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After the son of his body is born, Baoxiang manages to avoid seeing him for six months.
He busies himself with other things. He does not have a formal position at court. The Emperor does not offer him one. He does not dwell on it. He busies himself with other things. He carves a memorial tablet for his brother and sets it up in the little room he’s been given in a desolate wing of the palace. He digs into the workings of palace bureaucracy with an energy that feels almost like desperation, trying to work out how to fill in the gaps the Emperor has made by freeing all the eunuchs.
He busies himself with other things and then one day, he runs into the Empress in the gardens, and when he kneels and averts his gaze she does not pass him by. She bids him to stand, and when he does he keeps his gaze fixedly to her left, staring at nothing, until it catches and holds on an older maid with a bundle in her arms. He cannot see anything of the child from this position, save for a small arm, extending from the swaddling to bat haphazardly at the air.
“Would you like to hold him?” the Empress asks. The words stretch between them. They make Baoxiang wonder if this meeting was as accidental as it initially looked like. They make him wonder if the Emperor knows, if this is a trap or a test.
It doesn’t matter. Baoxiang has been dead for more than a year, and if wanting to hold the son he’s made is what kills him it will have been worth it. It might kill him regardless of what the Emperor does. “Please,” he says, and his voice sounds rough and strangled to his own ears. He sounds, he realizes with an edge of hysteria, like Ouyang had. Wanting and not wanting, tearing himself apart over it.
The baby is heavier than he expected, surprisingly muscular, twisting and turning in his arms like a cat. It takes a moment for Baoxiang to see his scowling little face, and once he does his heart throbs. He’d been prepared to see himself, or to see the Empress, but the Imperial Prince Zhu Di, at six months old, soft and round-cheeked and scowling, looks like he could be the son Esen never had.
Baoxiang does not know this yet, but the resemblance will fade over the years. Zhu Di will shoot up like a reed, sharp and lean and angular, and he will not look much like Esen at all, except for this one thing that will remain, always: how his face twists when he’s displeased, the way he scrunches up his forehead, the way his eyebrows slant, the way his mouth pinches together. Baoxiang will always look at it, and see, just for a moment, Esen mirrored through the years, and his chest will always collapse in on itself, almost gently.
There are more meetings in the garden, after that first one, and then he starts being invited to dinner with the Empress and Emperor. Neither one of them seems to care how shockingly inappropriate it is, to be dining alone with Baoxiang in an informal setting, Zhu Di toddling around at their feet and babbling excitedly and grabbing at anything that catches his fancy.
“Quite an extraordinary child, this son we’ve all made,” the Emperor says on one evening a few months shy of Zhu Di’s second birthday. It’s summer, and the sky is just beginning to darken despite the late hour, and the cicadas are singing softly from the trees. The Emperor swirls her wine in her cup and looks from Baoxiang to the Empress, an impish smile on her face. “Should we try to replicate our success?”
Baoxiang’s chest feels like it’s on fire, even as ice pours down his back. He finds himself sympathizing with Ouyang again, tearing himself apart over wanting and not wanting. He hasn’t managed to summon the energy to lie with a woman since that last time with Lady Shin, and even if he has more or less managed to avoid thinking of it until now, he sees her again in his bed, her hair spread out all around her, and her eyes soft.
The Empress whacks her husband on the arm with her folded fan. “Zhu Yuanzhang!” she exclaims. Her face has turned the color of her robes. “Have you no shame, to bring this sort of thing up before the sun has even set?”
“Aiya, Yingzi, would you ever have married me if I had any shame?” the Emperor asks beatifically. “It’s better to be upfront about these things, I’ve found.”
It’s easier to consider it, suddenly, with the Emperor’s gentle amusement, as though it does not bother her that Baoxiang might still desire her wife, or that her wife might desire him back. There’s a gleam of possibility in the Empresses’ eyes when she meets Baoxiang’s, and that too, makes it easier. She does want him. Now, at least, if she didn’t want him then. She wants him, and she loves him, probably, because she has the whole world in her heart, but she will never be in love with him the way she’s in love with the Emperor, the way he could fall back into love with her so easily, and that’s the reason he smiles and says, “I don’t think we could ever replicate the First Prince.”
As if on cue, Zhu Di toddles over and crashes his face into Baoxiang’s knees, not gently. It does not seem to bother him, because he stays there, making suspiciously wet snuffling sounds that mean he’s probably chewing on Baoxiang’s nice robe. In another life, he would have cared, but in this one he just sighs and resigns himself to his fate.
When he looks back up at the Emperor, she’s looking at him, too, her expression uncharacteristically soft. “You’re probably right. Shame. Xiao Di could use a playmate.”
