A Single Petal Read online

  “Good, good! So... you have a sword, a horse and some provisions,

  eh?”

  “You believe what I say, then?” asked Feng, still uncertain whether or not the large man was playing a cruel game with him.

  “Do not try my patience, teacher. Look, why do you think the Governor got rid of the last magistrate?”

  Why, indeed? Feng didn’t reply. Instead, he stared at Minsheng and studied the writing on his face, for years of teaching had taught him to read people’s thoughts from faces, particularly the eyes and the mouth. The magistrate’s eyes were set like stones, his mouth straight as an unstrung bow.

  “Did you really think I had no idea why the Miao girls are vanishing?”

  Still Feng said nothing.

  Minsheng erupted again into laughter.

  “Oh, what you think is of no importance! It’s what you find out to be true that matters. With your daughter’s fate in the balance you’ll crack this one, I can see. My manservant will get you a horse and provisions. And here, these coins will go some way towards buying the truth from people. Funny how a string of coins can make channels into people’s minds, uncover secrets, ay?”

  The magistrate slipped three strings of coppers off his shoulder and handed them to Feng. The teacher’s eyes widened in astonishment to see a gift of three moons worth of wages!

  “But...?” he began.

  “Quick! Before I change my mind and exchange this for your head! And that scroll you carry on your donkey. Is it valuable?”

  “How did... ?” Minsheng’s gaze cut off the end of his question. “Sung Po. Priceless.”

  “Leave it with my manservant.”

  Feng bowed and backed away, clutching the money in one hand and the sword in the other. At the door he bowed once more, turned and almost bumped into the manservant standing on the deck, holding the reins of a large grey mare, with Mimi’s baskets and his bamboo stake already strapped in place behind the saddle.

  The teacher felt uneasy. It seemed as if everything had been pre-planned, that the magistrate was using him rather than the other way round, and he read nothing in the manservant’s fine-lined face. Mimi stood patiently, one foot raised as always, still tethered to the post at the far end of the courtyard. Feng retrieved the scroll from the basket and handed it to the manservant.

  “Merchant Chang told me all about you. And I’ve been expecting this visit. So remember, Teacher Feng... “ Minsheng’s deep voice boomed from the doorway behind him. “That daughter of yours - slave to the emperor or the respected wife of a prefectural magistrate with high expectations? The choice is yours.”

  The slender branch of trust to which he’d so desperately clung snapped when he heard the man’s laughter.

  8 A language similar to Thai Hmong.

  9 A Miao wind instrument of multiple bamboo pipes.

  10 The three most north-easterly provinces of China.

  Reward of the Flesh

  The sun had already risen, reproducing, in long, dark shadows across the stony ground, the Miao farmer’s house, his miserable water buffalo and the bamboo grove, when the teacher’s daughter first heard the sound of excited children’s voices approaching from the village centre. Their noise set off a yapping dog, and for a few moments the animal’s barks seemed to keep time with the frantic beating of Feier’s heart as she awaited his arrival from beyond the screen of pliant bamboo stems. Would that her heart wasn’t so pliant in his presence, but there was nothing she could do about it. When he was close, she only wanted him to hold her... and more. She bit her lower lip, ashamed of the ‘more’ as her hand reached up to touch a hidden virgin’s breast.

  The fact that he’d remained silent had to be significant.

  A small group of young boys appeared... then more, and more. They stopped chattering. One had spotted her. He whispered to his friend and pointed, there was a whoop of joy then, quite suddenly, the children rushed forwards yelling “Feier! Feier!” She crouched down to their level, grinning as they ran up to her, jostling each other, pushing and shouting. And she felt his presence, saw his strong legs as he came to stand beside her but she remained crouched, explaining to the children how she wanted them all to be on their best behaviour and not to think they could get up to mischief just because their teacher was now a girl.

  “Or because she’s beautiful!” suggested Angwan with a chuckle.

  She stood up, her face burning crimson.

  “No girls? Where are the girls?” she asked, without turning to look at the young priest.

  “That’s for your father to find out.” “I’m sorry. But... so many missing?”

