Silk Road

  SILK ROAD

  Its fine silk, tightly wrapped around a thin roller, gave off a ghostly whiff of sandalwood. Tiny words brushed in vertical lines covered every inch of the cloth. What they said, of course, I had no idea. The scroll was as out of place in my world as I had come to be in the world of the other children. I didn’t dare return it to Beauty’s room. Yet if found, the thing might bring me trouble. Why didn’t I just toss those meaningless swipes of ink into the back comer of the storage room for the mice to gnaw?

  But I didn’t. The parakeet had said Take this.’ The scroll resembled my dreams of Nanny: obscure but compelling nonetheless. The lively brushstrokes seemed to promise something. Maybe I kept it because it was beautiful. Or maybe I just kept it because I had nothing else.

  Heavy footsteps sounded in the hallway. I dived behind three big grain sacks. The laundress’s peevish voice echoed through the stuffy room: ‘Where is she, then?’ I held my breath.

  She left. After waiting as long as a young child could, I took up the scroll. But its slick silk wrenched itself from my fingers, or seemed to, and the whole length of the writing unrolled itself before me, a white road marked with black signs through the dusk of the room.

  JEANNE

  LARSEN

  SILK

  ROAD

  The author wishes to thank Hollins College

  and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts

  for making the writing of this book possible.

  She also extends heartfelt thanks to Amy Hertz

  for her superb editing.

  A Mandarin Paperback

  SILK ROAD

  First published in Great Britain 1989

  by William Heinemann Ltd

  This edition published 1991

  by Mandarin Paperbacks

  an imprint of Reed Consumer Books Ltd

  Michelin House, 81 Fulham Road, London SW3 6RB

  and Auckland, Melbourne, Singapore and Toronto

  Reprinted 1994

  Copyright © Jeanne Larsen 1989

  A CIP catalogue record for this title

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN o 7493 0524 X

  Printed and bound in Great Britain

  by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berks

  This book is sold subject to the condition

  that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise,

  be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated

  without the publisher’s prior consent in any form

  of binding or cover other than that in which

  it is published and without a similar condition

  including this condition being imposed

  on the subsequent purchaser.

  for Tom,

  though the

  Lady Guan-yin

  knows he

  deserves better

  Preface

  Early in the eighth century, a great dynasty flourished in China. While the Angles and the Saxons disputed the borders of minor kingdoms on the patchwork map of England, and the Mound Builders in North America carried baskets of dirt to raise their effigies, the mighty Tang reached a golden age. A powerful emperor ruled lands that stretched from the deserts of Central Asia to the jungle-covered ranges of northern Vietnam. Staffed by educated men, the government maintained a prosperous tranquillity at home, while the Emperor’s glittering armies warded off attacks by Tibetans or nomads from the northern steppes. Travellers from Persia, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, and the Iranian city-states of Soghdiana in Central Asia traded their goods for tokens of China’s wealth. More than anything else, they came for a fine-spun luxury: the supple fabric called silk.

  These travellers found a culture rich in its arts. Painting, sculpture, calligraphy, architecture, and music flowered. Worldly-wise poets gathered at banquets, reciting lines that continue to move readers today. Talented women of the winehouses tossed off charming song lyrics and danced with heart-catching grace. What’s more, idle scholars, Buddhist monks with a message to spread, and, perhaps, the first few marketplace storytellers, spun tales to teach and to delight. As you travel the Silk Road to Great Tang you will find stories and poems and scraps of old books that echo in English the forms and rhythms of these Chinese texts.

  ‘All under heaven’ was Great Tang. But people knew that this was only the human realm. They lived in a multi-level cosmos that included paradises in the sky, palaces of divinities on faerie islands or beneath great lakes, and a fearful underworld. Their own realm corresponded to a heaven ruled by the Jade Emperor and administered by a celestial bureaucracy of lesser gods and spirits. To distinguish native Chinese beliefs from the Buddhism that had come from India some centuries before the Tang, the old beliefs are called Taoism, though they are a far cry from the mystical philosophy of the Taoist sages.

