"She Who Became the Sun"

[fiefoe]

Beautifully written, but the story is just brutal, and some internal dialogues get repetitive. Big battle scenes were mostly finessed out of existence -- maybe they are being saved for the second volume. Shelley Parker-Chan is good with sprinkling Chinese phrases into appropriate places.

• With her wide forehead and none of the roundness that makes children adorable, she had the mandibular look of a brown locust. Like that insect, the girl thought about food constantly. However, having grown up on a peasant’s monotonous diet, and with only a half-formed suspicion that better things might exist, her imagination was limited to the dimension of quantity.
• The elms had once been beautiful, but the girl remembered them without nostalgia. After the harvest had failed the third time the peasants had discovered their gracious elms could be butchered and eaten like any other living thing.
• The bucket got heavier each time, being less and less water and more and more the ochre mud from the bottom of the well. The earth had failed to give them food, but now it seemed determined to give itself to them in every gritty bite.
• Her father was carrying a winter melon under his arm. It was small, the size of a newborn baby, and its powdery white skin was dusty from having been buried underground for nearly two years. The tender look on her father’s face surprised the girl. She had never seen that expression on him before, but she knew what it meant. That was their last melon... A memory boiled up: soup made with pork bones and salt, the surface swimming with droplets of golden oil. The almost gelatinous flesh of the melon, as translucent as the eye of a fish, yielding sweetly between her teeth.
• There was no cruelty in his face, only blind, blissful satisfaction: that of someone perfectly concerned with himself. The girl knew that fathers and sons made the pattern of the family, as the family made the pattern of the universe, and for all her wishful thinking she had never really expected to be allowed to taste the melon.
• The girl was startled by her own anger. Heaven had promised Chongba life enough to achieve greatness, and he had given up that life as easily as breathing. He had chosen to become nothing. The girl wanted to scream at him. Her fate had always been nothing. She had never had a choice.
• She bore it all. Her body had become a barnacle’s shell, anchoring her to the stone, to life. She stayed. It was all she had left in her to do.
• His pouched lids were as round as a beetle’s wings; his cheeks sagged. It should have been a dull face. Instead its heaviness gathered upon itself: it had the potential of a boulder poised high above.
• The mountain’s tangled green slope climbed alongside them. The taste of it landed on Zhu’s tongue: a rich, heady fizz of life and decay that was unlike anything she’d ever known.
• Unlike the browned, dirt-encrusted Zhongli peasants, the monk’s face was as pale and finely wrinkled as tofu skin. Every wrinkle was angled downwards by scorn and sourness
• For a moment she hung suspended in a bubble of warm silence. She had the urge to stay underwater, in that safe moment in which there was neither success nor failure. But she had already acted, and she was surprised to find that it created its own bravery: there was nothing else to do but continue, no matter how frightened she might be. Surfacing, she stood.
• Princes and lords: people from the stories, made real. Representatives of the world beyond the monastery, which up until now Zhu had thought of as names on a map. A world in which greatness exists, she thought suddenly. When she had stolen Chongba’s name and stepped into the discarded shell of his life, her only consideration had been the certainty that he would have survived.
• The warrior was a girl. Her face, as bright and delicate as a polished abalone shell, brought to life every description of beauty that Zhu had ever read in poetry. And yet—even as Zhu saw beauty, she felt the lack of something the eye wanted. There was no femininity in that lovely face at all. Instead there was only the hard, haughty superiority that was somehow unmistakably that of a young man. Zhu stared in confusion, trying to find something comprehensible in that visage that was neither one thing nor the other.
• And as soon as she knew it, she felt a cold disquiet. To resonate in likeness to a eunuch, whose substance was neither male nor female—it was nothing less than a reminder from the world itself of what she tried so hard to deny: that she wasn’t made of the same pure male substance as Zhu Chongba. She had a different substance. A different fate.
• A pious man would make a poor abbot in these troubled times of ours. Do you think Wuhuang Monastery has survived this long in the midst of Nanren rebellion and Mongol retaliation solely due to the smiling regard of Heaven?
