Silk Road

by Jeanne Larsen

  So I wrapped the silver up and told old Walleye that the bundle was a gift of old skirts and leftover festival cakes for Baby to share with others in the Teaching Quarters. He did not question me: it was the sixteenth of the month, and he had let me slip out twice before on that date to visit her, posing as her cousin. I planned to leave the city through one of the eastern gates, hiring donkeys there in the hope that anyone in pursuit would not suspect that I was heading south and west to Shu, where Mothbrow Mountain stands. Feng said he would manage the official travel documents, or something that resembled them.

  In helping me. Walleye had simply repaid a soldier’s obligation to my father, yet it was hard for me to say goodbye with no more warmth than usual. He eased the gate open in the dim light. Tm taking my lute,’ I said as I stepped out, slipping the strap of its oiled-silk carrysack over one shoulder and struggling to carry my heavy bundle as if it were indeed no more than clothes and cakes. ‘My friend – I promised her I’d play for her today.’

  ‘Goodbye, Miss Bordermoon,’ his cracked voice whispered. He stood as nearly erect as he could manage, rubbing the knuckles of one hand inside the other palm. It was the last time I would answer to that name. The dawn drum sounded. As I walked down the lane, I wondered if Walleye knew I wasn’t coming back.

  My hair was arranged as simply as a charwoman’s; under my silk skirt and jacket I wore a plain shirt of cheap kudzu cloth and trousers to match. The knees of the trousers were patched and, after the night’s digging, so dirty that I hardly looked like one of the rising minor stars of the entertainment world. Near the head of the lane I slipped into the recessed doorway of a house called Coupled Joys, removed my silks, and wrapped them around the lute for extra padding. I wasn’t sure when I would have the chance to use the instrument, but I couldn’t bear to leave it behind.

  Edging past the breakfasters in the night market, I left the Pingkang Ward. Two mounted soldiers from the night watch passed me, joking with each other as they headed back to their barracks. Had they seen the sudden startled guilt on my face they would surely have stopped to question me, but I looked down before they drew too near. Or perhaps it was the lies my clothing told that saved me.

  After hurrying past the entrance to the Eastern Market, I drew near the city wall. Already streams of people passed back and forth beneath the watchtower atop Springbright Gate. Soon I spied what I wanted: a train of bearers leaving the city. The group straggled, and I found it easy enough to avoid the city guards by trailing along as if I were the last of the servants following behind. And so I left Chang-an, and the grandfather who refused to listen to my words, behind.

  Thinking of the hot sun and the rains that lay before me, I gave an old woman a few coins for one of the woven reed hats displayed before her doorway. Her face cracked as she smiled at me and wished me luck. I thought of her as I rented the donkeys – perhaps that kept me from showing signs of nervousness – and though the liveryman may have wondered why I should want them, he took the money eagerly enough.

  I’ll need luck all right, I thought as I mounted the leading donkey and kicked my heels against its sides. I looked up at the blue mountains where the others waited for me in the hidden shrine cave, and wondered if I was right to leave. Even with a famine coming, was that city of my fathers truly worse than whatever lay before me on my journey towards a mother I had seen only in dreams? A cloud passed before the sun, and a few drops spat tiny craters into the dust beneath my donkey’s hooves.

  A Decree Regarding the Temporary

  Removal of the Court from the

  Western Capital, Chang-an, to the

  Eastern Capital, Lo-yang

  Drafted by Lin Jian on behalf of the Brilliant Emperor, this eleventh month of the twenty-first year of His reign.

  It is decreed: Whenever We from time to time do make a state journey through Our realm. We do so in accordance with the current circumstances of all Under Heaven. Recently the harvest in the area around Our chief capital city has failed due to disastrous rains which fell without cease. The contents of the grain baskets are scanty and the people do not have enough to eat. This being the case, how can We not be constantly troubled on their behalf?

  Supplying the needs of Our court has become a hardship for the farmers. Such bitterness is not in accord with the benevolence with which We are accustomed to treat them. Furthermore, the recent omens in the starry firmament attest that by manifesting Our heartfelt pity for the people, We shall win the goodwill of the spirits of heaven and earth and thus bring benefits to all humankind.

