The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  Mr Feng has promised me he will learn to read and to write during his voyage with you to China, Captain Larkins. She looked directly into the Captain’s eyes, as if she searched for a thought in him which might wish to conceal its presence from her. Perhaps she detected it, perhaps she did not. At any rate she made a sound denoting her satisfaction and continued. You must see to it that he keeps his promise. Indeed, Captain, you must be his tutor yourself.

  Captain Larkins felt it was necessary to bow. I shall be honoured ma’am, he said, accepting both her commission and her ascendancy.

  It seemed appropriate to everyone that he had used a form of address usually reserved for married women to someone as young – she was not yet twenty – and as obviously un-married as Patrick’s daughter. For it was clear that she was the mistress of her father’s affairs already and hoped soon to be entirely the mistress of Feng’s affairs also. No one disputed, by an action or a word, that it was she with whom the Captain should consider himself to be dealing.

  In the evening the four of them dined together in the private dining room of the newly built Nunan Family Hotel in Swanston Street, in the heart of the growing metropolis of Melbourne. In the lamplight, among the gleaming silver and polished glass, Feng seemed a boy beside her, the heavy baluster of his wineglass too large for his hand. The Phoenix Cooperative Society of Victoria, they chorused, raising their glasses and drinking deeply of the rich red claret. The bloodhound by the door raised his head and growled and fixed his sorrowful bloodshot eyes upon them.

  After the toast Patrick rose and embraced Feng, clasping his friend firmly to his chest. God go with you laddie! he whispered hoarsely, exhaling a hot and reeking breath of pipe tobacco and wine fumes on to the back of Feng’s neck.

  Miss Nunan said it was time for a solemn presentation. She left the room briefly and returned carrying the tea box, which was decently clad in a purple drawstring bag that she had sewn herself. Feng was moved and rose to thank her. When he’d said his piece he raised his glass and looked at each of them in turn, his left hand firmly upon the purple-shrouded box. Dorset! he proposed, with a sudden excess of emotion, as an officer at the table of the Governor might have proposed to his exiled compatriots, ‘The Queen!’ They raised their glasses and repeated after him, Dorset!

  When the Nimrod sailed into the Formosa Strait, two days before she reached the entrance to Huetan Bay, Feng detected the stench of Amoy carried on the warm wind from the land. The ancient smell of China came out to greet him. It recalled to his mind not his childhood, but the boiling down of old ewes for tallow on Ballarat. The smell settled heavily on him and on the crew. And as the ship sailed more deeply into it and it became thicker and more pasted to the back of their throats, the sailors became quieter and more thoughtful than they had been when they were on the open sea. It was as if the slumbering giant of China was breathing upon them. They feared to wake her, in case she should destroy them by one of the hideous and sudden means she had long reserved for the destruction of foreign devils.

  In the port Feng saw that nothing here had changed. It was he who had changed. He stood at the rail and watched the throng of workers struggling past under their huge loads, silently suffering the blows and the abuse of their masters. And he looked down on the diseased and the dying and the silent dead. And he saw the stately mandarins in their brilliant gowns go by. And he smiled and was reassured. Here was the teeming shoal he had promised his partners they might drop their nets into with no risk to their capital, and from which, at little cost to themselves, they might draw a large fortune in steady increments.

  Runners were despatched throughout the city and to the mainland to inform the people that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to improve their family’s fortunes was to be offered at noon the following day by a wealthy merchant from the Colony of Victoria, so-named in honour of her gracious Britannic Majesty the Queen Empress.

  A little before noon the following day Feng peeked through a porthole in the Captain’s cabin and saw that several thousand mistrustful peasants were assembled on the wharf, their attention resentfully concentrated on the Nimrod. He understood intuitively that they had come not because they really believed they were to be offered a chance to improve their fortunes, but from a desperate conviction, a kind of superstitious dread, that if they did not come then, against all the odds of an eternally hostile universe, his offer would turn out to have been the one genuine philanthropic offer to be made to their caste in more than five thousand years. For others there was the inescapable parallel of Feng’s arrival with that of Zheng Chenggong, the pirate’s son who had returned from over the seas to lead the revolt against the Manchus from Amoy two hundred years earlier.

