Shan Sa - Empress

Harmony had refused her meal in the pavilion where she was locked up. When my serving women opened the door and lit the candles, she turned to look at me; she looked disheveled but showed no hint of remorse. It was as if she had lost all the heedless joy of childhood in one night. Her drawn features and her dark expression were those of a woman consumed by hatred.

With her forehead on the ground, she said, “Majesty, send me to a monastery or to the Cold Palace, condemn me to death, I would have no regrets. My body already belongs to the Son of Heaven. I am happy to offer him my life.”

Harmony’s impetuousness reminded me of my own. I had experienced this same voluptuous suffering, this heroic sadness, but I had lost my innocence: I no longer believed in that ridiculous word-love.

I ordered the young girl to look up. I looked her right in the eye and said: “I shall spare your life because you are the daughter of the Lady of the Kingdom of Han, my beloved sister, and because the Lady of the Kingdom of Dai, my venerable mother, would die of grief if you left this sullied Earth before she did. You are fifteen. The path of life before you is long. Today I am giving you a choice: Either I arrange to find you a good marriage and you shall have a husband and children, or I shall offer you a palace in the Inner Court. But you should know that, like your mother’s, your liaison with His Majesty will never be official. You will remain the Empress’s niece. Your body will never be touched by mortal men again; you will never have children.”

Harmony prostrated herself three times. “Who am I to make such a decision?” she said darkly. “My fate depends on the sovereign’s wishes. If he prefers my mother, I should kill myself straight away.”

Instead of expressing her gratitude, she was defying my authority.

And yet I felt no anger. I had become a spectator to all their insanities in the name of love.

ELDER SISTER BEGAN to wither.

On a ruling from the sovereign, Harmony received the title of Lady of the Kingdom of Wei and was raised to the first imperial rank. This august favor granted her a magnificence that no other princess could hope to rival. A lake was dug in the grounds of her residence to the south of the Imperial City. The excavated earth was used to create hills topped with pavilions several floors high overlooking the Capital. It was in the center of this body of clear water, in the endless meadows of lotuses and water lilies, that the favorite received the Emperor and his retinue. Their boats glided through the mist with musicians at the prow playing the latest melodies and dancing girls on the bridge twirling their long sleeves. Acrobats spun in the air at the top of the masts and created shapes together with extraordinary virtuosity.

The Lady of the Kingdom of Wei also owned several pavilions within the walls of the Forbidden City. She came and went between the two palaces on a Persian horse branded with the imperial iron. Dressed as a man, preceded by eunuchs and a detachment of guards, and followed by young girls dressed as pages, she would gallop through the avenues of Long Peace raising clouds of dust.

Mother and daughter no longer spoke to each other. They were rivals in love and murderously jealous of each other. When Purity received a piece of jewelry, Harmony would demand one twice as valuable. When His Majesty, consumed with nostalgia, furtively visited the mother for a cup of tea, the daughter would immediately be informed by her spies and would send word that she was dying of some strange illness. Horrified, the Emperor would leap up, and Purity would throw herself at his feet and soak the bottom of his tunic with her bitter tears. The sovereign would have to tear himself from her embraces with a broken heart and an aching soul.

The mother aged as the daughter blossomed. The august visits to Purity’s palace became less frequent and then stopped. The sovereign no longer summoned Elder Sister to his banquets for fear that the two women might argue. The favorite’s arrogance irritated me, but I held my anger in check. The fragile harmony within the gynaeceum depended on the calm and generosity of its Empress, and I pretended to know nothing of the turbulence amongst its capricious younger members.

Elder Sister followed me everywhere with her weeping. She was deaf to my reasoning and went around in circles of her own despair. I eventually tired of her miserable monologues; there were affairs of State calling for my attention: Famine and epidemics were ravaging the south. I turned away from my sister’s unhappiness in love and devoted myself to my people’s suffering.

In our Inner Palace, which was the size of an entire town, it was easy to melt into the labyrinth of passageways and to disappear in the tangle of gardens. Elder Sister was still alive, but she was already a ghost. My people informed me that her terrible sorrow had made her lose weight. She now refused to leave her palace for fear that people would make fun of her thin, wasted frame. The turmoil in the Court settled. Harmony was growing more charming; her laughter brightened our ageing pavilions. The household became accustomed to Elder Sister’s absence. They forgot her.

One evening when I summoned Elder Sister to my room to gossip with her, I was informed that she had not been living in the Forbidden City for three months. She had gone back to her property. I sent eunuchs to give her dishes served at my table, and they came back to tell me that the Lady of the Kingdom of Han was confined to bed. She was taking a drug that made her forget her heartbreak; she was living a half life, barely awake. I sent her a letter talking to her of life’s simple pleasures, of my affection for her, and of the future. I begged her to get up and come back to my side. I promised I would find men who would cherish her without the sovereign knowing. She replied only once to my countless letters. Her words quavered across paper white as a shroud: “Loving just once is enough for me.”

In the first year of the age of Dazzling Prosperity, on the first day of the seventh moon, I was informed that Elder Sister was dying. I rushed the imperial doctors to her bedside, and, at nightfall, their messengers knocked at the doors to my palace: The previous evening the Lady of the Kingdom of Han had taken a mortal poison. She had just exhaled her last breath.

An icy chill swept over me. I remembered the pale, ravishing child reading by candlelight. I remembered the scene when, dressed like a goddess, she had set off for a distant land to wed her destiny. My life was a tree that had spread too wide and robbed my sisters of light. They had both been like fragile flowers uprooted by a storm and laid at the foot of my altar.

THE EMPEROR WEPT over Purity’s death and called for an imperial funeral. He raised Mother to the position of Lady of the Kingdom of Rong and granted her the ultimate privilege of coming into the Palace on a litter. I adopted Purity’s son and named him as heir to my late father. To the detriment of my brothers’ children, when Intelligence was twenty years old, he inherited the title and the revenue of the Great Lord of the Kingdom of Zhou, he became the principal officiating priest in the worship of the Wu ancestors, and he took on his duties at Court.

The generous offerings and elaborate ceremonies devoted to the deceased did nothing to heal my sorrow. I could not shake off a feeling of guilt. To cut short this pointless grief, I gave orders to close the residences that had belonged to the Lady of the Kingdom of Han.

But her death had thrown the shadow of doubt over my life. Instead of accepting the changing of the seasons, the loss of her happiness and the decline in her beauty, Purity had rebelled against the laws of nature. The demon she had fought had been nothing other than an obsessive desire to make time stand still. Mutilating herself and destroying herself were her ways of refusing inevitable failure. There was a nobility and veracity in that desperate gesture that constantly troubled me.