Scribe of Loyalty came before me only when he had been beseeched through three imperial summons accompanied by my handwritten orders. I felt my stomach contract when he came into the room: I had not seen him forthree months and had forgotten how beautiful he was.He stood head and shoulders about the other men and walked with a swagger like the heroes of ancient mythology. When he prostrated himself, I noticed that his face was thinner and that his forehead bore the mark of melancholy. I was overwhelmed by emotion: Scribe of Loyalty was suffering!
I indulged him by offering him a seat. Then I asked him gently about his life, and he answered me in brief sentences. I caressed him in my mind. His eyes lingered neither on my face, which had been smoothed of all wrinkles by the latest unguent concocted by the doctor Shen Nan Qiu, nor on the very open neckline of my gown. He seemed to look through me and stare glumly at the screen behind my seat. Our love was damned: the forty years that lay between us were drawing us slowly but inexorably to a tragic conclusion. But, at my age, I had no time for tears. He was the one my desire had chosen!
I would have like to tell him that Shen Nan Qiu had never had permission to penetrate me. The fifty year old had served me as a sleeping draft and a bed-warmer. The affair had been a game, just to have revenge for Scribe of Loyalty’s infidelities, to make him jealous. I would have liked to tell him that I was disappointed by my sons and felt that my grandchildren were strangers, that my nephews could think of nothing but taking my place on the throne, and that he alone-he, Little Treasure, fished out of the mysterious river of destiny-brought light into my life. I was prepared to offer him a flock of young women to keep him close to me as he had been before, like an exuberant talkative child.
I was unable to put all this in words and was afraid that he would blackmail me; instead I spoke of the accusations leveled at him. First he paled, then he sneered“ ”So it is true then, what they say about the doctor Shen Nan Qiu. If you want to be rid of me, nothing could be easier. If you hand me over to Lai Jun Chen, I will tell him everything without being tortured: your obsessions, your fears, your weaknesses, your secret fantasies. You would do better to have me killed straight away!“
Seeing that he had flushed scarlet in his indignation, I smiled.
“I am showing you these denunciations only to tell you that I am prepared to forgive you. Don’t you see that, without my protection, you will be trailed by the judges like a hare hounded by hunting dogs. In your few years in the Forbidden City you made very few friends and a good many enemies. What would you be without me?”
He stared at me, and his eyes glowed with a dark fire.
“Why do you toy with me? You must choose between the doctor and the monk. Just one word: do you wish to marry me?”
My heart turned to ice, and the smile froze on my face. I delivered a prepared speech: “I still have not appointed the successor to the throne in Court. If, in such a situation, I were to marry, if I were to confer the first imperial title on one man, my actions would create confusion.”
“Majesty,” he cried, throwing himself at me and almost suffocating me, “I love you. I want you to be my wife; I want to call you Heaven-light; I want to be joined to you in life and in death! Yes, I will renounce the title of husband; I spit on recognition. Let us be married in secret, here, now; we shall take Heaven and Earth as our witnesses. Swear to me that you are mine.”
How could I believe that such a young and beautiful man could love an old woman so passionately? Was he hoping to manipulate me? Was he willing to usurp the throne? I pushed him: “The insolence! Kneel before your sovereign!”
Scribe of Loyalty froze and collapsed at my feet, and I spoke slowly and deliberately: “Leave and never come back!”
He smacked his forehead heavily against the ground and then ran off. When his silhouette was reduced to a blur and then disappeared between the gates of my palace, I was devastated.
The gods had not invented love for an emperor.
I WAS HAUNTED by Scribe of Loyalty’s sadness. I could not forgive myself for hurting him. By breaking off with him, I had deprived myself of happiness and of my remedy for immortality. I drove the doctor Shen Nan Qiu from my palace to lock myself away with my pain.
News of my lover reached me: The master monk was sowing terror in Luoyang. His disciples trawled the streets all day picking fights. They broke down the doors of foreign temples and destroyed their unfamiliar idols. For Buddha’s anniversary celebrations, the monk secretly arranged to have a pond dug out in front of his monastery. He stood up on a stage in public and cut his own thigh, then he unveiled the huge hole filled with the blood of an ox he had had slaughtered the day before. Claiming that it was his own blood, he said he would commission a divine portrait of me in this crimson paint.
Word of his clashes echoed through the Court. Some said he had gone mad; others called for him to be punished. His cries of despair tore me apart, but I brushed aside my own weakness by asking the judges to disarm his monastery. Delighted to be free to attack the imperial favorite, the Court raised an army and surrounded the estate. The monks were surprised and surrendered immediately. They were chained, thrown into prison, and then exiled. After a brief morning in custody, Scribe of Loyalty received my edict granting him grace and was freed from prison. He headed for the Palace and asked to speak with me, but I refused.
One night two months later, I woke with a start. There was an acrid smell in my pavilion. I asked for the door to be opened: Outside the sky was lit up like a brazier and seemed to be rippling. A column of smoke rose up from the Temple of Ten Thousand Elements where clusters of giant flames were blooming like monstrous flowers and spitting out showers of sparks.
Gentleness ran to me in tears. “Majesty, it’s the temple. Heaven is angry!”
My eunuchs arrived with a litter. They wanted to take me to a palace beside the river, but I refused to move.
Swarms of birds wheeled in the darkness screeching in fear. In the courtyard outside women fell to their knees, joined their hands and recited prayers. The fires rose up and dropped back down in time to their chanting. I was overwhelmed by a dark premonition and stood rooted to the spot. The macabre dance of the flames fell on my retinas, beneath the vault of my head, within my bleeding soul.
My ministers were silent during the morning salutation the following day. They feared my rage, but what they feared most was that the blaze might have been a warning from Heaven, a harbinger of imminent catastrophe. To calm the mood of anxiety spreading through the Empire, I decided to sacrifice myself. I published an imperial edict in which I asked my people and officials to lay the blame on me. Libations were made in the Eternal Temple. Taking the Ancestors as my witnesses, I prayed that the punishment of the gods might be visited on me alone.