The Moon in the Palace (The Empress of Bright Moon Duology) Read online

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  Copyright © 2016 by Weina Dai Randel

  Cover and internal design © 2016 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Laura Klynstra

  Cover images © Allan Jenkins/Trevillion Images, George Clerk/Getty Images, tomertu/Shutterstock, ussr/Shutterstock

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Randel, Weina Dai.

  Title: The moon in the palace / Weina Dai Randel.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015009943 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Wu hou, Empress of China, 624-705—Fiction. |

  China—History—Tang dynasty, 618-907—Fiction. |

  Empresses—China—Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3618.A6423 M66 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015009943

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Tang Dynasty, AD 631: The Fifth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Summer

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  AD 639: The Thirteenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Autumn

  Chapter 3

  AD 640: The Fourteenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Spring

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  AD 640: The Fourteenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Winter

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  AD 641: The Fifteenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Summer

  Chapter 10

  AD 641: The Fifteenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Autumn

  Chapter 11

  AD 641: The Fifteenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Winter

  Chapter 12

  AD 642: The Sixteenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Early Spring

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  AD 642: The Sixteenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Late Spring

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  AD 642: The Sixteenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Summer

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  AD 642: The Sixteenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Autumn

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  AD 642: The Sixteenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Winter

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  AD 643: The Seventeenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Spring

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  AD 643: The Seventeenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Summer

  Chapter 30

  AD 643: The Seventeenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Winter

  Chapter 31

  AD 644: The Eighteenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Spring

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  AD 644: The Eighteenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Autumn

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  AD 644: The Eighteenth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Winter

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  AD 648: The Twenty-Second Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect—Summer

  Chapter 41

  Author’s Note

  Reading Group Guide

  An Excerpt from The Empress of Bright Moon

  A Conversation with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Mark,

  whose love gives me a new life

  TANG DYNASTY, AD 631

  the Fifth Year of Emperor Taizong’s Reign of Peaceful Prospect

  SUMMER

  1

  The day my future was foretold, I was just five years old.

  I was practicing calligraphy in the garden where Father hosted his gathering with the nobles, scholars, and other important men of the prefecture. It was a brilliant summer afternoon. He was not wearing his governor’s hat, and the sunlight sifted through the maze of the oak branches and illuminated his gray hair like a silver crown.

  A monk, whom I had never seen before, asked to read my face.

  “How extraordinary!” He lowered himself to look into my eyes. “I have never seen a face with such perfection, a design so flawless and filled with inspiration. Look at his temple, the shape of his nose and eyes. This face bears the mission of Heaven.”

  I wanted to smile. I had fooled him. I was Father’s second daughter, and his favorite. He often dressed me in a boy’s tunic and treated me as the son he did not have. Mother was reluctant to go along with the game, but I considered it a great honor.

  “It is a pity, however, that he is a boy,” the monk said as people came to surround us.

  “A pity?” Father asked, his voice carrying a rare shade of confusion. “Why is that, Tripitaka?”

  I was curious too. How could a girl be more valuable than a boy?

  “If the child were a girl, with this face”—the monk, Tripitaka, watched me intently—“she would eclipse the light of the sun and shine brighter than the moon. She would reign over the kingdom that governs many men. She would mother the emperors of the land but also be emperor in her own name. She would dismantle the house of lies but build the temple of the divine. She would dissolve the kingdom of ghosts but found a dynasty of souls. She would be immortal.”

  “A woman emperor?” Father’s mouth was agape.
“How could this be possible?”

  “It is difficult to explain, Governor, but it is true. There would be no one before her and none after.”

  “But this child is not of the imperial family.”

  “It would be her destiny.”

  “I see,” Father said, looking pensive. “How could a woman reign over the kingdom?” Father was asking the monk, but he stared at me, his eyes glistening with a strange light.

  “She must endure.”

  “Endure what?”

  “Deaths.”

  “Whose?”

  Tripitaka did not answer; instead, he turned around to look at the reception hall through the moon-shaped garden entrance, where splendid murals and antique sandalwood screens inlaid with pearls and jade covered each wall. Leaning against the wall were shelved precious ceramic bowls and cups, a bone relic of Buddha—Mother’s most valued treasure—and a rare collection of four-hundred-year-old poems. In the center of the hall stood the object all Father’s guests envied—a life-size horse statue made of pure gold, a gift from Emperor Gaozu, the founder of the Tang Dynasty who owed his kingdom to Father.

