Chapter Text
1. 绸 / SILK
長熙 十四年
Changxi Era, Year Fourteen
Sleep eludes him tonight.
Midwinter eve—when the sun has turned its face elsewhere. Twilight sinks over the deep ravine. Pale smoke from Zongzheng rises up, quickly fading in the slow wind, and desolate lies the limits beyond, no hearth or light to be found within these valley walls. The winter air hangs like a blue veil. Zongzheng’s spires peer over it all, otherwise unlit and unwarmed, a prison for the dead and a grave for the living.
He has a blanket on his lap as he sits at the loom, drafts of wind pouring through the clattering windows, his calloused hands already unfeeling from the cold. He imagines the hoar of the courtyard outside, the silver branches of the winter birch, the shuddering snowfall that clings now to mountain ridges like a mantle. Beneath the cold, the brittle loess. What little that grows here winter has slain.
High from the lone oculus does moonlight pierce the dolor of Zongzheng. By the time it has fallen on him, he fears it has lost all its color and warmth.
His threads, pliant and fine, slip beneath his fingertips.
He counts them. Like reading a qi board. Counts them like connecting the invisible stones of a game he has happened upon, in medias res, and now he traces, commander over his inherited battlefield, each motif flashing under his fingers as if he could read both its liquid frontside and chaotic reverse: two over one, a conqueror’s threat, uncaring of his sacrifices; one over one, a cautious defense, eager for reinforcements; three around a void, a tiger’s maw, trap sprung and ready; one connecting two, stars colliding, solidified in lined defense.
Chou weaves two dimensions out of one. Shu weaves three dimensions out of two. In silk, just as on the qi board, you can imagine the world as you wish. You can walk within its logic.
Like this Ning Yi rehearses his world. The moon will continue its apogeic westward travel and he will soon lose its light—candlelight is forbidden to prisoners, for fear of its use as signal or tinding. He would have to stop, or have nothing save hand and mind to master warp and weft in the dusty darkness.
And so he sees with his fingers. With fingers he fashions the undulating topographies, the conflowing rivers of power, the shifting lineages within the elastic breadth of the brocade. With hands he moves from north to south, east to west, probing the bounds of his assembled enemies, testing if they are hardy or craven, whether they would gather or scatter before him as silks tensing and slacking, as if threads were the prime materials of thought and fate, and raised with them were not merely argent mandalas on a sable brocade but ragged mountain peaks and riven with them not only scarlet borders but watercourses that meander into the sea.
The warp. The weft. In them the Nine Lands. Selvedge to selvedge. In them the Four Seas.
The loom creaks in rhythm, making a certain music in the dark silence.
“Master, where does all the brocades go?” Ning Cheng asks, late into the night, sounding tired and bored as he sets down tea for his master.
Ning Yi looks askance at him, and does not answer for a moment.
“A nosy servant you’ve become.”
Ning Cheng is immediately chastened. “Be not angry, master. I was just mouthing nonsense.”
But Ning Yi does not admonish him. “The silks are stored,” he says. “For when I have need of them.”
“Oh,” Ning Cheng says, in the tone of a child waiting for more explanation. And receiving none, he says, sulkily, “I see.”
“Ning Cheng.”
“Yes, master.”
“You want to ask: what need would I have for them, as they are fabric for women’s clothing, and I have neither wife nor concubine by my side.”
Ning Cheng grins sheepishly, a bit like a puppy. “Well—yes, but I didn’t want you to get mad at me for asking too much.”
“Do you know how much I weave each day?”
“I’m not too sure, sir.”
“Every day I weave three inches, if I work from dawn to dusk and my eyes are cooperative,” Ning Yi answers as he maneuvers the shuttle. “I have now more than five hundred yards of work—all that I have personally woven or designed. Do you know how much a yard of this shujin would fetch among the noblewomen of Dijing?”
Ning Cheng shakes his head.
“A yard would cost three hundred silvers—and if the pattern is complex or colors especially splendid, five.”
“Woah, master. Think of how much silver you could rake in!”
The loom stops. Ning Yi looks at him out of the corner of his eyes, and suddenly he laughs—a throaty and wild laugh. “What use have I for silver, in Zongzheng Si?”
—
He had befriended Huo Laosan on the second year of his imprisonment. Though to all appearances he had nothing, he still had the royalty of his person and the delicacy of his youth. Small talk a first—that by his accent he could tell Laosan was from Shu. He was a silkworm farmer. His family lived in a village near Jincheng—generations of silk-weavers—but parasites had decimated their silkworm colonies for a season and the whole village could not pay its taxes. “I had some family in Dijing. I stayed with them to look for steady work.” Perhaps he felt that Ning Yi was but a fallen prince making casual conversation to pass the time, that it was no great matter if he divulged too much.
