Meihua stood in front of him.
‘I enjoyed our meal,’ she said. The cook is called Li Jung Chuan. Madame Zhou had him brought from Peking, where he cooked for the Prime Minister.’
‘I can well believe it. The Phoenix in the Nest was the best I’ve ever tasted.’
She ran her tongue slowly round her lips. He watched it inscribe its long oval, red as though flushed from the wine. Her eyes were bright.
‘Shall I undress for you now?’ she asked.
He nodded once.
Swiftly, she lifted her hair and tied it high with a comb and a ribbon, to leave her neck and shoulders bare. Then she unfastened her robe and let it fall to the ground. Underneath it she wore a long white shift that reached from her bare shoulders to her ankles. Her small breasts pushed the soft fabric out gently.
He felt his heart pounding. Her arms and shoulders and neck were the most perfect expressions of the human form he’d ever seen.
She pulled a ribbon high up on the shift, and it ran out in a single motion. For a moment, she held the ribbon between her fingers, then let it fall, and it dropped spinning to the floor. And she looked at him and smiled shyly, then moved her left shoulder and her right shoulder in turn, and the shift cascaded to the floor.
Her body was more perfect than he had ever dared imagine it. He’d slept with many women in his life, but none of them like this.
For the next three hours, they touched and withdrew, touched and withdrew. She came a dozen times, effortlessly, sometimes on her own, sometimes with his help. He could not manage that, but using a Taoist technique he had learned many years before, he reached orgasm three times without ejaculating. For the fourth time, Meihua played with him for almost an hour before finally giving him release.
So they continued through a long day, moving from room to room, pacing themselves carefully. Each room brought them closer, and the longer they went on the more passionate grew their lovemaking. In the sixth room, the peacock feather room, Meihua finally lost her virginity to him. He remained inside her for over an hour while she climaxed repeatedly. Then Master Wei changed his prescription, and in the seventh room she sat astride him, lightly moving her hips in a smooth rhythm that brought him to a climax time after time.
Afterwards, they lay in each other’s arms and fell asleep at last.
He woke sometime after midnight. Meihua was still asleep on the large bed beside him. Even now he was not sated. He wanted more of her, much more. She was the loveliest creature he had ever set eyes on, and he could not bear to part with her.
Quietly, he went into the corridor. Madame Zhou was there, waiting on a little stool. She had nodded off, but the moment the door opened, she looked up and greeted him brightly.
‘Well, Mista Fah-La. Did I speak truth?’
‘You’ve never been so honest in your life, you old scoundrel. I’d like to know all about her.’
‘Not permitted.’
‘Well, is Meihua her real name?’
‘Not know.’
‘Can I see her again? I’ve never asked that before. Perhaps even ...’
The little woman was on her feet now. She lifted a finger and set it gently against his lips, shaking her grey head.
‘Not permitted,’ she said, then paused. She frowned, as though pondering something hard. ‘Mista Fah-La
‘Yes?’
‘There is an eighth room, Mista Fah-La. White chrysanthemum. Would you like to see?’
He felt a slow chill pass through him. His breath caught in his chest. He’d always guessed there was an eighth room, often wondered if he had the courage.
‘How much?’ he asked.
The price she demanded was very steep, more than all he’d paid already. But he understood why.
‘Show me the room,’ he said.
It was the most beautiful room of all, utterly white, filled with white silk and leather and ivory. The only interruptions were on two walls, where poems had been executed in black ink on white paper.
Madame Zhou showed him through the room and its cupboards.
‘Is it used often?’ he asked.
She smiled crookedly.
‘Maybe once a year,’ she said. ‘Maybe less.’
‘I’ll wait here,’ he said. ‘When she wakes, bring her to me.’
‘I send Master Wei first. Most essential.’
When all that was done, and he’d taken the right drugs and herbs, and moxa had been lit in every corner, he sat down and waited. His heart was beating fast. Every inch of him was excited. And slowly, as the herbs began to work, he felt he had the courage.
The door opened and Meihua stepped into the room. She was still naked, and the moment he saw her his body responded. She saw his penis harden and smiled.
‘What is this room?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t know there was another room.’
‘I always thought there was, but this is the first time I’ve seen it myself. Do you like it?’
‘It’s a little cold. But very beautiful.’
‘Just like you.’
‘You don’t find me cold, do you?’
‘Cold? No, it’s just a way of talking.’
She started to read the poems on the wall. ‘What sad poems,’ she said. ‘I wonder who put them here.’
‘Madame Zhou, perhaps.’
She laughed. ‘I’m not even sure she can read.’
‘Well, I can read.’ He stood and went to a cupboard. From it he took a large pot of ink and a calligraphic brush. Next to them he found a small ivory box. He brought them all across to her and placed them on the floor.
‘Darling,’ he said, ‘why don’t you lie down there? It’s very comfortable.’
She knew at once what he planned to do. The tradition of writing poems on a woman’s body was an old one. She lay down at once. ‘Will it tickle?’ she asked.
‘Just a little,’ he said.
‘What will you write on me?’