• His drooping skin was held taut on the inside by a thrumming vibrance: the ferocious, irreligious joy of a man who has willingly cast aside any chance of nirvana for the sake of his attachment to life.
• Those years should have turned a youth into a man, but now Zhu had the impression of seeing an echo made flesh: someone as slight and beautiful as he had been all that time ago. Only his girl’s face had lost its pure loveliness to become something more unsettling: a sharp, eerie beauty held in as high a tension as the finest tempered steel.
• Ouyang called the order; it was picked up and repeated by each commander of ten thousand men, each subcommander of a thousand men, each leader of a hundred men. Their voices formed into a flocking and swooping chorus, an echoed song thrumming in a canyon. All at once the mighty army began to move. The light-swallowing columns flowed across the land; the metal crushed the grass and sent up a wave of earthen smell. And the restless banners flew above them: Lord Esen and General Ouyang, side by side at the head of the army of the Great Yuan on its march to the Red Turbans and Anfeng.
• the Prime Minister sat on the smaller of the two thrones. Above the frayed collar of his gown his white beard and darting eyes gave him the paranoid, vicious air of a winter ermine.
• How could he be so unaware of what had happened to her father—of how thin the line was in the Prime Minister’s mind between a reasonable effort to succeed, and punishable ambition?
• In a land where every opportunity for those of Nanren blood had been closed off, a rebel movement attracted a higher caliber of person than it might have otherwise.
• The eunuch general’s only response was to raise his arm. Behind him, the Yuan archers drew their bows. Zhu saw it as if in a dream. Inside her there was only the perfect, blank brightness of belief and desire. Desire is the cause of all suffering. The greater the desire, the greater the suffering, and now she desired greatness itself. With all her will, she directed the thought to Heaven and the watching statues: Whatever suffering it takes, I can bear it.
• In our father’s eyes, I’ll always be the failure. But, strangely, despite being a coward of a Manji, I still prefer failure on my own terms.”
• By causing his loss, and his shaming by Chaghan, the monk had triggered the start of his journey towards his purpose. He couldn’t find it in himself to be grateful. It felt like a violation. A theft of something he hadn’t been ready to give up. Not innocence, exactly, but the limbo in which he could still fool himself that other futures were possible.
• It was a quality of jealousy that you could only feel it for people who were like you. Ouyang could no more be jealous of Esen than he could be of the sun. But Ouyang and Lord Wang were alike. For a moment they stood there in bitter acknowledgment of it, feeling that likeness ringing through the space between them. The one reviled for not being a man, the other for not acting like one.
• “You’re even more of a lard-hearted idiot than I thought
• Her hair fell as straight and shining as black clouds. Perhaps her looks missed the Nanren standards of classic beauty, but in her face there was such a depth of raw and innocent emotion that Zhu’s eye was drawn as if to the scene of an accident.
• No doubt Chen would flatter himself to think it was a stolen insight into her character, rather than a gift she’d let him have.
• The residence’s doors banged and slammed as if by angry ghosts, and Ouyang felt his ancestors’ eyes upon him as he ate with the son of his family’s murderer, the person he held dearest in all the world.


• In Hichetu it was the performances that were praised, not the outcomes; often a loser with a flashier style was feted. <> “What did you expect, that merit is the basis for advancement in court?” Lord Wang had said acerbically when Esen pointed it out,
• Now, though, he had the unpeeled feeling that Zhang could tell, in some very specific way, that he was lying.
• “Do you believe that? That one day we’ll be out of a job, because of peace?” Ouyang could imagine the death of the Great Khan, but he couldn’t imagine the end of an empire. Neither could he truly imagine its return to stability. Imagination was, after all, powered by one’s investment in the outcome.
• Without me Henan would have fallen already, whether or not you have Bolud’s support. Rebellions promise their followers everything we fail to give. So if your peasants are starving, your soldiers unpaid, don’t think they’d be loyal to you, or the Mongols, or the Great Yuan. They’d join without a second thought. The only reason they don’t is because I govern and tax and administer. I pay their salaries and rescue their families from disaster. I am the Yuan. I uphold it more than you can ever do with the brute force of your swords.
