BST - Chapter 2
Chapter 2: Neither the Nephew nor the Uncle Is a Good Sort
The emperor was dead.
"His Majesty has passed away!"
When Wang Shen'ai was shoved to a place before Taiji Hall, everything struck her as absurd as the stage business of some ragtag troupe. And yet how should she put it...
All that lay before her eyes had seemed veiled behind a layer of mist; now the clouds had parted and the mist blown away, all of it burned clean by Noble Lady Zhang's fire.
Perhaps only now had she come fully to her senses.
Palace servants holding lanterns stood in a ring around the whole of Taiji Hall.
The body of Emperor Xiaowu, Sima Yao, had been hastily attended to, dressed in outer robes, and laid out in the great hall.
Noble Lady Zhang, who had murdered the sovereign, was brought here still with her hair hanging loose about her.
She seemed already to have lost her mind, caring nothing for whether she still possessed any of the dignity of a favored concubine, only laughing foolishly to herself.
For one instant Wang Shen'ai's gaze met hers, and it was like looking into a black, sunken mire.
But the next moment those eyes had closed, because a palm the size of a fan had struck her viciously across the face and knocked her flat to the ground.
The tall, burly figure that had rushed out threw itself directly on top of Noble Lady Zhang.
"Why did you kill my son! He was the emperor, he was your husband!"
The newcomer's face was swarthy to begin with, and now, with rage rising and blood suffusing it, she looked far more terrifying still; but for the fine silks she wore from head to foot and the gold and jade upon her head, one might have taken her for some Kunlun slave who had run off from somewhere.
Noble Lady Zhang flung her hand aside, threw back her head, and laughed to the heavens, without answering a single word.
That heavy dark palm was on the verge of striking her face again, when a hand shot out first and seized the woman's arm. "Mother!"
The speaker had earlier led men in breaking into Noble Lady Zhang's bedchamber; now he stood in the foremost place, the very picture of high office and great authority. And that cry of "Mother" settled his identity.
He was the emperor's own younger brother, Sima Daozi, Prince of Kuaiji.
"Well? Help the Empress Dowager up!" the man barked over his shoulder, then lowered his voice to murmur to the noblewoman before him, "This is no time for a scene."
Whether it was the Heavenly Screen overhead still speaking, or her son's reminder, the Empress Dowager slowly rose to her feet and was helped, dazed, to one side by the Prince of Kuaiji and the palace servants together.
Wang Shen'ai could at last see what this Empress Dowager looked like.
Rumor had it that in her early years she had been a servant in the embroidery workshops, and that a physiognomist had singled her out; she became the emperor's concubine, and only through her son's accession did she attain the honored station she held today. She was certainly not what one usually pictured as an "empress dowager."
She was a big, strapping woman to begin with, and had she laid into Noble Lady Zhang in earnest, the woman might not have died, but she would certainly have been badly injured. Fortunately the dead emperor's full brother had held her back. Now she sat to one side, slowly recovering her composure.
The palace servants here and the court officials who had arrived earlier kept their eyes lowered and their minds to themselves, each silent, all pretending they had not seen the scene.
Some simply turned their gaze toward Wang Shen'ai's side.
If the sight of an empress dowager beating a concubine while a prince went to pull them apart was a joke, things on this side were no better.
The youth's features were decent enough, yet now that his father was dead, there was not a trace of grief on his face. He merely swung his winter cloak back and forth, plainly an idiot.
The crown princess, of the Wang Clan of Langya, on the other hand, was a young woman of real grace and talent.
But before today's upheaval she could do nothing at all, and was merely another spectator standing in this place.
Most people thought so, and so no one noticed that before entering Taiji Hall she had spoken a few quiet words to her personal attendant and sent the woman away.
And now, at the sudden news of Sima Yao's death and the chaos that followed, young as she was, she showed no loss of composure. She simply went on listening to the commentary from the Heavenly Screen.
From the discovery that the emperor had been killed by Noble Lady Zhang until now, everything had happened in a flash of lightning.
The commentary from the Heavenly Screen had likewise only just finished sharing the historical records of and judgments upon Noble Lady Zhang's murder of her sovereign, along with the various conspiracy theories surrounding Sima Yao's death.
At this, the expression on Sima Daozi's face as he stood beside the Empress Dowager turned none too good.
