River Lanterns

She did not know how much time had passed before she opened her eyes. The ladies-in-waiting and court physicians were all kneeling outside the door, mute as sealed cicadas. All around was silence. Only the soft scent of medicine drifted quietly through the air. Layer upon layer of gauze curtains lay between the woman leaning against the carved bed and the stately man standing outside them. At the sight of her waking, the young emperor strode to the bedside. "Mother-Empress, you are awake at last." Against the pale yellow of his robes, a trace of emotion showed on his face, while those deep, distant eyes were filled with grief and anxious concern. A faint comfort stirred in her heart. After all, he was the child she had raised with her own hands; the bond between mother and son was still something to remember.... Thinking of that bond, she lifted a hand and beckoned him inside the curtains, to her side. When the others had all withdrawn, she called him by the pet name of his childhood. "I know my days are almost over." Raising a hand to touch her son's handsome face, she shook her head lightly, stopping the words of comfort he had not yet spoken. "There are things you ought to know. I am not your birth mother." Calmly she let out the sentence that had lodged in her throat for more than twenty years. She glanced at the emperor, who was gripping her hand tightly. Seeing no surprise on his face, she smiled despite herself. "You knew long ago, didn't you?" Years before, someone had secretly told him she was not the woman who had borne him. There had even been whispers in the palace that his ill-fated birth mother had died at her hands. If he hated her for it, that too would only have been human. Yet he merely tucked the quilt more carefully around her. "The grace of being raised is greater than the grace of being born. From the day I was placed in Mother-Empress's care, you have been the only mother in my heart." Tears slipped from the corners of her eyes. Whether that was comfort or courtesy, that one sentence was enough to warm what little life still remained to her. She lifted her head. "Come. Let me tell you a story. I remember it still. It was an especially beautiful morning. A fine mist of rain had just fallen, and the blue-stone road was speckled everywhere with little puddles. Whenever carts rolled past, flecks of mud would splash up against my bare feet. Birds cried now and then by my ear, and a branch of peach blossom stretched over the wall above my head, scattering petals into the wind and rain until my whole body seemed scented with flowers. It was still early, and there were few people in the market. The man set to watch us was dozing in a corner against the wall, but he never let go of the rope in his hand. The other end was tied around my waist and the waists of several other girls. He was afraid we would run. Taking advantage of his inattention, the girl standing beside me tugged my hand. 'I am ten,' she whispered."

I turned and looked at her, startled in spite of myself. There was something in her face, in the shape of her brows and eyes, that resembled mine. "I am eleven," she said. The road had been hard, and her face was streaked with dirt. I reached out and quickly wiped it away for her. In that marketplace, with grass markers stuck above our heads, we were goods waiting to be sold. How could such a bedraggled look ever win a buyer's favor? "Make yourself look a little cleaner," I whispered. "Only then can you be sold into a decent household. Otherwise..." I glanced toward the trafficker crouching by the wall and lowered my voice. "Otherwise there will only be more suffering." Perhaps she heard the concern in my words. Gratitude flickered in her eyes. "Elder sister," she called me, her tone suddenly intimate. "Did you come here from hardship too? Is there anyone still left at home?" I hesitated for a moment. Then I nodded, and shook my head. "No one." The year before, the Yellow River had flooded. Countless people were driven from their homes. Even those who fled a thousand miles south into Jiangnan could not escape the fate of starving or dying of sickness on the road. I had seen too many such human miseries along the way. Looking at her patched clothes, I knew at once that she too had come by way of such ruin. "My family is dead too," she said. There was a catch in her voice, but she never cried. "To have stayed alive is already a blessing. Since we're alive, we should go on living. Believe me. Our lives will not always be like this."

