Princess Yifan

by J L Blenkinsop

  “Good,” said John, snuggling up to his brave and beautiful wife, who told him to go get a shower. And that, it appeared, was the end of that.

  *

  The last few days of the holiday were spent finishing off some sightseeing tasks and doing last-minute shopping before the long flight back via Helsinki. It has to be said that John was quite unusually quiet in those last few days, and Yifan thought she saw a far-away look in his eyes. Being young and therefore not afraid to ask silly questions, she asked him if he was bothered by what had happened in Beijing. When he shook his head, she then asked him if he was bothered by what he had experienced on the flight from Shangri-La.

  “Not bothered, but it does have an effect on you,” he said. “To – well, to meet myself; how else could I put that? To talk to my own self in the future. And to feel my body at that age, to know what is about to happen, and then for it to happen…”

  “What was it like?” asked Yifan.

  “It was… indescribable. It’s like that meat we had at lunch at the North Korean restaurant – you can’t describe it in terms of any other thing. It’s not like chicken, or lamb, or beef, or pork…”

  Yifan knew what it had been, and did not approve, but she did understand what he was trying to say.

  “And you know,” said John, with that far-away look in his eye, and a touch of moisture too, “I never got around to asking him who won the Grand National.”

  *

  “I’m surprised that Yifan hasn’t asked you who won the Grand National,” said Ji Ye to Vicky, folding a shirt and putting it in her suitcase. “Now that the other me and the other John know all about this Universe thing.”

  “I don’t think it’s the sort of thing John would think of,” replied Vicky, her voice muffled by virtue of it being stuck deep inside a wardrobe. She, too, was packing.

  “Of course he wouldn’t. But I would.”

  “And Yifan would forget about it. Besides, it may not work. They live in a different Universe. There may be the same horses running, but there doesn’t have to be the same winner. What if you put a load of money you couldn’t afford on the horse that won in OUR Universe, and it didn’t come first in YOURS?”

  “Then I would blame John for not explaining it properly in the first place.”

  A few years had gone by since John had died. Ji Ye was retired from business, but making money from good investments, and Vicky was now an established and popular expert on Archaeology and History. The furore over her being a Princess of China had largely died down, although there was still some mention of that whenever additional publicity was wanted for a show.

  Vicky still, in her heart, and would not admit it to Yifan, felt like a Princess, was glad that she was a Princess, hated to have given up the substance of her role while keeping just the title. She had to admit that China seemed to be getting along very well nowadays without her and her mother there to rule it, but she would have liked to have had the opportunity to see how well she could have done it.

  And China seemed not to have forgotten about her. She was packing to go to Xi’an as a member of the Western advance group for the first serious archaeological dig into the great tomb of the First Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, invited by a Chinese media company in collaboration with the BBC, NBC and the Beijing People’s University’s Department of Chinese Culture and Historical Studies, who were managing the archaeology. She would be a member of the first party of archaeologists to enter that great man-made hill, the flattened cone that hid within it a palace of the dead built for just one man, and which had been guarded for two thousand three hundred years (give or take) by the Terracotta Warriors.

  Ji Ye had insisted on going with her.

  “I have nothing much else to do now,” she explained. “It’ll be nice to go back for a while, see some friends, do some shopping.”

  Vicky moaned a little about her mum coming along to hold her hand, but secretly she was very glad. She’d recently broken up with her latest boyfriend, and did not fancy being alone with a group of people she didn’t know for however long this jaunt would last.

  “I wish I could go in there with you,” said Ji Ye.

  “You went on a dig with me five years ago and moaned all the time,” reminded Vicky.

  “It was cold and wet. This will be different.”

  “It will be. We have to wear NBC suits and air tanks to go inside. The atmosphere in the tomb is full of mercury vapour. We would die quite quickly if we weren’t protected.”

  -- What’s NBC? asked Yifan, who had crept up on Vicky and had been listening.

  -- Nuclear, Biological and Chemical. The suit protects you from those things.

  “Ah,” said Ji Ye. “Iffy Yifan’s back.”

