Читать книгу The Jade Enchantress - E. Hoffmann Price - Страница 5

Chapter I

Kwan Ju-hai and his brother, Kwan Shou-chi, were glad it was a downgrade, and no doubt the overburdened pack horses shared that feeling as they came out of the wooded foothills of the Ta-pa Range, some three days march from Ch’ang-an, the capital city of the T’ang Emperor. Old Man Kwan’s sons wore blue shirts reaching halfway to the knee, and flopping black pants, about knee length. Their shoes were heavy. This was rocky ground.

Despite cursing the pack animals and inspiring them with whip flicks to the rump, each brother had breath for gabbling and energy for lifting his mushroom-shaped straw hat to mop the sweat that cut channels through the dust that caked his sun-blasted face.

For a farmer, Old Man Kwan was well off, but he never forgot that three centuries had been eaten up to expand a couple of peasant shacks to a walled village. He gave his sons every chance to learn that Kwan Village had not been the result of tail-sitting.

The animals had it easier. They’d tail-switched buzzing flies and done nothing while the brothers plied axe and saw to cut a trainload of wood, some for sale, some for village use. That the animals had gone upgrade without a burden had been only because the Old Man didn’t know what he could have had them carry on the outbound way.

Ju-hai, a head taller than his younger brother, was rangy, sharp-faced and, though he had the expression, he did not resemble father, brother, or any of the swarm of Kwan cousins. These were square rigged, squarish of face, inclined to look fixed, stubborn, and somewhat grim. Ju-hai, some months past his eighteenth birthday, carried himself as if savoring the mountain air, relishing the breath of conifers, scenting and anticipating the distant, whether in time or space. His eyes covered the entire field, ever poised, ever alert. Eagerness, versatility, and self-assurance promised Ju-hai eventful years rather than longevity.

Ju-hai’s vision reached from the range which tapered off from the snowcap of Tai Pai Shan, near Ch’ang-an, and reached westward toward Szechuan Province; it swooped up from the three-thousand-foot elevation of the cultivated plain of Shensi Province, cradle of the Chinese race. He looked through a golden haze of loess dust, windblown from waste areas which would before many years have to be cleared of rock and scrub. For too many years there had not been plague, war, or famine to keep the people from multiplying faster than the land could feed them.

Ju-hai looked through more than golden haze; his vision reached through the haze of time, and already instinct warned him against excessive optimism. Horse-flavored wind brought hoof-stirred dust to cake his mouth. He spat and said, “Younger Brother, this is a dog-fornicating mess—this is dung on our pancakes—for me, anyway.”

“Elder Brother,” Shou-chi dutifully responded, “it’s not always honey or syrup, as the Old Man’s always telling us.”

“He happens to be right, most of the time,” Ju-hai conceded. “You may wonder what I’m griping about.”

“Since you mention it—hai!” He scooped up a rock, hurled it, and nicked an erring pack horse’s rump. Belatedly, Elder Brother cracked his whip and corrected the misguided animal.

“Horses are crazy,” Ju-hai added. “That turtle-child is on his way home and still has to nibble at lilies and fem.”

“Or the dry manure of better animals,” Shou-chi cut in. “You were going to tell me how you like the idea of school in Ch’ang-an.”

“With all respect to the Old Man, I don’t want to be a scholar. I don’t want to be a bureaucrat. I don’t want to start out as magistrate in some louse-bound town with people committing crimes for me to investigate or suing each other for imaginary wrongs and damages.” He cracked the whip, drew a spurt of dust from a shaggy black rump, and resumed. “Dad does make sense. If one of us doesn’t get into the Civil Service, other civil servants will eat us alive, rob us blind. So, I’ll have to learn to be a gentleman.”

“I’d rather be a farmer,” Shou-chi admitted. “I see what you mean. But I’ll do my best while you’re at school and after you’ve got an official appointment.”

Younger Brother didn’t realize how dumb and plodding he was; he didn’t suspect that his earnestness, his industry, and his dedication were not enough to cope with the ever-increasing rapacity of the Bureaucracy.

“I know you’ll do your best, and I’ll outwit my fellow bureaucrats whenever I can, sleep with their concubines, and keep you informed as to what their next trick is going to be. With you doing the work and the Old Man doing the thinking, we ought to hold our own. All I meant was that I don’t like the idea of getting away from my own country and people, and from working with jade.”

Mention of the jade-craft, the art which Elder Brother pursued whenever his studies at the Kwan Village school permitted, put Shou-chi in mind of another severance. “You were speaking of concubines, a minute ago,” he finally said. “Our girl will miss you. Lan-yin, I mean,” he hastily added.

Shou-chi was far from subtle; his afterthought expression was as good as stating that he, too, had become aware of another girl—of Hsi-feng, the little slave girl who had blossomed into womanhood.

“I know you had Lan-yin in mind, and maybe the Old Man would arrange for you to take my turns with her, once I’m gone to Ch’ang-an. That way, you’d go through her pillow book twice as quickly and be just that much better off when you took a wife.”

Thus far, Hsi-feng was neither Ju-hai’s, Shou-chi’s, nor anyone else’s girl. Each knew that if either seduced Hsi-feng—Little Phoenix—the Old Man would flog the offender half to death and thereafter sleep with the girl himself. Nevertheless, Ju-hai was sorely worried; leaving Phoenix was his principal reason for hating the thought of three or four years away from home while preparing for the Imperial Civil Service examinations.

