Imperial Woman (4 page)

“The Emperor’s duty to his dead lady is done,” the eunuch went on. “Now his fancy will wander.”

She was silent. It might fall upon her!

“You must be ready,” he went on. “My reckoning is that within six or seven days he will think of a concubine.”

“How do you know everything?” she asked, half fearful in spite of her will not to fear.

“Eunuchs know such things,” he said, leering down into her face.

She spoke with dignity. “You forget yourself before me.”

“I offend you,” he said quickly. “I am wrong. You are always right. I am your servant, your slave.”

She was so solitary that even though he was frightening, she compelled herself to accept his assurance. “Yet why,” she now inquired, “do you wish to serve me? I have no money with which to reward you.”

It was true that she had not a penny of money. Daily she ate of the most delicate dishes, for whatever the Dowager Mother left was given to the concubines and there was abundance of every variety of food. The chests in her bedchamber were filled with beautiful robes. She slept between silken quilts and she was waited upon day and night by her woman. Yet she could not buy so much as a handkerchief or a packet of sweets for herself. And she had not seen a play since she entered the Forbidden City. The Dowager Mother was still in mourning for the dead Emperor, T’ao Kuang, her son’s father, and she would not allow even the concubines to enjoy themselves in a play, and this lack made Yehonala more lonely than the loss of her family. All her life, whenever her tasks were heavy, her mother scolding, her days without joy, she had escaped to watch the actors playing on the streets or in the courtyard of a temple. If she had a penny by chance, she saved it for the play, and if she had none, then she slipped away before the basket was passed among the crowd.

“Do you think I ask for gifts?” Li Lien-ying said. “Then you misjudge me. I know what your destiny is. You have a power in you that is in none of the others. Did I not perceive it as soon as my eyes fell upon you? I have told you. When you rise toward the Dragon Throne I will rise with you, always your servant and your slave.”

She was shrewd enough to know how skillfully he used her beauty and her ambition for his own ends while he knit the ties of obligation between himself and her. If ever she reached the throne, and surely she would some day, he would be there to remind her that he had helped her.

“Why should you serve me for nothing?” she asked, indifferently. “No one gives without thought of return.”

“We understand each other,” he said, and smiled.

She looked away. “Then we can only wait,” she said.

“We wait,” he agreed, and bowed and went away.

She returned to the library very thoughtful, the little dog padding after her. The old tutor still slept and she sat down in the chair she had left, and began once more to read. And everything was as it had been before, except that her heart, in this short space of time, was no more the soft heart of a virgin. She had become a woman, bent upon her destiny.

How could she now consider the meaning of ancient poetry? Her whole mind was playing about the moment when she would be summoned. And how would the summons come? Who would bring the message? Would she have time to bathe and perfume her body, or must she hasten as she was? The imperial concubines gossipped among themselves often, and when one had gone and come back again, the others questioned to the last shred of memory to know what had passed between her and the Emperor. Yehonala had not questioned but she had listened. Better to know!

“The Emperor does not wish you to talk,” a concubine had said. Once she had been the favorite, but now she lived forgotten, in the Palace of Forgotten Concubines with others whom the Emperor had not loved for long, or else who were the aging concubines of his dead father. Though she was not yet twenty-four years of age this concubine had been chosen and embraced and rejected. For the rest of her life she would live neither wife nor widow, and since she did not conceive she had not even the solace of a child. She was a pretty woman, idle and empty, talking only of the one day when she had lived in the private palace of the Emperor. That brief story she told again and again as the new concubines waited to be chosen.

But Yehonala listened and said nothing. She would divert the Emperor. She would amuse him and tease him and sing to him and tell him stories, weaving every bond between them of mind as well as flesh. She closed the
Book of Changes
and put it aside. There were other books, forbidden books,
Dream of the Red Chamber, Plum Flower in a Golden Vase, White Snake
—she would read them all, commanding Li Lien-ying to bring them to her from bookshops outside the walls if she could not find them here.

The tutor waked suddenly and quietly as the old do waken, the difference for them between sleep and awakening being so slight. He watched her without moving.

“How now?” he asked. “Have you finished your portion?”

“It is finished,” she said. “And I wish for other books, story books, tales of magic, something to amuse me.”

