The Tyrant's Sickly Consort Refuses to Die novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Three Bowls
Xiao Jue tests the sickly consort with three bowls of soup and loses; they set terms, share one cup of Su Ming's bitter tea, and the Emperor who has not slept in nine years falls asleep on his shoulder.
The second watch came and went, and Su Ming was still sitting upright on a hard chair with a mild ache behind his eyes.
The Emperor had been counting the drum from the bed.
When the last stroke died away he sat up and looked at him for a long time.
"You're not dead," said Xiao Jue.
"No, Your Majesty."
"The last one was on the floor by now."
"The last one was given a stronger cup, or a weaker stomach," said Su Ming. "This one has had practice."
The Emperor said something short to the door.
Gao Shun came in at once, carrying a tray with three plain bowls of ginger soup.
"I will not take your word on a talent," said Xiao Jue.
"Gao Shun made these himself, in front of me. I know which is which. Name them."
Su Ming looked at the tray.
He did not touch the bowls.
He leaned over the first and breathed in, and then the second, and then the third.
"The first is only ginger," he said.
"The second has tigerbane in it, a pinch, enough to numb the tongue and not kill. The third has dawn-vine."
Gao Shun's hand moved on the tray, a small jerk.
"Dawn-vine?" said the Emperor.
"It is bitter, and it works slowly," said Su Ming.
"A bowl of it makes you sick in the morning and kills you in three days. The doctors call it a bad winter chest."
The Emperor looked at the eunuch.
Gao Shun bowed his head. "It is correct, Majesty. I put a thread of dawn-vine in the third."
"How?" said Xiao Jue.
He was looking at Su Ming again, and there was no anger in it yet.
There was only a hard, attentive hunger.
"I had a nurse," said Su Ming. "The old woman who raised me."
He folded his hands.
"My mother's family kept poison-eaters for the sickly sons. A cousin who wanted our house had already killed my mother."
"My old nurse was hired to keep me alive," said Su Ming. "She did it by teaching my tongue."
"A grain on Monday, two on Thursday. By ten I could name forty-one roots in the dark."
"And your father?"
"My father thought she was a cook." Su Ming shrugged one shoulder. "He sold me before he noticed what the cook had done."
The Emperor was quiet.
Then he said, "I have a use for a man who cannot be killed with a cup."
"I thought you might."
"I have no use for a man who lies to me about one."
"Then we need terms, Your Majesty," said Su Ming.
For a moment he thought he had gone too far.
Gao Shun made a faint sound by the tray, but the Emperor lifted two fingers and the sound stopped.
"Say them," said the Emperor.
"First," said Su Ming. "Whatever cup you put in my hand, I will tell you plainly what is in it."
"I will never say it is clean when it is not, and I will never say it is poisoned when it is only bitter."
"Second," he said.
"Second. When you suspect who sent it, you will tell me, and not make me guess which of your people to watch."
"Third?"
"That is yours," said Su Ming. "You'll make one."
The Emperor's mouth moved.
It might have been the start of a smile, and it might have been pain.
"Third," said Xiao Jue. "You sleep where I can see you."
"In this room," said Su Ming.
"On the bed. It is large enough that you can lie on the far edge with a sword between us, if that is your fear."
"It is not my fear."
"Good." The Emperor looked at the tray, at the soup, and then away.
"I do not eat from the kitchens," he said. "Gao Shun tastes everything. He has been tasting for nine years, and he is going grey."
"Tonight you will taste it for him."
"I have a better thing than soup, Your Majesty."
Su Ming pulled a small clay kettle out of his sleeve, wrapped in oilcloth.
It was the one thing he had carried through the palace gate in his own hands.
"The court knows the sickly consort takes a medicine," he said.
"It is black bean and licorice and one dried root. It keeps my stomach quiet after a bad cup. You may watch me make it."
He made it on the brazier, with Gao Shun standing over him.
He poured it into a plain cup and drank the first mouthful, so that everyone could see.
Xiao Jue held out his hand.
Su Ming hesitated, and then put the cup into it.
The Emperor turned the cup so that his mouth met the rim where Su Ming's mouth had been, and he drank.
"I will drink only what you have drunk," he said. "That is the rule of this room now."
It was bitter and smoky, and not at all a thing for an emperor.
He finished it.
Then he said, abruptly, "Talk. I do not sleep. Say anything at all."
Su Ming sat on the edge of the bed and talked.
He told him about his old nurse and her two pots of tea, one for the guests and one for the boy.
He told him she had kept a crooked finger on his pulse every night for fifteen years.
He told him about the day he had first named a root by smell and she had slapped him for it and then wept.
"And the thing she said after," Su Ming began, "was that the world is full of cups, and the only wise thing is to know"
The weight arrived on his shoulder.
It was heavy and warm.
The Emperor's head had dropped sideways without a sound, and his breathing was slow and even and deep.
His hand lay open on the sheet.
Su Ming did not move.
He sat there the whole of the third watch, and then the fourth.
His shoulder went numb, and his arm went to sleep, and a tyrant's hair lay against his neck.
The window turned grey.
The door opened a hand's breadth, and Gao Shun looked in.
He stood without moving, with the grey light on his face.
Then he came in on soft feet and bent to Su Ming's ear.
"He has not slept past midnight since he was nineteen," whispered Gao Shun, and his voice cracked in the middle.
"I beg you. Do not move."
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