The King's Coin: Ambition is the only faith (Visigoths of Spain Book 2)

by Paula Constant

  They picked the tender new mulberry leaves in the early-morning light, whilst moisture hung still in the veins. The catkins of previous days had given way to the juicy new leaves. They were ripe and full of goodness. They must be perfect for when the eggs hatched.

  Near the temple was a specially constructed building, enclosed on all sides with openings both high in the walls and at the base of them, which allowed the correct flow of air and moisture. The building itself faced east, toward the rising sun, though no rays fell directly upon the trays made of twigs and paper.

  Morning was still fresh in the air when they entered the home of the silkworms. Fei Hong carefully laid the widest of the mulberry leaves across the paper on the round, woven trays, keeping the other, richest leaves to one side.

  There were no eggs on the trays, and Yosef looked around in confusion, wondering where they were. It was the first time he had been permitted in the hatching area, and he did not know where the eggs were kept.

  Fei Hong leaned over the round tray and opened the side of her robe. Carefully opening the material, she gently removed a large roll of material, placing it on the tray. Yosef’s eyes widened. Clinging to the material was a mass of eggs, clustered together. “You keep them inside your robes?” he asked, fascinated. Fei Hong nodded. Her face was still, her movements studied as she spread the eggs over the tray. Moving to one side, she took a sharp knife with a silver hilt and began to chop the remaining mulberry leaves with fine precision.

  “In the days leading up to the hatching, the eggs must be kept close to the body,” she told Yosef as she cut. “It is better for a woman to hold the eggs than a man, for it is women who are mothers. The eggs know they are safe with her. Soon the worms will emerge,” she told Yosef. “They will be hungry. When they are hatched, we will feed them for the first time. It is very important.”

  Day was high when the first worm poked its head from the translucent egg. Yosef watched in fascination as one by one the eggs broke open and the tray became a mass of wriggling, bemused silkworms, heads poking blindly into the air as they sought food. Fei Hong took the sliced leaf fragments and spread them through the tray, tilting it this way and that to nudge the infant worms to eat. Eagerly they fastened onto the rich mulberry flesh, and within minutes, the leaves were gone.

  “Now what?” asked Yosef.

  “Now,” said Fei Hong, giving him the unguarded smile that was so rare it always took him by surprise, “now we do not sleep, or rest, for the turn of a moon. The worms are our only job. Over the next few days, they will all hatch. We harvest leaves, feed them when they hunger, and watch them when they sleep. Five lives, the worms have, before they spin their cocoons and transform. We must be their god for all of the five lives.”

  “We do not have mulberry trees in Spania,” Yosef mused, frowning. “How will I feed our worms when they hatch?”

  “You cannot carry them to Spania,” she answered bluntly. “In Constantinople, the emperor makes silk beneath the palace in strict secrecy. There are people of your own there, people you can trust, who have access to trees, though they lack both the worms and the knowledge to make the cloth themselves. It is impossible to smuggle worms from the palace, and the secrets are so tightly kept that for decades none have penetrated them, which is why your father came to us. But you can stay there for a season, until the eggs have hatched, and take trees with you when you leave. You always planned to go to Constantinople, did you not?”

  “Yes,” said Yosef hesitantly; he turned away, ending the conversation, but inside he felt an all-too-familiar disquiet. Will I ever reach home again? he wondered, looking at the worms. Is my father’s dream no more than a fantasy?

  They were thoughts he had lived with for too long, and so in many ways, Yosef was grateful for the unceasing labour of the following days. He trudged to and from the mulberry plantation, cutting the best leaves, shaking them into the wide tray. He got to know the caterpillars, watching them for hours. “You must know them like your own children,” Fei Hong said. “For when they go into the cocoons, you must choose which will live to be your breeding pairs. The others will die in their cocoons when they are steamed. Only the strongest will live to lay your next harvest, and you cannot afford to choose wrongly. Watch them carefully, and see which are the survivors, the hardiest of the crop.”

