The Garden of Evening Mists (20 page)

Some of the children’s mouths were hanging open, their eyes wide and staring at Emily.

One boy got to his knees, turning around to look for reassurance from his parents.

‘The Emperor of China was worried,’ Emily continued, ‘but all his cleverest advisors told him there was nothing they could do. ‘It is the Will of Heaven,’ they said.

‘But a young court clerk asked for permission to speak. He said he had heard of an archer called Hou Yi, who could shoot down anything from the sky, anything at all, however high they flew – swallows, storks, eagles. His arrows, it was said, could even pierce the clouds. “Your Majesty,” this young official said, “perhaps Hou Yi could be asked to shoot down the suns?”’

Emily’s voice carried to the other guests, and one by one they broke off from their conversations to listen. Aritomo, I noticed, had sat up in his rattan chair, no longer talking to the American silk merchant beside him.

‘The Emperor thought the young clerk’s idea was good. “Send messengers to bring this Hou Yi to see me,” he commanded. “Quickly!” When the archer arrived, the Emperor told him what he had to do. Hou Yi listened and then asked to be taken to the highest tower in the palace.

The Emperor, carried on a sedan chair by his slaves, followed Hou Yi all the way up to the top of the tower. Higher and higher they climbed, until they arrived at the very top. This was an open space where the Emperor performed ceremonies to greet the sun on the first day of every New Year.

‘The ten suns were so bright and hot that when Hou Yi looked down at the scorched land, he noticed that there were no shadows anywhere. It was so bright that even the blue sky had become completely white.’ Emily looked at the children. ‘Hou Yi took up his bow. Now, this Hou Yi was a very big man.’

‘How big?’ A skinny boy broke in.

‘How big, Muthu? Oh, bigger than Mr Magnus, but without his huge stomach of course.

Big like that tree there, but a bit shorter.’ Emily’s eyes brushed over the other children. ‘Ah, but if Hou Yi was big, then his bow was even bigger, twice his size.’ She wet her lips before continuing. ‘Hou Yi took out his first arrow. It was long and thick, like a spear. He pulled his bowstring.’ Hands pushing on her knees, Emily rose to her feet stiffly and took up a shooting stance, stretching her arms wide. The younger children laughed. I glanced at Aritomo; he was leaning back in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest, his face in the shadows.

‘Hou Yi pulled the bowstring. He pulled and pulled and pulled until the Emperor feared the string would snap. He closed one eye and aimed his arrow at the closest, fiercest, sun.’ Emily paused, her arms still in the pose of the archer about to release his arrow. She let the silence stretch out. ‘He shot the arrow.’ Emily made a sharp whistling sound with her lips. ‘It flew up into the sky, towards the sun. It hit the sun right in the centre. The sun burned brighter for a second, then a minute, then another minute. Moans and groans filled the air. Hou Yi had failed.

But then the sun weakened, the flames died, and it disappeared from the sky. People cheered and shouted and clapped, even the Emperor. Hou Yi wiped his sweating brow and shot his arrows, again and again. He never missed. The Emperor and his courtiers and his slaves – everyone in the world – could feel the terrible heat disappearing, as one by one the suns died.

‘Finally there was just one sun left in that empty sky. As Hou Yi was about to shoot down the last sun, the Emperor leaped up from his chair and shouted, “Stop! You must leave it to shine, or the world will be covered in darkness.”’

‘But the moon
leh
? What about the moon?’ a girl in pigtails asked.

‘
Aiyah,
Parames, wait-
lah
, I’m not finished yet.’ Emily stopped for a second and made a show of gathering her disrupted thoughts. The children groaned loudly. ‘Where was I
hah
? Oh, yes. So the last sun was saved. Years later, when the Emperor was dying, he made Hou Yi the new ruler of China,’ she continued. ‘Hou Yi loved being an emperor so much that he asked the gods to make him immortal.’

‘What’s that?’ Parames asked.

‘It means forever and ever he cannot die,’ Emily replied. ‘The gods decided to give him a magic pill to eat, so that he would live forever.

