by Jeannie Lin
An airship rose lazily above the palace grounds, just edging above the horizon. Its belly must have been laden with cargo that slowed its ascent. I watched the sails billowing as they caught the wind.
The vessel resembled one of the great treasure ships that had sailed the oceans during the reign of the Ming Emperors. Perhaps that was done deliberately to evoke the same sense of grandeur and conquest. Only a few generations ago, our empire had ruled the seas.
Unfortunately, the Yangguizi weren’t as mindful of history or traditions.
“One would think you were eager to leave, Soling, the way you watch them go.”
I turned to see Chang-wei clearing the top step. The twilight sky beyond framed him in shadow, but I would recognize him anywhere from his silhouette alone. From his lean frame and strong shoulders to the tilt of his head. Chang-wei always held himself with such thoughtful poise.
He settled down beside me on the bench, and for a while we just watched the airship rise up into the clouds. The silence between us was easy, comfortable, like a warm blanket. For a moment, it was like it had been when we were traveling the southern province together. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed this.
“It’s been a year since we landed in that airfield,” I remarked.
“Hard to imagine.”
We used to watch the ships take off from the airfield together, speaking about the wide world outside of Peking, but lately there had been little opportunity. Chang-wei’s duties kept him busy, and I was being drawn deeper into the complexities of the inner palace.
“Peking has changed so much, I barely recognize it,” I went on.
“Every Emperor adds glory to his name by building,” Chang-wei remarked. “At the end of his reign, the Daoguang Emperor threw his efforts into fortifying the city.”
“And our Xianfeng Emperor builds war machines,” I finished for him, referring to Yizhu’s reigning name.
For the last ten years, the factories of the south had churned out weapons and ships, powered by coal and iron from the mines. If we’d remained in our village, my brother would have likely been conscripted into the factories. The frantic push to produce had put a strain on the population, which had, in turn, pushed more peasants and laborers into the rebellion.
“The walls and the towers, I can understand.” I had glimpsed the Western merchant fleet docked in Canton and Shanghai. The iron monsters lined our shores, fitted with their cannons and steam engines. The memory left me cold with dread.
“I had always thought of the palace itself as a grand and beautiful place,” I said. “A place where great things happened.”
“You’re inside now. Everything looks different from inside.”
“Sometimes I fear—” I looked to the horizon, past the walls and towers and fortifications. We were so enclosed inside the Forbidden City. “Sometimes I fear I’ll forget the things we’ve seen outside of the palace if I stay inside there too long.”
I thought about telling him of my petition to be transferred from the harem. Would he consider me ungrateful? Or worse, disloyal?
“It has been a while, hasn’t it?” Chang-wei asked quietly.
“One becomes isolated in the Forbidden City.”
“But not forgotten.”
Chang-wei was an anchoring presence beside me. When he leaned close, I could smell sandalwood on his robe. It was the scent of books and libraries and ancient scrolls kept in locked cases.
There was something I needed to know. “You left so quickly the other day.”
Chang-wei averted his eyes and pretended to watch the airship. “There are always eyes watching in the palace.”
“What did you not want them to see?”
My heart stood still as he glanced back at me. Chang-wei’s composure was a thing of legend, but his confounded look at that moment was almost endearing.
Gently, he reached to brush back a strand of my hair tugged loose by the evening breeze. His fingertips just grazed the shell of my ear. Each movement seemed drawn out and deliberate. At least time seemed to have slowed for me.
“There are things that have happened between us,” he began. “Things that make me irrational at times.”
Was now one of those times? The first and only time we kissed had been a situation like this. We were atop the citadel in the city of Changsha during the rebel siege. We had been alone up there before Chang-wei rode out with a garrison to defend the city.
He’d kissed me. And I’d kissed him back, forgetting all the chaos that swirled around us.
We were alone again now.
I turned on the bench to face him, fighting to keep my breath steady. But Chang-wei remained where he was.
He gazed at me thoughtfully. “I overstepped my bounds in the Inner Court the other day. When I saw you, I reacted out of emotion.”
“And how else can one be expected to react?”
He went on, unfazed. “The Emperor is our sovereign. If he had . . . he can have anyone he wants . . .”
“It’s not like that.”
Why was I blushing? I hadn’t encouraged the Emperor. And truly he hadn’t shown any interest aside from a few simple requests. Treatments for headaches. For sleeplessness. When considered in bright daylight, there was nothing unreasonable about his demands.
Yet there were stories told by the eunuchs. Our Emperor was young, virile. The stories claimed he had a taste for the forbidden: dancers, servants, perhaps even the daughter of a disgraced official?
His exploits were hardly for me to judge. I knew of another Yizhu. One who had studied diligently under my father. One who woke at first daylight to attend to the empire’s affairs and stayed awake late into the night fretting about uprisings and foreign devils and rebels who were tunneling under city walls and beheading Manchurian officials.
