The Dragon Men

Chapter Three

Peking was burning. The flames lit the night sky with phoenix wings, and smells of smoke and gunpowder stung Cixi’s nose, even here at the Mountain Palace for Avoiding Heat, far from the Forbidden City in Peking. Behind her in the spidery palanquin, her maids hid their painted faces in their sleeves and wept. Cixi, the Lady Yehenara, kept a carefully mild expression, as if she were out enjoying an evening ride, though inside she was weeping just like the maids. For a second time the British barbarians had invaded Peking, and now they were doing what they did best-destroy. Automatically she reached down to her lap to stroke one of her dogs for comfort, forgetting that her lap was empty. During the hasty evacuation of the Forbidden City, the eunuchs had thrown all her dear little lion- faced dogs down the well so the barbarians wouldn’t be able to touch them. She wondered if any of them were still alive, struggling to stay afloat in the cold water and begging for someone to take them out.

The spider palanquin came to a halt. Its legs lowered it to the ground, stirring the silk curtains that preserved the privacy of the riders. Li Liyang, her chief eunuch, personally helped her out and guided her toward the steps of the Pavilion of a Thousand Silver Stars, her own residence within the palace. The palace wasn’t a single building but was actually a compound that took up most of the little town of Chengde. Dozens of pavilions and temples and bridges and palaces lay scattered artfully about the lush lawns and gardens of perfumed flowers chosen for their complementary scents. Cixi, who pronounced her imperial name kee-shee in the Manchu fashion, paused at the top of the steps to look at the too-bright sky again. The city was dying as slowly and steadily as her dogs.

“My lady, we should not remain outdoors,” said Liyang in his high-pitched lilt. “It is too upsetting for a delicate constitution.”

“Where is my son?” she asked as she mounted the steps.

“He is safe,” Liyang replied. His head was shaved, and he wore a conical hat of gold silk that matched the elaborate geometric designs on his gold robe. Like most eunuchs, he smelled vaguely of urine-the knife that stripped away a boy’s three preciouses took with it the ability to control the bladder, a problem that remained through adulthood and led to the saying “smelly as a eunuch.” At his belt, Liyang carried a pouch with a small jar in it. The jar held his preciouses preserved in oil, and when he died, they would be buried with him so he could join the ancestors as a full man. Cixi thought of her dogs again and wondered how long it would be before such a thing happened to Liyang.

“Safe does not tell me where he is, Liyang,” she said. “Bring him to me immediately.”

“My lady-”

“You have disobeyed me, Liyang. Fortunately, you are my favorite eunuch, and these are trying times. Therefore I will not have you beaten for disobedience-if my son Zaichun is at my side by the time I reach the front door.”

Liyang scurried away. To be nice to him, Cixi took her time with the steps, pausing to allow her maids to smooth the wrinkles from her silken split-front robe and straighten the wide trousers beneath. Cixi was beautiful and knew it, but in the Imperial Court, beauty was common and cheap. Cixi’s lustrous hair, fine features, and smooth skin had gotten her chosen as a concubine of the fifth rank when she was sixteen, but poise, wit, and her skill in the bedroom had caught the emperor’s fancy, and by age twenty-two, Cixi had spun that fancy into a pregnancy and finally her current rank as Imperial Concubine. Beauty had its uses, and it had to be maintained, but it was nothing without a mind behind it.

Liyang was lucky that beauty requirements for Manchu women such as Cixi did not extend to binding their feet as some of the concubines did. Otherwise someone would have carried her up the steps in an instant and she would have been forced to have Liyang beaten with bamboo rods regardless of how she felt about him. She supposed she could order it done with the thicker ones that broke bones and left bruises instead of the thinner ones that split skin and laid flesh open. But that might show too much favoritism, even for Liyang, and when things were chaotic, people craved order. It wouldn’t do to go back on the rules for any reason. No, if Liyang didn’t produce her son within the allotted time, she would have to have the Imperial Master of a Hundred Cries mete out a severe beating with no intervention from Cixi. It would make everyone feel better.

