My Last Empress (25 page)

The innkeeper pulled me aside and whispered, “I asked them to ride with you and pretend to be your family, four people instead of the two they are searching for. They can travel as far as you need them.”

Gratitude flooded my heart. Rarely do I deserve such grace.

I pressed five silvers into the tiny palm of the innkeeper. He refused, pushing it back. “I was once a guest of her fragrant house. I can never repay the honor bestowed upon me, but please do compensate the pair who will accompany you farther. You know, they aren’t even family. Claudia is French, her ‘mother’ a Russian widow. They have a roof above them, paying when they can, and they help me when I am in need, as is the case now.”

“Why are you helping her?” I asked.

“We are distant cousins on her princely father’s side. I render aid, if not for blood then the clan name.” He slapped the horse’s belly with his hand. “Off you go.”

“Where are we going?” I asked him.

“Don’t worry, I am not sending you through the gates. They have been crowded with royal inspectors since yesterday. A boat man will meet you at a loading dock.”

With the facade of a benign family of four, we negotiated through the streets of Peking lined and guarded by the
minions of the palace, every street corner a hooded guard, every block an alert inspector.

The metropolis was a convenient amphitheater and the foursome a well-chosen cast in which I played the doting father touring the northern plains in pursuit of possible tea trading, if inquired, with the Russian widow as my indifferent wife, eyes downcast, mouth sagging, lips dried, whom I had cajoled with extra coin to lean woodenly on my left shoulder while the French girl sprawled across my thighs as my lap pet. Q, my grumpy older daughter, was wrapped up in her scarf and ensconced in the back row obscured by the dark carriage roof.

Our rider chose to traverse the quiet back alleys and narrow lanes to avoid the eyes and grid of the dragnet. The beast, a beauty he was, trotted with measured gait, hurried but not harried. Above our moving theater an agile storm gathered, ominously lurching among the surrounding treetops. Thunder soon rumbled like a string of cow moos following us from street to street, from lane to narrower lane in slow chase of our squeaky wheels as if it could detect us among this movable maze, pinpointing the exactitude of our whereabouts amidst the massive landscape, then the all-seeing eye in heaven began pelting us with bullet-size raindrops beating mercilessly upon our roof and on our horse’s back. The earth was hushed by this sudden downpour, the world silenced. I could see that only two streets away the ground was dry and the earth was unstirred and sun drenched. The space flanking us, a narrow lane with a Buddhist temple two corners away, was all clear, without a cloud above, but wherever our
carriage rode, a valley of dark rain preceded us, not by much, only a detrimental ten yards—enough that our beast could never outrun it. In our trail, a river of wetness gleamed in the reappearing sun.

It was beneath this mystical rumble of rain and thunder over us, and over us only, that we journeyed smoothly through the western part of the city after passing two inevitable checkpoints—shabby kiosks filled with drenched palace police, who might have been outside waving their swords, stopping this very chariot had they not sought shelter from the rain. By midmorning we reached the city’s edge with its stone wall looming, arriving at a loading dock of a small tributary of the Grand Canal. A boatman was introduced to us by the rider, who drove back the tragic Russian and French duet after boarding us on a flat-bottomed boat filled to its brim with cookery and humble belongings—chinaware and sacks of wheat and rice under the leaky roof among which we were to hide. An infant’s cry, the boatman’s son, perfected this drizzling portrait of familial bliss: chimney and pets (two nuzzling Pekingese afoot), dangling chimes, and two older sons. With his wife making a fire in an earthen stove to warm up the noon meal, the boatman, a pigtailed Chinaman of no discernible age, poled his vessel along the mossy root of the city wall whose mightiness could not stop the rain or echoing thunder claps. Gliding serenely among the dimpled surface of the mucky canal, with the rain still umbrellaing us, the boat snuck through an underpass beneath an arched base of the city wall, an egress granted only to certain merchants or mercenaries carrying a green flag at their stern.

As we disappeared from one side of the wall, the rain was
thinning and clouds clearing. By the time we emerged on the other side, the sky was as blue as a blue jay with no peep of prior thunder or a morsel of previous moisture. Beyond that wall summer noon smiled at us with clarity and radiance. Even that certain Bard of Avon could not have envisioned such theatrics.

For three days and nights, we sheltered in the negligible houseboat, inching southeast at a snail’s pace from the canal’s northernmost terminus toward Tianjin. Among slumbering grain barges, flower rafts, and wobbling sampans filled with cabbages and melons, the boatman’s two brooding sons took turns walking the rocky shore, a rope over their shoulders, hauling the boat forward while the father sat on the deck smoking his pipe, minding its course. When not cooking, the man’s wife could be seen rocking their youngest seed, an unclad infant in a round-bottomed bamboo cradle on deck.

The sun rose and set, left to right; the moon trailed us, to and fro. Q suffered some feverish chills by night that could not be soothed by either fish soup or green tea brewed from the wife’s stove. My sickened empress kept murmuring “Father … Father” in her delirium. I dared not leave her alone even for a short repose. Her feverish lips were burning hot, and her nether Venus an unadulterated thermal inferno threatening to inflame not just my part but my whole. Lovemaking, absent proper medicine, was the only amalgam I could tender aboard this floating vessel. It’s the air and the sun, God and his invisible goddess. It’s the Taoist way, the Buddhist nirvana, and the Christians’ paradise. The truth
dwelled right here between man and his woman. It was in the entwining of bodies that the ideal of God was conceived—it was that essential.