“Brocade-weaving—a hard craft, requiring years of honing. Yet the guarding of Zongzheng Si, how hard a craft is that?”
Huo Laosan bowed immediately. “With your highn—with Liulang to guard, an easy craft indeed.”
Most of the guards took a liking to him, as he was not the pompous princeling they had feared but had about him easy boyish manners. In his days in Dijing, they used to say that that the charms of the Prince of Chu knew no gender.
So in a side room of his quarters, such as he had, he obtained leave to let him have a loom built. The materials were inexpensive, but he needed Huo Laosan’s expert eyes for its construction.
“The heddles need to be perfectly parallel, and how far apart depends on the thread. It’s gotta have the right tension, you see, sir. And this joint here, this needs to be checked very regularly for alignment.”
And pointing to this joint or that frame, Huo Laosan would excitedly talk about the recognition of good silk and the adjustments needed from batch to batch.
“According to my sisters, the best silk threads are from Cuqiao, south of the river.”
“I see, I see.” Ning Yi would nod, his features frank and smooth, princely without a thread of princely regalia. How easily he smiles. How freely. How beautifully.
—
Ning Yi works at his loom, or reads by daylight, or walks in the courtyards, guarded on all side, or composes poetry or weaving-pattern by turns. Zongzheng is drowned in snow, the sun thin and far, and the disconsolate silence is only broken by the croaking of crows. New Years passes in these walls without fanfare or color, though his rations are better and he is allowed more letters. Soon it will be February.
“Master, there is message from Lanxiang.”
“Oh?”
“The kitchen boy says it’s from Miss Zhuyin.”
Ning Cheng proffers the letter—addressed to Liulang. The penmanship is small and clean, the paper faintly perfumed, by all appearances a love letter between a fallen prince and a paramour who could not forget him—who could blame the foolish girl, if Liulang is as magnetic and beautiful as they say? He would fain answer her now that he is titleless and imprisoned, with no family left in either court or harem.
Liulang,
I fear the snow, that has fallen on the courtyard of Lanxiang. For the orchids have shed both their petals and their scent. The moonlight falls on the River Wei, cold as frost. I wish for you, that your body fares well this winter.
First I must thank Liulang for his gift of silk last month. Its brilliance and color I have known no equal, even in the silk markets of Dijing. Please consider this poem as the only recompense I can yield, as I am but a simple girl in Lanxiang:
青鳥東飛正落梅，
衘花滿口下瑤臺。
一枝為授殷勤意，
把向風前轉轉開。When the holy blue-bird flew east the plum blossoms fell,
It held a flower branch in its beak as it descended from heaven.
Ah, your gift is like such a branch,
That has opened all the blossoms before the wind.I hope Zongzheng has material enough for you to read. Here is a second poem for your pleasure, if ever your brush or inkstone fails you:
越管宣豪始称情，
紅箋紙上散花琼。
都緣用久鋒頭儘，
不得羲之手里擎。Only the finest brush suited you
to scatter words like jewels on your scarlet paper.
But its sharp tip is now worn-down by long use,
no longer fit for the hand of the great calligrapher.
The letter ends with Yin. Ning Yi folds it back into its envelope.
Two poems—by the famous female secretary of the last dynasty. How utterly fitting, he thinks. Zhuyin, your mind is truly formidable. Your words are never wasted—written once but always meaning double. And judging by these poems, Xin Ziyan has entered into the services of Ning Chuan. I guess he aims to gain Qingming from under him. That is well.
He moves to the cedar box where he keeps his collection of silk samples. Taking them out he seems to contemplate them one by one, as if exegizing some hidden poem in each, and after a long while he selects a small swatch, a silver bird in a sea of blue-black, and bids Ning Cheng ready his brush and ink for his reply.
So they must, he and Zhuyin and Ziyan-xion: this charade of false lovers, for the eyes that watch Zongzheng do not blink, and Ning Yi can but disguise himself with masks.
“Master,” Ning Cheng asks.
“Yes, Ning Cheng.”
“Please forgive me for asking, but why are you so sure that bixia will one day restore you?”
Ning Yi closes his eyes. He should scold Ning Cheng for asking too much when there could be ears listening, but who else can he speak to? And why indeed? Why is he still alive, son of a traitor, mixed in blood, unloved by his father and despised by his brothers? If his brothers have had their way, he would long have been in the ground, felled by dagger or poison.
