The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (41 page)

That night the Forbidden City was overtaken by cold and showers of rain. Two days of rest the Yellow Lord granted himself. He sat at games of morra in the pillared hall of the Imperial quarters. His writing desk, low, of massive gold, was placed close behind him. Its top rested on the back of an elephant, whose legs formed the legs of the desk. Ch’ien-lung used to read off his poems from the long face of the God of Literature, who stood before a delicately fashioned pagoda in the middle of the desk, and from the folds of his gown. A-kuei the jester, honest man of action, squatted facing the Emperor on the ebony floor. A thickset, shortlegged man with a square face and erect back. A-kuei was always of the same temper. You could stick him in a corner and fetch him out again: he would act as if nothing had happened. His rough manners, coarse laughter, crude turns of phrase were considered sanctioned, were cultivated in the Vermilion Court. He himself seemed unaware of them, evinced unhappiness at every breach of etiquette; his attempts at caution made him even more comical. He was a splendid morra player, this peasant, better than Ch’ien-lung. Some whispered that A-kuei was not only grasping and avaricious, but frankly undependable; he was a fomenter of intrigues, a scandalmonger who used his boorishness to powerful advantage. Naturally such talk found willing ears among the most eminent courtiers: A-kuei’s services in the difficult campaign against the Miao-tzu discomfited other men. While the grey capricious ruler sat with A-kuei at the
game board, their elegant and cultivated lordships laughed as they amused themselves out on the fishing terrace flying kites; they professed to think that the Emperor tolerated his jester’s prattle; in reality he listened to them. But the Emperor belonged to the men on the fishing terrace and to A-kuei and to others: in his life he needed much and ignored everyone.

On the morning of the second day Chao Hui rode through the Meridian Gate and made the ninefold genuflection before Ch’ien-lung in the Hall of Exalted Harmony. The Yellow Lord mounted his horse; it took him out through the Western Flower Gate and at a regular pace around the three lakes, Chao Hui beside him, on to birdloud Coal Hill. The lean, supple mandarin was famous not only for his incomparable services in the campaign against the Dzungars on the Empire’s northwest frontier; no one forgot the deeds of this elegant man on the green banks of the Ili Chao Hui, holder of the title Guard of a Gate of Peking, whom the Emperor, after the crushing of the Dzungars, had come to meet bearing a cup of tea at the door of the Summer Palace, was famous also for his legitimate wife. The Emperor frequently read her poems, her impetuous yet restrained prose. Hai-t’ang was her name, the daughter of a former Governor of Anhui. When she married she received as dowry from the Emperor broad fertile estates in the south, on the lower reaches of the Yangtse. The infamous Ili army, the incendiary murderers of Ili, were under Chao’s command. No one dared demobilize these brutes; they were stationed in Chihli as a reserve guard.

For two days they found delight in fighting birds, huamei and wushicha, rowed on the artificial lotus pond. Only Chia-ch’ing, the heir apparent, walked along the bank. He never boarded a boat, could not stand the rowers close to him. Invited, he always made the same movement: a defensive spreading of both hands in front
of his chest. The mere invitation unsettled him, and once home his face and neck had to be rubbed with silken cloths.

Then the heavy, holy shrouds of the past fell over the Yellow Lord. He steeped himself in the terrible loftiness, the idolatrous glow of his rank; he found himself in the place prepared for him. By not so much as a finger did he disturb the stem rites. Without the sacred ritual the world collapsed, the earth lay alone, men would hurl themselves at one another, spirits of the air rage, heaven curl up, disorder break loose. Relations with Heaven and the Netherworld must be firmly maintained. The ancient past and its glorious flower, Confucius, knew that in the world of appearances the blood of Heaven must flow through every movement; nothing was without meaning. And so Ch’ien-lung spared himself none of the exhausting ceremonial. He did not feel above all this; he considered himself lucky to be the upholder of these terrible things beyond the control of men.

When he fasted on the day before the sacrifice to Heaven and the sharp eyes flashed in the immobile face, his servants knew as well as the priests, the favourites of his retinue, that this man did nothing superficially. Anything mechanical in their actions was noted by one glance of his eye. Ch’ien-lung, as Son of Heaven, prayed in earnest, thrillingly sincere.

