The Mandate of Heaven

  As the clouds cleared, a bright sun came out over the hill country. The Holy Mountain’s slopes shimmered and sweated in the glare. Groups of dazed witnesses to Yun Shu’s miracle climbed to Precious Forest Temple, chanting hymns. Here and there, the pathway was littered with shoes and garments, rice boxes and water gourds, abandoned by those who fled the dragon’s lightning and fury.

  Also littering the path was a young man in a scholar’s shabby blue robes, utterly sodden. He shook his cap so that droplets fell from its tattered earflaps and brushed wet hair from his forehead. Then he scratched itchy armpits. Glancing up the mountain, he watched hundreds of people carry a dwindling figure in purple robes onto the marble steps of Precious Forest Temple. Yun Shu, holding onto her hat with one hand as she was borne out of sight. Needless to say it was a far superior item of headgear to his own. The watching young man might have smiled, perhaps remembering how he had called her Aunty High Hat, except the joke tasted bitter.

  Had Yun Shu really defeated a dragon? Little Yun Shu from Monkey Hat Hill? Certainly there had been black clouds and a violent wind, as if from a dragon’s beating wings; also a downpour fierce enough to resemble a magical attack. And what of the lightning, a favourite weapon of dragons? One could argue the mere fact that so many pilgrims believed a miraculous battle had been fought – and won – proved the matter beyond doubt.

  Teng shielded his eyes and stared at the black clouds drifting west, away from Lingling. Distant flashes indicated more lightning, as though the dragon was venting its spleen. He also detected far away echoes of thunder. If the creature could still roar and hurl lightning perhaps it had not been vanquished at all. For a moment he contemplated the bizarre notion that, rather than a dragon, he was witnessing a severe thunderstorm – one that had been building up for days. Then prudence prevailed: such thoughts were dangerous; too novel to pursue to their conclusion.

  Perhaps Yun Shu was right and his doubts flowed from a green gush of jealousy. Certainly he was struggling not to envy the former servant-boy, Hsiung, now hailed as a leader of men. Worse, a leader of rebels bearing the name of Yueh Fei, his own ancestor! So mystifying a reversal to the natural order was better ignored.

  Teng dreaded to think how his father would react, how he would inevitably compare his son’s failure to a mere upstart’s success. That was bad enough. Now to find Yun Shu – a girl – applauded as half-Immortal, a heroine of the Dao! What did it say about Teng’s inability to satisfy the expectations of his ancestors?

  How scornfully they must regard this wretch in threadbare clothes, alone without a single servant or underling, the last of a noble lineage.

  He squeezed the sleeve of his robe so that a trickle fell to the ground. The itch in his sodden underwear and trousers intensified. He noticed a large, corked gourd-bottle beside the path, dropped in the stampede back to Lingling. Teng looked around for witnesses. No one. He approached the bottle and tested its weight. Liquid sloshed about. Glancing from side to side, he unstopped the cork and sniffed. Exactly as he had suspected!

  Concealing this booty under his robe, Teng hurried along a path that led round the mountain to a small, long-abandoned shrine wreathed with small yellow flowers. As the sun beat down, he stripped off his trousers, stretching them out on a rock to dry. Wearing only his loincloth like a mad hermit, he sat gloomily, noting the shrine was a memorial to some Imperial official from long ago. Tombs, graves, bones everywhere he went! How wearisome it was to contemplate death. Yun Shu had been right to call him tainted. What she did not understand was how little choice he had in the matter.

  Teng uncorked the gourd-bottle and drank. Belched defiantly. No doubt the green wine had been intended as an offering to Lord Lao. Stealing it could only deepen his bad luck, but so what? At least he’d confront karma in a blur.

  The wine burned his throat, suffusing him with an inner heat that rapidly circulated through his veins. Likewise the sun warmed his skin. The wine went down in a series of gulps. It occurred to Teng he really should get drunk more often.

  He remembered an obscure reference to cinnabar buds in the bamboo strips stolen from the dead prince’s tomb. Abruptly, as insight will often poke through the soil of the mind like stealthy shoots, he understood the cinnabar buds’ significance.

  He stood up, clutching the gourd to his chest. Of course! Why had he not seen it before!

