The years were flying by. Our bodies aged, and our souls trembled. I watched, powerless, as my husband drifted in the opposite direction from myself. He became slow while I remained alert; he became fragile while I remained robust. He was frequently indisposed, and I had never even experienced a migraine. His voice was weak and breathless, mine loud and full of energy. The heir, Splendor, was only sixteen years old when he was designated as regent, so I had to take responsibility for all affairs of State. I would rise when it was still dark, come summer or winter, to receive the salutation of officials that was set at daybreak by the ancestral calendar. As my husband weakened, my authority increased further. Ten years earlier, the Palace intrigues and the complexity of imperial decisions had irked me and I had sometimes felt oppressed by the impotence of power. Now, the government that I had appointed was proving its competence and obedience, and I had acquired all the assurance of a woman on the threshold of maturity. The art of commanding became a martial drill, a religious sacrifice. I was both involved and detached as I manipulated the opinions, vanities, and ever-changing truths of men.
I floated above this sullied world like a drop of oil in water.
The sovereign’s mania for traveling upset the smooth running of the Court, which sought discipline and routine. The work undertaken to satisfy his whims required hundreds of thousands of laborers. Mountains were razed to the ground, and entire forests fed the furnaces used to fire imperial bricks. Precious woods, alabasters, granites, and exotic plants arrived down the rivers and were then transported on carts drawn by oxen and horses. Having imposed restrictions on the people for the sake of the economy, I was annoyed to see my husband setting such a poor example with his profligacy. As he lost interest in politics, he became increasingly fanatical about war: He went from one province to another, visiting garrisons, reveling in their grandiose military displays. The subtle balances I had maintained within the Empire were upset by his impulsive decisions and his obsession for interpreting any kind of attack as a personal affront to his pride—which he now confused with the dignity of China itself.
The deep discord between us triggered a violent argument: Irritated by the severity of my comments to him, the Emperor shook with rage from head to toe and accused me of crossing him with the sole intention of making him unhappy. When I saw the tears on his cheeks and the pain he was enduring from an excruciating headache, I regretted giving full vent to my feelings. How could I forbid an ailing man from proving his power with military deployments? How could I deprive an already weary soul of his futile but precious earthly pleasures? How could I stand in the way of a weakening man tasting the last joys of this life?
At forty two I had brought a daughter into the world; she was called Moon and was given the title of Princess of Eternal Peace. After the birth of the daughter I had so longed for, we had brought an end to our sexual relationship. The sovereign still occasionally showed some enthusiasm for me, but I knew that his doctors had forbidden him from spilling his vital sap, and I myself no longer had any right to desire. The tormented love that I had felt for the only man in my life disappeared, and long-held resentments resurfaced. A bitterness mingled with disappointment secretly overran my heart. I was sad to see him turn his back on a vast empire and a glorious heritage for the sake of his own well-being. I had hoped that, as time passed, he would become a great sovereign, but he had proved to be full of fears and laziness. There were still days when I was moved by his helpless charm and his affable kindness, but there were others when his capricious moods and his selfish longings infuriated me. I disguised my growing weariness with him by lavishing him with affection and attention: I tended to his aches and pains, found new distractions for him, and made sure that I could devote time, patience, and maternal love to him.
I was drowning in the waves of daily life. The caravans and imperial parades snaked through the four seasons between Heaven and Earth. Clothed in green, red, yellow, then white, the trees were resplendent and then withered; flowers exploded and then fell silent. Day after day, night after night, the role of Empress became a full-time occupation, and the discipline I had imposed on my existence wrapped itself around me. I myself had made the chains that bound me, and I headed toward death with open eyes and a dry heart.
An unusually hard drought followed by a famine ravaged the Central Plain. Overwhelmed by the suffering and sorrow of the people, I decided to take on the anger of the gods myself: Considering myself unworthy of my position, I offered my abdication.
