The Mandate of Heaven (48 page)

Honoured Father, I write as your dutiful daughter, mindful of your lingering displeasure. First, I pray that you and my honoured brothers prosper for a thousand autumns. Likewise, your chosen companion, Golden Lotus.

Next, I pray the rumours concerning the destruction of Deng Mansions are unfounded. People claim Deng Teng perished in a fire started by your men, at your command. Father, only you know the full cause of that tragedy.

Honoured Parent, it cannot be that you do not know how high I have risen through the Dao’s favour. I cherish the hope you feel a little pride in your daughter. In obedience, Yun Shu.

This letter was not consigned to the flames but sent – as was a version of it every year – to Salt Minister Gui’s residence in Prince Arslan’s palace compound. Eunuch Bo-Bai carried the message, delivering it personally to Gui’s secretary.

A week later, a messenger arrived at Cloud Abode Monastery, asking for Abbess Yun Shu. He bowed deeply and presented a letter smelling faintly of sandalwood. Her nose twitched. With a suspicious glance at the messenger she opened it:

Yun Shu (sometimes called Abbess Yun Shu), you are summoned to Salt Minister Gui’s residence in five days at the noon bell. Not presenting will be disobedient badness.

The letter was not signed. Yun Shu’s emotions leapt between surprise, excitement, thankfulness and fear. Father had showed signs of forgiveness! Yet re-reading the letter stirred doubts. Not only was its style odd – indeed, vulgar – the characters were ill formed, suggesting a cheap, hired scribe. Then there was the scent of sandalwood.

For an hour she paced her apartments, leaving the messenger outside. Finally she summoned him: ‘Inform my Honoured Father I shall obey all his instructions. But tell me, did the Salt Minister give you the letter himself?’

The messenger shrugged. ‘A maid gave it to me.’

Yun Shu could learn no more from him.

* * *

She arrived at Prince Arslan’s palace on the allotted day. Fourteen years earlier, before her marriage into the wretched Zhong clan, the palace compound occupied a third of its current size. Since then the Prince had decreed much of the area within Hou-ming’s city walls should be cleared of houses. Not to create vegetable patches for hungry folk but parkland where deer could graze and be hunted by his entourage.

As Yun Shu arrived, a new boundary wall was being constructed by thousands of conscripted peasants. Dust drifted through the air, along with clouds of smoke. Many houses and other buildings – warehouses, temples, countless shops – had been either burned or dismantled. Their ash was shovelled over the soil to fertilise grass seeds specially imported from the north.

Everywhere, one heard beating hammers and saws. Teams of men pushed wheelbarrows of roof tiles and earth and timber from broken houses to create artificial hills. Other peasants laboured in the spring sunshine to dig a lake modelled on the great Khan’s in the capital, Dadu.

Soldiers stopped her palanquin at the barrier. Bo-Bai explained the Salt Minister’s invitation and they were waved through. Soon she entered an ornate gatehouse leading into the palace itself. Here the guards were more diligent. Yun Shu was forced to wave her letter, though none of the Prince’s elite Mongol bodyguard could read.

Beyond the gate, Yun Shu lowered her head. When she had lived here – if one might call it living, rather dragging through day after day, year after year – she had slept among the servants, an outcast in her own family. Sensations flooded back: scrubbing, sweeping, a thousand petty humiliations. She pulled her Abbess’s robe and shawl tight to hide her face.

They passed through lesser gates into a wide courtyard. Here she disembarked from the palanquin, leaving its sweating porters and Bo-Bai to await her return.

Someone familiar, a slender woman approaching her thirtieth year, had been sent to greet her.

‘Pink Rose!’ cried Yun Shu. ‘You are still here!’

Her old friend among the family maids had hardly changed. Pink Rose bowed very low. ‘Honoured Abbess,’ she said, ‘I beg you to follow.’

Yun Shu smiled. ‘Call me by my proper name! Have you forgotten our whispered gossip while the house slept around us? I have not.’

The maid looked around fearfully.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I have not forgotten.’

The two women – for neither were girls any longer – glanced sideways until Yun Shu spoke. ‘Pink Rose, how are my family?’

Her old friend’s expression clouded.

‘I must not say, Yun Shu! It is not for me to say. Who knows if we are being watched?’

Yun Shu followed with a heavy heart. They passed courtyards bright with coloured flags and gilt carvings, not to mention crowds of idlers in silks maintained by taxes and government monopolies. Prince Arslan’s court had gained flocks of lackeys and hangers-on. The palace was a maze of staring eyes.

They reached an area of houses allocated to high officials. Of all these, Salt Minister Gui possessed the grandest. Its familiar, low silhouette and ornate, upward-curving roof tiles filled Yun Shu’s eyes with uncontrollable tears.

‘This way,’ murmured Pink Rose.

Yun Shu expected to be shown to the main audience room, there to prostrate herself before Father’s chair. Terror gripped her at the thought of his reproaches – and excitement, too, for once he had finished chastising they might begin again.

Pink Rose gestured at a side door leading to a small courtyard garden.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Yun Shu.

‘We are already late, I shall get into trouble,’ urged Pink Rose.

Yun Shu followed down a clean, well-swept corridor to a sliding door. Beyond lay a rectangular garden. Dozens of clay pots were laid out in patterns on the gravelled paths. Some contained fish, others miniature trees or blooming flowers. In the centre was a flagged area with a circular marble bench around a drooping willow. On the bench sat a beautiful lady in perfect make-up and silks, her silver hairpiece glinting in the sun. When Yun Shu looked more closely the illusion was dispelled.

‘Where is my father?’ Yun Shu said, looking round.

Golden Lotus produced a fan. It clicked open and began to waft. ‘Please be seated.’ His voice was high-pitched and mellifluous.

