by Megan Bannen
Again with the embarrassment. “That’s disgusting,” I tell Weiji.
“You’re right. That is disgusting.” He shudders with revulsion.
“What are you doing here anyway?” I ask. I can’t help but notice that he looks uncommonly pleased with himself, too, in a way that has nothing to do with catching his sister whispering with a man at the inner quarters curtain. “And what are you grinning about?” I add.
“Am I grinning?”
“Yes, witless, you’re grinning like a madman.”
By now, his grin has grown positively stupid. He pushes the curtain aside and says, “I wanted to show you this.” He reaches into his sleeve pocket, pulls out a small portrait, and shows it to me. I take the portrait gingerly into my hands and study it. The girl staring back at me is lusciously beautiful.
“Turandokht?” I guess as I hand it back to him. He nods and stares down at the painting in his hand with that ridiculous smile still spread across his face.
“You like her?” I ask with a teasing grin of my own. “You like her picture?”
“Maybe.”
He’s beaming.
“What happened to all that Father-is-marrying-me-to-the-enemy business?”
“I know, but look at her.” He holds the painting up for me to see and fully appreciate. “She’s beautiful. I mean, she’s really, really beautiful.”
He turns the portrait back to face him and gazes at it moonily.
“And smart,” I remind him. “Don’t forget smart.”
“Brilliant,” he corrects me.
“Brilliant.” My smile fades. My sense of my own inadequacy looms large. How can a girl feel herself anything but inadequate when placed side by side with such brilliant, beautiful perfection?
Just because she’s one way doesn’t mean you’re the other, I try to tell myself. Her beauty doesn’t make you ugly. Her intelligence doesn’t make you stupid. Her value doesn’t make you worthless.
But I don’t really believe that.
“Do you think she’ll like me?” Weiji asks.
“She’d better like you, or I’ll spit in her eye.”
This time, Weiji grins at me rather than at the portrait. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
It hits me that I might never see Weiji again, and I’m going to miss him terribly. But that’s not the sort of thing you say to your big brother, so in the end, I tell him, “I’m very happy for you.”
“Thanks. Hey, can I tell you something?”
“Yes.”
“You smell funny.”
I reach beyond the curtain to box his ears, but I’m really just hiding the urge to cry. Because for the first time I understand that what I took for brotherly torment all my life was, in point of fact, affection.
29
“YOU WRITE TOLERABLY WELL, YOU KNOW,” Mother tells me as I practice calligraphy.
“Thank you,” I answer, even though the compliment is tepid. I pick up a brush, dip it in the ink, and finish Li Qingzhao’s “A Morning Dream.”
My heart knows I can never see my dream come true.
At least I can remember
That world and sigh.
It was the last poem Chancellor Zhang and I discussed before he left for Khanbalik ahead of my brother and my father to prepare for the wedding.
Before everything fell to pieces.
Mother comes around the table. She stands behind me and leans her chin on my shoulder. She’s not tall, but I’m so petite that it’s easy for her to peer over me and examine the calligraphy.
“See there?” she says. “When you’re beautiful on the inside, your beauty finds a way to show itself on the outside. There are men who can see that sort of beauty, who value it.”
This compliment is less tepid, but it still falls flat in my ears. The poem may be beautiful. The shapes of the words may be beautiful. But none of that has anything to do with me. I stare down at the parchment.
“I enjoy calligraphy,” I say, “but shouldn’t we be doing something useful?”
“Like what? Besides, your father wanted you educated, and so you shall be.”
“But that was before . . .” My voice trails off. I don’t need to finish. We are both more than aware that Turandokht rejected my brother before he ever reached Khanbalik. The girl never laid eyes on him, never gave him a chance. When the Song wedding delegation reached Kaifeng, they were greeted by Chancellor Zhang and a zuun of Yuan soldiers who forced them to turn back, an insult so grave that now the Mongols and the Song are at war over it. It’s a fact that permeates our lives like a fog that has set in and stayed. It grows heavier with each passing week, knowing that Father and Weiji are off fighting battles against the greatest empire in the world.
And I hate the fact that Zhang was the messenger.
Ostensibly, even with a war going on, my life has changed very little in Lin’an, yet everything feels different now, dimmer. The only change of note is that Mother has become fanatical about my father’s command that I be educated like Turandokht. It makes no sense on the surface, but I suspect it’s her way of reproaching him, as if to say, You wanted your daughter to emulate the girl who rejected your son and ruined us all? Fine. I have more tutors now, more subjects to learn, more tracts to read. I’m ashamed of myself for enjoying it so much when Weiji’s life has taken such a turn for the worse.
A servant comes into the women’s quarters. She gives my mother a low bow.
“Rise,” says Mother.
The girl glances warily at the curtain.
“What is it?” Mother snips.
“General Chen has just arrived, my lady, with a small contingent of men. He says your husband, the prince regent, sent him.”
To my shock and against all propriety, the man himself comes barging into the women’s quarters. Mother is still trying to formulate a comprehensible response to this intrusion when the man gives her a deep, ponderous bow.
