God of Luck (6 page)
“Is the mandarin back?”
“Did he bring braves?”
A mandarin? Here? Small Eyes
had
sounded more anguished than bold. Was that why the swineherd had run, why the devils had abruptly driven us below?
As hope flickered, a stick rapped wood, punctuating, “Get into a berth. Never mind numbers for now. Any of these upper berths will do.”
I was still unable to see much more than shadows, but from the scuffing and grunting on either side, I knew men were hoisting themselves up. Reaching out, I fumbled at a board level with my chest.
A knee, perhaps a heel, swiped my chin, and I jerked back, kicking metal. Liquid splashed my pants, soaked through to my calf, and the sharp odor of piss penetrated the general stink, setting off a string of curses.
The stick smashed my shoulder blades, knocking me flat against the board in a burst of pain.
“Up!”
Gripping the wood as though it were my tormentor’s throat, I lifted myself, slamming my crown into the ceiling. My head ringing, I ducked, canted over the board, and scrambled into the berth, arousing more curses from those I pinched and kicked while wriggling into place.
THE BERTHS HAD no partitions, and my nose itched from the coiled queue of a lad whose back curved into my chest. My bum pressed into the softness of a fatty whose sour breath added to the curdled soup of odors from bilge, waste, unwashed men.
Water slapped the hull, making it even harder for me to distinguish individual words from the clamor. Hoping to confirm we were about to be rescued, I strained to catch snippets of talk in the two dialects I understood, to string these snippets into some sort of order.
The devil-ship had been loading captives for a month. The stick wielder who’d driven us into our berths was a “corporal.” Corporals, one for every fifty of us, were captives too, chosen by the swineherd for their muscle, their willingness to enforce order for the devils who did not come below if they could avoid it.
A few days ago, a couple of dozen armed devils stormed down the ladder into the two walkways separating the three tiers of berths. The swineherd, hard on their heels, hissed into the shocked silence, “Move one muscle, say one word, make one sound, and you’re dead.”
In the unnatural quiet, the men in the berths became aware of an argument above decks. They recognized Red’s voice, the twitchy interpreter’s, but not the one speaking the formal Saang Wah of the gentry.
“I insist you show me the passenger list.”
“The captain’s ashore. I can’t release it without his authority.”
“I have here a petition from the relatives of seven kidnapped men, and I will not leave this vessel until I’ve examined your passenger list for their names.”
Back and forth they went. Finally, Red submitted to the stranger’s demand. And when the stranger declared a match for three names, Red sent Twitchy to fetch them.
In the between-decks, the devils had their swords, the muzzles of their muskets, the points of their bayonets inches from the men in their berths. So although the lucky three had heard the stranger say their numbers, they did not dare leave until the swineherd gave them permission.
After they followed Twitchy above, there was knocking on the deck, probably the lucky three kowtowing, then their heartfelt thanks, an urgent plea on behalf of those still below because they, too, had been decoyed or kidnapped.
The stranger demanded a response from Red to the charge.
“The rest are willing passengers,” Red protested through Twitchy. “I have their contracts to prove it.”
The pleader among the lucky three countered that the contracts were bogus, that the men, like themselves, had either been tricked or forced into signing. He begged the stranger to go into the between-decks and question the captives.
Red blustered, Twitchy translated, “Mistakes happen. Keep your advance as compensation.”
There was the clatter and roll of coins, the soft tread of cloth soles crossing planks. Those in the berths nearest the ladder, staring into the light, saw a mandarin in rich robes appear in the hatchway, recoil, thrust a large silk hankerchief to his nose. But the mandarin was looking into the dark. So he couldn’t have seen them. He couldn’t have known why no one left the between-decks after he called for those who were unwilling emigrants to go to him.
In any case, he was unlikely to have brought a force capable of subduing so many armed devils. That must be why the pleader did not then press him. Now the mandarin was back with soldiers to fight the devils and a fleet of junks that would carry us all to safety.
“Carry us to other devil-ships you mean.”
“That’s what happened to us.”
“Believe me, unless your family is one of wealth and influence, you don’t stand a chance in hell of returning home. Not now. Not ever.”
Listening to the men wrangle, the flicker of hope in my chest flared bright, then waned: If we were just going to be delivered to another devil-ship, what difference did it make whether the mandarin had returned?