  Teng paced before the shrine. With this understanding came a possibility of wealth and power almost as intoxicating as the raw country wine. At last he possessed something to sell in this sordid world! Something men would trade for heaps of jade and silk and gold! The collection of bamboo strips, lovingly buried with the dead prince’s other treasures, was no less than an ancient treatise how to gain Immortality.

  Chuckling oddly – by now he was quite drunk – Teng stared across the peaks and green-clad valleys of the limestone country. Blue lakes winked up at Heaven. Clouds roamed. Teng longed to ride them all the way to Hou-ming, no longer a wretched failure in the world’s eyes and his own.

  Not once did it occur to him, despite his father’s stern lectures on how to be a proper, virtuous gentleman, who might bear the cost of his discovery.

  Part Three

  Worthy Masters

  Six-hundred-li Lake, Central China.

  Winter, 1320

  Nineteen

  Snow spilled from a drab, slate sky, driven in flurries by the icy wind. It was late afternoon, that hour when travellers hurry to find shelter before dark. Fortunately for the two merchants and their servants plodding through drifts of dry, packed snow, their destination lay only a few li distant.

  They quickened their pace, urging the pack donkeys onwards with sharp blows, for the servants had learned their masters’ style.

  ‘Lingling Town!’ announced the first of these, a wiry, diminutive man of around thirty years, dressed in garish silks that had browned and curled at the edges like old chrysanthemum petals.

  His companion laughed coarsely. ‘You mean the Noble Count’s noble capital.’

  This traveller was tall and muscular, his own silks more suitable for a medium-class flower house than a blizzard. Although he spoke slowly, there was a gleam of cunning intelligence in his sideways glance.

  Waves of snow clouds covered more than Lingling County. Across lands south of the Yangtze to the North China Plain, thick flakes fell and settled, frozen into place by remorseless blasts from the Mongolian wastes. In many districts of the Empire a famine was entering its second year, provoked partly by heartless weather, more urgently by the demands of landlords and tax-farmers, by unmanageable debts and by the sheaves of worthless paper bank notes printed in vast numbers by the Great Khan.

  Even the Imperial Court was divided. Most Mongols sought to maintain the ancient ways of steppe and yasa, the all-conquering ways of Genghis Khan. Yet a growing number conceded that China, so wide and various, would never be ruled from the back of a shaggy steppe pony and sought to involve their Chinese subjects in official roles. So profound a division, ebbing back and forth across the royal dynasty’s collective mind, stifled the possibility of consistent rule.

  Little wonder rebels threatened government forces and officials all over the Empire. Most were little better than bandits exploiting the uncertainty of the times. A few, however, clung to higher ideals – and among these, to a degree generally described as quite remarkable, if not eccentric, was the self-styled Noble Count of Lingling.

  The travellers initially received a suspicious reception at Lingling Town’s city gates, but were waved through after the production of letters. They followed winding streets to what had been the Governor’s Dwelling, now known as the Count’s Palace. Here they were met in the courtyard by soldiers bearing pine torches that hissed when snow met flame. Darkness had come early and the travellers hurried indoors, rubbing their hands for warmth.

  Deep in the palace lay a large chamber. In the centre stood a lacquered throne that had once graced a treasure room in a huge, limesto
ne cavern. Yet the throne’s current owner, the Noble Count of Lingling, ignored his splendid seat; he perched on a stool before a brazier, staring into the glowing charcoal as though its heat and light could banish dark thoughts. For a long moment he did not notice the servant bowing at the door.

  ‘Sire!’ cried the messenger. ‘The visitors you asked about have arrived.’

  The young man on the stool nodded curtly. He was in his late twenties and broad-chested as a young bull, his arms and legs thick-sinewed.

  ‘Sire,’ continued the servant, ‘should I inform Chancellor Liu Shui of their arrival?’

  Again the Noble Count seemed inclined to nod. Then he shook his head.

  ‘Not yet. Tell the visitors I will see them in private tomorrow.’

  Once the servant had gone, Hsiung resumed his examination of the brazier’s hot, pulsing heart.

