The Book of Crows

by Sam Meekings

  Or I could be a hero. I could ignore every order, every word of advice, every instinct and every urge towards self-preservation and get Hong Youchen arrested. Would that be justice for Wei Shan and all the others? No. But it would be a start. Then I could bask in the smug moral glory of it for a few hours before my life got flushed down the shitter. I imagined they wouldn’t even bother with rumours and smears. No, the police would probably just turn up and take me away. The papers would be tipped off, of course. My face might make the front page, along with some spiel about my secret deviant encounters. My wife would die of shame at having been married to a degenerate. My daughter would get mercilessly teased and bullied, and her chances of going to a half-decent college would disappear overnight. I probably wouldn’t even get a trial. I’d just be locked in some damp cellar for the next decade. Or get sent to a labour camp, maybe even set to work in one of the last state-owned mines – nothing fate loves more than a bit of irony.

  And what would I have achieved? Pretty much fuck all. Even if I arrested Hong Youchen, he would never go to trial. He’d be out within an hour. Within a few years he’d take over his father’s position, and there’d be a lot of backslapping all round. I couldn’t change any of that, whatever I did. But at least I’d feel good about myself. Perhaps.

  Or else I could take the bottle and head back out onto the bridge. In this weather the surge would be unstoppable. Let my secrets scatter out towards the sea. It wouldn’t matter what people said about me then. My daughter would get pity and condolences, and in time her mind might gloss over the bad memories and remake me into a good man, a well-missed father.

  So those were the choices. The slow drift of daily life, the frantic tug against the currents of history, or something more final. I took a deep swig of baiju. For a moment I let myself believe in all the crap about the book – that whatever I ended up doing was already written down, somewhere, that the decision was beyond me. It was out of my hands. A sudden gust of wind whipped the restaurant door open and slapped it back upon its hinges.

  Then something caught my eye. The postmark on the letter. No, it couldn’t be. I pulled it closer and held the scrunched envelope up to the light. It had been posted in Mizhi County, Yulin. I slumped back in my chair.

  I topped up my glass. The sly bastard. This was worth a drink. How the hell had he pulled it off? I took a long swig, and slowly it all became clear.

  Maybe he’d stopped off on the way to Jawbone Hills to get a packet of Double Happiness or to fill up the car. And when he got there the landslide had already started – he must have thanked his lucky stars he hadn’t arrived ten minutes earlier and been buried alive in the mud and rubble tumbling down the hillside. Then he’d probably thought about phoning home or contacting the office to let everyone know he was all right. After all, the call had been logged in the records book and everyone at work knew where he was going – people would start to worry if they heard about the landslide on the news. Then it must have hit him. Everyone would think he was dead.

  The sneaky devil. I thought about the Buddhist temple I’d smashed up when I was a Red Guard, and about the old monks who believed that once you died you’d be reborn as someone else and get to start all over again. Somehow Wei Shan had pulled it off. Sure, he’d prattled on about escaping to the countryside often enough, but it was hard to take him seriously. I raised my glass to him. It’s not often you get the chance to rewrite history. To catch a glimpse of a possible future, then swap it for another. That took balls.

  I could picture him turning up in Mizhi County. After he abandoned his car at Jawbone Hills he must have hitched a lift along the highway, or else used up the rest of the cash in his wallet on a series of bus trips. The journey alone must have taken him days. But it would have been worth it. To start a new life on the farm, to shrug off the intervening years like a snake slithers free from its dead skin. To marry the woman he’d been dreaming about – so what if she was a little wrinkled round the eyes now, a little heavier around the hips? I stuffed the envelope into my pocket. At least one of us had worked out how to get out of this shitty town.

