My Last Empress (14 page)

She shook off the residue of the fallen net, revealing her back, slender and V shaped. With her gaze still on me, she spun him over and sat on his face. Then she rode with gentleness, as if the horse beneath her was trotting on a soft path;
her rosebud breasts heaved and her hair tossed with each motion.

In such coupling, he let out a string of muffled groans, ode of the beridden. She loosened a spread of spasmic utterance, not dissimilar to a chuckle, a giggle, or small cry.

This was not some fancy horseplay of Q’s Germanic upbringing, nor was it some banal theatrics. It was a page off an ignoble volume, namely
Yin Gong Yan Shi
, a hand-drawn pictorial of coital poses and positional perversions long cherished by emperors, and equally treasured by their concubines. Yale’s collegiate library boasted a rare copy, which I had copiously abused during the yellow days of June, July, and August, and all the seasons in between while cocooned in Connecticut.

Literally, S was involved in a ritual bearing the poetic caption of “A thirsty man drinks from a sweetened spring.” Straddling her emperor with her tailbone affixed on his eager lips, and her own head bent over his miserly growth, Qiu Rong was performing none other than the manly favorite known as “A virtuous girl blowing on a stiffened bamboo flute.”

Oh, the edacity of one and esuriency of the other!

The riding and the beridden lasted for long minutes before Q raised her head from her task, lips smeared and face sweaty, to reach under his sallow pillow. She fumbled out his
ru yi
—a smoothly polished wrist-thick jade stick, the emperor’s good luck vade mecum of Buddhist import and potency—and drilled it cold and hard into his anus, engendering a thrilling yelp of pleasure on the part of the delighted monarch. His engorgement firmed and then limped as Q gained her rhythm and probed it further in its depth.
S moaned in staccato hiccups, arching his knees, begging the enchantress to rekindle his waned wand, but such act of desperation only roused her tigress’s wrath. She unstraddled the fugitive, rolled him over and mounted him from the hind position as a raunchy gutter hound would of its yelping bitch, her jade stick sawing.

Never have I, in all my sordid years, encountered such sparks and spirals of eruptions. Thrashing beneath her, S was thrown sideways, headlong, every way and no way. Slowly his moans of pain sedated into whimpering groans and muddled gibberish of love and loving. Candlelight flicked its last buoyancy and bedposts ceased their shaking and squeaking. All was calm.

“Take me home now, you foreign pervert!” So saying, Qiu Rong rose from the emperor’s slain carcass, casting away the silk cloth I gave her to cover her body and throwing in my face a timely towel to dry her sweat.

“What about him?” I inquired, eyeing S, lying face down with arms sprawled and mouth foaming like a dead frog.

“He won’t die. He’s in heaven, if that’s what you are asking.” She gazed at me with her vivid blue eyes. “But I am not, can’t you see?” Without warning, she flung herself into my arms, sobbing and kissing me over my lips, my mouth. Oh, my ape heart, thawing and melting all in one monstrous beat and phantasmal rhyme! The saltiness of her probing tongue, the gentleness of her succumbing breasts …

“Take me home before I gouge the pervert’s heart out. What he needs are no wives but man-whores from Europe with all their palatial debauchery. I’m dying here from suffocation. You are the only one to save me …”

“Say no more!”

“Take me away from here—the further the better.” She leaned into my chest, her soft arms draped over my shoulders, kissing further down my neck, setting all my chest hair abuzz and my nether bulge to ache so. I could have had her, bare and whole in the dying glow of red candlelight, with utter impunity. After all, her husband’s fouling had already oiled her path, and her barren oven had heated to its hottest. All it would take was a devilish prick, a gentle lift off her feet sinking her carefully onto my lap, and heaven would be mine, and bliss hers.

Rather, I eased her into the waiting sack and swung her over my shoulder, heading for her chamber without In-In, who had been frightened away by the bedbound upheaval. Only when clear of the emperor’s chamber did I inquire of the cause of her utterances of escape and refuge.

