Taming Poison Dragons (59 page)

‘Can you really not have heard?’ he says, in wonderment. ‘I thought you must know. But I suppose the intrigues in the capital hardly matter here. She became His August Excellency Lu Sha’s concubine and then, after his first wife passed away, his official spouse. Even now she retains a little influence in the court.’

We fall silent. Su Lin, a great man’s wife! My sweet, pretty Su Lin! I stare into the darkness.

‘So she got what she desired,’ I say.

‘Not all she desired,’ he replies. ‘She never had children, except by adoption.’

‘And you see her still?’ I ask, eagerly.

‘Rarely. When the affairs of state allow. In truth, she has withdrawn to her mansion on Phoenix Hill. You will smile to learn it is Lord Xiao’s old house.’

I do not smile.

‘Was she happy after I left?’

‘She was unhappy for a while,’ he says, reluctantly. ‘I believe she struggled to present a serene face to the world.

Su Lin has led a notable life, Yun Cai! Whether one may call it happy is less certain. She always asks for word of you, if that is any comfort, even commissioning an agent to report on how you fare. A strange kind of fellow, but reliable.’

*

At last I understand Thousand-
li
-drunk’s obscure hints about a great lady. The silver he received must have paid for a whole year’s supply of wine and juicy crickets.

P’ei Ti shivers as night cools. Phlegm chokes his throat and I wait as he swallows. How feeble we have become!

‘What of you?’ I ask.

‘I have been successful. I have won high office. I have earned the Son of Heaven’s favour.’

‘What of sons?’ I ask. ‘None of your letters over the years announced an heir.’

‘There has been none.’

Silence lengthens.

‘Oh, you can guess why,’ he says, irritably. ‘I always had other tastes, as you are well aware! Though you were far too delicate to mention them.’

‘It never mattered to me,’ I say.

‘Perhaps not. Yet they shaped my life.’

We listen to the strange stillness in the prison.

‘They are taking their time,’ I say.

Then we hear footsteps approach our cell. A faint light from the corridor outlines the door and there is a rasp of heavy iron bolts.

We cower together, peering up at the door. As it swings open, I try to rise but P’ei Ti’s grip on my arm holds me back.

When I finally straighten, two white-uniformed soldiers hurry into the room and take up position, lanterns in hand. A third enters, carrying a sickle-bladed spear.

Behind comes a shuffling, bent figure; his moist, brooding eyes are shiny in the lamplight. He wears the same vermilion robes as he did in the Phoenix Chamber. His hat is heavy with jade badges of office, dangling from silken cords. A scroll juts from one of his sleeves.

I am glad to be on my feet, even if my shoulders are old and crooked. I would hate to meet the Lawyer Yuan Chu-Sou on my knees. But of course that title has lapsed, he is the Excellent Yuan Chu-Sou now. His word commands life or death – and agonising transitions from one to the other. I detect amusement and curiosity in the narrowing of his eyes as he watches P’ei Ti struggle to rise.

‘It is a long time since we last met, Yun Cai,’ he says.

‘Then you waved a sword around like a little boy with his toy. I have never quite forgiven you for that. Or your impudence.’

We stand sullenly. Silence is our last weapon. One of the soldiers advances menacingly to force us to our knees but the Excellent Yuan Chu-Sou halts him with a click of his fingers. P’ei Ti flinches at the sound. I recollect his talk of torture and that Youngest Son told me General An-Shu’s chief adviser was personally conducting the interrogation.

‘Let them stand,’ he says. ‘They will be kneeling soon enough.’

Still we say nothing. Yuan Chu-Sou raises an eyebrow.

‘I have come to confirm your sentence. Clemency was my first thought. After all, the Second Chancellor P’ei Ti is a valuable prisoner. Then I recollected how stubborn and insolent you both were in the Phoenix Chamber and wondered if the Four Punishments might tame your spirits. The Empress-in-waiting proposed a full ‘roasting’, but preparing all those coals is tiresome. So we settled on a compromise.’

The lanterns flicker as a cool night breeze penetrates the cell. All involuntarily glance at the barred window. Yuan Chu-Sou clears his throat, then announces in a sing-song voice: ‘At dawn the sentence of His Majesty shall be applied. First, at Her Highness’s request, the ‘heater’.

