Imperial Lady (Central Asia Series Book 1)

by Andre Norton

  Willow hissed, but Silver Snow was too angry to pay heed to her. “I tell you, Master Artist, had I gifts to give, I would not give them to such a one who seeks to exact them by trickery and threats.”

  Despite his immense bulk, Mao Yen-shou rose so quickly that Silver Snow was left kneeling on the floor. He towered over her, attempting to intimidate by his very height.

  “Noble words, lady, for one who should not dare to boast. A gift, you call this; an heirloom. How if I say otherwise?”

  “What else can be said?” demanded Silver Snow.

  “Elder Sister,” hissed Willow, “hush, I beg you!”

  Willow! Silver Snow felt herself chill with concern, but not for herself. For the first time in her life, she regretted her inability to take refuge in tears or swoons, then despised herself for the weakness. She had Willow to protect! She gestured, and the maid scuttled back into the corner in which she had hidden herself. Silver Snow only hoped that Willow—with her unnaturally black hair and her limp, so grotesque in this magnificent room—would pass unnoticed; but Mao Yen-Shou was as skilled an artist as he was greedy. He could not help but notice her.

  “Lady,” said the eunuch, menace chill in that supple, exquisite voice of his, “do you persist in your claim that these suits of funerary armor are an heirloom?”

  “My father says,” Silver Snow knew that she was faltering, but fought hopelessly on, “that they have always belonged to his house and that they are fit only for a Son of Heaven and his First Wife.”

  “Would you swear, then, that they were never used?”

  “On my Ancestors!” Silver Snow’s indignant voice echoed in the room.

  “Then how—Wang Lu, be you my witness to this—do you explain these?”

  Mao Yen-shou swooped down and opened his hand beneath Silver Snow’s nose.

  There on his palm lay three teeth, broken and yellowed as if with age.

  Silver Snow glanced up, confused at the sight of the teeth and the triumph that gleamed on the artist’s florid, sweaty face.

  “Lady, lady, if these suits had never been used, as you swear, how would I have found these teeth in one of them?”

  Mao Yen-shou was actor, then, as well as artist; the disgust and horror on his face, the revulsion in his voice were so well-crafted that, for a mad instant, Silver Snow was all but convinced that she indeed was a violator of her Ancestors’ tombs.

  The incense in the air, the sight of the teeth, the sandalwood and camphor that scented the eunuch’s clothing, and, above all, the sheer horror of what he implied . . . the floral patterns on the ceiling began to whirl and Silver Snow felt herself slipping sideways.

  An accusation of grave-robbing, and robbing of one’s own Ancestors at that: such crimes were too terrible to think of, much less to discuss. There were but two reasons to rob graves, too: greed or sorcery. And she was the daughter of a disgraced general. It would be her word against that of Mao Yen-shou and his friend. No one would believe her, should he bring charges against her of grave-robbery. She was innocent, but who would believe that? She was daughter to a man widely believed to be a traitor.

  But the thought, the very thought of either crime—not to mention how hideous the punishment was likely to be for her and for her family! She reeled, then drew herself upright. She would not faint, not be sick: not here, not before this sleek enemy.

  “You palmed those teeth,” she told the eunuch. “Like a mountebank at a farmer’s festival, you hid those teeth in your hand and would use them to force me to give you the armor. Let the world know it! I am innocent,” she whispered.

  “But who will believe you?” asked Mao Yen-shou. “Let a man be ever so innocent, yet, always, there is some act, some thought, that he would rather die than have revealed. Even such a simpleton as you, lady; I would wager that you cherish secrets too.”

  Silver Snow felt, rather than heard, the low growl. Willow! By all the Ancestors, she might be able to withstand a charge of grave-robbing—though what would become of her were such a cry even raised against her she hated to think; but a charge of sorcery, or of consorting with sorcerers? Of that, though she felt it to be no crime, she was most assuredly guilty; and the court feared sorcery as it feared little else beside pestilence or war with the Hsiung-nu. Death would be the least she could hope for, and her punishment would be a caress in comparison with Willow’s.

  She let her head droop, her entire body sag beneath the consciousness that she had been defeated by a thief. Worse yet, her hopes were shattered. Mao Yen-shou would take her one treasure and, because he dared not risk that she come to the Emperor’s attention, when he painted her, he would use a lying brush to make her as unattractive as possible.

