Becoming Zhang Lan
The Mountain Spirit.
In the twenty-first century, that name might as well have meant a living time machine. The spirit had guided the nation's supreme leader, and had sent a khan of the great steppe — a man born into the wrong age — back to the era where he belonged. Exploits of that order were already famous.
So when a Mountain Spirit appeared before me and began to speak of living a past life, I did not panic. I put my question with perfect calm.
"Does abroad count?"
"Abroad? Hmm... anywhere outside my jurisdiction is a little troublesome."
The Mountain Spirit sounded reluctant, but I was absolutely certain the complaint was nothing but theatrics.
A spirit who sighed that things were difficult had already twisted the history of the peninsula — and of the entire world — into one epoch-making upheaval. How did that even make sense? Of course, he had not written that history with his own hands. What he had done was smaller, and larger: he had flung a soul from the future into the past, and that butterfly had raised a hurricane. Even so, the origin of the storm was the Mountain Spirit's own true self. Was it not?
"Fine. Let's hear it, then."
There. You see?
Smug at having guessed right, I stated my wish without a shred of shame.
"I want to live as Jean Lannes."
Why hide it? I was a Bonapartist — a student of Western history who followed Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor the French Revolution had made. That was who I was.
I had not exactly never imagined becoming Napoleon himself. But the longing to watch the man I admired and envied from his very side was far stronger than that, and for such a place only two people would do: the ones who could stand at his closest shoulder and match him stride for stride. Joachim Murat, and the Jean Lannes I had just named. The only two Napoleon had ever addressed with the familiar tu. No one else was more fitting.
Of the two, Joachim Murat stirred something like reluctance in me. I am a creature of the mind more than of the flesh, and Joachim has always felt a little too unlettered, hasn't he? I will not pretend I do not covet that martial gift — the high-hearted charge that smashes everything in its path — but Jean Lannes, called the Achilles of the Grande Armée, draws me more. To someone born with empty hands, the course of his life had been an obsession I sank into far too deep.
Perhaps he felt the sincerity in it. The Mountain Spirit was silent for a moment, brooding, and then he nodded.
"Well, sure. That's close enough. I'll make it work somehow. But really — you are an odd one."
Odd? Was it strange for a Korean to want France? Novels of France, especially of the Revolution, turned up often enough among the great alternate histories.
In any case, if he meant to send me, that was enough.
But I should have listened, then, with far more care to what the Mountain Spirit had actually said.
I was a humanities student with no way to survive the merciless hell of this country. Giddy at the thought of leaving it for the revolutionary age I had only ever daydreamed about, I let the words slip past me. I should not have.
By the time I understood, it was already far too late.
I look into the mirror. Not a mirror of glass — a mirror of bronze.
Strange, isn't it? That in France, at the close of the eighteenth century, I should be peering into a bronze mirror rather than glass?
Something stranger still was waiting. The face the bronze held up to me.
The one reflected there was, in a single word, a girl. And not merely a girl — a beauty to whom the word beautiful would have to be fastened more than once.
Black hair, steeped in a muted sheen, slid smooth as threads of silk. Finer than anything I had seen in the advertisements of my previous life, it fell past the back and down to the waist. The touch of it was the sort one could grow addicted to; before I knew it, my hands would not leave it alone.
Her features, small and finely set, achieved a harmony as uncanny as a sculpture a master had cut with devoted care. Baby fat still rounded the face, and yet the clear, faintly upturned eyes — a cat's eyes — made her look prim. Long, abundant lashes; a small nose, straight and neat; beneath it, lips flushed a glossy pink. And the deep, limpid pupils that set the final stroke upon all that beauty held a light as lucid as amethyst. They kept a hush like the evening sky, and they seized the gaze as if some glamour were pouring out of them.
She was still a child, and already she wore that face without apology. The old praise — a flower's countenance, a moon's grace — would not have been wasted on her.
Yes. A beautiful girl. That was what stared back at me from the mirror.
And where, in any of that, had Jean Lannes been a woman? He was a man's man to the last, composed even at the hour of his death, insisting it was nothing. So had the Mountain Spirit broken his word and cheated me? No. Not that, either.
Because—
This body really was Zhang Lan.
It was only which Zhang Lan that mattered.
Not Jean Lannes, marshal of France. Zhang Lan — the girl whose name a Korean tongue pronounced the very same way. That, and that alone, was the problem.