Читать книгу In a Yün-nan Courtyard - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 10

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So Wing stayed at the homestead of Q’ūo Chung three days after that, completing the bargaining his master, Ko Ching-lin, had sent him to do. And then So Wing, with a heavied heart, unmoored his light junk, took a last look at the white-towered home on the cliff, and began his perilous journey back to Sze-ch’uen. And Q’ūo Ssu squared her young shoulders as best she could to woman’s immemorial burden: being left behind. He left her behind him to take up her old life that the press of his arms and the coax of his voice had turned into a dull nothingness. A changed girl in an unchanged life cannot often be a contented girl. Q’ūo Ssu was not. He had left her nothing but a rose-red memory of throbbing, stolen happiness; nothing but that and a promise. He had promised to come back; rich, ennobled, a suitor no father in Yün-nan could reject. She believed him. Her heart believed him, but her shrewd little Chinese head knew that he had set himself a stupendous task. Q’ūo Ssu was wildly in love—a throbbing happiness in itself, whether the love run smooth or no—but she was miserable at So Wing’s going, wretched in his absence, and tortured lest he might fail—lest he might not be able to come back. He would come, if the gods let him. Of her lover’s loyalty she had no doubt. Women as young as Q’ūo Ssu do not. Life has to teach them that lesson, and the learning is long. Often hearts as loyal as Q’ūo Ssu’s never learn it at all—perhaps because they will not. So Wing would keep faith, as she herself would. And if, because it was not within any possibility, he never returned to her, she would die—there was always the Great River—and wait for his soul to mate with hers down in the Yellow Springs.

Their stolen hour at the river after they had crossed it was not the last tryst they had kept before he went away. Each of the last three days had served them for meeting and courtship. Q’ūo Ssu had made the times, found the safe-sheltered place, and contrived the means. So Wing had provided the love-making, and Q’ūo Ssu had not repulsed it.

So Wing’s heart was heavy, but presently he sang as he poled and tacked and outwitted the angry Yang-tsze, for he was taking fair news of good profit back to Ko Ching-lin, and his soul was big and proud with dreams of love, of ambition, and of self-aggrandisement. He would accomplish mightily. The very gods should help him. All the gods of China should help him. He let out the old boat’s square sail to a favourable billow of wind, and considered whether he’d be a Governor or only a very great and always successful General; rule a province in luxurious ease or conquer Japan, and drive all the paler barbarians out for ever from the sacred, scented land of Han.

Q’ūo Ssu’s heart was torn, and she wept as she sat idle at her spinning-wheel, wept as she sat alone by the Great River, in the willow spinney or under the great banyan—where she and So Wing had sat close to each other so little ago.

When eyes were on her the girl dissembled well. But Chinese eyes have sharp sight. Busied as they all were at the towered chia of Q’ūo Chung, one by one they noticed that Q’ūo Ssu lacked something, or suffered something. She denied it, laughingly at first, hotly and angrily when they persisted and pressed her hard with prying questions. Then, at Q’ūo Chung’s sharp command they left the girl alone, and set their wits to work how best to help her, counselled together how best to help and medicine Q’ūo Ssu.

Her mother suggested Nung Fing the wizard. He was sent for. Q’ūo Ssu would have none of him. Nung Fing had to work his necromancy without the patient’s presence. That was the heaviest handicap a wizard could have. It almost disqualified him, and it offended him greatly. But he longed to pouch the generous fee Q’ūo Chung had promised; so, Nung Fing the wizard did his best.

For its more privacy, and because—whatever other skill he lacked—Nung Fing was an able stage-manager, the medicine-man wrought his necromancy “in the dead vast and middle of the night,” on a gloomy clearing at the base of a cypress-shaded hillside. And because of scoffing Q’ūo Ssu the rite was performed well distant from the house.

The wind was up, not boisterously, but soughing, sobbing weirdly through the trees. Nature was playing up to Nung loyally to-night.