  There was no hope now of success; no hope at all. Only her pride as a general’s daughter kept her from weeping and flinging herself to the floor as Mao Yen-shou clapped hands for a servant to conduct her to temporary lodgings and for another to bring him the scroll that he had rejected as being unfit to paint upon.

  She forced herself to stand passively, though she wanted to stab or to scream. She remembered the battle with the Red Brows. Then, there had been things that she could do to help herself. Now, there was nothing at all. The court, she had learned in this first, disastrous engagement, was more treacherous than any battle. But her father had survived defeat, survived and retained his dignity. Somehow, she must do the same, proving herself a worthy daughter of her line.

  Months might pass, Silver Snow gathered, before Mao Yen-shou completed the portraits of five hundred ladies summoned from all over the Middle Kingdom. She had as much chance of becoming one of the Brilliant Companions of the Son of Heaven as Willow had of leaping over the walls of Ch’ang-an and racing back to the North. As artists and artisans put the finishing touches to the Sun Bright Residence where the ladies most favored by the Emperor would live, Silver Snow wondered what her own lot would be.

  She could not aspire to such heights, nor perhaps even to the Residence of Increasing Reflection where the Favorite Beauties would live. Realistically, she thought that she might be placed among the lowest ranked of the concubines: the daughters of noble families. Because she preferred study to idleness, she set about learning the customs she must follow in this new and far from welcome life.

  She took part in the festivals that heralded the spring plantings, eagerly seized upon any chance to improve her calligraphy, and spent many hours composing upon silk a hopeful and dutiful account to her father of her journey to the capital. When older women such as the Lady Lilac—ladies too faded to attract notice and whose lusts were, in any case, for power—called for willing hands or sweet voices, she was quick to volunteer and quicker yet to withdraw should a brow be raised at the way that the northern girl of no particular prospects, the one with the maidservant of such surpassing, horrid ugliness, put herself forward.

  Such ladies seemed to sense that Silver Snow’s fortunes were different and far more lowly than the prospects of the scores of Precious Pearls, Cassias, Jasmines, and Plum Fragrances who clustered like so many blossoms in the Inner Courts, thronging in the terraces and passageways that joined one pavilion to the next. Under the guise of assisting the elder ladies, they exclaimed over the rich silk hangings, the huge painted pots, the ornate inlays of gold, malachite, and turquoise that, day by day, appeared in their quarters.

  How they talked! Silver Snow, raised to quiet and meditation, found that enduring the ever-present, ever-chattering crowd of young women the most onerous task of her days. Unlike her, they seemed to have no trouble adapting to the life of the courts, circumscribed, rigid, relentlessly polite even at its most hostile. She often thought that even if Mao Yen-shou painted her in his most flattering colors, she would have no chance among this garden of beauties. Each one, it seemed to her, embodied the highest praise that could be accorded a woman’s beauty. For a woman to have the expression of a flower, the mouth of a bud, the soul of the moon, the posture of the willow, bones of jade and a skin of snow, t
he charm of an autumn lake and the heart of poetry—that would indeed be perfect!

  Perfection indeed, unlike her own looks. Even the mirror held in Willow’s loving hands showed a woman whose eyes could flash or soften, depending upon her mood; whose mouth was quick to laugh; and whose soul was turbulent and whose charm—assuming that anyone would credit her with possessing it—was a matter of obedience, duty, and repose, not the quicksilver grace prized at court. The official had been right; Silver Snow might have been far more content as the busy first wife of an heir to a country estate than as a court lady of little favor and many trivial chores.

  Although she was forced often into the company of the other ladies, increasingly a gulf widened between her and them. With the same unconscious knowledge that let them place their hair ornaments to best advantage, they seemed somehow to sense that Silver Snow could not expect a bright future, let alone one as Illustrious Concubine. More and more often, they avoided her. Not even the too-tall girl so absurdly named Peony Bud nor Apricot, who wept because her skin was sallow and the others teased her about it, bothered to speak to her; they preferred instead to hover on the outskirts of the bevy of more fortunate girls, clustering eagerly about those whom they felt the Emperor might be likeliest to favor. Not for any of these ladies was the type of loyalty that made her father’s soldiers follow him into disgrace; they preferred to curry favor with potential favorites.