  For one reason or the other, Feng’s summons could not be ignored. The catch was, of course, that having attended they felt even more convinced than ever that it was to be just another hoax and that they were once again simply to be used to further the ambitions of a pirate or a warlord.

  So even before they set eyes on Feng many of them had privately decided that a reasonable outcome to the day would be to see him cut down. They hated him on principle. Working simply to pay taxes imposed on their family’s meagre holdings for the next generation, and miserably certain in their hearts that their desperate need had once again rendered them vulnerable to the deceitful blandishments of the mighty, they consoled themselves with the rationalisation that their real reason for answering Feng’s call had been not a naive hope of some improvement, but a desire to witness first-hand (with any luck) the asassination of a wealthy man.

  As the noon bell struck, flanked by Captain Larkins and followed by the ship’s mate, who carried a naked cutlass and led a detachment of six sailors, each armed with a smoking musket, Feng staggered on to the foredeck of the Nimrod. He was dressed in his elegant frock coat and shiny top hat. The reason he staggered was that he was clutching a weighty object to his breast, as if it were a new-born child composed of lead.

  As Feng came before them at the rail the crowd saw what it had expected to see. It saw, on the high deck of the foreign ship, a short (indeed a foreshortened) Western devil of extraordinary ugliness, a man not much taller than a dwarf with half-Chinese and half-Western features and a sinister black patch over his right eye. The peasants saw the corsair and freebooter they had been expecting to see and they began to jeer and to heckle and to toss cabbage stalks and other handy refuse on to the deck of the Nimrod.

  With an effort that made him grunt, Feng hoisted the great Dorset Nugget above his head. The midday sun shone on the polished gold and an anguished sigh swept the crowd. It swayed like a field of Wimmera rye struck by the first gust of an approaching storm. Feng felt the power concentrated in his hands, as if he held aloft the molten sun itself, and a spontaneous shout rose in his throat and burst from his lips. Gold! he bellowed, prophesying.

  Then he began to explain himself. In the hills of Ballarat, he shouted, there is enough gold for every one of you to pay his taxes for a generation and to dress his family in the gorgeous style of the mandarins. The Phoenix Society, which I represent, is willing to extend a line of credit for the cost of passage to Australia to any would-be gold seeker who is prepared in return to pledge to the Society his family holdings in Amoy and Fukien. At this stage we have only the one ship, so places can be guaranteed to no more than the first hundred and twenty successful applicants …

  Feng intended to go on to explain that if the initial contingent of living cargo proved to be profitable to the Society, then of course there would be many more voyages, indeed enough for everyone. But his arms were getting tired and he paused rather too long after the word ‘applicants’ while he adjusted the position of the nugget.

  The peasants closest to the ship heard him say there would be only a hundred and twenty places so, without waiting to hear more, they rushed forward and started fighting their way up the gangway to make certain of a berth among that number for themselves. Those further back in the crowd, who had not hea
rd what Feng had said, assumed the ones at the front must have decided to grab the gold and be done with it. And not wanting to miss out, they too rushed the gangway.

  Someone screamed, a shot rang out and an excited farmer set alight a faggot of rice straw he happened to be carrying and tossed it on to the deck of the Nimrod. Seeing the shower of sparks and flames, the crowd roared its approval and surged forward to join in the sack of the ship and the slaughter of her crew of hated foreign devils.

  Captain Larkins saw that Feng was looking stunned by the turn of events, and he grabbed the nugget and placed it safely between his own boots on the deck. He then drew his new revolver from its holster. It was a fine English weapon which he’d purchased in Sydney on the way out. Seeing how things stood, the mate closed ranks and gave his men the order to fire-at-will, while he himself commenced to chop off clambering fingers and hands with his cutlass as they appeared over the gunnel. The deck was soon slippery with blood.

