The Book of Crows

by Sam Meekings

  The box must have been destroyed in the fire, Silk said, and though everyone spent a long time searching, they were finally forced to admit that the coins too must have been claimed by the flames – or perhaps they were all in the Empress’s room by now, Tall suggested. In the chaos and commotion, no one seemed particularly concerned or upset about Boy’s disappearance, and, despite my suggestion that he might have come up to play with the fire and then been swept up in it, the others all agreed with the cook that he had probably taken advantage of the general confusion to make a run back towards his desert village. After all, they pointed out, there were no traces of his body in the ashes, and though it was hard to tell from the mess of charred bones near the huts, it seemed one of the camels was missing. ‘He probably started the fire himself,’ Homely said, while Silk argued that it might have been the soldier himself driven to madness after the loss of his leg and the Empress taking all his money. Tall even suggested I might have had something to do with it all, but after I broke down in tears the others told him to stop being so ridiculous and insensitive.

  I was still weeping when we took the soldier’s burnt remains to the top of the hill. They were real tears and I meant them. I cried because he’d meant more to me than I’d realised. And I cried because he had probably known all along how it was going to end but had let it happen anyway. As we walked back down again, Silk hugged my shoulders tight. Tiger stared at me, her head tilted and her lips parting as if to say something, but she obviously thought better of it, because she closed them quickly and shook her head instead. None of us mentioned him again.

  All of that was more than seven summers ago now. A lot has happened since then. Silk gave up serving men to take on the chores of the upper courtyard after the cook drank himself to death; new girls – Reed and Silver and Whisper – arrived; and a thousand merchants and desert traders have passed through. As for me, well, I suppose I’m a little fatter – but then, who isn’t? I never left to meet Boy in the capital, but, actually, I had never planned to do so. Just knowing that he’s somewhere far away from here is enough. And the truth is, I don’t think I’d know what to do with myself if I ever left the Whorehouse of a Thousand Sighs. As hard as I try, I can’t imagine being anywhere else; this place is my home.

  Sometimes, even now, I think about the soldier. I still miss him a little, but I don’t feel guilty. All the things that happened – to me, to Claws, to Silk and Tiger; to the Empress, Boy, the soldier – they were all written down long before we were even born. Besides, I gave up worrying about things like blame and regret ages ago. After all, history just picks you up and spins you along, like a whirlwind tearing across the sand, and there’s nothing you can do to free yourself from its grip.

  Fish and Bird

  SPRING 1738 CE

  In the last life I remember, I was a fish, blotting the water with the curve and snag of my scales – this is not unusual, and for karma accumulated in previous lifetimes some among us have been beasts, birds, cripples or even women – and at times, sitting as a lotus with my palms cupped upon my folded legs, when the low arched beams painted deepest red and the wooden pillars and the inglenooks and the silver Bodhisattva whirling in the flickers of the candlelight and the indigo-skinned gods gambolling across the jade green of the ceiling and the smells of saffron and sun-dried red chillies and slow-boiling rice all begin to fade and I give myself over to the nothingness that is nowhere and is everywhere and is nothing and is all things, at those times I often see the world a-shimmer, loose and translucent, as though I am pulsing up, all slick fins and beating tail, towards the surface, and always just before I can throw myself up above the waves the echo of the bronze gong stirs me from my meditation and I am once again all aching sinews and weather-thickened joints, wondering how many years are left for me in this form; and it was one such morning, as I was rising from the floor of the great prayer hall, thinking of those great sages who lived a thousand years in meditation, that one of my pupils – dabbing at his dribbling nose with the sleeve of his habit, woozy with the cold that afflicts most of the boys who reach the age where their hair must be shorn in the months of frost and sleet – came and told me that it was time, and so I hurried through the gardens where, in the shadow of the ashen hills standing guard over Tashilhunpo, the novices shouted in call and response the laws of the eternal wheel, the truths of fire, until I reached the most stately rooms reserved for the Panchen Lama and, venturing inside, found the other elders gathered around the bed where the living Buddha lay, shrivelled slim and shivering; God-King most merciful slipping slowly from sense; we waited with water and cloth and the Book of the Dead, we waited for the spirit to spill from the top of the head, and, at the sixth hour and seventeenth minute after dawn, I recorded the time of death and the recital began, to guide his ghost out among the world for, though it could have left this world behind in the attainment of nirvana – immersed, consumed, changed, as a teardrop is changed when it falls into an ocean – he had chosen to return again and guide others along their journeys, and so, close to three months after the body had been cleansed, the chanting given over to silence, and work begun on his great domed tomb, it was time to begin the search; after consulting the numerous astrological charts which hung in the Gyeni Chanting Hall, I assembled a small group – consisting of another elder learned in the art of the sacred rituals, and a number of young novices who might, as well as study the process of divination and the recognition of sacred signs, assist us in placating the spirits, gods and demons that might try to assail us in this most hallowed tradition – and together we set forth through the white thunderbolt gate down the winding slope towards the city of Samdruptse, where he will return (for though the spirit may move across the universe in mere moments, it also responds to the call of its home, the pull of the earth, the memory of soil and water).

