Empire of Dragons

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  Yun Shan brought her hands together at her chest and bowed to them as a sign of respect. No one spoke.

  Metellus could hear noises: iron scraping on rock and then a metallic clinking. He felt the boat swaying strongly and then heard an unmistakable dripping. The vessel had been lifted out of the water by cables secured to the railings and fastened to a metallic trestle at the top of the cliff; it was swinging through the air. The moon appeared again and illuminated the scene, and Metellus watched the rock wall covered with bushes, creepers, outstretched trees passing before his eyes as the boat rose. He saw, or heard, birds disturbed from their rest taking flight and abandoning their nests with a whirr of wings at the passage of that strangely suspended object, outside its own element.

  The boat was stopped, pulled to the side and set down at the top of the cliff. The four warriors leapt out and others arrived with a bamboo cane stretcher, on which they laid the wounded foreigner. Torches were lit to illuminate the scene and Prince Dan Qing arrived.

  ‘Sister,’ he said as soon as he saw Yun Shan.

  The girl bowed her head and stood mutely before him.

  ‘I’ve long awaited this moment. All these years I’ve dreamed of the instant that you would throw your arms around me again . . . but . . . I understand. But I beg of you, do not close your heart, and give yourself time to think. You will realize that, even if I was wrong, I thought I was making the right decision. And there must be a reason that the Heavens have reunited us here after these long years of separation.’

  He turned to Metellus. ‘Xiong Ying!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Prince,’ Metellus managed to respond, trying instinctively to prop himself up on his elbow. He fell over on his back with a groan of pain.

  Yun Shan took the silver cage and handed it to her brother. ‘It’s a gift from Daruma.’

  ‘A gift . . .’ Dan Qing smiled. ‘As if he hasn’t done enough already! That man freed me from prison when I had lost all hope.’

  ‘At the cost of many men’s lives,’ said Yun Shan.

  Her brother did not answer. He ordered the litter-bearers instead to transport Metellus to where he could be cared for. As they took him away, the prince saw the bloodstain in the bottom of the boat and watched his sister’s eyes following the Roman until he disappeared in the darkness.

  He went to the place where Metellus had been taken and entered. A group of monks had already gathered around the battered man. One of them was heating water, while another was dissolving a dark-coloured substance inside a bronze bowl over the fire. Others were preparing bandages, surgical instruments, bamboo splints.

  They peeled off the blanket wrapped around Metellus, which had stuck to the clotted blood in many places, causing some of the wounds to open up again. Dan Qing was dismayed at the sight of Xiong Ying’s tortured body. He raised an inquisitive glance towards the surgeons.

  ‘The person who stitched his wounds certainly increased the possibility that he might live,’ said one of them, ‘but what we must do tonight will put him sorely to the test. He is extremely weak, but we have no choice. Waiting any longer would be condemning him to certain death.’

  ‘Proceed, then,’ said Dan Qing.

  One of them walked to a cabinet and took out a silver case filled with a great quantity of slender needles. Metellus saw them and clenched his jaw, bracing himself to suffer more pain. He knew from experience what to expect from the needles of military surgeons, but Dan Qing was smiling at him, like an old friend trying to encourage him to take heart.

  ‘Let us proceed,’ said the surgeon. ‘First of all we must isolate the pain centres.’

  He took the needles, one after another, and began to stick them into various parts of the battered body. They were inserted just under the skin, with quick, precise gestures, and soon a forest of silver needles was marking out mysterious paths.

  The surgeon made a gesture. One of assistants, unseen by Metellus, brought the flame of an oil lamp close to his foot; the Roman showed no reaction whatsoever. The surgeon nodded, took the bowl from the hands of another assistant and brought it to the patient’s lips.

  ‘Drink,’ said Dan Qing. ‘It is incredibly bitter, but it will help you to slip into unconsciousness. You will feel no pain.’

  Metellus slowly drank the infusion, more bitter than poison, and sank back on the mat. He saw the faces of the men leaning over him and then nothing.

