A HAZARD OF HEARTS

by Frances Burke

  Tethered like one of the oxen that pulled the carts, Pearl lay at night on the cold earth and thought about the future. Others had said they were definitely headed for Nanking to the east, the intended new capital where Hung H’siu-ch’uan would make himself Heavenly Emperor with the help of this army of thousands. Pearl knew they would succeed. Evidence of their cruel ruthlessness abounded, although she doubted that the Imperial troops could be worse. The forthcoming battle would be a bloody event which could present an opportunity for escape.

  Eventually scouts warned of the enemy’s approach and the rebel army grouped, ready for attack. Watching her captor sharpen his blade and organise his followers, Pearl appreciated how much these men enjoyed the prospect of a fight. She heard them rally one another, wagering on the number of heads they would cause to roll, the promise of spoil. There was no mention of possible death or mutilation, no sign of fear. Nor did they discuss the cause they supposedly fought for. The Triads did battle for themselves, for excitement and freedom from the humdrum life of a peasant. They were young feral animals, and she despised them.

  Sent to the rear with the women, children and baggage, Pearl made her preparations. First she retrieved the small, sharp blade concealed in the lining of her padded jacket for such a moment. Her jacket was a treasure house, a survival kit, with even a pocket holding needle and thread to restitch the lining. With the blade she slit her bonds then climbed up into the oxcart, crouching down out of sight of the milling women and children aroused to a ferment over the imminent attack.

  Pearl went first to the opium chest, taking from it a sticky pellet of raw drug. From her secret cache in the jacket she took a silk bag, emptying into her hand a pinch of herb-like substance which she rolled into the opium. She did this with several more balls before replacing them and closing the chest. Then she searched for her mother’s earrings, finding them tied in a bag with other valuables stolen from bodies still warm and dripping their life-blood. There was dried blood on the golden hoops. Pearl held them in her shaking hand, taking a moment to regain control. She also picked out the biggest, blackest pearl she had ever seen, threaded on a piece of silk.

  ‘What are you doing there, boy?’

  Pearl jumped as if touched with red hot iron. Still crouched amongst the boxes she turned to see a woman silhouetted against the glaring sky. In the distance she heard the roar of the sea. But the sea lay many hundreds of li to the east, and what she heard was the voice of war.

  The woman leaned forward, peering in. ‘Thief!’ she screeched. ‘You rob your lord. Thief! Thief!’

  Pearl sprang, her outstretched leg a javelin that hit the woman under the chin, shutting her mouth effectively and knocking her backwards in a heap. Jumping down from the cart, Pearl ran, dodging and weaving amongst the startled crowd. Some tried to stop her only to find she was not where she’d been a split second before. A boy, older than the rest, grabbed at her arm. She sliced his knuckles with the knife and he let her go with a howl. She raced on.

  Now there was a mob on her trail, running and baying like wolves, infected by the battle excitement, hardly knowing who they chased or why, driven only by the mob’s bloodlust. Pearl slipped under a cart and crouched there, panting, easing the fire in her lungs. Dozens of blue-trousered legs ran past. She waited for a long time before slipping out the other side to mingle with a quieter group of people who stood peering northwards to where smoke and dust rose in a huge pall, darkening the sky, and from where rose the roar of the beast from Hell itself.

  Quietly, ghostlike, Pearl threaded through the crowd and crept away to the south. She picked up a pot and pretended to be fetching water, moving slowly backwards until finally she reached the lip of the vast plateau where the army had camped. Throwing aside the pot, she ran down the slope, tripping and rolling and scrambling to her feet again, braking with her heels where the angle grew steep, cannoning off rocks, until at last she reached shelter in a clump of trees. There she flung herself down, her chest labouring like a blacksmith’s bellows.

  Looking up into the trimmed bare branches she saw they were mulberry trees, planted in rows leading down to an expanse of water where sampans were towed by water buffalo, men fished and children played. It was a painted scene, peaceful, in total contrast to the fighting and bloodshed she’d left behind.

  She thought of her captor, taking his ease after the battle, if he survived. He would be weary, and furious that there was no slave to prepare his pipe. He’d take one of the pills and swallow it. Eating opium was an easy way to satisfy the drug craving. And with it he would swallow the deadly powdered mushroom.

