Daji Enters the Court

K ing Zhou of Shang held his court at Zhaoge, and for a while he had held it well enough — the granaries were full, the border lords came to pay their respects, and heaven had not yet decided anything. Among the ministers who bowed lowest at the New Year's audience was Fei Zhong, a man whose whole talent was knowing what a king wanted to hear before the king knew it himself. When the audience was done he stayed behind. He had heard, he said, of a girl. The Marquis of Jizhou, Su Hu, had a daughter — a face like nothing else in the empire, a bearing quiet and refined, wasted out there in the provinces. A woman like that belonged in the palace, near at hand, ready to serve. He said it the way you would recommend a good horse. King Zhou of Shang held court at Zhaoge. At the New Year's audience the feudal lords came to pay homage, and afterward the minister Fei Zhong stayed behind and reported: "I have lately learned that Su Hu, Marquis of Jizhou, has a daughter of surpassing beauty and of a quiet, gentle nature. Were she chosen into the palace to attend at Your Majesty's side, she would be fit for such service."

King Zhou summoned Su Hu and told him plainly: I hear you have a daughter, gentle and well-bred, and I mean to take her into the rear palace. Su Hu was a soldier and a marquis of an old line, and he did not hear a request. He heard a king who already had everything a king could want deciding to reach into a subject's household and take the one thing that was not his to take. He bowed, and he refused. My daughter is a plain and common thing, he said, untrained in manners, with neither virtue nor beauty worth the notice of the throne — and then, because he was a blunt man and could not stop himself, he added that His Majesty would do better to attend to the foundations of the state, and to behead the small men who whispered such counsel into his ear. King Zhou summoned Su Hu and said: "I hear you have a daughter of quiet virtue and proper bearing. I wish to select her to serve in the rear palace." Su Hu answered: "My daughter is a coarse and lowly thing, unversed in ritual, with neither virtue nor beauty worth the taking. I beg Your Majesty to attend to the foundations of the realm, and to behead these small men who bring slanderous counsel."

It was the wrong thing to say to King Zhou, and Fei Zhong made certain of it. By the time Su Hu left the palace he was a marked man. A wiser or a smaller man would have swallowed the insult and gone home to send the girl. Su Hu stopped at the Meridian Gate, took up a brush, and wrote four lines on the wall for the whole court to read: The lord breaks the bond between king and servant. The great constants are overthrown. Su Hu of Jizhou will never again attend the court of Shang. Then he mounted and rode for his own territory, and the plain word for what he had just done was rebellion. Su Hu, enraged, went to the Meridian Gate and wrote four lines upon the wall: "The sovereign wrecks the bonds of rule; the Five Constants are undone. Su Hu of Jizhou will never again pay court to Shang." Then he rode out of Zhaoge and returned to Jizhou, in open revolt against the Shang.

“A thousand-year fox walked in through the front gate of the Shang — dressed as a marquis's daughter, delivered by the marquis's own hand.”

The court sent an army. Chong Houhu, Marquis of Chong, marched on Jizhou to bring the rebel to heel, and the fighting ran longer and bloodier than anyone at Zhaoge had reckoned on. Su Hu's grain-officer, Zheng Lun, had a trick worth ten thousand men: at his command two beams of white light shot from his nostrils and blew a rider clean out of the saddle, and with it he took Chong Heihu, the marquis of Chong's own brother, alive. A war begun over the beauty of a girl had become a real war, with brothers captured and men dying in the field, and it had settled nothing at all. The court dispatched Chong Houhu, Marquis of Chong, to besiege Jizhou. The battles were hard-fought. Su Hu's provisioning officer, Zheng Lun, possessed a secret art — two beams of white light from his nostrils that could unhorse a warrior — and by it he captured Chong Heihu, brother of the Marquis of Chong. The war dragged on without resolution.

