Jade Dragon Mountain (13 page)

“The innkeeper's niece. She is a maid at the mansion, and every time there is gossip she appears like an
ifrit,
out of the air, to whisper the rumors to her uncle.”

Li Du thought about this, then said, “In this instance, I think that the gossips were put to clever use.”

“Explain this.”

Li Du chose his words carefully. “The magistrate's attention is fixed on the Emperor's arrival. He cannot consider the death of Brother Pieter beyond its potential to impede the success of the festival. If important guests are upset, or if the Emperor sees the crime as an inauspicious portent, the entire celebration might be canceled.”

“But that could still happen.”

Li Du shook his head. “The Khampa already have”—he glanced at Kalden, who was listening intently—“have a reputation for banditry. The magistrate was clever. He found an explanation that would satisfy the need to place blame, and reassure the visitors that there was no danger in the city.”

“And,” said Hamza, understanding, “he made sure that the gossiping maid knew of it as soon as possible. I have always thought that I have nothing in common with a bureaucrat. But I see now that the magistrate is capable of telling a tale. Perhaps we share something after all.”

Li Du waited while Hamza and Kalden spoke at some length. Kalden was mostly silent, nodding and affirming in low monosyllables. Then Hamza turned to Li Du. “The Khampa can bear the indignity of a false accusation,” he said, “but you are sure that the magistrate is not sending soldiers after them?”

“I am sure. There are no soldiers to spare. But there are other concerns.”

“What concerns?”

“When the Emperor hears the magistrate's version of what happened, it may influence him against Kham and Tibet. And the relationship between the empires is already unstable.”

Kalden shook his head. Hamza gave a little smile. “That is not Kalden's concern. The quarrels of emperors and kings do not reach the caravans. And their home villages are high in the mountains. They dwell with their families among stones and stars, so high that trees cannot grow. You will see, when you go north.”

Kalden spoke again, and Hamza translated. “He says that the murderer will be punished, if not in this life then in another. It is not their concern. It is not yours. These are the troubles of the powerful schemers. It is better to stay away from them. And he says that you may share their food and fire tonight.”

Li Du thanked Kalden, but the caravan leader waved away the gratitude.

 

Chapter 8

While Li Du and Hamza were talking, the two cooks had, with quiet competence, prepared a cauldron of stew and a stack of hot, salty, fried bread. With their hands wrapped in cloth, together they lifted the heavy pot, carried it outside, and called the camp to dinner.

Li Du followed Hamza and Kalden out of the crooked hut. Night had fallen, and the gaps in the clouds were crowded with stars. The stew was placed close to the largest fire, and the horsemen began to help themselves. Li Du ladled a portion into his bowl, and accepted one of the potatoes that Norbu had plucked from the white-hot ash. He scraped away the blackened potato skin with his knife. The inside was soft and steaming hot. A sip of stew soothed his tired bones and revived his exhausted spirits. He stretched his sore feet out to the fire and drew in a deep, contented breath, enjoying the voices around him even though he did not understand the language.

The cold on his back and shoulders made him shiver in spite of the flames, and he reached into his pack for his blanket. As he pulled it out, he noticed that someone's tea purse had been left on the ground. He looked for its owner and, seeing no one, he picked it up and examined it. The round, embroidered patch set into the leather frame depicted flowers and birds, not foxes, but the style and quality of the thread were identical to the one he had found in Pieter's room. He inhaled—it smelled of horses and good black tea.

When he looked up, Hamza and Kalden were approaching. Kalden had a small cask with him, and he indicated that Li Du should present his cup for wine. Li Du protested that this was too kind, but Kalden would not accept a refusal. He took Li Du's cup and filled it to the brim with clear wine. Then he filled Hamza's and his own.

“We liked the foreign monk,” said Kalden, in his deliberate, simple Chinese. “He should not have gone to Dayan. But his soul has left that city. Do you understand my words?”

“Yes.” Li Du held his cup with both hands and raised it deferentially to Kalden. They drank. The wine was strong, and Li Du felt its warmth settle in his chest before it coursed to his fingers and toes. As he reached to set his cup down on a flat stone he stopped, and brought it back to his lips to taste it again.

