Free The Red Queen by Margaret Drabble Page A

measles. He wished his own son dead. What cruelties there are in words! These words had a truth in them, but they should never have been spoken.
At this time, a rumour began to circulate that Prince Sado had given new currency to that old story about the fratricide and the poisoned mushrooms, and was spreading slander about his father, and plotting against him. There was not a word of truth in this cowardly attack, but King Yŏngjo took it upon himself to go through a ludicrous parade of prostrating himself in denunciation at the Sŏnhwa Gate of Seoul, crying out against his son the prince regent and the accusing memorial sent by a censor to the court.
It was by now bitter winter and the snow was deep. Our city is surrounded by steep mountains: their bare grey rocks look down upon us coldly even in summer, and in winter their peaks are clothed in white. Sado, compelled by court etiquette to attempt to outdo his father, went to the gate and awaited his punishment there in the open air, in an exaggerated display of remorse and penitence. He knelt on a straw mat, and beat his head upon the stones until it bled. The snow fell thick upon him, until he became a man of snow, white with rime, like a ghost from the mountains. And he had but lately recovered from the measles. My fury with both father and son was boundless. I despised their childish, empty, theatrical displays. I, of course, stayed at home in the palace, well wrapped in layers of padded garments and a fur-trimmed gown, with my feet tucked under the table and warmed by the comforting heat that rose through the smooth oiled stone slabs from the stoked furnaces below. The modest glow of a charcoal brazier kept me company: my attendants faithfully fed its soft dull red heart. I tucked myself into my bed that freezing night, ‘warm on my duck-embroidered pillow, beneath my kingfisher quilt’, as the old poet has it. I kept myself safe.
I hid away in my warm winter retreat, and while Sado and his father played deadly games at the city gate, I, within, played childish games with my little boy. I rolled a pomegranate, and he crawled after it. The charms on the little golden bracelets round his dimpled, chubby wrists and ankles made a music that pleased us both. He laughed with delight when I hid my face behind my fan, then revealed it. These are the games of all children of all ages of all the peoples of the earth. The descendant kittens of my first little cat (she now being dead) would play with the little prince, and pounce and bounce around him. Let those grown men play their stupid games, I said to myself in the bitterness of my fearful heart, we in here, in this safe place, will try to keep ourselves warm, and guard our innocent spirits from the demons of pride and hatred.
Ah, my little prince, how beautifully in the end you justified the promise of your boyhood! My heart’s darling, you were so gifted and so beautiful. It breaks my heart to think of the unmentionable tragedy and wickedness that you were forced to witness. You were exposed to horror, you were led into temptation and disgrace, you were manipulated by those you thought your friends, yet you survived and triumphed over them, and I am here to tell and to retell your tale, as I told and retold it upon earth.
The dim glow of the charcoal, the oiled veneer of the polished floor, the gold-red sheen of the tender veins of the living rosewood, the soft secret road of the silk, the cool green of the jade.
So your father Sado crouched in penitence in the snow, and the snow drifted down upon him and coated him and clothed him with the white robes of mourning. The flakes settled on his royal robes. He became a cold statue of grief. And still he was not forgiven. His father was a remorseless, relentless man. Has any father ever so tormented his son? And yet to the end of his long life on earth I had to sing the praises of this wilful old man, your grandfather. Our history remembers him as a great monarch, but he was