Silk Road Read online

  The future hardly mattered to someone of my years. It was the walking that was difficult, mile after mile, grey-brown dust puffing up around my feet, sliding into my nose and throat. I envied the camels their double eyelids and the way they could close their nostrils to mere slits when they sensed the rising of a storm. There must have been fifty of the beasts in the caravan –and at that it was not a large one – but each was loaded heavily with goods, and all the traders walked.

  But when the Silk Road led us onto high ground and I could turn my head to see the mica-sparkling realm of sand to the north, I felt peace. The unresting dunes sometimes revealed the broken comer of a long-dead home, or the pitted stump of a tree, yet I never felt that empty landscape to be lonely. It was as if the desert’s colourless world were the only true one, and all the water-bound scraps of green life possessed a reality no greater than that of the dreams that plagued me when I slept.

  High ranges of dunes ran along beside us, out of the west; lower transverse chains rose up parallel to one another, north to south. Something in me – something that loved the designing dance of the senses – took comfort from this wind-worked patterning. Mornings we wakened well before sunrise and set off towards the mother-of-pearl of the early sky. East, I had been taught, was the direction of home; I was the daughter of a good family of Chang-an, reached by travelling east, east, east. Baba told me that more than once, tickling me and making a game of it, question and answer. Perhaps he had seen other soldiers’ children, born to frontier concubines and raised by foreign nannies, wander from the Chinese way.

  Soon after Ghalib bought us from Broad Chest, we stopped to barter for more water bags at the insignificant settlement on the Keriya River. Umar, Ghalib’s lanky nephew, took great care to bar us from any chance to talk with people, there and in the other oases we came to. ‘You talk, I hurt,’ Umar had told us in his clumsy Soghdian as we drew near the Keriya. He leered then at Blackie, the farmboy whose sister had been taken off by the Tibetans’ one-eared leader. Umar took pleasure in teasing Blackie, stroking his head with a heavy hand or flicking at his thighs with a camel crop, but Ghalib had quite clearly warned him to do nothing more. They generally ignored us girls.

  The winds blew strong out of the northeast the day after the full moon that marked our first half-month on the Silk Road. Ghalib and Umar and the other traders seemed not to mind them, but we children slumped thirsty, weary, and now sand-stung as we walked. I could hear the demonic howls and whistles of the desert winds that lure travellers from the track, out into the wastes where directions have no meaning. The stretch of the Road we passed over worsened hourly: too many days yet from the easternmost section of the Takla Makan. There, water – welcome even when it was brackish – might be dug out where the camels stamped on the ground, in old stream channels and depressions that had been the lake bed of Lop Nor. Hares and an occasional fox roamed closer to Khotan and Keriya; eastwards, we would spot a few wild camels and a drift of gazelles. Here, though, nothing lived. I had seen the skull of a horse that morning, beside a jumble of bones I chose not to examine too closely as we passed by.

  At last we halted for the night, near a low sandhill covered with tamarisk bushes. Each day took us through four seasons, and by now we were stopping for a few hours every afternoon to hide from the sun in the shade of our tents. Yet we never travelled straight through the night, as so many do. The caravan master must have wanted to avoid steering by the stars; the full heat of summer would force them to that later, on the return trip from Dun-huang. Now, in the fading light, I felt the evening’s coming chill.

  Umar fed us: first a shared cup of camel’s milk, which soured as always in my stomach but wet my throat, then dried meat and sweet dried apricots. When he came to the boy, he pretended to hand him a share, then snatched his hand away when the boy reached out for it. Blackie’s eyes filled, Ghalib called out something in an irritated tone, and Umar dropped the food in the greyish dirt. After he’d moved on. Nephrite, oldest among us, moved to put her arm round Blackie; still he wept. The second-oldest girl, whose name I’ve lost, fixed her eyes upon him, but kept eating, too tired – as I was – to do more.

  I didn’t know the fifth child’s name. The only one younger than I, yet still well beyond the age of speech, she did not talk.

  She must have seen things, when the raiders struck her village, that pushed her back to the time before words persuade us to speak. Or perhaps her soul had entered this world mute. None of the children knew her. Because we had no other name for her, we called her Baby.

