no longer have the strength to unravel all this hatred and to cause bloodshed. In a kingdom everyone except the king is a conspirator. There is always an intelligent way of making peace with enemies. Why did you not realize that? Why have you forced me to sacrifice you?”
“Majesty,” he said, prostrating himself, “I am not yet beheaded. So long as there is breath left in me, I shall fight for you. Majesty, you must choose! Either you shall reign for ten thousand years, or the Zhou dynasty will be overthrown, and you will be betrayed for all eternity!”
“Lord Lai,” I cried despairingly, “look at my hands; look at my face. I’m growing old; I’m going to die! What does g
lory mean to me now or the dynasty!”
“You are wrong, Majesty; you are a goddess who will live as long as the River Luo flows and Mount Song stands!”
“I am a mere mortal in this existence. I too shall end up in the Yellow Earth, like all the other emperors resting in their tombs. While I am alive, I am Master of the World. Once I die I shall have only the narrow confines of a coffin! Lord Lai, leave me. Our families are a congenital illness. Mine is my infirmity. I did not choose it; the gods imposed it on me. I am condemned to disappear along with my dynasty.”
A sob wracked the man whom I believed to be incapable of emotion. His weeping was the strangled howl of a dying animal.
“How can I leave Your Majesty alone in this world! How can you fight everyone alone? Majesty, I beg you, let me live; let me defend you!”
My heart contracted, and my voice shook as I said, “Leave!”
“Majesty,” he said, wiping his tears, “your wish is my command. For you, I shall go to my death. May my sovereign be granted ten thousand years of happiness! May the Sacred Emperor be granted ten thousand years of good health!”
The wind lifted, and the judge disappeared. I was woken by a needling pain. The glow of nightlights danced on the walls of the Palace, like dying fireflies. I asked for Gentleness to be woken, and she played the zither until dawn.
The following day I hosted the annual banquet held in celebration of the moon. Dancing girls on the stage swirled their long sleeves. My son, my daughter, and my nephews took turns offering me wine. I waved them back to their seats. Up on my throne, I served myself and got drunk. I contemplated the heavenly mirror in its full and perfect splendor. In the middle of its silvery surface, there were darker patches that made its luminosity seem all the more pure and mysterious. Judge Lai Jun Chen had been the impurity that had accompanied me in my solitude. His head would already have rolled to the ground, and his body would have been handed to the crowd to trample on it in their fury. I had lanced an infection. I had stripped myself of my last weapon.