Imperial Lady

2

As Silver Snow sped across the frosty courtyard she was grateful for the weight of her robes: the silk underrobe with its high, modest satin collar, falling to a hem that covered even the tips of her slippers; and the overrobe with the long sleeves that tumbled over her hands, trapping some warmth within—along with the fingers that such robes were devised to render useless. The ritualized clamor of hospitality rang in the night air. Though she herself might never see the official who had brought the Emperor’s edicts to her father, she must later supervise from behind the screens the banquet her father would give later that night for their entertainment.

The stream designed to flow into a pool within her father’s courtyard was stilled and frozen. Gnarled pines leaned over it to shed their dark, fragrant needles onto snow shining silver in the lamplight from her father’s room. As much to guard herself from tripping over her flowing robes as to achieve the demure shuffling gait that the Book of Rites prescribed for maidens, she slowed as she climbed the slippery wooden steps. By the carved doorposts of her father’s study, she paused, astonished.

The familiar and much-loved scents of pine and incense wafted out from the splendid brazier, which had been newly polished so that its silver and gold ridges and the gem inlays gleamed. Usually so thrifty, her father must have ordered all twelve of the lights in the curving arms of the largest ceramic lampstand in the house to be kindled. Seated in a haze of incense and a halo of light was Chao Kuang himself. Silver Snow bowed deeply, as much out of love as from proper manners, before she glanced up.

Chao Kuang wore his finest tunic, woven and embroidered with red and blue with characters of good fortune, fastened on the right with five gold buttons. A wide vermilion belt (a privilege once granted and, unaccountably, never revoked by the Son of Heaven) was drawn atop it. His robe’s long sleeves fell over her father’s hands, hiding his scars and the missing finger. Though the room was warmly heated, a wide strip of sable encircled his throat, while ancient skins of the same precious fur lined his coat. There was no doubt that this splendor had been donned with care to receive an official to whom Chao Kuang would never reveal his house’s poverty.

He leaned against padded cushions, holding a two-foot-long bundle of thin wooden strips on which delicate characters hadjbeen inked. That must be the Emperor’s edict! Broken seals hung from it, chief of them, the signet of the Emperor himself.

Silver Snow drew a deep, shuddering breath and waited anxiously for her father to speak.

“Sit, daughter.” Chao Kuang gestured toward a pillow.

Silver Snow lowered herself, settling her robes in decorous folds. Once again, she ventured to look up.

“Doubtless, you have been listening to the gossip in the women’s quarters,” he observed, but he was not frowning with displeasure. “Vixens’ chatter, most of it; but even a fox, should it bark long enough, may once in its life utter the truth.”

Had Chao Kuang heard the women’s rumors about Willow? Silver Snow had asked herself so often if he had harkened to such spiteful tales that the arrow of fear once accompanying such a thought had long since lost its barbs. Was he about to examine her about that? But why would he do so at a time as important as this one? When he had purchased the maid, he had remarked only that the right-minded man tried to aid those in need, and that he had heard of a faraway province in which red hair—hard as it was to believe—was esteemed as a mark of beauty. Still, since Willow had come to live in their courtyards, Silver Snow noted, he had forbidden the hunting of foxes on their lands; he himself wore only sable or the fleece of sheep.

Chao Kuang raised the wooden strips of the Emperor’s edict and, seated as she was, Silver Snow bowed before the august words until her brow touched the felted mats covering the floor.

“As you have heard, because the Emperor’s Inner Courts have long been empty, the Censors have now reported to him the outcry of the people who rely upon those courts for their livelihood.”

Silver Snow nodded once, and kept her head down. Her eyes, however, darted about the familiar, cozy room, and noted an unfamiliar, ancient-looking chest in one corner. An odd surge of excitement made it difficult for her to sit and listen as, in strict propriety, she should. But it had never been just strict propriety for her and her father: beyond proper behavior lay hsin, or sincerity, and jen , good will; and beyond those virtues, she knew, lay love—though, of course, a decent reserve would forever prevent either of them from giving voice to such emotion.

“Moreover—and this too is the chatter of foxes—it is said that one night the Emperor dreamed of a woman as lovely as the lady who died, and vowed that he would discover whether such beauty existed anywhere within the Middle Kingdom. Consequently, he has decreed that five hundred concubines should be chosen, and he entrusted the task to Mao Yen-shou, the Administrator of the Inner Courts.” Her father paused, and Silver Snow dared to look directly at his face. His eyes were deep and shadowed with memory, the crease between them seeming to be all the deeper.

