The Mandate of Heaven (18 page)

Shadows gathered into twilight over the limestone hill country. Birds flapped to roosts or swirled in noisy clouds over Mirror Lake, before departing for favoured cliffs and caves. Yun Shu felt lonelier than ever as the stars appeared. Her visitor’s warnings lingered, despite hours of intense meditation and prayer.

She sat on the steps of the shrine, seeking cool breezes after the hot, uncomfortable day. Her eye was drawn up to the promontory on which the two silhouettes had stared down. A glow was coming from behind the peak. Was it a flicker of fire? Perhaps it came from the eyes of a dragon. She had also read of magic fungi glowing in the night. Eating their white flesh conferred Immortality, but one might only find them with divine help.

For a long while she glanced up, until curiosity and the impossibility of sleep tempted her across the stepping-stones into the bamboo groves. A bright quarter moon hovering over Holy Mount Chang showed the path. She followed the lake shore, wading over the lip of a waterfall frothing silver in the moonlight. Then she was back in the groves, climbing toward the rear of the promontory, seeking the red glow’s source.

The footpath joined a wider track into the limestone hills. Here Yun Shu hesitated and pulled her nun’s cape close. Although overgrown, a path had been trampled through the foliage – and recently, for severed plants lay on either side, barely wilted. Who would take the trouble to clear a road in so barren a place, one leading nowhere? Certainly not a dragon. And magical fungi had their own mystic means of transport, appearing and disappearing at will.

It was lucky for her she did not step out onto that trampled path. Lucky, too, she was standing still as a graceful sapling when she became aware of feet moving towards her. Yun Shu barely had time to crouch in the shadow of a nearby rhododendron bush before a tall man carrying a halberd came into view. One by one other soldiers followed.

Behind the soldiers came a procession of more lightly armed men. All wore headscarves, though she could not tell the colour in this shadowy place. Some carried bundles of tools and large wicker baskets. She counted dozens passing within a few yards of her hiding place, and trembled, awaiting a harsh cry of discovery. Hardly daring to breathe, she narrowed her eyes lest they reflect a glint of moonlight. Feet continued to shuffle. Breaths panted from heavy burdens. Surely the loud beat of her heart would betray her. None of the passing men spoke or complained, and soon they had gone like a wind through the darkness. Still Yun Shu dared not move for a long while. When she rose, her muscles quivered from crouching so long.

Were these soldiers also drawn by the red glow? Whatever their motive they came in great secrecy. Yun Shu returned to Sitting-and-Whistling Pavilion. No one waited for her there. Yet the door was slightly ajar and she was sure it had been closed when she left.

The red glow continued all night. Only now it was accompanied by faint, rhythmic echoes beyond the edge of hearing, more a disturbance of the soul than an identifiable sound.

The echoes guided her dream across the still, moonlit waters of Six-Hundred-
li
Lake. Back to the Hundred Stairs. Back through distance and time to the day she had intended to leap off the cliffs of Monkey Hat Hill. An insistent gong beat a low, sonorous summons to prayer. Lady Lu Si’s mouth, puckered by concern, was ordering a bald man with a wrestler’s burly physique to carry her to the nun’s quarters.

When Yun Shu had awoken the man sat beside her, apparently dozing. Memories of Dear Uncle made her afraid to be near any man. He opened a single quizzical eye and examined her, before closing it again.

‘Don’t worry about me, Little One,’ he said. ‘I lack that which gives a woman both pleasure and pain.’

In no time at all, he began to snore.

Yun Shu had glanced stealthily round the clean room, its varnished wooden walls dark with age. The bald man was an odd-looking creature, strong yet effeminate. His moon face reminded her of the Egg of Chaos where
yin
and
yang
contain each other’s seed. An odd thought; one of many triggered by the unworldly atmosphere in Cloud Abode Monastery.

She learned his name was Bo-Bai and that in his youth he had served as a minor eunuch in the Imperial women’s quarters of the old, failed dynasty. He had fled west when the Song capitulated and been allowed to serve the nuns precisely because he lacked
yang
’s weapon and could not threaten their composure.

As for Lady Lu Si, it seemed more than just her appearance had changed. Now she wore the yellow and blue robes of a
sanren
, Abbess of Cloud Abode Monastery. There was a new confidence about her, a new authority. The forlorn, nervous, broken woman from ten years earlier had acquired inner power through her devotion to the Dao.

Yun Shu had agreed to whatever the older lady said. Everything was so novel she dared not ask questions. Instead she lay in the bed for two days, eating simple food from wooden bowls, listening to chants and gongs from the nearby temple. Scents of bitter incense drifted through her open window, along with whispered conversations. The contrast between the coarse, vulgar bedlam of the Zhong household and this mansion of peace could not be more marked – nor more welcome …

Yun Shu’s dreaming body curled tightly. She murmured in her sleep, rehearsing an argument conducted within herself every day during those first weeks: whether she truly belonged among the Nuns of Serene Perfection. Whether chance or fate had deposited her there just when they needed a new acolyte.

Abbess Lu Si seemed to have no doubt: ‘How else can you recite
The Way and its Power
by heart? An Immortal must have taught you while you were dreaming. One may not deny one’s destiny! It will always pursue you.’

Yun Shu had meant to explain why she knew the book so well. That Lao Tzu’s holy volume had been almost her only agreeable companion for years and she possessed an unusually good memory. Instead she kept silent.

‘It is a miracle and a sign,’ agreed the other nuns: Gold Immortal, Earth Peace, kindly Jade Perfected, even sly Three Simplicities, the youngest of the Serene Ones, who Yun Shu distrusted instinctively.