  Filled with fierce satisfaction, she forced her bruised body to its feet and hurried down to the river.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The sun was at its zenith, bearing relentlessly down upon the earth. Elly felt it as an actual pressure that flattened her hair against her skull in a sweaty mat. All that was left of her thick gold braids was a rat’s nest of chopped ends which she couldn’t bear to touch, or even think about.

  Still stunned by the violence of events that had overtaken her so suddenly, she plodded along the middle of the track, stirring up dust that clung to her damp skin and masked her face. Stinging flies and midges clustered there, seeking moisture from her eyes, lips, skin. Listlessly she brushed at them with a swatch of gum leaves.

  She’d been walking a long time – herded out of The Settlement like an animal, followed by catcalls and the ugly epithets heard in a timber camp, her throat parched, her unprotected skin already on fire. Numbed by shock, she hadn’t even flinched when a stone was thrown at her, narrowly missing her head. And eventually they’d stopped following her to head back, no doubt for a pleasant interlude at the hotel. The dead child and her grieving family would already be out of mind, and Elly herself ancient history.

  Which was just what she was likely to become in a day or so if she didn’t find help. She stopped to tear off a long strip from a petticoat to wind around her head against the scorching sun before setting off once more. It was no use turning back to further abuse. She’d been warned. The thought that by now her home, all her possessions, her father’s precious chair, would be ash and rubble, brought her close to despair. The juggernaut of the mob had smashed her life completely, and now looked like taking the remains of that, too, from her.

  She walked for hours until the sun was replaced by stars shimmering overhead in the heated air, until the moon disappeared, leaving her to feel her way through confusing shadows, sometimes running into an outstretched branch or tripping over a stone. The rough track had been carved by the bullocks pulling cedar logs to the river, where they were floated down to a mill. However, due to summer’s drought, the water level had dropped and it was unlikely a team would pass by in time to help her.

  When the light failed completely she found shelter under a fallen tree, digging a hole for her hip in the sandy soil before trying to sleep. By this time her empty stomach had contracted into a tight knot, while her body ached unmercifully. Drained in every way, she lay and shivered, despite the lingering heat. Since her father’s death she’d managed to keep going, but now the last of her courage was seeping away like grains of sand in an hourglass.

  Oppressed by the awful loneliness of the bush, she listened to the night sounds and reasoned that she had nothing to fear. There were no nocturnal predators at large in Australia. Well, none larger than a rat. Not even the wild dogs, the dingoes, prowled after dark, did they? No, she was sure they didn’t. Which left only one kind of hunter, man himself. The blacks. But they were afraid of the night spirits. Surely she’d heard that.

  At last she slept, fitfully, wakening to a blazing dawn and the chorus of birds high in the trees, and a terrible hollowness within. She struggled up onto a log to tighten the bootlaces she’d loosened the night before. Light-headed from lack of food, she licked the dew from gum leaves. It was not sufficient to quench her thirst, yet something. She winced as she ran her tongue over cracked lips. A search o
f the scrubby growth beneath the trees disclosed a few flowering plants but no fruits or berries. She tightened her belt and, because there was nothing else to do, set off down the rutted track, hoping it would soon begin to slope downhill towards the river. Would it be salt, so far up from the mouth? More likely brackish. If she could find it, she’d drink it.

  But as the hours passed the track stayed level. She didn’t dare leave it, despite the fierce heat, for fear of being lost in the forest, which was closing in on both sides, thick with undergrowth. The gum leaves drooped dispiritedly, each tree the same as the next – a mind-numbing sameness that could quickly disorient a traveller without a path to follow. A million bush cicadas shrilled in Elly’s ears, drilling through her brain. Her eyes ached. Her tongue had become a wad of dry felt, so swollen it impeded her breathing. The flies maddened, and her arm itched and stung where an ant had bitten her. She meandered from side to side, scuffing in the sandy soil, only half-conscious.

