Portal of a Thousand Worlds

by Duncan, Dave

  Emperor Absolute Purity, Son of Heaven, Lord of the High and the Low, and so on, must never kowtow to any mortal, only to his ancestors during certain rituals. By ancient law, no woman could rule, although, historically, several had done so as regents, most of them very well. However, the Emperor’s mother was an ancestor and outranked him for ritual purposes, so she could summon him, and he came to her, not vice versa. Three days after the move to the Summer Palace, she summoned him to the Marble Ship.

  As she watched him striding in at the head of his retinue, she was overcome with a nostalgia quite foreign to her normally remorseless nature. The man was an astonishingly good fit for what the public expected the true Emperor to look like. He was also a superb actor, radiating the proper imperial arrogance like a noonday sun, ignoring prostrate servants and courtiers, careful to not gawk around at the miracles of marble tracery. How big he was, how strong! This was what her son should look like now, and the knowledge that whoever had blighted him fifteen years ago had undoubtedly died for it in her mass revenge was very small comfort. His recent untimely end had been very peaceful; she had seen to that.

  The imposter bowed to her with surprising grace for his size. As he took up her hands to kiss, his eyes twinkled with impertinent amusement. She met far too few real men these days, and never young ones, only ancient mandarins and decadent princes. He glowed with virility. She had been assured that he had no family of his own to comment on his unexplained disappearance, not even the girl whose unborn child had proved his fertility.

  He took the chair beside hers. Ceremonial greetings were exchanged, tea and sweetmeats brought, flunkies banished out of earshot, but not out of sight, available for summons by a gesture.

  “I did not even need to have the girl examined,” the Empress Mother said approvingly. “Her maids report that her toes have not touched the floor since you deflowered her. Instead of dread, she rushes to her lord’s embrace at sunset with eagerness and gaiety.”

  “I look forward to her arrival as stars await the dark,” the man admitted with seemly modesty. “You chose her well, Majesty.”

  “There are more waiting, just as worthy. You must not neglect the others who so anxiously long to seek your imperial pleasure.”

  He laughed, but for the first time showed a trace of unease.

  “You doubt your strength?” she inquired waspishly.

  “No. And when the duties were explained to me, they seemed like a young man’s dream.”

  “But now you feel like a neighbor’s boar borrowed to improve a farmer’s herd?”

  He bit his lip. “It is foolish. I accepted the contract.”

  “It is certainly not the correct attitude for an Emperor. Most of them reveled in their prowess at your age. Even when I knew him, Zealous Righteousness summoned two, often three, women a night.”

  Butterfly Sword nodded. “I have warned Snow Lily that I may not be able to send for her every night in the future.”

  “And she wept, I suppose? Your manly heart melts for her?”

  His control was too good for him to change color, but his eyes glittered. “I will do what is required of me, Your Majesty. But I cannot maintain my strength sitting around listening to music. I need exercise and variety. There is a hunting park, I understand.”

  He was issuing demands! Nobody had done that to her since Zealous Righteousness had died, and only he for years before that.

  “My son has never been on a horse.”

  “But how many people know that?” He eyed her warily and then risked even worse insolence. “Since childhood, I have been trained in the arts of deception, and I presume to advise Your Majesty that the path to success does not go by dark, unseen places, avoiding witnesses, but follows the bustling sunlit highway. The more I am seen around the palace, doing things a young Emperor would do, the less likely doubts will be voiced or considered.”

  She knew this was exactly what Lady Twilight had been telling her, but it was a path beset with traps. “You would like to lead the army on maneuvers?” she sneered.

  He took her seriously. “A wonderful suggestion, Your Majesty! No one in the army can possibly have met your noble son! I had in mind a pilgrimage to some sacred place outside Sublime Mountain, but the army would be even better.”

  Could he possibly be so naive? “You may risk a daily walk in the park. You may even have a favorite concubine, but you are to service others also. If you perform as required, I may allow more liberty later.”