Talking of vessel, Q during those three drenched, vulgar days of copulation wasn’t just serving as her own tool but as a bifurcated subvessel of her ancestor. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the arbiters of my dying soul, in all our couplings I stretched my vision beyond what lay before me to that faraway end goal. When loving her, I also loved her twin, that spirited mother, Annabelle.

For three cycles of the sun, I never left her. Three dark nights, water gurgling beside us, she lay coiled in my arms. There was the water police we had to evade, a tariff collector’s barge we had to negotiate; there might have even been some thunder or storms, but the only climatic wonders occurred under our soggy roof upon the flat bottom of the shaking boat.

The Grand Canal skirted the vast rice fields nearly ripened for harvest. Ears of rice, abundant and bending, eavesdropped on our affairs on this shameless boat. The country widened and the land flattened; more willows whispered and more birds twittered. Schools of young fish trailed our wake with leggy storks and throaty pelicans shimmering in the fringed shallows.

The fourth morning greeted us with a fishermen’s song sung along the shore, which woke my empress, my darling. Q was like the face of a mountain washed fresh by the thunderous storm: her cheeks were dimpled roses, her eyes ponds of liquid shimmering with light; her hair, a bird’s nest of chaos, only enhanced her unblemished beauty. The fishermen’s singing didn’t wake her; my swan song did when I slyly mounted her for the first and last time from her forbidden back garden. All the three days and nights of passion could only end in this fiery way: heaven and hell together.

From that morning after, intimate privilege was deprived me for more reason than I could account for. I thought it was Annabelle who gave the order to cut me off, though it could have been God, that we all fear, or his blushing bride, the Goddess—she was shamed by what underwent and what was undertaken. I must say in hindsight that if I were to give up
something so precious that the final coition should suffice me, not just for the rest of my earthly life but for all the end-time I had to endure.

On that day, Q emerged from under the roof a tad more womanly. There was an accusatory expression on her face each time she looked my way as we journeyed from our loading dock and took a carriage to the township of Wang, her presumed father. But there was no blame in her eyes, only a new light, a light of wisdom and insight, a newly gained confidence and higher strength, all earned by having been so deeply and maddeningly loved.

“Are you ready to face your father?” I asked. “I’ve heard bloody things about the man.”

“Anyone who could have loved my mother would not be a killer,” she said.

“Yes, but what right do we really have to come to his fortress uninvited?” I asked.

“My birthright,” she answered, her eyes looking afield.

Amidst the greenery of willows, summer corn, the gurgling rivulets, and quietly swimming geese suddenly emerged a mirage of humanity. A leafy townlet loomed against the range of a gentle hill, overgrown with blossoms of lavender. A faint and quaint aroma preceded, permeating the fresh air, framing the town as a garden, a sea of petals, an ocean of colors, vibrant and seasonal.

Q inhaled deeply, her eyes closed. “So fragrant.”

“They call it the ‘rebel’s fortress.’ ”

“Mother must have fallen in love on her way here, her Bible in hand. I can see her in her white frock and white hat, a pale butterfly amidst the green, feel her urgent heart beating,
measure her rhythm with mine. There is something in the air.… Then the lord of the manor opens his gate, and her heart softens, and forever she is his slave.”

“Mine, too.”

“You never got to love her.”

“But I did through you.”

“You are a rude man. Ugh, you ruined my vision, my pleasure.” She struck my shoulder with her bony fist. “What if his soldiers chase us away? What if he doesn’t want to see me? Is he even really my father?”

“There is no doubt.”

“What if I told him what you made me do?” she asked wickedly.

“You wouldn’t, would you?”

“They should probably lock you up to keep the young girls safe,” she said.

My paws would have choked her skinny neck had not the pull-bridge come into view marking the end of our ride. Three white uniformed soldiers kicked dirt toward us, stopping our carriage with their pointy spears.

The bridge guard took our arrival notice, a note that I had scribed with the most elegant characters I could summon during the three taxing days of passion, about the only exterior task I accomplished, which coaxed not admiration but only a cold chuckle from Q. Curtly it said that the guest was of importance, and that the consequence of seeing such would be beneficial to him and us mutually. The note ended succinctly, denoting Reverend Pickens, indicating my rank in the business of God, hoping to gain a tad closer entry to this
crazed specimen who, in this bleakest of time, was our only ray of hope in a dark sea.

Half an hour ensued without seeing the messenger’s return. Then another hour lapsed before a grim official of Wang’s clan rode to us on a blinking mule.

“His lordship has taken ill; therefore no visitor of any rank or officialdom will be granted audience.”

No sooner had the man swallowed the last syllable of his announcement than Q jumped off our carriage and slung herself onto the mule’s back, clutching the skinny man’s veiny neck.

“Listen, you worthless man of self-importance. Do you even know who I am?”

“No, please!” gasped the male on the mule.

“I am a reigning empress of the Qing Empire on my royal inspection tour to weed out remnants of our kingdom such as you. Get down this very moment and offer me twelve kowtows or my royal ocean tutor will sever your head and sell your scalp to the Indians of America. Do you even know what they will do with your soul? They will boil your scalp and eat it with their coarse wine and make you into the lowest animal form ever so that you will never rise again.”