Chapter 176 Interlude 27

The morning light enters Guifei Xiang’s room and falls on the floor while she, seated beside the window with a cup of tea that stopped steaming a while ago, looks at it without seeing it.

And she has been like that since dawn.

It is practically the only custom she can maintain, because everything else is gradually disappearing from her life with that quiet efficiency with which the Imperial Palace dismantles people when someone decides they have to be set aside.

First the visits ended, then the outings to the courtyard, so that, shortly afterward, the handmaidens of always were replaced by others she doesn’t know.

And it has been days since she has seen Lingxi.

Outside, in the corridor, there are two guards who are not from the Pavilion’s usual Nei Wei, and that is the final signal she needs to know that the excuses have run out. For weeks she endured everything excuses can endure, doesn't communicate and the court, which is many things but is sometimes not patient, ended up asking directly by order of the Yushitai where the Zhāohuán was, but she limited herself to keeping her mouth shut.

She did not deny it, she did not embellish it and she did not invent anything, she simply did not answer, and that same afternoon the guards appeared in the corridor.

But none of that is what occupies her head this morning, since what occupies her head this morning is the same thing that occupies it almost every morning since her daughter left, and it is a list of questions that have no possible answer and that, nevertheless, she asks herself all the same, with the stubbornness of one who knows perfectly that she is hurting herself and does not intend to stop doing it.

Whether the journey is going well, whether the weather is respecting them, whether Wen is eating enough since she never does when she is entertained with something.

Whether those merchants are fulfilling their part with the same seriousness with which they promised it and, above all, whether she is happy.

That last detail is the one that hurts her most, since it is the only one that truly matters and it is also the only one she is never going to be able to verify.

Guifei Xiang lets the air out slowly, leaves the cold cup on the little table and obliges herself to look toward the garden through the window, which is what she does whenever these thoughts get out of hand.

And it is then that she hears the commotion in the Courtyard, so Guifei Xiang gets to her feet without realizing that she has done it, since the noise advances through the hallways of the pavilion to the other side of her door, where it stops.

There is a momentary silence and, without anyone knocking, the door of the room opens.

In the threshold there is a handmaiden Guifei Xiang has never seen in her life. She is young, wears a uniform that does not belong to the Pavilion and has the rigid face of one who has been placed in that spot an instant ago to pronounce a single sentence and doesn’t know what is going to happen to her afterward.

“The Son of Heaven is here to visit the Guifei Xiang”, says the handmaiden with her voice too loud and tense.

And behind that sentence, without giving Guifei Xiang time to compose a reverence, the handmaiden steps aside, after which the Emperor Sun Hao enters the room.

He wears one of his imperial outfits of dark and sober silk, the one he uses on official visits outside the official agenda and that appear in no register. But it doesn’t matter what he is wearing, because behind him, piled up in the corridor, there are eunuchs, imperial guards and handmaidens enough that by this point half the palace already knows.

“We wish to speak alone with the Guifei,” he says without turning around.

The handmaiden says nothing, she doesn’t even answer with the formula that corresponds to her, she simply limits herself to taking the door with both hands and closing it behind the Emperor with a great deal of care.

And the moment Sun Hao hears that noise at his back, he brings his hand to his sleeve, takes out a privacy talisman and activates it.

The paper shines an instant, goes out, and all the noise of the Pavilion disappears all at once.

Only then does he turn toward her.

“Majesty”, says Guifei Xiang, and she begins to bow.

“Xiang”, he interrupts her with a gesture of his hand. “Not today.”

Guifei Xiang straightens up and looks at him, and in that moment she realizes two things at the same time. The first, that Sun Hao has aged in the last few weeks more than he aged in the last few years.

And the second, that he has come accompanied by half the palace on purpose, because an Emperor who wants something to be known does not send a messenger, he simply crosses a courtyard with forty people behind him.

Sun Hao lets out a long sigh.

“I have delayed the deadlines as much as they could be delayed”, he tells her. “And everything that could not be delayed as well. But it is over, Xiang, since in ten days there will be an open session of judgment.”