  “Snow Lily!” he said. “Snow Lily is special, because she knows I am not what I pretend to be, although at times she seems able to forget that. I am safer with her than I will ever be with others, who may notice a slip and gossip. I want to name Snow Lily the Pearl Concubine, which I understand is the rank below Junior Empress. And I want her company during the day. We can go boating, sightseeing. An Emperor should enjoy himself by day. I will do my duty by the others at night.”

  His bizarre impudence was almost refreshing. But not quite. She had never considered the possibility that juvenile lust would lead him into something so absurd as falling in love with one of the girls. Still, that weakness made him much more vulnerable to her control. Even at his age, could he be so stupid as to make Snow Lily hostage for his own good behavior? Or was he playing a clumsy double game?

  “I am unaccustomed to bargaining.”

  He had the gall to study her like a dealer eyeing a horse. “How long do I have?” he said brashly. “Do you have a target in mind? Three of them with child? Or four? Will you wait until my first brood hatches and you can confirm that I have sired at least one fake prince for you? Can I count on living that long?”

  She threw her tea in his face. He blinked, but made no move to wipe his face or robe.

  “Nobody speaks to me like that! Lady Twilight gave you absolute, ironclad assurances that you would be returned alive and unharmed when your mission was accomplished.”

  “She did. I did not believe that then and do not now.”

  Too accustomed to cringing eunuchs, she had forgotten how difficult unaltered males could be. “Faugh! You accepted the commission even believing you would be murdered at the end of it? You expect me to believe that?”

  “I did. I do. I did not care—then. But now I think I do.”

  “Oh, how romantic! You have fallen in love again after only three nights’ strenuous copulation?”

  “One was enough,” Butterfly Sword said simply. “Or maybe two,” he admitted with a fleeting smile. “I will fulfill my duties better if I may have Snow Lily as my daytime companion. With respect, Your Majesty, I am not the only one at risk in this venture. If the conspiracy leaks out, the Bamboo Banner will surely overrun Heart of the World.”

  “Insolence! The Bamboo Banner is a peasant rabble of no account. I let you see the Great Council just so you would know the real alternatives. Which of those degenerate princes would you have as Emperor—Crystal Sea, Gratify Poet, or Tungusic Vision?”

  “I would never deny that Your Majesty has ruled well, and I will do whatever I can to ensure that you rule for many more years. I hope that my reward will be to live to see them.”

  “Your insolence is insufferable! I made you, boy, and I can unmake you with a snap of my fingers.”

  “Did not the poet say, We are promised death so that we will enjoy life?” Without warning, he grinned at her and seemed to drop ten years and become a mere innocent boy. She was so startled that she discovered she was smiling back. She, the Empress Mother? Smiling at a common gigolo hired off the streets?

  “You shall have your sweetheart,” she promised, “but you must produce a boy child, whom I will serve as regent.”

  “I will work tirelessly to that end, Your Majesty.”

  That much she could believe, but it was a very long time since anyone had stood up to her like this hired stud. He would bear very careful watching. He m
ight well have completed his assignment already. More than one Emperor had been born posthumously.

  Chapter 9

  The sun sank to rest beyond the paddy fields and a moon thinner than paper showed for a few moments in the rosy hem of the sky. Nightingale Moon! Shard Gingko turned his head and, yes, he could see a few bright stars starting to appear in the east. And a broom star, still faintly. A second would join it soon, when the sky grew darker.

  He carefully cleaned his brush and placed it back in the box. He and the box were sharing a small jetty in a backwater of the Clay River—sharing it with a dozen small fishing skiffs and four million mosquitoes. It was Shard’s custom to withdraw to a quiet place in the evening, some empty corner where he could record whatever wisdom he had gleaned from Sunlight’s conversation during the day. The peasants were all preparing for bed, and the Firstborn himself always retired early, husbanding what little strength he had and resting up for another leg of his journey tomorrow.