  “Even our younger sisters are kept inside now. No-one dares let them out. These boys are going to have to do girls’ work in the rice fields too. I tell you, they’ve given me earfuls ever since I rounded them up. ‘Do we have to?’ ‘Can’t it wait ‘til our girls came back?’ ‘It’s not right, boys doing girls’ work!’ But their pleadings fell on deaf ears!”

  Angwan chuckled, and Feier felt his hand brush lightly against hers as he took the handle of her calligraphy case from her.

  “But carrying for a beautiful girl is a man’s job,” he added. Even if he was making fun of her, she enjoyed it. It made her feel warm and strangely whole inside, as if she’d only ever been half a person until that moment. “We can’t hang around. We’ll have to be back with this troupe of monkeys whilst the sun’s still high in the sky if we’re to get any work from them in the fields.”

  When the children closest to her pretended to be monkeys, Feier giggled. Thus encouraged, they leapt around making ‘ooh! ooh! ooh!’ sounds.

  “Fear not, pretty one! I shall protect you from the wild beasts!” whispered Angwan, and he laughed.

  Was he teasing her? Feier glanced repeatedly in Angwan’s direction, taking care to avoid eye contact, wishing there was only herself and the young priest without the encumbrance of a horde of monkey-children as they walked on to the Han village. She and the priest trailed some distance behind the boys, side by side, and talked. Not only did he speak Mandarin fluently but, like her father, he spoke of things that mattered.

  Ever since he’d returned from a period of training with a priest in the Miao village on the road to Chang’an to take over his father’s place as family head, her feelings for him had changed. and long before even then. Prior to his father’s untimely death he’d also spent several moons learning the Buddhist ways at the monastery near the lotus pond; essential, he had persuaded his father, to fully understand the Miao teachings of the spirits of nature. Back then, Feier-the-child thought of him as the handsome, bright peasant boy with a twinkle in his eyes; the one she and Xiaopeng would giggle about from behind the safety of young girls’ shy hands or half-closed doors. Now a ‘woman’ herself, freed from paternal scrutiny, she felt only a delicious welling of excitement in his proximity.

  Angwan was an intelligent, learned young man. Tutored in Miao folklore and animist beliefs, he could also recite Han poetry and lines from the writings of the great Kong Fuzi. Several times, as they followed the children through the wood, over the hill down towards the lotus lake, his hand would touch hers and she made no attempt to move it away. Instead, she turned her face towards his, taking in the angular lines of his features, his short hair, his strong chin and the movement of that lump in his neck that changed boys into men, and she prayed her father would not be too quick in finding Xiaopeng and returning the girl to her father. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her little Miao friend; she did, but she loved Angwan more.

  ***

  Feng turned for a last glance at Feier’s beloved Mimi as he rode the horse out of the courtyard. His heart sank, for the donkey had been his only link with the girl. He closed his eyes against their moistening.

  Beyond the courtyard entrance, the filthy street
s were already filled with men, women and children. Street stalls had been set up, and Feng, always a reluctant horseman, steered the grey mare cautiously, careful not to tip Feier’s provisions into the mud. Villagers back home took pride in keeping their own little streets free of the filth of human life, but here in Houzicheng it seemed as if residents competed to fill the public area with the most foul excrement and dirtiest rubbish they could find.

  Relieved at last to have left the town behind, Feng began his uncertain journey towards Chang’an. The mare, called ‘Rou’, had already lived up to her name meaning ‘gentle’. Untroubled by the harsh, raucous shouts in the town, the scuffles and the smell, she carried him effortlessly out onto the open narrow road where, putting all his trust in the beast, he slouched back in the saddle and tried to think.

  So Minsheng had been tipped off! By whom? The innkeeper and his ebullient wife, or that strange, young urchin poet, Jinjin? Had he destroyed Feier’s chances of happiness with his pig-headed determination to track down Chang’s killer and rescue the wives and daughters of his Miao friends? Would she be forced to become the young wife of that monster of a magistrate? Was being slave to the emperor a lesser fate? At least she would then be in the right place to further herself. Surely someone in the palace would notice that agility of mind behind his daughter’s beauty? But he had chosen this path and the destiny that awaited him at the end of it. He would have to play out the interminable game: one life closer to Nirvana or return to Earth... over and over and over again? Of one thing Feng was certain: his path would course through many hells before any destination was reached.

