The Incarnations (24 page)

Elsewhere in the chamber, tea is sipped, ivory mah-jong pieces shuffled about. A eunuch messenger appears at the door. The Emperor requests three bedmates for tonight. Names are named in a falsetto, and blood drains from faces, fingernails digging crescent moons in palms. The tea soothes me with breath of steam, the coal-fired kang warms my backside. I have not been summoned to the Leopard Room in years. I am one of the fortunate few.

The Imperial Gardens on a midwinter day. Frozen silver-baubled spider-threads dangle from the gnarled branches of the juniper trees. The winding pebble-mosaic path is slippery with frost. I sit on a chair of deer antlers in the Belvedere of Crimson Snow, the seat polished wood, the chair-back entangled horns curved to embrace the sitter, threatening to stab the sitter in retaliation for any false move. My fingers fiddle with embroidery, fumble with needle and thread. I abhor needlework and would like to read stories instead, but they keep us harem slaves as illiterate as she-goats.

The tapping of wooden-heeled slippers on the stone path disturbs my thoughts. Every so often the wooden heels cease tapping as one of the twenty pavilions is peered into. The Pavilion of Melancholy Clouds. The Pavilion of the Immortal Birds. The Pavilion of a Thousand Autumns. I scowl as you enter the Belvedere of Crimson Snow. Why have you come to disrupt my peace? I risk influenza for these solitary hours. To flee the idle gossip and stifling unhappiness of concubines.

Your pretty face is pink with cold, and a shawl of winter mink is thrown over your robe. You bow deep and low. ‘Boundless happiness to my Elder Sister Concubine Swallow.’

I murmur, ‘Boundless happiness to you, Concubine Bamboo.’

Needle and thread jerk up. You peer curiously at my embroidery: tufty feathered mandarin ducks on little slippers for maimed feet. You stand respectfully but within pace restlessly to and fro.

‘Concubine Swallow, I saw a girl dash out her own brains last week.’

Your voice is tight and high. Thread slips from the eye of the needle. Saliva glistens on the tongue-dampened thread as I poke it through again. ‘Ah yes, Imperial Consort Virtuous Purity.’

‘Yes. Her. Aged only twenty she charged into a lacquered pillar of the Gate of Divine Prowess. Staved in her own skull. I saw her brains splashed scarlet in the snow.’

I tut. ‘I know. I saw. A dreadful mess.’

‘Ethereal Dawn scraped the gold paint from her jewellery box. Swallowed it and died from poisoning.’

‘So I hear.’

‘Pale Sapphire slit her wrists with a jade-handled letter opener. She survives nursed by eunuchs in the palace infirmary. But when she recovers she will be executed for betraying Emperor Jiajing. Two deaths, back to back . . .’

You tremble with fear and say, ‘Beloved Elder Sister, why do so many girls in the harem want to kill themselves?’

Needle tugs thread taut. The second web-footed duck is nearly complete. Yellow-beaked bird with feathery tufts of green and blue.

‘Brain fever,’ I say.

A glare. Another tug of cotton thread.

You whisper, ‘I hear things about His Majesty. That he tortures concubines in the Leopard Room. That he “operates” on them with scalpels. That he has dispatched two hundred palace ladies early to the grave . . .’

Chin quivers and tears fall. O why did you come here, foolish child? Spoiling my solitude with your woes. One of the eunuch servants, Hunchback Guo, creeps near, cowering beneath his craggy hump of spine, sweeping the already swept pebble-mosaic path.

‘What do you want from me?’

Silence. More tears. Sprinkling tear ducts that rouse disgust.

‘Listen to me, Concubine Bamboo. To be born a woman is to be born into suffering. Our feet are mutilated claws. Our cunts bleed. Wombs suffer cramps, childbirth. Sex too brings pain, but a night with the Son of Heaven is an honour worthy of the Death by a Thousand Cuts. Pray to the Goddess of Mercy if you must. Grow a spine. Endure.’

Gathering up embroidery, I leave the deer-antler embrace of the chair. Out of the Belvedere of Crimson Snow, I spit at the feet of smirking Hunchback Guo. I hiss, ‘You crooked teapot with a broken spout. Repeat a word of what you just heard and I’ll cut out your tongue and boil it for soup!’

Without a backward glance, I go to the Pavilion of a Thousand Autumns. Sit on a stone bench by a statue of the Lord Buddha. Embroidery hoop on lap, glaring at the arched doorway. Pull the thread so hard it snaps.

Drumbeat in Drum Tower signals the fall of night. The beginning of First Watch.

‘Draw the bolts! Mind the lanterns!’ cry the eunuch guards, as the Forbidden City seals its gates.

