Taming Poison Dragons (13 page)

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modelled on the greatest of the court poets. Those composed on my own behalf employed a bolder, dare I say it, more ambiguous voice to pay my respects. There seemed no point in pretending to be someone other than myself.

We spent several evenings perfecting our calligraphy and P’ei Ti’s mother generously paid for the scrolls to be encased in sandalwood, embossed with the names of both recipient and supplicant. On a day declared propitious by an astrologer, we toured the wide city, presenting our gifts on bended knee, with many exclamations of unworthiness. In this, we had company. Outside one mansion a dozen other students from the Metropolitan Academy were queuing to present their own poems.

Afterwards I insisted we buy a flask of cheap wine, using the last of our cash. We drank perched on the city walls, gazing across the River Che as it flowed toward the sea. White birds wheeled and dived, their cries strangely exhilarating, and forlorn. We were like those gulls, except gulls seldom drown when fishing for the slippery eels of success.

A face swims into view, not arch and balanced like Su Lin’s. More like my wife’s, broad and prone to an uneasy grin. Her clothes simple and practical, sewn from hemp.

She wore her hair in the fashion of servant girls in those days, combed forward to the front of the head, bound by ribbons of blue, red, yellow – any cheap dye – above a straight fringe covering her forehead. Her hair was black and thick. Her figure already full, though she was no older than me.

I had picked her out among the other servant girls, as one does, through the corner of my eyes. When she stooped to scrub clothes, singing a wash-song in a city accent, her wet arms glistened in the sunshine. Sometimes her eyes would meet mine momentarily, then return to her tasks of sweeping and polishing. One day I passed her as she was being admonished by Honoured Aunty, head hung in submission, yet I caught the brief glitter of her gaze. Evidently Honoured Aunty did too, for she paused in her harangue.

Not long after, I was rooting through a box of old scrolls in the room beneath my bedchamber when she entered, carrying a square wooden bucket slopping water.

‘Sir, I have been ordered to keep this tower clean,’ she said, in a high-pitched, slightly whining voice, very different from Su Lin’s lively, delicate tone.

Welcome news. The place was grey with cobwebs and dust.

‘What is your name?’ I asked.

She glanced at me boldly from beneath her servant-girl’s fringe.

‘Peach Blossom,’ she said.

The name suited her complexion. Unaccountably I grew confused.

‘Carry on,’ I said, sternly. ‘Only don’t spill water on the scrolls.’

Most days she came in the late afternoon, so she often found me with head bowed, absorbed by my studies after long lessons in the Academy. At first I pretended not to notice her. Then, by degrees, I found myself questioning her. Peach Blossom’s father was a porter employed by Uncle Ming to carry wine. Her mother steamed rice balls flavoured with aniseed and sold them from a wheelbarrow beside Mallow Bridge. She never enquired about me, yet from unguarded slips I gathered she knew all manner of things concerning me. I found this vaguely flattering.

When she bent over her tasks I was aware of being distracted, her scent a presence I could not ignore.

One summer afternoon she came early and appeared in my doorway. The city was sluggish in the heat, sunlight poured through the eight small windows of my chamber.

There are wordless understandings. I watched her for a moment and she stood very still, her head bowed as though waiting. I felt my throat tighten.

‘Put the bucket down,’ I said. ‘Please come here.’

She did so. Her obedience excited me. She stood a yard in front of me. Both of us were breathing quickly. Her head remained bowed. So close, her sweat possessed a hundred lures. I reached out and pulled her towards me.

Her low moan acted upon my blood.

‘Please,’ I said, hoarsely, expecting a stream of angry words. ‘Unbutton your blouse.’

She reached across and slowly unbuttoned the bone oblongs from the loops holding them. Her small, firm breasts were revealed. I began to kiss her face and neck, hardly daring to venture down. She took my hand and led me to the bed.

Over forty years lie between that moment and now.

There have been many others since, but what of that? For an hour I knew nothing but intensity. Taste of her tongue, smell of her hair. My hand travelling up her plump thighs, encouraged by soft, insistent cries. Her own hands fumbling with my clothes, immodestly perhaps, though I did not care.

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How long we grappled awkwardly in this way I do not know, until she was naked beneath me. I reached down and she invited me with her limbs. Emboldened, I edged forward, and release set me free.