  Baby gnawed her dried meat as greedily as I at first, but when Blackie’s sobs continued she walked over to him and held out her apricots. As he took one and stuck it in his mouth, she clutched the rest in one hand and flung her other arm half crooked above her hair. Her chubby legs cut capers and she turned her head from side to side in rhythm with her feet. Blackie’s wellspring of tears dried up, and then he smiled, and then he laughed.

  Soon all of us laughed with him, and Baby took a bow. Grit and sweat vanished, for the moment. Ghalib was bent over a camel’s foot, examining a cut; it must have hurt her when he touched it, for she arched her shaggy neck and groaned in protest. The other traders remained by their own tents, eating and talking. But Umar strode over, giving off an air of importance disturbed. He stood, arms akimbo, before Blackie and Baby, asking in Soghdian, ‘What you do?’

  Baby’s dancing ceased. She squatted. Blackie, showing what in him came closest to bravery, shrugged and sucked at his teeth, looking only at the ground. Umar grasped him by the shoulders and shook him.

  The boy howled. I could see Ghalib’s obliviousness snap. He dropped the camel’s foot, slapped her flank, and turned our way. Before he reached us, though, I decided that what Blackie had done I should do. But I had words with which to help Blackie: I shouted to Umar to stop.

  I suppose I half realized that the effect of Persian on Umar would surpass that of anything I could say in Soghdian. I seized on the sound the men made to stop the camels; in fact, I must have used the Persian word for ‘whoa!’ It worked.

  Ghalib yelled out too, a stream of phrases that left Umar as limp as he had been proud. He slunk away, not even looking back. His uncle glanced cursorily at Blackie and Baby; Umar’s flight had cheered them greatly, though they took pains not to smile. Then he turned to me, his handsome face alive with amused intelligence. ‘Say it again, girl.’

  I drew in my breath. ‘Whoa!’ I blurted out.

  Ghalib laughed till his eyes watered nearly as much as Blackie’s had. ‘Splendid!’ he said. Over his shoulder, he yelled ‘Whoa, Umar! Whoa!’ Umar pretended not to notice. ‘Say more, girl,’ Ghalib commanded gently, ‘not in Soghdian. Say what you know in my tongue.’

  What could I say? ‘Gee-yap!’ I mumbled. ‘Camel’s milk. Time to get up. Hurry, brats. Shut up.’ Then I added a name Umar often used for Blackie, which set Ghalib to laughing again.

  ‘Can you others speak in Persian?’ Ghalib asked, scratching at his dense, curly beard. But they all stood mute as Baby. ‘Come then. Little Parrot,’ he said to me, and led me to his tent, waving me over to squat on a corner of the rug now spread before his doorway. ‘Take a piece of this,’ he said, reaching in a saddlebag and pulling out something sweet and fine. I nibbled at the candy and then – so strongly had Baby’s actions struck me – tucked it inside my sleeve, intending to share a bit with her later.

  The hawk-nosed merchant asked what else I could say in his language. Some of the words sounded like the Khotanese I had spoken with most of the servants at home, or Nanny’s Soghdian, but I had only picked up a few more. ‘Can you say interesting things in Soghdian then?’ he asked, leaning back on the rug, one elbow propped on the saddle at its end. His baggy trousers fell in graceful folds as he bent one leg upwards at the knee. Looking at the embroidered facing on the lapels and cuffs of his round-necked tunic, I thought for the first time how he resembled a younger version of my father: a man of some elegance, when t
ime allowed.

  Something interesting, he had said. I took a deep breath, and recited a poem that Nanny had taught me. Ghalib grunted softly. ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Do you sing?’

  ‘Water?’ I said, careful to use the Persian word.

  ‘A trader!’ Ghalib’s smile pushed his cheeks up like two round fruits on either side of his long arched nose. He handed me a green-glazed earthenware pilgrim’s bottle. I drank deeply, and sang:

  ‘We said goodbye

  when buds first swelled on the poplar trees.

  I sigh alone:

  the fall’s last reeds go white with frost.

  You wind your way

  upon long roads across the sands.

  I drop my head

  to think of lovers’ time-bound vows.’