  Would I be any better? Silver Snow asked herself time and again in the silence that she now had time to appreciate. She could spend time with Willow, calming the maid’s alarms, assuring her that, with the jade armor in his possession, Mao Yen-shou would be too concerned to avoid scandal to bring charges of sorcery against mistress and maid. She performed whatever tasks were assigned her and spent any leisure that she had contemplating what she had to admit was the very real beauty that Mao Yen-shou had created. If only his soul had been the equal of the craft of his hands and mind!

  “The portraits!” Suppressed laughs and shrieks of affected horror rang out in the courtyard where the willow trees had begun to bud. Three ladies passed the small court that had been assigned to Silver Snow; none stopped to call in at her door to invite her to come view them.

  “So he has finished these paintings?” Silver Snow mused, with only Willow as an audience. She bent her head over her own brushstrokes. “Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity: each has its time.” Painstakingly she drew characters that she hoped her father would not find too unworthy. By now he must realize that she would be unlikely to achieve their fondest hopes. Let him, at least, realize that she was suitably resigned and that, as he had said, she had found some occupation in study.

  She raised her brush once again, but found that her hand was shaking. After so many weeks, the mere mention that the completed portraits of the court ladies would be submitted to the Son of Heaven for his choice could reduce all her philosophy to a sham.

  “Willow?” Her voice trembled too.

  At once the faithful maid was at her side, her head bent as if admiring her mistress’ writing.

  “Willow,” whispered Silver Snow, “I know that Mao Yen-shou has painted no fine portrait of me. I know how foolish it is even to dream. But if I do not see it, if I do not know for certain, I believe that I shall never sleep again.”

  Willow nodded. “Then go and see, Elder Sister.”

  “I do not dare to,” Silver Snow flinched as if she faced the ridicule that had so often troubled her in dreams that she dared not admit, even to Willow. “At least, I do not think I can bear to be seen. Willow, I know that you . . .”

  “Indeed, yes, little mistress. I have explored the courts, Inner and Outer, and have seen this Son of Heaven about which these fine ladies chatter like so many jealous nightingales. Which, I make bold to say, is more than any of them have, so far. A fine, upright man, I must say, though I cannot understand one such who prefers to look upon paint and silk rather than on beautiful ladies.”

  “Willow!” Despite Silver Snow’s apprehension, Willow’s irreverence made her gasp with guilty laughter.

  “In all my prowlings, though, have I found a place where you might hide and view the portraits? Is that what my Elder Sister wants to know?”

  Silver Snow nodded reluctantly.

  Greatly daring, Willow put out a work-hardened hand, its three middle fingers all of equal length, to touch Silver Snow’s trailing sleeve. It fluttered as her hand shook despite her attempts to control it. “Is this the brave lady who avenged the worthy Ao Li? Courage, Elder Sister! I have found such a place from which you may see and not be seen. It is well that the Son of Heaven will come to the Inner Courts; to bring a lady into the Outer Courts might be perilous. Come you with me, though, and you will be safe.”

  Silver Snow allowed herself to be tugged from her mat onto her feet. Sweeping up her long robes, she hurried after Willow through dusty ways that, she thought, not even the designer of these pavilions would remember. You will be safe, Willow had said, but Silver Snow doubted it.

  “This way!” hissed Willow, and Silver Snow crept into a tiny passage on the third level of the Hall of Brilliance. She squeezed through it into a space the size of a small cabinet, gazed out through a peephole, and stifled a gasp.

  “Mistress, I beg you, do not sneeze!” Willow whispered.

  Silver Snow could only shake her head faintly. Just once in her life, she had ridden out on a sunny day in winter at noon and glanced from the sun to the snow and back into the sun. The very strength of its brilliance had made her reel in the saddle, and she had ridden thereafter with black specks before her eyes. She blinked and expected to see such specks dance before her eyes now too. Even the robes of the musicians and servants were finer than her most elaborate gowns; the robes, hats, and parasols of those officials who ran into the Son of Heaven’s presence chamber and prostrated themselves before the Dragon Throne provided a vivid magnificence against which the gauzy finery of those ladies who had dared to assemble appeared like Tung Shuang-ch’eng, the fairy who, in the legends that Silver Snow had loved as a child, guards the crystal snow vase.