"Well said." I had been talking with her so intently that I had not noticed someone come to stand beside us. It was a woman of about fifty, spare and thin, with a quiet, cold air about her. She was not what one would call beautiful, yet from the line of her brows and eyes one could tell that in youth she must once have been striking. She looked at me with a smile that seemed half amusement. "You said just now that life will not forever be this miserable?" I nodded. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the edge of a gilt command tablet showing from her sleeve, and all at once I understood that this might be the turning point of my life. "As long as we are alive, there is hope," I said, meeting her gaze and forcing courage into my voice. "Heaven let us live. It will surely leave us a road to walk. Perhaps one day, in some place, we may yet meet a benefactor. Will you be ours?" The woman laughed. "What an interesting little thing you are. Come with me. No need to ask where. However poor the future may be, it cannot be worse than the way you are now, can it?"

She truly was a benefactor. The one who took us away was Lady Kasuga, and the place she took us to was the most splendid place in this world: the forbidden palace. Though we were only newly arrived servant girls, still the lowliest creatures to be bullied by all, at least we no longer worried over food and clothing, and there was hope for the future. We no longer had to fear being sold into brothels or theater troupes and spending the rest of our days under beatings and trampling. Feiyan said to me, "Qingye, Lady Kasuga was your benefactor. You were mine. Without you, I do not know where I would be now." She said this while we were kneeling beneath the corridor of a side hall in Zichen Palace, scrubbing the floorboards. Though no one else was around, I still motioned for her to lower her voice. From the day we entered the palace, everyone had known us as sisters, and sisters did not speak that way to one another. "I am your elder sister," I reminded her.

At the time, I truly believed that until the day I died, I would always be her elder sister. I had never imagined that only ten years later everything would begin to bend another way. Ten years on, under Lady Kasuga's training, I had become the steward of a small waterside pavilion in the imperial garden. Though it was no more than a modest place among the many buildings of the palace, my rank and standing were already far from those of the little drudge who had first entered the gates. Feiyan had remained by my side the whole while. When I was assigned to Liuguang Water Pavilion, she was assigned there with me. Liuguang Water Pavilion was only a very small structure in the imperial garden, set in a remote corner. The emperor never came there. Even the consorts and ladies who passed through the garden seldom turned their eyes that way. The young girls under us often complained that such days were dull and hopeless, but Feiyan and I found the quiet hard to come by. Once the work of the day was done, we would sit beneath the eaves and talk, do a little sewing, or else play chess and read. There were many things to do, yet none of them could quite cover the loneliness underneath. So that day, when Feiyan suggested making river lanterns, I did not object. Hand over hand, she taught me to make the kind from her home, shaping thin gauze into little lotuses, setting a stub of candle inside, then pressing a tiny slip of paper beneath the flame with a wish written on it. At midnight, one would set them into the river and let them drift away into the distance. I agreed to make the lanterns with her, and to release them that night, but I forbade the paper wish. In the palace, what was most forbidden was any hint of magic or prayercraft; the slightest stain of it could cost one a life. A strip of paper might look harmless, but if it fell into the hands of someone with malice.... Feiyan nodded. "I understand. Then before we set them afloat, we can just whisper our wishes to the candle. It will be the same." She laughed, still with something childlike and mischievous about her. Ten years in the palace had long since rubbed away the misery of our childhood. Just as Lady Kasuga always said, if one wished to survive in such a place, one must learn to hide one's heart where other people could not see it. We were only lowly women; the only thing we could pass off as disguise was a look of guileless simplicity. "Too many schemes in that head of yours," I said, tickling her. "What did you wish for?" In truth, there was no need to ask. What wishes could a young woman in her twenties still have, after losing her family and being trapped inside the deep palace? Nothing more than the hope of meeting a good man, someone on whom she might lean for the rest of her life. A few more years, and at twenty-five we would be released from the palace. Surely Feiyan's wish was that by then she might meet someone who would give her half a lifetime of warmth. Warmth. The word suddenly turned sour inside my chest, and the lantern in my hand seemed to grow heavy. Feiyan's wish was to leave the palace and meet a good man. But mine? What could my wish possibly be?

