Breaking Bamboo (36 page)

I doubt one in a hundred cares that the Twin Cities are besieged.’

He recollected the strange fear and nervousness that had gripped him in their first days away from Nancheng. No longer feeling trapped and surrounded by a pitiless enemy had a contra dictory effect. Instead of release, he felt anxiety.

‘I cannot believe that,’ said Chen Song. ‘Nancheng and Fouzhou are the dams preventing the enemy from releasing a flood that would drown our Empire.’

‘You are eloquent,’ said Guang.

At noon the Grand Canal came to an end, depositing their small convoy on the long wharf of Linan’s famous West Lake.

Crowds of merchants and longshoremen, beggars and idlers, went about their business. Now it was Guang’s turn to feel inspired. The West Lake featured in many of Great-grandfather Yun Cai’s most popular and enduring poems. For a moment the old longing to be a poet like his noble ancestor caught him on its rusty hook. He was released by Wang Bai’s querulous voice.

‘Find a palanquin to bear me to the Palace!’ called his patron to one of the servants. ‘Commander Yun Guang! Prepare an honour guard led by yourself.’

He did as instructed, asking Chen Song to find suitable lodgings for all the officers, as only Wang Bai and a few body servants were to be accommodated in the Palace.

‘I already have somewhere in mind,’ smiled Chen Song, refusing to say more.

They hired the finest palanquin on the wharf, decorated with images of the Immortal Liu Hai standing on a three-legged toad. Wang Bai examined it suspiciously. He stiffly climbed aboard, hidden from the eyes of the city by thick, red brocade drapes.

The procession headed east, then south along the Imperial Way, trotting at the double to emphasise Wang Bai’s rank. The street was a hundred yards wide. Temples and many-storied buildings with flying balconies lined the way. Flags and banners proclaimed fashionable teashops and restaurants. They hurried past markets where hundreds of stalls devoured wealth from all corners of the world and strings of
cash
formed a serpent long enough to constrict the entire city.

Guang was out of breath, forehead moist with sweat, by the time he glimpsed the first towering gatehouse of the Palace. He tugged at the palanquin’s curtain.

‘Your Excellency!’ he called. ‘We near our destination!’

He expected Wang Bai to part the curtain a little. Indeed, he desired it. Was he, Captain Xiao, hero of Swallow Gate, reduced to a mere escort now the Mongols were far away?

‘Carry on!’ called a muffled voice from within.

When they reached the first archway decked with dragon and phoenix statues, a detachment of Imperial Guardsmen blocked the way. Guang realised his armour was scuffed and damaged from numerous blows, whereas theirs was flawless.

Yet he rose half a head above the tallest.

‘His Excellency Wang Bai!’ he announced.

The guard officer looked at him uncomprehendingly and seemed inclined to sneer.

‘Deposit a petition at one of the appropriate ministries,’ drawled the officer. ‘No entry without authorisation.’

Then Wang Bai’s arm appeared through the brocade curtain.

His pale hand held a scroll. With a flick, he let the document unroll. All capable of reading blinked in surprise. It was an urgent summons, bearing the divine seal of the Son of Heaven’s First Chancellor. Now the guardsmen fell to their knees. Wang Bai rapped on the roof to indicate they should proceed.

Guang stepped aside as the exhausted porters stumbled forward. The curtain parted and Wang Bai called out: ‘Find your own quarters, Guang, but ensure the ships are ready to leave at any time. I shall send word if you are required.’

The palanquin vanished into the palace complex and Guang was left on the dusty road with his battle-hardened soldiers.

‘Buy wine and pork,’ he ordered, passing over several strings of
cash
. ‘Toast the health of Pacification Commissioner Wang Ting-bo! Sergeant, take my helmet and halberd, as well as these gauntlets. I’ll join you on the ships before midnight. You have done your duty well.’

‘It’s your name we’ll toast, sir!’ called out the sergeant. ‘Not the Wang clan.’

Guang ignored this disloyalty and was left alone amidst a hundred thousand people. Litters and plodding camels and donkey-carts filled the Imperial way. Despite retaining his sword, he felt more exposed than when arrows showered down on Swallow Gate.

