“Please try to keep moving, Ke Mu-shih — if you don’t you’ll die!” Among the turmoil of prisoners, soldiers, and pack animals pressing anxiously past him toward the crest of the mountain, Jakob could not at first be sure who had whispered the pleading words of encouragement. His own guard, who had slipped on the ice twenty yards away, was still scrambling to catch up, and only when he looked down at his side did the missionary recognize the round, cheerful face of Little Liang beneath a rime-covered Red Army cap several times too large for him.
“Please drink this.” The Little Red Devil thrust a metal cup containing yellow liquid up at the missionary. “My brother and I boiled red peppers to make it this morning.”
Little Liang replaced the stopper in a small vacuum bottle and put it away in the medical box he carried slung around his narrow shoulders. Both Jakob and the boy glanced inquiringly at the guard as he caught up with them, and when he nodded his approval, Jakob took the proffered cup and drank the hot peppery liquid straight down. It made him cough but it warmed him, and leaning heavily on his staff, Jakob began pushing himself up the steep incline once more with Little Liang trudging beside him.
“I’ve been marching with the medical corps, looking after my father,” whispered Little Liang, nodding toward the rear of the column, which was visible snaking up the mountainside behind them. “He noticed you were staggering and sent me to help.” The boy’s face took on an anxious expression. “Are you all right, Ke Mu-shih?”
Jakob nodded, concentrating all his strength on climbing.
“My father hopes you don’t think badly of him for joining the, army holding you prisoner, Ke Mu-shih. He says for China it’s a good army — it helps the poor!” Little Liang glanced around over his shoulder to see if the guard was listening and moved closer to Jakob. “My father says the Red Army isn’t like the warlord armies. There’s no looting or stealing from ordinary people. All food is paid for — except when it’s confiscated from rich landlords! Officers and men eat and live together and the officers aren’t ever allowed to beat the soldiers. Soldiers can even criticize their officers at meetings after the fighting! One day we hope the Red Army will get our land back for us — that’s what my father told me to say.”
“You can tell your father that I understand,” gasped Jakob. “But don’t talk. Save your energy.”
“It doesn’t tire me, Ke Mu-shih,” whispered the boy, climbing without difficulty at the missionary’s side. “And I have something else to tell you from my father . .
Fifty or sixty feet above them Jakob could see that propaganda squads had planted a cluster of red flags on the pass to mark it; beneath them political instructors were waving and shouting encouragement to units as they neared the top. Gripping his staff with both hands to steady himself, Jakob levered himself up the slope, keeping his eyes fixed on the flags streaming in the wind.
“He was sorry he couldn’t talk to you that day in the field when he buried the baby,” whispered Little Liang, checking over his shoulder again to make sure they weren’t overheard by the guard. “But he thought it best to say nothing in front of the judge. It was Comrade Lu Mei-ling who ordered him to say nothing, you see.”
Distracted by the arduousness of the climb Jakob continued jabbing his staff into the compacted ice of tile track, hauling himself upward yard by yard with painful slowness. He had climbed to within a few feet of the summit before Little Liang’s words registered — but when they did, he stopped and stared down at the Little Red Devil, his chest heaving.
“What do you mean, Comrade Lu Mei-ling ordered him to say nothing? About what, Little Liang?”
“About your baby girl, Ke Mu-shih.”
“Did your father talk to Lu Mei-ling about her?”
The boy nodded quickly. “Yes, she agreed to look after your baby.”
“Then why did she die?”
“She didn’t die, Ke Mu-shih!”
Jakob stared at Little Liang in disbelief. “But your father buried her in front of me in the field in Yunnan!”