‘Where is Honoured Father?’ repeated Yun Shu.

Now the fan paused. ‘I can’t tell you until you sit beside me.’

Yun Shu obliged, keeping a distance from her host. The scent of sandalwood itched in her nose. ‘Father is not here, is he?’

‘What a bright girl you are! Very bright!’

Yun Shu watched him withdraw a packet of folded letters from his silk girdle bag. There were over a dozen and she recognised them at once.

‘My annual letters!’ she exclaimed. ‘How do you have them? They were sent to Father!’

A faint smile played over Golden Lotus’s rouged lips.

‘I believe he never received them!’ cried Yun Shu.

The fan wafted back and forth. ‘Your father is away at the Salt Pans,’ he said. ‘Does it surprise you that I wish to see my stepdaughter?’

Yun Shu did not disguise her scorn. ‘I was never
that
.’

‘Oh, but you were. Your Father commanded it. Did you come here, even now, to disobey him?’

‘No,’ said Yun Shu, hating the tremor in her voice, ‘of course not. But …’

‘There can be no
buts
,’ said Golden Lotus, mildly. ‘One either obeys or one is disobedient. That is all.’

Yun Shu dabbed her eyes with a sleeve as Golden Lotus opened one of the letters.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘written in your seventeenth year. It begs forgiveness.’ He opened another. ‘So does this, written only two years ago.’

Yun Shu’s head was lowered, tears upon her cheeks. She glanced up. Golden Lotus had risen, his delicate, manicured hands clenched as he stepped uncertainly over the crunching gravel with his tiny, lotus feet, graceful as a dancer even in the midst of his agitation.

‘No one thinks of me!’ he exclaimed. ‘How often I am unhappy! All people consider is themselves. Your Honoured Father is so very clever! His Excellency Jebe Khoja trusts him to write all his reports concerning taxes. Letters sealed with Prince Arslan’s own seal that go straight to the Great Khan. But, oh, his moods! Only I know how to bring him peace. He would never have reached his exalted position without me.’

Yun Shu stared fearfully at Golden Lotus. His outburst reminded her of the time he had tried to bind her feet, nearly twenty years before.

‘What has this to do with me?’ she asked.

Golden Lotus subsided and resumed his seat on the bench. ‘Do you really not know what has happened?’

‘No.’

‘Then I will tell you.’

Still he paused, once again fanning himself.

‘Your two brothers are dead,’ he murmured in his gentle falsetto, ‘or so we believe. First Son got involved with a lesser prince in the court. We do not really know. It seems this prince had ambitions beyond his stature. Certainly, the prince has been banished. And so have your brothers, along with many of the prince’s friends and followers. Only their banishment …’ Golden Lotus’s eyes filled with tears. ‘It was the kind that lasts forever! Their handsome young bodies are lost to us! We do not know where they are buried. Yet we dare not mourn in public, in case Prince Arslan thinks dear Gui is disloyal to the Great Khan. Those poor, foolish boys!’

The fan grew agitated as it rose and dipped. Yun Shu knew she should wail, weep, lament so close a loss. She felt nothing. Perhaps even a secret gladness. Her brothers had always been strangers. Now, with their deaths, Father’s attention became a possibility. Golden Lotus evidently sensed her reaction, for he nodded.

‘Everything has changed. Your Father cannot bear to think of it. Not yet. So angry! So miserable! Nothing I do or say calms him.’

The scent of sandalwood in Yun Shu’s nostrils intensified as Golden Lotus leaned forward, placing his hand on her knee. Her breath caught, paralysed by his touch.

‘And that,’ he said, ‘is why I wanted to speak with you.’

Their faces were an arm’s length apart. She exhaled slowly and shrank back. Still the pressure of his hand lay on her knee.

‘Why?’ she said. ‘What can I do?’

‘I have an offer,’ Golden Lotus’s hand withdrew and he grew businesslike. ‘If you ceased to be Abbess, you could become a wife. I could arrange that, Yun Shu. You could live here with your husband – I have one in mind, young, strong, handsome, a minor official in your father’s service who would do whatever you like – especially when it came to making grandsons for the Salt Minister. All disobedience would be forgotten. And my dear Gui would have a future for which to gather wealth, in the form of his grandsons.’

Yun Shu’s mouth felt uncomfortably dry. She rose and bowed.

‘I will mourn my brothers,’ she said. ‘And petition Heaven for their favourable rebirth.’

Golden Lotus fanned himself. ‘I did not expect you to agree at once,’ he said. ‘But do not imagine you will always be Abbess of Cloud Abode Monastery. Think of the Buddhists from Tibet! If you lived here we could keep each other company while the Salt Minister is away. I suspect you, too, are lonely. How pleasant it would be for us both!’

Yun Shu wished to hear no more. She left with a hurried bow.

Yet Golden Lotus’s suggestion of children touched longings that grew deeper each year, however hard she suppressed them. Inevitably she remembered her last meeting with Teng. It had seemed – for she knew he’d felt the same – he would have satisfied those longings.

Yun Shu wept silently in the palanquin all the way to Cloud Abode Monastery. Golden Lotus’s sad, watchful eyes and insinuating singsong voice seemed to shadow her progress.

‘Your thoughts drift from the Great Work.’

Yun Shu glanced up guiltily at Worthy Master Jian. ‘I apologise, Master.’

They were kneeling side by side in the lowest level of Wild Goose Pagoda, meditating upon the cosmic journey ahead. Even after his reproach, Yun Shu’s focus dissolved as soon as it hardened. She glanced sideways through half-opened lids at the Worthy Master, cross-legged on the mat beside her, his eyes closed. An unfamiliar odour hung upon his breath, rank and metallic. He sighed and relaxed his posture.