Imperial Lady

8

On the other side of the wall, sweet strains of flute and zither rang out, almost as sweet and considerably less artificial than the laughter and sighs of the ladies who drifted across the arched bridges or who, with outcries of mock fear, reclined on intricately painted boats on the lake in the central courtyard. Sunbeams slanted down into that court, though they seemed, thought Silver Snow as she gazed down at her hands, never to illuminate her own shabby courtyard in the Cold Palace.

Today, for a change, she sat not in the courtyard with its unpruned trees and its bushes that had gone to seed, but in the green and white octagonal pavilion that, even now, had not lost the chill of winter. No wonder, she thought, that this place was called the Cold Palace; but it was a cold not so much of air or water, but of the spirit.

She shut her eyes as if she were infinitely weary. Yet even in the darkness, with Willow kneeling beside her, crooning a wordless song, she found no comfort. The day’s humiliations had left wounds in her heart and mind, wounds that still bled. Even now, she panted as if, once again, she had to run weeping through the palace corridors, had reached her own tiny courtyard, and flung herself down, only to find herself almost instantly assailed by servants. With courtesy distinguishable from insolence only by an observer who worked hard to make that distinction, they had invaded her room, stripping even the hangings from her bed as they packed up her few possessions and hurried them—and herself—to the Cold Palace.

Her gamble to bring her father to the Son of Heaven’s attention had failed. Now, lifelong imprisonment was the punishment for losing her game.

The Cold Palace, isolated and unlucky, was a quiet, solitary world. No one called on her, except, of course, those who sought to save on tips to servants by using her for labor: an elder concubine or two who needed some tedious chore or other to be completed by someone who would not complain; a young woman whose fear, laziness, or caprice brought her to Silver Snow to remedy a mistake or shorten a lengthy task. Having little else to do, Silver Snow complied with their requests; had she refused, she might have lost the little goodwill that she might still have left. It was better to be patronized, she thought, than to be persecuted.

Such women swept in, bestowed the work upon her as if they honored her by their presence, and pressed her to complete it speedily. When it was finished, though, they came no more to the Cold Palace. It was better, she decided then, to be ignored than to be patronized.

Occasionally, Silver Snow heard their voices ring out over the wall. They called her the Shadowed One. That name that had spread throughout the Inner Courts and chilled Silver Snow even more than the usual dearth of fuel for her braziers. Even the one or two servants assigned for their misdeeds to wait upon her used that name when they spoke of her. To her and to Willow, they spoke as little as they could, and there was no way she could punish them for their insolence. Few creatures, she quickly learned, had as little influence as she who lives in disfavor among eunuchs and women.

Once or twice an occasional pitying girl with more sentimentality than intelligence might glance in upon her, then flee, as if fearing that Silver Snow’s disgrace might contaminate her too. After all, birds peck at the one who is different and judged to be an outcast; the pretty, bejeweled creatures of the Inner Courts much resembled those birds. By tormenting an outcast, they hoped to prevent themselves from being made outcast too.

Silver Snow might have sunk into a quiet, despairing madness had she not had Willow with her. Loving, patient Willow, who sat with her during the twelve hours of the day and, when she could not sleep, during the watches of the nights that grew shorter and shorter as the season turned toward a summer of joy and beauty in which Silver Snow, alone among palace maidens, might not share. (She did, however, accomplish more than one woman’s share of the needlework for the various festivals.) It was Willow, who gazed for long moments into her scrying mirror or cast the hexagrams time and again, trying to discern in their arrangement some scrap of good fortune.

“It is all change, Elder Sister,” the maid sighed after one such session. “Change and travel.”

Silver Snow threw down her brush with such force that it snapped. “But I am not destined to travel; I am immured here!” she cried. “Your yarrow stalks are as crooked as your . . . oh, Willow, forgive me!”

She covered her face with tiny hands from which the months in the Cold Palace had peeled the bow calluses and wept. To think that she would turn thus upon Willow, who had put her life in jeopardy to follow her and asked only to serve her! To think that she had lost control! How ashamed her father would be—almost as ashamed as she herself was.

After what seemed like a long, miserable hour, a soft, hesitant touch on her knee made her lift her head and see Willow crouched at her side.