“No, no, Ke Mu-shih. He buried Comrade Lu Mei-ling’s baby. She took your daughter. But she said it had to be kept secret . . .“
The propaganda squads, seeing Jakob and the boy standing at the crest of the pass, began shouting and waving, urging them not to rest where the air was thin. Coming up behind, Jakob’s guard propelled him forward sharply with his hands and as he crossed the summit, the missionary caught sight of the long, serpentine coils of men and animals winding down between ice-covered crags as precipitous as those on the ascent. He started in their wake, scanning the thin lines of dark, antlike figures, trying to pick out the General
Headquarters column and the long-legged brown mule on which he had seen Mei-ling ride. But a new wave of dizziness struck him suddenly and the scene began to swim and dissolve before his eyes. His staff skidded on the frozen ruts of the pass and he almost fell; then, seeing others sinking to the ground, he followed suit and began slithering down the mountain on his back.
7
For the next three days Jakob’s eyes never ceased to search the column ahead as he toiled over two more soaring ridges of the Great Snow Mountains. Once, as the marchers spread out along a high ice plateau above him, he felt certain he saw the silhouetted figure of Mei-ling riding on her mule and the thought that the baby daughter he had believed dead might be alive in the arms of the beautiful Chinese girl gave him enough strength to keep moving.
But in his enfeebled state Jakob had found he could not eat the coarse buckwheat and chingko barley cakes in his ration pouch: the only nourishment he was able to swallow was the hot chili soup which Little Liang brought to him two or three times each day on the march. Because of the extreme cold he had also found it impossible to sleep when they bivouacked on the lower slopes after crossing the first peak, and each passing hour found him climbing more slowly and clinging more desperately to his staff. To his dismay, other men and pack animals continued to die on the heights all around him. Pole carriers transporting ammunition chests and cooks bearing heavy loads of food and cooking utensils fell dead on the narrow passes, a train of exhausted pack mules and horses dragged their handlers over a precipice, and a young gunner shouldering his heavy mortar barrel sank lifeless into the snow almost at Jakob’s feet. To deepen the Red Army’s misery, violent hailstorms assailed the column on the third day. The skies turned black and fusillades of fist-sized hailstones drove down from the heavens, stunning the marchers and forcing them to shelter under metal cooking bowls and tarpaulins. In the afternoon Kuomintang biplanes appeared, spiraling up from below to bomb the head of the column in the narrow ice defiles. To Jakob’s relief the General Headquarters units escaped unscathed but although the planes were unable to fly high enough to attack on the passes, their bombs set off a series of avalanches which buried some vanguard units and swept others from a trail that wound along a narrow ledge.
The avalanches blocked the track, bringing the whole column to a standstill, and rescuers spent several hours digging out survivors. During the long wait Jakob huddled, shivering, against an ice- covered cliff with the other prisoners, and the bitter cold seemed to seep into the marrow of his bones. The blur of snow and ice all around him stretched endlessly into the distance and the conviction began to grow in him that his wasted body could not survive much longer in the towering canyons of snow and ice. When at last the order to move forward was given, his numbed limbs responded sluggishly. His strength seemed to ebb rapidly on the last Section of a steep climb to another high pass, and he fell more frequently than before.
Soon after the prisoners had crossed the pass, a shrieking wind began to dash blinding flurries of fresh snow against the downward slopes, and a halt was called for the night in a bleak, forbidding amphitheater of jagged rocks. There the wind howled eerily about them as the soldiers fumbled with frozen hands to erect bivouacs, stretching tarpaulins over tent poles or wedging canvas shelters into the crevices between the massive blocks of stone. Many of the
troops simply huddled together against the rocky walls, wrapped in their quilts, sheltering beneath the waxed-paper umbrellas they carried in their packs. As dusk fell, Jakob crouched, exhausted, beneath a bamboo shelter put up by his guards, watching dully as the General Headquarters units pitched their camp in a cluster of abandoned tribal yurts sited along a ledge at the foot of the rock valley. Only a few tattered strips of black yak wool fluttered on the bare poles but orderlies quickly lashed extra canvas sheets around them to keep out the weather. Before the whirling snow and thickening darkness obscured his vision Jakob saw an orderly tether the long-legged mule outside the last yurt at the far end of the ledge and carry the two large panniers from its back into the tent. It was in that moment that he knew what he must do before the last spark of life within him was snuffed out by the bitter cold.
