She Who Became the Sun

by Shelley Parker-Chan

  It was an opportunity he wanted, and at the same time it was the very last thing he wanted: it was a future too horrible to bear. But even as he prevaricated and agonized, and shrank from the thought of it, he knew it wasn’t a matter of choice. It was his fate, the thing no man can ever refuse.

  9

  ANFENG, THE NEW YEAR, 1355

  Zhu knelt before the Prime Minister. In light of the surprising events at Yao River, she had been granted a special audience with the Red Turban leaders. Outside the weather had been brightening daily with the approach of the New Year, but the Prime Minister’s throne room was still as dank as the cave from which the bear has departed. The red candles smoked and bled.

  “A victory ordained by Heaven itself!” the Prime Minister crowed. “The eunuch general has more audacity than any of us realized. If not for Heaven’s intervention, his ploy to cross downstream would have succeeded. We would have been annihilated! But in this miracle, what clearer proof could we have that the Mongols have lost their Mandate to rule?”

  It had been a miracle, but not quite the same one Zhu had planned and prayed for. When she had come up with the idea of causing the landslide, all she had intended was to destroy the bridge so that she and the Red Turbans might be spared annihilation. But instead of that, Heaven had given her a victory that neither she nor anyone else had known was possible. She had stood up as Zhu Chongba and claimed greatness, and Heaven had validated it. In the blink of an eye, ten thousand of the eunuch general’s men had become nothing. She shivered with awe, and with her feverish desire for something she had never thought she would desire. Her fate.

  “The monk must be rewarded,” the Prime Minister said. “Now that Guo Tianxu is general, there is a vacancy at the commander level. Let the monk fill it.”

  “Your Excellency wants to make—the monk a commander?” said Right Minister Guo. Zhu peered at him from her prostration, and saw him frowning. “I understand he has done us a service, but surely—”

  “We don’t owe that monk anything!” Little Guo burst in, indignantly. “He might have prayed, but it was my decision to face the Yuan at Yao River. If Heaven decreed we should win, doesn’t it make it my victory?”

  “Guo Tianxu,” his father said repressively. His eyes flicked to the Prime Minister. He knew perfectly well that if Zhu hadn’t won Yao River, Little Guo would be facing the Prime Minister’s wrath.

  Zhu wasn’t alone in her bystanding. Left Minister Chen was watching the two Guos, and there was nothing passive about his attention. Like a naked weapon, it promised violence. Chen, feeling her gaze on him, looked over; their eyes met. His regard had neither warmth nor hostility. Only the vertical creases on his cheeks deepened, which could have meant anything at all.

  The Prime Minister said coldly to Little Guo, “That monk’s intercession was the necessary condition for every part of your success.”

  “Your Excellency,” Right Minister Guo interjected. “It’s not that it wasn’t an achievement, but—”

  “Regardless of why anything happened, he didn’t even fight!” said Little Guo. “He can’t even hold a sword. How can a commander not have any military experience? Why not put him here in the throne room, attending the Prince of Radiance? Isn’t that more fitting for a monk?”

  Chen cleared his throat. In a tone of eminent reasonableness, he said, “If I’m not mistaken, neither the Prime Minister nor the Right Minister had any experience of war before becoming leaders. They achieved success on the basis of their natural talents. Why should the monk need experience when they did not?”

  In the gleam in Chen’s eye, Zhu saw what her role was to be: the wedge for him to drive between the Prime Minister and Right Minister Guo. She had known that advancing within the Red Turbans would mean choosing between Chen and the Guos in their struggle under the Prime Minister. Now a side had chosen her. But, she thought, it was the side she would have chosen anyway.

  Little Guo gave Zhu a poisonous look. “Any kind of fool can stumble into success once or twice. If his natural talent is praying, and we believe it works, then why not ask him to take Lu for us?”

  Lu, a walled city not far south of Anfeng, was one of the strongest in the area. In all the decades of unrest, it alone of the Yuan’s cities in the region had never fallen once to the rebels. Zhu’s stomach clenched at a sudden ominous feeling.