  He was already in the worst possible hell: an existence without Feier and without knowing what was happening to the girl.

  ***

  ‘There is beauty in everything, but a man does not always see it.’

  The famous words of Kong Fuzi surfaced in Feier’s mind to mock her when she stopped to stare at the spot where the body had been, now stained brown from the dead merchant’s blood. A frown darkened her pretty features.

  Beauty? Surely not even the master from Qu Fu would have used such a word to describe death. She took in the flattened grass, the random pattern of dried blood, and she recalled the bamboo pole sticking up from the bloated belly, and the partly-destroyed face.

  “Was your father a good man?” she asked Angwan. “He let you leave the village when you thought about becoming a priest. Was he also Bud-dhist like Uncle Li?”

  Angwan chuckled.

  “Baba a Buddhist? No, but they were friends, Xiaopeng’s father and mine.”

  “Xiaopeng never said. My best friend and she never told me!”

  “Told you what?” Feier glanced sideways at the young man, but said nothing. “The poor girl! Not very bright, ay?”

  In her mind, Feier saw the smiling face of her friend. She so wanted to agree with Angwan and erase the image of the person that separated them, but it remained stubbornly stuck, taunting her for hoping she could take the Miao girl’s place. They continued along the path, past the lotus lake; the flowers had opened in the warm sun.

  “She kept home for Uncle, did everything a wife would do, worked in the fields, was already gifted at embroidery... When she tried to teach me these things my fingers would tie themselves into knots. And you say she’s not very bright?”

  Feier’s eyes challenged him without accusation. Her question was irrelevant. She only wanted to know why he looked at her in that way. She’d often noticed it before when she was a young girl trailing after her teacher father, and then she’d assumed it was because she was the only Han child there. He was different now, a youth transformed into a proud young man, but the look in his eyes was the same.

  “That’s just it. Xiaopeng’s like all other Miao girls. No freedom of spirit. Why, a girl with a free spirit should fly like a crane. Her mind should travel to places others couldn’t even dream of. A girl...”

  “Hey!” exclaimed Feier, interrupting, wishing to stop the flow of words that fuelled impossible hope. “We’re falling behind. You’re supposed to be looking after those children.”

  She gave Angwan a playful punch in the side and ran on ahead. And she imagined she was that crane of whom he’d spoken and she felt strangely happy. The crane left the dead man’s final resting place and the blood stain of his life-cut-short, left behind thoughts of missing Miao girls, of Xiaopeng and Uncle Yueloong. No longer did memories of her mother haunt her. She even felt free of the ever-present shadow of her beloved baba. Angwan caught up with her when she reached the chattering crocodile tail of young boys. She sensed his happiness without the need to look him in the eye.

  “Why did you want to become a Buddhist monk? Xiaopeng told me. Before you trained to be a Miao priest, she said you spent three moons in the monastery,” asked Feier, looking the other way. “You people have your own spirits and gods.”

  “To be close to my crane,” was his reply.

  “I could never become a crane.”

  Her mother? Was she now as free and beautiful as a crane? “You can’t become what you already are.”

  They walked on to the Han village in silence. Angwan followed Feier and the boys into the schoolroom. It felt strangely unfamiliar without baba. The Han village children were already there, bursting with excitement at seeing the teacher’s daughter. They wanted to know all about the body near the lotus lake, for the whole village was alive with gossip of the murder. “How big was the pole?”

  “How much blood was there? Enough to fill a wine jug?”

  “How could you be sure it was the merchant if half his face was missing?”

  How, how, how?

  She looked at Angwan for reassurance. The tiger? Yes, she would tell them about the White Tiger tattooed onto the back of his hand. She’d never forget that tiger she’d grown to hate so much over the years during which the merchant had visited them. Often, she’d wondered whether the man had been a tiger in his previous life.