She reached the top of the steps. The Pavilion of a Thousand Silver Stars was three stories tall, bright and airy even in the night. Lacquered pillars held up the portico, which looked out over the serene waters of a lotus pond. She had ordered the pavilion painted a soft pink, the exact shade of an orchid, because her girlhood name had been Little Orchid. Cixi was the name given her on the day she had been chosen as an Imperial Concubine. A year after the birth of her son-so far the emperor’s only son-Cixi had been promoted to the position of Noble Consort, which put her second only to the empress. This meant she had the emperor’s ear and could do things such as build pink pavilions in the Mountain Palace for Avoiding Heat.

Cixi glanced at the fiery sky again. Last year, just before the signing of the awful Treaty of Tientsin-the treaty that granted the British power to travel within China and sell their filthy opium-a fleet of British ships carrying diplomats, envoys, and thousands of soldiers sailed up the Peiho River near the fortress at Taku. The emperor and his generals didn’t want an armed force coming so close to Taku, and so the emperor sent a message asking them to anchor at a harbor farther north. Although the request was perfectly reasonable and not even inconvenient, the English envoy Wright Frederick-or Frederick Wright, as Cixi supposed the barbarians put the name-ordered the fleet to attack Taku to teach the Chinese a lesson. No doubt to the great surprise of the English, the fortress at Taku had turned out to be more heavily fortified than expected. The automatons and soldiers at Taku had turned back the English forces with little effort. The easy victory emboldened the emperor to declare the entire Treaty of Tientsin in abeyance and the borders closed.

Now, a year later, the English responded in force. They fought their way up the river all the way to Peking, despite the best efforts of the emperor’s generals. Emperor Xianfeng had been forced to flee to the Mountain Palace for his own safety. A difficult thing it had been, too, with hundreds of soldiers, slaves, and eunuchs, and an equal number of mechanical carts filled with their minimal possessions and treasures, preceded by fifty spiders to sweep the road ahead of the emperor’s palanquin and strew the stones with rose petals.

Cixi reached the pavilion doors, gridded with flawless glass, and her maids hurried to slide them open. She glanced about. No sign of Liyang or Zaichun. Ah well. Cixi raised her foot, clad in a bejeweled slipper, to step over the threshold.

“Honored mother!” Her son Zaichun dashed up the steps, his dark eyes sparkling beneath his round cap. He was not quite six, and to him this was a grand adventure that kept him up well past his normal bedtime. Behind him came an entourage of eunuchs and his wet nurse, all of them carrying any toys, foodstuffs, and articles of clothing the boy might need. The servants looked frazzled, and their clothes were in disarray. Cixi made a mental note to have a sharp word with Liyang about that. Servants in the presence of the emperor’s son and the Imperial Concubine had no place to appear less than respectable. Disarray led to fear, fear led to panic, and right now, no one could afford to panic.

“You wished to see me, Mother?” Zaichun continued.

“I did, Little Cricket.” She touched his hair, careful not to the let the long jade coverings on her nails jab his face. “I wanted to see for myself that you were safe.”

“I am. I spoke with Father, too. He even let me ride behind his palanquin so I could watch for invaders!”

“That was kind of him. I hope you remembered to give him your thanks.”

“Of course, Mother. I heard him talking to General Su Shun about how well-mannered I was when we entered the palace.”

“That is good to hear, my son, and I am glad to see that you are safe, but perhaps you should sleep in my pavilion tonight.”

“I can sleep in my own pavilion,” he said sulkily, betraying his earlier good manners. “It’s bigger. And I’m not sleepy.”

“Mother has had a trying day. She hopes her son won’t make things more difficult.”

“I don’t like pink. It’s for girls.”

“Your words are very interesting.” Cixi’s tone remained mild, but her hand dropped to his shoulder, and the points of her nail covers dug into his flesh. He gasped. “But I’m sure you would rather spend the night here, where