She stood in the dark courtyard. The moon rose high now.
Lu Ying felt her gaze drawn upwards. How the Moon Goddess smiled at their small concerns! Lu Ying understood exactly, for once she had imagined that when Wang Ting-bo named her as his new First Wife she would smile, just so, at the little people scurrying round the foot of Peacock Hill. A painful memory.
That desire, once so deeply felt, mocked what she had become.
Even the aspiration had been faulty.
For a moment Lu Ying wondered if she should hurry back inside Dr Shih’s shop and learn as much as she could about giving birth. Lu Ying froze. A man had pushed open the wooden gates of the courtyard. She recognised him and stepped forward:
‘Master Hsu!’ she called. ‘What is the news from the city?’
Old Hsu’s Son shook his head in distress.
‘Fouzhou is no more. Only the river lies between us and the enemy.’
She was left alone in the courtyard while he moved from room to room in his small house, gathering the few valuables they owned. It seemed tactful to conceal Widow Mu’s return to Apricot Corner Court in the honourable role of Madam Midwife.
Lu Ying listened to Cao’s cries seeping into the night from Dr Shih’s shop. For a moment she remembered Lord Yun lying in his own incontinence. Where was Dr Shih! Over half an hour had passed since her messengers left to fetch him.
She shivered and stared up at the moon once more. How gay the goddess looked. One might think she was smiling. A sad, pitying kind of smile, it was true. One might almost think the moonbeams were roads to the Jade Emperor’s Cloud Terrace.
Abruptly, Lu Ying’s thoughts were dragged back to earth.
If the Mongols stormed the city, how hungry they would be!
Two years of frustration and terrible losses would fan their revenge. It would not take long to parade every pretty girl in the streets, to establish a slave market. Everyone had heard about their cruelty. Worse things existed than death. One might suffer as Madam Cao did now, only not to bear a handsome child of the House of Yun whose ancestor was the great poet Yun Cai, but a hideous bastard impregnated through. . . she must not think of it.
Lu Ying realised she was shaking and hugged herself. Tears stung her soft cheeks. Sooner join the Moon Goddess than that! Sooner drown herself in North Canal and float like a beautiful lily pad, its flower forever open to the moon.
*
Dr Shih tried to keep pace with his colleague. The young man’s walk was more like a run. Moonlight cast a silver sheen across the Water Basin, as they followed the canal to the Water Gate of Morning Radiance.
‘Dr Du Tun-i!’ called out Shih. ‘Our duty lies back at the Bureau. Besides. . .’
He did not explain his ‘besides’ – that messages from Apricot Corner Court could hardly reach him if he was scampering through the streets of Water Basin Ward on a mission of doubtful benefit to anyone. However, Dr Du Tun-i was defiant.
‘I must see if the rumours are true. Please accompany me, Dr Shih. You are my father when I am in Nancheng,’
‘Very well,’ sighed Shih. ‘But we may leave our posts only for a few minutes.’
Dr Du Tun-i was already climbing the steep stairs leading to the ramparts above the Water Gate of Morning Radiance. At the top a sergeant of the Militia blocked their way, the same man who had given Madam Cao permission to grow herbs on the riverbank. A dozen other soldiers were staring north.
‘Dr Shih, go back!’ urged the man. ‘You should not see this.
Go back, sir.’
Dr Du Tun-i pushed past the man to the stone battlements.
There he went very still. Shih joined him and laid a hand on his shoulder.
From the high Water Gate one could clearly see Fouzhou across the moonlit river. It was a night of unusual beauty. The Han River glowed eerily like polished jade. The wrecks of sunken ships exposed by the drought cast strange shadows.
There was a gentle, constant murmur from the current.
Then one’s eye found the wharf-side of Fouzhou where a mound was being raised. Gangs of slaves, supervised by Mongols on foot and horse, were dragging wagons and handcarts to the small hill, their labours illuminated by huge bonfires. Sparks rose and drifted into the cloudless sky.
Whenever a cart reached the mound, slaves emptied its contents, spurred on by clubs and whips.