“Why? Can you not see? Every breath I take here is fetid and foul. Don’t you know I was born to be a free-willed princess? My father spoiled me so. He let me learn Japanese and their art of flower arrangement when we lived in Tokyo where he was an ambassador, even though it was taboo, for Japanese was considered the language of our enemy and their customs barbaric. I even got a certificate for skill.… You know you should never put chrysanthemum in the same vase with anything else, ruins its purity.

“While in Austria, where he was next stationed, he had Vienna’s finest tailor cut all my dresses for all four years that I was to live and grow there—my happiest years. How I adored Vienna!

“A stubborn officer, Father’s first secretary, a pawn of
his enemy, protested Father’s indulgence of me. Another devious courtier even wrote secret letters back to Court to impeach Father as a traitor of Manchurian culture and customs. But Father heeded them not at all. On the eve of our departure he gave me permission to hold a farewell ball for my foreign friends against Mother’s protest. How I adored that evening: the beautifully dressed guests from all walks of Viennese society, the orchestra music swelling …”

Upon which I skipped down the steps of Tai Hong Palace.

“Stop tossing me around like that! Anyhow, I could never forget the very moment when I appeared at the grand staircase of that sumptuous residence, the grandest and most fashionable. Hundreds were awaiting me there in the ballroom, Father and Mother among them, my friends, friends of my father and mother—the entire diplomatic corps was there. Even their king sent me a token: a silk embroidered tapestry of the Blue Danube that ran across the girth of Vienna. How I adore that city.

“When I asked Father why he allowed me to hold such festivities, he said with much sadness that the moment we returned to China, all my fanciful ideas and free urges would have to be put away for good, for no one would allow any of my capriciousness back in China. Father threw that party for me at the risk of losing his office and of being labeled a traitor to his nationality and his Manchurian ancestry. It was just as Father had forewarned me. All these things he had done for me, all the love, and he isn’t even my birth father. I was passed into his wife’s arms not long after my birth by a foreign countess of unknown origin besoiled by a Chinese
merchant. My birth mother was young, forfeiting me to their care before hemorrhaging to death at Union Hospital. That swine Chinaman father of mine was nowhere to be traced, probably crouched in some
hutong
gutter puffing his opium, waiting to waylay other young white-skins of their innocence and naïveté. Cursed bastard that he is, he’s the only one I have left now. I wish I knew who he was, but I never tried to find him: I was afraid my lordly father would chastise me.”

“Did your adoptive father ever mention the facts of your birth to you?”

“Only once when I was still in Tokyo. Lady Dominic, the wife of the Portuguese ambassador, called me a mixed-blood in Japanese, which Father didn’t understand, of course: he never learned to speak Japanese though he is fluent in German and English and some French. When I told him about Lady Dominic’s words, Father was incensed and wanted to retrieve the dinner invitation he had previously sent her for the occasion of the emperor’s birthday. Mother was so upset that she suffered a headache for three days, refusing even to talk to me, which is a sure sign that I was not to broach the subject ever again; that Manchurian pride of fatherhood was not anything anyone could dare broach, and thinking herself barren was Mother’s everlasting sore spot. Now that I am all but abandoned here under these old trees in the cold palace, forbidden to be seen even by my father and mother, with a husband weak as he, that wish has again and again come back to haunt me, to seek out my birth father. Can you help me?”

“For what purpose?”

“So I can leave this place.”

Before I could give my reply, the courtyard door swung open and the maid Lin-Lin appeared like a phantasm.

“Is that you, Lin-Lin?” Q inquired.

The girl nodded.

“Were you listening to what we said?” Q asked.

“I heard only your voice but not your words,” Lin-Lin replied, eyes lowered.

“Stingy bones! You are lying again, aren’t you? Take me inside now.”

Her servant took the silk sack, swinging it over her shoulder before kicking closed the door in my face with a curt, “Good-bye, Mr. Pi-Jin!”

Summer solstice fell on the following day. The schoolhouse was closed so S, the son of heaven, might lie prostrate in prayer to his forbearers at the Ancestral Shrine, to thank them for a good year gone by and new one to come.

All palace concubines and eunuchs were restricted to a vegetarian diet while shunning the venomous sun, and all impure secularities were stalled, save for what was to befall my abode.