  In the dawn they exercised, Yosef following Fei Hong’s different sequences of movement, one for every age of the silkworms. At the beginning the worms were hesitant, finding their way into the new air.

  “This is the time of feeling,” said Fei Hong as they trained on the open terrace of the monastery. “Just like the silkworm, we practise strength, understanding the flow of energy through the body. We demand little and listen to the messages in our blood, noticing our weaknesses, feeling our strength.” Yosef trained blindfolded during these days, learning to anticipate Fei’s movements by the faintest stir of air, feeling where his own vulnerabilities lay.

  After several days of eating, the silkworms went dull and, one by one, sank into a deathlike sleep. “Now they change,” said Fei softly. “They disappear into their own underworld, to allow their skin to fall away.” That night Fei and Yosef sat out beneath the growing moon, cross legged in meditation.

  “Feel the river far below.” Fei’s voice guided Yosef onto the night breeze so the river’s noise became one with his own breath and the night flowers filled his senses. “Allow your mind to die and, with it, all that Yosef was. Follow the river to the stars and become one with its path.”

  Yosef followed her voice, upward and inward, so the river became one with the stars and both seemed to exist within him in an infinite expanse. He ceased to be Yosef of Garnata, Yosef the Jew, or even Yosef the traveller, instead becoming something else, another part of himself hitherto unknown. In that place of peace, he became aware that all those lives were simply parts he chose to play, whilst the piece of himself that existed amidst star and river was eternal, a different being altogether. When he emerged from the deep state of peace, he knew himself as if for the first time and the world around him as a place of wonder.

  “Now,” said Fei Hong in the hatching room, “after the first moulting, the silkworms hunger. We must feed them regularly and observe any who sicken, removing them from the rest to prevent the spread of disease.” She looked at Yosef. “We ourselves learn now about the enemy,” she said.

  “What enemy?” Yosef asked.

  “The one within.” Fei Hong raised a teapot. “This is our discipline for today.”

  Yosef frowned. “Making tea?”

  Fei Hong nodded, smiling at his confusion. “All that a person is can be observed in the manner in which they consume tea. In order to defeat an enemy, one must first understand how to control one’s own behaviour, and this begins from within.”

  The tea they used was particular to the terraces behind the monastery. It was clear and sweet, made by the monks themselves in a ritual older than any could recall. Fei Hong prepared it using water heated on coals, her utensils laid out on a specially prepared tray. It had taken Yosef many weeks of fascinated observation to understand even the basic sequence of tasks involved in preparing tea; but today, Fei Hong expected him to actually make it.

  “See how your hands shake,” she said as he poured the leaves into the funnel through which, in turn, they fell into the pot. “You are not thinking of the tea. You are thinking of me watching you. The tea is the river; become the stars. In making tea, cease to be Yosef and become the process. When you are the process itself, you are no longer showing your enemy Yosef. All that exists is the tea. When you yourself are serene, the tea becomes perfectly clear.”

  During this stage, they fed the silkworms every six hours. Every time, after they had finished laying the leaves over the trays, Fei Hong would lead Yosef through a sequence of movements, often outside beneath the clear night sky. Only when his breath had stilled to a slow calm, and his movements become like liquid, would she lead him to the fire in th
e next room, where he would make tea.

  “To a mind that is still,” she said, watching him, “the whole universe surrenders.”

  After several days, the silkworms became still once more.

  “See,” Fei Hong said, pointing to where the first worms had gone still, sitting up, legs folded before them, heads bowed. “Now the worms begin to pray, for once again they must die a little, lose their skin. They surrender who they are for who they must become. This, too, we must do.”

  That night they sat beneath the stars again, breathing in the scent of the river, and Yosef felt himself flowing as the tea itself had done. In his mind he saw the amber liquid, inhaled its clear fragrance, felt each tiny fragment of tea expand to give the liquid exactly the right amount of flavour.

  The next day, before the worms began to eat, he made tea for them both.

