Empire of Dragons (31 page)

‘Is everything all right?’ he asked.

‘Fine, Commander. I’m preparing the shields . . . a modification that will make them even more effective.’

‘A modification? What kind?’

‘You’ll know when it’s time, Commander. I want to make sure it works first . . .’

Severus was still talking when a youth from the village came running up and told Metellus that Prince Dan Qing wished to speak to him.

‘Y
OU HAD ME SUMMONED
?’ Metellus entered the library accompanied by a servant. Dan Qing was sitting on a mat with his back turned to him. A table was balanced on his knees and he was writing on a sheet which looked like papyrus, although it was much finer and more flexible.

‘Why did you not pay me homage yesterday, like all my other subjects? I am the legitimate heir to the throne of this empire and all the inhabitants of this land owe me the act of veneration prescribed by a ritual that is thousands of years old. Your refusal humiliated me before my subjects and Commander Baj Renjie.’

‘I am in this land,’ replied Metellus, ‘but I do not belong to this land. My men and I are not your subjects.’

‘You are trying to make me believe that in your country you do not render acts of veneration to the emperor?’

‘We burn incense to his
genius
every year, on the day he was born, but we stand on our feet when we speak to him and call him by name. During a military campaign, he eats the same food as us, drinks the same acidy wine and sleeps on the ground like the most humble of his soldiers. That doesn’t mean that we’re not ready to die for him if necessary. The only relationship that you can have with me is one of equality: one man to another.’

Dan Qing got to his feet and turned to face him. ‘Here, a person’s devotion towards his emperor is seen as a virtue. It is called
yi
, signifying what is “just”. The only relationship we consider in terms of equality is the bond between friends. It is called
xin
, which means “loyalty”. I can treat you as a friend, Xiong Ying, but are you prepared to be loyal?’

‘I believe I am,’ replied Metellus, ‘if you tell me that you are.’

Dan Qing nodded slightly, then sat down again and continued writing. Metellus drew closer, curious to see what was taking form on the white sheet.

‘Are they magical signs?’ he asked. ‘They look like the ones carved into the bones that the shaman used to pronounce his oracles in the caravanserai.’

‘They are not magical signs,’ replied the prince. ‘It’s the way we write.’

‘Complicated. No sign is like another . . . Our system is much more efficient. With twenty-three very simple symbols you can write any word.’

‘In what language?’

‘In our own, in Latin.’

‘And so anyone who wants to understand what you have written has to learn your language.’

‘Obviously.’

‘In this country we speak a hundred different languages. Each one of these signs expresses a concept of the mind, like “man” or “house” or “tree”, and can be recognized by all, although every person pronounces the corresponding word in his native tongue. No one has to bend to learning the terms of a foreign language. These signs respect our freedom of mind, more important still than the physical freedom which is so important to you. Why does it seem so terrible to you to bow before a sovereign?’

‘Have you ever heard of a Western king, a great young conqueror named Alexander?’

‘Yes, I heard tales of him in Persia, where they call him Iskander and consider him a demon, and news of his exploits reached our land in the past.’

‘When he arrived at the confines of India, he had already inherited the crown of the Persians and had decided to adopt their customs as well, so he demanded that his companions bend their backs to him when they greeted him. They refused to do so and an irremediable rift opened between them. Some of them even plotted to kill him. This tells you how important the dignity of a single person, no matter how humble, is to us.’

‘Do you have slaves?’ asked Dan Qing.

Metellus hesitated a moment, taken by surprise, then answered, ‘Yes, we have slaves.’

‘Here slavery was abolished by the decree of Emperor Wang Mang more than two centuries ago,’ replied Dan Qing, and said no more.

Metellus didn’t have an answer and remained to observe the prince as he was writing. ‘Where do you find such white papyrus?’ he asked after a while.

‘I don’t know what this . . . “papyrus” is,’ replied Dan Qing. ‘This is paper.’

‘Paper?’ repeated Metellus.

‘Paper,’ confirmed the prince. ‘We make it by soaking rags. We whiten them with lye and sometimes we perfume them with jasmine or with roses or violets.’ He extracted a sheet from a drawer and held it under Metellus’s nose.

