Binu and the Great Wall of China (3 page)

The sorceresses cleverly avoided giving Binu an answer; instead, they examined her tongue and cut off a lock of her hair, which they held over a flame with a pair of tongs. She did not know what it was the sorceresses saw, but they knelt on a straw mat, placed bleached
tortoise shells in an earthen vat, and then emptied them back out, all the time chanting incantations. Binu stared at their gaunt faces, their expressions a mixture of fear and joy.

‘Do not go,’ they said. ‘If you do, you will not return, but will be struck down by illness on the road and die on the plain.’

‘Will I die on the way there,’ Binu asked, ‘or on the way back?’

The sorceresses blinked rapidly as they examined the pattern created by the tortoise shells on the mat. ‘Do you not fear death?’ they asked. ‘Is it your wish that you will die on the way back?’

Binu nodded. ‘If I can deliver winter clothing to Qiliang,’ she said, ‘I will die happy.’

The sorceresses of Kindling Village had never before met a woman like this. With censorious looks in their eyes, they said, ‘What sort of men’s winter clothing is worth dying for?’

‘Winter clothing for my husband, Qiliang, is worth dying for,’ she replied.

The sorceresses were speechless. Then, one last time, they placed the tortoise shells into the earthen vat and emptied them out onto the mat. They fell in the shape of a horse. ‘Since you are willing to sacrifice your life,’
they said, ‘then go. Do not forget that you must hire a Blue Cloud horse, for only a Blue Cloud horse can bring you back home.’

So Binu went to hire a horse at Banqiao, only to discover that the domestic animal market there had closed down. An autumn flood had caused the river to overflow its banks and swallow up temporary bridges erected by the horse traders. Their riverside thatched sheds stood empty, and the fodder and the smell of livestock had drifted off on the wind, leaving only posts standing askew as they forlornly awaited the return of the horses, though indications were that they would not be coming back.

Water and straw merged to reclaim the riverbank and, in the wake of the plunder, Blue Cloud Prefecture was waterlogged and bleak. Binu stood at the water’s edge, recalling how she and Qiliang had passed through Banqiao on their way to Cinnamon City to sell their silk. There had been many, many horses in the livestock market that day. The half-naked horse traders used to lead the animals down to the river to drink, all the while calling out to the women tending distant paddies, ‘Big Sister, Big Sister, come and buy my horse.’ That is what Binu had come to do, but traders from the Western Regions or from Yunnan were nowhere to be seen. All that was left of
their presence was a large, cast-off, chipped vat in front of one of the sheds, filled half with rainwater and half with the remnants of burnt straw; a raven was perched on the rim.

Binu followed the riverbank, hoisting up the hem of her robe – pink flowers on a blue background – until she met up with the old pig tender, Sude, who stared at her in wonderment. ‘Are you trying to hire a horse? That, I’m afraid, is out of the question. There are so few of them left in Blue Cloud Prefecture that you could try for the next ten thousand years and not be able to hire one.’

She walked on in despair, thinking of the sorceresses’ prophecy, and was just stepping through a profusion of wild chrysanthemums when a frog hopped out from the water and, inexplicably, began to follow her. She stopped. ‘Why are you following me?’ she asked. ‘You’re not a horse and you’re not a donkey, so go, go, go back into the water.’ The frog hopped back to the river, landing on a raft bobbing lightly on the surface. Someone had cleaved the raft in two, and the surviving remnant was rotting away, its wooden planks sprouting a bed of musky green moss that was home to the frog. Binu recalled how, during the summer, a blind woman had poled that raft downriver, wearing a bamboo hat on her head and the
black attire favoured by women who lived in the mountains. As she sailed downriver she called out a name, but no one in the neighbourhood could understand her North Mountain accent. She was like a black egret that lived on the water, never on land. Eventually, the women who went down to the river to gather lotuses came to understand that the blind woman was searching for her son. But no one had ever seen her son, and nearly all the men of Blue Cloud Prefecture had been taken north as forced labour. Some people wanted to tell her that she should not be drifting downriver if she wanted to find him, that she should pole her raft up north. Others wanted to advise her that the first flood would soon arrive, making the river treacherous. But she stubbornly let the flow of water take her downriver, perhaps not understanding the language of those on the riverbank or maybe not knowing how to leave her raft; and she continued calling out for her son, first to this bank, then to the other. For the blind woman, the difference between day and night did not exist, so there were times in the dark early-morning hours when her shrill, mournful cries swirled above the riverbanks as her raft ploughed through, disturbing the crows in their treetop perches and interrupting the sleep of egrets on the sandbars. This night-shattering din startled people out of their
pre-dawn sleep, the sounds from the river bringing them an indescribable sense of unease in the darkness. And their discomfort was justified: the autumn floods arrived early, and everyone said it was the blind woman who had set them loose. After the waters receded, there on the riverbank they saw the wooden raft, now torn in half. The raft was empty, the rafter gone, like a single drop of water in a surging river.