  Ghalib clapped loudly, the sound echoing through the empty desert air. Several of the traders had looked over as I sang; now one of them said something that made the others laugh and turn away. Umar fussed with another of the camels, his sulky back towards us. I saw in that moment Ghalib’s separateness; he was kept apart from unpolished Umar by age and temperament, and from the others in this caravan by his origins and by what I’d now call his sensibilities, although I then thought of it only as a difference that reminded me of Baba talking with his Khotanese sergeants.

  Ghalib gave me another bit of candy – but no more extra water – and sent me back to the other children. After that, he paid little attention to me, except that now and then when camp was made, he would call me over to sing. As for me, I grew closer daily to Nephrite and Baby, and watched the desert as we rode. I think it fair to say I know it far better than the courtesans and gallants of Chang-an, who compose their fashionable poems and songs of the borderlands and have never been within a thousand miles of jade Gate Pass. Yet even the desert, and whatever wordless comfort the sight of it gave to me, did not relieve me of my terrible dreams at night.

  Midnight in the Desert

  The ghost’s hair streams down unkempt about its shoulders. Its eyes glitter with a hunger that cannot be sated, the hunger for flesh: not to devour it, but merely to live again within it, or failing that, to know its feel. The ghost stumbles over to the sleeping child. A hand of colourless bone reaches out to touch a peach-blush cheek.

  The child rolls over and opens her eyes. They do not blink; they gaze unfocused like the eyes of someone who sits up with a shriek when a nightmare becomes too terrifying to bear. And yet she shows no sign of terror. Watching her, you would know that she has met this fleshless visitor before: the child bears an air of weary resignation. Night after night the hungry ghost comes, trying to break through the silence that divides a shade’s existence from the chatter-filled human realm.

  The ghost squats beside the rug on which the child slept. The others curled together in the little tent sleep on, unaware. A faint whisper, like the rustle of sand trickling down the steep leeward slope of a dune, like the scrape of a flake of gesso falling from a mural to the floor of a cave, drifts from a mouth that works with anguish. A word comes through at last: Promised. Or is it promise? A history, or a command?

  The child’s gaze breaks, and she casts her eyes downwards again in avoidance. What is demanded of her? What is it she must know?

  Promise, the ghost hisses. Mother. Greenpearl. Silence. An aura of pale flame flickers into being around it, the shadow of the flame auras around the Blessed Ones painted on scrolls, or in temple caves.

  Now the child looks up, startled. She has not seen this barely perceptible halo before: night after night the ghost has waxed stronger, clearer. At first it was only a pair of large, blood-ravaged eyes in the dark hollows of a mouthless face. Now the completed outlines of a body waver in the desert air, lighted by this emanation of weak fire. ‘Greenpearl?’ she says. ‘Greenpearl is me.’

  The ghost shudders. Silence! Promise. Greenpearl must bear another name.

  The bewildered child can do nothing but nod her head in agreement. She does not know if she must promise to use another name, or if the ghost is telling her the consequences of some promise – kept or broken – in the past. And if she is to hide her true name, Greenpearl, what name is she to use, and why?

  Gasping like one who has not tasted water for days, the ghost stretches to its full height and the flames grow ever so slightly stronger. Find the mother, it sighs. Find her and seek the meaning of the words. It is compelled to say these things, compelled to further the working-out of karma. Find the words, their meaning, and seek the gem beneath the waters.

  As the faltering image flares briefly brighter, the child leaves off her wondering. (Is my mother not safe at home in Chang-an?

  What are the words whose meaning I must seek?) She cries out, finally understanding one thing: ‘Nanny!’

  The ghost emits a terrible moan. Greenpearl! Ah, my Little Imp! Its lips wrench and work, even as its body begins to fade away. Seagem. Find her. Lady Guan-yin would have it so. Now the body vanishes, and then the mouth, and then the red-riddled, weeping eyes. The child collapses, and only a kick and a curse, in the morning, bring her round.

  The Two Daughters

  Sometime during the Ming dynasty (say 1500-something, some eight hundred years after the height of the Tang), in a city marketplace, a storyteller clears his throat to still the crowd and begins to chant a poem:

  ‘Greedy parents send daughters to ill fates. But a filial child can save a mother’s life. A promise made before your birth still binds you. And ghostly visions outlive idle talk.’

