The Fragrant Sky
TAGS | fiction, local
Ng Yi-Sheng
Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and activist with a keen interest in Southeast Asian history and myth. He has been published in Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons—check out his Pushcart-nominated essay “A Spicepunk Manifesto” and his BSFA-longlisted “A Not-So-Swiftly Tilting Planet”— and is author of the speculative fiction collection Lion City (winner of the Singapore Literature Prize). Additionally, he served as editor of A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. His website is ngyisheng.com, and he tweets and Instagrams at @yishkabob.
It was here, my child. It was here, on the grounds of Moonbright Palace. This is where the Princess Cheungping and her Bridegroom held their wedding rites, joined by a crimson nanosilk sash. It was here that they bowed, first to the Celestial Vastness, then to the Holy Rock of the Planet Dai-Ming. And it was here, by the Phoenix Terrace, that they knelt one last time before the plasma of their nuptial candles.
The palace is rubble now. Only this canvas-clad steel pavilion, ragged and rusty, stands as monument to that night. But I remember. My eyes may be blind, and my neural implants clogged with grit, but I remember.
Sit with me, child, here on the iron steps. Take shelter where snipers cannot see us. I will tell you the tale of our people’s glory. I will tell you the tale of the Fragrant Sky.
***
His name was General Abahai Elliot. For countless orbits, he had waged war on Dai-Ming under the fearsome banner of the Interstellar Colonisation Corps. Wall by wall, he had broken through our defences, until nothing remained but the capital city of Bakging.
As the shields on the Moonbright Palace warped and trembled, as the boots of the shock troops thundered through the crystal gardens, the Emperor lost all hope. Summoning his wives and his husbands, gathering his daughters and his sons, he bestowed on them each a three-foot length of nanosilk. As per the ritual, each fastened the fabric about their frog-buttoned collars; each blinked away tears as it crushed the life from their brittle throats. And as they fell, blood spilling into the woven circuitry, an electromagnetic surge coursed through their meridians, erasing all memory, rendering their data irretrievable to marauders and thieves.
In a heartbeat, General Abahai stormed into the Dragon Mansion. Still armoured in his blood-rinsed exosuit, he planted himself on the throne and surveyed the bodies before him, both the lifeless stiffs of the royal family and the cowering mounds of the surviving eunuchs.
“We have come not to slaughter, but to civilise,” he said. “Together, we shall build marvels. Now, tell me. Who here can engineer a spacecraft to reach the Fragrant Sky?”
The eunuchs blinked at each other, puzzled.
“You speak of a myth,” said one. “Had we such a machine, would we now be humbled, prostrate, at the mercy of distant stars? Surely we would have conquered galaxies and crushed rogue planets, in the fashion of your imperium. Rule over our rice fields, plunder our palaces and porcelain factories. But do not bid us to build a folly like this.”
The General narrowed his eyes. “Search him,” he commanded. And a surgeon stepped forth with his cortical probe and bonesaw to unlock the truth from the eunuch’s skull.
Thus went the months of Abahai’s rule. The people of Dai-Ming suffered punitive taxes and unrelenting drone surveillance. Gun turrets were mounted on pagodas, monasteries and teahouses were transformed into detention camps. And in the depths of the Moonbright Palace, surgeons laboured over the royal cadavers, hunting for rumours of the mysterious machine within the codes of their rotting flesh.
Then came a day when a beggar woman arrived the throne room, bound in the titanium shackles of the military police.
“My Emperor,” she told Abahai, for an emperor he had become. “You seek royal secrets, but have no royals to reveal them. I, however, can help you, for I know what no other soul knows. The Princess Cheungping is still alive.”
“How?” asked Abahai.
“She fled at the dynasty’s fall. Now she dwells in a snowcapped convent, sealed in a pearl of jade, eyes clasped in prayer, nanosilk laced about her throat. Disturb her slumber, the abbess says, and she will flee once more into death.”
“Then that is useless!” Abahai snarled. “She is a slab of mere meat if I cannot master the mysteries of her mind.”
“She will wake at my bidding,” said the beggar woman, “for I am her betrothed, the Bridegroom Sahin. Wed us according to rites of Dai-Ming, and we shall grant every desire of your hungry heart.”
