The Incarnations (17 page)

The hooves wake me at dawn. The stampeding hooves of tens of thousands of Mongols galloping into Zhongdu on horseback. I shake you awake: ‘Tiger! Tiger! Listen!’ You sit up and listen to the kettledrums out in the streets. The yodellings of war cries and the bloodcurdling screams of Jurchens dragged from their homes.

‘Hide, we must hide!’

Shaking, we hurry up on to the roof. I am shuddering hard, pale with fright. ‘O Lord Buddha, have mercy on our souls,’ I plead, over and over, though the mantra brings no peace of mind. You are silent, keeping your wits about you as you watch the Mongols rampaging through Zhongdu. Narrowing your eyes and thinking of how to save our skins.

The Mongols are orderly and systematic. They plunder our city, ward by ward, street by street, house by house. From the roof, we watch them haul a wealthy merchant’s family out of hiding in the next alley, thrusting spears to their throats and commanding them to bring out their valuables. The family obey. They scurry back and forth, fetching porcelain vases, wooden puppets, silk gowns, paintings, ostrich-feather fans and other family heirlooms. They plead for mercy as they lay the offerings at the Mongols’ feet. But our conquerors have no mercy. They rape the screaming wife and daughters, penetrating and ejaculating in a few thrusts. Then they execute. For many moons the Jurchens have been wasting away slowly from starvation. But now death strikes the city like lightning as throats are slashed and hearts impaled by arrows at close range. The Mongols then set the houses of the slaughtered Jurchens ablaze; smoke darkening the sky as Zhongdu goes up in flames.

The devil’s horsemen gallop into our alley and we flatten ourselves against the roof as screams rise up from below. You curse as an axe smashes through the bolted door of Glassblower Hua’s workshop, and I shake and beg the Lord Buddha for mercy. I shut my eyes, awaiting death by suffocating smoke (should fate be lenient), or by burning (should fate be cruel). You shake my shoulder.

‘Look, Turnip, look. They are letting the craftsmen live!’

In the alley the Mongols are rounding up the craftsmen of Zhongdu: stonemasons and carpenters and glassblowers and metalworkers, a group of miserable old men with black and swollen eyes being trussed up with ropes.

‘We must surrender,’ you say. ‘Stay up here and we will burn.’

‘Tiger, no! They will kill us!’

‘Stay then. Burn in the flames.’

Though I am terrified, I go where you go. So, on shaking legs, I follow you down. In the alley you crash to your knees before a Mongol with flaring nostrils and yellow skin.

‘I am Glassblower Hua and this is Carpenter Lu! We offer our skills as craftsmen to our conquerors and rulers, the Mongols!’

A traitorous Jurchen in Mongol robes translates our surrender into Mongolian, as you kowtow, knocking your forehead to the ground. The Mongols seize us. They smite us with their fists, but they do not kill us. They bind our wrists with rope and march us and the other craftsmen down the central avenue of Zhongdu. Massacred victims of the fall are everywhere. Corpses young and old, flung in the dust. And stunned and bereaved and frightened as we are, we know that we are better off than them.

The wagers of war ride on horseback and the slave-drivers lash their whips, driving us Jurchens forth like herds of cattle, away from Zhongdu. Oxen drag the yurts where the high-ranking Mongols reside on wheeled platforms. Sixteen war-horses pull Genghis Khan in his magnificent palace yurt, surrounded by a battalion of ten thousand warriors, defending the ‘Lord of Mankind’.

The Mongols want to civilize their barbarous lands and have herded up Jurchens with knowledge and skills: bone-setters and physicians; artisans and engineers. They have gathered labourers too: young boys to tend to the animals and put up the Mongols’ yurts; young girls to milk the cows, gather dung for fires, cook meals and serve the Mongols’ voracious physical needs. After months of starvation, many Jurchens fall in the dust, too weak to march. The Mongols whip them and, when they don’t stand and walk, slash their throats. Throughout the day we stagger on and the Mongol juggernaut sheds corpses like a balding man sheds hairs.

At night we slaves sleep on the bare earth under the sky. When light rains fall we shiver and curve our spines against the drizzle, hugging ourselves in the cold. When there are thunderstorms and heavy rain beats the earth beneath us to mud, we abandon hope of sleep. Lightning illuminates our writhing sea of slaves, mud-drenched and with chattering teeth.

At daybreak the Mongols lash their whips and we drag our weary bones from the earth. Slave girls ladle rice gruel into our bare hands, and a leather flask of water is passed amongst the herd. The Mongols lash their whips once more and our dark swarm of humanity moves on, the sun beating down and dragging our shadows out from under our feet.

