The Concubine's Secret (17 page)

Mama was crying, dabbing at her tears, but Lydia refused to. In Papa’s pocket the cogs were still turning. The cogs of time, little teeth clinging to each other and moving the hands of the watch. The cogs would bring him back to her. She clenched her tiny fists and listened to their voices ticking inside her head.

The Work Zone was still there.

It hadn’t moved.

That had been her fear. That they’d have gone. Packed up their saws and their axes and their timber wagons, and transferred to another part of the forest far away from the railway line. She shivered but it wasn’t from the cold in the rail carriage, it was with relief. She felt the golden hairs rise on her arms and she leaned her forehead against the icy pane of glass as if it brought her closer to him. Outside the landscape was flat as the glass and frosted with patches of snow. Large swathes had been completely stripped of trees, so that rocky stretches were now visible, shifting the colour of the terrain from a thousand shades of green and russet brown to an unrelenting battleship grey.

Had that happened to Papa too? That shift to Soviet grey? She rested the fingertips of one hand on the window, averting her eyes from the monochrome uniforms that surrounded her.

Papa, I’m here. The cogs have brought me to you. The wheels are turning.

Lydia rose to her feet and yanked on the leather strap so hard the train window slid all the way down with a clunk. The rush of freezing air wrenched her breath away and an outburst of moans and complaints scrambled around her.

‘Shut that window!’

‘It’s fucking freezing.’

‘Are you out of your mind, girl? My bollocks are falling off!’

She scarcely heard the outcry. Every scrap of her attention was focused on the terrain as the tips of the watchtowers slid into view far in the distance, tiny grey matchsticks against a crisp blue sky. At first she could make out no figures labouring on the edge of the forest. Her heart slumped in her chest, but as the train billowed its way along the track it swept past a huge stack of pine trunks which lay on the ground like dead people’s limbs. Lydia had assumed the timber was floated downriver somewhere, the way she’d seen it done in China, but no. Not here anyway. This small mountain of tree trunks was clearly intended to be loaded on to flatbed wagons and hauled into the timber yards by rail.

Lumbering along the flat terrain at a painfully slow pace, still distant but heading in the direction of the dead limbs, a wagon was approaching loaded with another consignment. Lydia struggled to count the number of miniature figures yoked to the transporter, but it was too far away. She blinked and counted again. There had to be at least twenty. Her eyes fixed on them and wouldn’t let go.

‘Comrade.’ It was the man in the suit, her watch-companion. This time his voice was curt. ‘Close that window, pozhalusta.’

Still she didn’t hear. He touched her elbow to gain her attention and made as if to rise to perform the job himself, but before he could do so Lydia pulled from her shoulder pack two small scarlet bundles. Each one consisted of a headscarf tied in a knot and inside lay something of weight.

‘Look here…’ The suit was losing patience.

She’d seen a working party of prisoners up ahead, just four of them, no more than a few hundred metres away from the track. They were digging with spades, shifting rocks it seemed, maybe clearing a path for the wagon. Lydia snatched off the red scarf that was around her neck, leaned out of the window as far as she could and waved the vivid smear of material at them. Back and forth, back and forth, to gain their attention.

Pozhalusta, she breathed, please look up.

Smuts from the engine smacked into her face. The figures were coming closer. Not one of them looked up from his shovel. Don’t they want to see human faces at the train windows? Is the sight of freedom too painful to contemplate? One hundred metres. It was as close as she was going to get. She drew back her arm and hurled one of the scarlet bundles out of the window. As it arced through the trembling air like a bright red bird, she watched the men closely and emptied her lungs in one long banshee shriek. Not one of them looked her way.

Don’t they hear? Or don’t they care?

The red bird landed on the edge of a rock, rebounded and fluttered to rest on an open stretch of ground, where it fell against the stump of a tree and nestled among the dead roots. No, no, no. Lydia’s mouth gasped open and her tongue was stung by ash from the engine.

‘Stop that, comrade.’ This time it was the man who’d been asleep under the cap. He was awake now all right, alert and angry. ‘What you’re doing is against the law. Stop that right now or-’

‘Or what?’ A young loose-limbed soldier, who up till now had been sitting quietly next to Lydia and whom she had given barely a glance, unfolded himself from his seat and stood behind her. ‘Or what?’ he repeated.

