My one consolation was that I had managed to send a splendid report to Lord Xiao, boasting of our diligence and good health. A foolish gesture, as I soon came to learn. Yet truly I believed he had long ago given us up for ghosts swirling round the barren mountains, and so would never read it.
Wearily, I unrolled the scroll. From the prim style of the characters, it had evidently been dictated to a secretary. It read:
Bureau Chief Yun Cai, His Excellency Field Marshal Wen Po has received a memorandum from the capital regarding your work. Lord Xiao is concerned that your reports are niggardly and delayed. He has requested you should personally attend the foremost scenes of battle, in order to collect information at first hand. Accordingly, this is His Excellency Wen Po’s command: Bureau Chief Yun Cai is to proceed daily to the Western ramparts, there to fulfil his duties. May His Imperial Highness live a thousand years!
It was signed by Wen Po’s secretary.
For a long while I sat alone on an outcrop of rock. The clerks and Mi Feng kept a respectful distance. I stared sightlessly to the south-east, in the direction of the capital.
My spirit rose in a mournful sigh, flying over mountain and plain, through stalks of bamboo withered by winter, over the roofs of dull provincial towns, ships plying turbulent rivers, far far to the south where Su Lin would be bathing in tepid water poured by her maid. Perhaps they chattered about the day ahead: her engagement at some wedding or a trip to purchase new clothes. Then she would yawn, stretch, practise her lute for a while, gently sounding the strings, her plump lips pursed in concentration. Perhaps the maid brought out her chest of cosmetics, brushing rice powder on her face.
Did she think of me in my extremity? I had thrown away my entire future for love of her. Did she think of me as she looked out across the West Lake, and recall the pleasant hours we spent together? Oh, I had to believe it was true. Nothing made sense unless it was true. For two months since my arrival in Pinang I had been too dispirited to even compose a couplet! I was the worst of all failures – an ex-poet. Did she read the poems I had dedicated to her and sigh? Poems people sang on the street.
What honour I had brought her!
Perhaps my words seemed foolish now: a dream that was over. Nothing much. Perhaps she clutched another lover in the dark of night, breathing his breath, sharing her fragrance. How could she betray me so abominably?
Tears rolled down my cheeks, the first I had allowed myself since arriving in Pinang. How Lord Xiao must be chuckling at my discomfort! I felt too defeated even to hate him.
A rough hand gripped my shoulder. I was met by the grizzled face of Mi Feng.
‘Sir has had bad news?’ he said.
He listened carefully as I read the scroll aloud. Our eyes were drawn to the earthworks rising by the Western rampart. Even from this height, we could see arrows falling among the assembled labourers and soldiers. Shouts and screams were carried to us by the wind.
‘Do you know,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘I reckon Lord Xiao is afraid of you.’
I laughed bitterly, drying shameful tears on my sleeve.
To my shame I could not contain them.
‘Leave me!’ I stammered. ‘Save yourself, Mi Feng. Get away while you can. I am cursed!’
‘Think about what I’m saying,’ he urged. ‘He goes to the trouble of posting you here for the sake of a skirt. Then he writes to his cousin and forces him to send you where the arrows are thickest. He’s afraid you’ll come back.’
‘Little chance of that,’ I said, trying to smile.
The effort made me both sob and giggle hysterically at the same time.
‘Maybe, maybe not. Look at it from his point of view.
There he is, stuffing his face on a breakfast of roast swan and a report arrives from you. . . He reads it and goes cold because you might not die for his pleasure after all.’
‘But I am doomed, Mi Feng!’
He shook me by the shoulder so hard that I winced.
‘You’re going to disappoint him, aren’t you?’ he said, icily. ‘What kind of fool is this Lord Xiao? He doesn’t know Yun Cai like I do!’
Crazy talk to make me feel better.
‘You wait,’ he gloated. ‘You’ll be enjoying your girl before you know it and laughing at Lord Xiao as you ride her!’
‘Do not forget your place!’ I said, shocked.
‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘And don’t forget yours.’
