Treacherous Fox

Time passed slowly for the two prisoners, until, a few days later, they heard men at the door of their chamber. Someone was pulling away the bricks that barricaded them inside. For a moment, the ladies assumed that Gaozong had had a change of heart, and that, at the very least, their conditions would be improved. However, this turned out to be the cruellest trick of all, as the men at the door were revealed to be servants not of Gaozong, but of Wu. They revealed that they had been ordered to subject both to a hundred lashes - a punishment that could easily kill them.

The deposed Empress Wang refused to let her feelings show. Instead, she bowed three times, and said:

'I wish my former husband every happiness in the future. Bright Virtuous Wu has ensnared the love of His Majesty, nothing remains for me but death. Do as you will.'

Xiao Liangdi, the Pure Concubine, did not accept her fate with such a serene air. She yelled at her captors:

'Wu is a treacherous fox, who has bewitched the Emperor and now sits on the throne. I hope I shall be reborn as a cat, and the bitch Wu as a rat, that I may bite out her throat.'

It is unclear whether Wu was around to hear any of this. Chronicles of the Tang dynasty merely record the meting out of the women's punishment, after which their hands and feet were hacked off, their maimed extremities repeatedly smashed and broken, and their bleeding bodies dumped in vats of wine, where they took several days to die.

'Now those witches can get drunk to their bones,' Wu is supposed to have said, a strange comment with a meaning seeped in ironic retribution. 'Intoxicated unto the melting of the marrow' appears to have been a contemporary poetic term for an orgasm - Wu's chosen means of execution for her two bedroom rivals was a brutally literal enactment of sexual ecstasy. The closest possible analogy in a modern English vernacular, deprived of such classical niceties, would be: 'F*** them both to death.'

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Excerpt 1: Brute Beasts
Excerpt 3: The Cruel Clerks