The Book of Crows

by Sam Meekings

  As we raised our cups I thought I saw Claws smile, for the first time in almost eighteen moons. Perhaps the old man had spun a story about her ancestor just to gain her confidence. No, I told myself, he’s just being friendly and I’m letting my mind play tricks on me. I did think it was strange that our fancy guests mentioned history so often though. I mean, who really cares about what’s long past? The only history that matters is what you hear firsthand or what you see with your own eyes, and even then you’re not always sure you can believe it. The past belongs to the people who had to live through it, not to jumped-up cronies in some lavish palace.

  I remember that Claws, back when she was still teaching us about the language and traditions of her homeland, had told us about the emperor named Qin Shi Huang. Claws said he had not only lumped all her lot together into one big brimming, bubbling country, but that he’d also built a wall to keep out the barbarians and ordered his army to seek out and destroy all the official histories so that time could start again with him. I don’t know whether that worked, but I’m pretty sure about one thing: even if you’re the most powerful man in the world, no amount of orders or threats can make people forget.

  ‘I fear this fine liquor is going to my head,’ the old man exclaimed as his cup was topped up once again, his crumpled cheeks glowing in the night air. ‘I have enjoyed this wonderful meal and most delightful company. And I am sorry if I have embarrassed you, young lady, with my talk of ancestors.’

  ‘No, sir, not at all,’ Claws replied.

  ‘You humour me too much. I am afraid it is difficult at my age to show restraint once your mind takes hold of an idea. And I know something about falling from favour. Why, I would be back at home by the fire now if it wasn’t for the mistakes I’ve made. I only accepted this ridiculous mission because he said that if I did not then my son – ah, but see, my tongue is running away from my head again! Perhaps we should retire before I say enough to get us all thrown in prison!’

  We all laughed at his little joke, but it made me feel more nervous than amused. The old man reached his hand out to Claws. She hadn’t been picked first for ages, not since she stopped taking care of herself and started to let everything sag. But he was old and drunk, I considered, and his eyesight probably wasn’t too good.

  ‘It’s strange, when I am in distant places I yearn for home, or something that can remind me of it,’ he said, smiling at Claws as she helped him to his feet. ‘Yet as soon as I return I start itching to go out exploring again. Now, take your pick, Fang, but be sure to have the mule loaded by sunrise.’

  I wished with all my heart that the stocky assistant would not pick Boy. I even found myself thinking I would rather he picked me, though I was certainly in no hurry to get crushed under the big brute. Luckily, he thrust a hand out towards Tiger. She nodded and marched towards one of the guestrooms, leaving him to follow in her wake. If anyone could handle him, it was Tiger.

  That left the rest of us to pick at the cold dishes and finish the spittle-mixed liquor at the bottom of the two clay cups.

  ‘Do you believe him?’ I asked Silk.

  She shrugged. ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I?’

  The echo of exaggerated moans spilled out into the courtyard.

  ‘You don’t think it’s a bit strange, that an old soldier suddenly turns up here talking about missions and joking about prison and all that stuff?’

  Silk grinned as she licked a bowl clean. ‘No, he’s just a dotty old man who can’t keep his mouth shut. I don’t think he’s got the sense to be plotting something, nor the heart to have tortured a fellow soldier.’

  ‘But he was a general —’

  ‘Yeah, but you heard him, he’s just doing some rich bloke a favour. If he hasn’t got enough sense to pick one of us beauties over Claws, then he surely hasn’t got enough of his wits about him to be trying to hunt down a fugitive. I’ve haven’t seen anything bad on the horizon with my missing eye, so keep calm. You’re just worried because you’ve taken a fancy to that cripple.’ Silk grinned.

  Boy laughed, but I shot him a look. ‘I think it’s probably time you went to sleep.’

  ‘That’s not fair. Why can’t I stay up too?’

  ‘You need some rest.’

  ‘And you need some beauty sleep!’

  ‘This isn’t the time for games. Just go.’

  ‘You’re not in charge, you know. You can’t tell me what to do. You don’t own me!’ He hissed.

  Homely suppressed a snigger as Boy ran across the courtyard to their room on the other side.

  The moans from the guestrooms soon faded out into the calls of owls and distant wolves. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so harsh with Boy, but someone had to look out for him, to keep him in line. All I wanted was to make sure that for at least a little bit of his day he got treated like any other boy living in the desert villages or in the cities below. I bit down hard on the stone of a date until my jaw ached.

  Silk and I split the last half-empty cup after the boys had retired. We shared little sips of the moonlight that swished around in the dregs of the liquor.

  ‘I understand how you feel. I can see your heart with my special eye. But you’ve got to be careful. Not just with the cripple, but with Boy too.’

  ‘I just watch out for him. Claws is worse than me – you’ve seen how she stares,’ I replied, annoyed by her comments.

