976 words. Jiawei, the Emperor of Enyang, is a sad man. He walks around, controls his temper, likes making people feel small. He’s a villain and I don’t talk about him very often. I’m trying to get better acquainted with this guy.
Jiawei stood on his balcony and kept an eye on the world which moved along beneath him. Members of the lusezhong moved beneath him freely, enjoying their tours of the palace gardens. These ones were the lucky ones who happened to have a free day on the same day that the gardens opened for public viewing. They were held once a year, in late summer. The populace knew the date and had for the past few years.
Jiawei imagined they talked about it among themselves, brought it up in private. But what happened in places he could not hear and could not see seldom concerned him. The opinions of some lowly luse had very little influence over the way of the world.
But as he turned, his robes swirling about him and draping over the shining floor, and made his way through the hallways, he happened upon a conversation about the matter not from the mouths of luse but from the very men who kept his company. Two men stood around the corner, and from their whispers he heard things he did not like.
“Do you think he does this in mourning, or in celebration?”
“I’m not sure, but the people are certainly celebrating.”
“Yes, sir, they are. But do you think they are celebrating the execution, or the day of birth?”
Jiawei inhaled deeply. He could do many, many things to these men. The sword that clung to his hip may have been first and foremost a symbol, secondly a threat and thirdly a flash of fashion, but that didn’t mean that blade wasn’t sharp and couldn’t fulfill its purpose. Even if he didn’t enact physical violence here in these gilded halls, he still had many other methods of punishment at his disposal.
He could have them lose their jobs.
He could find a reason to take their wealth for his own. He would leave them enough to live a frugal life, but men like this would never be able to adapt. They would spend the rest of their money trying desperately to cling to the life they were accustomed to.
He could do something to their families. Perhaps he would take their first born son from them - or daughter, if either were too weak to have produced a son - and would do something to them. He doubted he would kill them.
Killing children had, perhaps regrettably, never been a strength of his.
“Do you think the day is just random?”
A laugh from the other man. “You think His Majesty would do anything on this day in random? He’s calculative about most things. I highly doubt a garden opening on the exact same day as The Unspeakable’s birth and his mother’s execution are exactly random.”
No, Jiawei wouldn’t do any of those things.
He clutched his cane and turned the corner. The hushed conversation halted, air of lungs replaced with air of earth. The two men did their best to appear nonchalant, to make new conversation about something ordinary. The peaches are quite good this year. The rain sure has been well mannered.
As he neared the two men bowed deep at the waist, the red tassels on their clasps dangling into their hair. From the way they wore it, one of them was firstborn. The other was very low down in his ranking; twelfth born or beyond. They muttered their greetings and Jiawei waited, patient as he always was with those more lowly than he, until they stood upright once more. He was pleased that they both remembered to keep their eyes on his shoes.
“The halls,” Jiawei began. He would drip his words like syrup.
“The halls, your majesty?” So the twelfth-born was the talkative one. How curious. With him having found his way to the palace, perhaps fortune did favour the bold.
“Yes.” Jiawei surveyed the left, the right. The ceiling was adorned with its gems, as all proper ceilings were. “The way it carries a voice, it makes me wonder what the great architects of old envisioned for its completion. Was it intention? Or, If I dare to question the great men who came before I, a fluke of design.” He raised his chin, peered down his nose at the two lowered before him. “Don’t you, statesmen?”
Both of them tried to stammer out some kind of response, unsure whether to agree and confess their questionings of ancient minds or to dare to disagree with the emperor, but Jiawei brought mercy to them by dismissing them. Both muttered their farewells and turned, nearly stumbling over themselves to leave his presence. The firstborn stepped on his robes as he hurried around the corner.
No, Jiawei would not do anything to them, but his knowing and judgement would be punishment alone. He walked through the halls, white finery like a ghost, until he came out of them and into the courtyard of the eastwing. Zhihao, his son, his only son, was sitting in the grass with Master Li. Neither of them noticed him, and Jiawei was content. He felt his best when he was being unobserved.
He surveyed the grounds. The pond, the two trees that mirrored each other on either side of it, the bridge over the trickle of a stream. There was a cobblestone path leading directly to the centre of the courtyard, with white daylilies at its edges.
Flowers for all the great emperors who had come before him. Flowers of death, of mourning, of funerals. A soil rooted with ghosts.
A glimmer of colour caught his eye in the succession and Jiawei squinted. There, across the garden, was a single firelily. Jiawei had every reason to kill that beacon of life in the garden of death, but he knew that even an emperor, a king who was more than a king only because he took what others could not defend, had his limits.
The flower danced in the wind and Jiawei turned to leave it to its private recital. Today, on the day of The Unspeakable’s birth, Jiawei knew he could not will himself to commit murder, even against a firelily.
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