Imperial Lady (Central Asia Series Book 1)

by Andre Norton

  Never mind that! Silver Snow told herself. She concentrated on Li Ling’s words. The disgraced courtier drew himself up, put on wisdom and his former dignity as if they were the finest of robes.

  “We are a mighty nation,” said the Son of Heaven. “Why do the Hsiung-nu dare to raid our borders?”

  Once again, Li Ling bowed. “May this one recall to the Son of Heaven his feeble words. Ever since the hour of my surrender until now, destitute of all resources, I have sat alone with the bitterness of my grief. All day long, I see none but barbarians around me.”

  One of the younger eunuchs giggled, and the disgraced lord halted. The Emperor gestured quickly in aggravation for him to continue. The eunuchs opened their ranks, concealing the young fool who had had so little control as to snicker at the Son of Heaven’s choice of advisor, regardless of his previous status among them.

  “Skins and felt protect me from wind and rain. With mutton and whey I satisfy my hunger and slake my thirst. The whole country is still with black ice. I hear naught but the moaning of the bitter autumn blast, beneath which all vegetation has disappeared. Most Illustrious Son of Heaven”—the old eunuch looked up earnestly—“the Hsiung-nu are poor in all but valor. They hold it a virtue to wrest what they will from those whom they consider weak.”

  “And yet this Khujanga promises us that, should we grant him our support, he will cease to raid. Will he keep his word?”

  The eunuch-lord appeared to consider. “May this one most humbly inquire what his words were?”

  The Emperor flicked his fingers, and a minister passed Li Ling a bundle of wood strips. He bent, shook his head over the awkwardness of the writing, and read, “ ‘I propose to have a frontier trade with Ch’in on a large scale, to marry a Ch’in princess, to receive annually ten thousand firkins of spirits, ten thousand pieces of assorted silk, besides all the rest as provided by previous treaties; if this is done, we will not raid the frontier.’ ”

  Li Ling paused momentarily as a brief eddy in the group of ladies rose and died at the mention of a Ch’in princess as the bride of the Hsiung-nu ruler. “Having naught else now to stake, this most miserable and unworthy one would stake his life that the shan-yu will keep to such an agreement.”

  Silver Snow could hear angry mutterings about tribute, about barbarians, and about the Emperor’s greatness of heart in hearing out an ill-fortuned dotard.

  From the side of the Hall of Brilliance, someone gestured, and the Son of Heaven sighed, as if recalling himself to matters less interesting, if more pressing.

  “We shall think on this and give the shan-yu our answer should he become the shan-yu in truth as he is in boast. You shall continue to advise us. Nay, you are too old for those skull-thumpings on the floor, man! But now . . . let our Administrator of the Inner Courts, Mao Yen-shou, come forward.”

  With a flourish of his embroidered robes, Mao Yen-shou prostrated himself before the Dragon Throne.

  “Let his robes split!” whispered Willow, and Silver Snow glared her maid into silence.

  So hard did her heart beat that she could not hear his words of greeting and of praise. But she saw, clearly enough, when the portraits of the ladies were unveiled. Aye, there was Precious Pearl, as lovely as her name and nature. The Son of Heaven deigned to nod. He smiled at the portrait of Cassia, shrugged at a number of others.

  “You are but one of five hundred,” Willow whispered. “Perhaps he will not even present your likeness at all.”

  Silver Snow shook her head. The Master of the Inner Courts would most certainly not ignore her, lest someone ask why but four hundred and ninety-nine ladies had been depicted. Peony Bud, Jade, Apricot—he must be showing the least attractive girls in a group. Silver Snow braced herself.

  At first, she did not recognize her own portrait. Then her hand jerked as if in instinct to cover her mouth, and she bit down to keep from crying out in anger. She had thought that she had very little vanity; that she knew that she was the equal of only a very few of the ladies who now pretended to gasp in shock at her picture. But that . . . that girl on the silk screen! Oh, it was she, all right: the darkness of the hair, the decisiveness of the tiny pursed mouth, the flash of the almond-shaped eyes. Those were all hers. No one could say that the painter had lied.

