Ruler of the Sky: A Novel of Genghis Khan

by Pamela Sargent

  This was how she saw her father, clothed in the garments of his Jurchen people while practising the calligraphic art of the Han, although she had no clear memory of ever seeing the Emperor Chang-tsung alone. As the Emperor Shih-tsung had done before him, he had encouraged the practice of his own people's customs, followed before they had left their forested lands in the north to rule the Han. Their own language would be spoken, their people forbidden to wear the clothing of the Han, and those who did not kowtow in the accepted manner at court risked a beating with willow sticks. Yet Chang-tsung had also conversed in the Han tongue, studied their writings, and gathered their scholars around him; the Jurchen nobles had often violated his edicts.

  Another image came to her, of Chang-tsung astride a white horse, in pursuit of a deer. A man who could not hunt would be unable to fight; the Emperor had demanded that his meng-an and mou-k'e, the officials who guarded his realm, pass a test in archery. Yet he himself had hunted only in the land around Chung Tu, never in the wilderness of the Jurchen homeland.

  Chang-tsung had ascended to the throne after the death of his grandfather Shih-tsung. He had come to the throne as a Jurchen ruler, but had also seen himself as the heir of the Han. Only the protests of his ministers had kept Chang-tsung from making his favourite Han slave his Empress, a place that had always belonged to a Jurchen wife.

  In the Year of the Tiger, when Ch'i-kuo was six, one of her father's concubines, briefly a favourite, had taught her how to paint. The lady had suggested that Ch'i-kuo might benefit from studying with a master, but such a prospect hardly seemed likely. Ch'i-kuo was the child of a minor Han concubine who had died without giving the Emperor a son, and she showed every sign of being as sickly as her mother.

  But in that same year, the southern Emperor of the Sung rashly attacked the Kin realm, only to be defeated. Ch'i-kuo's father had received the head of Han T'o-chou, the Sung prime minister who had provoked the war, and guarantees of peace and tribute. A minor master of painting and calligraphy had appeared in Ch'i-kuo's apartments shortly after the victory celebration to instruct her. Perhaps the Emperor had been in a generous mood when his concubine appealed to him.

  She thought of a day when she had seen her father at a distance, surrounded by his eunuchs and advisers, in the park that bordered his summer palace. It was the last time she had seen him. Two years after his victory, the Emperor of the Kin, successor to the Kings of Gold who had destroyed the Khitan dynasty of Liao, had joined his ancestors.

  The image of a bamboo stalk was before her. Ch'i-kuo's favourite place in the summer palace's park had been near the shore of its lake, where bamboo stalks grew. The summer palace of Chung Tu was almost as large as the imperial palace at the city's centre, and nearly a city itself, with its thousands of ministers, courtiers, eunuchs, visiting nobles, imperial guards, and legions of servants and slaves. Carts arrived daily with food and other necessities for the court; traders in turbans, white head-dresses, or the small caps of the Han often stayed within the palace walls.

  Ladies of the court often passed Ch'i-kuo, ignoring the solemn girl who sat by the lake with her slaves. The Jurchen ladies strolled by in their silk gowns, each with a slave carrying a parasol or canopy to shield her from the sun. Many of the Han ladies had tiny lotus feet, which made their hips sway as they minced along in their birdlike gait. The ladies with lotus feet did not often walk; they were usually conveyed in litters over the arched bridges and along the park's tree-lined paths.

  The Jurchen ladies were golden-skinned, with a rosy glow in their cheeks; the Han were delicate creatures with skin as pale as fine parchment. Ch'i-kuo looked much like the Han, having taken after her mother, but was grateful her own feet had never been bound. She had grown stronger since her father's death, and often walked through the park with a few of her sisters and her slaves.

  Her sisters and the other court ladies talked of love affairs and palace intrigues. Occasionally they touched on matters outside the palace walls. The Ongghuts outside the Great Wall still refused to send tribute; the Tanguts of Hsi-Hsia had finally submitted to the northern barbarian king, and were now raiding the Kin provinces bordering Hsi-Hsia. The Emperor did not seem concerned. The Tanguts were too weak to be successful against Kin armies, and the barbarians north of the desert would resume fighting among themselves.

