At the very hour Wanyan Qingjue and his party made their way toward the palace under the midday sun, in a small plaza to one side of the imperial city, carriages and horse-drawn carts were gathering.
Palace servants carried and hauled all manner of boxes toward the plaza; consorts of the rear palace followed along, their expressions panicked. Some of the boxes, in the course of being carried, were dropped and smashed open on the ground, spilling their contents of various colorful items; the consorts cried out anxiously nearby, some even scolding and striking the servants.
The whole scene was as chaotic and noisy as a marketplace.
Zhou Pei emerged from within, escorted by guards, her bearing indifferent yet commanding; the nearby servants and consorts instinctively avoided meeting her eyes.
She walked forward through the plaza, taking in the chaotic scene around her. The main gate leading out of the palace stood shut ahead of her; she turned toward a stairway leading up onto the city wall on one side, and the guards beside her hurried to block her path.
“Your Highness, please do not go up there.”
“Try and stop me!”
“It’s dangerous up there.”
“What danger! Have the Jurchens broken through?” There seemed to be blood welling in Zhou Pei’s eyes. “I want to watch them come!”
“We beg Your Highness not to put us in an impossible position.”
Zhou Pei stood facing off against the guards at the stairway entrance; the people in the plaza cast furtive glances her way, and whenever her sorrowful gaze swept back toward them, they quickly looked away again.
A breeze stirred the phoenix trees in the palace garden nearby. Zhou Pei’s gaze swept once across this scene of fleeing chaos. Years ago, during the humiliation of Jingping, she had not been in Bianliang; and the later “search the mountains and comb the seas” flight had felt more like a desperate escape forced by the aftermath of a great battle. Only now did she suddenly understand what it truly meant for a hundred and forty thousand men to lay down their arms together, with not a single one among them a real man.
The sky remained warm. Zhou Yong, in his loose robes, strode quickly toward the plaza. Where he had appeared gaunt and withdrawn these past days, he now seemed to have found some renewed vigor. As people around him knelt, he walked on, waving his hand vigorously. “Rise, rise. Hurry, hurry with the loading. Leave behind anything useless.”
The palace was falling into chaos; countless people had never imagined this day’s upheaval would come. In the Golden Bell Hall ahead, the various ministers were still locked in endless argument; some prostrated themselves, begging Zhou Yong not to leave, but these ministers had already been blocked off outside by soldiers Zhou Yong had dispatched—relations between the two sides had already soured before this, and there was little reason for delicacy now.
Zhou Yong had never held the consorts of his inner palace in high regard; having indulged in excess in his younger years, he had produced no more children after ascending the throne, and his consorts were, to him, little more than playthings. Crossing the plaza, he made his way toward his daughter, his face flushed and breathless, carrying a hint of embarrassment along with it.
“Ah, daughter…” he weighed his words carefully. “Father spoke too harshly before. But at this point, there’s no other way. There are troublemakers stirring up chaos within the city—I know it has nothing to do with you, but… the Jurchen envoy has already entered the city.”
Zhou Pei looked at him coldly.
“And that dog Wushu’s cavalry has already broken camp and is coming this way, to put pressure on us. Qin was right—we should leave first, wait aboard the Qiantang naval ships. So long as they can’t capture me, there’s nothing they can do—they can’t destroy the Wu Dynasty, and so they’ll have to negotiate!”
At this moment, Zhou Yong felt rather pleased with his own quick thinking. The Jurchen envoy, arriving at the palace, would surely be shocked to find no one there—however fierce and formidable you are, I’ll have already left, and I’ll simply wait you out; however outrageous your demands, I simply won’t agree… The more he thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make.
Zhou Pei looked at him, and after a moment, spoke in a hoarse voice, each word deliberate: “Father, if you leave, the Jurchens may not be able to destroy the Wu Dynasty—but what becomes of the people in this city? What becomes of the people of the Central Plains? If they cannot destroy the Wu Dynasty, they’ll simply carry out another search-the-mountains-and-comb-the-seas campaign—how are the common people of this realm to survive!?”
Zhou Yong faltered for a moment. Zhou Pei stepped forward and took hold of his hand, pulling him toward the stairs. “Father, come up with me! Just over there, on the other side of the palace wall—come up with me, look out at that place, at those hundreds of thousands, millions of people—they are your subjects. If you leave, they will…”
Zhou Yong yanked his hand away as if burned, stepping back. “I’ve told you already, what choice do I have! Do you think me staying here would save them? I’d only be sold off along with them! Even that traitor Ning said it himself—people must save themselves!!!”