“Mao Yen-shou is a skilled artist, well able to judge beauty.

However, all that he can do is judge; for he is a eunuch, and doubtless possesses the eunuch’s appetite for power. All of which he may indeed arise to in the course of this choosing and judging.”

But what has this to do with me? Silver Snow wanted to ask. For the first time in her life, she was impatient with her father’s measured fashion of imparting news.

Chao Kuang leaned forward and caught Silver Snow’s chin in his callused fingers, raising her face so that their eyes met squarely once more. “My daughter, this ancient one may be disgraced and degraded; yet word of his young, beautiful daughter has reached the Administrator of the Inner Courts; and you have been summoned.”

Silver Snow gasped. Tears stung her eyes, whether born of fear or excitement, she knew not. Out of all the maids in the Middle Kingdom, to be one of five hundred beauties selected for the Inner Courts, perhaps to become the next Brilliant Companion who would heal the heart of a grieving Emperor ... it was beyond dreaming.

Aye, you do well to weep, child of mine. For this means our farewell. Those ladies who enter the Inner Court—unless it pleases the Son of Heaven to dismiss them—never again see their homes. Nor, let me caution you, is their life all fine robes, sweet food, the Hall of Splendor, and an Emperor’s favor. Many, indeed, never see the Son of Heaven, much less bear him a son. Yet, such as they, too, are as firmly bound within the Inner Courts as the meanest slave.”

“But this insignificant wretch has been summoned,” Silver Snow murmured. Her heart raced. She was beautiful. Even her father, who had the most reason of all people in the world to wish her to be humble and modest, said so. She was brave; she was true. She had only to gain the favor of the Emperor, and everything that her father had lost would be restored. For it was well known that a favorite concubine was free to advance any of her house.

“You go to exile and, though it be not open battle, to another type of risk, my daughter,” said Chao Kuang. “The ladies of the Inner Courts engage, I am told, in their own wars; and their weapons are guile at the best, at the worst they spin plots, set snares, and, at length, deal even with poisons. You have been raised to much—perhaps to overmuch—freedom; you may find the life behind the walls of such courtyards as arduous as I found my own captivity. And yet...” Her father drew a deep sigh.

Silver Snow held her breath. It was not often that her father would speak—could bear to speak, she thought—of his ten years in captivity.

“Ever since the hour of my surrender until now, I have lived, destitute, with the bitterness of my grief aching like an unhealed wound. Even now I see in dreams the barbarians around me. That distant whole country was stiff with black ice, and I heard naught but the moaning of the bitter winter winds beneath which my hopes of return dwindled.

“And yet, my daughter, and yet, since I have returned, there have been days when it has seemed to me that my life among the Hsiung-nu was not wholly bad. What does the poet say? ‘When I fell among Hsiung-nu and was taken prisoner, I pined for the land of Han. Now that I am back in the land of Han, they have turned me into Hsiung-nu ... A Han heart and a Han tongue, set in the body of the Hsiung-nu.’ My years apart were not all ill, I think now.”

“When one finds himself in a foreign civilization, one adapts to foreign customs,” Silver Snow adapted a maxim from the Analects. The city of Ch’ang-an would be as foreign to her as the lands and yurts of the Hsiung-nu had been to her father; but she would behave with no less honor. For all that she was a female, she was his heir.

Chao Kuang nodded warm approval. The lamplight struck sparks of light from his fur collar, shone on his vermilion sash, reflecting upward until the broad, familiar face appeared to be bathed in light.

“It may be that you too may come to ‘adopt foreign customs’ to such an extent that you esteem your exile. Assuredly, I shall pray to the Ancestors that you do so. My disgrace meant that I might not betroth you as befitted your station. Nevertheless, I had always meant, insofar as propriety might permit, and perhaps somewhat further, to allow you what latitude I might in a choice of husband. But alas, my child, to this summons I can allow no indulgence.”

Silver Snow bowed to the mats. Had she been betrothed, she would not have been offered this dangerous blessing, this opportunity to act to retrieve her father’s honor.

