A Single Petal Page 3

  When they finally snuffed out their lamps and dragged themselves off to their beds, with Chang in the guest room made up by Feier, both men were so disconnected from their surroundings by virtue of three jugs of wine they even questioned how many beds they were looking at and wondered whether their legs were still attached to their bodies. Feier hated it when her father got drunk, and it only happened when Merchant Chang stayed the night. Once, she’d diluted the wine in an attempt to keep her father sober. The merchant sussed out her plan immediately and, because of his fury, she’d been beaten. The following day when Chang was gone, Feng crumpled. Tears streamed his cheeks as he hugged his daughter and begged her forgiveness.

  Feier had many reasons to dislike Chang, but she said nothing to her father for she knew he held the merchant in high regard, and perhaps the man could help solve the mystery of the disappearing Miao girls. Those three pupils of her father’s were all good friends, and what if Xiaopeng were to be taken? Xiaopeng was everyone’s darling.

  4 One li equals a third of a British mile.

  5 It is often said the most beautiful women in China are found in Hangzhou.

  6 Chinese greeting. Literally, “Have you had food?”

  7 In Tang Dynasty China, marriagable girls pinned up their hair at the age of fifteen.

  White Tiger

  “That tiger on his hand, baba... why did he have it?”

  Feier was peering at the body from behind her father. Feng focused on the tiger tattooed onto the back of the merchant’s right hand, the one that was still gripped around the bamboo pole emerging from his bloated belly. The beast, partly obscured by dried blood, was an exquisite work of art. He’d seen it before but never thought to ask his friend why it was there. It had white and black stripes - the guardian White Tiger of the West -fearsome jaws open in a snarl, a sinuous body curved into a semi-crouch, hind legs raised, and forelegs with extended claws reaching out to the base of the dead merchant’s stiff thumb. The flicked-up tail curled round the side of the man’s broad hand, giving it perfect balance in preparation for that lethal, never-to-be spring. The darkly vacant eyes stared at the bam-boo wedged between the corpse’s thumb and forefinger. Had they seen the man who’d killed Feng’s friend? Had those eyes of terror failed to alert the beast whose spirit should have leapt from Chang’s hand and sunk dagger teeth into the attacker’s throat? Suddenly art seemed a useless thing to Feng, powerless to save a good man who’d only been trying to help the hapless Miao villagers... trying to prevent an otherwise inevitable conflict between two peace-loving communities.

  “Baba? That tiger? It always frightened me.”

  “To guard and protect him. Huh! Fat lot of good it was! Oh, what have I done?”

  “You, baba?”

  “Don’t you see? I asked him to help me solve the mystery of the disappearing Miao girls, and now this! Feier, I feel awful! I’ve caused his death.”

  Feier appeared strangely uncomfortable. Feng dismissed this as simply due to his reference to death. What fear the word still engendered in the child!

  “No, baba! Remember how you said that with Mama it was her destiny she had to die. Why should it be different for Merchant Chang?”

  The teacher felt his daughter’s small, comforting hand touch his shoulder. He gently stroked it, silently thanking Buddha she was there with him at a time like this. He couldn’t imagine an existence without the girl.

  “It’s not always that simple, Feier,” he replied. “This is my doing! I must now bear the responsibility... but it adds urgency to solving the mystery of the Miao girls. These things have to be connected. It’ll be something big if they had to silence a respected man like Chang. He must’ve been onto them! Oh, why didn’t he come back to me straightaway?”

  Feier glanced at the dead merchant, her scorn barely concealed.

  “What about the body, baba? Shall I get help?”

  Feng hadn’t thought beyond his guilt.

  “The temple,” he said quietly. With the prefectural magistrate living on the other side of Three Monkey Mountain and Chen Jiabiao closeted in his large house on the hill, unapproachable to a lowly teacher, the monks seemed the obvious solution.

  “Do I have to?”

  The teacher looked up at her. One day the girl would have to overcome her phobia about the temple and what it stood for.

