NORTHERN SONG 1042
MY SECRET SWEETHEART AND I strolled down Imperial Boulevard, our hands brushing but never touching. We were two boys of seventeen, something sweet and heady blossoming between us like the pear trees that lined the banks of the Bian River. I was the son of the emperor’s favourite concubine, and Sun Tao was a sword-swallower famous far beyond the entertainment quarter, and we were so delicious and so scandalous and so right .
‘Do you want to be emperor some day?’ asked Sun Tao, biting wetly into an overripe peach he had plucked from a tree.
‘No. I do not have the stomach for it.’ I let my palm drift idly over the black fence running along the bank of the river, fighting the urge to lace my fingers through Sun Tao’s. ‘I would rather set a snake loose in my chaofu than dole out a punishment.’
Ahead of us was the Xuande Gate, painted a stark blood red and adorned with golden tacks. Its walls were decorated with phoenixes and floating clouds; two glazed dragons bit down on each end of the rooftop ridge, tails arched into the dusky sky. The Imperial Corridors lined either side of the river, merchants hawking their wares from makeshift shops notched into the corridors. Bolts of silk spilled into the street, and I longed to examine each one in detail, to imagine the luxurious garments they could be stitched into.
Sun Tao finished his peach and tossed the pit into the river. It landed on a lotus and capsized the flower. ‘What have you against the punishments?’
‘They are grotesque. If you have never seen a set of eyebrows sliced off with a sword, I do not wish the image upon you. Particularly when the victim does not deserve it. Last week a boy was executed for murdering his father – which is fair, perhaps – but his teacher was subjected to the same thousand cuts, simply for not imparting the right wisdom to his student. Tell me, is that just?’
Sun Tao shrugged, as though it were of little consequence to him. ‘It is the way things are done, and one must trust they are done for a reason.’
My attraction to him waned a little. I had thought him more a visionary, but perhaps the repeated thrusting of steel down his gullet had sawn away any sense of enlightenment in him.
‘I cannot explain it,’ I said, looking away from him. A donkey clopped along the boulevard, pulling a wooden cart laden with millet. One of its eyes had become mangey, and flies pestered at it. ‘When I witness suffering, it is as though I feel it in my own body.’
‘Empathy.’ Sun Tao tsk ed. ‘The human curse.’
One from which you do not appear to suffer , I muttered inwardly.
Righteous fire filling my chest, I urged, ‘China is greater than this. We can light the sky with fireworks and print books in their thousands. We can send a ship to sea with magnetic compasses, and trust it may find its way home. And still we butcher our people like animals. We offer them no way of proving their innocence, no trial, no counsel. It is barbarous and wrong.
‘There is a girl in the palace keep right this moment,’ I went on. We crossed a balustraded stone bridge with a gilded pavilion crowning its centre. Fishing boats bobbed cheerfully on the water. ‘She was caught last night scaling the walls, trying to break in for an audience with the emperor. A runty thing, by all accounts, and the guards confess she poses little real threat, but still they would subject her to forced suicide. Perhaps I should throw myself before the court and insist on receiving the punishment in her stead. My mother would soon demand the emperor have mercy. They might see the cruelty for what it is.’
Sun Tao laughed and shook his head. ‘Or they might execute you without a second thought. But you always have been a martyr. A naive one at that.’
More heat flared in my lungs. ‘Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.’
Then, without a backwards glance at my sweetheart’s muscled frame, I swept towards the palace with resolve steeling my ribs.
Upon my gusty arrival at the palace keep, the guarding officer – Wu Baihu, a round-bellied eunuch in a silken purple robe – furrowed his brow.
‘Zhao Sheng,’ he acknowledged with a slight head-bow. ‘I thought you were attending the Refined Music Society with your mother.’
‘I demand to see the prisoner,’ I said, puffing up my chest, tilting up my jaw, drawing myself to my full height. ‘The emperor has authorized it.’
Wu Baihu stilled. ‘To what end?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘I suppose not,’ he said warily, as though sensing a trap just beyond his scope. ‘But I shall accompany you regardless.’ His hand went to the loop of brass keys at his waist.
I swallowed hard, my heart thudding. I had not expected to be accommodated so readily, and now the enormity of what I was about to do left me winded.
‘Who is she?’ I asked, in an attempt to orientate myself in the moment. To remind myself of the why .
‘A nong.’ A peasant. A nobody. ‘She has not said a word, nor uttered a name – even when threatened with the bamboo – but Jiang Wen recognized her. A pig farmer’s daughter. She weaves mats and sells them at the market.’
‘Have her family paid the remittance yet?’
‘They have not the coppers.’
Another reason I loathed the Five Punishments. The rich bought their freedom, while the poor only watched in despair as their loved ones were tormented and executed. Life itself should not be a commodity.
We pushed into the keep, and I fought the urge to retch at the smell of unwashed bodies and stale waste buckets. It was dingy, with no natural light and a single reluctant lantern burning on the furthest stone wall. A far cry from the gilded splendour of the rest of the palace.
There was a row of cells separated by iron bars, but only two had occupants. In the first hunched an older man wearing only undergarments. His arms and face were covered in skin tags, and his back striped with angry welts. He rocked back and forward, gibbering in a foreign tongue. A Mongol prisoner.
Then there was the girl.
She did not cower in the corner of the cell, as many prisoners did. Nor did she press her face desperately to the bars, as though sheer force of will might cause them to bend round her. Instead, she lay flat on her back, one heel kicked over the other, her palms rested on her stomach and her fingers laced together. She might have been asleep, had her eyes not been fixed resolutely on the ceiling – where hung a thick brown rope, looped into a noose.
