Shan Sa - Empress

My voice became hard and surly as if I were addressing a minister: “This may be what you dream of, but it is impossible.”

“Majesty,” he insisted, “you have encouraged widows to remarry; you have scorned tradition and created new laws. You have just inaugurated a dynasty and ascended to the throne. An Emperor has an Empress, four wives, nine Concubines, nine Elegant Ones, nine Beauties, nine Talented Ones, twenty-seven Forests of Treasure, twenty-seven Imperial Serving Women, twenty-seven Gatherers, and a huge Inner Palace to satisfy his desires. And you have just one lover whom you have forced to become a monk and who has become a laughing stock for the entire world! Majesty, you need to take just one more step to be equal to a man. Marry me! I will abandon my freedom.” “It is late. I have to rise at dawn. We must sleep.” “Majesty, just one word. Do you want me as a husband?” My heart felt the chill of a strange premonition. Instead of replying I turned my back to him. He shook me and wept as he held me in his arms. Half way through the night, he sat up with a start, leapt to the ground, and disappeared.

While I sat on my raised throne the following morning, I was distracted. During the Celebration of the Double Sun, my nephew Piety presented me with a petition of five thousand signatures in which State officials and common people begged me to take the title of Sacred Emperor who Turns the Golden Wheel. All this glory was now my enemy: I was a divine sovereign, Master of the World, but I was losing my hair, my teeth, and my strength like any lowly creature. The Sacred Emperor who kept time and the fortunes of this world turning was also a prisoner of the wheel that would ultimately lead to downfall. Life, like love, strengthens and betrays, soothes and punishes. I was a usurper. I had stolen a crown, an epoch, a transient illusion.

SCRIBE OF LOYALTY was sulking and avoiding me. He paid no attention to my summons and lay low in his monastery.

In the arms of the imperial doctor Shen Nan Qiu, I found the confidence of which Scribe of Loyalty had robbed me. His body was docile, discreet; it soothed my anxieties and eased my troubles. The news spread through the Forbidden City, and the Court made no effort to hide its joy in seeing the monk losing my favor. The dignitaries who, only the day before, had been proud to call themselves his friends were now eager to speak ill of him. It seems that Scribe of Loyalty, the Lord of the Kingdom of Liang, Great General of the Left of the Invincible Defense, thought of himself as a founding force in my dynasty and chose to play the role of master in the Monastery of the White Horse. He fortified its walls and recruited thousands of young monks who were experts in martial arts. The clash of bamboo poles and war cries rang out all day long: this was Scribe of Loyalty having fun training his soldier-monks. When he came out of his temple and went into the city, he surrounded himself with the most beautiful and vigorous of his disciples. His horse would be decked in a harness of gold set with gems, and around him he would have a troop of young monks carrying the rod of iron and the long saber, marching in time. When they came across Taoists and devout followers of other religions, on a nod from their master, they would attack them, shaving their heads and forcing them to convert to Buddhism. It was not long before the prosecutor Lai Jun Chen, who loathed my lover, begged me to charge him for abducting and sequestering women, for forming an illegal army, and for attempting to usurp power.

Scribe of Loyalty came before me only when he had been beseeched through three imperial summons accompanied by my handwritten orders. I felt my stomach contract when he came into the room: I had not seen him forthree months and had forgotten how beautiful he was.He stood head and shoulders about the other men and walked with a swagger like the heroes of ancient mythology. When he prostrated himself, I noticed that his face was thinner and that his forehead bore the mark of melancholy. I was overwhelmed by emotion: Scribe of Loyalty was suffering!

I indulged him by offering him a seat. Then I asked him gently about his life, and he answered me in brief sentences. I caressed him in my mind. His eyes lingered neither on my face, which had been smoothed of all wrinkles by the latest unguent concocted by the doctor Shen Nan Qiu, nor on the very open neckline of my gown. He seemed to look through me and stare glumly at the screen behind my seat. Our love was damned: the forty years that lay between us were drawing us slowly but inexorably to a tragic conclusion. But, at my age, I had no time for tears. He was the one my desire had chosen!

I would have like to tell him that Shen Nan Qiu had never had permission to penetrate me. The fifty year old had served me as a sleeping draft and a bed-warmer. The affair had been a game, just to have revenge for Scribe of Loyalty’s infidelities, to make him jealous. I would have liked to tell him that I was disappointed by my sons and felt that my grandchildren were strangers, that my nephews could think of nothing but taking my place on the throne, and that he alone-he, Little Treasure, fished out of the mysterious river of destiny-brought light into my life. I was prepared to offer him a flock of young women to keep him close to me as he had been before, like an exuberant talkative child.

I was unable to put all this in words and was afraid that he would blackmail me; instead I spoke of the accusations leveled at him. First he paled, then he sneered“ ”So it is true then, what they say about the doctor Shen Nan Qiu. If you want to be rid of me, nothing could be easier. If you hand me over to Lai Jun Chen, I will tell him everything without being tortured: your obsessions, your fears, your weaknesses, your secret fantasies. You would do better to have me killed straight away!“

Seeing that he had flushed scarlet in his indignation, I smiled.

“I am showing you these denunciations only to tell you that I am prepared to forgive you. Don’t you see that, without my protection, you will be trailed by the judges like a hare hounded by hunting dogs. In your few years in the Forbidden City you made very few friends and a good many enemies. What would you be without me?”

He stared at me, and his eyes glowed with a dark fire.

“Why do you toy with me? You must choose between the doctor and the monk. Just one word: do you wish to marry me?”

My heart turned to ice, and the smile froze on my face. I delivered a prepared speech: “I still have not appointed the successor to the throne in Court. If, in such a situation, I were to marry, if I were to confer the first imperial title on one man, my actions would create confusion.”

“Majesty,” he cried, throwing himself at me and almost suffocating me, “I love you. I want you to be my wife; I want to call you Heaven-light; I want to be joined to you in life and in death! Yes, I will renounce the title of husband; I spit on recognition. Let us be married in secret, here, now; we shall take Heaven and Earth as our witnesses. Swear to me that you are mine.”

How could I believe that such a young and beautiful man could love an old woman so passionately? Was he hoping to manipulate me? Was he willing to usurp the throne? I pushed him: “The insolence! Kneel before your sovereign!”

Scribe of Loyalty froze and collapsed at my feet, and I spoke slowly and deliberately: “Leave and never come back!”

He smacked his forehead heavily against the ground and then ran off. When his silhouette was reduced to a blur and then disappeared between the gates of my palace, I was devastated.

The gods had not invented love for an emperor.

I WAS HAUNTED by Scribe of Loyalty’s sadness. I could not forgive myself for hurting him. By breaking off with him, I had deprived myself of happiness and of my remedy for immortality. I drove the doctor Shen Nan Qiu from my palace to lock myself away with my pain.