Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

by Justin Hill

  “You’re back,” he said. He smelled of horses. One shoulder of his red Tibetan coat was thrown off; underneath he wore a simple white shirt.

  He took her to his tent. Afterwards, her silk gown and his rough-spun red coat lay in a pile on the floor together, arms and necks all entwined. But this conquest had not brought her pleasure. It was too easy, his affection—like indulging in too many sweet lotus cakes—and it began to turn her stomach.

  “I cannot stay with you,” she told him. “For it is my destiny to be a great warrior, not a bandit’s wife.”

  “I will be a great warrior’s servant,” he said.

  “No,” she told him. “You’re a bandit. You will always smell of yak cheese and butter.”

  He had tried to take her hand but she had refused. She would not let love stand in the way of her destiny. As the storm grew stronger all this came back to her, and she laughed at her pride—an inhuman sound, like cracking ice. It was humor that saved her. She would not give up on her son. Jiaolong adjusted her pack over her shoulder and stumbled forward. Men said that when it is dark in the east, it is light in the west, but in her world it was dark north, south, east and west. Dark and cold and deadly.

  In the center of the border town stood the red-painted drum tower, its green-glazed roof tiles hidden under a large hat of snow. The wardens were struggling to stop the water clock within from freezing up. They ran back and forth with braziers of coal, kept the time running according to its nature. Each droplet was a success against the cold. Drop by drop sunset came closer and when the last bamboo clok! sounded, the clock warden called out, “Sunset!”

  In the Chamber of Fortunate Drums, the drum master put his cup of green tea down and signaled to his mandarins that the end of this day had come, which was the twenty-eighth day of the twelfth month in the tenth year of the Guangxu Emperor, sixth Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, which was in the Year of the Snake.

  The great padded knocker hung on two iron chains. A pair of shivering servants slowly pulled it back, swung it against the taut skin of the city drum.

  Boom! The vast drum sounded. A note so low and deep that it made the dust on the windowsill dance for a moment. Boom, it sounded again. Boom, over the low huddled houses, onto the west gate where the sergeant pulled his fur hat down low over his bushy brows.

  He cleared his throat and spat. He scuffed the spit with his toe and the gobbet froze as it touched the stone. “Shut the gates!” he shouted. One by one the heavy red gates were swung closed. As the second door was driven against the carved stone lintel, one of the soldiers stopped and pointed with a gloved hand. A dark shape staggered forward. They stood and watched it stumbling weakly, zigzagging toward them along the road, before falling. It did not move. The wind moaned as darkness thickened around them.

  The two guards looked at one another. “Should I go?” one said.

  The other shook his head. You never knew out here, there were so many bandits, so many ruses to trick a soldier into making the wrong decision.

  Old Wife Du was boiling noodles in the kitchen of the Happy Lucky Inn when she heard the insistent banging on her gate. It was too late for guests. It was the night before New Year: everyone with sense was home and safe and warm.

  All she had were a few strangers marooned in the middle of their journeys by the inclement weather: a camel trader who insisted on sleeping with his five pack-camels in the stables; a poor scholar, who sat up late burning the oil and writing desperate petitions to the local officials, begging for work; and then, of course, Concubine Fang and Maid Wang, who kept a constant vigil over the concubine’s month-old daughter: a pretty, snub-nosed child, with white skin and a tuft of silky black hair on the crown of her head.

  The banging kept going. Old Wife Du wiped her nose. It was dripping from the heat. “I’ll get it!” she shouted to Husband Du, who was pretending not to hear. “Don’t you move!”

  Husband Du had his knees under a thick blanket and his feet on a warm clay pot of coals. He waved a hand. Yes, you go, it seemed to say.

  Old Wife Du stomped across the yard in her padded cotton shoes. They left large duck-flapping prints across the snow. “I’m coming!” she shouted as the banging started again. She opened one door and peered out. Four soldiers at Old Wife Du’s gates. They were lean and thin and shivering, their dark coats freckled with snow, one of them thrusting his bare hands, blue with cold, deep into his pockets.