One of those theories held that Sima Daozi, resentful that his elder brother held the throne while his fool of a nephew was made crown prince, had arranged for a favored concubine to murder his brother so he could seize even greater power.
The Empress Dowager, who had been on the point of slapping Noble Lady Zhang again, now could not help casting a suspicious glance at her other son.
Sima Daozi swept his eyes over the surroundings, glaring wide. "Compose yourselves! Who knows whether this is a divine sign or some manner of punishment."
The scattered murmur of discussion died down for the moment.
And the voice of the Heavenly Screen at last drowned out everything else.
[All right, let us set these conspiracies aside for the moment and come back to the main subject. The emperor is dead, and one question after another has come bubbling up to the surface.]
[This is a historical setting that would leave anyone placed in it in despair. As luck would have it, the Yong'an Emperor was born into precisely this state of affairs.]
[The very first question is this: who succeeds to the throne?]
[Everything else can wait; the throne is what matters most.]
[And then the biggest joke of all appears. The late emperor was smothered to death by a favored concubine; his cause of death deserves a place in the compendium of imperial jokes, to be ranked against the one who fell into a cesspit and the one who starved to death. And his eldest son, the eldest son who had already been made crown prince, is a fool.]
[The histories say he stuttered and could hardly speak, and needed palace servants to attend to his daily needs, or he would lose track of the seasons and behave without rhyme or reason. Judging by his later conduct, that is no exaggeration. Yes, he really is a fool.]
[How can a fool be emperor?]
With a swish of turning heads, every eye fell on Sima Dezong.
Compared with his father's death, this was perhaps something more likely to draw a reaction from him.
But he plainly could not understand why everyone was looking at him; if anything he found it irritating, and had knotted his brow into a heavy frown.
Had the Heavenly Screen, which talked and moved, not still been a fresh and entertaining novelty to this foolish crown prince, he might well have lashed out and started striking people by now.
"... Yes. How can a fool be emperor?" Sima Daozi murmured to himself.
The "immortal" on the Heavenly Screen had said earlier that it was precisely because of Sima Dezong's imbecility that the Yong'an Emperor had gained the ability to hold the Son of Heaven in his grip and control the ministers.
If this great emperor came from their own Sima line, well and good. If not, then the best way to break the deadlock was to put a man of sound mind on the throne.
Then a second thought struck him: wait, no!
He had encouraged his brother to lose himself in wine and women and to hand power over to him, and he had not minded in the least that his brother chose a fool as his heir, precisely because he knew that if Sima Dezong became emperor, he, as the imperial uncle, could go on holding the true power, wielding the Son of Heaven's authority to command the disloyal.
Wait, if that was how it worked, then...
The moment that staggering possibility crossed his mind, Sima Daozi, Prince of Kuaiji, began breathing harder than before.
Had the voice overhead not still been ringing through and around the great hall, his strange behavior would surely have been noticed by now.
[A fool absolutely cannot be emperor. Any capable ruler could answer that with certainty.] The female voice on the Heavenly Screen dripped with mockery. [But the history of the Jin has given its answer: they truly did think a fool could be emperor. Not only that, but twice!]
[As everyone knows, the Jin is divided into Western Jin and Eastern Jin. The Han, which is likewise divided into east and west, was a unified dynasty from Western Han through Eastern Han. But the Jin went from Western to Eastern because in the final years of the Western Jin the War of the Eight Princes broke out together with invasions by the Xiongnu, forcing the court to flee south and re-establish the Eastern Jin regime at Jiankang, present-day Jinling, becoming a southern dynasty clinging to a single corner of the realm.]
The regime had been downgraded.
[Curiously enough, Emperor Wu of the Western Jin passed the throne to his fool of a son, and Emperor Wu of the Eastern Jin, after dying in an accident, would likewise pass the throne to his fool of a son.]
[It is hard to say whether this frequent production of idiot crown princes has anything to do with the Sima clan's breaking of the Oath of the Luo River; in any case, in the hundred-odd years this family ruled the realm it made a laughingstock of itself again and again, as if retribution had come home to roost.]
[But however you look at it, more than eighty years after the Eastern Jin was founded in the south, they are about to be saddled, as if in a nightmare, with their second idiot emperor. Let us give them a round of applause!]
