Silk Road

by Jeanne Larsen

  The Moon Lady purses her lips and brushes a nebular wisp from her diaphanous robe. She herself is, after all, the renegade wife who snatched the Herb of Immortality from her selfish husband and ran off to live forever in this sky palace of candlelit quartz. I’ll grant, she thinks, that my fitful astral sister may not yet have foreseen the flourishing of the perspicacious courtesan Xue Tao or poor Yu Hsuan-ji. But why such gloom? Young Li Ji-lan is already showing signs of her remarkable talent. And how can Sister have forgotten in mere decades the galaxy of feminine ability gathered in Chang-an under the Empress Wu?

  Images flurry like new-hatched moths into the Moon Lady’s thoughts: a Buddhist nun; a peasant woman; Madame Sun, who burned her own poems; Ladies of the Tao; empresses; consorts; more. True, many of their poems will be lost, as will other talented women’s very names – Jang Li-ben’s daughter, Liu Yuan-tsai’s wife – but who could deny that, despite the strictures, voices alive with the yin force can be heard? The Moon Lady shakes her head.

  Ts something wrong, Lady?’ The moonmaids have put aside their flutes and one of their number. White Aureole, has drifted over to the goddess’s side. ‘Shall I fetch you a cup of dew?’

  The Lady assures her that all is well, except that Dame Shamanka Star is in one of her glum moods and wants some cheering up. ‘If she weren’t beyond such things, I’d swear she was premenstrual.’ The Moon Lady pauses to chide herself for the thought. ‘Well, the poor dear has a right to be a bit eccentric, I suppose. Imagine having the responsibility for all those twitching, moaning mediums and ecstaticas when you know how many of the messages are going to be misread or ignored.’

  White Aureole murmurs sympathetically and floats off towards the Lady’s study to fetch paper, writing-brush, inkstick, and the concave stone on which to grind the solid ink and mix it with water.

  ‘Bring my Hyaline Cloud Inkstone this time please, dear,’ the Moon Lady calls softly after her. ‘The ink I grind on it always seems to give the brush a special flow.’ As she waits, she returns to the letter. The albino moonhare flicks one ear but never breaks the rhythm of his pounding.

  The letter continues in an erratic welter of emotions:… so that’s the last time I invite that tiresome Clerkstar over to tea – she insists on bringing up the conquest of the Shang by her wonderful Zhou Dynasty. As if that wasn’t a major calamity for all the yin-ruled!

  Possessed too many times by too many voices, sometimes the Shamanka Star loses her own. A hasty note at the end adds: Sorry, dear Sister, to have babbled on like this. You know how I am. And just now – a most distressing piece of news. A blue raven has come from the Motherqueen herself – some little chit has taken to speaking in tongues without even a by-your-leave! I could just nova! Apologies. S.

  The Moon Lady places the letter to the side of her writing-desk. She considers retiring to a chamber in her vast underground library to work on her reply, but the scent of the cinnamon tree urgers her to linger in the garden pavilion. Two of the moonmaids take up huge peacock-feather fans on poles of silver and wave them above her head. The frog carved into the ivory of the pavilion’s main rafter wriggles contentedly in the chilly breeze.

  When White Aureole finally returns, her eyes are wide with distress. On a tray of translucent nephrite, she bears rice paper, an heirloom stick of ink, and a writing brush with a handle made of a fine bamboo spotted by the tears of the Two Ladies of the Hsiang River. There is no inkstone. The Moon Lady raises her eyebrows inquiringly.

  The Hyaline Cloud Inkstone, says White Aureole, has vanished. She has looked everywhere. None of the household staff has seen it for days. The cloth of nimbus in which the stone is usually wrapped lies crumpled in a corner of the storage chest. Shall she bring one of the everyday inkstones? Has the Lady any instructions for a further search?

  The Lady and her students look through every chamber and courtyard. Finally, Oyster, the youngest of the moonmaids, spies an unusual nebular glow spilling from the moonhare’s mortar. She cries out, and the others gather round. The hare continues to pound out time’s passage. He embodies the insensible germ of the yang force in the moon, as the three-legged crow – dark as a sunspot – is the grain of yin within the distant solar palace.

  There, in the curve of the mortar, shine the last powdery fragments of the Hyaline Cloud Inkstone. No need to look further. No hope of repair.