“There will come a point when all his stones will burn his fingers, and ever he will seek to find a new one to counter the ones he has just laid on the board. I am but a stone he is storing at the bottom of his bowl.”
Bowing, Ning Cheng looks up at his master, awed, and whispers. “How is it that you were confined to this small place, yet you can still see so clearly?”
Ning Yi laughs, standing up, his long dark hair falling like a veil between his mind and his words. “Ning Cheng, you would do well to remember. Within the nineteen by nineteen vertices of the qi board, within a single square foot of the brocade—there is an innumerable infinity. Zongzheng, too, is as small as a qi board, as minute as a swatch.”
2. 海 / SEA
長熙 十九年
Changxi Era, Year Nineteen
Ning Cheng would never presume to know his master’s mind—being greater than his own in both breadth and depth, and knowing neither the noble arts of qi or poetry, nor the feminine pursuit of the weaving of silk, he cannot divine from stratagems or threadcraft his master’s thoughts. But Ning Cheng can read his master’s mood by his swordplay.
When he is relaxed, he fights like a dancer, though Ning Cheng would not say this aloud, his forms whirling and mobile, his limbs like a nimble willow, never staying still for long. When he is angry—his forms are heavy and punctual, as if the sword were a lead-tipped brush penning his fury in bloody words and not a blade, light and hard as a shard of ice.
Today, his master is full of doubt.
As per usual they spar in the morning, in the inner courtyard of the Chu Residence. Fighting him feels as if he had sunk into a watery blueness, his motions bereft of precision or will, his blade and aim both askew. It is rare for his master to be in such a state. Their spiritless spar isn’t going to do him any good either.
“Master,” Ning Cheng says after deflecting several blows that went wide, tucking his sword away and bowing, hand on fist.
“Ning Cheng.”
“Forgive me but I do not feel well this morning.”
“Oh?” His master simply looks at him, inscrutable.
“I—ate out in the city last night. It must have been bad meat.”
“I see.”
“May I—rest to settle my stomach?”
His master narrows his eyes, and cocks his eyebrow. Normally his master would scold him, and maybe throw a barb at him or two, call him insolent for daring to question his master’s moods. But today the Prince simply sighs. He switches his grip. He is looking down at the blade, fingering the fuller and the hilt, gazing into his own eyes in the reflective surface.
After a long moment, he says:
攀崖照石鏡，牽叶入松門。
“I scaled the cliffs to gaze upon the mirror-smooth rockface,
and clinging onto branches I summited Songmen Mountain.”
Ning Cheng bows and back away. He does not know the allusion—but the meaning is clear. The Prince of Chu is troubled deeply. The eddies of Minhai are churning his mind.
—
The Third Prince once told him, when Ning Yi was but ten, that in the game of qi, there are actually three factions: the black, the white, and the void. The game was first and foremost about the use and taming of voids—for they are what keeps you alive.
Minhai is where the roads intersect, where the waves crash, where the river becomes the sea. Once again he has failed to stymie Chang Yuan’s escape routes and allowed him to slip from his fingers. The voids are the hardest opponents to play against, playing both on your own turn and theirs. And so he must to Minhai where the Chang have undoubtedly already readied the tableau. The Fifth Army is with him but where do their loyalties truly lie? Yet to protect Zhiwei, there is no other way. The Chang will surely ill-use her once she arrives. They know who saved her from his father’s jaws—and he has all but sent her to them.
So it is. Now he has no choice but to follow them into their snake’s nest, not knowing whether if he reaches out what he shall find in his hand—a tail, or a fang.
—
When the day of departure nears, spring finally reaches Dijing.
The days are full of rain, coloring the city. Green is roof and tile and dark the wood and stone. Its music seeps into the streets, while the denizens loiter indoors, lifting their bamboo curtains to regard the rainwashed city—some sigh at their interrupted plans, some glad of the settling of the dust, and some rejoice the return of spring. Ning Yi likes to stand in the arcade of his garden when it rains, though nowadays he is busy in his office detailing his plans. The rain has a scent, he would say, an intimate scent.
The Chu Residence is neither large nor extravagant. It is as luxurious as the house of a prince needs to be, but no more—though even among the servants in Dijing it is noted for its eccentricity.
No wife has the Prince, so the women’s quarters he had converted into weaving and dyeing rooms. In the gardens he had brought in unusual flowers—not the peonies and orchids preferred by the nobility, but wildflowers from the northern mountains rumored to have been his mother’s favorite. In the main rooms the Prince does not favor his ballroom or feasting hall for use, setting no dais or platforms; even the receiving and tea rooms he has left sparse. No colorful things has he put out, no silks or gold, save a large screen he had specially made when he was first reinstated, and hanging on it are oversized actors’ masks.