Still the mound grew higher. Wails and screams from Fouzhou drifted through the calm summer night. It seemed the rumours were true. General A-ku was making good his promise to put every living thing to the sword, including household animals. Shih swirled with nausea and terror. Despite the many, many deaths he had witnessed since becoming a doctor’s apprentice this was a different kind of dying. How many thousands were on the mound? It rose almost to the height of the battlements of Jasper Gate. How many corpses did that take?
‘Come away,’ Shih urged Dr Du Tun-i.
‘What if my family are dragged out!’ sobbed the young man.
‘Mother and Little Sister. . . I have heard A-ku has pledged to search every room in every house.’
He broke down. Dr Shih took the young man’s arm and led him down the steps. His own spirit felt a racing panic, a revulsion against men and what they will do to each other, for the sake of self-preservation, or ambition, or fear, or honour, or greed. He heard himself speaking as though someone else was using his voice: ‘I am sure your family are well hidden. We shall make an offering to Huang Ti Nei’s image. The Yellow Emperor will surely listen.’
They walked back to the North Medical Relief Bureau. At the entrance Shih recognised two figures crouching in the dusty street. He was too dazed by what he had seen to remember his grievances against their mother, so he ushered Mung Po over to help Dr Du Tun-i and blinked down at the children.
‘Little Melon? Lan Tien? Why are you here?’
The boy shot his sister an angry look, then grovelled at Shih’s feet. It distressed him to see the boy so wretchedly thin. As for Lan Tien, there was something odd about the girl, suggestive of madness rather than physical infirmity.
‘Forgive us!’ blurted out the boy. ‘I would have come sooner but she would not let me.’
Lan Tien scrabbled at her brother’s arm to silence him and Shih bent down beside them.
‘Children, have you been sent with a message?’
Then Little Melon rushed it out: how Lady Lu Ying had sent him to say that Madam Cao needed his help; that her labour was difficult and the midwife had deserted them. How Lan Tien had forced him not to come because she was afraid of being sent to Lord Yun. How, in the end, Little Melon had decided to defy his sister and had run here as fast as he could.
Shih flinched at Lord Yun’s name. He did not care to think how near he had come to striking Father. A memory of the Tower Room and the old man’s avid observations suggested the reason for Lan Tien’s fear.
‘When was this? How long ago?’
Lan Tien buried her head in her hands but Little Melon said stoutly: ‘I counted two hour bells, sir.’
Dr Shih rose, eyeing the children angrily. That delay might cost him either his wife or unborn child. And yet again his father’s mischief was the cause.
‘Mung Po!’ he bellowed. ‘Mung Po!’
*
Cao could barely glimpse the room for pain. When not screwed tight, her eyes swam with tears. Shadows swirled in the lamp and candlelight. Never had she imagined such pain – every inner place, every entrance and exit of her body, all burned and shrieked as though connected by scalding rivers or fiery chains.
And then, unexpectedly, the pain receded a little, enough for her to gasp a lungful of precious air. When her vision cleared she could see Widow Mu’s anxious face and hear her voice:
‘Roll the boulder, Madam Cao!’ she intoned. ‘Clasp and roll it!
Good! How well you are doing. Soon we shall see your son!’
Cao laughed hysterically at such a prospect. Mu had repeated the word ‘soon’ so many times over the las
t hour.
‘Where is Shih?’ she wailed, abruptly recalling his absence.
‘Why has he not come?’
Indeed a summons had been sent to the Relief Bureau at least an hour ago, carried by Little Melon and Lan Tien. As the next lucky earthquake gathered force, billowing out to shake her exhausted body, Cao suddenly cried out: ‘I hate him! He is still chasing that whore! Oh! Oh! ’
Widow Mu squeezed her hand, while peering beneath the sheet she had placed over the arms of the birthing chair.
Suddenly her eyes opened wide.
‘Clasp the stone!’ she cried. ‘Madam Cao! Clasp the stone!
His head! Madam Cao, his head!’
Certainly more blood and fluid than before was dripping from the wooden chair to the earthen floor. As if through a haze of sound Cao distinctly heard screams of alarm on North Canal Street. They seemed to belong to another world, far away from this hot, dark well. Yet she could feel the child emerging, moment by moment, finger-breadth by finger.
‘Squeeze!’ cried Mu excitedly. ‘Now breathe! Breathe deeper, deep! Like this aaaah!’