  But Mao Yen-shou had painted her with her lips parted to reveal gapping teeth just the slightest bit yellowed. He had lowered her forehead, making her appear to seem stubborn, had mixed yellow with his skin tones until she looked unhealthy, and, worst of all, had painted an ugly black mole below her right eye, the unluckiest of all places for a maid to have such a blemish.

  Yuan Ti shook his head in amazement.

  “How was such a one ever selected for our Inner Courts?” he asked the self-assured eunuch. “Let a woman have a mole beneath her right eye, and she brings misfortune to all whom she sees.”

  As if sensing his master’s irritation, the mynah on the elaborately wrought perch at his side fluffed out its crest and shrieked. The Emperor caressed it with a careful finger.

  Mao Yen-shou flung himself spectacularly to the floor, wailing as if at his father’s funeral. The maid, he said, was as crafty as she was ill-favored; she had concealed her blemish. “Let this vile one’s head serve as recompense for the error!” he lamented. “The girl is as inauspicious as all her family, but I did not know that she was so homely!”

  Had it not been she, Silver Snow wondered if she would not have laughed. She noted that alone of the courtiers and ladies, the elder eunuch Li Ling had not joined in condemning her portrait. He chewed upon his beardless lip, and seemed to want to turn away.

  “Ill-favored and ill-fortuned,” mused the Emperor. “Was her father not a traitor?”

  “Let this one send the maid away!” begged Mao Yen-shou.

  Li Ling flung himself down too. “This one begs the Most August! Homely the maid may be, but she is blameless and should not have such a shame put upon her. Her father has already been punished twice. This one submits most humbly that he should not receive another punishment without having deserved it.”

  Silver Snow stifled a sob. Father, if only I could tell you how your old friend defends your honor and your most miserable child’s! But she knew that this scene was one that she would never describe in a letter; it was too humiliating.

  Mao Yen-shou glared at the older eunuch, and looked as if he wished to do worse when the Emperor held up a hand.

  “Li Ling has a point, Administrator. We cannot visit Chao Kuang with an undeserved punishment, not when he has already been cursed with . . .” He shut his eyes. “Take that picture from our sight.”

  “Let this one do more, Son of Heaven!” begged Mao Yen-shou. “Let that wretched girl be moved from the Inner Courts, whose harmonies she spoils and where, by chance, your eyes might light upon her, to the Cold Palace.”

  Silver Snow had been kind to Plum Blossom and Apricot, whose portraits had received so little attention, but not even they showed any sorrow at that sentence of exile.

  The Cold Palace! It was utterly isolated. That, Silver Snow felt in her present mood, might be a blessing, but the Cold Palace was as inauspicious as it was isolated. Some of the more timorous women even whispered that it was haunted by foxes.

  “It is not so bad, mistress,” whispered Willow at her side, but Silver Snow had stiffened, hearing a ribald murmur from one courtier to his fellow standing two floors below her vantage point. “Perhaps the girl will hang herself. I know I would, were I a maid with a face like that!”

  That snapped the control that Silver Snow had kept on herself all the weeks of her journey and all the months of her imprisonment, which would now be solitary and for the rest of her life. Knowing only that she must escape, that she must hide, she flung herself out of the passage and into a corridor that she had never seen before. Gone were the tiny, decorous steps enjoined upon fine ladies. She was no fine lady; she was but a girl so sorely insulted that she did not hear her maid’s hiss of caution, nor did she r
ealize what she had done.

  The passage down which she ran was screened from the Hall of Brilliance but by a thin veiling of silk; and it was directly across from the Dragon Throne. As she ran, the outline of her form, graceful in its trailing robes, flickered across the silk for all the court—and the Son of Heaven himself—to see.

  “Hold! What is that?” He half rose from his chair, one hand pressed against his heart. “My lady, whom even the wisest of my wizards could not restore to me.

  Is it or isn’t it?