In the bathhouse, concubines wallow in bronze tubs of petal-bestrewn water. Maidservants pour water over their mistresses from pretty cloisonné jugs. It cascades over dark raven’s hair, shoulders and breasts. The elder concubines wag their tongues. The younger novices are silent out of respect. ‘Toilet!’ I call before I bathe. A chamber pot appears. A maid offers, on a velvet pillow, a silken sheet manufactured by the Department of Toilet Paper. They shroud me with screens as I crouch over the pot. When I am finished, they whisk away my leavings for the eunuch scribe to record in the Ledger of Bowel Movements and Menstrual Cycles of the Concubines. I lower my chilled, goosepimpled skin into the water, slipping into the circling conversation. Steeping in our baths, we poach ourselves pink and talk of the famine that blights the empire.

‘The Gods disapprove of the Emperor Jiajing. They punish his subjects with poor harvests and starvation. Millions have died.’

You, recent arrival from the famine-stricken world beyond the Forbidden City, pipe up excitedly. ‘I saw, I saw! The peasants stagger from countryside to town, begging for work. They sell their children for a bowl of rice. They clutter the roadside with their heaped corpses. Flies buzz around them.’

‘Who spoke? Apprentice concubines should not speak! Someone ought to spank the saucy bitch.’

Daggers fly and silence you.

‘The Department of Astrology has charted many ill omens. On the Terrace of Spirits they observed with astrological instruments a star crashing from the sky in portent of war, the merging of lakes on the moon in portent of floods.’

‘Japanese pirates attack the east coast of the Celestial Kingdom. The Mongol army loot and raid us from the north. The Gods are angry indeed.’

‘The Stone Lions weep at the palace gates. Tears of stone drip from their manes. They weep over the ruination of the empire.’

‘The reign of Emperor Jiajing is inauspicious indeed.’

‘Indeed, indeed.’

Twenty bronze tubs of concubines in ponderous silence. Forty knees above water. Forty submerged three-quarter-moon breasts.

‘His Majesty has no interest in the affairs of his empire. He neglects his imperial duties. He is obsessed with his Daoist longevity ceremonies and immortality elixirs of arsenic and silver that turn his skin yellow, his breath like that of a corpse . . .’

‘He dreams of eternal life. He disappears for days in dark temples of incense smoke and Daoist monks chanting immortality prayers . . .’

‘I hear His Majesty has invited the hermit sage Filthy Zhang to his quarters,’ I say. ‘The pills of filth collected by Filthy Zhang as he rubs his finger on his skin are said to lengthen life. I believe Emperor Jiajing has imbibed a few of these.’

Peals of laughter. The maids’ smiles show teeth, which they hastily conceal. Drum beat in Drum Tower signals second watch. Bathtime is over. Bodies rise from the water into kang-warmed towels. The older concubines, with our Leopard Room-scarred flesh, are grotesque to behold. Your virginal body is pure and pale as almond milk. You shudder at the sight of what awaits. A whisper: ‘They are building his tomb in the valley of Mount Tianshou.’

‘Then pray he outlives us. Pray he doesn’t die. For we’ll be immolated with him when he does. And should we accompany him to the afterlife, he will torment us there with knives.’

Alone in my chamber in the Palace of All Sunshine. A bedchamber not shared with others now I am a concubine of first rank who has borne Emperor Jiajing three daughters. Princesses aged two, five and eleven, reared by nurses in the palace nursery. Princesses who cry and wriggle out of Mama’s arms during my brief visits. Alone in my chamber, but for my dearest companions, opium and wine, I am thinking with regret of my daughters, Lily, Chrysanthemum and Azalea, when there is a knock at my door. Swaying and inebriated, I open the door to my eldest, Lily. O beloved Lily, come to Mama at last! Then I blink my wine-befuddled eyes, and I see it is not Lily, but you, Concubine Bamboo, a winter mink over your shoulders, shivering in the courtyard.

‘Honourable Elder Sister Concubine Swallow. Forgive my grave insolence, but may I speak with you?’

Surly hostess swings wider the door. ‘Come in.’

I go to the dresser, my back turned on you. I drag a gem-studded comb through my tangled mane.

‘The Emperor has summoned me to his chambers tomorrow night. To the Leopard Room.’

‘Oh?’

You stammer on, ‘I hear he carved out Concubine Jasmine’s bellybutton. Used the flesh for a soup for eternal life. The eunuch physicians attend to the . . . cavity he made.’

