The ‘transmitted marvels’ stories of the Tang Dynasty may have arisen as a dodge around the famous Chinese civil service examination system. A man who came to the capital for the highly competitive national exam might write one of these tales as a showpiece of his skill in the concise, elegant language we call ‘literary Chinese’. Dropped on the doorstep of a powerful literatus-official, the tale could impress a potential patron with its author’s poetic sensibilities and high moral vision – and help him get a job.
PARROT
SPEAKS:
13
When I first met Dreamdragon Feng and Sparker, I might have seen the subtle signs of each young man’s discontent with his present place in life; but I noticed no more than the elegant airs of the one and the casual cheerfulness of the other. In truth, I wasn’t noticing much about anyone; I had been listless and withdrawn for months. All my thoughts were for what Ghalib had done, although by the time I met them my feeling for him seemed only a kind of story I had spun for myself, no more substantial than my dreams of my mother astride her magnificent horse.
Arriving in the capital from Liang-jou, I had been joyful, eager, dazzled. With our two long stops and the bad weather, it was nearly the eleventh month, but something more than the cold had made me trade, some ten days or so before, the peacefulness of travel for impatience.
An autumn drizzle greyed the air as Ghalib’s documents were checked and cleared and we entered the city proper. Even Khotan’s walls had not stood as tall as these, more than three times Ghalib’s height. We passed the food stalls and a swarm of street traders, and rode in through a side portal of one of the city’s western gates, beneath its proud watchtower. My breath came quickly as we moved through the shadowy tunnel.
Our camels paced indifferently towards the Persian Hostel in the great Western Market. What would happen now I did not know; I could think only that somehow I would find my mother at last in the home city I was seeing for the first time.
It was past noon when we passed through the ward walls of the Western Market, so the shops and stands of every lane had opened. Wheelbarrows full of dried fruit or cabbages rolled past the gem bazaar and warehouses and cooked-meat stalls rich with the smells of pork broth and fried liver and roasted dog. I saw a sword juggler half naked despite the clammy cold of the air. Outside the hostel a remarkably tall woman, her hair the colour of dirty copper, spun some wild tale for a crowd of yokels come into town for the day. As we passed, I noticed that her skin was virtually colourless; its freakish pallor revealed the blue web of a storyteller’s forking veins. A shop cat yowled. Carriage wheels creaked through the crowds. Voices wheedled, shouted, swore. Then we went through the gate of the hostel and left all that, for the moment, behind.
But no sooner had we dried ourselves and taken the hot wine the hostel keeper offered than Ghalib bent close to my ear and murmured, Tf the little mute really is your friend, you’d better make ready to say goodbye.’ Then he slapped Baby’s hips and told her to run up to the room and change into her best clothes.
Baby knew what was coming, I’m sure, but she only hung her head and walked upstairs, not even turning to catch my eye. I shouldn’t have been surprised. On the journey, I had tried again and again to get her to speak to me in her old language of hand-sign and glance, but she refused. As long as I loved some other – Ghalib or Nephrite, it didn’t matter – and not her alone, she was determined not to love me.
When she came back down to the dim main room of the hostel. Baby’s head was high, her face closed, and the pomegranate and leaf-green of her brocades shone even in the glow of the charcoal fire. By then the rain had stopped. Wine-warmed and rested, Ghalib wanted to take me up to the room; I could read the subtle signs of his behaviour well enough.
Ghalib drained his cup and ordered his nephew to take Baby to the dancers’ conservatory, in the Teaching Quarter of the Left. I’m tired of her sulking ways, Umar,’ he said. ‘Get the best price you can for her, but take any, as long as there’s a bit of profit in it.’
‘And if there’s no profit?’ Umar stretched and grinned. He had made it clear that whatever his uncle’s reasons for bringing the two of us from Liang-jou, he had considered it foolish from the start.
Then find someone somewhere that offers one,’ Ghalib’s callousness surprised me; on the Road I had put aside my knowledge that he was above all else a trader.
