“Huh! So it’s true?”

“It is! She said she saw the doctor go into their rooms with her own eyes!”

Maomao sipped her soup and listened. Hundreds of serving girls were having their breakfast in the vast dining room. The

meal consisted of soup and a porridge of mixed grains. She was listening to two women diagonally across from her as they traded gossip. The women took pains to look chagrined about the story, but it was an unseemly curiosity that lit their eyes.

“He visited both Lady Gyokuyou and Lady Lihua.”

“Gracious, both of them? But they’re only six months and three months, aren’t they?”

“That’s right! Maybe it really is a curse.”

The names were those of the Emperor’s two favorite consorts.

Six months and three months were the ages of the ladies’ children.

Rumors were rife in the palace. Some of them sprang from contempt for His Majesty’s companions and the heirs they bore him, but others had more the savor of simple ghost stories, the

sorts of tales told during the summer doldrums to beat the heat by chilling the blood.

“It must be. Otherwise, why would three separate children have died?”

All of the offspring in question had been born to consorts; that is to say, they could in principle have been heirs to the throne.

One of the poor victims had been born to His Majesty before his accession, while he still lived in the Eastern Palace, and two more since he had assumed the throne, but all three had passed away in infancy. Mortality was common among infants, of course, but

that three of the Emperor’s own progeny should die so young was strange. Only two children, those of the consorts Gyokuyou and

Lihua, still survived.

Poisonings, perhaps? Maomao mused, sipping her porridge, but she concluded it couldn’t be. After all, two of the three dead children had been girls. And in a land where only men could

inherit the throne, what reason was there to murder princesses?

The women across from Maomao were so busy talking about curses and hexes that they had stopped eating entirely. But there’s no such thing as curses! Maomao thought. It was stupid, that was the only word for it. How could you destroy an entire

clan with one curse? Such questions bordered on the heretical, but Maomao’s expertise, she felt, constituted proof of this

pronouncement.

Could it have been some kind of sickness? Something blood- borne, maybe? How exactly did they die?

And that was when the detached, quiet maid began talking to her chatty dining companions. It would not be long before Maomao regretted succumbing to her curiosity.

“I don’t know the whole story, but I heard they all wasted away!” Apparently inspired by Maomao’s show of interest, Xiaolan,

the talkative maid, thereafter regularly brought her the latest rumors. “The doctor’s been to see Lady Lihua more often than

Lady Gyokuyou, so I guess Lady Lihua must be worse.” She wiped at a window frame with a rag as she spoke.

“Lady Lihua herself?”

“Yes, it’s mother and child both.”

Maomao supposed the doctor paid closer attention to Lady Lihua not necessarily because she was more sick, but because her child was a little prince. Consort Gyokuyou had borne a princess.

The Imperial affection fell more upon Gyokuyou, but when one child was a boy and the other a girl, which one should receive preferential treatment was clear.

“Like I said, I don’t know everything, but I’ve heard she has headaches and stomachaches, and even some nausea.” Satisfied that she had divulged all her newest gleanings, Xiaolan busied

herself with another task. By way of thanks, Maomao gave her some tea flavored with licorice. She’d made it with some herbs that grew in a corner of the central garden. It smelled strongly medicinal, but was in fact quite sweet. Xiaolan was thrilled—

serving girls had all too few opportunities to enjoy sweet things.

Headache, stomachache, and nausea. Maomao had some ideas as to what illnesses these might portend, but she couldn’t be

sure. And her father had never tired of admonishing her not to do her thinking based on assumptions.

Maybe I’ll just pay her a little visit.

Maomao was determined to finish her work as quickly as

possible. The rear palace was in fact a vast place, housing more than two thousand women and five hundred eunuchs on the

premises. Lowly workers like Maomao slept ten to a room, but the lower-ranked consorts had their own chambers, mid-ranking ones had whole buildings to themselves, and the highest-ranking consorts virtually had their own palaces, sprawling complexes

including dining halls and gardens, large enough to dwarf a small town. Thus, Maomao rarely left the eastern quarter where she

lived; there was no need. She had neither the time nor the means to leave unless she was sent on some errand.

