Silk Road

by Jeanne Larsen

  My stomach held all it would take when the growling of the quarrel burst into open shouts. One Ear stood now, with the angry air of a commander defied; he pounded the black-lacquered scales of his leather armour. Those who had been gathering up the loot sat astride their restless ponies on his side of the cooking fire. The old man who fed us waited near the flock of stolen animals, his mouth distorted with repressed nervousness. Broad Chest stepped forward, closer to the embers that still lay between him and the leader.

  One Ear barked an order and jerked his chin towards the mountains. Broad Chest folded his arms and stood his ground. Nanny’s killer began to kick dirt over the embers, edging round to One Ear’s side as he did so, but at a word from Broad Chest he melted back and took the same pose, defiance painted on his face. Off in the hills, a marmot whistled, but no one seemed to hear it.

  One Ear waved a hand towards us children. He shrugged. Turning his head halfway – but no more – from Broad Chest, he called for his pony, snatched the reins from the youth who brought it, and mounted. Those beside him made way. A grimace like a smile tore his lips apart. His white teeth shone as he uttered what seemed to be a rough joke and, deliberately, turned his back. His pony began picking its way over the rocky ground towards the upper end of the valley and the knife-edged ridge beyond. The others, except for the few with Broad Chest, fell in behind. Goats bleated as the old man beat their rumps and prepared to follow the band. Broad Chest stood unmoved.

  Then, with a shrill whoop. One Ear wheeled his mount and bore down on us at full gallop. The raiders behind him drew to a halt. What Broad Chest did in that moment I cannot say, for my eyes were fixed on the pony hurtling towards me. One Ear passed so close to where I stood that – I remember it clearly – I could feel the heat of the pony’s body in the chilly air. He leaned from his saddle, snatched up the farmboy’s older sister, and threw her face downwards across the pony’s withers. On his way back to the head of the loose column of raiders, he tore through the last of the cooking fire, his pony’s hooves kicking up a cloud of hot coals and ash.

  The farmboy took up his howling again and no one stopped him. I and the others remained dumb. Two of the four men behind Broad Chest muttered to one another until he turned and spat in the settling ashy dust. At a word from Broad Chest, the young raider hustled to fill water bags from a stagnant pool beneath a cleft in the rock wall and loaded them on the few pack ponies that had been left behind. Then each rider mounted and pulled a child up to sit behind him; only Broad Chest rode alone.

  We rode down the valley. Some distance behind me the farmboy snivelled and blubbered, though I count myself no braver for my silence. Hours later, as we left the dry grasslands at the foot of the mountains for the grey-brown soil of the desert’s edge, I heard a small flurry up ahead and saw that one of the other girls, the one I would soon learn to call Nephrite, now lay prone across the withers of the pony just ahead of me. She had evidently tried to slip off and escape, though even I could see that escape in this unmarked stony wilderness meant a slow, dry death. My head slumped and I stared only at the uncurried fur on the pony’s flanks. I had never ridden a horse this far before; my thighs and buttocks and back burned.

  Once out of the valley we had turned more or less east, paralleling the distant line of mountains. We rode straight through the hot part of the day, and I prayed, as Nanny would have had me do, a prayer of thanks to the compassionate Lady Guan-yin, Bodhisattva of Mercy: Had it been summer, and not the height of spring, I surely would have died of thirst, if not that day, then the next. Had it been earlier in the year, I would have died another way, curled blanketless among the other captives, during the cold nights.

  It was on the second afternoon that we saw the monk. We had angled down to strike the Silk Road well to the east of Khotan. I still did not know what Broad Chest and the others planned to do; I had learned in two days a good deal about understanding their meaning without understanding their words, but I could tell only that they were looking for something and that they were anxious to be rid of us.

  The monk seemed at first to be no more than a glimmer on the far horizon, not moving towards us at all. The Road ran very close to the dunes just there, squeezing past the last few struggling steppe plants by a huge outcrop of rock. Waves of heat danced above the hot earth. Then the glimmer grew a little larger and began to coalesce into bodily form. The Tibetans drew up their ponies’ reins and waited.