Baby swept from the room before Umar could rise, as if impatient to be off. Perhaps she was. But I could not bear to see her leave that way. Without looking to Ghalib for permission, I ran after her to the entranceway and threw my arms around her stiff torso. When Umar ambled up to us, I asked him to tell the housemistress at the dancers’ conservatory that Baby had a cousin who would come to visit her one day. At an inn outside Lan-jou I had learned from a Chang-an singer heading west that female relatives were allowed to visit the artistes of the quarters on the second and sixteenth day of the month. Somehow I would manage it.
Umar reached out one lank arm, palm up. What did I have to give him? Only the gilt earrings Nephrite had taken from her hoard and pressed into my hand as I left Lutegarden House. Baby had no way to tell the housemistress of her ‘cousin’; I needed him to vouch for me. I took one off and dropped it into his waiting palm.
‘One’s no good without the other, little honey tongue,’ he said.
‘Give it back, then.’
He just waited, smirking, till I yielded and gave him the last memento of my friend. Then he said, ‘You may have spoken to me as a man speaks to his camel, but unlike a camel I’ve remembered what you said.’ I had picked up enough Persian to grasp his meaning, though I would have understood the long-simmering anger in his laughter if he’d spoken in a language not yet born. Here was another sour fruit of my cleverness with words.
Baby knew who had given me the earrings, and, no doubt, what it cost me to give them up. Hastily she returned my embrace and smiled at me, letting her eyes show sadness at last, as Umar pulled her after him into the courtyard. Then the hostel gate swung open and the hurly-burly of the market swallowed them up.
The rest of the day passed far too quickly, and not at all as in the tale I had invented of how it would be in Chang-an. In the room, Ghalib said nothing, only stared at me with a measuring gaze and scratched his beard and shrugged. In a manner not quite playful, he pushed me to my hands and knees on the low bed. Then he knelt behind me, pulled his trousers down, and raised my skirts. Usually we undressed each other slowly, and he liked it when I teased him, prolonging his pleasure and my own even after a hard day of travel. But this time he was rough and hasty, as if bound to prove himself the master. On the stairway I had been eager for him, despite my unhappiness at seeing Baby go. Then my desire for him died. Perhaps he meant that to happen; I don’t know.
‘Umar says you are some spirit wrapped in flesh to enchant me,’ he said, standing up and straightening his clothes. ‘And that I can’t let go of you. But I know you’re only a human woman, Little Parrot, one of many human women along the Road.’ His words were cold; his deep-set eyes said that he was angry.
My own anger rose and silenced me. That left only a muteness as sullen as Baby’s, and a wash of sorrow. Later, there would be worse moments, when I believed that somehow I deserved what he had done.
‘So we’ll part. Little Parrot,’ Ghalib said, leaning back against the far wall with a forced ease that aped the civility I had loved in him; ‘and soonest is best. I’m sure the mamas who run the entertainment houses have sharp eyes for a pregnant girl.’ He gave the same considering, half-apologetic nod as when he left me at Old Ma’s, and went back downstairs.
I sat upright on that shabby hostel bed, counting in a dizzy rush the days and weeks of our journey from Liang-jou. Mama Chen had kept careful watch over us at Lutegarden House, though during my years there more than one courtesan in the other houses had given a child to a farmwoman to wet-nurse or to raise as her own. Collator Wu had never worried about the harmful effect
s of fleshly joy when drunk or gorged with food, but he had always stayed away from me on the days some said were ill-omened, the dark of the moon when my blood ran and again when it shone full.
What Ghalib had said was true. The weeks on the Road had hardened my body again, but in recent days my small nipples had swollen. It was not the rigours of travel that had stopped my blood’s release, but the hunger of what would become a child. I tried to imagine my grandparents taking me in now and hated the body that had done this to me.
I rarely think of the next six weeks. Ghalib’s luck, at least, held good, for after nearly a year away in the eastern capital of Lo-yang the Brilliant Emperor and all his court would soon return to grace Chang-an. The city would fill with officials and hangers-on, and life would be busy again for the entertainers. This meant that Mama Lu of Felicity Hall was not the only one who sought out new talent: when Ghalib took me there and she heard me play my lute, she pulled her fur-lined jacket close with a money lover’s pleasure. The transaction was concluded quickly, and as quickly and coolly he left.
