Silk Road

by Jeanne Larsen

  Passing by Boat Through

  Shamanka Gorge

  Up at dawn, where Goddess Mountain

  rises, veiled with mists.

  And through the gorge: the narrowed river

  ripples, watered silk.

  Rosy wisps of wavering vapours

  recall her gauzy dress.

  Long-drawn wails of downstream winds

  cry her lover’s cries.

  The story’s old. She’s fragrant clouds,

  she’s evening’s shifting rain.

  The gibbons howl for a long-dead king,

  after one night’s love bereft.

  What speaks here? Iridescent haze,

  wild apes, and water’s surge?

  Or today’s dream of that dream-reft ghost,

  old stories’ musky flux?

  PARROT

  SPEAKS:

  20

  Our boat took us on through the third gorge, where the river had found a broader way for itself, though whirlpools and submerged boulders lurked even there. On the bank above us stood the temple of drowned Chu Yuan, the ancient poet and statesman whose talents were neglected by his king. Feng knew quite a lot about it all. His delicate fingers clenched while he told the tale, as if he felt the story was his own. He had heard that a giant fish swallowed the body and carried it off to Cavegarden Lake. Listening to this, I grew impatient, thinking that my mother waited for me not much farther downstream. Dragonrill hung heavy at my side, a reminder that the pace of my travel was not mine to decide.

  Just past Chu Yuan’s temple, Feng told us, on the north bank, a stream called Fragrant Creek carved through its own high-water depositions and entered the muddy Yangzi. Here, he said, the imperial concubine Wang Jao-jun had long ago dropped a pearl from her headdress into the water while washing her incomparable face. A pearl in the water. The yearning for my mother rose again.

  And then the river fell from the last constricting confines of rock. The floodplain opened wide around us, and we thought we would stop awhile, to rest from our passage through those bewitching, formidable gorges. When we left the Moon Lady’s palace, the moonmaid had murmured to Feng that he would fulfil his pledge to find a substitute stone just east of the third gorge. So when the little boat drifted to a village on the north bank and grounded itself on a shoal, we knew we had reached a place where we had business. Thoughts of Sparker forced aside my longing to free my mother, and I stepped up with the others onto the bank.

  The keeper of the little village inn split his greasy face with a grin when we four walked in. I had grown used to people’s responses to our unconventionality, but his was different. He gave no sign of heeding our swords. He didn’t ogle Baby, or cock an eyebrow at the sight of two roaming warrior women. He rushed over with a pitcher of warm wine – a gift for the noble strangers, he said – and made haste to acquaint himself with Feng.

  ‘Well, sir, I see you are a man of learning as well as valour,’ he said, after some conversation. ‘I suppose you’ve studied the classics and suchlike?’ He spoke with the accents of the southland, giving his words a countrified twist I had seldom heard.

  While Feng described his education modestly, his eyes revealed his pleasure at being understood to be a scholar. His experience since we climbed Mothbrow Mountain had erased the bombast of the Wizard Mimesis; he wanted only what any educated young man of the Tang would want, the respect accorded a learned servant of the state.

  ‘You know, sir,’ said the innkeeper, leaning forward across the table to refill Feng’s cup, then waving a hand towards the rest of us to indicate that we might help ourselves, ‘our little village needs you.’

  Feng beamed. He made haste to explain that he travelled in fulfilment of a vow and could not accept a teaching post. Yet I saw how attractive the idea was to him. Tutor Feng, just like his father: a position more humble than that of the government official he had hoped to be but one far more suited to his true temperament than charlatan wizard, or arranger of entertainments for the rich and idle.

  The innkeeper explained he had something else in mind. ‘It’s only temporary, sir, and it would be a boon to us. The Dragonboat Festival’s almost upon us, you know, and we need a headman for one of our boats.’ He shrugged in a worldly way;

  he’d heard enough travellers’ talk to know the southland was regarded as half civilized, heathenish, not really quite Chinese. ‘The old folks say it’s best if he’s a stranger and an educated man. You’d bring joy to their hearts if you would honour us. And the good ladies, too.’ He quickly turned to the three of us with offers of a comfortable room until the festival day.