MY HUSBAND REJECTED my request, and the Outer Court, in a state of panic, signed a petition begging me to remain on the throne. In the first year of the age of the Supreme Element16, Little Phoenix took the title of Celestial Emperor offered by the Court, and during the course of the ceremony, he conferred on me the golden blade and seal of the Celestial Empress. The fine gauze behind the throne that screened my seat was removed, and in palaces where receptions were held, two thrones now stood side by side. Up in the heavens, the stars foretold a luminous future for me, and yet, I could see only shadows.
My husband and his ministers had capitulated. My power was no longer contested. I returned to work giving audiences and scrutinizing political reports, as a weaver returns to her loom. I no longer needed to fight to secure my position. For the first time in my life, I tasted the bitterness of boredom. But it was in one of these moments of darkness that Heaven heard my prayer: It sent me a sign, a gift, a sparkle, and my life was suddenly set alight.
The precocious literary talents of a little servant girl had met with high praise in a report written by the eunuch professors at the Institute of Letters in the Inner Court. I was intrigued by her family name: I discovered that she was the granddaughter of Shang Guan Yi, the poet chancellor who had plotted my dismissal. After the execution of male members of her clan, she had followed her mother in becoming an imperial slave. I had her poems sent to me. Her calligraphy revealed a firm but supple wrist, and her verses had the direct elegance of simple cadences. If I had not been informed, I would never have guessed that these words had been written by a fourteen-year-old girl.
The child was summoned to my palace. Her fringe concealed the tattoos borne by the condemned, and she replied to my questions with considerable aplomb. Her blend of shyness and an indefinable assurance gave her charm. Listening to her, I remembered the Gracious Wife and her soft voice. My stomach lurched: This child reminded me of that devastating passion. Her huge eyes seduced me. Her smile was defiant. I could hear her unspoken question: “Would you dare to love me?”
That very evening, trembling in every limb, Gentleness offered me her virginity, and I initiated her in the realms of pleasure. I had just turned fifty. I had had her father, her grandfather, and all her brothers executed. I was the jailor and torturer whose tyranny she worshipped. She was the pale flower I would transform into a resplendent peony.
Sensual delight colored my world. Love is insolent. Disguised as a page, Gentleness followed me day and night from my palace to the audience hall. When I sat, she remained standing; when I held secret meetings with ministers, she kept watch at the door; when I flew into a rage, her expression of silent amazement appeased me. When I ordered her to rest, she would retire to her room and write. Her poetry soothed me with its chaste descriptions of festivities and journeys. As I held her in my arms, I wondered when she would betray me and avenge her clan’s extermination. Hers was a perfume of innocence and poison. Shy caresses preceded her violent release, shaken by an unknown pain. She would scream, and she would cry.
Her sleeping face held the dangers that made me feel young and strong.
TIME DIES, AND time is born again, but men’s lives are a one-way journey. Imperial birthdays were excuses for sumptuous festivities. Fireworks and banquets were laid on for the people in every town—our imperial generosity being matched by our subjects’ dissolute celebrations for a transient pleasure. From one year to the next, our ages accumulated and weighed us down. From one year to the next, thes
e birthdays changed and saw me mourning our long-buried youth. The sovereign’s inevitable deterioration gave real meaning to a vague concept: Death was lying in wait for us.
But it was the Supreme Son who succumbed to coughing and breathlessness. Splendor left us forever. The passing of his beloved heir affected the Celestial Emperor so profoundly that it provoked chest pains. United with my husband in grief and anguish, I forgot my resentments. Little Phoenix clung to me more than ever, as the shipwrecked cling to a piece of flotsam. And the fear of losing him paralyzed me more than ever. The memory of Father’s death, which had been such a brutal loss, came back to haunt me. I could clearly remember the utter dejection of those childhood days. Would I have the strength to survive another such onslaught? Little Phoenix and I had been living as prisoners of the Forbidden City for forty years now. His very presence was the air I breathed; he was the balancing pole to my tightrope-walking soul. How would I cope with the emptiness and loneliness when he joined the gods and embraced freedom?