  Though in possession of the advantages of efficient weapons and a defensible position, the crew of the Nimrod were so hard pressed that none had time to attend to the fire started by the blazing faggot of rice straw, and this soon began to take hold on the pitched timbers of the deck. Smoke and flames billowed around the struggling group of men, and those at the centre were lost to the view of those who fought on the periphery. Excited men ran backwards and forwards in and out of the smoke, shouting and firing their guns and stabbing with their bayonets, and they went sliding about out of control on the slippery deck, bumping into each other and grabbing at anything for a hold.

  Feng, the last person to be seen with the gold by the crowd, found himself in the very eye of this melee. He felt helpless, unable to defend himself, and completely at the mercy of events. A peculiar feeling of relief swept over him, an immense resignation stilling his mind, and he found himself encompassed by a spectacular quality of silence and calm. Time ceased to pass for him. He subsisted in a profoundly peaceful enclave of meditation, oblivious to the rain of blood.

  Death might have taken him in this condition and he would not have felt her touch.

  When the shouting and the shooting ceased as abruptly as they had begun, Feng was the only one to step out of the smoke unharmed. Like Shadrach Meshach or Abed-nego coming out of the fiery furnace, he was a man returning to present time with a new set of instructions for living.

  He looked about him but said nothing.

  At the still centre of the violent skirmish he had not heard the clamour of competing noises, but had been aware only of a continuous, single resonant note, the mantic sound of silence. In that silence the unspoken had greeted him. His new instructions for living had revoked the power of words – which had very nearly been the cause of his downfall – in favour of what might be exposed in the absence of words, the tacit. The interstitial place between one thing and another, where implication replaces explication and inference webs the darkness. He saw the power of the mysterious and the troubling in the perceptual habitat of silence and, in electing to become the silent stranger henceforth, he became the sinister stranger. Like the Western phoenix from Arabia, Feng was not consumed but changed by the fire of battle. He would say no more.

  When his conscious mind re-engaged with temporal events he saw that the crowd of peasants had fallen back on to the wharf, where they were now lined up along either side, leaving a cleared way down the centre, towards which they were kowtowing.

  Galloping full-tilt down this open aisle, with no care for the stragglers scrambling to get out of their way, were the Governor of Amoy and his military escort, their trumpets blaring and the hooves of their horses sounding a concert of drums on the heavy timbers of the wharf. The Governor’s spy had returned to the residence and uttered the one transfiguring word: gold.

  Feng stepped over the mate who lay moaning at his feet, hacked and bludgeoned (it had been the mate who had expertly defended him), and he grasped the ship’s rail just as the Governor’s cavalcade came to a crashing halt below him.

  Like the folded imago of a silken butterfly emerging from its chrysalis the gorgeous mandarin was eased from the trembling curtains of his huakan by the hands of his retainers. Once stabilised upon firm ground this personage turned his gaze upward. Feng bowed. He did not kowtow in the servile oriental manner, which must imply submission, but inclined his torso stiffly from the waist in meagrest salutation, as he had seen the gentlemen of Port Phillip do, careful to keep his chin thrust forward and his head held high so as to conserve his dignity and to imply an elusive but incontestable cultural superiority. It was a good bow from such a short man and did all he required of it. It was a bow that offered nothing.

  During his taxing meeting with the Governor in the wounded Captain’s cabin later, Feng kept forgetting to listen to the loquacious and greedy old mandarin. Tell him nothing! belled the message in the darkness of his incurious brain as he absently caressed the velvet cover of the tea box, which lay on his lap like a favourite pekinese, and he thought dreamily of the cosy parlour of the Nunan Family Hotel in Swanston Street, and sought vainly to stabilise a fugitive memory of Mary’s red hair, which had glowed once like mahogany in the firelight.

  He roused to the Captain’s promptings for brief moments and nodded sagely, avoiding the Governor’s gaze, which trembled with conjecture and greed – whether to sequester the Nimrod and her precious cargo at once, or to seek a share in her future bounty, was the question exercising his brain.