“But this is Lady Chen's wine,” he said.

Kalden looked questioningly at Hamza, and they had a brief exchange. Then Hamza said to Li Du, “When Kalden brings his caravan so far south, they always buy wine from Snow Village. It is the best in the province.”

“Snow Village?”

“It is not far. You passed very close to it on the road from Dayan.”

“Lady Chen said that it was her family wine. Is she from that village?”

Hamza nodded over his shoulder at the cabin roof, where the meat still smoked. “We bought that sheep from a Snow Village herder. She mentioned the lady's name.”

“What did she say?”

“I asked the old woman if she would attend the festival—I told her that I was going to perform. She was very suspicious of me, and with a disapproving squint she told me that she didn't like crowds, didn't like stories, and didn't like city food. But she confessed that she wanted to see if the Emperor could really command the moon to cover the sun. Then she boasted that the most beautiful woman at the festival would be from Snow Village. Of course I asked who it was, and she was offended that I did not know already. The Lady Chen, she told me, a consort to the highest official in Dayan. Her place there is a matter of village pride.”

Li Du nodded. For a peasant woman to attain that status required not only beauty, but skilled manipulation. She had to be clever, and ruthless.

Hamza said, thoughtfully, “I will have to look at her more closely when I return tomorrow. You understand I have seen many beautiful women. Princesses, queens, one of whom lived in the sea and had scales of every color. I have even seen one of your Chinese fox spirits. So I have a very high standard.”

Hamza looked up at the sky, in which stars were embedded like diamonds. “It is good that you are staying with us tonight. This mountain clatters and roars in the dark hours. I think it is monsters who are rattling the bamboo stalks that bind them. Better to be with a caravan. Better, at least, than sleeping in a cave with that dry old book. What traveler wrote it?”

“His name was Xu Xiake, a scholar of the Ming Dynasty. His obsession was correcting errors in previous texts. The Golden Sand River in the valley below us was not known to be the source of the Yangtze until he wrote that it was.”

Kalden asked a question, and Hamza translated it. “He says that when the Ming ruled China, the Mu family were in command here. Kalden's grandfathers fought them—a good-natured enmity: the Khampa raiding Dayan, the Mu raiding Khampa towns. More an exchange of goods than a feud. But he wonders what a Chinese scholar was doing here during the Mu reign.”

Li Du considered what he knew. He had read Yang Sehn's
Genealogy of the Mu
, in addition to Xu Xiake's account of Mu Zheng's hospitality. Mu Zheng had himself been a student of Chinese literature, and had charmed Xu Xiake by asking the scholar to edit his poetry for incorrect characters and repetition.

“The Mu,” he began, “had pledged loyalty to the Chinese Emperor even then. Officially, they were vassals of the Ming. But no real effort was made to institute Ming bureaucracy here.”

“So it was the Kangxi who truly subdued the Mu.”

In any other company this would have been a delicate, if not impermissible, subject. Here, Li Du realized, he could be almost as frank as he was in the privacy of his own mind. Not yet acclimated to this new freedom, Li Du began cautiously, with a question.

“Do you know of the traitor general Wu Sangui?”

Kalden shook his head, and Hamza said with a shrug, “I have heard of him. But my turn to tell a story will come later.”

Li Du looked at the fire, calling to mind the young Kangxi, and the empire that, at the tender age of sixteen, he had yet to claim. But the history of Wu Sangui had begun before that, when Kangxi's father was not the first Qing emperor, but only a Manchu warrior determined to lead his army through the Wall and make China his own.

Li Du took another sip of wine. “Wu Sangui was a powerful soldier of the Ming court. But he betrayed the last Ming emperor. It was he who opened the palace gates to the Manchu. And so the Kangxi's father, the Shunzhi Emperor, took Beijing, and Wu Sangui became his most trusted servant, an honorary Manchu. He fought countless battles for the Shunzhi, and it was with his might that the Qing Dynasty began.

