The Book of Bones

by Natasha Narayan

  I held Yin far more responsible for Horatio Pyke’s death than Isaac.

  Befuddlement gripped us all. None of us really understood what had just taken place at the Jade Dragon Theater. It had all happened so fast. It was a blur of fantastical events. Perhaps it was exhaustion or the poisoning, the long steamship journey or the confusion of being in this steamy foreign land. Whatever it was, for a second I had lost my bearings completely when I saw Yin stand up and begin to dismount from the carriage.

  “We must go,” Yin said, looking back at us.

  “Where?” asked Waldo, who looked as bewildered as I felt. Outside was a wide boulevard, those circular Chinese straw hats, the scent of salt and fish. Nothing I recognized.

  “Our boarding house. Bubbling Well Road,” Yin replied. Calmly she dismounted and waited for us on the pavement.

  We stumbled after her, disconcerted, as if we had been rescued by Yin rather than the other way round. How did she know where we were staying? None of us had told her the address of our boarding house.

  Chapter Sixteen

  My mistrust of Yin deepened as we took her up to our room and changed her into fresh linen belonging to Rachel, who is smaller than me. The Chinese girl looked comical in these clothes; they were far too big for her. I sat by the pillow, unable to keep my eyes off her pinched face. Formless suspicions were growing in my mind. Unease, dark clouds billowing. I shook my head, trying to shake off my fears.

  She’s just a child, I told myself fiercely. But … I couldn’t forget that dead man. Horatio Pyke. What kind of child drives a man to his death?

  “Don’t do that,” said Rachel, turning and noticing my stare. “The poor mite’s half dead. Do you want drink?” she asked, miming drinking from a glass. “Oh, sweetheart. Look, she’s trembling.”

  It was true. Yin was shivering as if she had a high temperature. Thick on her lashes were crusty flakes. The numbered segments Dr. Billings had drawn crawled over her scalp like black spiders. Rachel poured her a cool glass from the jug by the bed and tried to force it into her mouth. Yin’s hand knocked against it, spilling the water. I don’t know if she noticed the wet patch forming on the front of her dress.

  I watched her coldly. There was something not quite human about her. Was this all an act to gain our sympathy? The child was as hard to know as a cat. Indeed there was something catlike, curving and sly, about her. Cats often had mismatched eyes.

  “Maybe she’s hungry?” Rachel suggested.

  “We can get something from the kitchens, I suppose,” Waldo replied. “Rachel, can you—”

  “Of course,” she muttered, disappearing out of the door.

  We clustered around my bed. Every minute Yin seemed to grow hotter.

  “Yin,” I said, mastering my distaste to take her burning fingers, “who are you?”

  Abruptly the shaking stopped. She sat up. Looked around. Her hand reached for the glass and she took a few sips of water. Then she fell back in a daze, staring entranced at our kerosene light, which hung down low from a brass hook.

  “Are you hot?”

  Her eyes flickered to me for a moment and then back to the glowing lamp.

  “Put a cold compress on her face,” Isaac suggested, as Rachel came back into the room with the news that there was no food available till dinner time. “Rachel, have you a handkerchief?”

  Rachel hurriedly soaked one of her handkerchiefs in cold water from the jug and placed it on the girl’s forehead. She seemed barely aware of it, lost in a swoon.

  “If she gets really ill …” Rachel murmured, staring at the girl’s fever-racked form. “Oh, I hope we did the right thing!”

  “How could it be wrong?” Isaac hissed, suddenly angry. “You saw how Dr. Billings was making her do tricks, like a performing flea. That’s not science, Rachel!”

  “I know. Bu—”

  “Don’t talk then. Do something.”

  I understood why Isaac was so angry, for if we had done the wrong thing in rescuing Yin, then the volunteer Horatio Pyke’s death had indeed been for nothing.

  The water seemed to be having some effect. Yin’s eyes wandered, going round the room before settling on me.

  “Yin!” I murmured, unable to keep the agitation out of my voice. “Who are you?”

  I approached her. “Talk,” I demanded more roughly. “We don’t have much time.”