Binu had not expected that what awaited her at Banqiao was neither a horse nor a horse dealer, but a frog. It might well have been waiting there for some time, on the riverbank or in the water, listening for her footfalls, and the moment she left Banqiao, it began hopping along behind the terrified Binu on the road leading to the village. Was it in fact a reincarnation of the blind woman? All the women in Blue Cloud Prefecture had had previous lives, and some of those had come from the water. Wang Jie’s voiceless mother, at one time an aromatic calamus, crawled down into a calamus thicket just before she died, and when Wang Jie ran up to the riverbank, his mother was nowhere to be seen. He could not tell which calamus plant was his transformed mother, so each year at Qingming, the day for sweeping graves, he went down to the river and performed the rites for all the calamus there. If someone could transmigrate into
a calamus plant, Binu was thinking, couldn’t the blind woman have transmigrated into a frog? She turned to scrutinize the frog, and was shaken by what she saw. The amphibian’s eyes were like pearls, pure but lustreless. Yes, it was blind!

Hoisting up her robe, Binu ran like a madwoman and shouted fearfully, ‘It’s her, it’s her, she’s come back as a frog!’ No one was around to hear her – there was nothing but grass and weeds – so not a soul heard Binu reveal the frog’s true identity. As she ran, she dimly heard the sound of wind coming at her from the river, carrying with it the mountain woman’s cries for her son, and a sudden clarity in the indistinct shouts, ‘Qiliang! Qiliang!’ Unable to believe what she was hearing, Binu slowed her frantic steps, then stopped running altogether. She stood still beneath a mulberry tree and thought about whether she should fear the ghost of a frog. She was not really afraid, so she resolved to ask the blind woman the name of her son. The frog hopped wearily toward her; it was indeed a frog, one whose blind eyes held the sorrow of the mountain woman, but its tightly closed mouth uttered not a sound about the life of the departed.

‘What is your son’s name? Is it Qiliang? I’m asking you the name of your son.’

Binu waited patiently under the mulberry tree, until she realized that the frog was unable to answer this simple question. The villagers had said that people who live all year round in the mountains have no proper names and are either called by numbers or named after animals or plants. So the blind woman’s son could not be called Qiliang. Remembering this lessened her anxieties, so Binu heaved a long sigh and, with her hands on her hips, looked down at the frog and said, ‘It’s fine with me if you don’t say anything. I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m a raft, and you want to go with me to find your son! Well, you’re quite well informed. The people in Millstone Village do not know that I plan to go to Great Swallow Mountain, but it seems that you know. My husband Qiliang is there, building a great wall. It is thousands of li from here. I am going there, even though I cannot hire a horse. But you, how can you get there? You could try hopping that far, but I’m afraid you’d be a cripple before you got there.’

She had planned to hire a horse, or if there were no horses or her savings were inadequate to hire one, she would have hired a donkey. But, as it turned out, there were no donkeys either, and now it seemed that there was only this frog. What good was a frog to her? She could not, after all, ride north on its back.

Returning home empty-handed, she again met up with Sude and his pigs. He laughed when he saw her. ‘I wasn’t lying, was I? All the horse traders were taken away in the summer, and no one can say whether they are men or ghosts today. How can you expect to hire a horse? You traded away your mulberry trees and your silkworms, didn’t you? Well, if you have the money, why not hire one of my pigs? I’ll show you how to ride it. Yes, hire one of my pigs.’

Binu ignored the ravings of the pig herder and, with worry written all over her face, led the frog past Sude’s pigs, sighing over her fruitless trip to Banqiao. With Qiliang gone, it seemed that nothing remained!