  The next morning Hsiung rose early, a habit retained from his days as a scullery boy to the Deng clan, except now it satisfied restlessness rather than duty. He was pacing Far Vista Terrace, with its famous view of Holy Mount Chang, when his chancellor joined him. The sky remained grey and laden, stray flakes fluttering down. The rising sun cast an eerie mountain-glow across the limestone hills, a country Hsiung had come to know well since defeating Hornets’ Nest. The sun reminded him of last night’s glowing charcoal; his dangerous thoughts as it reduced to ash.

  Liu Shui bowed solemnly. Six years had scarcely altered the older man’s appearance: still absurdly fat, still smiling like a jovial, serene Buddha.

  ‘Noble Count,’ he said, breath steaming in the frozen air, ‘will you commence your morning audience?’

  Hsiung was inclined to say no, tired of audiences and appeals for justice where neither side was obviously guilty. Baffling decisions about this and that – questions that always seemed to have been decided in advance by Liu Shui. But the Chancellor insisted: ‘A daily audience is how the Song Emperors conducted the Empire’s business. Are we to neglect their example?’ As Hsiung could think of no argument to refute such precedents, he usually agreed. Only later did it occur to him that, despite elaborate audiences and rites, the Song had been overthrown by barbarians.

  That morning Hsiung would have preferred to meet the two travellers from last night, but as their presence in Lingling was not known to his Chancellor he yawned and followed the older man to the chamber containing his lacquered throne.

  Officials, all appointed by Liu Shui, waited with plans for extending the defences of Port Yulan and Lingling Town. The Chancellor nodded approvingly while they expounded their proposals, his hands buried in thick, trailing silk sleeves. When the officials knelt to proffer a memorandum and drawings, Hsiung took up the scrolls impatiently. Pretending to read them, he alternately grunted and glared at the officials. No one questioned the necessity of this charade, though everyone in Lingling knew the Noble Count was effectively illiterate. After all, the outer must denote the inner, even when the inner is a lie.

  ‘And may I add,’ said Liu Shui, smoothly, ‘the proposed works will not only make your domains more secure, but create much needed employment for those peasants going hungry.’

  Then an unheard of thing occurred. The Noble Count cast down the scrolls so they tangled at his feet. The room went silent.

  ‘Why do we waste our revenues on defence?’ he demanded. ‘What of attack? Order a parade of all my regiments in one hour!’ With that he stalked off to his private chamber and a breakfast of peppered kidneys. Liu Shui stayed behind, his brow furrowed.

  The parade turned out to be a disappointment, especially as Liu Shui insisted on accompanying him, protected from the quickening snow by cloaks and a huge, gaudy umbrella carried by two servants. Hsiung felt like he was being shielded by a gigantic butterfly.

  Only the Guards put on an impressive show, heavily armoured and helmeted, halberd pennants stiff with varnish. But they were just five hundred strong; the rest of his army, or at least those regulars under arms in Lingling Town, numbered barely twice that number. When Hsiung remarked upon it to his chancellor, Liu Shui bowed. ‘I believe the majority of the army are preparing flood defences,’ he said. ‘One must anticipate floods when the snow melts.’

  ‘What if we are attacked?’ asked Hsiung, wistfully. ‘We are surrounded by hostile forces.’

  The Chancellor nodded. ‘Forgive me, Noble Count,’ he said. Then he examined hillsides deep with snow and Hsiung felt suitably reproached. No sudden enemy invasion was possible in conditions like these. Yet Hsiung would not relinquish his point.

  ‘I need more regiments,’ he said, ‘all trained for attack! Our weapons are old and rusty. We are falling behind!’

  Liu Shui bowed once more.

  ‘As you say, Noble Count. But you will recollect that crowds cheer you as you ride by. That is because the people of Lingling County, though pinched, are not afflicted by the same famine as the rest of Hou-ming Province. That is because you spend more on their welfare than on conquest.’

  Liu Shui withdrew after delicately asking permission on the grounds of ill health.

  After the Noble Count had dined, he summoned last night’s secret guests to a private chamber adjoining his quarters. Liu Shui’s subtle reproaches echoed in his mind and he was eager to avoid more.

  The two men came and Hsiung examined them as they knelt, recollecting Liu Shui’s warning they should not be trusted too deeply. But other men’s faces most often shine with the character one hopes to find in them; so it was for Hsiung. He looked for loyal obedience and promptly discovered it.