Watching the fireworks blooming across the screen, Wang Shen'ai could not help twitching at the corner of her mouth.
What with the Oath of the Luo River and the curse of fools, it all sounded like a joke in the darkest possible taste.
Yet after that brief flicker of amusement, a nagging doubt she could not suppress rose in her mind.
Since she shared a name with the original owner of this body, she had once taken the trouble to learn about that namesake's fate.
If history ran its normal course, nearly two hundred years would have to pass after the fall of the Eastern Jin before anyone unified the realm and ended the chaos of the Northern and Southern Dynasties; not, as the woman on the Heavenly Screen described it, a Yong'an Emperor appearing so soon, like a formidable figure descending from the heavens to sweep through and pacify north and south, bringing the wars in the Central Plains to an early end.
Having read a good many transmigration novels, she could not help suspecting that some extraordinary person had crossed over into this era and, using the perspective of later ages, raised troops and amassed followers to achieve this.
If so, then as the future empress of a fool emperor, her situation could hardly be more dangerous.
For the empress of a puppet emperor, the best possible outcome was to die of illness.
Besides, the original owner's mother had been born a Sima, a princess of the imperial house, so however exalted her own status, she carried in her veins the blood of both the great clans and the royal family.
For anyone seeking to overturn heaven and earth and replace the dynasty, there was no reason at all to spare her life merely because of that shared status.
Or perhaps history had changed for some reason, allowing someone who had once come close to success to get his wish.
But that would not change the danger she faced.
And even now, even at this very moment, her circumstances were perilous in the extreme.
Anyone could hear how ridiculous the woman on the Heavenly Screen found the idea of a fool's accession. So why not simply strangle the crisis in its cradle?
In a dynasty where rites and music had collapsed, where concubines no longer balked at killing emperors, why would the court ministers scruple to kill a crown prince and crown princess who might bring the realm to ruin?
She had to find a way to protect herself. The single thing she had earlier sent someone to do was nowhere near enough.
The Heavenly Screen went on in its unhurried way.
[At this point someone will ask: why on earth choose a fool for emperor?]
[The system of primogeniture does not have to be followed to the letter, especially under circumstances like these. If you want to smooth over the shock of the late emperor's murder by a favored concubine as quickly as possible and bring government back to its normal state, nothing serves better than choosing a suitable emperor.]
[This emperor must at the very least have a clear head and a sound mind; better still, he should not be too young, lest powerful ministers get their hands on the government.]
[By age, Sima Daozi, full brother of the newly dead emperor Sima Yao, would be a fine choice.]
Sima Daozi's eyes lit up at once.
He did not even notice that the Heavenly Screen referred to him by nothing more than his title and name, not with the honorific "Yong'an Emperor" used before.
In other words...
[But as it happens, Sima Daozi is an even bigger scoundrel than the fool!]
Sima Daozi: "...!"
He raised his head slowly toward the Heavenly Screen as if struck by lightning, but the will of the "immortal" plainly would not change for the sake of one man's wishes.
Nor had he misheard a single word of what the voice said.
[We might even say that a large part of the chaos that follows can be 'credited' to this Sima Daozi, Prince of Kuaiji. He threw one obstacle after another in the way of the Yong'an Emperor's grand ambition to seize power and pacify the realm.]
[Of course, even while the late emperor still lived, he pulled a great many stupid stunts.]
[Sima Daozi surely knew that, given his everyday reputation and the fine deeds he had already performed, if he suddenly announced that he wanted to be emperor and would not let his nephew take the throne, he would face a string of objections. Far better to simply accept the accession of the idiot crown prince. At least with this nephew as a shield in front of him and that mother of the boy supporting him, he could go on enjoying the wealth and rank he had now.]
[Let me give an example to show why I can assert that Sima Daozi is an even greater aberration of the Sima line than the fool Sima Dezong!]
[Thirteen years before the Eastern Jin's Emperor Xiaowu, Sima Yao, was murdered, the Eastern Jin fought a famous battle against the northern regime of Former Qin as it came south: the Battle of the Fei River.]
The image on the Heavenly Screen shifted again.
From the narrator and the written text, it turned once more to a rolling scene of pictures.
Though the text accompanying it was strange to everyone beneath the Heavenly Screen, they could recognize the column fleeing south from Luoyang: the Jin imperial house and the great clans of the north.
