Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (6 page)

He had once in his youth dug a well for his father and for the first time he had seen what lay under their fields. First there was the deep thick crust of the earth, fertile and loose with the tilling of his forefathers and with their waste which they poured back into it year after year. This earth was so rich that almost it was quick enough to spring into life of its own accord. Fed for growing and nurtured for harvest, it lay hungry for seed as a woman is, eager to be about its business.

This earth he knew. But under it was a hard yellow bottom of clay, as tightly packed as the bottom of a pan. How did that yellow bottom come there? He did not know nor did his father, but there it lay to catch and hold the rain for the roots that needed it. And beneath that yellow clay was a bed of rock, not solid, but splintered and split into thin pieces, and between these was grayish sand. And under this bed was still another, strangest of all, for here were pieces of tile and scraps of blue pottery and when Ling Tan dug the well, he even found an old silver coin of a sort he had never seen before and then a broken white pottery bowl and at last a deep brown jar, glazed and whole and full of a gray dust. He had taken these things to his father, and father and son they had looked at them.

“These were used by those from whom we sprang,” his father had said. “Let us put them into the tombs with your grandparents.” So they had done, and then Ling Tan went on digging and out of those depths clear water spouted forth one morning like a fountain, and never to this day had the well failed.

Yet beneath that river, he used often to muse, this earth of his went on. Others had owned it and lived on it and had become part of it themselves, for it was a common saying of the old men in the village that if a man could dig deeply enough in his own land or any land, he would find, five times over, the roots and ruins of what had once been great cities and palaces and temples. Ling Tan’s own father’s father in his time had once dug deep for a grave for his father, and had found a small dragon, made of gold, such as might have fallen from the roof of an emperor’s palace, and he had sold it for enough to buy himself a little concubine he craved. Ill luck it was, too, so the story had come down from generation to generation, for that woman was evil and robbed his house of peace and goods and he was helpless whatever she did because he loved her and through this love they all but lost the very land they had, and would have lost it if his old wife, seeing what havoc was about to fall upon them, had not given the concubine timely poison. Even then it was evil enough, for the man, when his concubine was dead, killed himself, but at least the land was still his sons’ possession. But after that it was always told that the concubine was somehow faery and that the dragon was no true dragon but a fox spirit that had entered into the body of the pretty girl the man loved too well.

Whether all this was true or not, there the land was, and it went deep down beyond fountain and river and rock and as long as he lived it belonged to Ling Tan as far as it went down and to his sons after him.

The whole earth, he had heard, was round. This at least a young man had told who came preaching of many curious things to the village one summer’s day. He came, he said, to help the common people and to do them a good deed by what he called teaching, and because the people in the Ling village were courteous and kind they were willing to listen, especially as it was a feast season and they were not working. So they listened to tales of the roundness of the earth and to the wickedness of flies and the young man showed them pictures of flies as large as tigers, which he held up for them to see. The women cried out when they saw flies so big but Ling Tan told them afterwards to calm themselves, since it was only in foreign countries that flies were like that. Here they were small harmless things that a man could pinch between thumb and finger if he wished, but who cared whether they lived or not, since they had no sting and did no hurt?

That the whole earth was round he found it hard to believe, and he often thought of that young man, a good young man and doubtless a pilgrim of some religion, doing a penance for his soul by walking from one village to another preaching his knowledge. Thus when Ling Tan found among his melons a round one he would think, “That is as the earth is.” But what he could not comprehend was how, if the earth were round, men on the bottom side could walk. Yet when he talked of this in the tea shop one evening, his third cousin said that it could be true because he had heard that the people on the other side of the earth did all the opposite of what it should be done. Thus, he said, their children were born with white hair that grew dark as they grew older, and they pushed a saw away instead of pulled it to them, and they put cloth on the floor instead of on their beds, and all they did was reasonless and mad. So, he said, it might be true that they even walked with their heads hanging down and liked it.