He gestured at the chest at the outer reaches of the firelight. “The twenty rolls of tribute silk and two hundred ounces of gold ...”

So much? That would beggar their house! Silver Snow, who oversaw the household records as might a first wife, gasped, then flushed scarlet with shame. Her father continued as if he had not heard her outburst.

. . are ready for presentation to Mao Yen-shou upon your arrival. You have the jewels and robes that were your mother’s and my First Wife’s, as well. And, there is this.” Laboriously Chao Kuang rose. Obedient to his wish that his daughter not witness his infirmity, Silver Snow averted her eyes until the thump of his cane upon the mats indicated that he had reached the other mysterious carved chest that she had earlier noted.

At his gesture, she rose and approached. The lid lay back, and lamplight glittered off a splendor of jade plates and gold wire wrought into the replica of a man fully clad, even to the hood for the face, and the booted feet, in armor. Silver Snow bent close to eye the jade. Its color was that of stone precious in value, brought from across the Land of Fire and through the Jade Gate into the heart of Han. In itself, this armor was burial gear worthy of Heaven’s Son—or Heaven itself.

“There is another such beneath the rolls of silk and the gold,” said her father. “They were carved long ago to serve as shrouds, when our Ancestors were princes in this land. Alas, we have fallen far; and the last and greatest of our falls has been mine own. The Son of Heaven may have once heard that such a treasure lies in our possession, or he may not. Still, should you be so fortunate as to receive his favor, I charge you to present these suits of jade armor to him. He may wish to save one for himself, another for you; or he may throw them to his slaves: I care not.”

But he did, Silver Snow thought. He did. The jade armor was the last great treasure of their house, and he entrusted it to her as a general might entrust a banner to the youngest of his warriors to hearten him for a test.

“Perhaps when you present this gift, he will recall the most humble, unworthy, and wretched of his servants,” said Chao Kuang. His voice roughened, and he turned rapidly away.

For a long time, her father and she maintained silence. Silver Snow heard the clatter of dishes and voices raised in other courtyards in the house. The banquet in honor of the official who brought the edict—it must be under way, and her father had left it to speak with her, mere girlchild though she was. She tilted her head to listen, and he nodded.

“Indeed, I should return to my guests, but my heart is heavy within me. For, daughter, this must be our farewell. Tomorrow’s dawn will see the official go from here; and you must go with him. You shall have your gifts, and your maid, and whatever escort can be contrived. And you go with my blessing—” Silver Snow dropped to her knees.

“I do not expect that life will treat you too harshly,” said her father, limping back to his cushions. “For is it not written in the Analects that to be fond of learning is close to having wisdom? I know that you are fond of learning; and, in the Inner Courts, you may have opportunities to learn much that is lacking here.”

Silver Snow’s tears spilled over onto her sleeves, leaving round marks on the embroidered silk. “But not from you, honored father,” she whispered.

To her astonishment, just as he had done when she first saw him, he held out his hand to her. With small, hasty steps, she went to him and took it; and he drew her into a close, warm embrace.

“May all our Ancestors smile upon you, my daughter,” he said. “It may yet be that you shall bear a son to worship them, and our line shall not live in disgrace or die out altogether.”

For a moment longer, he held her, and she smelled the camphor in which, all summer, his sables had been preserved.

“Now,” he said, “I must indeed return to my guests. I congratulate you on the success of today’s hunt: a good one for your last.” Deliberately, as befitted a disciple of Confucius, he kept his voice even, seeking to return them both to the wholesome serenity of conduct that the Master taught.

Silver Snow withdrew from her father’s embrace, blinked once, furiously, and commanded her lips not to tremble.

“I shall see you depart tomorrow,” said her father. “But this shall be our true farewell. If you have time and the means, I charge you, write to me.”

She bowed deeply, and listened to her father’s uneven tread and the measured thump of his ebony cane as, slowly, painfully, he descended the stairs, and walked across the courtyard toward the room in which feasted the official and his officers who would, tomorrow, whisk her away from the only life that she had ever known.

The air in the room was fragrant with pine, almond, and artemisia; and the lamp shone brightly upon her as she curled into the cushions where her father had sat, weeping as she bade farewell to her home. Though excitement and splendor, she knew, might well lie ahead of her, she wept as if there were no end to tears in her whole world.