A chuckle rippled around the other soldiers and one warned, ‘Don’t cross him, comrade. He’s our boxing champ.’

Lydia raised the second bundle ready to throw.

‘Allow me?’

The soldier was holding out his big-knuckled hand, palm up, and waited with a polite smile on his face. Lydia noticed his nose had been recently broken and the bruise had spread to a muddy yellow. She hesitated for no more than one turn of the wheels, then entrusted the little parcel to him and edged back into her seat to allow him room. He grinned at her, tossed his army cap on to his seat, pushed his broad shoulders through the window as far as they would go and took careful aim. He launched the red bundle with a grunt of effort.

It sailed through the air as if it didn’t know how to stop. Lydia’s eyes didn’t leave it, her hopes all tied up inside the knotted scarf. It flew up and over the rocks until it finally hung in the air and curved gracefully down to earth. It didn’t even bounce, just landed flat right in the middle of an expanse of gleaming white snow. Lydia could have kissed the soldier.

‘
Spasibo
,’ she offered instead. ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’

She gave him a grateful smile. He blushed and sat down. Cheers rose from a few of his comrades and one crowed like a cockerel. The man in the flat cap scowled but had enough sense to say no more, while the suit stood up and yanked the window shut, ignoring the boisterous laughter with a degree of dignity.

It was done.

Lydia’s heart was beating fast. As the wheels turned and the prisoners were left far behind in the freezing wind, she let her thoughts race over the words crouched inside the scarlet bundles: I am the daughter of Jens Friis. If he is here, tell him I’ve come. I need a sign.

Inside each one lay five shiny silver coins.

Chang An Lo moved through the darkness like the breath of a shadow. Unseen, unheard. The air was moist in his lungs, while the call of frogs vibrated the night the way a concubine’s fingers vibrate the strings of a
guqin.

The village of Zhumatong was alive with light and noise, spilling from the windows, out through the doors and into the streets. The Red Army had descended like flies. Soldiers lurched from one house to another, trying to remember where their billets were, a bottle in one hand, a girl on the other. The village councillors bowed politely, hands stiff together in front of them, but steered the crumpled uniforms into the drinking house and the gambling room, where they could be fleeced of the few yuan in their pockets.

Chang remained patiently under the black overhang of a rear wall and listened to the soldiers leaving a building decorated with delicate fretwork, lanterns swaying from the eaves. Their voices were thick with
maotai
and complained loudly at the speed with which they were back on the street without the mahjong tiles falling even once their way. One soldier with hair cropped brutally short and long spindly legs detached himself from a group and picked his way into a side street, where he opened his trousers and urinated against a wall with a contented sigh.

Chang allowed him to finish before he approached silently from behind and slipped an arm round his throat, a hand placed firmly over his mouth. The soldier grew rigid and tried to turn.

‘Quiet, Hu Biao, or you are in danger of snapping your worthless neck.’ Chang spoke the words softly in the young man’s ear, letting them sneak out under the night’s breeze. He released his grip.

The soldier spun round. ‘Chang An Lo, you scared the shit out of me.’

Chang tipped his head in a light-hearted bow. ‘Stop bellowing like a stuck pig, Biao. That’s why I put a hand over that ever-open mouth of yours, to silence it.’

Hu Biao thumped the side of his own head with his knuckles. ‘My apologies, brother of my heart.’ He leaned close, fumes of something more than just alcohol rising from his angular frame, and lowered his voice to a murmur. ‘What in the name of the gods are you doing here in this piss-hole village?’

‘Searching for you.’

‘Why me?’

‘I was told your unit was billeted here. I heard that the fighting was fierce in the valley, so I came to see if your miserable ears were still attached to your hide.’

Their enemies counted the dead by slicing off ears and threading them on to a wire.

‘They’re both still mine,’ Biao laughed and swung his head to display them, leaning back against the wall.

But Chang could hear the tension in it, the nerves that had to be deadened with a night of
maotai
and a whiff of the black paste before the next march into battle.

‘So you’ve done well, my friend.’

