Breaking Bamboo Read online

  His sister-in-law’s elaborate courtesy contained a veiled reproach.

  ‘I could not visit earlier. I have been engaged on official business, following my promotion.’

  ‘So we have heard.’

  Cao poured him a fresh cup of tea and offered her seat to him with another deep bow.

  ‘We never stood on ceremony before,’ he said, finding a stool lower than her own. ‘Let us not do so now.’

  Her troubled expression cleared a little.

  ‘Well then I won’t, even if everyone is calling you Captain Xiao. Oh, Captain Xiao!’ She chuckled but stopped suddenly to check whether he was offended. Reassured, she continued: ‘I won’t pretend we didn’t weep with relief to see you return.

  While you were away, Shih could hardly sleep for fear of the dangers you faced. Yet it seems everything you asked for in your letter has been granted.’

  Guang sipped his tea and glanced at the closed door leading to the family apartments.

  ‘Father is within?’ he asked.

  ‘Why yes,’ said Cao, as though more might be said.

  ‘How is he?’

  Her eyes widened.

  ‘Lord Yun keeps to his room and mutters. We have provided him with a basin of golden carp and they suffice for company.

  Shih has discovered a strange thing. Honoured Father-in-law believes favourable demons are acting through the fish, that their circling of the bowl somehow protects him. Shih says curing such a malady is like unpicking a tangle of invisible threads.’

  Guang sipped his tea morosely.

  ‘I tried my best,’ he said. ‘There was such danger in the Mongol lands, Cao! We were lucky. Or our ancestors helped us.’

  Her eyes descended to his fine chest and shoulders.

  ‘You are what you are, Brother-in-law,’ she said. ‘You saved Lord Yun from one danger. Now Shih must protect him from another.’ She hesitated, adding: ‘I never met Honoured Father until you brought him here. I suspect that if the Mongols had not seized Three-Step-House, we would never have seen him at all.’

  ‘Misunderstandings,’ muttered Guang. ‘Foolish errors.

  Father was always demanding. I mean, if he felt – rightly or wrongly – that he had not been shown filial respect. . .’

  ‘Is that why Shih was sent away?’ asked Cao, doubtfully.

  ‘Did Shih not show him sufficient respect? He was just a little boy when Lord Yun. . . Oh, I shall say no more! It all happened long ago. But I must tell you, Brother-in-law, my own father always found Shih a respectful apprentice.’

  A helpless shrug was Guang’s only reply.

  ‘Perhaps it is best not to ask these things,’ said Cao. ‘Yet now Lord Yun lives in our house – and very unwillingly. He seems to believe we are gaolers working for a demon called Khan Bayke and that Apricot Corner Court is a sort of prison.’

  Her comment made Guang redden. As Eldest Son, his obvious duty was to provide a home for Father. There were many rooms in his new pavilion on Peacock Hill and a dozen servants to tend Lord Yun’s needs. Yet Guang shrank from such a responsibility.

  ‘You can imagine,’ continued Cao. ‘How little Lord Yun relishes depending on Shih. As for me, I am too common. And plain. He does not notice me. We are half-afraid Lord Yun will order Shih to divorce me. After all I have not borne the Yun clan a son to please your ancestors.’

  Guang retreated into his tea. Cao’s anxiety did not seem entirely misguided. He looked round the clean room with its fragrant jars and woodcut print of the Yellow Emperor.

  ‘When will Shih return?’ he asked.

  Cao shrugged.

  ‘It could be hours. Ever since he healed the Pacification Commissioner’s son, we have been besieged by fancy folk convinced their own heirs have the dry coughing sickness. Not that there isn’t plenty of it about. Perhaps you’ll find him at the North Medical Relief Bureau. He spends more and more time there.’

  ‘So you prosper?’ asked Guang.

  ‘We have plenty of money, if that’s what you mean.’ Cao looked at him sharply. ‘No doubt you have heard that Lord Yun is not our only Honoured Guest.’ She rose hurriedly and began to straighten the medicine jars. ‘His Excellency rewarded Shih with more than silver and jade. He gave him a concubine he wished to discard. She is in the room next to Lord Yun. Poor girl. Shih does not know what to do with her. She stays in her room from dawn until dusk.’