One dark autumn morning the Yellow Lord was carried into the Temple of the Ancestors. As he climbed the last step, a stone clattered a hand’s breadth from him onto the paving and smashed. Discomposed by the evil portent the Emperor went in to the tablets, recited the prayers. He was seen pacing up and down in his palace, greatly agitated. The ancestors weighed on Ch’ienl ung, they lashed him. This hotblooded restless man, the older he grew, could not live up to his ancestors. He trembled to think that he was born into the fearful responsibility of a descendant.

This was the day when the report on the Mongolian town and the destruction of Ma No had to be laid before him. Concealment or delay were impossible now that the viceregal memorial had been received. The astronomer, hastily summoned, reported one double hour later that the fallen stone was a fragment of meteorite; the grey ruler received the information impassively. Since the Imperial seal of this day’s date had to be affixed to the memorial the deputy president of the Council of State approached Chia-ch’ing, who undertook the commission disgusted with the man’s cowardice. The Tsungtu’s report was a bald one: it began with a reference to the military action launched against the remnants of the sect, described the investment of Yangchou, the final positions of the troops under their generals, whose names were supplied, then the discovery when the army marched in of the entire besieged population, dead. Wang Lun was designated the murderer, rumours of a massacre by demons not suppressed.

Chia-ch’ing, horror running down his spine, weighed the scroll in his hand. Were he Emperor, the Viceroy of Chihli and all the generals involved would be executed before the day was out, together with the bearer of the missive and the couriers. He gave instructions for three Under-directors of the Encyclopedia to lecture that afternoon to the Yellow Lord, among them the brilliant Hui, who always knew how to captivate the Emperor. First the deputy president of the Council of State bore onto the fishing terrace curiosities from the campaign against Burma; Ch’ien-lung showed lively interest. Hui was sent forward. Then Chia-ch’ing. The Emperor was still deeply pondering Hui’s quotations when he impressed his crimson seal onto the scroll. Boys in the tripleroofed Pavilion of Instruments sang antiphons with two choirs in a boat.

The Emperor, suddenly distracted again, pushed back a vase of blue porcelain: he wanted to ask Hui something more. Then:
not Hui, he already understood the allusion; rather, what was it they had just reported about the—. Chia-ch’ing in alarm mentioned details of the Burmese. The Emperor, puzzled, asked where he had learned these details. Chia-ch’ing: hadn’t they just heard a talk on the subject. And why was he so interested in the Burmese all of a sudden that he could recall so many details; in any case, it wasn’t that; was it not Hui in fact—. After lengthy toing and froing of questions and glances the Emperor focussed on Chia-ch’ing: surely he was only interested in politics and what had he brought up himself just now, this little local occurrence in Chihli. He wanted to show him the sort of thing an Emperor was pestered with, what trifles were put up to him. The scroll, then. The heir apparent knelt beside the Emperor, who read out the report line by line with a little red pointer. A third of the way through he laid the pointer aside, read in silence, then told Chia-ch’ing to kneel somewhat farther away. And for a quarter of an hour the ten men around the Yellow Lord kept silent as he read; he seemed not to hear the singing, for he did not order it stopped. Without a glance at any of his retinue the Emperor rose quickly, scroll in hand, climbed into his palanquin.

What else happened on the evening of this day in the Forbidden City is not known in detail. The Emperor spent the evening alone in his room with A-kuei, after a number of his favourites had found it necessary for some reason, apparently because of a sudden eruption of excitement on the part of the Emperor, to leave the room. Weeping and distraught, Ch’ien-lung is supposed to have smashed a wonderful rare vessel that stood on a stand of porphyry: an ancient plateshaped vessel of bronze, a lotus leaf sliding from the back of a slowworm. Late in the evening two astrologers were first summoned to the darkened palace quarters, then sent away again. Just as the captains of the guard were shifting uneasily
outside the Emperor’s window because it had stayed quiet for too long inside, Ch’ien-lung’s gong was struck. He was sitting in an awkward posture among the shards of the vessel. A-kuei transmitted with menacing severity the order to summon an extraordinary council in the morning, and at the same time to make preparations for a journey to the Summer Palace. His Majesty desired his sleeping quarters. Torches appeared.

