Portal of a Thousand Worlds Read online

  Go? Shard had been hoping for tomorrow, but the skies were clear and the moon was bright. Leave by night and no one would know whether they had headed upstream or down, except the men who took them, and who could remember, or be sure, who they had been? He followed as Mouse led the way and Sunlight brought up the rear. None of the villagers came after them, so this fast exit had been well planned. In a moment, he saw a boat at the jetty, and two men waiting there.

  Empty-handed! The expedition’s only luggage was his scribe’s box.

  “Mouse!” Sunlight caught the boy’s shoulder just before they reached the jetty. “Are you sure you want to come? Many men in the village would adopt another mouth in return for two strong hands. You could live here in peace, buy a wife, raise children.”

  Mouse’s recently found contentment vanished instantly. Dismay! “No, no! Do not abandon me, Holy Urfather!” He tried to kowtow, forgetting that he held a blazing torch.

  Sunlight leaped back, laughing, although Shard Gingko would later see him rubbing river water on a knee as if it had been scorched. “You do not have to set me on fire, Friend Mouse! If you want to come, then come with us by all means, and we will happily share whatever we have. The provisions may be small and the privations great, but if that is your choice, then just give us your company and you will be a thousand times welcome.”

  Chapter 8

  Snow Lily, as the senior, and still only, imperial concubine, outranked everyone in the Great Within except the Emperor and his mother. Rank had nothing to do with power, though. Hundreds or thousands of people there could overrule, forbid, or ignore her.

  She did merit the attendance of thirty-two girls and twenty eunuchs. They washed, perfumed, and dressed her, held her parasol or bore her palanquin when she ventured outdoors, guarded her at all times—from what she could not imagine—and slaved over her wardrobe, although clothes of any sort would be an impediment to the exercise of her duties.

  The Empress Mother had hundreds of flunkies to serve her, and the Emperor thousands. Amazingly, few of them ever saw the Son of the Sun face-to-face. Snow Lily’s best count was nineteen, including herself, Chief Eunuch, and the Empress Mother. There might be others in the mandarinate or nobility that she did not know of, but the Emperor’s personal attendants numbered only ten eunuchs and four women. On the rare occasions he appeared in public, he traveled in covered chairs, hidden from view. Emperors always did, always had.

  In icy dignity, this huge river of lives flowed along the valley of centuries, bearing the Emperor and his palace like a great barge, but also nurturing the teeming life under its surface, the unseen dwellers in mud and weed. The main business of that great army of eunuchs was theft. Tribute and gifts and bribes flowed in the main gates and vanished unseen down a thousand private sewers.

  As Hare Moon was dwindling to a dawn crescent, an unexpected ripple troubled the surface of the waters—Court Astrologer announced that the first day of Fish Moon would be extremely auspicious for the Lord of the High and the Low to move to the Summer Palace. In most years, this grand event did not take place until Nightingale Moon, so a horde of women and eunuchs were rushed there to begin preparations. Among them were four of His Majesty’s personal attendants. Snow Lily had nightmares in which the four who had gone to the Summer Palace had never arrived, and worse nightmares that she might soon be dispatched to join them in whatever state of nonexistence they currently abode. It was probably a capital offense to have nightmares like that.

  She had been Absolute Purity’s concubine for almost half a year, and he had never touched her or let her touch him. How long before the Empress Mother gave up on her and let some other lucky girl try?

  Today was the auspicious day. The journey would not be long, for the Summer Palace was just another part of the huge imperial city-within-a-city, the Great Within, but the slightest change upset him. The eunuchs were laying bets over how many days he would scream and have fits, but if the she-dragon Empress Mother said it was time to move to the Summer Palace, then what star would dare argue?

  As usual, Snow Lily had withdrawn from the sacred presence at dawn and returned to her own quarters nearby. She would have a minor part to play in the day’s proceedings—as a tiny part of the imperial baggage—and her maids were waiting to primp and bedeck her. Instead of dallying an hour or two over her toilet, as she usually did just to get through a little of the interminable boredom of yet another interminable day in a lonely, interminable, pointless existence, she told them to be as quick as possible.

