At my last view of the walls of the Imperial City, I fell behind the others, staring and remembering Baba’s old lessons: I was a daughter of Chang-an. But Chang-an had no proper place for me, and the mother that I sought was gone. I touched the secret pearl the bare-legged moonmaid had given me, nested safe within the sash that bound my breasts.
We arrived late, wet and exhausted, at a shabby inn – the sort where few questions are asked of those with cash to pay the reckoning – just outside Hsian-yang, once the seat of the emperor who ordered the building of the draconic Great Wall. So began our six weeks’ journey over the rugged road to Shu, a region famous for abundant crops, rhapsodic poets, and mountains veined with spiritual energy as if with high-grade ore.
Behold the Empires of the World
Behold the empires of the world. In 733, the Toltec, Byzantine, and Dvaravatiera still have long to flourish. And in less than twenty years, death spasms will shake the Pallava, the Umayyad, the Merovingian Franks. East of China, in the sacred islands where the sun is born, extraordinary examples are being erected in the new capital of Heijð-kyð. The Anglo-Saxons squabble with neighbours ferociously uncouth: their empire’s rise and fall are yet to come, and most of its citizen-subjects will never hear these other names. And what of Great Tang, and its glorious capital, the city of Everlasting Peace, largest on the earth? Look where it stands. The ghosts of other governing metropolises litter the plain around it, annihilated fortresses built perhaps as much as two millennia before. In ancient times a royal seat called Tai once stood somewhere along the banks of the Wei, and later Bin, and The Great King’s Chi, and Feng, which afterwards was known as Hu, and mighty Hao. Just north and a little west of where Chang-an would lie, a book-burning, wall-building tyrant founded immortal Hsian-yang. Later, he buried ranks of pottery soldiers beneath that plain, to defend his soul’s hegemony; his costly bier is still surrounded deep within its tumulus by a river of deadly mercury.
Then came the omnipotent Han Dynasty. Its early rulers raised the tawny walls of the first Chang-an just as Rome was winding down its second war with Carthage. This was Ptolemy’s Sera Metropolis, his City of Silk. In time the dynasty, and the city, fell. Brief nomad capitals claimed one corner or another of the rich loess plain in the centuries that followed, but ruins from that former Chang-an still stood when – some fifteen decades before the moment you are observing – China stood united once again, and a new city was planned to rise and rule.
The advisers of the Emperor counselled caution. Lay the city out in precise alignment with the cosmos, they urged. Observe the pole star by night and the gnomon-shadow of the sun at noon, that the central axis of the Son of Heaven’s capital may run true. The grid of avenues must accord with earth’s hidden lines of power, its vital breaths, as determined by the lay of waterways and the currents of the hills. Scrutinize the livers of sacrificial beasts to determine an auspicious day to start construction. And avoid the exact site of the old Han Dynasty Chang-an. Those acres where the crumbling corners of ancient buildings still held their peace had been corrupted, their spiritual energies fouled by ghosts as the water supply was fouled.
So the northern limit of the city was drawn south of the earlier Chang-an’s ruins, though the private suburban park of the Tang imperial family embraces those tawny earthen monuments to what passes, or what lasts. Here ladies of the palace make their pleasure outings and royal huntsmen wrangle with the hunting cheetahs carried across their horses’ rumps. How often does one of them gaze at those shards of grandeur and envision others yet to come?
You have seen the city now, perhaps have caught your breath at its splendour or wrinkled your nose at its stench. There are still stories you have missed, of course: a half-blind scholar hanging a cage of fancy birds out in the fresh air, a woman weeping because she bore only another girl, a high official’s steward reporting to the master on the welfare of great herds of oxen, horses, sheep. You could have stared at a solemn procession on the Buddha’s birthday – majestic censers swaying, cymbals clashing out the pace – or might have winked at the familiar look of an Armenian or Jewish merchant among the quarter of a million foreigners within or near the gates.