  All this being so. We should on the sixth day of the first month of next year make a state journey to Our eastern capital of Lo-yang, to remain in that more fortunate region until a timely return to Chang-an is possible, not giving a moment’s thought to the comfort We must forgo, but caring only that We may thereby bring happiness to the people. Accordingly, We order the appropriate authorities to make preparations, that Our requirements while on the journey may be met without unduly burdening Our subjects along the way.

  We permit Our ministers to promulgate this decree. Furthermore, though it is a trifling question better decided among themselves. We grant the request of some of them to send the various petitions of all Our counsellors regarding this matter to the Office of the Historians.

  When Famine Comes

  The famine of the Chang-an region in 733-34 was a minor one, they say. Yet who can imagine famine who has not lived through one? We may have known hunger, may even have known it when we did not will it so. But our bodies soon fed themselves, soon reasserted their bond with the earth’s fertile dust and so kept themselves apart from it. Maybe in those brief fasts we had some taste of hunger’s deep demands. Maybe we knew airiness, a dizzied freedom, the gluttonous satisfaction of the will to control. We did not know despair.

  That was not famine. Food was always somewhere near, or would be soon. And the hunger was only ours, only one mouth’s or at most the mouths of a few. Who can imagine the hunger of a city, its suburbs, the great sweep of wearied farmlands farther than the anxious eye can see or the wasted legs walk? Just as the starved body consumes its own meat, the land in famine shrinks, trees stripped of their leaves and bark, roadsides of their grass blades, clay banks ravaged to still the stomach’s twisting.

  Still, they say this famine was a minor one, no more than one of many that struck the overpopulated capital region in the first decades of the eighth century, before the rice transport system from the southland was improved. After three years of severe floods, too much rainfall killed the crops, but that disaster at least left the soil ready for another day: it did not blow off, as after a drought, in great light-headed clouds. The royal court did move in grand procession back to Lo-yang, amid the grain-rich plains farther east, for did not Master Kung himself say that a sufficiency of food is one of the three necessities for successful governance? Or as someone else might have put it, hunger breeds revolution. Those who died were, for the most part, only the very young or the aged, along with a scattering weakened by illness or by loss of hope.

  Prices rose after the harvest failed, and the markets emptied early. The good folk of the city hurried home with their expensive purchases, pinch-bellied, safe for another day. Secret stores were broached, fortunes made, wedding feasts postponed or cancelled, jewels sold off cheaply, and a few more weeping daughters left their fathers’ homes at an early age. Life in the Entertainment Quarter dragged. Plump bodies grew slender, and thin ones thinner. Still, the government’s relief granaries sold off their stores below the going price, and for most people there was enough. The land, the farmers, the glittering phantasmagorical city rising and spreading above its foundation of fine-grained loess, would recover and grow fat again.

  Perhaps it is possible after all for us to imagine a minor famine. Walk into your kitchen, stare at an empty bowl. Know you have no way of filling it. Listen for the wailing of children, drifting across the courtyard wall. You have seen a Persian trader’s carava
n, heard speech in long-dead languages, tasted rice wine fermented centuries ago, felt the silk brush of a dancer’s skirts. You have taken part in this construction of a world from documents and unearthed statues and notes on scattered slips of paper. See now if you can imagine a famine, a minor one.

  Billow Talk

  ‘And now you’ll stay with me,’ the Undersecretary says, as if the question were already settled. He leans back on his pillow cloud and stretches. When he wanted the woman, the womanly ghost who lies at her ease beside him, he felt a bit uncertain: if he joined with her, who then would he be? But now he has a name for her, or names, inamorata, leman, ladylove. It was, after all, a pleasure; and he is still who he is. Satisfied, he smiles.

  For the ghost, it was pleasure, too. Briefly, rolling there among a skyful of cirrocumuli, each face silvered over as the other’s mirror. Each became the other one’s desire, the very thing that each one most desired to be. There was no he or she then, only ,’ and thou and we.

