Li Po approached and bowed with difficulty in the Emperor’s direction. “Your Majesty desires a poem,” he said. “Your Majesty shall have a poem. But, at the risk of your displeasure and your favourite’s surprise, I must attribute the authorship of this poem to Winter Cherry, here.”
The Emperor demanded: “She wrote a poem?”
Li Po replied: “She inspired it. And to inspire a poem, in this world of imperfect people, is rarer than to write one.”
“The girl has begun to interest me,” the Emperor said. “Proceed.”
Li Po turned. Winter Cherry held a skin fan which she had taken from an attendant, an ink block and a brush. She mixed the ink and gave the brush to Li Po.
He wrote on the skin of the fan, intoning as he wrote:—
He handed back the writing materials, bowed low to the Emperor as he gave him the fan, and retired with too obvious dignity into a distant part of the park, where his green-and-white tiled pavilion could be seen between the trees. They all watched him go.
“He should have written that poem to me,” Yang Kuei-fei said.
The Emperor muttered regretfully: “If he were not so exquisite a poet!”
But Winter Cherry did not seem to hear at all, for her heart went with Li Po, who had been kind to her.
It was much later, in the dark.
Han Im said: “You know that this is the custom, as surely as I know it to be the custom. Why, therefore, repine? It cannot, surely, be true that you do not desire the honour which the Son of Heaven is about to confer on you?” He held out the swansdown rug, helplessly.
Winter Cherry cried: “I do not want to go to him. Why should I want to go to him? What is there different . . . .” Then she laughed through her tears. “You look foolish, holding the rug like that—much more foolish than I look. Why should I be carried to the Emperor in no more garments than a swansdown rug?”
Han Im answered: “Long ago, in the past, when it was feared that girls going to the Emperor might do him an injury, the custom grew up: with no more weapons than nature’s nails, he is safe. Come: there is no use in crying, and the hour grows late.”
“If you were not my friend,” Winter Cherry said, “I would say that you are talking like an old woman.”
Han Im said: “I am not very different from an old woman. If I were different, I should not be serving the Son of Heaven by doing what I am doing. And yet, would you not rather have me thus occupied, who remind you somewhat of your father, instead of Yen, who is fat and unsympathetic, or Ho, who is short and sharp and has hard hands, or Wen, whose tongue is like a file?”
He picked her up from her discarded clothes, wrapped her in the rug and bore her along the passage, through a curtained door and into a silent room where the Emperor sat, moodily playing with a jade fingering-piece. When the curtain fell behind her, Winter Cherry knew that she had come into a moment of time when men and events were larger than usual, when all the myriad small things of ordinary living gave place to concentrated reality, when she, a small thing without much of a history, crossed the path of something so much greater than herself that the future would chronicle the Emperor, would paint (on paper) facets of this man whom now she saw, almost motionless, thinking thoughts which she had not ever learned to think, a man whose word sent men on great errands or little, whose wish was death or life, whose glance saw more than another’s stare. He looked tired as he sat there playing with the jade fingering-piece, his long fingers caressing its surface as (she supposed) they would soon caress her. . . . Han Im took the rug from her, and laid it over the back of a couch. The Emperor did not show any sign of having seen her.
Han Im said: “This is the girl who inspired Li Po this afternoon.” Then he withdrew.