  That night we saw a crow skittering across the sky, chasing the sun as it sunk into fire – the same fine red as the darker tendrils a peach reveals in the softer flesh around where the stone is plucked out – then following it down to pick upon its bones and carry them to the silver moon for nourishment, and we were much encouraged by this sign, for it is well known that Mahakala, protector of monasteries, comes among us as a crow, for those great black birds alone have sense of the movement of the spirits of the dead, and it was then that one of the novices asked about the nature of the sun, for each day it swims westwards across the sky until it slips from sight, and each morning must begin its flight again; and so – as we made camp some several leagues between the hills that give shelter to great Tashilhunpo and the town whose lanterns burned deep in the distance ahead of us – I gave him answer: that just as self is impermanent, so the light which floats above us is impermanent too, though we may look to it for a lesson: for we too are bound within a cycle which seems endless, for we may be born many times and make the same journey again and again, and only once the desires that burn upon our senses as surely as the sun burns upon our backs are extinguished may we be liberated and find unity with that which we are not; and I reminded them of the fire sermon – lust, hate, despair, delusion, grief, pain, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, birth, death: all scald us incessantly, all are aflame within us, and thus we must grow weary, and when we are weary we shall be disenchanted, and when we are disenchanted we shall be dispassionate, and when we are dispassionate we might leave the world behind – and the novices were much gratified by my answer, though one boy (I remember well that he was one of those who find it hardest to stem the wellsprings of desire and attachment, for he had cried some forty nights unceasing after leaving his father’s home in his sixth year to join us) pressed me further, saying he feared the sun would, one morning, simply cease to appear, and so I told him that the sun might indeed be extinguished by its own flames, and yet it was not for him to think upon, for neither past nor future exists, neither tomorrow nor yesterday, neither before nor after, for all are illusion, and we must remember this or risk repeating our follies for a
thousand lifetimes, in a thousand bodies, as man or bird or beast, under a thousand suns.

  I then told the story of a monk who lived to be a hundred and spent each day in meditation in the courtyard outside the Hall of the Guanyin, and in springtime upon finishing he would open his eyes to see the plum blossoms giddy upon the boughs and so would tend the tree with a little drink of water and by trimming off the dead stems and plucking back the weeds that stole from their soil before he went to the kitchens to attend to his communal duties, and though all who knew him said that he had given up all earthly concerns and pleasures – he ate nothing but brown rice, and spoke to no one, and said nothing, and had learnt each word of each sutra so well that he could say them all standing upon one foot – as he lay dying, a week and a day after his one hundred and first birthday, he caught sight of the same plum tree keening to the breeze, holding its buds closed tight like little fists against the winter, and he thought briefly of how he would miss the bloom that year, and so was reborn an hour later as a sapling pushing up through the brown earth and clay.

  The following day we scoured the town and set about enquiring of the widows and midwives who assist at births, the herbalists and the astronomers, the gossips and the notaries, of any child born under the ribbons of clouds that scurried low across the sky some ten days before, and – after first turning up at a small house in the poorer district of the town only to find to our disappointment that a local child born around that time turned out to be female – were soon pointed towards a village three days away where it was rumoured that there had been the fortuitous event of two births within a single hour on the day of which we spoke; that evening we camped out in the gardens of a merchant who had, as a child, received his education under the late Lama at Tashilhunpo and so joined us in singing to the dead for the whole night and in the morning he ascended to the top of the hill at the south of the town and, along with many other local families, set about affixing bright rivers of fluttering prayer flags to the outpost so that their prayers might be untangled and carried aloft upon the wind in order that our quest would be met with success, and after we had given them our thanks we left the town, all before the golden light had frothed upon the valleys, and travelled on – we passed herds of slow driven yaks fat with milk and striking frail tails against flies and mites, and their wiry masters all muscle and grimace, and a few stray goats scampering across the wild dips and haunches of the rock-clotted slopes, as we wandered between the tiny scattered villages, searching for the flesh in which the spirit had settled, for he will be born again and again so that he may teach us how to slip free from our passions and longing as one might, at the end of the evening, shudder loose from the folds of the habit before lying down to sleep, all past and future lives given up and forgotten.

  As we walked down among the smallholdings that clustered together like ewes in winter, I told the students of how we might learn something of ourselves from studying the small stream we spotted slipping down a mountainside; it yearns for the sea, yet bends around skews of rocks, juts, falls; leaves waver and dance upon it, and these are our dreams, briefly borne along upon its current until they sink beneath it, while new ones fall from ever-bending trees; schools of fish weave through it, and these are our hopes and desires, shimmering and swimming deep within until they are plucked out by nets and hooks; and finally, at the end of the journey, if desires are conquered and dreams cast off, the stream becomes the river and the river becomes the sea and if a man should then look for the stream among the sea he will not find it, for it is no more what it once was.

