As for Bruce McLennan, sometimes as the weeks went by he caught himself glancing at her and wondering, ‘Why did I buy her?’ The only answer he allowed himself was, ‘At home I have servants. A laird should have someone to attend him.’ He had obeyed an impulse, the random, greedy impulse that makes a man buy something just because he can.
But why this one, why not some strong, big-foot girl or young lad who would be of more practical use? Deep down he sensed a dark mystery in it. Deep down, where his feelings lay as twisted and out of shape as the girl’s feet, was a connection between this little Mi-Ki and his children’s voices, cut short long ago. Now, instead of his own children, he owned the child of some other man, some dead foreigner whose children had, however wretchedly, survived. McLennan owned her and he could do as he liked with her. It was a warped way of expressing what could not otherwise be expressed – the fundamental loss that can never be made up, and so must be compared to something small and contemptible, not a loss at all. The fact that she was damaged goods somehow locked into that need.
There was one old soldier who tried to get to know the foreign devil with the round eyes and hair the colour of fire. His name was Li-wu and he was different from the others. He was something of a philosopher, both more learned and more curious than the other men. They just saw the foreigner as a sort of tame monster, a useful fighter. Li-wu wanted to know about him. And he was drawn through pity, but later fondness, to the little girl who attended him.
So he sat near them in the evenings and tried to teach the foreigner more words so they could talk. He even taught him some writing. Bruce McLennan found this interesting because he liked to draw, and Mi-Ki writing was like drawing pictures. He thought the characters were intriguing, but faintly absurd – why so many? Why did each ‘picture’ stand for an object or concept? Though scarcely literate in his own language, he knew his alphabet and that seemed to him a better system. But he learned, in order to save himself from idleness and boredom.
Peony watched this from her place at her master’s side. Sometimes she would copy the characters, drawing them with a pointed stick in the hard earth. When McLennan saw her doing this, he thought, ‘She’s not stupid,’ and felt better about his bargain. At times, when Li-wu praised her gently, he felt a sort of satisfaction. ‘I own her,’ he thought, ‘so I take some pride in her. That’s all.’ That made him feel at ease. It wasn’t as if he took any serious interest in her. But it disturbed him when he saw that Li-wu and the child had something like a friendship. He disliked it when she would smile up at the Chi-na man, and he would talk to her seriously in their own language and pat her shoulder.
Meanwhile, Li-wu learned too, or tried to. But it was very difficult for him to understand about the things ‘Ma-kri-nan’ tried to describe. Watching the foreigner with his fierce, hardhearted ways, Li-wu felt uneasy. He sat with McLennan less, and McLennan noticed.
One evening, after a skirmish in which the old soldier had received a flesh wound, McLennan unexpectedly called Peony. He made her wash Li-wu’s hurt, close it with thorns and wrap it in moss and bamboo leaves. The old man watched Peony’s delicate hands, and thanked her for being gentle. He said to the foreigner, ‘You are lucky to have this little flower.’
He shrugged. ‘No luck,’ he said. ‘I bought her. She’s mine.’
‘Still you are lucky,’ said the old man.
‘She’s just a slave,’ said McLennan, frowning.
‘Even slaves have spirits,’ said Li-wu. ‘Even slaves should be kindly used.’
McLennan stared into the older man’s veiled dark eyes. He couldn’t read them. Was he joking? He wanted to laugh with scorn at the notion that slaves had souls, but something stopped him. He felt uncomfortable. He was not used to feeling uncomfortable and it made him angry.
‘Enough!’ he barked suddenly, making Peony jump with fright. ‘Be off!’ He raised his hand to her and she scuttled away into the shadows of the buffalo shelter where they were.
‘Your spirit is far from enlightenment,’ said Li-wu quietly. And he turned away and lay down to sleep.
McLennan felt uneasy. But he put it from him. What did he care what an old Mi-Ki thought of him? He didn’t belong here, he was just entertaining himself – challenging himself – among these people. He was a Scottish laird! While he lay here in this barn, a fine castle was rising on a hilltop – a castle with battlements, a moat, a drawbridge…
A castle with a dungeon.