The river lanterns had not drifted far before a young guard in green found us. The two lotus lamps he had fished out of the water were tossed onto the ground before us. There was a faint anger on his young face. "Do you know what lies downstream? Have you forgotten the rules of the palace? You are far too bold." I had always been the one to shield Feiyan, yet before I could even speak, she had already stepped in front of me. "I am sorry. We did not know what was downstream. I made that lantern only because I was idle and wanted to play with it. If there has been offense..." She looked at the guard, then at me. "Punish me instead."

She looked at him with trembling lips, as startled as a little bird frightened in moonlight. The guard seemed to realize that he had spoken too harshly and softened his voice. "Let there not be a next time. You truly came within a hair of causing a great disaster. We knew only that the water from Liuguang Water Pavilion ran downstream and eventually wound into the imperial pond. We did not know that before that, a branch stream bent away into the imperial study hidden deep among the blossoms at the far end of the garden. If the night guard Zhenxiang had not picked up those two river lanterns before anyone else found them, the chief steward would likely have dragged the two of us away by now.... After Zhenxiang left, Feiyan and I did not speak, and neither of us slept. Feiyan seemed to have thoughts on her mind, tossing about all night. And as I watched his retreating figure vanish into the thick darkness, bright tears suddenly welled in my eyes. Zhenxiang. The moment I heard his name, every thread of my thoughts came undone. Of course he did not remember me. After such a terrible ruin, who would ever believe that the porcelain-doll girl from those days was still alive?

There had been a reason I insisted on bringing Feiyan, who looked somewhat like me, into the palace and calling her my own younger sister. What I had wanted to borrow was the identity of her dead elder sister, the other daughter of that private tutor who had perished on the road while fleeing disaster. Qingye was only a name I had spoken casually. My real name was Ye Bingli, of the Ye clan of Qingzhou. When I was eleven, my father died because of a treacherous minister's frame-up. Or perhaps he truly had been guilty; who can say? The ending would have been the same either way. The mighty Ye clan of Qingzhou had been made a stepping-stone when a new sovereign took the throne. With a single decree, the whole family was condemned. Feiyan could never have understood why there was such depth of coldness and such finality hidden in my bones. She could not. When a person has watched every member of her family be beheaded on the execution ground, what sort of shadows will be planted in her heart, and how will those shadows go on to change the rest of her life? The fact that I escaped at all was pure accident. On the day before the disaster broke, the Ye family's eldest daughter had gone to a temple with her servants to fulfill a vow; halfway there they ran into bandits, and the carriage plunged into a ravine. That was likely what those people told the censor, and so they were at ease in believing that the entire Ye clan had been wiped out. In truth, amid the chaos of that clash between servants and bandits, a boy of thirteen descended like something sent from heaven and saved me. He hid with me for a night in a hut deep in the hills and cooked sweet, fragrant porridge for me to drink.

Many years later, it would still be hard for me to describe how absolute a little girl's first awakening to love can be. What I do know is this: in Ye Bingli's memory, Zhenxiang was the last fragment of beauty left in all my life.

The day after I parted from Zhenxiang and returned to Qingzhou, I saw my parents and elder brothers thrown into prison carts and taken to the execution ground. When the headsman's blade came down, I bit hard into my own wrist. My tears would not stop, but I could not dare let a sound escape me. I was only eleven. I had not even the strength to collect the bodies of my own kin. I could only watch them thrown into a mass grave on barren ground, their heads and bodies severed apart, with not even half a gravestone to mark them. After that I drifted from hand to hand and fell into the grasp of traffickers. I never saw Zhenxiang again. The "we will meet another day" he had said when we parted became empty words forever. He must have thought me dead. On the yellowed notice pasted outside Qingzhou's city gate, among the names of the Ye clan condemned as traitors, the three characters for Ye Bingli were written plainly enough. If I had never met Zhenxiang again, I think I really would have believed that Ye Bingli had died on the day she fled Qingzhou. Yet after many years, he appeared before me once more. All my reason was drowned in an instant by the surge of memories I had tried to abandon. I wanted nothing more than to fling myself toward him, to borrow the solid breadth of his shoulder and cry out all the grievances I had swallowed through those years. But I did not dare. I was afraid that the name Ye Bingli would bring disaster upon him. Gradually we grew familiar. Whenever Zhenxiang was on duty, he would come sit for a while at Liuguang Water Pavilion. Now and then we would chat, now and then set up a board and play a game. He did not speak much, and there was no warmth of intimacy in it, yet that alone was enough to satisfy me beyond measure. Every time he left, I would stand by the water, looking far across the dark riverbank toward Ruiyun Hall, where he kept watch through the night. A confused tenderness would rise in my heart.

