The Mandate of Heaven (50 page)

More than that, less filial but closer to his heart, he remembered Yun Shu’s animated face as they talked in the moon-gazing pavilion. She had revealed her innermost feelings. Feelings he shared with all his heart. For both their sakes he would find a way back to Hou-ming. Of all the good he had ever known, she seemed best.

That night Deng Teng embraced a stark choice. Accept this hellish place until he escaped or deny reality and perish. His first act of acceptance was sleep.

He awoke at dawn to find Foreman Wu Mao looking down at him.

‘Eat now since you had nothing last night,’ he said.

Teng eagerly took the bowl and shovelled yesterday’s cold rice into his mouth. When he dropped a few grains, he scooped them up and devoured them with a sauce of dirt. Running his finger round the wooden bowl, he licked until every dreg of starch and sustenance had been consumed.

‘You’re a scholar, eh?’ asked Foreman Wu Mao.

Teng nodded, laughed hoarsely. ‘Fully literate,’ he said, ‘with ink for blood.’ Then he shrank back: the foreman might not know words like
literate
and punish Teng for his ignorance. But Wu Mao seemed to savour the unfamiliar syllables.

‘Lit-er-ate,’ he said. Then more forcefully: ‘
Literate
. It means, I think, you read and write well.’

Teng nodded. ‘You understand exactly.’

‘We shall talk later,’ promised the Foreman, rising to ensure the other labourers had been fed.

That day Teng was assigned the task of jumping on a wooden board to compress salt crystals into square bricks. An easier job than pumping or digging, yet one he could barely manage. His face and body were purple with bruises from the beating decreed by Overseer Pi-tou.

Later, as the work gang gathered for warmth round the gas flame, Foreman Wu Mao sat beside Teng. He seemed uneasy and Teng sensed why. It was a feeling he had learned as a boy when he wanted to ask Hsiung for a favour but feared to lose face.

‘Foreman,’ he said, softly, ‘you are thinking I can be of service in some way.’ Wu Mao looked at him suspiciously. ‘Do you read minds, scholar?’

‘No,’ said Teng, remembering Ying-ge’s betrayal, ‘I wouldn’t be here if I could.’

After Wu Mao had explained his difficulty, which was more his family’s than his own, Teng nodded. ‘Paper, ink, brush,’ he said. ‘That is all I need.’

Once these were produced he composed a letter on behalf of Foreman Wu Mao’s First Brother, who also led a work gang in the Salt Pans, to negotiate a favourable dowry with a distant cousin in a village south of Chenglingji famous for its apricots. Teng, relishing the feel of the brush, took special care. By the time he had finished, the entire work gang surrounded him, whispering as though a rite was being enacted. So it was. The rite of all civilized men to create and record and share thoughts.

After Teng read the letter aloud – including a prolonged and passionate appeal to the bride’s family for a large dowry – Foreman Wu Mao whistled through his few remaining teeth.

‘Strong!’ he muttered. ‘I’ll take it to my brothers and uncles. With a letter like that they might throw in a bride for me!’

Married foremen were allowed huts in an enclosure of their own. However, the Salt Authorities insisted on taxation of the dowry to such a degree that many could not afford to marry. For this reason, younger brothers like Wu Mao often went without a bride.

Weeks later the reply arrived: Teng’s letter had so impressed the local Sub-prefect (who had been paid a suitable fee for reading it) that he instructed the bride’s family to agree the marriage terms without haggling. As a result, Wu Mao’s First Brother moved into his own hut upon immediate receipt of wife and dowry.

‘We will talk later,’ said Foreman Wu Mao, his face flushed with satisfaction. Teng was left to wonder what about.

Once enslaved or indentured in the Salt Pans a man’s world dwindled. The past grew unreal, especially the consolation of happier times. Sixteen hours of toil each day, brief feeds, the discharge of bodily functions, all conducted in view of one’s gang. Perhaps half an hour’s muttered talk round the gas flame before exhausted sleep.

A man’s vision dwindled, too, reduced to the tool in his hands or snatched glimpses of the sky. If one scaled the high wooden derrick with its drill for deepening the borehole that allowed access to the precious salt-brine, there was little to see. Countless similar derricks spread across the swamp for several
li
in all directions and hundreds of iron pans emitted wreaths of steam into the dank air. On the landward side, one could trace the extent of the boundary walls and towers protecting the Salt Pans and imprisoning its thousands of toiling ants. Or even examine the fortress compound where the Salt Minister’s bureaux and warehouses were located, along with barracks of bored, restless soldiers. If one looked out across the lake, scores of small islands surrounded by rings of mud rose from the shallow waters to form a natural defensive barrier against marauding fleets. A desolate place unless one was a bird. White gulls, herons and cranes gathered in huge numbers to feast on tiny creatures in the mud and darken the sky at dusk and sunset.

Teng kept his eyes and ears open. He had been transported to the Salt Pans in chains at the beginning of autumn. Five months later, his body had hardened and grown tolerant of pains that, before his arrest, would have set him squealing. Only fools squealed in the Salt Pans. Weakness invited attempts by other slaves to steal your rations and clothes. In the case of pretty youths, more intimate treasures were looted.

Teng knew he was lucky to have gained the confidence of Foreman Wu Mao. Through him he heard rumours that Jebe Khoja had arrived at the Salt Pans shortly before New Year. When he left, half the garrison appeared to sail with him.

‘It is a ruse,’ revealed Foreman Wu Mao, as they sat beside the dancing blue flame one cold evening.

‘How so?’ asked Teng.

The younger man examined him. Then he seemed to decide. In that moment Teng knew he had gained a huge advantage against the fate Salt Minister Gui intended for him.

