“It is you that your Sovereign Father and I wish to see on the throne,” I told him, stroking his hair. “It is you who have the virtues necessary to be sovereign. You must regain your health!”
Tears trickled over my child’s cheeks: “Thank you, Venerable Mother, thank you.”
At the time, unbeknown to be me, Wisdom had spies planted in his brother’s entourage. It was only later that I learned that this conversation had sown the seed of furious resentment in a jealous brother’s heart.
I did not have the time to make a great emperor of Splendor; I did not have the time to teach him the truth about cruelty and compassion, tolerance and punishment; I did not have the time to tell him how to turn cowards into brave men, to make the lazy hardworking, and to make traitors loyal. Splendor died suddenly. Once again Buddha was showing me that everything is illusion.
My beloved son was buried on the Mountain of Eternal Peace near Luoyang. He was given the posthumous title of Emperor of Piety; this was the first time since the ancient dynasties that a king had been raised to the absolute rank after his death. The frescoes along the long subterranean corridor depicted the sumptuous delights of the afterlife. At the entrance I commissioned paintings of scenes showing feasting, hunting, and games with horses whinnying and dogs barking. The very chariots could be heard rumbling, the banners cracking in the wind, and the horns sounding to announce the Emperor’s arrival. On the star-studded vaulted ceiling of the funeral chamber, the sun gazed across at the moon, and the most beautiful wives strolled through a garden of blooming peonies. I hoped that Splendor, who had renounced the light and the changeability of this world, would still be living amid happiness and beauty thousands of years later.
Wisdom succeeded his brother in the title of Supreme Son and became actively involved with politics. In his Eastern Palace, he received intellectuals who acted as his scribes, and he started compiling books. My husband’s health was failing at the time, and I was informed that officials were secretly gathering in the heir’s household and criticizing my interference in affairs of State. It was not long before Wisdom gave his father a new version of The History of the Later Han Dynasty in which he rebuked regent empress mothers and referred to them as usurpers. I responded by writing two books intended for him: Advice to the Supreme Son and The Anthology of Sons Famous for Their Filial Devotion.
Wisdom cherished a particular adolescent whom he had had castrated. In the evenings, behind the closed doors of his palace, he organized feasts where he ran naked through the gardens with his guards and this emasculated favorite. When the noises from these orgies reached my husband over the walls of the Eastern Palace, he was furious and decided to punish the adolescent responsible for corrupting the king. The beautiful boy was snatched on a street corner and beaten by hired thugs, and he made some unexpected revelations: His master had had the Taoist Ming Chong Yan assassinated for refusing to poison me, and he was now planning a coup.
The Eastern Palace was searched, and the stables were found to be housing hundreds of weapons and breastplates, ready to equip a light cavalry. The coup was stopped just in time, and Wisdom was stripped of his title and banished from the Capital.
I discovered from his entourage that he knew I was not his true mother: Twenty years earlier, on the great pilgrimage, Elder Sister had delivered an illegitimate boy conceived with my husband. The very next day I had brought a stillborn child into the world. Ruby and Emerald were responsible for informing the sovereign and for swapping the infants. Claiming that she felt unwell, Mother left with the prince’s chill body wrapped in her coat and buried him in a monastery.
My son lay beneath a stela with no inscription. Wisdom, who was destined to be abandoned, could have taken his place on the throne. But the truth that we learn is more murderous than lies. Convinced that he was unloved, obsessed by imaginary hatred, he mistook my strict expectations and my severity for the deliberate oppression and gratuitous nastiness of a stepmother. In our eternal China, nothing comes closer to absolute power than the position of heir, and there is nothing more perilous than life spent so close to the flame. Some, like Wisdom, tried to force fate: The door was open, but it led only to downfall.
The Great General sent me a dispatch: Wisdom had hanged himself in his room. I had his body interred immediately, beneath a meager mound with no ornamentation, in an underground chamber with a few everyday objects. To appease evil minds who would have seen this as an assassination dressed up as suicide, I summoned the dignitaries to a lamentation ceremony. I wept tears of regret in public and granted a pardon to this rebellious son, restoring his crown as the King of Yong, the title he had borne as a youth.
My efforts to be joined to my children by a simple bond of happiness had proved fruitless. From the moment they were born, the distance between princes and an empress had only grown wider. I never breastfed my babies and had to disguise my jealousy as I watched them clutching avidly at other women’s breasts. As a young mother, I had been powerless to change the ancestral rules. My children were raised and instructed by high-ranking officials; they were taught to be afraid of me and to venerate me as a divinity. They grew up without learning so much as one poem from me. Whatever the circumstances, my thoughts and words for them took the form of orders transcribed onto silk by secretaries that they received on bended knee. At fifteen they were married and learned of physical pleasure. Their courts lay outside the Imperial City, and they opened their doors to ministers’ sons, guards, and their own ambitious cousins starting out on their careers. Their servants led them to believe that they were great men. Splendor decided to bide his time, and Wisdom wanted to make his mark. Miracle chose silence and Future rebellion.
At sixty, when women my age enjoyed the warmth of a happy home and played with their grandchildren, I felt more alone than ever. Little Phoenix had made his way to the heavens, and I to the abyss. Two of my sons now lay underground, and one was banished. Fearing that Wisdom’s supporters would get hold of his heirs and use their names to raise a rebel army, I had my grandsons repatriated into the Eastern Capital and shut away in a wing of the Forbidden City. Future’s family had gone with him into exile. Along the mountainous roads, his wife had brought a little girl into the world prematurely. With no midwife, Future himself had pulled her from her mother’s belly and hauled off his own tunic to swaddle her.
Gentleness stayed by my side, a young woman now, speechlessly contemplating my sorrow.
A FEW LETTERS sent by Wisdom had escaped the vigilance of the guards and had been propagated over the world. Seven months after his suicide, an insurrection erupted. Li Jing Yei, the grandson and heir of the Great General Li Ji, who had recommended me to the Forbidden City fifty years earlier, led a rebel army. He had been driven out of the Capital for corruption, and he and his supporters hoped to come back to Court as liberators. They succeeded by occupying the strategic town of Yang and gave command to a man who looked like Wisdom and claimed that the king was not dead, that they were acting on his orders. In the span of ten days, they gathered an army of one hundred thousand volunteers, a rabble of hooligans and bandits lured by the promise of incredible booty.
That morning I received the officials’ salutation in Luoyang. The pillars in the Palace of Virtuous Authority were like black dragons reaching up for the dark skies. Fires blazed along the rows, lighting the ministers’ anxious frightened faces. After the prostration and the prayer for long life, Pei Yan handed me the declaration that the rioters had distributed through districts that were now in their control.