-- So what do I do?
-- Take it to the British Museum. That’s what I did. Ask for someone in Chinese Antiquities. Phone before you go, get an appointment. And don’t break it – it’s more than two thousand years old.
Across the table, Belinda had her knuckles crammed into her mouth. Vicky nodded at her and mouthed, it’s her, as if she was taking a call on her mobile. Belinda nodded, her eyes wide.
-- Who’s that?
-- That’s Belinda, my friend, replied Vicky. We’re having a drink together.
-- It’s snowing outside! It was summer before! Are you drinking wine?
-- No, I’m drinking raspberry leaf tea.
-- Oh, yuck! I don’t like things like that.
-- Well, you will when you grow up.
-- I hoped I would see your boyfriend, moaned Yifan.
-- No way! Vicky was appalled – just thinking about Yifan coming across her cuddling and kissing made her go cold.
-- It’s not fair….
And that was it. Vicky felt Yifan’s presence fade quickly to a little pebble of strangeness in her mind, and then disappear completely. She leaned back in her seat and took a deep breath, opened her eyes and took up her teacup, and prepared for the barrage of silly questions she was going to get from Belinda.
*
Yifan blinked a couple of times and sat up. She was in the bottom part of her bunk bed, covered mostly by an anime-print duvet and surrounded by soft toys. It was Sunday morning. She had fallen awake only a few minutes ago, and almost immediately had been with her older self. In a bar! And with a friend, some sweet-looking woman called Brenda, or Linda.
Yifan tried to remember all of the conversation she had had. It seemed that other Yifan was calling herself Vicky, which was one of the English names that John and Ji Ye were thinking she might like to have. Yifan immediately decided she did not want to be called Vicky, or Victoria, just to spite her older self – imagine when she wakes up and finds her name has changed, Yifan thought to herself, and sniggered.
Princess Aster’s vase was in a safe place, according to John, and he had already mentioned taking it to the British Museum. But he thought it was probably a fake, or at least only a couple of hundred years old. And he had not tried very hard to get the top off, so maybe Vicky was being unnecessarily harsh on him.
Although she had known him longer.
So Yifan would urge John to call the British Museum, and that, after the usual breakfast negotiations and some Children’s TV, was what she did.
Bart, of course, got the story that evening, after he had been picked up and carried to Yifan’s room by a magical Princess. This method of transport was usual for him, and he no longer complained – just sighed and accepted his fate. He crouched beneath the bunk bed while Yifan knelt on the heart-shaped rug and told him about her morning adventure. It had to have been true, because she had found the…. Well, thought Yifan, we will have to enumerate the events. It was only right to do it that way. So she got paper and a pencil, and wrote down:
Met myself and have a talk about a vase. Was asleep for a long time, and mum and John got worried.
Finded a vase which is just like the one I talked to me about. This proves:
I really did meet myself
Older me was telling the truth about something I did not know about before.
That is magic.
Bart was looking a bit glazed, so Yifan added the new information.
It happened again, and I met myself again for a few minutes.
Some observations:
She has changed her name
She will not tell me about her bf
She has a friend called something. Brenda or Linda.
The vase is very old and probly valuble
I dont think I slept as long here as I was awake there
Bart made no comment about her spelling, or the rubbing-out that went on while the list was being compiled. He did yawn once, a big one, and immediately looked at her as if it was she who had yawned at him.
You could pick up a lot of valuable tips from a cat, thought Yifan. That was a trick she should practice.
*
The British Museum would not give an instant answer as to the age or provenance of the small pot. John took it there ten days after Yifan brought it back from Cardiff, and he reported that a little man who looked like a gnome had got quite excited when he opened the old cardboard box. Nevertheless, no information would be made available until some time had passed, and it was not until the end of the spring term, after Yifan had turned twelve, that she got the news that she and Ji Ye and John were going to talk with a Professor Steller at the Museum.