“Oh, Willow,” said Silver Snow, dashing her hand across eyes that she had not painted all spring long, “rather than live as such an ingrate, I should hang myself with my sash from that withered tree before I too wither.”

“Mistress, hush!” cried Willow. “There is nothing,” she added with a mischievous glance, “in the hexagrams to tell me you face death.”

Despite her shame at her self-pity, Silver Snow found herself laughing. “Ah, Willow, Willow,” she said, “you make me realize just how true is the proverb that one does not live in vain if there is one person in all this world who totally understands one.”

To her surprise, Willow flushed deeply and turned away. Lest Silver Snow embarrass the maid further, she cast about for some diversion. “I have embroidered until I have pads on my fingertips! And it does not seem as if I shall write any further today to my honored father. How can I? Even assuming that some worthy man would have the charity to deliver the messages of a maid as out of favor as myself, my father would see my distress in the clumsiness of my brushstrokes. But it seems to me that if I do not speak to someone other than you, I shall be distracted.”

“Perhaps, mistress, if you turned your sorrow into poetry, it might be sorrow no longer. Write down your thoughts, mistress, and let the winds carry your words to those who have hearts and minds to hear them,” suggested Willow.

“Excellent idea!” cried Silver Snow. “But what shall I write upon?” The small store of writing silk that she had must be hoarded for letters to her father, and she could hardly expect thin wooden strips to be carried away by the winds or, as Willow probably and more prosaically intended, to bob from some tree in another court.

“One moment, Elder Sister ... ah, I have it!” Willow leapt up with a grace belying her crippled leg and darted out into the court where she seized up a leaf that had blown across the wall from some rare tree or other. “Write on this leaf, then set it free.”

To her own astonishment, Silver Snow found that she was smiling. It had been months since she had even attempted verse. She settled herself more comfortably on her frayed mat and took up a fresh brush. A poem flickered into her consciousness, and she dipped her brush in the ink that glimmered on her inkstone.

How fast this water flows away! she wrote, looking at the clouded little stream that flowed past the windows of her octagonal pavilion.

She read the verse to Willow, who clapped her hands.

“Now,” she commanded, “take this leaf and set it free to find the person of whom I wrote.”

“And if no one replies, Elder Sister?” asked Willow, her head cocked to one side, her eyes inquisitive.

“Why then, tomorrow, you shall hunt me out another leaf, and I shall write another poem.” She found herself smiling, anti the very unexpectedness of that made her dare a little laugh. Hearing it, Willow brightened.

No, thought Silver Snow. She loves me, and I have not been a kind mistress to her.

Silver Snow rose and watched Willow limp down the steps, dulled by neglect, of the Cold Palace. Like a beast toying with its prey, she batted the leaf up into the air. A stray gust took it, and tossed it over the crumbling wall.

The next day, Silver Snow wrote out another verse: the day after, another; and the day after that, yet another.

“If I continue writing on leaves,” she told Willow, “I may just pluck the trees bare.”

The maid eyed her narrowly and laughed only when she did. As the days went by, however, Silver Snow admitted how keen her disappointment was. Tossing leaves that bore messages over a broken wall—that was a child’s game. It was ridiculous of her to have placed any hope at all upon it. And yet. . . and yet. . . tears stung her eyes, and she could not see clearly enough to make the next careful, exquisite brushstroke. She blinked fiercely.

Surely, on the steppes, her father must have had his lonely days when his exile galled him worse than the pain of any wound. Yet he had persevered and survived. All that was good in her, she thought, came from him; she must not disgrace his teaching by even a moment’s weakness. She drew a deep, consciously steady breath and bent to draw the next character on the fresh green leaf that lay upon the crazed lacquer table before which she knelt.

“Lady, oh lady!”

So steady was her hand that she completed the stroke flawlessly before she looked up. Never before had Willow’s voice lilted in precisely that way; in fact, she had always taken care to keep it low as befitted a humble maid, especially now that they were in disgrace. She heard the familiar step I drag — first of Willow’s strong leg, then of her lame one—up the hollowed stairs to the pavilion.

But what were those other, heavier and more measured footsteps that followed the maid’s?