I’ve seen General Chen only two or three times before. He has always been impeccably dressed and groomed. Today, I hardly recognize him. His beard is a scraggly mess. His clothes are stained and even torn in places. He still wears his armor, and it looks as if someone has taken an ax to it.
“Forgive me, madam.” His formality is stiff, his eyes cold and distant. “I come under inauspicious circumstances. It is imperative that I speak with you. I regret to inform you that your husband is dead.”
Mother grows still as a statue. “What?” she breathes, her hand fluttering to her chest.
“Your son, Prince Weiji, is also dead. The Mongols overtook us. They cut through our men like a knife. We’ve lost. All is lost.”
Weiji is also dead. The words push me down an abyss, into an empty well, only there’s no bottom. There’s only falling and falling and falling.
“No,” Mother whispers with lips gone bloodless.
“I’m here on your husband’s last orders,” Chen tells my mother. “You’ll come with me, madam. You and your daughter.”
“Of course,” Mother says, trying to pull herself together. She orders the servant to start packing our belongings.
“There’s no time for that, my lady.”
“But we’ll need our clothes, our shrine—”
“There’s no time!” His voice cracks through the air like a whip.
“What? Why?” she cries, her voice sharp with pain.
“The Mongols are coming. Now. We barely made it here alive.”
My mother covers her face with both hands. She breathes once, twice. I stare at her, willing her to make this better somehow, to reach out to me, comfort me.
I’m falling, falling.
Mother draws herself up, haughty. “I understand,” she says, her voice clipped. She tells the servant to let the others know to evacuate the estate. Then she turns to Chen and asks, “Where are we going?”
“The river.”
“Right. Come along, Daughter.”
I don’t know how she is able to hold hers
elf together when I feel so broken and afraid. I can barely walk, I’m shaking so badly.
We follow Chen through the outer chambers and into the courtyard garden toward a side entrance I’ve never used before. I’m trying hard to emulate my mother, to remain calm, to stuff my grief and terror into some dark corner inside myself, but I can already feel myself failing.
The garden is full of memories, and Weiji burns brightly in each and every one.
Weiji is also dead.
Falling and falling and falling.
“We’ll come back, won’t we?” I whisper to Mother.
“Of course,” she assures me, but I know she’s lying. We might never return. And I’ve never even left Lin’an before.
Chen’s men are waiting for us on the other side of the gate. They have brought my little cousin Emperor Bing with them as well. Out in the open now, we’re as exposed as ants on a picnic blanket.
“So few men?” Mother asks.
Chen nods grimly. The soldiers surround us as we make our way down to the dock. Even though they’re Song soldiers, it feels like a forced march, like we’re prisoners of our own people. I can’t think. My mind is a searing white wall that protects me from the overwhelming grief and fear welling up behind it. The tips of my fingers have gone numb. It’s not until we near the river that I realize something is terribly wrong.
“Where’s the boat?” I ask no one in particular, and no one answers me. “Mother, where’s the boat?”
Mother squints ahead at the water rushing past the empty dock. She stops, turns to Chen, and repeats the question: “Where is the boat?”
Chen doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. He simply takes my mother by one arm to drag her to the water. Mother wails, tearing at Chen’s arm, dragging the fingernails of her free hand down his cheek, but it does her no good. He won’t release her. “Why?” she keens as one of Chen’s men grabs hold of me, too. “Why? Why? Why?”
Chen squeezes her hard until her lungs are crushed into silence. “Do you want the Mongols to get their filthy hands on you? Or to take your one remaining child? Do you want her to live out her life as a slave? Let her death be honorable, woman.”
Her death.
My death.
We’re all going to die.
Mother grows limp with despair and lack of air, and Chen drops her, letting her fall to the ground like a wilted flower.
“Run!” I scream, as much at myself as at my mother and Bing. I knee my captor in the groin until he releases me with a grunt of pain. “Run!”
I bolt from the group, but one of the soldiers catches me, grabbing my upper arm with a hard, bruising hand. I bite him like a feral dog until I taste blood and break loose again. The word “run” drums in my head with the percussion of each footfall on the ground. Run-run-run-run-run. I’m just a skinny girl, but I’m faster than they are. I know where I’m going, and I’m not weighed down by armor or weapons. I run back to my house, the only home I’ve ever known. The salon, the dining hall, the women’s quarters, my bedroom: these comprise the sum total of safety in my universe, so that’s where I go. I flee to the safest place of all, my family’s shrine.
I don’t have time to light the joss sticks. I pick up the porcelain duck and cradle it against my heart. “Save us,” I beg my ancestors, but they either can’t or won’t intervene.
Running footsteps clatter across the hall beyond the shrine.
“Zhᾰngxiōng! Older Brother! Help me!” I plead.
Two men enter the shrine where I’ve trapped myself in front of the altar with its diminutive cups of wine.
My entire life, I have been a mouse, tiny and weak and insignificant. But like any creature cornered by threat, it isn’t terror I experience at the prospect of death. It’s rage. It’s fury. It’s a stone-cold will to live.
I lash out at the closest soldier, striking him in the shoulder with the incense burner. He’s completely unhurt, but the lotus flower breaks free and goes rolling across the floor, sending little porcelain chips scattering across the wood. I wave what’s left at the other man, who merely catches it in his hand and breaks it off so that only the duck’s jolly head remains in my fist. One of them grabs me under the arms while the other scoops up my legs.