  Her feet were two lumps of pain which extended up her legs, each step jarring her knees, while her face and hands were on fire. Knowing she couldn’t go much further, she considered crawling off into the bush, into the blessed shade to wait for death. It would be so much easier. Yet she still couldn’t do it. Something goaded her on – a stubborn determination that forced one foot ahead of the other, forced her to stay aware and upright for one more minute, then one more minute after that.

  As the afternoon shadows drew in Elly sensed another presence. She stopped and, shading her aching eyes with her hands, stared into the bush, her heart thudding against her ribs. No-one was there. She tried to call out but her voice died in her parched throat. Was that darkness beside a paler tree? A figure? No. Her eyes had tricked her. She saw a branch wriggling across her path. A hallucination, she thought. Next she’d be seeing a mirage of Sydney Town itself.

  The branch curved and reared a smooth flat head. Eyes like boot buttons stared at her. Snake! With an inward scream Elly threw herself backwards, overbalanced and fell. The strike was a knife-blade in her arm. As the snake slithered off into the bush she glimpsed the red under-belly. A venomous black snake.

  God have mercy on me, she thought, feeling her senses slipping away.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The city had fallen. All twenty-two miles of Nanking’s great walls, bristling with wooden beams and iron spikes, were breached. All but two of the thirteen original Ming gates had been largely destroyed. Shops, temples, houses, all had tumbled into smoking ruins, while twenty thousand people lay hacked or burned to death among them. With their protective walls destroyed, the powdered women in their peacock satins no longer lolled and gossiped the day away, for they, too, were dead or fled; and in the bare warrens the lifeless poor lay piled high.

  Pearl, crouched in a barrel amongst the rubble of the Protestant Mission where she had taken refuge, listened to the sporadic crackle of musketry and decided it sounded far enough away for her to creep out down to the river. For that was the only way of escape – the highway to the sea and a ship to take her in search of her brother. She would hide on the wharves, scavenge for food, await her chance.

  She thought, with a mixture of compassion and derision, of her missionary hosts, buried beneath their own fallen roof. How could they have been so stupid as to believe the Tai Ping promises of brotherhood in Jesus? This was an army of beggars, pirates, deserters, the country’s scourings whose only aim was ravishment and plunder. The high visionary outlook of Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, their leader, had degenerated into fanaticism, allowing the extreme brutality that would forever discredit the movement.

  Pearl had tried to disillusion the people at the mission, describing the sacking of her home and her mother’s murder. However, these had been seen as isolated incidents carried out by disaffected troops. Everyone knew the Triads were thugs, yet they formed only a part of Hung’s great army. Doubtless, when Hung himself arrived the Church Missionary Society would make fruitful contact, which would lead to the Christian Word being spread throughout China. With their eyes fixed firmly on the Holy Grail of conversion, the missionaries ignored the almost overwhelming obstacles to China’s Christianisation, putting their trust in the Divine Will. And thus they had died in the fires set by invaders too filled with blood-lust to differentiate between friend and foe.

  Pearl had arrived in Nanking a few days earlier, having worked her passage on a fishing boat. She headed immediately for the House of Five Lanterns, where western friends of her foster family lived and evangelised discreetly on sufferance, regarded more as an entertainment than a source of trouble. Here she did obtain news of the brother she had not seen since her babyhood. Mrs. Edna Horbury, tall, angular, self-satisfied as a wading bird in a fish-filled pond, had broken the news in a tediously roundabout way.

  ‘I’m sorry if you hoped to find Edgar here. When your family... er... dissipated, as you know, Edgar sold himself as a labourer. Later he was able to come to us but he was never... well, he was never a success, you know. Too independent, by far.’

  ‘Edgar?’

  ‘We gave him a proper Christian name, you know, one we could pronounce.’

  ‘His name is Li Po,’ Pearl said firmly, irritated by the arrogance.

  ‘Yes, well, as I said, he was with us for a year, then he ran away. It was most inconvenient, you know. We had to train another boy in his duties and it’s difficult to find a family that will sell a male child, as you know.’

  Pearl tightened her lips. ‘Li Po is not a boy, he is a man. No wonder he ran away, if you treated him like a child.’ Her heart had become a weight in her chest. Her brother, her last remaining relative, had left before she could reach him.