  I stand and look.

  The swish, swish of a silk skirt.

  How swiftly she flees!”

  Tears streaming down her face, Silver Snow had fled long before the echo of the Emperor’s heartbroken verse had died away.

  CHAPTER 8

  On the other side of the wall, sweet strains of flute and zither rang out, almost as sweet and considerably less artificial than the laughter and sighs of the ladies who drifted across the arched bridges or who, with outcries of mock fear, reclined on intricately painted boats on the lake in the central courtyard. Sunbeams slanted down into that court, though they seemed, thought Silver Snow as she gazed down at her hands, never to illuminate her own shabby courtyard in the Cold Palace.

  Today, for a change, she sat not in the courtyard with its unpruned trees and its bushes that had gone to seed, but in the green and white octagonal pavilion that, even now, had not lost the chill of winter. No wonder, she thought, that this place was called the Cold Palace; but it was a cold not so much of air or water, but of the spirit.

  She shut her eyes as if she were infinitely weary. Yet even in the darkness, with Willow kneeling beside her, crooning a wordless song, she found no comfort. The day’s humiliations had left wounds in her heart and mind, wounds that still bled. Even now, she panted as if, once again, she had to run weeping through the palace corridors, had reached her own tiny courtyard, and flung herself down, only to find herself almost instantly assailed by servants. With courtesy distinguishable from insolence only by an observer who worked hard to make that distinction, they had invaded her room, stripping even the hangings from her bed as they packed up her few possessions and hurried them—and herself—to the Cold Palace.

  Her gamble to bring her father to the Son of Heaven’s attention had failed. Now, lifelong imprisonment was the punishment for losing her game.

  The Cold Palace, isolated and unlucky, was a quiet, solitary world. No one called on her, except, of course, those who sought to save on tips to servants by using her for labor: an elder concubine or two who needed some tedious chore or other to be completed by someone who would not complain; a young woman whose fear, laziness, or caprice brought her to Silver Snow to remedy a mistake or shorten a lengthy task. Having little else to do, Silver Snow complied with their requests; had she refused, she might have lost the little goodwill that she might still have left. It was better to be patronized, she thought, than to be persecuted.

  Such women swept in, bestowed the work upon her as if they honored her by their presence, and pressed her to complete it speedily. When it was finished, though, they came no more to the Cold Palace. It was better, she decided then, to be ignored than to be patronized.

  Occasionally, Silver Snow heard their voices ring out over the wall. They called her the Shadowed One. That name that had spread throughout the Inner Courts and chilled Silver Snow even more than the usual dearth of fuel for her braziers. Even the one or two servants assigned for their misdeeds to wait upon her used that name when they spoke of her. To her and to Willow, they spoke as little as they could, and there was no way she could punish them for their insolence. Few creatures, she quickly learned, had as little influence as she who lives in disfavor among eunuchs and women.

  Once or twice an occasional pitying girl with more sentimentality than intelligence might glance in upon her, then flee, as if fearing that Silver Snow’s disgrace might contaminate her too. After all, birds peck at the one who is different and judged to be an outcast; the pretty, bejeweled creatures of the Inner Courts much resembled those birds. By tormenting an outcast, they hoped to prevent themselves from being made outcast too.

  Silver Snow might have sunk into a quiet, despairing madness had she not had Willow with her. Loving, patient Willow, who sat with her during the twelve hours of the day and, when she could not sleep, during the watches of the nights that grew shorter and shorter as the season turned toward a summer of joy and beauty in which Silver Snow, alone among palace maidens, might not share. (She did, however, accomplish more than one woman’s share of the needlework for the various festivals.) It was Willow, who gazed for long moments into her scrying mirror or cast the hexagrams time and again, trying to discern in their arrangement some scrap of good fortune.

  “It is all change, Elder Sister,” the maid sighed after one such session. “Change and travel.”

  Silver Snow threw down her brush with such force that it snapped. “But I am not destined to travel; I am immured here!” she cried. “Your yarrow stalks are as crooked as your . . . oh, Willow, forgive me!”

