Creation (66 page)

My fantastic master peered at the hill where lay, amongst ten thousand tiny white bones, a half-dozen blue-gray babies. Lazy vultures hovered in the bright wintry air. I thought of the dead and dying at Bactra. Said to myself a prayer for the dying.

“Trivial things can set in motion great catastrophes.” The duke paused. I looked attentive. In the Middle Kingdom, one never knows what is a proverb and what is nonsense. To a foreign ear, the two can sound perilously alike.

“Yes,” the duke continued, arranging the jade, gold and ivory ornaments on his belt, “a cockfight changed the history of Lu. A cockfight! Heaven never ceases to laugh at us. A baron of the Chi family owned a formidable fighting bird. A connection of the ducal family owned another. So they decided to pit their birds against each other. The contest was held outside the High South Gate of the capital city. Oh, what a tragic day. I know. I was there. I was very young, of course. A boy.”

I later learned that the duke had not attended the celebrated cockfight. But since he had so often said that he was present on that famous occasion, I am certain that he had come to believe his own story. It took me many years to get used to people who tell lies for no purpose. Since Persians must not lie, they do not lie—generally speaking. We have a racial horror of not telling the truth which goes back to the Wise Lord. Greeks have no such feeling, and they lie imaginatively. Cathayans lie conveniently. Most eunuchs and the duke of Sheh lie for pleasure. But I do the duke an injustice. With him, truth and fantasy were so mingled that I am certain that he never knew which was which. He lived in a made-up world at a sharp or right angle, as Pythagoras would say, to the always-so.

“The Chi baron put a subtle but swift-acting poison on the spurs of his fighting bird. After a brief skirmish, the ducal bird fell dead. I don’t need to tell you that there was a good deal of ill feeling that sunny day at the High South Gate. Half the city was there, including Duke Chao himself. The Chi family were delighted. The ducal family were not. There were all sorts of fights as the baron collected his money purses. The wicked baron then retired to the Chi palace for the night. The next morning there was a crowd outside the palace. During the night, the poison had been detected. Furious, the duke himself arrived with his personal guard. He ordered the arrest of the baron. But, disguised as a servant, the culprit had already slipped out of the house and fled north to Key. Duke Chao gave chase. Then—”

Abruptly, my master sat down on a stump; he looked grave, portentous. “These are bad times for the Middle Kingdom.” He lowered his voice as if someone might overhear us; yet it was plain that we were entirely alone. “The Chi family came to the aid of their relative. So did the Meng family. So did the Shu family. These are the three baronial families that rule illegally in Lu. At the Yellow River, their troops attacked my brother’s army. Yes, the heaven-appointed duke of Lu, the descendant of the Yellow Emperor, the descendant of Duke Tan of Chou, was attacked by his own slaves and forced to swim across the Yellow River and take refuge in the duchy of Key. And though Duke Chao was kind to him he would not help him regain his rightful place. The Chi family is too powerful, their private army is the largest in the Middle Kingdom, and they lord it over Lu. In fact—oh, I shudder even to say this!—the head of the family
on more than one occasion has worn the ducal insignia
.
The impiety! The impiety! Right then and there, heaven should have made plain its decree. But heaven was silent And my poor brother died in exile.” Just as the sleeve was about to cover once again the duke’s eyes, a swarm of black birds diverted his attention. He studied their formation, in search of omens. If he found any, he said nothing. But he did smile and I took that to be a good omen—for me.

“Who succeeded your brother, Lord Duke?”

“Our younger brother, the open-hearted one. Then he died, and his son succeeded him, my lovely nephew Duke Ai.”

“And the Chi family?”

“They now obey their duke in all things. How can they not?. To do otherwise would be to oppose heaven’s will. You will see them cringe in the presence of the heir of the glorious Tan.”

I was elated. We were going to Lu.

It was spring when we left Loyang. The first almond blossoms had opened, and the fields were turning from muddy red-brown to yellow-green. On every side, flowering dogwood looked like pink clouds fallen to earth. I must say that all things seem possible when new leaves unfold. For me, the spring is the best time of the year.