“When the Shunzhi died, the Kangxi was not yet old enough to rule. And so the empire was put under the command of his uncles, the old Manchu regents. They had no intention of ever allowing the young prince to assume the title of emperor. But when he was sixteen years old, the Kangxi wrested power from his uncles. This was, you understand, a terrible risk. Those who plotted against him were very powerful, and at any moment he might have been assassinated.

“No sooner had he accomplished this feat than rumor reached him of Ming loyalists gathering here, in the southwestern provinces. The Kangxi was then still a boy, and for him, these were wild lands, choked with jungle and poisonous insects and cannibals. Nothing in his own experience, or that of his ancestors on the frozen plateau, had prepared him to do battle in a place like this.

“So he sent his most trusted general—Wu Sangui—to fight the traitors, and to subdue the local people, whom he suspected of aiding their former masters, the Ming.”

Kalden spoke. “I remember now. Here he was called a different name. He was hated.”

Li Du nodded. “Wu Sangui fulfilled his task with terrible brutality. Many of the Mu family were slaughtered before Wu Sangui found the last Ming prince hiding in the forests with his supporters. After he defeated the small army he brought the prince to Kunming for execution. He strangled the young man before an audience.”

There was silence. Then Hamza said, “I told you that these mountains were haunted by ghosts. The monsters rattling the bamboo. Are the Ming truly defeated? There are none left?”

“None that threaten the Kangxi. Those who survived retreated across the borders of the empire to the jungles.”

“And the Mu?”

“The Mu were weakened by Wu Sangui's campaign against them. As I said, he succeeded in his mission. But instead of returning to the capital, triumphant, he remained in this province and declared himself the ruler of a new empire. He claimed this land as his own, and accused the Kangxi of being a descendent of barbarians, illegitimate, ill bred, and undeserving of power.

“In that month the Qing dynasty could have fallen. But it did not. The Kangxi was saved by the Mu.”

“After he had ordered their deaths?”

“Yes. He called for their aid, and they gave it. They hated Wu Sangui more than they hated the Manchu. They defeated their enemy, and the Emperor had his corpse scattered across the empire. To repay the Mu, he allowed them to keep their independence. For a time.” The strategy, Li Du remembered, was referred to by Beijing strategists as “using barbarians to rule barbarians.”

“And that time ended.”

“The Mu family weakened, slowly. There was illness, and bad luck. The Qing bureaucracy was installed one piece at a time, and met no resistance. Now Tulishen governs Dayan. And the only member of the Mu family still living in the mansion of his ancestors is the old servant, Mu Gao.” Li Du thought for a moment and, moved by the attention of his audience, by the firelight, and by this new sense of companionship high in the mountains, added, “You see why the Emperor's visit to Dayan is so important. This province has not been easy for him to control. It has frightened him. He knows that he has never won its soul—the ghosts, as you say, remain in the mountains where he cannot make them rest. That is why the festival must be a spectacle unlike anything this province has ever seen. That is why he has chosen to come to Dayan for the moment of the eclipse. He wants this province to be his—he wants it to forget the time when the Mu family lived in the mansion. And I, for one, have no desire to be there when the people are won over by theatrics that distract from—” He stopped, surprised into silence by his own emotion.

When he spoke again, his voice was level, his tone deliberate. “And I will not be there,” he said. “The Emperor would not welcome the presence of a man he exiled. And my cousin would do anything to avoid displeasing the Emperor. My intention has always been to journey north, to make use of my exile by following the paths of the scholars and seeing with my own eyes what I have only read. There is nothing I can do in Dayan.”

Hamza was regarding him intently as he spoke, and when Li Du had finished, Hamza gave a small smile. “True stories,” he said, “are too bitter. Perhaps you should leave the storytelling to a professional.” He held up his hands, drawing the eyes of the audience from Li Du to himself. “Now,” he announced, “it is my turn to tell a tale.

“But unfortunately, it must be in Chinese, as the great scholar among us does not count among his many learnings the language of Kham.” There was a chorus of friendly protest and disagreement, but in good cheer, and those who did not speak Chinese went to one of the other fires, while those who did remained to listen. Li Du gratefully settled into the shadows, ready for the distraction that Hamza was about to provide.