Guifei Xiang listens to the words and discovers, with a certain surprise, that she feels absolutely nothing. Neither fear, nor relief, nor even that cold stab she expected to have spent weeks anticipating.

The only thing she feels is that at last there is a date.

“Don’t worry”, she tells him. “I knew from the beginning that this had to happen sooner or later, and the truth is that ten days is considerably more than I had calculated.”

She approaches the little table, picks up the cup of cold tea and leaves it on the tray, more to do something with her hands than for anything else.

“And I have already decided”, she continues. “At the trial I intend to tell the truth.”

Sun Hao lifts his head upon hearing her.

“All of it”, she adds before he asks. “That I helped the Zhāohuán leave the Empire. That I prepared it, that I financed it and that I did it because she wanted to go.”

She makes a brief pause.

“Enough time has passed now”, she says, and that is the only part of the sentence that comes out with a minimal tremor underneath. “Even if they set out this very day to look for her, with the best horses and without sleeping along the way, they would not arrive in time. So at this point the truth can no longer harm anyone but me.”

Sun Hao looks at her for a good while without saying anything, and when he finally speaks, he does so slowly.

“It is the best thing you can do”, he tells her. “In fact, it is the only thing that can close this.”

He crosses the room to the window and stays looking at the garden, with his back to her.

“Right now the problem is not what you did, but what people are inventing that you did”, he continues. “Each day that passes without an explanation, someone adds a new layer. That it was a kidnapping, that it was a conspiracy with the Zhang, that the Sect has taken her in secret, that half the court has to be investigated. And once those stories begin to grow, no one stops them anymore.”

He turns toward her again.

“But the moment you declare that it was you, the escalation ends all at once, because there is no longer anything to investigate nor anyone to accuse”, he tells her. “And that lets me settle the matter in the most discreet way possible, which is to strip you of the rank of Guifei and return you to the outer palace.”

Guifei Xiang listens to him, and then she smiles.

It is a small and real smile, of those she almost never hands out, and Sun Hao recognizes it right away because he has spent thirteen years seeing it appear always at the most inopportune moments.

“That doesn’t worry me in the least”, she tells him. “I never wanted that rank, you know that. You put it on me in front of the whole court without asking me and I have spent thirteen years carrying it along with everything it brought behind it.”

She shrugs her shoulders with a naturalness that would have cost any other consort of the harem her tongue.

“Return me to the place I came from and you will not hear a single complaint from me”, she continues. “Of all this I am only going to regret one thing, and it is having to leave the garden.”

Sun Hao arches an eyebrow.

“The garden?” he repeats.

“The garden”, she confirms, and points at the window with her chin. “I have spent thirteen years painting in it. I have done it in good weather, in bad weather, at night, with Wen asleep in her chair at one side and without her. And I have grown attached to it in a manner fairly ridiculous for a woman of my age.”

Guifei Xiang lets the silence settle a moment and, when she speaks again, there is no longer a trace of a smile on her face.

“But that fixes things at court”, she says. “And the court is not what keeps me awake. Is that going to be enough for the Sect?”

Sun Hao lets the air out through his nose in something that is almost a laugh.

“With the Sect you are not going to have any problem”, he answers her. “And you are going to laugh when I tell you why.”

He moves away from the window and approaches her.

“The Elders are relieved”, he says. “Relieved, Xiang. None of them is going to say it aloud, but they had spent too long arguing among themselves about whether Wen had to be taken to the Sect or not, with some determined to recruit her, others determined that a girl who cannot walk would be a disgrace to the mountain and all the rest contemplating the spectacle. And now that she has left, that argument has disappeared on its own. No one has to yield, no one has to lose face and the matter closes without any of them having to concede the point to another.”

He makes a pause.

“In fact, if she had gone alone, I suspect all this fuss would have been unnecessary”, he adds. “With a bit of skill it could have been presented as a retreat, a study trip or any other equally discreet thing. I even think I could have sent her a few imperial guards to escort her to the border and no one would have said a word.”

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And there his tone changes.

“But she took Lianhua”, he says. “And that is the only part about which the Elders are truly angry, because they wanted her to guide their Disciples inside the Celestial Fragment of the Sands.”

