The Book of Crows

by Sam Meekings

  ‘The Empress sent me word that your … cousin is sick. I have brought the necessary tools in case we have to operate. The Empress knows that my discretion is beyond doubt, yet I should tell you now that since it is quite irregular for me to work in conditions such as these, I shall require double my usual fee.’

  After I had lit a torch from the last remnants of the cook’s fire, I led them into the little wooden hut then held the light up above the makeshift bed and watched the herbman kneel down and shake the soldier awake. He quickly understood and began to pull away the shoddy dressing from his leg. The bone looked yellow in the dim light, the tight coils of muscle oozing a dark liquid and the last shreds of skin around it now a dull-moss green. The herbman nodded appreciatively, and poked it, producing a sickly mew from the soldier.

  ‘I am afraid it is as I expected. Fortunately, I have come prepared. I need you to get that fire going again and boil some water, then bring it to me along with some strips of cloth. Some old clothes would do fine. And of course, let’s have the payment up front, in case anything … well, in case anything doesn’t go according to plan.’

  By the time I had returned with everything he had asked for, the herbman’s assistant had moved the wooden box to the floor and was in the process of tying the soldier’s arms behind his back. The soldier seemed to have accepted his fate.

  ‘Now normally we don’t allow ladies to be present for these procedures, but as I’m not sure you really qualify as such, and as these are pretty unusual circumstances, I would appreciate it if you gave us a little help. My apprentice is going to sit on his right leg and hold the left steady, but as you can see, he is a large, strong man, so I want you to kneel at his head, and hold him down. I’ve done this before, and let me tell you, even the small ones writhe and flail about, so you’ll have to be vigilant. Good, put your hands on his shoulders like that – yes, there you go. Now I want you to tie that strip of cloth round his chin. That’s it, nice and tight, so he’s got something to bite down on. We don’t want him swallowing his tongue, and I presume your mistress doesn’t want him waking up the whole mountain either. Ready?’

  I gave a little nod of my head, although I couldn’t really claim to be anything but terrified, so I can’t even imagine how the soldier must have been feeling, lying with his hands bound, his mouth gagged, his robe bunched up around his waist and a spotty boy sitting on his one good leg. Still, a man of war had to be used to things like this, didn’t he? The herbman took a saw from his sack. It looked to me like the same kind village men used to cut through timber for fishing boats and bridges. After rubbing the whole clotted area with a strong-smelling liquor that I expected was even more expensive than the stuff the cook brewed, he dipped the saw in the boiling water. The assistant gripped the thigh tight and the herbman took a deep breath. I fought against the urge to close my eyes. I failed.

  Despite the gag, the soldier’s gurgled screams quickly filled the room and, as predicted, he began to throw his head violently from side to side, his body in twitches and spasms as he tried to pull himself free. I kept a pretty good grip as he bucked and squirmed, his face and shoulders slick with sweat. At first I thought the muffled yelps of pain were the worst thing about the whole operation, but it wasn’t long before I found that the crackle and scratch of that old saw was ten times worse. The blade whistled against the bone, hissing like a snake caught by the tail. The one time I dared to look down I saw the herbman’s steady hands were flecked with blood and mulch and gristle, and the assistant was dabbing hot water and liquor around the oozing cut. The smell in the cramped, sticky room soon told me that the soldier had lost control of his bowels.

  ‘If we’re lucky,’ the herbman raised his voice above the walloping thumps and broken splutters of the struggling patient, ‘he’ll pass out soon.’

  He didn’t. I remembered the village men when they were setting out to break a wild colt, twisting handfuls of mane and digging in their heels as it wheeled and kicked and fought to throw them off. Then I found myself wondering what happens to all the things we lose, where they go. Silk’s eye, the soldier’s leg – hanging on now by only the last shard of bone and a ripped rung of trembling sinew – what happens to them? Tiger once said that everything lives on in your shadow. Perhaps that’s why she gets so angry with herself (though she does her best not to show it). It must be hard to have everything you have lost fluttering behind you wherever you go.

  The saw finally sliced through the last sliver of skin, and the herbman began cleaning the bloody stump. In a way I was a little disappointed. Is that all there is inside us, blood and bone and gunk? Where are all the thoughts, all the dreams, all the magic, all the secrets? The soldier’s eyes had rolled back in his head, greasy whites left staring at the ceiling. When the herbman’s assistant untied the gag, we found that it was specked with blood where he had bitten down into his tongue.

  ‘Now, this bind is going to have to stay on a few days, but after that you’re going to have to change the dressing every day and wash the stump as gently as you can. Though we have removed the physical manifestation, his spirit still possesses two legs, so don’t be surprised if he can still feel it. Send for me if it starts to turn green again, and we’ll go a bit higher. Give my regards to your mistress.’

  After the swollen knee was wrapped tight and the soiled blankets changed, I followed the herbman outside and helped him mount his donkey.

  ‘Will he be all right?’

  ‘He’ll be laid up for a while, but I believe he will live. However, his leg was crudely hacked at, and I’ll warrant from the state of the rest of him that whoever did this was probably rudely interrupted before they were able to finish the job. I would be very careful if I were you.’

