“I am showing you these denunciations only to tell you that I am prepared to forgive you. Don’t you see that, without my protection, you will be trailed by the judges like a hare hounded by hunting dogs. In your few years in the Forbidden City you made very few friends and a good many enemies. What would you be without me?”

He stared at me, and his eyes glowed with a dark fire.

“Why do you toy with me? You must choose between the doctor and the monk. Just one word: do you wish to marry me?”

My heart turned to ice, and the smile froze on my face. I delivered a prepared speech: “I still have not appointed the successor to the throne in Court. If, in such a situation, I were to marry, if I were to confer the first imperial title on one man, my actions would create confusion.”

“Majesty,” he cried, throwing himself at me and almost suffocating me, “I love you. I want you to be my wife; I want to call you Heaven-light; I want to be joined to you in life and in death! Yes, I will renounce the title of husband; I spit on recognition. Let us be married in secret, here, now; we shall take Heaven and Earth as our witnesses. Swear to me that you are mine.”

How could I believe that such a young and beautiful man could love an old woman so passionately? Was he hoping to manipulate me? Was he willing to usurp the throne? I pushed him: “The insolence! Kneel before your sovereign!”

Scribe of Loyalty froze and collapsed at my feet, and I spoke slowly and deliberately: “Leave and never come back!”

He smacked his forehead heavily against the ground and then ran off. When his silhouette was reduced to a blur and then disappeared between the gates of my palace, I was devastated.

The gods had not invented love for an emperor.

I WAS HAUNTED by Scribe of Loyalty’s sadness. I could not forgive myself for hurting him. By breaking off with him, I had deprived myself of happiness and of my remedy for immortality. I drove the doctor Shen Nan Qiu from my palace to lock myself away with my pain.

News of my lover reached me: The master monk was sowing terror in Luoyang. His disciples trawled the streets all day picking fights. They broke down the doors of foreign temples and destroyed their unfamiliar idols. For Buddha’s anniversary celebrations, the monk secretly arranged to have a pond dug out in front of his monastery. He stood up on a stage in public and cut his own thigh, then he unveiled the huge hole filled with the blood of an ox he had had slaughtered the day before. Claiming that it was his own blood, he said he would commission a divine portrait of me in this crimson paint.

Word of his clashes echoed through the Court. Some said he had gone mad; others called for him to be punished. His cries of despair tore me apart, but I brushed aside my own weakness by asking the judges to disarm his monastery. Delighted to be free to attack the imperial favorite, the Court raised an army and surrounded the estate. The monks were surprised and surrendered immediately. They were chained, thrown into prison, and then exiled. After a brief morning in custody, Scribe of Loyalty received my edict granting him grace and was freed from prison. He headed for the Palace and asked to speak with me, but I refused.

One night two months later, I woke with a start. There was an acrid smell in my pavilion. I asked for the door to be opened: Outside the sky was lit up like a brazier and seemed to be rippling. A column of smoke rose up from the Temple of Ten Thousand Elements where clusters of giant flames were blooming like monstrous flowers and spitting out showers of sparks.

Gentleness ran to me in tears. “Majesty, it’s the temple. Heaven is angry!”

My eunuchs arrived with a litter. They wanted to take me to a palace beside the river, but I refused to move.

Swarms of birds wheeled in the darkness screeching in fear. In the courtyard outside women fell to their knees, joined their hands and recited prayers. The fires rose up and dropped back down in time to their chanting. I was overwhelmed by a dark premonition and stood rooted to the spot. The macabre dance of the flames fell on my retinas, beneath the vault of my head, within my bleeding soul.

My ministers were silent during the morning salutation the following day. They feared my rage, but what they feared most was that the blaze might have been a warning from Heaven, a harbinger of imminent catastrophe. To calm the mood of anxiety spreading through the Empire, I decided to sacrifice myself. I published an imperial edict in which I asked my people and officials to lay the blame on me. Libations were made in the Eternal Temple. Taking the Ancestors as my witnesses, I prayed that the punishment of the gods might be visited on me alone.

I decided to have the Temple of Ten Thousand Elements rebuilt, and Scribe of Loyalty was appointed to oversee the work. But the master monk seemed to take a long time to come and thank me for this appointment. Gripped with indescribable anguish, I cancelled my evening ride and waited for him. A few days later, I was told that a beggar child claimed to have a message for me from Scribe of Loyalty. I received him. The boy was so awestruck that he shook from head to toe and could not answer my questions. I nevertheless managed to tear a crumpled letter from his hand. The paper seemed unbearably fine to me. My heart felt heavy in my breast, and my body froze under the effects of an unspeakable fear. I took a long time unfolding that piece of rice paper. My lover’s terrible handwriting leapt off the page at me: “Heavenlight, you shall never grow old. Tonight I shall be your sacrifice to Heaven.”

Near the Southern Gate of the Forbidden City, tens of thousands of workmen were toiling to evacuate melted bronze statues, charred wood, and ashes that were still glowing hot. One official reading through the Sacred Writings found a verse which said that the bodhisattva Maitreya had become Buddha of the Future after sacrificing himself by fire. This reading triggered a new religious fervor and restored hope among the people.

The world was borne on a wave of renewed enthusiasm that I pretended to share. As I watched the new temple reaching toward the skies, taller and more sumptuous than its predecessor, I saw Little Treasure’s smile, red on white. I sometimes dreamed of him, this man whose imposing statue was now silhouetted against the sky. With his phallus in my belly, he would lean over me and say, “Heavenlight, you misunderstood me.”

I had not realized that he loved me. I had thought he was acting out of self-interested ambition. I had been afraid he would rob me of my throne.

I had destroyed my own immortal remedy.

Had I become a senile tyrant?

FOR MY BIRTHDAY I ordered that feasts be offered to the people in every town for a period of nine days. Within the Palace I summoned only members of my family and a few favorite ministers to a banquet set up in the Pavilion of Flying Snow.

That evening I missed Scribe of Loyalty’s voice. The night had not come yet, and snowflakes fell against the window, gray forms wriggling down on a translucent screen. I sat with pride in the heart of the palace, with my back to the north, looking southward. Serving women stood behind me holding round or square fans on long handles, symbols of my imperial splendor; Gentleness and my Court ladies brought ink, paper, flowers, incense, handkerchiefs, and vases. They were all dressed as men. My son and his twenty children were lined up on my right, on the eastern side. His large family still seemed tiny compared to my thirteen nephews and the spreading mass of scores of great nephews and great nieces in the opposite wing. Further away from me, closer to the door, I had put my relations from my mother’s family and the ministers, indistinct silhouettes merging in the candlelight.