The Book of Crows

by Sam Meekings

  ‘Always crows,’ I said.

  ‘Naturally. Few other birds feed so wilfully on death. They are perhaps our mirror image, for we humans do the same – picking over the question of death again and again. But in any case, the origin of the book is unimportant. All that mattered to my father was finding it. That was the only way he could think of to relieve the pressure upon him, to set him free from the terrible fear that afflicted him every time he was forced to lie in front of the emperor. He made excuses to go on trips that lasted months, he attended clandestine meetings, he bribed corrupt officials, all in search of this mythical book. After more than a year of looking, he seemed suddenly to give up. He looked defeated. Then one day, on the eve of a battle in which he had predicted success for the imperial forces, he left the house to head to the hills where he had once read the auguries of the crows. We never saw him again. The emperor’s army lost the battle, and my family was subsequently driven from the city. That is why you find me here, my friend, living alone in the country. I saw what damage the desire for power, for knowledge, can do to people, and I long ago renounced that world.’

  He smiled once more, and raised his hands to gesture to the room around him, as though it was proof of all he had told me.

  ‘But if your father brought about such sorrow from his divination, then why do you continue dabbling in such arts every day?’

  ‘Because it is expected of me. Is there ever any other reason for people to act as they do? I fully intended to live alone, seeing no one and spending my days in uninterrupted meditation. But you know how rumours spread. One man sought me out and asked if I was indeed the son of the shaman who had disappeared with the crows. Once I admitted it, he would not leave me alone. I finally consented to divine his future simply to get rid of him. From that day on I have been fairly besieged with visitors. I find, though, that it gives me a sense of satisfaction, and of course a few comforts that aid my survival.’

  ‘And it does not bother you that the same thing may happen to you as happened to your father?’

  Master Zhong began to laugh.

  ‘I can see why you became an official, my friend, for you cannot stop asking questions. But I will answer, as I see you have not understood me at all. I am nothing like my father. Though the locals put about gossip that I can converse with crows, I do nothing of the sort. I know little of divination, and to be honest I am not particularly interested in it.’

  I smiled then, beginning to understand. ‘You do not tell people’s fortunes, do you? I’ll warrant you’ve never even consulted the I Ching.’

  ‘You are right, I have not and nor do I plan to. What a waste of time! I thought you already knew that I am no shaman. I would not know how to draw up a fortune if my life depended on it! I simply tell people what they want to hear. Yes, you may call me a liar and a fraud if you so wish, but do not think I do it for my own gain. I am helping people. Take the woman who entered before you. She was a lonely woman of poor means, treated harshly by her in-laws. All she wanted was the chance to marry again and secure a better life for her children. Of course I did not really communicate with her dead husband to ask his permission for her to remarry. Do you really think I can? But I did tell her that her dead husband granted her permission. I pretended, as I always do. And my words set her free.’

  ‘But how can you be sure you will not cause even more trouble by your meddling?’

  ‘Nothing is certain. If I cannot be sure of the consequences of my words, I tell my visitor that I can be of no help to them. But most people’s questions are simple enough. What they really want is someone who will listen to their worries. Let me give you an example. If a man asks me whether he should set about building a house although it might take him years of work, or if he ought to attempt to go into business with his in-laws despite the risks involved, I will always tell him yes, do it now, the omens are good. Because if a person comes to believe that something is possible, that it is within his grasp, then he will work hard to achieve it. It is as simple as that.’

  For a while we sat together in silence as I pondered his words. I could not help recalling what he had told me the first time I visited him, when I was still deep in mourning for my daughter. He had urged me to move forward without giving up hope, and for that I had been very grateful. Finally, I spoke.

  ‘I have travelled far from my home and my job to find you again, for I had hoped you would tell me something of the Book of Crows. Yet from what you say, searching for the book brings only pain and misery. But still I must ask, do you believe that such a book exists?’

  Master Zhong ran a hand over his great round belly as he mulled over my question.

  ‘No, I do not. It is just a myth, though a powerful one at that. All of us at some point have intimations that life must be more than a random series of events without meaning or coherence, and many yearn to believe that there is some grand purpose that sets the beat to which time marches. Yet there is no safety-net in life, no certainty. For myself, the book is a symbol of everything I seek to renounce – the desire for power that begets only the desire for even more power, the desire to know what we cannot know, to tame the whole world so that it is under our command, to control the things that remain beyond us. The world is to me as it was to my father in the end: ineffable. Yet unlike him I rejoice in that. I have no wish to tame it.

  ‘But there is no doubt that many people do believe that such a book exists, and spend their whole lives searching for it. I should think there are enough works of prophecy around to keep them sated, and I have no doubt that as long as man lives there will be people predicting the future. Perhaps the myth is part of some cosmic joke, a trick the gods or the crows play on us, knowing that we shall never find out its truth, no matter how hard we search. Or perhaps it is simply a way of reminding us that no action, however small, is without its consequences, and any of these might change the world irrefutably. Though to be honest, I prefer not to think of that silly myth at all, for those who live happily in the present should never have need of it.’