Guifei Xiang feels her shoulders tense, because that was exactly the point she had spent weeks waiting to hear.

“Even so, I am fairly sure I can calm them”, Sun Hao continues before she can say anything.

“How?” she asks.

And then, for the first time since he entered the room, something that resembles a smile a great deal escapes Sun Hao.

“Thanks to a birthday present”, he tells her.

Guifei Xiang takes an entire second to comprehend it.

“The model”, she says.

“The model”, he confirms. “The replica of the Celestial Fragment of the Sands that your daughter had built for her tenth birthday, that she gave me the following year and that Elder Feng looked at down his nose and dispatched saying that as a curiosity it was not bad, but that it was of no use because they already had the woman who found the formation.”

He raises a hand and makes a vague gesture toward nowhere in particular.

“Well, it turns out they no longer have her”, he says. “And it turns out that in that model there is the terrain, there are the ruins, there are all the reference points and there is the building of the formation, placed exactly where it belongs. It is, literally, a complete map of the interior of the Celestial Fragment, and at this moment it is the only thing resembling a map that exists in the whole world as far as anyone knows.”

He stops a moment, and when he continues there is something in his voice that Guifei Xiang has not heard from him in a long time.

“So in a few days I am going to have the pleasure of offering it to the council of elders”, he says. “And I am going to have to make a considerable effort not to enjoy it too much.”

Guifei Xiang lets the air out slowly and notices how, for the first time in weeks, something loosens in her chest.

“Thank goodness”, she says in a low voice. “I had been waiting for that part since they left.”

“I know”, Sun Hao answers her.

Afterward he looks toward the closed door, and by the gesture he makes, Guifei Xiang understands that he has already spent too long inside the room.

“I have to go”, he tells her. “I cannot stay long, since I have come with too many people and they may begin to speculate about how much time I spend inside.”

“Wait”, she tells him.

Sun Hao stops.

“Before leaving, Wen left you one last gift”, Guifei Xiang continues.

And there the Emperor turns around entirely and arches an eyebrow.

“What did she leave me?” he asks.

But Guifei Xiang does not answer, instead of that she approaches the chest of drawers she has beside the bed, opens one of the lower drawers and takes out of it a rectangular box, simple, of light wood and without any kind of adornment.

Afterward she crosses the room with it in her hands and stops in front of him.

“With the box came an envelope”, she tells him as she offers it to him. “And in the envelope there was a very concrete instruction, which was that I not hand it over to you until at least a month had passed since her departure.”

She makes a pause.

“Her exact words were that she did not want you, the moment you opened it, to send the imperial army after her to drag her back and force her to be the next Empress”, Guifei Xiang goes on saying with a certain tone of amusement in her voice.

Sun Hao lifts his gaze from the box and looks at her with an expression that needs no translation.

And Guifei Xiang, smiling, gets ahead of him.

“Those are her words, not mine”, she tells him. “And before you ask, I don’t know anything more because I have not looked at what is inside.”

Sun Hao lowers his eyes toward the box again, and this time he takes it from her hands, weighs it a moment and finally lifts the lid.

Inside there are no jewels, nor seals, nor any of the hundred things a man in his position would expect to find in a box handed over with a month of deliberate delay, but rather inside there is a book, hand-sewn and with the covers lined in simple cloth.

And beneath that book, a sheaf of loose papers covered with drawings, numbers and notes in the margin.

And on the cover, written in his daughter’s careful and minuscule handwriting, Sun Hao reads a title.

“How to Make a Loom Work with Steam.”

In the exact center of the Sect of the Celestial Sun, hidden behind the mountain and at the end of a canyon through which almost no one passes twice in their life, there is a small valley in whose center there is a Wutong tree.

It is an impossible tree, wider than any pavilion of the mountain, with pale bark and leaves so large that a man could cover himself entirely with a single one. And in its crown, wedged between the three massive branches, there is a golden nest, and inside the nest, with his head gathered beneath his wing and his eyes closed, Tianyu Feng is feeling his feathers.