  Tripitaka faced Father again, gazing at him like a man watching another drowning in a river yet unable to help.

  “I shall take my leave now, respected Governor. May fortune forever protect you. It is my privilege to offer you my service.” He pressed his hands together and bowed to leave.

  What I did next I could never explain. I ran to him and tugged at his stole. I might have only meant to say farewell, but the words that slipped from my mouth were “Wo men xia ci chong feng.”

  We shall meet again.

  Tripitaka’s eyes widened in surprise. Then, as though he had just understood something, he nodded, and with a deep bow, he said, “So it shall be.”

  Any other child my age would have felt confused or at least awkward. Not me. I smiled, withdrew, and took Father’s hand.

  After that day, I was not to wear a boy’s garment again, and Father began to draft letters and sent them to Emperor Taizong, Emperor Gaozu’s son, who had inherited the throne and resided in a great palace in Chang’an. When I asked him the purpose of the letters, Father explained there was a custom that every year the ruler of the kingdom chose a number of maidens to serve him. The maidens must come from noble families and be older than thirteen. It was a great honor for the women, because once they were favored by the Emperor and became high-ranking ladies, they would bring their families eternal fame and glory.

  Father said he would like me to go to the palace.

  He devoted himself to teaching me classical poems, history, calligraphy, and mathematics, and every night, before I went to bed, he would ask me to recite Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Oftentimes I went to sleep mumbling, “All warfare is based on deception…”

  Days went by, then seasons and years. When I was twelve, one year before Emperor Taizong would summon me, Father took me to our family’s grave site. He looked to be in high spirits, his footsteps light and his head held high. He told me old stories of how he, the wealthiest man in Shanxi Prefecture, had funded the war of Emperor Gaozu when he decided to rebel against the Sui Dynasty, how when the Emperor was betrayed and forced to flee, Father opened the gates of our enormous home to accommodate his army, and how, after the war was won, Emperor Gaozu proposed the marriage between Father and Mother, cousin of an empress, daughter of a renowned noble faithful to the empire that had perished.

  His long sleeves waving, Father showed me the undulating land that stretched to the edge of the sun—his land, my family’s land. “Will you promise to safeguard our family’s fortune and honor?” he asked me, his eyes glittering.

  Clenching my fists, I nodded solemnly, and he laughed. His voice melted into the warm air and echoed on the tops of the distant cypresses.

  The pleasure of pleasing him wrapped around me when I caught a pair of yellow bulbous eyes peering out of the bushes. The forest fell still, and all the chirping and rustling vanished. A shower of leaves, fur, and red drops poured down from the sky, and a scream pierced my ears. Perhaps it came from me, or Father, I was not sure, for everything turned black, and when I came to my senses, I was at the table with Mother and my two sisters, eating rice porridge with shredded pork.

  One of our servants rushed into the reception hall, his chest heaving and his face wet with perspiration. There had been an accident, he said. Father had fallen off a cliff and died.

  On the day of his funeral, a feeble sun blinked through the opaque morning haze that hovered above the mountain tracks. Slowly, I walked toward his grave. A blister broke on my toe, but I hardly felt it. In front of me, a priest wearing a square mask painted with four eyes hopped and danced, and near him, the bell ringers shook their small bells. The tinkling faded to the distant sky but lingered in my heart. Desperately, I searched my mind to find any clue that might hint at the nature of Father’s death, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not remember the details of the day he had died. I knelt, my face numb and my hands cold, as the hearse bearers pushed Father into the earthen chamber, burying him.

  I thought my life was over. I did not know it had just begun.

  2

  When we returned home, a group of men waited in front of my house, their torches roaring in the night like flaming trees, and the black smoke stretching in the sky like the shadowy cobweb of a monstrous spider.

  I recognized the magistrate, wearing my father’s hat. My heart sank. He had taken Father’s position. I knew the law well. No matter how much Father loved me, I was not his son, and thus I could not inherit his governorship. But there had to be another reason the magistrate was there. I stopped Mother and my two sisters, holding them close to me.