Then, when the prisoners’ hands are quite withered away, the Four Punishments. Do the criminals wish to make any appeal?’

He longs for us to beg and grovel. But if P’ei Ti lost his courage before, he does not now. I follow his lead and shake my head.

‘Very well,’ says the Excellent Yuan Chu-Sou. ‘As you wish. Oh, one final thing. You might imagine that the approach of the Imperial forces makes it likely you will be pardoned, or even rescued. Let me assure you, that will never occur.’

He bows with great solemnity, like a merchant who has struck a fine bargain.

When he has gone, we slump back on the filthy floor.

‘How long until dawn?’ asks P’ei Ti.

‘Six, seven hours, at most,’ I reply.

We sleep. At least, P’ei Ti does. I simply doze. There is a debt I must pay, an obligation of understanding. And, to do so, I must go back, however reluctantly. . . It does no good to rebuke yourself, though an honest man can scarcely avoid it.

I returned to Wei from the City of Heaven to find the village stricken by plague. No one ventured from their houses as I rode up the main street on a nag barely worth eating. Bodies smouldered in communal pits, scenting cold skies of winter with the aroma of ovens. Only the foolhardy dared speak to their neighbours in case they breathed on them. I had passed through villages where beloved parents lay unburied in ditches, beside pale maid-ens and strapping young fellows in their prime. Their corpses mirrored my hopes.

The doors of Three-Step-House were barred and few of the servants recognised me. Those that did were afraid to come near in case I was infected. I found Mother dying on her soiled bed, and in my reckless mood, clutched her until the moment her last breath rattled out.

Father, despite his old war wounds, seemed unaffected by the plague. It is a strange fact that where I expected anger, I encountered deep relief at the sight of his only son. He never asked why I returned without office or wealth. Instead, he feverishly set out to arrange my marriage – by no means a straightforward matter in a plague-ridden district – to a daughter of a once noble family who had fallen on hard times.

I lacked the courage to oppose his choice. That marriage obsessed him, it was his last chance to determine the future. Within a month of my return I was wed to Fragrant Dawn, the go-between having cut short all ceremony – though she charged her usual fee.

Find a door, step through into the past – it was once the present. Which is more real? Do both exist side by side in time?

I close my eyes and recall the touch of a vanished woman’s breasts. Where Su Lin’s were small and pert, hers were round as our hill-country, and fecund. Her nipples hard and full. On our wedding night I was determined to think of her as an imposition, a duty, yet she filled my senses. Afterwards I felt guilty, as though I had betrayed Su Lin. And indeed I had.

When we awoke beside each other, neither of us knew what to say.

‘Husband, are you angry with me? Do I not make my Father-in-law happy?’

Certainly she gave him comfort, I could not reproach her for that. But he was old and fading; he was disappointed with me. How absurdly jealous I felt, that he might love his gentle daughter-in-law more than his own son!

‘Father, do you remember the day we both walked to Mulberry Ridge and I improvised a verse? Do you remember the lucky geese who flew over us?’

He looked at me through blood-shot eyes. A stroke had paralysed him and he was dying.

‘Father, do you know what I am saying?’

Idiot-eyes blinked at me. A week later, he journeyed to the ancestral shrine he had commissioned for a thousand generations of bones.

Then I was Lord of Wei, the title inherited, but by no means deserved. I was no hero as Father had been. Yet I was determined to produce heirs, to fill the ancestral shrine. It was all I hoped for.

‘Husband, we have been married six months and I am not with child. I beg forgiveness it has taken so long.’

‘You beg forgiveness? Foolish woman! Such things are hardly subject to will.’

Of course, she saw no other way I might esteem her.

Habits of bitterness and rancour had begun to settle in my mind. Mostly my thoughts were groping after shadows, or griping at those shadows.

After Father’s death I became the reluctant custodian of our estate, obliged to contemplate the husbandry of pigs, yields of rice, the maintenance of our irrigation system.

Without the help of my old playmate, Wudi – who first became head of his clan, then Headman of the Village – I would have floundered. Of course he did very well by my ineptitude, for I rewarded him handsomely. With the proceeds he bought considerable property of his own. Did he cheat me? Probably. It was a price I paid gladly.

Then, eighteen months after my wedding with Fragrant Dawn, a daughter was born.

