Scorpion Soup (14 page)

‘So odious was he,’ said the knight, ‘that I slayed him before I could think.’

‘And that is what saved me,’ said Queen Amberin.

She smiled.

‘You do not recognise me, do you?’ she whispered.

Fu Sheng thought back through his many adventures.

‘I am searching for a unicorn’s tear,’ he replied, ‘and on my journey I have experienced many places and many people. Forgive me if I do not recognise you.’

The queen smiled abundantly.

‘I was the crone who sent you and your duelling partner to find the tear and to bring it to me,’ she said.

Fu Sheng drew a hand down over his face. He sighed.

‘Then I have failed you.’

Again, the queen smiled. And, gently, she pulled something out from around her neck – a glass phial, hanging on a silver chain.

‘This is what kept me safe all these years,’ she said. ‘A unicorn’s tear.’

‘But why did you dispatch us to search for it, if you had it already?’ asked the knight, a tone of frustration in his voice.

‘Sometimes in life the most effective route is not the shortest one,’ Amberin replied. ‘Through calculations and divinations I came to understand a method by which I might be freed from the troll’s spell. It involved two brave knights crisscrossing the world on a quest – the quest for a unicorn’s tear. Only through your quest could I be certain that the conditions would be right in order for the troll to be slain as he was, by your blade.’

‘But what of my fellow knight, what of Da Shun?’ asked Fu Sheng.

Queen Amberin held up a finger.

‘I shall reunite you both,’ she said, ‘so long as you both promise to be as brothers.’

‘But which of us was the winner?’ asked Fu Sheng.

‘Both of you, and neither of you.’

The queen clapped her hands and a secret door slid back in the east gallery of the reception hall. Reclining the other side of it in a palatial salon was Da Shun.

Before he and Fu Sheng were reunited, each one promised to regard the other as a brother and a friend.

When they had done so, their swords were melted down, the metal used to make a statue. It commemorated a wise queen who saved a life and regained her kingdom at the same time.

For many days and nights, festivities continued in the Kingdom of Salanaque.

The queen honoured the two knights, bestowing the highest title of chivalry upon them. Having been presented with royal robes, decorations pinned to their breasts, Da Shun and Fu Sheng led a grand procession down to the quay.

With trumpets heralding the moment, the knights took their leave of the Queen of Salanaque and her realm, and climbed aboard the royal galleon.

They sailed for a hundred days, across oceans and seas.

But, the night before they were hopeful of arriving home at their own kingdom, the ship was boarded by pirates. Unarmed, Fu Sheng and Da Shun were enslaved along with the crew.

They were shackled and beaten to within a hair’s breadth of life, then cast into a cell block of the death camp at Oran.

No man had the energy or interest to speak. For, if the jailer heard a voice he would open the door and slit the first five throats he could touch with his blade.

And so they existed in a dark, dank realm of squalor and silence.

But one man did have the courage to speak, albeit in a whisper.

An old sailor, he was ragged and cheerless, and his voice sounded like stone grinding on stone.

And this is what he said:

‘The heat more terrible than I can describe, we sailed into a small cove far to the south, a cove nestled on the coastline of far-off Senegal. We went ashore, slung hammocks in the trees, built a fire on the beach, and cooked up some langoustines.

‘I can taste their meat: all juicy and tender, with a hint of coconut.

‘That cove was idyllic, a paradise known only to one who has known the sea. Close my eyes and I can see the shadows thrown by the palm fronds in late afternoon, and can hear the sound of the birds gliding through the heat.

‘As the evening approached, we sat round and shared stories, stories of our travels and of our lives.

‘I remember it, clear as I am here with you now.

‘The man beside me was a Spaniard. His name was Alfonso, and he had one of those faces you could never forget: hollow features and an expression baked through from ordeal. Drawing a little on his pipe, he stooped to stoke the fire for a moment, his eyes lost in memory.

‘“I will tell you a tale,” he said softly. “A tale of another time, a time when I was not a sailor, but an apprentice to a master bookbinder, in Toledo. The bookbinder was the greatest craftsman of his age, from a family of ancestral binders to royalty no less. Clients would arrive at his workshop from across Spain. Sometimes they even came from France, and beyond. And it was a Frenchman, a famous writer from Troyes, with whom this tale is concerned...”’

Finis