A Song to Drown Rivers

by Ann Liang

my beauty was something unnatural, transcending nature itself. And that beauty is not so different from destruction.

Someone of such exquisite loveliness—she has the power to topple kingdoms and overturn cities.

Often, when I was around other people and felt their gazes on me, I had the strange, encroaching sense that my face and body did not belong to me. As if I had been designed purely for the pleasure of their viewing.

The mind destroys; the heart devours.

Protecting your interests could not have harmed mine.” He glanced at me sidelong, though I pretended not to see it. “It is quite a different thing to help someone when it puts yourself at risk.”

People always prefer the beauty who is oblivious, unaware of her own power, who blushes easily and is taken aback by strangers’ approval, who is soft and demure and lacking in just enough confidence so as to seek it out in the opinions of men. But these are such lies.

“And if I do succeed?” I whispered. His gaze met mine, and for a moment, all else ceased to be. The mournful cry of the geese, the rustling of trees. Everything seemed to shrink down to just the two of us. A shiver raced through my body, as if I already knew in my core, even then, the significance of what came next. “If you do succeed, Xishi,” he said quietly, “you will be the savior of our kingdom. You will forever alter the course of history.”

My breathing grew shallow. Yet his words did not leave me. 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. That old blessing, that tired curse. So flimsy and temporal, so easily faded, like the plum blossoms that withered in midwinter.

“If you agree to the mission, I won’t be the one helping you. You’ll be the one helping me.” I stared at him, my humor vanishing, my pulse striking faster in my veins. “I am the one who needs you.” He said it like a grave confession. “I am the one who suggested the plan to His Majesty, who is responsible for organizing this mission. Without you, I will fail.” I chewed the inside of my cheek, unsure what to make of this. Of anything. Plenty of people had made it clear how much they wanted me: my face, my beauty, my company. But nobody had ever really needed me before.

When it came down to it, the choice was this: a kingdom, or my happiness. And how many people under Heaven were really fortunate enough to know happiness? 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.

But even if I could not rid myself of the pain, I could live with it. One could live with almost anything, so long as they had something to live for.

Later, though, I would wish I had stayed longer. Woken them up, held them close. Given them the chance to say a proper goodbye. But such things only occur to you in hindsight, framed by the before and after of everything you’ve endured; when it is still happening, all you care about is what lies ahead.

In a world where everyone will demand something from you, it requires a certain degree of selfishness to be happy, you know.”

“From your very first encounter, you must make him desire you. But what is desire?”

“Absence,” I said, after some thought. Fanli looked at me and made a silent gesture for me to continue. “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.

I saw my own reflection swimming in his widened eyes, his dark, dilated pupils. It was true: I was beautiful, but it was less how I looked, and more what I felt.

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.

“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.

“You are different from how I imagined, you know.” I smiled slightly. “Aren’t we all?”

But I wasn’t angry at all. In fact, I wasn’t even surprised. 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 the look of someone wholly, utterly in love. Be careful, I wanted to warn her, a pang in my chest, that old affliction of the heart. Love is a knife; it cuts both ways.

Despite my apprehension, some part of me felt a great swell of pride. If she had never left our village, if she had listened to her mother and married one of those old, lifeless, drooping-eyed men, she would have been trapped there forever, a bird caught in a cage. Everything within her would have wilted until only her beauty remained. But here, she was radiant. She glowed with every thrust of the sword, every twist of her torso. And she was merciless.

They know what you have done, what you have sacrificed. You stopped a war and saved our kingdom. You’re a hero, Xishi.” A hero. The word sounded strange, like it had nothing to do with me. I did not feel heroic at all. I barely even felt human. I remembered again the sticky heat of Fuchai’s blood on my palms, the weight of Zhengdan’s limp body on my legs, every night passed alone in the dark palace chambers. How long until the memories dimmed? Or would this be another of my sacrifices—that I would carry these ghosts with me for as long as I lived?

“What difference does it make?” she murmured, and I was no longer sure if she was still speaking to me. “The kingdom will soon forget about her and move on, but I will not. They have swapped one king for another, but this—this is real life.” She motioned to the food, the tables, the villagers. “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.”

Fanli doesn’t even look up. “I regret it now.” Luyi stills. “What?” “I regret it,” Fanli repeats, his voice rusty with disuse. “I should never have trained her. I should never have let her go to the Wu.” “But—she saved the kingdom,” Luyi says. “She saved us all. She will go down in history as a hero.” Slowly, Fanli lifts his gaze. His face is hollow, haunted, his eyes black as the darkest night. Luyi flinches. “And who was there to save her?” Fanli rasps.

He laughs until tears flow down his cheeks. “Isn’t it funny? I used to dream of changing the world. Of working for the greater good. But what good is the world,” he asks, “if she is gone?”

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.

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