Then Mama Chen bustled back with Bellring, and the music was struck up at once. I saw Nephrite whisper something into Glory’s ear, but she just blushed and hung her head and shook it no. Had it been a boorish drunken guest who had hurt her, I’m certain that she would have embarrassed him with laughter, or complained to one of his companions, or had a quiet talk with Mama Chen, who would set him straight in the way best suited to his rank. But the looks the man gave her now, his single eye speaking not of impetuous admiration or honest need but of his superiority and her defilement, seemed to silence her. I thought how he, who should regard her with the benevolent sternness of a teacher for a pupil, did not even regard her with desire, but only with the will to hurt. Glory’s lashes dampened, her feet stumbled, the lesson went on. Then I wondered how it was that he had chosen the one out of the four of us who was the slowest-witted and the least likely to take action on her own.
Three days later the dancing teacher returned. Glory tried to excuse herself from the lesson, claiming a headache, but Mama Chen simply scolded her. ‘You’ve got a headache. Nephrite’s stomach hurts. Both of you are lazy, that’s all. Of course you’ll have to join the lesson. I don’t pay him good money because I don’t know what else to do with it, you know.’
This time he came with an apprentice, a young girl in a western dancer’s trousers. She followed him in, head down, squatted in the farthest comer, and pulled her little lacquered wether drum from its hemp-cloth bag. My attention was all on the teacher, and on Glory, but Mama Chen stayed with us that day, content at times to rest her fingers and let the drummer carry us through the steps.
It was a certain quality of sorrow in the drumming that first caught my attention. Whirling Sashes was in the ‘soft style’, yet it had a sprightliness about it. But though the drummer kept the variable rhythms remarkably well for one so young, somehow the beating told of humiliation and fear.
We paused to rest a moment, and Nephrite rushed to settle on the cushion next to mine. ‘Have you noticed the drummer?’ she asked me in her usual low tone.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She sounds sad.’
‘Oh, but more than that.’ Her eyes glowed. ‘It’s Baby!’
And in an instant I saw that Nephrite spoke the truth. Taller, slender-waisted now, her cheerful round Khotanese face subdued, still the little drummer was clearly the child who had been the darling at Old Ma’s, and the only tie, besides each other, that Nephrite and I had to Khotan. I thought of the time Baby had made poor Blackie laugh after Umar tormented him.
‘What are we going to do?’ I whispered to Nephrite in Khotanese.
She shook her head. ‘I’ll pray to the Western Motherqueen to help her, of course, but what else is there you and I can do. Parrot? Remember who we are.’
Did her acceptance reveal the difference in being raised a poor farmer’s daughter, rather than the indulged child of a powerful commander? Was it that her soul had come into this lifetime to learn how to control its desires for action, while mine had some other charge? I know only that I wanted to retort that even little entertainers could do something, just as Baby’s dancing had once helped sobbing Blackie forget Umar’s bullying.
But Mama Chen’s sharp voice cut off our conversation. ‘You two! Stop that foreign gabbling and stand up. Teacher’s ready to begin again.’
Glancing at the one-eyed man, I thought of Nanny, and how she’d use sweet words to get her way. ‘We’re having trouble with the second turn. Mama Chen,’ I said in a placating voice. ‘We can’t seem to get it as smooth as Teacher does and still keep together. Do you suppose Teacher and his apprentice might run through it together, so we can all watch?’
Mama Chen pursed her lips. The man’s face acknowledged our incompetence and his superior skill. He grunted to Baby to stand up. Mama Chen’s stiff fingers grasped her plectrum and she struck up the tune.
Baby had lost her gaiety, but her talent for dancing had blossomed into a remarkable skill. When the two completed the second turn and the teacher barked at her to stop, Nephrite and I clapped in nearly spontaneous applause. Even Mama Chen smiled. ‘Now, that little dancer,’ she said, ‘is what I want the four of you to look like by the time General Jao’s party comes round.’
By luck, that night was a busy one at Lutegarden. At last the governor had asked Little Pink if he might visit her in her rooms alone. A rich merchant who had lately taken quite a fancy to Glory had made an appointment to come by with a guest from out of town. Mama Chen was not supposed to let anyone into Lutegarden except scholars and officials, but sometimes rules could be bent, Liang-jou being a provincial town, and the clerk responsible for the entertainment quarter being as eager for bribes as Mama Chen was for traders’ wealth.