  “Old woman,” the magistrate said to Mother, his hands on his hips, “take your worthless girls with you and get out of here.”

  I could not stand this man or his utter disrespect of Mother. I stood before him. “Do not speak to my mother like this. If anyone needs to leave, it’s you. This is my home.”

  “Not anymore.” He sneered. “It’s mine now. Everything belongs to me: the house, the treasure, and all the gold. Now, I order you to get out of my sight.” He waved, and his men lunged toward us, pushing us to the road.

  “How dare you.” I struggled, trying to free myself from the arms that clamped on my shoulders. “You scoundrel!”

  A sharp pain stabbed me as the magistrate drove his fist into my stomach. I was stunned. No one had ever struck me before. I dove toward him and kicked with all my might. But another blow fell on my back, and I tumbled to the ground, my vision blurred with pain. For a moment, I could hear only the echoes of loud slaps and my sisters’ frightened cries. I shook my head and struggled to rise, because at that moment, I saw that Mother, her hand on her face, fell beside me and gasped. Instinctively, I leaned over and wrapped my arms around her, shielding her as more blows rained down on me.

  • • •

  Finally, all the kicks and commotion died off, and the gates of my home closed behind me. From inside came loud laughter and cheers.

  Our servants came to us, all one hundred of them, bearing sacks on their shoulders. They helped me sit up, and then one by one, they bowed, weeping miserably. As they turned around to leave, I watched them, a lump in my throat. I had known them since I was born and called them aunts and uncles, but they had to leave. It was just as the proverb said, “When a tree falls, wretched monkeys have no choice but to scatter.”

  Pushing back my tears, I turned to my mother and sisters, who sobbed beside me. I held them, trying to comfort them, and I swore I would protect them and take care of them, but I knew there was nothing I could do to take back our home. I could beg the nobles who had served Father to help me, but the greedy magistrate, whose words were law, was their superior, and no one would dare to defy him.

  I did not know where we could stay eith
er. All the family members on Mother’s side had died in the war, and Father had no relatives in Wenshui. I could ask to stay with neighbors, but we would be like beggars, relying on people’s charity. In the end, Mother said we should go to Qing, my half brother, who lived in Chang’an, the city where Emperor Taizong’s great palace was located. The eldest son from Father’s previous marriage, Qing was a greedy gambler who hated me and the last person from whom I would seek help.

  But I decided to listen to Mother. We would go to Chang’an, for once I got there, I would seek every opportunity to see the Emperor and beg him to return our house and belongings to us.

  The night grew cold. We huddled together under a tree to keep warm. I was hungry, exhausted, and my body was sore from the beating, but I could not shut my eyes as the night’s wind whipped my cold face.

  At dawn, Mother sought out a traveling caravan that passed our town and paid them with my jade bangle. Together with my two sisters, I limped to the carriage and climbed in.

  My chin knocking against the carriage’s window frame, I watched my home fade into the distance. I had drunk Wenshui’s water, walked on Wenshui’s muddy road, and grown up in Wenshui’s air. Now I had to leave.

  • • •

  Father used to say that Chang’an was the most glorious place under Heaven, and many people flocked to the Emperor’s city like moths attracted to light. Everyone—merchant, poet, mercenary, and prostitute alike—went there to realize dreams of fortune and decadence. It was also the destination of the Silk Route, where merchants from as far as Persia, Kucha, Kashgar, and Samarkand brought rare perfumes and hard-to-find luxuries for trade.

  But when we approached the city wall near the Jinguang Gate, the scenery before me reflected none of Father’s description. The gray ramparts, looking like the jagged teeth of a demon, sprawled endlessly in the distance. Around me, many merchants, their faces netted with wrinkles and their lips parched with thirst, faltered on the road in fatigue, and the leaves of persimmon groves near a lake shriveled, looking on the verge of dying.

  Once we entered the right gateway, the view of the city surprised me. White stone bridges arched in the shape of half-moons, stands of green willows edged deep ditches, vermillion-colored canoes and indigo-hued dragon boats floated on placid canals, and the enormous walled buildings—the residential wards, Mother told me—stood next to one another like fortresses.