A Song to Drown Rivers

by Ann Liang

“I do not need the silk to remember you,”

Nature had healed faster than we had.

Legend. Kingdom. History. These were new words in my vocabulary. They carried weight, solidity. I turned them over on my tongue, and they tasted sharp, like metal and blood. They were so different from what I was used to hearing: beautiful.

Happiness was a side dish, like the sweet, sticky rice cakes Mother made during the festivals, or the glutinous balls stuffed with rich sesame paste. But revenge—that was the salt of life. Necessary. Essential.

One could live with almost anything, so long as they had something to live for.

“Dancing is an expression of beauty, and what is beautiful is always derived from nature itself.”

It was like telling someone that you’d dreamed of them; even if there was little meaning to it, it still felt too intimate.

He is too virtuous to have a good ending with any woman. In a world where everyone will demand something from you, it requires a certain degree of selfishness to be happy, you know.”

“We are most tempted by what we cannot have. Men will dream of the mountains they have yet to scale, the rivers they have yet to set sail upon, the plains they have yet to conquer. They are told from birth everything belongs to them, and so when something does not, they view it as a personal challenge.” I thought about it longer. “But also, from a distance, everything looks more beautiful; we are better able to conjure our own fantasies about them. Sometimes the fragrance of a feast is better than the taste itself.”

“The heart is a fickle thing; it takes and takes. It is easily swayed, and tempted, and made weak. Too many have fallen victims to their own irrational desires. But the mind—the mind is dependable, accurate, deadly. It destroys the enemy, not the self, and ensures that we do what we need to, not what we want.”

When men say they want a lover, what they often mean is they want a mirror; they wish to see themselves reflected back at them in the best light.

They must have been from noble families; only the wealthy could show such joyous carelessness in an age of war and instability. They assumed their money protected them from everything. The ultimate injustice was that sometimes it did.

“I have always believed that knowing when to yield is even more important than winning.

But these things tend to make sense only in fantasies, in memory. In reality we were just two mortals, bound by our respective roles in history, and whatever flickered between us felt so terribly fragile compared to the immovable weight of mountains, of kingdoms, of war.

perhaps I only thought I saw the wild, raw emotion ablaze on his face, a wretched look I’d never witnessed before, like the world was crumbling around him.

What a bittersweet fate we shared, balanced so precariously on the fine line between life and death, union and separation, joy and despair.

“There goes this saying, that for somebody from Chu, they would not be able to tell a Wu and Yue man apart. You would think that after all our fighting—well, you’d think there would be some marker at the least. A good reason.”

“If heroes are born from tumultuous times, then he must be one of them. Perhaps very little from our kingdom will survive through the tides of history, but Fanli—I believe he will. Even hundreds or thousands of years from now, I believe they will remember him a hero.”

“Yes, well. One cannot save the world and live in peace. That’s not how these things work.”

He is disciplined, Xishi,” he said as his words buzzed in my head like a wild swarm of hornets, “but he is not made of stone. He suffers too. Privately.”

“Girls like me are not made for love; we are made to be wanted.” Then she cast me a careful, sidelong look from under her heavy lids, and amended: “Girls like us.”

“Oh, I am angry,” I reassured her. “Furious, in fact.” A beat. “But at more than just you.” These were the rules that shaped our lives from when we were born: Be beautiful, be charming, be the most coveted girl in the room, or else you will be nothing. For men, it was so easy; the path to power was so direct. But we had to manipulate and maneuver and claw our way to gain half of what they did.

How many women throughout history were blamed for the weaknesses of men? We made such convenient scapegoats. We were raised to be small, to be silent, to take whatever we were given and no more.

It was a reversal of the popular stories passed among the villagers. The beautiful girl with blood under her nails, who did not need saving from danger but was instead the danger itself.

“Sometimes I swear—I only feel like a person when I’m around you. Does that make sense?”

Perhaps history would remember him as a hero. But a hero to many was still a villain to one.

This is how kingdoms fall, I thought, but I didn’t feel as victorious as I’d imagined. My heart was too heavy, a solid stone in my chest.

