‘Welcome, sseekers,’ the monk said breathily. ‘Thiss one is called Nagadharma and will take you in his care. Thiss one sserves The Great Teacher of Illusion, but…’ When he smiled I saw he had only his two front teeth. ‘No ssermon now, only resst and ssomething hot to eat.’
So we followed him to a small hut, deep in a tangle of shrubs and wind-bent trees. ‘The evening bell has rung. The other monks make their final meditation and prepare to ssleep. The temple gate will sstay locked until the pre-dawn prayers begin. Thiss lodge awaits late-arriving travellers. Here, you may find peace.’ Again he smiled his gummy, otherworldly smile.
One by one, we ducked and entered the lodge, where a single oil-lamp flickered. The last one in, I turned for a moment to gaze past a fretwork of pale pink petals on the branch of a mountain pear, towards the rising jade-white moon.
Second Daughter and I now wore the swordswomen’s clothes that had awaited us on the enchanted boat: silver scabbards hanging from matched sashes of scarlet silk, knee-high boots into which we tucked our trousers – hers moon white and mine deepwater indigo – and round our heads plain turbans such as fisherwomen wear. Baby’s new bodice flashed with lilac threads, and her skirts swirled darkest crimson. Like the rest of us, she had hung a pilgrim’s bottle-gourd at her waist.
Only Feng, dad all in black, jade-handled dagger at his belt, dressed like a man. So when Nagadharma brought our supper in from some unseen kitchen, he offered the first bowl of steaming noodles, fragrant with pink peppercorns and sesame oil, to Feng. ‘Remember that thiss world’ss a phantassmagoria, good ssir, and eat,’ he said. Quickly then, he passed bowls round to the rest of us.
The favours life visits upon men do not arrive without a price. Feng was the first to raise his chopsticks towards his mouth. One drop of the dripping noodles’ broth upon his tongue, the good monks told us later, and he would have changed within the hour into a serpent-demon, held in thrall by the monstrous Nagadharma.
Of all of us, Feng came closest to that fate. His lips parted, his neck thrust slightly forward – and Baby slapped chopsticks, noodles, bowl and all out of his hand and onto the floor. Her round eyes rolled briefly up into her head. Her normally watchful, self-protecting face took on a look of authority and power I had never seen before.
Feng spluttered, too shocked to say a word.
‘Stay!’ Baby shouted to Nagadharma, who had whirled about and stooped to pass through the single door. ‘Sire of the Rain, I command you by your rightful name. Assume your true shape, and reveal yourself to us.’ Then she slumped down in a comer, holding her head in her hands. The words had come, for the first time, easily from her lips, and something about her voice – was it only hearing the accents of Khotan about her Chinese words? – put me in mind of Nanny in one of her rare serious angers.
Nagadharma, barely outside the doorway, dropped to the ground at Baby’s invocation. His body stretched out long behind him. White scales replaced his saffron robes. Horns like trees of coral sprouted from his snaky head and his tongue flickered past his two teeth. We hadn’t seen a single snake on Mothbrow Mountain, yet here on Beyond-the-Clouds we had been taken in by a cobra monster, a malevolent breathy-voiced emanation in monkish guise.
A noxious odour filled the little lodge. With a piercing hiss, Nagadharma summoned other snakes, who crawled out from under rocks and fallen logs, heading for their master.
Alas, those who devote themselves to telling tales, composing lyrics, and contemplating the wonders of the written word are often slow to rise to action! As I marvelled at the power of Baby’s words, as Feng rubbed his eyes in stupefied amazement. Second Daughter drew Moonsabre from its sheath and, rushing at the monster, let loose a battle cry that rang among the stunted trees.
The giant cobra reared up, towering five times Second Daughter’s height. Fiery red, sulphur yellow, pallid as a fish’s belly, the smaller snakes slithered towards her, but fearlessly she fixed all her attention on her real foe. Moonsabre gleamed in the light from the Lady’s crystalline sky palace. Second Daughter swung it as adroitly as one who had walked the martial way since infancy. Again and again, the keen blade rang on the monster’s colourless scales. Again and again, Nagadharma’s head bobbed and weaved, seeking an opening through which he might sink his venomous fangs into Second Daughter’s flesh.