Of such things Ling Tan mused as he tilled his earth and it moved him to laughter to think that somewhere very far below the spot where he stood his land went on and on until at last foreigners stood on it and doubtless planted seed on it and took their harvests from it as though it were their own.

“I ought to ask them for my rent,” he would think and grin until one of his sons seeing him grinning under his big bamboo hat called out to know why he was merry, and then Ling Tan said:

“I have just thought that on the bottom of this land of mine somewhere a foreigner reaps his grain without asking me and I could have the law on him if I knew how to tell him so.”

His little black eyes sparkled and his sons laughed with him. Not one of them had ever seen a foreigner close, though in the city there were some scores of them living peacefully and doing their business. Ling Tan had once asked a man who served in a foreign house and who had come into the country to search for fresh hen’s eggs if his master walked head down or up, and the man had said, up, as he did, and Ling Tan respected the foreigner the more for learning wisdom when he came here. But the foreigner on the other side of his land grew to be a joke in Ling Tan’s household, and if the soil grew dry he would pretend to grumble that the foreigner on the other side had drained it, or if his turnips came up smaller than they should, he said the foreigner was pulling at the roots. By this means all the household came to have a friendly merry feeling toward foreigners everywhere, though truly they knew none except in this merry fashion. And yet because of it, if a strange man had come to the house and said he was a foreigner, Ling Tan would have asked him to come in and sit down and drink tea and eat a meal with them.

But Ling Tan owned not only the earth as deep as it went beneath his feet but he owned the air above his land as far as it went up. The stars over his land were his stars and beyond them whatever there was was his. Of them he knew nothing for none could tell him of the heavens. To him the stars were a handful of lights, lanterns, jewels perhaps, toys and decorations, things for beauty rather than use, like a woman’s earrings. They did no harm and what their good was he did not know except that he was glad they were there, else the sky would have been too black above his head at night.

But sometimes he thought they followed the moon, perhaps, or splintered themselves from the sun. For that there was enmity between sun and moon in the sky everybody knew. Two or three times in his lifetime this enmity had blazed into battle and sun would try to swallow moon or moon would swallow sun, and then everywhere people were frightened and shouted and cried and screamed into the sky and beat gongs and hollow drums and empty rice cauldrons or whatever they had at hand to make a noise. After the noise grew great enough the sun and moon would give heed to it and slowly they drew apart and went back to their own ways again. But if they had not heard the commotion from the earth, they would have fought until one had downed the other somehow, and then half the light from heaven would have perished, and worse if the sun had lost and been swallowed by the moon. But whatever the stars were, they were his, Ling Tan thought, if they were above his land, and he used to wonder if in another life his would be the power to reach up and pull a star down and hold it in the palm of his hand, and if he did would it burn there?

Such were Ling Tan’s thoughts and they were mingled with others that had to do with the cost of grain and the measure of his harvest and whether or not he ought to divide the land among his three sons when his time came to go into earth himself, or ought he to let the eldest have it and the second help him. But if he did this then would there be food enough for the third one when he married and begat his own sons and then would they not quarrel because their bellies were not full? For Ling Tan knew out of his common wisdom that when men have land enough to give them food they have nothing to quarrel about beyond the small things that a night’s sleep can change. But when land is the cause of quarrel men will quarrel to killing each other.

He put the matter to his eldest son one day, not because he felt himself old and beyond work, but a man’s years are lived when they are lived and there is a time for everything, and now was the time to plan and to think while his mind was strong in his strong body.

“Can this land feed three men and their wives and children after I am gone?” he asked his eldest son.

Lao Ta was at that moment drawing water out of the well by rope and bucket and he drew it up and drank first and then splashed what was left over his bare shoulders and arms.

“It can, if you ask me if I am willing to have it so,” he said. “For I will eat less meat if my brothers will and live in peace with them.”