  “You can’t go on blaming the Buddha forever, Feier. Go quickly. Tell the monks. They’ll take Merchant Chang to the temple. And get them to send a messenger to the magistrate at Houzicheng. I’ll wait here... just in case.”

  The girl, clearly terrified, stayed put.

  “Why? He’s very dead, baba.”

  “They say with crimes like this that those responsible may return to the scene. Maybe the murderer will want to remove the body? No, don’t look at me like that. I’ll be fine. Just be quick.”

  Feier turned and began to run back in the direction of the temple when a sudden thought opened a yawning chasm of doubt in her father’s mind.

  “Feier!” he shouted. Thank the Buddha, she heard him and stopped. “Come back! At once!” The child’s relief was obvious. “Perhaps you’re right about the temple. He’d have told them!” explained Feng. “Who else apart from Chen Jiabiao could have known? Someone there might be afraid he was getting too close to the truth. A conspiracy, perhaps? When Chang came to them with his questions, his frankness, they’d have considered him better off dead. How stupid of me!”

  “Where now, then?”

  “Li Yueloong!” he replied. “We must go at once. Their village men can see to the body. But I don’t know what the poor farmer’s going to say or do! I persuaded him to put all his faith in my friend’s ability to solve the mystery. Some friend I’m turning out to be!”

  “Baba, don’t belittle yourself! Remember how you used to tell me to try my best? Well, you tried your best.”

  “But to end like this?”

  “Come, baba!” Feier tugged at her father’s sleeve. “Just a moment!”

  Holding his nose with one hand and reaching forward with the other, Feng grabbed the bamboo pole. “What are you doing?”

  “This pole’s our only link with Chang’s killer. I’ll take it. And it’ll help me protect you if we meet the monster.” The bamboo was so firmly embedded in the merchant it was impossible to dislodge with one hand. Releasing his nose, Feng grasped the pole with both hands, pushing it backwards and forwards before lifting it free from the corpse. He failed to notice the look on his daughter’s face. “See how reluctant the murderer is to leave his victim! He’ll be back, for sure. Better make haste to the Miao village!”

  The teacher wiped the gore sticking to the sharpened tip of the bamboo pole onto the merchant’s garment, sending the flies into a buzz of frenzied fury. Fashioned by a single diagonal blow with a sharp axe, the tip was as pointed as a knife. Opposite the tip, where the axe would have first struck the bamboo, was a short thumb-nail shaped projection.

  “Odd!” observed Feng. “Anyway, it’s formidable weapon. I’ll hang on to it ‘ til I’ve found friend Chang’s killer. Come!”

  Feng and his daughter continued along the path past the lotus lake, strangely still and peaceful, the lotus flowers half-closed in the sinking sunlight, and on beyond the grove of almond trees to the rice fields. Here the path was raised up on a long narrow bank above the flooded rectangular paddy fields striped green with rows of rice plants stretching to the hazed distance. Silhouetted against the rising sun were the bent figures of women hard at work, up to their knees in water, heads hidden under wide-brimmed conical straw hats. It angered Feng to think that some of these women must have passed by the body of Chang without bothering to think how or why the man had met his end. Wayside bodies of skeletal strangers were not uncommon, but the merchant was widely known in all local communiti
es; the teacher prayed to the Buddha that Feier would never finish up like one of those toadstool women, slave to Sheng Nong the god of farmers. Nonetheless, he never failed to marvel at the precision of their planting, every bit as skilful as the calligraphy Feier perfected with her pointed brushes.

  By the time they’d reached the far end of the rice fields, the sun hovered above the horizon and the sky to the east had turned a pastiche of yellow, gold and pink. They had at least another hour’s journey along the path that cut through the woods and Feng now held the bamboo pole horizontally, like a spear, expecting every shadow to transform into a brigand that would leap at them brandishing a sword. A moving black shape ahead, barely discernible in the gloom, caused Feng to halt and grab Feier by the arm.

  “It’s Mimi!” exclaimed the girl, laughing. “Poor Mimi!”