  But then another thought entered my head, and I could see Wei Shan once more at the end of his journey. By the time he found his way to the old village his suit would have been creased and crumpled and splattered with mud. He’d probably have done the last part of the journey on foot, trusting his memory to lead him back to a place he’d last visited more than fifteen years before. A smile started tugging at my lips. I could see him as clearly as if he was in front of me. There he was, wearing a dirty suit and trudging through mud and grass towards his dream, his heart beginning to beat faster. And right in front of him, where the farm used to be – where he had spent all those blissful days with the peasant family, working beside them in the field from dawn till dusk, laughing and joking with the farmer’s eldest daughter, swapping stories with her brothers, sharing their house and their food, and feeling by the end as though he was one of them – he sees a line of shops, or a block of flats, or a cluster of bright orange cranes and bulldozers working on a new highway. Still, he carries on unfazed – after all, he’s come this far. But after asking around, he finds the farmer’s daughter is married, with children of her own, and she and her family have long since moved south, to some sunnier province like Yunnan or Guangdong. And then he’s stuck – because our future is never what we think it will be. And he can’t go back home now, can he?

  Then I began to laugh. For the first time in weeks, a giddy snigger burst from my lips. I couldn’t stop myself – thinking of him standing ankle-deep in mud and manure in the middle of nowhere, trying to chase a dream. Even though the manager turned around to stare at me and the other customers tutted under their breath, I couldn’t control myself. I leaned back in my chair and laughed, a stomach-shaking, hiccup-inducing, eye-watering laugh – a laugh that spilled out from somewhere deep inside of me and rattled my whole body with its erratic rhythm – and I laughed so hard I thought I’d never, ever be able to stop.

  On the Principles of Nature

  PART 3 · SUMMER 1288 CE

  This is a country with too much of everything. Too much sun between Prime and Vespers and too bitter a wind after the hour of Compline. Too many dangers and diseases waiting to ensnare us. The men have too much haste and recklessness, and their womenfolk too little shame. There are too many deserts and yet, at the same time, I have crossed larger and more fearsome rivers than I have ever seen before. And each one alive with ducks and fish and frogs. Many men spend their whole lives upon these waters, and I have been most intrigued by those Cathaian fishermen who sail out with a number of birds perched upon the prow of their narrow boats. These birds have their necks bound with a knot of rope, so that they may not swallow. The fishermen draw a light over the waters to attract the fish, and then their birds dive. When they return to the surface, the fishermen squeeze the fish from their mouths, and so have their dinner, with none of the long trawl of nets and bait that our own fishermen spend hours upon.

  It is amazing how man might harness nature for his own purpose. The world brings us bounteous possibilities – this is why the Lord entreated us to make ourselves the masters of the fish and the fowl, of all the beasts and all the waters of this world.

  The sun is now sinking further and further into the west, so I call a servant to find out whether Lovari is yet woken. When I receive a reply to the affirmative, I make my way across the camp to his tent.

  He is still shivering despite the late afternoon heat, though his skin is now a sickly white and his cracked lips bloody. I kneel beside him and push a few damp strands of hair back from his brow, so that he might know I continue to care for the state of his undying soul.

  ‘Do not trouble yourself to speak, brother. I can give absolution, and we may sit in silent vigil together.’

  ‘No.’ His voice is cracked, harsh. ‘If my sickness progresses at the same speed as D’Antonio’s and Nazario’s, then I still have a little time left.
I shall finish before night falls. The rest has done me much good, Rosso, and now we must proceed to the last sin. We may gloss over my years in Ancona, for you know only too well the routine of a monk’s life. Understand only this, that whatever my brethren thought of me, there was another man lurking underneath my skin. I never gave up on my quest, and if I studied harder than the other monks, if I read more widely, travelled farther, argued more vehemently, it was only because my goal was more immediate, more important than theirs. Yes, I hid myself in the habit of a hypocrite, espousing poverty and separation for monks, whilst, like my brethren, turning my eyes away from the real poverty and suffering endured by the common people in the villages and towns around us. Monasteries, after all, are designed for hiding in.