  Ch'i-kuo, while she painted, had learned how to render the essential lines and strokes, to be undistracted by what was unnecessary. In the conversations she heard, there were also essentials to be grasped, however obscured they might be by much of the chatter. She saw that many viewed Yung-chi, who had become the Emperor Wei, as weak and indecisive, and that those nearest him preferred him that way. He left his meng-an and mou-k'e to collect their revenues, and did not demand that they hone their skills at hunting and fighting. That much of his military strength now rested on Khitan generals and soldiers did not seem to disturb him.

  In the Year of the Sheep, the talk of the court ladies took on a slightly more worried tone. The northern barbarians had taken several outposts; the army sent to meet them had been defeated. Some murmured that the Emperor had been ready to flee from Chung Tu, until his advisers convinced him to stay.

  Ch'i-kuo was powerless to influence such events, and had other concerns. At thirteen, she worried that the Emperor might give her in marriage to a man far from the court, a distant official whose favour he needed. She meant to avoid such a fate.

  She had begun to present a few of her paintings to the Emperor. A slave presented the scrolls to the Emperor's slaves and returned with grudging words of praise for the work. When a minor minister came to her apartments with a request for a new painting for the first time, Ch'i-kuo rejoiced. If the Emperor admired the paintings, he might want to keep the painter near him. The gossip of the ladies, which she nurtured, would paint a picture for him of a girl too fragile to survive away from the court.

  The brushstrokes of her paintings took on more sureness. She painted pictures of ladies playing a game with tiles, a group of courtiers in the wide courtyard, musicians plucking at their lutes, the mulberry trees outside her windows. She wanted to preserve these images of the imperial palace, and the summer palace in the north of the city she loved even more, if the court were forced to abandon them.

  Ch'i-kuo remembered a tall young man, a courtier who had spoken to her briefly in the imperial garden. Not many people lingered there in late winter, but Ch'i-kuo welcomed the sharp clear air and the sight of bare tree limbs only beginning to sprout leaves. Her slaves were with her, although they had protested that their mistress would grow ill from the cold.

  She halted along the path, expecting the young man to go on his way after his ceremonial greeting; instead, he lingered. His name was Ye-lu Ch'u-ts'ai, and he was a son of Ye-lu Lu, a Khitan descended from the former Khitan royal house, but his family had served the Kin since the reign of Shih-tsung. Ye-lu Ch'u-ts'ai was already winning renown as a scholar, despite his youth; he had passed his chin-shih examination, and served the Emperor at court. That he had won such honours was unusual for a Khitan, most of whom preferred the army; Jurchen scholars with only a shaky grasp of the classics were often granted chin-shih degrees over more learned Khitan or Han men.

  “I wish to tell you, Highness,” the young man murmured, “of how much I admire one of your bamboo paintings. It was of a single stalk, and the strokes were both delicate and sure.”

  “Your praise honours me,” she replied. “I know of your father's writings, and of your own recent accomplishments. That such a scholar could take pleasure in my pitiful efforts is a joy to me.”

  “There was another painting I also admired,” he said, “in the apartments of the Chief Astronomer, of a tree shaded by the roof of a palace wall.” Ch'i-kuo nodded; the Emperor sometimes favoured courtiers with the gift of one of her scrolls. “I felt that the wall might suddenly vanish, leaving the tree to stand alone. But a painter's soul is more clearly revealed in the bamboo art, and there I found both delicacy
and power.”

  “I thank you for your words,” she said.

  Ye-lu Ch'u-ts'ai bowed, drew his fur collar more closely around his neck, and left her.

  She might have forgotten the young man, but that day in the garden now seemed one of the last peaceful ones she had known. Later that spring, another Khitan, the prince Ye-lu Liu-ko, revolted against the Emperor and declared himself Liao Wang, King of his people, before joining the barbarian invaders. The enemy began to move along the roads and passes that led to Chung Tu.

  The face of a young Han woman rose before her. The woman was a slave, given to Ch'i-kuo several months after the traitor Ye-lu Liu-ko had deserted to the enemy. The slave's head was bowed; her half-closed eyes were crescents, her ivory cheeks suffused with a peach-coloured glow.