  Asked about the meaning of the broom stars, the Urfather said, “The Desert Teacher taught that changes in Heaven mean much to Heaven and little to us; for what good is a warning if you do not know to whom it is addressed? And again he taught, what is good for one person is often evil to another. So if a broom star presages a rich harvest, that may be good news to the fathers of many children and bad news to the rich merchant who has bought up much rice in expectation of a famine. Enjoy your own world, letting the Emperor worry about Heaven and Heaven worry about the Emperor.”

  Shard laid the paper in the box also and closed the lid. He chuckled, remembering a fragment he had uncovered in Four Mountains when trying to find out everything he could about the Firstborn. It told of the great Sixth Dynasty sage, Cone Mountain:

  Cone Mountain asked, “When so many books are filled with folly, why is the wisdom of the Firstborn not written for students to study?”

  The Firstborn said, “I have no wisdom. I am not clever, I only repeat what I have heard from persons wiser than I and poems from fine poets.”

  Then Cone Mountain said, “But what you say is so uplifting that this humble follower hungers to record the words he hears.”

  The Firstborn said, “You may write if you wish, but few will read, for many will seek to destroy what you have written.”

  Of course they would—mandarins who had spent lifetimes studying corrupted texts when the Urfather quoted the original versions, Emperors who did not wish to hear of their follies and ignorance, and even rebels who thought their cause was new and glorious. Of course, dozens or thousands of followers must have recorded the Firstborn’s sayings since the invention of writing. And now Shard Gingko had joined their number.

  He was about to rise when he sensed a shadow between him and the western brightness. Looking up, he saw a barefoot male peasant in a cloth and straw hat. Surprisingly, it was Mouse, apparently seeking him out, which was unprecedented.

  “Friend?” he said with a smile.

  The boy squatted on his heels and his somber dark eyes scanned the old man carefully, for Shard must seem very old to him.

  “Master, may I ask you a question?” His adult voice had grown in, deep and tuneful.

  “You may ask, by all means, but the Firstborn will give you a better answer.”

  Mouse shook his head. “It is his answer that troubles me. The villagers were asking him what the broom stars augur.”

  “And he said he didn’t know, that no one knew, and maybe he told the questioners to enjoy them, because they are beautiful, like brush strokes in Heaven.” That was more or less what he always said, every day, in every village.

  “But later, Master, I asked him what the broom stars meant for him.”

  Shard said, “Hm.” The question had been impertinent, but he could not resist asking, “And what did he tell you?”

  “He said that, for him, they were very bad news.”

  Shard shrugged and rose to his feet. “If the Man of a Thousand Lives wishes you to know more, lad, I expect he will tell you more. How many more days to High Abode?”

  “The villagers say two days, Master.”

  Two more boat trips. And then what? How many more days to Sublime Mountain and the Emperor?

  As he trudged back the few dozen paces to the village, Shard noticed that the smaller broom star was now brighter and closer to the larger than it had been last night. Two broom stars in Nightingale Moon in the Year of the Nightingale were a sure sign that the Portal of Worlds would open in the next Year of the Firebird. Sedge Shallows had told him that before he died, and Sedge Shallows had been a mandarin of very high rank.

  The mood of the villages had changed as the Firstborn’s expedition neared High Abode. By then, Shard had stopped worrying about pursuit, for thousands of boats plied the great waterway, thousands of towns and villages lined its banks. Sublime Mountain would never find them now, unless some genius mandarin guessed that they were bound for the site of last year’s brief rebellion, and how could anyone do that?

  It was easier to guess why nobody along the river wanted to discuss the place or even admit ever hearing of the mysterious Bamboo. His Banner had certainly not been seen or heard of anywhere else in Qiancheng Province. But the governor had been forced to send troops to High Abode, which was shameful, and a dangerous association to make.