What ended it was not a sword but a letter. Ji Chang, the Lord of the West, sent his counselor San Yisheng to Jizhou with an argument in place of an army. To hold out, San Yisheng told Su Hu, was to guarantee the ruin of his clan and the death of the very daughter he was fighting to keep: the girl would reach Zhaoge either as a gift or as a spoil, and only one of those roads left Jizhou standing. Far better to present her himself, and call it atonement. Su Hu was a proud man but not a stupid one. He agreed. He would carry his daughter to the capital with his own hands. Her name was Daji. In the end the siege was lifted not by battle but by persuasion. Ji Chang, Lord of the West, sent his counselor San Yisheng, who advised Su Hu that to go on resisting would destroy his house, and that it was better to present his daughter to the court himself, as atonement. Su Hu consented, saying he would follow after and present his daughter to Shang to redeem his fault. His daughter's name was Daji.

So Su Hu set out for Zhaoge with his daughter and an escort. Travel went by easy stages, and one evening near dusk they came to Enzhou, where Su Hu called a halt at the government courier-station — the Enzhou post-house — and the station warden came out to receive the marquis and give his daughter a room for the night. The true Daji, Su Hu's own child, the girl whose face had started a war, lay down to sleep behind that door. This is the last we ever see of her. Su Hu set out with his daughter for the capital. One day toward evening they reached Enzhou and came to the Enzhou post-station, where the station warden received them. There Daji lodged for the night.

A year before, in a temple on Mount Xuanyuan, the goddess Nüwa had been insulted by King Zhou and had loosed three spirits into the world with a single order: hasten the fall of the Shang. The eldest of them was a fox that had cultivated itself for a thousand years, and that night it came to the Enzhou post-station. When it left before dawn, Su Hu's daughter was dead — her soul drawn out of her and swallowed whole — and the thing that rose from her bed wore her body like a borrowed coat: her face, her voice, her ruinous beauty, with a thousand-year fox looking out through her eyes. Su Hu, asleep in the next room, suspected nothing. In the morning he woke, and thought his daughter had never looked so lovely. That night the thousand-year fox spirit — one of the three the goddess Nüwa had sent to bring down the Shang — entered the post-station. Daji's soul had already been drawn out and devoured by the fox; she had been dead some while, and the fox borrowed her body to take form, the better to bewitch King Zhou. Su Hu knew nothing of it. In the morning they went on.

They came to Zhaoge, and Su Hu presented his daughter to the throne he had sworn never again to attend. King Zhou looked at her — the dark clouds of her hair, the apricot of her cheeks, the willow of her waist — and the king who had reached into a subject's house to take one beautiful thing got exactly what he had asked for, and more than any man should survive. His soul went wandering past the rim of the sky; his spirit scattered to the ninth heaven; the bone went soft in him. Whatever quarrel had carried her to his hall was forgotten in a breath. He pardoned Su Hu on the spot, heaped honors on the marquis, and took the fox into his bed. They came to Zhaoge, and Su Hu presented his daughter at court. When King Zhou saw her — hair like piled dark clouds, apricot cheeks and peach complexion, brows like faint spring hills, a supple willow waist — his soul roamed beyond the sky and his spirit scattered to the ninth heaven, his bones and sinews gone soft. He pardoned Su Hu, rewarded him, and took Daji into the palace.

After that the court came apart by degrees, and then all at once. Feasting every morning, revels every night; the business of government left to rot, the memorials of loyal men piling up unread and jumbled on the floor. The strongest dynasty under heaven had let a thousand-year fox walk in through its front gate — dressed as a marquis's daughter, delivered by the marquis's own hand — and had seated her at the center of everything. Nüwa's three spirits had a long work ahead of them, and a full accounting still to come. But the first stone of it was laid the night a proud man lost a war he had been right to fight, and carried the instrument of his empire's ruin to the capital, believing to the very end that he was only saving his child. From then on there was feasting every morning and pleasure every night; the business of state fell into ruin and the memorials to the throne into confusion. So the fox, in Daji's form, entered the heart of the Shang court, and the corruption of the reign began.