The Iron Empress is intrigued with this O.J. Simpson person....

What you 20th-century people (and you were 20th-century people then) called a "low-speed chase" would have been, of course, an utterly appalling hurtling velocity for someone from any previous century. But once I was able to adjust my perception, I saw exactly what he was doing.

Some of us are simply above the law. I was, and so was my mother, Madame Yang. If you think that those of us who are above the law, but who kill, as I did, and as Mr. Simpson did, do not grieve for the ones we must kill, you are wrong. I sacrificed my own firstborn, a ten-day-old daughter. I did not hire someone to do it, nor did I order a servant to do it. I did it myself, as kindly as I could. I felt the life leaving her small body, felt the tremors traveling up my arms as I leaned, with my full weight, on the quilt I pressed down on her face.

Later, behind a stout locked door, after the "discovery" of the baby's death, I tore my hair and clothing, raked my flesh with my fingernails, howled until my throat was raw, broke furniture. Madame Yang was a great help, taking over for me from time to time so that I could rest and soothe my throat with hot tea. Madame Yang's voice was indistinguishable from mine, and so, to anyone on the other side of the door (including the Emperor Kaotsung, the infant's father, soon to be my Imperial husband), my grief was without surcease for many days. I know that this did not fail to make an impression.

Mere playacting, you say? Are you so sure that my performance was not driven by actual grief, and by fury that such an act was necessary? Could I have carried on as I did, for so long, with such intensity, on pretext alone? Perhaps you in your future world fail to grasp certain truths: the Great--and by that I mean the noble, the fine, the rare, the few--simply feel more intensely, more powerfully, more....deeply than ordinary people. It is our burden to bear, along with our greater obligations. A peasant woman would perhaps grieve over the death of her baby, yes, but only for a few hours at the very most. And when, I ask you, would a peasant woman be called upon to make such a sacrifice, and do it with her own hands, thereby increasing the grief a hundredfold? Only the Great can make great sacrifices. As they must.

Kaotsung, you see, was a comely man, intelligent, a lusty lover, but as a Son of Heaven, a thin shadow compared to his late father, Emperor Taitsung. And I, at the time of my daughter's death, was a concubine. An important one, a favorite, one who had unleashed the young Emperor's ardor in ways he'd never known, caused his juices to back up inside him and leave him rock-hard, writhing and helpless unless I released him--but a concubine, and not yet a queen. He had a queen already, of course, a silly, useless woman he was shackled to, chosen for him, ordained. Only I, as his queen, would be able to unleash his greatness. It was my mother, Madame Yang, who made me cognizant of the sacrifice I would have to make in order to overcome that limitation. Think as a queen. Behave as a queen. Be a queen, she said, daring me. I took her dare. I remember whispering to my infant daughter, as she slept, her belly full of my own warm milk, in the moment before I brought the quilt down onto her face: You are going to help to make your father great. 

It was a simple matter after that to frame the then-queen for the baby's murder and get rid of her.

Now do you have a better understanding of the particular burdens the Great must bear? Mr. Simpson understood it perfectly. The intensity of his murderous fury was in direct proportion to the greatness he knew to be his. He was not just an ordinary man slashing his woman's throat in a jealous rage--he was a champion, a warrior, a man whose life was larger than other men's lives. Practically a god, with an army of worshipers. He was obligated to do what he did, and to do it the way he did: with a knife. So acute, so blood-and-sinew personal, the blade penetrating and withdrawing, penetrating and withdrawing, the blade hitting bone, her cries filling the world, a final act of sexual conquest...and then, the processional.

That, of course, is what the "low-speed chase," as you put it, was: a royal processional. He traveled through his kingdom, the word spreading among the people with the speed of thought so that they gathered along the way and on the bridges, cheering and shouting and holding up painted signs proclaiming their love, mile after mile, while he absorbed their love and astonished them with the hugeness of his audacity and with his outsized grief for what he had been forced to do, his royal escorts of lights and sirens moving in majestic accompaniment like a thousand drummers and flutists declaring and affirming: Behold! This is no ordinary man!

And I hear that he asked for his mother.

The Iron Empress approves.



Do stop by for a visit. I am in high spirits.

Let us hope that my cheer endures.

For everyone's sake.

They speak as if I, the Iron Empress, was cruel.....

...when I exiled elderly men and poets to the island of Hainan. Men who had never held a weapon more formidable than a quill in their soft, uncallused hands.

This hurts me deeply. Would these poets and useless old men have preferred the view from atop the spiked gate of the White Horse Temple, along with twenty-five of their traitorous compatriots? I had to send my mother, Madame Yang, on daily tours of inspection past the temple gate to ensure that the heads were not interfered with.

There are silly people who attribute sacred significance to corpses, or in this case, parts of corpses; Madame Yang took upon herself the tiresome task of seeing to it that the old mothers of several of the men whose heads decorated the spikes did not disturb the display. There was one particularly persistent old lady who appeared at dawn every morning with a long stick in her hands, with which she would try to reach up and knock down her son's head. I could have had the woman arrested, but I did not! Instead, my mother and I agreed that we would simply have the monks shoo her away, until, after the ravens and the elements had done their work, her son's jawbone should detach itself and fall naturally to the paving stones, at which point she would be allowed to take it home with her. And they say I am without mercy!