  Fei Hong sipped from her bowl, her eyes never leaving Yosef’s face. Yosef met her gaze with clear ease. He had felt the tea within himself and knew it to be perfect.

  They drank in silence. Behind them, a soft rustling betrayed the stirring of the worms from their second death.

  “My grandfather,” said Fei Hong as she finished her bowl, “would not detest this tea.”

  The worms were stronger now; their appetites were voracious. Yosef and Fei Hong no longer slept an entire night through, their sleep disturbed by feeding times. They harvested branches from the mulberry trees and divided the silkworms onto trays, as they had become far too big, now, for only one. The worms devoured each leaf with gusto, leaving only the veins behind.

  “The worms must eat now, for when they make their cocoons, they live off their own fat,” said Fei Hong as Yosef scattered yet more leaves over the trays. “Notice how their faces have changed, grown bigger. The more they grow, the more they must consume, and they adapt to allow themselves to eat. They become strong, believe themselves invincible.”

  She looked at Yosef. “When we believe ourselves invincible, we become vulnerable.”

  That day, they sparred on the terrace outside the hatching room, in between feeding the worms. “You must move faster,” said Fei Hong, catching him on one side with the bamboo pole. “Like the tea, like the river – flow with your breath and leave your skin behind, as the worms do. Do not cling to what you once were, for if you do, you cannot learn what you must. Allow your skin to shift and change. Give your body permission to become something new, something you may not believe yet that it can. None of the silkworms know why they eat, or why they shed. They simply trust that they must, that the changes in their bodies are necessary. Trust in change, Yosef. Trust your body to adapt, to carry you where it must. Be at peace with your own skin and allow your instincts to guide your movements.”

  Over the following days, they fed the worms and sparred. When they did neither, they meditated on the high terrace or prepared tea. As the silkworms’ appetite grew, Yosef’s own disappeared, and days passed where he drank only water and tea, his body alive on the mountain air alone. Time became a distant concept and his mind and body a new, agile being closer in nature to the inner being Yosef sensed in meditation. He moved in harmony with Fei Hong and felt the movements of the silkworms as his own.

  When the silkworms began to retreat into their posture of prayer again, Fei Hong halted their sparring.

  “We must be attentive now,” she said. “Nothing must disturb this final changing. If the worms become stuck or are interrupted – if they fail to make the change, for any reason – then they will die. If any sicken, they must be removed immediately. Nothing can threaten the silkworms as they shed their final skin. This is the death through which they must all pass.”

  They sat through the night, watching, Fei Hong removing any worm that appeared to be struggling or ill. When dawn broke, only a handful of worms had shed their skin. The others lay in a deathlike state, preparing for their own battle.

  “I will watch them,” she said to Yosef. “You will spend today with my grandfather.”

  Jiahao did not speak Greek, and nor did he smile. Instead, Yosef sat before him, cross legged, as the old man made a tea that smelled heady and oddly disturbing. When Jiahao handed him the bowl, Yosef drank, masking his instinctive reaction to the bitter taste. He must not have been entirely successful, for Jiahao laughed, a sudden, harsh cackle that jolted Yosef’s nerves just as the liquid itself seemed to set his mind quivering.

  Later, he recalled little of that day, other than Jiahao’s face above him and the acrid scent of the incense the old man burned in the house. Yosef was aware he had fallen into a deep haze, but little remained with him. He had the sense of travelling along pathways upon which he found those he had left behind and faces he knew he had yet to meet. He saw his parents, as they had once been, laughing together and with him. He saw Sarah, healed and whole once more, playing in the sunlight with a small child, her face soft with love.

  Then he saw Fei Hong, naked beneath the moonlight, her ivory skin glowing a soft invitation. She reached toward him, and it seemed to Yosef that for a moment he touched her, feeling the dewy softness of her skin beneath his hand, his body filled with a sweet ache of longing.

  When he woke to the sunset, he was weak and tired, but a flame had been lit beneath his skin and to his embarrassment, he was stiff and hard beneath his robes.

