Silk Road

by Jeanne Larsen

  This was my chance to find out whether Baby was still at the Imperial Dancing School! Good Lady Guan-yin, I breathed, let her be here today. But a Kuchean drum fandango and then a sabre dance blazed across the stage and I saw nothing of my friend.

  I did see for the first time one of the tiny-footed ladies who were said to be setting a new fashion for feet no longer than a hand’s width. Amber took my arm again and told me how the bones of the growing foot – held tightly by the wrapping-cloths –are bent nearly double; the young girls it is done to weep with pain for months. I fell silent. Then a sprightly new tune swirled up and filled the space between us.

  A troupe of perhaps forty young women clad in green came out to perform a ‘flower dance’, turning their lithe bodies and forming the characters for ‘long life’, ‘flower’, and ‘wedded bliss’. Their arms waved rhythmically and their long, fluttering sleeves cast their spell. It was several minutes before I noticed that one of them was Baby. At the end of the dance, she pattered quickly off the embroidered rugs atop the stage, before I had a chance to catch her eye.

  A soloist appeared, and despite my mood my attention was caught up by her spectacular performance. Four times she flung off a gauzy layer of her costume, transforming the colours of her dress each time the tempo of the music quickened.

  Bouquet turned from her eager perusal of the audience and asked in condescending tones if I had ever seen the like of these dancers. I said I thought them splendid.

  ‘But there are better to be seen, Bordermoon,’ she said, assuming the air of one introducing a dear but too familiar garden to an outlander one knows will be impressed. ‘The best from the Teaching Quarters enter the Brilliant Emperor’s own Pear Garden Academy. And I’ve heard that in her day the Empress Wu once choreographed a performance for nine hundred – now that must have been a sight indeed!’

  Before I could answer, a pair of dancers burst forth, wearing Soghdian pantaloons and twirling atop great rolling balls. The one on my left was Baby. Without thinking, I left Bouquet and began to slip past the other watchers towards the stage. A gang of street boys pointed towards me, and two noblewomen in pearl-trimmed capelets stared in annoyance – and curiosity – at the brazen courtesan brushing past them. But as Baby leapt high off the scarlet ball and threw herself forward in a stage bow, I broke through into a little clear space. Her face swung towards me and lit up with happy recognition.

  Her partner took her hand. The two ran offstage, leaving me determined, now that I knew I could travel about the city on my own, to see Baby again immediately. I turned to hurry back to the others on the knoll before Mama Lu decided she should show the onlookers how carefully the entertainers of Felicity Hall were chaperoned. I nearly bumped into a young man I had seen before, Dreamdragon Feng, the failed examination candidate. He must have been directly behind me when Baby looked our way.

  The amused look he gave me implied that he had caught me out at something, but that there would be an agreement of silence between us. I drew myself up, finding it easy to let him see I thought he went too far. Easy too, after that, to fold my hands together in my soft sleeves and bow respectfully in his direction with an ironic but not inflexible courtesy. He bowed in return, and I walked off a bit more slowly towards the knoll.

  After one more number the dancers’ performance ended. The six of us, led by Mama Lu, drifted back towards the Waterlily Garden. We made ready for our second programme, and my other concerns dropped away as my solo neared.

  I stood alone on the platform, swaying slightly, and played the first notes of the melody on my lute. There were more people listening than there had been earlier, yet they all fell quiet as the song spun itself through the warm air. Only ten days before, listening to those folk songs from lost southern dynasties that we had learned to sing, I had felt a set of lyrics rise within me, and Mama Lu had said that I might perform them in the park. Bending one leg, I placed the sole of my foot against the other knee, curving my body to balance my stance as Bellring had taught me to do so long ago, and sang:

  ‘In early spring I wander out,

  I gather sameheart grass

  To tie a lover’s knot and send

  it off, to battlefields.

  But a soldier’s posting takes him far,

  and woven herbs are frail.

  When women dream of warriors.

  Bitter, thoughts of love.

  Bitter, thoughts of love:

  His hazy, distant face.