‘Now, Hou Yi had a beautiful wife, Chang Er. He loved her so much he wanted to give half the pill to her, so he kept the pill in a box to surprise her. Chang Er saw he was hiding something and became curious. One day, when her husband was out hunting, she opened the box. She saw the pill and picked it up. And then...’ Emily pinched the invisible tablet between her forefinger and thumb, looked around furtively, and then popped it into her mouth, forcing it down her gullet. The children shrieked.

‘Immediately she felt her body become lighter and lighter,’ Emily said. ‘Her feet lifted off the floor, higher and higher. She floated out of the window, into the sky. She went up and up and up. But she did not want to leave Hou Yi, and so, as she flew past the moon, she decided to stay there. It was the closest she could be to her husband. When Hou Yi came home and realised what she had done, he was heartbroken. But he realised that, on one single night every year, when the moon was at its largest, he could see his wife Chang Er, still living there on the moon.’

She stopped and pointed to the full moon rising over us. ‘There she is, dressed in her robes, with long flowing sleeves, waiting for Hou Yi to join her.’

Like the children, the grown-ups tilted their faces to the moon. For a while there was only silence in the garden. I looked as well, and it seemed to me that the shadows on the surface of the moon did appear like a woman in a robe.

Emily clapped her hands. ‘Time to light your lanterns, children.’

The guests cheered Emily, raising their drinks to her. Laughing and shouting, the children ran off, their lanterns bobbing like fireflies in the dark. Emily opened the box Aritomo had given her. Lying inside were three rice-paper lanterns, each one about a foot and a half high, their cylindrical frames constructed from thin bamboo sticks. Emily lit them and placed them on the buffet table, between the dishes of food. The lanterns spilled out shards of colour onto the white tablecloth.

‘They’re all Aritomo’s prints,’ I said, recognising the style from the illustrations in the copy of
Sakuteiki
he had given me. He had transformed his woodblock prints into lantern shades.

‘He used to give me these lanterns for Chong Qiu, before the war,’ she said. ‘They’re pieces that aren’t good enough, he told me, pieces he would have thrown out anyway.’

‘Nothing wrong with this one.’ I took the lantern and spun it slowly on my left palm.

Melting wax from the candle holder spilled onto my glove. The mountain scenery on the print flickered. ‘Good enough or not, they must be worth something.’ An idea occurred to me. ‘Have you kept all of them? I’d like to see them.’

‘Cannot,’ Emily said. ‘Don’t look so offended-
lah
. Wait until everyone goes home later, then you’ll see why.’

I set down the lantern on the table and closed my hand into a fist, cracking the skin of wax that had hardened on my palm.

* * *

Tea and moon-cakes were served after dinner. The cakes came in square, octagonal and round shapes, each one about two inches thick and covered in a soft, brown skin. Emily cut them into quarter slices and handed them around. Those who had come with children left shortly after; the other guests did not remain for much longer. Magnus had used his influence to obtain an exemption from curfew for his guests, arranging for them to be escorted home in groups by members of the Auxiliary Police. The servants were cleaning up when Emily caught my eye and nodded towards Aritomo. I watched him moving over to the buffet table. He carried two of his lanterns to the oil drum in which Magnus had cooked the
boerewors
and lamb chops. In the dark, with the pair of glowing lanterns in his hands, he looked like a monk leading a religious procession.

‘Bring me the other one,’ he called out over his shoulder to me.

I did as he asked. The guttering candles in the lanterns made them look as though they were shivering. He dropped the first one onto the embers in the oil drum. It caught fire instantly, the flames tearing through the print, consuming the shade in seconds.

I touched his elbow. ‘Give them to me.’

He looked at me, then dropped the other lanterns into the drum. The glow from the flames rippled across his face. We watched the lanterns burn to the end. The ashes flaked away into the night, edged in glowing red, soundless as moths.

He brushed his hands over the embers. ‘Let me walk you home.’

‘I’ll get a flashlight from Magnus.’

He shook his head and pointed to the cloudless sky. ‘I borrow moonlight for this journey of a million miles,’ he said.

One morning, I stood outside the archery hall and waited until Aritomo finished his practice.

When he returned his bow to its stand, I said, ‘I’d like to try.’

Perhaps I caught just the flicker of incredulity in his eyes; with Aritomo it was often difficult to gauge his reaction. ‘You cannot do it without the proper clothes,’ he managed to say at last.