*

Yun Guang paced up and down before the Imperial Palace, one hand resting on the hilt of his sword. Realising that he made a strange sight, he found a tea-stall further down the Imperial Way. Then he drank bowl after bowl, the hot tea failing to cool his fevered thoughts.

Of course, others of his family had visited the capital before.

Shih had lived here for over a decade after Father banished him. Most illustrious was Great-grandfather himself. But Yun Cai seemed too fabulous a personage for comparison.

Guang blinked as he sipped another scalding cup. The leaves were bitter, over-brewed. Clearly the vendor had decided he was a gull flown in from the provinces, ripe to be plucked.

Recollections of Shih made his forehead furrow. Guang could not forget their parting conversation – the accusation that Shih, not he, was Eldest Son. Those words had pursued Guang throughout the long journey to Linan. Intolerable thoughts he could not settle.

His brother had used the word ‘pretend’. But how could he expect Guang to remember what had happened all those years ago? They had been seven, eight, surely no older. Who could remember things from their eighth year? Not clearly, at least, or honestly. One must discount many memories. Guang did not like to think how many. He gulped the hot tea. Then, quite unexpectedly, a name came back to him from their eighth year:
Aunt Qin
, like a ship emerging from dawn mists,
Aunt Qin
. . .

Aunt Qin had always favoured Shih, he remembered that much, but it had not mattered to Guang because Father so obviously favoured him. And Father was Lord. Yet he did recollect envying his brother. When Aunt Qin walked and talked with Shih by Wei River she was full of tender enthusiasm for her faithful nephew. . .

Guang gripped the hot cup tighter.

Something had happened during his eighth year. A monsoon of endless rain. Three-Step-House filled with weeping. No one explained why – Mother, Aunt Qin, Shih, even the servants, all had seemed frightened. He remembered Father galloping to Chunming in the pouring rain, his face a mask of rage. When he returned a few days later, he summoned Guang and held out a high, silk-embroidered hat.

‘This is yours,’ he said, examining his son strangely. ‘Wear it with pride.’

Guang had seized the hat gladly, thinking how jealous Shih would be. No other child in Wei Valley possessed so fine a hat!

Not that he wished Shih to be unhappy, but he had so many empty places to fill in his soul. When he placed the hat on his head it was too big and settled over his eyebrows.

‘There is more,’ continued Father. ‘You are forbidden to see Little Brother – if he is indeed your brother – ever again. He will be leaving soon. Then you must never mention or think of him, for he will never return.
Never
.’

The eight year old boy detected hysteria in the way Father repeated that word. A hell of dishonour. And could not explain why.

‘Father,’ he stuttered. ‘It is I. . . I am Little Brother.’

In an instant Father was towering over him, clutching him by the shoulders.

‘You are Eldest Son now, curse you!’ he roared, shaking Guang so hard that his teeth rattled. ‘Do not
dare
to disappoint me!’

At last Guang broke free and fled to the room he shared with Shih. He expected to find his brother there. Instead a servant was hastily stuffing Shih’s clothes into hempen travelling sacks.

‘What are you stealing?’ he demanded, but the servant did not reply.

When Guang tried to leave he found his way barred by their drunken Tutor of Characters.

‘Little Master Yun Guang must stay in his room,’ said the man, slyly.

An hour passed, spent on games of chequers and drawing.

The tutor customarily had no patience but today he was all moderation. Guang wondered at it, and wore his fine new hat.

Here was something else to boast about when he met Shih again.

The sound of Mother and Father arguing reached them from the Middle House. Guang froze in fear. He had never imagined such shrieking. Not from passive, gentle mother.

‘Pay no heed!’ snapped the tutor. ‘Your turn! See, you’re winning!’

Yet Guang had lost all taste for the game.

At last he heard shouting and the rattle of wheels. Then, rising through it all, Shih’s wail of fear and despair.

After that, Guang could remember nothing. Had he forced a way past his tutor into the rain? Did he ever learn where Shih had gone? Father once muttered that Shih had been planted in Mother’s womb by an evil Fox Fairy. Answerless questions, inhabiting a guilty void. Not just his own. No one spoke of Shih after his departure. Mother hardly spoke at all except for the most necessary things and, to Father, never by choice.