  The girl’s lips opened. “Time,” she rasped.

  Time.

  That single word had unlocked a dam. Everything which we had been probing and looking for now came struggling out. It wasn’t easy for her, even I could see that.

  Yin had been raised in the far-off province of Henan. Her father was a scholar who did not regard the birth of a daughter as cause for dismay. Chinese parents commonly regarded their daughters as a burden. In fact thousands of girl babies were simply left out in the cold to die. Yin’s father had even decided not to bind his daughter’s feet. Many girls’ feet are bound in layers of cotton from birth, their toes broken to keep their feet small—“like lotus flowers.” Foot-binding blights this country. I had seen many Shanghai woman hobbling birdlike in tiny shoes, unable to walk properly. They are said to live in constant pain.

  Luckily Yin was spared this torment and grew up happily with her brothers and sisters on the slopes of Mount Shong. Their lives passed in the shadow of the great Shaolin monastery. Then one day a wise woman from the monastery noticed her. Auspicious signs were said to hang around her. It was a great honor for her family. So Yin was given away. Aged about four or five she was taken to the monastery. It was a beautiful place, with bamboo glades, flower orchards, babbling brooks and herb gardens. All in a remote part of the mountains, sheltered by groves of ancient trees. The nuns brought her up and she was trained in all the disciplines of the Buddhist order. This included meditation or the ability to empty the mind of all thought, calligraphy, herbal lore and Kung Fu fighting.

  When Yin was telling us this part of her life story I could not resist breaking out in wonder. “You fought?”

  She inclined her head.

  “Goodness,” I said, for Yin could not be much of a fighter. My doubts about her story were growing. Was she a bare-faced liar? She was just skin and bones. It was plain to see that anybody, even Rachel, could break her in a fight.

  “Stop interrupting,” Rachel hissed, and I subsided, letting the girl continue with her story.

  The religious folk and other students were kind to her and she knew happiness. She wore the white sash of the student and her mentor was a nun, of great fighting ability, known as Gray Eyebrows. She was still small when she realized that the nuns had marked her out as someone special, someone of a particular ability. It was even said that one day she would be shown the rare honor of reading the Book of Bones.

  “The Book of Bones?” I couldn’t help interrupting again. “The one the Bakers want?”

  The others shushed me. But I persisted.

  “What is it, Yin? This Book of Bones.”

  Yin regarded me. “It show how to do deep cleaning.”

  “Sounds like a Chinese laundry.”

  Isaac and Waldo tittered, but Rachel frowned and told me to keep quiet and the Chinese girl went on with her story.

  Yin seemed to have an uncanny ability to foretell. To bend time. This was first noticed in small things, like when she knew, without being told, that there would be noodles for lunch. Soon she wore the black sash of a disciple and she was excused many of the student duties in the vegetable gardens, while Gray Eyebrows trained her in Kung Fu. She also learned other things: the English language, reading and writing. Her ability grew until it became unclear, as Yin disappeared into a trance, who was the trainer and who the apprentice.

  Meanwhile these were unstable times in China. The foreign powers were pressing into the country and threatening the centuries-old rule of the decaying Manchu Empire. Opium flooded the land, fields went untended and famine followed. The court of the Manchu Emperor was corrupt and decaden
t. Warlords grew in strength. Many eyes turned to the monastery, coveting the wealth and knowledge of the holy fighters.

  Then one day a violent warlord attacked the monastery—there was much fighting and plunder. Not that this Shaolin temple was easy to take—indeed the monks quickly drove off the marauders. Yin was unaware of what was happening, only later did she learn of these events. She was deep in meditation during the battle, sitting alone in the cherry orchard lost in wonders. In her trance-like state she did not even realize she had been captured and taken as a slave to a nearby town. There she was sold, along with many, many others, as a coolie. She was destined to be taken to the New World, where she would work from dawn to dusk building America’s railroads.

  What Yin was talking of was not news to me. For the sad truth is that although the slave trade has been outlawed—by the efforts of William Wilberforce among others—wicked merchants still trade in human flesh. These poor humans, be they Indians or Chinese, are called “indentured laborers,” but they are still caged and bought and sold like slaves. The pens in the Mandalay had been intended for such people.