More than this Ling Tan did not ask because he was satisfied with the answer and with his eldest son’s honest looks. He could leave the land to him and know that whatever it bore this eldest son would divide equally among all, and if the others did not like it, they could go elsewhere and Ling Tan’s dust would not stir in its sleep, because he had done well enough in his time.

… To such things as stars and sun and moon Ling Sao gave no thought. What, she would have said, had they to do with her? The house was full of matters she must think about and manage and mend, and its lives all looked to her. Thus her smallest grandson as month followed month did not know which was his true mother, the one from whose soft breast he drank, or the strong big woman who took him often and carried him astride her hip while she came and went, and fed him with sweetened rice from her lips. Mother and grandmother were one to him. And her sons, though Ling Sao wanted them married and married early so that there need be no foolishness in the house, still she knew that no young woman could be to her sons what she was, and she loved to hear their voices, now the voices of men, call to her as once they had called in little childish piping, “M-ma!”

“Yes, my meat dumpling!” she always answered, and no one thought it strange that so she answered even to her eldest son, himself a father, when he came to her to get a button mended or the thong of a sandal secured. For Orchid was one of those women who when they have given birth are in a daze at what they have done and she could think of nothing but her last child and she would sit idle staring at him and listening to him breathe while he slept and think that she was busy and too busy to tidy their room or to sew a rent in her husband’s coat or to make a shoe sole. For this the mother cursed her secretly and complained about her to her husband.

“That Orchid,” she grumbled one night in bed, “she has this last child and now she has no time for anything else even the elder one. And if it were not for me our son himself would starve and go in rags like a beggar. She can do nothing but sit and look at the child, though he is still so small that put him anywhere and there he lies. What when he crawls and walks and what when there is a third and a fourth? Why, when I had a child I counted it nothing. Do you remember how I tended the fields and cut the wheat and harvested it and bore the second child and how I put the two of them in a tub and did my work and no ill came to them? But she—oh, the last child’s breath will stop if she does not see it come in and out, and the child might swallow a mite of dust out of a beam of sun falling upon it!”

“There are not many women like you,” Ling Tan agreed, half asleep.

“And Jade,” Ling Sao mourned. “What use is Jade to me? Her mind is on that book our second son brought her. Yes, when her child comes—”

Ling Tan woke up. “Is Jade to have a child, too?”

She pursed her lips in the dark. “Her flux has stayed itself ten days beyond its usual coming,” she said solemnly, for, being a good mother to her sons, Ling Sao knew it was her duty to question her sons’ wives of such things. “And what she will do when the child comes if she has not finished reading that book I do not know.” She went on, “She will hold it in her hand, I swear, and let the child be born anyhow. It was an evil day when a book came into this house, and there is nothing so bad for a woman as reading. I had rather she took to opium.”

“No, not opium,” he said. “I saw that curse in my own old mother and never will an ounce of opium come into this house.”

“Well, then, not opium,” his wife agreed. For she knew what ill had befallen this house when Ling Tan’s mother in the forty-sixth year of her age had begun to smoke opium to soften a pain she had in her womb. Food and clothing, she cared nothing if she had neither, but the opium she must have, and she lay with her eyes half shut night and day, dreaming and sleeping and waking only if they tried to cure her of the habit. Nor had they heart to try very much, for the pain grew hard and strong in her and only with opium could she draw her breath. Seven years the thing had gone on and more money had been wasted in the buying of opium than had been spent in food or clothing, and worse than that, for in those years opium was made a forbidden thing by the magistrates and if any bought or sold or used the stuff he took his life into his hands. Ling Tan’s father knew this, and so he forbade his son to buy it and he himself went to secret places to get it, telling no one, and it came to be so dangerous a thing to do that each month or so when Ling Tan’s father knew he must go yet again to buy he arranged all his affairs with his son and warned him that if he did not come back he must not go out to search for him, because he would be in prison and beyond any hope of rescue and Ling Tan must behave him as though he were dead and remember that it was his duty to live on.