The messenger raised his head, eyes downcast. “The empress, Yangchen-tsa, commands your attendance, Wizard Hong.”
* * *
Yangchen paced. The babe would not stop crying. She gave it her breast, but though it mumbled and fussed with the nipple it would not latch. She jiggled and coddled it. She gave it to the nurse to be burped and diapered and reswaddled and returned.
All this, and the babe, Namri—her son, her husband Songtsan’s heir, the child whose birth had made her first wife to the Bstangpo and the Empress of Rasa—would not stop crying. It wailed like a peacock. It shrieked like a tiger. It threw fits in circles and spirals and explosive vortexes of noise.
There is something about the sound of a crying baby—a truly inconsolable crying baby, not a merely fussy one—that brings a form of madness to otherwise calm and settled adults. Yangchen-tsa, at nineteen, considered herself very adult indeed: an empress, and one whose mastery of the viperous politics of the Rasan court had put her husband on the throne in advance of his majority.
It was she who had removed her husband’s dowager mother from the center of the web where she had sat like a bloated spider so long, controlling Songtsan and Yangchen both. It was she who had managed to cast the blame for that removal on the doorstep of her husband’s brother, thus requiring the new—and premature—emperor to condemn his sibling to death. Unkind, and ruthless—but Yangchen-tsa’s father had cautioned her when he sent her to marry Songtsan and Tsansong that if she wished to survive the imperial court, she must be subtle and unrestrained by compassion. What she did, she told herself, was for her son.
It was she who had ascertained that the child she would bear would be a son, and that her son would be born first among all the children of her sister-wives. She was not the empress by blood or birth; Yangchen had been born to a minor wife of a noble family of Song, the third living daughter and fourteenth child of her father. She had been traded away to Rasa because her father was notable, not because she was.
And yet it was by her own hand that Yangchen-tsa was Empress of Rasa, and though history and her husband would never know it, still the victory should have been sweet, so sweet, as secret and sweet as stolen honey on her tongue. So her father had assured her—that the sweetness of power paid for everything.
But the execution of Prince Tsansong would be carried out by burning this very day. And a plague as horrific as anything out of the bad old tales that Yangchen loved so dearly and so desperately raged across her empire. And as she gave the babe back to his nurse again so that her women could dress her for the arrival of the surgeon-wizard Hong-la, Yangchen entertained a momentary fantasy that the bitterness of her own acts had soured her milk and her son would never stop crying now.
What a ridiculous superstition, she told herself, and dropped her dressing gown. You might as well suppose that your own honored father could have offered poor advice.
The clothing and coifing she had to endure was elaborate, but it commenced, at least, with a hot and scented bath. On another day, Yangchen would have managed to relax as she leaned her head on the steep side of the neck-deep cedarwood tub. She would have felt the pain in her muscles subside as one of her women worked to ease the cramping brought on by elaborate hairstyles and elegant posture—not to mention the workings of a guilty conscience. Today, though, any sensual pleasure she might have felt was lost to the weight of her distraction. She scarcely noticed that the water had begun to cool around her until her women helped her to stand.
Yangchen waited on a cedarwood grating beside a brazier stocked with aromatic coals while the women scraped lingering droplets from her with sandalwood paddles, then softened her body with sandalwood-scented oil. The tub was emptied halfway and carried out. Yangchen—swathed now in a soft robe to give her skin time to absorb the oil—took a seat before the brazier. She perched on an elevated stool so her hair could be combed out without brushing the carpeted stone of the floor. Her women, as drilled as any military unit, moved on and off stepping stools so they could comb the whole length of each strand.
In the next room, Namri was still wailing. Ridiculous superstition or not, Yangchen shifted uncomfortably. If it were her milk souring, the babe would not fuss so when presented with the nurse’s breast.
At last her hair was dressed, her face painted. She stood to let her ladies fold and drape layers of silk and cloth of gold around her body. At first, the over-robe they provided was one in white and crimson, the colors of bone and blood for mourning. But Yangchen sent it away. The ladies might have raised their eyebrows, but they brought her another, this one in deep violets and indigos.