Was there ever such a servant? Sometimes I wondered who was the master. But he had revived my spirits and for that I was grateful. I wondered what Father would do in my situation. The answer seemed obvious. Resort to guile, dressed up as courage and decency.
Later that day I descended to the siege lines with my clerks and halted beyond arrow range. The brooding walls of Pinang stretched before us. Mi Feng handed me several shields lashed together that he had begged from the captain who had eaten our spare horse. As an afterthought he had lent me a helmet and armour for my legs and arms.
He offered more, but I could barely carry what I had.
My prospects were far from encouraging. Field Marshal Wen Po’s earthworks were rising, layer upon layer, built by swarms of conscripted peasants, busy removing soil from a long ditch and piling it high. Teams of men ran up walkways, pushing laden wheelbarrows. They dumped the soil as quickly as possible, then scurried back for more. Meanwhile the defenders poured down a steady hail of rocks and arrows, countered by our crossbowmen, hidden behind wooden palisades. At such close range Wang Tse’s huge catapults could not easily throw boulders or bombs at our men.
Already the earthworks were approaching the height of the lowest battlements, but at a terrible cost. As we watched, several labourers fell with arrows protruding from stomach or back. Even our crossbowmen were severely harried. A steady stream of wounded were carted away in wheelbarrows.
‘Clerks!’ I announced, in my gruffest voice. ‘You are aware of my orders. It is the duty of all to obey their superior without question. I have been instructed by Lord Xiao to station myself in that wretched trench over there and record all losses as they occur. You will stay under cover here and compile the numbers I bring.’
I staggered towards the siege works behind my outlandish shield. Almost at once I was rocked by the thud of a crossbow bolt piercing the edge of the wood. How I ran!
A minute later, I was cowering in the ditch while shafts and rocks fell around us.
Aside from the bodies, the trench reeked of excrement and urine. Positioning my shield as best I could, I drew an abacus from my belt and began to slide the beads, each click a wordless prayer for a man’s soul, just as a Buddhist prayer wheel ceaselessly clicks and revolves. Every few hours I retreated like a crab to my clerks and they duly recorded the numbers of fallen. Needless to say, both soldiers and labourers viewed my antics with complete incomprehension.
Several days passed in this way before I could skulk in the ditch beneath my shield no longer. The constant sight of blood and corpses had begun to gnaw at my sanity. I found myself chuckling or singing unaccountably. I conducted lengthy debates with myself about all kind of topics, or simply curled up in a tight ball. Each night sleep came hard; harder still to drag myself back to the siege lines the next day. Yet disobedience would be mutiny, instantly punishable by death.
By now the ditch was littered with decaying bodies.
Rats scurried and crows stalked from corpse to corpse.
Flies and maggots feasted. And still our rampart rose.
That morning I borrowed a wheelbarrow from my friend the captain, filling it with a water cask and strips of rag made from the uniforms of the fallen. Instead of advancing behind my shield, I charged over to the earthworks, pushing the barrow. Arrows skipped around me.
Once in the scant safety of the ditch, I doled out water to the wounded, who lay groaning in the dirt, waiting for night to bring a chance of escape. When the water ran out, I went back for more, and so more days passed.
My tendency to shiver an
d mutter faded. No pleasant thing mopping the brow of a man writhing on the ground, yet it was preferable to inactivity. Now I had no time to be afraid. As I worked, I recollected the beneficial effect of good deeds on my next reincarnation. Surely I would be reborn nearer to Nothingness, a blessed abbot or hermit, untroubled by the misery and illusion of this world. Never again a love-deluded poet. Never again a weary scholar with ink-blackened fingers, striving for knowledge when the Way may only be inhabited without thought.
All the while dying men surrounded me, crying out for their mothers. How hard it was to tear soul from body, to step from one room to the next. Some faces carve themselves on the hillside of one’s spirit, like giant stone Buddhas.
One day, as I pushed my empty water cask wearily back to Mi Feng, I noticed His Excellency Wen Po in the distance, watching my progress from his horse. He followed me like a tiger anticipating the heart and liver of its next meal. Impudently, for by now I was past caring, I stared back, until a flight of arrows sent me scurrying forwards.