  Then she went back to the Emperor’s rooms, which she very rarely had reason to visit in daylight. The guards were surprised to see her, but she had mastered the Look of Authority now, and they admitted her—without her entourage, of course. She walked quickly through deserted halls to the imperial bedroom, which the Lord of the High and the Low rarely left. There, amid grandeur of gold and jade, Precious Flower was spooning the imperial breakfast into the Son of the Sun’s slobbery mouth.

  Absolute Purity was a large man of nineteen winters. Although his bulk was mostly blubber, it took four eunuchs to restrain him when he was enraged. He had the mental capacity of a two-year-old, so that he could not speak in complete sentences or understand more than the simplest words and situations. Food and bed defined his world, toilet training was beyond it, and hygiene forcibly resisted, so he often reeked like a night-soil cart. He hated people touching him, and the one time Snow Lily had made a serious attempt to do so, he had given her a magnificent yellow and mauve eye. And yet—although this might be only wishful thinking—she sometimes suspected that a glimmer of thought lurked behind his moon-face. He recognized her now, and would sometimes smile or even say, “Lily!” He enjoyed music, so she spent hours every night playing and singing to him. They also played mah-jongg together, building palaces with the tiles so that he could knock them down. He greatly distrusted strangers and hated people of anywhere near his own size. His dislike of his mother was intense and mutual.

  Precious Flower was His Majesty’s official food taster. She fed him by hand so he didn’t throw food all over the palace. She was a plain-looking servant of around twenty, taciturn to the edge of insolence, and apparently unmarried. She ranked far down the prestige ladder, yet she regarded Snow Lily with disapproval or even anger, not respect.

  “You want something, Concubine?”

  Snow Lily had never liked Precious Flower and had recently come to distrust her. “I just came to see how my beloved lord was doing. Carry on, or he’ll start screaming.” She had slipped into the others’ habit of talking about him as if he were furniture.

  Precious Flower spooned more soup into the gaping mouth.

  “Did you taste that first?” the senior concubine demanded, and was caressed by a venomous stare.

  “I always taste first. It is my duty. If you managed your duties as well as I do mine, Concubine, then your belly would be bigger than a rice sack.”

  “Taste it again, then! Let me see you finish the bowl.”

  “Go away.” Another spoonful.

  Snow Lily grabbed for the bowl. Precious Flower snatched it away. Half the soup splashed over the rug.

  “You are poisoning the Emperor!” Snow Lily said. “You put opium in his food!”

  His Majesty Absolute Purity roared for more soup. Precious Flower gave him more. “That is absurd. I will report this conversation to the Empress Mother.”

  “Do so. I guessed what you were up to when he went to the Cherry Blossom Viewing. Of course I knew he had been unusually well washed when I attended him that night, but he was a dead lump. And for the next three nights, he was a mad dog. You are addicting him to opium. No wonder he has no use for a woman.”

  “Occasional medicinal use is not pernicious,” Precious Flower said, curling her lip in anger. “The first symptom of opium addiction is extreme emaciation. The emasculation comes later. His Majesty is anything bu
t emaciated. It is true that he has to be sedated before public appearances in order to maintain the imperial dignity. He can also be rinsed off at those times. You should be grateful for that, Concubine.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  Precious Flower frowned into the bowl as if assessing how much was left. “Ever since he became big enough to be dangerous.”

  The Emperor thumped his fists on the chair, wanting more. Snow Lily had never seen him so eager for food. So the she-rat was feeding him opium, and what other foul potions? Was this the cause of his idiocy, not some childhood disease as she had been told?

  “How long have you been official food taster?”

  Precious Flower sighed as if the conversation had become tedious. “Ever since I was old enough to help out my mother. My mother succeeded the taster who brought him to this sad pass.” She continued to feed the Emperor. “You don’t know that story? You never heard of the Scorpion Summer? Back in the Year of the Firebird, when the old Emperor died, he was followed to the Fifth World by many, many more. The imperial family suffered its own epidemic. Someone used a slow poison on the babe. His taster felt no symptoms until too late, after His Majesty had eaten enough to blight him.”