Thus, a deal was struck. From the convent, a palanquin bore the great pearl wherein the Princess Cheungping lay suspended in meditation. In the capital, Sahin directed the wedding preparations, commanding a banquet of a thousand tables, a retinue of officials and ladies-in-waiting, a dowry of holographic jewellery and preserved pork legs, a nuptial bed embroidered with threads of meteorite iron, a parade of golden parasols. Red paper packets were stuffed, urns of liquor and longan tea were brewed, a sleek white hovercar was adorned with pink rosettes. And at Sahin’s insistence, the royal family’s mouldering corpses were surrendered, ceremonially carbonized into ink-black altar stones, and installed in a steel pavilion, where incense burned from dusk to daybreak.
At long last, the auspicious date arrived. In the palace grounds, Abahai presided over the wedding guests, who comprised all Dai-Ming’s aristocracy, as well as the top brass of the Interplanetary Colonisation Corps. Amidst a clash of cymbals and a dance of cybernetically enhanced lions, the great pearl was unveiled. And as the gathered dignitaries watched, Sahin laid a hand on the flawless surface, which instantly splintered into a fine iridescent dust.
The Princess Cheungping rose from the cloud. Already, she was costumed in the scarlet robes of a bride. Already, her face was painted ghost white, her cheeks and lips stained mulberry, her hair a-glitter with a thousand golden pinpricks. Sahin bowed before her, whispering words in her ear, and the guests held their breath as a single tear fell down her royal cheek.
Then, she began to sing.
At first, Abahai allowed himself a smile. He was not immune to the charms of Dai-Ming’s music. If the bride wished to whistle an aria or two, that was her prerogative, as long as she spilled her secrets.
Then both sang: Cheungping and Sahin, Princess and Bridegroom, as they unfastened the nanosilk collar and extended the fabric between them, twisting a cinnabar knot to bind their hands. Both sang as they kowtowed to the Celestial Vastness, to the Holy Rock of the Planet Dai-Ming. Both sang as they honoured the dead Emperor’s altar at the heart of the Phoenix Terrace.
What did they sing? No-one knows. But it is said that Abahai found himself disturbed by the melody, by the concord and discord of two alien voices, looming above him on a proscenium stage of steel and candlewax. “Stop,” he said, or would have liked to say, for he found himself mute and paralysed, teacup falling from his fingers, terrified eyes following the motions of the couple’s vermilion sleeves as their voices rang with love, with despair, with eternal promise.
Finally, the song ended. And as the spell broke, Abahai leapt to his feet, as did the elites of the Colonisation Corps, guns to the ready, though the Dai-Ming nobles kept serenely to their seats.
But it was too late. For Cheungping and Sahin had paused only to raise their goblets to a toast, then to toss the wine down their throats. Still joined by the nanosilk, they opened their lips once again to breathe—
And then all was starfire, and all was blood.
***
You know the rest, my child, from your history lessons. The occupation did not end. The Interstellar Colonisation Corps despatched a new governor, crueller than Abahai, backed by droids that shot on sight. A planetwide revolt ensued, and in the wars since then, our temples and teahouses have been crushed into dirt and cinders.
But here is what you have not been told. It was not our oppressors who reduced the Moonbright Palace to ruin. It was the Princess. It was her decision to sacrifice her court, her Bridegroom, her own data and flesh, so that not an atom would remain to betray our people’s secrets. True, she could have ruled as a figurehead. But that was not her choice. Better to perish than to be a puppet of distant stars. Better to lose everything than to lose yourself.
But there are some who say this is only half the truth. That what happened the night of the wedding was no simple act of self-annihilation. That it was in fact the activation of a great machine.
The Fragrant Sky, they say, is not a dimension in space, but in time. Cheungping and Sahin’s desperate act was a performance of occult technology, meant to transport us there, to a moment when Dai-Ming is safe, is sound, is free.
And maybe it worked. Some say they are voyaging there still, and their faces and voices haunt this pavilion. Not spirits of the past, but pilgrims towards a future, both unimagined and unimaginable, both impossible and imperative, inescapable, destined.
Sit on the steps with me, child, and watch. Listen.
Do you see? Do you hear? Do you believe?
Close your mind to the rumble of gunfire, to the cries of your brethren trapped in the present. Cling to the pillars of this pavilion, bathe in the lights of the canvas. Witness the miracle for which emperors and generals have given their lives—
It is here, little one.
The Fragrant Sky.
It is waiting for you.