The Incarnations (7 page)
The grandeur of the Huang family mansion is such that I cling to the donkey reins, too intimidated to dismount. The manor has a glazed-tile roof and the walls are lacquered wood (unlike the sorceress’s mud-walled dwelling, which a thief needs only a pail of water to break into). A servant boy leads me through parlours and halls to a shady courtyard of cypresses and a shimmering pond of carp. I am exhausted from riding on donkey-back for three days, plodding along the river Sveltedeer to the foothills of Mount Weep. I am barefoot, in a tattered robe stitched from a discarded rice sack. A girl with no name. Having inherited the sorceress’s hump-backed nose, I lack even prettiness as a saving grace. What if the Huang family are disappointed and send me back? What bloodcurdling punishment would the sorceress mete out should that happen?
‘She’s here! She’s here!’ a woman chimes.
Master Huang and his wife enter the courtyard, a handsome couple in black damask robes of mourning, both tall and stately, with unpocked skin and fine sets of ivory teeth undamaged by rot. Wife Huang claps her hands in delight. She sweeps towards me and gathers me into her sweet, fragranced embrace. ‘Welcome to the Huang family, beloved Daughter-in-Law!’
Wife Huang then releases me and gazes upon me at arm’s length. ‘Oh you are lovely!’ she beams. ‘How lovely you are!’
Master Huang is more muted in his reception.
Sotto voce
, he says to his wife, ‘The girl is ugly. Horrendously hooked of nose.’
‘Oh shuush!’ scolds Wife Huang. ‘Can’t you see we are blessed? Once the dirt is scrubbed off she will be a passable bride!’
As Wife Huang fusses over me and Master Huang frowns, I am too timid to utter a word. Young Master Huang, to whom I am betrothed, is nowhere in sight. Shyness prohibits me from asking where he might be.
A pretty maidservant named Duckweed conducts me to a bedchamber with rosewood furniture and a four-poster bed with a canopy of chiffon, where I am to rest before the wedding the following day. Incense braziers burn patchouli and myrrh, and goldfish swim in a flower-and-bird-painted porcelain bowl. I daren’t touch anything, lest I grubby it with my hands.
As Duckweed bathes me in a brass claw-footed tub of water sprinkled with rose petals, she smirks and wrinkles her nose. Granted, I am skinny and fleabitten and turn the water black, but her rudeness offends me. I am about to marry into the most prosperous family in Goatherd Valley. Who is this servant girl to act so haughty and superior? After my bath, I change into a clean linen robe, and Duckweed brings me a tray with bowls of steaming rice, stewed meat and pickled vegetables. Famished, I bolt everything down, pretending not to care as Duckweed titters behind her dainty hand.
Later, as I lie in bed, Wife Huang enters the bedchamber like a visitation from the Goddess of Mercy. She kneels at my bedside and strokes my temples with a gentle smile. Not once in my thirteen years of girlhood has anyone touched me with such tenderness. A lump forms in my throat.
‘Sleep, beloved Daughter-in-Law,’ she whispers. ‘Tomorrow is the wedding. A day of joyous festivity. You need your rest.’
Daybreak. A sunny morning of birdsong, fragrant breezes and cloudless sky. In my wedding robe of embroidered red silk, my hair elaborately braided into the Anticipating Immortals style, I am radiant. In fact, I will shun modesty and own that I am beautiful for the first time in my life. Looking over the guests in the courtyard, I understand the wedding ceremony is to be an intimate affair, with only Master Huang, Wife Huang and an uncle and aunt in attendance. Evidently there has been a recent death in the family, for they are wearing mourning robes of black and are very solemn indeed. The Buddhist monk arrives and speaks in hushed tones with the Huangs. A cockerel is strutting around, cawing and pecking at the ground. Odd, I think. Why is it on the loose? Young Master Huang has not yet come, and I am jittery and dying to know what my husband will be like.
‘May the ceremony begin,’ intones the Buddhist monk. A stable boy comes forth and catches the cockerel, which squawks and flaps. The boy squats besides me, pinning the cockerel’s wings down and holding it steady. Where is Young Master Huang? The monk holds up a copper censer by a chain and sways it over the squawking bird and me. Strange blue smoke pours out of the censer, chokingly pungent and stinging my eyes. The monk begins to chant and, with an ear attuned to sorcerers’ dialects, I hear he is chanting not Buddhist sutras but ancient dark magic. He is not a monk, but a shaman. A necromancer, conjuring spirits, summoning the dead. The black-robed wedding guests are silent, except for Wife Huang, who sinks to her knees, sobbing and beating her chest. Where is Young Master Huang? The shaman’s eyes roll backwards in their sockets and, as he ululates, I hear the ancient Chinese for ‘marry’ and understand I am being joined in holy matrimony with the bird.