  The woman's name was Mu-tan. She had not been born a slave; a Jurchen meng-an who had desired her noble family's land had gathered enough false evidence to have her father executed and his family sold into slavery. Like most of the palace slaves, Mu-tan had a network of trusted fellow slaves who could be relied upon for information. Through them, she often learned of events in the court and beyond the palace walls before they became the subject of talk among the ladies.

  Ch'i-kuo found herself more dependent on what her slaves could tell her, since the court ladies were more guarded in their talk. Mu-tan brought her tales of famine, of peasants, with failing crops and land ravaged by the barbarians, streaming to Chung Tu's twelve gates to beg for food. The carts entering the city with provisions now came from K'ai-feng and the other cities along the Yellow River in the south. Mu-tan told her of towns that had burned for days and of roads littered with the bones of the dead. Ch'i-kuo thought of such stories whenever she was summoned to one of the Emperor's banquet halls, where the court still feasted on food brought there from the south.

  The Emperor sent an army, under the command of his generals Wan-yen Kang and Chu-hu Kao-ch'i, to engage the enemy that summer. Through Mu-tan, Ch'i-kuo learned that a general pardon had been given to all prisoners in Chung Tu, Hsi Ching, and Liaotung, in order to add them to the army's ranks. The Emperor's desperation was even more evident when he sent for Ke-shih-lieh Chih-chung, a general who had already suffered disgrace after his defeat by barbarian forces. Against the advice of most of his ministers, the Emperor pardoned Chih-chung and made him Vice-Commander of the Kin armies.

  Ch'i-kuo remembered gazing at a black autumn sky above the imperial palace. The stars were hidden by clouds, and then the blackness was suddenly alive with the bright sparks and glittering streams of trees of fire and flaming flowers as thunder crashed. Chih-chung, once Vice-Commander, now Regent of the Empire, had ordered the display.

  That autumn, word had come to the Emperor that the army led by the generals Kao-ch'i and Kang had suffered a crushing defeat. It was said that the barbarian King himself had led the assault against the centre, while two wings of the enemy had descended on the fleeing army's rear and flanks. The Emperor's rage mounted when he was told that Chih-chung, ordered to stay within the city's walls to protect it, had left Chung Tu with his men to hunt. Suspicious, fearing that his Vice-Commander might be prepared to join the enemy, the Emperor Wei sent a messenger to strip him of command.

  News of the Emperor's anger raced through the palace. According to Mu-tan, some in the court were preparing to leave the city. Ch'i-kuo never learned whether any of those courtiers had escaped. A few days after the Emperor had sent his messenger to Chih-chung, the Vice-Commander entered Chung Tu and surrounded the palace with his men.

  Screams echoed through the courtyard; the halls outside Ch'i-kuo's door were filled with the clashing of weapons and the shouts of triumphant or dying soldiers. She waited inside her rooms, her women huddled around her, until the sounds died. Before she could rise from her chair, three soldiers pushed through the door, swords in hand.

  She saw immediately that they were not palace guards. “How dare you enter my apartments.” Her voice shook as she spoke; fear of these red-faced, violent men nearly overwhelmed her. “You stand before a daughter of the Emperor Chang-tsung.”

  The soldiers drew back. One said, “We mean you no harm.”

  “And you will not harm those with me. If you lay a hand on them, the Emperor will have your heads.”

  “The Son of Heaven will do nothing without the consent of our Commander. The city belongs to him now.”

  Her courage nearly failed her, but she compelled herself to keep her eyes on him. The men stared at her for a while, then bowed and retreated from the room.

  She waited with her women, afraid to leave the rooms. That evening, a soldier came to tell Ch'i-kuo her presence was requested at a banquet. Her women dressed her in a green robe trimmed with gold brocade, then led her into the hallway.

  The gold-encrusted corridor was filled with soldiers posted by each door. More were stationed along the open passageways that connected the palace wings and before the entrance to the largest banquet hall. On the dais where the Emperor usually sat, Chih-chung presided, surrounded by ladies with painted white faces. The Emperor was nowhere to be seen.

  Thousands of courtiers sat at the long tables and feasted as a minister announced that Chih-chung had proclaimed himself Regent. The women seated with him were the most famous courtesans of the city, commanded to be present. The courtiers gulped hot soup and devoured their food without showing any of their usual restraint. When the wine was served, and flowers of silk, as was customary, were presented to the guests, many laughed loudly before twisting the flowers into their hair. Formality was forgotten as the babble of voices drowned out the sombre music of the lute-players.

