It was the old story. Having conquered a quarter of world, the Owe-ejan-akhar bullied the Immortal of the time into buying her favor and protection. He dismissed His generals and advisers and, to seal the alliance, His wives, lemans, concubines, and all His children as well. The daughter the Ejan was willing to spare was her third, a young woman with little aptitude for war who chose to rank the Kandadal’s precepts in different order than her mother preferred.
The marriage of the Immortal of Haisn and the Ive-ojan-akhar was solemnized at the Ejan’s camp and court on the plain of Niw—it was the only time in all His mortal life the Immortal ventured outside the walls of the Palace Invisible. Then in grand cavalcade the Ejan and her Thousand Tall Riders wheeled their horses about and departed once again for the west, about the business of subduing rebellions and conquering further dominions.
Borne in their twin palanquins, escorted by half the northern quarter of Haisn’s Celestial Army, the Immortal and the Ojan travelled southeast more slowly, accompanied by her guards, magicians, shamans, counsellors, and half a monastery’s worth of acolytes of the Kandadal. The Ojan’s old companion, a mastiff fleeced like a lamb, rode in her palanquin.
They crossed the Blue Wall by a bridge demolished as soon as they passed over the mighty channel. It was left up to the governor of the Reclaimed Province how to defend the wide new avenue hacked through the Green Wall, if defense be required. The Cinnabar Wall possessed a gate wide enough but not sufficiently grand, so gilded stands were raised and choirs of sweet-voiced children and eunuchs impressed to sing welcome to the Immortal bringing the mother of unborn Immortals out of Regions Heaven Does Not Acknowledge.
Until now all converse between the Immortal and His wife had been formal, witnessed. Once entered into the Celestial Realm the Immortal felt secure requesting she invite Him to attend her privately. Knowing as well as her husband the urgent need for an heir—the Immortal had merely disinherited and delegitimated His former children, not had them killed—the Ojan acquiesced. She had, of course, ceased chewing banleaf the day before her wedding.
This took place in the Black Palace of Husth, ancient war capital of the eldest and northernmost of the Nine Principalities that had become Haisn. The magic-lantern depictions of the palace were splendid. Wearing His saffron-orange nightgown, the automaton playing the Immortal traversed endless black corridors guarded by innumerable porcelain warriors in antique armor, the immortal army of the First Immortal. When at last He reached the Ojan’s chambers He was ushered in by members of her own guard, not as tall as her mother’s Tall Riders but towering nonetheless over the Haisner Immortal. The white mastiff inside the door growled but she was tied up.
Because it was a Turtle Market production the automaton the Immortal found within was already nude and reclining, cunningly articulated in all her members. While music from the band attempted to drown out the click and whirr of gears, the clack and thump of porcelain limb against wooden trunk, Immortal and Ojan performed the act of coition in elaborate detail—I heard the envoy’s inamorato snicker—and then the scene changed.
Now the stage became some artist’s naïvely voluptuous vision of the Palace Invisible in Bhekai some months later. The Ojan’s womb had failed yet to quicken. Counsellors of both personages were nearly as concerned as the Ojan and her husband. None dared suggest relegitimating the Immortal’s cast-off heir for the Owe-ejan-akhar had many spies. The Immortal dedicated great sums to the gods of venery, fertility, increase, and visited the Ojan as often as His appetites permitted.
Always least favored of the Ejan’s daughters, the Ojan had grown fearful. She knew the shamans and magicians in her train were her mother’s agents. She knew very well her mother’s ruthlessness. This was a mother whose several sons had not been permitted to survive past their second breaths, for the magnates and warriors of her people would not answer to masculine authority. If the Ojan proved barren the Ejan would never hesitate to dispatch a different daughter to take her place—perhaps, if impatience rather than good sense had the upper hand in the Ejan’s mind, instead to breach Blue, Green, and Cinnabar Walls herself and lead her Tall Riders into the Celestial Realm. In either case the failed Ojan would be disgraced. She made sure to welcome the Immortal into her chamber, her bed, her body whenever the urge struck Him, but when He departed she threw her arms about the neck of the white mastiff and groaned in frustration and despair.
These scenes were played, of course, to titillate the audience. For myself, after the first, I found them tedious. They were dolls on the stage, clever unnatural toys. I had seen automaton productions no less lewd involving men with other men which were scarcely more entertaining. But after the third I understood I was meant to understand the Ojan’s wretchedness was not solely on account of fear. Fearful Himself, in fatal need of an heir, for all His divinity merely a stupid self-involved man, the Immortal took no pains to involve His wife in the act, to give her pleasure.
After the third, the Ojan took up an ancient Haisner book few members of any Turtle Market audience would know except by reputation for it had been banned again and again, and read a passage aloud—the only prose in the entire drama. I heard the envoy’s inamorato hoot with embarrassed laughter when he understood what he was hearing. What he was seeing for, while the offstage ventriloquist recited Lady Tonnù’s ghost’s counsel to her living granddaughter, the Ojan-automaton’s articulated fingers tapped and fiddled at the delicately sculpted crevice between her legs until she broke off the recitation with a cry.
The white mastiff howled. Clever small pyrotechnics set about the front of the stage flared with blinding flashes, deafening bangs. A new personage descended on wires from the flies.
I, for one, had read Summer Sunlight in the Walled Garden, less for its scandalous anecdotes of courtiers two millennia dead than its prose. The book’s—and author’s—most vicious critics acknowledge its style to be immaculate, unprecedented: few great works of Haisner literature don’t bear its stamp. At any rate, although this twist in the Ive-ojan-akhar’s tale was new to me I recognized the figure represented by the device making its appearance in the Ojan’s chamber, half spring-powered automaton, half marionette.
The Ojan’s white dog whined and quailed but tall mistress rose from low bed and demanded to know what being it was dared approach her uninvited.
“Wakè-ì,” the demon named herself, at which the Ojan tilted her painted face into shadow. In the language of today wakè-ì alludes to a hopeless yearning that can never be satisfied whilst also serving as an old-fashioned synonym for vengeance. Stepping back, the Ojan laid a hand on her dog’s head while the demon pranced and capered about, displaying herself to the audience: a kind of lithe tigress, scarlet and black, bearing great ebony and cinnabar bat wings between her shoulders and wearing the mask of a human face.
When for an instant that mask was fully illuminated I choked on my tepid yellow liquor and either the envoy or his inamorato uttered a shocked noise. Wakè-ì’s was not the full, round moon face of Haisner beauty. A person from the distant west regarded the darkness beyond the stage lights—a person with mottled pink and white complexion, axe-blade nose and hollow cheeks and thin lips, round eyes with irises of pale blue glass. It was neither quite womanly nor quite manly yet I had no trouble imagining the envoy’s daughter wearing that face if she were to reach maturity.
A moment only. The monster’s capers brought her again to face the Ojan and she stilled, spoke again. Wakè-ì’s voice was unpleasant, grating, a harridan’s screech. She could, she said, ensure the Ojan bore the Immortal’s heir if that was truly the woman’s desire.