Still, you can say that you have travelled there, to the Chang-an of ad 733. And if you cast your gaze off towards northeast China, where brave armies defend the Tang against the encroaching Khitan horde, you will see the gifted young officer who soon will rebel and sow the salty seeds of the city’s lingering deaths. Barely thirty, he is already plagued by signs –dimming eyesight, pus-filled boils, remarkable obesity – of diabetes, but his end will come at his ill-treated attendant’s own hands. The Chinese whom he serves, so far, with loyalty call him An Lu-shan, their version of his Soghdian name, Rokhshan. Odd how this name’s meaning (‘light’ or ‘bright’) links him to the Brilliant Emperor whose reign he will end. The Chinese historians will write that a certain magus saw a star of evil magic in the sky above his mother’s tent the night of his birth, and that all around the infant the wild animals of the lawless wilderness howled.
Someday the wolves will howl again where Chang-an once stood – but not for some time yet. Just after the fat general’s murder, while the rebels hold the capital – The state is smashed, yet hills and streams remain – the greatest poet in all of Chinese history will wander by the waters of the Serpentine to ask for whom the willows and the rushes wear their springtime green. Where sparkling ladies of the court once rode out with their hunting bows, the hooves of barbarian horses will kick up dust to sting his eyes. A few years later, Uighur troops brought in by the loyalists to take the city back will be rewarded with the freedom to loot and rape. Bodies by the tens of thousands will pile up in the marketplaces and the lanes. Temples and houses will smoulder for weeks.
And after that? The city will serve as capital until the very end of this empire’s long slow fall. In fifteen more decades, Chang-an will have suffered another dreadful occupation: tombs looted, the trees of the gardens cut down for fuel, sumptuous wall hangings ripped or burnt, silver filigree melted down for cash, bones of workers and dancers and bureaucrats lying among the weeds. Shortly before the last sparks of the Tang imperial line are snuffed out, the order will go out: raze the remnants of Chang-an, and float whatever carved pillars or ornamental rafters can be re-used to the would-be successor’s own doomed capital in the east. The glimmering Serpentine will turn then to cracked yellow mud.
Return to your own century: a city called Xi’an now covers much of that land, proud of its vague memories, ashamed by its belatedness. You can climb restored pagodas, take a bus tour to see the heartbreaking willows around the hot springs where the Brilliant Emperor dallied with his last and greatest love, watch a movie about a wandering swordswoman not far from where Felicity Hall might once have stood. Archaeologists have determined that the ancient north-south axis was only sixteen minutes of arc west of what we take to be true north: that heap of rubble accorded with its orderly cosmos rather well. Ephemeral, eternal, Chang-an lives on its inky midden-heap, a grand municipality now constructed chiefly of imagination, mortared together with electrons shot like nomads’ arrows (the metaphors jumble as half-remembered dynasties do) at a video screen. Behold the empires of the world, lying at your feet. You have brought the city back. Go ahead and turn the page. Bring its brief walls down.
PARROT
SPEAKS:
17
The road to Shu is a hard one – hard, it is said, as climbing to the bright blue sky. Much of the way we four travellers walked, for no donkey could carry a person up the irregular flights of stone steps that struggled past sheer escarpments and over the great folds of the Jin-ling range, the easternmost outcrop of the Kun-lun Mountains themselves. But before we headed southwards into that tortured landscape, we made our way in stages west, up the valley of the Wei. A new administrative system was sending a stream of fat officials and their retinues to the district capital of Shu – the Brocade City, people called it – through which we our
selves would pass before we got to Mothbrow Mountain. Hordes of shabby farmers from the north also took that route, flooded and starved out, or fleeing military service, or forced from their lands by the unlawful growth of private estates. The four of us clutched our forged travel papers and bobbed like flotsam on an uncontrollable river of people who had turned their backs on whatever place they were officially registered in.
After Hsian-yang and Goldtown, we came to the Horsecrest Post Station, where once again we arranged to change our mounts for fresh ones. Dreamdragon Feng used a little sleight of hand to persuade the widow who ran the poorest of the nearby inns to put us up for free. In exchange, he gave her an amulet he swore would bring a long and wealthy life.
