The incense in the air, the sight of the teeth, the sandalwood and camphor that scented the eunuch’s clothing, and, above all, the sheer horror of what he implied . . . the floral patterns on the ceiling began to whirl and Silver Snow felt herself slipping sideways.
An accusation of grave-robbing, and robbing of one’s own Ancestors at that: such crimes were too terrible to think of, much less to discuss. There were but two reasons to rob graves, too: greed or sorcery. And she was the daughter of a disgraced general. . It would be her word against that of Mao Yen-shou and his friend. No one would believe her, should he bring charges against her of grave-robbery. She was innocent, but who would believe that? She was daughter to a man widely believed to be a traitor.
But the thought, the very thought of either crime—not to mention how hideous the punishment was likely to be for her and for her family! She reeled, then drew herself upright. She would not faint, not be sick: not here, not before this sleek enemy “You palmed those teeth,” she told the eunuch. “Like a mountebank at a farmer’s festival, you hid those teeth in your hand and would use them to force me to give you the armor. Let the world know it! I am innocent,” she whispered.
“But who will believe you?” asked Mao Yen-shou. “Let a man be ever so innocent, yet, always, there is some act, some thought, that he would rather die than have revealed. Even such a simpleton as you, lady; I would wager that you cherish secrets too.”
Silver Snow felt, rather than heard, the low growl. Willow! By all the Ancestors, she might be able to withstand a charge of grave-robbing—though what would become of her were such a cry even raised against her she hated to think; but a charge of sorcery, or of consorting with sorcerers? Of that, though she felt it to be no crime, she was most assuredly guilty; and the court feared sorcery as it feared little else beside pestilence or war with the Hsiung-nu. Death would be the least she could hope for, and her punishment would be a caress in comparison with Willow’s.
She let her head droop, her entire body sag beneath the consciousness that she had been defeated by a thief. Worse yet, her hopes were shattered. Mao Yen-shou would take her one treasure and, because he dared not risk that she come to the Emperor’s attention, when he painted her, he would use a lying brush to make her as unattractive as possible.
There was no hope now of success; no hope at all. Only her pride as a general’s daughter kept her from weeping and flinging herself to the floor as Mao Yen-shou clapped hands for a servant to conduct her to temporary lodgings and for another to bring him the scroll that he had rejected as being unfit to paint upon.
She forced herself to stand passively, though she wanted to stab or to scream. She remembered the battle with the Red Brows. Then, there had been things that she could do to help herself. Now, there was nothing at all. The court, she had learned in this first, disastrous engagement, was more treacherous than any battle. But her father had survived defeat, survived and retained his dignity. Somehow, she must do the same, proving herself a worthy daughter of her line.
Months might pass, Silver Snow gathered, before Mao Yen-shou completed the portraits of five hundred ladies summoned from all over the Middle Kingdom. She had as much chance of becoming one of the Brilliant Companions of the Son of Heaven as Willow had of leaping over the walls of Ch’ang-an and racing back to the North. As artists and artisans put the finishing touches to the Sun Bright Residence where the ladies most favored by the Emperor would live, Silver Snow wondered what her own lot would be.
She could not aspire to such heights, nor perhaps even to the Residence of Increasing Reflection where the Favorite Beauties would live. Realistically, she thought that she might be placed among the lowest ranked of the concubines: the daughters of noble families. Because she preferred study to idleness, she set about learning the customs she must follow in this new and far from welcome life.
She took part in the festivals that heralded the spring plantings, eagerly seized upon any chance to improve her calligraphy, and spent many hours composing upon silk a hopeful and dutiful account to her father of her journey to the capital. When older women such as the Lady Lilac—ladies too faded to attract notice and whose lusts were, in any case, for power—called for willing hands or sweet voices, she was quick to volunteer and quicker yet to withdraw should a brow be raised at the way that the northern girl of no particular prospects, the one with the maidservant of such surpassing, horrid ugliness, put herself forward.
Such ladies seemed to sense that Silver Snow’s fortunes were different and far more lowly than the prospects of the scores of Precious Pearls, Cassias, Jasmines, and Plum Fragrances who clustered like so many blossoms in the Inner Courts, thronging in the terraces and passageways that joined one pavilion to the next. Under the guise of assisting the elder ladies, they exclaimed over the rich silk hangings, the huge painted pots, the ornate inlays of gold, malachite, and turquoise that, day by day, appeared in their quarters.
How they talked! Silver Snow, raised to quiet and meditation, found that enduring the ever-present, ever-chattering crowd of young women the most onerous task of her days. Unlike her, they seemed to have no trouble adapting to the life of the courts, circumscribed, rigid, relentlessly polite even at its most hostile. She often thought that even if Mao Yen-shou painted her in his most flattering colors, she would have no chance among this garden of beauties. Each one, it seemed to her, embodied the highest praise that could be accorded a woman’s beauty. For a woman to have the expression of a flower, the mouth of a bud, the soul of the moon, the posture of the willow, bones of jade and a skin of snow, the charm of an autumn lake and the heart of poetry—that would indeed be perfect!
Perfection indeed, unlike her own looks. Even the mirror held in Willow’s loving hands showed a woman whose eyes could flash or soften, depending upon her mood; whose mouth was quick to laugh; and whose soul was turbulent and whose charm—assuming that anyone would credit her with possessing it—was a matter of obedience, duty, and repose, not the quicksilver grace prized at court. The official had been right; Silver Snow might have been far more content as the busy first wife of an heir to a country estate than as a court lady of little favor and many trivial chores.
Although she was forced often into the company of the other ladies, increasingly a gulf widened between her and them. With the same unconscious knowledge that let them place their hair ornaments to best advantage, they seemed somehow to sense that Silver Snow could not expect a bright future, let alone one as Illustrious Concubine. More and more often, they avoided her. Not even the too-tall girl so absurdly named Peony Bud nor Apricot, who wept because her skin was sallow and the others teased her about it, bothered to speak to her; they preferred instead to hover on the outskirts of the bevy of more fortunate girls, clustering eagerly about those whom they felt the Emperor might be likeliest to favor. Not for any of these ladies was the type of loyalty that made her father’s soldiers follow him into disgrace; they preferred to curry favor with potential favorites.
Would I be any better? Silver Snow asked herself time and again in the silence that she now had time to appreciate. She could spend time with Willow, calming the maid’s alarms, assuring her that, with the jade armor in his possession, Mao Yen-shou would be too concerned to avoid scandal to bring charges of sorcery against mistress and maid. She performed whatever tasks were assigned her and spent any leisure that she had contemplating what she had to admit was the very real beauty that Mao Yen-shou had created. If only his soul had been the equal of the craft of his hands and mind!