The Mongol caravan journeys north by hoof and wheel and blistered foot, kicking up a storm of dust. I walk by your side, stride for limping stride. The nearness of you, the rhythm of your breath, and your stoic, determined face is a comfort to me.

‘I can’t go on, Tiger . . .’ I say, as my skull throbs and the weals from Ogre’s thrashing whip ache on my back. ‘I am at the end of my strength . . .’

‘No,’ you say, ‘there’s strength in you yet. Keep going and there will come a time when we are free. Surrender now and you will die a slave.’

I would have fallen down long ago and let the ground drink the blood of my slit throat, were it not for you. So long as you are by my side, I can endure. You ease the stoned-to-death feeling in my soul.

Though the Jin Dynasty has fallen and they stagger in rags, the craftsmen of Zhongdu brag of their former renown.

‘My swords were so sharp they sliced human bone as though it were tofu,’ boasts Swordmaker Fu. ‘Warlords came from thousands of li away for my weapons.’

‘My Lady Mu dolls fetched a hundred silvers each,’ says Doll-maker Wan, whose dolls once lived in the bedchambers of the princesses. ‘Lady Mu Flies a Kite. Lady Mu Plays with a Little Dog. I have crafted thousands over the years . . .’

The craftsmen are distinguished indeed. Gem-cutter Hu’s necklaces were worn on the lily-white necks of the Emperor’s concubines. Stone-carver Peng’s fearsome tomb gargoyles protect the dead in the imperial mausoleums. There is a saying, ‘He who stands upright, does not fear a crooked shadow.’ Well, Tiger and Turnip have much to fear. For we are not who we say we are and our shadows are crooked as bent nails. But the craftsmen of Zhongdu don’t tell on us. The Mongols don’t know our language, and to speak to them is to risk aggravating their tempers and fists. So long as we don’t antagonize them, the craftsmen leave us be.

The Mongol in charge of our herd has a name that’s some guttural sound in the throat. We do not call our slave-driver by his name, though. Ogre is what we call him. Ogre rides with his leather boots in stirrups and a coat of dog-skins over his shoulders, and his mare is equipped with a hook-ended lance and a horsehair lasso. Your iron-branded scars are nothing compared to Ogre’s battle scars. One fault line cleaves Ogre’s face in two, from forehead to chin, as though someone once pickaxed his head. His nose has been fractured so many times, it’s hardly worth calling a nose. The only word he knows in our Jurchen dialect is ‘Go!’, which he shouts often, as he is impatient with stragglers. When the elderly Fan-maker Zu fainted in the heat, Ogre reached down from his mare and stuck Fan-maker Zu’s chest with the hook-ended lance. Ogre gurgled with laughter and dragged him through the dirt until he was quite dead. He has a gallows sense of humour, it can be said.

At dusk the Mongols stop and rest. They drink fermented yak’s milk by firelight as captured Jurchen jugglers and acrobats perform for them. The Mongols laugh and jeer, but never applaud.

‘I can’t walk another step. My knees are aching. My heels are weeping blisters. I am dying of thirst. I’ve not had a sip of water all day . . .’

Gem-cutter Hu is at the age when humans start to shrink, when the spine buckles and the skin wrinkles and grows slack. He bends over his staff as he grumbles, his hair white and his eyes nearsighted from a lifetime of squinting at precious gems through a magnifying lens. Someone tells the gem-cutter that water-drinking time is near. Master Hu scoffs, ‘Ha! There’s just spittle in that flask by the time it gets to me. I’ll drop dead of thirst in no time, just you wait and see . . .’

It’s drizzling and the thousands of hooves and wheels ahead of us have trampled the grasslands to mud that squelches through our shoes and splatters our legs. Staggering by my side, you look daggers at Master Hu. The old man brays on: ‘The Mongols ought not to treat us this way. Don’t these ignorant barbarians know who we are? They are marching us to our deaths. Won’t be long until I fall down and they cut my throat . . .’

‘Good,’ you mutter. ‘Fall down dead and spare our ears your whinging.’

Master Hu spins round, squinting accusingly. ‘Who said that? The Tiger Boy? The boy with the branded face? You donkey’s afterbirth! How dare you speak to me like that? You are not one of us. You should have been killed in Zhongdu.’

Shut up now, Tiger, I think. But you laugh in Master Hu’s face.

‘I heard you kept slaves in Zhongdu,’ you say. ‘I heard you beat them, and when they ran away, you caught them and cut off their ears. I heard you imprisoned your slaves in your cellar during the famine. Then you cooked and ate them, one by one.’