  Shard could piece it together as easily as the Firstborn could. No great peasant rabble had come marching through on its way north from Dongguan to overthrow the Son of the Sun. That was how dynasties fell. This had been some local dissident picking up the rumors of southern unrest and deciding to start his own reform movement before Bamboo himself arrived. Rash youngsters had joined in and overwhelmed the elders. The nonsense might have been stopped with a few beatings or executions, but the governor of Qiancheng had chosen to defend the dynasty.

  Sunlight insisted on seeing for himself, which proved difficult, for the village stood on a high bench, too far back from the river for his misshapen legs to carry him. Eventually, Mouse found a farmer with a bullock cart and an independent turn of mind who agreed to take a day away from his labors to show the Urfather the remains of High Abode. At first, the road crossed paddy fields on the river’s flood plain, where every able-bodied man and woman was busily transplanting rice in the heat of early summer. Then it angled up the slope, much of which had been terraced into more fields, although the upper levels were deserted and already seemed forlorn and desolate.

  Long before Shard saw the village, he smelled the stench of burned homes and the choking sweetness of decay. When the road leveled off, he saw heaped ashes of wicker and thatch, scraps of iron, broken pottery, and a few stark chimney tombstones marking houses of the wealthy. Much worse than those were human remains, scattered bones, scavenger birds too bloated to fly, waddling rats, scraps of clothing. High Abode had not just been massacred; it had been left to rot.

  Mouse went chalky white with shock. Sunlight lost his temper. His outrage should have been the shrill complaint of an adolescent, but it came out as a thunderclap of celestial fury.

  “Absolute Purity, he calls himself? Absolute Putrefaction, I say! Is the Son of the Sun mad? Does no one teach him history? Do they not warn him that such atrocities herald the end of a dynasty? Go! Go now! Go and bring honest people to give these wretches peace!”

  The farmer was so overcome that he left his tortoise cart and ran off on foot, leaving Sunlight weeping in it. Shard and Mouse remained behind on the charnel ground, making vain efforts to drive away the vermin. The Firstborn continued to growl in tongues Shard did not know, although sometimes he recognized the names of infamous tyrants and celebrated battles.

  Eventually, the youth’s frail strength gave way and he flopped down in exhaustion and misery. Shard waited a few prudent moments, then approached the cart. He had no doubt that an army of the local peasants would come running in answer to the Firstborn’s summons, eager
now to give the dead proper burial as they should have done sooner.

  “Master?” he whispered.

  The boy looked up with eyes hollowed like caves by the cares of centuries. “I warned you that my disciples come to no good.”

  “Yes, Master, and I do not flinch, not yet. We’ll go on to Sublime Mountain, now? So you can admonish the Golden Throne?”

  The Firstborn shook his head. “We must go south. I must find Bamboo and stop him. He does not know what he is doing.”

  Shard remembered something he had written only yesterday.

  The Master said, “No folly have I not seen before, no sorrow have I not mourned many times, no warning is ever heeded.”

  Chapter 10

  “I am carrying your child,” Verdant Harmony announced in a very soft voice.

  She was brushing out her hair at her dressing table by the light of a single lamp. Verdant was crazy about hair brushing, always pestering Silky to do it for her. Usually, he was happy to oblige, because it made her lubricious as fast as any trick in his bag, but at the moment, he was resting, spread on the bed in much the same condition he had been when some fortunate midwife had been the first person to set eyes on him. Except that then she would have been holding his legs together, likely.

  Obviously rest time was over. He summoned enthusiasm and sat up. “Oh, that’s wonderful news!” Wonderful, yes, but not news. He could count. Sixty-nine nights without a single refusal? He had told the Abbot weeks ago that he had completed that stage of his mission. He held out his arms. “Come here and be smothered in kisses.”

  She turned on her stool to stare at him. “What are we going to do about it?” Her face, her body, would make a eunuch weep.

  He rose from the bed and went to kneel at her feet. “Not it—he! He won’t stop us making love for a long time yet. Come back to bed and let’s celebrate!”

  She slapped his face. He saw it coming and steeled himself to take it. She had muscles to stun a mule. He thought his neck was broken.