Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  Pearl groggily dressed while Hope roused Morris. The little boy reached for his hobbyhorse, and Hope proceeded to change his clothes around the wooden appendage, talking boldly about their moonlight ride, the magic journey ahead of them. She had almost persuaded herself that this ploy was working, and all the evenings spent reading Kidnapped and Captains Courageous had finally paid off, when Pearl said, “I like Peking.”

  “Me, too,” Morris echoed.

  “Shanghai’s sticky and smelly and the children in the park are mean.”

  Morris nodded emphatically, squirming out of Hope’s grasp.

  “Put your shoes on, Pearl.”

  “But, Mama—!”

  Pearl broke off in stricken silence, head flung back, jaw slack. Her cheek flamed where Hope, for the first time in her life, had slapped her. Hope’s hand, too, stung. Her whole body was shaking, and she could feel the layers of sorrow and regret descending like armored gates. She wanted to take her daughter in her arms and rock her, beg her forgiveness. Instead she heard her own icy voice. “These are your father’s instructions. Hurry.”

  Minutes later they left the lamp-whipped quarters they had all come to love, marched like convicts down the covered gallery and past the writhing spirit wall for the final time. It was one o’clock in the morning, the earth black under a dense shield of cloud. The air sparked against their skin. “Rain,” said Hope.

  Yen nodded. “Maybe better. Keep police inside.”

  “With good reason,” she answered grimly. Spring rains in northeastern China were as treacherous for travelers as a hail of artillery fire. They washed out bridges, flooded streambeds, blinded animals and drivers alike to the changed contours of the road. “Let’s hope we make Tientsin before it starts.”

  The cart that stood waiting, with its wizened driver, derelict donkeys, and tightly arching hood, was indistinguishable from the thousands of such vehicles that plodded through the city each day, but at this hour, when only soldiers and robbers were about, its waiting presence was like a beacon. Yen’s eyes flashed up and down the shrouded hut’ung, and he came as near to losing his temper with the dawdling children as Hope had ever heard him. Finally they were jammed with their few hastily packed bags into the goatskin-lined wagon. Hope’s spine was wedged against the side board, her hat crushed against the arching canopy, and only after considerable experimentation did she manage to tuck her legs, angling and folding them around Pearl’s. Morris, lying across their laps, whimpered as he realized that Ah-nie was to be left behind, but the amah shushed and handed in his hobbyhorse. He clung to it silently as the wooden wheels began to creak and Yen, sitting up with the driver, lowered the hood’s front flap.

  Hope whispered for the children to stay quiet, though the monstrous transformation of her character had effectively struck them dumb. She said nothing to comfort them, nothing to inform them. Instead she kept her eyes fixed on the small string grid that served as a one-way window. As they wound through the shadowed alleyways, avoiding the wide public avenues, her head filled with the images that seemed as inextricably bound to China as its dust, and smells, and walls. The detached head of the innocent man she’d seen murdered in the market. The slumped figures of Paul’s fellow revolutionaries shot dead on railroad platforms or poisoned at state dinners. The ruffled streamers of flesh crossing Paul’s own back. From every black gateway, around each new corner she expected the sudden gleam of a bayonet or the shivering nose of a pistol. Paul always assured her that Chinese respect for family preserved the lives of wives and children even when men were targeted for treason. And even the most bloodthirsty of today’s generals knew to leave foreigners alone. But if this was true, why were she and the children being spirited away under darkness?

  All the gates of the city but Ch’ien Men were locked at this hour, and even Ch’ien Men was deserted. Beggars huddled in shadow clusters. Sentries dozed against the city wall. There were no camels or mule trains tonight, only a few stalwart vendors hunched by their ovens, and three or four straggling revelers. The latter wore the regimental green of Yüan’s municipal troops, and Hope shrank from their erratic laughter.

  “T’ing!”

  The cart jerked to a halt. The voice that had commanded them to stop was slurred and, judging from the exchange up front, only the mafoo understood the man’s dialect. But there was no mistaking his intent when, with a blow, he shoved Yen aside and peered under the flap. His grin, fully visible even in the darkness, was reptilian.