‘Word has reached my friends that the Mongols merely gather in villages up the coast, ready to issue forth in fleets of small boats. They are waiting for something. Or someone.’

Teng nodded thoughtfully. ‘The jaws of a trap,’ he murmured.

Foreman Wu Mao held out his hands to the flame so they seemed to glow, but said no more. Teng wondered who these well-informed friends might be.

Another evening, Foreman Wu Mao’s burly brothers and uncles arrived at their derrick and muttered in a close huddle, passing round leather wineskins. Teng tactfully withdrew to the shelter of the boiling pan and tried to sleep. He was awoken by a gentle tug on his shoulder.

‘We need your services,’ whispered Foreman Wu Mao.

Teng, who slept in damp clothes and rotting shoes, rose at once. He was led to the circle of Wu Mao’s relatives, who assessed him coldly. Remembering he was a Deng and they – whatever the ironies of their current positions – mere labourers, Teng returned their gaze.

‘Deng Teng,’ said Foreman Wu Mao, holding out the same cheap paper, ink and brush he had used before. ‘Write the following, if you please:
Separate must become together
.’

Teng looked at him curiously. But asking was dangerous in the Salt Pans. The question was, who would receive it, and why. ‘Nothing more?’ he asked.

Wu Mao nodded. It took little time to oblige. He was then dismissed to his blanket while the foreman’s brothers and uncles disappeared into the night to rejoin their own work gangs, for their clan had toiled in the Salt Pans for three generations. This fact gave Teng a chance to extend his influence.

‘Tell me, Wu Mao,’ he said, a few days later, ‘were the Salt Pans like this in the previous dynasty?’

The foreman granted him one of his sharp looks. ‘Why do you ask, scholar? Are you going to write a history? I’ll warn you now, no one cares about the likes of us. All they care about is how much salt we send.’

Teng threw caution aside, explaining the exalted rank of his Grandfather and all that the Dengs had lost by the change of dynasty.

Wu Mao replied with new respect: ‘No wonder Overseer Pi-tou has been instructed to take special care of you.’

He answered Teng’s original question: though life had been hungry under the Song Dynasty, conditions had been easier, wages higher and taxes lower. Above all, there had been no slaves to reduce the earnings of the salt workers and no omnipotent tyrants like Overseer Pi-tou with the power of instant life and death. Worse, many of the old salt-working families were being enslaved as a punishment for spurious debts invented by the Salt Bureau. It was well known these unfortunate wretches’ wages – no longer payable because they had been re-classified as slaves – were stolen by Bureau officials. As a result, many salt workers had fled to join the Red Turbans.

‘Perhaps the old conditions could be restored,’ said Teng, ‘if we were not ruled by foreign devils.’

Wu Mao looked round nervously. No one could overhear.

‘Perhaps,’ he replied.

When Deng Teng climbed the wooden derrick to inspect the Salt Pans, he always paid particular attention to the fortress compound. That walled rectangle crammed with buildings was the beating heart of power in this dismal place. And things were stirring in its hidden chambers.

One day he said to Foreman Wu Mao: ‘I have noticed many soldiers on the walls of the fortress. This seems impossible when half the garrison so publicly sailed away.’

They were inspecting bamboo pipes for leakages.

‘What goes away with great show can return in secret,’ said the Foreman. ‘Hold the pipe straight! Let us be thankful Overseer Pi-tou’s men did not find this leak before us.’

When it had been sealed, Teng said: ‘That is not all. I noticed lines of men with large packs on their backs, all tied together like a train of mules and whipped along by guards. They seemed to be taking a road through the marshes into the hills.’

‘Of course,’ said Wu Mao, ‘the Salt Minister maintains an illicit trade with customers in the southern lands where hardly any officials dare go. Those men carry blocks of pure salt and are forbidden to untie them from their backs on pain of death. They even sleep with them on.’

Teng considered this as Wu Mao caulked another bamboo water pipe.

‘How corrupt the Middle Kingdom has grown,’ sighed Teng, unconsciously using a favourite phrase of his father’s. ‘The Mandate of Heaven must surely pass into worthier hands.’

Foreman Wu Mao straightened and examined him in his careful way.

‘There are others who believe that,’ he said, softly. ‘My whole clan believe it and are ready to act. I tell you, the Buddha Maitreya is coming to cleanse the world! Then a new golden age shall begin, my friend. The Great Togetherness will unite all people! Look around you: famine, war, signs in the sky. Proofs are everywhere.’

‘You are a Red Turban,’ whispered the scholar. ‘So was my father! So am I.’

Foreman Wu Mao nodded. ‘I sensed you were a good man. Here’s another leak. We will talk of this later.’

Later, always later. Teng sometimes wondered if he would survive long enough to hear the foreman’s revelations. He was ordered to haul timber for a neighbouring derrick, leaving Foreman Wu Mao to fulfil his quota with a reduced number of hands. Teng dragged bundles of bamboo logs over the mud, slipping and sliding when they stuck until, with a heave, he advanced a little further. Such agonies interested Chief Overseer Pi-tou. Teng sometimes noticed him watching avidly.

Perhaps this, and the certainty he could not endure such treatment, drove Teng to desperate intentions. He would be avenged, whatever the cost! As he lay beneath his blanket, Teng pondered the apparent withdrawal of Jebe Khoja’s garrison. What prey did they hope to lure? He suspected it dwelt in Lingling County, proclaiming rebellion and the cause of Yueh Fei. In short, Jebe Khoja hoped to trap and destroy the Red Turbans led by the Noble Count of Lingling, once and for all.

This realisation stirred uncomfortable memories. He had failed Hsiung when they were boys, neglecting the duty of a worthy master to protect his servant. Now he glimpsed a way to make amends.