  Jiahao stroked his chin and opened his mouth in silent laughter at Yosef’s discomfort. He nodded in the direction of the hatching room and Yosef stumbled from the monastery, stopping to wash and change his robes before rejoining Fei Hong.

  They sat the rest of the night in silence, Yosef not daring to look at her lest she guess at what he had seen in his vision.

  For days the worms struggled through their changing, and as they emerged, Fei Hong and Yosef moved them to new trays, fewer to each, so they had more room to move.

  “Look how they seek food now,” said Fei Hong, smiling as they watched the silkworms rear up, waving in the air eagerly, searching for food. “Now we can place the leaves further away, and still the worms will find it. They are curious about the world now, seeking their own destiny.” She looked up at Yosef, and her eyes held something new, a strange uncertainty. “They prepare to spin their cocoons,” she said, and Yosef thought he heard a note of shyness in her voice.

  They went down to the mulberry plantation and stood close together in the dawn, cutting whole branches of leaves.

  “Now, in their last age before transformation, they feast with abandon,” Fei Hong said, her hands moving close to Yosef’s on the rich, moist leaves. “We must cut plenty. They will eat all they are able and lust for more.”

  As she said the last words, her eyes slid to Yosef, and he saw the tip of her tongue reach out and touch her lip.

  Yosef felt lust rip through him with an almost unbearable ferocity. One hand on the silver knife trembled, and he touched the thin stuff of her robes with the other, feeling the warmth of her flesh beneath. “When I drank your father’s tea,” he began, his voice not quite steady, “I saw –”

  “I know what you saw.” Fei Hong’s head was bent, but through the loose strands of hair against her face he could see faint rose colour her skin. “It is necessary, if you are to understand their urges, for you to feel as the silkworms do.” Her tone lowered, and she said: “I, too, drank the tea. We are taught to do so.”

  “But” – Yosef drew her face up, his hand light on her chin so the dark almond eyes met his own – “it is more than just the tea, Fei Hong.”

  “No,” she said softly, drawing a hand down his face. “It is not more. It is simply your body, your skin, and what is meant to be learned. But I am content to be part of that, Yosef. I learned long ago to become one with these cycles.” The colour grew deeper on her face, and her eyes dropped to one side. “Although,” she said softly, “I have never longed for this fifth life so much before now.”

  That day, as the worms ate and ate, their sound like a distant sea stroking the shore, Yosef fell into Fei Hong’s body, d
evouring her flesh with his mouth and hands until the tide took them both in a storm that consumed them for days. As the silkworms voraciously consumed whole branches of leaves, so Yosef and Fei Hong became consumed in each other. Yosef found in himself an endless appetite for her body, the silken taste of her beneath his mouth, the sinuous entwining of her limbs about his own. At times he thought of Sarah. When he moved above Fei Hong in the pale dawn, for a moment he saw Sarah’s face in his mind, felt her lips beneath his, and when he did, he surged into Fei Hong with a fierce longing that left him both sated and hungry.

  “Who is she, the girl you see in your dreams?” Fei Hong’s voice came through the darkness on the third night, and Yosef was grateful she had not asked when daylight would have exposed him.

  “Her name was Sarah,” he said quietly.

  “Was? Does she no longer live?”

  “I don’t know.” Yosef moved restlessly on the thin pallet. “After I drank the tea, I saw her – but I also saw my father, and he, I know to be dead.”

  “How do you know your father is dead?”

  “I saw him tortured.” The words brought the scene back in all its horror, and once again Yosef could taste the foul stench in the air, hear his father’s screams above the roar of the crowd. He trembled, and Fei Hong put a hand on his thigh.

  “Tortured,” she said slowly. “But did you see him die?”

  Yosef swallowed, tasting acrid smoke as if it were real. “No man could survive his wounds,” he said. “My father is dead.”

  “But,” said Fei Hong, “you did not see this.”