  But now the Undersecretary senses that something is lacking and seeks to fill the gap with words: mistress? wanton? He thinks the language that he knows is the only right one. She shifts her legs and rubs her lips together and dreams of other tongues. Then she stands, and shakes her hasty skirts down, and prepares to leave. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No go, you know. I’ll go’

  He snaps bolt upright. Hysterical gibberish! How can the wench refuse his offer? He meant never to throw her past at her; he meant to give her a place within his household. It is the kindest thing he knows how to do. The trollop, floosie, strumpet, tart!

  The heavenly bureaucrat stands up, too, and shows himself the taller, and takes up from a nearby creamy billow the robe that marks him as the man he is: Acting Assistant Controller of the Ministry of Babble, though inside he knows he is something more. Still, its emblems reassure him. Its colours are the prescribed ones, not the proscribed; they are the legal indicators of his rank. The insignia of his office are blazoned on the robe, emblems assigned him by the Jade Emperor himself, as a father bestows his name upon his legitimated son. Once the robe is on, the Undersecretary blusters. He has generously offered to regularize this unlawful union. She will be his concubine. She’ll stay.

  The ghost laughs. Long-lashed eyes blink at him, astonished.

  A red mouth blows a kiss. And with that non-word’s smack, the ghost goes airy, goes.

  Now the Undersecretary mounts his yellow crane and flies off in a rage. The hussy, pussy, castrating bitch, cunt, crack, slut, whore! In truth, he has never acted like this before; his anger is born of confusion and of pain. He is what they call ‘a nice chap’, and ‘a thoughtful lover’. He meant to treat her well. It’s just that her rebellion, her rejection, her mere departure takes from him the thing he needs in order to define himself, for what can male be if there is no female who is different?

  Enough. He urges his magical bird off towards the ocean. Once he swore eternal brotherhood with the Spirit-Lord of the Eastern Sea. He will ask of him just one fraternal favour. The Undersecretary knows who it is the ghost loves – loves like a daughter. Oh, he’ll keep the Jade Emperor’s commandment, watch over that greenpearl girl all right, although in truth he has recently been so bogged down in celestial paperwork that he’s lost track of just what she’s up to. But no one said he couldn’t get a friend to bring down upon her rain, and floods, and famine. Wait till the ghost-wench sees her baby starving. He’ll teach that woman just what the meaning of regret is, teach her new lyrics, teach her to sing them to another tune.

  PARROT

  SPEAKS:

  16

  The donkeys ambled past the sodden fields and clustered houses of the suburbs outside Chang-an. Rain showers stopped and spattered, spattered and stopped. Part of me wanted to hurry to meet Baby and Feng and carefree Sparker in the shrine cave where they waited. Another part savoured this moment alone.

  I had long ago noticed that I thought about myself – observed my thoughts and feelings as one might observe a landscape before writing a poem – more than most of the people I knew. Now there appeared in my reverie not self-absorbed Little Pink or pained, grasping Mama Lu, but a gathering of women –Bellring, Saffron, pretty Amber – whose goodness I loved, even as I realized how differently they experienced their lives. None of them was likely ever to tell the story of herself. Why, I wondered as I rode, was I compelled to do so, even when I was my only audience?

  The rain picked up. To the east, heavy banks of clouds were rolling in. I hunched forward and shook my head. My wet shirt clung to my shoulders and back. Then I caught sight of a farmer in a straw cape leaning on his hoe to stare at me. All I could do was ride on and hope that no one followed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him shrug and return to piling a wall of mud along a drainage ditch.

  It struck me that, with my hat covering my hair, he might easily have taken me for a boy. For once, I wore no makeup, and I hadn’t regained the weight I had lost during the winter: even when my shirt was soaked through, an observer at a distance would be hard-pressed to see the signs of my sex.

  Yet it was my fifteenth summer, two years and more since I’d become a woman. Had I grown up in my father’s house I would surely have been leaving it soon for another man’s. Instead of learning to make music and write, and all the ways of artful conversation, I would have sat beside my mother as she taught me how to weave and sew, how to manage the servants and the moneys of a noble household. Perhaps if that had happened I would have grown up without all this strange inwardness and would never have had occasion to wonder what or who I was, as the farmer might be wondering even now. I clucked to my donkey and soon found the pathway to the yellow bamboo before the cave mouth of the shrine.

