My Last Empress (22 page)

“Another offense on Grandpa’s list that won’t easily be forgiven or forgotten, you unrepentant ingénue,” S said lovingly to Q as she huddled next to him like a cat.

“Slippery rock he might be, but he is evil to the core.” I slowly unveiled the treasure list I had bought off the shopkeeper. “Do you know what this is? Do you even want to know?”

“Surely, what other shocking news could there be?” He reached out his hand for the scroll and casually glanced at the coarsely copied items. Perusing it more intently with a deepening frown, he asked, “This is the list of famed treasures from our ancestors’ trove. How—?”

“Bought it at the market …”

“This is only known to a few,” S said, smirkless now.

“… for two silver coins.”

“But why is this list out there?” He waved the list angrily.

“This is the list of treasures for sale. You no longer own those antiques.”

“But I do. They belong to the Qing Empire.”

“Not anymore. Someone has helped himself to all on the list. You, my emperor, have a big hole in your pocket. All of the men working here are minions of thievery with Li Liang as their head. This is your empire only in name. It is his empire in reality. The list was sold to me by his third cousin, one of many, forming a family of companies on his behest. The whole Tartar City commerce district is his empire reaching as far as customs in Tianjin and Shanghai. How do I know? Because his cousin told me. If I wanted to buy any of the items of treasure from this list, they could also sell me the proper legal documentation to go through customs without any complications. Either they have an alliance with the customs officers or with local government officials who can dole out the documents for coin. It seems the whole empire outside is working against you, with your mightiest opponent being the eunuch in your utmost confidence and trust.”

“Now you are onto something, something vital to pin down that half-man. You foreign devils never fail, do you? Your tenacity!” The elated emperor landed a kiss on the left cheek of his spouse. Addressing her, he said, “You should take my teacher to the treasure vaults tonight and record the inventory, or more pertinently, the lack of which. Create for me a list of missing items. When confirmed, this will be our scepter to fight back the wave against me. All these faux diagnoses and these medical advisers will be swept aside once Grandpa finds me useful and vital again. This will show her
that I have been right all along. The entire horde of eunuchs has been against me and more important, against her and this palace. Once she sees her new foe clearly, all ill feeling toward me will be swept away. Mr. Pickens, you have no idea what this will do for me, for you, for us. You will formally be appointed to the highest rank of royal counsel. You and your heirs shall forever benefit from the enjoyment of this titular privilege for eternity, in perpetuity.”

“I am honored, but I’m not doing this for my heirs. I see none coming.”

“Nevertheless, the honor you shall carry. Go now, you two. At daybreak, a new sun shall rise, and we shall all breathe in fresh air. I am not unwell, as you two can see. I am just suffering from such anguish … unknowable anguish. I am about to be freed from all these accusations, all this coldness and neglect—”

“No one neglects you,” Q said, embracing the emperor, holding him as a mother would her fretful child.

“The bitter coldness from Grandpa. All because she thinks I am weak like a girl, that I am useless and powerless. That’s why Grandpa seeks to have me retired. I have been weak, but no longer. You two go and find proof of theft. With that one genuine thing, I can be proved right on all other matters. Grandpa will not think of me again as weak. That’s all I ask for. Go, you two.” He removed Q’s arms from around his shoulders and pushed her away. The exertion seemed to exhaust him, sending a shiver through his frame and rendering him to seek the only solace he knew.

“Servant! Bring me the pipe.”

The shadow of his servant swept in like a ghost and lit the
emperor’s pipe. Such was our titular ruler. Such was the plight of this helpless soul, in which lay clarity and sweet innocence. Such was what bound me to him in ways I cannot describe, in ways that incite nostalgia, homesickness, and longing, a certain hollowness of one’s heart. Fondness for another being.

Strength might be heroic, but frailty is darling, and utter fragility outright endearing, for in that weakness there is a certain strength that urged me to charge afore and lay myself down in his defense.

Helplessness is a gift in and of itself.

Brushing this entry, how I wish I had a second chance to relive the events that followed. Had I the opportunity to live that night one more time, I might see the blinking signs of my undoing that marred the dark night.

I had intended only to include Q in my effort to account for all the treasure piling under the roof of the Treasure Chamber, a stout building on the neglected western spur of the palace grounds. But the emperor instead sent an order to assemble a team of palace women and cursed eunuchs under the leadership of the very man about whom all these investigations were aimed. At once, this discreet act initiated by the new inspector was transformed into a full-blown affair.

“Don’t worry, Li Liang will not be concerned by all this,” S answered when I rushed back to question him about that decision. His naïveté was alarming. “These servants all follow my orders.”

“Wrong again, my sovereign. Haven’t you seen what this palace has been reduced to?”
I wanted to shout at him.
“What a den of thieves it has become? And you are but a parody of power, a ruler of ultimate foolishness and utter idiocy.”

How I wished to wipe that smirk off his face, as if I were the blind one seeing nothing, fumbling my way around this
foreign land and alien Court. And yet how my heart ached for this helpless lamb on the chopping block.

Into the night came the firebugs and minions, the hidden and the ugly, mutually crowding the nocturnal chamber filled to the rafters with the annual gifts from far provinces and ocean nations, offerings by empires, foreign kings and queens. Q was regal, organizing the eunuchs and palace women into queues and circles in their respective tasks. The commingling of the two—the neglected palace concubines and feminized half-men—had long been the fodder of salacious novels: lone and lonely men without wherewithal, and their opposite fully equipped with their wiles and whistles. The haphazard fumbling and caressing is a given, given the nature of their existence. Little though the neuters had, they became peerless experts and authorities on pleasing a woman with what organs they had remaining. I had witnessed with my own eyes a young eunuch, a kitchen hand from the north, bending over an older palace woman, his face between her thighs, his agile tongue causing her to give out delighted cries.