The next afternoon a conference took place, during which the Court of Censors was commissioned to investigate the Ma No affair. The following morning, with a minimal retinue, the Yellow Lord slipped hurriedly out of the Forbidden City. On boats they crossed the artificial lakes beside the Imperial palaces, through the north wall of· the city up the stream that drained from K’unming Lake. No flutes played on the yellow-pennanted boats. Gusty autumn shook the stonepines in the lush bankside gardens, tinkled the little bells hanging in thousands from the upswung roofs of elegant summer houses, secluded pavilions; all went unremarked from the boats. Oars creaked in the tholes, struck the water in rhythm; they glided under bridges of icy white marble from Kaoliang-ch’iao to the ornate humpback bridge, sped into K’unming-hu. The glorious surroundings seemed to calm the Emperor. The censors came out from Peking.

More enlightening than debates as to whether in the history of the empire demons had ever caused the deaths of so many was the report of the commanding generals: that a notorious bandit by the name of Wang Lun, guilty, as had subsequently been discovered, of several murders, had offered to make the sectarians vanish by some means within three days. This, together with some unusual goings-on in the populous Lower Town of Yangchou before it was taken, gave cause for suspicion that Wang Lun, with the aid of persons
unknown, had poisoned the wells. A hunt for this man, notorious throughout Shantung and Chihli, held in quite extraordinary regard by the common people as a sorcerer, was now in progress.

Ch’ien-lung froze and trembled with horror. He said to Chao Hui it was impossible to comprehend such an atrocity; truly, no man could fathom such deeds. With a certain lack of ardour, a curious pensiveness, he decreed the speediest possible apprehension of the murderer, who was to be brought at once to Peking. No interrogation: he himself would conduct the only interrogation of Wang Lun. No one was permitted to mention the name of Chia-ch’ing.

For the ministers this decision concluded the affair. But it gnawed at the Emperor. Only just himself again, he was more than ever disposed to pay heed to external things, to start at the jangling of unfamiliar events. Heartsore, unnerved, he would not let it be. He wanted to sniff out connections, signs, voices.

No long sojourn in Yuanming-yuan: after only a month the Imperial court set off for Kolotu’r, a village southwest of Peking where the monastery of Chieht’ai-ssu lay, its extensive buildings sprawling over sprucewooded hills. This was Ch’ien-lung’s favourite resort; one’s unobstructed eye could sate itself on the myriad roofs of the city, the delicate pavilions gleaming on Coal Hill, the white shimmer of Lukou-ch’iao bridge; just below one’s feet the green waters of the Hun-ho.

While the aged ruler pondered and pondered on the terrace and avoided Peking like an exile, insolent pleasures sprouted in the Vermilion City. Plump Chia-ch’ing behaved like a usurper. He had the deputy president of the Council of State thoroughly flogged, without Imperial sanction, for some breach of etiquette. He vowed revenge on the Yellow Lord for daring to treat him so. Then all at once, fearful of the consequences, he resolutely shrugged off the distressing affair. He soothed himself, spoke calming words. At
Court he staged amusements, ribaldry. Masques were organized which evolved into parodies of exalted figures, of the most exalted. When word came that the Yellow Lord was returning he slipped away with his jugglers and musicians to the Western Hills where he had a house on Jade Spring Hill, protected by a tall pagoda dating from the time of the great Manchu emperor, K’ang-hsi.

While on the frontiers of the empire an unusual peace reigned, Ch’ien-lung succumbed more and more to the insidious effects of that dreadful event. He understood why the Court astrologers were so thoughtful, his censors so distracted; they were mulling over the import of various things they would not speak of, in particular this doom, this calamity of unprecedented horror; considering which authorities should answer for it. The Emperor would not flinch from the lance thrust; he was the pivot of the empire. Through him Heaven spoke, only to him.

Erupting from unapproachable silence he drove three censors yet again, still in winter, out to the Mongolian town of Yangchou to investigate the affair. They returned shaking their heads: one of the many proscribed sects that were confusing the minds of the common people and impoverishing the land was implicated in it.

Ch’ien-lung scorned this diversionary explanation. Events of such horror could not be explained rationally.

One day in the tenth month of the year Imperial couriers sped to Peking, into this walled expanse containing, besides meadows and fallow land, a city that rang hour after hour to a cacophonous roar. To Ch’ien-lung were summoned A-kuei, loyal Chao Hui, Sung the historian and certain others.