Shanghai (37 page)

The door opened behind him and the History Teller entered. “Bring the lamp closer,” the Assassin said.

This boy is my death, too,
the History Teller thought as she moved the lamp.

Loa Wei Fen reached up and pulled the lamp closer to the Captain's chest. He put the thumb and forefinger of his left hand on the man's ribs, gently forcing the skin between the ribs taut. Then he leaned in and placed his ear to the Captain's chest. He forced himself to ignore the man's heartbeat and instead listened carefully to the pull and push of his lungs. His fingers crept across the ribs to the right side of his chest. No need to enter the left side. Then he sensed it: the place where the lung expanded, and to the left, the place where the viscera moved to allow the expansion. It was not so different from the way he would have tried to find a wall beam beneath a wall covering.

Satisfied with his placement, he withdrew his swalto blade and rested the point at the exact place on the man's
chest. Instantly blood welled up and began to pool. Loa Wei Fen quickly stilled his breath and made himself hear the entirety of the room. Then, with an elegant thrust, he pushed the swalto blade through the Captain's chest and retracted it instantly. He was happy, when he looked at his knife, that no hint of the bedding came back with the blade. Any foreign matter left in the wound could be fatal. Quickly he reached in his bag and crushed the healing herb into the wound, then wound it tight with silk.

“Will he…?”

“Live?” Loa Wei Fen asked. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. But if he does, he will have a very convincing wound to show the Manchus. Where are the rest of the crew?”

“They've been tied up and put in the hold.”

“Who will guide the ship?”

“A man from Chinkiang who owes my mother a favour should be here shortly. He'll lead us to the horses.”

* * *

SIX HOURS LATER the last of the actors and their equipment were ashore several miles west of Chinkiang, and the junk was set loose to attract attention on the Yangtze. Travelling on horseback and walking, the troupe made their way through what the one-eyed Captain would no doubt have called the “real China.”

And the “real China” was a place of real danger. North of the Yangtze, where they were, was disputed land. One week the Manchus controlled it, one week the Taipingers. The farmers were terrified. The large landowners had armies of their own to protect their property. Many of the merchants were the first to leave for the safety of Shanghai. The roads were not well tended, and the horses were often skittish in the foul breezes.

The first two days of travelling were relatively uneventful. The troupe stopped to admire the ancient pillars erected by villages in honour of their famous sons and the feats of engineering that allowed rice paddies to rise like stacked lily pads up the sides of sheer mountains. As well, they stopped and offered their respects at graveyards and Buddhist temples. Twice Taoist priests stopped the troupe, but once it was established that there were no Christian missionaries, they were permitted to proceed.

Beside the mulberry trees

the women,

wrapped in scarves,

move like shadows in the dawn.

 

Those were the opening lines that the History Teller penned when the troupe approached the first of many silk farms on the gentle slopes of the Hua Shan. As she watched, thoughts kept moving across her mind as if imprinting themselves there like acid on a bronze plate. So unlike Shanghai. So ancient compared to the world in which she lived. But so much of who she was.

The troupe once more performed for their lodging, but this time in a large interior courtyard surrounded by wooden balustrades. This night they began with the play's fourth act, the arrival of the Monkey King in the mountain pass. The History Teller watched closely as Loa Wei Fen made his way through the moves they had practised, leading to the entrance of the Princess and the Serving Man.

The History Teller was not pleased. Although the moves were all technically correct—in fact immaculately so—they were lifeless. The young man was trying to
duplicate exactly what he had been taught. There was no sense of making the leap from the notes to the music. The actual killings seemed so formal that they caused hardly a ripple in the audience watching.

The History Teller thought of the word
ripple
and wondered why that had stuck in her mind, then she mouthed the word and her head turned and there before her was a group of peasant women with their children, sitting quietly watching the play—but
rippling
. For an instant the History Teller thought it must have been a trick of the fading light, but as she looked more closely she realized that these women and their children were alive with the pupa form of the silkworm. On their clothing, beneath their clothing, in their hair, in their ears—one gently pulled a creature away from her nostril and put it back beneath her quilted coat.