Perhaps a secret part of him expected his favour with Father to grow, now that he was Eldest Son, heir to Wei Valley. Yet each time Lord Yun looked at Guang’s face he seemed to see the features of another. He would glance away, avoiding his son’s eye.

One day Guang discovered some moth-eaten scrolls and books in a lumber-room. They contained Great-grandfather Yun Cai’s verses, hidden away because Father thought them dull.

He studied them over several months and conceived a strange notion that Great-grandfather was displeased with them all. He tried to explain it to Father but was scornfully rebuffed. Guang kept thinking of Shih and why he had been sent away. For the first time he wondered if he liked Father. Yet when the Lord of Wei bent towards him – less and less often as the years passed – Guang would melt at once, eager for approval.

When Guang was thirteen a furious desire to write poetry like Great-grandfather took hold. He mixed ink and dipped his brush, though he knew Father would greet his efforts with mockery.

Guang remembered that moment always. It was a doorway, to dip his brush in the black ink of truth and push open the door. To wipe it on the ink-tray and peer into a strange house.

Dip and form columns of characters. To enter that house of truth. He wrote:

Since           Not                             Shadows        Darkness
you               complete                   at                     between
and              our                              evening           plum
I                    hearts                         grow               trees
parted          wither                         long                above
snow            like                              as                   Three
rain              breaking                     sad                 Step
sun               bamboo                     ghosts            House

Guang read and re-read his poem. Gloried in it. He chanted it aloud while hiding in the ancestral tomb, certain Great-grandfather was listening and that the verse would lift the curse of their ancestor’s disapproval.

At last he sought out Mother and recited it. First she blinked, tears filling her eyes, then her voice rose in a wail like a river over-flowing a dam. Father and all the servants came running.

She sobbed and rocked over the poem, tears dripping onto the ink so that it blurred. Father snatched the poem from her listless hand. Because he was a poor reader, it took time for him to decipher the characters. When he did his gaze fell on Guang like a thunderbolt. The youth met it for a moment, then looked away, horribly afraid.

‘I shall not forgive this!’ he roared.

He swept from the room, tearing the poem in two. The paper fluttered to the ground like moth-wings.

A week later Guang was sent away to the Military Academy in distant Nancheng for training in the artillery. A demeaning position for one whose forebears included fully-examined scholars and a poet beloved throughout the Empire. But Guang had not argued, glad to escape the misery of Three-Step-House and Mother’s lifeless eyes. There were no more poems, though he longed to write them. Instead he learned a different rigour –that of killing through force and fire.

Guang ceased his pacing. This was what he had been trying to remember! All his life, it seemed. With release came a deep, swirling sadness. At last he understood the reserve that always lay between himself and Shih; as his poem said, there was darkness between the plum trees. For even during their most intimate conversations, both habitually held back, as though intimacy would expose something shameful and secret. At last Guang saw how much false fellowship characterised their relationship and blamed himself. But that was not a fixed thing. They could change. He resolved to share all he had remembered with Shih as soon as he returned to Nancheng.

He swallowed another bowl of tea and solemnly bowed to the Son of Heaven’s palace.

*

Guang handed back the empty teacup, paying the vendor with a few
cash
.

How he wished he could heal the rift with his brother and their drunken quarrel on the night he left for the capital! Once, during that splendid winter when he had lived with Shih and Cao in Apricot Corner Court, when the two brothers had been reunited by destiny itself, Shih had let slip a street name. It had been a street in the capital – the very place where he had served out his medical apprenticeship to a certain Dr Ou-yang. As Guang stood on the Imperial Way, he conceived of a service he could accomplish for his dear brother and sister-in-law.

‘Where is Black Tortoise Street?’ he asked the stall-holder.

‘There!’ cried the man, pointing up the Imperial Way.

‘Twenty minute’s walk! By the Jade Disc Tea-house.’

Guang strode north, hand on hilt, his back straight. Many eyes were drawn to his fine figure. What he expected to achieve in Black Tortoise Street was simple, yet deeply filial. He hoped to gather greetings for Shih and Cao, perhaps even letters of blessing from Sister-in-law’s relatives, then bear them back to besieged Nancheng as a peace offering.