With the northern peoples invading, all their former poise was gone; they had no choice but to flee south, preserving the last of their fighting strength.
Before long, centered on Jiankang, the Sima royal clan, the great clans transplanted from the north, and the clans of Jiangdong consolidated into a vast power.
Army after army still burned with fighting spirit, intent on marching north to reclaim the lost lands, but every one of them broke its halberds on the way.
Instead it was the Di in the north who rose steadily, founding the regime of Former Qin. Fu Jian, Heavenly King of Great Qin, swept the north clean, and at last, in the eighth year of Taiyuan of the Eastern Jin, rolled south in force, launching an all-out assault upon the south.
Dark masses of cavalry and infantry pressed toward the Huai River.
No one knew how the Heavenly Screen recreated the scene, but looking up they could see, north of the Huai, elite northern troops numbered in the hundreds of thousands bearing down in grim mass, and the sheer terror of an army's arrival swept over them.
No wonder Fu Jian, when he marched south in those days, dared to say that if the northern army threw its horsewhips into the water, they could dam the very river.
Gasps echoed through the great hall.
The fall of the Western Jin and the flight of the gentry south lay more than eighty years in the past; those who had lived through those days were long dead, and for the people gathered here today it did not feel entirely real.
But the Battle of the Fei River had taken place a mere thirteen years ago. A good number of those in the hall had fought in it, and every one of them knew how impossible it had sounded in those days to stand against Fu Jian of the north.
You could say it was the battle that decided whether the Eastern Jin would live or die!
Iron hooves pounded the ground and fierce horses screamed, as though about to pour down out of the Heavenly Screen, and many of the more timid palace servants went white as paper.
Sima Daozi's face went white as well.
But not because of that near-immersive scene. It was because of the Heavenly Screen...
Because of what it was about to reveal. That would be a line extremely damaging to him.
"Ah!"
His nerves already drawn taut, Sima Daozi heard this sudden cry and instinctively turned to look.
There stood a child in a golden cap and brocade robes who had only just arrived; the astonishing scene overhead had fixed his staring eyes, and he bolted in panic to hide behind a figure in a sapphire-blue skirt.
Even once he had stopped, he clung only to the sleeve of the person he leaned on, burying his face behind her and calling out, "Cousin!"
Without someone to explain, who would believe that this child, startled like a bird at the twang of a bow, was the fool crown prince's own younger brother, eleven years old by now?
Sima Daozi's brow shot up, as though all his earlier agitation had found an outlet at last. "What is he doing here?"
Compared with Sima Dezong, the idiot crown prince, Sima Dewen, the emperor's second son, enfeoffed Prince of Langya, was unquestionably far more normal. But he was young, and had no abilities to speak of; his coming served no purpose, and he would do far better to stay quietly outside.
Yet for no fathomable reason he had suddenly turned up here.
Wang Shen'ai reached out and drew him behind her.
Faced with Sima Daozi's aggressive questioning, the young crown princess seemed a little frightened and unsettled too; still, she braced her slender frame and stood in front of Sima Dewen.
"I wonder... whether you were listening carefully to what the Heavenly Screen said a moment ago, Imperial Uncle."
She pressed her lips together, a glint of resolve hidden in her fine eyes. "She said that the crown prince's mother, Chen Shuyuan, bore two sons who each became emperor in turn. That is to say, besides the crown prince as heir to the throne, the Prince of Langya also became emperor later on."
"I do not know whether the immortal on the Heavenly Screen is real or false, nor what she means by saying all this. I know only this: if the Heavenly Screen speaks the truth and the Prince of Langya too is destined for the throne, then he belongs here, not outside the palace!"
Her gaze dark and deep, she spoke a single line: "Imperial Uncle, I do not trust you."
The Heavenly Screen had already said it: compared with the fool Sima Dezong, her Imperial Uncle Sima Daozi was the bigger scoundrel of the two!
Sima Daozi's face sank like water.
He saw it clearly: the instant the crown princess, whom no one had thought anything of, uttered those words, the palace guards shifted by the smallest of steps, placing themselves in front of her and forming her first line of shelter in this place.
More precisely, what they protected was not only this high-born crown princess, but the two "emperors" beside her.
Those few short sentences had drawn a line straight down the middle of the hall, dividing it into two clear sides.
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