  ‘Well, Hua,’ he said, ‘what news do you have? And you, Chao?’

  Chao and Hua had changed more than just their allegiance since Hornets’ Nest’s fall. Both now sported goatee beards and sideburns requiring frequent attention, as well as quantities of lemon-scented beeswax. Both had set themselves up as successful merchants trading rare woods and precious stones provided free by Hsiung in order to maintain their cover as spies. The sale of these goods led to sheer profit – Chao and Hua drove hard bargains, especially when it came to reimbursing cash to the Noble Count’s treasury in Lingling. In this way they successfully acted as Hsiung’s eyes and ears the entire length of Six-Hundred-li Lake, and particularly in the city of Hou-ming.

  ‘Noble Count,’ said Hua, ‘first to military matters …’

  Hsiung listened as the spy told an interesting tale, aided by interjections from Chao, concerning Prince Arslan’s continued absence. It seemed the ruler of Hou-ming Province, an area vast enough to form an entire kingdom, rarely strayed from court except to hunt, feasting day and night with his cousin the Emperor. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands around the lake starved.

  ‘What of Jebe Khoja?’ asked Hsiung. ‘Is he still Prince Arslan’s right hand?’

  Hua related how Jebe Khoja, despite lingering infirmities from his wounds, was kept busy suppressing bandits of every description. Yet as soon as one rebel was defeated another arose.

  ‘He never tests his strength in Lingling County,’ mused the Noble Count. ‘I wonder why.’

  It was a puzzle Liu Shui had already explained: Jebe Khoja knew the Yueh Fei rebels in Lingling were disinclined to extend their rule through conquest. If anything, Hsiung’s strength ensured other rebel chiefs on this side of Six-Hundred-li Lake could not expand. There was another, less politic reason for Jebe Khoja’s temporary blind eye: the fact he possessed eyes stemmed from Hsiung’s merciful decision not to execute him at Fourth Hell Mouth, six years earlier. Chao and Hua, however, had another theory.

  ‘He’s afraid of you, Your Worship!’ cried Chao.

  ‘Frightened,’ echoed his friend.

  Hsiung tugged gently at his beard. ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Of course, Your Highness.’

  ‘There is no other reason,’ protested Hua. ‘People in Hou-ming talk of nothing else.’

  ‘And further than Hou-ming,’ added Chao, not to be outdone.

  ‘Hmmm,’ mused Hsiung, ordering wine f
or himself and his companions.

  Once settled over their refreshments, he glanced imperiously out of the window at the ceaseless snow. Chao and Hua met each other’s eye while he was not looking.

  ‘What other news from Hou-ming?’ he asked. ‘Is the city as poor as ever?’

  ‘Of course, sire!’ said Chao.

  ‘If only you were the ruler there,’ declared Hua, sadly. ‘The people will rejoice on the day you enter the Gate of Ten Thousand Victories clad in glory!’

  This sentiment was a little too fine for his companion, who had drunk more than his share of the wine. Chao looked puzzled for a moment then added sagely: ‘Ah, you’ll need to wear your finest silks then, that is for sure!’

  Hsiung might reasonably have detected flattery; certainly he frowned and turned the conversation to more relevant concerns.

  ‘What of the dispute between the Daoists and Buddhists? Does it continue?’

  Hua’s tone mirrored the seriousness of his master when he answered: ‘Ah, a pertinent question, if I may so!’

  ‘Very persistent,’ agreed Chao. ‘Most persistent.’

  Hsiung examined the taller of the spies in surprise.

  ‘My partner means to say the dispute between Buddhist and Daoist is very persistent,’ said Hua, smoothly. ‘Furthermore, it is rumoured Prince Arslan has followed the fashion at Court and is besotted with the Buddhists from Tibet. It is said he wants to assign them the noblest monastery available in Hou-ming.’

  ‘I see,’ said Hsiung. ‘But aren’t all the monasteries occupied?’

  ‘Not if you chuck out the monks and nuns,’ said Chao, with a wink.

  ‘If that’s the case,’ said Hsiung, ruffled, ‘what of the new Abbess of Cloud Abode Monastery?’