Every feather he has given away over the centuries preserves a remnant of his aura, and those remnants are for him like embers distributed around a darkened room, some more alive than others.

Although the majority from the last few centuries barely shine anymore.

There is one that has spent two hundred years without moving from a sandalwood box in the treasury of a noble family of the south and that at this point is little more than an ember. There is another on an altar, in a hall that is entered three times a year and always for the same thing. There are a few in the Imperial Palace, sewn to banners, kept in chests and taken out only when a newborn has to be blessed with a formula that has spent eight hundred years without changing a single syllable.

All still, all in the same place where the one who received them left them.

And then there is the last one, the one that still burns.

It is the most recent of all, the only one he has given away in the last fifty years, and its aura is still so fresh that Tianyu Feng could point to it without being off by a single step. And when he searches for it this morning, as he has been doing every morning since he let it fall onto a lap, he discovers once again the same thing that surprised him the first time it began to move away from the imperial capital.

That it is, by a great deal, the one that is farthest away.

Tianyu Feng concentrates on it a moment longer, measuring the distance and confirming what he already knew, that that feather is ever closer to the border of the Empire and keeps moving away.

If he had lips, he would smile.

Because when he indicated to the Elders that they should bring that girl to the mountain, when they were still hesitating over whether it was worth interviewing her or not, he did it for a single reason, which was to warn her about the two references that had escaped her in her novel and about how extremely dangerous it is to go through this world speaking about Buddhism.

And he had to do it halfway, in a veiled manner and without permitting himself a single clear sentence, because speaking of that openly, even within his own valley and even with two witnesses in a trance three paces away, is the kind of risk that not even he is disposed to run.

But what he truly congratulates himself on, and he does it without any modesty because there is no one in front of him to judge him, is having had the foresight to let a feather fall onto the lap of a kid who could not walk and who had just told him to his face that his sect had too many staircases.

Because it turns out that, in the last few hundred years, that girl is the only person he has seen with real possibilities of leaving the borders of the Empire with one of his feathers.

He is thinking about exactly that when he notices that someone enters his valley, so he leaves his tracking like one who looks away from a map and brings all his attention to the canyon. He doesn’t need to open his eyes to know who it is, but he opens them all the same because there are visits that deserve one taking the trouble.

Afterward he unfolds his wings and flies out of the nest.

He crosses the valley in three long beats, with the hot air rising around him and the grass bending in circles beneath him, and alights a few meters from the entrance of the canyon with a muffled noise of feathers and a last gust of warm wind that lifts the dust from the gravel.

He lowers his head and looks at the woman of small stature who is in front of him.

She is alone, dressed in the sober robes of the Elders of the Sect and carries neither a disciple nor a servant behind her, which says more about her than any embroidery. And she has a clearly aged appearance, with parchment-like skin and hands spotted by the years, which reveals clearly how advanced her age must be for her cultivation to reveal those signs of old age.

If Wen were here, she would recognize her without hesitation, because she is the diminutive old woman who almost disappeared inside her chair and the only one of the eight who, in that whole interview, asked her about her day-to-day difficulties.

“Elder Yun”, says Tianyu Feng.

His voice does not sound in the valley, it sounds inside her head, deep and tranquil, as it always sounds.

“To what do I owe your visit?” he asks her.

Elder Yun lifts her face toward him without any haste and without any reverence, because it has been a long time since reverences between these two were left very far behind.

“The council of elders”, she answers. “They have sent me.”

“I imagined as much”, Tianyu Feng tells her. “No one crosses that canyon on a hot day like this because they feel like it.”

Elder Yun lets out a short noise through her nose that in a younger woman would have been amusing.

“The council knows that you gave one of your feathers to the Zhāohuán”, she continues. “And it also knows that you can locate your own feathers wherever they may be.”

“Both things are true”, he concedes.

“Then I’ll spare myself the roundabout”, she tells him. “The council wants to ask you, as a favor, that you locate that feather, that you go to where it is and that you bring back to the Sect the handmaiden named Lianhua.”