She sent Nephrite in with Glory, to wait on them, in keeping with her theory that it wouldn’t do to let the merchant spend time alone with Glory too soon. Then a whole group of young bloods dropped in to eat and drink, asking Mama Chen to let them hear some of her ‘famous musicians, especially someone skilled at playing the flute’. The old woman knew what that meant: word was out of Saffron’s brief attachment to Imperial Emissary Gao; there would be a flurry of interest in her now. I couldn’t yet play more than a few songs on the lute well enough for guests, so most of the time Bellring played, or sang while Saffron piped. I struck the gong and the great drum when I wasn’t running for more wine. Mama Chen beat the wether drum herself. But then her hands tired, and she needed to check things in the kitchen, and someone had to keep popping in to ‘assist’ Glory and Nephrite, and Little Pink, in order to keep an eye on both those situations. It was altogether an exhausting evening.
It was nearly dawn before the big group wore themselves out and left, and the weary kitchenmaids hurried in to clear out the room. The merchant and his friend had given up and gone home only a short while earlier, though Mama Chen had allowed Glory and Nephrite to walk with them through our little garden to the front gate to say goodbye.
I sighed, and made my hundredth trip to the kitchen, where Cook was draining the last drops from the ewers into her own cup. When I returned with a final pot of tea. Nephrite, Saffron, and Glory were chattering in the lively way that entertainers do when the guests have left at last. Mama Chen was telling them about checking Glory and Nephrite’s party only to discover that they were completely out of wine, and the merchant and his friend were bellowing in the general direction of the kitchen, rather than letting the girls go together for some more. ‘Not wanting to be separated, they’d told the men that they were a bit afraid to go out through the passageway to the kitchen alone!’ she chuckled. ‘Fortunately I got there before the merchants disturbed the other parties. Men of that class really are completely unrefined.’
An idea struck me. ‘I should have gone down to see them sooner. Mama Chen, instead of making you do it,’ I said, placing a marbled pottery cup in front of her. ‘But Little Pink had rung for me to fetch a few cloves for His Excellency to chew, to clear the wine fumes from his head.’ I poured her tea. ‘I feel ashamed that you should have to do apprentice work after all these years. Forgive me. Lady, please.’
She chuckled again, leaning on her armrest while the tea cooled enough for her to drink it. ‘ “Old Lady” is more like it,’ she said, but I could tell that she was pleased. ‘No, the problem is clear. We need another apprentice. Nephrite’s been out for months now, and there’s too much for you to do alone. Besides’ – she glanced slyly at Saffron and Bellring – ‘sooner or later someone is going to leave us.’
The two older girls laughed tipsily, and I said, ‘It really is too bad that we lost Grapevine. Saffron and Glory dance nicely enough, but none of us can attract guests with our dancing like she did. But Mama Chen, how can a person tell an apprentice’s dancing skill before taking her on?’
Mama Chen conceded that, though she had the ear to discern talent in an untrained singer or musician, the real gift of dancing – something beyond a general grace – wasn’t as easy for her to pick out. ‘
Perhaps I should just say farewell to this difficult life, retire to some quiet place outside the city, and take the veil of a Lady of the Tao,’ she said, in a voice which made it clear that in fact she was at least one ex-courtesan with no such plans.
The conversation was shifting in the wrong direction. I hastily agreed that she was indeed overworked, and admitted that I feared I had been so tired I came close to angering Glory’s friend with my carelessness. Before she could begin to scold, though, I added, ‘What we need, then, isn’t it, is to find a little girl with the skill of the Iranian teacher’s apprentice. But surely Mama Chen’s eye can pick out such a child.’
There. The seed had been planted. We had another dancing lesson in two days. Tomorrow I would mention the expense of bringing in a teacher from outside the house; I was certain that Baby knew enough to train us. Maybe I could save her with my words.
Seagem’s Bedchamber
For years now, as mortals reckon time, this hungry ghost roamed the human realm. Most nights, it haunts the riverbank where the soul was torn from the flesh. Once it was called against its will to a back room in a shabby inn, where two lovers lay together in a bed the ghost had known. And at times it has trailed along the Silk Road, keeping an invisible, longing watch over the child to whom it is bound. It roams desirous. It remains unfulfilled.