  The Moon Lady smiles with a tranquil irony. A certain handsome visitor who passed a night within the moon palace once gave her that stone, before his sky raft took him back down to the human realm. It was carved, he told her as they bade one another farewell, of a rare rock found only on Mothbrow Mountain in his native province. In exchange, she had given him an inkstone made of a petrified star, like those that sometimes fell to earth. But in later days, the man’s great-grandson dropped that stone, and smashed it, and now hers too is gone.

  The seven moonmaids exclaim in shock and futile outrage. The Lady is an incomparable calligrapher, but surely the graceful ‘silver hooks’ she inscribes upon the page will suffer from the loss! How can another such rock be brought to their lunar dwelling place? No dweller on the moon may violate cosmic decorum by taking one from earth. Some human must be induced to offer one at once!

  The Moon Lady smiles her cool but charming smile. That,’ she says, ‘is exactly what will happen. Oyster, you may bring me my Wateressence Stone; it will do for now. I must advise Dame Shamanka Star to look into this business of an unauthorized medium. No doubt that’s what’s bothering the poor thing. All those energies released without any sort of regulation! It’s enough to throw anybody out of kilter.’ She glances ruefully at the albino hare. ‘And now, girls, I want each of you to write me a poem on the sun crow, in heptasyllabic regulated verse. The exercise will help you calm yourselves. The word to rhyme with is rays.’

  Oyster goes away, and the six other young scholars glide off after her towards their studies, chastened by the Lady’s serenity. After her letter is written, she decides, she will look into a report of a general’s runaway wife that has reached her, slowly but inevitably, through the celestial grapevine. She pauses to gaze at her own frost-white face in the silver-washed disc hanging from one of the posts of the pavilion. The moonhare’s monotonous pounding reverberates. The cinnamon twigs rustle. A sliver of hoarshine hangs above the pellucid air of the frontier wastelands, the autumnal loess-clouds over Liang-jou and Chang-an, the argentine waters of Cavegarden Lake.

  PARROT

  SPEAKS:

  12

  I sat inside the curtains of my bed, my knees pulled up to my chest. The ninth night of the ninth moon. Mid-autumn Festival, and I was passing the evening alone. Ghalib had come by earlier for a hasty meal and hastier lovemaking. Then he rushed back to his inn to oversee the last preparations: Umar had passed through some kind of feverish crisis, and tomorrow we would join a caravan leaving for Chang-an. I had told Ghalib I wanted only to go to the capital, that I knew he wouldn’t take me back with him to Persia. Now I realize it was just this that fanned his feeling for me; had I vowed eternal love and pleaded to stay with him, he would have stroked my cheek and left me as quietly as he could. But as long as he thought me ambitious for the opportunities of the imperial city, he came, frowning, to Lutegarden, striding to my room with the air of a man who catches himself attending to some trivial matter better left to a servant.

  Yet in my bedroom, after music, and food and wine, he changed. ‘You’ve made me a greedy man. Little Parrot,’ he had said three nights ago, scratching his beard, ‘but I’ll take you with me. If this Mama Chen of yours will accept a reasonable offer.’

  She would accept. I knew how badly she needed some extra cash right now – she had grumbled about it most of the day –yet as soon as he gave me what I desired, my mouth went dry with loss. Though I returned often to Khotan in dreams, and reminded myself at every mention of the capital that I was the daughter of a good Chang-an family, Liang-jou was the home I had known for years. While I lived there, I felt I
was an outsider; but when I learned I would be leaving, I thought only of the smell of Liang-jou mutton pasties, and the melodies that came there first from the West, and the pond in Lutegarden, and Baby and Nephrite left behind.

  So I told Ghalib that Mama Chen would be more willing to arrange my transfer to the Chang-an registry of entertainers if he asked for both of us. Baby and me, together. ‘She’s ready to get rid of Baby, and buying two girls’ contracts will convince her it’s trade, not personal attachment.’ I lay on my stomach and traced the incised pattern of leaves and flowers atop my white ceramic pillow. ‘She’ll drive a harder bargain if she thinks you want me because of some feeling, and not for business.’ The last sentence disappeared into the air between us.

