Shan Sa - Empress

Further down, after she had anointed my thighs with fragrant oil, the stranger’s manipulations became more equivocal. Her hands glided over my buttocks, sometimes sliding delicately off course. The silent language of her fingers made my blood seethe within me. I encouraged her by spreading my legs slightly. Her middle fingers plunged into the core of me and grew bolder. My prolonged abstinence had made me all the more sensitive, and her caresses provoked quivers that rippled through me. The stranger was an expert. She overcame my nervous agitation and steered me to the first pleasurable climax with great precision. Slowly, she turned me onto my back and took my face in her hands. As she rubbed my cheeks, my eyes, my forehead, and my ear-lobes, she made me blaze with desire. I rose up abruptly and clasped her in my arms. She fell onto me, and I tore her tunic. Her skin smelled of honey and orchids. Her chest was flat and muscled like a man’s, her stomach firm, and I felt an erect phallus.

A man!

A man in my bed, in the bed of the Supreme Empress, widow of the Sovereign Lordly Ancestor!

I leapt up, but he held me in his arms, against his burning member.

“Yes, Supreme Majesty, do not be afraid. I am a man. My name is Little Treasure. I am your remedy. Tomorrow, you will have me beheaded or quartered by chariots. But tonight, let yourself go, allow me to love you.”

I cannot give a reason for my capitulation; it is impossible. I, Empress, sworn to virtue. I, a woman preoccupied with matters of State. I, a warrior who had never removed her armor, I, who considered men to be dust and who conversed with the stars. On that night I betrayed Little Phoenix, for whom my heart still mourned. I allowed myself that one weakness by revealing myself, without shame or regret, to a stranger.

My couplings with the Emperor of China had been a conscientious duty. By the time I was thirty, I had become obsessed with perfection and hygiene. I had had my genitals massaged for fear that they would lose their firm outline. I had abstained from spicy food and had drunk infusions to perfume my breath and my sweat. My body had been anointed with oil of peony and rubbed with cedar bark before being delivered, plucked and powdered, to my husband.

When Little Treasure parted my legs, my genitals were neither combed nor perfumed. I had the same nudity, the same lack of artifice as an ordinary woman. It was nearly twenty years since I had felt a phallus in my belly. The stranger tore me in two. For the first time I let myself neglect the man’s gratification to concentrate on my own pleasure. Little Treasure moved his hips with masterful skill. He listened to my shivers and conducted the music of my sighs. Where had he learned the art of copulation? It mattered little; the following day I would send him to his death.

Suddenly my body began to boil. A scream was torn from my lungs. With great assurance and little effort, the stranger had just delivered me an orgasm, a firework of ten thousand dazzling sparks.

I SPENT A feverish night.

One moment I dreamed that I had tied him up in a sack and thrown him into the river in the grounds; the next I saw him lying poisoned. I was suddenly afraid that I would not wake in time to receive the morning salutation. Then I wondered how I would look my servants in the eye and whether I should have all their eyes gouged out and their tongues cut off.

I woke with a start. In the half light, the stranger was sleeping naked on the crumpled sheets. His bronze skin gleamed. Filled by this giant frame, the bed looked narrow as a cradle. He was very young with a hint of a moustache on his lips. Quite suddenly he opened his eyes and smiled at me.

I had never seen such a happy smile. I was so surprised by it that I forgot my dark thoughts and let him draw me to him. He made love to me again. This time I realized that, in the distant past, Little Phoenix had never granted me such intense pleasure. Unlike my husband, who thought only of his own gratification, the young man guided my body and steered it till it folded on itself, stretched out, and executed contortions. I became his zither, and he made my every string hum, discovering resonances I had not known until then. Dawn was growing lighter. I realized that my muscles were almost intact, that my firm breasts were those of an adolescent. My belly that had brought forth six children had kept its vigorous round outline. Little Treasure’s dark eyes betrayed his furious passion and reflected this flattering truth: I was still beautiful and desirable.

GENTLENESS SCRATCHED AT the door and announced that I was late for the morning salutation.

“The Supreme Empress is unwell,” I replied. “She will not go to the audience. Tell the officials to withdraw and return to their ministries. Tell the Great Ministers to prepare written reports. There will be no meeting today.”

Little Phoenix had often announced this decree while in the grips of a short-lived passion for a young favorite. I remembered finding it irritating, but now how I regretted battering him with my moralizing! For the first time I could appreciate that, beyond the interests of the Empire and my duties as sovereign, I had an obligation to the impetuous demands of my body!

I let my serving women in at midday. They arranged my hair in silence, eyes lowered. I sent Little Treasure to Ruby, who washed him in a side pavilion. He came back wearing a eunuch’s tunic. I made sure he shared my morning meal with me. He devoured it, and his appetite and vulgar manners fascinated me. As he ate, he answered my questions, often simply smiling at me instead of speaking.

As the third son of well-to-do peasants, Little Treasure had been educated by the master scribe in his village. At fourteen he slipped away from home for the first time and tried his luck in the imperial competitions held in the regional academy. In the space of three years, he failed three times, but, as he loitered in the streets, he glimpsed a better world. At eighteen he fled an arranged marriage to a cousin from his village and made his way to Luoyang.

He came to the eastern city that I had just named Sacred Capital and wandered aimlessly with no money or relations to call on. He did have a few contacts, beggars from the same district as himself, who found him precarious work as a porter, a mason, or a swindler. He learned to lie, steal, and defend himself; he shivered under the bridges and was kicked by passers by as he gazed enviously at horses with precious stones in their harnesses and carriages draped in gleaming gold cloth. He was eventually taken on by a Taoist who secretly concocted aphrodisiacs and was entrusted with bamboo boxes carrying precious pills with mysterious ingredients. He walked through the streets improvising cheerful tunes expounding their miraculous effects. In the poorest quarters, he would sell a pill for one sou, claiming it would cure every kind of sexual ill. In the noble districts, he became friends with footmen and lackeys, swapping these so-called contraceptives for things stolen from their masters. These medicines proved curiously effective, and Little Treasure became famous. Wherever he went there was always someone calling to him cheerfully, warm bread waiting for him, cups of tea offered on the pavement, and children running behind him joining in the chorus of his songs. One day a guard who worked for the Princess of Gold asked him whether he knew a good masseur, and Little Treasure recommended himself. He went into the princely palace by the back door and had not set foot in the outside world since.

The princess liked to bring on a dozen or so beautiful young men in the Side Court of her palace. They were bathed, fed, and perfumed, living like parrots in a cage. Eunuchs taught them how to massage their aging mistress, and on Her Highness’s orders, servants offered them their bodies to improve their performance. At night they were summoned in rotation. Occasionally some of them performed services outside the palace-gifts the princess gave to her friends. On her very first night with Little Treasure, she had recognized such exceptional sensuality in him that she set him up in his own pavilion and insisted that he followed a strict diet to purify his skin, hair, intestines, and blood. Apart from the experienced women whom the princess sent to him to widen his knowledge, Little Treasure never laid eyes on anyone. He was dying of hunger and boredom. Then, one evening, someone had called him from his rooms and entrusted him with the sacred mission for which he had been intended.