Another lucky earthquake made Madam Cao moan out a stream of curses at her faithless husband.
‘His shoulders!’ cried Mu. ‘Here he comes!’
Then, preceded by a flow of blood and mucus, the baby slid into the midwife’s waiting hands.
Cao closed her eyes and tried to breathe. It would end now.
All that mattered was that it would end. Why then did her pain feel no less than before? Another wave was mounting, burning through her lower body.
When she opened her eyes again, Cao found Widow Mu diligently swaddling the baby in a hemp blanket, a guarded expression on her face. Then Cao knew the child must be stillborn. A wail began to form and her chest heaved, but Widow Mu was slapping the baby’s feet and, miraculously, like a bud opening out in a single moment, the child wailed and Madam Cao’s incipient cry of despair turned into a sob of joy.
If it had not been for the continuing pain she might have collapsed back in relief, staring in wonder at the baby’s streaked, contorted face as it howled, features so long anticipated and dreamed about. Still she held back from reaching out for the child that had caused so much agony.
‘Healthy!’ declared Widow Mu. ‘I’ve never seen one stronger!’
Cao suspected something hidden in Mu’s manner.
‘Is he?’ she said. ‘Is he whole?’
Mu shrugged apologetically.
‘He’s a she,’ she admitted, softly. ‘But quite, quite whole.’
‘Aieee!’
Cao’s scream tore through Apricot Corner Court. Widow Mu clasped the child to her breast in alarm.
‘Do not despair!’ she said. ‘Think, Madam Cao, how great a blessing a daughter can be!’
Then she fell silent, puzzled by the way Cao writhed on the birthing chair. At last a look of comprehension spread across her face.
‘Madam Cao,’ she said, shaking her by the arm, ‘are the lucky earthquakes continuing?’
Now Mu was feeling and squeezing Cao’s stomach, all the while examining her closely. She looked up and laughed.
‘Him a doctor, too!’ she exclaimed. ‘And he didn’t even know!’
Oh! Oh! Help me! Oh! Madam Cao’s protestations filled the medicine shop. Again and again Widow Mu intoned: ‘Clasp the boulder! Squeeze the stone!’
For long minutes nothing emerged, either still or alive. Now Mu’s voice grew more insistent and Cao saw through her clouds of pain that the midwife was afraid.
‘Breathe!’ she urged. ‘And squeeze!’
The change, when it came, was sudden.
‘Coming!’ cried out Mu. ‘One more time! Nearly here!’
Cao felt herself tear open, her whole lower body tear open, so she was undone, forever emptied. Her breath panted quicker than her heart. She felt herself fading, flowing away. How often had Shih reported such things in a solemn voice about other women. Women she had envied for the gift they left on this earth, whatever its cost. Amidst her agony came snatches of clarity. Widow Mu crowing, ‘A boy, Madam Cao, a boy this time!’ And her chest heaved with laughter that fled towards stupor, the numb, retreating blackness from which all the ten thousand creatures come and go, life after life, and to which each returns, forever and ever, when Nothingness is attained.
seventeen
‘The Song Dynasty may well be inept at ruling their domains, but Linan will not capitulate without terrible losses on all sides. To lust after life and fear death is merely natural. When the Men of the South choose death over life, it is simply because they do not believe our promises to spare and reward those who surrender to us. We should therefore repeat our pledge to favour all who renounce their loyalty to the Song. . .’
From Secret Memorandum to the Great Khan by Yao Shu, a Chinese adviser to Khubilai Khan
*
Peacock Hill, Nancheng. Autumn, 1268
It was a bright morning on Peacock Hill. The pleasure gardens constructed by ancient kings danced with colour and shadow.
Charms of finches twittered from branch to branch. Gardeners cast fearful glances towards the river as they went about their duties, the sharper-eyed among them observing the new hillock that continued to grow, day by day, on the wharf-side of Fouzhou.
Guang sat in the gardens beside a moon-gate, awaiting a bell of summons. He wore his splendid uniform and waist-badges of office. His head was bowed, as though pressed earthward by care. So still did he sit that the finches lost their fear and pecked the gravel path near his feet. His eyes were half-closed, gazing inwards.