  One pushed a wheelbarrow. On it lay a heap of dark clothes. They pulled back the blanket and Old Wife Du saw that the rags had a face. The face was that of a girl with black hair and white skin, blue lips. Her eyes were closed, her teeth were rattling like a Tibetan drum.

  “She is pregnant,” the soldier said, and pulled back an arm. “We found her by the gate.”

  “Aiya!” Old Wife Du said. “Bring her in!”

  Each soldier took a limb and she murmured as they carried the girl into the hostel courtyard. Old Wife Du ran back and forth, from door to door, all in a fluster. Another baby to be born! What a month! Her fluster turned to panicked shouts and her husband looked up in wonder. “There is a girl,” she shouted, “and she is in labor!”

  The commotion roused the interest of the other guests and they all came to stop and stand and stare. The camel herder rubbed the scabs on the back of his hands and scratched his head. The poor scholar saw the girl’s face and sighed, and for a moment the thoughts of official posts were banished, and he thought of warm rice wine and a little cold meat, chanting poems with this beauty late into a summer’s night.

  “Brazier!” Old Wife Du shouted. “Blankets!”

  It was only the concubine’s maid who helped. Her mistress had given birth only weeks before, so she knew what a woman in labor needed: pretty or not, young or old. She elbowed the men out of the way; stoked the fire, boiled water, fanned the charcoal outside until the smoke had been driven off, then set it near the bed, licked a scrap of paper and stuck it over the hole in the papered windows.

  Across the courtyard Concubine Fang sat silent at the side of her daughter’s cot. The gray of her silk sleeve caught the thin winter light, illuminating a simple pattern of tiny twigs. Within the wooden rocking cot, wrapped tighter than a dumpling in padded silk, a fat face showed, with pink cheeks and almond eyes.

  She looked up when her maid came in. “The girl is giving birth?” she said.

  Her maid nodded.

  Her baby had one of the concubine’s fingers clamped tightly within her fist. “You look after her. I will be fine.” The concubine shooed her maid away, tugged gently, but her daughter would not let go. “You look after her.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” her maid said and grabbed a bag of herbs she had used before, and hurried back across the yard. As the moans came more and more regularly, Concubine Fang picked her daughter up, unbuttoned her top, and helped the child to find the milk.

  Her daughter was thirsty. She sucked greedily at life. The concubine rocked back and forth.

  The darkness had a strange brightness to it, with all the snow filling the yard. From across the courtyard another moan came. Low and pained and strangled.

  Concubine Fang knew that sound.

  The birth would be soon, she thought. Another life spilling into the world, taking a sudden first breath.

  The storm had stopped by the time Maid Wang knocked gently on the door and slipped inside. Her hair had come undone, hanging untidily around her ears in uncombed strands.

  Concubine Fang sat before a silver mirror, plucking her forehead so that her hairline was straight and gave her face a pleasing, high, square brow. “It is a boy,” the maid said.

  Concubine Fang rubbed where she had just plucked a hair, peered close to the mirror to isolate another hair. She caught an odd note in her maid’s voice. “She’s just a child. Alone and lost and wandering. What can she do for a son?”

  Concubine Fang bit he
r lip. She knew what the maid was thinking. She felt tears inside her, joy and horror boiling together, building like a thunderstorm.

  “Does the boy look healthy?” she said at last.

  “He is the fattest, healthiest little boy you have ever seen. Such pink cheeks. Soft dark hair. And his nose. A Manchu nose, I should say.”

  Concubine Fang glanced up. She caught the look in her maid’s eyes.

  “There would be no harm in going to see him,” she said at last.

  Birth was exhausting for both mother and child. Both of them slept, the girl had a hand held out to her boy, it rested gently on his tightly swaddled body. A blue cloth bundle lay untied, and all the contents, lovingly stitched garments, were laid out in a line: split trousers of red silk lined with cotton, a jacket of soft washed cotton, soft blue nappies, tiger-head red shoes, red tiger cap with ears decorated with silver bells, a bright red quilt for swaddling. The spread of long-prepared clothes spoke powerfully of love and care and expectation. Concubine Fang put her hand to her heart as she drew near to the bed. She spoke in a whisper. “Poor child. She is sick, you say?” she said.

