“—and I left my house. I made my way through the crowds without difficulty, carrying a small anonymous lantern I had bought—one without my name and place of residence painted on it. The watchmen were hammering upon their bamboo drums, the servants of the great households beating gongs, and from the roof of the palace, fireworks were being set off in great profusion.”
The small round face was marked by nostalgia, as he remembered.
“It was in a way a most appropriate farewell for a poet,” he said. “Fleeing nameless, to the sound of great applause. As I passed the soldiers’ garrison at the city gate, I looked back, to see the many roofs of the Palace outlined by bursting flowers of red and gold. It looked like a magic garden—and a forbidden one, for me.”
Yi Tien Cho had made his way without incident through the night, but had nearly been caught the next day.
“I had forgotten my fingernails,” he said. He spread out a hand, small and short-fingered, the nails bitten to the quicks. “For a Mandarin has long nails, as symbol that he is not obliged to work with his hands, and my own were the length of one of my finger joints.”
A servant at the house where he had stopped for refreshment next day saw them, and ran to tell the guard. Yi Tien Cho ran, too, and succeeded at last in eluding his pursuers by sliding into a wet ditch and lying hidden in the bushes.
“While lying there, I destroyed my nails, of course,” he said. He waggled the little finger of his right hand. “I was obliged to tear that nail out, for it had a golden da zi inlaid in it, which I could not dislodge.”
He had stolen a peasant’s clothes from a bush where they had been hung to dry, leaving the torn-out nail with its golden character in exchange, and made his way slowly across country toward the coast. At first he paid for his food with the small store of money he had brought away, but outside Lulong he met with a band of robbers, who took his money but left him his life.
“And after that,” he said simply, “I stole food when I could, and starved when I could not. And at last the wind of fortune changed a little, and I met with a group of traveling apothecaries, on their way to the physicians’ fair near the coast. In return for my skill at drawing banners for their booth and composing labels extolling the virtues of their medicines, they carried me along with them.”
Once reaching the coast, he had made his way to the waterfront, and tried there to pass himself off as a seaman, but failed utterly, as his fingers, so skillful with brush and ink, knew nothing of the art of knots and lines. There were several foreign ships in port; he had chosen the one whose sailors looked the most barbarous as being likely to carry him farthest away, and seizing his chance, had slipped past the deck guard and into the hold of the Serafina, bound for Edinburgh.
“You had always meant to leave the country altogether?” Fergus asked, interested. “It seems a desperate choice.”
“Emperor’s reach very long,” Mr. Willoughby said softly in English, not waiting for translation. “I am exile, or I am dead.”
His listeners gave a collective sigh at the awesome contemplation of such bloodthirsty power, and there was a moment of silence, with only the whine of the rigging overhead, while Mr. Willoughby picked up his neglected cup and drained the last drops of his grog.
He set it down, licking his lips, and laid his hand once more on Jamie’s arm.
“It is strange,” Mr. Willoughby said, and the air of reflection in his voice was echoed exactly by Jamie’s, “but it was my joy of women that Second Wife saw and loved in my words. Yet by desiring to possess me—and my poems—she would have forever destroyed what she admired.”
Mr. Willoughby uttered a small chuckle, whose irony was unmistakable.
“Nor is that the end of the contradiction my life has become. Because I could not bring myself to surrender my manhood, I have lost all else—honor, livelihood, country. By that, I mean not only the land itself, with the slopes of noble fir trees where I spent my summers in Tartary, and the great plains of the south, the flowing of rivers filled with fish, but also the loss of myself. My parents are dishonored, the tombs of my ancestors fall into ruin, and no joss burns before their images.
“All order, all beauty is lost. I am come to a place where the golden words of my poems are taken for the clucking of hens, and my brushstrokes for their scratchings. I am taken as less than the meanest beggar, who swallows serpents for the entertainment of the crowds, allowing passersby to draw the serpent from my mouth by its tail for the tiny payment that will let me live another day.”
Mr. Willoughby glared round at his hearers, making his parallel evident.
“I am come to a country of women coarse and rank as bears.” The Chinaman’s voice rose passionately, though Jamie kept to an even tone, reciting the words, but stripping them of feeling. “They are creatures of no grace, no learning, ignorant, bad-smelling, their bodies gross with sprouting hair, like dogs! And these—these! disdain me as a yellow worm, so that even the lowest whores will not lie with me.
“For the love of Woman, I am come to a place where no woman is worthy of love!” At this point, seeing the dark looks on the seamen’s faces, Jamie ceased translating, and instead tried to calm the Chinaman, laying a big hand on the blue-silk shoulder.
“Aye, man, I quite see. And I’m sure there’s no a man present would have done otherwise, given the choice. Is that not so, lads?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder with eyebrows raised significantly.
His moral force was sufficient to extort a grudging murmur of agreement, but the crowd’s sympathy with the tale of Mr. Willoughby’s travails had been quite dissipated by his insulting conclusion. Pointed remarks were made about licentious, ungrateful heathen, and a great many extravagantly admiring compliments paid to Marsali and me, as the men dispersed aft.
Fergus and Marsali left then, too, Fergus pausing en route to inform Mr. Willoughby that any further remarks about European women would cause him, Fergus, to be obliged to wrap his, Willoughby’s, queue about his neck and strangle him with it.
Mr. Willoughby ignored remarks and threats alike, merely staring straight ahead, his black eyes shining with memory and grog. Jamie at last stood up, too, and held out a hand to help me down from my cask.
It was as we were turning to leave that the Chinaman reached down between his legs. Completely without lewdness, he cupped his testicles, so that the rounded mass pressed against the silk. He rolled them slowly in the palm of his hand, staring at the bulge in deep meditation.
“Sometime,” he said, as though to himself, “I think not worth it.”
46
WE MEET A PORPOISE
I had been conscious for some time that Marsali was trying to get up the nerve to speak to me. I had thought she would, sooner or later; whatever her feelings toward me, I was the only other woman aboard. I did my best to help, smiling kindly and saying “Good morning,” but the first move would have to be hers.
She made it, finally, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, a month after we had left Scotland.
I was writing in our shared cabin, making surgical notes on a minor amputation—two smashed toes on one of the foredeck hands. I had just completed a drawing of the surgical site, when a shadow darkened the doorway of the cabin, and I looked up to see Marsali standing there, chin thrust out pugnaciously.