Rage.
Fury.
The will to live.
I kick and scream to no effect, but that doesn’t stop me. I pull at the first man’s arms with my free hand and hit him with my other hand fisted around the duck’s head. I try to shake free of the second man. They stagger back to the river with me, cursing the entire way. We pass through a gauntlet of grave-faced soldiers, here to carry out their sad duty of honor, to kill the royal family before the Mongols do something far worse to us. I stop thrashing long enough to search frantically for my mother, but I don’t see her. I only see General Chen nod to my captors, who take me to the edge of the dock.
“No!” I struggle against them. “No!”
The man who clutches my legs eases back so that he has me by the ankles, and the two men swing my body between them like a sack.
Once.
“No!” I scream.
Twice.
“No!”
I hear a hissing sound and a thunk, and the man who has me under the arms cries out and releases me. I have just enough time to see an arrow jutting from his chest before my upper half careens through the air as the other soldier tosses me into the river by my ankles.
I crash through the water’s surface as if it were a wall of ice. My gold brocade robe rips away from my body and billows around me while the water pulls me under and sideways. I hold my breath and clutch the duck’s head, praying to gods and ancestors, anyone. My robe dances lithely in the current. For an odd moment I’m calm, watching the pretty thing sway and swirl in front of me like a jellyfish, its excruciating beauty soporific.
The will to live.
My foot touches something solid and I push against it with all my might. I burst through the surface and gasp air and water. I sputter and cough and plunge once more under the water’s violent surface. Somehow the mad movements of my arms and legs push me upward once more, and this time, there is a thick strong hand that lifts me out of river and flings my half-dead body into a boat. I cough up water and turn my head just in time to see my cousin Bing as the river hurls him past me. His eyes are as dead and empty as those of a fish on a platter.
My mind goes somewhere else, somewhere far away from here, and I begin to sing.
Jasmine flower
Your willowy stems clustered with sweet-smelling buds
Fragrant and white, everyone praises your beauty
Let me pluck you down
And give you to the one I love
My voice wavers. I can’t stop shivering, and my lungs haven’t quite adjusted yet to breathing air again. The sky above is unforgivably clear and beautiful. When the peasant who fished me out of the water leans over me, I no longer know whether I want to live or die. I clutch the duck’s head. The jagged edges where it broke free of the incense burner cut into my palm. Blood streaks across my skin and leaves diluted red droplets on the rocking floor of the boat.
When we reach shore, the peasant lifts me out of the boat and hands me over to a group of Mongol warriors on the bank. Money changes hands, but I’m too cold and hazy to care. The Mongols’ foreign words twang in my water-clogged ears.
I can’t stop shaking. One of the Mongols slips off his rough wool outer robe and ties it around me. My skin grows drunk on his residual body heat. The man takes my hand and pries my fingers off the duck’s head. My fingers snap back and clutch at what’s left of my life, the entire sum of strength left in my body dedicated to this one act. The Mongol says something to one of his companions, and the other man hands him a length of twine. He pulls a knife from his belt, and fear flickers inside me. But he uses his knife to cut the twine, not me. He puts the knife back, takes my hand again, and gently unfurls my fingers.
And he takes the duck.
�
��No!” I scream. My limp body springs into action. My flaccid mind focuses on one burning purpose. Hands become claws. Teeth become fangs. I attack the man who took my duck, but one of the other warriors grabs me about the middle and clamps my arms to my sides.
The man looks at me with raised eyebrows, his expression one of amusement, which makes me rage all the harder. He takes the duck’s head and runs the twine through the hole in the beak and out the hollow, broken neck. He ties the ends of the twine together, steps over to me, and places the makeshift necklace over my head so that the duck rests over my heart. He steps back and looks at me, trying to say something with his face that he can’t communicate to me with his strange language.
My last fit of rage has sapped every ounce of energy I had out of me, and I hang in the warrior’s arms. The man takes my hand again and, meeting no resistance, begins to clean and bandage my cut.
And just like that, in the blink of an eye, between life and death, I am transformed from princess to slave.
In Khanbalik, I lie on the ground with my back pressed against the earthen wall of the small room where slaves sleep. We’re packed together like bundles of firewood, twists of rope, our bodies rank with labor, our breath rough with exhaustion. The Great Khan’s slaves. Turandokht’s slaves.
Me.
A slave.
I hate myself for accepting it. I hate myself for resisting it.
I roll onto my side, fetal on my mat, curled like a fern before it unfurls. I whisper my name into the darkness. I say it over and over again, my breath as thin as a string.
Jinghua.
I’m so afraid I’ll forget who I am.
30
I STAND NEXT TO A BOILING vat filled with silkworms ready for harvesting and stir the carcasses with a long paddle. Steam rises from the cauldron like a frenetic ghost as it sifts itself through the bamboo awning above, and I stop to wipe condensation and sweat from my forehead. My rough, woven trousers and linen shirt chafe my sweat-sticky skin. Take away the silk and what am I? A slave. How perfectly simple.