A wooden stool sat squarely beneath it.
An invitation.
We drew closer, but she did not cast us a single glance. She wore ragged duanhe made of coarse cloth, and her bare feet were dark with grime. Her lank black hair was shaggy around her shoulders.
I cleared my throat, and it echoed in the dim keep. ‘Excuse me. What is your name?’
Nothing. Not even the slightest twitch of a muscle.
This was not at all how I had pictured my act of self-sacrifice unfolding.
‘My name is Zhao Sheng, and I am the emperor’s son.’ At this, she snapped upright, as though poison had suddenly been released into her bloodstream. But still she said nothing, simply stared at me as though I were a ghost – or a monster. ‘If you tell me your name, I will take your punishment for you.’
There was something to her tempestuous stare that made my stomach churn. An almost-familiarity, a primal attraction, an unnameable force I had never felt before in my life. There was a loathing there too, which I could not quite understand given that we were strangers.
I imagined how she must see me, in all my meretricious costumery. The red court robes, the brocade ribbons, the jade ornaments and bracelets, the butter-soft black leather shoes and socks of damask silk. Hatred erupted from her like volcanic ash, cloying and deathly.
‘Why?’ Her first word was a croak; the water jug in the corner of the cell had been left untouched. A stubborn ox of a girl.
Stoic, I met her unflinching gaze. ‘For it is wrong.’
Wu Baihu stepped forward, his official purple robes grazing the cold stone floor. ‘What is the meaning of this, Zhao Sheng?’
My throat was dry, and I longed to grab the water jug from the mule-girl’s cell. ‘I mean to protest the cruelty of the Five Punishments.’
‘Protest?’ Wu Baihu’s expression was somewhere between incredulous and indignant. ‘You will be dead, child.’
‘My mother will surely pay the forty-two guàn and remit the death penalty.’ I gulped back the fear licking up my chest. What if she didn’t? ‘The bamboo strokes I will receive willingly.’ The rack of canes on the wall sent an involuntary shudder through me.
Wu Baihu’s mouth widened, letting loose a bark of ill-humoured laughter. ‘Have you gone mad?’
‘Perhaps,’ I admitted. ‘Will you – the court – allow it?’
‘I will not,’ the girl said sharply, standing suddenly and sending the wooden stool clattering on to its side.
My attention snapped from Wu Baihu back to her. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I will do it.’ She picked up the stool with unshaking hands, setting it tidily beneath the noose once more. ‘I will kill myself. I do not want to live in his debt.’ She climbed on to the stool, one filthy foot after the other, and stared up at the length of fraying rope with a dark expression on her face.
Panic rose in me. ‘You will owe me nothing.’
She tilted her jaw back down, glaring at me once more. ‘Why would you do this? Guilt? Shame?’
‘Simply because it is right.’
She shook her head, long, slow, disbelieving. ‘You do not remember.’
‘Remember what?’ A shiver bolted up my spine.
‘Any of it.’
Her voice was barely a whisper, and yet there was a pulse of hatred, of heat, between us that I did not understand. She was a stranger to me. So why did my bones grind with recognition? Why did the chambers of my heart flutter beneath her furious gaze?
On the periphery of my mind, of my very consciousness, there was a kind of almost-comprehension, a veil not lifting but fluttering, and I knew something significant sat behind it. But what could it be? Had I met this girl before? I thought not, and yet …
I took a step towards her, gripping the bars so tightly my knuckles turned white. ‘You would sooner die than have me help you.’
Her teeth ground together like a pestle and mortar. ‘I would.’
I thought of calling her a fool, but then, would I be so different to Sun Tao? We all made our choices. I could not begin to comprehend the complexities of this girl’s life, the hardships that had driven her to scale the palace wall in the first place. She had wanted an audience with the emperor – at any cost. What had made her so desperate? I would likely never know or understand. The thought felt slick and slimy as an eel in my stomach.
Casting a final defiant glance in my direction, the girl began to loop the noose around her neck. Wu Baihu did not move to stop her.
‘No!’ My pulse hammered against my skull.
I had inadvertently driven her to the thing she had so boldly resisted until now.
The door to the keep banged suddenly open, and another guard half dragged a wrist-bound man along the floor. The new prisoner’s head was lolling dangerously, as though he had recently sustained a blow to the temple.
At the sight of him, the girl yanked the noose over her head and leaped down from the stool in a frenzy. ‘Bàba!’
My blood ran cold. The father who could not afford the remittance.
The sound of her shrill voice jolted the man back to full consciousness, and he yanked the guard forward towards his daughter with a look of existential fear on his face. ‘My girl, my girl, I will not let them do this to you, I will – Arrrrgh!’
The guard had grabbed a bamboo cane from the rack and brought it down on the man’s back.
‘No!’ begged the girl, her face suddenly childlike and terrified. She wrapped her hands around the bars, our fingers grazing with a curious reverberation. ‘Please! Leave him alone!’
Still the lashes fell.
I looked at her, and she looked at me, eyes strained and watery, and she nodded without nodding, pleaded without pleading, something rich and complex knotting between us, and I threw myself to the ground beneath the bamboo, and as the pain rained down on my back I knew, somehow, somewhere, I had felt such agonies before; had felt the skin and flesh on my back scream out, felt the furious stripes of pain all the way to the bone.
And I also knew that somehow, somewhere, this girl was to blame.