I had a burning desire to realize my husband’s unfulfilled dream, to perform the Sanctification of Heaven at the top of Mount Song. I was impatient to be the unique woman in the world who leads the supreme ceremony awarded to the greatest sovereign. The preparations soothed away the boredom that gnawed at me constantly. I raised the imperial parade, accompanied by my Court and our foreign vassals. The procession was wider than the River Luo and filled entire plains and valleys. As I observed the rites of purification, I felt a weight lift from my body and my spirits. Despite my seventy-one years, I reached the snowy peak of Mount Song. After carrying out the libations, I dismissed my attendants and stood alone in the sacred enclosure at the very top of an altar-hill built as a sequence of terraces in five different colors of Earth. There prostrated, I recited the prayers of invocation.
Somewhere in the distance, musicians were striking their bronze bells and their sounding stones. The peak was shrouded by the wind and snow. In the darkness, I searched in vain for a light, a sign from the Supreme Being. I could see nothing. The god was deaf to my prayers. He who turned the wheel of destiny knew that I had falsified the stone with the inscription “Divine Mother, who graces the earth, through her, let the Emperor’s reign prosper” and thrown it into Luo River. He knew that I had dictated to the monk, Clarity of Law, the passage concerning a Celestial Daughter called Purity of Heavenlight when he was translating the Sutra of the Great Cloud. I had fashioned the divine will to take the reigns from men’s hands. But God had not appointed a woman to rule the world. I was just a usurper, and this was why I had no heir!
I wept in silence. Suddenly, the sun sprang out of the darkness and poured out a thin stream of red that swelled to tumbling waves in an ocean of mist. In those brightly colored undulating clouds, I could see celestial horses galloping toward me. Suddenly the miracle I had waited for all my life came to pass: The glowing disc of the sun drew closer, grew larger and larger like a silk sheet unfurling, then it filled space in its entirety. Its countless rays were like sharpened arrows hurtling toward my flesh, and the pain as they burned me became the sweetest pleasure. God was there; God appeared to me! With my forehead to the ground and my eyes closed, I let his incandescence embrace me bodily. I did not have time to ask him whether I was his beloved daughter, nor what death was, nor who would be my heir. I forgot to beg his protection for my dynasty or my people. I forgot my dream of an eternal reign. The questions that had always tormented me ebbed away. I was burning. I was turning into a ball of fire revolving slowly on itself. I could feel myself dissolving in a sea of light. I suddenly saw my own body prostrating itself at the top of a mountain, surrounded by the snow. I saw the world below, beneath the clouds, in the depths of the abyss.
Rivers scour through the earth and run toward the ocean. The snows fall, and trees cover themselves with leaves. Palaces crumble, paths disappear, wheat sprouts up and transforms deserts into fields. God is the source of all movement, inexhaustible life, eternal energy. God had made me and sent me here to demonstrate his might: He creates and destroys, erases and renews. Even at the heights to which I had risen, I remained dust in the palm of his hand.
THE JOURNEY BACK to Luoyang was gloomy. I lay huddled in fur coats inside my carriage surrounded by fires crackling in braziers, but still shivering with cold. The strength was being drawn out of me like an ebbing tide. My ears were filled with a buzzing sound. My eyesight became hazy, and I ordered my officials to write their political reports in larger characters. Once I had dictated the commemorative hymn that would be engraved on the stela erected at the top of Mount Song, I accepted the idea of dying.
One evening the prosecutor Lai Jun Chen asked to speak to me in secret. He was brought to the palace along an underground passageway. As he threw himself at my feet, I noticed a feverish red flush on his pale cheeks. His wolf-like eyes glowed with something akin to joy. My wildcats seemed to have picked up the scent of blood on him; they roared and paced agitatedly. The judge was surrounded by dogs and leopards, but he showed no fear. He took from his sleeve a scroll of paper and held it aloft in both his hands to offer it to me. I unrolled it in the candlelight to reveal a diagram in which the First Magistrate had traced the networks of conspirators from the time of Wu Ji, Shang Guan Yi, and Pei Yan right up to the present. There were hundreds of names, all written in large characters and connected to form a tree whose branches reached as far as provincial governments and the encampments of those who had been banished. Every enemy of the State was inscribed there: The dead were ringed with red ink, the exiled with blue, and prisoners in green, and there were black circles hovering threateningly around those who were still free. At the very end of the scroll, I found Miracle, Moon, Future, Piety, and Spirit.
Lai Jun Chen’s voice quavered slightly. Miracle, the Emperor who had resigned; Future, the deposed emperor; Piety, the King of Wei; Spirit, the King of Liang; Moon, the Princess of Eternal Peace; and her husband, Tranquility, the King of Jian Chang were secretly planning a coup and preparing to share the kingdom between them.
“Lord Lai,” I sighed, “I have taken note of your observations. You may leave.”
“Majesty,” he said, edging forward on his knees, “the King of Wei has been restless the whole time you have delayed appointing an heir. He is weary of waiting; he is preparing to resort to force and will call on his cousins who command your guards regiments. The Princess of Eternal Peace is secretly scheming to establish an agreement between her brothers and her husband’s clan. Majesty, the time has come, an uprising in the Court is imminent!”
“Let me think!” I said, silencing the prosecutor with a wave. He disappeared through the partition. Lai Jun Chen had an acute sense of smell like an animal, which meant that he could identify the ideas that people were harboring and the longings they themselves had not yet formulated. While other judges were happy simply examining the facts, he projected himself into the future. The plot he was imagining was one I had already lived in my nightmares. Men’s strengths go hand in hand with their weaknesses. That is why there is no such thing as an invincible warrior, and why heroes die.
Two days later during the morning audience Piety, King of Wei, asked to speak. His powerful voice reverberated around the halclass="underline" He charged the magistrate Lai Jun Chen with corruption, exploiting his influential position, and attempting to usurp power. My Great Ministers and my nephews Spirit and Tranquility stepped forward and unanimously upheld his charges. In keeping with Palace codes, Lai Jun Chen had risen from his seat and prostrated himself as soon as his name was mentioned. I was surprised by this violent attack and remained silent. Someone had betrayed the prosecutor by warning the King of Wei, who had responded with an adroit riposte: Piety had pointed the finger at Lai Jun Chen for the crimes of which he himself was accused. The entire government had joined him and was declaring war on the most feared man in the Empire. How was it that the prosecutor, who saw plots in every direction, had been unaware of this one, like a soothsayer blind to his own fate?
I silenced my own irritation while my ministers pressed me for a response, and Lai Jun Chen asked to speak. Either I would hand the magistrate over to the Court, or I would let him explain himself. He would denounce the conspiracy: With one hundred members of both my families in prison or condemned to death, I would become the laughing stock of the entire world. I would be the senile emperor sinking the very ship on which she sails. What authority would I have left to reign? Who would be heir to the throne? Piety had played his part very cleverly. On the chessboard of the Forbidden City, he had just checkmated his opponent. I did not grant the judge the right to defend himself, but pretended to be furious and ordered that his cap and official’s tablet be removed and that he be thrown in prison.