Imperial Woman (48 page)

On this day, then, at midmorning, she sat in the wisteria pavilion at ease in her large carved chair, set high like a small throne upon a platform. She made no pretense now that any was her equal, for she knew at last that her power depended upon herself and her own inner strength. Her ladies stood about her.

“Amuse yourselves, little ones,” she said. “Walk where you will, watch the goldfish in the pools, talk as you will, in whispers or aloud. Only remember that we are here to enjoy the wisteria and do not mention sorrows.”

They thanked her in murmurs, these young and beautiful ladies robed in the brightest hues of every color, the sunshine falling upon their flawless skins and pretty hands and lighting their black eyes and glittering upon their flowered headdresses.

They obeyed her but cautiously, careful that always some remained. When twenty drifted away, another twenty clustered about her. But the Empress did not seem to see them. Her eyes were always upon the little Emperor, her nephew, who played with his toys on a terrace nearby. With him were two young eunuchs whom she ignored. Suddenly she lifted her right hand and palm downward she beckoned to the child.

“Come here, my son,” she said.

He was not her son, and when she spoke the words her heart turned against him. Yet she spoke them, for she had chosen him to sit in her son’s place upon the Dragon Throne.

The boy looked at her and then came slowly toward her, pushed by the elder of the two young eunuchs.

“Do not touch him,” the Empress commanded sharply. “He must come to me of his own accord.”

Still the child did not come willingly. He put his finger in his mouth and stared at her, and the toy he held dropped to the tiled path.

“Pick it up,” she said. “Bring it to me that I may see what you have.”

Her face did not change. Beautiful and calm, she neither smiled nor was angry. She waited until, compelled by her powerful stillness, the child stooped and took up the toy and came toward her. Baby though he was, he knelt before her while he held up the toy for her to see.

“What is it?” she inquired.

“An engine,” he replied, his voice so small that she could scarcely hear him.

“These engines,” she mused, not putting out her hand to take the toy. “And who gave you an engine?”

“No one,” the child answered.

“Nonsense,” she said. “Did it grow in your hand?” And she nodded to the young eunuch to speak for him.

“High Majesty,” he said, “the little Emperor is always lonely. Here in the palaces are no children for him to play with. And lest he cry until he sickens, we bring him many toys. He likes best the toys from the foreign shop in the Legation Quarter.”

“Foreign toys?” She put the question in the same sharp voice.

“The shop is kept by a Dane, High Majesty,” the eunuch explained, “and this Dane sends everywhere in Europe for toys for our little Emperor.”

“An engine,” she repeated. Now she reached forward and took the toy. It was made of iron, small but heavy. Under the body were wheels, and upon the top a chimney.

“How do you play with this?” she inquired of the little Emperor.

He forgot his fear of her and scrambled to his feet.

“Ancient Mother, like this!” He seized it and opened a small door. “Inside here I can light a fire with bits of wood. And here I put water and when the water boils, steam comes out and then the wheels go round. Behind it I hook some cars, and the engine pulls them. It is called a train, Ancient Mother.”

“Is it indeed,” she mused.

She looked at the child thoughtfully. Too pale, too thin, the face too weak, a reed of a boy—

“What else have you?” she asked.

“More trains,” the child said eagerly. “Some wind with a key, and I have a great army of soldiers.”

“What soldiers?” she asked.

“Many kinds, Mother,” he said. He forgot to be afraid of her and even came close enough to lean upon her knees. She felt a strange pain where his arm rested and in her heart a yearning for something lost.

“My soldiers carry guns,” he was saying, “and they wear uniforms, painted, of course, because they are tin soldiers, not real ones.”

“Have you Chinese soldiers?” she asked.

“No Chinese soldiers,” he said, “but English and French, German and Russian and Americans. The Russians wear—”

“And can you tell them one from the other?” she asked.

He laughed aloud. “Oh easily, Mother! The Russians have beards—long—” he measured his hands against his waist. “And the French have beards only here—” he touched his forefinger across his upper lip. “And the Americans—”

“All, all have white faces,” she said in the same strange voice.

“How did you know?” he asked, surprised.

“I know,” she said.