  30

  METELLUS ENTERED INTO a state of mind that he had never experienced before in his whole life. A suspended, rarefied dimension, like a dream but deeper; hazy awareness alternated with a complete disengagement from any reality known to him. He thought that he was dead, and that this inkling he had of his frail spirit was the afterlife. What the poets had described. Hades, with no divinities but thronging with spectres.

  The first to appear were those of his comrades who had fallen in the fierce battle. They approached him with their faces bloodied and disfigured by the beatings they’d taken, limbs maimed, guts spilling out. And then they’d vanish like mist in the wind, without saying a thing, without responding to his pleas. But he knew that they were appealing to his fluctuating yet heedful conscience: they were demanding revenge. The restless shades of men who had been denied the fulfilment of the promise he had made them, denied funeral rites as well.

  And then there was the shade of Clelia, gentle spirit, so small she seemed a child. She watched him, caressed him with the gaze of a devoted, loving wife. It seemed that she wanted to tell him something: her mouth moved, but no sound came out. And he cried out, invoking her name, weeping. In vain.

  She faded away.

  At times he felt that he was on the verge of understanding; close, very close to a revelation. But of what? Of the meaning of life, perhaps, or the meaning of death, but that sensation spun around on itself, spiralling faster and faster, creating a vortex that sucked him upwards like a leaf at the mercy of the autumn wind.

  There were sounds he wanted to hear, sounds he mourned for: the voice of his son, which he imagined must be different after all this time; but he couldn’t hear it, as hard as he tried! He thought it must be a good sign: Titus was alive and thus could not appear to him in Hades. But he still missed him intensely and he realized, he was sure, that he’d never again see him or hear his voice. That the emotions that made him feel like a father would be denied him forever.

  In such a state, time no longer had any meaning: there was neither light nor shadow, day nor night, nothing that allowed him to place the flow of events or to perceive a duration or an end or an interruption. The only sensation that reminded him of existing was a scent: light, almost constant. Which became faint, at times, only to pervade him again. Unable to associate this fragrance with any creature or image or concept, he ended up believing that it was the scent of the afterworld.

  The asphodel meadows? He could see them: long, slender stalks with spikes of white flowers, stretching out as far as the eye could see in every direction, without a horizon, without limits, traversed by a mysterious pulsing, the wind perhaps, or an interior light of their own, that vibrated absurdly in that diffused, shadowy, empty atmosphere.

  And his essence became that fragrance, and with the passing of time, the fragrance became warmth and then both things together. He felt like he was floating, he felt the sensations that reminded him of life. And he was conscious of remembering . . . Then, in a single event that he could not place in any particular moment of his being, there was a caress.

  A caress.

  He knew it must be one of the cycles of his bodiless existence. What else? And yet he’d never had such a sudden, concrete sense of the truth. And the next sensation was that of light.

  Soft.

  Without colour. Without edges but growing, constantly, throbbing abruptly, taking on an impetuous rhythm. Until he could feel that he had . . . eyes.

  And tears.

  ‘Xiong Ying . . .’

  The tears were running down his cheeks into his mouth and he
could taste them. He saw dark, shining eyes, and smelled the fragrance, now connected with a look, a body, an expression.

  ‘Yun Shan.’

  ‘You’re back.’

  ‘And . . . I’m alive.’

  ‘You are, but . . .’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Many days and many nights.’

  ‘And you’ve always been here with me?’

  ‘Don’t speak.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you don’t have the strength.’

  SHE BROUGHT HIM a drink with a strange flavour, slightly bitter, and then some nearly liquid food. His strength did return, day by day, and with it the pain. Acute. In his arms, his legs, his chest.

  ‘You will feel pain,’ Yun Shan had told him.

  ‘Pain is . . . life, at least. A life that I owe to you.’

  ‘To the physicians.’

  ‘Yet I know that it was you who saved me from certain death. But I don’t know why.’

  ‘Each one of us knows what our heart tells us.’

  ‘What did they do to me? Why don’t I remember anything?’