We traveled by land. Once or twice the duke tried to go by river barge, but the current was too swift. Incidentally, these barges can go upriver as well as down. To travel against the current, lines from the barge are attached to a team of oxen that then pulls the barge upstream. The oxen travel along special roads cut out of the soft stone that edges the river. In this way, even narrow gorges can be navigated in every season of the year except early spring, when unexpected floods make river travel dangerous.

I was charmed by the countryside. The soil is rich. The forests are magical. Best of all, we were never far from the silvery river. At night, its soft, rushing sound became a part of pleasant, soothing dreams.

Occasionally our road brought us to the riverbank itself. Oddly shaped islands looked as if they had been dropped into the silver water by some god or devil. Many resembled miniature limestone mountains, covered with cypress and pines. On each island there is at least one shrine to the deity of the place. Some of these island shrines are beautifully made with glazed tile roofs; others are rough work, dating from the time of the Yellow Emperor—or so the people say.

In the midst of a pale-green and yellow bamboo grove, the duke’s steward gave a terrible cry. “Lord Duke! A dragon!”

Sword in hand, the duke leaped to the ground and took up his position behind the rear wheel of his personal wagon. Everyone else vanished into the grove, except for a dozen knights who had elected to travel with us from Loyang. They drew their swords. I was alarmed; and curious.

The duke sniffed the air. “Yes,” he whispered. “He is nearby. He is very ancient. Very fierce. Follow me.”

As the duke made his way into the bamboo grove, the new shoots bent before him as if he were some sort of celestial wind. Then we lost sight of him. But we could hear his shrill cry: “Death!” This was followed by the noise of some large beast crashing through the grove in the opposite direction.

A moment later the duke returned, pale face bright with sweat. “He escaped, worse luck! If only I’d been on horseback, I would have had his head by now.” With one sleeve, the duke dried his face. “Of course, they all know me, which makes it even more difficult for me to bring one to earth.”

“But they are only beasts,” I said. “How can beasts know people by reputation?”

“How does your dog know you? He’s a beast, isn’t he? Anyway, dragons are in a class by themselves. They are neither human nor beast but something else. Also, they live practically forever. It is said that some are as old as the Yellow Emperor. And they know their enemy, as you saw just now. One glimpse of me, and he fled in terror.”

Later one of the knights told me that he had actually seen the so-called dragon, which proved to be a water buffalo. “I was standing beside the steward on the first wagon. Either the steward is blind or he deliberately pretended to see a dragon.” Then the young knight told me an amusing story about the duke. In fact, the story is so amusing that before I left Cathay I had heard at least a dozen versions of it.

“As you know, the duke of Sheh has a passion not only for dragon’s bone but for dragons.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “He has killed many.”

The young knight smiled. “So he says. But in the Middle Kingdom there are few if any dragons left, except in the mind of the duke of Sheh.”

I was startled. After all, there are dragons in almost every country and many reliable witnesses have described encounters with them. When I was a child there was a famous one in Bactria. He used to eat children and goats. Eventually he died or went away.

“But if there are so few,” I asked, “how do you explain the quantities of dragon’s bone that the duke collects, particularly in the west?”

“Old, old bones. Once upon a time there must have been millions of dragons within the four seas, but that was in the time of the Yellow Emperor. What bones you find nowadays are so old that they’ve turned to stone. But your duke is a madman on the subject of living dragons, as you know.”

“He’s hardly mad. He makes quite a good living selling dragon’s bones.”

“Of course. But the duke’s passion for living dragons is something else. Some years ago he visited Ch’u, a wild southern country on the Yangtze River, where dragons can still be found. Naturally, word spread that the famous devotee of dragons was staying in the capital, in a bedroom on the second floor of a small guesthouse.

“One morning, at dawn, the duke awakened with a start; sensing that he was being spied on, he got up and went to the window and pulled back the shutters and there, staring at him, teeth bared in a friendly smile, was a dragon. Terrified, the duke hurried downstairs. In the main hall he stumbled over what looked to be a rolled-up carpet. But it was not a carpet. It was the tail of the dragon, which saluted him by banging up and down on the floor. The duke fainted dead away. And that, as far as we know, is the closest that the duke of Sheh has ever got to a living dragon.” Although I never dared ask the duke if this story was true, he himself alluded to it our first day at Ch’u-fu.

