Empress

by Shan Sa

  Hearing Wisdom’s name infuriated me.

  “Have you received letters from this banished commoner?” I asked, scowling. “Any exchange of information with those excluded from Court is a crime of betrayal punishable with imprisonment and exile. As King of Yu, you should not allow yourself to flout the law.”

  But Miracle insisted, “Supreme Mother, Wisdom is ready to—”

  “Wisdom,” I interrupted him, “committed an unforgivable crime in trying to usurp the throne. Even if my heart felt pity for him in his exile, I could not call him back to Court. Such an action would prove a destructive influence for posterity. It would serve as encouragement for every prince to rebel against his sovereign father. As for your brother, Future, I do acknowledge that his rash words did not correspond with his true intentions, but I am obliged to apply the ancestral ruling because to tolerate such negligence would debase the power granted to an emperor. Without respect and without fear, reigning would become child’s play, and the dynasty would be overthrown. It is pointless discussing this further: You shall be Emperor of China.”

  A few days later, I watched with satisfaction as Miracle officially acceded to the throne. Chants and incense, praises from officials, cheers from soldiers, and feasting offered to the people helped to erase the dark days. The new sovereign’s wife, Lady Liu, became Empress, and their eldest son took the title of Supreme Son. I inaugurated a new era called the Awakening of Culture. Future and his wife were exiled to the south of the River Long where they would have to meditate on the vanities of this world as they contemplated the inhospitable terrain. Members of the deposed empress’s clan were deported to the province of Qin and would perish in poverty.

  The new sovereign refused to reign and gave a decree that paid homage to the role I had played beside the late emperor, recognized his own lack of political experience, and announced his decision to entrust the Empire to me. He had his throne removed from the Palace of Audiences and left me to receive the morning salutations alone. He shut himself away in his palace with his discreet retinue and court and appeared by my side only for major occasions.

  One evening, my people informed me that the commoner, Wisdom, was secretly planning to escape from his guarded residence. Letters addressed to his uncles and cousins in posts in kingdom-provinces had been intercepted. In them, this unworthy son claimed that my regency was a usurpation and called on all princes by birth to rebel.

  I was wracked with sorrow and fury, but I had no time to waste on pointless lamentations. That very night, I called for Qiu Shen Ji, the Great General of the Cavalry of the Left, overseer of the imperial Forest of Plumes Guard, and sent him hastily to the mountainous province of Ba with an army of one thousand cavalrymen. Their mission was to dissuade Wisdom from launching into such foolish behavior again.

  My second son had been born in the fifth year of the era of Eternal Shining, in the month of December, during the pilgrimage to the tomb of the Emperor Eternal Ancestor, in an eerily white landscape where naked trees pierced the fog with their slender branches. I carried this embryo in my belly as if issuing a challenge to the Outer Court that refused to grant me a title. Wisdom came into the world as the first snows fell. His life would be one of cold elegance and anxious agitation.

  From his earliest years during childhood, it had pained him to be the younger brother of the Supreme Son. There were two years between the boys, and Wisdom had been appointed as his brother’s official companion. They were taught by the same masters, read the same books, played the same sports, and were even the same height, and yet the inequalities between them could be seen everywhere: the number of valets, the different salutations, the choice of meals, the colors of their clothes associated with their rank, and the attention paid to them by the Sovereign Father. Wisdom was the King of Yong and would always be his brother’s servant.

  When he was eight years old, Wisdom left the Forbidden City and moved into his royal palace. He was taught by officials I had chosen and grew up in the outside world, slipping into adulthood behind my back. At fifteen he climbed up the Vermilion Steps and started attending the morning salutation. During ritual ceremonies and imperial banquets, he made sure he was the most elegantly dressed courtier. As well as the ceremonial tunics prescribed by his rank, he always added details that secretly transgressed restrictions and highlighted the fact that he was different. He was made-up by the most skilled, graceful hands; enveloped in the most subtle fragrances; and surrounded by beautiful adolescents with cherry-red lips: His magnificence eclipsed the Supreme Son.

