Chương 121: Chapter 119

We cross the threshold of the room intended for the presentation of gifts without my new portable throne stumbling even once, which I attribute less to the skill of my mother pushing me and more to the fact that the chair itself, despite its appearance, seems to have been designed by someone with the firm conviction that the Zhāohuán must never be permitted the undignified spectacle of tipping over.

My Nei Wei escort has remained outside, and we have barely advanced a few steps inside when a handmaiden appears out of nowhere, because in a place like this the handmaidens do not appear, but rather they materialize, and bows before us with a reverence.

"Venerable Guifei Xiang, Zhāohuán Wen", she tells us keeping her gaze respectfully low.

"If you would have the kindness to follow me, I will lead you to the place that has been assigned to you for the ceremony." My mother inclines her head barely to indicate that she has understood, and without letting go of the handles of the chair, begins to push me behind the handmaiden, who glides through the room with those short, silent steps that here they seem to teach them before walking.

While we follow her I take the opportunity to look around me, because it is the first time I set foot in this hall and, for once, my curiosity wins the round against my habitual desire for all this to end as soon as possible.

The hall is enormous, with extremely high ceilings supported by columns lacquered in red and gold, with draperies that hang from the ceiling like cascades of silk and a floor of polished stone so shiny that it almost embarrasses me to think of the quantity of handmaidens it must have taken to leave it like that despite the fact that the use of the mop has begun to spread through the Imperial Palace.

The handmaiden guides us to one of the zones nearest the head of the hall, where there is already gathered a group of people at whom I take a quick glance as we approach, and my head begins to classify what it sees. There are several women of an apparent age similar to my mother's, all dressed with a luxury that leaves no room for doubt about their position, and the rest are men, of very disparate apparent ages, from some who would be around middle age to others who seem little older than I am.

And among them, without needing to make much effort, I recognize the face of Sun Rui. The second prince, the one of the military faction, and with that to tie up loose ends, it takes me no time at all to deduce the evident, which is that the women are my father's consorts and the men are the rest of my brothers, that collection of half-brothers whom, in their immense majority, I still know only by name.

The handmaiden leads us, with no surprise whatsoever, to the most prominent place in the whole hall, and once there she turns toward us, bows one last time and withdraws, leaving us installed in what I understand to be our spot. It is from that position, while my mother positions my chair with care, that I notice a detail that disconcerts me.

In front of the platform where the throne rises, that ostentatious seat that can only belong to one person in all the empire, there is arranged a row of long tables, perfectly aligned and covered with cloths of a brocade so ornate that they almost hurt the eyes, but which are empty.

I furrow my brow, because I would swear that my mother had told me expressly that the gifts would be here after having been duly examined to verify that none concealed unpleasant surprises, which in a court like this is a very elegant euphemism for saying poison, hidden blades, or any other of the thousand creative and possibly mystical ways that people here may have of trying to kill each other. I turn my head a bit to the back and lower my voice until I turn it into a whisper.

"Mother", I tell her.

"Why are the gift tables empty? I thought you had told me they would be here to display them before my father." My mother leans slightly toward me to reply in the same confidential tone.

"They will bring them later, Wen", she replies with the patience of someone who has attended more of these ceremonies than she can count.

"They will be handed to us at the proper moment so that afterward we ourselves can present them to the Emperor." I nod slowly as I shake my head internally at the quantity of complications, protocols, and solemnities that an act implies which, on top of it, takes place once a year, every year and without fail.

And I cannot help a wry smile escaping me, because thinking about it, it doesn't surprise me in the least that a culture like this should have considered it necessary to create a ministry dedicated exclusively to managing the extremely complicated and interminable ceremonies and rituals that seem to follow one another here without rest.

There is an entire body of functionaries that probably earns its living by deciding the exact order in which people should present their gifts, and the most astonishing thing is that, until today, I had managed to escape attending all of them, in part thanks to my age and in part thanks to my condition, two things that for once have played in my favor.