  ‘A strange fee,’ said Guang.

  ‘You may say so. These noble folk have their own special ways.’

  Brother and sister-in-law sat in silence for a while. At last, he said: ‘Perhaps I should pay my respects to Father.’

  ‘If you will forgive advice from a woman,’ she said. ‘I’d wait until Shih returns. It will give him a chance to wash away any dishonourable messes Honoured Father may have around his person.’

  ‘You mean. . . Ah, I see.’

  Guang felt a deep desire to be away from Apricot Corner Court. He could not bear the thought of Father soiling himself.

  Besides, he had so much business to undertake – a visit to the papermakers’ guild to requisition supplies for the manufacture of thunderclap bombs – there was no end to it. Father was probably sleeping anyway.

  ‘I will come back soon,’ he promised.

  Cao rose, too, evidently alarmed.

  ‘You must dine with us! Please wait! I will send for wine.

  Perhaps I have said too much and you are offended.’

  ‘No, I must go. But I shall return soon.’

  He bowed to her with feeling.

  ‘Whatever Father may think, my brother is lucky in his wife,’ he said. ‘She never says too much. And unlike many a painted lady, everything she says is honest. Tell Shih that I. . . I honour how he helps Father. That I see how difficult it must be.’

  Cao laughed her dry laugh.

  ‘I’ll tell him, Captain Xiao. But do come back soon. We will be offended if you do not.’

  ‘I dare not risk that,’ he said.

  As he untied his horse, Guang glimpsed a lady looking at him from a side window. His mouth opened in surprise. Her green eyes were perfect pools of jade. He could not equate such beauty with Apricot Corner Court. Her perfect make-up and oval face belonged in palaces, not Water Basin Ward. Yet her look was wrenchingly sad. She reached up a slender arm and the bamboo curtain descended with a clatter. The spell was broken and Guang was left blinking.

  As he mounted his horse, he tossed a string of cash to Little Melon.

  ‘Here is another for your mother,’ he said. ‘Tell her it is in payment for her fine dumplings.’

  Guang trotted into the street, resisting an urge to dig in his heels and gallop all the way back to Peacock Hill. Then he realised why he did not want Father to stay in his new pavilion.

  His promotion was only temporary. When the commission ended, his new home would pass to another. It would be wrong to accustom Lord Yun to a new home then snatch it away.

  Quite wrong, even unfilial. Whereas Shih could address Lord Yun’s most intimate problems with a practised hand.

  When Guang arrived home his melancholy did not lift. He drank wine alone in his courtyard garden, listening to the trickle of the fountain and recollecting the lady with green, unsettling eyes who had hastily lowered the curtain so as not to be defiled by his gaze. No doubt Wang Ting-bo’s former concubine considered herself far too precious a sight for a mere soldier. Guang smiled scornfully. After all, what was she except a discarded ornament? All his thoughts should be concentrated on strengthening Nancheng’s defences and, above all, on winning honour and respect.

  Still he felt unsettled. So Guang sent out a dozen servants to scour the city for Chen Song, each bearing an invitation to dine at the most expensive restaurant in Nancheng as Captain Xiao’s personal Honoured Guest.

  five

  ‘In the time long ago, all followed the teachings of the Wise Sages, who taught that moral weakness, poisonous influences and harm-ful minds were to be avoided at
one’s peril . . . They never entered the chamber of love in a drunken state, lest their qi energies be wasted. How, therefore, could sickness or corruption find a place among such pure people?’

  From The Yellow Emperor’s Classic on Internal Medicine

  Water Basin Ward, Nancheng. Mid-Autumn, 1266.

  Dr Shih and Apprentice Chung made a surly pair as they hurried down North Canal Street.

  ‘You forgot the soup of ground ox bones and honey,’ said Shih. ‘And the infusion of raspberry leaves. How many more times must I remind you? Rigour and insight are the twin mountains on which our art nestles!’

  The apprentice bowed miserably and his master frowned but said no more. Sensing he was forgiven, Chung lifted his head.

  He gestured surreptitiously to an acquaintance loitering on the opposite side of the street as if to say, not now. The latter, a young man in an apprentice apothecary’s robes, nodded and melted into the crowd.