Xin Ziyan had asked about them once, pointing to them and cocking his head. “Dianxia, these masks—are you putting on the play, or am I?” His wry smile almost reaching his eyes.
“Ziyan-xion,” Ning Yi replied, walking close and touching the large one gingerly. “That is an interesting word: xì, play,” he wagged his finger. “Do you know why it looks like the word for war? If you traced this word back to the ancient Jinwen scripts, you would find that for entertainment the old kings used to mimic war: they would force their slaves to fight tigers—or war with each other unto their deaths. Does that not remind you of what happens in these rooms?”
Xin Ziyan, upon hearing this, formed his hands in obeisance, and said, “Are we the kings, or the tigers—or—?”
And Ning Yi did not answer.
So it is that one day towards the evening the rain finally falters, and eventually the sun peeks shyly out of the clouds, and the air is fresh and moist, and the sky a battlement of color. And the servants of Dijing begin to sweep water from the courtyards and platforms of the great households, complaining of their bad luck that the rains have added so much work to do, and their shoes are already soaking wet, and there is no place to dry the laundry. Indeed many servants’ meals are delayed, though at least there is water collected enough for all to wash in.
And in the evening calm after meals, Ning Yi calls Ning Cheng into his reception room to discuss their next steps.
“You must stay in Dijing, Ning Cheng,” his voice is stern.
“But—”
Ning Yi is looking upon the masks. They do not move, do not react, do not change. “I know your heart, Ning Cheng, but I have decided and I will have speak no more of it.”
“Yes, master.”
—
When next morning he meets with Zhiwei, his stern mood has subsided.
Zhiwei bows before him—an empty-hand bow—no longer garbed as a man. She looks well, he thinks. Her face has become so familiar to him, as intimate as his own. It’s the colors of her women’s clothes: their brilliance befits her complexion—the reds and greens her spring and summer, the golds and silvers her autumn and winter. Had things been different he would have woven for her, woven all his silks for her features, her skin, her hair, for all her seasons. How tightly we’ve been wound around each other, he thinks, and how tightly still we wind.
Walking so near death’s door—has it fazed her, or hardened her, or readied her?
“Dianxia.”
You’ve come to talk about Minhai. You want to convince me to not go. What are you thinking about, Zhiwei?
When he looks on her he seems to see her entirety—even as her smile softens her eyes he can still see the steeliness of her gaze, and in her laughter he remembers her grief, in her steadfastness he remembers her doubt. When she is far away from him, he can only feel the aftermarks on his wrist of her bite, faint and small, its pain almost imperceptible, faded as soon as she had walked away.
Just a month ago you were in the imperial prison, as resigned as a hare caught in a hunter’s trap, and the despair on your face was like a knife to my heart. With all the words I had I played a deadly game against my father. And I’ve gained the you that stands before me, Feng Zhiwei.
But I must send you again to death’s door. What can I do but follow?
She looks at him with her calm, probing eyes.
It reminds him of her when he caught her beneath him in the sideroom of the Wei Residence, her warmth and proximity, her scent—and in dreams, in dreams he imagines her dancing for him, an ordinary woman, and him just watching her, an ordinary man, and they say ordinary things to each other, and write ordinary letters, and they have ordinary wines and ordinary meals, they touch with ordinary hands their ordinary bodies, and with ordinary mouths they kiss each other, and their concourse is ordinary. What game have we played between you and I? For I both want you—I want you the nearest, the closest, the dearest, soul and body—and I want you to be gone before me, for us to be sundered forever, our fates cloven like headwaters upon a steep mountain flowing east and west, never to be gathered again. For as long as you are near me you are in danger, and I cannot bear it.
“Zhiwei, you’ve come,” he says, softly, and it’s like a prayer.
—
On the journey south she comes to his camp and they discuss strategy. When they are attacked, his first thought is of her. Of course. How else could it be? He has long known his heart—it is merely a matter of when to say it out loud.
—
“This move, this attack.” Ning Yi muses. “It is not like Chang Yuan. Someone else is at work here.”
“I was thinking much the same. A clear attack—that old fox would never do such an openhanded thing.”
“Whoever it is, he is not as clever as he thinks. He thinks to capture, but he will find only a ko, not a resolution. And when we get out of these mountains—he will find he has lost his temporal advantage.”
The cave they’ve found is damp, and they dare not venture further into its depths. With much effort they started a fire—neither had brought matches with them in their scramble to escape the attackers.
Feng Zhiwei is picking out the berries she’d gathered.