  How she now hated tigers!

  ***

  Feng wished he’d never even met the scoundrel Jinjin. All that nonsense about a White Tiger League! The very idea that an urchin could pretend to know more about his murdered friend than he did was absurd; yet there was something disarmingly open about the boy. A thought occurred to Feng. Had Jinjin also been murdered - like Chang - again because of him? The shifty pair he’d been talking to in Wong’s inn, the fox-faced man and the one called Yaosheng with the droopy moustache, they’d seemed only too keen to put the boy down and make fun of him. Were they also in with the White Tiger League?

  He now wished for the boy’s company, interminable questioning included, if only for reassurance that yet another burden of guilt hadn’t been layered on top of the dead merchant and the farmer’s missing daughter.

  Setting off at an easy trot, Rou bounced Feng up and down whilst the man’s mind darted from Feier to the urchin Jinjin, innkeeper Wong, his disturbing encounter with Minsheng, monk-turned-magistrate, and to his bamboo-impaled friend. It seemed the whole world, apart from Feier, knew more than it cared to tell him about the mystery of the Miao girls and the murder he’d vowed to solve. Anger spurred him on.

  One good thing: those fretful thoughts of the marriage maker had been swept away by a constant stream of unanswered questions: Merchant Chang’s links with the monks and Chen Jiabiao, the White Tiger tattoos,

  Minsheng’s connections with government or with persons other than government, Feier’s insistence she remain behind with Yueloong, and now Jinjin’s disappearance...

  ***

  Jinjin had been up well before the first cock crowed. He had crept into Wenling’s kitchen and filled a cloth with dumplings and rice cakes for the journey with the teacher. He saw no need to ask. After all, he offered his services for free, and if he were to take off with Teacher Feng for a week or two, why, he’d be costi
ng Wong nothing in food! He had wandered out into the yard to look for eggs and that’s when he had spotted him again: the man with the white tiger tattoo, the one who’d given money to the emperor’s soldiers for taking them to the Miao girl’s house.

  The merchant was saddling his horse in the yard. Oddly, Jinjin hadn’t noticed him eating in the inn the night before. Perhaps he’d been too busy talking with Teacher Feng. Or were Wong and his wife in on this as well? Had this man been kept hidden? Was the teacher in danger? In a harsh and friendless world, Jinjin trusted no-one.

  The merchant glanced in his direction but showed no response to his presence; one blessing for an urchin is to be rendered invisible by poverty and shabbiness. Not worth looking at, although in his case this would change given time, thought Jinjin, as he continued his sham hunt for eggs. Men like that would not only look at him, they’d be forced to bow before him! The teacher’s daughter, too.

  Oh, the teacher’s daughter!

  Jinjin even searched silly places for eggs, but never took his eyes off the tattooed man for more than a second. The tiger was clearly visible, and the boy wondered how a wise man like Teacher Feng could misjudge the murdered merchant. Everyone knew the White Tiger League was up to no good and, whatever the merchant’s involvement, Jinjin saw his chance to earn respect from the teacher and his beautiful daughter Feier. A swallow [11], no less! The boy was fed up with also being invisible to girls, but a swallow? Would that swallow see him for the person he truly was, respect him, bear him children? If he were to help the girl’s father with some crazy mission, then perhaps she would have to do all these things.

  The promise of the trader leading him to the White Tiger League - and to the girl - gave him an idea. Adjacent to Wenling’s kitchen was a room where Wong would sort out his affairs, his bills and his payments. Tucked away on a shelf was a box with ink tablets, brushes, and blank scrolls. Jinjin returned to the inn. Whilst Wenling was busy talking to someone, her back turned, he crept into that room, stole ink, one of the smaller brushes and, on his way back through the kitchen, he found himself a sharp knife. He tied these things into the food bundle and set off after the White Tiger trader. It was early, and he could return and report back in time to join Teacher Feng whose donkey was still tethered in the courtyard, asleep on her hooves.