Chapter Five
The private armies marched on foot. There were no horses except for the officers. There were days, sometimes weeks, with no fighting, nothing to do. The life McLennan was living seemed to get harder, and, as it became routine, to lack the excitement and satisfaction it had had at first.
He thought it a pity, perhaps, that he had opted for the life of a soldier. As an object of curiosity, he might have inveigled himself into the life of the rich here, the elegant, idle, embellished life. But then he might be shamed by these exquisite Mi-Kis with their wealth, their beautiful houses and objects, their flowered gowns and and tiny-footed women hiding behind fans and screens. Laird or no laird, gold or no gold, he was a rough man, without refinement, and he felt his appearance and manners would be out of place, as he was not out of place, ever, in his own country, where his rank would always be respected.
He was growing weary of Chi-na. As he became more used to the life, the customs and the language – and even the food, at last – he began to fear that he was losing his real self. Forgetting that he was better than these Mi-Kis. Becoming, almost, one of them. He began to think more and more about home.
It was midwinter and the countryside was bleak and cold; the nights were particularly bitter. Once something happened that disturbed McLennan very much. He woke, half-frozen, in the morning to find himself uncovered. He looked around, and saw Peony curled up under his own grimy, padded cotton quilt.
He snatched it off her, roaring, ‘How dare ye, ye thieving wee nanny-goat?’ She cowered, shaking her head piteously. He was about to strike her, when Li-wu intervened.
‘You put it on her yourself,’ he said. ‘I saw you.’
McLennan was shocked to dumbness. In his sleep, had he somehow acted so contrary to himself?
‘Why would I?’ he muttered. ‘One might as well wrap up a dog!’ Li-wu just looked at him. ‘I must ha’ been drunk.’
‘You may be a better man than you think,’ said Li-wu.
McLennan set his jaw. To him, ‘better’ meant ‘soft’ and ‘soft’ meant ‘weak’. He resolved not to drink rice-spirit or millet beer with the other men, if it made him do stupid, unwary things. He took his anger out on Peony, and Li-wu, seeing this, regretted his remarks, and refrained from saying what he was thinking – that McLennan had some feelings for the child that he refused to acknowledge.
Early one morning after a bloody skirmish in which he had received a wound that, while not serious, gave him nauseating pain and a sleepless night, McLennan watched dawn break in a sullen sky and knew he had had enough. He reckoned he had been away for three years. His castle must be nearly finished. It was time to go.
He looked at Peony, curled up under some straw. Should he take her? Her feet were much better now, and she served him well, but on a journey she could be a burden to him. On the other hand, who would make his tea, fetch and carry and tend his wants if he left her here? Fleetingly he thought of how she had washed and anointed and bound up his wound, only yesterday, the elfin touch of her small, gentle fingers… He shook her awake and pulled her upright.
‘Pack, we’re leaving,’ he ordered in a terse undertone.
He pointed to his few belongings. Rubbing her eyes, she stuffed them into his bundle. He jerked his head to the doorway and walked away from the sleeping soldiers.
Peony looked back once. The old soldier, Li-wu, lay asleep. She wanted to say goodbye to him. He had been kind to her. He had taught her more than just a little reading and writing.
He had told her,
‘We pass through this world many times. This hard life will pass. You will have others. In one of them perhaps you will reach Nirvana, where one is free of desires. Be righteous and patient and seek nothing for yourself. Don’t hate your master, even when he ill-treats you; pity him, for he has a young soul, and if I am not mistaken, he has suffered greatly.’
Peony tried to follow this advice. It was easy not to hate McLennan, if for only one reason – he had unbound her feet. She knew that for whatever reason, he’d saved her from a life where every step would have been an agony, and where she would have been something worse than a man’s servant – a man’s plaything. For this she could accept her master and absorb his changing moods and even his occasional blows, which hurt her heart more than her body. For the rest, she learned to stifle fear and not to want anything too much. She tried not to think of herself at all. Now, as ‘Ma-kri-nan’ strode out of the camp, she followed behind, carrying his things on her back.