“If ever you manage to corner Chang Yuan,” she says, tasting them and cringing at their taste. “How will you resolve this game? Are you going to cut off his supports one by one, or are you going to let him find his two eyes?”
Ning Yi is tending the fire and does not answer.
“Dianxia,” Zhiwei says softly.
“Zhiwei, I know I don’t have to spell it out for you.”
Look before us, you had said, when we first stumbled on this vista overlooking the valley. Look at these mountains—how far and wide this view of greenness. But dianxia, have you truly looked upon them? These stone skeletons of the ragged mountains where clouds lie asleep like lakes of air, and forests as deep and cold as the flashing winter. Do they care for the goings on of man? Does a hare in the meadow or a hawk upon the eyrie, for the variegated dealings of palace and border—do they know who is king and who is traitor, who is master and who is slave?
I know your plans for Chang Yuan. You mean to goad him into open war—to corner him to raise his own banners as king, so that his fall is all the more absolute, all the the sweeter for you.
Flowing inside the cave there is a small spring, rushing with groundwater, cold and clear. Its voice echoes between the walls. A wry smile is all she can manage. And turning the words in her mind, she quotes:
“水聲激激，蒲葦冥冥”
“Deep waters roar,
Dark are rush and reed”
He does gaze back at her now, his black eyes turning upon the firelight, and the subtle flare of the quiet fire is like a spirit dancing in his features. He quotes back:
“枭騎戰斗死，駑馬徘徊鳴。”
“The riders dead on the saddle
The steeds pace and cry.”
So you know my meaning. What would war render them? What would war render us? She clenches her fist. You think you are at your most just when you weigh human lives in thousands and not in the singular. You are wrong, Ning Yi.
That night they sleep, uncertain of the wild silence and darkness, lit only by the sickled moon and their dying fire. He falls asleep first, but Zhiwei is thinking of the road ahead, and it seems to her that being so far from the machinations of empire and state, she can see it more clearly: Ning Yi, his father. Ning Shizheng can send her to the limits of the world with the wave of his hand—and yet, the power does not reside in him, neither throne nor crown nor seal. It does not disappear, even if you slay the king, break his seal, burn down his house, throw his children to the wolves. It lives in the thousand people common and noble, for whom the palace must be rebuilt, for whom Four Seas had to have a master, for whom the throne existed anywhere and everywhere unceasing, its emptiness only a void to be tamed.
In the morning when he wakes, she is resting on him, her warmth a cloak over his body. He whispers to her sleeping face:
“其象無雙，其美無极
其狀峨峨，何可极言”
“This visage knows no double, this beauty no bound
Against your likeness what words could I say?”
When she wakes, she raises her hand. It almost touches him. His hunger is the sea.
“Ning Yi,” she says, and it’s like a dream.
3. 为 / BECOMING
鳳翔 元年
Feng Xiang Era, Premier Year
In the imperial record book, thus:
In year twenty Changxi Emperor deceased. Sixth Prince Chu-wang Ning Yi ascends as Fengxiang Emperor—on August Nineteenth, the Autumn Equinox. Receiving the Hereditary Seal and the Imperial Sword, the court made full obeisance to His Majesty, and hailed him as sovereign of Tiansheng.
And on that day, backwards he turns: Before him the assembled court, the stoneswept palace, the wide imperial avenue encrossed like the qi board, interwoven like a brocade, as deep as the ocean, as unending as the sky.
—
Ning Qiao, my honored brother. Remember that game we first played when I was ten? Whenever I was allowed out of the Zhaoqing Palace, beyond Chang-guifei’s surveillance, I would go to your residence in the city at your invitation. A long game—it took more than a week to finish, interrupted you were by your duties taxing the eastern provinces and answering to father’s whims.
I concentrated too much effort on the southwest corner—thinking you were doing the same. But you answered my ko threat with invasion, my invasion with sacrifice; before I long I realized I had fallen into your traps—again and again. The corner was won but the center was lost.
“Ning Yi,” you had said, a smile in your eyes. “Some things are not as they seem. You cannot march forward without thinking ten steps ahead.”
The hour is late.
He is busy in Fengyun Pavillion with the restructuring he wants to accomplish in court: he knows full well which ministers, once deep in allegiance to Chang, are still clinging to each other in secret, or those that were all too eager to jump for Ning Qi when they caught scent of changes in the wind, or those that showed their true face when he voluntarily shed his armor and title—but he must be subtle in this turnover of the court, lest he incite insurgence during the crucial period of transition.