  My eldest son, the lamented Splendor, had not worn his name well. He had suffered from shortness of breath even as a child, and had looked on the world with the tenderness and indulgence of a young man struggling under the weight of his own death. Wisdom was eloquent; Splendor spoke only softly. The younger had pink cheeks, the elder a pale face dotted with sickly red patches. The prince liked rare jewels, precious fabrics, wine, and good cheer; the heir to the throne was happy with sober tunics, vegetables, and tea.

  One winter’s day when Splendor was having difficulty breathing, he begged me to listen to him: “My health is failing, and I am growing weaker. Despite my wishes, I will not be able to perform my duties to the full. Now, the Imperial Father’s successor should be a vigorous man: Wisdom is strong and gifted—he will one day make an excellent sovereign. Please do not take my birthright into consideration! I would be happy to surrender my title as Supreme Son to him.”

  Since the very highest dynasty, there have been countless brothers in the imperial family who have fought for the position of Supreme Son. It was a rare thing for an eldest son to offer his future to someone he deemed worthier than himself. Moved by this selfless act, I took his hand in mine. It was the first time I had touched one of my sons, and this unaccustomed contact made me shudder with happiness and sorrow. Splendor lifted himself up and rested his head on my knees; I held him tightly in my arms.

  “It is you that your Sovereign Father and I wish to see on the throne,” I told him, stroking his hair. “It is you who have the virtues necessary to be sovereign. You must regain your health!”

  Tears trickled over my child’s cheeks: “Thank you, Venerable Mother, thank you.”

  At the time, unbeknown to be me, Wisdom had spies planted in his brother’s entourage. It was only later that I learned that this conversation had sown the seed of furious resentment in a jealous brother’s heart.

  I did not have the time to make a great emperor of Splendor; I did not have the time to teach him the truth about cruelty and compassion, tolerance and punishment; I did not have the time to tell him how to turn cowards into brave men, to make the lazy hardworking, and to make traitors loyal. Splendor died suddenly. Once again Buddha was showing me that everything is illusion.

  My beloved son was buried on the Mountain of Eternal Peace near Luoyang. He was given the posthumous title of Emperor of Piety; this was the first time since the ancient dynasties that a king had been raised to the absolute rank after his death. The frescoes along the long subterranean corridor depicted the sumptuous delights of the afterlife. At the entrance I commissioned paintings of scenes showing feasting, hunting, and games with horses whinnying and dogs barking. The very chariots could be heard rumbling, the banners cracking in the wind, and the horns sounding to announce the Emperor’s arrival. On the star-studded vaulted ceiling of the funeral chamber, the sun gazed across at the moon, and the most beautiful wives strolled through a garden of blooming peonies. I hoped that Splendor, who had renounced the light and the changeability of this world, would still be living amid happiness and beauty thousands of years later.

  Wisdom succeeded his brother in the title of Supreme Son and became actively involved with politics. In his Eastern Palace, he received intellectuals who acted as his scribes, and he started compiling books. My husband’s health was failing at the time, and I was informed that officials were secretly gathering in the heir’s household and criticizing my interference in aff
airs of State. It was not long before Wisdom gave his father a new version of The History of the Later Han Dynasty in which he rebuked regent empress mothers and referred to them as usurpers. I responded by writing two books intended for him: Advice to the Supreme Son and The Anthology of Sons Famous for Their Filial Devotion.

  Wisdom cherished a particular adolescent whom he had had castrated. In the evenings, behind the closed doors of his palace, he organized feasts where he ran naked through the gardens with his guards and this emasculated favorite. When the noises from these orgies reached my husband over the walls of the Eastern Palace, he was furious and decided to punish the adolescent responsible for corrupting the king. The beautiful boy was snatched on a street corner and beaten by hired thugs, and he made some unexpected revelations: His master had had the Taoist Ming Chong Yan assassinated for refusing to poison me, and he was now planning a coup.

  The Eastern Palace was searched, and the stables were found to be housing hundreds of weapons and breastplates, ready to equip a light cavalry. The coup was stopped just in time, and Wisdom was stripped of his title and banished from the Capital.