  -- Don’t let her call me that, moaned Yifan, and Vicky admonished her mother gravely.

  -- We’re off to China tomorrow, explained Vicky, and told Yifan all that had taken place since her last visit. Yifan appeared to be quite impressed, and wished that she could see Vicky on the TV. Especially the one where Yifan had appeared too.

  Vicky was nonplussed for a moment, then remembered, and said, “I’ll show you. Screen on – play part one of Desert Citadels.”

  In the middle of the bedroom in which they stood a rectangle grew brightly in the air until it was about three feet wide. The colours of the desert sprang out, the program title hung in the shimmering air, the music swelled. The viewpoint swung slowly around to show Vicky, in her khaki shorts and blouse, holding the skull, Geoff.

  “This skull is over thirteen thousand years old…”

  -- It’s not new, then, said Yifan; and Ji Ye was astonished when Vicky bent in the middle and then collapsed on the floor laughing like a drain.

  *

  Nothing seemed to have happened as a result of the exhibition at the British Museum. No-one came looking for the Chinese Princesses. Of course, it was only a matter of time until someone managed to find out about them, but they were well prepared for discovery, knowing what had happened to Vicky. They would not be shot at; they would come to an agreement immediately with all the interested parties, and then have the rest of their lives to live out in peace, as Princesses-en-titre. Ji Ye was sure it would help Yifan’s chances in whatever career she eventually chose for herself. Yifan mentioned Vicky’s Xi’an opportunity as an example of that, and then boasted of having appeared with Vicky on TV, in three-dee in the middle of the bedroom, which totally confused her mother and required further, more elaborate explanation until Ji Ye begged her to stop.

  The next day was a school day, and Yifan was up reasonably early despite a late night. John, looking bleary and drinking black coffee, complimented her on her eagerness and early rising. Yifan just grunted, and went off in search of Bart, to hug him before she left.

  It was 6:45 am.

  By 6:48 am, Yifan had been to see Vicky and almost crushed Bart when she went, her head falling on him as she held him in her lap. She reported to John and Ji Ye (who was standing by in the guise of a chauffeuse) that Vicky had wished her well and had a new boyfriend, who was an American. And he was older than her, and rich, and Yifan had seen him. Also, said Yifan, he had almost kissed her, but she had managed to move Vicky’s head in time so all he had done was hit Vicky in the nose with his forehead.

  John sputtered over his coffee and went to the bathroom to practice laughing.

  *

  “I’m sorry, I probably was too sudden,” Abel said, proffering a neatly-ironed cotton handkerchief.

  “’S a’ ri’,” said Vicky indistinctly, pressing a wad of tissues to her nose. The tissues were mostly red, and beginning to drip. “Y’ve g’ a h’d h’d, ‘n’ ‘ve g’ a s’f n’se…”

  Abel was, as Yifan had revealed, older than Vicky, but only by four years. He was a tall American from San Francisco, and owned a media production company that was in the collaboration which was going to make the Xi’an documentary. He had met Vicky at a reception for the foreign media companies coming on-board, an
d had hit it off with her almost immediately.

  “You’re Princess Vicky,” he had said, and she had corrected him.

  “I’m Princess Yifan,” she admonished. “My name is actually Yifan, but I’ve used the name Vicky for years now. Stops me getting confused.”

  He had looked a bit puzzled at that, but as the uneventful evening wore on, and the speeches got even longer and more boring, they had hidden themselves away in a quiet corner and chatted. First it was about the project, and then about one another. At the end of the reception they had gone for dinner together; and by the time Yifan caused him to head-butt her they had been an item for almost two months.

  Vicky inspected her nose in her mobile using the front camera and cleaned up with spit and paper tissues. The bleeding seemed to have stopped. Abel turned away and looked out of the wide window over the bright holographic lights of Xi’an city.

  “Where shall we eat tonight?” he enquired. Vicky shrugged.

  “Same as last night.”

  “We can’t always eat burgers.”

  “You’re an American. Of course you can always eat burgers.”