She pushed him away, her hand at his elbow, and he stepped back, the light gone from his eyes. At this moment Sakota, Empress Dowager, came in with four of her own ladies, walking slowly, her figure stooping under the heavy headdress that made her face so small.

The little Emperor ran to meet her. “M-ma!” he cried. “I thought you were never coming!” His fond hands reached for hers, and he laid her palms against his cheeks. Over his dark head Sakota looked across the courtyard and met the imperial gaze fastened upon her.

“Loose me, child,” she murmured.

But he would not let her go. While the Empress watched he clung to Sakota, walking beside her as she walked, holding in his hands a fold of her gray silk robe.

“Come and sit near me, Sister,” the Empress said. She pointed with her jeweled thumb to a carved chair near her own, and Sakota came toward her and bowed and took her seat.

Still the little Emperor stood by her, clinging to her hand. This the Empress saw as she saw everything, but without seeming to notice. Her long calm eyes rested upon the child and then moved to the wisteria vines. The male vines, huge and old, had been planted close to the female that the flowers might be at their best. Together they twined around the twin pagodas and foamed in a froth of white and purple over the roofs of yellow porcelain tiles. The sun was warm, and bees, made frantic by the fragrance, buzzed over the blossoms.

“Those bees,” the Empress observed. “They gather here from everywhere in the city.”

“Indeed, they do, Sister,” Sakota replied. But she did not look at the flowers. Instead, she smoothed the childish hand she held, a thin small hand, the veins too clear under the soft skin.

“This little Son of Heaven,” she murmured, “he does not eat enough.”

“He eats the wrong foods,” the Empress said.

It was an old quarrel between the two of them. The Empress believed that health lay in simple foods, in vegetables cooked slightly, in meats not fat, in few sweets. These foods she commanded for the little Emperor. Yet she knew very well that he refused them when her back was turned and that he ran to Sakota to be fed sweetened dough balls and rich dumplings and roasted pork, dripping with sugar. When he had pains in his belly she knew that Sakota in her fond blind love gave him whiffs of opium from her own pipe. This, too, the Empress held against her cousin, that she yielded to the foreign opium habit, smoking in secret the vile black stuff that came from India under foreign flags. Yet, Sakota, sad and foolish woman, believed that it was only she who truly loved the little Emperor!

The brightness of the morning clouded under such thoughts and Sakota, seeing the beautiful imperial face grow stern, was frightened. She beckoned to a eunuch.

“Take the little Emperor somewhere to play,” she whispered.

The Empress heard as she heard every whisper. “Do not take the child away,” she commanded. She turned her head. “You know, Sister, that I do not wish him to be alone with these small eunuchs. There is not one of them who is pure. The Emperor will be corrupted before he is grown. How many emperors have thus been spoiled!”

At such words the waiting eunuch, a youth of fifteen or sixteen years, crept away abashed.

“Sister,” Sakota murmured. Her pale face spotted crimson.

“What now?” the Empress demanded.

“To speak so before everyone,” Sakota said, faintly remonstrating.

“I speak the truth,” the Empress said firmly. “I know you think that I do not love the royal child. Yet which loves him the more, you who pander to his every peevish wish or I who would mend his health by good food and healthy play? You who give him over to these small devils who are eunuchs or I who would keep him from their foulness?”

At this Sakota began to cry quietly behind her sleeve. Her ladies ran to her but the Empress motioned them away, and she herself rose and took Sakota by the hand and led her into the hall at the right of the court. There she sat down upon a gilded couch and drew Sakota down beside her.

“Now,” she said, “we are alone. Tell me why you are always angry with me.”

But Sakota had a soft stubbornness of her own and would not speak. She continued to sob while the Empress waited, until she, who was never patient long, grew too impatient to listen any more to the wailing half-stifled sobs of the weak woman.

“Weep,” the Empress said relentlessly. “Cry until you are happy again. I think you are never happy unless the tears are streaming from your eyes. I wonder your sight is not washed away.”

With this she rose and walked out of the pavilion and away from the garden and into her library. There, forbidding anyone to enter, she spent the rest of the bright spring day, her books before her, and the fragrance of the wisteria drifting in through the wide and open doors.