If you had asked me to describe it, I might have called it beautiful. Beautiful not in the way of a painting or poetry, but a natural disaster: a storm, or a falling comet. The intensity of it drew your eyes in and held you there, the sheer scale of it breathtaking. How many were able to witness history as it unfurled? Already I could imagine the books composed for this very day, the tales told by the fireplace. But I could also hear the dying men’s howls and their curses as if they were right beside my ear, addressing me.

What is home, if not you?”

I stepped back, feeling sick. When I’d mounted the horse on the riverbanks, left my home for the palace, I had imagined the world righting itself, the scales tipping back, the balance finally restored in Susu’s absence. That was what revenge was. What it promised. But now the ground seemed to sway violently beneath my feet, everything spinning into reverse.

“The kingdom.” He tilted his head farther back, eyes closed. “The land, the lakes, the places of worship. All the gold and the godly statues and the jewels. I’m willing to give them all up,” he said, a grin splitting across his face like lightning, “as long as I can be with you always.” I stared. I had not imagined this. It was one thing to know that he desired me, that he enjoyed my presence, admired my dancing, that I occupied a place in his heart few others ever would. But what he spoke of now—it sounded suspiciously like love. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I managed. “I do,” he said sincerely.

And yet my voice was soft, not a weapon, but a song. I could conjure no flames; I was too hollow, drowning in cold blood, my insurmountable sorrow, my unspeakable grief. How much loss could one soul tolerate?

The king of Wu crumpled, and then he was no longer a king at all, but a boy, bleeding against my robes. I held him. His eyes fluttered open, focused on me; it was how he had looked at me in all our time together, across the palace rivers, across the polished floors of his chambers, underneath the moonlight. No matter where we were, he was always the first one to spot me, always the last to look away. As if afraid I would disappear at any moment, like smoke in a breeze. As if he knew that one day, he would run out of time, out of chances.

Who was I crying for? Perhaps for myself. Perhaps for him. Perhaps for both of us, the borders of our fate. Now that he was dying, I could finally bring myself to admit it: I did not want to lose him.

All under Heaven, laid out before me. It was strange. It seemed wrong in some vague but fundamental way. In folklore, when the monster was killed, the enemy conquered, there was always some sort of unnatural sign, some rare sighting to mark the birth of a new era. Fuchai was meant to be the problem, his downfall the one solution. But now he was gone, and the world remained the same.

“The men will fight for their thrones and their power and their legacies, but to them we are nothing more than crickets and ants, insignificant, expendable. We will continue to worry over the rice and soy sauce and oil, three meals a day, how to escape the cold in the winter and the heat in the high summer, the holes in the roof and the bedding and the taxes. What does it matter who wears the crown, if they will not change any of this for us?” “But…” I was stunned. “But—Zhengdan’s father … Your husband … He was killed by the Wu. Doesn’t that matter?” “He was not killed by the Wu,” she said harshly. “He was killed by the war. By the will of kings.”

But King Goujian is not the answer to peace. None of them are. So long as we continue to put mortal men on thrones and hail them as gods, sacrifice our lives to their legacies, history will repeat itself. Just as the ocean tides ebb and flow beneath the moon, empires will rise and collapse, wars will start and cease, and the rest of us will be left to struggle against the currents.

“All I know,” Fanli says, his eyes like knifepoints, “is that she is worth more than you could ever dream of becoming. If killing you could bring her back, I would do it without hesitation.”

Don’t be a fool, I wish to tell him. I will meet you again in every lifetime there is.

Above us, the world goes on for the living. The same domestic worries and looming disasters; empty grain stores, separated lovers, cold porridge, brutal murders, warm bedding, permanent scars, missing children, ailing parents, loud festivals. They reunite and part, celebrate and grieve, hate each other and love each other fiercely, irrationally.

There is so much between us; the years and the yards of distance. I run through it all until I am standing before him, the darkness devoured by his beauty. He smiles, and the fog lifts.