The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  As the cockerel puffs up his feathers and swaggers about, I sit on the edge of the four-poster bed in my red silk wedding gown, wringing my hands on my lap as I ponder the fate that awaits me. Am I really to spend the rest of my days wedded to a bird? What a preposterous destiny! Then, out of nowhere, I hear the low cackle of the Sorceress Wu: ‘Wretched she-brat! Character determines destiny. Fate is the excuse of the spineless and weak!’ And though it was my evil grandmother who sold me into this strange predicament, her words lend me strength.

  Dusk creeps into the bridal chamber, and I plot and wait as the shadows thicken. My spouse is quieter now, grooming his plumage, plucking out the odd feather not to his liking with his beak. When at last the bolt slides back and the door creaks open, the bridal chamber is completely dark. It is Duckweed, bringing the supper tray. I needn’t see her face to know she is smirking. Duckweed lowers the tray on a rosewood table then turns to the dresser to light the oil lamp. I waste no time. I leap up, grab the water carafe from the tray and smash its neck against the bedpost. At the shattering of glass, Duckweed gasps and spins round. I knock her head with my knuckles and drag her to me by her hair. I touch the jagged edge of the carafe to her throat.

  ‘Don’t scream,’ I warn her, ‘or I’ll stab out your eyes!’

  Duckweed whimpers. In the flickering oil-lamp light her eyes are frantic. Not so high and mighty any more.

  ‘Tell me what is going on. Speak!’

  Duckweed speaks. A breathless rush of words. Young Master Huang died in a tragic hunting accident the year before. He’d passed on before marrying, so his parents wanted to find him a bride, a companion for the afterlife. I was the Spirit Bride in a Spirit Wedding and the cockerel the stand-in for the Spirit Groom. Then, with some satisfaction, Duckweed adds that the eminent Huang family would never have wed me to their handsome son were he alive.

  ‘Now let me go!’ Duckweed weeps. ‘I have told you everything.’

  ‘Liar!’ I spit. ‘What happens next?’

  Duckweed won’t say. I scratch the broken glass of the carafe against her cheek, drawing blood. ‘Oh no! Not my pretty face!’ she wails. The maidservant then reveals the final stage of the Spirit Wedding: the Sacrificial Ceremony. The following morning I am to be ritually slaughtered then laid to rest beside the corpse of Young Master Huang in the Huang family mausoleum, joining him in eternal sleep. I thank Duckweed, then I beat her with my fists until she is limp and barely conscious. I rip off my accursed silk wedding gown and change into Duckweed’s servant robes and woven reed sandals. Out of spite I snatch up the Spirit Bridegroom, tucking him under my arm. I slip out of the unbolted door and make my getaway.

  IV

  I flee through the night. The runaway Spirit Bride, dashing pell-mell through paddy fields of croaking frogs, leaping over ditches and streams. ‘Run! Run! Run!’ squawks Young Master Huang under my arm. And I obey, hurtling through the darkness without pause for breath or to ease the stitch in my side. The Huang family own a stable of horses and will come galloping for me at dawn.

  Where in the Middle Kingdom am I fleeing to? As far away from Goatherd Valley as possible. And then, who knows? As I tear through the night, I think of you, the father I have never met. Eunuch Wu of the Imperial Palace in Chang’an, loyal servant to the Emperor Taizong. I decide to go to Chang’an and find you. I am your daughter, and perhaps our blood bond will oblige you to find me lodgings and work. Perhaps you will find me a position as a chambermaid in the Imperial Palace. Perhaps the Emperor Taizong will fall in love with me, and I will ascend from servant girl to empress. And with these fatuous thoughts of fame and fortune in my head, I run and run, wishing I could grow wings and fly to Chang’an.

  By sunrise I am staggering beneath the strange turquoise peaks of the Tiltingsky mountain range, following the Turnabout River to its end. Under my arm Young Master Huang stabs at me with his beak, wriggling to be set free. Fed up with his squirming, I wring his neck. Widowed at the age of thirteen, I tuck my spouse’s feathered corpse back under my arm and stagger onwards, not daring to stop. At sundown I build a fire, pluck Young Master Huang, then roast and eat him. He is delicious. As I suck the marrow from his bones and lick bird fat from my fingers, I contemplate the journey ahead. The city of Chang’an is three years away by foot, and one year by horse and cart. A thousand-league journey I must rise at the crack of dawn to begin. Sated with bird, I fall asleep, full of uncertainty but grateful not to be in the Huang family mausoleum, dead.