  Hope squeezed Pearl’s hand, transferred the slumbering Morris into her lap, and inched forward. The stink of garlic and liquor very nearly overpowered her as she leaned through the opening, but she caught her breath and swallowed hard. “Why have you stopped us?

  The soldier was as short as he was broad, and the cart gave Hope just enough height that she looked down on him. Yen made a single motion with his eyes to the man’s scraggly mustache, the buttons of his epaulets, and his holstered Mauser. Behind him three infantrymen stood at attention. Yen was armed, she knew, but that would hardly help this situation. They were dealing with an officer.

  He spat thickly, then snarled at the driver. Yen eased a wad of bills from his pocket, but the soldier knocked them from his hand and made him kneel in the mud to retrieve them. Hope hugged herself. It was a rare misstep for Yen. He should have slipped the money to the man while being cuffed, so the others would not see the bribe. Now it was too public and too late. The officer raised his boot to Yen’s head.

  Gripping the cart, Hope hauled herself to a standing position, so that she towered over them all. “Yen,” she said in peremptory English, as if she neither noticed nor concerned herself with his peril. “Tell this man I am wife of President Yüan’s personal advisor George Morrison. My husband is awaiting me in Tientsin, and if we are further detained here, this man will have to answer to both the President and the British Legation.”

  Yen’s jaw dropped at the baldness of this lie, but he duly translated to the mafoo, who in turn translated for the officer. Their assailant knit his heavy eyebrows as he assessed Hope’s crushed fedora, her navy tweed coat and leather gloves, the muddied spats over her button boots. He teetered as he considered his options. Finally he spat again and threw Hope a look of such undisguised hatred that she could feel it burn in her stomach. One of the subordinates drove his rifle into Yen’s ribs, sending him sprawling against the wooden wheel. The driver scurried to help him up.

  “Chi hsü tsoul” Hope ordered the driver. To Yen she whispered, “Don’t look back.”

  As they jerked forward, she withdrew behind the flap and enfolded the children, pulling them as flat as possible against the cart floor. Morris was awake, but Pearl had planted her thumb in his mouth to silence him. Behind, the commander was screaming at his men. Even above the rasp of the wheels, Hope could hear the slap of flesh. In that most Chinese of ways, she thought, the commander had diverted his rage from the hated Westerner, turned it against his own.

  “Mama?” Pearl whispered. “He’s wet.” Morris stirred in denial, shrank into the corner.

  Hope started to respond, but as she opened her mouth she realized that she could not catch her breath. The burning in her stomach had spread to her throat, and the soldier’s stench was still on her. She held herself as they lurched and slammed down one rutted lane after another, but they had traveled little more than a mile when she suddenly pitched forward, grabbing the mafoo by the shoulder, and hurled herself into the road. There was a ditch, visible only as a black line against the marginally lighter darkness. As Hope reeled toward it she clutched at the ghostly figure of a sapling, all that stopped her headlong fall. The smells of night-soil and donkey, her own sweat, and imminent rain overcame her, and she was as sick as she had ever been in her life.

  Yen, ever-dutiful Yen, stood by as the emotions she had been holding inside now erupted with volcanic imprecision. When she could retch no more, he offered a canister of boiled water, and she realized she was parched with thirst. She poured t
he liquid down her throat and let him help her back into the cart. They had to continue. They were nowhere, and at any moment the storm would begin. She braced herself against the violence of the cart and tried to comfort her terrified children. “It’s going to be all right,” she whispered. “I’m sorry—” Tears sprang to her eyes, and she bit down to stop them. “I’m sorry I was short with you, Pearl.”

  “I understand, Mama. You feel bad.”

  “Want to hold Prancer, Mama?” Morris asked tentatively.

  “No, darling.” Hope forced her burning cheek away from the little boy’s forehead. “You keep your Prancer.”

  “Is Papa going to meet us in Tientsin?”

  “No.”