Metellus breathed in the delicate fragrance, then took it into his hands and held it up against the sunlight, admiring its marvellous transparency and homogeneous consistency. ‘Scented sheets,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘For love letters. Your beloved recognizes your missive from the fragrance it gives off even before she reads it. Charming, wouldn’t you say?’

Metellus nodded, his eyes misting over.

‘You are thinking of her, Xiong Ying, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘The favourite among your concubines?’

For a moment, Metellus’s gaze and the mysterious anguish evoked by those words were mirrored in the inscrutable eyes of the prince.

‘My bride, Prince,’ he replied. ‘A Roman has only one wife, usually for his whole life.’

‘How barbaric,’ observed Dan Qing. ‘But if it pleases you . . . Do you miss her very much?’

‘Terribly.’

‘Would you like her to read your words?’

Metellus bowed his head and remained in silence for a few moments. Then he said, ‘I’d give anything for that to happen. But I fear it’s impossible: there is no message that can reach the kingdom of the dead.’

‘Is no one left to you?’ asked Dan Qing.

‘My son. A boy of seven. I did not even say goodbye. And I do not know what has become of him.’

Dan Qing lowered his head. According to the mechanisms of power that he was accustomed to, that child would already be dead.

Metellus sighed and said no more as Dan Qing began to write again, using a slender brush to draw the elegant signs of his script.

‘What does Flying Foxes mean?’ asked Metellus after some time.

‘They are animals that live in the great forests of the south. They resemble little foxes, but they have a membrane between their front and back paws that stretches out when they jump from one branch to another and allows them to soar and wheel through the air, like birds.’

‘But when you spoke of them you were referring to men, not to animals. To the men who attacked us in the valley.’

‘Garbed in black,’ continued Dan Qing, leaning his brush on a lacquered wooden stand, ‘implacable, swift as lightning, peerless combatants, fanatically devoted to their chief and to their mission. Whoever has them on his side can be certain of victory.’

Metellus neared a stone wall on which the shell of an enormous tortoise hung, so large that he had never seen anything like it. He stroked the smooth, shiny surface; it seemed like polished ebony. ‘We defeated them, though.’

‘Because they did not expect such resistance . . . forces arrayed in a way they were totally unfamiliar with.’

Metellus stroked the big burnished shell. ‘We call the technique
testudo
, which means tortoise. A tortoise beat the flying foxes . . . Although perhaps our tactics are more like a porcupine’s. It’s strange how men so often compare their behaviour to that of animals . . .’

‘Don’t delude yourself, Xiong Ying. When they have your strategy figured out, they will find a way . . .’

‘That may be. But you see, we have an ancient proverb, coined by a great poet of the past: “A fox has many tricks. The porcupine just one, but a good one.” ’

Dan Qing turned to face him and a slight smile crossed his lips. ‘That’s a good proverb,’ he said.

‘But who are they, in reality? Where do they come from?’

Dan Qing rose to his feet, uncrossing his legs with the fluid elegance of a serpent or a fish gliding through water. He went to a cabinet built into a wall, opened it and extracted a bundle of reed canes tied with laces. He unwound one of them on the floor and a text written in their script appeared.

‘Many centuries ago,’ he began, scanning those ancient signs, ‘a great master lived in the Middle Kingdom. His name was Mo Tze. It was a dark time, marked by continuous strife between the most powerful families. This master developed a theory wherein the family and its ties of blood were considered the origin of all evil, of all favouritism and all egoism. He designed a society in which each man could be a member of a single universal community, not broken up into families; where every father was the father of all, each son the son of every man, every city the city of all and each citizen a member of each city, without distinction . . .’

‘We have a master who developed a similar theory as well. We call it
cosmopolitismòs
in the language of our greatest philosophers,’ Metellus could not help but observe, but then added immediately, ‘Go on, please.’

‘Master Mo considered war the worst of all evils, the human action most abhorred by the Heavens. He called warriors the fierce mastiffs of the abyss. And thus he decided to oppose war with every means available to him . . . including war!’

Metellus shook his head in wonder. ‘We also have this concept of the absurd. We call it
paradoxon
.’