‘First turn over on to your front. I want to write on your back.’
‘A poem?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it one I know?’
‘I think so. The poem of Li Yu before he died.’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I know it.’
‘Recite it, then.’
He knelt over her, and as she recited he painted the characters on her back and buttocks and legs, the strokes shortening and lengthening to accommodate the fluctuations and creases of her skin. He thought she looked exquisite from behind. Her proportions were perfect, more perfect than any poem.
‘Wu yan du shang Shilou ...‘ she began.
‘“I climb West Tower alone in silence".'
He knew his calligraphic skills were limited, but for the first time in his life he felt his fingers relax into the brush, felt the strokes come under his control. He wrote the last line of nine characters along the length of her left leg, and as he came to the final stroke of the last character, tou, her voice died away. He sat and looked at her, at her white skin, at the ebony ink drying across it. He wanted to run his hands across her, wanted to tell her everything was all right. She tormented him more than any woman had ever done.
‘Turn over,’ he said when the ink had finally dried. She rolled on to her back, and he caught his breath once more, seeing her face.
‘When are we going to make love again?’ she asked.
‘In a moment, love. You have to be patient.’
‘I never thought actually making love could be so fantastic’
He stroked her cheek. Her use of the word "fantastic" brought home to him just how young she was.
‘Poor Meihua,’ he said.
‘Are you very rich?’ she asked. She wasn’t supposed to ask such questions, but he sensed something irrepressible about her, an instinct for fun or mischief that was locked inside her by the rules and regulations of the house.
‘Not very rich,’ he said. ‘At least, not yet.’ He looked down at her breasts, and ran the palm of his right hand across th
em. She arched her back as his hand grazed her nipples. ‘A few weeks more, perhaps. Then I may be very rich indeed.’
She smiled and held his hand to her left breast.
‘When you are very rich, can I come and live with you always? Make love every day?’
He shook his head sadly.
‘You belong to the Hui Hou,’ he said.
‘Perhaps you can buy me from them.’
It was a shocking thing for her to say. The Hui Hou considered even a hint of treachery a major crime. Farrar looked at her and frowned.
‘I already have done’ he said.
Her mouth opened to ask another question, but he bent forward and closed it with a kiss. He was in love with her, truly in love with her.
He picked up the brush and wrote across her breasts and belly the first seven characters of a poem by Li Shang-Yin, the poet whose words she had read to him in the jade room.
‘It is always hard to meet, unbearable to part.’
As his hand moved across her body, slanting, sloping, sliding in practised gestures, evoking a dead poet’s yearning on a living woman’s flesh, tears began to run from his eyes. She did not notice at first, then a drop fell near her navel.
She reached a hand up and put it behind his head, drawing him down on to her. The floor was soft, almost like a bed. He lay on her like that, pressed close to her, the ink from her skin transferring itself to his. And as he lay, he became aroused again, suddenly, unendurably.
They began to make love again, this time with a passion lovers might have felt only after long experience, at a time of parting, or when coming together again after a painful separation. Every part of her body had become sensitive to his caresses. He only had to kiss or stroke her anywhere, and she would cry out and cling to him hotly. Her sweat and his sweat combined to wash the ink slowly into incomprehensible smears, leaving great stains across the white carpet.
He entered her, holding her hard against him, and began moving slowly inside her, rousing her yet further. As he did so, he reached out for the little ivory box and pulled back the lid. Inside lay a thin cord of silk, about two feet long.
Lifting her head, he slipped the cord behind her neck, then brought the ends to the front.
She paused.
‘What are you doing?’
He made a simple knot in the cord, then turned his fingers almost languidly in its ends, shortening it.
‘Fah-La? What are you doing?’
‘Shhhhh,’ he said. ‘Relax. This will make you come harder than you’ve ever come.’ And he started to tighten the cord, just enough to constrict her breathing. As he did so, he began to move inside her again. She relaxed briefly, and let him move and tighten and relax the cord, and as the minutes passed her body grew hot, and her breath grew hard to catch, and her head started spinning, and everything, everything was concentrated between her legs until the sensation grew and widened, spreading to every part of her body, consuming her, tightening her like a bow, and she came, and kept coming time after time until she sank back exhausted to the floor.
He bent and kissed her.
‘Poor Meihua,’ he said. And she smiled up at him, her first lover.
He pulled on the cord tighter now, watching it cut into her throat. Too late, she realized what was happening. Her body fought against him, but he was too heavy for her, and the cord was cutting the breath out of her quicker and quicker every second. Her eyes, that he’d called beautiful before, bulged in their sockets, her hands, that he’d praised earlier, flapped awkwardly in her effort to grab hold of something, her legs, that he’d admired so often, kicked out at all angles, her face, that he’d thought the most beautiful face in the world, began to grow red, then purple.
And the whole thing came to an end in a moment. All her movements stopped, and the eyes that stared up at him were as lifeless as eggs. He let the cord fall from his hands. Then he started moving inside her again. She was still warm and moist, and he was excited beyond measure.
When he came, it was the most perfect orgasm of his life. And he came again and again, eight times in all.