  Incredibly, the monk travelled with only three disciples and four puny camels that slouched along the trail worn into the loose earth. Other travellers might have stopped at the sight of Broad Chest sitting tall astride his pony, or might have turned and fled, however fruitlessly. But the monk came on at a steady pace, eyes fixed on the back of his camel’s head, droning his prayers. When he came to the impassive Tibetan, he merely nodded and sketched a blessing with one hand. The peace of the Enlightened One be upon you, good sir,’ he said, in the pure Chinese of Chang-an, and began to lead his little caravan round Broad Chest and his pony. I noticed that he did attempt to pass on the side of the loose sands, away from where the rest of the warriors clustered. The plumpest of his disciples squinted his piggish eyes and prodded his camel to hurry after.

  ‘Stop,’ said Broad Chest, first in what I suppose was Tibetan, and then in Soghdian.

  The monk blinked his mild eyes and smiled a benign smile. ‘I go India,’ he said in Soghdian. ‘I go fetch holy scriptures. Lady Guan-yin watches me. Peace.’ Again, he made as if to pass. ‘Farewell.’

  ‘Trader?’ asked Broad Chest, leaning forward, every muscle tensed. Then, jerking his chin in my direction, he added, ‘We sell slaves. Good slaves.’ Another disciple began to twitch, screwing up his face like an angry monkey’s. But at a glance from his master, he grimaced, clutched his head, and was still.

  ‘I no trader,’ the monk said with a patient sigh. ‘I go fetch holy scrolls. Farewell.’

  Evidently ‘scrolls’ meant no more to Broad Chest than ‘scriptures’ had, but the man I rode behind called out something and Broad Chest shrugged. ‘Trader where?’ he growled at the frail-looking monk. ‘Trader that way’ – he pointed in the direction from which the monk had come – ‘you go.’

  The monk nodded as if conceding a treat to a demanding child. All human wants were to be met in the same fashion, with detachment even from the desire to do good. ‘Trader there,’ he said, turning to point behind him. ‘Persian trader go Dun-huang. I meet one hour before. Farewell.’

  ‘Eee-yah,’ yelled Broad Chest, standing triumphantly in his stirrups and releasing two days’ frustration with his yell. He scarcely looked as the monk, his three quaking disciples, and their camels began to move on past. But before he could spur his pony on, the young raider who had killed Nanny pushed the farmboy from his seat behind him, drew his long knife, and headed for the monk. What wealth he thought the holy man might carry I cannot say, but he was evidently prepared to slaughter him and the disciples for their rosaries and begging bowls.

  The monk, who had already passed some way beyond, turned slowly back to fix the murderer with a severe father’s look. ‘Guan-yin watches,’ he said in warning tones. ‘Peace.’

  The other ignored him. Brandishing his bright blade, the young Tibetan rushed past the disciples, evidently reckoning them easy prey once their master fell to his knife.

  And then it happened. I have told this tale to more than one, swearing its truth to them as I swear it to you. Some have spoken to me at great length of the treacherous undertow of wind-driven sand. One old scholar, who loved yellow wine and arcane lore far more than Confucian texts, claimed that certain wizards can put people into a light sleep and tell them what to do, or see. But I believe that it all took place just as you will read it: the galloping pony seemed to slip, or turn its ankle on a loose stone. It heaved over on its side, pitching its rider into the sand beyond the trail. The first encroaching dune rose up, and roiled, and rushed towards him like a wave of meltwater when a river crests.
The young Tibetan, screaming threats or curses, sank beneath the steep leeward slope of the sand. One of his brothers began to ride up to pull him out, but his mount stopped, unnaturally still, remaining unmoved by kicks or blows from the whip.

  The sand surged from the murderer’s chest up to his neck, his mouth, his nose, and he was gone. When I looked in their direction, the monk and his caravan were once again a shimmering on the horizon, as if they had been no more than a mirage.

  The Yellow Springs

  Now a soul arrives at the gates of the underworld. Its hair streams down thick, wavy, dishevelled. It is weeping, but what soul does not weep when it comes at last to the Yellow Springs?