Yizhu was my Emperor, and his purpose was my purpose. But he was also a man pulled in too many directions. Perhaps he couldn’t be blamed for drowning himself in pleasure for the few moments that were his own. But I was determined not to become one of those conquests.
Overhead, the airship turned southward, trailing a faint plume of gunpowder smoke. It passed to the east, avoiding the grounds of the Forbidden City. The low rumbling of the engine split the air like thunder.
“Where do you think this one is going?” I asked as the roar of the engine faded. I didn’t want to talk about the palace anymore.
“Perhaps it’s being sent to supply troops along the Yellow River. Or to reinforce the fleet in Changsha,” Chang-wei surmised. “The imperial army has started using the walled city as a base for further attacks against the rebels.”
“Yang Hanzhu escaped from Peking on the Ministry’s old airship,” I remarked, not knowing exactly why I thought of the chemist at that moment. “He escaped the purge along with several others.”
Chang-wei’s mood darkened at the mention of his former colleague. “Yang has always been resourceful.”
“Would you have gone with them?”
“It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t possible.”
Chang-wei had been captured at the battle of Wusong and imprisoned on a ship captained by the Yangguizi. After my father took the blame for the empire’s loss, his corps of engineers and scientists had been scattered, but Chang-wei alone returned to the Emperor’s service.
“I tried to continue Yang’s opium experiments,” I confessed. “But the head physician wouldn’t allow it.”
In the evenings, I wrote down all I could remember of the experiments I had conducted on Hanzhu’s ship as we’d analyzed different opium samples. Yang Hanzhu had been convinced opium was at the heart of the empire’s decay. I couldn’t argue with him on that. Even if the Yangguizi were chased out, and the rebels defeated, our empire would still be infected.
Yang theorized that something had made the substance more addictive. That it ha
d been altered in some way.
“I proposed such a study to the Ministry of Science as well,” Chang-wei admitted. “But Minister Kuo rejected the notion. There’s no glory in such experiments. He prefers to sponsor building projects on a grand scale so the court can shower him with praise.”
“While opium is an unfavorable endeavor,” I murmured.
The drug was a black mark upon the empire. It left everyone’s hands unclean.
After being apart for so long, I was afraid we would be strangers again, but here we were, falling into our old patterns: Chang-wei discussing his dreams for the empire; me listening intently, wondering if this is what our lives would have been like if fate had been different.
When I’d returned to Peking, I thought we would continue as we had before. Chang-wei and I fighting for the empire. Together.
The airship had become a smudge against the clouds, fading quickly into the evening sky.
“Will you be watching when my airship takes flight?” Chang-wei asked.
I turned to him, startled. “Where are you going?”
“To see our neighbors on the island empire of Japan.”
My eyes grew wide. “The Emperor decided in your favor after all.”
“Several days ago, Chief Engineer Kuo changed his stance and argued on my behalf. Nothing like an adversary’s support to make one doubt oneself.”
It was the first time Chang-wei had called Kuo Lishen a rival. “You think the chief engineer has some other purpose in mind?”
Chang-wei shrugged. “Perhaps he merely wants me out of sight for a while.”
Despite his loyalty to the empire, Chang-wei still struggled for acceptance. There was a time when I had doubted him as well. Even though I considered him a friend, there was so much I didn’t know about him. What had happened during his time among the Yangguizi? And why did he continue to maintain contact with Westerners in the treaty ports?
But all those questions faded away as the realization of what he’d just told me sank in. “How long will you be gone?”
“It’s uncertain. A few weeks, perhaps a month.”
I hugged my arms to myself, suddenly feeling cold. “That . . . that isn’t too long, I suppose. Hopefully it will be an uneventful journey. Are airships as tossed by storms as the ones in the sea?”
I was unable to focus my thoughts. Chang-wei watched me with a look that was part kindness, part confusion, and I wanted to swallow my own tongue to keep it from babbling.
He was my only friend in the capital. I was feeling more trapped inside the inner palace every day, and now Chang-wei would be leaving as well.
“Do you truly believe an alliance with Japan will help us?” I asked.
His expression became thoughtful. “The Ministry used to exchange ideas with scientists in Japan, but not since your father left and Kuo took his place. Their studies took a different direction than ours. The study of firearms.”
“From the Yangguizi.” Just the mention of the foreign devils left a bitter taste in my mouth.
“Not everything from the West is evil, Soling.”
I didn’t respond. The war against the Yangguizi had cost my father his life. I would never trust them.
“Japanese knowledge with our factories to produce the weapons,” Chang-wei went on. “I’m not a strategist or a general, but it seems logical to me. Combine the efforts of our two nations against a common adversary. The Westerners haven’t attacked Japan, but it’s only a matter of time.”
“The Japanese won’t think kindly of you if you go bearing that message,” I warned.
Chang-wei always forgot about politics and human pride. In his head, the world was a logical place where people would be compelled to make the right decisions if allowed to see them.
In truth, people had the right decisions in front of them all the time and still chose wrong.
