It was a bad idea to crowd the memory structure with people. In Rome, twenty-one hundred years ago, the anonymous author of the Ad Herennium-still one of the greatest standing works on memory-had written:… the crowding and passing to and fro of people confuse and weaken the impress of the images while solitude keeps their outlines sharp. So Lia saw the clean-swept lanes between her testing cubicles as wide, bare stones, always lit with changing shadows under the leaves of the trees, but empty of people. Though she did let Albert in. He was one of the few. Albert had been her stepfather for a few happy years; he had introduced her to porcelain. She had loved him, and in her memory world he was welcome.
But she had passed him back near the entrance, his image, never speaking, radiating kindness. She walked the silent avenues lined with all the rooms of her life, all the worlds of porcelain: the purist aesthetic of the Song; the mi-se, or secret color olive-green porcelain of the Tang; the ornate virtuosity of the Qing.
She came to the Ming Dynasty: hundreds of examination cells stuffed with data and pots and poems and remembrances. Here she was at the reign of Chenghua, ninth emperor of the Ming Dynasty. Marked on his cubicle door was the character hai, or child. She had chosen this character for his cubicle because when he was a man, a child was the thing he most wanted. All Lia had to do was open the door in her mind’s eye, and she saw him at the annual ritual at the Temple of Heaven, Peking; 1474 by the Western calendar. His personal name was Xuantong.
He was brought here once a year. Before the tallow candles and the brass figure of the god, he prayed on his knees through the night. This was the first phase of the ritual.
He’d had his eyes on the statue for hours. It glimmered under the leaping candlelight. The metal eyes were flat and dead, but he knew the god’s spirit shone within. The emperor believed in divine providence. Maybe once he hadn’t, but now he did, for he himself had finally been given a son. Moreover, this son had lived-the first of his sons to live-and was safely growing up.
He had loved only one woman. She was the wet nurse who’d fed him as a baby. When he came of age he made her his concubine. She liked to dress alternately as a man and a woman. He adored her. She bore him a son but the infant died.
After that, the sons he had by every woman also died mysteriously. Whenever the empress or another concubine managed to bear the emperor a son, the baby died. Soon everyone, even the emperor, knew it was his concubine who was killing them. And now his line would die with him.
Until he learned in one breath, in seemingly a single heartbeat, that he had a son after all.
From outside the door Xuantong heard the murmured breathing, the stone-shuffle of men’s feet. The Officials of the Sacrificial Court had arrived. Finally. It must be near dawn.
He stretched his aching legs and slipped the ritual satin cap on his head, the satin boots on his feet. These were never worn except on this day, at this moment. Like all the other sacred objects, the plum silk robes, the Tablet of Heaven, the blue jewel called Symbol of Heaven, they were hidden away through the rest of the year. Their power was in their concealment. Like the survival of his boy.
He paced slowly outside the Palace of Abstinence, down a few marble steps into the walled courtyard. The officials swept low and touched their foreheads to the earth.
As he stepped past them he heard the first boom from the Taihezhong, the Bell of Supreme Harmony. It could be heard miles away. He glanced up at the stone tower. Inside, two men were dragging a suspended log back, pulling it as far as it would go before releasing it again and again. The log crashed into the bell with a bone-ringing reverberation.
Ahead of him, through the ancient cypress trees, he saw the Temple of Heaven against the lightening sky. The shape so pleased him. The way its circular inner wall exerted itself against an outer square. The way the four Ling Shing Men, Starry Wicket Gates, stood in white marble at the cardinal points.
The day he had learned of his son’s existence also was the day he reached the bottom of his sadness. Childlessness was bad for any man, but he was the emperor, and his shame soared in all four directions.
His chief eunuch, Geng Tie, noticed. “Is it headache?” he asked kindly.
“It’s not headache,” Xuantong snapped. “It’s that which Uncle well knows.”
Geng Tie felt his frail heart tugged as he looked at this unfortunate, weak-spined, art-minded man he had served for many years. He was ineffective as emperor. He had been born to patronize art. And he needed a son. He had to have a son.
Was this the time to tell him? They had waited five years. The child lived, the child thrived. And no one knew of his existence beyond a sworn secret handful in the palace. “But your majesty,” Geng said.
“What?” Xuantong was irritated.
“But your majesty has a son.”
Xuantong stared. “Bie shuo,” he said, Don’t talk like that.
Geng Tie stood trembling. “Your majesty has a son,” he said again. “We have kept him hidden in the Court of Quiet Virtue. Forgive us, your loyal slaves. We sought only to preserve him. He is healthy, ready for schooling. His milk name is Huobu.”
And so Xuantong had flown, his silk-encrusted robes flapping. He leapt over stones and potted plants, the eunuchs fluttering in a line behind him. He raced from his living quarters to the far northwestern corner of the palace, to the remote court shaded with a lace-leafed elm. Over the sill, around the spirit wall. There was a boy, right in front of him, eyes wide and face as round and tight-skinned as a plum. The nursemaids around him fell to the ground in reverence.
“Who was it?” he gasped to Geng Tie, now lurching up behind him.
Geng Tie understood. He meant the woman. “It was a little slave from Guizhou,” he answered. “Right after Spring Festival six years ago. We hid her in this court until she delivered.”
Vaguely, Xuantong recalled the encounter. He had been walking back to his quarters from an audience with his ministers. His retainers walked a short distance behind. He surprised a girl with a covered bowl stepping out of an arched gateway. Their eyes met and there was an insouciant smile to her, a careless light of laughter, until she realized who he was and froze. He found this diverting. She set the bowl on the sill and made to lower herself to koutou, but he stepped close to her and stopped her. He didn’t want a reverence from her. Instead, he parted her skirts and slid one hand between her legs. He could feel her trembling. After a minute he pulled her skirts all the way up. He lifted her a few inches to sit on the edge of the stone wall, and he favored her, without thinking about it, opening her jacket to play with her at the same time. It only took a few minutes. The eunuchs stood back on the stone path, watching.
A quick pleasure with a slave. He had forgotten it. “Does she still live?”
The eunuch nodded.
“Elevate her rank. And the child…” Xuantong considered. Continue to keep him a secret, or name him crown prince right away? He had a son!
Now, approaching the Temple of Heaven, he felt connected to all the earth for the first time. He watched the pale iridescence come alive on the marble under the rising sun. Flawless, he thought. As perfect as the sacred porcelains waiting on the altars within: the red, yellow, blue, and white, colors of the sun, the earth, heaven, and the moon. Perfect as his paintings, his jades and bronzes, but most especially his porcelains. Porcelain lived forever. And the potters at Jingdezhen were doing magnificent work, the best since the reign of Xuande. He was about to commission them to make a set of wine cups, in honor of his son. The prince.