  She covered her face with tiny hands from which the months in the Cold Palace had peeled the bow calluses and wept. To think that she would turn thus upon Willow, who had put her life in jeopardy to follow her and asked only to serve her! To think that she had lost control! How ashamed her father would be—almost as ashamed as she herself was.

  After what seemed like a long, miserable hour, a soft, hesitant touch on her knee made her lift her head and see Willow crouched at her side.

  “Oh, Willow,” said Silver Snow, dashing her hand across eyes that she had not painted all spring long, “rather than live as such an ingrate, I should hang myself with my sash from that withered tree before I too wither.”

  “Mistress, hush!” cried Willow. “There is nothing,” she added with a mischievous glance, “in the hexagrams to tell me you face death.”

  Despite her shame at her self-pity, Silver Snow found herself laughing. “Ah, Willow, Willow,” she said, “you make me realize just how true is the proverb that one does not live in vain if there is one person in all this world who totally understands one.”

  To her surprise, Willow flushed deeply and turned away. Lest Silver Snow embarrass the maid further, she cast about for some diversion. “I have embroidered until I have pads on my fingertips! And it does not seem as if I shall write any further today to my honored father. How can I? Even assuming that some worthy man would have the charity to deliver the messages of a maid as out of favor as myself, my father would see my distress in the clumsiness of my brushstrokes. But it seems to me that if I do not speak to someone other than you, I shall be distracted.”

  “Perhaps, mistress, if you turned your sorrow into poetry, it might be sorrow no longer. Write down your thoughts, mistress, and let the winds carry your words to those who have hearts and minds to hear them,” suggested Willow.

  “Excellent idea!” cried Silver Snow. “But what shall I write upon?” The small store of writing silk that she had must be hoarded for letters to her father, and she could hardly expect thin wooden strips to be carried away by the winds or, as Willow probably and more prosaically intended, to bob from some tree in another court.

  “One moment, Elder Sister . . . ah, I have it!” Willow leapt up with a grace belying her crippled leg and darted out into the court where she seized up a leaf that had blown across the wall from some rare tree or other. “Write on this leaf, then set it free.”

  To her own astonishment, Silver Snow found that she was smiling. It had been months since she had even attempted verse. She settled herself more comfortably on her frayed mat and took up a fresh brush. A poem flickered into her consciousness, and she dipped her brush in the ink that glimmered on her inkstone.

  How fast this water flows away! she wrote, looking at the clouded little stream that flowed past the windows of her octagonal pavilion.

  Buried in the women’s quarters,

  The days pass in idlenes
s.

  Red leaf, I order you—

  Go find someone

  In the world of men.

  She read the verse to Willow, who clapped her hands.

  “Now,” she commanded, “take this leaf and set it free to find the person of whom I wrote.”

  “And if no one replies, Elder Sister?” asked Willow, her head cocked to one side, her eyes inquisitive.

  “Why then, tomorrow, you shall hunt me out another leaf, and I shall write another poem.” She found herself smiling, and the very unexpectedness of that made her dare a little laugh. Hearing it, Willow brightened.

  No, thought Silver Snow. She loves me, and I have not been a kind mistress to her.

  Silver Snow rose and watched Willow limp down the steps, dulled by neglect, of the Cold Palace. Like a beast toying with its prey, she batted the leaf up into the air. A stray gust took it, and tossed it over the crumbling wall.

  The next day, Silver Snow wrote out another verse: the day after, another; and the day after that, yet another.

  “If I continue writing on leaves,” she told Willow, “I may just pluck the trees bare.”

  The maid eyed her narrowly and laughed only when she did. As the days went by, however, Silver Snow admitted how keen her disappointment was. Tossing leaves that bore messages over a broken wall—that was a child’s game. It was ridiculous of her to have placed any hope at all upon it. And yet . . . and yet . . . tears stung her eyes, and she could not see clearly enough to make the next careful, exquisite brushstroke. She blinked fiercely.