That night, the Eastern Bureau received the news that the king of the Ryūkyūs had died of old age.
Noon, January 27 (Gregorian), 1673
Jiayu Pass
It was a cosmic understatement to say that the Church had entered a state of panic over China. Because the Emperor had never been baptized, it wasn’t exactly a schism, but it was being handled with the seriousness of one. Scholars in Europe had started to lament that it was a new era of pharaohs, of presumptuous tyrants who fancied themselves living gods. A horde of missionaries descended upon the empire following Taichang’s proclamation, and whole monasteries of preachers would have been transplanted there if by the middle of the century the Canutic Empire hadn’t begun to make sea travel mortally dangerous for Catholic ships.
Taichang died in 1647, having consolidated China’s transition toward full theocracy, and was succeeded by his eldest surviving son Youjian, who on the day of his accession to the title of Son of the Heavenly Lord adopted the regnal name Zhenzui, which was an immediate headache for the Jesuits. A regnal name served to define the entire period during which an emperor ruled, and was selected as a harbinger of the ideal of government that he aspired to provide. Zhenzui could be translated as “veritably excellent,” a grandiose exaggeration that, as regnal names went, sounded perfectly normal. However, plaques and signboards in Chinese were written from right to left; to Western eyes, accustomed to reading from left to right, the name could be taken to mean “ultimate truth,” which made it a blasphemous name, an overt defiance to the Pope’s authority to declare what was the correct doctrine. It didn’t escape Xiaobo that under that reading it was blasphemous to two religions, because “the Truest” was one of the holy names of Allah.
Her own name was still, as far as everyone knew, Ma Liang, and under that name she ascended several ranks in the Eastern Bureau, propelled by her own hard work and by Taichang’s grateful remembrance of her service during his time of illness. By the time Emperor Zhenzui was crowned, she had become Chief Eunuch of the Great Ming, and all her efforts were now devoted to tempering her ruler’s claims of divinity. She was on a self-assigned mission to one day restore the primacy of the one true god, although she had come to terms with the unpleasant fact that it would probably take several generations of emperors and as many generations of faithful Muslims in the bureaucracy to steer matters back to normalcy. For the time being, she carefully recruited more and more Hui spies, and waited.
The Church was making its own moves to contain the new heresy, striving to fix Hasekura Tsunenaga’s mistake and teach the Emperor the proper version of the religion. What puzzled them was that, just like his late father, Zhenzui was more than happy to let them keep coming to China, and positively eager to listen to their preaching, but no matter how much they repeated the Pope-approved dogmas, no amount of theology sufficed to lure him away from his own interpretations. Scholars in Rome were at a loss for a strategy that would ensure the salvation of China, and the only thing they seemed able to do was to send a continuous flow of missionaries in the hopes that one of them would be blessed with a solution.
The kingdoms of the recently dissolved Iberian Union were busy keeping their hold on their established colonies, and the mere task of making it to their destination on each trip across the ocean demanded enough of their efforts at a time when every Catholic ship could just disappear for no reason known to them. Of the ships that managed to evade destruction, one had, decades before, carried a Flemish Jesuit in his early thirties who was destined, as had been his superiors and his fellow preachers, to speak for hours until his voice was hoarse and obtain nothing from the unsympathetic ears of the Chinese sovereign. By the time he approached the age of fifty, he had become, as had been his superiors and his fellow preachers, fully disillusioned with the goal of ever convincing that man of his error, and resigned himself to spending his old age doing no more than go through the motions of being a herald of Christ. For the sole purpose of keeping his mind active on something, he had continued to feed the Emperor’s hunger for European learning and European news, as this was a new China, where foreign ideas and especially foreign inventions were now getting a warm welcome, but the most important of his messages, the guiding force of his life, had near to zero prospects of succeeding. His name was Ferdinand Verbiest, and when he was presented with a personal invitation from the Emperor to go on an expedition to the western end of the Great Wall, which the maps revealed to him to lie deep in the middle of nowhere, he feared it would feature yet another parade of cheap curiosities and trinkets.
After merciless middays and freezing midnights on what had once been a busy silk route, their caravan camped within sight of the Great Wall and still no one had explained to Father Verbiest what they were doing there. They had arrived in the early morning and, under specific instructions from the Emperor, selected a certain spot in the desert to set up their tents. Verbiest had seen servants leave Zhenzui’s tent to walk someplace between the nearby hills, and once they even went past the Wall, and as the day progressed and the sun became more intense, he grew impatient.
He visited the Emperor’s tent, only to be rebuked by a team of servants who repeated several times that he had no business entering there. Telling them that he’d been invited didn’t do any good, and he decided to try asking someone else. He’d heard that Chief Eunuch Ma Liang was also accompanying the Emperor on this trip, so he walked under the punishing, cloudless sky the short but tiring distance to the second-largest tent of the caravan.
Even after weeks of traveling together, meeting Xiaobo was still a disconcerting experience. He didn’t know how careful she was to eschew all forms of romance; to him, every time his eyes met with this mysterious being, he felt his vows were in danger.
“Good morning, Father,” she said in Dutch. He, like every missionary in the empire, was required to master a flawless Chinese to avoid repeating Hasekura’s disaster, but she could tell he needed to be put at ease. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
He hated the idea of drinking anything hot with the weather they were enduring, but he’d had enough experiences with dysentery to know to always ask for boiled water, regardless of how uncomfortable it would doubtlessly feel in those circumstances.
As one of the eunuchs traveling in Xiaobo’s retinue poured him a cup, she asked, “To what do I owe this visit?”
“I was hoping you’d know what we came all the way here for.”
She glanced at her servant, weighing the need to signal him to leave them alone, and decided there was no danger. “Does Rome receive news of what goes on along the Silk Road?”
“The Silk Road hasn’t been used in centuries.”
“True, but the countries it passed through still exist. What do you know of them?”
“Very little, in fact. We’ve only learned enough to start suspecting Marco Polo may not have been entirely truthful.”
She laughed at the name. “That’s a woeful degree of ignorance. And if I can get away with admitting openly before a foreigner that we’re not better informed than you are, it’s only because no one else in all this wretched desert can speak Dutch.”
Verbiest looked out and trembled. He could easily imagine all of Europe fitting in that desert. “Why do you bring up those countries?”