• That was the pureness that Ouyang wanted to protect forever. Esen’s large heart, and his simple, trusting belief in everyone. He made himself say, “You need to be careful of Wang Baoxiang.”
• There was a soft thump, no louder than peaches falling in the orchard. Ouyang went in a leisurely way to where Lord Wang lay stricken, his hand still outstretched, and looked down. Far below, Chaghan’s purple silks were splashed out like a lone jacaranda blooming in the dust. Dead, Ouyang thought. Dead like my brothers, my cousins, my uncles. Dead like the Ouyang line...  Ouyang realized he had always believed revenge would change something. It was only in having done it that he understood that what had been lost was still lost forever; that nothing he could do would ever erase the shame of his own existence.
• She had murdered a man with her bare hands in the pursuit of her desire. As she looked up at Chen’s smiling tiger face, she recognized pragmatism taken to its natural endpoint: the person who climbed according to his desire, with no regard to what he did to get there.
• Zhu bowed and let Chen precede her into the throne room. His massive bulk moved lightly, clad in that black gown so heavy with its own thickness that it barely moved around him: the stillness of power.
• For whatever reason, he had gifted her with some truth of himself, and she couldn’t unsee it: the unnatural, frightening immensity of his desire. She didn’t understand or trust it, but knowing it was there filled her with the fascination of a moth for a flame.
• How was it he saw her as someone who acted of her own volition, when to everyone else she was just an object performing its function? It filled her with a sudden rage. She was grieving her life as she never had before, and it was all this monk’s fault for having conjured the impossible fantasy of a world in which she was free to desire.
• Ma grabbed her hand. The immediacy of skin against skin shocked her into a sudden, exaggerated awareness of the thin boundary between herself and the outside world... Now a foreign tremor raced up her arm: the quiver of another’s heartbeat in her own body... Zhu realized she wanted to keep that fierce empathy in the world. Not because she understood it, but because she didn’t, and for that reason it seemed precious.
• Even though she denied it even to herself, at some point since that conversation Ma had realized that she didn’t want the life she was being forced into. <> Zhu felt a stab of uncharacteristic pity. Not-wanting is a desire too; it yields suffering just as much as wanting.
• Zhu watched her look. Her face had a flayed vulnerability, something so raw and terrible that Ma flinched to see it. It made her think of someone baring a mortal wound they dared not look at themselves, for fear of the reality of it undoing them in an instant. <> Zhu spoke calmly, but beneath the surface Ma sensed a shivering horror. “Ma Xiuying. Do you see something you want?”
• Even Ouyang lingered too far behind for comfort: a shadow that had somehow become detached.
• “What large projects?” Esen said scornfully. “More roads? Ditch-digging?” He felt a surly thrill of pleasure at the thought of crushing what his brother cared about. Returning pain for pain.
• “I don’t admit anything! I don’t need to! You’ve already made up your mind.” Baoxiang grabbed the desk and held on as if it were a slipping deck at sea; his pale fingers whitened further with the pressure.
• Ouyang pressed his feelings down until they were packed as tightly as a cake of tea. “He’s not your brother.
• Ma’s hope was like seeing the world through the iridescent wing of an insect: a glowing, soft-edged version of itself in which the arc of history could still trend towards kindness and decency. Ma always felt so much, and with such a foolish, beautiful intensity, that witnessing her emotions made Zhu’s own internal landscape seem as barren as a cracked lake bed.
• A soft, lingering press of lips against lips. A moment of yielding warmth that generated something infinitely tender and precious, and as fragile as a butterfly’s wing. It was nothing at all like the unrestrained, half-violent passions of the body that Xu Da had described. It felt like something new, something they’d invented themselves. Something that existed only for the two of them, in the penumbral shadow of their little room, for the span of a single kiss.
• she had been surprised and more than a little disconcerted to see Jining surrounded by the white fungal sprawl of the eunuch general’s army.