Master Hu wheezes as though his heart has seized up.

‘If the Mongols slash your throat, Master Hu,’ you say calmly, ‘then that will be less than what you deserve.’

Gem-cutter Hu shakes his crooked staff at you. ‘You are a liar and imposter! You are not Glassblower Hua! I knew Master Hua, and you are not him. I will tell the Mongols about you!’

‘Tell, and I’ll wring your neck.’

‘Not if I beat you to death with a rock first!’ hisses Swordmaker Fu.

You laugh at the swordmaker. ‘And then will you eat me? Like you ate your own son?’

The herd of old men turns on you. ‘Shut that evil Tiger mouth!’ they curse. ‘Imposter!’ ‘Lowbreed mongrel!’

You open your mouth, to lash your tongue once more, but I grab you and say, ‘Tiger.
Shut up
.’

You shut your mouth, but your eyes are amused. You won’t be civil to men for whom you have nothing but contempt. You let that be known.

Every slave dreams of escape. Some daring souls flee into the northern wilderness, only to be shot down by Mongol arrows. Two Jurchen princes gallop away one night on stolen mares, only to be recaptured, rolled up in blankets and kicked to death (for the Mongols are superstitious about spilling the blood of royalty on the ground). Suicide is the means of escape for some. They weigh their tunic pockets down with stones and hurl themselves into fast-flowing rivers. Or they goad the Mongols into losing their tempers and beating them to death, and die smiling and satisfied.

Puppetmaker Xia, whose beloved Concubine Sparrow is now a girl slave, is the most suicidal of our herd: ‘After the famine stole my wife and sons away, I prayed to the Lord Buddha to spare Concubine Sparrow. But now I regret that Concubine Sparrow did not die in the famine too, for death would have spared her the yoke of the Mongols.’

The puppetmaker calls for Concubine Sparrow in his sleep, ordering her to bring his slippers and draw his bath, then wakes distraught because she isn’t there. One evening, when the Mongols are setting up camp, he sees Concubine Sparrow crouched behind the hindquarters of a cow, shovelling dung into a bucket. He stumbles over to her.

‘Sparrow,’ he calls. ‘Come here, my love . . .’

But before the concubine hears Master Xia, a Mongol warrior strolls up behind her and drags her up by the hair. The bucket rolls sideways and the look on Concubine Sparrow’s face is one of weary resignation as the Mongol throws her over his shoulder like a rolled-up Persian rug and saunters into a yurt. Puppetmaker Xia turns pale as his own ghost.

‘How can she betray me like this?’ he cries. ‘I should’ve carved up her pretty face whilst I had the chance . . .’

The puppetmaker reaches for the nearest rock and dashes the sharp, jagged edge across his wrist, over and over, drawing blood. Other slaves rush over to restrain him, grappling the wrist-cutting stone from his suicidal grip. It is a pitiful and tragic sight, but when I look at you, you are shaking with laughter, your eyes creased up.

It’s just like you, Tiger, to find the humour in the bleakest of scenes.

When the night is clear and starry constellations are scattered across the sky, the slaves sleep deeply as a battlefield of slain men. I lay behind you in the dark and breathe in your rankness, my heart thudding against your spine. My fingers count your ribs. They explore your bones, protruding under your stretched-taut skin. Your hip bones, your sacrum, your shoulder blades like wings. I reach down to your groin and stroke you to life. Slowly. Cautiously. One ear listening out. I clench my fist around your stiffness, and your breathing quickens as I draw it back and forth. After your warm, sticky release, I lick my hand clean. Then I bury my face in your wild, stinking hair and hold you. To hold you is to be at one with you. To be at one with the starry cosmos of ancient Gods above. As I hold you I will the night never to end. For our oneness fades with the disappearing stars. And by daylight you are other again.

As the Mongol juggernaut moves north the grasslands become sparse and wither away. The earth becomes bone dry and rocks burn under our bare feet. The Mongols raid and lay waste to nearby villages. They steal two hundred head of camel and thousands of leak-proof barrels and leather casks. At the lake at Dolon Nor every barrel and cask is filled to the brim. The Mongol juggernaut splits up. Most of the caravan, Genghis Khan and the seventy thousand horseback warriors, journey to the west, to battle and conquer other lands. One hundred slave-drivers and a thousand Jurchen slaves trudge with the camels up to the north. You and I are amongst those bound for Karakarhoum.

‘Are we in Mongolia yet?’ I ask you.