When he was finished, he lay down beside her, cradling her body in his arms as though trying to bring her back to life. The door opened and Master Lu entered. He sat down and stroked the ch ‘in, bringing the instrument to life. Then he began to sing, a poem of Meng Chiao, dead nearly twelve centuries.
‘Keep away from sharp swords,
Don’t go near a lovely woman.
A sharp sword too close will wound your hand,
Woman’s beauty too close will wound your life.
The danger of the road is not in the distance,
Ten yards is far enough to break a wheel.
The peril of love is not in loving too often,
A single evening can leave its wound in the soul.’
Farrar looked at him and remembered the words of the oracle she had cast:
‘“Remorse disappears".'
And he put his head in his hands and wondered how long that would take.
Part IV
RADIANT WHITE SKY
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Kashgar
Something felt wrong. It had started with the silence that attended sunset. No call to prayer, no voice raised anywhere in the twilit city to summon men to God. Later, the silence had revealed the sound of engines somewhere in the distance, heavy engines whose rumbling continued late into the night.
‘Tanks,’ David had said. ‘T59s and T69s, and maybe some long-range artillery. They’re circling the city.’
He looked up and caught Nabila’s eyes. He could tell she was frightened. The atmosphere in the house was a mixture of fear and defiance. One group of firebrands was at that very moment planning how to rescue Sheikh Azad from captivity. An informant at the local garrison had told them the old man was being held just outside the city at a military barracks called Kizilkara. Now, they were thinking of ignoring all advice and disregarding the sheikh’s own instructions in order to prove their manhood or their religious commitment. Osman was doing his best to keep them under control.
‘Your father will be all right,' David said. ‘I know Chang Zhangyi. I’ve watched him for years. He can be brutal. But he uses brutality as a means to an end. It isn’t in his interest to hurt your father at the moment, or kill him.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I told you: he plans to his own advantage. If Chang Zhangyi discovered that being kind to people achieved better results, he’d be the kindest man in the world.’
‘I disagree. Even if it damaged him, Chang Zhangyi would go on being cruel. It’s his nature. You don’t expect a cat to be kind to mice.’
'That’s not the point. Chang Zhangyi could kill your father in order to be rid of him, but he knows that would only turn the rage over Urumchi into something beyond all reason. I think he believes that, as long as he holds your father hostage, it gives him some sort of power over the population. And I personally think he’s right.’
They were sitting in a room on the second floor, next door to Nabila’s mother’s room. The old woman was resting at last, lulled to sleep by a concoction made by Nabila, who had brought a supply of herbs back to the house. Every now and then, Nabila would pop into her mother’s bedroom to check how she was. David, as an outsider, could not meet any of the female members of the family except Nabila.
In one corner of their room sat Asiyeh, a plump Hui Muslim from Gansu. Now in her mid-fifties, she had arrived in Kashgar during the Cultural Revolution and stayed on as a seamstress in Sheikh Azad’s household. She had never married, partly because she was as ugly as sin, and partly because men gave her a nasty feeling. ‘I get a horrible feeling if one comes close,’ she used to say. ‘Very nasty. God’s hand slipped when he made men.’ Osman had planted her in the room to act as a chaperone. While David and Nabila talked, she sewed elaborate embroideries on silk. She never missed a stitch. and she never missed a movement of the couple she’d been set to watch.
They were sitting facing one another across a long table on which Nabila’s map had been spread. She would read out results from her records, and watch as David marked them carefully on the landscape.
‘I’m afraid of Chang Zhangyi,’ she said. She looked down at the map, then up at David and across at Asiyeh. ‘I had a sister,’ she went on. ‘Her name was Rabbia, she was sixteen years old. I was very close to her. One day, when I was at university, Chang Zhangyi’s men came here. They took my father to prison, and they took my sister to a place they call Hei Juyuan. Do you know of it?’
He nodded. He knew it only too well.
‘I don’t know exactly what happened there,’ she said. ‘But I have been told that Chang Zhangyi raped my sister. She was very beautiful.’
She saw Asiyeh watching her closely, on the verge of speaking.
‘Some say he fell in love with her, some that it was simple lust. He had sex with her many times.’
‘Miss Nabila, you should not talk about such things.’ To Asiyeh, talking about sex in front of men was almost as bad as doing it.
‘Not now, Asiyeh. Dr Osmanop is a medical doctor. He understands such delicate matters.’
A surly look was her only reply.
‘This took place over a week or two. He would have her taken to a comfortable bed each evening. He would rape her, then he would have her sent back to her cell to lie on a heap of straw until it was time for him to make use of her again. One of the guards who came on duty in the second week was a secret Muslim. He kept his conversion to himself in order to infiltrate Chang Zhangyi’s headquarters. Chang Zhangyi’s treatment of Rabbia made him very angry. He smuggled in a knife with her food, a very beautiful knife from the country of the Baoan. It was his intention that she should use the knife on Chang Zhangyi when he next came for her. Instead, she used it on herself. She must have stabbed herself twenty or thirty times before she found the fatal spot.’
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