The duties of a Talented One were to keep records of feasting and days of rest, as well as ensuring that the silk worms were reared satisfactorily. Even though they were paltry tasks, I relied on these occupations to escape boredom. On the very first day, Governess informed me that she would free me from such minor concerns and explained that, from the fifth rank up, it was a woman’s duty to be at leisure.
Painted beams, gilded partitions, and fragrant powders entwined us like ivy around trees. This dull, slow life stifled our youth. The freshness and vivacity drained from my companions and me without our knowing when or how. The Court had a liking for fat women, so my companions crammed themselves with food. Their transparent white skin quivered over ample folds of fat. They spent their days perfecting their hair and makeup. Their daily walk through the Northern Gardens was becoming a ritual, and they would spend this time comparing their beauty and exchanging gossip. To escape the loneliness and monotony, some had pet cats and dogs, while others formed friendships and called each other “sister.”
There were women everywhere in the Side Court. They trod softly along the galleries, appeared and disappeared behind screens, and let their silhouettes linger on the partitions covered in rice paper. The servants observed a respectful silence, but the mistresses needed to chatter constantly to kill their boredom. A closed door or a secured shutter was tantamount to some inadmissible act, so all the bedrooms had to remain open for impromptu visits. Throughout the day, groups of Court ladies would appear from nowhere, expecting me to offer them tea and to listen to their chattering.
I found refuge in the Inner Institute of Letters where learned eunuchs gave lessons in literature, philosophy, history, geography, astrology, and mathematics to the few students who voluntarily attended their lectures. Books became wings that bore me far away from the Palace. The annals of former dynasties tore me from the immobility of the present. I lived in those vanished kingdoms and I took part in plots, galloped across battlefields, and shared in the rise and fall of heroes.
I visited the library regularly, and I sometimes would run into Talented One Xu, who had already been promoted to the rank of Delicate Concubine of the second imperial rank. I now had to give her a deep curtsey, and she replied with a condescending nod. Her body had thickened, her expression darkened. Her face had lost its poetic naivete. When she smiled at me, I could see a vague melancholy on her lips that seemed to express resentment and resignation. I longed to ask her questions but did not dare. A Delicate Concubine would never confide in a Talented One of inferior rank.
Was she not happy on the other side of the wall?
In the Side Court, I may have struggled to be like a perfect lady, but in the exercise quarters, I abandoned all civility. On horseback, with a bow in my hand, I forgot how time passed one slow drip after another, and I became one with my speeding mount and embraced the power of my arrows as they reached their target.
After each training session, I would linger a while at the stables. The eunuch grooms had become my friends: I would recite to them the poems I had read that morning, and they taught me to school foals and told me what was going on in the Palace.
That was how I discovered that, in the days when the sovereign was still only King of Qin, he had set an ambush for his older brothers at the Northern Gate, not far from the stables. The imperial heir and the King of Qi had been killed, and the Emperor Lordly Forebear had been forced to abdicate in his favor. Our sovereign had usurped the throne! Heroes seemed to attach little importance to filial devotion! I was shattered by this revelation.
And in her latest letter Mother told me that Little Sister had succumbed to an epidemic. Poorly tended by the clan, she had died. I lost my appetite; I loathed the dresses, the perfumes, the gardens. The beauty of that Palace was a screen hiding corpses and lies.
I grew thinner while all around me girls reveled in their flesh. I had grown tall and slender, a bundle of muscles on a strong frame.
ONE DAY SHE appeared. Her face was white as snow, like a perfectly circular mirror fashioned by the most adept craftsmen. Her mouth was a crimson cherry, ready to drop from the tree. Her eyes, like the long leaves of the willow, disappeared into the black hair that swept over her temples, and they glittered with a strange light. Seeing her, I forgot my own sorrow, the Side Court, and my sister’s decomposing body. I forgot that the world existed, and I understood what eternal friendship meant.
“Are you the girl who loves horses?” her clear, haughty voice woke me from my torpor. “Do you not greet the Gracious Wife?”
I bent my knees and leaned right down to the ground. When I stood back up, she looked me straight in the eye. The other women’s eyes were water, ice, fire, and rock; she alone had eyes full of mists and vapors.
“My little cousin, I have heard stories of you,” she said, pronouncing each word carefully. Her lips were two petals of red grenadine. “I shall take care of your instruction, my little, wild one.”
A mysterious smile appeared in the corners of her mouth, and she left me where I stood: Followed by a dozen servants and ladies-in-waiting, she disappeared into the trees.
That evening I could still see her smooth face; so pure it was almost childlike, her dresses of layered silk and muslin in exquisitely subtle shades. She wore her hair in the shape of a butterfly adorned with the most beautiful jewels I had ever seen. How old was she? I did not know. In the Inner Palace, ladies were careful to hide their age. She was timeless.
We were related through my mother’s family. But, in the Side Court, everyone knew that Father had been an ennobled commoner, a wood merchant who had become a dignitary. Was it a mark of respect or out of irony that she had called me cousin? But she too had a dark stain on her past. She had been a concubine to the King of Qi, the third son of the Emperor Lordly Forebear, who was killed at the Northern Gate and stripped of his princely title. Along with the other women in his retinue, she had come into the Side Court as a slave. The new sovereign had taken her to his bed, she had delivered a boy child, and he had offered her the title of wife.
I enjoyed imagining the King of Qi’s palace surrounded by his own brother’s army: In the gynaeceum eunuchs wailing lamentations, women fleeing to their rooms, and wet nurses hiding the king’s sons. Soon the clatter of weapons echoed around the palace, fierce-faced soldiers broke into the inner apartments where no man had dared tread before. They ransacked pavilions, strangled male children, looted treasure, and dragged concubines out by their hair. In all this furious assault, jostled, chained, and wracked with sobs of fear, my cousin was like pear blossom damaged by the rain and sullied in the mud. A feeling of intense suffering and, yet, nameless pleasure swept over me. I could see her face streaming with tears. I could picture her insulted and violated by the soldier’s crude and penetrating stares. They thought she was beautiful. They threw her at their master’s feet, at the feet of the future sovereign of the empire. He commanded her to expose her white bosom, her belly soft as a turtle dove; he ordered her to dance, writhe, and grovel at his feet. His hands, still warm with blood, caressed her, he sprayed her with his seed. Humiliated and violated, she had to smile, to love, to please.
My body was on fire. I let the full voluptuous pleasure of this poor tortured woman overcome me. Inch by inch, from my toes to the top of my head, my cousin devoured me, made me quiver, glided over my skin. I drank her as a child drinks milk.