Wu Ming he has set to oversee the formalities that must be obeyed after his ascension. Ning Cheng—overhaul of the imperial guards. Gu Yan he has elevated to court. All is as well as it could be, even without Ziyan-xion with whom to refine his plans.
Eventually he would need to turn his eyes towards the borders—Dayue may not miss the cold wrath of Jin Siyu, but the murder of the Jinshi sovereign within Tiansheng borders and the disappearance of his intended will be not countenanced easily. For the blood of Helian Zheng thousands more shall pay. So be it—Helian Zheng made his choice when he allowed the insurgents into his retinue, and Ning Yi made his when he pursued. The lion throne will go to the younger brother, and its power the queen dowager. She is a careful woman, but Jinshi’s culture may not permit her to find any response other than war. And yet Jinshi is but a small nation. If war it is they seek, they perhaps sooner rather than later Ning Yi will get his wish.
This must be what his father felt at all times: always in want of stones.
—
Stars wheel. Birds fly. The hours with them, southward, southward. Winter deepens, uncaring of the turmoil in the world of men.
Some cold weathers not even the imperial palace can banish. But Ning Yi does not show his discomfort, for he is young, and he is sovereign, and power is in his limb and word. The fires burn late. When the third night-bell strikes he finally puts down his brush and walks into the courtyard outside.
The moon is full—nearly full. Its light a heavy cloak upon the courtyard. And yet by the time it has fallen on him, it is as cold as jade.
Birds no longer flew in the sky when he went out to meet her, not even the straining wings of wild geese, late upon the season. That day his retinue ventured forth from the city into the foothills where she was staying, and found they the courtyard doors open and unguarded, and dusty the table in the main hall, and the only remaining maid crying in the kitchen, saying that the mistress is gone, has been for days, but yes she did say before she left that one of these days she was going to climb up to the peak to find some fresh air, and Gu Nanyi could not be found anywhere either, and on her pillow was an envelope without a letter, empty save two wooden pieces of a small hairpin, snapped.
Before him rose the painted shoulders of southern mountains, like wardens guarding the road into the heavens, and ever the clouds flowed upwards to caress those high, snow-clad peaks, but alas, their fingers melt away as they rise, forever reaching yet forever in vain.
When he sleeps she is not there. When he wakes she has not returned.
—
Ning Qiao, my brother. Sometimes I cannot help but think of you. Had I been old enough to be by your side. Had I done more when you were falsely accused. Had you been crowned and throned. Had I you to serve. I would have gladly given position and place, and entrusted my ambitions to you, for you could always see some things more clearly than I.
Look behind me. To vanquish evil I must sit the throne, to sit the throne I must take up the sword, to take up the sword I must behead a man, and before the stroke falls, before I wake, before the wild storm has abated and the wounded sky has brushed away its tears, I realized something I’ve always known: the sword now wields the arm, the chair now bestrides the man.
And now all who have stood by me have fallen away. With no one beside me but Ning Cheng—Ning Cheng may understand my heart but not my mind, and my mind is in disarray.
Who among the friends of old can I gather by me now? Zhuyin, I have long sent to the ground. Ziyan-xion has left on his self-exile. And Zhiwei. Zhiwei… What does it feel like to be drawn and quartered? To be severed limb from body, soul from spirit.
In the month after the chaos of his ascension, he commanded her into Fengyun Pavillion to play a game. She played a sly game, sending prisoners into false eyes and walking into nets with deliberation. He had stared at her delicate hand as she placed her stones and slid them out of true, damning group after group to death.
“If you will not really play with zhen, then zhen has no use for you.”
“Zhiwei begs pardon that I cannot match bixia in wits.”
He grew angry then. He had stood over her, thinking of an appropriate answer to bite back to break her feigned obsequity.
“This game has always been yours to play, Feng Zhiwei.”
But kneeling in obeisance, she said, her voice clear as glass: “Ning Yi.” He had sent all the servants away and there was no one to hear this breach of etiquette. The way she said his name was so tender and yet it hung in the air, like a curse. “Do you know, that to be a woman in this world is like playing qi with no stones at all, having at your command only the voids of the board, only absence?”
Her face hidden from him—perhaps it has always been hidden from him. “Bixia, I beg my leave. If bixia has no use of me, may Zhiwei be permitted to go? The hour is late and my quarters far—the days have become cold.”
Only absence.
All that is under the sky—that is the throne. Heavenly order on earth—that is Empire. Climb up: to the topmost balustrade of Guangque Tower, and look onto the horizon. The white sun leans against the receding mountains, above the silty rolling of the Yellow River, arterial and wild. Look you then, towards all edges of the world—for all that you see lies under Tiansheng.