While those thoughts cross my head, I keep sweeping the hall with my gaze, which doesn't stop filling up with people, official tunics, jewels, fans, and contained voices, and above all I notice the zone reserved for the imperial family, where little by little more of my brothers go positioning themselves. And I observe something that, far from bothering me, almost feels comfortable to me.

As they take their places, several of them direct a brief look at me, one of those quick looks with which one sizes someone up in an instant, and then they avert their eyes and seem determined to ignore me with a deliberation so elaborate that it almost has its merit. To me, sincerely, it makes no difference.

Their ignoring me spares me uncomfortable conversations, false smiles, and the exhausting task of pretending I care what they think, so I keep contemplating the rest of the imperial family, when suddenly a concrete memory rises to the surface and makes me search for another face among the crowd, that of Sun Qiang.

The elderly man who presented himself at my eighth birthday seated in a wheelchair, accompanied by a handful of servants, to thank me with that brusque frankness so characteristic of him for having invented the contraption that had returned to him the dignity of moving about the palace on his own instead of having to let himself be carried like a bundle. The one who claimed to be my great-uncle, the former general retired after a wound from which he never quite recovered.

I search for him with my gaze across the entire zone of the imperial family and do not find him, so I furrow my brow, and since the doubt gets the better of me, I lean back once again and lower my voice.

"Mother", I whisper to her.

"Has great-uncle Sun Qiang not come to the ceremony? Is it because he had no one to push his chair?" There is a brief silence at my back, barely a couple of seconds, but sufficiently different from my mother's habitual silences that my stomach clenches even before hearing the reply. And then I hear her sigh, paused and low, after which she replies to me also in whispers.

"Wen", she tells me softly.

"The Elder Sun Qiang passed away while we were exiled in Xi'An." I remain very still upon hearing her reply.

"The wound he had been carrying for years could not be cured with any kind of pill", my mother continues in the same contained tone.

"And with time it ended up damaging his cultivation as well, so that in the end, it could not even sustain his age." I say nothing, I simply remain looking toward the point where, without quite knowing why, I had expected to see him among the rest of the imperial family.

I remember the games of Othello I played with him that afternoon, of how he placed the pieces with fingers that already trembled a little while he told me of battles that, at that moment, seemed to me taken directly from a Marvel movie with their waves of beasts, blows that split rocks, and impossible survivals.

I remember his harsh laugh, the direct and unadorned way in which he spoke to me, so different from the calculated courtesy of all the others, and how, for a while, I stopped feeling like an oddity and felt, simply, like a niece playing with her uncle. And in the end, I too let out a sigh, a very deep one, as I think that even with all the extra years that cultivation grants, with all that time stolen from nature, it is clear that old age and death remain the great equalizer.

They will take longer to arrive, they will arrive in a different way, but they arrive all the same, and in the end not even the immortals are as immortal as they like to believe. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. I swallow the knot that has formed in my throat and look again at the hall in silence, letting the bustle of the salon fill the hole that the news has left inside me.

I don't have time to sink too far, fortunately, because a couple of handmaidens suddenly appear beside my mother and me, each one holding between her hands a box luxuriously adorned with inlays, embroidery, and clasps of a craftsmanship that is probably worth more than the house where I was born in my other life.

"Your gifts for the Emperor, Venerable Guifei, Zhāohuán", says one of them with an inclination. My mother takes the two boxes with care. One is elongated and narrow, and by its shape I don't need to be a genius to deduce that it contains her gift, almost with total certainty one of her paintings. The other is square, more compact, and that one she hands to me, depositing it softly on my lap. And by its size and its weight, I know exactly what is inside.

I take the box between my hands and, as I do so, I take a glance around, and I see how other handmaidens are handing over in exactly the same way their respective gifts to the rest of the consorts and to my brothers, but only to them and to no one else in the whole hall.