The History Teller knew that the pupa stage of the silkworm was the most delicate. In that stage, the worms had to be kept warm and dry for almost three weeks before they completed the weaving of the cocoon, which was done with the silk they excreted. The only way to assure the warm and dry conditions was for the workers on the estate to each “wear” thousands of the worms.

That made the History Teller shiver—three weeks with living things on your body, day and night! But that was almost nothing compared to the women's crippled hands. The threads of silk were held together by a gummy substance. The only way to remove the substance was to submerge the pupae in boiling water. That could be done with a stick, but retrieving them from the boiling water required real delicacy and care that only a human hand could manage. As a result, not
a single woman or girl could pick up a teacup without pain and tears. She wrote:

The tears of the women

fall on angry red hands.

 

But the silk was beautiful, she had to admit. And she thought of two more lines:

Women's tears

Bring beauty to the world.

 

She turned back to the stage—to the artifice she had created. And she frowned.
There needs to be more truth. This young man has to learn how to dance, not just do the steps, make art of juggling and tumbling, not just fulfill the task. He must take the art of it, the truth of it, and, like these people, put it under his clothing and in his ears.

The next day, when the troupe finally left the silk farm, the History Teller went through her possessions and discarded any made of silk. Although the characters in her plays would continue to wear silk to represent the figures in the dramas properly, she, herself, would never again allow “the beauty that came from tears” to touch her body.

* * *

THE NEXT EVENING the Taipingers arrived, in force. They had been warned of the movements of the History Teller's troupe and were positioned and ready when the troupe turned west off the northbound trail. Quickly a second force came up behind the acting troupe so that there was no way out of the trap.

The History Teller dismounted and signalled that the rest should do the same. The Taiping soldiers looked
confident, well fed but none too friendly. When the History Teller stepped forward to speak to the head of the Taiping patrol she was surprised to sense an agile movement in the tall trees to her right. She caught just the slightest glimpse of a figure scaling a tree and knew it was Loa Wei Fen. She took a deep breath and made sure not to look in the boy-man's direction.

“We come in peace,” she began, but the Taiping Commander strode past her, followed closely by ten of his armed guards. They quickly but thoroughly emptied the contents from the wagons and the horses' saddlebags.

The commander picked up a long, black wig and demanded, “What's this?”

“A king's wig.”

“And this?” he asked, holding up a mask painted a bright red and black.

“A courtier's mask.”

“And this?” This time he had a woman's costume with long sleeves that fell all the way to the ground, despite the fact that he held it up over his head.

“The dress of a saddened woman,” the History Teller said.

That seemed to interest the Commander and he turned toward her. “Are you a saddened woman?”

The History Teller held her ground and kept her voice level, although she sensed Loa Wei Fen leaning out toward her from above in the tree.
Is the boy going to do something stupid?
she wondered.
God help me if he feels he has to protect me.
She forced her eyes away from the stand of trees and looked at the Commander. It was clear that the man was taken with her features. She allowed herself to smile. He smiled back. Finally she said, “I am not a saddened woman, Commander.”

“I could make you a very sad woman indeed.”

“Or a very happy woman, by bringing me to the court of the Heavenly King.”

The Commander was clearly surprised that this tall, handsome woman wasn't afraid of him. He stepped quickly toward her, but she didn't retreat. She did, though, suddenly look up at the trees to his left. He was about to turn when he caught a glimpse of a red kerchief, then shortly after heard the thundering of a horse's hooves.

He stepped back from the woman, a curse rising in his throat that he quickly swallowed.

The horse entered the clearing and reared as its rider pulled hard on the reins. Then the man took the red kerchief from his neck and wiped the sweat from his face.

Maxi Hordoon smiled at the History Teller.

