The Dragon's Breath

by James Boschert

  “Hello, Lun,” the old man said as the boy approached. “How was school today? What did you learn about?”

  Lun looked down, shuffled his feet and pretended to look over the books and some silk paintings that were on display. “Hello, Tseng Jung,” Lun finally greeted the old man respectfully by his courtesy name. “Today they told us to memorize phrases from Confucius which I didn’t understand, so I could not remember them very well. I was punished and my hand hurts.” He held out his right hand, displaying a red welt along his palm.

  “Ah. I see, but you know we are here to learn, and when I was a boy we were beaten regularly. It taught us to apply ourselves,” Tseng Jung told him kindly enough. He raised his hands as though to show his own scars, displaying thin, almost emaciated wrists and forearms emerging from the deep wide sleeves of his not so clean green silk overcoat. His under tunic, held together with a grubby silk sash, was of light cotton and frayed at the hem, which came down to his clogs just an inch off the ground.

  “I have just the right ointment for that pain. If it continues to hurt, you will have to go to the medicine doctor over there, across the street, for something stronger.”

  Lun glanced over at the medicine shop and grimaced. He didn’t like going into that dark, sinister cave, where just about every living creature that crawled or walked was on display in some form or another. An authoritative placard next to the low door extolled its owner’s medical powers. His mother sent her maids there for powders and creams, and he had accompanied one of the servants from time to time.

  The old man took a small ceramic jar from behind the counter and opened the lid. Despite the almost overwhelming odors from all around of cooking meat, fish, vegetables and hot oil, as well as more noisome stinks coming from the large drains nearby, Lun wrinkled his nose at the smell emanating from the thick ointment inside the little pot that was being held under his nose.

  “It will sooth the pain,” Tseng Jung assured him, and put a forefinger of ointment on Lun’s hand.

  It did soothe the pain, and Lun brightened up.

  “I had another dream, Tseng Jung,” he stated.

  Tseng Jung looked interested. “Your last one was not a good one, as I recall.”

  “No, but this time I saw Father on another ship. It did not look like his ship, more like one of those Arab ships we see anchored in the straights down by the Arab settlements.” He paused and waved his arm in the general direction of a mass of masts and spars down river in the distance.

  “I could almost point to one of them and say that was the one, but I know he is not here but far, far away.”

  Tears formed in his dark eyes when he gazed up at the old man, whose own aged but kindly brown eyes were almost lost in the wrinkles on either side.

  “Ai yah! I am sure that is a good omen!” Tseng Jung exclaimed, his white eyebrows shooting up. “First you see a horrible storm, and then you see your father on a ship. Even if it was not his own, it must mean that he is alive. That is very good Joss indeed!”

  “Do you think so?” asked Lun.

  “Oh yes! It is excellent, although I cannot fathom how you dream so. Perhaps you have the gift. Some people do,” Tseng Jung told him with assurance.

  “Mother thinks I am imagining things, but they are so real when I dream them.”

  “Never mind. I believe you, and that is what matters,” Tseng Jung told him in a kindly manner. “You had better head home now, or she will find another reason to be displeased with you. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.”

  Lun smiled and hitched his large school bag more comfortably onto his shoulder. “I will see you tomorrow, Tseng Jung. Stay well.”

  Tseng Jung smiled and placed both hands together. “May you be at peace! Remember that everything arises from the mind. Study hard and you will win through.”

  *****

  Lun looked up at the clouds boiling into great pillars in the sky to the north of the city. It was going to rain soon, he decided, and hastened his pace. He continued his way along the busy avenue to the water’s edge to where the ferry boats waited. He had only two coins on him. One, the larger, would pay for the boatman to take him across the river to his family compound, and the other had been saved from his small savings to buy some of the mouthwatering meat and noodles from a stall close to the landing. His stomach rumbled as he joined the short line waiting to be served.

  He was forbidden to linger after school, and he was expected to make his way home on his own in the middle of the afternoon when everything interesting was on display. He would do his best to be home promptly, but whenever he had put aside a little money, he would treat himself to a little food to get him through the rest of the day: supper was a long time away at the hour of the Dog, when it was dark.

  The avenue if anything became livelier as the day passed; well dressed clerks rubbed shoulders with stevedores and laborers who were clad in rough, grimy clothes; they all stood in lines just like this one. They ordered their food from the person who owned the stall, behind whom were one, two or even three sweating cooks surrounded by steaming copper and bronze pots, laboring over charcoal fires and wielding wide, beaten iron woks full of smoking oil into which they flash fried fresh chopped vegetables and meat. The oil would hiss and splutter as it cooked the food. The cooks shook the contents vigorously over the glowing fires or briskly stirred them for a few minutes before scooping the food out and dumping it into rows of wooden bowls with the help of a ladle made out of woven bamboo, calling out the orders as they turned away to attend to the next order.

  A coin would be passed to the owner, and a laden bowl with crudely carved wooden chop sticks placed inside was shoved into the customer’s hands. Then it was a matter of looking for a place to sit and eat among the other people hunched over their food. Most of them were holding their bowls close to their lips and shoveling the food straight into their mouths, talking loudly to one another at the same time. The customers were expected to return the chop-sticks and bowls when finished, and there were attendants there to see that they did.