  There was silence then as the cart tipped and rattled deeper into the countryside. They dared not light the driver’s lantern for fear of attracting unwanted attention, and the thickening night swallowed the least glimmer of milestone or landmark. A soft watery slapping suggested a nearby canal, and every now and then a spate of birdsong or batwings broke above their heads, but the cold had grown clammy, and the trees along the road were beginning to heave with the approaching storm.

  Hope fought for these observations as a distraction from her body’s continuing rebellion. Her bones were burning, her stomach yanked in knots, and her throat felt as if it were filled with stones, making it impossible to swallow and difficult to breathe. When she closed her eyes, the darkness whirled. She drew her daughter’s head against her shoulder, held both children against the vehicle’s battering waves. The rain began, a brittle scatter across the canvas top, and she felt the motion of an arm reaching to secure the flap.

  “Yen.”

  “Yes, Taitai.”

  “I—I can’t…” These few whispered syllables consumed every reserve of energy Hope could muster, and she sank back, depleted, as the storms within and without rose in competition. The night was splitting in a battle of purple, gold, navy, and orange so brilliant that it glowed through the canvas. The thunder’s force rocked the cart, and the rain beat now, solid and relentless, swamping the rural lane. Through the string grid, Hope watched the river ignite with lightning, the dark forms of sampans shadow-boxing trees along the shore. Seconds or hours passed, the same. She was only dimly aware of Yen and the driver out in front, dragging the donkeys through mud.

  Dawn was paling a low line of sky, and the torrent had steadied to a downpour when the outline of a two-story inn at last materialized by the roadside. Yen tucked the children under his coat and carried them to the unlit door, then came back with an oil-paper umbrella to cover Hope as she staggered from the cart. She leaned on him, panting, insensible to the rain. Her skin was streaming anyway, her corset spongy with perspiration, but she could rest here, at least, lie quiet, stop moving.

  By the wavering light of a single stump candle planted inside the door, she could see her children waiting down a long, low-ceilinged passageway with crumbling, sooty walls and a dirt floor strewn with moldering grass. There were goats and chickens underfoot, and the smells of excrement and rot and seeping damp were unbearable. Hope’s stomach clenched and she turned, groping for the door, but instead stumbled into a windowless antechamber where the stink of decay was replaced by a sweet, tarry, green perfume, like medicinal incense. Her stomach relaxed, and it occurred to her to wonder if the sickness had caused her to hallucinate. She fought the impulse to close her eyes and succumb to the fragrant haze. Slowly her vision adjusted. She became aware of figures slumped about the room. She saw the walls were lined with shallow bunks, like so many coffins stacked to the ceiling, and from each one stared the starved, motionless skull of an opium addict.

  Reeling, she fell back into the light. Yen’s face rose before her, an exaggeration of her own disorientation and terror, but she lunged toward it. She was burning and shivering in the bitter damp, her tongue swollen in her mouth. She shook her head, unable to speak, and while Pearl strained to support her weight, Yen clutched the sleeping Morris and argued with the proprietor, who had a harelip and black teeth. Painstakingly, Hope came to understand that this disheveled man wanted nothing to do with the foreign woman and her children. He could see she was ill, he had no interest in housing a foreigner’s corpse. Then Yen reached into his pocket, and in her delirium, Hope was convinced he was reaching for his gun.

  A choked, guttural protest fought its way up her throat. She wobbled against Pearl’s shoulder and felt inside her waistband. At the same time, she arched her neck, tipped her chin, working her perspiring head in the attempt to free her vocal cords.

  But when her fingers at last fastened on the concealed packets, she felt herself sliding again. She couldn’t remember which was which, and in any case, she couldn’t decide … If she showed the necklace, the man would admit them, but would surely attempt to steal it. If she showed the marquis medal, he might be sufficiently cowed to help them, but he might not believe it real.

  They were all watching her. The innkeeper clicked his teeth. Morris had wakened without a sound against Yen’s rigid shoulder, and Pearl looked up with a spellbound expression, as if praying with her eyes open. Hope worked her hand slowly free of the folded liner. She held the smaller of the two pouches out to Yen, who opened it with great ceremony. The innkeeper’s eyes widened as Yen explained the medal’s significance.

