In the morning the other children regarded me curiously at first, but nothing changed, except that Nephrite gave me a special smile and Beauty avoided meeting my eyes. That afternoon, she called us all together and told us that in a few days her second brother would take us with him, east to Liang-jou; Old Ma had gathered enough little slaves to make his son’s journey worthwhile. We were caught up in a final flurry of stitching and packing that kept us too busy to wonder much about what was to come. I mostly thought, Chang-an! – for Liang-jou was the next major city on the Road towards the capital – and tried as always to keep out of the laundress’s way.
The day before our last in Dun-huang, as I was packing my new shoes and tunic into a saddlebag, I came across the scroll. Looking as busy as possible, I carried the bag into the shadows of a storage room and slipped the scroll from its hiding place.
Its fine silk, tightly wrapped around a thin roller, gave off a ghostly whiff of sandalwood. Tiny words brushed in vertical lines covered every inch of the cloth. What they said, of course, I had no idea. The scroll was as out of place in my world as I had come to be in the world of the other children. I didn’t dare return it to Beauty’s room. Yet if found, the thing might bring me trouble. Why didn’t I just toss those meaningless swipes of ink into the back corner of the storage room for the mice to gnaw?
But I didn’t. The parakeet had said ‘Take this.’ The scroll resembled my dreams of Nanny: obscure but compelling nonetheless. The lively brushstrokes seemed to promise something. Maybe I kept it because it was beautiful. Or maybe I just kept it because I had nothing else.
Heavy footsteps sounded in the hallway. I dived behind three big grain sacks. The laundress’s peevish voice echoed through the stuffy room: ‘Where is she, then?’ I held my breath.
She left. After waiting as long as a young child could, I took up the scroll. But its slick silk wrenched itself from my fingers, or seemed to, and the whole length of the writing unrolled itself before me, a white road marked with black signs through the dusk of the room.
Beneath Cavegarden Lake
Cavegarden Lake, richly fed by myriad vassal streams, spreads its vast waters in the distant, not quite Chinese lands south of the Yangzi River. The lake, it is said, serves as an entryway to the subterranean circuitry of mystical caverns and Taoist grotto heavens that honeycomb a world beneath the one we know. Here, sudden squalls spring up and sink the boats of unwary fisherfolk. Here, the occasional poet, perhaps a government magistrate of unusual sensibility, comes to the moss-covered shrine of the Hsiang River Ladies to pay homage with fragrant pepperwort and the innermost longings of his heart. Here, mystical islands bearing springs of sweet wine rise up and disappear among the waves. And here, a mortal woman married to the son of the Dragon Monarch roams the watery Mother-of-Pearl Villa, longing for news of the human realm.
The woman, Seagem, wanders beneath rainbow rafters, through cockleshell gates. Her mind turns again and again to the husband and the unknown child she was forced to leave behind. Just now, she must go to a family birthday party for her uncle-in-law, the impetuous younger brother of the Dragon Monarch. Sighing, she takes her place among the others gathered in Misty Daybreak Pavilion.
The celebration is a merry one: the members of the family feast and drink and watch the sinuous dancing of the eels and starfish come to entertain them. Only Seagem sits quietly, with downcast eyes. Her new uncle notices.
‘What’s this?’ he roars, shrugging his shoulders and changing from human form into his true aspect as a gigantic vermilion dragon with lightning eyes and thunder breath. Most of the guests, familiar with his quick shifts of mood, continue talking and joking, but a school of catfish cousins seated at the lower end of the pavilion dart under their amber tables to hide. The new bride’s too modest!’ he says. ‘Let’s see a smile for your husband’s uncle.’ A bit of flame flickers, beardlike, upon his chin.
But at the word husband, Seagem can bear no more, and bursts into tears. She wants to please this fearsome creature, just as she has wanted to please everyone she has come across in life. Yet here she is, she who was always chaste and virtuous, she who always did what she was told, married to two men. She buries her face in her sleeve and sobs.