  Most of the women and men of Great Tang looked at various religions with open minds. They paid homage to the heavenly hierarchy of folk Taoism. They worshipped the goddess of the moon, or the tigerish Western Motherqueen who dwelt somewhere in the wild Himalayas. They respected ancient local deities – among them the dragons of the rivers and seas. They revered the whole new pantheon that had arrived in China along with the Buddha’s teachings, including the merciful bodhisattva Lady Guan-yin and King Yama, who judges the dead in Buddhist hell. Even sceptical intellectuals honoured the spirits of deceased ancestors, sometimes catching glimpses of terrifying ghosts out of the comers of their eyes.

  The people of the Tang understood that all things known through the senses, the ten thousand things, manifest the endless alternation of two essential forces: darkness and light, inaction and action, yin and yang. As followers of the Buddha, they also recognized that the phenomenal world is the senses’ trick. And all the while they lived in an enchanting multiplex world where events on one plane of reality resonated with those of other realms.

  PART ONE

  Nu

  Wa’s

  Grotto

  Before the beginning, blanker than an eggshell, blanker than the blankest scroll, blanker than all the hungry wordless pages in the hungry word-filled dynasties of what will someday be the future, is the uncarved block.

  And then there is Nu Wa. Who gets bored.

  She switches her divine and snaky tail. She hums a tune, sweet and nasal as the flutings of reed pipes. Heaven and Earth, and the ten thousand things that litter them, have now been born from that watery, womby, uncarved block, but none of this is quite amusing enough for Nu Wa. She has just finished repairing the cracks in the sky-dome and is resting in her Snail Grotto Mansion far beneath the Yangzi River, grooming her long hair and polishing her scales. After such a wearisome task, Nu Wa, tugging petulantly at a knot in one of her cloudy sidelocks, feels she deserves a treat.

  A small water dragon slithers up beside her, and she absent-mindedly reaches out a hand to scratch the tender plates beneath the hinge of its jaw. The water dragon, who is very young, twitches its head, and the dot of light dances in the black sea of its eye and splits in two. ‘That’s it!’ cries Nu Wa. ‘I shall make a creature that will see one thing as two. It will look at moon as moon, and pearls as pearls, and it won’t see that moon and pearl are the same thing. In fact’ – and here she becomes so excited that she drops her tortoiseshell comb and cracks it, which makes her peevish again – ‘it will see only the ten thousand things and not the One.’

  The small water dragon, wishing to remind Nu Wa that she has stopped scratching its jaw, nudges her hand with its damp nose, and gazes at her with doleful eyes. Nu Wa, who is not peevish by nature, relents. ‘It won’t be so bad, little one,’ she murmurs. ‘Some of them may learn how to see properly. Who knows?’ She looks down at the cracked comb. ‘If a crack in a tortoiseshell is not just a cra
ck, if they take it to have some other meaning, what might they do with it?’ So she takes a bit of yellow mud, and pats it, and pokes it, and prods it into life.

  She makes one creature, and then another, and their antics are so comical that she soon feels better, so much so that she begins thinking of summoning her consort Fu Hsi for a bit of rest and recreation. ‘Brother,’ she will say, sliding her silken-scaled tail over to entwine itself around his, ‘look at these curious scatterbrained creatures I have pinched together out of a little yellow mud.’ Fu Hsi, no doubt, will titter as his tail begins to coil.

  The water dragon has been waiting for some time for Nu Wa to resume the scratching. It nudges her hand again.

  ‘Patience, darling,’ the goddess says. ‘Look! They’re running about on their hind legs now. Be a dear and go and summon Fu Hsi for me. I’ll tell you both a story if you do.’

  PARROT

  SPEAKS:

  1

  My name is, for the moment. Parrot, though it has been by turns Little Imp and Dragonfly and Bordermoon and Skywhistle and Heavenglaive and Greenpearl and more. I’ll tell you the story of how I got each of those names, though that is rather a forward thing for a woman of Tang to do. Or a man (and I was that too, for a little while). But no matter. Here the rules are different, are whatever you and I can agree for them to be.