The smile on Willow’s face as she entered the pavilion that, even in summer, retained some chill from its very isolation was as bright as sunlight flashing from the mirror that the maid used to foretell. Just as quickly as a maid blows out a lamp, however, Willow shuttered her smile, hooded her eyes, and bowed slowly, painfully, and ceremonially to the floor in appropriate homage to the visitor who followed her into the pavilion.

It was the eunuch Li Ling who had spoken bravely to the Emperor of the Hsiung-nu before the entire court. In his hand, he held, as another might carry a spray of lilacs or a fan, a number of drying leaves, each of which bore the verses of lament and loneliness that she had composed and so painstakingly inscribed.

She bowed herself before him, shaking with a return of the old, childish hope. Surely he would speak first. If he did not, then she might venture a word, assuming she could find the power of speech at all.

“Seeing you, lady,” said Li Ling, “this one feels as if he has asked for melons and been given fine jade.”

Wondering, Silver Snow looked up. Li Ling stepped forward, his hand going out so that the leaves brushed her chin. Then, quickly, he recollected himself and drew it back.

“Those are the features of the ill-favored lady of Mao Yen-shou’s portrait,” mused the eunuch-scholar, “and yet, how different! Your complexion is like almonds, not like mud; and your brow and chin do not protrude like a soldier’s. As for the mole—surely that was our worthy Administrator’s invention.”

Aware that her cheeks were flushing so that her skin resembled not an almond but a peony, Silver Snow looked down.

“Yes, yes, I am well aware that my behavior is unpardonable, but I pray that you will pardon it for the sake of my old friend, your most estimable father. I had heard that his last child had come to court, and it grieved me to know that you were unhappy and alone.”

Silver Snow felt the corners of her mouth ache from the unfamiliar wideness of her smile. She cocked her head to one side, looking at the leaves that Li Ling held.

“Is this writing yours? The brushstrokes are very fine.” She shook her head and gestured as if to decry her own ability.

“And the verses too? I have never seen them before. You composed them upon the leaves, then simply blew them into the air, to fly where they would? Is that it, lady?”

Silver Snow nodded, then realized that a nod was hardly sufficient courtesy to a friend of her father, an advisor to the Son of Heaven, and the only person, save Willow, to come to her in her exile with no thought but to cheer her. She rose, ceremoniously begged that he seat himself, and ordered Willow to heat the last of the rice wine that she had brought with her from the North.

“Willow threw the leaves over the wall,” said Silver Snow.

“And that is Willow?” asked the eunuch-scholar. He stared at her with the same keen interest that he had taken in Silver Snow’s own appearance and her writing: glanced at her hair, which gleamed with russet highlights in the summer sunshine, then dropped his speculative, narrow-eyed gaze to Willow’s hands and the curious way in which the middle three fingers of each hand were of equal length.

“Very interesting,” he said calmly. “Your maid. Is she from—” he paused, then spoke the name of a region of the Middle Kingdom so obscure that Silver Snow remembered hearing it pronounced but once or twice.

Willow, entering with the hot wine, heard him and froze on the threshold, the delicate winecups and flask trembling on the tray that she bore.

“Well, girl, are you?”

Willow dropped to her knees awkwardly, favoring her lame leg. “Yes,” she whispered. Her hands trembled as she set out the wine on the low table.

“Then I take it that you are an herbalist? I too have interests in that direction . . . and in alchemy. ” He flashed mistress and maid a quick, warning look.

Alchemy. Some men said that the study revealed secrets of the Tao that otherwise would be locked away from humankind; others, more fearful and more numerous, held that those secrets were, indeed, proscribed to man. From the study of alchemy to accusations of witchcraft, Silver Snow thought, was but a tiny step, no more than a lady in a new gown and shoes might take crossing a high-arched bridge.

“Be honest with me, as I have been honest with you,” said Li Ling. “Lady, you are my old companion’s youngest child. I mean you only well in your solitude. As for my . . . studies”— he paused delicately—“they, along with music, calligraphy, and poetry”—he bowed at her, a subtle compliment to her verse—“are compensations for what I have lost. I have no heir nor am likely to now. What else can they do but kill me?”