Into my mind came the picture of our captors marching us through the cobbled streets between the quay and the pigpen with no attempt to hide the fact that we were shackled. Of course, prisoners were routinely paraded. But on this devil-ship alone there were almost eight hundred captives. Since there were other devil-ships in the harbor, the number of shackled men marched through the streets must be in the thousands. Even a fool would have to wonder why there were so many criminals, why they were all being loaded onto foreign vessels. As for officials, they must be deliberately refusing to see, refusing to act except when their hands were forced. No wonder Young Master’s father had managed to save him but Moongirl had lamented.
I groaned. The timbers against my head vibrated. From above came the prolonged rattle of chains, voices raised in unison. The rhythm was obviously that of a work song. Amidst the chanting I detected the grunts of men lifting a heavy weight, guessed the sailors were raising anchor, groaned again.
Around me, talk faded into moans, open weeping. Suddenly, the hull creaked, shuddered into motion. With nothing to hold onto, I’d have been thrown out of the berth were it not for the lip of wood at my feet.
Abruptly the ship lurched. The lad’s head crashed into my nose. His elbows and knees jabbed. Mine scraped wood, sank into the fatty. There were cries, thuds, smelly clouds of straw and dirt churning up, coughing, sticks striking wood.
“Back in your berths!”
“That means you!”
“And you!”
“Now!”
Again the ship swung, pitching us into each other, the walkway. My cries, however, were not so much because of the ship’s crazed lunges as for Bo See.
AS THE YOUNGEST daughter-in-law in our family, Bo See was expected to rise earlier than the rest of the household to fetch the day’s water from the village well, then prepare Ba’s orange-rind brew, Ma’s tea, and a basin of hot water for their morning wash. But I always rose with Bo See, and while she split kindling and started a fire in the kitchen stove, I’d set off at a trot to fill our waterbuckets.
Of course I was laughed at for doing women’s work. I didn’t care: My help allowed Bo See and I to linger in bed together until the square of sky in the window was tinged a faint pink. Now Bo See was alone in our bed, rising in the dark, stepping out of the house before cockcrow.
The street would be lively with other women on the same errand. At the clackety-clack of Bo See’s wooden clogs, their chatter would fall away. They wouldn’t shut Bo See out completely. At least they never had. They just wouldn’t include her in talk beyond an exchange of greetings, the kind of polite conversation that passes between strangers rather than close neighbors, friends.
Long ago, Bo See had confided with a rueful smile that she’d been similarly treated in her home village. “Not always. But after people realized from the bride price my parents demanded that our family’s success in raising silkworms came from me rather than luck. Even my close friends shut me out.”
Exceptional skills were bound to arouse jealousy. Where Bo See’s family had insisted she keep her skills secret, though, Ma had said, “The way of Heaven is fairness. We can’t harm others by refusing to share what you know.”
So Bo See had searched the dark corners and rafters of every wormhouse in Strongworm for insects that might lay eggs on the family’s worms or suck their blood. She’d instructed wives not to cook with ginger or beans and cautioned those in charge of the wormhouses to sniff each person who entered to make sure there was nothing odorous on their persons. She’d demonstrated how she slapped the dust from the hems of her pants before entering a wormhouse, how she further purified herself with sprinkles of water from a basin placed just inside the door for that purpose. She’d explained that in catering to the silkworms’ sensitivity, it wasn’t enough to entice them onto fresh paper with mulberry instead of flicking them with a brush or feather; it was important to speak softly, to be mindful of their feelings. “Silkworms can sense the least agitation, so you must be calm inside and out.”
Still no family met with success like ours, and people blamed Bo See for hiding something important.
“No one is hiding anything,” Ma protested over and over. “It’s the calm Bo See has brought to our wormhouse that makes our success exceed yours.”
“Calm?”
“Bo See?”
“We’re not blind, you know.”
“Or without memory.”
“Yeah! I thought
I
was a nervous bride, but Bo See had me beat.”
“Me, too.”
“Even with her escort holding her up, Bo See was swaying like a reed in a big wind.”
Our family explained that Bo See had been suffering from motion sickness, not nervousness. We pointed out that she’d performed every ritual perfectly despite her near faint. Surely that was proof of extraordinary self-control.
Then people held Bo See at a distance for being unnatural.