  Edna Horbury bridled. ‘You are just a little impertinent. I’m sure my husband and I did our best for the b... for Edgar. We were quite hurt when he left us without a word, you know.’

  ‘Do you know where he went? Is he still in Nanking?’

  ‘I really couldn’t say.’

  Pearl saw that she’d given offence, and hastened to alter her tone. ‘Mrs Horbury, I apologise. I was too abrupt. My excuse is my anxiety to find my brother. He is all I have left in the world.’

  ‘You have the Lord Jesus, my child, and are therefore never alone.’

  ‘Of course.’ Pearl’s voice was smooth. ‘And if my prayers are answered I will find my brother. Could you possibly be instrumental in answering those prayers, Mrs Horbury? Could you?’

  Edna Horbury succumbed. ‘Well, do you know, I just might be. Thomas, our gardener, was Edgar’s friend. They may have secretly kept in touch.’

  When consulted, Thomas, a gnarled tree stump of a man totally at home in his setting, was able to provide an answer. It was one that, at first, added a load to Pearl’s weighted heart. Her brother had heard about the great gold strikes in a land of the Red Hairs far to the south and had gone to make his fortune.

  ‘Left China!’ Pearl sank down on her haunches and laid her forehead on her knees.

  Thomas tittered. ‘He heard that gold hung from the trees in this land, this Ostrahleeah. He told me he would come home with a sackful to buy the house of a mandarin and live in it and forget that he ever bore the mark of slavery.’

  Gold that hung from trees? Pearl shook her head. Li Po would be disappointed. But at least she now knew where to find him. She rose and thanked Thomas for his help, then turned to his mistress.

  ‘I will follow my brother to this Ostrahleeah. How do I get there?’

  Edna Horbury allowed herself a superior smile. ‘My dear, the place is practically off the map, thousands of miles away. You could never travel such a distance.’

  ‘Others do. Where can I find a ship to take me?’ When the woman hesitated, Pearl moved impatiently. ‘I’ll find out for myself. Could I please stay with you for a few days until I make my arrangements? I want to leave Nanking before the Tai Ping come.’

  Hospitality being offered and accepted, Edna Horbury set herself to explain to this half pagan child just how sh
e had misjudged the God-worshipping Tai Ping leader. Pearl listened, argued, then gave up in the face of such monumental assurance. However, she had not been alone in appreciating that the river made a swift highway. The rebels also had taken to the water, and within three days were at the city walls. Pearl had left it too late to leave.

  ~*~

  By dusk the rampage had ended. Certain by then that whatever was left of the city had quietened, Pearl picked her way cautiously through the narrow streets blocked with clay bricks, shattered tiles and shards of timber. These were remains of narrow houses butted hard against one another yet not strong enough to withstand deliberate attack. The air was thick with smoke and the sweet smell of roasted flesh, overlaid with charred wood. Even the inevitable miasma that cloaked China in an ancient stinking pall – decayed garbage, over-flowing sewers, faeces spread in the paddy fields, putrefied remains floating in the canals – even this had been temporarily overcome.

  Accustomed as she was to unpleasant smells, Pearl wrinkled her small nose and covered it with her sleeve. She remembered these streets as busy arteries leading to the markets where all the world gathered to gossip and haggle over the produce brought in from the countryside; where rickshaws jostled chairmen transporting high-nosed mandarins to the palaces for audience with equally high-nosed officials; and street urchins and beggars blocked passage to the many temples, whining, importuning.

  Pearl’s eyes filled with tears, the first she had allowed herself to shed since war swept away her world. The tears became a torrent and, shaking too much to continue, she crept into shelter under some fallen pillars to give way to her grief. She didn’t weep for the destruction, or for the mass death surrounding her, but for herself and the loss of two good people who had cared enough about their fellow men to leave home, comfort and loved ones to bring an important gift of knowledge to a country lacking that knowledge. It didn’t matter whether they were unwelcome, that their message had little relevance for the people they tried to help, physically and spiritually. They had ignored the very real risks they ran and in the end had given their lives for their beliefs. All that Pearl knew of goodness and self- sacrifice came from them, so she wept for her loss.