Tianyu Feng does not tilt his head, does not click his beak and does not make any of those quick and avian gestures with which he usually accompanies his answers, but rather he limits himself to answering.

“No”, he tells her.

Elder Yun waits, because she knows him.

“They have a destiny to fulfill”, Tianyu Feng adds.

And Elder Yun nods slowly, with the face of one who has just received exactly the answer she brought written down.

“I already told the council”, she comments. “I told them it was completely certain that you would refuse, and that sending me to ask you was a perfectly elegant way of making me waste a morning.”

Afterward she smiles.

It is a small and fairly disrespectful smile, of those only permitted to someone who has spent two hundred years dealing with the same creature.

“But tell me one thing”, she says to him. “Do they really have a destiny to fulfill? Or are they simply, right now, the people with the most possibilities of carrying your feather to the central continent and thus making it so that your wife can find you?”

And Tianyu Feng, at that question, sighs.

It is a long sigh, tired and absolutely improper for a bird, that comes out of his chest with a deep whistle and that makes Elder Yun’s clothing ripple.

“I have explained it to you so many times that I am even ashamed to recall it”, he tells her. “She is not my wife, she is my other half. It is not the same, it does not resemble it and the fact that you insist on calling it that after two centuries is beginning to strike me as suspicious.”

“It still seems the same thing to me”, Elder Yun answers with all the tranquility in the world.

“Right”, he tells her.

And then, because the conversation has reached the place it always reaches, Tianyu Feng lowers his head until placing it at her height.

“And since you bring up the subject, allow me to remind you of something else”, he continues. “Two hundred years ago I asked someone to make that journey. A single person, because she was the only one on this whole mountain who had sufficient potential to reach the central continent and return.”

He makes a pause.

“And if that person had accepted, you and I would not be having this conversation this morning”, he finishes.

Elder Yun holds his gaze without blinking, and there is not a trace of discomfort on her face, only that mineral patience that comes over people when someone brings up a matter they considered closed long ago.

“In its day I made perfectly clear to you why I did not abandon the Sect to go to the central continent”, she tells him. “I gave you my reasons and I kept none back. And I do not intend to revive that argument with you again, neither today nor ever.”

Tianyu Feng does not insist.

And Elder Yun, the moment she confirms that he is not going to insist, changes her tone.

It is a small change, but he notices it right away, because the mischief disappears from her voice and what remains underneath is something considerably more serious.

“But since I am here, there is something I do want to ask you”, she tells him. “And I want you to answer me truly.”

“Ask”, he tells her.

“The girl”, says Elder Yun. “With her problem. Is she going to be capable of finishing that journey?”

And Tianyu Feng, this time, answers without taking a single instant to think about it.

“That girl, with her problem and all, is far more capable than you were in your good days”, he tells her.

Elder Yun raises her eyebrows.

“I have not the slightest doubt that they will arrive”, he finishes.

And it seems he is going to add something more, because he lowers his neck a bit further and opens his beak, but whatever it was he was about to say never gets out, because suddenly Tianyu Feng lifts his head all at once.

He rises to his full height, stays completely motionless and turns his neck toward the east, in the exact direction in which the Imperial Capital lies, with both wings half open and all the feathers of his breast bristling.

And then, he bursts out laughing.

He laughs heartily, with a series of clicks and deep trills that shake his body, and he laughs besides inside Elder Yun’s head, who finds herself obliged to take a step backward on the gravel while she contemplates the spectacle with her brow furrowed.

“May I know what amuses you so much?” she asks him.

Tianyu Feng takes a good while to stop, and when he finally does and speaks again, there is something in his voice that Elder Yun has never heard from him in two hundred years of knowing him, and it is emotion.

“Something has just happened”, he tells her. “Something that, across innumerable incarnations, I have only witnessed a handful of times.”

He lowers his neck again to place himself at her height.

“And before you ask, I’ll tell you”, he continues. “I have felt how, in the Imperial Capital, something has occurred that has changed the destiny of the entire Empire.”

He makes a very brief pause.

“And not only that”, Tianyu Feng finishes. “The threads that come out of that event also have, if they manage to develop, the potential to change the destiny of this world completely.”