Medicine, prayer, and magic services secretly arranged in monasteries sustained the Emperor but did not cure him. There were more and more bad omens. I had just announced a pilgrimage to Mount Song for another blessing from Heaven, but a Tibetan attack forced me to abandon the expedition. During the Eternal Ancestor’s reign, the Court had planned to build a Temple of Clarity dedicated to the sacred religions, as a symbol of union between imperial power and the will of Heaven. The idea had matured, and now the architects’ plans were ready, but an incident ruffled the serenity of the proceedings and delayed this building project that had been wanted for so long. Wisdom, my second son, tried to usurp the throne. He was stripped of his title as heir and driven from the Capital.
There was a succession of terrible natural catastrophes. After a winter that yielded no snow, cereal production dropped in the north and the region near Luoyang declared penury. Later a very wet summer saw the Yellow River burst its banks, and the floods were followed by an epidemic that killed tens of thousands of horses and cows. The following year, clouds of locusts descended on the fields, and an earthquake rocked both capitals. The Ancients said that when the natural elements were unsettled in this way, great misfortune would befall the Empire. They even specified that if, amid all this fury, the Earth began to tremble, Heaven was announcing the death of an eminent man.
Exploiting the difficulties our empire was suffering, the Turks rose up against us. Negotiations with them failed, and I had to send imperial troops to put down the rebellion with bloodshed. I may have maintained the country’s stability by force of arms, but in the Inner Palace, I was completely disarmed by just one man’s illnesses.
In the residential city of the Celestial Oblation, my husband’s body doubled in size, and violent spells of dizziness and headaches pinned him to his bed. He lay behind the curtains moaning while a crowd of doctors thronged round him. The Supreme Son and the Great Ministers knelt beside him. It was their duty to approve prescriptions and to taste each remedy. I dismissed all these people whose agitated bustling was only weakening my husband. I set up my own bed and my writing table in his palace of rest. With one hand I countersigned political decisions, and with the other, I held the sovereign’s limp, clammy hand. He was soothed by my presence; drinking in my strength, he seemed to improve and asked for food.
I spoon-fed him some soup; thirty years earlier, he had been the one who did this for me. I remembered his distraught face full of love, his tentative voice asking me to be his empress. Tears clouded my eyes: if only I could die and he could be resuscitated!
But the gods remained deaf to my pleas. Once again Little Phoenix would betray my hopes. One evening when he had been bled from his head, his pains disappeared, his eyes regained their sight, and he smiled at me.
“Sovereign Father appeared to me in a dream,” he murmured. “He invited me to follow him, and I started to float through a sea of clouds. Father led me through the fog and raised his arm to point to the horizon. The mists dispersed to reveal a golden palace surrounded by light, and flying round it were phoenixes with wings in nine colors. I realized that this was the celestial residence of Sovereign Father, Empress Mother, and my beloved sister, Little Bull. Music began to play, an extraordinary tinkling sound. A procession of immortals came from far away to greet me. And I decided to come back to Earth to tell you that I’m leaving!”
Tears streamed over my face.
“Empress,” the sovereign continued, “my time has been accounted for. What a shame the heir is not ready to reign—this one concern means I cannot leave in peace.”
“Your Majesty tortures himself in vain,” I cried. “He will soon be well again. Next year he will undertake the pilgrimage to Mount Song, and Heaven will bless him and grant him the secret of immortality.”
“I’m so tired of living in pain. The apparition of Sovereign Father has calmed my fears. Death is nothing. It is abandoning a rotting, worthless body; it is a soul ascending. The peak of the sacred mountain, which is the highest most point to the living, will be nothing but a blade of grass when I am in the heavens. Be happy—I am to be delivered!”
I was silenced by Little Phoenix’s words. It was too late to hold back a man who had laid eyes on the marvels of the afterlife. In his eyes all the riches and delights of this world were now mere filth and dust.