She gets her wish a few weeks later, when a young woman with a small child in her arms bribes her way into the palace. The story she tells sounds ludicrous, but one look into the child’s face and the Emperor starts weeping.
The newly minted Madam Xu moves into the palace, and her daughter and Zhu Di become inseparable. The Emperor never quite loses the devastated look in her eyes when she looks at Xu Yihua, and Baoxiang finds himself stepping in between them to make things easier. It’s not a burden, he finds. He likes Yihua, both because she never reminds him of who she isn’t and because she’s quick and sharp and funny, even at three years old, and she likes to study the patterns and the weaves of his robes. He finds himself dragged along to all her appointments with the palace tailors, sharing fond, slightly exasperated looks with the other adults as she insists on seeing all the rolls of fabric they have in storage before making her own selections.
“How bossy! She has the makings of an Empress,” the Emperor says, nudging her wife, her eyes brimming with amusement.
“Oh, shut up,” the Empress says easily.
Yihua’s mother looks from husband to wife with wide eyes, and Baoxiang finds himself stepping in close to her, and touching her arm, very lightly, with only his fingertips.
“You’ll get used to it,” he promises.
She gives him a bright, thankful smile, and his world gets a little warmer, and a little bigger.
***
The years pass. Yihua develops an interest in poetry, and so Baoxiang loans her some of his books, and she comes back with questions and Zhu Di at her heels as he always is. He starts teaching them both quite by accident, and six months in the Emperor grins at him and says they might as well make things official, and the next morning Baoxiang wakes up to an imperial edict and a formal position in court. He does not argue about the political implications of making him the Crown Prince’s Tutor. He would lay down his life for the children. He knows this, the Emperor knows this. Ultimately, that’s all that matters.
It doesn’t change his life much. He has a real salary now. His class of pupils swells in numbers. He’s expected to put in appearances at formal banquets and feasts. They’re mostly boring, stiff occasions, but as he’s walking back from the third one he attends, a palace guard stops him in the garden with a greeting and smiles at him in unmistakable invitation.
Baoxiang’s first, instinctive reaction is anger. It’s to wonder if the guard knows about him and the Third Prince, and expects to be able to take his turn. Rationality reasserts itself the next moment. It’s been eight years since Baoxiang was the Third Prince’s lover, and this guard can’t be much over twenty. He doesn’t know. He just saw the way Baoxiang walked and dressed and drew his conclusions.
“I don’t,” Baoxiang says, and finds he can’t look away from the young man’s mouth. “I don’t like taking the receiving role in bed,” he says, instead of I don’t like men like he’d meant to.
The young man shrugs. “You don’t have to.”
It goes as well as can be expected, all things considered. The young man is less experienced than his bold approach might have suggested, but they muddle through, and it’s sweet and a little clumsy, and Baoxiang manages to wait until after the young man has left before he bursts into tears.
“I suppose I owe you an apology,” he says, sniffling, to Esen’s memorial tablet. “I’m as stupid as you, it seems.” We were alike, he thinks. We could have helped each other. We could have been kind.
***
The year Zhu Di is eight, the Emperor sends troops to fight the Mongol remnants in Yunnan. The year he’s ten, the troops come back with a young eunuch by the name of Ma He. He is one of five children who have been cut, and the only one to survive the journey.
It is not often that Baoxiang has seen the Emperor show her anger to this degree.
The general in charge of the troops, a man by the surname Zheng, adopts the child in penance for his men’s actions, and the newly renamed Zheng He is sent off to join Baoxiang’s class alongside the other study companions of the Crown Prince.
Baoxiang keeps his objections behind his teeth.
With his large frame and broad face Zheng He looks more like Esen than he does anyone else Baoxiang might compare him to, but Baoxiang still looks at him and sees Ouyang. It’s the way he holds himself, ramrod straight as though it’s a challenge. The way he walks, decisive but always a bit too cautious, as though carrying always the memory of pain. The preternatural stillness of his expression.
On the first day he attends Baoxiang’s classes, he sits in the back and does not speak, and does not look up from his parchment and the crooked characters he writes on it.
The second day Zheng He attends Baoxiang’s classes, Zhu Di waits until Baoxiang is occupied dealing with the latest nobleman Yihua has driven to tears, and calls out loudly “Ah-He! Come sit next to me.”
The third son of the Minister to the Left, whose seat is being given away, makes a small noise of dismay from across the room, but does not protest further, only meekly setting his things on an unoccupied table. Baoxiang, from where he’s helping a future duke wipe his face, sends Zhu Di an exasperated look, and gets only a stubborn tilt of the chin in reply. Baoxiang spares a moment to wonder if it was the Empress or the Emperor who put him up to this, and then resolutely puts it from his mind. It might not have been either one of them. More and more often, Zhu Di keeps his own counsel, and he has the world in his heart like his mother.