They gave their names at the Information desk and stood like rocks in the rushing stream of tourists that surged around them for a few minutes, until a smiling girl came up and shook John by the hand (which Yifan suspected he enjoyed) and led them through the press of chattering people to a door in the Egyptian Antiquities section. She used a keypad and ushered them through into a plain, quiet corridor and then into what were ordinary offices, just like anywhere else, but with old pots, bits of rock, stuffed animals and items of gold jewellery lying around on desks and shelves where anyone could pick them up. In one of the offices a tall window let the bright sunshine flood in, and it lit up the small gnome-like man whom John had described from his previous visit.
“Professor Steller,” said John, putting out his hand. The small bearded man indicated the girl who had led them to him.
“That’s Professor Steller,” he said, which made both Yifan and Ji Ye feel really good. “I’m Doctor Parfew. You’ve got a very interesting piece here,” he continued, looking straight at Yifan. “Would you mind telling us what you think it is?”
Yifan dried up. She found she could not think of a single thing to do with the pot, or remember why she was here, or who these people were. It was a classic case of stage-fright. So Ji Ye took her hand and spoke to the Doctor and the Professor, and told them that they didn’t really know much about it, but Yifan had found it in a trunk in the attic, and it belonged to her grandfather.
“Well,” said Doctor Parfew, “It looks like an oil lamp, and they were being made for thousands of years, all over the world. Yours – ah, here it is…” Professor Steller had brought a plastic box out from a cupboard. Inside it was the pot, nestling on a bed of plastic fleece. “It’s not a pot. That’s because it’s not pottery. It’s gold.”
Professor Steller picked it out of the box and held it up.
“It was made in the third century BC,” she said, “In China, in the reign of the first Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi. It is ornamental, not intended to be used as a lamp. It bears characters naming a Princess Aster. You can see in this picture…” she held up a black and white photograph. The characters were quite clear.
“That’s Xing Hua, which means Star Flower. We call that flower Aster, in English. And on the other side” – she held out another picture – “there is the name of her father.”
“Do you know who that is?” enquired the Professor.
Ji Ye looked at the photographs. “That is the First Emperor. And so this lamp must have belonged to his daughter Xing Hua.”
“Correct. Which begs the question – why does your grandfather have it, Yifan? How did it come all the way through more than two thousand years, and into your hands?”
They all stood silent for a few moments. This was a really strange situation. How had this precious item come into her family’s possession? Yifan felt that she had to say something.
“It’s gold?” She said, eventually. “But why does it look like pot?”
Professor Steller hitched her bottom onto the corner of a desk. “It’s been covered with a thin slip of clay. We think it was just to hide the fact that it’s gold, to stop it being stolen. It wasn’t originally like that, but that disguise has been on the lamp for hundreds of years. The clay hid the engraved lettering, too, but we have some very good cameras here.”
“Vicky told me it’s got a lid,” began Yifan, and then she blushed. She had revealed her secret. John looked at her with astonishment, and Ji Ye put her hand on her shoulder.
“Who’s Vicky?” asked John.
“She’s my thin doll,” Yifan stammered. “You know, the thin blonde doll?”
Doctor Parfew smiled. “Vicky is correct. It does have a lid. You can see it quite clearly. Your father told me he did not want to disturb it, and neither have we. But if we are to learn more about this object, we will have to clean off its disguise, and then open it up.”
“It was never used as a lamp,” said Professor Steller. “If there is anything inside it, it can’t be seen with x-rays because of the gold. Once the clay is gone the lid should come off easily. True oil lamps didn’t have lids, by the way – you just put oil in the spout, and a wick, and light it. It’s shaped like a lamp because it was popular to make precious copies of everyday objects. If this belonged to a Princess, it may have been used to keep something even more precious.”
“How much do you think it’s worth?” asked John. Neither Ji Ye nor Yifan would have thought to ask such a vulgar question, but John was not Chinese.