  The maid nodded. She had been almost half dead when they brought her in, nose bitten black with frost, the fingertips of her right hand already blistering.

  As if to reinforce the fact, the mother coughed, a dry racking cough, but did not wake.

  “Will she live?”

  “I do not know.”

  They turned away from the sleeping mother to the baby. His face was bruised from birth and he had the odd look of the newborn, where the head was still taking its normal shape.

  The old wife had dressed him in some old baby clothes: a red cap, red blanket, with a worn old yellow lion propped up against the bed head to ward off evil spirits.

  Concubine Fang stared for a long time. At last she put out a hand and touched his cheek. He smelled like her child. She stroked his head.

  “Isn’t he a fine child?” the maid said.

  Her mistress nodded sadly. “He will make a fine son.”

  “He will,” the maid said. “Can you picture it?”

  “Oh yes,” Concubine Fang said. She thought of herself, her daughter and this poor girl who slept and coughed again. It is hard, Concubine Fang thought, to be born into this world as a woman.

  2

  Jiaolong did not want to wake but someone was crying and that sound was like a chain dragging her from dreams of warmth and weight, very slowly, like coming up from a deep cave back to the light. The noise grew louder and more insistent, until she could no longer ignore it.

  Something was missing, she thought, and the absence of the life within her, which had been so strange for so long, so pressing, so uncomfortable, so heavy, startled her. Memories rushed back. Pain, yes, but then utter relief as the baby slipped through at last.

  Jiaolong blinked awake. It was not snow that pressed down on her but thick heavy mattresses. They smelled cheap and dusty and old. Above her were papered rafters, torn and rippling in unseen drafts of air. She swallowed back distaste. She was used to fine rooms, palaces and silk-hung beds. Her father’s stables were finer than this room.

  She put a hand to her belly, and it was no longer taut and stretched but fat and saggy and sore. Fragments of memory came back to her like shards of a smashed porcelain cup: a city gateway, snow like cherry blossom, hands and warmth and her empty womb. It took a long moment before she understood where she was, and she turned and saw her child lying next to her, toothless mouth open, gums wailing loud.

  She felt the warmth in her breasts as the milk began to rise like spring sap. She gathered the child in. She kissed his forehead. His eyes were high and narrow and noble-looking. He was fat and heavy. She could barely believe she had carried him inside her.

  “Hush,” she whispered. “Hush!” and fumbled at the clasps on her top, pulled away her undershirt so that her left breast came free, the dark nipple already beaded with white. “Here,” she whispered, and pressed milk out, and the baby opened wide and took hold. A powerful, hungry movement and he began to suck nosily.

  Jiaolong let her son drink, and when she was done she laid him on his back and opened his cloths. He wore slit-bottomed trousers so that he did not soil himself. The cloth there was wet. She pulled it away, to clean and dry him, but she paused.

  Her son was not a son.

  Her son was a girl.

  She pushed the hair from her face. Her voice had command within it. “Old woman!” she shouted. The world seemed empty and quiet as the snow covered them all. “Old woman,” she shouted three more times before she heard the door across the courtyard open and footsteps crunch across the snow.

  Old Wife Du had a belly full of this morning’s dumplings. She had cooked extra for the girl as well, and when she heard her calling she took the lid off the steamer and tipped them into a bowl, drizzled on some dark vinegar and flakes of chili and set out into the cold.

  “Old woman!” The words came again, impatient, threatening.

  She paused at the door, chopsticks in one hand, dumplings in the other, and pushed the door open. “I made some dumplings,” she said, but the girl sat straight up, her top unbuttoned, her black hair hanging unkempt around her face. She seemed very white against the red of her top. The baby lay on the bed before her. It was naked from the bottom down, legs kicking as it started to fuss. “Explain to me, old woman,” the girl said, her hand shaking as she pointed at the child. “I gave birth to a boy last night—or a girl?”

