Chapter 1
On the days the king came to sacrifice to the gods, I had only to press my ear to the stone to hear the thunder of horses and carriages shaking the earth.
I spread my arms and embraced the cold floor of the underground chamber.
My ears hummed. My heart trembled with them.
The palace attendant set down the food box, paying no heed to my madness.
I begged him to let me climb the high spirit terrace once more, to look at the king’s carriage.
He glanced sideways at me with his clouded eyes, drawing out the words. “That would be against the rules—”
I fumbled about my person.
Pearls, jade, silk, and purple shells had purchased one distant glimpse after another.
All I had left now was the girdle Ziyou, my king, had fastened around me with his own hands on our wedding day.
Then he had bowed his head and murmured:
“With pearls I gird you; with tender devotion I bind us. Before spirits and gods I vow: in life or death, I will not forget.”
Over the long years, the pearls and jade had fallen away. Only dull, faded brocade remained.
I tore it off and thrust it into the attendant’s hands.
He inspected it a moment, curled his lip, and at last moved half a step from the door. “This is the last time.”
My loose robes snapped in the wind, as though countless butterflies had flown beneath my ribs and buoyed me, weightless, onto the terrace.
I looked as far as I could.
Through the dense sea of trees, the great sacrificial procession was making its way.
They brought mountains of rhinoceros horn and ivory.
And enormous ritual cauldrons of fine bronze, gleaming gold in the sun.
And cart after cart of human victims captured from the tribes in every direction.
At the center of the procession stood the king’s imposing canopy.
Beneath it sat his consort Shaosi, her hair pinned up, wearing a black upper robe and a vermilion skirt. Every detail followed the dress prescribed for a queen.
Her belly swelled in a rounded curve.
Ziyou held her hand between his palms, tender and solicitous.
He had not seen me in fifteen years.
The last time had been beside my birthing bed.
What a perilous night that was. Blood and tears flowed together, opening countless crimson rivers through my body.
He did not arrive until dawn the next morning.
And even then he stood beyond the curtains, refusing to come close.
So, at our final meeting, Ziyou left me only an indistinct shadow.
My eardrums had ruptured during the difficult birth. The deep, pleasing voice I had loved best was distant and broken, too.
“…to do such a thing. Had Shaosi not come to visit and caught you…”
“The queen ought to have been executed,” a soft woman’s voice agreed through tears. “The king spared you only for the affection he once bore you.”
Shaosi took the swaddled infant.
She had been in the palace less than a year then.
I could not make out her beautiful face. All I saw was the fresh, youthful color of her sleeves.
Her fingers emerged gently from the cuffs to tease the baby’s face, red from crying.
As a child, I had accompanied my mother to a sacrifice and seen an elephant whose face had been split open while it was still alive, its tusks gouged out.
Its huge, heavy body collapsed like a mountain, shuddering with rage and despair.
When Shaosi carried my child away, I bled and howled just as it had.
Afterward, they said the queen had gone mad.
The king sent me away from the palace and confined me to the ancestral temple, ordering me to tend the spirits of the kings and queens before us.
Fifteen years.
My carefree girlhood among my clan, the tender days of riding and hunting with Ziyou, our whispered conversations on a shared pillow…
It had all rotted with the brocade. Threads once bright broke inch by inch or tangled into dead knots.
Only one thing remained impossible to forget. One person.
My child.
I lay against the high terrace and craned my neck.
Beyond the splendid canopy, I finally caught sight of the boy.
He sat tall on horseback, his bearing cold and stern, the very image of the king in his youth.
My eyes pursued him as though pursuing a white rabbit.
Until the trees swallowed him and he vanished.
Blue smoke rose from the distant altar.
This was the day the High Diviner heated tortoise shells to foretell the kingdom’s fortunes each year.
And from a clear sky stretching ten thousand miles, rain suddenly fell.
The downpour quenched the sacrificial fire and veiled the green forest in fine mist.
I stood in the rain, staring for a long time toward the place where the horses and carriages had disappeared.
Until the attendant hurried up the terrace and dragged me back into the depths below.
Everyone we passed exchanged glances and whispered.
“Have you heard? Have you heard?”
They cast startled, frightened looks at me.
That night, the young priestess came as usual, lit the tallow candles, and prayed in a low voice.
When she had finished, she knelt beside me and reached around my body to gather my robes together.
I looked down. The faded brocade at my waist was the girdle Ziyou had fastened around me with his own hands on our wedding day.
Then he had bowed his head and murmured…
“The High Diviner asked after the kingdom’s fortunes today. The spirits have made their will known.”
The priestess leaned close to my ear. Her voice trembled slightly.
“Your own flesh and blood shall receive the mandate of Heaven and become sovereign of the world.”
I closed my hand around hers.