  This soul has come wailing alone through the empty fields and desolate wildlands. It goes to judgement before Yama, great King of the Realm of Darkness, who will decide what fate it has earned by its actions in the life just gone by: perhaps a term in purgatory, to await release through the prayers of the faithful; perhaps rebirth as the lowest of beasts; perhaps an eternity of torment – tongue flayed, guts ripped out again and again by red-hot hooks – in an icy pool of pus and shit; perhaps another human life with its feet set at last on the way to paradise. First, though, it must cross the River of Futility. It hovers on the bank, uncertain. It sees on the far shore ox-faced demons jabbing hordes of sinners, driving them down to the Eighteen Hells. It hears all around it the piteous lamentations of other poor souls, who have hung their gaudy rags of silk upon the branches of trees made leafless by the noxious fumes. These creatures cannot cross the river; they gnash their teeth and moan, striding back and forth, endlessly back and forth along the riverbank. This new soul knows what it must do. It crosses over.

  Reaching the far shore, it approaches, all a-tremble, the triple gate to King Yama’s realm. Ten thousand guardians, armed with iron swords and staffs of bronze, bar the way. Air rushes out through the portal, heavy with the sobbing of those grown rich on the griefs of others, of those who lived in heedless luxury or sowed wild words with no regard for truth, of those who took pleasure in falsity and deceit. The Gatekeeper steps forward, sneers at the new soul’s buxom form. His teeth are jagged spears; his mouth is a midwife’s bowl of blood.

  Leering, the Gatekeeper conducts the soul to the tribunal of the implacable judge of the netherworld. Twin torches blaze in the gloom; regal jade belt-pendants ring as King Yama bends to look down upon the sinner. The soul approaches the bench. Yama orders the General of the Five Ways to read the record of its actions in the Book of Life and Death. The General kowtows and complies.

  This soul’s sins, though not few, are merely venial: the vain admiration of its own rotting flesh, a love of taste and smell and the beautiful appearance of what is only illusion, a sweet indulgence of the body’s laziness, and lust. This lust it fulfilled at the cost of distraction from its duties, and from contemplation of the One True Way. The soul hangs its head and feels its heart wrench with remorse as the list is read.

  ‘And to the good?’ King Yama asks.

  ‘Sire,’ says the General, unrolling the scroll a bit farther, ‘though this soul had no child of its own, it was as a mother to a child who knew no mother. It gave alms to mendicant priests. It regularly burned incense at the altar of Guan-yin.’ For the first time, hope begins to rise within the soul, but it dare not raise its head. ‘Still,’ the General continues, ‘it raised the child for money, and carelessly at times. The alms never stood at more than it might have spent for a bit of ribbon. And its devotions never postponed its pleasures for long.’

  King Yama nods. The story rings familiarly in his divine ears: a fortunate soul, born where it could hear the Teachings of the Law, so that it had the chance to see beyond the false veil of the senses’ lying signals and thus draw closer to enlightenment; a soul choosing instead to take fiction as truth and to tread the way of the body and its flimsy delights. He clears his throat and prepares to pass sentence. It will not be endless torment, but the next rebirth will not be a pleasant one.

  Like a woman casting herself in despair after a heedless departing lover, the soul throws itself forward at the foot of the judge’s ebony bench. ‘Mercy!’ it cries. ‘In the name of Lady Guan-yin the Compassionate, in the name of Kshitigarbha the Deliverer of the Lost from Hell, I beg for mercy.’

  Yama frowns. ‘What is written – ‘ he begins.

  There is a disturbance at the door. King Yama, the General of the Five Ways, the guardian horse-headed demons beside the bench, even at last the lost soul itself, all turn and stare. A young man with an old man’s eyebrows shakes a sealed scroll at the ferocious soldier there, demanding to be let in. The General barks out a command, and the young man bustles up to the bench, hastily brushing sand from the sleeves of his official’s gown. He wears silk robes fashioned in the style worn by the Taoist Immortals of the Heaven of Upper Purity.

  The General rolls his eyes. He has little patience with the Taoists and their seeking after long life. But King Yama smiles an ecumenical smile and bids the newcomer speak.