  Yin was traded in this way, bought and sold—she didn’t recall how many times. Worse was to happen to her, for on the journey west an overseer noticed her strange trances. She was skinny, worthless as a worker. They were about to discard her, throw her overboard as human rubbish, when the overseer chanced on the mutterings of the other coolies.

  The child was special. This child was different.

  She didn’t know how these mutterings caused her to wake up one day in a vast granite castle, with a sky the color of lead bearing down upon her.

  As she said these words Rachel, who had told me off for interrupting, broke in herself. “That sounds like Hadden Castle—the Baker Brothers’ home.”

  Yin nodded. I could see she didn’t want to dwell on the castle as she quickly went on with her story. She didn’t know why the scientist—the “Yellow Heart” she called him—shaved her head and scribbled on it. He hooked her up to machines which made her feel as if she was buried in a block of ice. Time passed—she was experimented on, prodded and poked and jabbed and hooked up to “humming beasts.” In those days vivid images passed through her mind, of her mother and sisters and Gray Eyebrows.

  Yin must have babbled. She was a shrewd girl and she tried to hold her tongue. She tried especially not to talk of the Shaolin temple, for that was sacred to her. But she believes the Bakers learned the secret of the Book of Bones’ existence from her. The scientists and “ghost men” were after her gift of prophesy, this she had guessed. All her life, her flickering ability to read time like you and I can skim through a book had marked her out as different.

  But she claimed this ability was a broken gift. Sometimes she could see clearly. More often, the future was as blank to her as to you or me. On some occasions she saw wrong, and what she beheld clear as glass did not come to pass.

  Worst of all was when she saw disturbing things. Things that made her skin crawl and gripped her heart with horror. At such times she regarded her gift as a curse.

  Then she was back on the ship and one day she woke up to see—us!

  I must not give you the impression that Yin’s story came out this clearly. I had to work hard, to guess and patch it up and tell it to you in proper English. I found as I listened that some of my suspicions of the child were melting away. Looking at the others I saw they believed her completely. She sounded so upset by her “gift.” She was so young that it cannot have been easy to carry such a burden around. However, that lump of suspicion in my throat refused to go away. True she told her story well—but there were things that still did not make sense to me. I resolved to keep a close eye on her and not to take too much of her story on trust.

  One thing I did believe completely about Yin’s story was the bit about the Bakers. Men who could visit such cruelty on a child. They had put her through horror. Their souls were steeped in darkness.

  I could see only one way out of the Bakers’ trap. The doctor had not helped us—that visit had been more than useless. If this small child really had the “gift” she claimed, only Yin could save us—and herself.

  If she helped us, it would prove that she was not the dark force I imagined. It would also prove she was on our side.

  “Yin,” I said, “can you help us?”

  She shifted her position on the bed uncertainly. “What you want I do?”

  “There is something you can do. Have you guessed?”

  She stared back at me.

  “One of us has been poisoned by the Baker Brothers. We don’t know which one it is. All we know is that one of us will die if we don’t stop it. Yin, you can see through time. Can you tell us which one of us is condemned?”

  Yin shrank back against the headboard, her body rigid. Her eyes swiveled over Waldo, Rachel, Isaac and me.

  “No! NO! I cannot see this.”

  “Cannot or will not?” I asked, my doubts resurfacing.

  “Please,” Rachel whispered.

  “No. You never ask me this again!”

  “So you refuse to help us,” I said.

  “I cannot see.”

  There was little more said that evening, as we bid goodnight to Waldo and Isaac and settled down in our cramped room. Rachel and I were sleeping on mattresses as it had been decided to let Yin have the big bed.