  “Michael told me about a place near here that does great seafood. We’ll go there.”

  So they did, and Vicky enjoyed the food and the bustle, and they saw Michael, who was the BBC production secretary, with a few others from the advance group.

  Ji Ye had gone on from Xi’an to Shanghai and then to Changchun to see friends. Vicky, as the only actual archaeologist in the Western advance group, was working with the archaeologists from Beijing who were preparing to open the tomb. They had conducted a huge array of tests on the conditions inside it, using chemical sniffers and robot cameras inserted from the top of the great mound, and magnetometers and ground radar over and around it, identifying structures inside the space the mound enclosed. The entrances to the tomb had been identified early in the century, and excavation towards one of them was proceeding slowly. So many things were being discovered even in that simple dig that there was great excitement within the archaeological community around the world. Some said that the bodies which were being found were tomb robbers; others thought they were tomb builders who had been ritually sacrificed before the tomb was covered over with earth. Whichever it was, they were accompanied by items of gold and jade which were of fabulous craftsmanship and value.

  The media coverage at Xi’an so far was being provided by the Chinese media partners, but at the weekend the advance group would go to the site to set up their establishing shots. Vicky would be doing to-camera work from the script she was writing which would introduce the tomb, its location and history, and the story of its archaeological examination. This would continue as a weekly broadcast leading up to the opening of the tomb and its exploration.

  Abel was not an archaeologist and had first amused and later exasperated Vicky with constant questions about the site. How big were the entrances? How big was the space inside? How much would be in there – of gold, of gems? To many of his questions she had no accurate answers. All they had were the legends about the tomb, their current examinations, and the results of some chemical and ground radar tests done at the end of the twentieth century. They indicated that inside the Qin tomb was a vast space landscaped as a map of China, with its major rivers represented by liquid mercury, and the major cities as golden models. The stars in the sky were pearls set in the ceiling high above, accurately mapping the constellations. Somewhere near the centre of the map would be the sarcophagus containing the body of the First Emperor. There may be lesser coffins containing wives, concubines or servants, but this was not known for sure. When the Terracotta Warriors had first been discovered it had been supposed there would be none, because the Emperor had not heeded the custom of the time by guarding his tomb with the slain bodies of his own soldiers, but with the life-sized terracotta army; so why would he then have killed the ones he loved?

  But there was an account written about a hundred years after the death of Qin Shi Huangdi which told that his successor, Qin Er Shi, had killed the builders of the tomb and the concubines of his father the First Emperor – hundreds of people in all – as well as his own brothers and sisters. And in the digs around the mound that took place at the beginning of the twenty-first century huge burial pits had been found – the tomb builders in three jumbled graveyards, and what appeared to be servants and the families of the sons and daughters of the Emperor in another set of seventeen pits. It appeared that Qin Er Shi had indeed got rid of any other claimants to the throne.

  Vicky was particularly sad about the stable pits, where horses had been found which had clearly been buried alive.

  Abel was not so interested in the vast city of the dead that surrounded the tomb mound, although for Vicky it was fascinating. Much of the documentary series would be looking at it, and the opening of the tomb itself would be the climax of the fourth two-hour-long episode. Altogether there were twenty-two hours of 3DHD programming planned for broadcast, along with another eighty hours of net content aimed at educators, museums and interested institutions. And the pay was, to Vicky’s mind, unreal – she could retire and start her own stud farm, breeding palominos, with the money this work would bring her.

  As she brushed her teeth that night she dreamed of what she would see when finally the tomb was opened.

  VII.

  Yifan dreamed of ponies, then pennies, then peonies. Then she dreamed about a particular boy band she really loved, but they all turned into ponies and cantered off in one direction. And then the alarm went off, in a different direction.

  She really did enjoy school, but did not enjoy getting up so early. This was the time that John usually got up to go to work – in fact she could hear him in the bathroom – and he had to make a long journey to get there. She was being picked up by Rachel and her friend, who took her to the bus stop and then clustered together with their friends, while Yifan clustered together with hers.