  The next day, by stroke of good luck, I meet an expedition of merchants travelling northwards to Chang’an. There are eighty merchants in the caravan, riding in eighty horse-drawn wagons carrying exotic spices and fabrics, frankincense, silver ewers, skyblue Syrian glass, delicate ostrich-egg cups and countless other frivolous trinkets for the capital’s rich. As well as these exquisite trifles, the merchants have collected many marvels of the plant and animal kingdom to sell to the nobility of Chang’an. Curiosities such as albino frogs and a wise and ancient monkey who can do sums with an abacus. Russian conjoined twins fused at the head (like one man resting his temple against a mirror) and a barebreasted Japanese mermaid, her tail curled up in a barrel of salty water, weeping bitterly to be so far from the sea. In the very last wagon, a cyclops and a wolfman, both shackled at the ankles, play a never-ending game of chess. The wolfman furrows his furry brow and deliberates for hours on end before moving a chess piece with his shaggy paw.

  The journey to Chang’an lasts three hundred days and the caravan passes through every landscape of the Middle Kingdom. Terraced hillsides where water buffalo pull ploughs. Holy mountains with peaks so high they penetrate the cloudy realm of the Gods. Vast stretches of barren nothingness where not even the wild grasses grow. As the scenery changes by the day, the heavens above us change by the hour. The Gods of Thunder brew up dark lagoons of cloud that the Gods of Rain turn into heavy deluges and floods. The Gods of Wind bluster and chase flocks of cloud across the sky, until the Gods of Bright Skies clear the firmament for the sun.

  During my time in the merchant expedition I am wretchedly miserable, as for three hundred days I ride in the wagon of the Merchant Fang, who’d taken a fancy to me and rescued me from the roadside when every other wagon had rolled on by. The old merchant is blotchy with gout and has many yellow rolls of fat under his robes cut from fine expensive cloth. The merchant calls me ‘wench’ and likes to fondle me on his lap and tickle me with his beard. Needless to say, my passage to Chang’an is not free of charge, and within months I have a bulging belly. By the time the caravan enters the gates of Chang’an and proceeds up the Vermilion Bird Avenue with much trumpeting of horns, clashing of cymbals and weeping of merchants affected by the homecoming, I add to the cacophony a cry of pain as the Merchant Fang’s baby prepares to come out. As the merchant already has a wife and a brood of eleven children, to him the progeny in my womb is a bothersome thing. So when the baby is born lifeless in a boarding house on Drum Tower Lane, the Merchant Fang sighs with relief. ‘Well, that’s that then,’ he says, pulling a blanket over his stillborn son. He tosses the midwife a string of coppers, bids me farewell and is on his way.

  V

  Springtime in Chang’an, the tree peonies in blossom. Bleeding, weeping and limping, I stagger about the streets of the twelve-gated city, to the Imperial Palace in the north. In a daze, I roam in and out of the city wards, gazing in wonderment at the sights. Row upon row of wooden houses, vertiginously soaring up to three storeys in height. Avenues of horse-drawn carts, clattering at breakneck speeds, and magnificent palanquins borne aloft on the shoulders of manservants, velvet curtains hiding the distinguished noblemen inside.

  The Eastern Market teems with common folk and Uighurs and Persians and Europeans trading their wares. I wander by stalls of millet, bamboo shoots, pigs and Tibetan slaves in pens. Arabian stalls of alfalfa, pomegranate, spices and wool. I wander into the market square, where magicians in dark booths sell python’s bile for melancholia and dragon’s
bones for fatigue. Troupes of buskers strum zithers and pipas, and a dancing bear shambles on his hind legs as his master waves a birch wand. A storyteller has attracted a crowd with his tale of the Sea-dragon King who lives in a palace under the ocean and feasts on opals and pearls.

  I ask passer-by after passer-by, ‘Excuse me, which way to the Imperial Palace?’

  And in this manner, I gradually find my way there.

  I arrive at the gates of the Imperial City at sunset. Though I am tired and aching to the marrow of my bones, the magnificence of the palace rejuvenates me. Stone lions roar at the Vermilion Gates and the palace rooftops, curved elegantly from ridge to eaves, are shining gold in the setting sun.

  I accost an armoured guard at the gate.

  ‘Excuse me. Could you pass on a message to Eunuch Wu? Could you tell him his long-lost daughter has come to Chang’an to see him. I don’t mind waiting here while you fetch him.’