  I discovered from his entourage that he knew I was not his true mother: Twenty years earlier, on the great pilgrimage, Elder Sister had delivered an illegitimate boy conceived with my husband. The very next day I had brought a stillborn child into the world. Ruby and Emerald were responsible for informing the sovereign and for swapping the infants. Claiming that she felt unwell, Mother left with the prince’s chill body wrapped in her coat and buried him in a monastery.

  My son lay beneath a stela with no inscription. Wisdom, who was destined to be abandoned, could have taken his place on the throne. But the truth that we learn is more murderous than lies. Convinced that he was unloved, obsessed by imaginary hatred, he mistook my strict expectations and my severity for the deliberate oppression and gratuitous nastiness of a stepmother. In our eternal China, nothing comes closer to absolute power than the position of heir, and there is nothing more perilous than life spent so close to the flame. Some, like Wisdom, tried to force fate: The door was open, but it led only to downfall.

  The Great General sent me a dispatch: Wisdom had hanged himself in his room. I had his body interred immediately, beneath a meager mound with no ornamentation, in an underground chamber with a few everyday objects. To appease evil minds who would have seen this as an assassination dressed up as suicide, I summoned the dignitaries to a lamentation ceremony. I wept tears of regret in public and granted a pardon to this rebellious son, restoring his crown as the King of Yong, the title he had borne as a youth.

  My efforts to be joined to my children by a simple bond of happiness had proved fruitless. From the moment they were born, the distance between princes and an empress had only grown wider. I never breastfed my babies and had to disguise my jealousy as I watched them clutching avidly at other women’s breasts. As a young mother, I had been powerless to change the ancestral rules. My children were raised and instructed by high-ranking officials; they were taught to be afraid of me and to venerate me as a divinity. They grew up without learning so much as one poem from me. Whatever the circumstances, my thoughts and words for them took the form of orders transcribed onto silk by secretaries that they received on bended knee. At fifteen they were married and learned of physical pleasure. Their courts lay outside the Imperial City, and they opened their doors to ministers’ sons, guards, and their own ambitious cousins starting out on their careers. Their servants led them to believe that they were great men. Splendor decided to bide his time, and Wisdom wanted to make his mark. Miracle chose silence and Future rebellion.

  At sixty, when women my age enjoyed the warmth of a happy home and played with their grandchildren, I felt more alone than ever. Little Phoenix had made his way to the heavens, and I to the abyss. Two of my sons now lay underground, and one was banished. Fearing that Wisdom’s supporters would get hold of his heirs and use their names to raise a rebel army, I had my grandsons repatriated into the Eastern Capital and shut away in a wing of the Forbidden City. Future’s family had gone with him into exile. Along the mountainous roads, his wife had brought a little girl into the world prematurely. With no midwife, Future himself had pulled her from her mother’s belly and hauled off his own tunic to swaddle her.

  Gentleness stayed by my side, a young woman now, speechlessly contemplating my sorrow.

  A FEW LETTERS sent by Wisdom had escaped the vigilance of the guards and had been propagated over the world. Seven months after his suicide, an insurrection erupted. Li Jing Yei, the grandson and heir of the Great General Li Ji, who had recommended me to the Forbidden City fifty years earlier, led a rebel army. He had been driven out of the Capital for corruption, and he and his supporters hoped to come back to Court as liberators. They succeeded by occupying the strategic town of Yang and gave command to a man who looked like Wisdom and claimed that the king was not dead, that they were acting on his orders. In the span of ten days, they gathered an army of one hundred thousand volunteers, a rabble of hooligans and bandits lured by the promise of incredible booty.

  That morning I received the officials’ salutation in Luoyang. The pillars in the Palace of Virtuous Authority were like black dragons reaching up for the dark skies. Fires blazed along the rows, lighting the ministers’ anxious frightened faces. After the prostration and the prayer for long life, Pei Yan handed me the declaration that the rioters had distributed through districts that were now in their control.