Because water could not be boiled quickly at that altitude, the gruel of half-cooked buckwheat offered him by his guards was tepid, and he could not get a single spoonful past his lips. He drank only a mouthful or two of melted snow, then pulled a tattered palm-fiber rain cape closer about his shoulders and squatted, shivering, inside the shelter, staring at the snow whirling in the orange glow of the fire. A young guard lay down on an oilcloth at the rear of the shelter, wrapping his bedroll about himself, and within minutes had fallen into an exhausted sleep. Seeing this, Jakob reached over to his pack and picked up the red-starred cap that lay on it.
Besieged by the snowstorm in the high mountain rock basin, the exhausted men and animals were huddling together like corpses around their flimsy bivouacs, and from inside his shelter Jakob watched their fires guttering and dying, losing the battle with the thickening snow. Deep within his own body he felt the chilling cold spreading like poison, and fearing he would lose the power of his limbs if he waited any longer, he put on the guard’s cap, pulled it down over his eyes, and stood up. Stepping out unsteadily into the whirling snow, he picked his way between the spluttering campfires toward the eastern wall of the high valley, holding the palm-fiber cape up around his ears to hide his face. Within moments the snow swallowed him up, making him invisible to anyone watching from the guard shelters, and when he reached the foot of the wall he turned south and began stumbling down the valley toward the yurts of the General Headquarters units.
8
Jakob fell several times in waist-deep drifts before he reached the Toot of the ledge where the black yurts were pitched. Crouching in the swirling snow, he waited for the patrolling guard of the Red Cadres Regiment to pass before he scrambled up the slippery rocks and ducked behind the end yurt. To his surprise he found no mule tied up outside and for a moment he thought he had made a mistake. But, moving closer, he peered in through a gap in the canvas and saw that the animal was tethered inside, standing motionless against one wall. A fire crackled in the stone-ringed fireplace in the center of the floor and by its flickering light Jakob saw Mei-ling: seated on a bed of animal skins strewn around the fire, she was in the act of drawing one of the mule’s panniers toward her.
He held his breath as she lifted a blanket-wrapped bundle in her arms. Turning it against herself, she drew back the coarse cloth and in the glow of the fire Jakob saw the peaceful, sleeping face of his daughter. For a moment Mei-ling also sat looking down at the child in her arms, her own face as still and composed as that of the eight- month-old infant. The wind shrilled across the icy rock face at Jakob’s back, hurling furious gusts of snow against the yurt walls, but the beautiful Chinese girl and the pale-skinned European baby remained quiet and unmoving inside the fire-lit shelter. When a stick crackled and sparked inside the ring of stones, Abigail opened her eyes to look up at Mei-ling. The Chinese girl murmured a greeting and the face of the baby appeared to crinkle into a smile. Deeply moved, Jakob sank to his knees in the snow beside the yurt and bent his head over his clasped hands in a silent prayer of thanks. When he opened his eyes again Mei-ling was unfastening her tunic and moving closer to the fire. The expression on her face was intent but in the same moment serene and at peace as she uncovered her breasts.
Huddled in the storm outside, Jakob felt tears sting his eyes. Conflicting emotions of grief and gratitude engulfed him, and rising blindly from his knees, he turned to start back for his own bivouac. But his foot caught in one of the yurt’s supports and he fell heavily against the wall of the shelter.
“Who’s there?”
Mei-ling’s voice was low but firm and Jakob, struggling to his feet, parted the flaps and stumbled inside, tugging off his cap.
“I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Jakob swayed on his feet, looking down uncertainly at the seated Chinese girl; then he sank slowly to his knees in front of her. He gazed wonderingly at his daughter, who had turned her head and was looking at him with wide, unblinking eyes.
“I thought she was dead. . . I found out only a few days ago that you’d taken her. . . . Thank you!”
Mei-ling stared in consternation at the disheveled missionary: snow lay thick on the shoulders of the palm-fiber cape and his beard was streaked with white. Exhaustion had etched deep lines into his haggard features and she could see the light of despair in his eyes. “Your daughter’s doing as well as anyone could hope in these terrible conditions,” said Mei-ling softly. “She lacks many things and I have to keep her swaddled more than is good for her but despite everything there’s a very strong will to live inside that little body . .