  But to proceed: I was born in the Tang garrison town of Khotan, on the edge of the dry wastelands of the Takla Makan, far out along the Silk Road that stretches west from China across the desert towards Samarkand and Persia and the fabled empire of H’rom. My father was the garrison commander and I his only child and so prized (foolishly, Baba always said as he dandled me on his brocaded knee) even though I was a girl. He himself had little concern with my upbringing, caring only that I was dressed well and learned to play the wild, sad music of the frontier lands; those barbarian melodies were sweeping through the banqueting halls and winehouses of the Chinese empire, and he thought himself a connoisseur. Perhaps he would have taken a stricter interest in me had I been his son.

  I remember clearly one evening when the notion came to him that I should be brought in to play a song. He had dined with an important visitor – an emissary from the military governor in Kucha, I believe – and the two of them were laughing and arguing over bow-hunting when my nanny led me in.

  Truly your daughter?’ exclaimed the visitor, who must have had a bit too much to drink. ‘With those deep-set Iranian witch’s eyes?’

  I stood hanging my head while Baba rose to the occasion with a joke about how no man could be absolutely certain of paternity with the wanton women of Khotan; the governor’s emissary was not to be offended, after all. But he added in a growl that I was surely his, and quickly bade me play.

  Nanny placed my bent-necked lute in my hands, giving my shoulder a squeeze. At the end of the song, the emissary made haste to praise my skill, and the blackness of my hair. Baba took me into his broad lap and chucked me underneath my chin. His left sleeve fell back as he raised his arm; I saw the tiger tattooed on the hard muscle above his elbow.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked, for I had not yet learned caution with my tongue. But immediately, I saw that my asking was wrong. Frowning, Baba dismissed me. Later, Nanny explained that the tiger was the sign of a military brotherhood not to be spoken of, especially in front of an aristocrat who was bound to look on such marking of the body as not properly Chinese. She found this attitude amusing, but in my mind my shame at having said something that irritated Baba mingled with the embarrassment of the emissary’s comment on my eyes. In my other memories of Baba, he rides past me, tall upon his mount, the eagle’s head on his helmet-mask stern as his face when I displeased him.

  What my mother felt about me I could not have told you. I knew that she was living in my grandfather’s house in Chang-an, capital of the empire, and the hometown I’d never seen. She had, quite properly, stayed there when my father and his troops were posted to the uncouth lands of the far northwest before my birth. And so we never met.

  The woman who bore me was a concubine of my father’s. ‘Auntie’ I would have called her, had she survived my birth, since Baba’s formal wife was my true mother. My nurse always told me that the concubine had been a pretty, fair-skinned thing, mostly of Iranian blood, as Nanny was herself. My father’s own mother, I heard Nanny whisper to Second Cook one afternoon in the servants’ courtyard, had been Grandfather’s Turkish concubine; these outlandish foremothers (as Second Cook murmured back to her) explained my odd-shaped green-flecked eyes. ‘Barbarian eyes’ Second Cook called them, with all the smug pride of a full-blooded illiterate from the home provinces, quite forgetting Nanny’s origins. Leaning across the table by the cistern he poured himself another cup of my father’s best tea.

  ‘No!’ I cried out, as children will, reaching to my full height and beating Second Cook about his stringy thighs. Whoever I am, I am no barbarian. I knew my family name was Li, the same clan name as the Sons of Heaven, the very rulers of Great Tang. But Second Cook only drained his cup and laughed, picking me up and swinging me around by my arms, like a dragonfly tied to a leash of thread.

  My legs kicked the air. I screamed. What came after this I cannot say; I was surely no more than five at the time, or four, as Nanny, with her determinedly non-Chinese ways, would have reckoned. I remember only the sour face of Second Cook leaving in a huff and Nanny’s promise to take me out to the bazaar if only I would hush.