But Ning Yi knows, the infinite paths among the stoneworks of the Zongzheng Si are the same ones that lead to Chengming Dian. He has not escaped that place after all. It is world that has compressed. It is Chengming Dian that has folded itself over the twenty acres inside those bare, stony walls, over the iron-raked, graceless grounds as if the maze-world of Dijing could have been shrunken unto its airless diorama. And if Zongzheng and Chengming are both a prison for a prince, then the lock is divine right, the warden himself, the world and sky its iron cage.
And so he moves people and fortunes from the prison of his throne, for he is master and slave, tiger and man.
I have played this game against fate. I have gained the board and lost the stone—or have I? Have I been mistaken all along, which one is the board, and which one is the stone.
—
In qi, what you thought was the outside can, with the flash of a stone, become the inside. The guards you set before to fence and capture could suddenly be trapped themselves. So it is with man. What he thought was a mask, within a single flash, he could realize he can no longer unwear. The actor and the role can no longer be cleaved. The war and the play become indistinguishable. When he walks to the mirror, when he sees his face, how long does it take until he forgets what is beneath the mask, if there are no others to remember it?
When he was Liulang, even in the colorless abyss of Zongzheng Si, he still held within him silk as resplendent as autumnal vistas, swimming with light. And now, now that he is Fengxiang, and all at his hand is gold and jade and gems inlaid, at his feet the painted splendors of mountain and river, he is stripped and numb, his grief without end.
How long has she known it would turn out like this?
Did she see it then, even on the bridge so long ago after she saved Shaoning, when she looked up at him on that cold and sunless Hanyi Day as she burned joss for Zhuyin, and her peering eyes were lucid and probing, and she had tried to use words as weapon but found him obstinate and impervious—did she already see that maybe Liulang was the mask and Fengxiang the core, waiting for the right moment to shed its skin?
When does the phoenix find his double. When can he see his reflection. Why did he ever find out what love must feel like, to stand nose-to-nose, to be with each other’s creature, to have been an equal.
4. 桥 / BRIDGE
鳳翔 五年
Fengxiang Era, Year Five
It is midwinter and the sunlight falls anemic.
By rights the Imperial Harem should have held a feast for the Emperor, with all his women and children in attendance. Perhaps his brother, the Prince of Duan, Ning Ji, would have been invited. But Emperor Fengxiang has no Empress, nor any high consorts, nor sons and daughters. A few low concubines he has made but by palace gossip he does not lie with them often nor are they of sufficient rank to manage the Inner Palace. Even his servants from the Chu household he has let go. The harem lies quiet and desolate, unvisited and unloved.
Fine, dusty snow. Like soft down.
They whisper in the backrooms of the palace—what happened to that dissolute prince who proclaimed he wanted nothing but to weave silk and drink wine? What happened to that profligate who spent silver like tea-water in pleasure boats on women and drink and the whims of his followers?
“All that infighting with his brothers, that rebellion in Minhai, that must have been what’s changed him so,” one of the eunuchs says to another, in the back passages where they are scurrying to set out fixtures for tomorrow’s morning court. “Truly, only through a hundred fires can you become steel.”
“But he now has all under heaven in his palm—why does he not indulge—why is the harem desolate? He used to be such a rake, in and out of Lanxiang. Does he think he needn’t hurry to beget sons because he is so young?” and, in a lower, conspiratorial whisper: “Or—you know—that woman—”
He is cut off when colleague shakes his head with a thunderous expression. “Do not gossip about these things overloud—Geishi Wu’s people are everywhere.” And as if suddenly overcome with paranoia, he turns around to peer down the dark and silent hallway, expecting shadows to move therein. And who can say if the walls were listening?
—
There is no feast for the holiday, and no celebration within the palace. The Emperor has instead ventured forth from the palace grounds without a retinue, with only Ning Cheng and some servants at his side.
The bridge has been preserved since the founding of Dacheng six hundred years ago. Tonight its stones are slippery with icy snowmelt, and many disrepairs now betray its age—cracked are the flagstones and broken are some balustrades, yet the Emperor pays little heed these dishevelments.
Below, in the River Wei, he stands a lone figure upon an almost perfect circle, though snowfall continue to break upon the calmly water, dashing the illusion. Slowly the river wends, like some unhurried cowherd on his leisurely homeward path already thinking of the waiting arms of his lover.
How long, Zhiwei? How long have you flown over the fields and mountains, and circumscribed my world with your wings, and how long have I tried to find you among the towns and cities scattered north and south, combing branch from branch for hope of you—but you’ve gone.