That strikes me as odd for an instant until I remember the protocol of the ceremony, that only the direct family of the Emperor presents their gifts in person during the ceremony, while those of the rest of the guests, that tide of nobles and functionaries that fills the salon to the brim, are managed by other much less visible means.

And, sincerely, that reassures me enormously, because the mere idea of having to witness an interminable ceremony in which the nearly thousand people present paraded one by one exhibiting their gifts was exactly the type of protocolary torture that would have made me seriously consider the advantages of feigning once again that my legs hurt.

And just as I am comforting myself with that idea, the Shangshu, standing beside the platform of the throne, raises his voice and calls the whole hall to order, announcing with the solemnity proper to his office that the ceremony of the presentation of gifts is about to begin.

Instantly, the murmur of the hall extinguishes as if someone had closed a tap while all those present turn in unison toward the head of the hall, toward the place where the empty throne waits, and I don't have to wait long because immediately, through a door situated at the back of the platform, my father appears. The Emperor of the Tianjing Empire. As soon as he enters, the entire hall kneels in a single, fluid movement rehearsed over generations followed by a thousand heads inclining at once toward the floor.

I, who for evident reasons have kneeling crossed off my repertoire, do the only thing within my power, which is to lean forward in the chair as much as my body allows me, bending myself as far as I can, because the last thing I need is to give one of those present the perfect excuse to murmur later about the crippled princess's lack of respect. My father crosses the platform with a relaxed step and sits on the throne.

As soon as he does, the whole hall rises again in another perfectly coordinated movement, and I straighten myself once more in my chair, silently grateful that the gymnastic part of the ceremony has ended for now.

Next, the Shangshu gives commencement to the ritual proper, that of the celebration of the one hundred and forty-seventh birthday of the Emperor, and with it begins a display of protocols, formulas, recitations, and reverences so long and meticulous that within a matter of minutes I feel how my attention begins to detach from the act.

To entertain myself, and because it seems to me an infinitely more profitable use of my time, I dedicate myself to looking more closely at my brothers, now that I have them all placed and still. And, as I count them, I realize something, which is that there are only nineteen. I furrow my brow and quickly do the math mentally as I review the family tree in my head. My father had twenty-two male children.

Of those, one died when I was still very small, and later Sun Chao also died in the Celestial Fragment of the Sands. For an instant I think I have made a mistake somewhere, but I also notice the consorts, and then I realize that one is missing as well. And, tying up the loose ends, I arrive at the only reasonable conclusion.

The Fei Zhi, the consort my father exiled, must have had another son besides the one who died, a son who with total certainty accompanied her into her banishment, and that is why neither she nor he are here today, adding between the two of them the absences.

Satisfied at having solved the little puzzle, I return to the ceremony that half-attention which is the most I am willing to grant it, although it doesn't escape me that if any of my old university professors, those who would have sold their own mother to witness firsthand a ritual like this, knew that I am here ignoring it, they would be perfectly capable of taking me up to the rooftop of the faculty just for the pleasure of throwing me off it.

But fortunately for my patience, the most arid part of the ceremony passes relatively quickly, and the Shangshu finally announces the beginning of the presentation of gifts on the part of the imperial family. And here I do pay attention for real, because for me this is, by far, the best moment of the whole day, since it is the perfect occasion to begin at last to put faces to all those names of princes and consorts that I have memorized without knowing to whom they belong.

The Shangshu begins to call them one by one, and I observe with the concentration of someone studying for an exam as each brother steps forward, recites his formula of congratulation, and presents his gift.

And it doesn't take me long to realize that the gifts are more ceremonial than anything else, because there has to exist a limit to the quantity of swords that a single person can be excited to receive, and more than half of the gifts turn out to be, precisely, luxuriously adorned swords that, I suspect, will go directly to some imperial storehouse where mountains of identical swords will have been accumulating for years, all gifted at previous birthdays.