He shouted this loudly. Zhou Pei’s eyes went wide with fury as Zhou Yong continued: “I too am saving myself—it’s only because we couldn’t win at the front that things have come to this. I’m cutting off my own arm to save the rest of my body… There’s little time left. Get into the carriage. I’ll board the ship with the rest of you first; the officials and the palace’s belongings can follow at their own pace. Even if the Jurchens come rushing after us, once I’m aboard ship, they can only stare helplessly out at the sea!”
As he spoke, he pointed toward a carriage not far off, gesturing for Zhou Pei to go to it. Zhou Pei shook her head. Zhou Yong waved for the nearby female officials to come over and lift Zhou Pei bodily toward the carriage. Zhou Pei, stunned, allowed herself to be pushed along—until, just as she was about to be forced into the carriage, she suddenly began struggling. “Let go of me! Don’t any of you dare touch me!”
The female officials, startled, drew back their hands, and Zhou Pei ran toward the palace gate. Zhou Yong shouted after her: “Stop her! Stop her!” The nearby officials closed in again, and Zhou Yong strode forward as well. “Get in there, now!”
“You all go! I’m staying! Father, if you want to leave, then leave—but leave me here to hold the capital.”
“I will not let you stay! I will not let you stay!” Zhou Yong stamped his foot. “Daughter, stop this nonsense!”
Zhou Pei began grappling with the female officials.
Rarely had the palace witnessed such a scene—even a fierce-tempered consort who had suffered some grave injustice within the inner palace would not normally resort to something so undignified and futile. But in this moment, Zhou Pei could no longer contain herself; she struck out, knocking one of the nearby female officials to the ground, and several others were subjected to slaps or scratches, their faces marked with bloody scrapes, thoroughly disheveled. The female officials, not daring to fight back, kept pushing and dragging Zhou Pei toward the carriage amid the emperor’s shouting—and in the midst of this struggle, Zhou Pei suddenly pulled the hairpin from her own hair and plunged it into the neck of one of the female officials standing before her!
The sun beat straight down. Blood sprayed across the plaza, splattering Zhou Pei and the surrounding officials head to toe. People screamed in shock. Zhou Pei’s long hair hung loose and disheveled; she paused for a moment, dazed, then brandished the blood-red hairpin. “Get back, all of you, get back!”
“Seize her, take the hairpin from her!” Zhou Yong bellowed. Several female officials skilled in martial arts rushed forward and wrestled the hairpin from Zhou Pei’s grasp, while others closed in around her. Zhou Yong himself rushed over, wrapped an arm around her waist, and with a single motion lifted and shoved her into the fully steel-plated carriage. “Lock her in! Lock her in!”
Tears streaming from her eyes, Zhou Pei scrambled up from within the carriage, trying once more to push her way out, but the two doors slammed shut with a heavy clang. Zhou Pei threw herself against the doors, and heard Zhou Yong shouting from outside: “It’s all right, it’s all right, this is for your own protection…”
“Foolish ruler—”
“Don’t say such things…”
“Everyone in this world will look down on you, will look down on our entire Zhou family… Father, you’re no different from Zhou Zhe—”
Her body slammed against the carriage door again and again. Zhou Yong pounded on the outer wall of the carriage, walking on ahead. “It’s all right, it’s all right, things have come to this, they’ve come to this… Daughter, I cannot simply let myself be captured. I need to buy time for you and Jun Wu, I need to give you both a chance to survive. Let me bear this infamy—things will be all right eventually, you’ll understand one day, you will…”
His murmuring continued for a long while as he himself boarded the carriage. The plaza continued its ceaseless loading and unloading of goods, and before long, the palace gates finally opened, and the whole procession streamed forth in grand array through the long avenues, heading toward the southern city gate.
Inside the dim, iron-walled carriage, Zhou Pei felt the motion of the vehicle’s journey. Covered head to toe in the smell of blood, she watched a narrow strip of light seeping in through the crack in the door ahead; the carriage rolled steadily onward through the streets of Lin’an she knew so well. She pounded on the door a while, then began ramming her body against it—but it was no use.
Partway along the route, chaotic sounds could be faintly heard up ahead—as if a crowd had surged forward, blocking the convoy’s path. After a moment, the chaos grew louder, as if people were launching an assault on the convoy. Through the gap in the door up ahead, a figure appeared, curled up as if being sheltered by the imperial guard—her father, Zhou Yong.
