by Andre Norton
“Your mother’s letters, all these years, have informed us well. Aye, and told us—allowing for a mother’s favor—what manner of young man we now welcome. Be as a son within our walls. We shall try to make your stay pleasant, and not too confining.” Then, as if he had delivered the message that he had set himself, he turned to matters of state. “Now, your mother has told me about the barbarians to the west.”
It surprised Khujanga that the Son of Heaven included him on the inside of that comment: it was the westerners, not the Hsiung-nu, whom he considered the barbarians. “What can you tell me about them, and what else does she say?”
Khujanga had been primed for that moment, ready with his opinions of the men from beyond the Roof of the World and their horses. Before he spoke of them, however, he owed his mother to deliver one more message and one more gift.
“This one’s mother sends her greetings and her observations, contained in her letter. And she begs the Son of Heaven to receive this for her who keeps his tents!”
With a flourish that suited a Hsiung-nu feast better than it did the Bright Court of Ch’ang-an, the young prince beckoned, and two of his men laid a chest before the Dragon Throne. The prince himself knelt to open it.
It held a suit of jade armor, cunningly fastened with delicate gold wire, the mate to the suit that, years ago, the Lady Silver Snow had presented to the Son of Heaven.
HISTORICAL NOTE
We’re happy to share with you our fascination with the history and culture of Ch’in, a fascination of which this book is just the latest part.
Imperial Lady, although it is a work of fantasy, is based on an historical incident that has become one of the most beloved of Chinese tales and has served as the inspiration for countless poems and stories: the life of Chao Chun, the concubine who became, first, a princess of the Han dynasty, and, second, the queen of the shan-yu of the Hsiung-nu, the fierce, nomadic people who are, to a great extent, the ancestors of the Huns and Mongols.
In a graceful and useful book, The Purple Wall: The Story of the Great Wall of China (London: Robert Hale, Ltd., 1960), Peter Lum describes the Chao Chun of Han dynasty history as the daughter of a Hupei official. Like our own Silver Snow, the Chao Chun who actually lived was beautiful and high-spirited, rejected the offer of the corrupt eunuch-artist Mao Yen-shou, and lived for a time in isolation before she was packed off to marry, first, the shan-yu Khujanga, and then his heir, Vughturoi.
That much is history. Thereafter, history and legend coexist. In some rather romantic accounts of Chao Chun, she throws herself into the Yellow River at the pass between the river and the Great Wall because she cannot bear to leave China. Because of her tears, the grass along the river there is greener than it is anyplace else; and the river there is called the River of the Princess. In other accounts, the “real” Chao Chun bore a son to Khujanga, who died in 31 B.C. (a year after the death of the Emperor Yuan Ti, a date that we have simply altered for the purposes of the story). Thereafter, she indeed married Vughturoi, ruled as queen, with, apparently, a good deal of influence on peaceful relations with China, until 20 B.C. when Vughturoi died, leaving Chao Chun a thirty-three-year-old widow with two daughters by her second husband.
At this point in the story, history again fades into myth. No one knows for certain what happened to Chao Chun. Some say that she died within a few years, others that she died of grief when a new shan-yu murdered her son, still others that she and her son were both murdered in A.D. 18. Though she never did return to China, legend has it that she asked to be buried on its borders and that she is indeed buried by the Yellow River, beneath a huge artificial mound that is still called the Tomb of the Flower Garden of Chao Chun.
Also a part of history are the suits of jade armor, which are meticulously described and most beautifully photographed in Edmund Capon and William MacQuitty’s Princes of Jade (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd., 1973), which deals with the discovery on June 27, 1968, of the bodies of the Han dynasty Prince Liu Sheng and his consort Princess Tou Wan, which were decked in precisely the type of jade armor that we have given to Silver Snow.
We take much of the rest of the story from the many fine books that Western writers have provided to introduce 5,000 years of an astonishing wealth of culture to Western readers, whose knowledge of one of the most ancient civilizations on Earth is all too often limited to “here be dragons” on the map or “one from column A” on a Chinese menu. In the past thirty years, however, interest in China has flourished, extended far beyond the province of scholars, explorers, and the somewhat eccentric “China hands” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
For those readers who might be interested in learning more about the poetry and history of Han and Hsiung-nu alike, we would like to suggest Michael Loewe’s Crisis and Conflict in Han China (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974), which provided the inspiration for the story of Silver Snow’s father, as well as Loewe’s Everyday Life in Early Imperial China (London: B.T. Batsford, 1968).
The fourth- or fifth-century Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, with a foreword by General Basil Liddell Hart (Oxford University Press, 1963), is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance of its own in the wake of current interest in Eastern martial arts.
Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen’s monumental The World of the Huns (University of California, 1973) is probably the standard work on the Huns and Hsiung-nu, and is far more readable than it appears.
Finally, the poems in Imperial Lady are taken from actual verse from the Han and T’ang Dynasties; they are drawn, primarily, from two volumes and used with permission: The Orchid Boat: Woman Poets of China, translated and edited by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972); and Translations from the Chinese by Arthur Waley (Knopf, 1941).
We would also like to acknowledge our indebtedness to Dr. Morris Rossabi, director of The China Institute, in New York City.
Whether you actually do travel to China (as we would like to do) or travel no farther than your own bookstore, we wish you a happy and rewarding journey.
Andre Norton,
Winter Park, Florida
Susan Shwartz,
Forest Hills, New York
February 1988
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
One of the best-loved and most famous science fiction and fantasy authors of all time, Andre Norton was named Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America and was awarded a Life Achievement Award by the World Fantasy Convention. She wrote over a hundred novels which have sold millions of copies worldwide, including her Witch World, Beast Master, Solar Queen, and Time Traders series, among others. She passed away in 2005. More can be learned at www.andre-norton-books.com.
Susan Shwartz has authored historical, fantasy, and science fiction novels and short stories, including Imperial Lady and Empire of the Eagle with Andre Norton. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards for her work. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and has a PhD in English from Harvard University.
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
EPILOGUE
HISTORICAL NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
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