Purely by Accident – Chapter 45
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‘Crown prince.’
That was a title I hadn’t heard in a long time — so long ago that it might as well have been shut away in some distant grave. Hearing it now made me think back on my meagre, tragic past, and in that moment, I felt as if I had been transported into another lifetime.
‘Bandit chief’ had been my day job, ‘son of an official of a middling rank’ my side gig — but these were just my professions, not my identity. When it came to the latter, I too would have grown up as a princess, as one reckoned such things, if not for the vagaries of fate.
Of course, there are many ‘would haves’ and ‘should haves’ in this life — when events that seem to be travelling along a fixed path are suddenly sent hurtling down another route entirely, presumably because Heaven had dozed off at the reins. To take an example, Zhao Yishu should have married Chu Feichen; instead, he’d chosen to break both her heart and his own. Or to take another example, I should have stayed firmly in my mountain stronghold, plying my trade as a bandit chief; instead, I’d ended up in the capital of the Yan Empire and become a prince consort. Or to take yet another example, Chu Feichen and I should have held to the terms of our original bargain, and treated each other with nothing more than the civility due to an acquaintance; instead, we’d taken a tumble — well, several — through the sheets and promised the rest of our lives to each other. These were all debts of the heart, and bad debts at that.
There was a saying about the caprices of fate: it turns its palm up and clouds gather; it turns it palm down and rain begins to fall. If I kept that firmly in mind, then the rather fantastical events of my past began to seem somewhat less farfetched.
My real father had been the previous ruler of the Qi Empire — Emperor Ling, born Wei Jingxuan. As emperors go, he had been a fairly unlucky man. All of his predecessors had passed away peacefully after an uneventful reign, but once he came to the throne, a coup soon turned his world upside down.
Another deposed ruler of an empire had once lamented:
‘For I knew not that ’twas a dream
And I a passing guest.
Let me tarry a little while
And taste that false sweet joy.’[1]
These seemed like apt enough lines to describe what my father must have felt on the night of the coup.
My father had been young then, with a taste for the pleasures of the flesh. On that fateful night, he had been in my mother’s bedchamber, and the pair of them were vigorously plucking their blossoms while they might,[2] when one of the eunuchs burst in with an urgent message. The empress’ brother is revolting, he proclaimed as he prostrated himself on the floor, his face filled with grief. The rebels had already broken through the main gates of the palace, the little messenger added, and the inner court itself was likely to be breached soon.
That night, the palace burned so fiercely that the flames lit the sky. Under cover of the confusion, Xu Ziqi and Yi Chen’s fathers — both of whom were commanders of my father’s imperial guard — escorted my parents out of the palace through a series of secret passageways. As for the little princes and princesses, my father’s other consorts and the palace maids, well, they were much less lucky.
After that, those troops who remained loyal to my father formed a court-in-exile. Given their paltry numbers, there was little they could actually do, so most of their time was spent in guerrilla warfare — launching a sudden ambush on the enemy, then retreating and regrouping somewhere else.
It was into this chaos that I was born. Not only was I never given a chance at the life of a pampered princess, even my true sex was concealed from the world, and I was declared to be my father’s son. Because what his loyalists needed was a crown prince capable of inheriting the family fortune — even if the fortune itself seemed rather threadbare and shabby, no matter how you looked at it.
And so ever since I was born, I was raised as a boy, and life was often hard. The army of loyalists who had formed around my father and myself soon became a thorn in the new emperor’s side. As the saying went, to eradicate weeds, you must rip them out by the roots; otherwise they’ll only sprout again the following spring.[3] Determined to seal our doom, that dear relative of mine seized every opportunity to harry us with his own troops, sending us fleeing from one corner of the empire to the next.
It was in these wretched conditions — where our troops were able to retaliate perhaps once for every five attacks we received — that Xu Ziqi, Yi Chen and I forged a deep bond of comradeship. Together, we scrambled up trees in search of birds, waded into rivers to catch fish, and sheltered behind the rear detachments of my father’s troops when yet another clash with the enemy made dust roil and horses kick up their hooves at the front. We ate together, lived together, grew up together.
Then the day came when my father finally acknowledged that he might never sit on the throne of Qi again in his lifetime, though I secretly suspected this realisation had been forced on him by the desperation of our circumstances, rather than any inner clarity of thought.