Well, if I don’t have an errand, I’ll just have to make one.

Maomao spoke to a woman holding a basket. This basket

contained fine silk that would have to be washed over in the laundry area in the western quarter. No one seemed to know

whether there was something different about the water there, or perhaps about the people who did the washing, but apparently

the silk would soon be ruined if handled here in the eastern quarter. Maomao understood that silk degraded more or less

depending on whether it was dried out in the sun or kept in the shade, but she felt no particular need to tell anybody that.

“I’m just dying to get a look at that gorgeous eunuch they say lives in the central area,” Maomao said, invoking one of the other rumors Xiaolan had mentioned in passing, and the woman gladly gave her the basket. Chances for anything resembling romance were few and far between in this place, so that even the eunuchs, men who were not really men, soon became something to swoon over. Stories were even told, from time to time, of women who

became the wives of eunuchs after they left palace service. Presumably this was all healthier than the women lusting after each other instead, but still it puzzled Maomao.

Wonder if I’ll end up like everyone else one day, she thought to herself. She crossed her arms and grunted. Romantic matters held scant interest for her.

She delivered the basket of laundry as quickly as she could, and then a red-lacquered building of the central area came into view. Carvings were everywhere, every pillar like a work of art unto itself. Each detail had been attended to, so that the whole was far more refined than anything on the fringes of the eastern quarter. At present, the largest quarters in the rear palace were

occupied by Consort Lihua, the mother of the prince. The Emperor was without an Empress proper, which made Lihua, the only one of his women with a son, the most powerful person here.

The scene Maomao discovered looked almost as if it could have come from the city itself. One woman fulminated, one hung her head in gloom, while others fussed and fretted, and a man

tried to make peace among them all.

It’s hardly different from a brothel, Maomao thought, a cold observation made possible by her status as a third party, if not a gawker.

The upset woman was the most powerful person in the rear

palace, the one hanging her head the next most powerful, and

the fussy women were attendants. The man (no doubt a man no longer at this point) interceding was the doctor. So much, Maomao gathered from the whispering she heard and the general state of things around her. That first woman would have to be

Consort Lihua, mother of the Imperial prince, and the second

woman would be Consort Gyokuyou, blessed—though not quite so blessed as Lihua—with a daughter. As for the eunuch doctor, Maomao knew nothing about him, but she had heard that in this whole great palace there was only one person who could truly be called a practitioner of medicine.

“This is your doing. Just because you had a girl, you got it into your head to curse my prince to death!” A beautiful face distorted by anger is a frightful thing. Eyes as furious as a demon’s, set in a face as pale as a ghost’s, were turned upon the beautiful

Gyokuyou, who held a hand to her cheek. There was a red mark under her fingers; she had, Maomao surmised, been slapped with an open hand.

“That isn’t true, and you know it. My Xiaoling is suffering just as much as your son.” The second woman had red hair and eyes the color of emeralds, and she answered the charges calmly,

referring to the young Princess Lingli by an affectionate nickname. Consort Gyokuyou’s looks suggested no small amount of western blood in her veins. Now she raised her head and glared at the doctor. “And that is why I request that you not neglect to attend to my daughter as well.”

It seemed the doctor himself was the reason intercession had been needed between the two women. He had been spending all his time looking in here at the young prince, and Gyokuyou was

appealing in her daughter’s behalf. One sympathized with her, but this was the rear palace, and male children were more prized than female ones. The doctor, for his part, looked caught between

trying to make an excuse, and total speechlessness.

What a knave, that sawbones, Maomao thought. To fail to

notice with the two consorts right in front of him. How could he not have figured it out already, anyway? The dead infants, the headaches, the stomach pains, the nausea. To say nothing of

Consort Lihua’s ghostly pallor and frail appearance.

Muttering to herself, Maomao put the raucous scene behind her. I need something to write on, she thought. She was so busy thinking it, in fact, that she didn’t even notice the person passing by.