Empress (25 page)

That very evening, trembling in every limb, Gentleness offered me her virginity, and I initiated her in the realms of pleasure. I had just turned fifty. I had had her father, her grandfather, and all her brothers executed. I was the jailor and torturer whose tyranny she worshipped. She was the pale flower I would transform into a resplendent peony.

Sensual delight colored my world. Love is insolent. Disguised as a page, Gentleness followed me day and night from my palace to the audience hall. When I sat, she remained standing; when I held secret meetings with ministers, she kept watch at the door; when I flew into a rage, her expression of silent amazement appeased me. When I ordered her to rest, she would retire to her room and write. Her poetry soothed me with its chaste descriptions of festivities and journeys. As I held her in my arms, I wondered when she would betray me and avenge her clan’s extermination. Hers was a perfume of innocence and poison. Shy caresses preceded her violent release, shaken by an unknown pain. She would scream, and she would cry.

Her sleeping face held the dangers that made me feel young and strong.

TIME DIES, AND time is born again, but men’s lives are a one-way journey. Imperial birthdays were excuses for sumptuous festivities. Fireworks and banquets were laid on for the people in every town-our imperial generosity being matched by our subjects’ dissolute celebrations for a transient pleasure. From one year to the next, our ages accumulated and weighed us down. From one year to the next, these birthdays changed and saw me mourning our long-buried youth. The sovereign’s inevitable deterioration gave real meaning to a vague concept: Death was lying in wait for us.

But it was the Supreme Son who succumbed to coughing and breathlessness. Splendor left us forever. The passing of his beloved heir affected the Celestial Emperor so profoundly that it provoked chest pains. United with my husband in grief and anguish, I forgot my resentments. Little Phoenix clung to me more than ever, as the shipwrecked cling to a piece of flotsam. And the fear of losing him paralyzed me more than ever. The memory of Father’s death, which had been such a brutal loss, came back to haunt me. I could clearly remember the utter dejection of those childhood days. Would I have the strength to survive another such onslaught? Little Phoenix and I had been living as prisoners of the Forbidden City for forty years now. His very presence was the air I breathed; he was the balancing pole to my tightrope-walking soul. How would I cope with the emptiness and loneliness when he joined the gods and embraced freedom?

Medicine, prayer, and magic services secretly arranged in monasteries sustained the Emperor but did not cure him. There were more and more bad omens. I had just announced a pilgrimage to Mount Song for another blessing from Heaven, but a Tibetan attack forced me to abandon the expedition. During the Eternal Ancestor’s reign, the Court had planned to build a Temple of Clarity dedicated to the sacred religions, as a symbol of union between imperial power and the will of Heaven. The idea had matured, and now the architects’ plans were ready, but an incident ruffled the serenity of the proceedings and delayed this building project that had been wanted for so long. Wisdom, my second son, tried to usurp the throne. He was stripped of his title as heir and driven from the Capital.

There was a succession of terrible natural catastrophes. After a winter that yielded no snow, cereal production dropped in the north and the region near Luoyang declared penury. Later a very wet summer saw the Yellow River burst its banks, and the floods were followed by an epidemic that killed tens of thousands of horses and cows. The following year, clouds of locusts descended on the fields, and an earthquake rocked both capitals. The Ancients said that when the natural elements were unsettled in this way, great misfortune would befall the Empire. They even specified that if, amid all this fury, the Earth began to tremble, Heaven was announcing the death of an eminent man.

Exploiting the difficulties our empire was suffering, the Turks rose up against us. Negotiations with them failed, and I had to send imperial troops to put down the rebellion with bloodshed. I may have maintained the country’s stability by force of arms, but in the Inner Palace, I was completely disarmed by just one man’s illnesses.

In the residential city of the Celestial Oblation, my husband’s body doubled in size, and violent spells of dizziness and headaches pinned him to his bed. He lay behind the curtains moaning while a crowd of doctors thronged round him. The Supreme Son and the Great Ministers knelt beside him. It was their duty to approve prescriptions and to taste each remedy. I dismissed all these people whose agitated bustling was only weakening my husband. I set up my own bed and my writing table in his palace of rest. With one hand I countersigned political decisions, and with the other, I held the sovereign’s limp, clammy hand. He was soothed by my presence; drinking in my strength, he seemed to improve and asked for food.