  ‘I kept up coded correspondence with the Carthusian – though I never learnt his real name, and that was perhaps the secret of his survival in a time when so many others in our Order were rounded up and purged by various Papal Inquisitions or infiltrated by traitorous spies like that old turncoat, my erstwhile friend Alessio. In each of the journeys I undertook for our patron Montecorvino, and for a number of others, I learnt a little more. Everything pointed to the lands that lie to the east of the country in which our Lord was born to Mary and Joseph. Thus when this chance to go to Cathay arose, I made sure I would be chosen.

  ‘Perhaps it would surprise you to learn how many of the merchants and cartographers that travelled with us at some point or guided us through those perilous mountains and plains were members of the Order, though to my sadness none was able to remain with us for this return journey. And there were many too in the Khan’s capital, explorers and traders and merchants who visited me while you were praying or studying, for what better location for secret meetings than that street of iniquity?

  ‘Now, do you remember the day we were finally admitted to the Khan’s palace?’

  I nod, not telling him that I had myself revisited those days only hours before.

  ‘Indeed. The cherry blossoms had begun to bloom, and I fear both of us were overawed by the magnificence of the gardens through which we were led. We had been waiting to be seen for what, two, three weeks? And all that time we had been told by everyone we met about the great wisdom of the Khan, his remarkable benevolence, and his unparalleled knowledge of every corner of his vast kingdom – we were both easy prey to nerves, I think, and rightly so.’

  Lovari manages a tight smile, the dry skin of his lips crackling as they purse.

  ‘Yes, we were well fooled. It did not take long after our many prostrations to realise that the great Khan barely noticed us. It is his eyes – more than his long dark beard, his long knots of black hair, his small curled hands or stubbed nose – that I remember most clearly. They were the night without a moon; great black lakes in which I suspect many a man has drowned. He lounged back upon that fierce dragon throne, gazing at something above our heads. The mass of attendants, servants, guards, advisors and dignitaries, however, would not stop staring at us.’

  ‘They seemed distinctly unimpressed, I recall, by our grey cloth habits,’ I say. ‘Perhaps they had never seen anything so plain and godly. The thing that most sticks in my memory is the disproportionate amount of words we devoted to our entreaties compared to the number the court interpreter used in his translation to the Khan.’

  Lovari coughs up a laugh like a coin jangling in a clay jug then clears his throat.

  ‘Yes, he was a wily creature. As you know, I never judge a man by his appearance, yet there was something reptilian about that interpreter. His great bald dome of a head, his pinprick eyes, his high-turned nose. I too got the feeling that he was not translating everything we said. I spent close to five minutes making a most formal greeting, praising the Khan and his achievements, pledging our support and allegiance and giving the most high regards of our master, and when I had finally finished speaking, the interpreter uttered only three words to the Khan.

  ‘The Khan, if you remember, nodded his head benignly, making it clear that he had to sit through a thousand such speeches daily, then spoke slowly, in a low drawl that, even though I could not understand even a little of that lilting, melodious language, make my bones shiver.

  ‘The interpreter then turned to us to give an explanation, and though his formal Latin was grammatically correct in every way, did you not think there was something odd about the way in which he spoke, as though to part his teeth would have been too much of an effort? His words thus had the timbre of a hiss.

  ‘“His most noble Excellency Kublai Khan, celestial ruler of the kingdom in the centre of the universe, most benevolent of emperors, bids you tell your masters that they may come and build their temple. We welcome trade with any other nation who will bow before us, and indeed already have many believers such as yourselves.”

  ‘I know, Rosso, that you were as surprised as I at this last statement, for it is well known that there is no church, no mission and no altar to Christ throughout the entire kingdom.

  ‘“I beg your pardon, sir, but we know of no other Christians here,” I believe I replied, as politely as I could.

  ‘The interpreter did not need to turn to his ruler to answer me. “Yes, we have many. Like you they cover their heads and will not wear good clothes.”