You stammer on, ‘I hear the Jiajing Emperor favours you. Pardons you from the Leopard Room. I hear, Elder Sister Swallow, that you are his luncheon companion on the twelfth day of the first lunar month. Tomorrow. Honourable Elder Sister, would it be possible for you to ask him to spare me? Please? I am only fourteen. I am too young, not ready to suffer and die . . .’

I loosen my sash and shrug my shoulders so my robe slides to my feet. The stitches that criss-cross my body are like puckered seams, holding together my patchwork of skin. ‘Do these scars count as evidence that His Majesty favours me?’

Mesmerized, not appalled by my scars, you murmur, ‘I hear Emperor Jiajing has allowed you special privileges for years.’

‘By speaking on your behalf, I may provoke his ire. Concubine Bamboo, what will you give me in return?’

As we both know, you have only one thing worth giving and, having researched my predilections, you give it. I fondle and taste every part of your lithe, paler than moonlight body. I bury my teeth in you without breaking the skin. You lick the cleft between my legs until I am sated and permit you to stop. It is daybreak by the time it is over. You peel apart from me, sticky with my fluids, my sweat. Can’t look me in the eye.

‘Why so humiliated? I am not a man. I did not pierce you or touch you there. I know the folly of depriving you of the trickle of blood that must stain his sheets. Why are you crying, Concubine Bamboo? You miss your mother? Forget her. She’s to blame you are here in the first place.’

Naked, you stare into emptiness, knees hugged to chest. I scrape my long and tapered fingernails across your scalp. Clutch a fistful of hair. I promise to speak to the Emperor for you, I promise to do my best.

The drum bangs to signal dawn. Lanterns are lit all across the Palace of Heavenly Purity and Emperor Jiajing rises. ‘Ten Thousand Blessings to His Majesty!’ cry the eunuchs as they attend to his morning ablutions. They bath him, comb and trim his beard and clean the wax from his ears. They dress him in a padded blue silk, fox-fur-trimmed robe, brocade leggings and sheepskin-lined boots (recorded by a eunuch scribe in the Ledger for the Department of Wardrobes). The winter day is cold. All across the Forbidden City eunuch servants swish brooms back and forth, sweeping clean the courtyards. The Go-betweens of the Grand Secretaries present to the Emperor trays of scrolls, reporting of famines, droughts, peasant uprisings and warlord rebellions across the empire; trays of official decrees for His Majesty to approve and sign to quell these calamities. But Emperor Jiajing waves the triple-kowtowing Go-betweens away. He has a meeting with a Daoist sage who has journeyed from Yunnan with the waters of a legendary stream, promised to add to a lifespan fifty years.

The Hall of Literary Brilliance. One hundred serving eunuchs march in holding silver platters aloft. They cry, ‘Transmitting the viands! Transmitting the viands!’

The eunuchs lower the one hundred silver platters on six round tables before His Majesty, then withdraw to the edges of the room. Heavy-lidded on his throne, Emperor Jiajing scarcely stirs as the serving eunuchs whirl around him, pouring his much-loved elk-horn and deer-penis brew into a porcelain cup. He scarcely acknowledges Concubine What’s Her Name, mother of three of his daughters, genuflecting on her hands and knees, touching her forehead to the cold stone floor. The she-goat bleats, ‘Ten thousand blessings to Your Majesty! There is no greater honour than to be invited to dine with our Supreme Ruler today!’

Wretched Concubine What’s Her Name, with her defective girl-bearing uterus. Her man-hating womb, castrating his foetal sons so only daughters are born. Arising from her knees, Concubine What’s Her Name, head bowed with humility and deference, goes to stand at His Majesty’s shoulder. His rage blows over. The Emperor is hungry, his stomach growls with impatience.

‘Remove the covers!’ commands the Chief Serving Eunuch.

One hundred serving eunuchs scurry from the peripheries of the Hall of Literary Brilliance, remove the silver-domed platter lids and carry them away. What a feast! The Emperor licks his lips and points at a dish of noodles. The Eunuch Food-taster cries, ‘Appraising the viands!’ and pincers some dangling threads of noodles with his chopsticks. The Eunuch Food-taster nibbles, nods that the noodles are unpoisoned, and the Emperor proceeds to eat. Concubine What’s Her Name hovers out of eye-shot, at the shoulder of His Majesty’s fox-fur-trimmed robes. Concubine Meek and Timid. O how ashamed of her I am. But to behave in any other manner is to provoke his wrath. To dine with Emperor Jiajing is not to eat oneself but to stand beside him, encouraging him and praising him for every mouthful he masticates. A sip of elk-horn and deer-penis brewed tea necessitates a cry of, ‘O how this revives the blood, enhances potency, o Emperor of Ten Thousand Years!’