Night might be dark out on the palace grounds, but the chamber’s interior was well lit with rows of gigantic ceremonial candles giving off hisses of light and fragrant scent. The palace women, the engines of this stately household, moved the wares from shelf to shelf, inspecting their provenance, voicing their gift labels to the eunuchs recording the confirmations at hand, who in turn told other eunuchs to register them either as missing or intact. Such trigroupings repeated at length from aisle to aisle and hall to hall, seeking order amidst chaos. These halls might bear treasures, but signs of
abandonment and neglect were everywhere: dust and spiderwebs, and worse, the haunts of theft and embezzlement.

In its midst were vases from Versailles, clocks from Colón, little engines from the English Court, porcelain from Poland, gems from Germany—in sum and to wit, the rarities from the far corners of this earth, valuables from the high mountains to the deep seas.

In it all was Q, my queen bee, inspecting room to room, advising aisle to aisle. A creature of the arts, native or foreign, she possessed a sharp eye for paintings, particularly of the Baroque era, and a taste for North Soong Dynasty watercolors. It owed much to the fact that her adoptive father had been a premier collector of that period’s art, from porcelain jars to poetry scrolls and silk and satin tapestry, much of which adorned the walls of Q’s private study.

What ensued next I should have perceived had I possession of that illusive third eye. The mystical firebugs of that long ago night must have invaded my aura without my detection, flooding through unlocked doors and released window latches of those dusty rooms, creating a gale that gained passage behind a scroll hanging crookedly on the western wall and causing a nearby candle flame to elongate and stretch, nipping first at the sleeves of a busy palace woman’s gown. She flailed her hand frantically, aiming to douse the fire, and her arm caught the edges of the volume in a eunuch’s hands. The volume, with its thin and fragile pages, was instantly aflame, sending its sparks to fly in a radius within which a silk tapestry was hung, that in turn burned quickly upward, leading the fire to squirm like some sly snake all the way to
the ceiling rafter, igniting the wooden roof into a canopy of heat and dancing flames.

I was marveling at a marble sculpture of Venus when the heat wave sliced the dense air, piercing the spiderwebs as quick and palpable as lightning. The age-old rafters gave off sizzling fury as they were engulfed in flame, which soon gave way to panic. Eunuchs threw away their record books, adding fuel to the growing fire; palace women screeched, batting at the flames lighting up their dresses, their sleeves, their hair. Some ran for the door, others squatted down in confusion. A burning chunk of wood breaking off from the ceiling beam hit my shoulder. Sparks quickly nipped at my scalp, burning a few strands of my hair, dying quickly under my smothering palm.

Looking from the other side of this slippery truth, one could argue that the chamber fire had nothing to do with imagined firebugs: there had never been those flying creatures, neither in the autumn meadows of New England nor in the July air of Peking. In-In was but a liar with the sweetness of spirit to conform to his pitiful master, and their flight, nocturnal, was an astral vision by a misguided, crazed man of inborn or acquired madness. Perhaps the following was what had actually occurred.

Only a moment ago, I had a glimpse of that particular palace woman letting go of the vase she was holding, thereby toppling a giant candle toward her sleeves, which a second ago had been pushed aside by the fleeting hand of a particular eunuch with a square face and jutting chin, the kind that defies authority, the kind most liable to rebel, the kind
that is ambitious beyond his means. He had not merely pushed the giant wooden candle stand but had duly kicked the stand off its support—amazing how one’s memory could withhold all these truths only to be revealed later. While he concocted these sequences, his muddy eyes had darted toward me at the very second when Q ran over in excitement, a scroll half open in her hand, to tell me about a rare find, the original of a legendary poet who had hidden the answer to a riddle in another scroll, the one that she possessed.

Just a split second after, a shadow lurched behind her, one that shut closed the heavy door with a clacking noise associated with certain clinking of a heavy lock, the kind requiring two keys to open. The candle tilted, falling and alarming the palace woman, so on and so forth.

The scenario was simple. All had been well thought out, with a commanding choreographer silently mastering every single step and move within. Maybe Q’s find had been planted by the same invisible master, leading her to run into the same room I was in. We had positioned ourselves in separate rooms so that two set of eyes could keep the servitude honest and diligent.

My first instinct was to fling myself toward Q, catching her in my arms as she glimpsed the fire burning the palace woman. Her move to render aid was impeded by the rush of palace women, who abandoned the wares and treasures at hand and rushed to the door. The first one to reach it yanked at the inner door knob. It didn’t budge. The second one leaped over her, pulling at the latch, but the door seemed stuck. The look on their faces was telling—frightened and anguished. Together, they aimed their shoulders at the door,
giving it a mighty slam. The door stood firmly as it was so meant.

The fire had by now flooded the room like a raging tide spitting up sparks and sparkles, turning the area into an instant pond of flames. The heat rose, stifling our noses and throats. I did my best to shield Q within my arms, holding her thin frame close to my chest into which her shouts and screams could be felt vibrating, muffled against my rib cage.

Some palace women collapsed; others dashed from one corner to another, their clothes and hair aflame. A handful of eunuchs, all young and vital, were taking turns trying to break down the door with precious jars and statues. Nothing gave. The air turned denser, the heat rising, clawing at our skin, eyelashes, and hair.

“Window? Is there a window in here?” I shouted, only to be muted by falling debris from above. The only one who heard me was my Q. She pushed herself away from my chest to leap on a stool partially aflame and quickly rip away a watercolor hanging on the eastern wall. There an ingenious window was revealed, barred by three iron rods.