  Though summer dries the river’s banks,

  this longing will not end.’

  Amber had said this year’s flowers were unusually profuse because of the heavy autumn rains, but I think any spring in Chang-an would have dazzled me after the parched greening of Liang-jou. Yet something else struck me that day. Only during the dark weeks just after I came to Chang-an had making music failed to bring me pleasure. This was the first time I had played for so many, though, and I liked it. It was not the crowd’s stares when I stepped out from behind the screen at the start of our performance. It was not the moment when I saw a gentleman turn his face towards another black-capped official and wave a wine cup in my direction, as if to say, ‘Oh, yes, she’s fairly new in town, but I’ve been keeping an eye on her for some time now.’ What dazzled me were the moments when I seemed to fade away; when all of us, players and listeners, were caught up as melody and lyric said what each of us thought they had to say.

  My joy in the performance, and in Amber’s new friendliness, was swept aside by Walleye’s news the next morning. ‘The trip back from the Serpentine gave me my chance,’ he said. ‘I passed by the Li compound and had a quick word with an old comrade of mine who works as a gardener there now.’ His face was grave, as if he were making a report to my father, but he couldn’t hide his satisfaction at his success. ‘He’s agreed to persuade the gatekeeper to let you slip into the place and try your luck. I’m afraid he hasn’t got the influence to arrange a proper audience for you with your grandfather, but this should do the trick.’

  After three long days. Amber’s friend came again to stay the night, and again I rose early and borrowed his mare. I might have spared myself the risk of detection and taken the time to walk, for of course the mare was put away by a surly stableboy at the Lis’ as soon as I arrived. I was left thin and childish, barely a woman at all despite my showy clothes, and so tongue-tied that I envied Baby’s muteness.

  The old gardener greeted me hastily in the great courtyard of the mansion. Looking past him, I saw that one wing of the house must have been empty for years. As I stared at those cobwebbed windows, the gardener told me what he hadn’t had time to explain to Walleye: my father’s mother – Grandfather’s proper wife; he knew little of the long-gone Turkish concubine – had died only a few months earlier. The master’s grieving heavily, miss,’ he said, ‘and I can’t say as I blame him when I remember my old woman. I’m sorry about your loss, and sorry to be the one to tell you of it.’ He hesitated. ‘Perhaps it will be your good fortune, though. Perhaps the master will be eager to take you in.’

  Unfilial though it was, I put the thought of this lost grandmother aside for later, so eager was I to see my mother. Then, when the gardener looked away and told me of her mysterious illness and disappearance, I went blank and stood in the deep morning shadows shivering.

  ‘Go on now, miss,’ the gardener said, softening his old man’s voice as best he could. ‘I’m terribly sorry for both losses. It’s been so long since Mistress Seagem was spirited away that I thought you surely knew of it, or I’d have had a word with Walleye. Anyway, it’s your grandfather that can care for you if he chooses. He’s at his sharpest early in the day. You’d best go inside.’

  He led me along a corridor to a room where a dusty-legged table was laid with a morning meal for one. I followed absently. ‘This is the girl,’ he said to a tight-faced maid who brought in a steaming bowl and set it on the table. ‘How is the master this morning?’

  The maid shook her head and b
it her lips and sniffed at me. ‘Look at her!’ she said to the gardener, as if she sensed that I was too far away to speak to her. ‘Iranian or some such, isn’t she? Do you honestly think she looks like the late young master?’

  Before I could hear the answer, one I wanted very much to hear, a thick voice called out from a back room. The maid ran off towards it, and the gardener bobbed his head nervously towards me and left. In a moment, my grandfather bore down on me in a querulous ferment, demanding to know who I was and why I had come to bother him.

  ‘You’re a little singer, aren’t you, girl?’ He broke off abruptly to pick a thread from the patched sleeve of his scholar’s robe, then jerked his head back up. ‘Did some unfeeling acquaintance of mine send you as a gift? Has the corruption of this age taken over even the few righteous men left in the city? Well?’

