The Concubine's Secret

by Kate Furnivall

  Hu Biao thumped the side of his own head with his knuckles. ‘My apologies, brother of my heart.’ He leaned close, fumes of something more than just alcohol rising from his angular frame, and lowered his voice to a murmur. ‘What in the name of the gods are you doing here in this piss-hole village?’

  ‘Searching for you.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘I was told your unit was billeted here. I heard that the fighting was fierce in the valley, so I came to see if your miserable ears were still attached to your hide.’

  Their enemies counted the dead by slicing off ears and threading them on to a wire.

  ‘They’re both still mine,’ Biao laughed and swung his head to display them, leaning back against the wall.

  But Chang could hear the tension in it, the nerves that had to be deadened with a night of maotai and a whiff of the black paste before the next march into battle.

  ‘So you’ve done well, my friend.’

  ‘What are you doing all the way down here, Chang? I thought you were somewhere up north.’

  ‘I was, but I’ve been summoned to Guitan.’ Even in the shadows his sharp eyes took in the hollow cheeks and scarecrow limbs of Hu Biao, and he feared for Yi-ling’s son. ‘My escort troop sleeps even now the sleep of drunken monkeys, ten li away from here. Tomorrow I will arrive at Guitan to do Mao’s bidding.’

  Biao pushed himself off the wall, suddenly sober, and gave a deep respectful bow. ‘I am honoured that one so distinguished chooses to spend time with an unworthy army dog like myself.’

  Voices in the main street shouted out Biao’s name, searching for him. Chang took hold of his shoulder and led him further into the shadows, drawing away from the dancing lanterns.

  ‘Biao,’ he said urgently, ‘my time is short. I have to return to my escort before they wake.’

  Biao nodded. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘I’ve come to ask you to be my aide.’ His eyes scanned his friend for a reaction and he was satisfied by what he saw. A quick flicker of excitement. ‘Good. I shall order the escort to request your presence in the morning.’

  Their eyes met and something in Biao’s changed. His exhausted gaze didn’t move from Chang’s face. ‘This is for Si-qi, isn’t it? Not for me. Did she ask you to do this?’

  ‘No. This has nothing to do with your sister.’ He smiled and treated Biao to another light-hearted bow. ‘Believe me, times are hard. I need a good man I can rely on at my back. You are that man.’

  ‘But it’s fortunate for me that I have a beautiful sister. She could steal any man’s soul, couldn’t she?’

  ‘As easily as a butterfly steals nectar from a blossom.’

  Biao clapped Chang on the back and released a pungent belch. ‘She’ll love you for ever after this. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  Chang An Lo stepped back into deeper shadow and when Biao spoke again, he was gone.

  Chang An Lo had not anticipated this. This decadence. Despite all the whispers that flitted through the sultry air, more numerous than bats’ wings on a summer’s evening, this was worse than he expected. His spirits sank as he contemplated the knowledge that the leader of China’s Communist movement was a man of such total self-indulgence.

  Mao Tse Tung sprawled in a giant four-poster bed. His large round head, a receding hairline exaggerating its height, rested back on a tumble of pillows as if the thoughts inside were too weighty for his short, stubby neck. Elaborate silk canopies hung from above in vivid turquoise and magenta folds, while scarlet sheets flowed around him in the colour of the Communist flag, chosen to give the impression that this great leader had spilled his blood for the cause. But Chang knew differently. When Mao travelled with his armies he enjoyed a level of comfort and safety his soldiers could only dream about.

  Mao lay on the sheets and conducted this meeting with his observant eyes narrowed, watching the individuals he had summoned to attend him in his bedroom. The immense bed was raised up on a double step so that his head remained higher than those of the nervous men in the seven chairs that encircled him. The chairs were elegant but deliberately hard, and were placed at least six feet from the silk coverlets so that the occupants had to strain to hear when Mao chose to lower his voice.

  The atmosphere was tense. Chang was aware that the official next to him had a trickle of sweat running down his temple and he had no doubt that Mao’s quick eyes had spotted it too. Mao had seized leadership of the army from men like General Zhu, a sullen figure who sat silent in the room, by being both intelligent and bold. Men followed him because, despite being just a schoolteacher and adopting a peasant’s plain dress, he was astute at manipulating people and situations. And, above all, he knew how to win. Chang had to remind himself not to be fooled by the soft moon face and the rough rural dialect. This man was nobody’s fool. He had no problem with inflicting terror on his own people. ‘Power,’ he had stated, ‘comes out of the barrel of a gun.’ Chang even breathed carefully so as not to create a ripple in the flow of the great man’s thoughts.

