Silk Road

by Jeanne Larsen

  ‘Why, she even sent her grandnephew off to many a barbarian woman, in order to seal the allegiance of a khan!’ He clenched his arthritic fist, and I remembered the stem soldier within this kindly old man. I knew it didn’t bother him that imperial princesses were regularly married off to Tibetans or to Turks, rarely returning home to civilization. I thought about going back inside, but I could hear Mama Lu in the front room scolding Mistmaid and Amber. A few petals fluttered from a tree in the neighbour’s garden, catching the sunshine as they fell. Crescent and Luna were taking a nap, and I felt lonely. Surely I could get Walleye onto another subject.

  …told me that back in the early days, when she was still trying to get her husband’s chief consort out of the way –’ Walleye had been staring at his knotted hands, held out before him in the warm sunlight as if the heat might ease the pain in his joints, but now his head snapped up. ‘Well, she killed her own daughter to frame her rival, and it worked!’ The indignation left the old man’s voice, and his good eye fixed itself on my face. ‘Of course,’ he rasped, ‘the shocking thing is that it was a living child she killed, one old enough to toddle about, not a sickly infant that might really be an evil spirit come to worm its way inside a family. It’s not the same –’

  The freshening breeze brought a flurry of petals over the wall. I knew old Walleye hadn’t meant to speak of anything I’d done, and everyone knows not to care too much for babies in their early days – so many die – much less something not yet formed into a child. But my skin chilled just the same, and I stared at the design of the petals scattered over the swept earth at my feet.

  The silence bothered me. ‘Tell me something else about Empress Wu,’ I said hastily. ‘Something new.’

  He rubbed one hand against the other. ‘Let me see now. Something new. Ah, here’s something a talented young lady like yourself might want to know. They say that just before she proclaimed her new dynasty, she set herself up as equal to the very creator of writing.’ He glanced at me again. ‘Not that I mind women who write, you know. I admire anyone who can do more than scratch out a word or two like me. But what she did was, she made new written words, you see. New forms for old words, that is, and said they showed the meaning better. I call that tampering with things that oughtn’t to be tampered with, myself.’ He massaged a knuckle too hard, and winced. ‘But maybe you can put some of that into a poem?’

  I laughed. ‘Tell me another story instead,’ I said.

  ‘Well, well. As long as I’m on about the women, has anyone ever told you that it was Empress Wu’s daughter, the Peace Princess she was called, that really put our Brilliant Emperor on the throne?’

  I shook my head, and he looked about us cautiously, but Mama Lu’s scolding voice was the only sign of life around Felicity Hall.

  ‘Well, you know His Majesty discovered, oh, years ago, that this Peace Princess was plotting a coup against him. But His Majesty let her kill herself quietly at home, instead of having her head chopped off for all the court to gawk at like most of the other traitors, and why do you think that was?’

  ‘She was his aunt, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Ah, but those things don’t count for much when the royalty’s scrapping for power!’ His good eye flashed, and I saw for a moment the idealistic, youthful soldier he had once been, loyal to his code and contemptuous of those who would break with righteousness for gain. But then he looked around again, afraid of being overheard, and became once more the gossipy old man, sitting in the sunshine and talking more than he should. ‘But our emperor did owe the Peace Princess something, so he let her die with dignity.’

  I picked up one of the flower petals and asked him why.

  ‘Let me see now,’ he said in lower tones. ‘It all goes back to a power grab by some other women, when the Brilliant Emperor was still a young and unimportant prince. The Empress Wu died at last. Her son had been placed upon the throne. I must have been about thirty-five then. But it was the new emperor’s wife, Empress Wei, and their daughter who ran things, you know, and there was no love lost between them and that emperor’s sister, the Peace Princess.