  I had an unsettled night. In my dreams I saw a clock face, the hands swinging randomly forward and back. But both the minute and the second hand always halted on the Roman numeral two. There they stayed for a while, with an unnerving clack. Like a door repeatedly slamming shut.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I woke up at dawn, chilly despite the sun on my face. Something was watching me. Turning a little, I saw Yin. She was already dressed in the navy jacket and wide-legged trousers our landlady had brought for her—a small figure hunched on the windowsill. Her eyes, glinting green and gray, were fixed on my face. I shivered and pulled my blanket up to my chin. She was so peculiar, waiting for something, curled up like a cat in the sunshine.

  Normally I talk a lot. I know I do because Rachel and Waldo are always keen to point it out to me. But that morning I was unusually quiet. Just as Yin had watched me, I watched her, searching for clues. As we trooped downstairs to meet the others for breakfast, I turned her story over and over in my mind. She could foretell the future, she claimed. Why then had she not foreseen the burning of her monastery and the Bakers’ dark role? Why had she not stopped it? I know she claimed she could see only infrequently. So she saw what page of a book someone had been reading, but not important things like destruction. Was that plausible? Did anything about her really make sense?

  Breakfast was served in the restaurant, an airy room with pillars, palms in pots and lotus flowers on the table. Sunlight slanted down on pale china, heaped with dumplings. Alongside were varnished sticks, lying in pairs by the plates.

  “What on earth are these?” Waldo held up the twigs in wonder.

  “Chopsticks!” exclaimed Yin, beaming. It was the first genuine smile I had ever seen on her face. Deftly Yin picked up a pair of “chopsticks,” holding them between finger and thumb, and placed one of the dumplings in her mouth.

  Uncertainly I took hold of the chopsticks and tried to hoist one of the slimy dumplings into my mouth. It was devilishly hard.

  “Bao Zi,” Yin said.

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “You know the Dim Sum?”

  I hadn’t the faintest idea what she was talking about. Why couldn’t we have normal food? Yesterday we’d had porridge. We’d even had the luxury of spoons! Looking around I saw most of the other guests were Europeans, many in topis and cream linen suits, with sunburnt faces. That handsome man over there, blond and blue-eyed, had a German air. That pale man looked like a Viking. In the corner, under the fan, was unmistakably a pair of Englishmen. Probably old China hands. In any case, they seemed to be stomaching the fare. As I pride myself on being adventurous when i
t comes to food, I took a bite. Waldo, Rachel and Isaac were watching suspiciously. It was horrible, some kind of sickly sweet bean mixture. I wanted to spit it out but there was such pride on Yin’s face that I nodded vigorously.

  “Mmm … delicious,” I said.

  Waldo took a pair of the chopsticks and clumsily speared a dumpling. I watched, smiling, as he bit in. He was about to blurt out with a yuck. But in a rare burst of sensitivity, when he saw Yin’s hopeful expression, he quickly turned it into a yum. So we ate the soggy things filled with sickly paste and made murmurs of delight while Yin looked on. We had washed her head clean of those disfiguring black lines and given her one of Rachel’s bonnets to wear. Rest had improved her a little. I could imagine her after a few weeks of feeding, her face filled out a little and without the bones poking through her skin.

  She’d look less like a walking skull. But there would still be something that set her apart.

  “We should go back to Doctor Sheldrake’s,” I said, trying to shake off these thoughts. “Find out about the blood tests.”

  “He’s horrible.” Rachel shivered. “You’ll have to drag me there kicking and screaming.”

  “We’ve got to know the truth.”

  “It won’t do any good,” Isaac interrupted. “The doctor is a waste of time.”

  “Aren’t you being a bit pessimistic?”

  “While you weren’t looking I saw Doctor Sheldrake throw our blood samples in the bin.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  Isaac shrugged.

  “That doctor’s up to something, something sinister.” I went on.

  “Or he never believed our story,” Isaac replied. “Maybe he was taking the samples to humor us? Either way, there’s no point going back to him.”

  Waldo threw down his chopsticks on a lump of uneaten dumpling. “I don’t believe this!”

  “What now?”

  “It seemed like we were getting somewhere—with the doctor, I mean. Maybe he would have helped us. But he was a crank or a fraud—or something much more dangerous. And, well, we’re stuck in Shanghai with a sick child.” He glanced at Yin. “No offense.”