Mandarin-Gold (8 page)

He became aware that the procession was about to stop. The rhapsodists and eunuchs had ceased their songs, and were now humming a hymn of praise to him. At the tap of a drum, his sixteen bearers, with one well-drilled movement, slid the poles from their shoulders, bowed, and prostrated themselves until his palanquin was resting on the ground.

Tao climbed out and, walking with the stiff ceremonial gait he had been taught as a child, as rigorously defined as the steps of a formal dance, every step made on the beat of a gong, he approached the altar to pray. All around him, people flung themselves, faces down, in the dust.

'Wu Hu, oh, alas, Imperial Heaven, were not the world afflicted by extraordinary ills, I should not dare to present extraordinary supplications,' he began, in a ritual sing-song voice. 'But this year the drought passes all precedent. Summer is past and still no rain has fallen. Mankind is bowed beneath calamity, and even the beasts and insects cease to live.'

Tao paused, hands outstretched, looking at the thousands of his subjects lying still as the dead. A few dogs and hogs grouted and grunted among them, but even those people they pressed against did not dare to move.

'I, the Son of Heaven, am Lord of this World,' he went on. 'Heaven looks to me that I preserve tranquillity. Yet, though I cannot sleep, though I cannot eat with appetite, though I shake with grief and anxiety, my grief, my fasts, my sleepless nights have obtained but a trifling shower.

'Have I wanted in respect for you? Has pride or prodigality too deep a place in my heart, springing like weeds by my neglect?

'Have I been negligent in public business, lacking in the diligence and effort that was due? Have unfit persons been appointed to official posts? Have magistrates declined their ear to petitioners?

'I implore Imperial Heaven to pardon my ignorance. Summer is past, autumn is close at hand, truly to wait is not possible. Hasten and confer clement deliverance. With speed send down the blessing of rain. Wu Hu, oh, alas, Imperial Heaven, give ear to my petition!'

Tao paused, head down now that his prayer was over, hands by his sides. Then he turned and walked back to his palanquin and climbed inside. The sixteen men took the strain on their shoulders again and raised him up. The procession began to march back to the palace, and the crowds stood up on their feet.

Above them all, the sun still burned like a flame in the sky; there seemed neither sign nor hope of rain. The Emperor sat, face composed and expressionless as a mask, but his mind in a ferment. If no rain fell, his power would be doubted, his whole authority questioned. For this reason, he had delayed making his prayer for weeks; for the longer he waited, the nearer rain must be. Yet he could do no more than pray in the ancient, stylized way, using phrases as old as his religion.

Perhaps he should have promised something specific in return for rain? Perhaps he should have made a private vow to Heaven that he would do some great and worthy act — like driving the Barbarians out of his kingdom?

But how could he force them to go? His Viceroy in Canton had repeatedly assured him that they were harmless; that foreign ships were leaky, and because European soldiers wore such heavy uniforms, they were unable to run without falling over on their backs like beetles, and so offered no challenge to Chinese troops.

Tao doubted this, for the Portuguese, the British and the Americans had sailed these same contemptible ships for thousands of miles; and some of their ships were now propelled by fire and steam, and not by wind or oars. Also, their soldiers had stayed upright in many hard campaigns elsewhere. So, lacking direct force, he would have to use guile. He thought about the problem during the long journey back to his palace, bowing mechanically from time to time, not seeing any of the people who flung themselves, heads down, in front of his procession.

He had passed the Palace of Heavenly Purity, the Hall of the Blending of Heaven and Earth, and was going through the Archway of the Purple Forbidden City, at the centre of which was his palace, when he realized what he must do.

He could not demean himself by attempting to deal with Barbarians and Foreign Devils direct. Instead, he would make all opium dealers liable to instant death if dealing was discovered. The trade was already illegal, and this Imperial Edict, if enforced rigorously and without exception, would soon stamp it out, as a man in heavy boots can beat down a fire before it spreads and sets a whole forest aflame.