That was the day when we were trapped against the shores of the Wei River. Before us were ten thousand of the Qi Empire’s finest troops; behind us lay the vast pale expanse of the water. When I looked across it, I could just about make out the easternmost edge of the Yan Empire.
I still remembered how my father had looked that day. His expression was that of a man who had lost all hope, and in doing so, gained a kind of freedom. A dense network of lines had sprung up around the corners of his eyes, but his always-steely gaze was still so bright that I understood why his men looked at him as if he was capable of holding up the sky.
Those eyes gazed upon me with no small amount of paternal love, and an even greater measure of hope. He said nothing as two of his soldiers came up to me and took hold of my hands. As they started to lead me away, I called out to him again and again, until my voice grew hoarse and my eyes became reddened with tears. It was only then that he reached out and cupped my face with both hands — hands that had once handled imperial decrees and now wielded swords. His palms were a little cold, and when he spoke, his voice gave me an even greater chill than the wind sweeping in from the river.
He said, Zisong, you must live.
Then his men bundled me onto a small, leaky dinghy, and began rowing it across the river. That was the first time I’d ever been on a boat. I hung over the side, watching as clouds of smoke and dust rose from the shore we’d just left, and puked up my guts.
Soon after we landed on the shore opposite, I became the son of the Governor of Yinzhou, the province that lay at the Yan Empire’s easternmost border.
Wei Tiancheng, the Governor of Yinzhou himself, was a distant relative of my father’s — a second cousin of a second cousin of a second cousin, or some such. Many years ago, when he was young and foolish, my father had wheedled him into being placed in the Yan Empire as one of Qi’s eyes-and-ears. To put it more colloquially, he was a spy — the kind who purported to serve one master while being secretly loyal to another.[4] As things turned out, my father had been overthrown well before he could call upon this kinsman to carry out whatever purpose he’d been planted there to serve. As a well-known scholar had once said, a sovereign must first quell the enemies within his own borders before turning his eyes to external threats.[5] Wise words indeed.
Looking back on it, I must have been a fairly happy-go-lucky young person: the transition from ‘Qi crown prince in exile’ to ‘son of a Yan official’ cost me not one twinge of psychological pain. All I needed to do was tell myself every single day: you must live you must live you must live. And I thought, perhaps if I did that enough, I would finally be able to forget the look in my father’s eyes as we parted on the shores of the Wei River.
Several years passed in the blink of an eye. When Xu Ziqi and Yi Chen finally found me after many misadventures, we’d all changed so much that we barely recognised each other. And when I saw them again, I finally had to accept that my real father, the one who had told me you must live, had been unable to do so himself.
The thought of calling another man ‘father’ suddenly became unbearable. At Xu Ziqi and Yi Chen’s instigation, I set myself up as a bandit chief on a nearby mountain.
Life in my bandit stronghold was monotonous but peaceful. Perhaps I should live out the rest of my life like this, I often thought to myself. The lost throne of Qi, my dead father, the ghosts of my ancestors — I could put all that out of my mind. In a hundred years, I too would be nothing more than a pile of bones buried in the earth, left behind by the remorseless march of time.
And then I met Chu Feichen.
I meant every word I said to her in that letter. I’d felt instinctively that it was dangerous for me to be near her, and knew I should keep as much of a distance from her as possible. Yet, at the same time, I was drawn irresistibly to her presence.
Right up until this morning, I’d thought, since I loved her and she loved me, then let that worn, battered past of mine be buried forever. After all, why should one cling so stubbornly to what was already gone? We had each other, and we had a future together; that was enough.
But now, as I stared at the three men kneeling before me, I realised that there were some things from the past that I couldn’t simply cast aside even if I wanted to — and that the long-drawn-out jape that bitch karma had been playing on me was far from over.
Possibly because I’d been staring blankly at them for too long, and he felt that their poses would seem suspicious to anyone else who might happen to come in, Yi Chen tugged at Xu Ziqi’s sleeve. The two of them exchanged glances with the man who held himself out as my father, then all three of them stood up.
Yi Chen gazed at me steadily out of clear eyes. ‘Crown prince?’ he asked hesitantly, his voice low.