The woman treated all of us with deference, as disciples of the Wizard Mimesis. Still, although we had stopped early that day, she claimed she had no more to offer us than one tiny room. But who could blame her when there were so many paying guests along that difficult road to Shu?
Besides, the four of us had shared one room – and one wide platform bed – before. Baby always slept between me and the wall. She still maintained the reserve she had fallen into in the shrine cave when she thought she heard me barter her for my freedom, though, and a slight wariness now replaced the delight she had shown whenever I came to visit her at the Teaching Quarters back in Chang-an. Yet three or four times in those first days I had caught a questioning smile sent to her from Feng, or a sidelong glance returned.
The day we stopped at Horsecrest, Sparker suggested that he and I walk over to the Buddhist temple beside the post station before our evening meal. He longed to follow the Tao, he said with a wink, but it never hurt to pay a little homage to the Teacher of the Middle Way. For once, it was neither raining nor too dusty, and our shadows stretched before us as we strolled. It pleased me that a man, even a servant, was showing me this special attention. After Lutegarden and Felicity Hall, those few days on my own had left me hungry for something I hadn’t known I craved.
As the two of us approached the temple, a droning prayer drifted from the monks’ chantry. In the outer courtyard, fugitive farmers and their children were relaxing before nightfall. A gang of young girls played a kind of football popular among the palace ladies in Chang-an, though they used a knot of rags. I wondered how they had the energy to play. Some of the other, thinner children already slept, or fretted over blistered feet, or simply sat and stared. Sparker squatted to watch two boys wrestling in a corner.
Inside an empty worship hall, I stopped before a stone statue of the Lady Guan-yin. She looked down at me as if the hubbub from the courtyard meant no more than the silence that would descend after dusk. Her stance undulated in smooth curves like those formed by the sand dunes of the Takla Makan, curves echoed by the draperies of her garments and her flowing scarves. Staring at the flask of sweet succouring nectar she wore suspended from her graceful neck, I tried to remember all that Nanny had told me of the Lady of Compassion.
I had no money with me to buy incense. On a sudden impulse I ducked into a dusky corner, reached inside my shirtfront, and pulled from its safe pocket in the folded sash that bound my breasts the tiny pearl necklace on its chain. Reaching up, I placed it in her outstretched palm and offered with it a prayer for Nanny’s soul.
Then I went back out to Sparker. He grinned and said he thought that enough time had passed; we could go back to the inn. His words made no particular sense to me, but when I walked into our upstairs room to see Baby sitting flushed upon the bed while Feng stared out of the tiny window, it all came clear. I can’t say exactly what Baby’s eyes told me when at last she looked up and into mine. Certainly I saw apology, and a kind of triumph, and something like happiness. So it was done. She had chosen this attachment, and this time I was the one to be left alone.
After supper, because we had no cash to waste on oil or candles, and the landlady offered us none, we slept, crowded together in the little room. Baby lay down between me and Feng. I fell into a fitful sleep.
A sudden boom reverberated through the room. Baby rose up from the bed, drifting through the air before me, and danced –slowly at first, then flinging her arms in a frenzied sword dance. Sea-green and violet light washed over her. Then she called out feverish words, but Feng and Sparker slept. I wanted to reach out to her. I could not move.
Her face was distorted. Her body softened. She – or was it some other woman now? – danced with a languid, bewitching grace, despite her plumpness, proud. She swayed and bent on a pavilion lacquered brilliant crimson, a curtain of delicate willow withes behind her, the clear, flower-spattered waters of a hot-springs pool spreading out in front. A dignified old man, an ageing hero with an imperial air, devoured her with besotted eyes. Through the air between them, an unearthly melody twined. I hovered somewhere, unseen, watching, as if I were a disembodied traveller from the past.
Then I saw the old hero leaning on his cane inside the post station at Horsecrest, just where Feng had stood while he arranged for our next day’s mounts. I understood that the lovers were resting there from the noontime sun and their wearying flight from a Chang-an torn by rebellion. Threatening shouts replaced the ethereal melody. The hero nodded his head, abruptly, sorrowfully, in response to the imprecations of a chubby, effeminate man.