But the high point of all this, at least for me, arrives when the Shangshu pronounces a concrete name, that of the Fei Lan. I straighten up a bit in the chair, because at last I am going to be able to see with my own eyes the person whom, in my head, I have for some time been labeling as my Archvillain, the woman who has tried to kill me several times, the one who has blamed my mother and me for practically everything bad that has happened to her, including the death of her own son.

And to my genuine surprise, the woman who steps forward is not at all what I expected. She is not a great beauty of the kind that takes your breath away and does not have an imposing presence that makes the hall hold its breath at her passing.

She is, simply, a woman of middle age of pleasant appearance and soft features who, if you took away the luxurious attire, the jewels, and the impossible hairstyle, could perfectly pass for that kind and good-natured neighbor whom someone would go to ask for sugar when they run out without thinking twice.

I am left so disconcerted by the contrast between the image I had constructed and the reality I have before me, because I had taken for granted that my Archvillain would be one of the other consorts of more imposing presence, that the next name almost completely escapes me, that of the Guifei Xiang, my mother. I come back to myself just in time to see her step forward with the elongated box between her hands. And, just as I suspected, upon presenting her gift she confirms that it is a painting.

But then she adds something I did not expect, which is that that painting has been made with a new type of ink. And to me there is not the slightest doubt as to what ink she refers to, since it is surely the one I formulated for the printing press, and therefore, my mother has just slipped, in the middle of the ceremony and before the whole court, a discreet but brilliant presentation of a product that does not yet officially exist.

I don't have time to admire her move, because immediately the Shangshu pronounces the next name, mine. And for an instant my brain goes completely blank wondering how the devil I am supposed to step forward, when I notice that a handmaiden silently positions herself behind me and, without my having to ask for anything, begins to push my chair toward the place of presentation.

The trip feels to me at once extremely long and too short, but the chair finally stops at the marked point, in front of the platform, in front of the throne and in front of my father. I lift my gaze toward him, take a breath and, with the clearest and firmest voice I am capable of, I begin to recite the speech I have been rehearsing in my head for days.

"This humble daughter brings two gifts for her Imperial Father", I say. And as soon as I pronounce those two words, a murmur runs through the hall, subtle but unmistakable, because all my brothers, without exception, have referred to him during the ceremony as Emperor, and I am the first to call him Imperial Father.

It is, protocolarily, a perfectly correct form, even more filial than the other, but not for that reason, it is clear, does it cease to draw attention that it should be precisely I, the exiled daughter, the cripple, the oddity of the family, who uses it. I ignore the whispers as if they did not exist and continue.

"The first of my gifts, due to its dimensions, has already been delivered to the Shangshu for its proper safekeeping and presentation", I say keeping my gaze on my father.

"Its dimensions made it so that it was not possible to exhibit it here in the middle of the ceremony." Next, with a gesture I have also rehearsed, I open the square box that rests on my lap, and inside, in an almost violent contrast with the overflowing luxury of the case containing it, there is a simple book. It has no inlays, it does not have the cover full of colorful drawings or of gold leaf. It has nothing of what the rest of the hall would associate with an object worthy of being given to the Emperor.

It is, simply, a book, and the only thing visible on its cover is its title, written with characters of a strange calligraphy, regular, identical letter by letter, a calligraphy that no human brush could reproduce with that monotonous exactitude. I take it out of the box with care and hold it aloft so that all those present can see it well.

"This book contains an original story, written by this humble daughter", I say, and I let the phrase breathe for an instant before arriving at what truly matters.

"But it is not the story that makes it worthy of being a gift for the Emperor of the Tianjing Empire." I make a pause, and I notice that the entire hall has fallen silent, expectant, still not understanding what is so special about that such modest object.

"What makes it worthy is that it is the first book in the world that has not been copied by human hand", I continue raising my voice a bit more so that it reaches the last corner of the salon.

"It has been reproduced by a machine capable of copying dozens of copies of the same book in a single day. A machine that, from today on, will make books, and with them, knowledge, cease to be a luxury reserved for a few and come to be within the reach of all the inhabitants of the empire, regardless of their status, their birth, or their fortune."