The men I sent to Hainan went with their heads attached to their bodies. Poets and scholars, mostly, followers, not leaders. They should have been grateful not only for their lives, but for the opportunity to inhabit such a rich environment. Scholars, we are told, are hungry for knowledge, and poets for inspiration! The seething life in the tropics should more than satiate the hungers of both scholar and poet. My grandson, Minghuang, who became the Emperor fifty years after my death (a weakling, scarcely worthy of my blood, but that is another story) had a brilliant Chief Minister. His name was Li Lin-fu--or, as he was fond of calling himself--The Lizard, and he was, as you in the distant future might put it, a man after my own heart, the true Emperor. He said this of my lovely Shore of Pearls, describing it to some poor trembling fool standing before him:

 "It is very hot there, General. And there is abundant life such as is always found in the tropical climes; a fascinating variety of insects, serpents, and plants which inhabitants of temperate zones cannot even imagine. Think of the contrast, General, between such life-forms and those of the far north, where nature must practice economy. Plants and animals existing under rigid conditions have no time for any sort of experimental frivolity. Colors are subdued, practical. But in the tropics, it is different. There, with the excess of heat, light, and moisture, we find out what nature really yearns to do. We see her true mind. I’ve heard that the trees are laden with the most delectable-looking fruit. Some varieties are good and will nourish you, while others ... one bite and you will die in agony. Poison, General. Nature dearly loves to put poison in things that jump, crawl, and grow. And she loves to decorate them in the most brilliant colors and let them multiply in feverish profusion. It is no wonder that the Empress Wu had an affinity for the tropics. I don’t believe that she ever visited there herself, but I know that the island of Hainan received many ‘guests,’ courtesy of Her Highness. Those who were troublesome to her soon forgot any court business as they occupied themselves with their immediate surroundings. There are people there, too, if you can call them that: an indigenous race of savages scarcely distinguishable from the monkeys who scream and chatter in the treetops.” 

It is true that I never visited the island myself. But I didn't need to. The interior of my own mind seethed with equal richness, fecundity, and inventiveness.

Yes, I was the authoress of many an unprecedented device for the extraction of information or the exposure and execution of a traitor--and in one instance, all three! I defy any of you to surpass, for sheer ingenuity and practicality, with a touch of whimsy, my "Voice of the Thunder Owl." I feel the warmth of life again just remembering it. Picture a man-sized box, of sturdy iron, on wheels. Into the court a man--an informer, an accuser--could ride, anonymous and secure, to give his testimony against anyone at all whom he suspected of plotting against my rule. And picture, on the outside of the wheeled box, a protuberance resembling the beaked head of a huge owl, and within that protuberance, an ingenious system of sliding flutelike tubes and narrow bamboo baffles through which the accuser spoke. Those on the outside would be quite able to distinguish the words, but the voice emanating from the box--buzzing, humming, muffled and distorted--would be thoroughly unrecognizable! The pitch of the accuser's voice could even be raised or lowered by manipulation of the sliding tubes within!

What happened in a certain instance will surely make you smile. An ambitious informer had chosen the anonymity of the Thunder Owl. He was wheeled into court, and speaking through the apparatus in his reedy, buzzing, high-pitched voice, proceeded to accuse his father of being a traitor, and his mother of hiding the father's traitorous activities.

This was more than the court could stomach! The crimes of the parents were one thing, but the grotesque lapse in filial piety, especially against a mother, was another altogether. The mother-incriminating informer was told that the court would have to recess for a short time until it reached a decision, and that he was to remain safely inside the box until then. The box was then wheeled into the courtyard and left there. After several weeks of deliberation, a verdict of guilt against the parents was delivered. The crying and screaming from within the box, distorted by the Voice of the Thunder Owl, had lasted nearly ten days, so it was said. The informer himself was found posthumously guilty of transgression of the bounds of filial respect. It is imperative that certain standards are vigilantly maintained!

But I must admit to a nearly overwhelming envy that I have no doubt Chief Minister Li Lin-fu--himself no "slouch" (as you in the future might say) at ingenious methods, mechanisms and systems--would share. I speak, of course of the Moon Door in your shared electronic dream you call the Game of Thrones.

The Moon Door is a thing of transcendent beauty. No spikes, no blades, no crushing weights or wicked screw devices. Just air, with puffy white drifting clouds and distant rocks below, the Moon Door itself nothing more elaborate than a big hole in the elegant stone floor of a great throne room of a great castle, high, high, high on a craggy mountain. The throne room with its dreadful beautiful Moon Door occupies an outcropping of solid rock protruding out over empty space, a decorative but only partial stone railing embracing the hole. And always a cold wind rising from it, lifting one's hair, one's clothing. To look at the Moon Door is to feel one's foot stepping off into nothing, and the thrill of the body, still living, breathing, and intact, built for solid ground beneath it, beginning its plunge. Only the gentlest push is needed. Just the slightest loss of balance, a tip, a slip, a stumble.

Of course I am envious.

And oh, I fret over the fate of the imp, Tyrion Lannister. Would that I could transport him to my own court. I would make him a monk of the White Cloud Sect, and I would dress him in robes, and I would have him walk alongside the tallest of the monks, the man who towers over all the others, my very own Tibetan monk-magician holy man Hsueh-Huai-i


Do stop by. I am in an excellent mood!

And likely to remain so. For now.