How I loved Little Peony! At last the dammed up love within me flowed freely, a love I never felt for her mother.

Pretty, lisping girl, I rebuked any who suggested she was less than a son. What plans I made to teach her to write and learn the Five Classics, as though she were a boy!

She was an artless child, blessed with round, earnest eyes and a most frank gaze. At first her unblinking way of examining my face made me uncomfortable, then I came to welcome it, for her love, guileless and trusting, lent me confidence. I would perch her on my knee and the nagging emptiness in my breast faded for a while. She was a doorway through which a life of quiet affection and laughter might be glimpsed. Her freckles were deliciously absurd.

She took after her mother in eating anything set before her, then wanting more.

Yet one morning Little Peony left me and went far away. Her giggling suddenly stopped. She was just learning to talk. There is no reasoning away such sorrow.

Sometimes, when I met her old nurse in the village, I would be filled with a desire to weep.

Our next child, another girl, died before her swaddling clothes were cast aside.

Perhaps that was what drove me, step by step, toward the numbness of wine. After all, it is no weakness to seek oblivion, but a kind of wisdom. In the midst of drunkenness one glimpses things otherwise unrevealed. Stars shine brighter and the moon fills one’s heart. I wrote hundreds of poems no one ever read. And constantly, I neglected Fragrant Dawn.

So it was a surprise when Eldest Son was born in my twenty-ninth year. I barely noticed him. Then came Youngest Son, an autumn child to bless my thirty-sixth birthday.

I am sure my indifference towards my sons grew from a certainty they would not live. After all, our other children had died in infancy. I could not bear to become attached to them, or mourn as I did for Little Peony. Their mother never shared my reserve. She cooed and delighted over each stage of their growing. I looked on with a hundred emotions and, in my confusion, appeared cold.

‘Husband, why do you not teach Eldest Son how to hold a brush?’

I remember that conversation well. The boy was six years old. I was copying out a poem praising Su Lin, written when I lived in Goose Pavilion by the West Lake. The paper had grown mouldy in our damp mountain air. In truth, the same mould was rotting my soul.

‘I have told you before not to interrupt me when I am composing,’ I chided.

She put on her obstinate face. No escaping a conversation then.

‘Husband, you write so well. Are our sons not to learn their characters?’

I laid my brush on its wooden rest.

‘What for?’

‘Because all gentlemen should know how to read and write,’ she insisted. ‘Honoured Father-in-law did as much for you.’

Perhaps I emptied my cup and filled another with a shaking hand.

‘Madam, go away.’

As a dutiful wife should, she obliged.

But I did pursue her suggestion, every day insisting that my sons learn a new character. One might think that a man who has loved the flow of writing like his own breath, would seek to nurture the same in his sons, yet I was a harsh teacher. Each mistake was met with disappointment and rebukes. The more they dreaded our lessons, the more intolerant I became. Still I persevered and our daily lessons dragged on through years of resentment.

Fragrant Dawn sometimes criticised my methods and I would reply scornfully: ‘What do you know? You are an illiterate woman.’

Once she replied: ‘Perhaps so, husband, but I can see that you are crushing our boys’ spirits!’

Of course I fumed and ignored her. Each time I punished them for stupidity, I was punishing myself.

Then, in the depth of winter, as frost hardened the hillsides, Fragrant Dawn fell sick. At first I ignored it. Too busy, always too busy with something. As her health failed I went the other way. Day and night I lingered by her bedside, overcome with remorse. Her spirit escaped in a rattle of breath. As she stepped from this world into the next, her eyes glittered at me – a look of distrust and reproach, I thought. She feared what would become of our sons when she was no longer there to protect them.

From me, their own father! Oh, I understood her final look very well. I have never ceased to grieve over it. . .

Father! Look at me! Look how high I go!’

Youngest Son cries out as he swings back and forth on a rope attached to a tall bough in our orchard. Why don’t I acknowledge him? No doubt I am thinking of something else. What it is, I cannot remember.

‘Father, I have copied out the verses of Lao Tzu you wanted.’

There is a plea in Eldest Son’s voice. He is trembling. At once I realise he is afraid of me, that he yearns for a slight dusting of praise as a flower needs pollen. I am torn between sadness and irritation. I glance over his efforts and say sharply to cover my own confusion, ‘Much neater than usual. Do you know what the words mean?’