  This was not what I wanted to hear. ‘Can I ask you something sir?’

  ‘Yes, you may.’

  I pointed to the soggy wrap sticking out of his bag. ‘What are you going to do with his leg?’

  He stared at me as if I was an idiot. ‘I’ll bury it, and when the blood takes root the man’s broken hopes may begin to grow again.’

  My mind kept returning to the soldier’s box, to the way he guarded it so closely. Men will keep anything. Trinkets, jewels, paintings, old knickknacks, animals, women. The thing is, none of those things are worth anything on their own. People pay for them and keep them and look after them and all that because of the possibilities they imagine from them. Jewels aren’t worth a thing if no one is going to see you wearing them. A dog is useless if he’s not going to bark and attack when robbers get close. A woman is useless if she’s not going to lie down and prise open her thighs when you tell her to. All of us knew that Claws hoarded the stray coins she collected as tips from the punters, but when you think about it, they were pretty useless too since they couldn’t be exchanged for anything she actually needed – like love, her child or a way home. The only things worth anything in this world are possibilities. That’s why it’s so hard to give up, no matter how low your life gets or how many bits of your body or your spirit you lose. As long as you can imagine a future, you keep going.

  Boy asked me about the operation again and again, and seemed transfixed by the gory details.

  ‘Where is the leg? Can I see it? Can I touch it?’

  ‘No, it’s gone.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Well, it’s gone off walking on its own. It wanted to keep on with the journey and it couldn’t wait for the rest of him so it hopped away down the hill as soon as the herbman had lopped it off.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘Can I go and look at where it was chopped off?’

  ‘If he’s awake, yes. But don’t stay in there long, and if he gets angry you come back and tell me. And don’t get too close to him. And don’t touch it, or else your own leg might fall off. And don’t —’

  ‘Ok, ok!’

  He ran off to look at the wound. The other girls were sewing nearby, and I
saw Claws’ eyes follow him towards the gate. Silk shook her head.

  ‘You know, that just doesn’t sound right. What you said about the blood and white bone and everything. I can’t believe it. I mean, where were all the emotions, all the moonwaters and pulses? It was dark in there, wasn’t it, even with a burning torch? So are you sure you saw everything clearly?’

  ‘Well, actually, I tried not to look, so perhaps I could have missed something,’ I said to placate her.

  ‘I once saw a skeleton on the sand plains, picked dry by birds,’ Tiger said. ‘You know, once the spirit is gone, once hope is gone, there’s nothing left to hold the bones together. In my homeland we return the dead to fire, and all that’s left is ash. Crumbly grey flecks of ash.’

  ‘So nothing survives?’ Claws said, and we all looked round, amazed that she was joining in one of our conversations again. Her voice was deep and worn.

  ‘The spirit survives,’ Tiger said. ‘It just goes somewhere else. A sheep, a man, a flower, a grain of sand, a cloud. It never stops travelling.’

  ‘Never?’

  Tiger shrugged. She was tired of us, I could tell. She didn’t want to talk about her homeland, and she probably thought we wouldn’t understand. Maybe she was right. And it was pretty depressing stuff she was spouting anyway. I didn’t want to end up as a sheep, torn apart by wolves or desert foxes. I just wanted a good rest.

  Boy came back looking disappointed. ‘He’s boring. He wouldn’t take the bandage off and he wouldn’t let me play with his box. It’s not fair!’

  I was getting a bit annoyed with the soldier myself. I was stuck visiting him a couple of times a day, bringing him his meals and checking the horrible fist of clumped bone where his leg ended. It was almost enough to put me off my food. I scrubbed him down with water from the bucket and tried to make conversation, but most of the time he was in too much pain to do anything but grunt and sigh.

  Whenever I came in he would be curled on his side with his good arm clutched around his box, staring at it as if he could see straight through the slats of rain-buckled wood. There was no lid or catch, and the smooth joins were obviously made by a better class of craftsman than those from around here – for the life of me I couldn’t see how you could get inside without taking an axe to it.

  ‘What’s in your box?’ I asked one morning when I was rubbing liquor into the blistering stump.

  He didn’t even bother to look at me.

  ‘Come on. I’ve helped you out. If it weren’t for me, you’d probably be dead. The least you can do is tell me what you’ve got in there. You can trust me. I’m not asking you to tell me who you’re running from, or who you stole it from, or where you’re going to go once you’re well enough to walk on crutches. I’m just interested in the box.’

  He finally looked at me and shook his head.

  I pointed to it, then tapped it a few time, testing the strength of the wood.

  I spoke slowly, enunciating each word. ‘This box. What – is – inside – it?’

  He pulled it closer to his body.

  ‘The whole world.’

  ‘Ha! So you can speak. I knew you were just playing dumb.’

  He nodded, then brought one of his remaining fingers to his lips.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone? Yep, I know, I’m good at that. We live on secrets here. Some days I don’t want to talk to anybody either. Most of what people say they only say to fill the air anyway. So you’ve got the whole world inside your box? Great. I’m sure that’ll come in handy!’