Now another chain of wanting tugs it to where it has not been before. The woman Seagem, residing with her otherworldly husband in the fabulous villa of the Dragon Monarch, has prayed repeatedly for some word of her daughter, to whose fate this roaming soul’s is linked. Good Lady Guan-yin, who keeps the ghost in her charge, is pleased to grant Seagem’s petitions. Guan-yin’s ways are a mystery, but whatever her reasons, she allows this interview.
Seagem has seen so many strange things since the fishy, vermilion-robed doctor – her husband’s hot-blooded uncle –took her away from the house of the Lis in Chang-an. Even so, she is startled when the ghost appears. Seagem is lying with her head on a coral pillow, her body sweet with the recent touch of her husband, asleep beside her. She breathes out her quiet supplication to the Lady once again. And then the apparition rises before her, more solid than if she had met it up on earth, but quivering, flickering, all the same.
Where is this? Why do you summon me? And who are you to call? The ghost’s unkempt hair flies wild as tumbleweed, or kelp washed by underwater currents.
Eventually they work the story out: each of them mother in her own way to the same child; the granting of the scroll by the Western Motherqueen at Seagem’s request; the hungry ghost’s confirmation that the girl received it at the bidding of a talking bird, though it seems that Greenpearl has long since forgotten it; their fruitless guesses at what text its silk might bear. All this while – as the women feel now the blood tie of true sisters, now the aching jealousy of rivals for one daughter’s heart – Seagem’s husband sleeps.
‘And now?’ asks Seagem quietly. ‘How is the girl living, so far from home and family, her father dead, and me kept here underneath the waves?’
So the ghost tells of Greenpearl’s present life: she is a little apprentice in the Entertainment Quarter of Liang-jou, ready soon for womanhood as a skilled musician whose talents and way with words will win the hearts of men. To the spirit’s great surprise, Seagem begins to weep.
‘My daughter ruined!’ she says between her sobs. ‘Good Lady Guan-yin, is this your punishment for the delight I’ve taken in illicit love?’ Her husband stirs and mutters in his sleep; she reaches out and smooths his fine black hair. ‘Oh, husband!’ she whispers. She always thought. At least we are bound in marriage. We must have been joined before birth by the red thread that ties those destined to become husband and wife. But her beloved daughter will lose her chastity as an entertainer. Shame tingles across her shoulders. ‘Is it retribution for my two husbands that she’ll have none?’ Seagem sighs.
Softly the ghost moans. She shudders, she fades from sight for a moment, but she cannot leave.
‘Don’t go!’ says Seagem. She is afraid of losing this solitary link to the satisfaction of a hunger she has nourished within herself for years. She listens in silence while the ghost stammers out the reasons a woman might choose to lie with a man to whom she is not wed. Love, it says. Or an empty stomach. As a gift of comforting, or as comfort taken. For the sake of foolish laughter. Anger. Spite. Because she’ll soon grow old. In a moment of hot joy, or a long cool hour of ease. Loneliness, or fear. For the honey taste of someone unknown. Contempt. To feel the dizzy pulse-rate of adventure. To hear his praise her beauty. Pure unreckoning desire.
‘But what will we do?’ asks Seagem, as soon as she can turn the talk back to her daughter. ‘Is there no way we can send some further word to the child, to bring her here to me? Surely that will let you find your rest.’
The ghost moans its agreement: If the girl can complete the search for Seagem, as – following Lady Guan-yin’s command – it bade her do that desert night when it summoned all its longing and uttered a few words audible to Greenpearl’s mortal ears, then the Lady will release the ghost from the death promise. Then it may end this aimless wandering, perhaps may set its feet again upon the wheeling way of rebirth, in hopes of reaching enlightenment, and peace.
Yet how will they get a message to the girl? Her heart is closed, by the doors fear closes over memory, against any appearance of the hungry ghost. Is there not someone else then, Seagem asks, who might give guidance to her daughter? Some person who might make a link between the realms?
Perhaps there is someone. Hissing and shaking, the ghost describes a mortal different from other mortals: a round-faced, slender-waisted child, with a dancer’s nimble feet, and bruises scattered on the insides of her thighs, and a scar like a knife wound near the nipple of one budding breast. She is mute, and so not fully bound to the labyrinth of hes that is the human world. Perhaps she can get a message through.