  ‘I know. But when she looks at him she’s thinking of the past. I’m worried that when you look at him you’re thinking of the future.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So you’re going to get burnt by your own dreams. How many of your tips and gifts have you saved up to buy yourself free from the Empress? Claws and I have been here close to five winters longer than you, and we’ve saved every little thing the customers have given us, and we’re both still here. Do you really think by the time you’re free to go that he’s going to be the same little boy? You can’t come here as a child and grow to be a man. Plant a tree in the dark and it will twist and contort itself to find the light, and by the time it’s fully grown it doesn’t look anything like a tree anymore. His troubles aren’t yours. You’ve got to remember that. The same goes for the soldier. You take on someone else’s worries as well as your own and they’ll crush you. Listen to me, Jade, keep your own heart safe, and you might get free one day.’

  ‘One day.’

  She sighed. ‘I’m just trying to help you. I don’t need to use my special vision to see that you care about him. Just be careful, ok?’

  I nodded. I wanted to tell her that despite her special vision she didn’t see the way Boy relaxed back into himself when he lay beside me at night, the way he squirmed when I tickled the soft spots on the underside of his elbows and the soles of his feet, or the way his fears seemed to drift away when I whispered to him all the old stories I still remembered from before. But she’d been here too long; she wouldn’t understand.

  Rain at Night

  PART 1 · DECEMBER 814 CE

  Yuan Chen,

  My dearest friend, your solicitations have not fallen on barren ground. You write that

  Even the sweetest of fruits will grow rotten on the vine should the farmers forget their harvest

  and there is, as ever, truth in your analogy. Perhaps I have been as one of those farmers who abandons the hard labour of the field for the altogether different labour of contemplation. Perhaps something of the hunger in me left when she did. At times I have imagined myself a man of the land, my concerns stretching only as far as the horizon, my life reaching only to where the sun wades down among the corn. And yet my old life returns to me everywhere. In the sound of the rain at night, when I catch her laughter amid the babble of the downpour playing upon the roof; in the mellow flush of twilight, when my drowsy eyes forge hopes from the shadows. What cruel masters our hearts can be.

  And so it is that I decided to yield to your entreaties and return to the capital. I must admit that you shamed me with your reminders of our earliest conve
rsations, our plans for a new poetry that would make manifest our dreams of social change. There is nothing like the memories of a young man’s passion to make an older man nostalgic. Yes, I know what you would say: forty is not that old, and the most important plans take time to blossom. I was shamed too by the looks my wife gave me sometimes, by the lilt in her voice whenever the city was mentioned. Since my health has improved somewhat over the last few months, I resolved to ask my contacts at the court to petition the eunuchs on my behalf, that I might return to work somewhere in the imperial retinue. Word soon reached us that I would be welcome back, and so the decision was made.

  The journey to Changan took close to a fortnight. I hope that will go some way to explaining why it has taken me so long to reply to your kindly missives. I can confirm first-hand that the emperor’s scheme of rebuilding the roads has paid off handsomely. We were able to change horses every three li, and the majority of farmers living along these sturdy pathways were much pleased with the way the increase in trade has affected their livelihood. Of course, it is still difficult to travel far without meeting some braggard or rogue who would curse the capital and its ‘endless stream of edicts’. It is difficult to reason with such fellows. Instead I did my best to listen and understand their complaints, however contradictory I sometimes found them. For how can we even consider to work for the best of the country if we do not remember the needs of the common man? The capital – as I remember you told me on one of our first meetings – is the centre of a great sea, and the laws and actions there are like stones dropped from a great height which send ripples spreading slowly out to the furthest reaches.

  It felt, though I am somewhat ashamed to say it, good to be out of white clothes again. My wife tells me the ghosts are sated, and the augurs say the same, and yet … but I risk becoming a bore. You will undoubtedly chide me for indulging in my own feelings when there are bigger social ills that we all ought to be working to solve. And to show you that I have not forgotten the early promises we made, I will recount for you the events of a few days previously, when we stopped at a horse station on our journey.

  After supping on leathery mallard in the dark backroom, we were approached by two tall men who requested our company. My wife retired, for it had been a hard day’s travel through the marshes and sodden country abandoned since the floods, and I spoke with them for some time. The elder of the two, a stooped man wearing the fine-coloured robes of a merchant, introduced himself and his son as silk traders. Over a few cups of rice wine we talked amiably of the latest news from the capital, of the rising expenses incurred by their wives in the raising of the silkworms, and of the ever-persistent rumour that foreigners had at last discovered the secrets of sericulture. The night crept up on us, and the son soon excused himself, leaving only myself and the older man. It was then that the conversation took a more interesting turn.

  He confided that, despite his hearty appearance, he feared he was close to reaching the last of his days. Yet this was not what troubled him. He had begun life as a shepherd, taking charge of his family’s meagre flock when he was still a boy, after his father was killed in an altercation with a cattle herder. Though it was long, cold, bone-numbing work, there was something in the solitude that stirred him, that brought him a feeling of calm and respite that he had not known amid the bustle and arguments of the cramped family home. I could sympathise with this, and for a while we shared our common experiences of finding solace in the words of the Buddha, in the first realisation of the illusory nature of the world and, therefore, of the self. But I shall not bore you with that, for I know you have little time for such matters these days.

