Daylight on Iron Mountain (10 page)

Jiang looked stunned. ‘No.’

‘His sense of humour is… how should I put this… raw. People getting badly hurt… that amuses him. That probably makes him a sociopath, but it’s not enough to label him so. He’s a multifaceted man. What he’s trying to do… the idea of a world state shared by both our kinds… that’s rather heroic, wouldn’t you say?
Visionary
.’

Jiang Lei said nothing. He was still reeling from the fact that Tsao Ch’un knew what he’d done to Cadre Wang.

‘The bastard deserved it,’ Amos said, reaching for his coffee. ‘And it was a nice touch… good aiming by your men.’

Jiang looked to him. ‘You speak as if you saw it.’

‘And so I did. Tsao Ch’un sent me a copy, along with your file.’

‘Oh…’

‘You can see it if you want. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.’

Jiang Lei hesitated, then asked, ‘The two women who arrived… last night…’

‘My wife and daughter… you’ll meet them later.’

‘Ah…’ Jiang hesitated, then, changing the subject: ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand about Tsao Ch’un. His obsession with animals and insects – with killing them off.’

Amos nodded. ‘Now that I do know. It dates back to his childhood, to the time when he was the youngest of six brothers.’

‘He had five brothers? But I thought…’ Jiang fell silent. There was clearly a lot he didn’t know.

‘The eldest, Hsiao, was something of a bully. It was Hsiao who had his brothers dig a pit and throw Ch’un into it. And then, as if that were not enough, he had them pour jars of insects into the pit with him. All manner of nasty crawly things. Things that bit and things that stung, and others – perhaps the worst of all as far as he was concerned – that merely flapped and clicked.’

Shepherd looked down. ‘Three days he spent in that pit. Three whole days. Something broke in him. Trust, certainly, but more than that. One thing I’m sure of. Whatever Tsao Ch’un is now was forged in that pit.’

Jiang’s voice was almost a whisper now. ‘How old was he when this happened?’

‘Just six. You can imagine. And when they finally came back for him and lifted him up out of the pit, he swore silently that he would kill them – every last one.’

‘I see.’

‘Yes. And when he learned that most animals carry some form of parasite or another, he put them too on his list of things he would kill when he was older.’

‘Did
he
tell you that?’

‘No. I got the story from one of his retainers. An old Han servant who had been with him since he was a child. He’s dead now, but I have no reason to doubt the truth of what he told me… Anyway, years later, when finally we met, the thing that was uppermost on his mind was how we might keep his City free of infestation. To me the answer was obvious. We had to seal the City off, hence the Net, the seals, the de-infestation chambers. Especially the last, which I conceived very much as a kind of airlock.’ Amos laughed. ‘Spaceship Earth, I used to call it.’

‘And the hexagonal shape of the stacks?’

‘I took that from my hives. I’ve kept bees since I was four. It’s such a strong shape, the hexagon. I’m astonished it never caught on architecturally.’

Jiang smiled. ‘I think you had the last laugh, neh?’

‘Maybe. As it is, the City is a vast recycling plant, a huge biosphere. It has to be. I used to liken it to a fish tank, awaiting its fish.’

Amos turned, looking back at the whiteness that surrounded the valley on all sides. ‘It looks so permanent, don’t you think? But it will all fall apart one day. Not today. Nor ten years from now. Not even a hundred years from now. But one day our descendants will wake up and it will have gone. We’ll have moved on. On to another stage of our perpetual development. But don’t tell your Master that. He doesn’t want to know. Ten thousand years, that’s what he wants.’ He laughed, robustly. ‘As if I could promise him that!

‘Anyway,’ he said, a moment later. ‘Let’s hunt. I’ll get my gun… and one for you… in case you change your mind.’

Jiang Lei had a short nap after lunch. Refreshed, he sought out Amos again, and found him beneath the oak tree, working on his painting.

It had changed greatly. Almost a third of the large canvas was now filled. Jiang walked over, standing behind Shepherd, squinting at the painting, trying to make out what it was.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t the view across the bay. It had the look of something symbolic. And the figures…

Amos’s figures were tiny. They were dwarfed by the canvas, like travellers in some vast wilderness.

‘Here,’ Amos said, handing Jiang a magnifying glass. ‘Don’t you like the detail?’

Jiang stepped closer, taking the glass, then looked. And looked again, his eyes widening. ‘But those…’ He laughed uncomfortably. ‘I don’t understand. Why have you turned them into insects?’