  Here is a list of the things that Yifan could choose to do at her school, in addition to the normal lessons:

  Trampolining, flute, violin, ukulele, Zumba, modern dance, street dance, drah-mah, choir.

  There are many more, but surely this is enough to be going on with. Yifan chose trampolining, flute and ukulele. John hoped that she would practice them serially and not all together, which could get messy and might mean a visit to the hospital for flute extraction.

  The school set quite a lot of homework, and Yifan tried to get John to do some of it for her, but he displayed his ignorance of mathematics, history, geography and German so well that she had to do it all herself, which was inconvenient. But at least she did her homework and gave it in on time, which attracted admiration from her family – excepting Bart, who was miffed at having not been asked to help.

  When Rachel knocked at the front door Yifan let John answer it, since he was on his way out anyway, and then started looking for her shoes while Rachel stood hopping from one foot to the other with impatience. Eventually she was ready, and they made their way to the bus stop. Yifan itched to tell Rachel all about her being a Princess, and about Vicky, and about Bart being the famous lover of a famous Queen (she had not decided which one), and who had been exiled because he was only a lowly cat; but she held back, as she had done every day. Although one day the news that she was the Princess of China (“a” Princess of China did not sound as important) would become public, and then she would have nothing to tell to Rachel.

  They arrived at the bus stop, and Rachel’s friend Lauren was waiting, and Yifan’s friend Claire was waiting, so they paired off and it was just a normal day, and Bart’s secret was safe.

  But on the bus it was a different story.

  Some girls Yifan did not know were looking at her. And several were whispering together, and one or two even pointed. Then Rachel and Lauren were whispering with their friends, and Rachel looked astonished, and looked straight at Yifan, and Yifan wondered what she had done, or what might be hanging out of her nose. She sniffed
hard, but there was nothing to be reeled back in. Then Rachel came down the aisle towards her and made Claire move so she could sit with Yifan.

  “There was something on the news this morning about a Chinese man in Cardiff, a Professor of Engineering, who’s descended from the Emperor of China. And his daughter and grand-daughter live in Kent, and they’re both Princesses. Your grandfather lives in Cardiff.”

  Yifan agreed that he did, indeed, live in Cardiff. She had told her friends about Cardiff, and about moving to Kent, and about her grandfather the Professor of Engineering. So now they thought…

  Oh!

  Yifan motioned Rachel to come closer, and to be quiet, and tried to whisper as softly as possible that it was true, but Rachel mustn’t tell anyone else about it.

  This whisper was picked up by sharp ears nearby and relayed to the rest of the bus.

  And, whispered Yifan, people might come after her and start to murder her.

  This spread rather more quickly, together with alarm.

  But, whispered Yifan, she would renounce the throne of China, and just live as a Princess in name only, so long as she got some money and holidays, and people were nice to her.

  Although this was also relayed, it did not get very far because of the notion that Yifan might be murdered soon; and speculation arose as to whom amongst her friends would get to do the job.

  All in all, it was a very long drive to school for Yifan that morning, and a strange day throughout as friends refused to sit near her or play with her, and teachers didn’t ask her questions or even look in her direction. At the end of the school day she phoned her mum and demanded to be picked up.

  “I’m sorry,” said Ji Ye. “The place is surrounded by reporters. I can’t get out of the house!”

  John had been called, and had arranged to leave work early. No reporters had caught up with him yet, so he was able to get to Yifan’s school and take her back home in a taxi.

  *

  Outside the house there was a scrum of people all milling around. There were cameras from TV stations and from newspapers, and more than one van had dishes on the roof. John directed the taxi to stop at Rachel’s house, and they holed up there with tea (for John) and cola (for Yifan). On the phone Ji Ye was getting frantic. Rachel’s mother suggested that she should go out the back door and climb over the fence to the neighbouring garden, and then the next garden, and so come at last to Rachel’s. Ji Ye tied string to the kitchen steps and took them with her. She stood on them to get over the fence, then pulled them over and used them again until she reached her goal and collapsed into John’s arms, sobbing.