  The old man had been, for want of a better expression, satisfied. It was not that he had everything he needed – far from it – but that he wanted nothing more. He had no further expectations than finding a sheltered spot to sleep or of making sure that his flock did not wander away towards the eager mouths of wolves or foxes. Yet that was the time – before either you or I, dear friend, were even born – of the rebellion of An Lushan against Emperor Xuanzong. An old flicker of pride, I am somewhat embarrassed to say, led me to interject to the old man that I had written a poem about the causes of that dreadful episode, and I was delighted to find that he had in fact read my ‘Song of Everlasting Sorrow’. But I digress.

  The ragged band of mercenaries following An Lushan, my aged friend explained, had neither the decorum nor the ethics of the imperial army. On the march towards Changan to rout the emperor, this vagabond army devastated every village they made camp in. The locals came to fear the soldiers staying anywhere near their homes, because there was little they could do to stop this vast swathe of men stealing their sheep and cattle to roast on their huge campfires. Plots of vegetables were pulled up, fields of cereal were hacked down. By the time the army moved on, all that would be left were licked-clean bones, ashes and freshly dug pits of excrement. A whole year’s harvest and all of a family’s livestock would disappear in a single evening.

  My friend and his flock of sheep, however, were far up in the mountains when the rebel army passed through his hometown. When he returned for market day he was amazed to find that he was one of the only people in the prefecture who still had a good number of sheep to his name. At first, he told me, he feared he would be attacked by the crowd that soon thronged around him. However, he quickly realised that he was in fact in the midst of a fierce bidding competition. As the offers rose and rose he thought that it must be some kind of joke, for he was soon being offered jewels, silks and even small plots of land in exchange for his sheep. He may have been a simple shepherd, but he understood the law of the market well enough to know that he should hold out as long as he could, and see how high the offers would rise. He was not disappointed. By the end of the day he had sold every single one of his sheep, and had amassed enough money to move his family from their shoddy wooden shack to a house on a small plot of arable land all their own.

  The rest of his life was a familiar story of luck and perseverance – against the prevailing wisdom of the time, instead of taking on tenants of his own or planting grain on his plot, my friend set about cultivating mulberry bushes on a vast scale and instructed the women of the household that they would now devote their time to the care of silkworms. There were some rough years, some hardships, some compromises and, as ever, an element of risk and chance. Yet since then he has become one of the richest men in the prefecture, making frequent business trips to bargain his wares in the capital and in the western desert. His small house has become a veritable mansion, his name is well respected in these parts, and his son is a hard-working young man who is soon to marry the daughter of a civil servant. He even makes frequent offerings at the temple nearby, and much of the cost of the new pagoda was covered by his sizable donations. Everything appears to be perfect.

  Yet you and I both know that appearances disguise deeper truths. The old man told me that, as he grows closer to the end of his life, he finds that the riches, the arbitrary power, the fawning, the prestige – all the elements that came together to make up his life – sicken him to the very core. He had not wanted to say this in front of his son, who is keen to inherit all that is his, but sometimes, he admitted, he could not look on his beautiful house, his loving family or his expensive robes without being overcome with shame.

  ‘All my wealth has come from the suffering of others,’ he said. ‘Without the famine and food shortage caused by the rebellion, I would never have got started in my business. That moment, when my whole life changed, was dependent not on luck or good karma, as I convinced myself at the time, but on the poverty of others. My sheep would never have raised such a price were it not for the sudden food shortage, if everyone else had not seen all of their possessions taken and destroyed by those soldiers. While I got rich, others lost everything. When I built my own house, others were driven from theirs. While I feasted, others starved. It only dawned on me far too late that the two were bound together.’

  Althoug
h I tried to placate him, he would not listen to any of my arguments, and instead kept returning to the idea of eternal balance.

  ‘I must atone, somehow, before it is too late.’

  He had a horror of dying before he had made amends for the suffering he had profited from, for he was convinced that if he did not act soon then he would be reincarnated as a rat or a mosquito, or else forever have to dwell in one of the dark subterranean realms of which many fear to speak.

  It was then, my friend, that I remembered one of our earliest conversations. It returned with such surprising lucidity that it seemed as if my mind had stored it for the very purpose of upbraiding my heart for its long sloth and indulgence. I could even recall where the discussion had taken place – in the garden of the teahouse in the south of the city, watched over by the shadow of the Big Goose Pagoda. I took the elderly merchant’s hand in mine and leaned closer to him.

  ‘You have learnt what I have always believed: that our responsibilities are to the world, not to ourselves. Since we are trapped, albeit briefly, in this physical form, we trick ourselves into believing that we are responsible chiefly to ourselves, and therefore the primal urge arises to look after one’s own self above all others. In some, this urge takes over completely, and they forget everything except money and the most fleeting of pleasures. For most, this responsibility may spread to the family, and to those close around them, but not much further. It is a great irony that while we Han never skimp on the veneration of our long-dead ancestors, we often pay less attention to the needs of the living all around us.

  ‘As is to be expected, we are often given emperors who provide a reflection of this base urge in ourselves, emperors who squander taxes on jewels, wine and concubines, emperors whose thoughts reach no further than the palace compound. However, fortunately we are also sometimes given emperors who embody the more noble sentiment that you, my friend, have shown. For we are all responsible for the world around us, and we can all work to change it.