The Silk Tree

by Julian Stockwin

  The chat stopped when Su himself arrived, looking tired and distracted. ‘Things on the trail are going to get worse – a whole lot worse,’ he muttered to no one in particular.

  With a sweep of his hand he cut short the anxious babble. ‘You’ll find out soon enough. Now let’s have some eats.’

  The mutton stew was cheering against the chill of the night and with the appearance of the hung tsao chiu things were definitely on the rise. Made from dried and powdered buckthorn date, the hot drink was mixed with a liquor. Su swore by its effectiveness against both cold and heat and declared that it would be on issue every night while in the desert.

  Nicander was puzzled. The fierce-eyed seer was nowhere to be seen.

  He asked Su, ‘Could you tell me where I’d find Dao Pa at all?’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘Some kind of monk, I think. Comes from the south somewhere, if you saw him you’d never forget the man.’

  ‘Look, I know who’s in this caravan and there’s no Dao Pa!’

  ‘Beard, biggish fellow – and blue eyes.’

  ‘A foreigner! I know all you buggers, and there’s no one like that. Now I’m bloody tired. Why don’t you leave me be, hey?’

  Nicander shrugged. He’d search out Dao Pa later.

  There seemed to be an unspoken acknowledgement that any entertainment in this appalling loneliness would have to come from among themselves. One of the cameleers came forward shyly, and sat cross-legged. He pulled out a flute and softly accompanied by another on a small drum performed a dreamy piece.

  They played a second tune, spirited and gay.

  Zarina got to her feet. ‘Let cares take flight!’ she laughed, and began dancing.

  Shouts of encouragement came from all sides and she drew up one of the young serving girls and the two whirled and gyrated in a dance of Central Asia, ribbons swirling, dresses flaring, faces alight.

  They sat to thunderous applause.

  A woman who tended to the cooking was next. From one of the many tribes from the outer lands, her features were bluff, oriental and sun-darkened. She wore a padded tunic and her boots were as colourful as the long scarf that she coyly flicked as she stepped into the firelight.

  Another drummer joined in. The rhythm set toes tapping as she strutted about in a high-fingered twirl, moving faster and faster until she collapsed in an exhausted heap.

  Nicander was enchanted. It was so unreal: far out in the desert, untouchably remote and so dependent on each other and their animals, a bubble of humanity progressing through a hostile universe.

  A gruff merchant stood up and came forward. He said some incomprehensible introductory words and then, unaccompanied, sang in a deep voice that rang with emotion.

  There was a pause; people looked about expectantly. A voice called from the other side of the fire. It was Ying Mei asking if anyone possessed a pipa, or any kind of lute. Someone brought an old but clearly cherished yu ch’in, a circular instrument with four strings.

  She accepted it gracefully and experimentally plucked delicate notes.

  She nodded. ‘“Water Lilies in the Shade of Purple Bamboo”.’

  The music flowed like water in a brook, tinkling and rushing, her clear, high voice complementing it. Around the fire there was rapturous attention and when the piece concluded with a last melting and affecting note held to nothing, there was stunned silence and then wild applause.

  Korkut stirred in admiration. ‘I’d have thought that kind of playing you’d only ever hear at the imperial court.’

  Her next piece was more robust. ‘Night of the Torch Festival.’

  First one drummer then another picked up on the processional rhythm and the flute came in with an ingenious cross-melody.

  After another two tunes she sat down, pleading fatigue.

  The fire crackled and spat, its red glare illuminating the near desert with moving shadows and ghost-like shapes.

  Marius leapt up. ‘Damn it, I’m in!’

  ‘Fighting song o’ the Pannonians!’ he roared in Latin. Marching up and down he belted out a legionary favourite, his audience bemused but appreciative.

  When it was over he flopped heavily next to Nicander. ‘Be buggered, but that felt good!’ he muttered, taking a long pull at his hung tsao. ‘Memories …’

  Then he turned and shoved Nicander to his feet. ‘Sing something, Greek!’

  There was a patter of polite applause but Nicander’s mind went blank.

  It had to be something from the motherland. Perhaps from the rich traditions of Pythagoras’s music of the spheres, one of the songs which he had learnt so painfully at school.

  The difficulty was that there was no kithara to play and also the Grecian modes were so at variance with the oriental. In their classicism they could seem remote and unfeeling. He refused to compromise with Byzantine catch-songs of the street so there was nothing for it but to try to conjure something of value and moment.

  He stepped forward. A vision of a scowling music dominie with a willow switch waiting for his first bad note threatened to unnerve him but he manfully launched into one of the Hymns of Apollo.

  A Greek song was a series of long notes, full of feeling and intended to be accompanied by a plucked instrument which would drop notes rich with meaning into the spaces between.

  There was a respectful quiet as he did his best, striving for pure and golden notes but aware that without the plangent twanging of the kithara the strange Greek intervals would sound baffling to his audience.

  Then a soft tone sounded – and another. In the right places and while not in strict Phrygian mode, they were a very good approximation. He looked round. Ying Mei with her borrowed juan had come around to his side.

  She stood beside him, watching intently.

  They finished the song together to a wondering applause.