  I began to tell him that I was his granddaughter, though it was some time before I got enough of the story out for him to understand it. He kept interrupting me to expound peevishly on the fallen morals of modem times, when licentious camp followers strutted freely into good men’s homes. Later I realized that though he himself was a retired army officer of undistinguished origins, in his zeal to be accepted by the old aristocracy, he had taken on the ways of the strictest Confucian men of letters. At that time, however, I was simply stunned. As soon as I managed to stammer out a mention of my father, the old man’s white beard set to wagging. He denounced him as a bad son, one who had had the effrontery to die before his parents did.

  ‘Bad enough when he insisted on that runaway slut of a vulgar merchant’s get for his second wife instead of marrying a daughter of one of the great families as he should have. But then he let himself get killed. He still had the responsibility of caring for my spirit tablet after I leave this world! He’s a wicked, unfilial son, and I’ll hear no more about him.’ His face worked then as a little boy’s might before he bursts into tears. I could see that grief and age had driven him into the renewed childhood that awaits a few who live that long.

  More than that I could not think. A voice inside me chanted. This is not real, not real, a lying fantasy, all of it, never real, so loudly that it was impossible to decide what to do next. I mumbled the one bit of proof I had, the thing that in my picturings of this day had put any doubt of my identity to rest. ‘He, Baba, he bore the image of a tiger on the skin of his left arm – here.’ I touched a spot on my own upper arm.

  The old man leapt to his feet and shrieked with rage. ‘Unfilial! Unfilial! Do not remind me of this shame. He mutilated the body his father and his mother gave to him! If he were alive, I would beat him to death right here. If he were alive – ‘

  Again he broke off abruptly, and returned to his seat to search his worn cuffs for another loose thread, as if we had been discussing something of no moment. ‘Have you anything else you wish to say, little sly-tongued foreign prostitute, before you go?’

  I feared another outburst of anger, but I knew I had to speak. ‘Don’t you see? I am his daughter, the daughter of your son. I know about the – the sign on his flesh. You say it was unfilial, but it was there and I saw it. Doesn’t that tell you who I am?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, in an aged aristocrat’s suave tones, ‘the tattooed tiger?’ He chuckled. ‘Who can understand the rash whims of a young military man? Yet we need such fellows to keep the barbarian hordes in line.’ Then he leaned forward across the table and spat. ‘And any little slut who tempts a man away from duty might know of it. Be off!’

  He bellowed for the gatekeeper, who must have been waiting just outside the door. The tight-faced maid poured my grandfather’s tea as if I were already gone. ‘Go,’ the gatekeeper hissed, loosening his painful grip on my arm at the shabby front gate, ‘before he thinks to ask how you got in. Tell that friend of the gardener’s not to bring us any more trouble, thank you. I’ll not let him in this gate again. The boy has your horse ready. Go.’

  Still numb, I mounted the mare and started out, not thinking much about what I did. My mother had vanished into some supernatural captivity, my grandmother had died, and the father of my father had turned me out.

  The white mare picked her way around a carriage where a fat man in the clothes of a well-to-do merchant submitted to the scoldings of his needle-thin, bejewelled wife. Whoever my mother’s parents had been, I thought, they were only commoners like these two. And even if I knew their names or could find them in this great city, I was convinced now that they too would call me fallen and turn me out. I clucked to the mare to hurry and swore I would go to visit Baby soon.

  PART THREE

  In a

  Shrine

  Cave

  South of

  Chang-an

  In a shrine cave south of Chang-an, among the foothills of blue mountains, a young musician sleeps through this delightful summer night. Far to the west, in a silver-walled palace atop a much higher range, her father’s mother has come at last to serve as an attendant to the Western Motherqueen. Months ago, at the grandmother’s funeral, the few women remaining in a declining household bade her farewell until they should meet her again after their own deaths, at the moon gate into the Amah’s fastness, there in the heights of the Kun-lun massif.