I froze. Feng knelt beside Baby and stroked her hair. In that moment, I quietly named him coward. Now the memory makes me ashamed; evidence of his courage would come, and who can say it is not braver – and wiser – for a man to kneel and tend to a concubine perhaps endangered by some oracular spirit than it is for him to attack a monster with a dagger when others have been given swords?
I ran towards Second Daughter, who by now had fought Nagadharma to a spot some forty feet from the lodge. Dragonrill cut the head off several smaller snakes as I approached the battle. Then Second Daughter saw her moment, lunged directly at the cobra’s open mouth, and thrust her blade hilt-deep down his blood-dark throat. Her hand snatched itself free an instant before the fangs closed. She danced backwards as drops of venom rained down, searing the underbrush.
The monster fell. Branches cracked. The noxious fumes swirled round us, thicker than ever, and the thrall-snakes turned and vanished into their hiding places. Second Daughter pulled Moonsabre free and wiped it clean on a tuft of grass. Then she who never cried buried her face in my shoulder and wept.
In the morning, the true monks listened to our story and rejoiced that the abomination had finally been slain. With blessings and promises of prayers on our behalf, they sent us on our way.
So the boat carried us down the Min to the great Yangzi River. Gliding easily, the enchanted boulder avoided treacherous sandspits and the combers running with the cross-currents where submerged rocks hid. Hawks rode updrafts overhead; egrets waded in the shoals. We saw a small boat, heading upriver under sail, caught in a vortex, whirling helplessly, unable to leave until the Yangzi let it go. We passed terraced slopes and hilltop pagodas, passed sweating quarrymen and dreamers panning for gold and families standing hip-deep in the water with their fishing nets.
We stopped where fancy took us, staying on a day if our blades proved to be of use to someone, though we accepted no payment but hot wine. The magic was upon us. We rode it like a river, or a storyteller’s flow of words.
In larger towns like Rong-jou, where we joined the Yangzi, we left our boat moored, giving some boy a few coppers for watching it. Then we would seek out the comfort of an inn. Feng found men to bet with him on the fall of the bamboo sticks, though the compulsion of his wasted days in Chang-an did not return. In fact, he always seemed to win a bit more than he lost. I played my lute when the mood came on me, and Baby, who daily gained strength and pride, sometimes chose to dance. Dishes clattered in those smoky provincial inns, and the locals’ approving shouts rang through warm smells of savoury pork and frying chillies as she leapt and turned. The innkeepers never minded the coins tossed in our direction, for they made as much or more in increased sales.
Baby was not the only one to change. As Second Daughter travelled farther from her father’s house and the town where she had been reckoned nearly worthless (not male, nor eldest, nor beautiful, though some conceded she was a hard worker), her assurance grew. The pockmarks never left her face, yet they became less noticeable, even though she had left off using rouge. She learned – better than I, it seemed – how to balance friendship with reserve around Baby and quickly caught hold of the flying significations of the little dancer’s hands. The two spent long hours at the rear sweep, though the boat nearly always guided itself, pointing out to one another interesting objects in the panorama along the shore.
Feng’s changes came with greater difficulty. His glance fell more often in my direction. He no longer assumed the airs of paterfamilias, or scholar-official, or wizard to apprentice. With Sparker gone and Second Daughter keeping Baby company –and me changing from the hesitant lad Skywhistle to the swordswoman Heavenglaive – the moods of the
group were not the same. I think he viewed his actions at Beyond-the-Clouds as cowardice, for he retreated into himself for the next few days.
I felt a lonely jealousy of Second Daughter’s casual camaraderie with Baby, but Feng seemed not to mind that, at least. He and Baby had slipped off for privacy less and less over the winter in the Brocade City, and hardly at all once we left there. Between the two of them a distant concord had developed, a tenuous yet sympathetic bond, but little else.
I did make more poems, as the Moon Lady told me to, though I would have done so anyway now that I had the chance. Travel in a boat that slips downstream is leisure to one who has walked the desert sands and the difficult road to Shu.