He called out from there: “It’s all right, it’s all right, just some troublemaking rabble, it’s all right…”
After a while longer, the disturbance outside was dealt with—whoever it had been, whether trying to stop Zhou Yong or trying to rescue her, they had been cleared away—and the convoy resumed moving, proceeding smoothly the rest of the way to the Qiantang River docks outside the city.
By the time the triumphant Wanyan Qingjue reached the palace, Zhou Yong had already boarded ship at the docks outside the city—perhaps the only thing along this entire journey that genuinely surprised him.
Nine years earlier, during the “search the mountains and comb the seas” campaign, in order to live comfortably at sea, Zhou Yong had commissioned the construction of an enormous dragon ship—so massive that, even adrift on the ocean, it remained as steady as if resting on solid land. Nine years later, this same ship had been brought out once more.
Once aboard, Zhou Yong had her released from the carriage and had lodgings and attendants arranged for her; perhaps out of some sense of guilt, he did not appear before her again for the rest of that afternoon.
The great dragon-ship fleet thus lay anchored on the waters of the Qiantang River. Throughout the afternoon, all manner of goods continued arriving in a steady stream. Zhou Pei was confined to her chamber, and for the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth of the fourth month, she did not go out at all. She sat in her room in a daze, unable to close her eyes, until late in the night of the twenty-ninth, when she was finally startled from a brief moment of sleep by some commotion outside—some disturbance had apparently broken out within the fleet, a great collision sounding through the night.
Hurried footsteps rang out beyond her door. Zhou Yong, dressed all in white, burst in; seeing that she was still fully clothed, having fallen asleep as she was, his face full of sorrowful anger, he came over and pulled her outside.
Zhou Pei followed without a word, and gradually they emerged onto the deck of the great dragon ship. Zhou Yong pointed out toward the commotion on the water not far off, urging her to look. Several warships were already locked in battle, flames burning, the sound of cannon fire ringing out across the night, sparks scattering everywhere.
“Look at that! Just look at that! Those are your people! They must be your people! I am the emperor, you are the princess! I trusted you, and that’s why you hold the authority of the Princess’s household! And now you would try to kill me!” Zhou Yong’s words were full of bitter grief. He pointed toward the other side, toward the city of Lin’an, where faint chaotic fires flickered in the distance as well. “Traitors! All of them, traitors! They’ll come to no good end! Your people even sabotaged my ship’s rudder! Thank goodness it was discovered in time—it must have been your people, this is rebellion—”
Tears welled up in Zhou Pei’s eyes, falling despite herself. In her heart, she understood full well that her father had already been utterly terrified—frightened by the sabotage of the rudder into believing that escape was no longer possible.
In this moment, the distant mountains lay dim and shadowed, the near waters shimmering; the firelight from the city reflected against the sky. Zhou Pei understood that this was the various factions within the city locked in one final struggle, including the naval battle out on the water itself—the desperate war faction making their last, hopeless strike. Li Pin, Cheng Zhouhai, and others must surely have had a hand in this—but the Princess’s household had never before prepared for the possibility of resisting Zhou Yong directly, and even with all of Cheng Zhouhai’s ability, under such circumstances, success was likely beyond reach. There might even have been involvement from the Huaxia Army in this—but the Princess’s household had, for so long, kept the Huaxia Army suppressed and at arm’s length, and in the end, their reaching hand, too, proved futile.
Those flames against the night sky looked like the ashes of some vast palace burning and disintegrating upon the pitch-black sea.
The fleet remained anchored on the Qiantang River for several days. Skilled craftsmen repaired the minor damage to the ships, and over this time, officials and wealthy gentry, one after another, arrived bringing their families and hauling all manner of treasures with them—but Crown Prince Jun Wu never came. Confined as she was, Zhou Pei heard no further news of him either.
Not until the fifth day of the fifth month did the fleet finally set sail, carrying this small remnant of a court and all who depended on it, passing through the mouth of the Qiantang River out to sea. Zhou Pei looked out through the crack of a sealed window, watching free seabirds fly past her line of sight.
She gripped the iron window bars and began to weep—the most sorrowful weeping is the kind that makes no sound at all. In this moment, the Wu Dynasty existed in name only. As they sailed out to sea, her younger brother—that bravest of men, Crown Prince Jun Wu—and indeed, the entire realm’s people of the Wu Dynasty, were once again abandoned to a hell of fire…