She couldn’t know that she was leaving her homeland forever.
McLennan and Peony found one of the caravan routes to the west, and waited in a village for several weeks until one came by. Here the local dialect completely defeated the Scotsman and he found himself dependent on the child to communicate all his wants. She ordered his food and invariably tasted it first and even sent it back if it was too spicy or otherwise not to his taste. She arranged their lodgings and made sure that all was clean and comfortable according to what she knew, by now, he liked. Early on she had a serious quarrel with an innkeeper – the man was tightfisted with the tea leaves and served what was little more than hot water.
On this occasion McLennan stood aside and watched as the child stood toe to toe with a man twice her height and harangued him fiercely, flinging the watery brew at his feet. McLennan was astonished. She had always seemed so meek, but now he saw fire in her. In the end the man stepped aside and let Peony make the tea herself. She approached McLennan carrying it, with the light of triumph scarcely hidden in her downcast eyes. For his part he couldn’t hold back a broad smile at this little thing, fighting his battles. He wanted to say something to her – he felt the need to praise her, to thank – but no. The shadow of Li-wu flitted across his mind and was banished. A slave is a slave. She had done no more than her duty.
After several weeks of shared silences which – however hard he tried – were not entirely uncompanionable, the day came when the innkeeper summoned him to the low doorway of the inn. A caravan was coming! At last! McLennan showed his teeth in excitement at the approach of the swaying camels laden with carefully packed boxes and bales of Middle Kingdom treasures, the men, foreigners like himself, trudging beside them. To these cameleer-traders he paid over some of the last of his gold coins to be allowed to join them.
At first they refused to take Peony, showing by signs that she would be a burden and would only die on the way. But McLennan negotiated, and paid more, and after much argument one of the men shrugged, laughed, lifted her up on to a camel and tied her there.
They set off. By day this man whose camel she rode made her wear a straw hat, and by night he wrapped her in sheepskin. McLennan felt irritated by these attentions, and at the same time, a strange sense of relief. But he said nothing because he didn’t want Peony to die, and to treat her with such consideration would be beneath his own dignity. But sometimes at night when she crept away from the fire and curled up against the side of a recumbent camel to sleep, a vagrant sense of rightness lurked in his mind when he thought of her warm and safe and sheltered from the wind.
The Silk Road took them across deserts and through forests and over mountain passes. There were extremes of heat and cold, and food was sometimes scarce. If Peony had not been by this time sturdy and enduring, she would not have survived that journey. But after the fighting and the blood, the squalid bivouacs and the rowdy, drunken men, this was not such an ordeal for her. It was better than life with the soldiers.
After she got used to the swaying gait of the camel, and stopped being so afraid of falling off, she began to enjoy travelling. They lived mainly outside in the fresh air. There was no fighting or killing – other than game – and after some weeks of travel, the caravan moulded itself into a community of which she was a part. Every day she saw many strange things and many beautiful vistas and wild creatures. Also, there was a lot going on in her head, with so little to do but think and dream.
She remembered Li-wu saying, ‘Store beauty. Furnish your memory with it. It will turn your mind into a beautiful garden that you can visit when things in the real world are hard or ugly.’ A garden in her mind! Yes. She could do that.
It was strange, even to her, to find that she knew something of what a garden must be. Ever since Li-wu had mentioned the word, there had been, in her head, some shapes, shadows, like memories of a dream. She’d asked him once, ‘Do gardens have…’ She’d groped, trying to pin down a shadow, ‘…buildings in them?’ And he’d replied, ‘Yes.’ ‘And trees?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And – bridges? Why should there be bridges?’
So he told her. A garden has four elements: water, trees, stones, and pavilions. ‘What’s a pavilion?’ she had asked, and he’d told her that a pavilion was like a small house which was not for living in but for leisure, a place to relax, to meditate, to enjoy beauty. To listen to music. To be fulfilled.
And at once she’d remembered.