He looked stern and he stroked his hairless chin with a hand as dry and withered as a dead palm leaf. “Such books poison the thoughts, especially of females,” he declared. “You will not find them here in the Imperial Library, no, there is not one among all the thirty-six thousand upon these shelves. Such books ought not even to be mentioned by a virtuous lady.”

“Then I will not mention them,” she said playfully.

And stooping she gathered the little dog into her sleeve and went away to her own chamber.

What she had known in the afternoon of one day was by the next day known everywhere. Mouth to ear, the gossip flew from courtyard to courtyard and excitement rose like wind. In spite of his Consort and his many concubines, the Emperor had never had a child, and the great Manchu clans were restless. If there were no heir, then an heir must be chosen from among them, and princes watched each other closely, guarding themselves and their sons, jealous of where the choice might fall. Now, since Sakota, the new Consort, had conceived, they could only wait. If she had a daughter instead of a son the strife would begin again.

Yehonala herself belonged to the most powerful of these clans, and from her clan three Empresses had already risen. Should she not be a fourth? Ah, if she were chosen, if she could conceive immediately, if she had a son, and Sakota but a daughter, the path of destiny would be clear indeed—too clear, perhaps, for who had such good fortune that one step could lead so swiftly to another? Yet all was possible.

In preparation she began from that day on to read the memorials that came from the Throne, studying every word of the edicts the Emperor sent forth. Thus she might inform herself concerning the realm and so be ready if ever the gods willed to send her forward. And slowly she began to comprehend the vastness of the country and its people. Her world had been the city of Peking, wherein she grew from child to maiden. She knew her ruling race, the Manchu clans who from their invading ancestors had seized and held the power over a mighty people who were Chinese. Two hundred years the northern dynasty had built its heart here in the imperial city, its red walls four square inside the capital. The Emperor’s City, it was called, or the Forbidden City, for he was its king, its solitary male, and he alone could sleep here at night. At twilight the drums beat in every lane and cranny to warn all men to depart. The Emperor remained alone among his women and his eunuchs.

But this capital, this inner city, so she now comprehended, was but the ruling center of a country eternal in its mountains, rivers, lakes and seashores, in the endless numbers of its cities and villages, in the hundreds of millions of its various people, its merchants, farmers, scholars, its weavers, artisans, smiths and innkeepers, men and women of every sort, craft and art. Her bright imagination flew from the gates of her royal prison and traveled everywhere that her eyes led upon the printed pages of her books. From the imperial edicts she learned yet more. She learned that a mighty rebellion was rising in the south, the hateful fruit of a foreign religion. These Chinese rebels called themselves T’ai P’ing and they were led by a fanatic Christian, surnamed Hung, who imagined himself an incarnated brother of the one called Christ, son of a foreign god by a peasant woman. This birth was not strange, for in the ancient books were many such stories. A farm wife could tell of a god who came before her in a cloud while she was tilling the field, and by magic he impregnated her so that in ten moon months she bore a godly son. Or a fisherman’s daughter, though still a virgin, would tell how a god came up out of the river while she tended her father’s fishing nets, and by his magic she was impregnated. But under the Christian banner of T’ai P’ing rebels the restless and the discontents were gathering themselves, and unless they were quelled, these men might even overthrow the Manchu dynasty. T’ao Kuang had been a weak emperor and so now was his son, Hsien Feng, whom the Dowager Mother commanded as though he were a child.

Through the Dowager Mother, then, Yehonala must find her access, and she made it her daily duty to wait upon the elder lady, appearing with a choice flower or a ripe fruit plucked from the imperial gardens.

It was now nearly the season of summer melons, and the Dowager Mother loved very well the small yellow-fleshed sweet melons that grow on dung heaps, where in the spring the seeds are sown. Yehonala walked daily in the melon rows and searched for the first sweet melons, hidden under the leaves. Upon those most nearly ripe she pasted bits of yellow paper brushed with the name of the Dowager Mother, so that no greedy eunuch or woman servant would steal them. Every day she tested the melons with her thumb and forefinger and one day, seven days after Li Lien-ying had told her of the news concerning Sakota, she heard a melon sound as empty as a drum. It was ripe, and she twisted it from its stem and, carrying it in both hands, she went to the courtyards of the Dowager Mother.

“Our Venerable Mother is asleep,” a serving woman said. She was jealous of Yehonala because the Dowager Mother favored her.

