Creation (61 page)

The new duke stood to the north of us. As ritual requires, he was alone. He looked as old as, if not older than, his predecessor. But then, according to the duke of Sheh, he was not one of the dead man’s sons but a cousin. The ministry had rejected all of Duke P’ing’s sons in favor of an obscure first cousin who was “noted for his stupidity. He’ll do very well from the ministry’s point of view.”

“Do the ministers always choose the sovereign?”

“He who has received heaven’s appointment chooses as ministers only his loyal slaves.” The duke’s voice was suddenly shrill. As I came to know him, I realized that if he was not indeed two separate people inside one body, he certainly possessed two entirely different manners. One was confiding and sly, marked by a low-pitched voice; the other was highly cryptic and distinguished by a voice that was monotonous, thin, high. He made it clear that this was neither the place nor the time to discuss the anomalous position of his ducal cousins. As I soon learned, they are, with few exceptions, powerless; and their realms are governed by hereditary ministers, either alone or in combination with other hereditary office-holders. The mandate of heaven is no more than a golden dream of what might be but never is and, perhaps, never was.

In a loud voice the new duke of Ch’in addressed his ancestors. I did not understand a word that he said. While he spoke to the sky, slaves bore the chests, tripods, furniture into what looked to be a natural cave at the foot of a steep limestone cliff. All the while, music played. Since there were some three hundred musicians playing simultaneously, the effect was peculiarly distressing to a foreign ear. Later I came to like a good deal of Cathayan music. I was particularly charmed by those stones of different size which make such lovely sounds when struck with hammers.

As the duke finished the address to the ancestors, the palanquin that bore the body of his predecessor was hoisted high on the shoulders of a dozen men. The music stopped. In silence, the palanquin was carried past the new duke into the cave. Once the body was out of sight, everyone exhaled. The effect was eerie—like the first breath of a summer storm.

I turned to the duke of Sheh. He was hunched like a molting bird at the edge of the wagon, bright eyes on the cave. The men who had carried the body into the cave did not come out. Instead, a hundred veiled women moved in slow procession toward the cave. Some were wives of the late duke; others were concubines, dancers, slaves. The women were followed by a separate procession of men and eunuchs headed by the old nobleman who had attended the baked suckling pig dinner. A number of the men were guards’ officers; others were high-ranking courtiers. They were followed by musicians, carrying their instruments; by cooks and waiters who carried bamboo tables on which had been arranged an elaborate feast. One by one, the women and the men entered what was obviously not just a cave but an enormous room carved in the limestone.

Once the last of what proved to be five hundred men and women had vanished inside the cave, the new duke spoke again to his ancestors in heaven. This time I understood, more or less, what he said. He praised the ancestors by name. This took some time. Then he asked the ancestors to accept his predecessor in heaven. He referred to Duke P’ing as the all-compassionate one. In Cathay a dead man is never referred to by his proper name on the sensible ground that if he is called by name, his spirit is apt to come back to earth and haunt one. If the all-compassionate one was accepted by heaven, the duke swore that he would never omit any of the rituals that keep in harmony heaven and earth. He asked the blessings of all the ancestors for the orphan. I had no idea whom he was talking about. Later I learned that the ruler often refers to himself as either the orphan or the lonely one, since, of necessity, his father, or predecessor, is dead. He refers to his principal wife as that person, while the people call her that person of the duke’s.
She
refers to herself as the little boy. I don’t know why. They are unusual, the Cathayans.

From inside the cave, music began to play. Apparently a feast was in progress. For an hour we stood facing north while the new duke faced south. For an hour we listened to the music from inside the cave. Then, one by one, each of the instruments fell silent. The last sound was that of a bronze bell tolling. Every eye was now on the entrance to the cave. Beside me, the duke of Sheh was trembling. At first I thought that he was ill; but he was simply excited.

When the bronze bell ceased its ringing, the duke of Sheh gave a long sigh. But then everyone sighed, as if by prearrangement. Suddenly the men who had carried the palanquin emerged from the cave. Each man held in his right hand a sword; each sword dripped blood.