Phoenix was a slave because of a contract which her parents, desperately short of money, had signed to make her a bond servant of the Kwan family, and the terms were honorable. When she reached marriageable age, the Kwans were bound by old custom and honor to arrange a decent marriage for her. If any of the Kwans had an illicit relationship with her, they could not sell her to any other family, nor could they make as good a marriage for her as they otherwise could.

Although Ju-hai had developed an obsessive craving for Phoenix, his sense of propriety kept him from trifling with the girl, or even trying to; and sharing Lan-yin with his brother kept his decent restraint from being too onerous.

This turtle-loving school in Ch’ang-an… He’d been brooding, day after day, week after week, as Hsi-feng became ever more aware of her ripening femaleness. If Younger Brother doesn’t get her, someone will marry her.

The more he had of Lan-yin, the more he wondered how it would be with Little Phoenix as pictured on page such-and-such, of Lan-yin’s pillow book. As he pondered all these facets of the disturbance stirred up by a slave girl suddenly become big enough and old enough, he was quite certain that Younger Brother and every other male within a hundred li was wallowing in comparable thoughts.

These woman-thinkings were interrupted as the pack train neared the yawning gateway of Kwan Village. Shou-chi pointed.

“Look at that big hulk of a Mongol!”

Ju-hai looked. “Must be a shaman. The old guy has his drum and rattles and stuff flopping all over him.”

“What do you suppose he’s doing out here?”

“I’ll ask him.”

The limping wanderer came from north of the Great Wall built centuries ago to exclude armies of Mongols, Manchus, and other barbarians from the realm of the Son of Heaven. They were crude fellows—their daily life was so grim that warfare was a welcome relief from herding their flocks. They were so poverty-stricken that they had nothing to put on the altars of the Lord Buddha but the dried meat of sheep or the fermented milk of mares. Civilized folk, on the other hand, offered only fruit, nuts, grain, incense, or flowers—things which those dangerous blockheads never had except when they congregated around the western gate of Ch’ang-an, where a colony of the nomads lived in their yurts.

The brothers met the hobbling wanderer. Ju-hai waved his brother on with the pack train and paused. “You are tired. Why not go in and rest and eat?” he asked the man.

The big fellow eyed Ju-hai, and finger combed his forked beard. His ears reached out like fans. He leaned on his heavy staff. His sheepskin jacket was greasy-dirty, even for a Mongol. The rest of his clothing and his floppy-brimmed high-crowned hat were equally grimy.

“You’re a shaman,” Ju-hai said.

It was a statement, not a question. The little drum, rattle, and all the rest of the gear that those half-madmen used in their prophetic art or craft made questions needless. This man might be able to give Ju-hai a helpful answer to important questions.

Ju-hai dug into the sash which seemed his short pants and found a piece of silver.

“How did you hurt your leg?”

“Tiger clawed and bit me.” The stranger’s Chinese was crude.

“What did you do—”

“I beat the bastard to death with my staff and cut out his liver and ate it, so I feel like a tiger, but my leg bothers me.”

Ju-hai reckoned from this that the Mongol had come up from the southeast, and was heading in the general direction of Ch’ang-an.

“Man after my own heart.” He offered the silver. “This isn’t beggar-bait. It is a present.”

The wanderer understood the great distinction between the two. He said something which Ju-hai no more than half understood.

“My father runs the village. Go in, get food, rest up, and later we’ll talk.”

“What you want?”

“Stick around and you’ll find out.”

The shaman made a grunting sound which might have been a word. “So you got troubles? Tax collector? Or who’s going to get your girl when you go in the army?”

“How do you know I got troubles?” Ju-hai challenged.

The broad face became shrewd. He said, good humouredly, “Nobody talks to me except when he’s in trouble up to his chin. All my life people tell me about troubles. So when I see a trouble-face, I know it.”

“How long you been a shaman?”

“Born that way. Some got to study how, but I wonder why anyone is so crazy and wants to be one when he don’t have to.”

Ju-hai nodded. “I don’t know a thing about shamanizing except what I’ve heard people say.”

“Then both ears are full of manure. If you got a question, you can’t ask me in this town.”

“Why not?”

“My spirit friend takes my body and talks for me; I am somewhere else. Before I go into open-eye sleep, there is drumming and chanting and whanging and then my spirit friend roars like a crazy thunderstorm, and every bastard in town knows what is being said.”

“Then why would anyone ask you questions?”

“Because they trust me.”

Ju-hai didn’t know whether to be skeptical or perplexed, and his face revealed the conflict.

The shaman explained, “When the spirit takes my body, I don’t hear what you say, I don’t hear what it says. So I can’t tell you any lies, I can t make any mistakes.”

“But your pet devil can tell me any kind of nonsense, and what can I do to him?”

The Mongolian chuckled. “You see what a lot of fellows don’t. When they get worried enough, they’ll believe anything. But a lot of times, my spirit-devil gives them good advice.”

After a long silence, Ju-hai said, “You’re on your way to Ch’ang-an.” A grunt, a nod, and then Ju-hai resumed, “At the Moon Festival, I’m going to Ch’ang-an with my Old Man’s wagon train. You wait and give your leg a chance. I’ll see you get food, and you can ride one of the wagons. I’m Ju-hai. My father is the Kwan.”

“I’m Yatu and I don’t know who my father was.”

Yatu made for the cooked-food stall near the inn, and Ju-hai went to his apartment in the Kwan quarter of the village.