Then, almost unexpectedly, the ramparts were complete. We retreated for the last time as twilight fell and I found my path blocked by a dainty youth in yellow silks.
He was so out of place in dreary Pinang that I almost took him for an Immortal. He smiled at me.
‘Come with me, Honourable Yun Cai,’ he piped in a dreamy, mincing voice. ‘You are invited to dinner.’
The youth led me toward Wen Po’s headquarters, situated in a village above Pinang. At first I feared punishment. My crime? That was obvious. I was still alive. Yet it seemed strange that an austere man like Wen Po would send a catamite as his messenger, unless he intended it as a joke.
We were an odd pair. My guide anxious to avoid dirtying his silken clothes and slippers, all the while eyeing the soldiers we passed like a less-than-coy girl. And then myself: Yun Cai, pitiful Yun Cai, stinking of sweat, dried blood and soil. As I staggered through lines of marching men, a few bowed or called out my name, for my wheelbarrow of water had made me a curiosity among the besieging army. A few even seemed to know the reason for my presence in Pinang. Why should they not sympathise when most had been conscripted against their will?
Besides, I flattered myself that my poems were known even here. At least I wished to believe so.
‘How sad you look!’ tittered the youth.
I peered at him. His elation was too brittle to be natural. It made me think of the drugs used in the decadent days of the Han to make one impervious to sorrow.
‘I have every reason to be sad,’ I said. ‘That’s natural sometimes.’
‘You need someone to make you glad,’ he replied, coquettishly.
I glowered at him.
‘Who exactly has invited me to dinner?’ I asked. ‘It is evidently not His Excellency Wen Po for we have just passed the way to his headquarters.’
‘Yun Cai will see!’ cried the youth, covering his face with perfectly manicured hands and peering through the gaps between his fingers.
We reached an encampment constructed beside fetid marshland on the south side of the city. A small village of tents and pavilions stood in the centre of the camp, lit by red and blue lanterns. Soldiers in the white uniforms of a penal battalion, wearing death’s colour because their lives were forfeit, guarded the entrance. Beyond a low palisade of reeds gathered from the marsh, huddles of men lay on the chilly ground. Here thousands of conscripted peasants were bivouacked, those who raised the earthworks each day, cheap fodder for war’s senseless teeth to grind.
As we weaved through their silent ranks, my guide hummed a dance song I recollected from the capital. By this means he hoped to forget the miserable wretches around him. I could not resist a cruel urge.
‘You are afraid you will join them, aren’t you?’ I said.
He twirled on his heels like a dancer.
‘That will never happen!’ he cried.
Then he sang in a high, clear voice:
‘ Oh, never will the wind part the rushes, my love! ’
‘Who is your master?’ I demanded again.
‘ Never will the wind part the rushes,’ he sang. ‘ Never will the wind blow east, or west! ’
A low, restless murmur rose from the conscripted peasants hidden in the darkness. I, too, found his song disturbing. I shivered as the wind unfurled its icy breath.
We picked a way through to the pavilions, protected by a ditch and an earth wall six feet high. I was inclined to think these defences were not meant for Wang Tse’s rebels, but to keep the conscripted peasants from murdering their overseers. Certainly a large contingent from the penal battalion guarded the gates.
I was led to the largest of the pavilions and my guide bowed low, evidently relieved to arrive home.
‘Enter!’ he said. ‘You are welcome.’
I stepped inside. The tent was carpeted with dozens of thick rugs of the kind one finds among the nomads. A small charcoal fire glowed in the centre, roasting a stuffed piglet on a spit. A piglet! Roast pork! At once my mouth drooled shamelessly and I felt light-headed. Incense burners scented the air with pleasant perfumes. A lute accompanied by wisp-like bells tinkled lulling melodies from a darkened corner. Was I dreaming? I screwed my eyes shut. When I opened them again I saw Cousin Zhi lolling on a wide bed of furs, watching my confusion with evident enjoyment.
‘Cousin!’ he said. ‘Welcome to my humble home!’
He was still wiry and delicate although he had acquired a dainty, waxed moustache and goatee beard. I looked round and laughed.