  I thanked him profusely for meeting with me once again, though in truth his words had done little to dispel my worries. For the entire journey back, as I rode past field upon barren field, I went over my dilemma again and again. Should I tell the prince that there was no such book – that the quest had destroyed each man who searched for it – and risk his wrath? After all, men have been gaoled or exiled for less. Or should I hold silent, and try to exert influence more subtly, gaining the prince’s trust and so guiding him slowly away from such foolish notions and back towards the more pressing issue of restoring our great country to its former glory? I arrived home exhausted.

  The question, it seemed to me, was this: what is more important to a man, the truth or his dreams? Though all our ideals tell us resoundingly that the former must always take precedence, for the good of the country and the common man, this last year I have come to believe it is the latter that provide kindling for the fire of the heart. If I were to leave the prince to his maddening quest, would I be abandoning my duty to the country? Yet if I were to destroy his hopes of finding the book, would I also risk destroying his ambition of remaking this nation as a grand and noble empire? I felt myself tugged this way and then that, my worries only made worse by my suspicion that if you take away a man’s dreams you steal something of his soul – you leave him with a hole inside him, and who can tell what might emerge to fill such a hole?

  My sleep soon suffered under the weight of these questions. I found myself retreating back into my grief and melancholy, and I have not been able to escape the strange certainty that she is here. For the idea, however ludicrous, that there might be some book in which every life is written out only made me think of my daughter more and more.

  Prompted by the sight of the Big Goose Pagoda rising above the southern market, I tried to take comfort in the Buddhist scriptures. You see, if – as they assure us – our lifetimes are but studs on the great wheel and our souls live many lives,
then she might yet be here. And so I find I see her everywhere – perhaps she is one of the birds that alights on the window ledge as the bells from the palace announce the beginning of the day, say, or perhaps the tawny fox that slips past the guards to scavenge in the courtyards of the larger houses after the curfew. It sounds ridiculous, I know. And yet, the bright, blissful song of those birds, the glinting eyes of that fox …

  Yet there were many moments during those days leading up to my meeting with the crown prince when I could not bear to even look in the direction of the Big Goose Pagoda, and I had to turn my head away from the great tower of wood and brick, since not only did it prompt thoughts of reincarnation and memories of the fervent debates you and I had once had in its shadows, but it seemed also to taunt me with my own shortcomings. For it was built (as I am sure you well know) a century ago to provide sanctuary for the Buddhist scriptures that the great monk Xuan Zang carried back from the west. The journey took seventeen years, during which time the monk faced snowstorms, dust-storms, sandstorms and thunderstorms, getting lost in the burning desert and near-buried under avalanches on mountains whose snowy tips pierced through cloud, meeting nefarious bandits and vicious border guards and sentries, his sandals baked by the sun and his fingers twisted rigid by the frost – yet still he persisted.

  One man – neither emperor, nor king, nor even official – wading out into the slipstream of history and diverting the flow. If he had not brought back those scriptures, who knows the number of truths that would still elude us? One stubborn man holding out – despite innumerable hardships – for the single thing that mattered to him. He defied imperial bans on travel, faced death countless times, and remained away from the comforts of home for all those long years, driven onward only by a singular purpose. If this one man could change history, the pagoda seems to whisper, then why can’t I? I sometimes wonder whether I have capitulated too easily, whether I have failed our promises. What is it that makes one man stand firm while another gives in? There must be some untamed drum of the soul whose throbbing beat can only be heard by those who cast aside all else to listen. Or is it that although our convictions sometimes get in the way of life, more often than not life gets in the way of our convictions?

  Enough. Let me put a stop to these fruitless meanderings. I do not wish to bore you with the longwinded hypotheses of my dotage, and besides, I have not yet finished telling you about the circumstances surrounding my exile. You see how my thoughts continually slip away from me these days? I am at their mercy now. It was not always thus. You and I used to spend whole evenings debating the finer terms of the fiscal policy of the Central Palace, but now I have barely begun giving voice to one thought when another rushes in and joins the clamour to be heard. But I must restrain myself and return to the story. I came back from my meeting with Master Zhong feeling more confused than ever. I was scheduled to meet with the crown prince three days later, and I had little doubt that he would press me for my opinion. I ate little, and slept even less, spending my nights fidgeting and turning, trying to work out what to tell the crown prince about the Book of Crows.

  I became distracted at work, yet would not allow myself to stay at home. Three days became two. Two days became one. The only time I felt at ease was in the early hours around dawn, on the journey between my house and the palace, caught not quite between two worlds. Have you noticed how frost bathes stone pathways in a light sheen that seems to shift when the first fuzzy light hits? It seems as if the ice is slowly moving, rippling out across the city – and though you feel it crunch and crackle beneath your feet, you cannot shake off the perception that the narrow streets and squares have been transformed into a billowing ocean. For those few minutes each morning, as I held the furs tight about my robe and tried not to slip, I was almost able to pretend that I was once again at home in the capital, that it needed me as much as I needed it, that this was where I would remain. Despite the hour, there were always men already hunched over street fires, farmers unfolding sheets of grubby vegetables, servants making the breakfast errands for the mansions, a few coaches rattling down the wider streets and teahouse owners preparing for the day’s trade.