  ‘I was embarrassed to have to tell him he was confused. “These are Mohammedans, kind sir, not Christians. The distinction is of great importance, for the heathen idol they worship is malice and ignorance, while we strive in the light and truth of Jesus Christ. I know you have many mosques and even the Jews have a fraternity here, yet —”

  ‘The interpreter did not let me finish my sentence, for he held up one of his bony hands, clearly uninterested in my explanation.

  ‘“It matters not. His most royal highness has received tributes from men who pray to shadows, men who worship clouds and men who kneel before the graves of their fathers. The immortal Khan looks benevolently upon you all – if you act as faithful, respectful children, then he will reward you as a tolerant father should. He welcomes men of all faiths, of all creeds, of all ideas. His Excellency well knows that there are as many kinds of truth as there are men.”

  ‘I do not know whether you noticed, Rosso, but I was then struck dumb. For as the interpreter bowed his head at the end of his speech, I caught a glimpse of the large scar that could be seen poking out from his robe at the very back of his neck. You must have noted it, for it looked akin to those marks you see on criminals who have been branded by hot irons. Yet do you remember the shape? It resembled a great dark crow, its wings spread in flight. I was amazed, for I had been searching for days for a clue within the great city and had found nothing, yet suddenly the subtlest of hints, which only an adept such as myself might read, was presented before my very eyes. Truly, as the most Holy Bible reminds us, if you seek, then you shall find.

  ‘I barely heard what you were saying, Rosso, as you picked up the thread of the conversation and thanked the Khan for his audience and ensured the necessary red seal was stamped upon our papers, but my ears pricked up again when the interpreter bid us farewell – again, upon his own initiative, for the Khan had clearly lost interest in us by then.

  ‘“Farewell, men of the periphery. His Excellency, the most noble Kublai Khan, exhorts you to enjoy your stay in his kingdom. We ask only that when you return to your own lands you bring word to your fledgling princes that we shall always welcome men who come to us in peace.”

  ‘We bowed again – imitating their manner of touching our very heads to the floor in front of the dragon throne – then left.’

  Lovari shifts in his blankets, clearly wracked by pains though trying his best to shelter me from the worst of his suffering. Yet it seems apparent that there is something he wants to tell me about the day we spent in the presence of the Khan, so I make an effort to pick up where he left off.

  ‘Yes, brother, it was indeed a strange conclusion to our brief meeting. We had both expected long negotiations, many questions about our motiv
es and purpose, or at least the formal process of swearing allegiances and promises, yet in truth we were in that great hall less than an hour. The Khan and his followers seemed to regard us as little different from fruit-sellers asking to set up a stall on one of the small street corners in the city, and they gave the palpable impression that talking to us for too long would be a waste of their time. I remember I had to do my utmost to stop feeling slighted and offended. I recall also that you felt suddenly sick, my friend, as we were walking back past the cherry blossoms in the courtyard. You were so overcome that you could not walk, and had to be set down upon one of the ornate benches.’

  Lovari sighs, and reaches a feeble, shaking hand from his blankets, searching for mine. I let him take it, albeit reluctantly, and feel the clammy damp of his sickness as he squeezes weakly.

  ‘I am truly sorry, Rosso, that I had to deceive you. It was never my intention to bring you into my plans, but I realised that it was perhaps the only opportunity I would get to stay within the palace grounds a little longer. In truth, I felt in rude health, but you were evidently taken in by my charade and, thankfully, you agreed to let me sit and recuperate for a few minutes while you carried the Khan’s seals to safekeeping back at our lodgings.

  ‘For a while I waited, feigning stomach cramps and nausea, while the rest of the palace passed me by. It was surprisingly easy to fade into the background, and I am not sure I received more than a couple of glances the whole time as haughty officials strolled past, bearing piles of bound scrolls to the taller buildings beyond the carp pond. It was perhaps close to an hour before I saw the interpreter emerge from the great hall with another advisor and begin to stroll towards the gate. No doubt the Khan was to retire to a great feast, some rich and sumptuous banquet where, I know from personal experience, invitations are rarely extended to functionaries and lowly men of letters.