The title pierced right through me. The jade pendant the princess had given me suddenly felt ice-cold against my heart.
I took a moment to steady myself, and forced my features into a smile. ‘What do you mean “crown prince”? That was all dead and buried long ago — why bring it up again now?’
The three of them exchanged yet another glance, this one filled with shock and dismay. Then my nominal father spoke up, plucking at his beard as he did. ‘Crown prince, has life as a prince consort of the Yan Empire been so comfortable as to make you forget who you really are?’
Involuntarily, I let out a snort of cold derision. ‘What do you mean by “who you really are”?’ I demanded, fixing a stare on him. ‘Do you mean my identity as your son, or something else? Father?’ I emphasised the last word deliberately.
My father looked at me, opening and shutting his mouth soundlessly a few times; the colour had drained almost completely from his face.
I took a step forward and stood right in front of him. ‘The day you pressed me into the princess’ service without so much as a by-your-leave, didn’t you manage to foresee that I would become so used to the life of luxury she could offer that I would forget who I truly was?’
He went on staring at me. His mouth had fallen open, and his face had become even more bloodless.
How cruel I am, I thought, to speak like this to the ‘father’ who raised and educated me for so long. But I had neither his patience nor his talent for keeping faith with the past even after being undercover for so many years. The only thing I knew was, I was Chu Feichen’s prince consort.
Yi Chen patted my father reassuringly on the shoulder. Then, looking straight at me, he said slowly and deliberately, ‘Even if you’ve forgotten who you really are, crown prince, you surely can’t have forgotten His Majesty the late emperor?’
The late emperor. The late emperor.
That day by the shores of the Wei River, where the sky and the water merged into misty whiteness, and he’d said to me, Zisong, you must live.
I dug my nails into the soft flesh of my palms. Bleakness filled my heart.
Yi Chen marched right up to me, thrusting his usually pale face — now scarlet with emotion — within inches of mine. ‘If I told you we now have a chance of restoring you to the throne of Qi, crown prince, would you also cast that aside without a backward glance?’
Restore me to the throne? But whose throne was it, really, and whose empire? I had been born outside the palace walls, I had spent my formative years in the middle of an army, I had come of age in the Yan Empire, and I had found happiness wherever Chu Feichen was. Whose was the throne they spoke of?
I backed away from Yi Chen, my expression crumpling.
Yi Chen sighed and softened slightly. ‘Crown prince, even leaving aside all talk of restoring you to the throne, you still shouldn’t let this opportunity slip by lightly, if only to avenge our late emperor.’
I twisted my head away and stared out of the window at the osmanthus tree in the courtyard. Its upthrust branches were mostly bare; only a few withered leaves still clung to them, shivering in the cold wind. All of us mortals were but pawns of fate, and any struggle was futile. So be it.
‘What “opportunity” do you mean?’
It was only after I’d spoken the words that I realised my voice had become terribly hoarse. I coughed, covering my mouth with my sleeve.
A complicated mixture of emotions came over Yi Chen’s face. ‘The Grand Marshal of the Yan Empire has promised us,’ he began, his eyes looking everywhere except into mine, ‘that if we can help him seize the throne of Yan, he’ll lend us the troops we need to retake the Qi Empire.’
A coup? I couldn’t believe my ears. That was exactly what Chu Feichen had been worrying about earlier this morning — and now, was I to become an accomplice to those traitors who wanted to depose her father? My father had lost his empire to a usurper, and now many years later, I was expected to help another usurper mount a different throne. Heaven had an excellent sense of irony.
I couldn’t help a cold, humourless chuckle. ‘Help him seize the throne? With what? Our brave loyalist troops? How many of them are still left after that battle at the Wei River?’
Yi Chen shook his head. His eyes seemed to have taken on some inner light. ‘No. We’ll do it with just one man — you, the consort of the Yan Empire’s Eldest Princess!’
My face must have been quite a picture.
‘What the Grand Marshal wants,’ Yi Chen continued, ‘is a map of all the secret passageways under the inner palace. On the day he launches his attack, he wants to capture the whole royal family in one fell swoop, and make sure none of them slips through his net.’
The Grand Marshal was ambitious indeed!