I do not know whether, in such quiet nights, he ever felt lonely. But I knew that he would surely be like me, staring at the running water until his thoughts strayed.

The scattered lanterns drifted into the river, flickering in and out, floating toward the place where he was.

He abruptly let go of the hand he had laid on the shoulder of the woman whose back was turned to me. When the woman in the goose-yellow palace dress turned around, the face I saw was Feiyan's. For a moment the sky spun and the earth turned under me. All the words I had prepared jammed hard in my throat, unable to come out. Under Zhenxiang's cool, faintly distant gaze, I had no strength left to ask anything more of the details between them. I only said the first words that came to me, though they were far from my heart. "You both know that in this palace, a private affair is punishable by death." Then I seized Feiyan by the hand and dragged her away. Back at Liuguang Water Pavilion, Feiyan looked at me, the rosy flush on her face lingering for a long time. She said that Zhenxiang had told her he liked her. She said they had already been meeting in secret for two months. Heaven had answered a human wish. It had been love at first sight, she said. Those eight words were like narrow blades, each one sharp enough to cut across my heart. Feiyan noticed none of what was strange in me. She only smiled, utterly content. "Elder sister, you'll help me keep the secret, won't you? He said he will wait for me. In a few more years, when I can leave the palace..." Her voice drifted lower and lower until it thinned into mist.

I had loved him earlier than she had. But by then all things had already become fixed beyond my power to change. The way I came to meet the late emperor was, in truth, a beautiful mistake. For the first time, I wrote the feelings in my heart onto a scrap of paper and tucked it into a river lantern, letting it go with the current. On it I told Zhenxiang what had long been hidden in me: that I loved him; that night after night I thought of him, remembering the figure of his back against the flowing water; all those little hopes, all that sour, tender sweetness. One by one I entrusted them to that sheet of paper and let the water bear them away. I thought that whether he was moved or whether he refused me, for my part the ending would at least be a clear answer. I had no delusion of snatching anything back from Feiyan's hands.

The lantern had been in the water only a short while when a line of palace lamps came through the dark. Yet the figure at the far end of that light was not Zhenxiang. It was only much later that I learned why, on that very night, he had slipped away from his post: he had made an appointment to meet Feiyan in secret.

That night was too long, long enough to change everything. When Zhenxiang and Feiyan came hurrying over on hearing the news, Qingye, the stewardess of Liuguang Water Pavilion, had already changed into the emperor's newest favorite. That lotus river lantern lay on the ground, soaked through. When Zhenxiang's gaze swept over it, his face changed ever so slightly. And as the emperor led me by the hand past him, I saw that his eyes were full of grief splintered into pieces.

Later, Zhenxiang finally learned that I had loved him. He finally learned as well that I was the Ye Bingli of ten years before. And I, in turn, finally learned that the one he had first liked had been me. But on that day Feiyan had taken every blame upon herself, making him believe that the person who had secretly set the river lanterns adrift could only have been her. Such a tiny misunderstanding, so small it hardly deserved to be called one, destroyed every possibility between us. Tears streamed down my face. I choked and reached for his arm, wanting to hold him back, but he only stepped lightly aside. "Your Grace," he called me, and there was a deliberate respect in his tone. That cool remoteness, that careful distance, was enough to make me understand his heart. He looked at me. The sorrow had vanished from his eyes; only a sort of firmness remained. "At first, yes, it was because of that lantern. But afterward I truly did fall in love with Feiyan. The river lantern was only a misunderstanding. The one I finally loved was that woman as fragile and gentle as a little bird. She is simple and good. I do not want to hurt her." That sentence was the greatest mistake of Zhenxiang's life. He could never have understood how much unspeakable pain lay in the heart of a desperate woman, nor how deep the hatred would be in the one who heard such words. I was never certain whether, in that misunderstanding, Feiyan had deliberately allowed certain truths to remain hidden. But at the time, I was more willing to believe that she had done it on purpose.