“Perhaps it’s meant to be,” gasped Jakob. He closed his eyes and his chin sank onto his chest. “Perhaps I am meant to die ... Perhaps God wills it . .
Again the Chinese girl searched his face. “Do your guards know you’ve come?”
Jakob shook his head. “I slipped away in the blizzard . . . I wanted one last glimpse of her.”
Lifting his head, he looked at the Chinese girl: her dark eyes, steady on him, were filled with compassion and in the glow of the fire the emphatic Asian beauty of her face was ethereal, almost painful to look at. Unaccountably, in the sudden warmth of the yurt he began to shiver more violently.
“I didn’t mean to disturb you. . . . I was going back to my shelter when I fell.”
“You’re worn out. You need food.”
Mei-ling wrapped the blanket around the baby again and sat her on a bed of animal skins beside the fire. In the months since Jakob had seen her, Abigail had grown noticeably. She was able to sit upright now without support and although her movements were clumsy and uncertain she gazed curiously about, gurgling occasionally and clutching at the tufts of fur on the skins. A blackened pot was simmering on a hob of stones and Mei-Ling smilingly moved it beyond the child’s reach, picking up a ladle and a tin dish at the same time.
“I’m unable to eat Jakob reached out impulsively with one arm to restrain her, and feeling his hand on her shoulder she turned back to him, a faint expression of surprise showing in her face. They remained motionless on their knees, their eyes on one another, and despite his exhaustion Jakob felt himself deeply stirred by her closeness.
“I must go back at once,” he said shakily, “before my guards begin looking for me.”
Mei-ling looked searchingly at him. It was clear he had little strength to drag himself out into the snow again and he made no attempt to move. Behind her in the shadows the tethered mule snorted quietly and shifted its feet in the straw. The fire in the hearth of stones spluttered and cracked while outside the wind howled to a higher note, rocking the yurt walls. The baby had grown still, and seeing her eyes close, Mei-ling settled her more comfortably among the skins and drew closer to the fire, adding a few sticks to the flames.
“Stay here.”
Her voice was quiet and firm and when he failed to reply, she came closer to him and removed the palm-fiber cape. She shook off the snow and laid it aside, then unwound the sodden quilt from his shoulders. The tattered long-gown beneath the quilt was wet too and she motioned for him to move nearer to the flames. Taking up a cloth, she knelt beside him and wiped th
e melted snow from his face and hair. He was still shivering but the flames were warming him and his eyes began to lose their defeated look. Mei-ling’s tunic, unbuttoned to suckle the baby, still hung open, and when she had finished she laid the cloth aside and shifted her position to face him. For a long time she knelt in front of him without speaking. Then, reaching toward him, she cradled his shivering body in her arms and drew his face gently toward her naked breasts.
Still shuddering, Jakob closed his eyes: in his throat the sweet, life-giving liquid that he drew from her body was warm and comforting. Gradually, the noise of the storm seemed to fade and he became conscious only of the sweetness on his tongue and the soft warmth of Mei-ling’s body against him. Pulling him gently down beside the fire, she lifted the animal skins to cover them both. As the minutes passed, Jakob’s shuddering slowly diminished and soon he fell into an exhausted sleep.
When he opened his eyes again the embers of the fire were casting a dull red glow on the roof and walls of the yurt. Wrapped in the animal skins, they lay close against one another and he could feel the warmth of Mei-ling’s unclothed body along the whole length of his own. Only a few hours had passed but he had slept deeply and he felt stronger in mind and body than he had for many days. Although the wind continued to howl outside, in the protected gloom of the yurt there was a profound feeling of stillness and peace, and gradually a new spark of hope rekindled itself within him. At his side Mei-ling seemed to be sleeping quietly and he was surprised on glancing down to find that her eyes were open. She was lying on her side, watching him with an unusual intentness, and she did not turn away when he shifted to face her.
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