  She ran to the donkey. Mimi stood swishing flies with her straggly tail, one hoof characteristically raised. Feier hugged the large head, patting the bewildered animal’s rubbery pink nose.

  “The baskets are still full of his goods. Proves my point,” said Feng on catching up with his daughter. “This was no common thief. The evil man’s intent was purely to silence Chang. I’m determined to find out what he’d discovered. I owe him that. Yueloong too.”

  Feier began to stroke the donkey.

  “Why is Mimi so far from her master?” she asked.

  “She’ll have walked off to get help.”

  “All this way? Across the rice fields, into these woods, instead of to our village? If she’d got to us sooner we might have found him before that beast took away half his face.”

  “Don’t, my child... but you’re right. Why would she have strayed so far? Makes no sense.”

  “Neither does the blood there.”

  The girl pointed to dark brown stains of congealed blood streaking the donkey’s flank.

  “Oh, my clever daughter! I’d not have spotted that myself. Can only mean one thing. Poor Mimi would never have borne the weight of Chang’s body, so the murderer must have ridden her as far as here, with Chang’s blood on him. Perhaps she’d got the better of him, and kicked him off, or. rather more likely, I think... he did this as a distraction. To make us think Chang was killed by the Miao people and that those disappearances are a hoax. Well, I’ll not fall for that! But it raises another possibility. A plot by a rival to our Governor? To cause unrest? By helping to spread rumours? Enough to get the lazy good-for-nothing deposed? But to sacrifice my friend for such a cause.”

  “You were blaming the monks a moment ago, baba.”

  “Them? Maybe. I know they’re not too happy with the new taxes lev-ied on the monastery lands.”

  “I don’t understand taxes, baba.”

  “Costs a lot of money to keep an emperor, his court, his concubines, the army... not to mention the thousands of officials and small fry. But enough of speculation. I’ll lift you up onto Mimi’s back. We’ll take her with us.”

  Feier let go of the donkey’s head and stood back. She had no greater wish to touch the dead merchant’s blood with her leg than to brush against his arm when he was alive.

  “I’ll walk, baba.”

  Feng, his daughter and his dead friend’s donkey journeyed the remaining ten li, passing over the familiar two small hills before descending into the valley of the Miao. Li Yueloong’s single-roomed, stone house was the first building at the edge of the village, standing proud beside his neatly trimmed patchwork of rice fields. His trusty old water buffalo was secured to a stake driven into the ground at the edge of the fields. Feng always felt the sadness of Yueloong’s life had become imprinted upon the water-buffalo’s face for it portrayed abject misery. With her legs folded beneath her as she chewed on nothing, she cocked her head sideways at the visitors, fixing them with doleful eyes as if to say ‘Oh, I’ve seen you lot before and a fat lot you did for me then!’ before looking away and ruminating on private thoughts about a destiny of perpetual servitude.

  “Xiaopeng! It’s me, Feier! We’ve come to tell you something awful!” shouted the teacher’s daughter.

  The little farmhouse was ominously quiet, except for discontented grunts from the pigs foraging at the side of the house where Yueloong grew vegetables sheltered from the wind by a semi-circular bamboo grove. The girl ran on towards the farmhouse, shouting ‘Xiaopeng, Xiaopeng!’ before she halted, aghast. Yueloong had appeared alone in the doorway, his head bowed.

  “Xiaopeng?” Feier repeated quietly, her fear evident in the tone of her voice.

  Feng tied Mimi to the water-buffalo’s stake - neither animal objected to the proximity of the other - and approached his friend. “Yueloong? Where’s Xiaopeng?”

  No reply. The other man remained in the doorway, silent. Feng came closer.

  “Friend Yueloong, please tell me Xiaopeng’s all right. Why doesn’t she come to greet her friend?”

  Nothing. Feng reached out and gently placed his hand on Yueloong’s shoulder.

  “Yueloong?”

  The farmer looked up, and Feng knew. He knew from the pain in the other man’s eyes. A pain he recalled every night alone in bed, thinking about how cruelly Meili was snatched from him eight summers back.

  Xiaopeng had been taken.