Our sisters-in-law groused that silkworms were more trouble than babies. Not only did silkworms have to be fed constantly, but the mulberry had to be exactly right. If the leaves were too old or not yet mature or still wet with dew, the worms would sicken. If the knives used for shredding were dull, there’d be insufficient sap for nourishment. If the pieces weren’t fine enough or too long, the worms would not eat them.
Certainly Ba had to carefully assess our mulberry every day. Whenever it looked like we might run short of mature leaves, he had to send Ah Lung and his brothers in all directions to find more. Ba also had to do whatever was necessary to pay for the leaves our worms required, whether it was hiring out my sisters-in-law to reel cocoons for the village landlords, pawning our winter quilts, borrowing against a future harvest, or telling Ma we’d have to make do with watery gruel instead of rice.
During the nine-month silk season, seven generations of silkworms, each numbering in the thousands, had to be raised, and every hand capable of labor, even a child’s, had to help cultivate the mulberry, pick the leaves, shred them, feed the worms, clean their trays, place them on spinning racks, smother the chrysalids in their cocoons, reel the silk, begin again.
I’d started working when I was five, as had my brother. Where he’d quit the wormhouse for play as soon as he’d completed his tasks, however, I’d lingered in the silkworms’ thrall.
Newly hatched, they were shorter than my smallest fingernail, black as my hair and as fine. Yet they’d know to rear up, sway from side to side in search of mulberry. As I sprinkled finely chopped leaves over them, they’d seize the slivers in their tiny jaws, and so loud was their collective crunching and grinding that it would muffle the chop-chop-chop of the cleavers preparing more mulberry.
Eating nonstop, the worms quickly doubled in size, swelled until they had to shed their skin or burst. But first they’d fall into an eerie quiet in which they slept with their little heads crooked skyward, gathering the strength necessary to make a new skin, wriggle out of the old.
Each of their four new skins was lighter in color than the last, and the worms would, after thirty-two days, become a luminous white-amber, long and thick as my mother’s middle finger. Then they’d start spinning silk from their mouths, and through deft tilting and looping shroud themselves completely.
This silk was the harvest for which everyone toiled, and it fetched far more on the market after the strands had been reeled from the cocoons, wound into skeins. Whether reeling silk or picking mulberry leaves, however, I’d be impatient to return to the worms themselves. And while my parents and brother celebrated the end of a season, I’d be eagerly anticipating the next.
I still did. Indeed, during the three months our worm-house stood silent, my sisters-in-law liked to joke that I paced and fidgeted like an addict deprived of her opium. When at last it thrummed with life again, my husband’s brothers would ask him:
“Does Bo See take care of your worm this tenderly?”
“Is your worm neglected now that she has charge of thousands?”
Despite their teasing and grousing, my brothers- and sisters-in-law always placed the well-being of the worms before their own, and they taught their children to do the same. Without exception, then, every member of the family old enough to work labored as diligently as I did to ensure our worms’ contentment. For they understood that the less satisfied our worms, the poorer their appetities and the quality of their cocoons, hence the family’s profit. Moreover, the moths that emerged and the eggs they laid would be inferior, affect- ing the family’s income through several generations of worms. Should our worms, weakened from eating too little, sicken and perish, so would the family.
Fourth Brother-in-law, in doubling the family’s worry and leaving us short of his hands as well as Ah Lung’s, clearly had not followed his own teaching when catching a fastboat for Canton. Had I thought for a moment that my presence would contribute to my husband’s rescue, though, I would have jumped into a boat, too.
AFTER FOURTH BROTHER-IN-LAW’S arrival in Canton, Moongirl, through the husband of a patron, secured the help of a mandarin in finding mine.
This mandarin—forbidding and stiff as his black lacquered hat and high-collared, brocaded robe—had lost his only son to pig-traders, and he’d since executed all kidnappers caught within his jurisdiction no matter how heavily their families or associates weighted pleas for mercy with silver ingots, how much the wretches themselves soaked the earth with their tears. He also committed his personal wealth as well as the resources of his office to looking for stolen men.
Promising to scour the vicinity and outlying areas for Ah Lung, the mandarin counseled Moongirl and Fourth Brother-in-law to extend their search beyond his authority to Macao, the loading point for devil-ships. He provided them with letters of introduction to appropriate officials; passage on a speedy fire-driven boat; even the protection of a barrel-chested lieutenant armed with a sharp-edged broadsword.
