Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (25 page)

You have to evolve to survive.

The sparrows have leapt at a way to feed themselves.

Is this the answer I’ve been looking for? It feels right, righter than anything else.

Their innocence is too absolute. Nobody, nothing, is that innocent. There is no such thing as the perfect creature, without a blemish on its spirit. There is no such thing as purity. The robin has a savage heart, its terrible beak poised ready to spear any creature of spearable size. If I were smaller, or he bigger, he would spear me without compunction. The sparrows cannot be so innocent, beside such a bird. They must have
some
bad in them, however slight. Yet I cannot see it, feel it, when I reach out with my gift.

I look towards my escape.

It is a long long way away. Several steps. Further than an instant. Almost infinity.

‘Are you going to give me a chance?’ I say.
‘Or what?
Do I get just a try at it?’

There is no intelligence there, no way to reason. They do not even look at me, as they peck around at the cracks in the concrete, searching for grubs and insects. They are carnivores, trained on cooked meat but long since graduated to raw flesh, when it’s available, when they can
make
it available.

I turn and run.

I’ve been hooked on Medieval China ever since I first saw
The Water Margin
when it was on television. Stories grow out of fascination
.

Mai Song was twelve years of age when the mocking man first appeared at her side. ‘You are the daughter of an impoverished war lord,’ he sneered. ‘You will never amount to anything.’

‘I am not concerned about riches or fame,’ she replied, ‘so long as I find happiness.’

The mocking man laughed in a particularly offensive manner.

‘That too will be beyond your grasp, if I have anything to do with it.’

Mai Song was an accomplished archer. She could hit a knotted clout at a hundred paces with the bow her father had given her. However, her next shot missed the target. The mocking man laughed and jeered.

Thereafter the mocking man was always there, at crucial times, to denigrate her. He jeered at her efforts to paint beautiful watercolours of the firs clinging to the crags of Guilin’s hills, telling her that mud splashed on walls by the wheels of ox-carts was more artistic. He called her horse, the beast she loved,
a
shambling monster. He said she rode it like a frog rode a lump of driftwood floating on a scummy pond. Her efforts at Chinese characters, the lovely picture-language of her nation, he said were pathetic and corrupt, and therefore meaningless.
Everything and anything she did was ridiculed by the mocking man
, until the princess felt she was totally unworthy. She might have been utterly and hopelessly miserable if she had not a companion, a talking crane which landed in the courtyard of the garden on the odd frosty morning, and who told her she was estimable.

‘Do not listen to the mocking man,’ the white crane told her, as it took fish from the lily pond, ‘he is trying to break your spirit.’

It upset Mai Song’s father to lose his precious goldfishes, but Mai Song told her father cranes had to eat just as people did. Moreover, when the white crane was in evidence, the mocking man stayed away. Just the presence of the white crane seemed to deter the mocking man from appearing.

Mai Song’s home was alive with mosquitoes and bog rats, snakes and leeches. Mai Song lived in a bamboo castle on the edge of the marsh country over which her father ruled. The
war lord
’s subjects were mostly poor fishermen who scraped a living from the shallow waters of the swamp, or hunters of small birds and game in the bogs and fens. These people lived for the best part in rickety houses on stilts, though some had to use their small fishing rafts as their places of rest. They gave no money to their lord because they had none. He and his small contingent of soldiers provided protection for these people against the bandits who were the scourge of the water margin. The
war lord
was paid in kind: fish and fowl mostly, but sometimes with manual labour. In this way he maintained his bamboo castle and fed himself and his daughter, his wife being long dead from swamp fever.

Sometimes there would pass by her father’s castle the troops and retinues of rich and powerful
war lords
. She would glimpse silk banners in the distance, fluttering like trapped birds on the tips of tall lances. Then knights in bright metal would appear under them, as they reached the crest of rising ground. They would be riding magnificent chargers: black, white and dappled, dripping with curtains of flank armour, their brown eyes peering through dark holes in satin hoods. Behind the cavalry the foot soldiers would come, their heads high, green plumes spouting from their helmets like fountains of liquid jade,
chinking
and
clinking
as they marched over the soft marshy earth.

In the centre of this long lizard of metalled military rode a large arrogant man, sitting tall on his goatskin saddle,
his
eyes like flint arrowheads. This was the
war lord
himself, surrounded by strolling figures in silk robes: scribes, overseers, body-servants, grooms, cup-bearers, and sometimes, a sorcerer. Following the
war lord
was often a brocade-covered litter, behind which sat the war lord’s wife or daughter. This person sometimes drew back the rich folds of the litter’s drapes to peer out at Mai Song who stood on the battlements of her father’s wooden fort watching the carnival go by. The eyes of these women and girls were full of disdain for the young child behind the bamboo spikes. When she grew older they glanced at her close-cropped hair and often mistook her for a kitchen boy, dismissing her at once in a single indifferent glance.

But sometimes a sorcerer!