“Airships and war vessels won’t solve all of our problems. Chief Engineer Kuo has risen through the ranks by feeding the court’s hatred and fear of the Yingguoren. His solution is to build higher walls around the ports,” Chang-wei said, agitated. “A dome around the inner palace to prevent attack. A greater army. Everything is focused within, like a tortoise retreating into its shell. It can’t be the only way. We have to look outward.”
“I hope you’re right,” I murmured. “I really hope you are.”
When I had returned to Peking, it was upon one of the Emperor’s dragon ships. For the first time in eight years, I had looked upon the city of my birth with hope. Chang-wei had given that to me.
“The Emperor refuses to consider an alliance with a nation that is beneath him. And Chief Engineer Kuo won’t abide by any ideas but his own.”
“Yet they are allowing you to go.”
He smiled faintly. “Chen Chang-wei on another one of his mad schemes.”
A wave of loneliness hit me. I wanted very much to be a part of his mad schemes. I had come to the capital to be a part of the fight, but now Chang-wei would continue with his battle, while I remained tucked away, hiding like a tortoise in its shell.
Chapter Five
I tried not to think too much of Chang-wei leaving. It would drive me mad.
Instead I absorbed myself in my duties in the physicians’ court, and the next days passed by uneventfully. I heard nothing else from the Emperor. Hopefully he’d forgotten about me.
By the time I was to take my monthly leave, the natural rhythm and routine of the harem returned.
Outside of the Forbidden City lay the Manchurian section of the city. My mother had found lodging in a modest courtyard house among the winding hutong alleyways. I was given permission once every month to visit her and my brother.
The mechanical sedan chair took me through the palace gates and along the prescribed path through the streets. I always looked forward to these visits away from the protocols and rituals of the palace. Every time I saw my younger brother, I was reminded of exactly why we had come back to Peking.
The property was not much larger than ours had been back in the village. It was comprised of three rooms around a central yard. Nothing like the mansion our family had once occupied in Peking, but that place had been long taken over by some other official. I wouldn’t have remembered it if I saw it. That time was a lifetime away from who we were now.
But life had been good to us, all things considered. I drew an imperial salary now, and I sent my earnings to my family. My brother Tian was promptly enrolled into one of the imperial academies after Chang-wei personally presented him to the headmaster. How could the academy refuse when Tian was sponsored by a prominent member of the Ministry of Science? For the first time in years, all things seemed possible.
My duties in the Court of Physicians had taken on a comfortable routine. I knew the eunuchs looked upon me as an outsider, but the work kept me busy. I had hundreds of herbs and ingredients to study and memorize. The imperial records were also fascinating. I pored through historical records of elixirs given to emperors. Elixirs of crushed pearl and mercury, meant to increase virility. Even grant immortality.
It was easy in the shelter of the palace to believe there weren’t foreign devils living among us. That the empire wasn’t being torn apart from inside by rebellion. But I couldn’t forget. At night when I closed my eyes, I could see the ports of Canton and Shanghai clogged with foreign ships. I could hear the explosions that shook the walls of Changsha.
I wouldn’t let myself forget.
As I approached the gate of my mother’s home, a man with his cap pulled low nearly collided with me. He only glanced at me before departing without apology.
The door of the front room was open, so I entered without needing to knock. Mother was seated over a satchel of papers. She straightened abruptly when she saw me.
“Soling, I had forgotten you were coming today.” Her hands fidgeted, touching the po
rtfolio and retreating. There was a lacquered box beside it.
“Where’s Nan?” I asked, glancing at the slim case warily. Our maidservant was always about, but I couldn’t hear her in any part of the house.
“I sent Nan to the market for a few things. She should be back soon. How are you, Daughter?” Mother spoke in a rush, all her words strung into a single sentence.
“I’m well. And you?”
Without even thinking, I searched for the signs. The shades were drawn, and Mother was certainly nervous. The pupils were the easiest way to tell if she had taken a pipe, but she was avoiding my gaze.
Immediately I felt guilty. It had been over a year since Mother had touched opium, yet every time I came to see her, I was in fear that she’d weakened and returned to it.
Mother glanced furtively at the lacquered box before redirecting her gaze to me. “I needed something to keep me busy. Especially when your brother is away at the academy.”
Once more, she grasped the edges of the portfolio, straightening it in front of her. What had my mother so agitated?
“What’s in the box?” I asked, bracing myself for the worst.
“It’s not what you think, Daughter.” With a sigh, she opened the case to reveal a series of brass dials inside. “It’s a calculating machine,” she explained when I continued to stare at it without comprehending. “It’s been years since I used one of these.”
Her hands caressed the dials almost lovingly. I had only recently learned that my mother had once been a candidate for the imperial science exams. An oddity, since the exam was only open to men.
“The Ministry requires some calculations for their building projects.”
I sat down beside her as she opened the portfolio and rifled through the papers. Each one was covered with mechanical drawings and symbols. After a few pages, my eyes swam.
“Do you understand all of this?”
“Understand it? In many ways this is clearer to me than language.”