‘The whole royal family,’ I muttered. ‘Does that include Chu Feichen?’
Yi Chen’s expression changed slightly. His lips twitched a few times, but he said nothing.
I turned to look at Xu Ziqi. ‘Ziqi, is that what you think as well?’
A rueful look flashed briefly across Xu Ziqi’s face, then he too nodded slightly.
I turned to my father. ‘The day you all but sold me into the princess’ service, did you already have this in mind? Otherwise how would the Grand Marshal know he could seek aid from you?’
Governor Wei looked away from me.
Very good. Very good. My oh-so-thoughtful friends and family, it turned out, had been setting a trap for me all along. And who was I supposed to trap in return? Chu Feichen?
The very thought made me feel as if someone had stuck a knife through my heart and twisted it. It hurt so much that I nearly stopped breathing.
I turned back to Xu Ziqi. ‘The day you kidnapped Chu Feichen and brought her back to our stronghold,’ I said, my voice unsteady, ‘did you know she was a princess of the Yan Empire?’
A storm was raging in my heart. If even our first meeting had been part of some premeditated scheme, then all those things I’d said to her about destiny, about love — what did they count for?
Luckily, Xu Ziqi shook his head.
Yi Chen closed his eyes briefly and opened them again. ‘Crown prince?’ he said. He was clearly anxious for my answer.
My mind was a complete blank. ‘If I manage to get hold of the map the Grand Marshal wants,’ I said, staring at him without really seeing him, ‘who should I hand it to?’
A look of mingled surprise and delight came into Yi Chen’s eyes. ‘To the commander of the imperial guard, Zhao Yishu.’
Zhao Yishu, that traitorous rat. Just as I’d expected.
I turned away from the three of them and took a deep breath. My fists clenched and unclenched. A long moment later, I finally managed to force out two words.
‘All right.’
***
Footnotes:
- In Chinese, 梦里不知身是客, 一晌贪欢. These are lines from a ci poem set to the tune of ‘Waves Washing the Sand’ (浪淘沙) by Li Yu (李煜). Li Yu was the last ruler of the Southern Tang Dynasty during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. His reign was ended when his state was annexed by the invading Northern Song Dynasty armies and he was captured and imprisoned. Li Yu was an accomplished poet, and many of his best-known ci poems were written during the period while he was a prisoner. The poem quoted here is one of these. In it, Li Yu describes how only in his dreams of his lost homeland is he able to forget, albeit briefly, the fact that he is a prisoner. The word 客 in the poem is often glossed as ‘captive’ or ‘prisoner’ in commentaries. I have chosen to translate it more literally as ‘guest’ here to better fit the tale Zisong is telling. [return to text]
- In Chinese, 花开堪折直须折. This is a line from the shi poem ‘Golden Dress Song’ (金缕衣), traditionally attributed to the Tang Dynasty poet Du Qiuniang (杜秋娘) (see footnote 2 to Chapter 8). [return to text]
- In Chinese, 斩草不除根, 春风吹又生. Possibly derived from 野火烧不尽, 春风吹又生, a line from the shi poem ‘Bidding Farewell on the Plain’ (赋得古原草送别) by the Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi (白居易). The latter translates loosely as ‘wildfires will never burn them [the grasses on the plain] out / they grow again in the spring’. [return to text]
- In Chinese, the saying 身在曹营心在汉, literally ‘body in the Cao camp but heart in the Han camp’. This is a reference to an event from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义) by the Ming Dynasty novelist Luo Guanzhong (罗贯中), one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature. The event in question occurs when the military general Guan Yu is captured by and is briefly in the service of the warlord Cao Cao (leader of the ‘Cao camp’ referred to in the saying), while remaining loyal to his sworn brother, the rival warlord Liu Bei (leader of the ‘Han camp’ referred to here). [return to text]
- In Chinese, 攘外必先安内. This was one of the key policies adopted by Kuomintang-ruled government of the Republic of China following the Mukden incident in 1931, a false flag event staged by Japanese military personnel as a pretext for the Japanese invasion of the Manchuria region of the Republic of China. In this context, the ‘enemy within’ refers to the Chinese Communist Party, while the ‘external threat’ refers to the Japanese forces. [return to text]
douqi 随笔 