Yes, it must have been a sorcerer, accompanying a
war lord
, who was responsible for the mocking man. Just before her twelfth birthday Mai Song had been standing on the battlements as she usually did, watching a parade of soldiers go by, when she happened to stare at a young man of some fourteen winters who had eyes like a snake. He stared back, it seemed belligerently, as if he were offended by her interest in him. When her eyes did not waver this youthful wizard wafted the air with his right hand, no doubt leaving a curse on the child.

The mocking man was not real of course, being simply an image in the likeness of a young man. Though the mocking man’s features were not at all clear, being shrouded in a misty darkness which clung to his form, Mai Song got the impression that he was not more that eighteen years of age, a petulant youth with a crescent red mouth that curved up on either side of a lean nose. His hair was long and lank, hanging down to his waist. He wore a silk gown covered in strange symbols and leather sandals with gold buckles on his feet.

The mocking man was invisible and silent to all but Mai Song. The
war lord
thought his daughter was quietly mad, but did not blame his child for that, given the environment in which she had been raised.

One day when she had grown into a woman Mai Song was playing mah jong (which is called
mah jeuk
in the local dialect) when a prince rode by the castle. This prince had no bodyguard of shining soldiers, no litter, no feng shui man or sorcerer accompanying him. He was entirely alone, the prey of bandits and rogue war lords along the water margin. This prince called up to Mai Song and asked her if he might spend the night at the castle. She replied that she would have to ask her father, who was the
war lord
, but thought the answer would be yes.

That evening the prince dined with Mai Song and the
war lord
. The prince’s name was Pang Yau (which means ‘friend’) and his father was the King of Gwongdong, one of the most wealthy and powerful regions in all China. Mai Song felt instinctively that though his father had the reputation of being a tyrant, Prince Pang Yau was a good man.

The prince radiated goodness from his face, his hands,
his
feet. He smiled at her all the time, his hazel eyes twinkling, and once during the meal he ‘accidentally’ touched her hand with his fingertips. A dramatic thrill went through Mai Song.

The mocking man appeared and on seeing her expression, laughed at her.

‘Do you honestly think you could capture the heart of a man like this? A woman whose hands are rough with washing dishes because her father cannot afford a scullery maid?
A sweeper of floors?
Why this is a young fine prince from a wealthy family. He would not look twice at you if you were not the only woman for a hundred miles.’

She thought this was probably true. Mai Song knew that
men
who went into regions where females were scarce, thought the first woman they saw on returning to their homeland was beautiful.

Before he left in the morning, Prince Pang Yau asked the
war lord
’s permission to return once his visit to a far country was over.

‘I shall tell you my reason,’ said the prince. ‘I have fallen in love with your daughter, Mai Song.’

The
war lord
was dubious about this match. ‘Mai Song is pretty, I grant you—but not beautiful. You are still a very young man. You may yet see other women in this far country who appeal to you more.’

The prince shook his head solemnly. ‘I am not as fickle as you believe me to be. I have seen many beautiful women. My father’s palace is full of them. My father gathers them in droves from his kingdom and parades them before me. Mai Song
is
pretty, but that is not why I have fallen in love with her. I have fortunately—though sometimes it is a curse—been born with insight— and she has the most gentle and lovely spirit I have ever encountered in any woman. It is
her
I love, not her looks, though I am grateful for her pleasant features too.’

When Mai Song heard what the young prince had said her heart soared. She ran to the prince and proclaimed her love for him. She was gratified to see he was bursting with happiness at this news. They strolled outside the castle walls, holding hands, along the banks of the marsh. For the first time she saw beauty in the still waters of the swamp: dragonflies hovered like chips of lapis lazuli above the surface; reed warblers swayed on the rushes and sang high sweet notes to her; emerald lizards and small marsh frogs flashed their green in the sun.

Once the prince had left her side Mai Song took her turn to sneer back at the mocking man.

‘Not fit for a prince? Perhaps. But this prince looks beyond my menial surroundings, my poor upbringing. He sees someone who could love him better than any other. You shall not put me down in this matter. When Pang Yau returns, I shall marry him.’

‘
If
he returns,’ derided the mocking man, his mouth curved downwards for once. ‘Perhaps I can do something about that!’

Fear for the prince’s
well-being
struck Mai Song deep in the heart like a sword. She said nothing more to the mocking man, for she remembered that he was in effect a sorcerer’s image. She had no doubt that
all that went on inside the bamboo castle was known to the sorcerer himself
. Running to the battlements she managed to shout a warning to the prince, as he rode away, but her words were lost on the wind. He turned in his saddle and waved back at her, no doubt thinking she was wishing him a good journey and a safe return to her side.

For many months Mai Song waited for her prince to come. He had promised to return within two, but six,
then
eight months passed by. No letter came. No messenger arrived. The mocking man crowed.

Finally, the terrible news came with a passing peddler. Prince Pang Yau had been captured and imprisoned by a powerful wizard in the north of China. The prince was being held in a high tower in a castle with only a single door and no windows. The prince’s father had sent his own sorcerer with an army to attempt to free the youth, but all the soldiers in the world could not get inside the impregnable fortress, and the king’s sorcerer failed in his bid to force an opening. It was said that the wizard inside the castle was feeding on the goodness of the prince and growing stronger for it.