And the History Teller smiled back at the white-skinned, red-haired
Fan Kuei
who had sat so often in the back of her rehearsal room in her mother's brothel. Words again flew into her head:

A barbarian emerges

From the darkened woods,

Like an angel on a horse.

And the world, once more, turns.

 

As her smile broadened she sensed something cold near her and turned. The boy-man, Loa Wei Fen, was standing behind her looking at the red-haired
Fan Kuei.
And for an instant the History Teller thought she saw rage cross the young man's face.

More words bloomed in her mind—but these words were dark blossoms of blood and pain.

Nanking, the seat of the Heavenly Kingdom 1857

The flames from the torches within their porcelain reflectors cast a cool light in the warm spring evening. The only noise was the hum of insects moving about the interior courtyard where the Heavenly King himself, Hung Hsiu-ch'uan, sat on a raised chair. To his left, a delicately featured young girl fanned away the bugs from the lower half of his body. To his right, another fine-boned Han Chinese girl protected the upper reaches of his person. His feet had not touched the ground for more than five years—and he never waited for anything. Yet here he waited. Waited for the play,
Journey to the West,
to begin.

The other five kings of the Taiping empire were already in their assigned places with their respective retainers, concubines, and children. And they, too, waited.

Behind them were the heads of Taiping brigades, amongst them Maxi, who stood out like a dumpling on a bed of eggplant.

At last the musicians entered and bowed to the Heavenly King, then took their places downstage left.

All was still for a moment. Then, with a cymbal crash, the play began.

—

From upstage right twelve women in perfect step move effortlessly onto the stage and float in quick circles, chanting their sorrow. The patterns they make vary, then vary again, eventually revealing the figure of the small Serving Man standing very still all the way upstage. Horns sound, then more cymbals, and a long, sustained note on the two-stringed arhu follows. Then silence. Then more horns, and the Lord of the East makes his entrance with his full entourage. They come to a dramatic stop and the Lord of the East steps forward, then strikes a startling pose and sings, “Bring her here, to me, my daughter. Bring her to her father. To accept her duty to her father and her kingdom. Bring my daughter here.”

But rather than the daughter, the daughter's nurse glides forward and in high-pitched wails presents the distress of the Princess. Several times the Lord of the East silences her and commands her to get his daughter. Finally the nurse relents and in a beautiful aria sings of the sorrow of duty when one is “married to the kingdom
and a daughter of the state.” Once more the Lord of the East commands her to get her charge. Before she does, she approaches the Lord of the East, challenging his wrath, and reminds him that his daughter is the “very jewel in your crown” and her leaving “will plant a tear in your heart.”

The Lord of the East orders the nurse to get his daughter. Then he and his counsellors sing of the onerous task of bearing the weight of state on their shoulders, ending with, “Even a loved daughter is not more to us than our love of our land.”

The horns give way to a chopping, snarling series of echoing notes from the arhu. In syncopation to the beat, the young Princess arrives. She wears a headdress with two tall feathers, and the sleeves of her Chinkiang silk gown are rolled up to expose her hands. She glides across the stage with such grace that the audience literally gasps. The tilt of her body shows the weight of sorrow on her back, her floating entrance her high status, and her two-feathered headdress her sensual allure. She turns as she comes to centre stage and looks out at the audience, then reaches up and pulls one long feather down into her mouth, strikes a pose on one foot, and opens her mouth—as in a scream—but all that is heard is a single sustained note from the arhu. Her sorrow is music itself.

The ensuing scene is surprisingly sweet. The daughter professes loyalty to her father, he his love to her. Then he commands her to go to the King of the West as a new wife to seal the treaty of peace between the two kingdoms. She bows. All seems well until she races downstage and throws her arms up in the air. The rolled up sleeves climb the air to the top of the stage and seem to hang there, as if waiting to be told what to do next.
The horns' sorrowful moan fills the stage as the Princess of the East sings her song of parting.