“I love her,” says the Stranger.
“She does not love you,” says Liù.
The Stranger is handsome, broad of shoulder and bright of eye, unbowed by his years of exile. He is gentle with slaves like Liù, lowly men and women most princes would spit on. When he speaks, he really looks at her. When he smiles, the sun’s rays burst through.
He smiles like that now, irresistibly. “You are mistaken, Liù. Don’t be afraid. Even from across the crowded square, I could see love in her eyes.”
Liù does not think so. Liù has always read people easily, and what she sees in the Princess’s eyes is not love. In the Princess’s first and most fearsome aria, when she tells the story of her ancestress Lo-u-Ling, there is resolve in her eyes, anger, pain. And something else, behind it. A very great fear. As if the men who come to her are soldiers scaling a wall, and one day she will fail to destroy them in time. But no one seems to care about that fear, and for all his kindness, neither does the Stranger.
Liù is afraid every night: afraid of pain, afraid of losing the Stranger, afraid to die. Her fear has never mattered to anyone either.
The Conductor catches the Soprano by the arm on her way backstage. “Tell me what this is about.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says the Soprano, squinting up at him in the gloom. She is all too aware of the Conductor’s power: he tall, white, distinguished by decades of accolades; she small, Korean American, a relative unknown. Liù is her first big professional role. The Conductor can scuttle her career with a word. She wishes he would not touch her.
“Do not play stupid with me, signorina. For months now you have been singing erratically, changing your words—porco mondo, even changing the music. It is a wonder my orchestra keeps up. I did not hire you to improvise.”
The Soprano thinks, Maybe the words needed changing. She wouldn’t be singing Liù if she were successful enough to pick and choose. She does not think much of this stage China which is nothing like China, these stage women who are nothing like women.
The Conductor waves a hand. “I would be firing you now, except the audience seems to like it. But do not try my patience. At least you must tell me what you are doing.”
“I don’t know, Maestro. I am not at all sure.”
Ever since she was a little girl imitating her mother’s records, the Soprano has had a secret detachment while singing, a sense that the character appears and sings through her. Most nights she only vaguely remembers what has happened onstage. This Liù, this production of Turandot, brings on the feeling more strongly than ever. But as to why, the Soprano knows nothing.
Liù kneels before the screen in the Princess’s sitting room, head bowed.
“I should have had you killed by now,” says the Princess. “But you feel familiar, as if I have known you a long time. Why? And why do I feel you have something to offer me?”
Liù does not raise her eyes from the floor. “I am a lowly woman, acquainted with pain. I see pain when I look upon you. I wish only to help. If the Daughter of Heaven should be in pain—a supernatural pain, perhaps . . .”
Cold amusement. “Are you a witch? An exorcist?”
“If it pleases the Daughter of Heaven,” says Liù, “I would like to speak to Lo-u-Ling.”
The Princess has her flayed.
The Princess sits alone in her garden, cradling the Persian Prince’s head. The opera has begun again, and she has not yet met Liù or the Stranger. But the Stranger will hardly surprise her. Man after man comes to answer the Princess’s riddles, to demand her as a prize.
The Princess is the empire’s only heir. It is unthinkable for her not to marry, not to carry on the sacred family line. She cannot outright refuse. Not forever.
At the first suitor, when the Princess was only sixteen, she panicked. The boy was a foreign prince her own age. He was soft-spoken; he had never done anything to hurt her. She could not explain why, when she looked at him, an icy vise closed in around her lungs.
So she made up a reason. She thought up her three impossible riddles. Vowed to marry only the man who solved them and to kill the ones who failed. Harsh, yes, but the point of this was to deter them. She did not want men to swarm in from every kingdom, attracted by the challenge.
Being men, they swarmed in anyway.
When the first prince’s head rolled to a stop in its pool of blood, the Princess felt only a shameful relief. Malice came later. When the fifth prince came sharp on the heels of the fourth, flouncing in his feathered cloak through the blood in the streets, that was when she began to hate them all. To enjoy the killing. If men did not value their lives, why should she?
Lo-u-Ling, the ghost, came to her after that. Attracted, perhaps, by the scent of a terror as large as her own.
Blood, Lo-u-Ling whispers in the Princess’s ear. Blood, pain, fear. Men crawling over the walls. Fear. Flight. Falling on the path, cobblestones scraping blood from my arms. Men, fear, a helplessness worse than choking, blood . . .
Lo-u-Ling, the Princess’s ancestress, was raped and put to death during war, centuries ago, in this very garden. She approves of what the Princess does.
The Princess curls her fingers tightly in the Persian Prince’s hair until she can distinguish her garden from Lo-u-Ling’s. Until she is sure the only blood is that which clings to the tatters of the Persian Prince’s throat. The Princess won this time. As long as she lives, the Princess swears to herself, she will win.
“Daughter of Heaven,” says Liù with her eyes to the ground, “I will find you the Stranger’s name. I do not know it now, but I, and I alone, can learn it from him. But, unworthy as I am, I must ask one tiny boon—or else, betraying him, I will die of shame.”
“Yes?” says the Princess cautiously. Two months ago she would have had Liù tortured even for asking. But things are beginning to change.
“Let him live,” says Liù. “You need not marry him. Cast him out of the empire if you like, but send him on his way as an equal, alive.”
“You are asking me,” says the Princess, “to forgive him.”
“But what must you forgive him for? What crime has he committed?”
“He has answered my riddles. He has insisted that I must be his, though I never wanted any man. If I do not punish him, what then? How many more strangers will ride in on the wind with nothing to lose? I know the things men do—I and Lo-u-Ling, both. We have sworn never to forgive anyone at all.”
“I understand,” says Liù, bowing low. “But, if I may be so bold, I have not asked you to forgive him. You may brand him as a criminal, a disgrace to your kingdom. You may hate and rage against him to the end of your days, so long as you let him live.”
“No,” says the Princess. “You will do as I say, and I will have mercy on no one.”
“Then,” says Liù, bowing lower still, “if you truly have no mercy, you will kill me as well.”
The Princess draws back, surprised. “I have killed you many times now. But why should I kill you again, so long as you do as I say?”
“Because I am as wicked as he is,” says Liù. “I love him too much to let him die at your hand. No matter what he has done, or will do, Daughter of Heaven. That is my crime.”
The Princess is silent a long moment.
“No,” she says. “You are not wicked. You are only a fool.”