The captains and crews of riverboats were sometimes overcome by man-stealers posing as passengers or in attacks launched from vessels alongside. So braves armed with muskets patrolled the deck of the fire-driven boat, and the lieutenant’s sword-hand never shifted from his weapon’s hilt.
His other hand waving off fiery-hot cinders and throat-searing billows of smoke, the lieutenant grimly jutted out his chin, directing Moongirl’s and Fourth Brother-in-law’s attention to the rotting hulks, secluded bays, and grassy islands that were once the refuge of opium smugglers, now pig-traders; the stone forts—embowered by shady banyans, flowering acacias, and dense bamboo groves—from which soldiers hunted them down.
The lieutenant hawked his disgust, spit over the railing. “Evil-doers are like autumn leaves. No sooner are some swept away, then more take their place.”
To Moongirl, the river—muddy with silt—smelled as much of earth as water, and as the fire-boat chugged past junks and sampans, the deck pulsed beneath her feet like a live animal, reminding her of the buffalo she and Ah Lung had ridden as children, the games of hide-and-go-seek they’d played.
Suddenly he felt very close, and she wondered out loud whether Ah Lung might be hidden beneath an awning or in the hold of a nearby boat.
The lieutenant dismissed the possibility. “More likely your brother’s already in a pigpen or devil-ship.”
“What are his chances of escape?”
“From a pigpen? Next to none. Not in one piece anyway. Same for a devil-ship so long as it’s at anchor in the harbor. There are too many guards. But captives on most ships organize rebellions soon after they’re at sea, and although few of these mutinies succeed, some of the rebels do escape.”
Making a fist, the lieutenant rapped his barrel-chest, then his forehead.
“What’s required is courage and good planning.”
EVEN AS THE fire-driven boat was tying up at the quay, Moongirl was leaning over the railing, hiring a skiff. Then, while Fourth Brother-in-law and the lieutenant hurried off to deliver the mandarin’s letters to officials and urge thorough searches of pigpens, lists of men already boarded, Moongirl leaped onto the skiff and directed the boatman to nose out devil-ships in the crowded harbor.
She knew from the lieutenant that devil-ships could be identified by their smell. But so terrible was their stink that were it not for the drone of talk from the holds, Moongirl would have thought the ships filled with captured beasts.
Yet Moongirl refused the boatman’s offer of a cloth to cover her nose and mouth as he circled the devil-ships. There was such a din from bird cries, men bawling and swearing, that she was afraid her voice, if the least bit muffled, would fail to penetrate the thick planks of the ships’ hulls.
Nor did Moongirl shout, “Ah Lung,” the way men and women on other skiffs were calling the names of brothers, husbands, sons, and fathers. She chanted the lament, “Savages have taken you prisoner,” in hopes that Ah Lung, should he hear her, would heed its warning.
She never expected to see him. And since she was partially blinded by a fierce glare, Moongirl couldn’t be sure the man mounting a narrow gangplank stretched between junk and devil-ship actually
was
Ah Lung. With soldiers on both sides of the gangplank aiming their muskets at him though, Moongirl realized that whether she startled the man and he fell or he responded to her by deliberately jumping, he’d be shot. So she did not cry, “Ah Lung,” even then. Instead she promised the boatman, “Double pay for doubling your pace,” and raced to shore for an official.
BACK AGAIN ON the devil-ship’s gangplank, I was walking towards Moongirl and freedom when I misstepped, fell. At the rush of air, my arms flew up, my jacket ballooned out, floated over my mouth and nose.
Reminding myself that I was holding my breath, I did nothing foolish. Not even when the force with which I hit water stung my feet, ripped loose my pants.
Once submerged, my pants torqued around my legs; the jacket’s grip on my head tightened. In a flash, I was shackled and shrouded, and I clawed and kicked in a panic.
For what seemed forever, the water churned as wildly as myself. Then Bo See’s arms were encircling me and all turned calm.
Little by little, though, disparate sensations pricked this calm:
The distant chimes of a bell.
Curses, mutterings, harsh heaving.
More chimes, closer and clearer; a shout.
Fetid heat, flesh—not Bo See’s—sticking to mine.
The slap of bare feet, clank of buckets and pump.
My mouth filling with water, the taste of salt.
A wracking wet cough that brought back full awareness— and with it, the bitter knowledge that Moongirl had not returned and I was yet a captive on the devil-ship, squeezed between Ah Jook on my left, Ah Ming on my right.