Upon the bridge he bids them lay out the spread: wine, in place of tears; cakes, in place of words; umbrella, in place of the sky; table, in place of the earth. From the bridge you can see almost half of Dijing.
He only allows Ning Cheng to remain.
“Bixia,” says Ning Cheng, bowing. At his hands a bottle of wine.
The Emperor stands atop the stone bridge. Slowly he takes the bottle from Ning Cheng, and stepping out of the umbrella into the fine snowfall, he says, barely audible:
“鳳凰臺上鳳凰遊，
鳳去臺空江自流。”
“Upon the Phoenix Terrace, a phoenix used to roam;
The phoenix has left, the terrace bare; the Yangtze flows alone.”
Stand I now on the bare terrace, though the capital is with me everywhere, the country is with me everywhere, everywhere.
Imagine if truly she were the phoenix. Imagine if she had power, imagine if she had an army. Imagine to her flew the partisans of the Bloody Pagoda, and the Dacheng resurgence had not at its helm the petty Zhangsun Hong reining a guileless Ning Qi but her endless patience and infinite brilliance, and she cultivated her armies in the borders and limits, or plighted her troth with Jinshi or Dayue, or hidden her rebels in impassable mountains, and at her disposal one day footmen and cavalries thundering down from the trackless ridgeways where they lay in ambush, and fire and siegework in leaguer around his city, and all his plans cast down, his throne broken, his ministers scattered, his tattered cloak strewn before her sweeping fury, the image of her standing against him, his equal and mirror, even if he were kneeling in defeat with no plate upon his breast, no defense against her sword at his collar but the words on his tongue and the secrets in his mind—the thought made him fear her still, and yearn for her.
What had she quoted once?
“水聲激激，蒲葦冥冥”
War. The desolate cries of bewildered, riderless horses. Limbs turned to flesh, tangled in the dark reeds. If she did not have to beg for his mercy, would this have been what she wanted?
That night, when she had entered his chambers, she had been soft. Softer than silk. Softer than air. But what he wanted was flame and thunder, whether in fury or lust he did not care. Was it daggers or tears that lay unexcavated in her heart? Would he have? Would he have captured her—enclosed her—trammeled her in—made ransom her body and prisoner her mind? Would he have let her go—to soar on the wide sky as she always said?
She wanted the only thing he could not give her—for him to not be Fengxiang, for there to be no Tiansheng, no Dacheng, for him to be just Ning Yi, and her just Feng Zhiwei.
But neither Ning Yi nor Feng Zhiwei were real, not in so many words.
River, so you have sundered us, he thinks. Near shore from far shore, this earth from that land. You who guilelessly flow down from Dijing through dales and valleys to the South Sea, your waters forever out of my reach, forever pouring away, never to be gathered again.
Her features—carve them out of your silty banks. Her hair, your drifting water. Her smile, your sullen waves, her spirit, your thundering falls. Her robes as they were when I first clothed her, form them out of your unnumbered tributaries joined, and let her body be your sea, your sea. Her mind as clear as jade, as sharp as the sword, as deep as the darkness, as kind as rain. Her words—distill them out of thin air.
Unmake it all. Unmake the mountain. Unmake the sky. Let Nüwa leave broken the diaphanous heavens and let the drowning flood pour through to earth if it can abrogate this grief. If silk can be the sea—let it be burned—if silk clothes the man—then unbelt the robe. Unline the layers. Unstitch the sleeve. Open up the seams and lay down the brocades one by one. Maybe she will return then, when all the silks have been unwoven, the warp unembraced from the weft, the threads unspooled in their twining, the colors stripped from aching fibers and the cocoons unboiled, the pupae uncut in their short lives and turn in crystalline metamorphosis into pale fluttering silkmoths. Maybe the hoary heaven unweep, and time and snowfall drift backwards, will she return then?
But time is irredeemable. The world, irrefusable. Though it is still justice that he wants—the world is too entangled and he cannot remake it all. Tiansheng is no place for a woman like her, not even Tiansheng that is his. For where under these empyrean bounds is there a place for women like her—like his mother, like Zhuyin, like so many women before them? No where, and no place. Were all threads mine, he remembers thinking when he sat weaving alone in Zongzheng Si. Were all threads and all colors mine to choose, and all the positions on the qi board mine to keep, and all my stones uncaptured and my enemy surrounded utterly—would I still not be trapped?
By the thread, by the loom, by the board, by the stone.
He raises the glass, its green jade meeting the falling snow. Perhaps you can contain the moon your small pale, he thinks. Perhaps even in this smallest cup is the world.
And in mourning, its wine he pours on the earth—for the soul to drink.
-finis.