Читать книгу Go Ask the River - Evelyn Eaton - Страница 12

II

HE WOKE TO PAIN AND NOISE. Someone was kicking him, someone was shouting. He was lying, naked, on a pile of heaped-up leaves. He sat up groggily. Two angry men stood over him…soldiers…

“Wha…wha…where?”

They struck him. They yanked him to his feet. They were rough-looking brutes with mean faces. One of them, the older, had a scar across his lips that puckered them into a sneer.

“If those are yours, get into them,” this Scarface said, tossing him a bundle scooped up from the ground.

They were his clothes. He groped to put them on, shaking with shock, with fear.

“I don’t understand… I don’t understand…”

He saw his pack a few feet away, hanging from a bush, and stumbled toward it. It was still fastened. He loosened the straps and looked in. His purse was there. He had not been robbed. But something terrible had happened…

“How did I get here?”

Scarface clouted him savagely across the mouth.

“Quiet, Scum!”

The other man laughed. “How did I get here?” he said mincingly. Then they both guffawed.

They took his arms and began to hustle him forward, through a crowd of curious, watching people who made no effort to help him. They halted for a moment, stared, and went hurrying about their business, while new ones came and stared.

He tried to appeal to the nearest. “Wait…wait…these soldiers are making a terrible mistake…help me…help me…” “Come on!” Scarface struck him again.

He staggered a few feet farther, then he stopped and tried to wrench himself free. “Take me to the Inn…they know me there…they’ll tell you…”

“Shut your lying mouth,” Scarface said, hitting him once for every word. “Save your strength to move your feet.”

“Shall we slice him up a bit? Let’s take off his ears.”

Someone in the watching crowd laughed. They were dragging him between them now like a sack of stones.

“You’d better stop,” he shouted. “I tell you it’s a mistake. The Governor will punish you for this. He’s expecting me.”

“You’re an envoy from the Emperor, I suppose?”

“Can’t you see, he’s the Emperor himself.”

“I’m in the Governor’s service.”

“Ho! It so happens we’re in the Governor’s service and we never saw you before.”

“I’ve just come from Canton. I’m the tutor for his sons.”

They slackened their hold for a moment while they considered this. He looked at them hopefully, but they rejected it.

“A fine tutor you’d make, sleeping off your wine, stark naked in a public place! Are you going to step along, or shall we finish what the wine began?”

“If we have to carry you,” the other man said, “we’d as soon tote you dead.”

He gave up struggling then and walked beside them, dazed, trying to remember what had happened, what he could have done to be dumped out naked on a pile of leaves…who put him there?

The last thing he remembered was rising with his Chance Met Lady from writing the last poem together, following her to a pavilion where the sleeping mat was spread, taking off his robe and sinking down upon her, then her arms around him, then… hot shame flooded him, he must have fallen into a drunken sleep, a stupor, on her very breast.

Was that it? Had he insulted her, and was she so disgusted with him that she had her servants throw out the drunken boor?

“No more funny stories?”

“Left his tongue somewhere. At that inn he’s raving about.”

They guffawed again, winked, made signs to the passing crowd, but they stopped hitting him and twisting his arms.

“Where are you taking me?”

“To the jail.”

He knew what that meant. Months, a year perhaps, and meanwhile nobody would know where he had gone or be able to find him. He would rot…

“Take me to the Governor first…”

“Still harping on the Governor.”

He looked at their stupid, cruel faces. “Listen,” he said, “if you’ll take me to a magistrate or any city official, I’ll pay you well.”

“Ho! In gold, I suppose.”

“Yes, in gold. One piece each.”

“And what would scum like you be doing with gold pieces?”

“Stolen, perhaps?”

“Well, let’s see them anyway.”

He undid his pack and handed them his purse. There was some silver in it besides the two gold pieces. They took it all, dividing it between them.

“Hey, what else is in that pack?” Scarface snatched it and started rummaging. T’ien Chu’s few belongings fell out, slippers, pen case, clothes, a scroll…

“Give me that!” He struggled with Scarface, who held him off and shook him, while the other undid the ribbon and unrolled the scroll.

“What is it? What’s on it?”

“Just some writing.”

They looked at each other uneasily, then at T’ien Chu, and the pen case in the mud. They released him. They handed him back the scroll. He stood holding it for a moment uncertainly, then he put it into the pack and began to stuff the other things around it, while they watched.

“Maybe he is some sort of scholar,” the younger one said. “That was columns of learned sort of writing.”

“What about it?”

“Nothing, only maybe we could take him to some official, if that’s what he wants…”

“What’s the odds where we take him? He’ll get to jail in the end. Scum like him…”

“Yes, but after all…”

“After all, what?”

“Well, he paid.”

“Ho! So why not jail, jail for the plucked crow?”

“There’s nothing more in it for us that way. There might be something to pick up from some official for bringing him in… it looks well too…and if they don’t want him then we can take him to the jail…”

“What makes you so fond of officials?”

They took him to Magistrate Wu-tsung, and after an interval of waiting the complaint against him was recorded, the soldiers’ statements sworn to, and T’ien Chu had his first chance to defend himself.

He plunged into the story urgently, reliving it as he told it. How he entered the city by the East Gate, and saw an inn on the right side of the road, and then… It was the barest outline, with much glossed over or left out, but it was the truth, and as he told it he was seized with anguish, desire, despair… He went stammering on and Magistrate Wu-tsung listened without interrupting him.

It was hard to tell from his expression what he was thinking. He seemed to be a grave man, of the age of T’ien Chu’s father, and he looked as though he found it natural to be severe. But still he listened. And when T’ien Chu ground to an end with: “So you see, Sir, I did not go to sleep where I was found. I did not intend any scandal or disturbance. I don’t know what happened. It’s a mystery. I need your help, Sir, to discover the truth. If you will come with me to the Inn, or send some servant you trust…” Magistrate Wu-tsung did not immediately answer. He leaned back and closed his eyes. When he opened them, after a moment of unbearable suspense for T’ien Chu, he did not look at him directly. He looked around the room.

“Let us proceed in an orderly fashion,” he said thoughtfully, beckoning to his clerk. “You will go to the Governor and inquire with my heartfelt compliments whether a tutor for his princely sons is expected from Canton, and if the answer is yes, what the name of such a tutor should be.”

“You may depart,” he added to the soldiers, staring uneasily. “You have done your duty. The delinquent will remain in my custody until we have finished with his case.”

They bowed and hurried away, glad to escape before the answer came and while they still had the gold.

He smiled at T’ien Chu, gray-faced and exhausted on his bench.

“While we wait for the Governor’s word,” he told him kindly, “we will share tea and rice. You must be hungry, after such a day and such a night as you describe…whether or not they occurred.”