A well-kept hand stripped the curtains from the cart, and Silver Snow sat blinking in the unfamiliar light.
6
S he blinked to prevent tears from rolling down the cheeks that, grudgingly, Lady Lilac had shown her how to paint just that morning lest I disgrace her too badly by entering the Palace with cheeks as raw as those of any bumpkin wench. In a moment her sight would clear, and she would see this wonder of a palace that henceforth was to be her home.
“Remember what I said,” whispered Lilac, and her voice quivered.
“Descend, ladies,” fluted a high, cultivated voice. For a moment, Silver Snow thought that other ladies had been dispatched to welcome her go-between back to her quarters and to greet her. Then the dazzle in her eyes subsided. She saw that the cart was surrounded not by ladies but by . . . they had the height and garb of men, though their robes were richer and more lavish than her father’s holiday robes or the furs that the official had worn at the banquet at her home. The robes fastened as men’s robes should. And, where ladies wore no headgear other than flowers or jeweled ornaments, these officials wore stiffly lacquered hats of a wondrous variety of shapes, each of which, surely, had some meaning that it would doubtless give grave offense not to know.
Used, however, as Silver Snow was to her father’s soldiers, she found the splendor of the robes, the smoothness of hair, the plumpness of belly and well-kept, grasping hands, and, above all, the lack of scars and the high, fluting voices utterly strange. These men, she knew, were eunuchs of the Palace.
Only such men—or not-men—might guard the ladies of the Inner Chambers. Incapable themselves of marriage or progeny, their loyalty was said to be directed solely toward the Emperor Yuan Ti whose new concubines they would guard with a jealousy that outdid even that of the most ambitious first wife for a younger, pregnant rival. Silver Snow’s future might well depend upon their favor even more than upon the say-so of women like Lilac.
It was not their fault, she told herself, that they had suffered mutilation as children, or even as young men for the sake of the Emperor. But for the sake of power? a voice asked in her mind. One eunuch, whose robes were less elaborate than the others’, clapped his hands, and a bevy of young women, their hair knotted forward in the style of serving girls, ran forward.
Lady Lilac tossed her head and extended her hand haughtily as she descended. Silver Snow began to slide from the cart, glancing eagerly about. The eunuch who clapped his hands could not be Mao Yen-shou; such an official as important as the Minister of Selection, the Administrator of the Inner Courts, would receive them within, if he deigned to receive a concubine as inauspicious as Silver Snow at all.
She glanced at the eunuchs, then cast down her eyes in a better-than-passable imitation of the maidenliness that she had observed in houses along the road to Ch’ang-an. But in that one glance had been a huntress’ awareness; her eyes took in plum, pear, and apricot trees, their bare branches pruned into symmetrical order and leafless now, and white flower beds in which silk flowers fluttered gaily, harbingers of the real blossoms that would fill them in the spring. Incense, not the sweetness of leaves and blooms, nor the wild freshness of wind and snow, scented the courtyard. In all that vast space encircled by the palace walls, Silver Snow thought, there was not one thing that had been left to nature itself. Beyond the wilderness of sculpted trees and silken gardens rose a splendor of walls and columns, enameled and gilded, pillars stretching up from polished porches to intricately carven roofs of great pavilions.
It was toward one such pavilion that Silver Snow and Lilac were led, Willow stumping behind them.
Lilac licked her lips, dry beneath their red paint.
Why, she is frightened! Silver Snow thought. And her fear stems, not from ignorance, as does mine, but from knowledge. She did not need her father’s scrolls filled with the wisdom of General Sun Tzu to warn her that she must be very careful. Despite all of Lilac’s gushing praise of the dear, dear Administrator Mao Yen-shou, clearly he commanded fear as well as obedience.
And on him, her future rested.
Up the stairs they were led, Silver Snow careful to mince as delicately as the elder lady by her side. Perhaps she fears that / shall tell this eunuch that she did not make the journey North. For a moment she toyed with the idea, finding brief respite from fear in a malice that brought a flush to her cheeks in the next instant. Surely, were their positions reversed, Lilac would not hesitate to betray her. But she herself had been raised in a Confucian household; thus was not how she would wish Lilac to behave; and therefore, she herself must not do it. True propriety, not courtly artifice, silenced her.
They entered a pavilion in which incense fumes wafted in soft gray spirals and melded with the fragrance of the cassia wood of which Silver Snow thought it must be constructed. This pavilion, however, was so richly carved—its pillars inlaid with jade, its walls and cornices inlaid with precious stones, its ceilings brilliant with floral designs—that she could not see the wood itself. Up a flight of marble stairs they climbed, Silver Snow’s eyes flickering from side to side at heavily robed officials and scholars. She despaired at ever understanding the faint, but significant, distinctions of color and headgear that set one rank apart from the next. The ladies— splendid in their robes and hair ornaments, their scent bags fluttering from their sashes—clustered briefly on landings, like flocks of great butterflies pausing on a single stem, before a glance from the ponderously important eunuch, who conducted Silver Snow within, sent them scurrying as fast as decorum and expensive garments would permit.
The next room was warm, unusually, unnaturally so. Rising from huge glazed jars were the trees which had blossomed and budded in the heat. Behind them, as if hidden in an embrasure or behind a door, musicians played flutes or, with a jade plectrum, plucked music from the strings and sounding board of the p’i-pa.
A burst of high-pitched voices greeted Silver Snow as she entered the room, but they were speaking not to her, but of politics.
“Why support one barbarian against another?” asked one eunuch. “In fact, how does one tell the difference between them?”
“Khujanga,” said a second, deeper voice, with some patience, “is no fool. More than his enemy, he is willing to be guided ...”
“Croak . . . croak ...” several people interrupted, and laughter rose.
Her guide thumped on the polished wood floor with a staff, then walked boldly into the center of the room. Whether any of the eunuchs would even have looked at her unless her escort had been so dramatic, she neither knew or cared. She was too busy looking about. Here lounged or stood a veritable eunuchs’ court, all more or less brightly clad, more or less avidly curious, save for one man, older than most, thinner than all, who sketched a greeting and slipped from the room. It had been he, she suspected, at whom the others had laughed. And yet, save that he was thinner than the others, she could see no difference among them.
The next eldest, and far the heaviest and most splendidly dressed, stepped forward. Surely, Silver Snow thought, surely this must be the Administrator of the Inner Courts, responsible for . . . all this splendor.
But no, he was gesturing them toward the most elaborate door that Silver Snow had yet seen.
“Will this new lady be received by him}" asked their attendant, apprehension and awe evident in his voice. Just as evidently, he felt that this was an honor that the likes of Silver Snow did not deserve.