  We were weary from our battles, and travel, and more than one good deed. True, courtesy required us to grant this request for aid, even though it was not in a chivalrous wanderer’s usual line. True, too, that we reckoned such an offer part of the Moon Lady’s plans: the boat had brought us here. Yet our fatigue alone was enough to make us stay.

  The next morning, before we ate, Second Daughter whispered to me of her pleasure at the prospect of a few days’ rest and an interesting festival. ‘A friend of my father’s once told him something of this Dragonboat affair – just tales he’d picked up in Jia-jou, he’d never seen it. They say the day’s a potent one for making love charms.’ She glanced at me through lowered lashes. ‘And that a child born then will kill its father.’

  We had arrived on the third of the fifth month; the preparations for the festival, on the fifth, were already under way. Feng soon found himself out on the river at the head of fifty men in a slender boat called Lunar Aqua. The crew of a second, known as Solar Fire, paddled fiercely up and down nearby. Other boats practised some way off, along the opposite shore. The villagers scanned the sky for rain clouds, and talked excitedly of how the race would bring the moisture needed for their paddy fields. I felt how different they were from the people of the north; their very expressions, their ways of moving, sometimes puzzled me.

  The morning of the fourth, the innkeeper’s wife – Mistress Hu – hesitantly invited Second Daughter, Baby, and me to join in the preparations. Her sentences bore heavy accents of the middle Yangzi and she used more odd dialect words than her husband. Most of the villagers did; as host of an inn he must have learned how to tailor his speech to strangers passing through. I wondered at her shyness, then remembered how unusual we must have seemed to her: two women wearing swords, and one who spoke mostly with her hands.

  Soon the three of us walked out with Mistress Hu, her daughter-in-law, and her unmarried daughter to the wetlands and the nearby hills. The day warmed us with the southland’s heat. We gathered iris for the festival wine, marsh orchids to be brewed for special bath water, and artemisia to tie with multicoloured threads to the doorway for keeping the spirits of war and malaria away. All afternoon we single women busied ourselves with fragrant blossoms while Mistress Hu and her daughter-in-law steamed triangular cakes of sticky rice wrapped up in bamboo leaves. Near day’s end, she gave us bright silk amulets to wear and painted the sign for ‘Monarch’ in sulphur yellow on her little grandson’s forehead, to protect him from poison and from snakes.

  ‘Mind you don’t rub that off tonight. Little Tiger,’ she said to the pudgy boy. ‘It’s the start of summer, you know. The year will turn soon and the yin will rise.’ She clasped him to her soft bosom. ‘I want to keep my darling safe.’ He laughed smugly and ran off to show his maternal cousins in the house next door.

  Supper was casual and hurried. No other travellers came to the inn. Feng and the innkeeper arrived sweaty but exuberant from their rowing. The young daughter, Sweetflag, turned her face down and said nothing; the contrast to her high-strung laughter while we picked the flowers impressed me. Then I decided it was no more than the presence of a strange man, for from time to time she stole a glance at Feng. The rest of us wore what we’d had on all day, but she had already bathed in the orchid water and put on a loose gown that must have been her best. Just before darkness fell her mother made a fuss of fixi
ng honey clover in Sweetflag’s damp, glossy hair.

  Feng bathed next, laughing as he left to do so. He exclaimed that he would catch a chill bathing in the open evening air the way the innkeeper had insisted, even so close to the solstice. ‘Ah, but the good wine will keep me warm,’ he said as he stepped from the room where we had eaten, and I saw how red his face had gone.

  Later, when the meaning of all this had been made clear to us. Second Daughter and I decided what must have happened. Though Second Daughter remained a virgin, she was the daughter of a farmer and spoke of such things more easily than I suppose gentlewomen do. I compared it to the wiles – the necessary wiles – of courtesans, and wondered once again if such things are trickery, or women’s way of using the only power allowed them, or some force greater than either men or women. To the villagers it must have been a holy thing.