Up above the cypress belt, the cliff’s bare rockside was honeycombed with open-faced caves and crevices. They were absolutely inaccessible. No man could scale up to them, not even the surest footed of the marvellously sure and dexterous Yün-nan ponies. Yet each cave held at least one coffin. Most of them held more. The starlight showed them clearly now and then when the heavy clouds drifted away. The people called them “fairy coffins”—perhaps believed them so. Superstition and ignorance are more rife in Yün-nan than in any other part of China. The coffins were real enough. Who placed them there?—none can even surmise. They have been there longer than Yün-nan’s recorded history. Some forgotten race, greatly strong, superlatively athletic, must have hauled them up or slung them down, and placed them there—unless the formation of the cliff and of its surroundings had changed incredibly in time’s upheavals and downslides.

A black and sullen river tore literally through the hill’s solid rock above the coffin-caverns, and disappeared again tempestuously into the rock beneath them; all its angry outer course dripped gigantic stalactites, as if bygone giants of fabulous size had left their frozen tears to mourn the man-forgotten dead.

Storm-fleeing night-birds flapped and cried.

Nung Fing had indeed chosen his theatre well.

But for two immovable acolytes, who held great flaming torches above him, the wizard stood alone in the centre of the wide human ring formed by his own chorus and by Q’ūo’s kinsmen and retainers.

There was not a woman here. Magic cannot be performed in the presence of the “mean-ones.”

A fire of charcoal and resined wood burned before the wizard; a great caldron of oil was hissing on it. A flat basket heaped with eggs stood at his feet. A goat was tethered near him, between two stout bolted boxes.

The “doctor” was magnificently apparelled. His purple velvet coat was heavily embossed with pink and scarlet tulips. His green satin petticoat was sprinkled thickly with black luck-bats. His naked arms were festooned with long variegated, glittering chains of glass beads. Below his skirt his legs were bare; but what they lacked in stockings his feet made up in shoes. The shoes were of soft blue leather, a cat’s head grinned up from one of them, an owl’s head from the other. The owl’s head was cleverly made from glass-eyed, painted clay. The cat’s head had lived once. A small brocade-lined tiger’s skin hung from his shoulders. It was badly worn and moth-riddled, but of immense antiquity and value. His face was painted a ghastly white, his lips were thickly smeared with phosphorescent green paint. Most of all—and most terrible—was his head-dress: a Jack o’ lantern of human bones and skin, a red candle burning in it, bats’ wings for its ears; worms, beautifully made of tissue paper twisted over spirals of hair-thin wire, sprawled, and seemed to crawl, from gape-open toothless mouth and eyeless sockets. It wore a diminutive, high-perched mandarin’s hat; fashioned so small that it might not hide the hideousness it crowned.

Q’ūo Chung sat alone on the bare ground just inside the human circle. He wore no trappings; only the wizard did.

The rites began with repeated volleys of fire-crackers—to frighten away every hovering demon, every spirit of ill-intent.

Music followed to invite and to pleasure the kindly spirit ones of good intent. The music was mixed, and it was badly amateur. Jews’ harps predominated feebly, for all that they were very large ones. Drums and gongs made up in sound what they lacked in number and in finesse. Three fiddles made no pretence of being tuned together. The flute took its own key. But one musical quality they all achieved faultlessly: they kept perfect time. Accurate time is the hall-mark of all Chinese music; few Western musicians who might not envy it.

When the instruments ceased—it was not soon—Q’ūo Chung laid him face down in supplication, and his sons, the next in kinship to Q’ūo Ssu, led in wailing. Except Q’ūo Chung prone on the ground, and Nung Fing and his two attendant satellites, still unmoved, they all wailed—up and down, up and down, more and more crescendo, more and more doleful. Long minutes in the insatiable maw of time, were lost for ever in the maze of eternity, before the wailing ceased. It did not slacken or dwindle. It ceased abruptly, completely and in absolute unison; as if one great voice of prayer and sorrow suddenly had been knife-cut.

The doctor’s painted face quivered convulsively. Q’ūo Chung sat up, and watched Nung Fing intently. All the others craned their necks to watch the nearer.