  It was mid-autumn, that time when summer’s discomfort fades into memory while sufficient warmth lingers. The evening had only just commenced. Half the city was outdoors, leaving crowded rooms and courtyards to drift from one diversion to the next.

  A crowd of fresh-landed boatmen passed, singing and jostling one another like wide-eyed youths. Dr Shih envied their freedom to roam through the pleasant twilight.

  ‘I’ll buy wine for us both after we’ve finished tonight,’ he told Chung, ‘though really you don’t deserve it.’

  Now they walked with better feeling and soon came to the paper manufactory of Ibn Rashid in Date Palm Alley.

  Ibn Rashid’s father had been indentured to a paper-maker in his youth as payment for a gambling debt and now the family trade was in its second generation. Their religion was outlandish, but Dr Shih was too delicate to mention it.

  Before he could examine Ibn Rashid’s Third Son, a veiled daughter of the house brought out a lacquered tray of mint tea and Turkish pastries.

  ‘We have been greatly honoured this last week,’ said the paper-maker, while Shih nibbled the corner of a pastry greasy with sheep’s butter. ‘I, Ibn Rashid, am ordered to set aside all my paper. Do you know why?’

  Shih shook his head, and quietly placed the pastry back on its plate.

  ‘Not for books, sir! Rashid’s paper is for thunderclap bombs!’ Ibn Rashid looked at him shrewdly. ‘I believe you know about this already. For it is your own brother, Captain Xiao, who demands every paper-maker in the city soak and pound from dawn until dusk.’

  At the mention of his brother Shih’s bland face flickered. He wondered if Ibn Rashid noticed. It was his private sorrow that Guang seldom visited Apricot Corner Court. He was too busy revelling in his reputation as Captain Xiao while others endured the consequences of filial piety. Yet when the humble doctor walked his rounds, a hope of meeting his illustrious brother accompanied him; and he often thought of that joyful day when they met by chance on Bright Hoop Street after two decades apart. Just as often, his feelings would drift from nostalgia to resentment – a bitterness he was ashamed to acknowledge except in secret thoughts.

  Dr Shih’s next patient lived in Xue Alley. This narrow, zigzagging street had been named after the clan who occupied two-thirds of it. Children with similar faces hung around doorways, resembling their parents like a stand of young bamboo.

  For all their wealth in numbers the Xue Clan were poor, so Dr Shih often halved his normal fee. Yet they took up more of his time than any other family.

  He was met on the street by their clan head, Carpenter Xue.

  Dr Shih had once diagnosed him as suffering from an excess of the seven sentiments – love leading to fear, sadness, then anger, especially in summer. This evening he had entered a phase of anger.

  ‘Dr Shih! You took your time, sir! No doubt you have better patients than us Xue since you cured the Pacification Commissioner’s son!’

  ‘I have no better patients,’ said Shih.

  He was led to the carpenter’s eldest daughter, who had suffered bleeding since the birth of a stillborn son. An hour later Shih emerged sweating and took Chung by the arm.

  ‘If she lives they will say it is because Xue blood is thicker than millet-broth,’ he said. ‘And if she dies, they’ll blame me.

  Let us buy that wine we talked about.’

  Shih drank alone in his shop while Chung proudly carried a large jug into Apricot Corner Court. The apprentice shared it beneath a tree with Old Hsu’s youngest son and one of his friends, an apothecary’s apprentice. Although Dr Shih considered it his duty to counter the weaknesses in Chung’s character, tonight he let the lad gamble at cards. He invariably lost, as his father had before him, with the result that his son failed to inherit a plump tailor’s business. Shih had liked Chung’s father and still remembered him with sadness.

  As he drank, Shih considered their most intractable case. Although his shelves contained hundreds of medicines and a whole library of treatises, nothing seemed to shake Lord Yun’s madness. A noise made him look up. Cao stood in the doorway wearing nightclothes. He gestured to a chair beside him.

  ‘Take a cup with me,’ he said. ‘Only poets and morose people drink alone.’

  Brushing back her disordered hair, Cao took the place he offered.

  She poured him a large bowl, then another for herself. They sat in silence, at a loss for words not concerning shop or food, unsettled fees or patients.

  ‘I’m worried about Father,’ he said.