Clouds filled the Blue Cloud Prefecture autumn sky. Though weak and fragile, they rolled northward, passing over winding mountain ranges and abandoned groves of mulberry trees. Binu dreamed endlessly of Qiliang coming down the slope of North Mountain. Up in the sky the silvery Weaving Maid, Vega, was pointing the way home to Qiliang. Binu complained to people that she had seen him coming down North Mountain in the morning. ‘So why is he still walking when the sun drops below the mountain at dusk? Why won’t he come down?’ she said.

Someone answered, ‘You mustn’t think such thoughts.
You were having a bad dream. If Qiliang had come down the mountain in the morning, by nightfall his head would be rolling on the ground.’ They told her that all the Blue Cloud Prefecture men who had escaped from their labours in the north and come home had been caught and taken back. Their captors had then dug a huge pit on the other side of the mountain and buried the escaped labourers alive. With all those corpses down there, the people went on, it is likely that the mulberry trees on the back slope will grow tall and lush next year.

Qiliang had once said to Binu, ‘If you cross those mountains and pass through seven prefectures and eighteen counties, you will reach Great Swallow Mountain.’ But he had never told her how long that would take. As she walked along the riverbank on her way home, she gazed up at the far-off mountains, which appeared to retreat farther and farther into the distance the longer she looked. She wondered why there were so many mountains in Blue Cloud Prefecture, and could not imagine what a place without mountains might look like, what sort of world it might be. Many of the residents of her village had travelled to the plains and returned filled with envious stories of the splendour and richness of those places, whose residents did not, as foretold, have three heads and six arms, but were graced with the good fortune
of vast land holdings. Binu had never seen a plain, and the people’s descriptions of such places made her head spin. She was reminded again of the Kindling Village sorceresses’ prediction, that if she did not hire a Blue Cloud horse, she would be struck down by illness and die on the plain. Who would come to bring her home? Would she die in a mulberry field or in an irrigation ditch, or would she die on a heavily travelled public road? Did people who lived on the plain grow mulberry trees? Did they grow gourds? If there were no gourds, there would be no one there to bring them home and, after she died, would she turn into a lonely wandering ghost?

Binu anxiously made her way home. At the village entrance, she changed direction and led the frog toward the nine mulberry trees. They had been submerged under the flood waters, yet all nine stood there calm and composed, looking as if they’d been planted in a paddy field. ‘You see how fine those nine mulberry trees are? Even after being under water, they’re as good as ever,’ she said to the frog. ‘Those nine trees have fed vast numbers of precious silkworms, but now they belong to someone else.’ She waded through the water up to the largest tree and stood there, pointing to the gourd vines wrapped around the trunk. ‘See that,’ she said to the frog. ‘That is Qiliang and me: one is a mulberry tree,
the other a gourd. You are the lucky one, your spirit can go wherever it wants on those frog’s legs. Qiliang and I need a place where we can put down roots together. I’m not sure if mulberry trees grow up north, or gourds, and I wonder if there’s a place where we can settle down.’

As she stood beneath the tree, Binu took one last look at the limbs and branches of all nine trees; seeing them was like seeing Qiliang. The image of him washing his face early in the morning materialized out of thin air as the sun was setting; though it was autumn, she could see him as if in winter. Though she had not been able to hire a horse, she saw him riding down the slope of North Mountain on a great Blue Cloud horse, wearing the new winter coat she’d taken him. How handsome and valiant he looked! Could there be another Peach Village man dressed as smartly? A blue cotton coat crafted by the seamstress from East Village, brocaded hemp shoes from Hailing Prefecture, and a phoenix-patterned sash that cost half a bushel of rice. The sash had a jade-inlaid hook on which he could hang anything he wanted.

Binu picked a gourd from the ground around the mulberry tree. Tears flowed from her palms when she did so. The tree and the gourd cried too, wetting her hand. The gourd had been taken from the heart of the
mulberry tree, just as Binu had been torn from the heart of Qiliang. The vine was unhappy, the tree was unhappy and the woman was unhappy. But she knew that, whatever her feelings, the gourd had to be picked, for she needed to settle the matter of her reincarnation before she left. The sorceresses of Kindling Village had revealed another strange fate, and the memory of that dark prediction made her tremble with fear. ‘You were once a gourd,’ they cautioned menacingly, ‘so you should not casually leave the safety of your home. People are buried in the ground all over the world, but for you, Binu, no grave awaits. If you die in a foreign land, your ghost will turn back into a gourd, discarded at the side of a road, just waiting for a passerby to pick you up, cut you in half and give one half to this family, the other to that family, both of whom will throw you into a vat and use you as a ladle!’