  Lun listened with half an ear to the loud chatter going on all around him. People gossiped about the latest palace scandals, news of which had reached Guangzhou from the capital: this or that eunuch had been caught with one of the numerous princesses in a compromising situation, an execution would result for sure. Smirks and raucous laughter followed, accompanied by obscene gestures. This or that faction in the city of Guangzhou itself was suspected of being involved in a suspicious murder of an opponent from another administrative faction at the college of trade and taxes; the body had turned up in the usual watery grave, the river. The governor was sick. The Mongols had invaded. The gossip continued unabated as rumors were savored and enlarged upon.

  Lun was not a part of this community; as a boy of nine, even if better clothed than most, he went virtually unnoticed among the myriad of other children running errands. There were others like him going home after an arduous day under harsh tutelage studying the Rules of Confucius.

  He finished his snack of fried noodles and small fish cubes in a brown sauce of soy and gravy with hot chili sauce. It made him sweat in the humid heat, causing his shirt to stick to his back, but it tasted delicious. He handed his empty bowl off to an impatient attendant, then hurried along the busy riverbank. The meal had made him feel cooler.

  He sometimes had to elbow his way through the packed crowd towards the boat landing. It was almost impossible to see over the top of them. A sea of wide, coned straw hats, many as wide as the shoulders of the wearer, and of the tall, elaborately shaped silk hats officials wore obscured any view for a small boy. He emerged at last from a cluster of people gathered around someone who was reading an impressive looking document to the crowd in a loud voice. Something about reporting robberies to the authorities. He paid it no notice and looked for a boat. A sharp-eyed boatman spotted him and skulled his light vessel speedily towards him. Waving off others who wanted to board, he called to Lun to get in the sampan
. He knew Lun lived on the island of Haizu, which was just across the neck of water to the south of the main city.

  Lun tossed the man his remaining coin and jumped aboard. The boatman, who was standing at the very rear of the sampan, clutching his one oar, snatched the coin out of the air, and then waited for Lun to step onto the rocking boat. Lun took care with his step; he certainly didn’t want to fall into the stinking mess that rose and fell on the edge of the river. Some of it looked as though it had died a week ago, and the stench was strong in the hot, humid air. The oarsman grinned a gummy smile of welcome and pushed away from the steps before anyone else could get on board. The boy paid just over the odds for a short ride across the river, and the boatman knew him by name.

  “How have you been, Master Meng Lun?” the man, clad only in a coarse cotton shirt, much patched, ragged trousers, and a wide rimmed grass woven hat, asked him politely as they negotiated the crowded river. Lun nodded but said nothing. It was cooler under the round mat covering the middle of the sampan.

  Lun was concentrating on the ships in the distance further upriver. The boatman knew when to stay quiet, leaving Lun to his thoughts, while he skulled their fragile sampan adroitly around fast moving river traffic, any one of which could have capsized their own should they collide. As it was, their tiny boat bobbed up and down in the wakes, forcing Lun to hang onto the sides. The standing boatman, well used to the river, balanced himself easily against the rise and fall of the vessel.

  On the bank where he had just embarked, a man who had been following the boy from his school stood watching for a while as the boat pulled into the center of the river on its way to the other side. He then turned and disappeared into the crowd.

  The boy could see several of the Arab vessels in the distance of the type that he had dreamed about. Why, he wondered, would he have such a vivid picture in his mind? Was it simply that he remembered these oceangoing ships because he saw them every day? They were very large, and quite different from the Chinese boats that plied the waters off the coast, bringing fish to the port. Most of the Chinese coastal vessels he knew had blunt bows and a shallow draught for sailing in the relatively shallow waters of the delta. He noticed a flotilla of this kind tied up side by side, their crews idle, sleeping, or having betting games in the shade of temporary stretched rattan overhangs. They waited for the early hours of the night when they would catch the off shore breezes and all sail into the large delta to fish for shrimp and freshwater fish. The people of Guangzhou preferred freshwater fish to the salty ocean kind found further out to sea.

  By glancing over his shoulder he could see a cluster of other Chinese ships which were every bit as large as the Arab vessels; they had three masts—in some cases even four—and they were designed for long voyages out into the open ocean. They ventured to places where the Arab ships came from. His father and elder brother had left in one. Why, then, would he dream of one of the Arab vessels, and not a Chinese ship with his father on board?

  His first dream had been more of a nightmare. In it he had seen his father and his brother on a distinctly Chinese vessel that was being battered by the fury of a storm. He had woken up crying, which woke his amah, who had rushed in to find him so agitated that she could barely restrain him. After finally calming him down, she had brought him to his mother, who was sitting up in her bed. She had not, however, been very sympathetic and had slapped him, inducing more tears, and told him to stop crying and go back to sleep. Everyone had nightmares, she had told him, and he would soon grow out of it. His amah had guided him back to his own bed and had given him a small cup of fragrant tea to drink. He had eventually fallen into a dreamless slumber, but the memory persisted, and now he’d had another dream. The images were so clear they were frightening.