Yehonala raised her voice. “Is the Dowager Mother sleeping at this hour? Then she must be ill. It is long past the hour when she wakes—”

She had, when she wished, a thrush-clear voice that carried through several rooms. Now it reached the ears of the Dowager Mother, who was not sleeping but sat in her bedroom embroidering a gold dragon upon a black girdle which she wished to present to her son. There was no need for her to do such work but she could not read and she liked to embroider. She heard Yehonala’s voice and since she was growing weary of her needle, which she soon did, she put it down and called.

“Yehonala, come here! Who says I am sleeping is a liar!”

Yehonala made a coaxing smile for the serving woman who frowned. “No one says you sleep, Venerable,” she called, in reply. “It is I who heard it wrong.”

With this courteous lie she tripped through the rooms holding her melon until she reached the bedchamber of the Dowager Mother, where the old lady sat in her undergarments because of the heat, and to her she presented the melon with both hands.

“Ah,” the Dowager Mother cried, “and I sat here thinking of sweet melons and wishing for one, and you come at the very moment!”

“Let me bid a eunuch hang it in one of the northern wells to cool it,” Yehonala said.

But the Dowager Mother would not allow this. “No, no,” she argued, “if this melon falls into the hands of a eunuch he will eat it secretly and then when I send for it, he will bring me a green one or he will say the rats have gnawed it or it has fallen into the well and he cannot get it up. I know those eunuchs! I will eat it here and now and have it safely in my belly.”

She turned her head and shouted to any serving woman who was near. “Fetch me a large knife!”

Three or four women ran for knives and in a moment they were back and Yehonala took a knife and sliced the melon delicately and neatly and the Dowager Mother seized a piece of it and began to eat it as greedily as a child, the sweet water dripping from her chin.

“A towel,” Yehonala said to a serving woman and when it was put in her hand she tied it about the old lady’s neck to keep her silken undervest from soiling.

“Save half of it,” the Dowager Mother commanded, when she had eaten as much as she could. “When my son comes to present himself this evening as he always does before I sleep, I will give it to him. But it is to stay here beside me or one of those eunuchs will snatch it.”

“Let me—” Yehonala said.

And she would not allow a serving woman to touch the melon. She called for a dish and placed the melon into it, and then she called for a porcelain bowl and this she placed over the melon, and the dish was set into a basin of cold water. All this trouble she took that the Dowager Mother might mention it to the Emperor when he came and so her name would fall somewhere into the Emperor’s hearing.

While she worked in such ways, Li Lien-ying worked in his, also. He bribed the menservants in the Emperor’s private courts to watch their lord and when the monarch appeared restless, his eyes moving this way and that after a woman, the eunuch bade them speak the name of Yehonala.

Thus in one way and another it was done, and the very day after the presentation of the melon Yehonala found in the pages of her book when she opened it in the library a sheet of paper folded small. Upon it were written two lines in rude handwriting. They said:

“The Dragon awakes again,

The day of the Phoenix has come.”

She knew who had written the words. Yet how did Li Lien-ying know? She would not ask him. What he did to fulfill her purposes must be secret even from herself, and quietly she read her books while the old tutor eunuch slept and woke and slept again until hours passed. But this was the day when she received her usual painting lesson in midafternoon and she was glad, for her mind darted here and there and she could not keep her thoughts upon the calm words of a dead sage. Upon painting she must keep her mind fixed, for her teacher was a woman, not yet old, and very exacting. She was Lady Miao, a widow, a Chinese, whose husband had died in youth. Since it was not usual for Chinese ladies to appear in the Manchu Court, this lady was allowed to unbind her feet, to comb her hair high as Manchu ladies do, and to put on Manchu robes, so that at least she looked a Manchu, and she was thus permitted because she was perfect in her art. She came of a family of Chinese artists, for her father and her brothers were artists, too, but she excelled them all, especially in the painting of cocks and chrysanthemums, and she was employed to teach the concubines her art. Yet she was so skilled and impatient that she would not teach a concubine who had no will to learn, or no talent. Both will and talent Yehonala had, and when Lady Miao discovered this to be so, she devoted herself to the proud young girl, although she continued insistent and severe as a teacher. Thus she had not as yet let Yehonala paint anything from life. Instead she compelled her to study ancient woodcuts and the prints of dead masters, so that she might engrave upon her mind the strokes they made, the lines they drew, the colors they mixed. After such study she allowed Yehonala to begin to copy and still forbade her to work alone.