  Chen regarded Zhu with the look of someone who was perfectly happy to gamble, since it was with someone else’s money. “A decade of Red Turban actions have failed to take that particular city, General Guo.”

  “So it’s a good test. If he can pray his way to victory: make him a commander. And if he fails—well, then we’ll know exactly how much use he is.”

  Internally cursing Little Guo, Zhu pressed her forehead back to the throne room’s cracked tiles. “Although this unworthy monk is nothing but a speck of dust, he will gladly lend his meager talents to serving Your Excellency’s will. With Heaven’s backing, we will bring about the fall of the Hu and see the Prince of Radiance in his rightful place upon the throne of our own empire!”

  “The monk speaks well,” the Prime Minister said, mollified. “Let him go, to return with fortune and the Buddha’s blessing.” He rose and left, followed by his two ministers: one annoyed, and the other with a cool look of contemplation that masked who knew what.

  Zhu, rising, found Little Guo in her way. His face was ugly with satisfaction. “You’re even more of a lard-hearted idiot than I thought if you think you can pray your way to taking a walled city. Why don’t you just run away and leave war to the people who know how to do it?”

  He was so tall that Zhu strained to look up at him. She gave him her best imitation of the Dharma Master’s tranquil smile. “The Buddha taught: begin in hopelessness. Only when we surrender to the hopelessness of the current moment can suffering begin to dissolve—”

  “The Prime Minister might love you now,” Little Guo said viciously. “But you’re going to fail. And when you do, don’t you think he’ll rather have you killed as a false monk than believe Heaven willed a failure?”

  She said, hardening, “Heaven doesn’t will my failure.”

  * * *

  When Ma came into the room that had once been the Guo mansion’s library, she found Commander Sun Meng saying placatingly to Little Guo, “Does it really matter who’s getting credit for the victory? The Prime Minister’s happy, and it’s put Chen Youliang back in his place. You know he was hoping you’d fail so he could challenge your father.”

  The two young men were sitting on the floor at a low table, eating the dinner Ma had brought them earlier: tofu simmered with ham and chestnuts, sliced soaked lotus root, and millet. They were surrounded by shelves stacked with paper-wrapped cabbages. Only Ma, who as a general’s daughter had received more than the usual education, missed the books. The cabbages gave the unheated room a damp vegetal smell, like a field after a winter rain.

  Seeing Ma there, Sun patted the space next to him. “Yingzi, have you eaten? There’s some left.” Sun was as slight as Little Guo was tall, and as good-tempered as his friend was sour. He had a lively, pretty face topped with a shock of wavy, reddish hair that was always escaping his topknot. Despite his boyish looks, he was in fact the best by far of the Red Turbans’ three young leaders.

  As Ma smiled and sat, Sun said, “So how do you like our victory?”

  “I think you were incredibly lucky, whatever the cause.” Borrowing Sun’s bowl and spoon, Ma reached for the tofu. “And I think water has leaked into your brains if you think this has put Chen Youliang in his place. Guo Tianxu, did you really challenge that monk to go take the city of Lu? Haven’t you learned by now that whenever you show your resentment, you’re giving Chen Youliang something to use against you?”

  “You dare criticize?” Little Guo’s face reddened. He snatched the clay pot from under Ma’s hand and emptied the tofu into his own bowl. “What do you know, Ma Xiuying? You thought I couldn’t win at the Yao. Well, I did. And if I�
�d followed the Prime Minister’s plan, we’d still be out on that plain losing a hundred men a day, with nothing to look forward to but that little eunuch bitch coming for us over the Huai. And this is the respect my victory gets?”

  “It’s not about respect,” Ma said crossly. “I’m just saying that with Chen Youliang watching, you should take more care—”

  “With everyone watching, you should learn not to criticize—”

  Sun inserted himself between them. “I did ask for her opinion, Xu’er. Aiya, you two are such a bad match. Can’t you have a single conversation without fighting?”

  “You want a woman’s useless opinions, you listen to them.” Glaring at them, Little Guo drained his cup and stood. “I’m leaving first.” He didn’t bother shutting the door behind him.