  On the third day the hill cleaved itself in two and we wandered down a stony path, picking through fern and bramble as we clambered towards the houses beside the slipshod curve of a lake; as I led our procession down the treacherous slope into the valley – noticing even from that great distance the flags and banners laid out to welcome us – one of the novices came to my side and asked how we would know which child was the reborn Lama, and so I sated his curiosity by explaining the rites and signs that would establish the presence of that benevolent spirit, freshly forged in new flesh, and another took this chance to ask how many times the great Lamas would return to human form, and I answered that both the Panchen Lama and his most holy superior, the Dalai Lama, possess infinite compassion and will therefore continue to walk among us and guide us until every man has found enlightenment and so transcended this veil of illusions, and that it might take one hundred years and it might take a thousand, but I added that, considering the baseness of the petty squabbles among the locals that we were so often called to adjudicate upon, I suspected it would perhaps be closer to a million before mankind might be persuaded to turn away from its desires and so end suffering; and the first novice spoke again, enquiring excitedly whether I therefore thought there was a possibility that the rumours might be true and that there really existed an ancient book in which the first Lama had set down the details of all his future incarnations upon the earth – yet here the elderly astrologer interrupted the questioning with a curt reply that the novices should be wary of such idle prattle and should bear in mind that time is pure illusion, an elaborate web spun to ensnare us, and that they would themselves be caught within it and forced to repeat their mistakes again and again if they were not careful.

  When we reached the bottom of the track, passing crowds of scrawny cloud-backed goats tearing at tufts of sun-shrivelled grass, so many of the villagers gathered round us, each offering us the comforts of their homes, meals of hot stew and yak-butter tea, each entreating us to honour their homes by accepting their hospitality, that it took more than an hour for us to make our way to the lake to refill our flasks; after we had refreshed ourselves, it was clear we could postpone our meetings no longer, and so we asked to be guided to the house where the first child was born on the day of red clouds: it was a small, musty place, one circular room set around a fire whose thick black dragon breath spilled out through a cut in the roof, and there was barely enough room for the family members themselves to all huddle on the berths beside the fire, so I bid the novices wait outside while the elderly astrologer and myself questioned the parents – a squat, sun-swollen man with bird-nest hair and a tall, scuttle-backed woman wrapped head to toe in foul-smelling shawls – about the signs that attended the birth, the pitch and tone of the first cries of the child, the celestial phenomena visible at the time and the shape conjured by the umbilical cord after it was cut; it was then time to inspect the infant lying in a crudely fashioned crib on the floor, and as soon as I saw the tiny boy – saw his almond eyes following my own, saw his plump hands thump against his side and his mouth blossom into a little laugh – I felt as though I had been struck deep in the ball of my stomach, such was the force of recognition, for this tiny child knew me, and I him, and his fat red cheeks puffed up and he gurgled to himself and I saw again in my mind that tanka of the laughing Buddha who transcended suffering with the sublime realisation that life is little more than a cosmic joke, delightfully ludicrous and inane; yet I knew well enough of the petty jealousies and rivalries of small communities so I kept silent, for we had to remain judicious and fair, and it would have been imprudent to pronounce upon the return of the Lama before both children had been seen and all the rites observed, and so we said nothing to the anxious parents promising us sacrifices and a thousand prayers if we bestowed fame, honour and the blessings of posterity upon their family name by taking their son, but instead made our way across the village to the house where the other child was born.

  We were obliged to wander around the marshes and streams – past families tending torn nets laid out upon the ground and herders ignoring their beasts to bow before us with entreaties to the gods and spirits – for more than an hour before we reached our destination at the other side of the lake, a dismal abode of rotting wood speckled with damp, great blotches of lichen green spreading across the walls, and a roof which managed, quite miraculously, to keep in the cloying smoke of the pitiful fire spluttering
in the centre of the room while also letting in the frost-tongued wind that turned up the corners of the lake; once again, the elderly monk and myself went in alone, and found a cluttered room whose stale air was thick with the stinging smell of yak’s urine, and two women dressed in mud-stained rags, who shuffled nervously as we went through the same questions and received their worried nods and monosyllables in reply; it seemed the child’s father had been killed in an accident some months before the birth, and the widow was thus left alone to care not only for the new child but also for her ailing aunt and a group of gangly yaks – the skinny young mother, her face scarred with acne and slick with sweat, told us she wished only that she might marry again, for she feared the three of them could not go on without the strength of men to carry them, and I understood her worry, for there is no comfort in a life lived only in the long shadow cast by death, yet I also knew that she would find it hard to make a new match, for few men would risk being second in affection to the son of another man, and so I felt much compassion for her situation and told her I would look upon her son; he was a tiny runt of a boy, square-headed and dark-skinned, with eyes perched too close above a lumpy potato of a nose and sickly, blistered lips which let out raspy, crackling breaths, and I had to work hard to stop a frown from settling upon my brow, for the child emitted a most foul odour, and, as soon as I stepped cautiously forward, he began to howl, his face scrunched into a purple blotch that brought to mind the pinched faces of the bats that we sometimes find folded in the dusty corners of the Hall of Contemplation.