  The guard beats me so hard with his spear he knocks out a tooth, and this is how I learn that commoners are not meant to approach the gates of the Imperial City without an invitation bearing the imperial seal. I would have to contact you through other means.

  VI

  I spend a night shivering in a ditch, then in the morning return to the Eastern Market to look for work. I go to Butchers Lane, Ironmongers Lane, Axe-makers Alley, and Cloth-weavers Lane, in and out of every shop. ‘I am hungry and strong,’ I say. ‘I am willing to work for a crust of bread.’ But no one wants me. Not even the human-waste collectors who trundle wheelbarrows from privy to privy. I am starving. I go over to the gangs of beggars rattling begging bowls in the market square. The first gang of beggars tells me to go away. ‘Only those with missing limbs can beg here,’ they say, waving me away with stump-ended arms. The second gang tells me to get lost too: ‘Only the blind or one-eyed allowed here.’ I glance over at the third gang, swatting at the flies buzzing over their pustule-weeping skin, and realize I lack the requisite skin disease.

  I am at my wits’ end. How will I survive in this black-hearted city? I may as well crawl back into the ditch and wait to die, as the Heavens must have decreed. Then, out of nowhere, I hear the cackling of the Sorceress Wu – borne by the Daemons of Wind from that mud-walled dwelling over a thousand leagues away. ‘Wretched she-brat,’ she cackles. ‘Character determines destiny. Courage and boldness. Not fate.’ And goaded thus, I holler at the top of my lungs, ‘Has anyone any work for me? I am hungry and strong! I can work as hard as any man. I will toil like a dog! I will toil until I sweat out my blood! I am willing to do anything!’

  ‘Anything?’

  A pedlar of candy apples with scheming eyes and hog bristles spouting out of his chin stalls his pushcart nearby. The pedlar holds out a sugar-coated apple on a stick, and my stomach growls.

  ‘Anything,’ I repeat.

  I stumble to him. I snatch the sugar-coated apple and, lightheaded with hunger, I take a bite. The pedlar shows his stumpy brown teeth in a sly grin.

  ‘Then come with me.’

  VII

  ‘I see you’ve lost your virtue then,’ says Madam Plum Blossom as she peers between my legs. ‘Pity. Customers pay a fortune to defile a girl with her purity intact.’

  She orders me to strip for inspection. She prods and pokes. Tweaks and peeks. She squeezes my breasts and tuts.

  ‘Sallow complexion . . . Hump-backed nose . . . Sour, down-turned mouth . . . Knocked-out tooth . . . Chest like a boy . . .’

  But in spite of her harsh and negative appraisal, Madam Plum Blossom likes me.

  ‘There’s some fighting spirit in you,’ she says. ‘The gentleman callers like a girl with fire in her belly. Night Coming. That will be your name. Night Coming. Yes. Can’t think of a better sobriquet than that!’

  When the pedlar said he would take me to a brothel in the Gay Quarters of Chang’an, hopes of fame and fortune rang out in my head. On the long journey to Chang’an the Merchant Fang had waxed lyrical about the Gay Quarters and their legendary brothels, such as the House of Willowy Enchantresses and the Parlour of the Golden Peaches, frequented by aristocracy, imperial scholars and literati.

  According to the Merchant Fang, the courtesans of the Gay Quarters are classical beauties with lunar skin, scallion fingers and tresses dark as ravens’ plumage. They flutter about like exotic birds in an aviary, in the finest, most intricately embroidered robes. Such is their beauty, boasted Merchant Fang, that should they happen by your hometown, the common folk of Kill the Barbarians Village would mistake them for immortal goddesses and lay sacrificial offerings of slaughtered pigs at their feet.

  Not content with mere pulchritude, the courtesans of the Gay Quarters have many talents and accomplishments. They are gregarious hostesses and poetesses, enlivening banquets with witty repartee and verses composed on the spot. They sing like songbirds and are skilled musicians, strumming the zither and playing the lute and flute. They are intellects educated in the Five Classics and Daoist and Confucian philosophy, and keen to engage in verbal jousting and philosophical debate. The life of a celebrated courtesan, whose patrons and admirers are the most powerful men in Chang’an, was very appealing to me. So my hopes were dashed when the pedlar brought me to the Hummingbird Inn in Old Temple Lane, which makes no pretence of being a high-class establishment.