• The explosion smacked Ouyang from his horse. Bodies and burning rocks crashed down around him. His ears rang so loudly that he could only tell men were screaming by their gaping mouths. Covered in ash, their bodies twisted unnaturally, they looked like demons stumbling through the smoke. Coughing, Ouyang staggered in the direction of his front line. Which wasn’t there. There was only a vast burning pit, as deep as a ten-story pagoda. And all around it, in a blackened starburst of horror, was a wreckage the likes of which Ouyang had never seen
• Zhu was struck anew by the eunuch general’s crystalline beauty. Flesh of ice and bones of jade, she thought: the most exquisite form of female beauty. But for all that, there was no mistaking him for a woman. Where that smoothness should have been yielding, there was only hardness: it was in the set of his jaw, the arrogant tilt to his chin. His stride and bearing were those of a person who carried himself with the bitter pride of knowing that his separation came from being above.
• The room was too full of perfume. Ouyang’s head spun. He was trapped in this nightmarish female space, where Esen was lord and king. And as with all the other inhabitants of this domain, Ouyang was Esen’s too; he was mastered... He stood, and felt a deep current of pleasure beneath his anger. It was the pleasure of a slave who wanted to please his master; the comfort of a chaotic world returning to order.
• First snowfall, which lovers liked to watch together. All the things that Ouyang could never have were too present, like haunting ghosts. This was why he had wanted to be angry, so it could wash away everything else he might feel. But instead it was his anger that hadn’t been strong enough, and had been drowned. <> Esen said, still with that odd pain on his face, “If you want me there, I’ll come.”
• She dived deep into the mutilated body that wasn’t Zhu Chongba’s body, but a different person’s body—a different substance entirely. She had always done this looking for something that felt foreign—for that seed of greatness that had been transplanted into her under the false understanding that she was someone else. But now when she looked, she saw what had been there all along.
• He hated speaking about Esen to Shao, as if Esen were only an enemy. He made himself do it anyway. He had the image of his relationship to Esen being a thin strip of metal that Ouyang was deliberately bending back and forth. Each time it bent, it hurt. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt after it finally snapped, but Ouyang couldn’t make himself believe it.
• The Jurchens deposed the Song, but at least their Jin Dynasty recognized beauty, and preserved it. Then the first khan of our Great Yuan sent his general Subotai to conquer the Jin. Subotai had no use for gardens, so he drained the lake and cut down the trees with the idea of turning it into pasture. But no grass ever grew. It’s said that the tears of the Jin princesses salted the ground, so the only thing that can grow here is this red plant.”
• Commander Zhao ran to my brother to tell of your treachery, and the only reason he didn’t succeed was because I was there to stop him. And when you poisoned your own commanders—no doubt because they lost trust in you—that physician would have told the truth had I not guided his tongue.” A spasm of detestation crossed his face. “No, indeed, General: not luck. Any success you have is due to me.”
• And perhaps Lord Wang had spoken truly when he claimed his likeness to Ouyang, because at that moment Ouyang understood that emotion perfectly. It was the wretched, propulsive self-hate of someone determined to travel the path he had chosen, even in the knowledge that its end holds nothing but ugliness and destruction.
• It was what they wanted to hear; it was the only thing that would have ever motivated them to follow someone like him. As he spoke to them in Han’er, he realized he might never speak Mongolian again. But his native language held no comfort. It felt like a cold leather glove that had been prised from a corpse. His Mongol self was dead, but there was no other to take its place, only a hungry ghost containing the singular purpose of revenge, and the inevitability of its own death.
• If you want a fate other than what Heaven gave you, you have to want that other fate. You have to struggle for it. Suffer for it. Liu Futong never did anything for himself, and so when I took you away from him, he had nothing. He became nothing.”
  The child was silent.
  Zhu said, “I wasn’t born with the promise of greatness either. But I have it now. Heaven gave it to me because I wanted it. Because I’m strong, because I’ve struggled and suffered to become the person I need to be, and because I do what needs to be done.”