Imperial Fire (59 page)

She walked towards the stern. Nobody else moved.

‘Qiuylue?’

She turned at the stern rail, faced him, brought her hands together and bowed.

‘Someone stop her!’ Vallon shouted.

The nearest man was still feet away when she gathered the folds of her gown, stepped onto the transom, spread her arms like a bird taking flight and jumped.

I drew some of the Kaifeng street scenes from Zhang Zeduan’s
Spring Festival on the River
, an early twelfth-century scroll painting depicting society in the Chinese capital. This remarkable work, more than seventeen feet long, is unmatched in the amount of information it gives about a medieval city anywhere in the world. As well as showing the architectural details, it presents a pageant of everyday life in the metropolis, including scenes of traders and storytellers, caravans and cargo boats, fishermen and scholars, wrestlers and garden designers, conjurors and musicians, students and stevedores…

As ever, I’m grateful to my agent Anthony Goff and his colleagues at David Higham Associates. Thanks, too, to Ed Wood and Iain Hunt, my editors at Sphere for their invaluable input.

With the delivery deadline approaching, my daughter Lily offered to read the first half of the typescript. Her corrections and suggestions were greatly appreciated – not least for what she implied rather than stated.

Deborah, my wife, provided the Latin and Greek, including the translation from Virgil’s
Aeneid
. For her support and encouragement, I am more grateful than I can say.