  I smiled and he smiled back. He wasn’t that bad-looking really, when you ignored his stump and his missing fingers. There was something intimate in his smile. And the fact that he had enough money to buy the whole world – that must be what he meant, I thought – helped him to look a little more attractive.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll bring a sharp knife and some scented water and give you a shave tomorrow. Would you like that?’

  I mimed drawing a knife over his throat and for a second he looked worried. But soon we were both laughing, and I left feeling pretty good about having saved him. I didn’t really care that he might be lying to me – everyone has secrets they can’t turn into words, even if most of us don’t haul them around with us in bloody great wooden boxes. To be honest, it was nice to be able to talk to a man who wasn’t just thinking about what was under my robe. It would have been better for him, however, if he had kept pretending he couldn’t say a thing. Perhaps he would even be alive today. But I don’t want to dwell on that. I only want to show that I did my best to help him, and I never asked for anything in return. At least not at first.

  I didn’t get a chance to talk to him properly again for a few weeks. We were so busy back then, as spring slowly spread across the hill and the sun stayed longer into the nights, that if we weren’t cleaning up from one party we were getting ready for the next, so I could only spare a minute or two a day to hurry in and change his bandage before rushing right back down to the main courtyard again. What with all the cleaning and primping and washing and combing and plucking and dusting and smiling and serving and giggling and fluttering and dancing and pouting, it was almost a relief to get thrown down on your back at the end of an evening. As I said, my heart had grown hard, and it took a really imaginative or degenerate request to surprise me. It wasn’t so easy for Boy though. He would be fine in the mornings, mucking about at the wash trough or playing with the ribbons fluttering off the gate, but as the afternoon crept on he became quiet, tense. Sometimes he’d sit on one of the cushions and hug his own arms close for warmth. We learnt to feed him up at lunchtime, because by evening he would be almost shaking and too nervous to eat a single bite without heaving.

  Boy kept coming to find me late at night, and I’d make my way outside without waking the other girls to meet him in the freezing courtyard, clean him up and hold him while he sobbed and moaned. I guess I’d given up trying to find words to comfort him by then. I knew there wasn’t a single thing I could say that would make the memory of the evening disappear, that would turn back time, that would take him home. And every night without fail he’d rub the slimy trail of snot from his nose and ask me why. Well, what do you say to that? I don’t know if it’s worse to think there is a reason for your suffering or just to pin it down to bad luck. Either way it doesn’t make anyone feel any better hearing it, so I kept my mouth shut. I just held him a little bit tighter and tried to hush him to sleep.

  I remember one of those nights, in between an evening with a group of unwashed camel traders and the day a party of returning desert guides stopped by, we had a visit from a retired general and his assistant. Claws identified the symbols and insignia on his ornate robe straight away, and the Empress had to pinch herself to avoid panicking. Only the spirits know how on earth they ended up finding us, and it may have been they simply got a little lost in the hills and decided to stop at the first place they found, but it got our suspicions up nonetheless. I mean, one soldier in hiding here and another ex-military man from the middle kingdom just happens to pop by? The coincidence seemed too great.

  The Empress took each of us aside while the cook took instructions from the general and his assistant for the overnight care of their mules, and warned us not to mention anything about our secret guest.

  ‘Not a bad little place here,’ the retired general said as he sat down at our table.

  He was short and completely bald, and nodded his head to the tune the cook picked out on his hushtar behind us. His assistant, meanwhile, was a huge, stocky man who did not seem to take much pleasure from talking.

  ‘And so nice to see a sister from the Han nation – if I am not much mistaken – in this wilderness. You must forgive an old man his silliness, my dear, but your face looks familiar.’

  Claws blushed a little. ‘I was once a daughter of the house of Yuan, sir, though that was many lifetimes ago.’

  The old man nodded. ‘Then I am sorry if I have brought back painful memories. At my age it is
hard to keep your thoughts in your head without losing them. But wait – you are not then some relative of General Yuan Huang?’

  Claws nodded, not daring to look him in the face. ‘I was, sir. You knew him?’

  ‘Alas, no. But when I was a younger man I heard of his exploits. Just like the mighty Emperor Qin Shi Huang, may his spirit burn strong, your ancestor fought hard to try to subdue the south and unite the country. Most of my life has been dedicated to smaller battles and border duties, and yet it seems to me that unity of the middle kingdom is now something that must be consigned to myth. There are more warring factions now than a man can count. But perhaps disunity is no bad thing, for how can you have such a huge kingdom without it splitting at the seams? You would need men who lived as gods to run such a thing.

  ‘In any case, some of my father’s men witnessed Yuan Huang’s last stand, and they told me that they had never seen such a brave commander determined to fight to the last for his country and his people. I do believe that too, though many do not. I am afraid the official histories will condemn him as an incompetent coward, but you should know that such things are only written to explain away such humiliating losses. To admit he was a worthy general and did his best would be tantamount to admitting that the middle kingdom is not the all-powerful centre of the earth, and who knows what the people would do if they found out such a thing. I am afraid that neither historians nor soldiers have much time for the truth. But listen to me babbling on. I only wanted to say I am sorry for what has happened to your family. Let us drink to them, and enjoy some of these fine meats.’