  The yawning palace guards were never surprised to see me so early – in the current climate of nepotism and sycophancy, it is common to see officials arrive as early as they can in attempts to appear more dedicated than their colleagues. In the gingko garden surrounding the lotus pond, I usually spotted groups of men in official robes bowed together in heated discussion, forming bonds and contacts. There were always eunuchs about, of course (perhaps their unusual constitution allows them to forgo sleep entirely, since it has often been remarked that they cannot be entirely human), yet they are renowned for their ability to move without making a sound, born – I suspect – from the amount of creeping and spying they do.

  It was during an early morning walk around the palace gardens on the day before my audience, as I contemplated my dilemma of what to say to the prince the next afternoon, that I happened to meet an old acquaintance of ours. Indeed, my thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a voice booming behind me.

  ‘Ah. The great poet Bai Juyi caught daydreaming within the palace. What has the world come to!’

  I turned from my trance to see a strange man before me.

  ‘I – wait. Hua Jinbo? Is that you?’

  The man in front of me was short and fat, and must have been close to my own age. He began to laugh.

  ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist it! Still, it’s a bit of a shock to see you wandering about here when we haven’t bumped into each other for, what, five years?’

  It was indeed Hua Jinbo. You must remember him. He was the small fellow who used to join us occasionally to listen to those ancient operas about the earliest dynasties. I recall he used to screw up his eyes as we sat in some teahouse or snack-theatre and would sing along to every single performance we watched. I am afraid to say I have memories of us making cruel jokes about such behaviour behind his back, though I think secretly each of us envied his ability to fully immerse himself in those wondrous stories of love and death, of hope and sacrifice. It had taken me a few moments to remember that high voice of his, yet as soon as I did I too began to smile, and bowed down before him.

  ‘Can it have been that long?’ I asked.

  ‘I fear it must. If my memory serves me, we last met shortly before I left to take up that post in Fuli. Do you remember we all went to see a performance of The Lotus Bride in Bo’s teahouse? What a tremulous voice that young man playing the bride had! Sometimes I wake at night and can still hear his tear-stoked notes trembling in my ears. Oh, that really was one of my favourites.’

  ‘I am sorry to have lost touch with you.’

  ‘And I with you. I had no idea you had also returned to the capital. In the time since we were last together I have devoured your poems ravenously, and I have been wanting to discuss a few of them with you for some time.’

  ‘Perhaps we could share some cups of rice wine by the lake this evening?’

  ‘That would be delightful. Shall we meet at the gate to the sweet bread street at the muezzin’s last call?’

  And so it was agreed. You may be wondering why I labour so to tell you each word that passed between us, yet let me assure you that there is a reason, for it was Hua Jinbo who helped me make my decision.

  Barely had I ensured all the affairs of the day were in order when the sun began glinting on the western towers and the youngest of the apprentices made for the door. I soon left and hurried towards the Muslim quarter.

  It was not difficult to spot Hua Jinbo’s squat, pale form amid the traders and lean labourers. He beckoned me over, and I reached the alcove where he was standing just in time to avoid the throng of people that set off once that melodious call to prayer rang out from the two-storey tower. We watched the tide of unshaven men in their white cloth hats as they hurried past us, heeding the lingering summons of their faith. It amazed me that even in the midst of the most important wor
k they would set down their tools, and even then I found myself wishing that I could turn from my daily worries to the comfort of the eternal as quickly and as easily.

  On the days the cattle market is held in the city, or when the first merchants return from foreign expeditions in the spring, a man risks getting trampled to death by the crowd of Han rushing frantically to be the first to view the wares. Indeed, you are likely to be elbowed and kicked and shoved mercilessly if you impede their progress by accidentally getting in their way. But there was patience and composure in the way the men in the Muslim quarter joined the slow wave building towards their brick-walled temple. I must admit, I know little of their philosophy, yet I wonder whether this calmness comes from having only the single deity to submit to. It must bring a little peace of mind – we Han must choose among the powerful spirits of our ancestors, the Jade Emperor, the former Celestial Emperors who have ascended to heaven, the Dragon of the Wind and the Dragon of the River, the noble Lao Tzu, the Buddha and all the hundred Bodhisattvas, the Money God, the Luck God, the Kitchen God, the demon-catcher Zhong Kui … no wonder our heads are cluttered as we rush to our destinations, often causing us to forget where it is that we intend to go.

  Hua Jinbo led me to a dilapidated wooden restaurant standing near the northern corner of the city walls, and he was quite surprised when I told him I had never visited it before. He seemed somewhat subdued by the muezzin’s call, for he said that it reminded him of a song whose title and lyrics always remained, regrettably, just on the tip of his tongue. He professed a weary astonishment that the Muslim men should voluntarily deny themselves the delights of wine, for he found that the sweet, languorous warmth and lightness of head induced by a few cups were quite conducive to a contemplation of the infinite.