On the third day after Second Daughter killed the cobra monster, we stopped at a cove out of sight of any village, beaching our boat on brown river-laid silt. Baby kindled a cooking fire – she had taken a liking to that task – while Second Daughter brought out the cabbage and dried bean curd and began to wash the rice. Rather than stand uselessly watching, I asked Feng if I might join him on his stroll. Unexpectedly, he smiled broadly, the first time since Sparker’s transformation. Now that he no longer knitted them together in grandfatherly style, I saw again how long and fine his eyebrows were and the liveliness of the eyes beneath.
We walked into the bamboo grove feathering the shore. ‘I like it when you smile like that,’ I said. Then I blushed: to speak so directly to a man when it was not the coy boldness of a courtesan’s flirtation! But he merely looked at me for a moment, then lowered his refined, thoughtful-looking face. A blue-grey bird called happysparrow banked past us, russet tail fanned out, to land in the shallows of a stream across the way.
We soon came to a grassy meadow. The air was valley-warm that late afternoon near the fourth month’s end. Beside a glossy-leaved clump of clove-daphne bushes, I asked him to lie down with me. The pleasure, and the comfort against loneliness, that we gave to each other there were not new to me, though I felt the joy of learning the lexicon of a new lover’s body. But something else was new: without coquetry, or any aim of seduction, I had been the one who proposed what we did. I was not the waiting one some other stirred into desire. I was not the entertainer who needed a patron and so sent roundabout messages of receptivity. I wanted, and I asked.
Why we did not continue as lovers I can’t quite say. It may have been the magic. Or it may have been the withdrawal we had for some time been making, separately, into our selves. In any case, the energies we might have spent in passion simply seemed to shift to different channels, as a river will.
An easy peace established itself between the two of us, though we never spoke of what had passed. I suppose it had to do with the new courses all our lives had taken since Dragongate Cave. We still lived in the human world, yet the boat, my sword and Second Daughter’s, even the jade-handled dagger the Moon Lady had given Feng – these things pulled us towards another realm. The way of chivalrous wanderers is not the way that Nephrite had chosen as Lady of the Tao, nor the hermit recluse’s way that Sparker had longed for. But they are not without similarity.
And there was much for us to do. From Dun-huang to the capital, and from there to Shu, the suzerainty of Great Tang protected the people from lawlessness, even during famine. But the rugged mountain land above the gorges was not entirely pacified. The wide, muddy Yangzi carried us to more than one adventure.
Just before reaching the perilous gorges, we stopped at a tiny riverside settlement – only three or four families – not far from Wan-jou. Feng and I took the path to the nearest house, to see if they had fresh vegetables to sell, while the other two began to cook the rice. Outside the compound’s courtyard, I felt Dragon-rill start to vibrate. Laying a hand on Feng’s arm, I put my finger to my lips. Alert now, all my senses open, I still saw nothing but the blue- and yellow-green of crops in the red-brown fields. Then I heard an infant’s cry’, sudden, as if someone had slapped it, and then the cry cut off.
We were too late to save that child. Bursting through the compound gate, we saw one of five bandits wiping blood from his sword. Shrieks and sobs from the farm family mingled with our shouts, and the bandits’, and the clash of blades. Almost before the bandits noticed us, Dragonrill dispatched the one who had killed the baby, and Feng quickly sank his dagger into the heart of their stocky leader. I say Dragonrill did the killing, and that was how it seemed as I fought, though later I shuddered at the thought of ending any life, even a murderer’s, and did not sleep well for many nights.
Second Daughter never quite decided whether it was the sound of battle that drew her to our aid, or a trembling in Moonsabre that responded to its twin. But she joined us in time to kill the last bandit, the strongest, who had cut my cheek, giving me the scar I wear today. I came to think of that thin white line as an emblem marking a part of me as always Heavenglaive. Back then, once the fight had ended and I had time to examine its gaping redness in Baby’s little mirror, it seemed a sign of my mortality.
.As for Feng, he had slit the throat of one bandit, after the family’s eldest son had valiantly knocked the man senseless with a hoe, then flung himself past the scimitar of the fourth, whom I had wounded, to administer the coup de grace. We both stared stupidly as the grateful family crowded round us, and I saw his long-fingered scholar’s hands begin to shake.