  ‘Anyway, after five years Empress Wei and the daughter killed the Emperor by putting poison in his favourite cakes. At least, most folks think the story’s true. The women set his last son, a boy no more than your age, young miss, on the throne. He was the Empress Wei’s own son, you see, so she reckoned to rule through him as dowager. Two weeks later, though, our Brilliant Emperor and the Peace Princess’s son rallied some of us Palace Guards and took the palace. The Empress Wei was killed trying to escape, and they got her daughter while she was putting on her fancy makeup.’ He chortled, and the gaze of both eyes, the good one and the dead, fixed far away. ‘There was another woman in the Wei clique, Shuang-guan Wan-er, who’d worked her way up from a palace slave and had been practically running the civil service exams. Wild for poetry they say that one was! She tried to change over to t’other side that night, but got herself killed for her pains.’

  So old Walleye had once been in the palace guard. I didn’t want to hear any more, yet I couldn’t stop listening: the sinuous history had me caught, as they say snakes in the faraway birthland of the Buddha catch birds with their eyes and dance before them the story of their deaths. Seeking some distraction, I reached into the pocket of my jacket and found a broken hempseed cake wrapped in a handkerchief. Walleye took half when I offered it, but his voice reeled out unstopped, describing that stifling summer night of the coup, the way the men’s warrior shouts and the frantic voices of the women had rung through the long galleries of the inner palace.

  I held my half of the cake uneaten. ‘How do you know it was the Peace Princess who was behind the move against the Empress Wei and the others?’

  ‘I was there! Besides, who else had the connections and the money to make a coup against the palace itself succeed?’ Again, his good eye went steely. ‘Remember, the Brilliant Emperor was only a concubine’s son and had two elder brothers besides. He didn’t have the standing to carry it off without her help.’

  ‘But I always heard he took the throne on his own, for his father’s sake – his father was the murdered emperor’s brother, you know – and only ascended himself when heaven sent a comet to tell his father to abdicate.’

  ‘Oh, it’s true about the comet. The government under the Brilliant Emperor’s father was completely out of control. But don’t you ever say that to anyone!’ A tone of command leapt into his cracked voice for an instant, then faded as he continued, ‘The Peace Princess was running things – a woman in charge again! –through her brother, which was why she’d set him upon the throne in the first place. Things went her way for the next two years, you can be sure of that. Why, the Brilliant Emperor himself even got his father to recall his aunt from banishment. But the comet came, the old emperor knew it was time to step down, and that was that. It was only a matter of time until the Peace Princess went. She’d already tried to poison her nephew once, but then she attempted that second coup and he couldn’t let her stay around to make more trouble.’

  The story stopped at last. I crumbled a few seeds from a bit of the cake, and they fell among the petals.

  ‘That’s when I lost the sight of my eye.’ Walleye returned from the maze of bygone days, though I don’t think he knew, or cared much, whether I was listening now. ‘Not in the failed coup, but in the first one, against the Wei group. Some vixen of a lady-in-waiting nicked my eye with her dagger.’ He snorted. ‘Much good it did her! My own commander treated me well enough after that, but it was General Li who really helped me, got me a place when they mustered me out and all. Said it was a shame they wouldn’t use a disfigured man in the palace of the Son of Heaven, considering how I’d come to be that way.’

  His voice trailed off, but mine burst forth. ‘General Li? Of the Palace Guard?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He smiled into the past. ‘Haven’t I told you about him? He wasn’t one of the three commanders they brought into the coup, but I�
�d been transferred over from his unit just a few months before, and he’d always had a liking for me. Said I was a real soldier’s soldier. He wasn’t a general yet in those days, of course, but later he was and they sent him off to command a garrison out in the far West.’

  It seemed forever until I got him to confirm what my heart had known right away: this General Li was my own father. Some part of me still wanted to keep the secret of who I was, but when I described Baba’s tiger tattoo and told Walleye how I had been captured by the Tibetan raiders he struck his palm with his fist, then winced.

  ‘Death-bound dogs of Tibet!’ he muttered. After I mentioned those enemies of the empire, nothing else was needed to win over the loyalty he had borne my father for years.

  ‘The little daughter of my General Li!’ he exclaimed joyfully. ‘Well, well. Miss Bordermoon, now I know why I took to you. “She has an air of quality about her,” I said to myself right away. A warrior’s daughter, that’s what you are, and it didn’t escape this old soldier’s eye.’