  She looked at him in the soft lamplight. He sensed she wanted to mention Wang Ting-bo’s former concubine, that she desired reassurance concerning his feelings for the girl. He continued doggedly: ‘I cannot understand Father’s sickness.

  Sometimes I think it would be better to take away his bowl of fishes, but that would be cruel.’

  Cao laughed nervously. ‘What could ever replace them?’

  ‘You express the matter exactly. Tomorrow I will speak frankly with him. Perhaps I shall learn how to restore the balance of yin and yang in his brain.’ He looked up darkly.

  ‘Not that his former self was worth restoring.’

  Cao shook her head. ‘Do not say such things! It will bring us bad luck.’

  ‘It is the truth.’

  He wondered why they did not laugh as they drank. Should not wine awaken mirth? In the early years of their marriage there had always been humour and amused gossip. Surely that was better. Shih blamed himself, for Cao was naturally mirthful.

  The couple drank cup after cup, exchanging a few desultory words. Both were dulled by the day’s long labours.

  ‘I will speak to Father tomorrow,’ said Shih, his voice slurring as they prepared for bed. ‘Then we shall see.’

  Cao’s fragrance attracted him as he lay beside her, until thoughts of Father awoke an old anxiety, one he shrank from, and all his ardour failed. He rolled over, pretending to sleep.

  *

  Dr Shih rose at dawn like most of the city and found Cao preparing breakfast in the kitchen, the bamboo curtain rolled up. As she worked, his wife watched Widow Mu’s children playing round the apricot tree. She called out words of praise when Little Melon tossed his wooden ball over the branches and ran beneath to catch it on the other side. Her bright look faded as Shih arrived and this grieved him.

  ‘I will take Honoured Father his breakfast,’ he said.

  When he knocked on the door there was no reply. Shih entered and found the room deserted, apart from the bowl of slowly circling carp. He sniffed. Old man’s smell filled every corner, acrid and musty. At first he felt alarmed, wondering if Lord Yun had developed a firestorm of the head and thrown himself into the canal. Then he heard a creak from the ceiling.

  Dr Shih quietly mounted the steps leading up to the tower room, where he liked to look over the rooftops as he prepared medicines. He found Lord Yun peering round a corner of the window into Apricot Corner Court. Lord Yun was a little deaf and did not notice his approach. Intrigued, Shih stealthily positioned himself so he could see wha
t engrossed the old man.

  The tower provided a clear, slanting view of the Widow Mu’s back room. Through a gap in the upper half of the window, her daughter, Lan Tian, could be seen washing small breasts, a dreamy expression on her face. Father stared, his mouth slightly open. Dr Shih’s own eyes narrowed.

  ‘Come away from there, Father,’ he said, sharply.

  The old man started in alarm. Then flushed.

  ‘You were spying on me!’ he said.

  ‘Your breakfast awaits you, sir. I have laid it out in your room.’

  Father’s composure had recovered by the time the meal was over. It had been eaten daintily, with much dabbing of the clean napkin he insisted on. Lord Yun had rediscovered his fine manners since escaping from Whale Rock Monastery. When he looked up he seemed surprised to see his son still there. For a while they sat in silence, Shih’s hands folded on his lap, until the old man grew uncomfortable and pulled his chair close to the bowl of fishes. His entire attention focused on the circling carp. Still Shih did not move.

  ‘I would hate to place a lock on the tower room door, Father,’ he said. ‘But I will if necessary.’

  No reply. Shih knew he had been heard.

  ‘I will say no more on that matter. You know my resolve.’

  The old man suddenly looked up. His eyes were cold and fathomless, so that Shih recoiled inwardly, remembering how he had felt as a boy when Father examined him.

  ‘What do you know about resolve?’ asked Lord Yun. ‘You are not Guang. You are not even my son. I am doubly dis -

  honoured that Bayke chose someone like you for my gaoler.’

  Shih struggled for composure.

  ‘You are wrong, Father. Of course I am your son.’

  ‘Not if I don’t want,’ said the old man, triumphantly.

  The purpose of their interview seemed to be slipping away.

  Shih tried again: ‘You are not well, Father. If I could be per mitted to take your pulse, I might find a name for your sickness.’

  The old man snorted.

  ‘You are not fit to touch my wrist,’ he said. ‘Where is Guang?