Amos looked to him and smiled. ‘Our conversation earlier suggested it. Tsao Ch’un may have kept the real insects out of his City, but the
true
insects got through. You recognize them, then?’

Jiang did indeed. As he studied them, he was struck by how clever Amos’s
imagination was. Here was the whole of Tsao Ch’un’s court; all of his so-called friends and advisors, all of his stewards and servants, every last one of them captured perfectly, their faces pasted on to an array of verminous creatures. Faces of greed and lust and ambition. Faces stripped of their masks and revealed to the world in miniature.

He would have said it was wonderful, only it wasn’t. There was something quite awful about it, something utterly repellent.

Amos seemed to sense his reaction. ‘You don’t
have
to like it, Jiang Lei. It’s not meant to be liked. It has no
Wen Ch’a Te
, eh? No elegance. But sometimes that’s a virtue. Not to be liked. That is the condition that the great man aspires to.’

Jiang handed him the glass. He was about to say something, but Shepherd got there first.

‘I read those poems that you wrote. You know, the ones you didn’t want published. The spiky ones. They’re by far your best.’

‘But…’

‘You destroyed them, I know. But Tsao Ch’un had a spy-eye watching you. It was in your tent. Size of a very small bug. He used to watch you for hours. I didn’t know why, back then, but now I do. He made his mind up early when it came to you.’

Jiang looked down. If there’d been a spy-eye in his tent, then it was not just the poetry Tsao Ch’un would have seen. He had been faithful to Chun Hua, true, but that did not mean he had not relieved himself now and then. When things got really bad. And Tsao Ch’un would have seen that.

He felt… humiliated.

But Amos had moved on. ‘I promised you earlier that I’d introduce you to my girls. Let’s do that now. They’re working down by the water. We grow our own tobacco, you know.’

Jiang followed Amos down.

The slope dipped sharply at first, then rose a little. Beyond that it fell away again, ending at the water’s edge. There, to one side, behind a low wooden fence, the two women were at work, their hair tied back.

Amos stopped, then cleared his throat. The two women looked up.

Both were tanned from the sun, their long hair dark and lustrous, and both had beautiful green eyes – deep, sea-green eyes. The only difference was their age.

Like twins, they were. Twins separated by twenty years.

‘Alexandra… Beth… this is my good friend, Jiang Lei.’

The two climbed to their feet, then came across, smiling as each in turn took his hand and shook it.

‘I’m delighted to meet you,’ Alexandra, the elder of the two, said. ‘I’m sorry we weren’t here to welcome you yesterday.’

Beth, had looked down shyly, saying nothing.

‘We’ll see the girls at dinner tonight,’ Amos said, stepping carefully over the fence, then crouching to examine the leathery-looking plants. ‘Did you know our friend here is a poet? Probably the best Han poet of his age. His pen name is Nai Liu.’

‘Really?’ She seemed to look at him anew. ‘Then maybe you’ll read us some of your poems later, Enduring Willow…’

Jiang laughed. ‘You speak Mandarin?’

‘Just a little. My father, Charles Melfi, was a China scholar, back before the Collapse. He taught me the odd phrase or two.’

Jiang Lei bowed. ‘Then I shall be honoured to read for you,
T’ai T’ai
Shepherd… I haven’t brought anything with me, but I’m sure I can recite one or two from memory.’

Amos straightened. Then, stepping back across the fence, he smiled at Jiang.

‘I have all your stuff, Jiang Lei… including the spiky stuff. I especially like the one you called “Voices”.’

‘You
have
that?’

‘I could recite it for you, if you like.’

But Alexandra wasn’t having that. ‘Don’t tease our guest, Amos. They’re
his
poems and
he
should read them. That is, if he wants to.’

‘Did Tsao Ch’un send them to you?’ Jiang asked, intrigued now.

‘Not at all,’ Amos answered. ‘I’ve been an admirer of yours for some while. I bought each collection as it came out. My favourite is
Restraint
. So understated.’

Jiang looked down, embarrassed as always, by such praise. But it was true.
Restraint
was his best, and Shepherd understood that.

‘I was wondering,’ he said hesitantly, ‘if we could go out on the water. If it’s not possible, of course, just say. Only…’

He met Amos’s eyes, and saw how the man was grinning at him.

‘You had only to say,’ Amos said. ‘Beth… help me get the boat out… let’s show our good friend here how nautical we English are!’