‘He was convinced that no human action is evil on its own. What makes it such is intent. He organized his followers into a secret sect which was divided into many autonomous groups, governed by iron-clad rules. The sect developed combat techniques of every kind, some purely defensive, others of devastating offensive power, techniques based on control of the mind and its unlimited energies . . .

‘If a family fell victim to tyranny, if a community – whether a mere village or even a city – suffered unjustified violence, those men entered into action. They moved in the dark like ghosts, attacked with the speed of a thunderbolt and then vanished, melting into the darkness. They would materialize from out of nowhere, as if answering a call that only they could hear, and their combat units took form as if by magic, in the most unthought-of places.

‘They struck with extreme harshness and always left their seal, so that the significance and the targets of their punishment would be evident. If one of them was wounded in combat, he would never allow himself to be taken alive, ensuring that the secrets of the sect would never be revealed . . .’

‘Like the men who attacked us . . . But if they fight in the name of justice, then why . . .’

‘There is no temptation greater than power. Nothing created by man is free from the risk of corruption, and you should know that well,’ continued Dan Qing. ‘Could such a formidable tool remain immune to the temptations of power?’

Metellus thought of the legions, the extraordinary military machine of Rome, born to defend her and transformed through time into an instrument of bloody wars of conquest, of mass extermination, of cruel civil conflict.

Dan Qing continued his story: ‘Upon the death of Master Mo, the sect stepped back into the shadows. For long periods it even seemed to have disappeared, so that people thought it had ceased to exist. In reality, during those long intervals of silence, the followers not only survived but made continuous progress by refining their fighting techniques and developing sophisticated systems of communication.

‘Such efficiency presupposes a completely secret hierarchical order, absolute internal unanimity and blind obedience. They succeeded so well in maintaining secrecy that in certain periods people began to believe that the existence of the sect was pure fantasy, a legend like the many others that circulate in this endless land. It may even be that such a belief was actively spread and sustained by the members of the sect themselves. But at the critical moment they would re-emerge and strike, often in places very distant from one another, and in the most diverse situations.

‘From what we know, it seems that, starting about fifty years ago, a momentous degeneration of the sect took place. Those at the top began to use the enormous power and the secrets of their combat arts to support or to oppose one candidate to the throne or another. This was one of the causes that led to the decline and the end of the glorious Han dynasty, which had governed the country for over four centuries . . . and to the division of the empire into three separate, rival kingdoms: Wei, Shu and Wu.’

Metellus felt his head spinning: four centuries! A single dynasty had reigned in that land for a longer time than all the imperial dynasties of Rome put together.

‘These combatants,’ continued Dan Qing, ‘who had lost sight of their origins and their reasons for existing became known as the Flying Foxes. Others, a minority, separated from their brothers who had fallen away and took refuge in a secluded place whose location has always remained secret. They founded a community where they live according to the rules of brotherhood, sharing food, natural resources and water, devoting themselves to agriculture and sheep raising, but mainly to meditation, in which they excel.’

‘But now,’ said Metellus, ‘the Flying Foxes have sided against you and want you dead. Why?’

Dan Qing rolled the bundle of reed canes and put it back into the cabinet, locking it with a key. ‘The answer may be very simple,’ he said. ‘Desire for supreme power.’

‘Or?’

Dan Qing fixed him with a magnetic look. ‘I don’t know why, but I find myself telling you things that I never thought I would tell anyone, and this disturbs me.’

‘I would never have imagined that a feeling could disturb you. We can’t even hide our emotions: you can see them immediately by the way our faces change colour. But you never blush, or grow pale. Your face is a mask of wax.’

‘Yours is a race still in evolution; the material you are made of is still in tumult. We have reached perfection . . . but nonetheless we are subject to the will of the Heavens. And the Heavens can decide to disempower a dynasty – or an emperor – if it has been stained by infamy or tyranny, or by irremediable corruption. What happens then is called
geming
– revocation – and it is followed by a spirit of revolt that nothing can stop. This generates distress that not even an emperor can escape . . . But you will be faithful to me, will you not, Xiong Ying?’