  “Not what I was told. Does the Empress Mother know what you are doing?”

  “Of course I do,” said the Empress Mother.

  Snow Lily gasped, spun around, prostrated herself.

  “Look at me, child.” The Empress Mother stood a head taller than Snow Lily. Seen from the floor, she loomed like a pagoda. Her face had been carved from flint and her gaze was deadlier than a pit viper. Scraggy rather than lean, she held herself as erect as bamboo and was invariably a walking treasure of glorious gems and embroidery, painted like a Ninth Dynasty tea caddy. “You are too clever for your own good. As Precious Flower says, you should be bearing by now.” The threat was blatant.

  Trembling, Snow Lily lowered her eyes. The dowager’s wrath on those who displeased her could be fearful. But that accusation was unfair. “The fault is not mine, Your Majesty.”

  “You presume to criticize your Emperor? Do you know what happens to unwanted concubines, you foolish girl? A new Emperor always chooses his own bed toys. He never accepts the old ones. We still have crones dating back three and four reigns, moldering away in cobwebby corners. Most of them are loopier than bluebottles.”

  “I have done my best,” Snow Lily whispered. Then, louder, “I have tried everything I was taught, everything I could think of!” There was no reply, and eventually she looked up to meet the kohl-rimmed obsidian eyes and the smile of a demon image.

  “I know you have,” the harridan conceded. “And your interference here today shows that you do have my son’s well-being at heart. Who have you told about my son’s affliction?”

  “No one, Your Majesty! No one at all. I tell lies! I tell my maids he was especially demanding—”

  “I know that, too. Well, since you had to be trusted with the heart of the secret and have guessed at more, I don’t suppose it matters if you learn a few even messier details. Return to your quarters. I will send some dark clothes for you. Put them on. Be ready at the third gong.”

  Snow Lily crawled back a few paces, then rose and fled.

  Why dark clothes? Snow Lily had no dark clothes, for an imperial possession must always wear yellow. The floor tiles in the Private Quarters were yellow, the draperies yellow, the walls paneled in yellow silk. But the Empress Mother was as good as her word, and a eunuch runner arrived by the second gong with a carefully wrapped bundle. When the summons came at the third gong, it was in the form of a carrying chair and a team of the Empress Mother’s own lackeys. Refusing to answer questions, they bore Snow Lily away, leaving all her followers behind. The journey was a long one, into a part of the Great Within that she had never seen before, and it was followed by a suspenseful wait in an empty room until the Empress Mother herself was carried in to join her.

  “This,” she announced, hobbling toward a magnificently carved door that armed eunuchs were just opening for them, “is known as the Emperor’s Eye. You must keep very quiet! Do not speak a word!”

  The Eye was the smallest room Snow Lily had seen in Sublime Mountain, little more than a closet, barely large enough to hold two chairs side by side, facing a heavy drapery. The women sat, the door silently closed, leaving them in complete darkness, and then the curtain softly moved aside, to reveal a grille, and beyond that a vast throne room.

  The Emperor himself was there, holding court in all his golden finery. His eyes were open. Once in a while, they moved, but the rest of him did not. He sat like a resplendent work of art, obviously drugged senseless. At his feet knelt a frail old man massively robed in scarlet and blue, who at a guess must be First Mandarin. Another ancient was in the process of completing his kowtow before the throne. In the back, many more waited.

  “The Great Council,” the Empress Mother rasped softly in Snow Lily’s ear. Apparently, rules of silence applied to her no more than any other rules did. “The first time he has presided in person. Do you understand the sedation now?”

  Snow Lily nodded. Without the sedation, Absolute Purity would be thrashing in a screaming panic. But what purpose did this charade serve? Even fully conscious, he would not understand one thousandth of what was being done here in his name.

  “His Highness,” First Mandarin intoned, “implores Your Majesty to hear of regrettable unrest in the provinces of Dongguan, Kermang, and Shiman.”

  “Prince Tungusic Vision,” the Empress Mother explained, “senior prince of the Empire, heir presumptive. Doesn’t know a glove from a shoe now.”

