The Palace guards tied Gentleness up and pulled her out by her hair. With the young girl’s terrified screams still echoing, Little Treasure dragged me forcibly into my bedroom and began massaging me to relax me. He slipped his clothes off in a flash and held me in his arms.
“Supreme Majesty, let me kiss you before I die.”
“I shall have you grilled on a fire; I shall have you flayed by a thousand knives; I shall have you cut in half.”
“Supreme Majesty, don’t scream. Your threats don’t frighten me. There is nothing that can hold me back when I desire a woman. At the moment, it is you that I want.”
As I lay beneath him, I was wracked by violent spasms and crushed by huge burning waves. It suddenly seemed as if it was my husband holding me by the hips. Men’s freedom is their unfaithfulness: the Son of Heaven or the son of a peasant, they could both reduce me to the mediocre torments of a woman.
THE PRINCESS OF Gold informed me that the Outer Court had heard of Gentleness’s disgrace and had learned that there was a man in the gynaeceum.
“Supreme Majesty,” she said, “if you cannot bring yourself to eliminate him, give him back to me, and I shall make him disappear.”
“Princess, this matter is of no concern to you.”
My old governess Emerald had the courage to whisper in my ear: “Supreme Majesty, you cannot keep a man in your rooms for ever. Even if your servant watches night and day over the virtue of the Court ladies, I shall stumble across the inevitable one morning. Lord Little Treasure is twenty-four-he is a bull, and you are shutting him away in a birdcage. Let him go, I beg you.”
“My poor Emerald, if he leaves, he will talk about me to the whole world! I must kill him. But I cannot…”
One of the eunuch officers who oversaw palace protocol wrote to me: “Some time ago the Emperor Eternal Ancestor appreciated the talents of a pipa-player from the Western Kingdom, but it was only once he had been castrated that the sovereign gave him permission to go into the gynaeceum and to teach the Court ladies his divine art. If Little Treasure’s knowledge can be of use to Your Supreme Majesty, your servant asks that he undergoes the procedure of castration before having access to the Inner Court. If not you shall be covered with opprobrium.”
In the end, my daughter Moon, the Princess of Eternal Peace, released me from my predicament: “Supreme Majesty, Little Treasure is an indispensable remedy to maintain your health and the balance of your energies, and those are qualities that warrant reward. Your child has found a solution that will satisfy both protocol and your own requirements. The Emperor of Clarity of the Eastern Han dynasty erected the Temple of the White Horse to the west of Luoyang some time ago. It was the first Buddhist temple to be built on Chinese soil. Alas, having survived countless dynasties and frequent wars, its fires no longer attract any pilgrims and the temple has fallen into ruins. Why does Your Majesty not present her servant with this sacred place? With his shaven head and his rosary in his hands, a master monk would be allowed to circulate freely in the Inner Palace and no one would be able to reproach Your Majesty for wanting to listen to the wise words of this Buddhist.”
My daughter disappeared, and I received Gentleness whom I had freed from the Cold Palace. The girl had been spared the one hundred strokes on my orders, but she had suffered the harsh treatment meted out to all imperial prisoners. In only a few days, she had become thin as a reed.
“I can make you powerful or take your life, do you know that?”
She prostrated herself at my feet in tears, and I sighed: “I know that, here in the Inner Court, Court Ladies, officials, and overseers are only too eager to obey you, and outside these walls, princesses shower you with compliments, and ministers and magistrates bend over backwards to please you. Your mother has been raised from the position of seamstress in the Side Court to the ranks of nobility once more. She has taken up residence in a palace, and I myself have given her precious stones and countless servants. You already have everything a woman could dream of! If you want to take a lover, choose one from among the princes and kings. Leave Little Treasure to me. He is mine.”
In my bed chamber that evening I dismissed my serving women and ordered Little Treasure to kneel. My mind was made up: If he did not love me and wanted to leave, he would be killed at the gates of the Forbidden City. If he loved me and decided to become a monk, I would give him honor and glory.
I eyed him sternly.
“You will not be executed or mutilated. I shall give you your freedom.”
A little shiver ran through him.
“Will I still be able to see Your Supreme Majesty?” he whispered.
As I gave no reply, he looked up. His beautiful face was bathed in tears: I had not realized that this hard-hearted man could falter too.
“Supreme Majesty, I beg you. Keep me. Don’t abandon me! Think of your servant as a dog who asks only for a little food and to stay by your side.”
I contained my emotions as I told him, “I cannot keep a man in the Inner Palace.”
“Then have me castrated! What does that matter to me now! Never mind if I can no longer give you pleasure and if I become like all the other eunuchs with their flaccid flesh and cloying eyes. I only hope my heart will stay intact and will still love you.”
“I would not let you leave as you arrived,” I said, trying to test him. “Once outside the Palace, you would be rich. The money I give you would be enough to buy the most beautiful concubines, to start a large family, set up a business, and become a respectable man. Why do you want to remain a slave when you could be a master with women and land? If you wanted you could own merchant ships that could transport you up and down the Empire with their scarlet sails billowing in the wind.”
The young man only wept more desperately: “Supreme Majesty, forgive me for hiding the truth from you. I did not leave my village because of an arranged marriage. The great epidemic in the first year of the Era of Eternal Purity killed my parents, my grandparents, and my brothers and sisters. I fled after burying all their bodies in the fields. After that I roamed around Luoyang with death hovering over me. In five aimless years I was beaten, robbed, and raped; I was spat at, kicked, and insulted. You are the first and only woman who took me in her arms as anything more than a tool. No woman in the world, not even my mother, looked at me with the tenderness that you do. Supreme Majesty, forgive me. Keep me in your gynaeceum or have me killed! Don’t abandon me!”
Little Treasure’s words tore me apart. His distress awakened my own. I sighed and drew him into my arms: “Then you must listen to me and do as I ask. You, the son of a peasant, the vagrant, the aphrodisiac-seller, you shall be respected by the world. If you obey me I shall make you, a man off the streets of Luoyang, into a glorious Lord in the Imperial Court.”
LITTLE TREASURE’S SUFFERING was that of my people, and I felt ashamed for living in artificial abundance within a fortified city. This Court bathing in its happiness was a miraculous island in an ocean of misery. When I resolved to change Little Treasure’s fate, the fate of one child picked up by the wayside of life, it was not merely to reward his devotion: He was my window to this world of despair. The Mandarin Competitions had allowed thousands of scholarly individuals to enjoy a better life, but diplomas could in turn become barriers, and opening doors could transform into exclusion. Peasant children, orphans, and abandoned youngsters still had no right to fulfill their talents. Little Treasure was one of these battered, frustrated creatures, and I was offering him a chance.