chapter 5
Mother once told me that Abbess Jing’an had gone pale after reading my fate.
“Exalted beyond measure, but ruinous to her husband. If she does not die young, she will slay a sovereign and rule all beneath Heaven.”
Fortunately, Mother and the abbess were close. Mother begged her to disguise my chart, changing my birth from the late midnight hour to the early one, and bribed the midwife heavily. She also had the abbess accept me as a nominal disciple, hoping Buddhist merit would protect me from an early death.
At six I contracted smallpox and nearly died. Father, fearing infection, wanted to cast my weakened body onto a country estate and leave me to fate. Only Mother’s threat to kill herself won permission to send me to Yuhua Temple, where Abbess Jing’an was the superior.
Mother and the abbess watched over me without rest until they dragged me back from death. On the day I recovered, the abbess warned Mother that another great calamity awaited me at nine. If I failed to cross it, I would die.
Mother did not weep. She stared into the abbess’s eyes. “Jing’an, you have a way. Don’t you?”
The abbess lowered her gaze, recited the Buddha’s name, and looked up with infinite pity.
“Legend says the Immortal Patriarch Lu left descendants by the Eastern Sea. Their judgments are ironclad, and they never speak falsely. If you can travel to Jiangnan, you may meet one. Should they agree to avert the calamity, Lingyi may live a long life.”
Three years later, Father traveled south in disguise. Mother bent every effort to please him until he agreed to take us. She chose her attendants carefully. Of the two confidantes she had brought from the southern frontier, Wanqiu knew medicine and poison, while Wangchun knew divination. Since the abbess said my calamity was no illness, Mother took Wangchun.
With three copper coins, Wangchun cast hexagram after hexagram, seeking the Lu heir. On the day the diviner arrived uninvited, her coins produced After Completion—water above fire, auspicious at first, chaotic in the end.
Mother told me to hide behind the curtains. She would test the man first. At her clap, I was to pretend I had been playing hide-and-seek with Wangchun and fallen asleep there.
No one expected him to announce his lineage, expose Father’s identity, and declare, “The one who will plunge my realm into chaos stands even now at Your Majesty’s side.”
Father demanded a name. The diviner only shook his head. After a hundred strokes, barely breathing, he said, “My Lu family has a rule: our judgments must never be false. Beat me to death if you will, but I cannot invent what is not there.”
Father laughed coldly. “First you say the traitor stands beside me, then claim you cannot invent one. You are no heir of Lu, only a glib fraud. Continue! If he cannot answer, kill him for deceiving his sovereign!”
I held my breath as his groans weakened and vanished, leaving only the sickening thud of boards against flesh and bone.
A cold hand covered my mouth. Mother stood behind me. Signaling silence, she led me through the north hall’s rear door.
That was our last farewell.
Only when she drank the arsenic and stroked my face, her reluctant gaze fading inch by inch, did I understand what “auspicious at first, chaotic in the end” meant.
To serve beside a sovereign is to live beside a tiger. To serve beside a tyrant is to live beside a rabid one.
I looked at that tyrant now, drunk and flushed, embracing a voluptuous western dancer. Around him, other men imitated his debauchery while Hexi burned and common people suffered.
Could I truly bring blessing to such a realm?
My eyes moved to Lu Daowei. No beauty sat in his arms. He seemed detached from mortal dust—until he caught my gaze, winked, and gave me an almost familiar look of teasing.
I stared. Had the wine blurred my sight?
Could this Lu Daowei truly be an heir of the Eastern Sea?