No… how could it be remembering when she had never seen a rich man’s pleasure garden? Yet she knew. She knew, as surely as if she had once enjoyed the marvels of such a place: stolling, reclining, trailing her hand in a pool, listening to birdsong and sweet instruments being played, gazing about her… Her eyes, her hand, her ears, her feet (perfect feet, these, not crippled) remembered.
It was still vague and shadowy, and she hadn’t thought about it very much during the time she’d been with the soldiers. But now, as, perched high on the camel’s back, she crossed the wide stretches of desert, forest and mountain, she did think about it. She thought intently. She sought her garden among the shadows that mysteriously lurked at the back of her mind, or memory, or imagination… She built on the shadows. She created a magical garden out of the sights she saw in nature.
The mountain shapes became the lumps of pierced stone, which in rich men’s gardens – Li-wu had explained – had been chiselled into rough, pleasing shapes, and then left in a running river for years to be worn smooth. From the trees of the forests, she picked out special ones for her garden, the small ones with twisted branches and long, dark needles and pointed cones. She shrank a lake they passed, making it into a small, placid pond, and filled it with red and white carp (oh, surely that was a memory, she saw them so clearly!) swimming lazily amid the waxy lotus flowers.
The squalid huts and tents of nomadic villages could not be recruited as pavilions, so she ‘built’ her own, fit to be the centrepiece of her enchanted garden. It had lacquered red pillars, beautifully carved, and fretted wooden balustrades to lean on and gaze at the beauty around her; on the pavilion walls she set scrolled hangings with paintings on them of birds, rivers, mountains and blossoms. She had music playing from musicians invisible within the pavilion. This part was easy because there were musicians of sorts among the cameleers, who played on flutes and drums and stringed boxes with bows, strange half-toned tunes that floated through the night air as she nodded half-asleep at McLennan’s side after the evening meal. It was so easy to retreat to her garden then.
Evil spirits, she knew, could not move except in straight lines, so she made sure that the paths meandering through her garden were full of sinuous curves, that the bridge leading over the pond to her pavilion went zigzag.
Finally she added dragon carvings on the curved roof-corners. Her own teahouse home had had those, and of all the things she put into her magic garden, she loved the dragons best of all. Swaying on the camel’s hump or huddled in her sheepskin at night, she talked in her head to her dragons. They didn’t reply in words, but she could read their thought
s. These blended with the words of Li-wu, reinforcing his messages.
After some weeks, there was a food crisis. The nomadic tribes that normally provisioned the caravans by way of trade became scarce; in the desert they were passing through, there was a shortage of game. At night when they camped, the men held anxious conferences in their tents and around the fire. At last it was decided to take a detour to a small town across one of the passes in the mountains where, some said, food might be bartered. If this failed, they might have to turn back, or explore farther south, off the caravan route, into perilously unknown territory.
Two days’ hungry journey up a steep gradient and down the other side brought them in sight of a walled desert township. Seen from above, it looked to McLennan as if it might hold four or five hundred souls. There was movement to be seen in the streets and he was hopeful; but the cameleers began shouting to each other as they came closer, and the caravan halted, still some distance above the town.
‘What? What?’ McLennan asked.
‘See, they run about in fear! They are closing the gates! We shouldn’t stay here, some evil is coming!’ the cameleers were saying.
McLennan stared all around. Far away in the distance, on the plain that stretched beyond the town, he saw a sign that he understood so well that he froze at the sight of it – a dust cloud with a dark shadow running ahead of it.
‘Look! It’s an army riding on the town!’
There was a moment’s silence as they all followed his pointing finger. Then they broke into cries and gestures of frantic alarm.
‘The Mongols! The Mongols are coming! Turn the camels, run, run!’
In a frenzied scramble of movement, they tugged their beasts’ heads around and began to climb back up the mountain toward the pass they had just crossed. The path was steep, and stones and shale slipped under the camels’ padded feet. The men were so unmanned by fear they were not careful; many of them stumbled or slid back down the slope. Others urged and screamed at the camels, dragging on their heads; unaccustomed to hurrying, the camels hung back, uttering their strange gurgles of protest, their heads thrown up, their feet braced.
The Dungeon Page 4