  I realize now I had a childhood freedom there in Khotan that I would not have had growing up in Chang-an. The only woman in that soldier’s household, besides Nanny and a few servant girls, was my father’s newest concubine, a gloomy thing of fifteen or so, with wide-set eyes and a flat, flaring nose. She mostly kept to her apartments, except when Baba let her come hawking with him or take part in a game of polo with the other officers and their girls. At least she bore me no ill will.

  In any case, Nanny took me out often to the bazaars. As general over all the garrison troops, Baba had a splendid house, more elegant even than the gaudy painted mansion of the puppet who still called himself king of Khotan and the villages round about. But I preferred the byways of the city, shadowed over by the five fortresses that guarded the trade route and Chinese sovereignty. I loved to look at the fine silks and the intricate patterned rugs of knotted wool. The merchants haggled in half a dozen languages, but mostly in Soghdian, which every trader knew; it was Nanny’s mother tongue, and so my own, though I spoke Khotanese with the lower servants, and with Baba and his personal staff chattered freely in Chinese.

  Best of all was the gem bazaar. In the booths there, uncut stones jostled against gorgeously worked bracelets, goblets, boxes, and pipes – gleaming bits of lapis lazuli, and pomegranate-red agate, and blue-green lang-gan from the jewelled world tree, and moonstone and malachite, and the rock crystal that some call watersperm, and amber and coral and jet. What I loved most, though, was the jade, the famous jade of Khotan: pale chunks from the stream bed of the Yurung Kash, deep green from the Kara Kash. Nanny told me they were gifts from the earth goddess to her best-loved city, whose first king she herself had suckled. These precious pebbles washed down with the melting snows from the Kun-lun range to the gravelled incline where the foot of the mountains meets the sands. Here the two rivers marry to form the River Khotan, which flows out to dusty nothing among the dunes. Here the oasis waters the thirsty irrigation ditches of the farmers, and the troopers’ hardy ponies, and the camels of the caravans. Here stands the gem bazaar in the city of my birth.

  I remember how I cried and kicked because Nanny would not take me to the bazaar one particular spring morning, the morning that the raiders came. So much of that day is blurred by fear and chaos and time that I can’t be certain of all that happened. But in the clear, distant vision of memory I can see a girl of nearly seven in the outer courtyard, clinging to her nurse’s full trousers and wailing like a younger child. Nanny would not indulge me that day; she had other plans. She r
olled her large eyes and lifted me up to my usual seat in front of her on the black mare. Her mind must have been on her appointment, though she could not know just who else she would meet.

  My mood changed quickly as we rode through the crowded streets, past the flat-roofed houses, and out of the city’s eastern gate. By the time the mare trotted over the bridge across the first of the countryside canals, I was staring eagerly at the farmers and pilgrims travelling with us, southwards along the road to a tiny village on the bank of the Yurung Kash. At first we passed through irrigated fields. Seeing a stand of mulberry trees, I asked Nanny to tell me again about the long-ago Chinese princess who smuggled mulberry seeds and silkworm eggs in her elaborate hairdo when she was sent out to marry a king of Khotan. Though I knew the story by heart, I always thrilled at the princess’s defiance of the centuries-long ban on letting the secrets of silk out into the barbarian world. Nanny smiled, and sighed, and pushed her hidden thoughts aside, and began to spin the tale. Listening, I half watched two or three vultures idling overhead.

  The croplands yielded to a sparse, sandy grassland. Then we drew close to the great river, and the land grew green again. The full heat of the spring forenoon had not yet risen when we reached the Buddhist temple that was our ostensible destination. We had come before, more than once, but the gold leaf on its walls still dazzled me. Nanny made her offerings to Lady Guan-yin, to Vaisravana, and to the Buddha Sakyamuni, who they say once came to Khotan when he was in the world, enveloping all the city in rays of liquid light. While she prayed, I slipped round a corner and spied on a monk with a sloping forehead, who copied out a holy text in some Indie script. Later, I half convinced myself that all that day’s pain had been sent as punishment for my flighty curiosity. Could it have been avoided if rd paid attention to Nanny’s sincere, if slightly hurried, devotions, rather than to those meaningless scratchings of a wooden pen?