After that our liaisons became an agreed thing, though a great secret. Uncle Ming would be angry to learn of a shameful liaison with one of his oldest employee’s daughters. As for Honoured Aunty, I had no doubt she would dismiss poor Peach Blossom in disgrace.

Every afternoon, I would hurry from the Academy to my room and wait impatiently, imagining the warm, soft places of her body, our hurried, awkward conversation.

Often she did not appear, assigned other duties in the house, and I would pace with frustration, sometimes missing meals in the hope of better food. My studies suffered as they had when Su Lin deserted me, and truly I was in a bad way. Yet my situation was worse than I guessed, as later became clear.

In the year preceding the examination, Cousin Zhi’s animosity towards me grew alongside his fear of failure.

These were harsh and perplexing times for Cousin Zhi.

All his life he had been assured of a particular destiny, confirmed by the best astrologers; above all by Honoured Aunty’s expectations, repeated day after anxious day. Yet everything depended on passing the Metropolitan Examination, and there his troubles began.

As the months passed, his studies fell further behind, almost in proportion to the effort he expended. Never was there so earnest a student. Cousin Zhi listened with desperate diligence to every word from our teachers.

When I glanced at him in lessons, I could sense the fingers of his mind groping out blindly, grasping a few confused concepts, then dragging them home, where they promptly dissipated like mist. Frustration etched itself upon his young face. A fixed, determined scowl, unrelieved by mirth. I have no doubt he felt utterly alone. Ambition such as his stands or falls by itself, for it seeks pinnacles, by their nature solitary.

I would like to pretend my offer to help him stemmed from goodwill. That would be a lie. First I became convinced he would never pass the examination. Then, that Honoured Aunty would find someone to punish, and who was closer to hand than myself?

One afternoon I waited for him at the end of our lessons. He ignored my greeting. Honoured Aunty had ordered he must be carried everywhere by litter, in order to preserve his essential breaths. We made a comic sight, me trotting alongside while his chair bobbed through the crowds on the Imperial Way, surrounded by sweating lackeys. On-lookers must have thought me one of them.

‘Cousin Zhi!’ I called. ‘Please stop! I wish to speak to you!’

He looked pale and exhausted.

‘What is it?’ he snapped.

‘I have an idea for our mutual benefit.’

His red-rimmed eyes narrowed as he bumped and jolted along.

‘Why don’t we spend some time together reviewing our studies?’ I suggested. ‘It would help us both.’

A sly, thoughtful look crossed his thin face.

‘Ah, so you find it difficult,’ he said.

‘Not really. But I thought. . .’

‘Why should I help you?’ he interrupted, shrilly.

‘No, it’s not that. Can’t you ask the bearers to slow down?’

He seemed enraged. Almost mad.

‘Why should I help you?’ he repeated. ‘Your arrogance makes me laugh! Don’t think you’ll ever get the better of us! Look to yourself!’

The curtain of his litter fell and I was left breathless by the entrance to Ocean Market. My nostrils filled with the odour of decaying fish. Doubt touched me. Did he know about Peach Blossom? But that was impossible. I shrugged and walked home. Cousin Zhi’s litter disappeared in the crowd.

Soon afterwards his nervous affliction took hold.

First he stayed at home for one, two, then successive days, missing vital lessons. A dark cloud settled on Uncle Ming’s house, emanating from Honoured Aunty. A rule of absolute silence was imposed, lest laughter disturb Cousin Zhi’s rest. Even the porters and brewers were ordered to conduct their business quietly. I witnessed one servant being beaten for giggling below his bedchamber. Uncle Ming disappeared more often than usual to his establishment outside the city walls and Cousin Hong walked around with an unusually thoughtful expression.

When Cousin Zhi’s affliction continued, Honoured Aunty hired an army of healers. We have a saying in the mountains: plough too often and the soil blows away. So it was with Cousin Zhi’s cure. All agreed his illness stemmed from disharmony among the separate virtues pertaining to health, especially the circulation of the breaths. That much was obvious. However none could agree which breath was deficient.

One learned doctor diagnosed an excess of cold and dry breaths, prescribing a decoction of thirty-two ingredients, including toad-venom, earthworms, spiders and centipedes, boiled and reduced to powder. A second devised a medicine of crushed rhinoceros horn, jade and ground pearls, so costly that Cousin Hong muttered about frittering his inheritance. A third doctor attempted simple acupuncture and massage, claiming Cousin Zhi’s malady stemmed from an excess of the female principle, yin. Honoured Aunty sent him away after a single consultation.