  Sun looked after him and sighed. “I’ll talk to him later. Come on, Yingzi: see me out.” He draped his arm about Ma’s shoulders in a friendly way as they walked. It was one of Little Guo’s quirks that despite his petty nature, her friendship with Sun didn’t bother him at all. It was like he couldn’t fathom the possibility of a woman finding Sun’s effeminate looks more attractive than his own. Ma thought wryly: and yet even in that, he was blind. If it had been a matter of choosing one over the other, of course she would have picked the flower boy with his cheeks as round and smooth as a girl’s. But of course: she hadn’t had a choice.

  She asked, “Do you think what happened was really because of that monk?”

  “I have no idea. All I know is that we needed a miracle, and we got one.”

  To walk onto a bridge between two armies: it was an action that was hard to comprehend. Which was easier to believe: that the monk was a naïve fool with an extraordinary amount of luck, or an enlightened bodhisattva with no concern at all for his own skin? Ma remembered his sharp glance at their first meeting, and thought: Not a fool. But she wasn’t sure the other was correct either.

  “What are you worrying about now?” asked Sun, who could tell her moods. “We have the Mandate of Heaven and our best victory in years. The Yuan will be rebuilding until next autumn, so we’ll have six months to take back ground and build a strong position.” He gave her a gentle squeeze. “This is the moment everything changes, Yingzi. You’ll see! In ten years when the Prince of Radiance sits on the throne of our own empire, we’ll look back at this moment and smile.”

  * * *

  The flickering late winter sunshine had dried Anfeng’s mud. Zhu sauntered through the cold shade between the market stalls. It was more crowded than usual—almost lively. Since the resounding defeat of the Yuan at Yao River, the city had an air of renewed enthusiasm. Hope, one might think.

  “Hey, granny!”

  Well, less hope for some. Zhu, observing the unfolding human drama, felt a stirring of unease: the memory of something witnessed so long ago that it might as well have been in a past life.

  “Hey, I said: hey, granny!” The group of men pressed around an old woman sitting behind her pile of vegetables. “You’re gonna give us a few of these for keeping the troublemakers away, aren’t you? Anfeng is a pretty dangerous place to be! You better thank us well for our support—”

  “Support, you rotten turtle eggs?” Someone elbowed their way in, furious; Zhu was surprised to see it was the Semu girl who’d saved her from Little Guo. General Ma’s daughter. To the old woman’s downturned head, the girl instructed: “Don’t give them anything.”

  “You can shut up,” said the men’s leader.

  “You dare talk to me like that! Don’t you know who I am?”

  After a pause one of them observed, “Isn’t it Little Guo’s woman?”

  The leader gave the girl a closer examination, smirking. “That half-empty vinegar bottle who calls himself a general? Think I give a fuck?”

  The girl Ma refused to give ground. Glaring, she said, “Get lost!”

  “Or what?” As his men descended on the old woman’s vegetables, the leader grabbed the girl and flung her easily into the street. She cried out as she landed on her hands and knees. The leader laughed. “Roll back to your mother’s cunt, bitch.”

  After the men had gone Zhu went over and crouched next to Ma. “So, that went well.”

  She got an angry look in return. Even with that expression, the girl was striking. The smooth golden tone of her skin was only more luminous in contrast to a small dark mole high on her forehead. Her hair fell as straight and shining as black clouds. Perhaps her looks missed the Nanren standards of classic beauty, but in her face there was such a depth of raw and innocent emotion that Zhu’s eye was drawn as if to the scene of an accident.

  “What should I have done? Ignored it?” Ma said, scowling. She dabbed her bleeding palms with her skirt.

  “You’re upset,” Zhu observed.

  Ma looked up fiercely. “Yes, I’m upset! Oh, I know, it happens all the time. She’s used to it. Everyone’s used to it. It’s just—”

  “It hurts.” Zhu felt a sense of wonder at the girl’s empathy. If Zhu had ever had such a soft part of herself, capable of tenderness based on nothing more than a shared humanity, she wasn’t sure it was still there.

  “Of course.”

  “Of course?” Zhu said, amused. “Don’t assume. Hardly anyone’s like that.” She bounced up and bought a cup of soy milk from the neighboring stall, and gave it to Ma.