Zheng He doesn’t say anything this time around, either, though it’s much more obvious now that he’s sitting in the front row. Once classes let out for the day, he’s slow to gather his things, to the point that he’s the only student still in the room when one of the other scholars comes by to invite Baoxiang to lunch. It’s an older man who has survived three Emperors and two coups by virtue of being too boring to get involved with any of the court factions, and who Baoxiang dislikes for no other reason that he’s one of the few people left in the palace who knew him before.
There’s no polite way to turn down the invitation, but before Baoxiang can accept the scholar adds, loudly, looking at Zheng He, “Is this the new eunuch? Pity he won’t turn out as pretty as the one your brother used to have.”
It’s odd, how slow anger is sometimes. “General Ouyang was a hero of the Great Ming,” Baoxiang says, and he feels nothing at all save for a sluggish, shifting thing deep below his breastbone. Eleven years, he thinks. That’s how long Ouyang has been dead. Zheng He had not yet been born when it happened. Zheng He is ten years old. Ouyang had been ten years old, too, when it happened.
The scholar blinks rheumy eyes at him. “I was just talking.”
“You should mind how you do it,” Baoxiang says. “And you should leave.”
It’s quiet, in the room, after the scholar walks off in a huff. Zheng He is still pretending to gather his things. Baoxiang’s stomach roils.
Eventually, it’s Zheng He who breaks the quiet. His voice is too quick, undercut by tremors. “Is General Ouyang the one who has that big tomb right outside the Imperial Mausoleum?”
“The very one,” Baoxiang says, though he’s never seen it. In his mind’s eye, he sees Ouyang again, a pale ghost with a broken sword.
“General Zheng took me to see it before we entered the capital,” Zheng He says. He’s not looking at Baoxiang, with the kind of studiousness that says it’s deliberate. “He told me all about how he was a eunuch and a general and everyone still respected him. I figured he was just trying to make me feel better.”
Ten years old, Baoxiang thinks again, and wonders how he managed to see Zheng He’s stillness as anything other than fear. He tries to imagine someone holding Zhu Di down and cutting pieces off of him and bile burns its way up his throat. “He probably was, a bit,” Baoxiang says, because if there is one thing he’s learned over the years is that children aren’t stupid. “But he really was a eunuch. And a feared general. He commanded a troop a hundred thousand men strong.”
“And people still didn’t respect him.”
“Most people didn’t, no. Not really. They resented him for having risen so far. But the Emperor respected him so much that she erected a monument for him. And my brother adored him.”
“And you?”
Baoxiang considers lying. Zheng He doesn’t care about his relationship with Ouyang, not really. He just wants to know that Baoxiang is safe to trust. But it feels wrong to lie about this, so he offers up half a truth instead. “I resented him for taking Esen’s attention away. And I squabbled with him as only two people who grew up together can.”
“Esen,” Zheng He repeats. “Esen-Temur? The other name on the tomb? That’s your brother?” And then, before Baoxiang can respond, “He was buried with his master, then.”
“It’d be more correct to say his master was buried with him. Esen died first, and was buried near Bianliang. The Emperor had his body moved after Ouyang’s death.”
Zheng He is quiet for a long moment. “Is that what he wanted? General Ouyang? To be buried alongside your brother?”
“I think it was the only thing he wanted, after Esen died,” Baoxiang says truthfully.
Zheng He nods. “Thank you,” he says, “for telling me about them.”
***
That evening, alone in his rooms, Baoxiang makes a memorial tablet for Ouyang. He kneels in front of it, his nostrils full of the sawdust smell of newly carved wood, and thinks of echoes and mirrors and of the pattern of the world, always repeating itself.
“Were you scared, too?” he asks. It’s useless, of course. Ouyang’s been dead for more than a decade, and Baoxiang is speaking to the air. And even if he wasn’t, he already knows the answer, and Ouyang would lie.
If someone had protected you, would all our lives have been different? This, he doesn’t ask. He cannot bear to, not even of the empty room. This, he thinks, will always be the price of living in a new world: seeing all the places the old one could have been mended.
The next day, before class, Zhu Di says something in a voice too low for Baoxiang to hear, and Zheng He smiles back at him, small but bright. Baoxiang does not think Ouyang ever smiled like that, but he does not have time to consider that for too long, because Yihua has joined Zhu Di and Zheng He, and all their heads are bent together in a way that spells trouble. He calls the class to order, but judging by the gleam in his children’s eyes, he does so too late.
He cannot bring himself to care.