  Feng had the best room in the inn; after bathing, he retired there for the night. Soon after, Sweetflag, all trembling and blushes, slipped past our door – Second Daughter saw her –with more wine, to wait upon him. Feng was the scholar-stranger who on the morrow would draw baleful influences away from the village. Sweetflag was the maiden who would send him to the river suffused with tender aching, as the priests of olden Chu had gone out in their half-forgotten rituals, to tryst with a fickle deity. I think she had been carefully instructed in how to excite him to an ardour he would carry with him through the ceremony to come. Touch him so,’ the village women would have said. ‘Allow your skirt to fall a little open. Say this, or this, brush your nipples unseen against his back, let him glimpse your body’s heat. Then quickly leave.’

  Certainly in the morning the three of us saw the strength of his new feeling for her, though none of this was spoken of. Baby was remote, turned inwards, as she hadn’t been since that night on Beyond-the-Clouds when Second Daughter killed the monster Nagadharma. Feng too kept silent. The innkeeper’s face shone jovially, while Mistress Hu seemed ready to burst with excitement, for all her protectiveness towards Little Tiger. The boy ran about shouting and waving a magnolia branch, a glutinous rice grain stuck to one of his chubby cheeks.

  The day grew warm before we arrived at the riverbank. The villagers had put up reed mats as awnings and sat beneath them to eat and drink, or strolled about to talk with friends. Scarlet banners and garlands of pomegranate blossoms decked the long boats and their dragon-headed prows. Soon some kind of singing contest began. Then, forming a procession, we marched with the hundred boatmen – all the young men of the village, and the strongest of the middle-aged – to the sound of gongs. Feng came last of all, striding side by side with a curly haired outlander who had been staying in the village elder’s house. Like Feng, he looked eager, and a little dazed.

  The boatmen took their places, stepping carefully to sit in pairs in the narrow boats. Lunar Aqua veered and dipped as Feng took his single seat behind the prow, and the drummer in the stem struck his first rhythmic beats. Many of the people waved flower wands like Little Tiger’s. Finally, the village elder was rowed out in a small boat almost to midriver, where he dropped bamboo-wrapped rice cakes into the water, offering them to drowned Chu Yuan. The boats put out from shore.

  Feng nodded his head towards me in a farewell reminiscent of his earlier bows. But he was touched now with a new, abstracted air of dedication. Earlier, at the inn, he had taken Baby’s hand for one instant and murmured something that sounded like a request for her forgiveness. That made little sense to me: what gentleman begs pardon for neglecting an unofficial concubine? Now, as the drumbeats quickened and the oars flashed, he fixed a lingering, entranced gaze on Sweetflag. She hung her head. Then the boat carried him so far out I could no longer see his face.

  Solar Fire and Lunar Aqua joined six other dragonboats from two villages across the wide river. The day grew hotter, though a fresh breeze had sprung up. The boats paired off as if at random, vying feverishly for a while, then dropping off when no one gained an obvious victory. The races had no clear beginning, no marked finishing line. ‘My father’s friend heard it was like this,’ Second Daughter whispered as we stood in the crowd admiring the distant, gleaming backs of the boatmen. ‘They’ll paddle back and forth and back again. The boats look unstable, don’t they? Maybe no one wants to take a chance of spilling.’

  Iris wine passed among us, groups of unmarried girls and boys challenged one another in song, and a sense of anticipation grew. Or perhaps it was just the steamy air, so different from the arid northwest, or Chang-an, or the high basin of Shu.

  To distract myself, I began a conversation with Mistress Hu. She was curious about Baby, who had wandered off towards the singing, and began to ask about her, where she came from, how she got her peculiar name.

  The name, I explained, was a Chinese substitute for what she had once been called in another language; Bao-bei – Baby – she’d been dubbed west of Dun-huang, ‘Precious’ if you took it literally, but the fond nickname of ten thousand babies. ‘Do you know the words?’ I asked her, a bit bored, headachy, and no doubt showing off. ‘Bao meaning “jewel”, and bei like “cowrie shell”.’ And then I added, feigning more interest than I felt just then, ‘Do you use the same nickname down here in the south?’

  ‘ “Cowrie shell”,’ mused Mistress Hu. She caught her breath. ‘Sweetflag!’ she called, and her daughter came closer, careful to keep her mother between us, as if she feared me. ‘Sweetflag, give me that purple treasure Granny Gu lent you for, ah, last night.’