  Old Wife Du stomped forward and stopped, confused. She frowned as she held the bowl of steaming dumplings. She looked down at the baby that was no longer a boy, but a girl, and she had to put a hand to the wall. “Well,” she said, “he was a boy last night!”

  Jiaolong was only eighteen years old but she seemed to rear up over the poor, simple old woman, her voice harsh with authority. “You have sold him!”

  “I have not!” the old woman said, and fell to her knees and lifted her hands in supplication.

  “Liar!”

  The commotion brought Old Wife Du’s husband. “A disaster!” she said. “Look—he’s turned into a girl.” Her husband stumped forward to look. True enough, he thought. The baby was a girl. “Oh heavens!” he said. “How did that happen? I thought the concubine had a girl, and this one had a boy?”

  Jiaolong pushed past the old fools. She was already at the door and crossing the yard.

  The beauty of her almond-shaped face turned harsh as she spoke to them. “She’s taken my son,” she said.

  They ran back and forth, crisscrossing the courtyard with footprints. All they could find in the concubine’s room was a silver vase, engraved with a scene of winter snow, and a silver boat-shaped ingot, stamped with a Shanxi banker’s mark. Jiaolong flung it into the corner of the room.

  The burst of energy had exhausted her. She pulled her sword free from her baggage, and drew it so fast it flashed in the cold air. She looked wild and deadly.

  “Find her!” Jiaolong said as she clung to the doorpost. She waved the sword, and the old couple wailed so loudly that the camel herder stumbled out of the stables, his head groggy with last night’s wine.

  “She has stolen my child!” Jiaolong hissed, holding herself up. She held out a bag of silver at the end of a trembling hand. “Find them,” she said. “Please.”

  The camel herder took the money and hurried off, but the weather was so bleak and the silver so heavy he could not stop himself from going to a house where he paid for a pretty sing-song girl to light his opium pipe, and she sang to him as he dreamt simple dreams of palaces and warmth and food and wine.

  How long he lay there he had no idea. Whenever the dreams wore off he waved to the bag of silver he had, and a girl with a white-powdered face and small red lips bent over him again and cooed softly like a dove.

  It was a trip to heaven. But then c
ame a woman whose voice was not soft. He tried to roll away, and reached for his pipe, but a hand gripped the front of his padded jacket and lifted him from the bed. A hand slapped his face. “Where is my money?” a voice shouted at him. “Where is the coin?”

  There were screams and shouts that made no sense to him. He distinctly heard the sound of a sword being drawn, then the screams grew louder and more insistent and he did not know anymore.

  Before she was fit enough, Jiaolong set off in pursuit of the concubine. She took the girl babe with her. It was a simple decision. She would not leave the child, but wrapped her up, fixed her into the basket on her back, and set off with pack and babe and staff. The cold and the winds meant nothing to her. It was her son, her blood, the night with her lover, Dark Cloud.

  Everywhere she went, east and west, she asked for news of a woman with a maid and a child. Innkeepers shrugged, soldiers had seen nothing. The baby in the bamboo basket cried, and she had wide unbound feet, like a peasant. When she arrived at an inn in the Silk Road town of Zhangye, she put the bamboo baby basket down on the table and asked the innkeeper, “I am looking for a concubine named Fang, who has a baby boy. She belongs to a magistrate named Han. She took my child. I want it back.”

  She drew the characters of the names on her open palm as she spoke, but the baby in the basket started crying.

  The man was peeling garlic cloves with the square end of a chopstick. He looked the girl up and down, saw unbound feet, and mistook her for the lowest form of peasant, spoke to her as if she were stupid.

  “If she took your child then what is that?” he said.

  “It’s her child. She gave me a girl. I bore a boy.”

  The man gave her a look that said fate was an arrow that was hard to dodge. “If I was a beggar and my son was taken in by a magistrate’s wife, I would consider the Heavens had been good to me. Clear off. They’ll give him a better home than you. Sell the daughter when she’s old enough, and save yourself the pain.”