  ‘Chou En-lai informs me,’ Mao said with a guttural emphasis on the word me, ‘that our bearded neighbours, the Russians, are playing both hands still, one against the other. That is foolish of them.’

  ‘Yes, as our young comrade across the room discovered,’ said a sharp-faced Party official whom Chang did not recognise. But with Mao, people fell in and out of favour with a speed that set a man’s head spinning.

  Mao had listened with close attention to Chang’s account of the train raid and the acquisition of the Russian Tokarev rifles. He’d clearly relished the details of the discovery of papers that revealed the secret Russian orders to Chiang Kai-shek. In exchange for the weaponry and the gold, the Chinese Nationalist leader was supposed to lay siege to a list of towns and strong-holds, and even give his whole-hearted support to Russia’s invasion of Manchuria.

  ‘Tell me, young comrade,’ Mao asked now, ‘how you knew the contents of that train were destined for the hairless hyena, Chiang Kai-shek?’

  ‘From my intelligence sources.’

  ‘And what sources are these?’

  Chang drew a slow breath. ‘My humble apologies, but it’s not possible for me to reveal them, Honoured Leader.’ He looked directly into Mao’s dark gaze. It was like looking into the eyes of a snow leopard he had once stumbled across up in the mountains - insatiably greedy, unwilling to let any prey pass without leaving claw marks on its back. ‘There are too many loose tongues in a place like this.’ Chang gestured round the room. ‘Not these honourable men, but the ears that listen outside and the unseen eyes that are fixed to spyholes. The invisible traitors who take Chiang Kai-shek’s silver.’

  Mao’s expression hardened and he nodded, satisfied. ‘You are wiser than your years, comrade. For you are right. It is the same wherever I go, always surrounded by those I cannot trust.’

  He turned away, fingering the huge pile of books that lay spread out on one side of the bed as if he had dismissed further discussion, but Chang felt the vibrations soft as drumbeats in the room. He knew it wasn’t over.

  ‘When we catch them,’ Mao said quietly, so quietly two of the older men had to lean forward to hear, ‘we deal with these traitors. Is that not so, Han-tu?’

  Han-tu smiled as if his lips had been oiled. He wore a military uniform and nodded his head sharply in salute. He didn’t speak.

  ‘Tell him, Han-tu. Tell our fresh-faced comrade what we do, so that he can tell others.’

  ‘The punishment is severe: death by a thousand cuts.’

  ‘Tell him more.’

  Han-tu didn’t look at Chang, just at the Buddha figure in the bed. He spoke as though describing how to take apart a piece of machinery. ‘The traitor is stripped naked. His wrists and ankles are tethered to stakes, so that he is upright but immobile. He cannot fall to the ground or turn in any direction.’

  ‘And then?’ Mao urged.

  ‘A knife is wielded by an expert butcher. One thousand cuts into his fles
h. It is a slow and painful death. By the time the treacherous snake loses consciousness he will have told all he knows, who he works for, who he has betrayed and what secrets he is hiding.’

  Still Mao wasn’t satisfied. ‘Tell him of the warning of the lizard skin.’

  ‘Ah, Comrade Commander, the lizard skin is a specialist art.’ Han-tu puffed out his chest like a pigeon. ‘Few can perform it well.’

  A sad-faced elderly man was seated on the opposite side of the room. He had a throaty smoker’s cough and his flesh bore the telltale yellow tinge of opium, but his fierce eyes were glaring at Chang, his papery skin creased in lines of disapproval. Chang had been ushered into this inner sanctum an hour after the meeting had started and he knew it would drone on long after he left. He had not been told the names of the other men but felt the hostility in many of the looks cast in his direction, sharp as wasp stings on his face. He was young. He had Mao’s ear. He was a threat.

  Mao smoothed a hand over his large square forehead, as though feeling the shape of the thoughts inside his skull. The hands of a girl, Chang noted, soft and milk-fed.