  Blushing, Sweetflag took from her bosom a tiny jade-white seashell, a polished tinge edging its single slitlike opening, like heavy lips suffused with blood. Reluctant though she seemed at first to display it to a stranger, she held it out on her palm with an air of newfound pride. Shells like this one circulated as money in the wild lands farther south, I knew, and they were said to stud the gateways of underwater palaces.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said politely. ‘So you call it “purple treasure”?’

  Sweetflag drew back.

  ‘Ah,’ said Mistress Hu. ‘Yes. It’s wonderful what peculiar names you travellers come up with for ordinary things.’

  I might have called my own names ordinary and hers peculiar, I thought a little sourly, but I made some empty pleasantry instead of saying this. The grey thunderheads piling up beyond the farther shore seemed to be pressing against my temples.

  Baby returned, and now, with the afternoon at its height, I could see that the suppressed agitation of the crowd animated her round eyes. She seemed to sense my mood, for she stared down into her wine cup.

  One swift shriek: she sprang to her feet and ran, the cup grasped still in both hands, to the riverbank before us. ‘He sinks!’ she cried out, and dashed the fragrant spirits into the Yangzi.

  Heads jerked round. Voices hushed. My eyes met Second Daughter’s, and we rushed to Baby.

  Ten pairs of hands stopped each of us. We might have drawn our starswords, but how could we, against defenceless villagers who did her no harm?

  Then there was something else to think of. The hands dropped. All of us on shore stood unmoving, staring out across the river. A dragonboat had overturned.

  Men were flailing in the water. The other boats kept away. No one, we learned later, dared attempt to rescue a drowning boatman, for the gods of the river might take the rescuer as their sacrifice instead. One by one, the drummer and forty-eight oarsmen made their way to us – our shore was the nearer – but I knew before I heard it said that it was Lunar Aqua that had tipped over, and I felt it in my heart that Feng had drowned.

  PART FOUR

  On the

  Fifth Day

  of the

  Fifth

  Month

  The fifth day of the fifth month: for intercourse, inauspicious; for casting mirrors out of bronze, most puissant; for love charms, excellent – a good charm may be made with earthworms one has caused to copulate this day. Cut a magpie’s tongue out on this festival and the bird will speak. An official appointed in
the fifth month never loses his position – good news if he likes the post. Long ago, on Doublefiveday, the body of a royal minister in the delta lands was wrapped in a sack of fishskin and thrown into the Yangzi.

  Seagem paces slowly through nacreous corridors, enjoying her solitude, thinking about these things. More lore, something Seagem has only lately learned in one of her talks with her mother-in-law: at noon on the fifth of the fifth, one may make a solar-follow, the reflector-mirror that takes fire from the sun, companion to the squarepearl, a shell cup for collecting the waters of the moon. Once more she sees the necessary, beautiful equilibrium of yin and yang.

  She thinks of her beloved Princeling and frowns a pretty frown. She cannot conceive of the interchange of yin and yang as a struggle, though up in the human realm the country 303

  people think it so. She walks out through a gateway trimmed with white-and-purplish shells, into a garden of shadowy waterweeds drifting higher than her head, growing towards the light that filters down from the distant surface.

  Someone else wanders along those sun-dappled pathways. The vermilion dragon, the Dragon Monarch’s younger brother, celebrates today. The fuss the farmers are making throughout the southland stirs up something deep in him. Despite his nostalgia for the more splendid masques of bygone times, he is unusually at ease. ‘Ah, niece!’ he says, careful for once to modulate his voice. ‘Well met! Well met this glorious day.’

  Seagem represses a half-gasp, inclines her head, and raises it to meet his bulging eyes. Her years of virtuous tremulousness have ended, she tells herself. She has seen how seriously the women – or females, one might say – are taken here. Her mother-in-law admires the tensile strength of her calligraphy, has told her she is a clever learner and that her husband’s fretful demands for her attention are something he will outgrow. Besides, in spite of his impetuosity, her uncle has a kindly side. She thinks of the times he has assumed the guise of a red-gold carp to see how her daughter fared; perhaps it was no more than a lark for him, but she is grateful nonetheless.