  He continues:

  This poem tells us that love of right action, not love of riches, should guide us in life, and that filial piety is every child’s duty to its parents. Thus Old Lai-zi played like a toddler, and dressed in toddler’s clothes, to lighten the hearts of his parents when they feared they were getting too old. But why, you ask, should this storyteller be talking of such things? Well, today I will tell you about two young women (step right up there, you at the back – plenty of room in the audience for all), each loyal in her own way to her parents. One of them paid a terrible price for following her parents’ will, yet in the end rewards were heaped upon her head, while the other, daughter to the first, set forth on a quest to rescue her mother from a living death beneath the waters of Cavegarden Lake. As the saying goes:

  If even hens know Virtue’s Way,

  Then surely cocks must Law obey.

  Today’s story relates how, long ago in the Great Tang dynasty, in the glorious reign of the Brilliant Emperor, there lived in the capital city of Chang-an a certain merchant, a seller of coffins. This merchant, whose name was Jiang Guang-lang, loved nothing so much as unusual savoury dishes, and so he was called Greedyguts Jiang. His wife, a sharp-faced, sharp-boned woman, despised her husband’s gluttony and cared only for jewellery. Because of her appearance, and because she thought nothing of haggling furiously with each grieving relative who came into the coffin shop, and each oldster planning ahead, everyone referred to her as the Needle.

  Now, the Needle would have preferred to spend all their money on fine bracelets and hairpins for herself. Yet she knew that if she fed her husband well, and kept him in a good temper, he would allow her to buy at least some of the things she desired. As for Greedyguts, he didn’t care one whit about managing their finances, as long as his dinner arrived at the table on time. So every penny that came into the household flew quickly out again. If it wasn’t sea-pine seeds imported from Korea, it was lichee fruits rushed up from the southland. If it wasn’t a ring of russet jade, it was a wavering kingfisher hair ornament worked in fine gold.

  One day, not many years after Greedyguts and the Needle were married, Greedyguts left the shop in his wife’s charge and rode out into an outlying district in search of a rare and tasty mushroom he had heard about. He was looking in a clump of trees beside the river when he heard a strange voice calling ‘Help!’

  Greedyguts looked all about him, but he saw no one. ‘Here,’ the voice gasped, ‘beside the riv
erbank.’ There, flapping on a slab of stone, a giant red-gold carp heaved its gills and struggled mightily, to no avail. ‘I am the younger brother of the Dragon Monarch,’ the carp said. ‘Throw me back into the river and I will reward you handsomely.’ Greedyguts considered briefly how tasty such a fish might be but decided he had better not take the risk. Puffing and sweating, he threw the great carp up and out, so that it landed with a mighty splash in the river.

  The carp danced and played among the waves for several minutes, then he stopped and swam up close to the bank. ‘You have saved my life,’ he said. ‘I was leaping high above the water when an ill wind buffeted me over to the stone. Come to me here tomorrow at this time and I will tell you what your reward will be.’ Greedyguts wondered if he had been tricked, but he merely agreed to meet the carp and continued his search for the mushrooms.

  Greedyguts failed to find the mushrooms, but the next day, when he arrived – a bit late – at the stone on the riverbank, the brother of the Dragon Monarch was waiting. The carp broke from the surface of the water, twisting in mid-air to catch a dazzling ray of light on its ruddy scales. ‘I bring you greetings. Master Jiang, from my august sibling, who has suggested a suitable reward. A son has just been born to the Dragon Monarch, and your new wife will bear a daughter in eight months’ time. Why not ally your family with mine in marriage? As my nephew’s wife, your daughter will live in luxury in our Mother-of-Pearl Villa beneath the waters, and we will send her to visit you as often as she wishes. Should you accept, I am empowered to present you with a few trivial betrothal gifts.’

  Greedyguts considered briefly. The whole thing struck him as rather far-fetched, since as far as he knew his wife wasn’t pregnant. Still, it would never do to offend the Dragon Monarch, and if such a marriage did come to pass, it might prove fortunate for him. So he clasped his hands together and bowed deeply towards the carp. ‘You honour me greatly,’ he said unctuously. ‘Let the match be made.’