  He bowed, touched at her gesture. ‘Thank you, My Lady.’

  She smiled – but without a word returned to Tai Yi.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Day followed day as they passed through a moonscape of ragged sere cliffs and sand bluffs.

  For all of one stage the camels trudged through a salt-encrusted surface of hard-packed clay, what remained of the inland sea Lop Nor. The spongy grit slowed them and made them spit harshly. At one point Su stopped the caravan while chunks of salt were lifted and stowed for later use.

  Occasionally there were old watercourses, meandering to peter out among the sand-blown flatlands with relics of past times of plenty – low thorny bushes, stunted clumps of wiry grasses, bleached skeletons of long-ago tree life.

  The heat rose and the stony plains shimmered and rippled into an uncertain distance, each plodding pace an effort of will, the only distraction the occasional whirlwind of sand moving over the ground like a dancing ghost.

  How Su could make out where to go in the stony wastes was beyond Nicander. If it was by recall, he would need to remember hundreds, thousands of miles of a featureless landscape from all perspectives and all seasons – or was it by some other way, perhaps watching the angle of the sun, the stars at night?

  One afternoon the camels imperceptibly quickened their pace, raising their heads and snorting. They came upon a small group of wells, each some four feet across, and with age-withered fitments including ropes and buckets. The caravan stayed several hours, sitting under makeshift awnings while the animals took their fill. However, this water was brackish and no one felt inclined to drink it.

  Then it was the dunes again – a broad tongue of the Taklamakan that had to be crossed before the Gobi beyond.

  The camels wound up into the maze of vast dunes, picking their way along the crests and into the hollows between in patient, slow steps.

  The yellow-grey sand was an endless succession of immense curved waves, shimmering in the heat. There was no rest, Su was anxious to be quit of the soft dunes.

  At last they subsided and quite abruptly terminated in a vast wall.

  The caravan wound
down on to the flat desert floor and Su called a halt, then climbed to the top of the tallest dune.

  ‘We overnight here,’ he announced bleakly when he descended.

  It had been some time since he had last been this way and the dunes had shifted inexorably forward. Not only that, but their shape was now quite different and they were without any kind of track or sign. After the traverse, the waterhole he had expected was not there.

  They were lost.

  As the camp soberly prepared for the night, Su rode out on a tarpan. He returned just before dark set in, his face long.

  The travellers turned in early; who knew what lay in store for them the next day?

  Even before the stars had left the sky the caravan was assembled and ready to depart. Su looked gaunt as he went over his orders yet again for the conserving of water and protection from the sun.

  When it became light enough to see he would have to decide the heading: his choice would save them or doom them to a slow death.

  The order was made. To the east, toward the orb of the dawning sun.

  It was a different, bleaker landscape. The sand was swept clean from the desert floor; they now faced a stippled plain of stones – not the familiar water-rounded ones about a river but sharp, many-coloured gravel.

  A wind arose that whipped up spiteful sand particles, stinging exposed flesh and working into clothing.

  They pressed ahead. Beside Nicander, Meng Hsiang paced on, his uncomplaining calmness a reassurance, a fellow living creature who was not intimidated by their peril. There were lessons to be had even from a beast of burden, and he vowed to bring it up with Dao Pa – when he could find him.

  He reached out and patted the big flank.

  Out of the distance huge vertical forms coalesced out of the haze. Thrusting up out of the flatness of the desert, fluted and pillared, these seemed like the very bones of the earth rearing up.

  The caravan reached the monoliths, the travellers awed by their majesty and height, their untouchable silence. They threaded through and Su called a halt in the shade of one.

  They dismounted, and as if there were safety in numbers, stayed together and sipped from their gourds.

  ‘We can’t go on like this!’ one of the merchants moaned. ‘While we’ve got the chance we should take it.’

  ‘What’s that, then?’ Korkut grunted, looking up from his seat on a rocky slab.

  ‘Accept that we’re lost. Turn round, go back and over the dunes. Then at least we’ll know where we are.’

  ‘Su knows what he’s doing,’ Zarina said. ‘I trust him to get us through!’ The desert had not been kind to her: dust-blown, her clothes worn, she was not the sparkling dancer of some nights before.

  ‘If he does, then why are we lost?’ the merchant came back instantly. ‘To go back we lose a few days, but to go forward without knowing—’

  ‘He’s striking out until he finds the track he knows,’ Korkut snapped. ‘Let him get on with it!’

  ‘Why should we all …’

  Nicander wandered away from the bickering, remembering his foreboding as they left Chang An. He stared up at the forbidding monoliths and wondered at their meaning. Were they emerging from some subterranean hell into the world of man, a fearsome token of the diabolic realm of devils and demons – or were they the cast-down remains of giant columns that once reached into heaven?

  A memory of his mother squeezed at his heart. It was so unfair; that he had shortly to lay down his life in this—

  There – in the shadow under a rock slab …

  ‘Dao Pa! You …’

  The man was sitting cross-legged, his hands in his lap cupped and facing upwards.

  ‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been asking—’

  He turned slowly. ‘Solitude is the highest blessing to the soul. Grant that I may so take of it.’