  He said nothing then, but the next day Mama Chen agreed to negotiate on Ghalib’s behalf with the city clerk in charge of transferring entertainers’ official registrations. The silver Ghalib gave her more than paid the bribe to have whatever problem there was with Baby’s papers overlooked. That night Umar’s illness grew suddenly worse and then suddenly better, and all was arranged so quickly that it did not yet seem real to me. The morning of the Mid-autumn Festival, when Mama Chen told Baby that she was to go to Chang-an with me, the little dancer broke two days of gloom with a leap and full twist in midair. Now she was out with Bellring, Glory, Little Pink, and young Jujube. They were joining entertainers from other houses at the governor’s big mid-autumn banquet. Mama Chen had drunk herself to sleep on chrysanthemum wine after seeing them off and Ghalib safely escorted from my room.

  As for Nephrite, she had left Lutegarden early in the afternoon, decked out in Mid-autumn Festival style, a spray of crimson dogwood leaves hanging from her sash and a tiny embroidered bag of the scarlet berries attached to one sleeve. A new young man had asked her to join him on a mountain picnic for the holiday.

  I had just pulled myself from my bed and walked through the dark room to raise the window blind and gaze at the gibbous Ninthnight moon when I heard a thump and a giggle behind me. I whirled about and by the watery light saw Nephrite leaning in my doorway. I lighted a new candle, she threw herself laughing on my bed, and I sat down beside her. Usually her fastidious restraint extended to alcohol, but tonight she was as drunk as I’d ever seen her, her pale face flushed to beauty with the festival wine.

  ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Oh, Parrot, what happened tonight! A perfect Ninthnight. I wore the long-life dogwood. I drank the long-life wine, oh and one other thing –’ She sat up with a jerk and threw her arms around me. ‘Oh, Parrot, you may be leaving, and it may be months and months before the Ladies at Darkdazzle Vista can buy my contract, but I can still follow the disciplines and achieve transcendence.’ Her head hung down and she spoke with her warm face pressed against my breasts. ‘And, oh, he was so, so – ‘

  Her shoulders shook and I thought she was crying. I smoothed her hair with my hand. Then she raised her laughing face and brought it so close to mine I could smell the spicy wine on her breath.

  ‘Oh, Parrot, he was almost a virgin, and half drunk, and got so excited when I asked him if he wanted to slip away from the group and walk in the moonlight. When I lay down he opened my skirt and called me a frostfairy and said he’d never made clouds and rain out among the greenery before.’

  I asked her only if she hadn’t been cold.

  ‘Cold? I almost froze to death. Thank the Amah that it’s warmer than last week! But that helped me keep control – not easy. Parrot, with the moon and the wine. I’m a little tipsy, you know. Anyway, sister, his male essence has fed my spirit. He almost fell asleep on his horse on the way home, and I feel so alive I must have added years to my longevity.’ She sighed and held my gaze with hers. ‘And tomorrow you leave me.’

  The candle burned brightly, and Nephrite asked if she might touch me, and first I said no, because I was afraid, and then I said yes, because I wanted her to. Sometimes it seemed strange to make love to a body that mirrored my own. Sometimes it seemed the same as with a man, and sometimes it seemed different but exactly right. Her fingers drew new patterns across the skin of my back. I called her names I’ve said to no one else. We had no book of secret teachings, no words for the ways our bodies fitted together, and no struggle to see who might win what from the other.

  At last she slept. The moon had sailed on past my window. I lay awake, thinking of what had happened, and how Nephrite had called me ‘little sister’ the first time at Old Ma’s house in Dun-huang, and how I had to leave her now because Baby had told me in a fever to go to Chang-an where my mother was. It was too late to stop it; I had made it happen.

  Nephrite was still dozing beneath my quilts when I heard the others return at last from the governor’s banquet. Baby hurried ahead of the rest, and burst into my room. But when she saw Nephrite roll over in her sleep so that the light of the guttering candle struck her white breasts. Baby’s face crumpled and she ran.

  The next day is a jumble. I remember far more clearly the weeks of the journey to the capital: up through scrub-covered hills of sandstone and shale where pheasants rose up crying, then down again to pastures and terraced croplands, the yellowish earth still riddled with the deep fissures that the Road must twist round and twist round again. Dust hung heavy about us, except when we hit the autumn rains as we neared Chang-an, and made our way afterwards through thick mud.