The Hsiao River Princeling, Seagem’s recent bridegroom, hurries over to comfort his wife. In truth, he is quite besotted with love for her, enamoured as he is of her compliant ways. He does wish that she would cry a little less often, not realizing that it is the very quality he cherishes, her desire to do what others would have her do, that brings on her tears. Ignoring his uncle’s scowl and the amused glances of some of the older members of the company, he puts one arm around Seagem and with the other hand offers her a sip of wine from a cup made of narwhal ivory. But though Seagem has responded warmly and willingly to his touch at night, when they sport like mandarin duck and drake within the cloudy curtains of their bed, now she only tenses and sobs all the more.
For the worst of her dilemma is this: It is the Hsiao River Princeling, not General Li, that she really loves. And the teachings of generations of pious Confucian scholars tell her that, kidnapped and given to another man, she should kill herself to preserve her virtue, or at the very least should pine away. But how can she choose to die when she is, at last, so happy? The general treated her well, and to a sensitive woman such as Seagem, life in his parents’ household was infinitely superior to the vulgar ways – may she be forgiven the thought – of her grasping, quarrelsome parents. But the general was far older than she and chiefly interested in military strategy and the music of barbarian musiciennes. It was duty that bound her to him, while what binds her to the Dragon Monarch’s son is true affection and the warmth of their secret flesh.
The vermilion dragon snorts; murky winds gust in, bearing pellets of snow and waves of sleet. The guests begin to grumble. The Princeling glares at his uncle. The Monarch looks annoyed. And Seagem finally breaks her lifelong observance of feminine decorum and wails aloud for everyone to hear, ‘How can I be good if I’m married to two men?’
Silence falls upon the pavilion. A few members of the more promiscuous scaly tribes cock amused eyebrows at one another, but most of the company are touched by her simplicity.
Not so the vermilion dragon. ‘So you’d spoil my birthday feast with that?’ he asks with a sound like the booming of a great bronze basin. ‘You humans are altogether too pathetic. Mustn’t make clouds and rain with one man while the other’s still alive, eh? Well, I’ll fix things up for you, Madame Chastity!’
The Hsiao River Princeling wants to explain that all this is hardly Seagem’s fault, although he is a bit miffed that her passion for him has not led her to cast all her conventional training to the winds. But before he can say something to placate his temperamental uncle, the vermilion dragon has departed in a flash of brilliance and a crash of clouds.
Seagem, having been raised to cultivate her embroidery skills rather than her mind, is not the first to deduce what her new uncle’s mission must be, but when she does she collapses, face down, in the Princeling’s lap. A rather awkward expression spreads across his countenance, an eel dancer sniggers audibly, and the Dragon Monarch hastily orders the musicians to play something lively on their barnacle-covered pipes.
Fortunately, the vermilion dragon soon returns, clutching the supernatural pearl that embodies his whirlwind of power and looking pleased. With a shake of his reptilian body, he becomes once again a human figure clad in bright red brocade. ‘Well, that was easier than I expected,’ he announces, taking his place of honour at the table. ‘My naughty niece need not worry about her virtue. Now, how about a nice hot cup of yellow wine for the birthday boy?’
Seagem’s eyes meet the Princeling’s. His look of tender concern mingled with a rising passion stirs similar feelings within her. His hand strokes the delicate high chignon that he himself decked with tiny starfish after their midday rest. But then Seagem thinks of how General Li has been cruelly murdered because of her and of how her li
fe story will doubtless be recorded in the official history of the dynasty, in the section entitled ‘Biographies of Pernicious and Depraved Women’. The combination of desire and anguish and shame is too much for her. What, she wonders, is a proper lady to do in such a situation? But the Empress Chang-sun’s Selected Rules for Women certainly never covered anything like this. There’s only one solution: she swoons.
PARROT
SPEAKS:
5
The morning I learned of my father’s death. Beauty sat weaving at her loom. The outermost courtyard was a-whirl: Old Ma and his son called out orders, servants loaded bundles of provisions, and the ponies that would carry us east and south on the long road to Liang-jou shook their shaggy heads. We little slave girls scurried back and forth, arms filled with whatever we were told to carry. I felt excited: Beauty’s second brother was taking us closer to Chang-an, where I was sure to find my mother.
I knew that I could never make my way back to Khotan, across the wastes of the Takla Makan. Besides, all my life I had been taught to regard that frontier city as at best a temporary home; Chang-an was where I belonged. And now, amid shouts and whinnyings and the stamping of hooves, I would soon be on my way.