  Separation

  Yueloong retreated into the house. Feier hovered in the doorway, uncer-tain what to do.

  “He needs us,” Feng whispered, “now more than ever.”

  He led his daughter into the single dingy room where the two fathers would sit and talk for hours whilst the girls laughed and played, but which now seemed like a place of death entombing the farmer’s sorrow. They shared a single thought: would little Xiaopeng’s cheerful face ever again brighten that room?

  Yueloong sank to his knees on the dusty floor, banged on the stone ground until his fist bled, and wept. Feng couldn’t imagine how, if it were Feier who had been taken and he down there on the floor grieving, he’d ever again eat, drink, breathe or live. The vision of his friend in such tormented loss played with the personal terror of losing his daughter until guilt for considering he had woes of his own took over. He knelt beside the other man and rested a comforting arm across his shoulders.

  “Feier, make Farmer Li some tea,” he said, looking back at the tearful girl.

  “No, no!” protested Yueloong through sobs.

  “Go anyway,” insisted Feng.

  He helped his friend to the stone bed covered with sack-cloth and straw. At the opposite end of the room was another bed half-covered with a neatly-folded patterned rug. Xiaopeng’s. Her red-clothed bridal doll and beloved carved dragon head lay on top of the rug.

  “Yueloong, I just don’t know how to share your grief,” Feng said when they were seated together. “Somehow I feel it’s my fault.”

  Feier stood heating water in a pot on the glowing embers of the wood fire, preparing tea. She’d done this so often with Xiaopeng when she and the younger girl switched roles and she became student of the domestic arts that she knew exactly where everything was kept, but it felt wrong. Like her mother not returning, being reincarnated somewhere else, as someone or something different, was wrong.

  “Your fault?” Yueloong looked puzzled.

  “Merchant Chang. I was so sure he’d solve the mystery that’s befallen your village. so certain Xiaopeng would be.”

  He checked himself. How could he know Xiaopeng was not all right? Taken, yes, but that didn’t mean they should all give in to despair and fear the worst. Yueloong said nothing.

  “I don’t know how to say this about Chang, but...” Yueloong looked blankly up at him. “He’s dead. Feier found him near the lotus lake. Impaled on a bamboo stake. The one I’ve left outside. We found his donkey, Mimi, in the woods and... well, there was blood on Mimi. We hurried here in case.”

  “In case of what?”

&
nbsp; Feng paused. He didn’t really know why they’d hurried. One man, if it had only been one man, would hardly pose a threat to the whole Miao village. And he hadn’t even considered the unthinkable at the time, that Xiaopeng might be stolen.

  “Look, I owe it to you - to both of you - to get to the bottom of this whole affair.”

  “Why?”

  The farmer’s monosyllabic answers unnerved Feng. Feier looked at him anxiously, obviously upset by the way the conversation was going. The teacher sighed.

  “If I hadn’t tried to enlist Chang’s help, the poor man wouldn’t be dead.”

  There was a pause.

  “So you think his killer took Xiaopeng, huh?”

  The farmer’s voice was flat, without emotion, as if he no longer cared who it was who’d done the deed. He might as well have been referring to the governor’s new rice tax or the current shortage of calligraphy ink, but Feng knew his friend’s mind was allowing nothing to displace the wretch-edness of losing Xiaopeng.

  “A man is dead because of my stupid interference,” he insisted. “I owe it to his spirit to finish the task of finding your girls.”

  “Do what you bleeding like. But I’m warning you and your villagers -our men are talking about revenge.”

  “Revenge? You too?” Yueloong said nothing but Feng, who for the first time sensed his vulnerability in the Miao village, knew his friend well enough to read the expression on his face. “Surely you can’t believe we’ve had anything to do with this terrible business?”

  The farmer, ignoring his question, began to rock to-and-fro. He was beginning to irritate the teacher. He’d always accepted Yueloong’s uncouth behaviour as the inverse charm of an illiterate peasant. He knew the man would suffer his loss badly, but Feng was merely trying his best to make amends for the living lost and for the dead.