  Gentleness spread the scroll out on my table. The first verse seemed to jump off the page at me like a jet of venom: “The aforementioned regent Lady Wu is the issue of vile origins. In her youth she was summoned by the Emperor Eternal Ancestor, then she seduced Sovereign Father, debauched the Inner Palace, and bewitched the Supreme Son. She supplanted the Empress with her slander; her treacherous smile drove our master into an incestuous trap. Her heart is slyer than a lizard’s and crueler than a she-wolf’s. She is possessed by demons; she tortures loyal servants. She killed her sisters and assassinated her brothers. She hastened the sovereign’s death and poisoned her mother. Now that she has committed these murders, she no longer hides her usurpatory ambitions. She has imprisoned the heirs to the throne and entrusted affairs of State to members of her family. She is a cannibal, eating her way through the imperial lineage; she is evil, putting the dynasty in peril. Her crimes have provoked the wrath of men and of the gods. Her very existence sullies the purity of Heaven and Earth….”

  In the second half of the manifesto, its author sang the praises of the rebel leader Li Jing Yei: “…Jing Yei, a former servant to the Imperial Court, the son of noble and glorious lords, has been denied power because he denounced corruption. Since then his indignation has grown more furious than a rainstorm, and he has sworn that he will free the throne from these vampires. Summoned by the disappointment of this world beneath the heavens and mandated by the Will of the People, he has raised the flag of revolt to cleanse away the scum of humanity. As far as the Land of One Hundred Tribes to the south and the limits of the Mountains of Rivers in the north, iron horsemen jostle to be first in line, wheels of jade rumble constantly onwards, everyone is marching on the enemy. Our grain stores are full of red sorghum from the four seas; our yellow banners advance inexorably as impetuous waves in a storm. The whinnying of our horses silences the North Wind itself, the gleaming blades of our swords outshine the celestial constellations. Our troops have only to whisper for entire hills and valleys to collapse; when our troops utter war cries, the clouds and the wind change color. With this strength, what enemy can resist us? With this strength, what city could withstand us?”

  The third part was the height of pathos: “…The earth poured onto His Majesty’s tomb is not yet dry, and already his orphans no longer have a right to exist…. If you still cling to the warmth of your home, you will be lost in the labyrinth of fate! If you do not grasp the providential hour, you will flounder in the hour of downfall! Answer me now—this very moment:
Who shall be sovereign of the Empire, who shall own the Black Lands, who shall be master of the Yellow People!”

  I closed the scroll and looked up. I asked who had wielded this quill. Someone in the audience hall replied that it was the scholar Luo Bin Wang.

  “Surely he has a reputation for having been a precociously gifted poet, already famous by the time he was seven? What a shame that his flamboyant style and powerful gift should have been used to serve these intriguers. For a poet to become an instrument of politics, for the genius of an artist to debase itself and surrender itself to be used for dishonest propaganda—what a pity! How is it that I did not hear of him sooner? The fault lies with the Great Ministers who have neglected such talent. Mistakes like this must not be made again!”

  My calm reaction astonished the ministers and reassured the generals. The Meeting could go ahead in an atmosphere of confidence. Suddenly, in among the vociferous opinions that needed quashing immediately, Great Secretary Pei Yan made his voice heard: “Supreme Majesty, your servant feels it would not be sensible to raise an imperial army!”

  Surprised by his attitude, I asked him why.

  “His Majesty the Emperor Heir has already reached adulthood, but Your Supreme Majesty is still governing in his place. This irregular situation means that the rebels are right to call for the reign of a prince by blood. If your Supreme Majesty hands over the reins and gives power to the sovereign, all this agitation will no longer be legitimate and could be calmed with no crossing of swords.”

  I was more stunned by Pei Yan’s words than by the rioters’ shattering manifesto. Thirty years earlier, this Great Secretary had been nothing more than an impoverished scholar from commoner stock. I myself had noticed him during the last stage of the imperial competition, and, on my orders, he had been received at the Splendid Institute of Letters, the school of higher administrative studies established by the sovereign Eternal Ancestor to train future ministers. As a reclusive Mandarin, he knew neither how to build up a network of contacts nor how to espouse a political leaning. His career had taken off only when I perceived his qualities as a hardworking and incorruptible official. In fifteen years, under my protection, he had climbed up the imperial hierarchy and had become head of government. Now, when I most needed his support, his conciliatory attitude was worse than a betrayal. Instead of condemning the rebels, he was acting as their mouthpiece by publicly accusing me of monopolizing power for too long.