  Walleye was glad enough to talk about his hero. As the sunlight moved on, I found out where Baba’s family home was, in a ward not far away. Then before we could talk further. Mama Lu called me in, upbraiding me for sitting around in the courtyard when the first guests of the day might call at any moment.

  ‘I’ve been thinking of how to handle your career. Miss Bordermoon,’ she said over her shoulder as her skirts swept before me through the reception room. ‘The reputation of Felicity Hall is on the rise, I’m sure of it, and now that you’ve come out of your shell, and the men are beginning to talk of your music and –’ she turned to give me a look that made me cast my eyes down – ‘and your other charms, I think we’d do best if you stayed a bit aloof. The Lady Guan-yin knows that suits your personality, and with spring here the gentlemen will be ready to compete for a popular new beauty who seems unwilling to form an attachment. Yes, we’ll make sure you circulate a bit, but don’t seem too eager.’ She stopped and faced me, rubbing one of her green jade bracelets voluptuously with her thumb. ‘We have a good season before us, I feel sure.’

  Now that I had found out where my mother lived, I was impatient to put this life behind me. After several talks with Walleye, I came up with a plan. I was only allowed to leave Felicity Hall on the eighth, eighteenth, or twenty-eighth of each month, after paying Mama Lu a string of cash, and even then I was supposed to go no farther than a temple in the Pingkang Ward. But a certain friend of Amber’s never left her room before midday when he stayed over. I would steal out before dawn and be ready to leave the ward when the morning drum sounded and the big gates were opened, riding the beautiful white mare that belonged to Amber’s friend. That way I could travel quickly, and in a suitable style, without attracting attention by renting a sedan chair.

  I wanted to go alone, so I persuaded Walleye that it was far too risky for him to leave his post at Felicity Hall. ‘Right enough,’ the old soldier said. I’ll take care of things here for you.’

  So I dressed quietly in the darkness of my room, choosing a blue-green brocade dress, and a tight jacket with a higher neckline than most. I added a brightly patterned stole for modesty. The little ‘barbarian headdress’ had already come into style for ladies of the upper classes, but instead I put on an old-fashioned broad-brimmed hat with a veil that came to my shoulders. I didn’t want a chance meeting with some visitor to Felicity Hall to let my secret out, and besides, my mother and my grandparents might not approve of the new and more daring fashion, which displayed a lady’s face. It could have occurred to me to wonder whether they might not disapprove of other things, but it did not.

  I felt strange, riding that horse down the lane away from Felicity Hall. I had gone out to entertain at banquets, and once or twice a month Mama Lu took us to visit a temple. But now I was on my own, astride a beautiful horse with silken tassels hanging from her bridle. Her narrow, dished face revealed her descent from the big horses of the Arabs, perhaps one of those presented to the court in the days of Empress Wu; she stood taller than the stocky Mongol ponies I had ridden before. The dawn drum sounded, and the ward gate creaked open. I hung back until a worried-looking charwoman, a few gentlemen with bleary eyes, and a sly-faced groom in the high boots and knee-length coat of the west had all gone on through. Then I rode out into the expansive avenue, happy and alone.

  At first I wanted to toss my hat into the ditch beside me. I was the daughter of the heroic General Li, returning home to my mother’s side at last! Why did I need to hide my face? Then there were moments, as the light rose and more people filled the streets, when I was glad of the veil and the distance it put between me and that multitude of strangers. I was not used to seeing so many new faces when I had no companion. Still, the white mare stepped proudly, as if she exulted in her exotic looks that set her apart from the common run of horses. And for once I felt the same.

  That mood soon passed. I suppose I expected the Li family gatekeeper to summon my mother, who would sweep me into her arms, and crying tears of joy would lead me in to kowtow happily before my father’s own father and mother. Then my grandfather would take me on his knee as Baba had, and my grandmother and mother would pet me, and listen to my stories, weeping and gasping by turns, and praising me for all I had endured so well.