So I was registered as a musician and hostess at Felicity Hall. I tried telling myself that I had what I wanted – after journeying thousands of li, I was in Chang-an! – which was true enough. But somehow I could do only what Mama Lu ordered me to, and that as one no more than half awake. Even at the winter solstice, when people feast all night, exchanging merry wishes for good fortune with their companions, I only picked at the pork-and-ginger dumplings, and wished that I might leave our guests and slip away to bed.
My depression that winter set the tone of Mama Lu’s opinion of me from the first. ‘What a waste of good silver you were!’ she snapped one afternoon about ten days after my arrival, when she sailed into my tiny bedroom, bracelets ajangle, to slap me awake from yet another nap. Mama Chen back at Lutegarden had obviously never been especially good-looking; it was by means of her wit and her strength of will that she had made her way. But Mama Lu still had the well-rounded mouth and smooth skin of her youth, despite the shadows beneath her dissipated eyes, and a haughty beauty’s airs. ‘That Persian trader cheated me – typical! – with his tales of your amusing ways. I thought the day he dragged you here that you showed some promise. Now I see I’m saddled with a pallid mope who can’t do a thing on her own.’ She pursed her mouth, making it rounder and fuller than ever. ‘Your technique on the lute’s not bad – someone took the trouble to teach you well enough out there in the barbarian western lands – but Lady Guan-yin bless me, there’s not a spark when you perform. The men want some feeling to the music, girl! Surely you know that much?’
Business grew lively with the court’s return. Mama Lu kept me working chiefly as a wine-server, tending to the drunkards and not the guests who appreciated the best in music. I liked to bring out the doll they called ‘the wine barbarian’; I would set the roly-poly fellow on his rounded bottom in the centre of the table, hoping he would fall in my direction so I would be the one required to drink a cup. The old men fell asleep and we made up beds for them, or their patient grooms took them home just before the curfew drum. Young men rode off to other parties, or stayed the night in someone’s room, but not in mine.
The three older courtesans in the house – Mistmaid, who was rather clever and extremely idle, and gossipy Bouquet and gentle Amber – mostly ignored me. They looked down on the houses of the northernmost lane of Pingkang Ward as little more than brothels, but despite its more prestigious location Felicity Hall was not quite one of the city’s top entertainment houses. The women there had less reason to hope for a secure future as favoured concubine or household entertainer than had Little Pink or Glory or the others back at Lutegarden. I didn’t blame my new ‘sisters’ for not wanting to be friends, for in those weeks I told myself that Ghalib would not have left me so easily if I had been worth staying with. And when a guest commented that the new girl was a fetching little beauty, or some such nonsense. Bouquet would murmur to Amber, or Mistmaid would purse her lips as Mama Lu did and draw her delicate eyebrows together. How could they see me as a friend when any attractiveness of mine might take away their one chance of a comfortable old age?
We had a full staff of maids – Mama Lu spent much more freely than Mama Chen ever had – but they took their cues from the senior entertainers and left me alone when they could. Only the gatekeeper, a bent old ex-soldier everyone called Walleye, seemed to like me; to pass the time when I couldn’t sleep or drink, I would listen, or half listen, to long stories about the days of his youth.
Finally winter folded itself around us. In the darkness of the third watch I would lie in bed, still half drunk and unable to sleep, and hear the steady hissing of falling snow. In the mornings I woke with a dull throbbing in my ears and a queasy stomach. Sometimes when I opened my gauze-covered window and leaned out on the carved sill to watch the slow growth of the icicles from the eaves, the cold wind braced me up and I determined that I would soon take my rightful place as a general’s daughter: I had only to seek out my mother in my father’s house..
But how was I to accomplish that? I didn’t have the freedom of the city, nor any idea where the house would be. I knew I should try to get some word of that particular Li family from our guests. But not just yet, I thought, staring out at the white roofs. I’ll do it soon, but not just yet.