The enchanting dancer was dragged out of the post station and through the temple courtyard where Sparker and I had watched the children play. The chubby man took her into the little chapel in which I had prayed to Lady Guan-yin. There, he closed strong, pudgy fingers around the smooth flesh of her neck and strangled her. Angry soldiers cheered as if her death would cure an empire’s ills.
I heard a moan of gut-wrenching remorse tear from the old hero’s lips. I reached for a fragile bird of yellow gold that had fallen from the lovely dancer’s chignon to the courtyard dust. But before I could pluck it up. Baby laid a hand upon my arm and woke me. The moan had been born of my own throat, and I knew as I lay waiting for the day to break that I would tell this story more than once.
I didn’t understand what the dream prefigured, for Baby, or for that other dancer in the future. But I learned from it one thing: some tales must be told, and told again, in an everlasting rehearsal of love and betrayal and regret – or whatever it is they are taken to signify. Later I would see Baby dance possessed in that unworldly light, though I haven’t yet learned who the murdered woman was, or will be. I knew, though, that what I saw would come to pass someday, as I know that someday even Great Tang must fall. I lay wakeful until the others rose.
On our journey the following afternoon, the plain rose steadily before us, and for the next few days we continued upstream and westwards. The great range sprawled parallel to the road, on the far side of the River Wei. Soon we could see the last snows, a few shaded patches clinging even beyond midsummer, on the peak of Greatwhite Mountain. We turned our donkeys’ heads towards that majestic summit. The ferry took us across the river with great difficulty. Currents swelled above sandbars normally exposed in that season, and we sighed with exhaustion when we reached our stopping-place in Mei-hsian, on the southern bank.
We soon left the familiar rolling plateau, entering the foothills of the Jin-ling range by a rocky valley that narrowed to a gorge. Our donkeys’ hooves rang against the cobbles of the trail, and Feng told us we would have to walk. That was just as well, for our supply of silver would not have lasted had we hired mounts at each post station and stayed every night at inns.
Those north-facing, densely wooded slopes held the air’s chill well into each day: I entered a lush, new world. The places I had known were grounded on sand, or loess, or greyish desert soils. Here, brown loam from an upland forest covered all but the sheerest outcrops of sandy stone. Trees and plants grew thickly everywhere. One night we camped beneath a cliff magically stamped with the fragile shells of tiny snails and starry creatures Feng said lived beneath the waters of the sea. By our flickering cooking fire, I traced one with my finger and wondered what watery deity had
pressed its seal into the rock, and why.
We ascended by fertile ravines where tiny farmhouses huddled in the shadows, crossed the saddles of ridges, and climbed again, making for the high pass on the shoulder of Greatwhite Mountain. They say the trail is no more than a bird’s track there, and what they say is true. Gasping for breath, we made our way up ‘sky ladders’ and across ‘hanging bridges’ of rough-hewn rock, craning our necks to see Sixdragon Peak. After the pass, more steps – some slippery with the spray of slender waterfalls – took us down a cliff side: every time I paused to rest the aching muscles of my thighs, my vision fell to the whirling torrent in the defile below.
Day after day, we descended by stages to the upper reaches of the River Han. The gohome birds cried gloomily about us, and from time to time a gibbon screamed. I saw mountain goats staring down at us, as if with contempt. Even the wind seemed to call out in an unorthodox poet’s irregular metre, demanding, Alas for you, who’ve gone a distant road, why, ah, why ever have you come? I felt a vague urge to put some of this into words – song lyrics, perhaps, or even a formal poem. Yet nothing I could think of seemed adequate.
In the Han Valley, we came again to villages and could hire donkeys, riding once more upstream and to the west. One misty evening, we travelled late, hoping to stop the night at a settlement. Baby nearly rode off the narrow pathway into the wild river. After that, inn or no inn, we halted before darkness fell. The gorge of the Han grew cramped then, and we left its gold-flecked sands behind (much to the regret of Sparker, who had kept a sharp and hopeful eye out as we rode), climbing over a low divide of broken hills green with paulownia trees.
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