Chapter 52 A Nation Beautiful and Wounded #2
But the farther away from the capital we got, the more obvious the famine became.
The land might still be green, the flowers of early summer still abloom, but almost everything edible was dead.
The mulberry trees stood wilted, the soybeans dried.
The fields of wheat stretched on ghost-pale.
Sometimes I spotted people standing in them, and they were all so thin their clothes fluttered loose around their bodies.
The first village we passed by, I tore my eyes away from my curtain, unable to look.
I didn’t want to be broken by the sight of sick grandfathers, or mothers with sunken eyes, or little children toddling about with visible ribs.
I didn’t want to see the holes in their roofs, swallowing the light of the languid sun.
But then I started forcing myself to look, because not looking felt even more wrong.
When I sat in my comfortable carriage, full and swathed in soft silks, not looking felt like forgetting.
When I returned to the palace, where the banquet tables were stacked high and the pear trees drooped heavy with fruit, I wanted to remember places like these.
We gave out what we could. I told Ciyi to calculate what provisions we could spare—food supply, clothing, shoes without holes—so that we could pass them out to the villages.
When the recipients asked who to thank, I named the Rice Wife.
I told them the story of a girl who grew up on a farm, one who had somehow survived to marry the crown prince.
“She is the one who sponsored my husband’s mission,” I would tell them, and Ciyi would nod and play along.
It was not out of egotism that I told them this.
I had been thinking of all those cold New Year’s mornings, when nobody had come to give any Blessings.
I was remembering the night on the hill, when the spark went to Bao’s heart, and everyone—even for just one night—had believed greatness was possible.
I was picturing all the letters I had received after my wedding retreat, asking things of the House nobody would have dared ask before.
It was important, I now viscerally understood, for one to believe.
That far away, in the capital, behind impenetrable palace walls, where there lived magic and unimaginable power, there was at least one person who cared about them, who thought of them.
When I named the Rice Wife, I had only told those villagers what I wished someone had once told me.
It was near Tieza that I wrote my first Blessing.
We had taken a winding back road through Torun County.
Beside an old river, under old larches, I had spotted a field of graves.
Dried buttercups, valerian, and wild asters lay at their bases.
In the traditions of Lu’an, it was customary to pay respect to the dead we passed, to appease their ghosts, so I sent Ciyi and my servants away and visited them.
Only a few graves had names on them. Presumably, only a few families could afford a scribe to translate names into written characters, and when they did it was mostly for patriarchs or eldest sons.
Even fewer held descriptions, to tell their lives’ truths.
I bowed to each of them in turn. Under one of the unnamed graves, someone had laid a little doll.
It had hair made of yarn and a dress woven from old cotton, and an inked smile under round, black eyes.
Something about it made me stop. I stared at it for a long time, until the sun had begun to set a poppy red. And then all the grief, sorrow, and bitter anger accumulated over the years came pouring out at once.
When I carved a poem into the soil, it was for that nameless girl at first. But soon it became also a song for my sister Larkspur, and my two eldest brothers, and the children who came in the middle. A song for Ba and Ma, and for my village, languishing in the famine.
For Pima, unhappy and ashamed in the capital. For the other eunuchs, brought to the palace young and frightened. For Hu, the maid with the cut-off tongue. For all the servants in the Cypress Pavilion, who had once told each other stories by the fire but were now just as silent.
For everyone else in Tensha who were not in books, or memorials, or poems.
Let the suffering be over. There has been so much of it, enough of it. Let there be no more.
As I traced those characters on the ground, the Ancestors saw in them truth and emotion, and they vanished with a flurry of sparks.
My eyes stung as I stood again. Nothing had happened, but I had known it wouldn’t.
The Blessing I had written had not been for now but the future; the Ancestors had told me so.
In two years, perhaps three, the wheat fields would turn golden again in the perimeter all around Torun.
The mulberry trees here would once again bear fruit.
By then, I would be gone. Nobody would suspect the spell had come from me. But perhaps some little girl would stumble upon the doll, where the magic had begun, and see that its eyes had become full of light. And perhaps, even without anyone telling her, she would believe that anything was possible.
A Harvest Song, I thought into the setting sun, having decided on a title for the poem I was already beginning to forget. It was the spell I’d wanted to write from the start, when I had first decided to learn how to read. Now, more than a year later and far from home, I had done it.