  ‘We don’t put on any airs and graces here!’ laughs Madam Plum Blossom. ‘We’re a lowly brothel, for commoners! For scoundrels, rascals and ne’er-do-wells. Hiring our cunts out. That’s our job. We make no pretences to the contrary. We can’t sing or dance and the only verse we compose is doggerel and bawdy rhymes. But our customers come to our parlour and have themselves a rollicking good time! I’ll teach you all the tricks of the trade, Night Coming. I was an excellent whore in my day. A veritable snake-charmer . . .’

  Proprietress of the Hummingbird Inn for twenty years, Madam Plum Blossom is a cheerful woman with a loud and raucous laugh. The pastimes she is most fond of include ale drinking, gorging herself with cakes and tutoring Master Xing, her Burmese parrot, to curse and sing vulgar little ditties for the gentlemen callers. Proud of her voluptuous figure, Madam Plum Blossom is often tethered to a brass mirror, admiring her wide hips and the ample cleavage she flaunts with a low-cut décolletage. Though most madams of the Gay Quarters have a reputation for being mean-spirited and quick-tempered, quoting Confucius as they beat their girls for alleged wrongs (‘Those!’ whack ‘who err!’ whack ‘on the side of strictness!’ whack ‘are few indeed!’ whack), Madam Plum Blossom spares us the rod, being too jolly of temperament for such corporal spite. Though most madams keep their daughters imprisoned under lock and key, Madam Plum Blossom encourages us to venture out into the hustle and bustle of Chang’an on daily constitutionals. The warm-hearted proprietress quickly becomes like a mother to me.

  The other two prostitutes at the Hummingbird Inn, Moonglow and Heavenly Lotus Flower, are nowhere near as kind. ‘Stinking southerner,’ they mutter, pinching their noses when I am near. But Madam Plum Blossom tells me to pay them no heed.

  ‘Don’t mind them, Night Coming. They’ve no right to put on airs. Heavenly Lotus Flower used to be a scullery maid called Appleseed, and Moonglow’s husband is a dissolute wastrel who sold her to pay off his gambling debts.’

  As I am a fledging in the bedchamber, Madam Plum Blossom prepares me for brothel life by having me tryst with the young stablehand from down the lane. She stands at the bedside as the boy and I fumble together, clumsy and maladroit, haplessly muddling through the conjoining of our yin and yang parts. Though we go at it until I am quite saddle-sore, Madam Plum Blossom casts a critical eye over the proceedings. Her arms crossed, her lips a thin line of disapproval, she scolds, ‘Don’t be so coy, Night Coming! There are more ways to make Clouds and Rain than by lying on your back, y’know. And why are you flinching? That’s his Jade Stalk he’s stabbing you with, not a dagger!’

  Exasperated, she teaches me how to straddle the stablehand and rise up and down in a style
known as Riding the Unicorn Horn. ‘This position is very good for the elderly and infirm,’ she advises. ‘As well as veterans who have fought in many battles and are missing their limbs.’

  The tutorial underway, Madam Plum Blossom drills the stable boy and me with step-by-step instructions, through the Raising the Yin to Meet the Yang position, the Two Dragons Who Fight until They Drop, and the Silkworm Spinning a Cocoon. The stable boy and I are soon quite knackered, pink in the cheeks and out of breath from flailing and contorting our limbs. The first tutorial reaches its climax when Madam Plum Blossom is teaching me the best technique for Playing the Jade Flute, and the stable boy, no longer able to contain his excitement, spurts the Jade Liquor into my mouth. Madam is very cross when I gag and grimace and spit.

  ‘Impoliteness!’ she scolds. ‘One mustn’t spit the Jade Liquor as though it scalds the tongue. One must swallow and smile.’ After twenty years of whoredom, Madam Plum Blossom’s knowledge is as boundless as the sea. ‘Men have all sorts of peccadilloes,’ she tells me. ‘Some men like to Penetrate the Red during a woman’s moon cycle, or piddle on a woman out of the Jade Watering Spout. Some men like to poke a woman in the back passage, which is called Pushing the Boat Upstream.’

  When she suggests I attempt to Push the Boat Upstream with the stable boy, I protest I cannot imagine a more agonizing suffering. But I then try it, and it’s not so bad once I am used to the clogged-up sensation in my rear end.

  ‘They come here to do the things their wives won’t do, you see,’ Madam Plum Blossom says, ‘unless they have a delightfully wicked and depraved wife, who may come to watch her husband go at you, and then Mirror Dance with you, which is how two women enact the Clouds and Rain.’