  Before he had finished Hope was overcome by a sudden, shimmering light that seemed to start from the base of her skull. She heard words, a rustle and stamp, felt the folds of Pearl’s taffeta bow, a pressure at her arm. Somehow she managed to haul herself up the rope-bound ladder to the second floor. They entered a square room with a plank table, a single wooden chair, an open chamber pot and brick k’ang, a sleeping platform under which a fire could be made during the cold months. The fire was unlit. There was no mattress or bedding. The single oil-paper window flamed with the lightning outside, while the thatched ceiling rustled with rats, the floorboards with roaches, and rainwater ran in a dark screen down the wall behind the k’ang.

  Pearl was stepping gingerly to join Hope on the k’ang,

  “No!” Hope winced at the pain of speaking, but held up her hand, palm out. “Germs. Take Morris. Stay … table.” She tried in vain to swallow, turned to Yen. “Doctor. Go.”

  There was no doubt in her mind what was going to happen. Her mother’s fate was to be Morris and Pearl’s legacy as it had been her own. And the new child would go with her.

  But she would not submit willingly.

  Yen gave Morris to Pearl. The children huddled together in the middle of the table. The candle twitched as Yen bent to light the fire, but Hope was already burning, and the coal smoke would make it even harder to breathe. She reached out a hand, pushing him roughly. “Go.”

  Yen backed away. The door latched behind him. Her children’s faces were gray in this light, their arms and legs entwined. Hope remembered the tree she and Paul had seen in Wyoming, the sycamore and oak growing into each other, and she thought that was how her children seemed, growing up in this raw, brutal country. Paul’s voice wound a slender thread through her mind now, and though at first she couldn’t hear what he was saying, she could feel the effect working up her spine. She saw his face, one eyebrow ruffled, the pale sienna of his skin alight in the lantern flame that leapt in a ruthless cat’s dance. He was reading. “We could not understand because we were too far, could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—no memories.”

  “No memories,” Hope mouthed, and vomited a thin trail of bile.

  Some time later the door slammed open and Yen entered, accompanied by a squat, bent-back man cloaked in black with eyes like two tarnished razors. Even through her fever Hope felt the sting as his gaze sliced into her.

  “Yang kuei!” The Chinese doctor raised his arm as if to ward off a blow. Yen tried to hold him, but the man slapped him away, barking something about Chinese graves. Hope saw rain spitting against the sodden window, seeping
down the wall. She thought of that headless body in the square, the dark shimmer of its blood easing into the earth.

  2

  Shadows goose-stepped across her mind. Her thoughts themselves were white, empty except for the barren light of a distance too great to travel. If not for the shadows, this far light would settle and bury her like snow. But the shadows stalked the whiteness. They assumed the shapes of palm fronds rattling in a dry wind, of hard-cut puppets acting out tales of infidelity or defilement. A sword. A whale. A dangling figure, sexless and free. The curled and pulsing shape of a heart. Beating. Beating.

  Emotion was a stranger in this universe of whiteness, silence the one consistent note, but the shadows danced on, faces now. Or parts of faces. Lips curled back. A heavy-lidded eye. The probing slide of an overgrown nose. Someone was putting a name to these shapes, but who? Where? Shadow and light were the sole inhabitants of this noiseless, rimless desert. Perhaps it was they who labeled themselves. A self-contained universe, needing nothing. Wanting nothing …

  “Hope?”

  She moaned, tried to turn her head.

  “Quiet now.”

  The shadows darkened. And shattered in a blinding rain.

  A sound like bells woke her. She could not open her eyes. Her arms were lifeless, her lungs searing. But that sound called her.

  “Pearl.” The effort ground her throat.

  “There she is.” Something cool and damp moved over her face. “Can you open your eyes, Hope? Atta girl.”

  She felt a fluttering and clawing at her breast, and her head filled with the shadow of a bird being ravaged by a cat.

  “Slow. Take it slow.” The voice climbed over her, shading her as she struggled to work her eyelids. “Pearl and Morris are fine. Yen’s here, too. They’re all waiting to see you.”