“We’re not antique dealers,” explained Doctor Parfew, “but we do of course have quite a good idea how valuable the items in our care are. And this object is probably worth close to half a million pounds. Maybe more, since it’s a unique Chinese treasure, and China is keen to bring its treasures back home.”
*
The rest of the day passed in a daze for the whole family, and it wasn’t until after dinner that evening that they all remembered that the lamp was Mister Ji’s property, and not theirs. They were not half a million pounds richer. But they did decide not to tell Ji Ye’s father about the discovery until the Museum had gone as far as it could with the object.
The Professor had said that they would carefully clean off the clay shell, and then take photographs and measurements. They would open the pot and see what, if anything, was inside. This would all take a couple of months, which seemed like an awfully long time to Yifan.
When Ji Ye took her to bed that night, Yifan took care to address her thin blonde doll as ‘Vicky’. It was not a bad name, anyway. And as she fell asleep she wondered about a Princess who lived over two thousand years ago, and perhaps she dreamed.
Downstairs, Ji Ye and John talked about the events of the day.
“I asked him where it came from, and he said it had been in the family for ever,” said Ji Ye. Her father had not been very communicative about the pot, claiming that there was nothing to say about it – it was a pot, in a box, and it had always been in his family.
“Which side of his family?” asked John.
“His mother’s side, and her mother before her, and her mother before her, all the way back. He doesn’t know how long. Just that it has always been there, and always been passed to the eldest daughter. So really, it will pass to me, and then to Yifan.”
“It doesn’t mean that he couldn’t sell it, if he wanted to.”
“True, and who would blame him, if it’s worth so much?”
A thought occurred to John. “Your father is not a female,” he began.
“You noticed?”
“I mean, if the pot passes down the female line, why has he got it?”
“No sisters, no nieces. It has to go to someone, so it went to him. And he just put it away without thinking about it.”
“I wondered why it was so heavy,” John said, “being made of clay, it should have been just a little bit weighty, if it was solid. But I really didn’t think about it being gold.”
“Well, you don’t. Who would think something like that?”
“It was very lucky that Yifan went up into the loft and discovered it.”
Ji Ye looked at John, and he looked back at her. They did not have to say that they knew there was more to Yifan’s involvement in this than met the eye. But they just did not know how she could have known that there was anything special up there to look for.
IV.
Yifan was, in the months that followed the unmasking of Princess Aster’s pot, increasingly preoccupied with learning. She had almost forgotten about the pot. She almost forgot everything, because of the relentless pressure of the Grammar school. Every waking moment seemed to be taken up with making decisions about triangles and adjectives, and ticking boxes, and finding out how many sweets Abdul, Ben and Chandra had between them. They seemed to get through tons of sugar, those three.
There were social pressures, too. Being an only child had left Yifan unprepared for the concentration of friendships and enmities that could consume the inhabitants of an all-girl school. Friends like Megan, enemies like Zoe. What had Yifan ever done to her, to deserve snide comments and sneaky tricks?
It was on a dull May weekday that it happened again. Luckily she was alone in her room, except for Bart, and her mum would not go in while Bart was there. Yifan was pondering a particularly pointless homework question – it was about a trapezoid – and then suddenly everything went dark.
There was no light, but it was not completely black. Then sounds began to be heard as if from far away, or through a wall.
There was no feeling. Yifan tried, but could not move an arm or a leg, or turn her head, or open her eyes.
Worst of all, there was no Vicky. Yifan called for her, but there was no response. She began to panic, but just in time she clamped down on that feeling – panic would lead to real fear, and what then?
There was breath. She was at least breathing. The sounds that she could understand were unfamiliar to her. There was clinking, there was beeping, there were low voices.
And then there was a smell.
It was a clinical smell. A hospital smell.
Yifan bit down hard on the panic and fear that threatened to well up in her and overwhelm her. She must not give in to her imagination. And she could not breathe any faster than this body was able to breathe – she did not have that sort of control. So she could not pant, could not cry out – and could not over-breathe and give herself a panic attack.