PARROT
SPEAKS:
7
Baby had been with us at Lutegarden for two years – it was the beginning of spring and the plum trees were in bloom – when I ‘broke the melon’ and the moon-ruled coursing of my blood marked me as a woman. Even then, I remained slender, but Baby had grown plump again. Mama Chen beamed when Baby danced and the guests applauded; she beamed more broadly when the rest of us learned the steps that Baby showed us without a teacher’s fee. That the little dancer never spoke didn’t seem to matter much just then, though of course it had been a useful bargaining point when Mama Chen and the Iranian dancing teacher negotiated her price.
Not long after Baby moved in to share the apprentices’ room with me, I told her – hoping to make her smile – the story of how I had persuaded Mama Chen that we needed a new little apprentice who could already dance. Baby knelt before me, threw her arms around my legs, and began to weep.
I felt ashamed: of course I had wanted to get her away from the casual viciousness of the dancing teacher, but I had also been moved by my desire to share the apprentice work, and mostly by a need to have someone else around me from Khotan. When I felt homesick for the city of jade where I was born. Nephrite would only say, ‘The past is past’; then she would turn back to the latest scroll lent her by the Taoist holy woman she had begun to study with. My homesickness grew worse every time I heard Little Pink’s ‘barbarian this’ and ‘uncultured foreign that’, and Glory’s murmurs of agreement, even though Bellring – whose looks were as fully Chinese as theirs – would tell them they were being tiresome. In Khotan I had been set apart by being a daughter of Chang-an, yet visitors to Lutegarden would look at my Turkish cheekbones and Iranian eyes and call me ‘exotic’ or ‘outlandish’ as they pleased.
So I pulled Baby up to stand before me and put my arms around her. I did this shyly. Sometimes, walking in the garden before the guests arrived, I would see Little Pink and Glory holding hands in friendship, and I would envy them. Or a guest, his spirit eased with wine, would throw an arm about the neck of the companion come to
drink with him, and I would feel more than ever a loneliness of the flesh. But of course, when that same guest brushed against my leg, it meant his thoughts were elsewhere, and a little apprentice girl must smile bashfully and turn away.
Baby’s tears stopped, but she held her body stiff and cold, waiting for me to drop my arms. I did. Even Baby finds me strange, I thought, and almost began to weep myself. She must have seen that idea within me, for she explained herself without speech. Sitting on the wide platform bed we shared, she opened her skirt to show me the last greenish bruises on her thighs. Then she held up a hand to silence me, and let me see a scar torn across one small breast.
Poor thing, my heart said, but there was no need to utter that aloud. I asked if it had been the Iranian who had done it, knowing as I asked that she would nod yes. Reaching towards her, I traced the scar line with one finger, as if a touch could smooth it from existence. Then she covered her body again with her clothing, and waved one arm in a gesture that took in the room, all Lutegarden, and her new life. She smiled and, as she waved, shifted her body a fraction farther from me.
Still, in the years that followed, Baby did begin to take my hand on those garden walks, or in our bed at night. At times I longed for something more, but never asked for it. I was afraid of what the Iranian had done to her trusting nature, afraid of driving her away.
Nephrite took an elder sister’s care to see that all went well for Baby in the early days at Lutegarden. Yet Nephrite’s mind was elsewhere. The summer before Baby came, when Nephrite was ready to step from her apprentice life to that of a fully fledged courtesan, Mama Chen sent her off by sedan chair to stay for a few days with a certain Lady of the Tao who lived with other Taoist holy women at Darkdazzle Vista, on a hilltop outside town. This woman had been an ‘elder sister’ of Mama Chen’s years ago and, on retirement from the Entertainment Quarter, had taken on the cap and robes of holy orders. She had studied the boudoir techniques for nourishing the body’s vital energy and was skilled in the methods of attaining long life through the fivefold joyful struggle of woman and man. When it was my turn to be sent to her, she lectured me on the importance of maintaining a tranquil spirit while uniting with a man. She told me, too, how to use the ten movements and the nine essences to increase my pleasure and my partner’s.
Silk Road Page 10