  But our visions of the future have no more truth about them than our rehearsals of the past. I found the house with little difficulty. The crimson lacquer of its gateposts was badly chipped and cracked, yet the gatekeeper answered smartly enough. And closed the gate smartly, too, after I had given him my tale. ‘Be off!’ he growled, squinting up at me. ‘What proof do you have for this reckless talk? We’ve trouble enough here without lying gold-diggers like you. Go away before I call a bailiff and have you carted off for fraud.’

  Having no other choice, I left. I told Walleye what had happened – it took only a moment – and stayed on watch in his room by the gate while he quickly put the white mare away. When he returned, he wanted to talk of other plans, but I only shook my head and ran off to my room. The solitude I had relished an hour before made a poor companion now.

  Walleye thought of a new plan soon enough, but it was to be some time before we could put it into effect. That afternoon Mama Lu began preparations for our performances in the park along the Serpentine; the flower-viewing season was at its height, and she had managed to get one of the city magistrates to sponsor us in a recital in the Waterlily Garden there. She kept after us to practise every moment we weren’t entertaining guests. The dressmaker came each morning. The whole house was in an uproar of music and cutting and stitching.

  I was glad to have the distraction of the festivities to come. And glad, I must admit, that I would have the chance to play my lute and sing a set of lyrics of my own composing, though a nervous tightness gripped my chest.

  The day dawned clear and spring-warm. Felicity Hall was left in the cook’s charge, and even Walleye came along to help with the arrangements. Our hired carriages left us near Purple-cloud Tower in the southwest corner of the park, and more than one head in the throng of strollers turned as Mama Lu led the six of us slowly north towards the Waterlily Garden at the far end of the park. It seemed that half the city had come to enjoy the springtime, and then it came to me that Baby too might be there, somewhere in the crowds.

  I was uncomfortably conscious of the stares as we walked along an avenue of crab-apple trees in full bloom. Would I be able to play well before so many people? And yet the park was so beautiful that I soon regained my inner privacy. The shores of the Serpentine glinted green with new grasses and young willow leaves. I caught sight of a pair of half-tame teal leading their ducklings among the blossoms reflected, and fallen, on the clear water. The first of the redbuds were out, and the last of the white-petalled pear trees filled the air with flying foam.

  Sparkling-eyed Bouquet and languid Mistmaid, as the two eldest, walked first behind Mama Lu, the kingfisher-feather ornaments in their hair wavering and glinting with eve
ry step. Crescent and Luna followed hand in hand, eyes downcast as suited little apprentice entertainers. But none of us could resist stealing a glance when a palace eunuch trotted by on a dainty horse, bearing a carrying box of food towards the screens and canopies set up atop a little rise for the empress and her party.

  Walleye, two hired bearers, and the four maids – fashionably dressed as Persian boys – lingered some distance to the rear. That left pretty, dark-skinned Amber to walk with me. I was a bit surprised when she took my arm, but pleased, too.

  Amber seemed to sense my nervousness and did what she could to distract me from my thoughts. She whispered that the unusually snowy winter had dampened the Emperor’s New Year entertainments in the park. But today, every pavilion was filled with picnicking courtiers, and many of the best families had pitched bright damask tents where they could drink with their friends.

  Mistmaid began our first programme with a solo piece on the classical stone chimes. Despite the glitter of the golden phoenixes embroidered on her robe, when she knelt on her cushion and began to play I felt the austere beauty of the melody soaring above the scenery’s springtime lures. Some of the tightness in my chest eased.

  Then Amber played two songs on her harp of paulownia-wood, one gentle, one rather lively, just as Amber herself could be gentle and lively by turns. After that, all of us finished off the first set of performances by singing together seasonal songs from the south. They went well, but my solo would open the second programme. My chest grew tight again.

  The crowd of watchers moved on. More people filled the walkways and lanes now, some already tired, some newly exhilarated by the weather or the wine. They stepped aside reluctantly for ladies and gentlemen on horseback or in flowery carriages with vines and leaves engraved on their sides. Mama Lu led us towards a pavilion and chose a little knoll some distance back where we could stand and watch. She plumped her lips and told us we were about to see the dancers of the Imperial Teaching Quarters.