  ‘How is it performed, this lizard skin?’ Mao demanded of Han-tu.

  As if he didn’t know.

  ‘The blade is sharpened to the width of a hair,’ Han-tu explained in the same flat voice, ‘and sliced under the skin on face and body in a thousand shallow, round cuts, so that when it heals it has the appearance of a reptile’s scales. It is a sign to others. A blood warning that . . .’

  Mao licked his lips, his tongue quicker than a snake’s. Chang blocked Han-tu’s words from his ears and breathed out slowly to flush the images from his mind. Addicted. That was the rumour. It was whispered in dark corners of Communist hideouts and in the sultry air of interrogation huts. Mao was addicted to violence. Even between his sheets with the young maidens who were lined up for his bed at night when his fragrant wife, Gui-yuan, was not at his side. None of his wives had yet lasted long, despite producing a clutch of sons for him.

  What kind of ruler would this man make when he finally held the whole of China in his grip? Because Chang had no doubt that the Communists would oust the Nationalists and send Chiang Kai-shek fleeing like a whipped cur into the sea, tail between his legs. Not this year, maybe not even next year. But eventually it would happen. Chang believed it passionately with his heart and soul, but would Mao bring to China the justice and equality it craved? The peasants in the fields yearned for freedom from the yoke of feudal landlords, and this was what the Communists promised them.

  But would Mao Tse Tung deliver it? He was an intelligent man, well-read, sharp-eyed, a bed full of books beside him, but . . .

  ‘Chang An Lo, are you no longer with us?’

  Chang bowed his head low and cursed his foolishness. ‘Forgive my distraction, Honoured Leader. I am overawed in the presence of such company.’

  Mao snorted and Chang knew he must tread with infinite care.

  ‘But my mind is still chasing in and out of the Russian maze, seeking the twisting path of their reasoning.’

  ‘And what conclusion did you reach, young comrade?’

  ‘That either the Russians are trying to destroy China by prolonging the civil war, providing finance to both sides so that the Soviet army will be free to invade not only Manchuria but also other northern provinces of our country. While we busy ourselves with snapping at each other’s tails here in the south.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or there is a traitor at the heart of the Politburo in Moscow.’

  A hiss and an intake of breath trickled round the room. Han-tu thumped the palm of his hand on his knee with a loud slap. ‘Our last delegation to Moscow reported that it found Stalin eager to commit greater resources to our struggle against the Nationalist despot. I cannot believe that they would betray us to—’

  Mao sat up abruptly. Han-tu fell silent.

  ‘The Russian bear has always been a dangerous and unreliable ally.’ Mao’s moon face was stern. ‘I remind you all that at one time it had such control over our Chinese Communist Party that it tried to force us to merge with Chiang Kai-shek’s treacherous Nationalists. Stalin believed we were too weak to seize control of China but . . .’ a cold smile tilted his lips and he smoothed the red sheet in front of him with his small hands, ‘the Vozhd of Soviet Russia was wrong.’

  ‘He underestimated you, our Great Leader.’

  ‘You are leading us to victory.’

  ‘Your army will die for you if you ask.’

  Mao nodded, satisfied, then his eyes sought out the one man who so far had said nothing. ‘Is that true, General Zhu? Will my Red Army die for me?’

  Everyone in the room studied the man who had been outmanoeuvred by Mao for control of the military. Zhu was an army man to his core and his men loved and respected him.

  ‘My Comrade Commander,’ Zhu growled, ‘the army is yours to command. They have already died for you.’

  Silence hit the room. Was the General implying Mao had commanded them unwisely? Chang felt the air shudder and saw the eyes of the five other men drop to the silk carpet beneath their feet. The stench of their fear was sharp as cow dung in his nostrils. Mao let the silence lengthen, held the General’s gaze until Zhu also was forced to lower his eyes, then he lifted a small brass hand-bell at the side of his bed and rang it. Immediately a young servant girl entered the room, bowing almost to the floor.

  ‘Chai,’ Mao ordered with a dismissive flick of his wrist, ‘tea.’ He leaned back among the pillows as she left the room, his eyes tracing the swing of her slender hips. ‘Perhaps,’ he said with a sudden burst of energy, ‘our young comrade here is correct. Perhaps Josef Stalin himself is lying to us with a whore’s smile on his face while he still hands out arms and Soviet gold to our enemies. ’

  Mao looked again at Chang, thoughtfully studying this young newcomer who seemed to know too much.