Gravely the men saluted their new master, who raised his face to heaven and gave a howl like that of a wolf. From all of his subjects to the south came an answering howl. I have never been so terrified. What I had taken to be men were wolves in masquerade. And now, before my eyes, they had begun to revert to their true nature. Even the duke of Sheh joined in the howling. Snout toward heaven, he bared preternaturally long teeth.

I still hear that terrible howling in those dreams where I relive that awful moment when the twelve blood-streaked men emerged from the cave, their duty done. Five hundred men and women had been killed so that their corpses might attend for all eternity their lord.

Although human sacrifice is hardly unknown in our part of the world, I have never seen it practiced on such a scale as it is in Cathay. I was told that when a true son of heaven dies, as many as a thousand members of the court will be put to death, which explained the sudden odd intensity of those prayers for the duke’s health at the end of the baked suckling pig dinner. Alive, the duke was merely contemptible; dead, he could take many of them with him. Actually, according to Ch’inese custom, only one of the council of ministers is sacrificed and he is chosen by lot. As luck and the highly tricky Huan would have it, the old minister who had defied him at dinner drew the unfortunate yarrow stick.

The cave was sealed. There was music, dancing, a feast. Later a mound would be built to cover the entrance to the tomb. Needless to say, a ducal tomb is such a great temptation to thieves that the beautiful and costly objects placed beside a duke’s bier are usually in circulation not too long after the funeral.

Huan refused to sell me to the duke of Sheh. “How,” said Huan, “can I sell an ambassador who is free to come and go?”

“In that case, Lord Huan, perhaps the time has come for me to go, in the company of the duke of Sheh.”

This impertinence caused my master to smile. “Surely you would not want to risk your life in the company of a man who looks for dragons in wild country, who fights with brigands, who consorts with witches. Oh, the duke of Sheh is a dangerous man to know! I could not let one that I have come to love confront such dangers in a strange land. No, no, no!”

That was that. But I had made up my mind to leave. When I told the duke of my resolve, he proved to be unexpectedly resourceful. “We shall disguise you,” he whispered. We were at the prime minister’s weekly audience. Petitioners from all over Ch’in were allowed to approach Huan, who stood at one end of a low-ceilinged room. Gold tripods to Huan’s left and right symbolized authority.

The prime minister received each petitioner with a quiet courtesy that was entirely unlike his fierce political views. He was shrewd enough to know that you can never enslave a reluctant people without first charming them. Certainly, you must convince them that your way is their way and that the chains which you have forged for them are necessary ornaments. In a sense, the Great Kings have always realized this. From Cyrus to our current enlightened lord, Artaxerxes, the diverse peoples of the empire are allowed to live pretty much as they have always lived, owing the Great King no more than annual taxes, in exchange for which he gives them safety and law. Huan had managed to convince the admittedly barbarous and remote Ch’inese that although there had once been a golden age when men were free to live as they pleased, that age ended when—and how he loved to use the phrase!—“there were too many people and too few things.”

Actually, Cathay is relatively underpopulated and many parts of that rich land are empty. Except for a half-dozen cities with populations of a hundred thousand, Cathay is a land of stone-walled villages set in rolling countryside between the two rivers. Much of the country is densely forested, particularly to the west, while to the south there are Indian-like jungles. Consequently, except for the well-disciplined and entirely controlled Ch’inese, Cathayans tend to move about a good deal. If a farm is washed out by a flood, the farmer and his family will simply shoulder their plows and the ancestral hearthstone, and move on to another country where they will begin again, paying tribute to a new overlord.

The most important travelers are the shih. There is no equivalent word—or class—in Greek or Persian. To understand the shih, one must understand the Cathayan class system.

At the top is the emperor, or son of heaven. Currently, he was and perhaps will be but certainly, he
is
not. As I say this, I suddenly realize how clever the Cathayans are to have a language without a past, future or present tense. Below the emperor, there are five orders of nobility. The highest is that of duke. With odd exceptions, like the mad duke of Sheh, the dukes are the titular and sometimes actual rulers of states, which makes them equivalent to our kings and tyrants; and like our kings and tyrants, who recognize the Great King as overlord and source of legitimacy, each of these dukes has received, in theory, his authority from the son of heaven, who does not exist. If he were to exist—that is, exercise hegemony over the Middle Kingdom—he would probably be the duke of Chou, the direct descendant of the Emperor Wen, who established the Chou hegemony over the Middle Kingdom. Certainly he would
not
be the duke of Ch’in, who descends from Wen’s brutal son Wu.