  Ma accepted it with a skeptical look. “I thought you were a clouds and water monk without two coins to rub together.”

  “This monk has nothing but what the generosity of others has blessed him with,” Zhu said piously. She did actually have more than two coins, since she had traded the gong back to Jiao (who had come back after the victory) in return for the horse and a few strings of copper cash. It made sense to turn a profit—it was the gong that could summon Heaven, after all.

  Zhu saw Ma examining her from under her eyelashes as she drank the milk. It was a vexed look, as if she were convinced there was something else happening under Zhu’s monkly naïveté, but she couldn’t tell what it was. Still, she was the first person in the Red Turbans who’d even seen that much. Zhu supposed that if General Ma had been as competent as everyone said, it made sense that his daughter was smarter than most of the Red Turbans’ actual leadership. Curious to know the girl better, Zhu said, “The horse.”

  “What?”

  “This monk’s horse. You remember it. Since General Guo has given this monk the modest next task of conquering a city, this monk was thinking he might prefer to ride the horse for the fighting part. It might make his survival less dependent on miracles.” She gave Ma an inviting look. “Know any riding tutors?”

  “This again? Why are you so sure I can ride?”

  “Your name is horse, isn’t it?” Zhu said playfully. “Names don’t lie.”

  “Oh, please!” The girl was scornful. “On that principle, every drunkard named Wang would be king. And you’d be—” She stopped.

  “Red?” teased Zhu. “Like a—Red Turban?”

  “That’s a different kind of a red! What’s the rest of your name, anyway?”

  When Zhu told her, she shook her head and laughed in exasperation. “Red and lucky double eight? Your parents must have been happy to have you.”

  Images of a childhood—not Zhu Chongba’s—shuttered across Zhu’s mind like flashes seen through torn window-paper. But she was Zhu Chongba, and just as much as his fate was now hers, so was his past. She said, “Ah, it’s true: despite never having shown much promise, this monk’s parents always believed he’d achieve great things.” She waggled her eyebrows. “And now look! Here he is: an educated monk instead of a peasant. What more could farmers ask for?”

  Zhu thought she’d spoken lightly, but when Ma gave her a searching look she wondered what inadvertent truth might have shown on her face. But the girl said only, “Nice to meet you, Master Zhu the Extremely Lucky.”

  “Aiya, so formal! This monk had better call you Teacher Ma, since you’ll be giving him lessons.”
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  “Who’s giving lessons!”

  “Or if you’re not giving lessons, should this monk call you big sister Ying?”

  “Oh, too bold!” Ma exclaimed. Shooting Zhu a perspicacious glance, she said, “And who’s older than who, exactly? If you’re a monk, you have to be at least twenty.”

  Zhu grinned: it was true that Ma herself couldn’t be more than seventeen. “So Teacher Ma it is, if you can’t bear this monk calling you anything else.”

  “That’s your argument?”

  Zhu arranged her face in her best expectant look. The girl stared, seemingly torn between outrage and exasperation, then sighed. “All right! One lesson. One.”

  “This monk is a fast learner. But the horse—who knows?” Zhu said, feeling lighthearted at her success. She liked the idea of seeing Ma’s snapping eyes again, and of teasing her with more naïve-monk performance. “Maybe you can give him extra lessons separately, if it’s this monk that’s too much of a headache for you.”

  “Yes, you’re the headache! Now get lost.”

  But when Zhu glanced back, she saw Ma was smiling.

  * * *

  Zhu looked down at Anfeng from her high-up perch on the temple steps and watched the colorful New Year traffic flowing through the narrow streets as thickly as rivers and dragons. The temple in Anfeng’s eastern quarter had been a filthy ruin when Zhu had come across it. Knowing an opportunity when she saw one, she had immediately moved in. With her came the two hundred raw recruits that Little Guo had grudgingly given her for the purpose of taking Lu. The sight of all those tents cluttering the temple grounds made her feel as if she had an army of her own. But if it was an army, it was still far too small. Zhu was worried about Lu. The more she learned about the city, the more she understood what an impossible challenge Little Guo had given her. Who could take a stone-walled city with two hundred men?