  ‘Permit me to introduce myself. Your Most Buddhistic Highness,’ says the Taoist, bowing to the precise angle demanded by correctness, and no more. ‘I am the Undersecretary – ‘ He coughs. ‘That is, I am a factotum in the office of the Acting Assistant Controller of the Jade Emperor’s Ministry of Babble. I bring you greetings from the Ruler of the Taoist Heavens and Monarch of the Ten Thousand Things.’ One hand glides to the back of his neck; he brushes at a few more grains of sand, wriggling as they slide along his spine.

  The General scowls, but King Yama airily waves a hand in his direction and smiles even more broadly. ‘Yes?’ he says.

  ‘I also bring word from the gracious bodhisattva Guan-yin, whom I have recently assisted by protecting a certain travelling monk.’ He flicks one last stray grain of sand from his collar. The good Lady has brought it to my – that is to say, our – attention that the soul who stands presently before you is bound to earth by a death promise. One that may even change the weighing of the balance. I – or, well, the Jade Emperor has, ah, taken a special interest in the case.’ He glances slyly in the direction of the General.

  Yama bids him tell more, so the Taoist relates how, in its last moments of life in the human realm, the soul now before the tribunal promised to return to a certain child. ‘What’s more, it would seem that it sealed that promise with an act of self-sacrifice, for the sake of the child’s life.’

  The soul straightens up and begins to speak, but appears to think better of it. Its breasts heave as it sighs.

  ‘Nonsense!’ cries the General of the Five Ways, thumping the reading stand that holds the Book of Life and Death. ‘There’s nothing of that written here!’

  ‘One would not wish to accuse the karma recorders of inefficiency,’ the Taoist says with another little cough, ‘but the situation seems to have been rather confused just then. There were a number of sudden deaths. Such an omission would certainly be nothing if not understandable, don’t you think? And’ – he makes haste to continue, for one of the guardian horse-head demons has stepped forward and is looking to the General for instructions – ‘it is not altogether certain that the soul intended to make the sacrifice.’

  King Yama nods thoughtfully. ‘Still, the teachings of the Enlightened One are clear; the merciful course is to give it the benefit of the doubt. And at the very least, its business in the human world stands unfinished.’ The soul takes a small step, almost a skip, forward, then prostrates itself again before him. ‘It has been here in the Yellow Springs for some time now, however, so its body may very well no longer exist for it to attach itself to.’ The General leans over and whispers in the King’s ear.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ says Yama. ‘Well, a return to life in its body certainly is out of the question.’ He turns his terrible divine face to the soul. ‘You would have to go back as a ghost to finish up. Then we shall see where things stand. Are you willing to return on that condition?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sire,’ says the soul,
a-quiver with eagerness. ‘Yes, Your Highness. Ghost or flesh, it doesn’t matter. I’m more than willing to go back.’

  The Taoist looks relieved. A sour expression spreads across the countenance of the General.

  ‘Of course,’ says King Yama with a long exhalation. ‘They always are. Next case.’

  PARROT

  SPEAKS:

  3

  Now, when I recall the Takla Makan, or the crescent of dry, rock-strewn steppe edging that sandy basin, I think not of the lands around Khotan, but of the weeks of my journey towards Dun-huang with the Persian trader Ghalib, who bought me and the other children from the Tibetan raiders. As the carelessly pampered daughter of the commander of the Chinese garrison, I had ventured beyond the outlying settlements before – I remember my father’s good-humoured consent the time I begged to go out and wait with his field cook and the wine servers while he rode through the grasslands to hunt wild pigs. And then there were those trips to the village temple with “Nanny, and the not quite licit walks along the river with her tall friend. But most of my early days were spent in the thick-walled rooms and garden courtyards of my father’s house, or at least within the ring the five fortresses made about the city.

  Passed from the Tibetans to Ghalib, certain only that wherever I was going it was not of my own will, I nevertheless came to see the beauty of the countryside, despite the scanty supply of water and a gale of sand that turned the sun dark red and kept us huddled for hours, half smothered beneath our felt tent-cloths. The first few nights after the Tibetans sold us, the sky blazed starry-clear. Then the moon was born again and grew until half its disc blazed like frost. By the time it reached fullness I had toughened, and in the long weeks that followed I grew stronger still, though I was always tired, even after we had rested several days in one of the oasis towns.