Tomorrow I Will Be a Body in a Well
by Lixin Foo
They are coming, the soldiers of Sui. With their spears and swords of dragon-emblazoned sheaths and ambition to supplant one decaying dynasty with another. Tomorrow I will be a body in a well.
When I was a child my father and brother wove pads out of straw for a living. They had followed their liege lord south to fight for the enemy emperor, but no one remembered their valor in victory, only their traitorous origins.
I pitied them then, for the derisive sneers from neighbors who scoffed at men toiling the labor of women. I did not yet know there existed a fate worse than forcing your body into disdained drudgery: to have no control at all.
A poor boy grows up to be an apprentice, a soldier, or a scholar with some brains and luck. A poor girl can only become one thing: a whore. To an aged lecher who would accept a young concubine without a dowry, or a man who couldn't afford to be picky but would resent her for the miserliness thereafter.
Only one dictum endures: your body is not your own.
When he heard that the Southern Prince's palace was buying maidservants, my father tried to choose a second path.
He should have known that there was really no choice at all.
Away from my hometown of Qinhuai I went, to the capitol and the distant finery of the Southern Prince's halls.
All women in the estate belong to the Master, my mistress Consort Kong had warned proudly to her new ten-year-old maid-in-waiting. But don't even think about acting like a whore. Few have the privilege of receiving Heaven’s favor. I believed her. I waited.
If I was going to be a whore I would give myself to the highest bidder.
All it took was a slip of my feet—a slip of his eye—to slip into his bed. I was pregnant with a future prince of the realm.
Silks, jewels, servants and maids. When my now husband ascended the throne he made me Imperial Consort, second only to a discarded empress. And all I had to do was smile and blush in his fawning embrace, and laughter came quickly on a full belly and soft comforts. How could I not have known the good life was so easy?
The emperor built luxurious palaces for his favored concubines, and I reigned alone in his greatest hall. But whenever his attention flickered to the highborn Consort Kong, he left my bed cold for the adjoining door.
I was still a whore, just by a different name.
But there's rank and file among whores too, like any other office—it's true. I rose above my former mistress and made sure she knew it. My sons became the most esteemed among the master's brood.
On my husband’s knee I learned that brains could be of use to a woman after all. Hungry for power, corrupt eunuchs and courtiers read their missives aloud once and never again, trusting that their liege was distracted by his whore. I recited and wrote a thousand dictums without missing a word; it was as easy as spinning flattering poetry for the emperor’s poetry parties. From then on I commandeered all his political decrees.
But the southern kingdom was declining, and men like wolves had come to tear its carcass apart and scavenge for scraps. A soldier would fight, a scholar could parley, and even an apprentice might lie low and live. But a whore?
A whore is nothing without her patron benefactor.
Down, down, into the well. Weaver's daughter and highborn maiden and hiding emperor, strung on a string of three. My painted face scrapes stone and leaves a pale print on the well’s lip.
In a well a body is just a body. In the darkness you cannot tell the suffocating breaths of a terrified man apart from his frightened whore.
But they are coming, the soldiers of Sui, boys with steel swords playing men with wooden toys and they will hack and slash and not know that the blood they spill will be the same color that flows out of their bodies when the next lord raises the rebel flag.
That there will be another body in a well, another deposed concubine strangled for her distracting beauty and another body forced to bear the intrusion and extrusion of her husband's murderer and his children.
They will haul my body out of the well and desecrate it, sever my head from my shoulders and dump it on the bridge between green streams and the southern capitol.
The executioner asks me if I have any last words and I crack open my blood-red lips to tell him: "When I die, I want to be buried in my hometown. A whore of lowborn origins doesn't deserve to be buried with the emperor." Before I return to my father and brother, I dream of how different my life might have been if we knew what a girl could become with a brain and some luck.
Based on the life of Consort Zhang Lihua of the Chen Dynasty
About the author
Lixin Foo is a Chinese Singaporean writer of prose, poetry and plays. From 2019-2022, she was a co-founder and Design Director at PLAYSET! literary magazine. A lover of historical fiction since childhood, her debut flash in Flashback Fiction was nominated for Best Microfiction 2021.
About the illustration
The illustration is "Painting of a Young Lady" by Ch'iu Ying, ca. 16th century. Qiu Ying, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.