Zhenxiang's life was buried in a single lightly spoken sentence of mine. At that time war had just flared in the northwest. He was, after all, a man of spirit, still with a hero's blood that could not easily be extinguished. So one day, as an inner-court guard, he suddenly knelt at the emperor's feet and asked leave to go to war. He said that at such a perilous hour, to go to the frontier and defend home and country was a man's proper duty. The emperor was displeased. "You are one of my own guards. How can you..." I cut across his words. "Guard Zhenxiang's heart is all loyalty. Your Majesty ought to be pleased." Then I tugged at the emperor's sleeve and spoke in a murmur beside his ear. "Has Your Majesty not always wished to promote this man? Let him go to the frontier and temper himself there. If he earns merit, he can be used more heavily in days to come. Besides, is Your Majesty not worried that in the army there are commanders beyond your full control, and in need of a trusted man to keep an eye on the grand marshal?" Those few sentences made the emperor nod again and again. With one sweep of his hand, he granted Zhenxiang's request to join the campaign.

And to his dying day he never knew that in the third month after he left the capital, I got Feiyan drunk and sent her onto the emperor's bed. On the surface, the reason was for an heir. By then I was already empress, favored above the six palaces because of the emperor's wholehearted devotion. But I had no child, and without offspring the position of empress never truly stood firm. I had sought medicine in secret, only to have the physician finally tell me that I would probably never in my life bear a child of my own. His Majesty said nothing openly, yet all his words and gestures made his meaning clear: he tacitly allowed me to adopt the child borne by another palace woman. Lady Sun, blunt as ever, advised me simply to borrow another womb. In that instant Feiyan's face flashed through my mind. She resembled me; everyone in the palace knew us as sisters. If she became a consort and bore a child, then one day, more important still, Zhenxiang would be free to marry any other woman in the world. Any woman at all, except Feiyan. If I could not have him, then she would lose him as well. I hated her. I could not bear to imagine the day Zhenxiang returned triumphant and asked the emperor to grant him a marriage. Yes, that is exactly what Feiyan once said to me. "Elder sister, Zhenxiang says that when he comes back this time, he will ask His Majesty to bestow me upon him in marriage." Her whole heart was fixed on leaving the palace, on dreaming of the day she might put on bridal robes for him. But I, no matter how I tried, had no way to make myself stand quietly and watch her with Zhenxiang together. To watch you two walking hand in hand, growing white-haired side by side? No. Never. Feiyan, whether or not you had once meant to steal my happiness, I would not let you go. Since heaven had already intertwined our fates ten years before, then the latter half of your life was destined to be like mine, buried away in this deep palace where no sun ever truly reached.

I was already a trapped beast. So you would not escape either.

When Feiyan reached the seventh day of her hunger strike, Ping'er, the maid who attended me most closely, said, "Consort Yan is truly pitiful." The sunlight that day was bright, the spring wind gentle and warm. I stood beneath the corridor watching willow threads drift through the air and said, only lightly, "The pitiful always have something hateful in them."

On the second day after I lost myself to the emperor, Feiyan told me with her own mouth that Zhenxiang had once asked her about those lotus lanterns. In that moment she had already understood that I, too, harbored love for him. But out of selfishness she had not spoken the truth. "I knew it was unfair to you, Elder Sister." She sat amid a disorder of brocade, her face empty and drained, exactly like the girl in the marketplace years before. Piece by piece she told me all the things I had once suspected. "After all, nothing had really begun between you and him." Tears wound down her delicate chin. "So I thought... let me be selfish just this once. Just this once. Elder Sister always looked after me, always yielded to me. Elder Sister would forgive me, wouldn't she?" Like a helpless child, she clutched tightly at the back hem of my robe. Only when she saw the chill on my face clearly did she slowly loosen her hand. "You needn't blame yourself for hating me," she said. "If I were Elder Sister, there would be hatred in my heart too. But now that things have come to this, what use is there in saying any of it?" I turned away and walked slowly out of the great hall.