‘You shall join us,’ Abbess Lu Si said, ‘it is inevitable.’

Lady Lu Si’s whispered revelations concerning the Great Work set her imagination ablaze. Could she, too, perfect herself and become Pure Spirit? An Immortal granted the power to change shape and fly, to walk among the stars, weave magic at will? It seemed the supreme triumph over Dear Uncle and the hateful Zhongs, over the father she could not forgive. How he would long to acknowledge his big-footed daughter then!

Her heart hid a final reason, one that had nothing to do with the Dao. In truth, Yun Shu had nowhere else to go. Cloud Abode Monastery offered spaces to feel safe. The world bore little regard for women in general, even less for poor girls without family. The nuns might become her new family.

So Yun Shu had donned an acolyte’s robes and learned the ways of the ancient monastery. When the gong sounded she hurried to the temple bright with candles and gaudy images of a hundred Gods, a place alive with power. There they chanted and danced magical steps. All applauded her swiftness in learning the rites except for Three Simplicities who invariably noticed some error.

Between rituals she explored the many buildings within the high brick monastery walls: here were courtyards and meditation pavilions dating back five hundred years; a vegetable garden tended by faithful Bo-Bai; rat-infested wooden pagodas ten men high whose stairs creaked alarmingly. From their topmost balconies one could gaze beyond the city to the mountains ringing the great lake.

She also discovered a flight of stone steps cut into the limestone cliff, leading down to a jetty that gave access to the monastery by boat. No one tethered there now, not even fishermen. Yun Shu often sat on the jetty when she desired solitude, hugging her knees and staring out across the waters, re-enacting in her soul a hundred old sorrows that threatened to drown her new-found peace.

After two years of this life, Abbess Lu Si had summoned Yun Shu to the temple. She found the four senior nuns sitting on mats. All were unusually animated: even old Earth Peace was muttering in Jade Perfected’s ear.

‘Please sit,’ twittered Gold Immortal.

‘We are pleased with your progress,’ said Jade Perfected. ‘Do not think we mean to criticise.’

Yun Shu had knelt on a mat and waited. Abbess Lu Si glanced uneasily at her colleagues.

‘I really think we owe Yun Shu absolute frankness,’ she said. ‘There may be danger.’

The other two nodded.

‘Dangerous times outside our walls,’ croaked Earth Peace, who had not stepped beyond them for decades.

‘You see,’ said Gold Immortal, in her fluty voice, ‘we know you are resourceful and have seen, well, rather more of the world than some of us.’

After that, their tale – and request – came out gradually. How an acolyte had been sent to an out of the way shrine at Mirror Lake near Holy Changshan to purify herself following certain laxities uncovered by Three Simplicities. No one chose to elaborate the nature of the poor girl’s lapses. For the first year, regular if infrequent reports had come via travelling merchants and monks heading for the shrines at Changshan. Yet no word of her had arrived back in a long time.

‘We would like you to see how she fares,’ concluded Jade Perfected. ‘After that, dwell in the shrine at Mirror Lake and see what good you can do. When you are ready, take the poor girl and visit the shrines on Holy Changshan. We will send a message to a wise woman in the nearby village who will ensure you have sufficient food. When you return fully purified, we shall apply to the provincial authorities for your certificate as a Serene One.’

Yun Shu had bowed with gratitude. To be appointed a
sanren
so young! She had insisted on leaving for Mirror Lake without delay, even though winter had not fully turned to spring. There must be no slacking in the Great Work! For when concentration lapsed, melancholy and rasping, grating memories crept in. And her spirit felt sick, raw …

At dawn Yun Shu woke in the shrine room of Sitting-and Whistling Pavilion. The dream had been a warning, perhaps even an admonishment. Today she must fulfil the first of her allotted tasks, one she should have pursued with greater vigour. Namely, to discover exactly what had happened to her predecessor.

So far, all Yun Shu’s enquiries among the villagers had met with frightened silence. It seemed the only person likely to know was Mother Muxing. Yet even she had avoided an answer by rambling in the obscure Yulai dialect or pretending to be deaf. This time, however, Yun Shu was determined to get her way.

Besides, if anyone would know about the red glow in the hills and the secret procession of men, it would be Muxing. Her sons were hunters and familiar with the whole limestone country. Accordingly, she hurried off to Ou-Fang Village as soon as her morning devotions were complete.

The village had been a gloomy, suspicious place when she last visited; now its peasants peered from their houses as though destruction would fall any moment.

Four weeks had passed since Hornets’ Nest ambushed the tax farmers near Yulan Port. Everyone with access to news in Hou-ming Province had heard the story – and it had grown in the telling. Instead of three hundred soldiers, five times that number were rumoured to have lost their heads before being cast into a deep pit leading directly to the Fourth Hell. If Hornets’ Nest had been prone to worry, he might have wondered how so accurate a description of his secret hideaway was in circulation. Fortunately for his equanimity, he wasn’t. As for the haul of taxes, it had grown huge. Enough, whispered wits, to feed the Great Khan’s dogs for a week – or provide his princes and nobles and countless yes-sayers with a single breakfast.

Little surprise the hapless people of Ou-Fang Village considered themselves fortunate to greet another dawn. Four weeks was plenty of time to gather a large force and transport it to Yulan Port. And no one expected anything less than savage retribution.

* * *

Yun Shu picked her way through the narrow, muddy lanes, expecting a discourteous reception. This time, however, she was known. Mothers of children attending her school left the riverbank where they were singing as they washed clothes. All lined up and bowed in unison. One old man nodded from a doorway, aware the Nun had taught his grandson how to write their clan name.