  ‘They prevented the pain from reaching your mind while they opened your flesh and reassembled your bones. It is there that you feel pain, not in your hands or arms. They enclosed your mind in a web of slender needles.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘And then they put you to sleep.’

  ‘Will I go back to being what I was?’

  ‘Yes. But it will take time.’

  ‘Days? Months?’

  ‘Whatever is necessary.’

  Metellus fell silent, absorbed again in his thoughts.

  ‘And when you are healed, what will you do, Xiong Ying? Will you return to your home . . . to your family?’

  ‘My homeland, Taqin Guo . . . It’s been so long since I’ve heard anything. I saw my emperor die in prison like a slave. I left my city at the mercy of the enemy . . . I saw my wife murdered before my eyes and my son . . . I have had no news of my son.’

  ‘And these are the reasons why you want to return . . . It’s only right.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s right any more. I don’t know what world awaits me . . . And my comrades, contemptibly slaughtered . . . their shades demand justice.’

  ‘Is that what matters most?’

  Metellus searched for her eyes. ‘No . . . When I look at you, my thoughts are different. My life is measured by the beating of your heart.’

  Yun Shan bowed her head.

  ‘Lately I’ve been having the same dream. I find myself in the big courtyard of the imperial palace. My comrades’ dead bodies are all around me and my enemy stands in front of me, about to deal the death blow. But when his hand darts into the air you put yourself between us and you receive the blow for me. There, where your heart is.’

  ‘Xiong Ying . . .’ murmured the girl, ‘dreams are only dreams.’

  ‘Right there . . .’ His hand neared her breast. ‘It’s as if you gave a part of your life to save mine. It’s true, isn’t it? I don’t know how, but I know it happened.’

  Yun Shan said nothing. She continued to keep her eyes low.

  ‘Why did you do it? I will be grateful to you for all the time I have left to live. But please, tell me why you did it.’

  She lifted her head and looked at him. No language could have expressed what her eyes were saying in that moment: her answer went straight to his heart. Emotion that burned with arcane power, with fervent passion.

  He saw those eyes shining with tears while her face remained composed in supreme dignity, in sublime harmony. All in the blink of an eye, in a heartbeat. Yun Shan got up, bowed her head ever so slightly, and left. Metellus fell back on to the mat and closed his eyes, as if to imprison her look inside him and seal it in his heart.

  HE DIDN’T SEE HER again for many days, but he did receive a visit from Dan Qing, who showed him the gift Daruma had sent. The upper part of the cage was activated by a mechanism which made it revolve like a miniature firmament, marking the months and the seasons on the rim of the base, as well as the zodiac, which bore strange names in Chinese: the monkey, the mouse, the rabbit. The ingenious mechanism was rewound by the movements of the dove on his little swing.

  Metellus was finally able to rise from his sickbed and to begin walking. In a few days’ time he felt ready to start running. He didn’t have any idea of where he was, except that the citadel was called Li Cheng. His rehabilitation took place in a vast room roofed with beams of enormous oak logs. The floor was of polished pine and the walls of white-plastered bricks.

  At times he was given access to the garden, a place of divine perfection where paths had been marked out to allow visitors to walk without breaking a branch or causing a leaf to fall. There were plants of rare beauty, in dreamy hues, and the branches and leaves had been trained into fantastic shapes. There was one, in particular, overhanging a pond, covered with very big, fleshy flowers, pink with hints of white. How could such a celestial plant, so harmonious and noble in bearing, grow outside of Elysium? Its flowers were so numerous that they created a cloud, and not a single leaf opened until the last petal had fallen.

  The flowers of the red lotus blossomed in the pond; they were the symbol and emblem of the sect of monks who lived there. The bottom of the pond was an artful mix of grey and white pebbles, and it was populated by marvellous red, blue and iridescent green fish.