  Baby flew to greet me. Feng clasped his long-fingered hands and bowed his ironic bow, as if he held a post no lower than head of the Imperial Chancellory. Sparker ran his fingers through his sparse, shaggy hair and looked from me to Baby as if he knew something amusing that I did not. Though I felt we would be safe waiting out the rains in the Western Mother-queen’s cave, Feng – certain that the showers would stop soon –argued that we ought to set off right away. I preferred a soaking to a quarrel. Besides, there was bad weather enough before us, I knew, and good reason to depart. Mama Lu’s silver, my contract price, and the reward for a dancer stolen from the Imperial Teaching Quarters might well spur on a search.

  Feng had taken the route we would travel when he came to the capital from his home in Jia-jou, so he knew the way. As we made our final preparations to leave the shrine cave, he showed me the travel papers he had forged. ‘Look here,’ he said, as a father might when instructing a child, ‘this mark is your new name. As a novice Lady of the Tao en route with me to study with a teacher in Shu, your name will be Sky whistle. That’s what these words here mean.’ He looked up. ‘Perhaps you know the one for ‘sky’?’

  I knew them both, and almost all the other words as well, but only nodded. ‘A good name for a Taoist,’ I began. ‘But – ‘

  ‘Oh yes.’ He waved one hand airily. ‘It’s rather boyish, isn’t it?

  But you see, a Taoist developing spiritual powers learns a secret whistle that can summon hosts of sylphs from the heavens. It won’t hurt to have people think that you can do that. No need to worry about not knowing the right jargon. If we run into any tight spots, Sparker and I will do the talking,’ Sparker grinned in a befuddled, abstracted way that made him look just like a wandering Taoist recluse, while Feng laughed as if he were a great deal older than he was. ‘You just follow Baby’s example and we’ll muddle through.’

  Well, I thought, whatever the moonmaid may have told him, it’s clear that he’s the leader on this journey. I didn’t care about that, but on my short ride alone I had made a decision. I would have to tell him about it now: I intended to travel as a boy.

  First he chuckled, then he argued, then he shrugged a sulky shrug. ‘What will people think,’ he demanded, after I silently began to pack up the provisions they had br
ought along, ‘if only Baby travels as a little novice with two men and a boy?’ Both of us looked over to where she knelt on the rug in the alcove, waiting impassively for the discussion to end. There would be no disguising her sweetly female form.

  Another time that might have given me pause, but the headstrong, spoiled daughter of a general answered for me that I didn’t care. ‘You wouldn’t be the only Taoist priest to journey with a little maid to keep your spirits up,’ I snapped. Sparker sniggered, and out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flicker of outrage passing over Baby’s face. I realized she thought that I was trading her for greater freedom for myself and bit my lip and shook my head to tell her it wasn’t so. But she turned away.

  So I twisted my hair up in the rough knot of a youth who would be a Taoist, and tied an old sash tight across my small breasts. With Sparker’s faded cotton jacket, and my new hat pulled down over my forehead, there would be no reason to think I was anything but a skinny boy whose voice had not yet broken. ‘Bordermoon’ stayed behind us in the shrine cave, and I can’t say I ever missed her much. I was Skywhistle now, and though I hadn’t chosen that name either, it suited my taste far more.

  The rain poured down on us all that afternoon. Cattle tracks had turned to creeks and creeks to torrents that the donkeys hated fording, and the River Wei roared foamy just beneath the Western Bridge as we crossed to the north bank, where travel was easier, and turned west. I wondered briefly what celestial vengeance was being wreaked upon the capital, and why. But when I rode up to pose this question to Baby, who slumped in her saddle next to Feng, she still refused to meet my eye. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that for all the unspoken tensions twining among us, we four were a band united by the Moon Lady’s bidding, off in search of a stone on Mothbrow Mountain.