Only Beauty remained apart. From her shadowed seat at the loom, she could oversee the bustle in the courtyard, and occasionally she would rise, with an air of patience sorely tried, to remind one of the household servants of some forgotten task. The stoop of her shoulders as she bent close to the gaily figured cloth proclaimed that her responsibilities towards the rest of us had ended.
Before we had half finished the loading of the ponies, a friend of hers came to call; I wonder now if Beauty might not have deliberately invited her for that morning, to show that she had other business to attend to. She seldom had visitors from outside the household.
This other merchant’s daughter was fashionably plump, but her small eyes and mouth seemed lost in her broad face. She sat fanning herself, admiring the design of Beauty’s cloth and insisting that she not stop weaving. ‘Go on, go on,’ I heard her say as I passed by with a rolled-up felt blanket almost too heavy for me to lift. ‘I know how busy you are.’ Her fan wavered and she sighed. ‘Aiya. Will autumn never come?’
‘You!’ Beauty called out, bringing me to an instant halt. ‘Finish with that and run to the kitchen to fetch a cup of grape juice for Miss Honeymelon. Quickly now.’ She turned to Honeymelon. ‘It would frustrate anyone. I barely get them trained and then they’re off.’
I left with Honeymelon’s polite protestations hanging in the heated air. When I got back, she had picked up an ivory statuette of a goddess that Beauty kept near the loom and was admiring the roundness and the easy stance of the figure. ‘Quite nice, actually,’ she said. ‘Is it the Western Motherqueen? No, no, of course not. She doesn’t have the headdress, and you’d never see the Motherqueen suckling a baby like that. It’s – what’s that silly Indian name – Hariti, isn’t it?’ A giggle broke from her lips. ‘Do you think we’ll be married ladies with children at our breasts like that someday soon?’
Beauty did not seem at all inclined to discuss motherhood. ‘Yes, it’s Hariti,’ she said. ‘You can tell, can’t you, by the foreign look about the carving? From Khotan, maybe, or somewhere farther out.’ Then she noticed that I’d returned. I was proud that I thought to bring two cups of juice, but she only frowned and signalled with her eyes that I was to offer the tray to Miss Honeymelon first.
Honeymelon ignored me. Her voice forgot its cultivated languor and grew shrill as she told a story that the mention of Khotan had brought to mind: the vassal king of the city-state had forsworn his oath of loyalty to the Tang and risen in rebellion against the Chinese forces – Baba’s army – garrisoned there. ‘The khan of the Turgesh Turks sent forces down from the north to help the rebels. Can you imagine the nerve of the man? He was given a Chinese princess in marriage years ago.’ Her fan waved briskly in indignation, then slowed. ‘Well, not real Chinese like us, but the daughter of a loyal Turk, which should be good enough. Though I hear he’s also joined himself in marriage to the Tibetans and some of those awful unpacified Turks in the northeast,’ At last she deigned to notice me and reached out diffidently for her cup of juice. I stood unmoving as she took a deep slurp.
Beauty’s eyes had locked back onto her weaving as Honey-melon’s talk slid from the uprising to marriage. ‘What happened?’ she prompted. ‘In Khotan?’
Honeymelon slurped again, draining her cup. ‘Oh, the rebellion didn’t last long.’ She plonked the cup down on my tray. They killed the general in command, though, and three other important officers. And a fair number of troopers, of course. But they were only soldiers, after all.’ She went on to express her opinion of disloyal foreign kings and, more heatedly, of men like the Turgesh khan who forget the obligations that marriage entails. Eventually, Beauty looked up and snapped at me to set the other cup of juice on the little table near her loom and get back to work.
I suppose I did. I suppose I did whatever else was required of me, mounted my pony, and left with the caravan. I don’t remember. For weeks we travelled the Silk Road between Dun-huang and Liang-jou, along a narrow plateau that formed a kind of corridor within the bitterly bought safety of the Great Wall. To the north lay the A-la Shan desert, and beyond that the cold, dry Gobi; to the south rose terrible mountains where Tibetans waited to prey upon Chinese travellers.