He would also appoint a new Viceroy in Canton, a man who had reached high rank by his own endeavours, whose honesty was not suspect. He would give this man strict orders to deal harshly with the Foreign Devils. They would react in some violent and un-Confucian way, as they had so often reacted in the past, and he would strike and banish them all. And then China and all his empire could return to peaceful things, and life would be as it had been in the olden .times. He would promise Heaven he would do this great deed, worthy of all his ancestors; now Heaven would relent and allow rain to fall.

The procession stopped as it approached his palace. Gently, his palanquin was lowered, and the singing died to a whisper. A servant prostrated himself and then opened the door.

The Emperor stepped out. As he turned his face to look up at the sky, rain began to fall; thin scattered drops at first, like tiny fingers tapping on a drum, and then in a torrent of water as the skies opened.

Now the gongs and drums beat triumphantly and the singers took up their song. The crowds shouted with wild delight. Truly, the Son of Heaven's prayer had been answered with unusual and amazing swiftness.

But only the Son of Heaven knew why.

5

In Which a Reverend American

Gentleman Receives an Important Visitor

At the same hour that rain fell in Peking, the Reverend Selmer Mackereth knelt piously at prayer in his room in Macao. It was not raining there, and the room was warm, and he was praying to another God.

Mackereth was a squat, broad-shouldered man, with hair turning grey and cropped short against the heat. In the half light of evening, his head looked as though it had been dusted with iron fillings.

Mackereth's hands were broad and the nails bitten down to the quick. His eyes, unusually, were open, for he had run out of anything further to say to the Almighty. As he knelt, elbows tucked into his round stomach, looking at the opposite wall of the room where Christ hung on an ivory crucifix, the thought struck him that he had been praying like this in Macao, morning and evening, for seven years, and he. was still as far from converting the Chinese heathen to the ways of the one true God' as when he had arrived from New York. Perhaps this was God's way of informing him that he was in the wrong place, and had answered the wrong call? Or perhaps he had only imagined he had ever heard a call?

He struggled to his feet, stiff in his joints, confused and disappointed, and sat back thankfully in a wicker chair. He poured himself a neat whisky. I have laboured in the vineyard, he thought to himself, but there are no grapes yet worth gathering, nor any foreseeable harvest worthy of the name.

His mind ran back for a moment over the chequer-board of his life. His family had sailed from Bohemia to the United States, where his parents had both died when he was in his teens, and on money he inherited from his father, who owned a market garden, he had qualified as a priest of a small and unfashionable order, the Sons of Zebedee.

Priesthood in this order was no bar to marriage, and he chose as his wife a dull, mousey woman who sang in the tabernacle choir. She was a widow, in poor health, as it turned out, and had died within months of their marriage. Mackereth then discovered with surprise, and some relief, that her first husband had left her thousands of acres of wheatland. Mackereth sold this, banked the money and lived comfortably off the interest.

He liked travel and had visited England, but the climate and the welcome were both too chill for him; also, England already had enough priests. He had moved on to France and Germany, then back to Bohemia; next, on to Egypt. His rank and his money assured him of respect, but friends he would have to make himself, and this he had always found difficult.

He rented a villa on the outskirts of Cairo near the Nile, but the weather was hot, and the rasping dust from the desert and those endless burning days, irritated his throat and made him cough. Also, it had been difficult to find companions among either the English or the French community. He had been disturbed by critical remarks from irreligious people who doubted that he was a priest, for the Sons of Zebedee were not widely known. So he had sailed even farther east to India; then on to Burma. A brief stay in Java followed, and finally, he had reached Macao, the farthest East that he could travel. If he left Macao, he could only go back, not forward, and there was nothing and no-one to return to in any of the countries he had visited.

Mackereth had established himself as a missionary in Macao, printing Bible tracts with his own money, and distributing them to the Chinese. They accepted them politely enough at street corners, but once out of his sight either threw the paper into the gutter, or else carried it home to patch up a hole in one of their ramshackle houses.