Much later, alone once again in that narrow bed beneath the eaves, Jiang Lei found his thoughts returning to the day.

That afternoon, on the river, he had seen a different side to Amos: less intense, more relaxed, almost childlike. To think of him as the architect of their world was strange. But that was what he was. Without Amos Shepherd, Tsao Ch’un’s vision of a unified world state would have remained just that… a vision. For Chung Kuo was the City and its workings. And that city had sprung, fully formed, from Amos Shepherd’s head.

It was strange, being out there on the water. Amos had shipped the oars and let them drift, leaning back on the cushions, talking lazily of this and that. And, after a while, Jiang had found himself relaxing too.

He was here for a serious purpose, certainly. Next week he would meet his generals and put to them the strategies devised here in the Domain. Men would live or die according to those strategies. Many men. For the Americans, he knew, would not give up their empire without a struggle, no matter how divided they now were.

But so it would be, whether he commanded it or not. And maybe it was best that he was in charge, for another, more brutal man might have chosen a more costly approach, spilling blood carelessly.

That was not
his
way.

Jiang slept, to be woken hours later by the sound of rain on the thatch overhead.

He lay there a while, disoriented, vaguely aware that there was something he needed to attend to. Something he had to do.

Then he remembered where he was.

Slowly he sat up. Light was coming from the window to his right. He leaned forward, pulling the curtain aside, and looked.

Down in the garden, beneath the oak tree, a canopy had been set up. There beneath the awning, working by the light of an arc lamp, was Amos.

He was painting.

Jiang looked at his wrist timer. It was almost four-thirty.

What was he doing, working at this godforsaken hour? Did the man never sleep?

Jiang was tempted to go down and see what he was doing. To see what else had crawled from his mind in the night. Only he was tired.

He lay down again, turning on his side, facing away from the light.

Sleep. I need to sleep.

Only sleep would not come. Not immediately. He kept thinking about how pretty Alexandra and her daughter were. Not that he had any romantic ideas regarding them. Just that it was rare for him to find Western women attractive in that way. He had enjoyed reading his poems to them; enjoyed the way they’d applauded him.

Jiang yawned. The rain had woken him from a dream. A vague, meandering dream about Corfe and mechanical creatures that hopped and sprang and flew. A very odd dream, now that he came to think about it.

In the darkness, Jiang smiled. Maybe that was where Amos’s paintings came from. Maybe he simply painted his dreams.

He yawned again. It was such a comfortable bed…

There was a rustling in the thatch above, the light patter of raindrops. Soft, soothing sounds.

Jiang Lei slept.

‘Well? What do you think?’

Jiang Lei turned, watching as Amos came down the path towards him, ruddy with health and smiling.

Jiang turned back. He had been studying the canvas this past half hour, and he still wasn’t sure whether he liked it or not. It was a work of genius, certainly, only…

Only it was a little bit too honest for Jiang’s taste. A little bit too
real
, in its abstract way.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said, bearing in mind what Amos had said about not holding back; about not being polite for the sake of it. If that was what Amos wanted…

‘Go on,’ Amos said, his eyes holding Jiang’s.

‘It’s brilliant, obviously… but uncomfortable.’

‘Should art be comfortable then, friend Jiang?’

‘No, but it shouldn’t… perhaps… be quite so disturbing.’

‘Do you find it so?’

‘Immensely so. I’ve stood here trying to argue myself out of it, but I can’t. This painting – in fact, this whole aspect of your work – unsettles me.’

Amos smiled. ‘Well done. That didn’t hurt now, did it?’

‘No, but…’ Jiang shook his head. ‘I feel you’re asking questions of me.’

‘In the painting?’

‘Yes. I feel… oh, I don’t know… insufficiently prepared.’

Amos laughed. ‘That makes you sound like an academic. It is but a dream, Jiang Lei. A vision I had. Have you ever seen the work of Samuel Butler?’

‘No… is he proscribed?’

‘Yes, but I have copies of all that stuff… in my vaults. I’ll show you in a while. But I guess what I was trying to illustrate was the corruption behind it all… The thing is, we experience but a minuscule slice of existence. A single safe segment. If we were capable of seeing the bigger picture – of seeing, say, a thousand years of life in an instant – we would see that life is but a heaving, ever-changing flow. All of our growth stems from death, and what we call life is but an endless cycle of corruption.’