The capital of Lu is much like Loyang, but considerably older. It is built on that grid pattern which is a characteristic of those cities founded by the Chou dynasty. But between the four broad, straight avenues, there are countless side streets so narrow that two people cannot pass unless each flattens himself against a wall, all the while running the risk of being drenched by the contents of a chamber pot. Yet the smells of a Cathayan city are more agreeable than not because pungent foods are cooked on braziers at every crossing and sweet-smelling wood is burned in private as well as in public houses.

The people themselves have a curious but not disagreeable odor, as I have noted before. A Cathayan crowd smells more of oranges than of sweat. I don’t know why. Perhaps their yellow skin has something to do with their odor. Certainly, they eat few oranges; and bathe far less often than Persians, whose sweat has a much stronger smell. Nothing, of course, can compare with the fragrance of those woollen drawers that Athenian youths put on in the fall of the year and do not change until the fall of the next year. Democritus tells me that the upper-class young men wash themselves daily at the gymnasium. He says that they use not only oil to make their skins glossy but water as well. But why, once clean, do they put on those filthy woollen drawers? In matters like these, Democritus, do not dispute the remaining senses of a blind man.

The ducal palace is not unlike that of the son of heaven—which is to say, the palace is old and dilapidated and the banners in front of the main door are torn and dusty.

“The duke is away.” My master could read the message of the banners as easily as I can—could—read Akkadian script. “Well, we must make ourselves known to the chamberlain.”

I was surprised to find that the entrance hall to the palace was empty except for a pair of drowsy guards at the door to the inner court. Despite my master’s assurance to the contrary, the duke of Lu is as powerless as the so-called son of heaven. But at least the duke of Chao has a symbolic role to enact, and his palace at Loyang is always crowded with pilgrims from every part of the Middle Kingdom. The fact that the duke’s possessions of heaven’s mandate is a fiction does not deter the simple folk. They still come to gaze upon the lonely one, to receive his blessing, to make him an offering in either money or kind. It is said that the duke of Chao lives entirely on the proceeds of the faithful. Although the duke of Lu is wealthier than his cousin at Loyang, he is nowhere near as wealthy as any of the three lordly families of Lu.

While we waited for the chamberlain, the duke told me his version of the dragon story. It was much the same as the one that I had heard from the young knight except that the protagonist was not the duke himself but a pretentious courtier, and the moral was: “Avoid false enthusiasm. By affecting to like what he did not know, a very silly man was frightened to death. In all things, one must be faithful to what is true.” The duke could be remarkably sententious; but then, I have yet to come across a really inspired liar who was not positively lyric on the virtue of truth-telling.

The chamberlain saluted the duke with every mark of respect, looked at me with polite wonder; then told us that Duke Ai was in the south. “But we expect him any moment. The messengers found him yesterday. You can imagine how distraught we are, Lord Duke.”

“Because my illustrious nephew has gone hunting?” The duke raised one eyebrow, a signal that more information was needed.

“I thought you knew. For three days now we have been at war. And if the duke does not report this state of affairs to the ancestors, we shall lose. Oh, it is a terrible crisis, my lord. As you see, all Lu is in a state of chaos.” I thought of the placid everyday crowds that I had just seen in the streets of the capital. Obviously, chaos is a relative matter in the Middle Kingdom, and as I have already noted, the Cathayan word for chaos is also a word for heaven—for creation, too.

“We’ve heard nothing, Chamberlain. War with whom?”

“Key.” Whenever the hegemony is spoken of—and when is it not?—this nation to the north of the Yellow River is always considered the one most likely to receive heaven’s mandate. Originally, Key’s wealth came from salt. Today Key is easily the richest and most advanced of all the Cathayan states. Incidentally, the first Cathayan coins were struck there, which makes Key a sort of eastern Lydia.

“The army of Key is at the Stone Gates.” This is the border between Key and Lu. “Our troops are ready, of course. But there can be no victory until the duke goes to the temple of the ancestors and reports first to the Yellow Emperor and then to our founder, Duke Tan. Not until he has made his report will we receive their blessings.”