Baby must have been puzzled when Second Daughter dropped the rice pot and dashed off; certainly she was hampered, once she too heard the shouting, by her skirts. She arrived as the last two bandits released their final screams. Shock protected me from memory, but Baby must have travelled instantly to that spring day when the Tibetans raided the village outside Khotan and slaughtered all her family.
‘Dead,’ she said. ‘All dead.’ I heard the words, and heard that they were not in the Chinese she had always spoken when possessed by spirits, but in a childish-sounding Khotanese.
Yet I hardly took notice of her then. The distorted bodies, the red-splashed courtyard, the sobbing of the dead child’s mother, all seemed far away, as if I stared down at the scene from a lofty mountaintop, or a cloud. Later, I learned that Second Daughter had rushed to Baby’s side, only to see that she seemed quite normal. As she was at last.
The old grandmother of the household insisted that we come inside, insisted on serving us tea herself. One of her daughters-in-law rushed around bringing out some food for us. The tea in fact smacked of its cheapness, yet only water in the desert was ever so delicious. I turned to Baby and asked her in Chinese if she was all right.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I am,’ and smiled, startling me into laughter. Second Daughter laughed too, and even Feng broke from his daze to stare at her. In the giddiness of crisis past, she sprang to her feet and gave a dancer’s fancy curtsy. Then she spied the mother of the slaughtered infant, mourning in a corner, and hastily sat down again. A salt-sweet metallic taste tainted my pleasure in the tea when I saw the mother’s face, and I only shook my head when the grandmother, wishing to ease our sudden bleakness, touched my sleeve and offered another cup to ‘Kind Mistress Heavenglaive’.
‘No, thank you, madam,’ Baby said, when the grandmother turned to her, and again I was amazed. Baby’s words shaped themselves oddly when they left her lips – as Ghalib’s few phrases in Chinese had. She spoke again from time to time over the next few days, though her brief sentences never sounded fluent. She still used mostly gestures with our group, and in the larger world preferred silence, or a dance. No one pressed her to do otherwise. But that bloody scene at the farmhouse opened up something in her.
Two days later we passed White Emperor City. The clean-cut shadows of the first gorge seemed to dispel the last sickening taste of blood that had clung to my lips and mouth since the battle. We stopped for the night just upstream from Goddess Mountain, at the beginning of the second gorge, Shamanka itself.
As we neared the river’s great narrows, we had begun to see scattered groves of orange trees on the slopes and plumes of reddish grass taller than a fu
ll-grown man. Fewer bamboo grew there and no plantains. Desert-born, I still stared astounded at the constant expanse of water, and listened to it sliding by, and saw how it gave life all along its banks. Long flights of steps ran down from towns perched above the floodline. Old women squatted on the lowest steps to do the washing, or to fill pails with water for their thatched-roof homes.
We might have climbed such a stairway, and stayed the night in the little town on the north bank that overlooked the upstream entrance to the gorge. But fearing the rip currents from the tributary river beside the town, we decided to cross to the south bank before nightfall and make camp on the last bit of easy incline before the cliffs. Besides, all of us seemed to feel a pull away from human habitation that night. We woke to see Goddess Mountain in dawn’s stillness and made our cautious way among the twelve peaks of the gorge, accompanied by the eerie wails of long-armed gibbons concealed in the trees of the remotest slopes.
Turning to look back as the current pulled us past Goddess Mountain, I saw the weird pillarlike rock high in the shadows of its peak. The local people say the rock embodies the deity of the mountain and the gorge, protectress of the ships that thread their way through the walls cleft by the river. I remembered all I could from poems about the goddess that I’d heard recited by guests at Felicity Hall. Nearly everyone who came there composed some retelling of the famous tale: the shimmering beauty of the sacred woman when she coalesces from the vapours, her appearance to the king of ancient Chu, their one night of love, his lifelong yearning, the echoes of his woe.
Despite the loveliness of the place, being there was not at all like meeting face-to-face with the Moon Lady in her palace. Perhaps the primordial goddess of the mountain and the gorge had aged too far beneath the weight of history to show herself directly. It seemed to me that where she lived now was in all those poems. That afternoon, the water easing slick beneath the boat, I composed my own. I thought that nearing this elusive sacred woman had some connection with Baby’s newfound speech – and with the words I’d said to Feng not long before, when in that valley meadow I asked him to lie down.
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