‘
Proper clothes?
Well, don’t you have a spare set lying around? Emily will know someone who can alter it for me.’

‘Why would you want to learn
kyudo
?’

‘Doesn’t it say in
Sakuteiki
that to become a skilled gardener you ought to take up one of the other arts too?’

He reflected on my reply for a moment or two. ‘Perhaps I have an old set of clothes somewhere.’

I returned to the archery range a few days later, carrying the
kyudo
kit in a bag. Before entering the practice hall, I removed my shoes and placed them on the lowest step. In a space sectioned off by a curtain at the back of the hall I changed into a thin white cotton robe and black
hakama
– loose pleated pantaloons. Emily had done the alterations for me herself, and the kit fitted me well.

Coming out from the cubicle, I held up the long, tangled straps of the
hakama
and gave Aritomo a perplexed look. He showed me how to tie them around my waist with a series of loops and knots. Then he gave me an odd-looking leather glove, similar to the one he wore during his practice. ‘The
yugake
has to be worn on the drawing hand.’ I struggled with its separate components – the three leather pieces, the various straps and padding – and in the end I had to let him put it on for me.

We knelt on the tatami mats and bowed to each other. I repeated his every movement. I resented these rituals. They were tainted with the memories of the acts of obeisance I once had to perform for my captors.

Aritomo selected a bow from the stand, offering it to me on his open palms. The bow, made from compressed bamboo and cypress wood, came up past my head when I rested one end on the floor. Pulling the bowstring all the way into the shooting position, I fought the bow’s unwillingness to bend to my will.

‘There is no need to use brute strength. The power comes not from your arms, but from the earth, rising through your legs, up along your hips, and into your chest, into your heart,’

Aritomo said. ‘Breathe properly. Use your
hara
, your abdomen. Pull every breath deep down into you. Feel your body expanding as you breathe: that is where we live, in the moments between each inhalation and exhalation.’

I did as I was told, choking a few times before I could achieve some semblance of what he wanted from me. I felt I was drowning in air.

He nocked an arrow to the string of his own bow – there were two arrows to every round and the second was held between the fingers of the drawing hand as he pulled the bow. He drew the string with an ease I envied, now that I knew how hard it was to do it. The fletched end of the arrow was brought low to his ear, as though he was listening to the vibrations of the feathers.

The world around us collected into an expectant stillness, a drop of dew poised on the tip of a leaf. He released the arrow and it struck the centre of the target. He maintained his position for a second or two longer before lowering his arms, the bow coming down with the weightlessness of a crescent moon sinking into the mountains. Repeating the entire process, he shot the second arrow dead centre again. I plucked at the string of my bow, but failed to replicate the sound I had heard.

‘
Tsurune
,’ he said, glancing at my hands. ‘The song of the bowstring.’

‘There’s even a name for that?’

‘Anything beautiful should be given a name, do you not agree?’ he replied. ‘It is said that one can gauge the ability of a
kyudo-ka
just from hearing the quality of the sound of his bowstring when he shoots. The purer the
tsurune
, the greater the archer’s skills.’

By the end of the hour’s practice my arms, shoulders and stomach muscles were trembling and sore, but I also noticed Aritomo squeeze his fingers and then grunt in pain.

‘Arthritis?’ I said. I had seen the slight swelling in the joints of his fingers.

‘My acupuncturist blames it on the damp air.’

‘Then you shouldn’t be living here.’

‘That is what my acupuncturist says too.’

I followed him back to the house to change into my work clothes. We went all the way to the western side of the garden, where the ground began to swell into the foothills. Just before coming to the perimeter wall, Aritomo turned off the path and continued uphill. A short distance further, the track ended at an exposed rock face, about ten feet high and just as wide, ferns curling from its base.

‘I found this when I was clearing the land,’ he said.

I wondered if we had stumbled upon a sacred stone left behind by a tribe of rainforest aborigines, a tribe that, centuries before, had trekked into extinction. The iron buried in the stone had bled up to the rock face. In the morning light, shorelines of rust overlapped and glowed. I stretched out my hand and traced the unknown continents and nameless islands the lichen had mapped on the pitted surface.