The eldest son of a duke is a marquis, and when the duke dies he becomes a duke, barring an all-too-common untoward accident. The other sons of the duke are also marquises, and while the eldest son of the second son will retain that title, the other sons will drop to the next order of nobility, and their sons to the next, and theirs to baron. The sons of a baron—the lowest aristocratic order—are shih. During the six or seven centuries since the establishment of the Chou hegemony, the Chou descendants now number in the tens of thousands, and those without rank are shih or, let us say, knights, who retain only one hereditary privilege: a knight can go to war in a chariot, assuming that he can afford to maintain one.

In recent years there has been a considerable increase in the ranks of the knights. These not-quite noblemen are everywhere. Many specialize in administration, rather the way our eunuchs do. Many are army officers. Many teach. A few devote themselves, rather like Zoroastrians, to keeping uncorrupt those religious observances that maintain a proper harmony between heaven and earth. Finally, the knights administer most of the Cathayan nations, serving those hereditary officers of state who have managed to usurp the powers if not the divinity of the dukes.

The highways of Cathay are crowded with ambitious knights. If one of them fails to find a position in, say, the ministry of police at Lu, he will move on to Wei, where his services may be valued more by the local administration than they were at home. Human perversity being what it is, a knight’s chance of employment is usually best the farther he is from his native land.

Consequently, at any given moment, thousands are on the move. As they tend to maintain close communication with one another, they form a sort of middle kingdom of their own. In place of a son of heaven, there are now ten thousand knights who govern Cathay, and though the states are constantly at war with one another, the knights are often able to mitigate the savagery of their masters—except at Ch’in, where they have little or no influence over Huan and his fellow despots.

Finally, a new element has been introduced in the class system. There is now a category—one cannot say class—known as gentlemen. Anyone can become a gentleman if he observes the way of heaven, a complicated business that I shall get to when I describe Master K’ung, or Confucius, as he is also known. He is given credit for having invented the idea of the gentleman, a notion of great appeal to the knights, and to hardly anyone else.

As Huan accepted petitions and listened to the complaints of the people, the duke of Sheh and I plotted my escape. “You must shave off your beard.” The duke pretended to admire a feather screen. “We shall get you women’s clothes. You will travel as one of my concubines.”

“A
white
concubine?”

“Precisely the sort of concubine who would appeal to the duke of Sheh, as all the world knows.” The duke looked amused. “But we’ll take no chances. You’d better darken your face. I’ll send you a coloring I use myself. And of course you’ll also be veiled.”

“Will your retinue be searched?” I knew the strict guard that was kept not only at the gates of the city of Yung but at checkpoints throughout Ch’in. People were forever trying to escape Huan’s entirely rational rule.

“They would not dare! I am a fellow sovereign. But if they do ...” The duke made the universal gesture of bribery.

Suddenly Huan was at our side. He had the gift of noiseless ubiquity. I often thought of him as resembling the earth shadow of a fast-moving cloud.

“Lord Duke ... honored Ambassador! I can see that you admire my screen of feathers.”

“Yes,” said the duke of Sheh very smoothly, “and I was about to explain to your guest its meaning.” I looked at the screen and for the first time actually saw it. Eight black birds against a stormy sky.

“You would know its meaning, Lord Duke.” Huan turned to me. “There is nothing that our lord of Sheh does not know about our ducal family, which is also his family.”

“Quite true. The great-grandfather of the late all-compassionate one was my great-uncle. He was called P’ing. One day he received from the north a group of musicians. They told him that they knew all the music that had been played at the court of the Emperor Wu. Duke P’ing was skeptical. Who wouldn’t be? Everyone knows that most of the sacred music of the original Chou court is either hopelessly corrupt or entirely forgotten. He told them as much. But the music master—who was not blind, a suspicious detail, since every proper music master must be blind—the music master said, ‘We shall prove that we can bring heaven close to earth.’