The familiar and much-loved scents of pine and incense wafted out from the splendid brazier, which had been newly polished so that its silver and gold ridges and the gem inlays gleamed. Usually so thrifty, her father must have ordered all twelve of the lights in the curving arms of the largest ceramic lampstand in the house to be kindled. Seated in a haze of incense and a halo of light was Chao Kuang himself. Silver Snow bowed deeply, as much out of love as from proper manners, before she glanced up.
Chao Kuang wore his finest tunic, woven and embroidered with red and blue with characters of good fortune, fastened on the right with five gold buttons. A wide vermilion belt (a privilege once granted and, unaccountably, never revoked by the Son of Heaven) was drawn atop it. His robe’s long sleeves fell over her father’s hands, hiding his scars and the missing finger. Though the room was warmly heated, a wide strip of sable encircled his throat, while ancient skins of the same precious fur lined his coat. There was no doubt that this splendor had been donned with care to receive an official to whom Chao Kuang would never reveal his house’s poverty.
He leaned against padded cushions, holding a two-foot-long bundle of thin wooden strips on which delicate characters hadjbeen inked. That must be the Emperor’s edict! Broken seals hung from it, chief of them, the signet of the Emperor himself.
Silver Snow drew a deep, shuddering breath and waited anxiously for her father to speak.
“Sit, daughter.” Chao Kuang gestured toward a pillow.
Silver Snow lowered herself, settling her robes in decorous folds. Once again, she ventured to look up.
“Doubtless, you have been listening to the gossip in the women’s quarters,” he observed, but he was not frowning with displeasure. “Vixens’ chatter, most of it; but even a fox, should it bark long enough, may once in its life utter the truth.”
Had Chao Kuang heard the women’s rumors about Willow? Silver Snow had asked herself so often if he had harkened to such spiteful tales that the arrow of fear once accompanying such a thought had long since lost its barbs. Was he about to examine her about that? But why would he do so at a time as important as this one? When he had purchased the maid, he had remarked only that the right-minded man tried to aid those in need, and that he had heard of a faraway province in which red hair—hard as it was to believe—was esteemed as a mark of beauty. Still, since Willow had come to live in their courtyards, Silver Snow noted, he had forbidden the hunting of foxes on their lands; he himself wore only sable or the fleece of sheep.
Chao Kuang raised the wooden strips of the Emperor’s edict and, seated as she was, Silver Snow bowed before the august words until her brow touched the felted mats covering the floor.
“As you have heard, because the Emperor’s Inner Courts have long been empty, the Censors have now reported to him the outcry of the people who rely upon those courts for their livelihood.”
Silver Snow nodded once, and kept her head down. Her eyes, however, darted about the familiar, cozy room, and noted an unfamiliar, ancient-looking chest in one corner. An odd surge of excitement made it difficult for her to sit and listen as, in strict propriety, she should. But it had never been just strict propriety for her and her father: beyond proper behavior lay hsin, or sincerity, and jen , good will; and beyond those virtues, she knew, lay love—though, of course, a decent reserve would forever prevent either of them from giving voice to such emotion.
“Moreover—and this too is the chatter of foxes—it is said that one night the Emperor dreamed of a woman as lovely as the lady who died, and vowed that he would discover whether such beauty existed anywhere within the Middle Kingdom. Consequently, he has decreed that five hundred concubines should be chosen, and he entrusted the task to Mao Yen-shou, the Administrator of the Inner Courts.” Her father paused, and Silver Snow dared to look directly at his face. His eyes were deep and shadowed with memory, the crease between them seeming to be all the deeper.
“Mao Yen-shou is a skilled artist, well able to judge beauty.
However, all that he can do is judge; for he is a eunuch, and doubtless possesses the eunuch’s appetite for power. All of which he may indeed arise to in the course of this choosing and judging.”
But what has this to do with me? Silver Snow wanted to ask. For the first time in her life, she was impatient with her father’s measured fashion of imparting news.
Chao Kuang leaned forward and caught Silver Snow’s chin in his callused fingers, raising her face so that their eyes met squarely once more. “My daughter, this ancient one may be disgraced and degraded; yet word of his young, beautiful daughter has reached the Administrator of the Inner Courts; and you have been summoned.”
Silver Snow gasped. Tears stung her eyes, whether born of fear or excitement, she knew not. Out of all the maids in the Middle Kingdom, to be one of five hundred beauties selected for the Inner Courts, perhaps to become the next Brilliant Companion who would heal the heart of a grieving Emperor ... it was beyond dreaming.
Aye, you do well to weep, child of mine. For this means our farewell. Those ladies who enter the Inner Court—unless it pleases the Son of Heaven to dismiss them—never again see their homes. Nor, let me caution you, is their life all fine robes, sweet food, the Hall of Splendor, and an Emperor’s favor. Many, indeed, never see the Son of Heaven, much less bear him a son. Yet, such as they, too, are as firmly bound within the Inner Courts as the meanest slave.”
“But this insignificant wretch has been summoned,” Silver Snow murmured. Her heart raced. She was beautiful. Even her father, who had the most reason of all people in the world to wish her to be humble and modest, said so. She was brave; she was true. She had only to gain the favor of the Emperor, and everything that her father had lost would be restored. For it was well known that a favorite concubine was free to advance any of her house.
“You go to exile and, though it be not open battle, to another type of risk, my daughter,” said Chao Kuang. “The ladies of the Inner Courts engage, I am told, in their own wars; and their weapons are guile at the best, at the worst they spin plots, set snares, and, at length, deal even with poisons. You have been raised to much—perhaps to overmuch—freedom; you may find the life behind the walls of such courtyards as arduous as I found my own captivity. And yet...” Her father drew a deep sigh.
Silver Snow held her breath. It was not often that her father would speak—could bear to speak, she thought—of his ten years in captivity.
“Ever since the hour of my surrender until now, I have lived, destitute, with the bitterness of my grief aching like an unhealed wound. Even now I see in dreams the barbarians around me. That distant whole country was stiff with black ice, and I heard naught but the moaning of the bitter winter winds beneath which my hopes of return dwindled.
“And yet, my daughter, and yet, since I have returned, there have been days when it has seemed to me that my life among the Hsiung-nu was not wholly bad. What does the poet say? ‘When I fell among Hsiung-nu and was taken prisoner, I pined for the land of Han. Now that I am back in the land of Han, they have turned me into Hsiung-nu ... A Han heart and a Han tongue, set in the body of the Hsiung-nu.’ My years apart were not all ill, I think now.”
“When one finds himself in a foreign civilization, one adapts to foreign customs,” Silver Snow adapted a maxim from the Analects. The city of Ch’ang-an would be as foreign to her as the lands and yurts of the Hsiung-nu had been to her father; but she would behave with no less honor. For all that she was a female, she was his heir.