  The old man on his knees was peering around him as if lost. A mandarin of the fourth rank swept forward from the sidelines to stand alongside him and read out a report about rioting and burning towns in the south, attributed to misguided peasants calling themselves the Bamboo Banner.

  “Bawolung and Jingyan will be getting infected soon,” the Empress Mother remarked sourly.

  Prince Tungusic Vision was thanked for his report by First Mandarin and given leave to withdraw. His purely figurative mandarin assistant helped him rise and steadied him as he backed away, bowing.

  Prince Crystal Sea was proclaimed and helped forward to kowtow. He seemed even more bewildered than Tungusic Vision, and his face was a skull. Snow Lily had seen enough addicts to guess that the body hidden inside all those pleats and folds of silk was skeletal and barely functional.

  The Empress Mother pulled a face. “Typical opium smoker.”

  Like his predecessor, Prince Crystal Sea served as a ventriloquist’s dummy. A mandarin reported on famine developing in the northern provinces. He dared to compare it to the famine of the Year of the Swan, which probably meant that it would be much worse.

  After him came Prince Gratify Poet to describe flood damage along several major rivers. He was a man of middle years, capable of reading out his own report, but the Empress Mother’s comment on him was even more damning, possibly the most terrible accusation possible by Good Land standards. “He killed his own father.” At Snow Lily’s gasp of horror, she added, “Very touchy temper.”

  After the princes came senior mandarins, identified by office, not name. Supreme Guardian was trying to gather the widely scattered army to counter the Bamboo Banner insurrection, but spring mud, spring planting, spring floods, and a drastic shortage of funds were delaying inevitable success. Senior Gatherer of Bounty described a catastrophic collapse of tax revenue. Court Astrologer warned that a broom star was being observed in the constellation of the Fishing Net, and another in the Cart. Both were still small and hard to see, but if they grew over the next couple of moons, as some broom stars did, they would be exceedingly inauspicious and cause widespread panic. There would be an eclipse in Nightingale Moon.

  That news actually provoked a reaction from First Mandarin. A warning of the
eclipse would be distributed to all provincial and city governors, he said, so that ritual countermeasures could be organized in time.

  The Empress Mother sent some signal then, or she had issued orders previously, because the drape silently closed, shutting off the women’s view of the hall. The door behind them opened, flooding the Emperor’s Eye with light. The Empress Mother rose stiffly and turned to leave.

  “You will not speak a word of what you have seen.”

  “Oh no, Your Majesty, I won’t! But I do not understand!” Snow Lily was as confused as Absolute Purity must be. Why had she been shown all this, what was the Council supposed to achieve, and was the Empire really falling apart?

  The old lady stopped and looked back. “Of course you do not understand! But now you know of all the troubles the Good Land suffers, all of which may be your fault.”

  “Mine, Your Majesty? How could I possibly have—”

  “Court Astrologer is of the opinion that Heaven is displaying its displeasure at the Emperor’s failure to produce a son. I realize that he is not the most ardent of lovers, but you must redouble your efforts, for everybody’s sake.”

  The old witch paused with a hand on her carrying chair. “But I hope you have the wit now to see why Emperors so rarely attend meetings of the Great Council and most certainly never address it. Suppose one did and misquoted a report or decreed an impossible solution? The loss of face would be intolerable. Keep your mouth shut.” She took her seat and, while her attendants were arranging her robes for her, added, “I will explain more fully when we are at the Summer Palace.”

  An imperial progress was a major event, with bands, horses, guards, and hordes of officials, guests, flunkies, and sweepers. The Emperor was carried in a grandiose golden palanquin on the shoulders of sixteen bearers, and his mother followed in one hardly less gaudy. His senior concubine—whom he was rumored to favor so extravagantly that he had refused to accept any others yet—came right behind, peering out through pinholes at hundreds of heads and raised bottoms, for faces were all pressed in the dirt as the Son of the Sun passed. She wondered why a procession was necessary at all when no one ever really saw it. No doubt this was a very foolish question and she was an ignorant and stupid girl even to think it.