‘What are you doing all the way down here, Chang? I thought you were somewhere up north.’

‘I was, but I’ve been summoned to Guitan.’ Even in the shadows his sharp eyes took in the hollow cheeks and scarecrow limbs of Hu Biao, and he feared for Yi-ling’s son. ‘My escort troop sleeps even now the sleep of drunken monkeys, ten
li
away from here. Tomorrow I will arrive at Guitan to do Mao’s bidding.’

Biao pushed himself off the wall, suddenly sober, and gave a deep respectful bow. ‘I am honoured that one so distinguished chooses to spend time with an unworthy army dog like myself.’

Voices in the main street shouted out Biao’s name, searching for him. Chang took hold of his shoulder and led him further into the shadows, drawing away from the dancing lanterns.

‘Biao,’ he said urgently, ‘my time is short. I have to return to my escort before they wake.’

Biao nodded. ‘I’m listening.’

‘I’ve come to ask you to be my aide.’ His eyes scanned his friend for a reaction and he was satisfied by what he saw. A quick flicker of excitement. ‘Good. I shall order the escort to request your presence in the morning.’

Their eyes met and something in Biao’s changed. His exhausted gaze didn’t move from Chang’s face. ‘This is for Si-qi, isn’t it? Not for me. Did she ask you to do this?’

‘No. This has nothing to do with your sister.’ He smiled and treated Biao to another light-hearted bow. ‘Believe me, times are hard. I need a good man I can rely on at my back. You are that man.’

‘But it’s fortunate for me that I have a beautiful sister. She could steal any man’s soul, couldn’t she?’

‘As easily as a butterfly steals nectar from a blossom.’

Biao clapped Chang on the back and released a pungent belch. ‘She’ll love you for ever after this. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

Chang An Lo stepped back into deeper shadow and when Biao spoke again, he was gone.

Chang An Lo had not anticipated this. This decadence. Despite all the whispers that flitted through the sultry air, more numerous than bats’ wings on a summer’s evening, this was worse than he expected. His spirits sank as he contemplated the knowledge that the leader of China’s Communist movement was a man of such total self-indulgence.

Mao Tse Tung sprawled in a giant four-poster bed. His large round head, a receding hairline exaggerating its height, rested back on a tumble of pillows as if the thoughts inside were too weighty for his short, stubby neck. Elaborate silk canopies hung from above in vivid turquoise and magenta folds, while scarlet sheets flowed around him in the colour of the Communist flag, chosen to give the impression that this great leader had spilled his blood for the cause. But Chang knew differently. When Mao travelled with his armies he enjoyed a level of comfort and safety his soldiers could only dream about.

Mao lay on the sheets and conducted this meeting with his observant eyes narrowed, watching the individuals he had summoned to attend him in his bedroom. The immense bed was raised up on a double step so that his head remained higher than those of the nervous men in the seven chairs that encircled him. The chairs were elegant but deliberately hard, and were placed at least six feet from the silk coverlets so that the occupants had to strain to hear when Mao chose to lower his voice.

The atmosphere was tense. Chang was aware that the official next to him had a trickle of sweat running down his temple and he had no doubt that Mao’s quick eyes had spotted it too. Mao had seized leadership of the army from men like General Zhu, a sullen figure who sat silent in the room, by being both intelligent and bold. Men followed him because, despite being just a schoolteacher and adopting a peasant’s plain dress, he was astute at manipulating people and situations. And, above all, he knew how to win. Chang had to remind himself not to be fooled by the soft moon face and the rough rural dialect. This man was nobody’s fool. He had no problem with inflicting terror on his own people. ‘Power,’ he had stated, ‘comes out of the barrel of a gun.’ Chang even breathed carefully so as not to create a ripple in the flow of the great man’s thoughts.

‘Chou En-lai informs me,’ Mao said with a guttural emphasis on the word
me
, ‘that our bearded neighbours, the Russians, are playing both hands still, one against the other. That is foolish of them.’

‘Yes, as our young comrade across the room discovered,’ said a sharp-faced Party official whom Chang did not recognise. But with Mao, people fell in and out of favour with a speed that set a man’s head spinning.