The Blue-Eyed Shan (38 page)

Naung led them back to the Russian. They took his head cleanly. He led them then to Green Wood. They took his head cleanly. They rode to the nearest cages, undid the hempen knots, released the balance beams and set each head in a separate cage, tossing the old heads into the brush at the side of the road.

Next day, when they came to loot the Chinese camp, the heads had vanished.

12

Ranga

And then the headman of Ranga turns to another precious relic. This too is the head of a wise man, who came from a far place. Its hair and eyes are also light. Old Thuan-yi the warrior took his head also, in fierce combat as he tells the tale; each head with one stroke.

And when the headman turns to the bones. For the bones a platform has been built of oak; and a stout tanned hide shelters the bones from wind and rain. The bones are of several small people, perhaps children, perhaps the smaller forefathers that figure in ceremonial tales of the ancient hot green land to the south. Thirty years ago, when these bones were taken, the headman declared that they were old indeed, older than any bones yet seen by him, older than any head yet taken by the Wild Wa; perhaps even older than the headman's grandfather's grandfather. In those days men and gods roamed the earth together, and copulated freely; these bones are surely the relics of living gods.

Thuan-yi's woman will not walk the avenue between the double line of trees. She will pause before the platform of bones at the northern end, and often she prays there, or meditates. She will not look upon the two heads or even pass near them. She is a somber woman of some forty monsoons, taken in the War of the Bones, a stranger to the Wild Wa and of unknown family, too golden for a Shan. She was owned by each man of Ranga in turn, and Thuan-yi then took her to wife. She has borne him five sons and three daughters, and among them there is an occasional lock of wavy hair the color of tobacco. Because of her mysterious birth, her tawny complexion and her habitual silence, Ranga deems her holy, and no man spoke against it when she called her first son Green Wood.

About the Author

Stephen Becker (1927–1999) was an American author, translator, and teacher whose published works include eleven novels and the English translations of Elie Wiesel's
The Town Behind the Wall
and André Malraux's
The Conquerors
. He was born in Mount Vernon, New York, and after serving in World War II, he graduated from Harvard University and studied in Peking and Paris, where he was friends with the novelist Richard Wright and learned French in part by reading detective novels. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Becker taught at numerous schools throughout the United States, including the University of Iowa, Bennington College, and the University of Central Florida in Orlando. His best-known works include
A Covenant with Death
(1965), which was adapted into a Warner Brothers film starring Gene Hackman and George Maharis;
When the War Is Over
(1969), a Civil War novel based on the true story of a teenage Confederate soldier executed more than a month after Lee's surrender; and the Far East trilogy of literary adventure novels:
The Chinese Bandit
(1975),
The Last Mandarin
(1979), and
The Blue-Eyed Shan
(1982).

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1982 by Stephen Becker

Cover design by Kat JK Lee

ISBN: 978-1-5040-2696-3

This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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