  Instead of speech, from Feng’s throat there came a sound repeated ten or twenty or even more times, a sound denoting comprehension and a need for further deliberation. Hm-hm-hm-hm hm, he went, varying the tone the pitch the timbre and the cadence. And that is all he did, but did it respectfully and enigmatically. The Governor, meantime, reading into these sounds the inferences his greed inspired in him. Feng had achieved inscrutability, which is to say, he could no longer be read with certainty.

  He felt incredibly old. As if during his ‘absence’ in the heat of the battle he had been whisked through four decades of life’s experience. He scarcely heard the Governor’s voice except as a sing-song tone in the background. He was thinking of his home in far away Victoria and wishing for the day when he might return there. Australia, he was heard to murmur more than once, his fingers idly playing with the purple nap of the velvet.

  At which the Governor leaned towards him, his features contorted with the effort of listening, anxious to catch the precise intonation of the cabalistic phrase. Astray Li Ah, the old mandarin mouthed, his gaze fixed on Feng’s full dark lips, certain that here was an invocation to the powerful demon in the mysterious velvet covered box. A kind of abracadabra to unlock the source of Feng’s indifference to danger. For how else, but with the protection of his demon, Li Ah, had Feng survived the attack of the peasants without suffering so much as a scratch? The Governor decided it might be as well to proceed with care and to cultivate this man’s trust.

  My Dear Mary,

  The return expedition is assembled at last. One hundred and twenty new members of the Society sail with Captain Larkins and his crew on the morning tide. They are but the first of a great number. There are Captains who do not deserve their rank, but our friend is not among them. I should be very content if you and Patrick would confirm him as the Admiral of all our sea-going affairs. During these past difficult months he has ably seen to the charter, the provendering and the crewing of ten ships in addition to his own. These, fully loaded with gold seekers, are all to shortly follow the Nimrod, now quite literally the flagship of our fleet, for you will identify her by the phoenix on her masthead when she draws in to Hobson’s Bay.

  The members of the Society, our gold seekers, have been selected with great care. Each man has a family and some small holding here. None are free, as I was. Their families have pledged to repay the value of the passage at the rate of two English guineas per new calendar month, or its equivalent in silver coin, whether the member find gold at Ballarat or not, and on defau
lt of such payment the entire outstanding amount to fall due immediately, the same redeemable by the Society from the family here in Amoy, whether in kind or in land or in property or in trade, or in labour if need be when no other form of goods are obtainable.

  Sheng Fo-sheng travels with this advance party. You may trust him. I have his two sons in my service until his return. Sheng speaks several words of English and is experienced in the ways of the comprador through his activities as an agent in the coolie trade for many years – a trade we have soon put an end to with our offer of gold (our offices in the city and throughout the province are besieged by those who must see the hills of Ballarat or die attempting it). Sheng is to be stationed in Ballarat at the camp he will set up there. He has instructions to take account of all the needs of members; of their supplies, their gold, their health and their recreations, and of their dealings with Commissioner Armstrong and with the Protector and all the other colonial officials. In the event of the death of a member, Sheng will, at a cost to the deceased’s estate, ship the remains to the family in Amoy, or wherever else in the province they may have had their home. You may with confidence make Sheng privy to everything that concerns the Society, except the knowledge that he is never to return to China. He will be of use to us only so long as he does not know this. His greatest desire must be to execute faithfully the functions of headman of the Society of the Phoenix. His one thought must be to do this well. All the commerce should therefore pass through his hands and be accountable to his manner of dealing with it. For in the quality of his service will he endeavour to deserve his eventual liberty from us and a reunion with his sons. Likewise, so long as Sheng remains in our service in Australia so will his sons continue to be our diligent and loyal servants here in Amoy, or in whatever other place I care to appoint them our representatives. Treat Sheng with every considered respect and provide him liberally with every luxury he may require to sustain the dignity of his office, so that he is kept in mind every day of our power over him.