Riding felt like a luxury after walking to Dun-huang with Ghalib’s caravan; Old Ma didn’t want us to look worn out when his son sold us in Liang-jou. But the nights grew steadily colder, and some mornings the rocks and scrubby grasses of the plain bore a white dust of frost.
As my pony plodded towards the next outpost town one forenoon, my head bobbed and I stared unseeing into the chilly air. A dance of sparks showered into my field of vision, struck from the cobalt hooves of a mighty chestnut horse as it flew across the great ravine we were skirting. My mother rode astride its gleaming saddle, bold and joyful, come to rescue me. Her mount – a dragon in disguise – could out-race any caravan pony. Its nostrils flared; it sweated drops of blood. We would dash past Liang-jou without stopping, on to Chang-an. Then she would laugh out loud and cuddle me and sing as Nanny used to do.
This waking vision kept me company day after day. I no longer tried to befriend the other girls, who still kept their distance from me. Nephrite always had a calm smile for me and made sure I had a warm place to sleep. But she remained wrapped in silence, more inclined to sit by herself, well away from Beauty’s second brother and the other traders in the caravan. Even Baby was subdued. Still, the other girls took pleasure in gathering for a bit of music when they could, or simply in sitting together exhausted for a few moments before they slept.
I can remember only one other thing from the journey. The day I left Dun-huang, passing the last of the willow-lined fields outside the city, I started back to awareness when my eye caught the white-tailed flash of deer sprinting off into a gully. Then I felt it with the shock of an unexpected slap. Baba was dead, and nothing in the world was sure.
Seagem’s Soul Journey
Some time earlier, while her daughter still walks the sands of the Takla Makan, Seagem lies in her swoon upon her pearly nuptial bed. The Hsiao River Princeling watches over her, bending once – when the servants aren’t watching – to loosen the neck of her gown and kiss a golden breast.
But only her fleshly self remains at rest in the Mother-of-Pearl Villa. Her soul has risen, as if on a chariot pulled by sea serpents, to travel to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. It soars, it hovers, it roams through emptiness. The Confucian teachings that ordered her earthly life as filial daughter and faithful wife have failed her. She bears the guilty weight of causing her unruly dragon-uncle to murder her husband, the first of her husbands. And perhaps she will never meet the daughter she has longed to greet someday in Chang-an, for all that another woman bore her.
Only Guan-yin can calm this turbulence. At last that compassionat
e Lady glides into the vision of the troubled soul. The Wheel of the Dharma-law hangs from a silk cord about the bodhisattva’s neck; she confirms for the human woman General Li’s death in the uprising at Khotan. With a sweet severity, Guan-yin reminds Seagem that all mortal beings must let go of earthly existence in the end and that to mourn them merely engenders a foolish attachment to the unreal. Chastened and comforted, Seagem hangs her head, vowing that she will pray –but will not weep – for the man who has died a fitting soldier’s death, just as the Lady has told her to do.
‘But what of my daughter?’ asks Seagem. She cannot release herself from mother love, even for this child she has never seen. ‘Did she too die there in Khotan?’
Lady Guan-yin smiles. The tiny bells of her headdress tinkle. She tells Seagem of the girl’s capture and that just now a Persian trader is taking her along the Silk Road towards the city of Dun-huang, where she will stay awhile in the household of a slave dealer named Old Ma. ‘So you see,’ the bodhisattva concludes with divine indifference, ‘what you might have regretted, her enslavement, was in fact a blessing, for it freed her from the vanities of a wealthy child’s life.’
Seagem takes the news with less detachment than Guan-yin might have hoped. Her daughter – the little girl she has, in years I of daydreams, played with, crooned to, and petted – has been sold into slavery! But the Lady has other souls to comfort, and turns to go.
‘Wait!’ Seagem calls out. ‘Compassionate Lady, can you rescue her?’
‘Ah,’ says Guan-yin. ‘It is not I that binds her to this fate, child, but the desires of her own soul, which before her birth set her feet upon the road she travels.’ She pauses to consider. ‘But perhaps you could get some kind of message through to her. A letter, maybe. Or a scroll. I’ll see. Now really I must go. I’ll arrange for you to meet someone who can explain the child’s situation to you, dear.’ And trailing vaporous ribbons of cloud, she takes her leave.
Silk Road Page 7