  The first six or seven days we travelled slowly, so that Umar might rest, and we lingered awhile in the city of Lan-jou, its yellow-brown walls set where yellow-brown hills close in towards the great River Huang. One miserable morning we crossed the pass over the Liuban range, a sleetstorm out of the west driving hard at our backs as we topped the divide.

  There was more water than in the far west, though the first ten days out of Liang-jou most of it tasted brackish. And there were far more inns. Travellers’ tales grow with the telling, I know, but one day we heard that the roof and flooring of an inn we had stopped at the night before had burned, and its walls collapsed, and half the people died. Still, the Silk Road carried us on, east and south and east, while the soft, ceaseless plodding of the camels took me back to the peace I had known along the Road before.

  Baby treated me as if she knew nothing of what had passed between Nephrite and me – and as if nothing had ever been possible between the two of us. One day early on, as we picked our way among the loose stones of the plain just outside Liang-jou, I realized I could do nothing but accept this. In the evenings, Ghalib and I taught each other what we had learned, in our different worlds, about the ways of passion. Sometimes he told me stories of his travels, or I played my lute for him, but often we held to the silence of the day’s long ride. I heard him say to Umar more than once that the cold was closing in and that he hoped we would make good time, but when he and I were alone together he seemed to be in no hurry to end the journey.

  Huddled within layers of clothing, I dreamed as I had on the journey from Dun-huang. This time, though, my mother came for me by night, and not in daytime reveries. Her gleaming chestnut steed still danced on hooves of cobalt grey. Once the swift rider had Baby’s round cheeks and slender waist. Often she was Nephrite, pale and remote and beautiful as the moon. And on the last night that we made camp in the wild lands, I saw a queen’s face, splendid with tiger’s teeth, and in her dishevelled hair a crown of stars shaped like a loom.

  On my final morning at Lutegarden House, tired though I was, I woke early. Nephrite had slipped off to her own room. I walked out into the garden, to see it one last time alone in the first light. Then Baby walked up to where I stood beside the lily pond, something small and white held in her two fists. It was the strange scroll that the parakeet had led me to at Old Ma’s. When I packed my things to take with me to Chang-an, I couldn’t find it; in fact, I hadn’t seen it for years. Now here was Baby, clutching the scroll with an air of triumphant scorn. Before I could ask how she came by it, or where it had been, she threw it at me, hard.

  When the scroll flew towards me, I tried to
catch it. It slipped from my fingers and tumbled at my feet. The cord that bound it loosened and it fell open, so that I could see the first column of the writing. I knew how to read now, and the words still looked as if they were Chinese, yet they did not quite make sense. When I glanced up, Baby had marched off again, into the house. I picked up the scroll for a closer look. Word after word, column after column, the black signs hung on the silk like dark stars collapsing in on themselves. I shrugged, glad to have the curious thing again after all, and turned to take it to my room. Rerolling it as I walked, I passed through a patch of morning sunlight reflected off the garden pond. A long ray fell on one of the first words and I saw that it was, and was not, a word I knew: in pictographic, antique form, the ink made a human figure, her breasts large with milk for her child.

  Seagem’s Chamber

  In a coral chamber of the Dragon Monarch’s Mother-of-Pearl Villa, Seagem grinds a stick of ink upon a stone. A black lake forms and she sets the inkstick aside, breathing easily, feeling her body relaxed and alert. Raised to be a good wife, Seagem learned sewing and courtesy and how to keep accounts in her head and how to hold her tongue. She never unwound a scroll, never held a writing brush. Now, at the Dragon Monarch’s suggestion, she reads slowly, and practises the quiet discipline of calligraphy every morning. It has become another of the guilty joys of her new life, though she remembers, still, that her happiness in this unearthly realm violates the laws of man.

  She dips the brush into the dark pool. She traces upon the untouched page a pattern held clearly in her mind. A sudden ray of light breaks from the nearby moonpearl lamp, startling her. The hand slips, the fickle ink twists, the word appears transmuted. No longer is it in the stylized form declared standard by that book-burning autocrat, the builder of the Great Wall. It has become again a true pictograph, the very image of mother. The brilliant runaway beam strikes the page and is refracted off, towards the human realm.