Shih and Dr Du Tun-i were not the only ones to witness the corpse-mound’s construction. Guang and Chen Song had watched from the Gate Of The Vermilion Sparrow. Even now wagons were discharging their burdens and hurrying off for a fresh load. It had surprised him he should tremble and stutter when answering Chen Song’s questions. How absurd! Had he not braved worse sights than this? Captain Xiao did not quiver like a frightened boy!
But Guang was weary of Captain Xiao. He could not avoid the knowledge that he alone had ordered the closure of Jasper Gate and demolished the Floating Bridge, trapping tens of thousands in Fouzhou. Loyal Chen Song assured him that otherwise Nancheng would have fallen, the slaughter fifty times worse. Yet Guang could not reason away the piles of dead, or the screams – pitiful, keening voices – or the grief visible everywhere. Mongol resolve was implacable and now their attention was rapidly returning to Nancheng.
A bell rang from the Old Palace. The Pacification Commissioner had ordered Guang to attend an audience where future strategy would be decided. In the past, such a prospect would have filled him with enthusiasm.
He rose from the bench and the finches scattered in alarm.
They perched on nearby branches and watched him go with bright, unblinking eyes.
Over thirty of the Province’s most senior military and civil officials conversed quietly. Chen Song joined Guang near the front. With the death of General Zheng Shun and other officers over the last few days they had gained in seniority.
‘An interesting choice of room for our meeting,’ murmured the scholar-soldier.
Wang Ting-bo had again summoned them to the Hall of Obedient Rectitude, once the audience chamber of a petty king.
‘Behold!’ added Chen Song, drily. ‘Even the thrones are back.’
Two huge new chairs of lacquered wood, marble and ivory, had been placed on a freshly constructed dais. The two men wandered over to examine the carvings. The significance of river-dragons entwined around chrysanthemums was obvious.
A gong echoed and a grand procession entered the audience chamber. Lesser officials carrying ink and paper led the way, followed by fan-bearers. Finally came the Pacification Commissioner himself in full uniform. At his side walked his nephew, Prefect Wang Bai.
All the company bowed. Some fell to their knees in grovelling homage – as though Wang Ting-bo’s right to rule had grown, rather than been diminish
ed, by the appalling loss of Fouzhou and its entire population. Guang felt listless and subdued as the Pacification Commissioner and Prefect settled on their new thrones.
‘Gentlemen!’ said Wang Ting-bo. ‘Powers beyond our control have heaped disaster upon us. Despite our brave strategy and our unflagging resolve, Fouzhou has been overwhelmed as is a beach by the tide!’
The only sounds came from the click of the fan-wafting servants. Guang recollected the reinforcements that never came and wondered how inevitable A-ku’s victory had been. Perhaps Wang Ting-bo comprehended the feebleness of his explanation for he repeated: ‘Like a beach swept by the tide!’
No one spoke. The Pacification Commissioner nodded to his nephew who surveyed the waiting men imperiously.
‘For three hundred years,’ said Wang Bai, ‘the Royal House have ruled our Empire. Think how we have benefited! For three hundred years the Mandate of Heaven has ensured their rule – despite, it is true, the unfortunate loss of half our ancestral lands due to extravagance and folly, as well as the ignoble purchase of peace through tribute – but let us not speak of those things. Endless errors have laid bare the bosom of our Empire, but I say again, let us not mention them. Now we must ask ourselves, what is to be done? Now we must answer those who say the Mandate of Heaven no longer belongs to our Holy Ruler, due to lascivious greed, incompetence and waste! We must answer them, as best we can. We must find ways of answering such voices. Or conclude – a dreadful thought! –they are right.’
All listened in amazement to this speech. Guang was not sure he understood Wang Bai exactly. Was he criticising the Emperor or calling for the utmost loyalty? Others shared his confusion. A few watched the Pacification Commissioner carefully, waiting for his next words.
‘Our duty, gentlemen,’ said Wang Ting-bo, ‘is to ensure Nancheng does not suffer the same fate as its sister city.’
All could agree with that.
‘But how, Your Excellency?’ called out an old man.
‘Ah!’ said Wang Ting-bo, raising his finger for emphasis.
‘The sounds of woeful lament echo through our province! We must act with resolve and wisdom to soothe the people’s wounds.’
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