So she lay there, on an operating table (she supposed), and endured whatever it was that was being done. Once she had come to terms with the situation, she could gather quite a bit of information…
First, there was no urgency in the conversations going on around her. They were conducted in low voices, sometimes hard to hear, and when heard full of unfamiliar words. This was reassuring. This was unworried people doing their jobs.
And then there was no pain. Yifan concentrated, and could just about feel an itching sensation in her tummy.
And then, just as she was starting to get bored with this, she found some memories.
Was it just a dream that Vicky was having, and Yifan could see it? Or were these images real memories about Vicky’s past (and therefore Yifan’s future)? Carefully, because her mental hold was slippery, she looked at the memories that circled her like butterflies, pale floating images in the half-dark of Vicky’s sedated mind.
There was Vicky’s boyfriend – Oh! Well, he looked better than she had thought before. Quite handsome, really…
And there was Belinda, in a flat-bottomed boat with a young man. He propelled the boat through the water with a pole. Vicky’s memory concentrated a bit too much on the young man for Yifan’s taste.
And there was Yifan. Yifan watched the moving picture. It was grainy, like an old film. It was an old memory, coloured by whatever Vicky now thought she had been like as a child. As she watched, the picture expanded towards her and wrapped around her, and now she was inside it, as if she was a ghost or an invisible friend, watching herself riding a really cute but probably too fat pony around a paddock. This was news to Yifan – it was something she really wanted to do, but she didn’t have the time this year. So probably she was older here.
And then, older still, looking at a scrap of faded cloth held down beneath a sheet of glass. It was filled with Chinese writing, names a
ll connected with lines. She did not know what it was.
The memories suddenly broke into fragments and whirled away like confetti. She opened her eyes and the trapezoid looked back at her, showing that it was still there to be dealt with. Bart still slept on her feet. Hardly any time seemed to have passed. And her mother was coming up the stairs, calling her name. She did not come in to the room, because of Bart, but told Yifan through the door that the British Museum would like them all to visit again. Princess Aster’s pot had been opened.
And of course - Yifan knew what was inside it.
*
“It is a genealogical document,” said Doctor Parfew, in the sort of John-voice that probably meant he was going to go on about it for quite a while.
“A family tree,” explained Professor Steller. “Starting from Qin himself, then here is his daughter, Aster, Xing Hua, connected to the man she married.” The Professor pointed to the document which lay pinned beneath the glass sheet, indicating some writing at the top of the page.
The document itself was made from silk, it had been explained. That’s how it had been possible for it to have been hidden inside such a small object. Unfurled it was really quite big. It was somewhat grubby with age, and it may have been taken from a garment, since it had been painted with a formal Chinese garden scene which had faded with age.
The writing, Professor Steller explained, was in several hands and in different inks, and had obviously been written over a long period of time. It showed the Emperor’s sons, Fu Su and Hu Hai, and Ji Ye recalled the story of Hu Hai’s usurpation of power after Qin Shi Huangdi’s death – the Emperor’s will had been altered by the Prime Minister, Zhao Gao, and ordered Fu Su to commit suicide, leaving the throne to his scheming brother, who now called himself Emperor Qin Er Shi. After Hu Hai himself committed suicide, Zi Ying, who some supposed to be Fu Su’s son, but who was probably a brother of Qin Shi Huangdi, took the throne. When he died the First Empire collapsed and China returned to a collection of warring states.
But it was Xing Hua’s life which interested Yifan. While the male line of descent from Qin Shi Huangdi petered out quickly, the female line through his daughter flowed down the faded silk like a stream of black chicken-marks, the tiny pecks of Chinese writing dense and almost unreadable. Indeed, to most of those gathered around, it was completely unreadable. Only Ji Ye and Doctor Parfew could make much sense out of it.
Princess Yifan Page 3