  The boat man brought the sampan alongside the pier and bade him goodbye. Mumbling his thanks, Lun jumped off and walked up the worn stone steps to the paved road, which ran parallel to the river. This was the part of the journey home that he dreaded most.

  Between this place and the sanctuary of his home there were small gangs of boys who were from the poorer section of the town, but also other boys who were in his same social class who liked to hang out with the tougher crowd. It was these boys that he feared most, as they were the most vicious, and he had had more than one unpleasant encounter with them.

  His eyes flicked nervously from side to side as he looked for any evidence of them among the porters and laborers and the dense cluster of houses facing the river. He wished he had some form of protection, or even a protector. Several of his friends at school had bodyguards; not because they themselves were special, but because their fathers were important people in the administration, which therefore made their sons vulnerable to being kidnapped for ransom, or so they supposed. Lawlessness and banditry had been on the rise recently, or so his Grandmother said.

  He, Lun, had a father who was now far removed from the intrigues and infighting of the academics and administrators. Hence he was now unimportant, at least for the time being.

  The people on the docks ignored him, engrossed in their work, shouting instructions and ribald jokes at one another. They were a rough crowd, spitting everywhere as they went, and they smelled bad. He shrugged his book bag onto his shoulder and stepped out at a lively pace for home but kept an eye about him as he went. As he came closer to where he lived he began to hope that he might make it home without trouble.

  The street was reasonably well paved and cleaner than on the other side of the river on the mainland. Even so, the ubiquitous food stalls were there, although in fewer numbers, with their clients seated on small wooden stools, stuffing their faces with rice and morsels of fish or pork. He was no longer hungry, so looked instead towards the numerous large walled compounds in the distance, one of which was home and a haven from this noisy, bustling world he passed through almost every day.

  To his left, large multistoried houses lined the riverbank on the side of the paved road, in some cases joined wall to wall. These houses were owned by wealthy merchants who needed to be close to their point of business. These had well made doorways, correctly positioned per the Feng shui directions. Harmony for the inhabitants was of prime importance.

  They had ornate shutters and decorations on their roofs. His uncle on his mother’s side of the family owned one of them. Their steep, red tiled roofs curved slightly. Some had, at the end of the corners or on their crests, a stone decoration, such as a glaring dragon’s head with protruding eyes and bared teeth, to keep away the bad spirits and the hairy-faced, bad-tempered djins. Lun had to keep a wary eye open for carts laden with bales of silk and other goods which ground by, their iron rimmed wheels grating on the stone of the street. Their drovers shouted for passage, and he scurried around the small, dark, sweating porters carrying impossibly heavy loads on their backs.

  Although one of many islands in the delta, this particular island was an important trading area where there were several sea going ships tied up alongside the wharf. The warehouses, or godowns, were either behind the houses or were some way along the road. The laborers used flat bamboo rods, which flexed up and down on their shoulders as they loped on bare feet from ship to godown and back carrying merchandise. These ships were of Chinese build; their sails were made of dark painted oil-cloth, ribbed with wooden slats, quite unlike the sails of the Arab ships further down river. The creak of timber and the slap of water between the hulls, along with the low murmur of the crews taking their ease or squatting on the decks eating, lulled him into thinking he was safe.

  He heard them before he saw them as they ran down the street in a small mob. They had been teasing an old woman who had a pitifully small vegetable stall on the river’s edge. Their loud insults and playful shoving, combined with the agitated, high-pitched voice of the woman as she tried to protect her property, woke him up to reality.

  It was Hang who was leading the persecution of the old woman, poking her and calling her names. Lun crossed over the road to be nearer t
he houses in the feeble hope that he could get by without being noticed, but one of Hang’s accomplices noticed him and shouted to the others, pointing.

  Lun began to run. The satchel was heavy and impeded his legs as he scurried up the slope towards the safety of his family compound, his heart pounding. The gang of four left off the old woman and began to chase after him, laughing and threatening him with what they were going to do to him.

  “Hey, little boy! Run run, run! We are going to throw you in the river and watch you drown!” they shouted as they chased him. Lun didn’t look back but raced as fast as his legs could carry him. The gates were in sight and safety was just within reach when he felt a blow to his back that sent him sprawling in the dust.

  He rolled onto his back and looked up fearfully to see Hang standing over him, reaching down to grab him by the throat. Suddenly Lun heard a shout, then a thumping sound, and Hang fell, sprawling across him. Lun lifted his head in surprise and pushed the inert body away from him, trying to get out from under. He heard another shout another cracking sound, and a cry of pain, then another and another. He swiveled his head around and found that all four of his would-be assailants were lying unconscious on the ground.

  A hard hand attached to an arm made of corded sinew and roped muscle reached down, seized him by the front of his coat, and heaved him back onto his feet.

  “You all right?” a gruff voice asked him.

  Lun stared around at the devastation in mute astonishment and nodded. “Y-yes,” he stammered. He gazed up at his rescuer. Fang, his father’s household bodyguard, paid him scant attention. He carried in his right hand a long carved wooden sword that resembled in shape the other one he had in the sash around his waist. He pushed Lun towards the gates of the property and said, “Leave them to me.”