It was near daybreak, semidark, and my senses were keen and lucid, still indulged in a continual dream, in which one thinks of genuine occurrences as a dream with sleep an interrupting agent breaking its sequential order.

I shaved, urgently wiping the wick of red blood off my upper lip, trembling hand to blame, before dousing it with a dash of Clubmen, the patented pungency of muskiness and man. Bathrobed in a silk gown of Kyoto origin embroidered with a giant butterfly on its back—its wings extending onto my arms, causing a backward onlooker to see not its wearer but a metamorphosed monarch motioning with life—I sipped first tea, which In-In had brewed and brought upstairs. Slowly blowing its jasmine steam, I gazed out the eastward window whence my angelic darling would materialize, if not to soothe the ache of my apish self, then to round up the dipping arc
of the perpetuating dream. Like the dream, the meandering mood was pastoral in tone, dim in hue, with a deafening quietness sans morning birdsong or early leaf rustle, clear of the harried footfalls of eunuchs long gone beyond the palace wall accompanying their master to the Heavenly Shrine. Humanity stood evanesced within this planetary consciousness, save for that tinny, tiny caress of my beloved pet’s feet, courtyards away yet only heartbeats apart. The dimpled courtyards were rattled by the summer rains, and the pelting raindrops were like the palpitations of the
di hua’
s heaving heart—a mythical flora believed to hold aloft all locality, big or small, in prosperity or in despair—and mine as well. It was along that petal-strewn path, rustle-less, through a grove of bamboo trees, their leaves rain-laden, that she came, her feet bare and hair wet.

I heard an exchange of hushed words downstairs, and In-In was dispatched out the door into the rain, re-entering the mossy path she had trod. Leaves stirred, and petioles and branches swayed apart like the entrance to an enchanted fortress. Resultantly, the circumference of the current dream was upheld.

She stomped upstairs, running into me on my way down on that narrow curving flight: it was a flicker of a moment but an unending eternity. She had on a red
qipao
, a bewitching dress hugging her pubescent shape and tart nipples. Heavenly she smelled of wet soil, crushed leaves, and a stale sweat. Morning light showed the delicate down on her forehead, the asymmetrical dimples shallowing her cheeks, and long sloping earlobes that paled against her russet summer skin. She was caught, weak-kneed by the moment, with lovey-dovey
symptoms of an enraptured youth: a held breath suspended midchest, slightly parted lips, softening almond eyes, and an acknowledging blush tiding high cheekbones.

I put my arms over her lean shoulders.

“Behave, you ape. We’ve got work to do,” she said, dodging out of the rim of my hands. “And what is that awful odor about you?” Before I could lower my arms to contain her, she slipped through, climbing to the top of the stairs, leaving me just the sight of her small back, boyish hips, and in-turned toes. I could have thrown myself at her, ravaging her, again and again on the steps, but the moment passed, though not the ache of my groins.

“What, might I ask, do you mean by that?” I was barely able to uphold my crumpling self by adjusting the belt around my slick waist, ill-hiding a certain protuberance.

She sprawled obliquely on the top steps, elbows on the landing, wet dress conforming to her bodice and thighs, thin legs apart, sloping calves naked, bare ankles bent in the most juvenile of manners.

There, before my gorging eyes, as I followed her upward, were her unshod feet dangling over the edge of a step, mud on her soles, blades of weed on her toes. Feet to pleasure, feet to torture: an erogenous paradise, a provenance of obsessive fancies. How I yearned to suck on every digit from her innermost lanky big toe to her littlest pinkie, an afterthought of a toe. Did I mention that she had a case of syndactyly, with her second and third toes stuck together by a meaty web? But all the more suckable and succulent. Feet, mind you, were no mere parts of functionality, but sensuous condiments in lovemaking in this culture tilted for perversion, preferably
bound, the tinier, the more alluring. A corseted foot arched to resemble a horse hoof was poetically potent, known as a
three-inch lotus;
the faltering hippy gait it engendered was a tingling object of lust among all flat-faced and sunken-nosed Chinamen.