  Now the grandmother tremblingly approaches the Western Motherqueen, who sits listening to music near a cluster of snowjewel shrubs in her garden. The goddess’s leopard tail lashes idly. The air around her is a-dance with what you may call (in a pretty myth of quarks and electron clouds and charm) ‘electricity’, or (if your mind is of another bent) the numen of the place. Beside the nearby Malachite Pond, six jade maidens play for the Amah their unearthly instruments: a thundercall flute, a Kun-lun-stone drum, a cloudbreath mouth organ, a magicbeast lithophone, a set of jade chimes, and a Cavegarden-limestone gong.

  Still attached to the human world, the new attendant has learned of the plight of her granddaughter, her only living descendant, and wishes to see her protected. Though the young woman sleeping in the shrine cave has been barred from her paternal ancestral hall, she has paid homage to her grandmother’s spirit, and the grandmother has been moved. But she is awed by the goddess and loath to disturb her.

  Finally the music ends, and the musicians rest quietly. The jade maiden who was playing the thundercall flute unrolls a bundle of silk and takes out fifty yarrow stalks. She sets one of them aside.

  Looking up, the Amah deigns to notice the tentative approach of the new attendant and bids her speak. The goddess’s tiger teeth glint and her flower-wild ringlets wave free as she hears of the granddaughter’s unjust treatment, of the denial of her paternity.

  ‘So the old man fears his own lusts and calls her liar and whore?’ the goddess asks with an eerie whistling of her breath. ‘But this granddaughter of yours – does she know me?’

  Rather uncomfortably, the grandmother explains that although the young woman does not worship the goddess, certain friends of hers do, a novice Lady of the Tao named Nephrite, for one. Some of the musicians are listening in, but the graceful flautist bends over the yarrow stalks in her left hand, absorbed, counting them out. From them, she will learn the state of the forces of yin and yang at this point in their endless flux and reflux.

  ‘Enough! For your sake I will help, but since she is no devotee, by no more than the sending of a dream for comfort. Or perhaps – ‘ The Western Motherqueen stops as one of her blue-black birds alights on a nearby snowjewel branch, bearing a report. She reads it. The flautist rests her relaxed, attentive gaze briefly on the messenger bird, then divides the stalks and begins to count again. Soon she will know the moment’s brief balancings and impending changes, and so something of the meaning behind synchronous events.

  The report comes from the Moon Lady, who was herself an attendant on the goddess before she married the archer Yi, stole from him the immortality herb, and ran off to live on the moon. ‘Yes,’ the Amah says thoughtfully, ‘a dream –or something like one – with a message of comfort and a job to do.’
/>   In response to a summons, a jade woman in dark red petticoats brings a little table with the goddess’s writing things and starts to grind the inkstick on its stone. But before the preparations are done, the Western Motherqueen looks up, as if she hears some distant, startling noise. ‘The moment’s not complete yet,’ she says, and tells her attendants that there is another event in resonance with these. ‘Perhaps that’s word of it now,’ she adds in an abstracted voice.

  The grandmother can hear nothing, but she dares not speak. The flautist, who has finished counting the yarrow stalks, nods once, with the satisfaction of an expectation fulfilled. Then a rapid chiaroscuro flicker of variable starlight blazes and dims near the Western Motherqueen, in a gaseous swirl of photons and interstellar dust focused about a gibbering voice: – my jurisdiction – I told you before, a brash interloper – I’ve waited months now – Amah, please, I beg you, something must be done –

  It is Dame Shamanka Star, come (not for the first time) to beg a judgement of punishment against the mute human dancer who spoke prophecy without initiation, in a fever in Liang-jou more than half a year ago. The Western Motherqueen listens for a moment, then stills the riot of torn shrieks by lifting a hand.

  Would the presumptuous little sibyl not be a good candidate to serve the Shamanka Star? she asks. Those who can restore, if only for a moment, human communication with the divine are rare finds, the Amah reminds the Star. But the starlight blazes more wildly and a voice moans that the dancer has not been tested, that she is no initiate. The grandmother shifts as quietly as possible from one foot to the other, torn between her awful misgivings about the volatile astral deity who has burst on the scene in the middle of her petitioning of the Amah and her desire that her granddaughter’s case not be forgotten.