  That natural perfection, fruit of the most sophisticated artifice, gave him a sense of profound peace on one hand, but on the other a strange excitation, a thrill that he could feel under his skin. The garden’s natural terrace overlooked the jutting face of the cliff, and from there he could see the river bend and beyond it an expanse of forests and marshes from which flocks of birds took wing at dawn, passing in front of the disc of sun, which was immersed in the dense cloud of vapours that rose from the wetlands.

  Once, from his room, he saw Yun Shan strolling in that enchanted garden, enveloped in a gown of light blue silk that gracefully sheathed her body. He watched her passing among the flowered branches as though she were ethereal, as light and vaporous as a cloud.

  He would have liked to speak with her, to look into her eyes to see if they were still burning with the light that had enraptured him that day. But he knew that the garden was a shelter of the spirit, and that its delights had to be savoured alone, in solitude. It was a taste of the hereafter in which those extraordinary beings prepared their souls for undisturbed happiness, for the life without end.

  THE DAY CAME in which Metellus began to learn the secrets of the ancient arts of combat which Master Mo had taught his followers: both those who had chosen the righteous path and those who had fallen away from it.

  ‘You’ll learn to move like me,’ Dan Qing told him, ‘like the Flying Foxes. But you can even surpass them if you are convinced, if you are certain of the road you must take.’

  ‘Tao . . .’ said Metellus.

  ‘A philosophy, more than mere physical discipline. A deep conviction, a leap of faith, of the mind. We call it Go Ti.

  ‘You will move in harmony with nature, perceive its breath, let it run through your body. There is nothing that you cannot achieve. But you must not strain convulsively towards the goal. You must allow yourself to be transported by the current of life, by the energy of the cosmos that flows through a blade of grass as it does through your body, through a grain of sand or through the stars that pulse in the eternity of the sky. You will have to learn meditation, as I have learned it from my master, Wangzi. And you must forget everything that you learned in your country, because what you knew led you to defeat and to the massacre of your men.’

  ‘There’s one thing I won’t forget,’ replied Metellus. ‘The force which pushed the valour of my men beyond every limit. The courage that can lead a man to sacrifice his very life because of his faith in the values handed down to him.’

  ‘If that’s what you want, may it be thus. Perhaps it is only by remembering
the sacrifice of your comrades that you will be able to fight the demon who destroyed them and hope to defeat him. But you can unite your destiny with ours, learn a different life, a world that you’ve never even imagined, a civilization built on an unparalleled intensity of thought. I’m not saying that you’ll attain truth – truth always flees from us like the horizon from the weary traveller. But you’ll live your life with the maximum intensity that a human being is capable of. Do you want to learn all this, Xiong Ying? Will you join us and fight our battle?’

  ‘I will,’ replied Metellus.

  ‘Then thus it shall be. But on one condition. You must promise me on your honour that what you learn will never leave our realm.’

  ‘This I promise,’ said Metellus. ‘But how will you convince me that you are less blameworthy than your enemy? That his cruelty is not the consequence of your cruelty, of your unrestrained thirst for power? In your search for perfect harmony between the force of the body and that of the spirit, have you perhaps forgotten that none of this makes any sense without virtue? If you give me an explanation, I will accept it because I am your friend, and friendship, like love, does not observe propriety.’

  Dan Qing looked deep into his eyes and smiled. ‘You are starting to think and talk like the Chinese, Xiong Ying . . . but I’m afraid there’s not a single word that I could tell you at this moment that would be capable of convincing you. At that time I was too young to resist the corruptive force of power. I reacted to what I felt was a threat in an extreme way, but in the atmosphere of supreme authority, it seemed completely normal. A wise measure, even, a way to protect the dynasty from disorder and from disruptive forces.

  ‘It is only now that I have fully realized the suffering I caused by brutally destroying the love of two adolescents, shattering the utmost harmony of a universal emotion with the utmost violence. At times I wonder if it is not for this reason that our land has been mortally wounded, split into three separate warring bodies. But all I can do now is to try to repair the damage by rebuilding the country. By fighting without sparing my strength and without fleeing from any danger, and by healing the wound that I myself inflicted on Yun Shan’s heart. I think she loves you.’