  The ladies clustered in one corner, occupying themselves, or pretending to do so, with the placement of their sisters’ ornaments, the float of a sleeve, the particular angle at which a scent bag fell from a lavishly embroidered sash. But their eyes, beneath their plucked and painted brows, kept flickering toward the ranks of the eunuchs where, in a place of pride, his companions arrayed behind him, stood Mao Yen-shou, awaiting the Emperor’s pleasure, his young assistant hovering close at his plump shoulder.

  Silver Snow drew a deep, shuddering breath. Finally, she permitted herself to gaze upon this Son of Heaven for whom she had journeyed so long and so fruitlessly. Despite his youth, the Emperor Yuan Ti bore himself with the dignity of a man at least of middle years. He wore his heavy robes, embroidered with five-toed dragons, negligently, as if he would much prefer the dark simplicity of a scholar’s gown, and he kept his eyes resolutely averted from the bevy of ladies who watched and sighed over his every move.

  “Wan Sui!” Silver Snow whispered dutifully. “May the Emperor live ten thousand years!”

  Was it her imagination, or, in that moment, did the Son of Heaven look up as if his vision could pierce the wall behind which she had concealed herself? She flushed, and tried to hear what he was talking about.

  The Emperor apparently shared the court’s preoccupation with the Hsiung-nu. At least that subject intrigued him far more than the chance that, among such pictures, he might find a lady who would be to his liking. From the way he spoke and the way that the eunuchs replied, he had been discussing them all day; and, when he had perforce broken off council to come into the Inner Courts, he had brought what he clearly felt to be more pressing concerns than a new chief concubine with him.

  Because none of his advisors except his eunuchs could accompany him into the Inner Courts, his eunuchs must now serve to discuss it rather than generals, treasurers, and ministers of sta
te. Their attempts, coupled with a lack of interest that was total and a lack of information that came close, to humor their Emperor pleased neither eunuchs nor Emperor. Mao Yen-shou’s shining face bore a poorly concealed petulance; several of his underlings flared their nostrils in attempts to conceal their yawns; and the Emperor himself grew impatient.

  From her vantage point, Silver Snow could see the ladies droop as they realized that they could not compete with the Son of Heaven’s interest in negotiations with the Hsiung-nu. It would all be unfamiliar names and threats of violence to them, Silver Snow was sure. To her, however, the names were well known as antagonists or worthy opponents of her house. She longed to creep closer to hear the discussion that, against strict propriety, the Emperor had brought into the Inner Courts where all should be lightness, beauty, and peace. A vain, foolish custom, she told herself, and was immediately aghast at her daring to have such a thought.

  The Emperor looked up dissatisfied, waving aside those eunuchs who had stood closest to him. What—or whom—was he seeking? Certainly he glanced about as if he lacked something . . . or someone. Then memory seemed to come to him. He nodded and beckoned. To the hissed amazement of the eunuchs, out walked one among their number: thinner than most; his face weathered and lined, where his brother eunuchs’ cheeks glowed like plums; his eyes thoughtful, a little wry. While the splendid silks of the other eunuchs’ robes seemed to rival the gowns of the ladies whom they guarded, this one wore a plain scholar’s robe. He bowed himself to the floor, and when he replied to the Emperor’s questions, it was in a voice deeper than properly belonged to the eunuch’s kind.

  “This one, the most miserable Li Ling, wishes the Son of Heaven to live ten thousand years. This abject one thanks the Son of Heaven for the summons after so long, so very long.” (The eunuchs gasped with righteous outrage at that too.) “How may this one serve? What may this one speak of?”

  Li Ling! Silver Snow had heard of him. Like her father, he was a general and a noble . . . or had been. Like her father, he had been unlucky, both in battle and in his choice of allies at court. But, unlike her father, Li Ling was no longer a man. Involvement with losing generals had begun the downfall that an accusation of sorcery had only hastened. And when instruments of alchemy had been discovered in his home, he had been put first to the question, then to the knife that reduced him from general, noble, and lord of a domain, to last of his line and a eunuch of the court like the once-illustrious Ssu-ma Chien, who had been similarly unlucky.