Feiyan knew that in this life there was no longer any possibility between herself and Zhenxiang. So her resolve to starve herself to death was absolute. I used many methods to force her to go on living, until at last the physician felt the pulse of pregnancy. "A child is always innocent," I said. "And besides, you know that I need this child." Feiyan stared at me woodenly. "Let us make a bargain." I smiled then, every bit of calculation plain in it. "If you bear the child, I will let you leave the palace. I think that even if you must die, you would rather die beside Zhenxiang, wouldn't you?" I admit I was cruel. But to give her hope was the only way to keep her alive. And sure enough, Feiyan lifted her eyes to me and silently took the bowl from the palace woman's hand.

I did not know then that the moment she said "I'm sorry" to me, I had already begun to regret. When she laid the truth bare before me like that, I found that I no longer hated her after all. Instead I began to reflect on myself, to ask how many wrongs I had committed. The pitiful always have something hateful in them. Did that sentence not fit me just as well?

Letting her leave the palace had never been anything but an empty promise, yet in my heart I truly did hope there might be some real spark of light to hold her up and keep her living. I did not want her child. I did not want to secure my own place, nor did I want any more of that ridiculous imperial favor. None of it meant anything anymore. Who had deceived whom, or who had failed whom, no longer mattered.

I only hoped that Feiyan would never learn of Zhenxiang's death. But of all things in this world, news is the hardest to keep hidden.

The last place Feiyan went was Ruiyun Hall. She danced there alone on the high platform above the water, like a waterbird blown away by the wind. Such was her despair. I tried to catch hold of her, but all I managed to seize was a strip of light gauze.

Feiyan had always told me that setting river lanterns afloat was a way of making wishes. Only later did I learn that there was another saying about them. It was said that souls left behind in the water could cling to the flickering river lanterns and drift all the way to the farther shore of rebirth. And so every year I set river lanterns afloat within the palace. Countless lotus lamps begin at Liuguang Water Pavilion, travel past Ruiyun Hall with the current, and at last flow into the ponded waters of the palace.

Tears slid slowly down, wetting the dragon embroidery flung wide across the emperor's bright yellow robe. He remembered that when he was small, Mother-Empress had once held his hand and helped him push a river lantern into the water. He had always thought it the loveliest sight in the world: beneath the night sky, points of candlelight, and upon the imperial pond ten thousand red lotuses blooming. Magnificent and enchantingly beautiful, like a dream. He lifted his head and looked at the woman's withered face upon the bed. Who could have imagined that this woman, old now and faded in color, had thirty years before been the unrivaled beauty of the inner palace? And who could have imagined that behind those river lanterns blooming upon the pond like sleeping lotuses there was hidden such a desolate old story? Just as he thought she had fallen asleep, the woman, already drooping toward old age and death, suddenly opened her eyes. "If I am gone... next year, my son, you must remember to set river lanterns afloat for me." He nodded at once, not even choosing his words. Seeing her lie back at ease, he could not help the doubt in his heart and asked, "Year after year Mother-Empress prayed for them to meet again in the next life. Does that mean that in your heart you have finally set Guard Zhenxiang down?" She looked at the emperor, who in that moment was earnest as a child, and smiled faintly. "In this world, what one can never force is fate. Do people not always say that even two people brushing shoulders in this life have spent a thousand years cultivating that chance in the life before?" There her words came softly to an end. The flame of life had burnt out. Her breath, fine as floating silk, was finally reduced to a wisp of pale smoke after a candle goes dark. She never had time to tell him....