“Lord Lai,” I cried despairingly, “look at my hands; look at my face.
I’m growing old; I’m going to die! What does glory mean to me now or the dynasty!“
“You are wrong, Majesty; you are a goddess who will live as long as the River Luo flows and Mount Song stands!”
“I am a mere mortal in this existence. I too shall end up in the Yellow Earth, like all the other emperors resting in their tombs. While I am alive, I am Master of the World. Once I die I shall have only the narrow confines of a coffin! Lord Lai, leave me. Our families are a congenital illness. Mine is my infirmity. I did not choose it; the gods imposed it on me. I am condemned to disappear along with my dynasty.”
A sob wracked the man whom I believed to be incapable of emotion. His weeping was the strangled howl of a dying animal.
“How can I leave Your Majesty alone in this world! How can you fight everyone alone? Majesty, I beg you, let me live; let me defend you!”
My heart contracted, and my voice shook as I said, “Leave!”
“Majesty,” he said, wiping his tears, “your wish is my command. For you, I shall go to my death. May my sovereign be granted ten thousand years of happiness! May the Sacred Emperor be granted ten thousand years of good health!”
The wind lifted, and the judge disappeared. I was woken by a needling pain. The glow of nightlights danced on the walls of the Palace, like dying fireflies. I asked for Gentleness to be woken, and she played the zither until dawn.
The following day I hosted the annual banquet held in celebration of the moon. Dancing girls on the stage swirled their long sleeves. My son, my daughter, and my nephews took turns offering me wine. I waved them back to their seats. Up on my throne, I served myself and got drunk. I contemplated the heavenly mirror in its full and perfect splendor. In the middle of its silvery surface, there were darker patches that made its luminosity seem all the more pure and mysterious. Judge Lai Jun Chen had been the impurity that had accompanied me in my solitude. His head would already have rolled to the ground, and his body would have been handed to the crowd to trample on it in their fury. I had lanced an infection. I had stripped myself of my last weapon.
I stood alone at the top of the world. Before me and behind me, there was now only emptiness and infinity.
THE REGIMENTS OF the imperial guard were posted along every avenue, and the inhabitants of Luoyang received orders to stay at home with their doors and windows closed. I stepped into the golden carriage to join Moon, who was celebrating her thirtieth spring. The imperial procession filed through the streets for hours on end.
Hills covered in blossoming plum trees undulated around a frozen lake, and crimson galleries snaked through the snow. The residence of the Princess of Eternal Peace was a palace of jade and crystal. Fires crackled in braziers, and rare dishes appeared in a heady succession. This banquet marking the reconciliation between emperor and her family brought together every powerful figure in the Empire. The great men in magnificent finery were soon drunk, constantly raising their glasses to toast the omnipotent princess and to wish her a thousand years of happiness. A dais had been set up for me at the far end of the room, and perched on my throne, I was bored as usual.
A rustling sound woke me from my snoozing; I opened my heavy eyelids and saw a silhouette in the doorway. Whoever it was prostrated themselves and came toward me through the turmoil of the banquet, a slender boat plying through a lotus field. The figure drew closer and revealed itself to be an extraordinary beauty: Now I could make out the square tips of his shoes and the flowing movements of his tunic with its long sleeves. His oval face was lightly powdered, and he had dark slanting eyes. There was something familiar about this stranger!
He prostrated himself again, then took a bamboo flute from his belt and brought it to his lips with his eyes still modestly lowered. When he blew into the instrument the world suddenly stopped buzzing around me, the winter faded away, and spring spread its wings. Flowers bloomed between his arpeggios, and I saw swallows flying overhead. A great plain of green meadows embraced me in its cool, fresh grasses. A hill wreathed in mist appeared on the horizon. A pathway zigzagged through fields of sorghum toward the top of the hill where there was a stela covered with inscriptions. Then the vision melted away. The youth bowed to me once more and backed away respectfully before disappearing. I looked at the emptiness he had left, speechless and terrified.
I called Gentleness and asked her the musician’s name. She told me that he was called Prosperity and was a descendant of Zhang Xing Cheng, a minister in the Department of Punishments during Emperor Eternal Ancestor’s reign. She added that my daughter, Moon, was hoping to find a position for him at the Court.
That night I was haunted by the boy’s pale face and pink lips. A year earlier, as I returned from Mount Song, I had secretly met with a Taoist monk who claimed he had lived a thousand years and could see a thousand years of the future. I remembered his enigmatic prediction: “The end will come when the Celestial Prince plays his bamboo flute.”
Prosperity had come, the end was beginning. A bamboo flute was guiding me through the darkness to the mouth of the labyrinth. It had all been written.
The very next day I sent a message to Moon, and that evening the princess sent her lover to the Inner Palace and offered him to me.
HOLDING PROSPERITY IN my arms, I realized I was no longer the same woman, no longer ashamed of my old age or filled with self-loathing. The despair had vanished. This coming together of two bodies had been inscribed in the Book of the Earth. Prosperity was a present from God. He was bringing me new life even as he announced my death.
When the Mistress of the World, Emperor of the Zhou dynasty, quivered to a man’s rhythms once more Tai Mountain crumbled, the Yellow Sea boiled, wild animals roared in the forest, and the whole universe shivered with joy and amazement. It was a long time since I had had an official favorite, and the Court was bowled over by the news.
Urged on by my Great Ministers, the imperial doctors recommended that I should be examined immediately, and they forbade violent orgasms that might prove fatal. Their eager concern amused me. From the very first night with my new lover, I knew that my pleasure was no longer the physical contractions. In my dotage, death’s mystic light was blinding me. My erotic pleasure was almost a breathing exercise, an elation that lay along the torturous path of caresses on my skin. It was a dreamlike pilgrimage toward the kingdom of the immortals.
A month later, for my entertainment and to ensure that he was no longer the only man in the gynaeceum attracting jealousy, Prosperity brought his elder brother Simplicity to my bed. The boy was eighteen. Their fresh faces, their soft skin, and their exquisite smell of crisp green leaves overwhelmed me. I had been neither a good mother nor a good lover. The Zhang brothers were my last chance to savor the joys of ordinary women. They were my last rays of sunlight before the ultimate sunset.
I gave them the most beautiful things in my possession. Sumptuous palaces had been raised for them close to the Forbidden City. Their stables were filled with the rarest chargers, gifts from kings in the west. Imperial peonies bloomed in their beautiful gardens where little boats glided over serpentine lakes, and cranes danced under canopies edged with gold bells. I gave noble titles to their mother and brothers, and all five boys from the family now had honorable positions. I indulged their faults in a way I never had my husband, and I was tender with them as I never had been with Scribe of Loyalty. I had stopped questioning my every move and forbidding myself pleasures. I had given up worrying about betrayal and usurpation. Simplicity and Prosperity’s delicate virility erased memories of the presumptuous phallus of man. I was no longer an assailed female, a conquered land. The love that I had always thought of as a theft was offered as a soothing balm.