“Mao Yen-shou threatened me with the penalty for grave-robbing.” The words, still painful after all of these months, slipped out with a speed and bitterness that made Silver Snow gasp, wishing that she unsay them. This man—impossible to think of him as one of the posturing, flabby effeminates who surrounded Mao Yen-shou!—his lordly manner and his keen wit drew the entire sorry tale from her before he had finished his first cup of wine, though, in courtesy, she truly should have waited until he had refreshed himself before she spoke.

When the tale was finished, Silver Snow sat quietly. For the first time in months, the tension that had knotted in her belly and tightened her spine after the Administrator of the Inner Court’s theft of the jade armor dissipated. Telling Ling Li had brought its own healing, just as lancing a boil relieved pain and swelling.

“You are indeed your father’s child,” said the old alchemist. “It was not just alchemy for which I was punished. I was your father’s advocate as well as his friend. Do you know, I was there when he was captured? Ah, that was a mighty battle. We would have pursued the Hsiung-nu, but I had no support to follow. Your father set out the crossbowmen. Their aim was so deadly that even the shan-yu himself was forced to dismount and fight on foot. And the Hsiung-nu, without their horses, are but half alive.

“As I said, we followed. Perhaps we were immodest, maddened by the thought of victory. Your father pursued the Hsiung-nu into a narrow valley, determined to wipe them out. That was when they rolled rocks down to block the valley. Thus, your father was trapped within with his men; I without.

“First, your father’s men ran out of arrows. In their haste to escape the valley, they abandoned their supply carts ... a fatal error. Soon they were brought to fighting with axles torn from the carts, with short swords; very quickly, their numbers were reduced. Even had your father been minded to flee, he could not have done so.

“Once the sun went down, your father took desperate measures. He ordered his men to put away the banners and the flags that they had marched behind with such pride. He burned the treasure that the army carried, ordered his troops to disperse, and himself set off with ten men. Two of those died before he surrendered himself to the Hsiung-nu to save the lives of the other eight—and, lady, you would not fear death in the Middle Kingdom had you but seen death as the Hsiung-nu deal it. The bows, the whistling arrows, the knives, cunningly . . . no!

“Your father surrendered to save his troops. And yet, of all those brave soldiers, only four hundred ever escaped.

“I returned to Ch’ang-an, of course, to resign my commission and confess my failure to save my friend, who, I wanted to assure the Son of Heaven, had acquitted himself with courage and dignity. However, I found myself plunged from defeat into scandal and intrigue. Your father’s name and Ancestors were blackened as traitors. I pleaded; all the spirits of my own house know how I pleaded. The fact,” he added with a glance at her, “that you are alive for me to repeat this story is proof of how well I pled. Yet, when the great fears of witchcraft arose, as they do every few years, my defense of a man who now rode with the Hsiung-nu was remembered; and my name and manhood paid the forfeit of my loyalty.

“After such a life, lady, can you truly fear that I would ever mean harm to you and yours?”

Silver Snow shook her head, moved past speech.

“Then let me be your friend. You are in exile from your home. I, too, am in a kind of exile; I miss the honor that once I had. That unfortunate day of the presentation of the pictures, when the Son of Heaven summoned me, was the first time for many sorrowful years. Your father would want you to study, and there is much that I can teach. Will you accept me as a friend?”

Her eyes bright with admiration at the story of her father’s valor, Silver Snow did not answer for a moment. For a few precious moments, Li Ling’s story had freed Silver Snow from the confinement of the Cold Palace, released her from the constraints of the Inner Courts, set her free to wander, in her imagination, the lands that she had gazed at for all of her girlhood. There too the freedom that she sought was walled away from her. Though her father had had the freedom of the steppes, yet he too had not been free. She sighed deeply.

Sorrow and disappointment flickered on Li Ling’s face, and he began to rise.

She held out a hand, daring to restrain him. If he left, she would never again have company, and, once again, she would retreat into the hateful cocoon of the Shadowed One. She would rather die than do that—or would she? Li Ling had not. Her father had not.

Neither would she.

She raised her eyes and realized that she had kept the scholar waiting too long for his answer. Both of them were prisoners, suffering shame and loneliness. She would not start this new friendship with more hurt. She smiled, nodded, and poured him some more rice wine.

“Wonderful!” cried Li Ling. “Your lessons—and yours too, little changeling—will begin immediately.” And this time his smile included Willow.