  ‘Chang An Lo,’ he said softly, ‘do you speak Russian?’

  16

  Alexei moved. Nothing much at first, just a slight shift of his body. Pain. Bright and bloody. It gathered in his lungs and reached out to portions of his flesh in sharp malicious handfuls. Dermo! Shit! Even his thoughts hurt. They felt as though they were being crushed like walnuts under a flat iron till their shells split and splintered. The pieces lodged in his brain.

  ‘Awake, are you?’

  Alexei opened his eyes. His eyeballs felt dry and gritty, as if they hadn’t been used in a long time. The light that greeted them was yellow and smelled of kerosene. He was lying flat on his back, that much he registered, so with an effort he rolled his head to one side and slowly the world around him shivered into focus. A low planked ceiling, wooden walls, a table bolted to the floor, cupboards with delicate fretwork, the strong aroma of coffee.

  ‘Coffee?’

  Alexei attempted to sit up. Not a good move. The pain in his lungs sank its teeth in and set off a vicious spasm of coughing, but a strong arm supported him and a deep laugh gusted warm air on his skin.

  ‘Take your time, comrade.’

  Alexei took his time. How in hell’s name did I get here? He eased himself so that he was propped up on the narrow bunk, his head resting against the wall. Someone had lit hell’s fire inside his chest.

  ‘Spasibo,’ he murmured. Throat as dry as ash.

  He focused on the fair-haired man sitting on the edge of the bed and saw a handsome face, neat features clean-shaven but with a hesitancy in his blue eyes. Eyelashes too long for a man but large masculine teeth, full lips more than ready to laugh. In his forties, perhaps a little younger.

  ‘Spasibo,’ Alexei said again, and this time he made it more robust.

  ‘You’re welcome, friend. Ready for coffee?’

  Alexei nodded, regretted it, and waited for the room to reassemble. The man moved away to a stove in the corner and lifted a coffee pot that was stewing there. It was at this exact moment that it dawned on Alexei’s sluggish mind that this new world of his was rocking. The m
ovement wasn’t just inside his head. A gentle sway, but definitely rocking.

  ‘We’re on a boat,’ he said.

  ‘Correct. The Red Maiden.’

  ‘Yours?’

  ‘She certainly is.’

  The word she was spoken with affection. The man patted the wall with his palm, the way Alexei would a horse, and poured coffee into two metal cups. He was wearing a thick fisherman’s jersey which looked as if it hadn’t been washed in a while, and for the first time Alexei realised he was clothed in a similar one himself, as well as rough socks and trousers he’d never seen before. He watched warily as his host returned to sit on the side of the bed and wrapped Alexei’s hand around the cup.

  ‘Here, drink, tovarishch. It’ll put iron in your veins.’

  To Alexei’s shock his arm felt like a dead weight when he tried to lift the cup. His hand shuddered and spilled some liquid on his sweater but eventually it reached his lips. The coffee was black and strong and seemed to kick a hole in the fog as it scalded his tongue, but it tasted good. Where the hell did a fisherman get his hands on coffee like this in Stalin’s Russia, where the shop shelves were covered in nothing but dust? He felt his senses returning one by one and breathed cautiously.

  ‘Your name, comrade?’ he asked.

  ‘Konstantin Duretin. Yours?’

  ‘Alexei Serov.’

  ‘Well, Comrade Serov, what were you doing swimming in the river with the fish in the middle of winter?’

  ‘Fish?’ Alexei frowned. Images battered his brain. A game of chess, a long-stemmed pipe. The curve of a road to a bridge.

  Dear God, the bridge. Men coming at him from all directions. With a jolt of memory he slid a hand down to his side and felt the bulk of bandages there.

  The blue eyes were still smiling at him, but more thoughtful now. ‘I did the best I could for you. As good as dead, you were. I found your carcass clinging to a scrap of wood in the middle of the river like a drowning kitten. Lost all but a cupful of blood, I’d guess, and near frozen to death.’

  ‘Spasibo, Konstantin. I owe you—’