  ‘Master, we’re in such danger and you need to be alone?’

  ‘You think deliverance is to be found in the company of others in like affliction? You may share their bitterness, they may feel yours – but a true release is only to be found within yourself. To understand your place in the Tao, to have your being at last one with the universe.’

  ‘When we face … what we do, you still find time for such?’

  ‘What better? Tell me; in your philosophy, Ni lao na, what course do you take when all else is in vain and hopeless?’

  ‘We …’

  ‘Then preparing the soul for what must come seems to me the more rational course.’

  ‘Yes, Master,’ Nicander said humbly.

  ‘There are powers within, that you are unaware you possess. Together we will realise them.’

  ‘We have no time.’

  ‘Rest your fears. Su is right – soon he will find an oasis of running water and the knowledge of his position. We will have time.’

  ‘What! How can you know this?’

  ‘You have much to learn, Ni lao na, but you will achieve it. And now, for myself I crave the benison of meditation.’

  He raised his head and closed his eyes.

  The caravan got under way at first light, still eastwards. They would proceed on until the last possible minute of daylight before stopping on the flatness between two monoliths.

  After an uneasy night they resumed their onward toil. The monoliths were left behind and the landscape became overlain with undulating ripples of hard-packed sand and further on, the fantastic sight of a fleet of sculpted rock formations, streamlined and sleek.

  Too troubled to wonder at them the lonely caravan moved on into ragged, red-streaked sandhills, even the camels making heavy going of it. They had reached a gully between two lesser ranges when Meng Hsiang gave a low growl, a long purring grumble. He tossed his head, snatching at the head-rope, showing the whites of his eyes.

  ‘Steady, there,’ Nicander said, uneasy about what unseen threat out in the savage wilderness had alarmed him. He went to pat the big muzzle but it was jerked away. He heard other snorts and gnarls behind and realised the whole camel train was disturbed. A stab of fear went through him.

  A little further on they came across it. A field of bones. Bleached a glaring white, obscenely protruding from rags and the mummified remains of bodies half-covered in sand, camel skeletons each arched back the same way at the agonising moment of death, their burdens still tied on them.

  There was no pattern to it – the bodies lay at random in all directions. Had they kept together to the last and then … crept away for their final minutes under the pitiless sky?

  Gulping, he went to the nearest human remains and stared down at the untidy body. The skull still had hair plastered on a leathery skin, the desiccated face leering at the world that had taken its life.

  ‘Poor devil,’ he whispered. ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘You never can tell.’ It was Marius, standing behind him. ‘The desert dries ’em out, then leaves it alone. Could be one year, a hundred. Who knows.’

  ‘We could be joining them, my friend.’

  ‘Yes, possibly. Doesn’t mean we give it away before we have to? Come on, Nico. Think what we’ve got in our little chest there. Some day …’

  He couldn’t find words and turned away.

  There was a knot of people around Su, shouting at him in despair and anger. The voices carried clearly – Su was arguing that this only proved they were on the right track, that this was where other caravans passed, just that this particular one was ill-prepared.

  He set the camel train in motion again, the imperative of survival taking priority over the impulse to provide a decent burial.

  They had left the bone-field far behind but Meng Hsiang was still not happy. His eyes were rolling and he was jibbing. After what he had just seen Nicander was full of dread and the fear of the unknown returned.

  The camel wrenched at his rope, snarling in temper and frustration. Nicander tried to calm the beast.

  There was shouting at the head of the line and the caravan stopped. Unbel
ievably he saw that the cameleers were throwing off the nose-peg ropes to let the animals free. As each camel was released it made off at an ungainly lope into the sandhills on the right and disappeared.

  From the crest of a nearby coarse, sandy hummock Nicander marvelled at the sight. A sizeable streamlet glittering and lazily meandering before him. And along the bank was green –breathtaking, beautiful, unbelievable green!

  He and the others, delirious with the joy of life restored, were soon gulping greedily at the runnels of water.

  The camels were in a solid line, splashing and slurping, giving rumbles of contentment and flicking water over themselves. They had been saved – and it had been the camels who had been the means.

  They had been travelling so many miles in the gully, not knowing that running parallel, only a short distance away, was water and life. What cruel circumstance had meant that for the other caravan, the wind on that day had chosen to blow in the wrong direction, that their camels had not picked up on the scent of water, while this day theirs had?

  Now Su knew where they were. Impatiently he drove the caravan across the braided stream. Then they followed the river for another five miles before they were presented with an even bigger miracle. The oasis village of Yu Li.

  Willows, poplars – trees! Growing along the banks and pathways – and an orchard!

  Men came out, advancing on the caravan – women too, laughing faces. Stalls of bright melons were wheeled into place under the shade of the poplars, with much chattering, greeting, calling.

  The oasis had been planted centuries before, in the time of the Han when caravans traded across immense distances to bring wealth to China and needed fresh supplies and water. That it was situated on the edge of the hideous Gobi was no supernatural feat – all it had needed was the miracle of water. The natural fertility lying waiting in the soil did the rest.

  There was even a caravanserai! This far from civilisation it would be too much to expect all the comforts of home but to those emerged from the valley of death it was heaven.