But her thoughts were not with her books. Though she sat as motionless as an image of carved ivory, her thoughts were restless inside her beautiful skull. Was she never to be loved? This was the question that rose too often from the crowded days of her life. Millions of people depended upon her wisdom. Here in the palace no one could live unless she willed it. She was just, she was careful, she rewarded those who were faithful and she punished none but the evil. Yet she discerned no love for her in any face she saw, not even in the child’s face, though he was her own nephew, her very blood, and now her chosen son. Even that solitary one she loved and still did love in the depths of her being, even Jung Lu, had not spoken to her now for two years, nay for three, except as a courtier speaks to his sovereign. He came no more into her presence as once he had, he made no excuse for audience, and when she summoned him he came as haughtily as any prince and kept his distance, scrupulously performing his duty and yielding nothing more. And yet he was so matchless a man that maidens in the city, gossip said, declared that they would have husbands only when they were as handsome as Prince Jung Lu. The Empress had lifted him to be a prince by now, but high as he was he came no nearer to her. Yet he was loyal to her, she knew him loyal, but it was not enough. Could her heart never be cured of longing?

She sighed and closed her books. Of all human beings herself she knew the least. Knowing herself so little, how could she know why today she had been cruel again to Sakota? She sat motionless, too honest to avoid her own question and thus relentless even with herself, she perceived that she was jealous for the child’s love, a strange old jealousy reaching into the past, when her dead son had been a lad and like this living child had escaped her by loving Sakota instead of her who was his mother.

Yet it was I who loved him, she thought, and mine was the duty to teach and train him. Had he lived longer he might have known—

But he had not lived. She rose restlessly, never able to bear the thought of her son dead and in his tomb. She wandered out again into the wisteria gardens and seemed not to see her patient ladies, waiting through the hours outside her door. The air was cool with sunset and the fragrance was gone. She shivered and stood for a moment, gazing about her at the splendors of the scene, the iridescent pools, the purple-laden vines laced with white, the bright roofs of gold and the sculptured beasts upon their crests, the tiled walks and the crimson walls. All this was hers, and was it not enough? It must be enough, for what more could be hers? She had her heir, her chosen. The child Emperor was in his ninth year, tall and slender as a new bamboo. His pale skin was translucent and too delicate, but his will was strong and he made no secret that he loved Sakota better than his imperial aunt and foster mother. The only one more proud than he was the Empress herself. She would not stoop to woo the boy, nor could she even hide her deepening dislike of him because of her heart’s disappointment. The rising strife between the beautiful aging Empress and the young Emperor pervaded the whole court, dividing courtiers and eunuchs, one against the other, and in this division the silly woman who was Sakota began to make faint dreams of power. She who had ever been the weakest and most timid creature in the palace had such dreams. From Li Lien-ying the Empress heard gossip that her cousin-Empress planned to take her rightful place as the Consort of the Emperor Hsien Feng, a place, she declared privately, that had been usurped by her cousin.

The Empress had laughed at such a tale. She could still laugh a hearty peal when faced with absurdity.

“Surely it is a kitten against a tiger,” she said, and would not yield a moment’s further heed, nor did she reprove her eunuch when he joined in her laughter.

In that same year, nevertheless, Sakota struck a feeble blow. It was upon that sacred day when the whole Court must make obeisance before the Eastern Imperial Tombs. When she arrived at noon with her cortêge, the Empress was amazed to find that Sakota had set her will to be the first to offer sacrifice before the dead Emperor Hsien Feng and thus take precedence in all the ceremonies of the day. Now the Empress had come here with full preparation of mind and spirit. She had fasted the day before, taking neither food nor water, and she had risen at dawn and outside the hall where she had meditated through the long and lonely night, Jung Lu had waited with other princes and the ministers to escort her to the tombs. Through the deep vast forest which surrounds the Tombs of the Eight Emperors, the Empress was carried in her palanquin. All traveled in silence, and in the dim dawn not even a bird song fell upon her ears. In solemnity and reverence she came, pondering the weight of her position, her many peoples subject to her alone, and upon her alone the weary duty weighed to keep them safe from foreign enemies now threatening in ever-growing power. She who seldom prayed to Heaven did pray today within her heart for wisdom and strength, and she prayed to the Imperial Ancestors as gods to guide her thoughts and plans, fingering the jade beads of her Buddhist rosary, one for each prayer.