Still he languished, and began to suffer fits of vomiting.

Honoured Aunty resorted to more proven methods.

Buddhist and Daoist monks were hired to chant spells and produce charms inscribed with potent characters, which Cousin Zhi wore continually, so his amulets clanked whenever he moved.

Finally, Honoured Aunty summoned her old familiar, the sorcerer who had frightened me when I first arrived in Uncle Ming’s household. The intervening years had fattened him. His robes, paid for by Honoured Aunty, shimmered with gold and silver thread.

One night everyone was barred from the house at his command, even Uncle Ming. Strange chants and smells escaped through cracks in the windows, or when Honoured Aunty, unable to contain herself, bustled in to check her son’s progress. The whole household crouched outside in the courtyard, waiting in appalled fascination.

At dawn the sorcerer appeared, pale and exhausted, propped between two young boys, smears of sickly yellow powder on his hands. He swayed as if in a trance, screaming hysterically that an evil influence lay heavy on the family, and that until it was removed, no cure was possible. Then he stumbled from the house and would only communicate the demons’ messages through secret letters to Honoured Aunty.

Cousin Hong cornered me and whispered: ‘Ah, Little General, the sooner you pass that examination the better for everyone. I have heard that the demons mentioned your name.’

I was so alarmed by this news I begged an audience with Uncle Ming. He saw me in his office. I got down on my knees and stayed there.

‘Uncle,’ I said. ‘Have I displeased you?’

His customary smile had grown thin and fixed of late.

Sighing, he poured himself a cup of wine from a simple, earthenware cooler which always stood by his divan.

‘Do you see this wine cooler?’ he asked.

‘Yes, Uncle.’

‘Do you know who gave it to me? Of course not. It was your father. When we were young we barely had enough food to get from one winter to another. The only reason I am here today is because your father shared half his rations. And they were little enough. Sometimes he gave me more than half, for I was feebler than him. Did you know that?’

‘No, Honoured Uncle.’

‘Of course not! Why talk of unpleasant things. He gave me a present when I married, this wine cooler. He advised I would need it. And though it is cracked and poor, and I could buy a hundred carved from the finest green jade, I still use it each day. Does that answer your question?’

My confusion must have been evident.

‘Simply pass the examination, win the honour your 

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father deserves, and I will consider this wine cooler paid for. Whatever befalls my youngest son will never make the wine I pour from it taste sour.’

‘I understand, Honoured Uncle.’

‘Good. Now leave me in peace. I’m sick of the lot of you.’

Afterwards I heard through Peach Blossom that the sorcerer had been set upon by unknown bravos and beaten to an inch of his life. I never again saw him loitering in Uncle Ming’s house. Yet every time I met Honoured Aunty she examined me coldly. Deep thought lay behind her look.

A month before the examination, P’ei Ti and I received a summons.

I have often watched the wind pluck seeds winged with fine, downy strands from a flower, and wondered if destiny or chance determines their settling place. Our poems had not been delivered by chance. Unexpectedly, they sprouted leaves.

We found ourselves in the huge antechamber of a mansion on Phoenix Hill, dressed in our best clothes, clutching yet more poems of praise. P’ei Ti could hardly disguise his elation and anxiety. This was the game he had been born to play. My own feelings were mixed.

We were both chaperoned by uncles, our fathers being far away. Uncle Ming wore robes of exceptional splendour which seemed to make him itch. P’ei Ti’s uncle, an official in the Imperial Treasury, exclaimed constantly about the value of the furniture and statues around us. We had been summoned for a test of worthiness, along with fifty others in the same expectant, awkward position, everyone competing to win patronage. In truth, Lord Xiao was merely looking us over, as one might a new wardrobe.

Lord Xiao. Chief Minister of the Imperial Finance, former Governor of Nanking and illustrious Foochow, author of a famous treatise on taxation which was notable for its rigour. While not of the Emperor’s intimate coun-cil, he had access to the sacred ear. Hundreds in the Imperial Administration built their careers upon Lord Xiao’s patronage, and through such obligations his influence spread far and wide in the Four Ministries. It was Lord Xiao’s custom to gather new protégés each year from the most promising students in the Academy. By virtue of our consistent success in the monthly examinations, and our flattering poems, P’ei Ti and myself had attracted his secretary’s interest, who had summoned us for an audience.