One such morning not long before New Year –1 remember it was unusually sunny and still, and the east light clarified my icicles as unstrained wine clears when the lees settle –1 roused myself early. Once again I checked to see if by some chance my blood had begun to flow in the night. Once again it hadn’t, and again I started to put the thought of the future aside; it was surprisingly easy to forget, most of the time. But I knew the pregnancy would soon show beyond any hope of hiding it, so on this day I found a resolve within me, as if it had been waiting all along, the way the winter sunlight waits for the clouds to break.
It was time to find the family of my father. I corrected myself: my own family. Surely someone visiting Felicity Hall would know the whereabouts of the parents of the General Li who had died on duty in Khotan. All I had learned about managing a conversation was bound to serve me in good stead.
Just then Mama Lu, snug in her fur-lined jacket, bustled into the room, preceded by a strong smell of roses. ‘It’s time, dear Bordermoon,’ she said to me, ‘that we took care of your little problem.’ Her round mouth set itself in an oily smile.
I hated the name she had given me. Bordermoon. It had the vulgarly overblown air of the woman herself. She liked it because she thought it went nicely with the names of the two farmgirls she had recently taken into Felicity Hall as apprentices, dubbing them Luna and Crescent. She liked it, too, because it would appeal to men with a taste for the melancholic poems about the frontier lands that were all the rage. And, I had decided, she liked it because it made a virtue of my foreign appearance, which I suppose she looked down upon, though she had never commented on it.
‘You know, dear,’ she said, smiling again and holding out a cup, ‘I pay close attention to my girls’ health, and I don’t like it when they’re careless. The moon has run its course and more since that Persian dumped you on me. Maybe when you’re older you can indulge yourself in a child, though I shouldn’t recommend it. Now drink this down.’
I knew from stories at Lutegarden what kind of drink it was and knew that there was nothing I could do but swallow it. Some bitter oil with a leafy smell was mixed with the wine; I still taste it sometimes. Mama Lu turned and left. My stomach ached at once, and soon fire and icy winds raced by turns across my skin. I wanted to vomit but couldn’t, so I sat weak-legged by the window and waited, watching the steady trickle of meltwater off the icicles. A thin needle seemed to stir deep in my belly. The pain at least was familiar at first, but after some hours it grew worse than any cramping I had felt before. I began to bleed, first slowly, then more heavily. My skin grew hotter and the cloths I used each month soaked through. At last the flow of blood sent me racing dizzily
to the privy in the far corner of the courtyard. It wouldn’t stop.
It was Crescent and wide-eyed Luna who found me hours later and washed me off and helped me back to bed. The stopped-up blood of three months had poured out between my legs, taking with it the thing that would have been a child, and leaving me too weak to walk.
I stayed in my room for twenty days, recovering from the poison and the lingering bleeding, then lost in feverish visions as my body suffered from the great imbalance of its vital forces. I hardly noticed the turning of the year. I wondered why Mama Lu had left me alone after she gave me the drink, until Amber told me that Mama Lu had lost a pregnant singer once to the herb, a sweet-faced thing called Charmeur whom she had loved like a real daughter. She had been afraid I too would die, and so refused to let herself care.
Yet all the time I was in bed. Mama Lu made sure the maids looked after me. She herself came to see me once the worst had passed, sometimes bringing me healthful powders mixed with broth, sometimes scolding me for a careless pregnancy and urging me to get well. This was not so different from the way I regarded myself then: unsure whether I was the helpless victim of someone else’s actions or was responsible for all that had happened. It didn’t seem that there might be any third way to understand things, so I lay there unresisting as she placed her plump hand on my forehead or shook her bracelets angrily.
I can remember, dimly, the sound of fireworks on the last night of the year, and how I wept because I felt so hot and weak. The fever left me for the last time on the day little Crescent skipped in with a toy oriole that Walleye had bought from a pedlar and sent in for me. People played with them at the solar festival of Spring’s Beginning, early in the first month; I could only look at the little bird and imagine its sweet song, but I did that many times.
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