The wedding banquet is a sumptuous feast served with silver ewers of wine. Not a morsel passes my lips and I don’t speak a word. The bridegroom, however, is in high spirits, throwing his wattle-and-combed head back and crowing vociferously, scampering about on clawed feet and pecking up the grain Master Huang scatters for him. Wife Huang has recovered from her sobbing. Whenever our eyes meet across the banquet table she beams and raises her goblet of plum wine: ‘To our son’s new bride!’
After the banquet, Duckweed the maidservant leads the cockerel and me to the bridal chamber. She bolts the latticed door when she leaves, locking the newly-weds in. Unperturbed, the cockerel hops and squawks and flaps up on the conjugal bed. He struts in a half-circle then defecates on the bedspread. Has the son of the Huangs died and been reincarnated into this bird? Is that what the ceremony was about?
‘Young Master Huang?’ I call experimentally.
The bird claps its beak and blinks its beady eyes. I shake my head at my foolishness then decide to call the cockerel Young Master Huang anyway, as he responds to it.
As the cockerel puffs up his feathers and swaggers about, I sit on the edge of the four-poster bed in my red silk wedding gown, wringing my hands on my lap as I ponder the fate that awaits me. Am I really to spend the rest of my days wedded to a bird? What a preposterous destiny! Then, out of nowhere, I hear the low cackle of the Sorceress Wu: ‘Wretched she-brat! Character determines destiny. Fate is the excuse of the spineless and weak!’ And though it was my evil grandmother who sold me into this strange predicament, her words lend me strength.
Dusk creeps into the bridal chamber, and I plot and wait as the shadows thicken. My spouse is quieter now, grooming his plumage, plucking out the odd feather not to his liking with his beak. When at last the bolt slides back and the door creaks open, the bridal chamber is completely dark. It is Duckweed, bringing the supper tray. I needn’t see her face to know she is smirking. Duckweed lowers the tray on a rosewood table then turns to the dresser to light the oil lamp. I waste no time. I leap up, grab the water carafe from the tray and smash its neck against the bedpost. At the shattering of glass, Duckweed gasps and spins round. I knock her head with my knuckles and drag her to me by her hair. I touch the jagged edge of the carafe to her throat.
‘Don’t scream,’ I warn her, ‘or I’ll stab out your eyes!’
Duckweed whimpers. In the flickering oil-lamp light her eyes are frantic. Not so high and mighty any more.
‘Tell me what is going on. Speak!’
Duckweed speaks. A breathless rush of words. Young Master Huang died in a tragic hunting accident the year before. He’d passed on before marrying, so his parents wanted to find him a bride, a companion for the afterlife. I was the Spirit Bride in a Spirit Wedding and the cockerel the stand-in for the Spirit Groom. Then, with some satisfaction, Duckweed adds that the eminent Huang family would never have wed me to their handsome son were he alive.
‘Now let me go!’ Duckweed weeps. ‘I have told you everything.’
‘Liar!’ I spit. ‘What happens next?’
Duckweed won’t say. I scratch the broken glass of the carafe against her cheek, drawing blood. ‘Oh no! Not my pretty face!’ she wails. The maidservant then reveals the final stage of the Spirit Wedding: the Sacrificial Ceremony. The following morning I am to be ritually slaughtered then laid to rest beside the corpse of Young Master Huang in the Huang family mausoleum, joining him in eternal sleep. I thank Duckweed, then I beat her with my fists until she is limp and barely conscious. I rip off my accursed silk wedding gown and change into Duckweed’s servant robes and woven reed sandals. Out of spite I snatch up the Spirit Bridegroom, tucking him under my arm. I slip out of the unbolted door and make my getaway.
I flee through the night. The runaway Spirit Bride, dashing pell-mell through paddy fields of croaking frogs, leaping over ditches and streams. ‘Run! Run! Run!’ squawks Young Master Huang under my arm. And I obey, hurtling through the darkness without pause for breath or to ease the stitch in my side. The Huang family own a stable of horses and will come galloping for me at dawn.
Where in the Middle Kingdom am I fleeing to? As far away from Goatherd Valley as possible. And then, who knows? As I tear through the night, I think of you, the father I have never met. Eunuch Wu of the Imperial Palace in Chang’an, loyal servant to the Emperor Taizong. I decide to go to Chang’an and find you. I am your daughter, and perhaps our blood bond will oblige you to find me lodgings and work. Perhaps you will find me a position as a chambermaid in the Imperial Palace. Perhaps the Emperor Taizong will fall in love with me, and I will ascend from servant girl to empress. And with these fatuous thoughts of fame and fortune in my head, I run and run, wishing I could grow wings and fly to Chang’an.