“Majesty,” I said despairingly, “allow me to follow you; I want to continue serving you.”
“Heavenlight, I have been a very ordinary sovereign. My only good quality has been that I have succeeded in surrounding myself with people more able than me. I have never liked being on the throne or giving commands. But I was able to make a great empress of you. If I had to enumerate the achievements of my time on Earth, I would say that you were my masterpiece. Before we are temporarily parted—because, later, you will come to join me—I wanted to thank you for your patience, for the sacrifices you have made, for risking your own life to give me heirs. Forgive me if I caused you suffering.”
I was overwhelmed by the thoughts milling in my mind. I was about to reply when the sovereign interrupted me, his voice reduced to a feeble hiss: “Heavenlight, your hour has not yet come. You must stay here to watch over the dynasty. The heir is too young; when I die, he will not know how to run an empire weakened by natural disasters and uprisings. I have faith in your experience. You will know how to master the situation and restore order and stability to the world. Heavenlight, look after yourself; I am trusting you with my people and my empire.”
His eyes closed, and I cried: “Little Phoenix, don’t abandon me!”
I thought I saw a mischievous smile on his face as he whispered almost inaudibly: “I’ve always wanted to die before you, did you know that?”
THE COURT HASTILY left the Palace of Celestial Oblations. The Celestial Emperor lay on his bed in a carriage drawn by two hundred coachmen. The imperial road to the eastern capital would be the route he took toward his death. To reach the world of clouds and eternal ease, my husband endured his final torment. I stayed beside him, grimly fascinated by the terrifying process of dematerialization that would render him immortal: his skin had to be burned of its filth until only purity and incandescence were left. The soul that had been called up by the gods had to break free from the flesh that housed it to fly up to the heavens.
At Luoyang, border troubles forced me to leave the dying sovereign’s side to hold audiences alongside the heir regent. For the first time I was inattentive, distracted, listening out for messengers coming to bring me news of his death. Human affairs seemed so futile to me now that I had seen the splendors of another world through my husband’s agony. When the meeting was over, I hurried back to the Inner Palace and went back to my prayers at Little Phoenix’s bedside. It was now he, a dying man, who gave me strength and warmth and illuminated my entire existence.
On the third night of the twelfth moon in the second year of Eternal Purity, the astrologers were burning tortoise scales, and they announced the word “sev
ering.” The following morning the Celestial Emperor woke and found that his pains had disappeared. He spoke clearly, and he himself wanted to announce the Great Remission and the Changing of the Era to the name the Magnificent Path. Doctors and eunuchs managed to lift him from his bed and to wrap him in fur-lined tunics. A litter carried him through the narrow passageways of the Forbidden City and took him to the pavilion at the top of the Gate of Celestial Law.
On the far side of the moat, beyond the square formations of cavalry and foot soldiers, were the common people who had come from the four corners of the city. They prostrated themselves before him. Morning snow had covered the roofs of the eastern capital; temples, bell-towers, and pagodas looked alike in the flurrying greyness, and princely pavilions could hardly be distinguished from merchant’s houses and more humble dwellings.
For a moment the Celestial Emperor’s gaze lingered on the horizon to the west and focused through the fog and falling snow on Long Peace, his native town. Drums, bells, and gongs began to sound. The sovereign could not read his decree because the jubilant people were already crying “Long live the Emperor!”
That afternoon he summoned ministers; the Supreme Son; the King of Yu, Sun; and Moon, the Princess of Eternal Peace to his bedside. He dictated his will: “…seven days will be sufficient for the funeral ceremonies; the heir will ascend to the throne in the presence of the coffin; the tomb and the funeral city will be built in sober style; the government will consult the Celestial Empress on important military and political matters.”
Early in the evening, my husband woke feeling very short of breath. He asked for an anaesthetizing drug, and, before sinking back into sleep, he called me over to his bed and took my hand.