‘Not so humble,’ I stammered.
‘Perhaps not, perhaps not.’
He rose and hurried over. Taking my hands, he patted them earnestly. His touch felt hot.
‘What a terrible time you are having!’ he cried. ‘Sit down! Rest! I insist on it.’
He clapped his hands and half a dozen servants appeared from the shadows. Two began to turn and baste the roasting piglet. Others brought me a cup of warm wine. How I gulped! I had thought to never taste such a pleasure again.
He motioned that I should sit on a divan beside his bed and I obeyed in a daze. Smiling, he took up his former position.
‘You do not look quite as you used to,’ he remarked.
‘Neither do you,’ I replied.
His robes were splendid. As fine as when he had followed the life of a foppish rake in the capital. He possessed a new confidence and, yes, power, for strength may shine from a man’s face. Cousin Zhi waved at the gorgeous tent, its statuettes and wall-hangings, with feigned embarrassment.
‘I must beg forgiveness for my poor hospitality,’ he said.
‘But in times of war. . . Well, what can one do?’
Where had he learnt such fastidious manners? Frankly, I preferred the old, resentful Cousin Zhi of my youth. At least I’d known what he was thinking. More wine appeared in my cup and disappeared down my throat.
‘How did you gain. . .’ I gestured around me. ‘All this?’
His smile widened and he curled up his knees.
‘Through my own merits,’ he said. ‘How else? Actually, I inherited my position from my predecessor, who found me useful in all sorts of ways. Regrettably, he had an accident involving some of our labourers and I was appointed in his place. I’m surprised you have not heard of the incident.’
‘What exactly is your position?’ I asked.
‘Why, I am in charge of this labour brigade! Come now, you must know that. I cannot believe you have not heard my name mentioned!’
He seemed piqued.
‘And what is your position?’ he asked, more in his old style.
‘Chief of the Bureau of Fallen Heroes,’ I said. ‘A more melancholy duty than you can imagine.’
He sipped his wine.
‘Oh, I can imagine,’ he said.
‘But Zhi! Look at you! You have become a great man.’
‘Of course,’ he said, wagging his finger as though chiding me. ‘In a normal battle the labour brigades are little regarded. They
transport stores, dig a few ditches, all the glory belongs to the fighting men. But in a siege, Yun Cai, in a long siege everything is different. Take the earthworks I have constructed: who could raise them for His Excellency except I? No one. You may wonder how I achieve this, but the answer is simple. The peasants out there,’ he gestured beyond the tent, ‘either dig or die. You see, Yun Cai, you need to know how a man thinks.’
He tapped his forehead significantly and peered at me from his elevated couch.
‘Of course, I know why you’ve been sent here,’ he said.
‘So don’t bother to pretend. I know everything. Oh, Yun Cai, how could you cast away all those years of study, even your honour, for the sake of a worthless girl?’
I gulped another cup. It coursed right through me.
‘It is strange how things end up,’ I said.
Cousin Zhi gestured impatiently to the servants and at once his own cup was filled. It seemed better to change the conversation.
‘How is Honoured Aunty?’ I asked. ‘I take it she prospers?’
‘Never mind her,’ he said, his voice slurring. ‘Actually I never think of her. Do such unfilial sentiments shock you?’
He obviously wanted me to be shocked.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Well, I don’t. Honestly, I don’t.’
‘Yet she is your mother.’
‘Why should I think of her?’ he demanded, shrilly. ‘Do you know that if I succeed here, I have been promised a Sub-prefect’s position? Oh yes, even though I have not passed the necessary examinations! Mother will be proud of me then! I might even allow her to live with me.’
He threw down his cup and began to pace before the roasting piglet. For the first time I wondered if he was entirely sane.
‘You haven’t changed at all,’ he said. ‘Still as arrogant as ever! But this is no monthly examination you can cheat at. Your life hangs on a thread, Yun Cai! A single thread!
Tomorrow His Excellency will launch our final attack on the walls and Pinang will fall. A victory I alone have made possible. You realise, of course, that you will be expected to accompany the first wave of troops.’
Taming Poison Dragons Page 26