By sunrise I am staggering beneath the strange turquoise peaks of the Tiltingsky mountain range, following the Turnabout River to its end. Under my arm Young Master Huang stabs at me with his beak, wriggling to be set free. Fed up with his squirming, I wring his neck. Widowed at the age of thirteen, I tuck my spouse’s feathered corpse back under my arm and stagger onwards, not daring to stop. At sundown I build a fire, pluck Young Master Huang, then roast and eat him. He is delicious. As I suck the marrow from his bones and lick bird fat from my fingers, I contemplate the journey ahead. The city of Chang’an is three years away by foot, and one year by horse and cart. A thousand-league journey I must rise at the crack of dawn to begin. Sated with bird, I fall asleep, full of uncertainty but grateful not to be in the Huang family mausoleum, dead.
The next day, by stroke of good luck, I meet an expedition of merchants travelling northwards to Chang’an. There are eighty merchants in the caravan, riding in eighty horse-drawn wagons carrying exotic spices and fabrics, frankincense, silver ewers, skyblue Syrian glass, delicate ostrich-egg cups and countless other frivolous trinkets for the capital’s rich. As well as these exquisite trifles, the merchants have collected many marvels of the plant and animal kingdom to sell to the nobility of Chang’an. Curiosities such as albino frogs and a wise and ancient monkey who can do sums with an abacus. Russian conjoined twins fused at the head (like one man resting his temple against a mirror) and a barebreasted Japanese mermaid, her tail curled up in a barrel of salty water, weeping bitterly to be so far from the sea. In the very last wagon, a cyclops and a wolfman, both shackled at the ankles, play a never-ending game of chess. The wolfman furrows his furry brow and deliberates for hours on end before moving a chess piece with his shaggy paw.
The journey to Chang’an lasts three hundred days and the caravan passes through every landscape of the Middle Kingdom. Terraced hillsides where water buffalo pull ploughs. Holy mountains with peaks so high they penetrate the cloudy realm of the Gods. Vast stretches of barren nothingness where not even the wild grasses grow. As the scenery changes by the day, the heavens above us change by the hour. The Gods of Thunder brew up dark lagoons of cloud that the Gods of Rain turn into heavy deluges and floods. The Gods of Wind bluster and chase flocks of cloud across the sky, until the Gods of Bright Skies clear the firmament for the sun.
During my time in the merchant expedition I am wretchedly miserable, as for three hundred days I ride in the wagon of the Merchant Fang, who’d taken a fancy to me and rescued me from the roadside when every other wagon had rolled on by. The old merchant is blotchy with gout and has many yellow rolls of fat under his robes cut from fine expensive cloth. The merchant calls me ‘wench’ and likes to fondle me on his lap and tickle me with his beard. Needless to say, my passage to Chang’an is not free of charge, and within months I have a bulging belly. By the time the caravan enters the gates of Chang’an and proceeds up the Vermilion Bird Avenue with much trumpeting of horns, clashing of cymbals and weeping of merchants affected by the homecoming, I add to the cacophony a cry of pain as the Merchant Fang’s baby prepares to come out. As the merchant already has a wife and a brood of eleven children, to him the progeny in my womb is a bothersome thing. So when the baby is born lifeless in a boarding house on Drum Tower Lane, the Merchant Fang sighs with relief. ‘Well, that’s that then,’ he says, pulling a blanket over his stillborn son. He tosses the midwife a string of coppers, bids me farewell and is on his way.
Springtime in Chang’an, the tree peonies in blossom. Bleeding, weeping and limping, I stagger about the streets of the twelve-gated city, to the Imperial Palace in the north. In a daze, I roam in and out of the city wards, gazing in wonderment at the sights. Row upon row of wooden houses, vertiginously soaring up to three storeys in height. Avenues of horse-drawn carts, clattering at breakneck speeds, and magnificent palanquins borne aloft on the shoulders of manservants, velvet curtains hiding the distinguished noblemen inside.
The Eastern Market teems with common folk and Uighurs and Persians and Europeans trading their wares. I wander by stalls of millet, bamboo shoots, pigs and Tibetan slaves in pens. Arabian stalls of alfalfa, pomegranate, spices and wool. I wander into the market square, where magicians in dark booths sell python’s bile for melancholia and dragon’s bones for fatigue. Troupes of buskers strum zithers and pipas, and a dancing bear shambles on his hind legs as his master waves a birch wand. A storyteller has attracted a crowd with his tale of the Sea-dragon King who lives in a palace under the ocean and feasts on opals and pearls.