The wizard drew a knife from his bosom, chanting a guttural charm, slashed his left forearm furiously. They all saw the blade buried in his flesh. They heard his skin rip.

“Approach me, Q’ūo Chung,” the charlatan—if he were one—commanded. “The miracle works!”

Q’ūo Ssu’s father rose and obeyed.

“Draw from me the sacred knife,” Nung Fing ordered, holding out the arm it pierced.

Q’ūo Chung obeyed.

The knife’s blade was clean. Nung Fing’s arm was whole.

A great guttural sigh quivered the watching circle. Tears started in Q’ūo Chung’s eyes.

A tremendous scream of fire-crackers hissed and spat.

The wonder-worker held out his left hand, and took the knife from Q’ūo Chung. Q’ūo Chung saw the muscles ripple powerfully in the arm that should have been hanging limp and bleeding.

Nung Fing strode to the now moaning goat. The two attendants kept obsequious pace with him, and kept the flare of their torches on his immobile painted face.

With one clutch of his right hand’s sinewy fingers Nung Fing caught the terrified goat by its long knotted mane, with one twist of his right arm lifted it high as his own grotesque, preposterous head-dress, flung it down again on its back, and with one move of the knife in his left hand ripped the poor creature from jaw to tail. One more cut of the knife, a cross-cut, and he lifted out on its point the animal’s still-throbbing heart, held it up for all to see. The knife ran blood now, Nung Fing’s hand and forearm dripped vermilion, blood pooled at the wizard’s feet. The stuffed cat’s head on his left shoe was spattered.

Nung Fing carried the dripping heart to the bubbling caldron, and tossed the raw heart in. Q’ūo Chung lugged the slaughtered goat at Nung Fing’s heels, and heaved the carcass into the oil-filled caldron—matted hair, hoofs, and all.

Music followed fire-crackers; fire-crackers followed music.

The rest was less. But it was equally important and sacerdotal. The human ring watched it as breathlessly, drawing a little closer to the caldron as they did.

The wizard cut open one of the boxes. A long snake writhed out, and raised an angry, hooded, hissing head. It hissed but once before the medicine man’s knife had found its neck, and instantly sliced off the pointed, spotted head. Severed head and headless dead snake went into the loathsome cooking-pot.

When the second box was cut open, carelessly and contemptuously, two draggled white cocks—common barnyard ones, and old—limped out dejectedly. Their despatch was quick and easy. In they went, feathers and all.

The eggs Nung Fing dropped in one by one, and reverently chanting an incantation as he did.

Again the scream of fire-crackers split the night air.

The broth was complete; its last ingredient was boiling furiously.

Then the climax!

Nung Fing thrust his left hand slowly into the boiling oil, drew out an egg, held it high for all to see, and let it slip back into the oil again, releasing it gently and slowly from his uninjured fingers.

And, because the boiling oil had been powerless to burn Nung Fing the wizard, Q’ūo Ssu was cured.

The gods had heard and had granted.

A flagon was filled with the broth—for Q’ūo Ssu to drink. An egg, too, was taken out and reserved for her. All the rest the watchers shared when the broth had a very little cooled.

It had been a great miracle, greatly performed. And great as was Q’ūo Chung the wax-insect breeder’s joy, the extortionate price he paid Nung Fing wrung with torture the withers of Q’ūo Chung the insect breeder.

The next day Q’ūo Ssu drank the broth and ate the hard boiled egg contentedly, and enjoyed them. Would she have tasted or enjoyed if she had known all the broth’s ingredients? Only the gods of China know!

But she never knew. And there was only one hitch—slight, but a hitch: the spell did not work; the great miracle was barren. Q’ūo Ssu’s lassitude and restless discontent did not lessen. They increased.

Great and bitter was the wrath of Q’ūo Chung the insect breeder. Nung Fing went in fear of slaughter; and presently Nung Fing betook him and his high gift to Hu-peh. And Nung Fing went swiftly and secretly.