Mackereth had really achieved nothing, and now as he sat in the evening of middle age, dwelling on his past and contemplating the present, he knew the future would be similarly full of failures. How disappointed Our Lord must have felt, he thought, when He had walked round the shores of Lake Galilee and spoken to the multitudes in parables, and even performed miracles for them, and yet
still
they remained unbelievers, or even worse, disbelievers!

Mackereth sipped his drink again, and poured himself another. He was running away, of course. He could admit this to himself only after a few drinks; but never to anyone else. He was running away from that terrible vice which every nation gave to a neighbouring country. In England, it was the French complaint; in France, the English vice. In Germany it was said to belong to Italians; Italy blamed it on the Slavs. Only in the comfortable acceptability of Cairo and in some of the anonymous back streets of Bombay, had Mackereth been at ease, out of his dark suits and imprisoning white collar; for he was a homosexual. He had realized this as soon as he was married — before, if he was absolutely honest — but the Lord in His infinite mercy, in gathering his wife to the Eternal Blessed, had saved him the further degradation of connection with a woman.

He sat, legs apart, head flung back, remembering the Chinese and half-caste Portuguese boys he liked to think of as his friends, with their fresh clean complexions and firm young limbs, their flat bellies and rounded buttocks. At the thought, he squirmed in his seat, and the familiar arrows of desire dug well-sharpened barbs in his loins.

Of course, he was not alone in this private battle. Had not St Paul suffered from these same agonies of lust? Mackereth had adopted all kinds of allies in his war against these forbidden longings. He had endured cold baths, purges, sea-bathings. He had drunk foul-tasting elixirs and swallowed pills, but beneath these extremes of drugs and discomforts, his need burned oh like fire below a covering of burnt-out ash.

He told himself he was helping the boys, that he was teaching them Christianity. If, in return, they shared his bed or fingered him, or allowed him to finger them with his brown, nicotine-stained hands, while his breath throbbed and rattled in his throat, perhaps they would forget these physical indignities, and remember the spiritual introduction he had given them to the Kingdom of Heaven?

There had been complaints against him, but he had bought them off. In Macao, this was not difficult to do. Officials of every kind and every rank had their price, just as in Canton and Lintin the mandarins had theirs.

He was a labourer in the vineyard of the Lord, and of all the millions in China, surely a handful would eventually accept the message of the Gospels he had come so far to spread? Then everything would be worthwhile, but to achieve this, he needed money, more than his means would allow, and only that week he had heard the shattering news that the bank in which he had placed his money had found itself unable to meet its commitments.

He read the letter time and again, before the horrible, unspeakable message filtered through to his understanding. They had lent more money than they possessed; there had been a run on their funds, and they had closed their doors.

Mackereth was therefore not a rich man with private means, but a frightened, worried, middle-aged man with rent to pay, a housekeeper to pay, boys to pay, bribes to pay; and no money for any of his debts. So he had been praying for help to the God he had served in his own way. Had not Our Lord Himself advised: Take no thought for tomorrow, what ye shall eat or what ye shall put on, for the Lord shall provide? Now was His chance, thought Mackereth.

He poured a third whisky, and its rough fire began to burn in his veins. There were many rich families in Macao. Perhaps one would hire him as a tutor for children; perhaps they might even have young boys? Maybe he could be a confessor? The Catholics had done very well out of that for centuries. There was no reason, surely, why a Son of Zebedee could not follow where they had led. The Lord would provide for him somehow, he kept telling himself, assuring-himself, but how?

He poured himself a fourth whisky and sat, head sunk down now on his chest, as the shadows grew longer and darker. His Chinese servant appeared silently in the doorway; he often watched his master thus. How odd that these Barbarians found such comfort in this fiery, angry water! Of course, he had sampled it when Mackereth was away, but he had not found its heat at all to his liking. Now Mackereth owed him a month's salary. He would have to steal some whisky to sell or some food. He had never been owed a month's salary before.