I spoon-fed him some soup; thirty years earlier, he had been the one who did this for me. I remembered his distraught face full of love, his tentative voice asking me to be his empress. Tears clouded my eyes: if only I could die and he could be resuscitated!

But the gods remained deaf to my pleas. Once again Little Phoenix would betray my hopes. One evening when he had been bled from his head, his pains disappeared, his eyes regained their sight, and he smiled at me.

“Sovereign Father appeared to me in a dream,” he murmured. “He invited me to follow him, and I started to float through a sea of clouds. Father led me through the fog and raised his arm to point to the horizon. The mists dispersed to reveal a golden palace surrounded by light, and flying round it were phoenixes with wings in nine colors. I realized that this was the celestial residence of Sovereign Father, Empress Mother, and my beloved sister, Little Bull. Music began to play, an extraordinary tinkling sound. A procession of immortals came from far away to greet me. And I decided to come back to Earth to tell you that I’m leaving!”

Tears streamed over my face.

“Empress,” the sovereign continued, “my time has been accounted for. What a shame the heir is not ready to reign-this one concern means I cannot leave in peace.”

“Your Majesty tortures himself in vain,” I cried. “He will soon be well again. Next year he will undertake the pilgrimage to Mount Song, and Heaven will bless him and grant him the secret of immortality.”

“I’m so tired of living in pain. The apparition of Sovereign Father has calmed my fears. Death is nothing. It is abandoning a rotting, worthless body; it is a soul ascending. The peak of the sacred mountain, which is the highest most point to the living, will be nothing but a blade of grass when I am in the heavens. Be happy-I am to be delivered!”

I was silenced by Little Phoenix’s words. It was too late to hold back a man who had laid eyes on the marvels of the afterlife. In his eyes all the riches and delights of this world were now mere filth and dust.

“Majesty,” I said despairingly, “allow me to follow you; I want to continue serving you.”

“Heavenlight, I have been a very ordinary sovereign. My only good quality has been that I have succeeded in surrounding myself with people more able than me. I have never liked being on the throne or giving commands. But I was able to make a great empress of you. If I had to enumerate the achievements of my time on Earth, I would say that you were my masterpiece. Before we are temporarily parted-because, later, you will come to join me-I wanted to thank you for your patience, for the sacrifices you have made, for risking your own life to give me heirs. Forgive me if I caused you suffering.”

I was overwhelmed by the thoughts milling in my mind. I was about to reply when the sovereign interrupted me, his voice reduced to a feeble hiss: “Heavenlight, your hour has not yet come. You must stay here to watch over the dynasty. The heir is too young; when I die, he will not know how to run an empire weakened by natural disasters and uprisings. I have faith in your experience. You will know how to master the situation and restore order and stability to the world. Heavenlight, look after yourself; I am trusting you with my people and my empire.” His eyes closed, and I cried: “Little Phoenix, don’t abandon me!” I thought I saw a mischievous smile on his face as he whispered almost inaudibly: “I’ve always wanted to die before you, did you know that?”

THE COURT HASTILY left the Palace of Celestial Oblations. The Celestial Emperor lay on his bed in a carriage drawn by two hundred coachmen. The imperial road to the eastern capital would be the route he took toward his death. To reach the world of clouds and eternal ease, my husband endured his final torment. I stayed beside him, grimly fascinated by the terrifying process of dematerialization that would render him immortal: his skin had to be burned of its filth until only purity and incandescence were left. The soul that had been called up by the gods had to break free from the flesh that housed it to fly up to the heavens.

At Luoyang, border troubles forced me to leave the dying sovereign’s side to hold audiences alongside the heir regent. For the first time I was inattentive, distracted, listening out for messengers coming to bring me news of his death. Human affairs seemed so futile to me now that I had seen the splendors of another world through my husband’s agony. When the meeting was over, I hurried back to the Inner Palace and went back to my prayers at Little Phoenix’s bedside. It was now he, a dying man, who gave me strength and warmth and illuminated my entire existence.