  Ch'i-kuo ate little as one minister after another toasted the Regent; their bows and speeches seemed a mockery of ceremony. The court was beyond shame, and all too aware of the soldiers inside the palace walls. Perhaps they thought Chih-chung could save them from the Mongol invaders. Maybe they were simply celebrating while they still could.

  Chih-chung did not dismiss them until well into the night. By then, he was quite drunk, his head resting on the shoulder of one of the white-faced courtesans. Fewer soldiers were in the halls and passageways when Ch'i-kuo returned to her rooms. Her women stood by the antechamber's window watching the display of fireworks over the courtyard.

  “Bring me my inks and a paper scroll,” Ch'i-kuo said as she sat down at the low table where she usually painted. Two women brought her the tools; another set oil lamps on the table to give her more light. She waved the women away and began to rub her inks on moistened flat stones.

  The picture came to her in an instant. Her brushes moved across the paper in firm, sure strokes. The man seated in the Emperor's chair had one hand clutching a goblet and the other in the disordered hair of a white-faced woman. A soldier stood to one side, his shield raised, a sword in his hand, his head turned slightly towards the seated man.

  Ch'i-kuo set down her brush and stretched her arms, feeling the ache in her shoulders. A faint light glowed beyond the window; most of the women were asleep on couches and cushions, but Mu-tan was awake, and Ch'i-kuo motioned to her.

  The young woman rose, came to her, and knelt by the table. “He is not the Emperor,” Mu-tan said as she gazed at the painting, “and the woman looks much like a common harlot. As for the soldier, I can't tell if he is protecting them or about to turn on them.”

  “The man is the Regent Chih-chung. The woman is the sort of guest he should have summoned to the banquet instead of those he did, and the soldier—”

  Mu-tan gasped. “What if he saw this? If it were found—”

  “Then we must see that it isn't,” Ch'i-kuo said, “and if it is, does it matter? We are lost, but I am grateful for my art—it will live in me for a little while before the end.”

  Ridding herself of the illusions that still gripped many in the court had freed her to see more clearly. Painting without fear of what she might reveal about herself and her own thoughts, as any true master had to do, brought more s
trength to her art. Her earlier paintings, she saw now, had been, for all their skill, largely the work of a girl anxious to please. The best of them—the bamboos, the painting of the tree the Khitan Ye-lu Ch'u-ts'ai had admired—had been done when her mind was free of such worries. Whether she escaped the storm that threatened her city, with only her paintings to remind her of what was lost, or was caught up in it, no longer mattered.

  Hearing that Chih-chung had executed Wan-yen Kang had not surprised her. Kang had been one of those commanders defeated by the Mongol armies and was a possible rival of Chih-chung's. The news that he had also had the Emperor Wei murdered left her indifferent. Only the advice of the ministers, she knew, had kept the Regent from claiming the throne himself. Within a few days of taking the palace, Chih-chung summoned Wan-yen Hsun, a half-brother of Ch'i-kuo's father, to the capital to become Emperor.

  The Regent's disdain for the new Emperor was evident. Ch'i-kuo had painted a scene of the court, the Emperor Hsun sagging against his throne while Chih-chung, who always remained seated in the Emperor's presence, addressed the court himself. The painting would have offended both men, showing as it did an Emperor too uncertain to demand proper respect and a general drunk with his power.

  Two months after declaring himself Regent, Chih-chung rode out to meet a Mongol force north of the city. He returned to Chung Tu claiming victory, then sent Chu-hu Kao-ch'i against the enemy, threatening Kao-ch'i with death if he did not drive the enemy back. It was clear by then that Chih-chung's victory had been costly, and that only desperation could have brought him to turn to Kao-ch'i, who had been in disgrace after his earlier defeat.

  Kao-ch'i was overwhelmed by the Mongols, but the sentence of death Chih-chung had promised him if he failed was carried instead to the Regent. Before word of the rout could reach the capital, Kao-ch'i returned to the city, surprised Chih-chung in his residence, and beheaded him as he tried to escape. Emperor Hsun forgot the man who had put him on the throne, pardoned Kao-ch'i, and made him Vice-Commander.