On the third night of the twelfth moon in the second year of Eternal Purity, the astrologers were burning tortoise scales, and they announced the word “severing.” The following morning the Celestial Emperor woke and found that his pains had disappeared. He spoke clearly, and he himself wanted to announce the Great Remission and the Changing of the Era to the name the Magnificent Path. Doctors and eunuchs managed to lift him from his bed and to wrap him in fur-lined tunics. A litter carried him through the narrow passageways of the Forbidden City and took him to the pavilion at the top of the Gate of Celestial Law.

On the far side of the moat, beyond the square formations of cavalry and foot soldiers, were the common people who had come from the four corners of the city. They prostrated themselves before him. Morning snow had covered the roofs of the eastern capital; temples, bell-towers, and pagodas looked alike in the flurrying greyness, and princely pavilions could hardly be distinguished from merchant’s houses and more humble dwellings.

For a moment the Celestial Emperor’s gaze lingered on the horizon to the west and focused through the fog and falling snow on Long Peace, his native town. Drums, bells, and gongs began to sound. The sovereign could not read his decree because the jubilant people were already crying “Long live the Emperor!”

That afternoon he summoned ministers; the Supreme Son; the King of Yu, Sun; and Moon, the Princess of Eternal Peace to his bedside. He dictated his will: “… seven days will be sufficient for the funeral ceremonies; the heir will ascend to the throne in the presence of the coffin; the tomb and the funeral city will be built in sober style; the government will consult the Celestial Empress on important military and political matters.”

Early in the evening, my husband woke feeling very short of breath. He asked for an anaesthetizing drug, and, before sinking back into sleep, he called me over to his bed and took my hand.

Night fell, but I dared not move. As I held his hand in mine, I was his last link with the world of the living. There in the flickering candlelight, with his hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, and dry lips, he already looked like a pallid corpse. A cold current suddenly ran through the palm of my hand, and I heard muted music, a tinkling of crystal, silver bells and jade flutes.

Little Phoenix ’s face relaxed. Smoothed of their suffering, his motionless features had all the elegance of sculpted marble and the beauty of an enigmatic mask. His half-open eyes continued to watch the gods as they gathered invisibly around him. His lips were drawn out to the corners of his mouth, already in an expression of rapture.

I waited for the divine music to fade before rising to my feet. Eunuchs opened the doors of the palace wide. In the lantern light, I saw no hint of white snow in the square courtyard, so full was it of princes and ministers prostrating themselves on the ground. Town criers chorused the words I murmured: “The Emperor of China has risen up to Heaven. The greatest empire in the world has been orphaned.”

The people dressed themselves in the white of mourning. Music, laughter, and banquets vanished from every household. For seven days the Court carried out the simplified version of the twenty-seven ceremonies for putting the body in its coffin. For seven days the city of Luoyang rang to the sound of lamentations, esoteric prayers, and Buddhist recitations. For seven days incense dispersed from ritual basins and columns of gray smoke haunted the sky.

In his will my celestial husband had not specified where his tomb should be built. But as he stood at the top of the Gate of Celestial Law, his gaze had led me to understand that he wanted to return to his birthplace. Against the advice of ministers who wanted to bury him close to Luoyang, I rushed a delegation to Long Peace: Ministers of Human Affairs, engineers from the Department of Major Works, and experts in geomancy from the Funerals Department.

This commission sent messengers back to me with sketches and descriptions of the sites they had inspected. On my very first reading, I was drawn to Liang Mountain to the northeast of Long Peace, a site whose astral position corresponded to the number one and to the element of the heavens. It backed onto a chain of lush green hills and, on its eastern side, looked out over the Mountain of Nine Horses where the Eternal Ancestor was buried, while on its western side it quenched its thirst in the River Wu, a limpid source that barred the route to any demons from the Shades. The plain around the River Wei came and prostrated itself before the mountain’s southerly face that was defended by two hills, the towers of celestial archers.