The Old Dragon's Head Read online

  He put his arm around her shoulder and endeavoured to turn her round. Despite her frailty, she resisted him. “I don’t need any help,” she grumbled, plonked herself down in a chair, whipped out a ’kerchief and wiped her nose. “Now, I want to know your intentions.”

  “Mother, listen to your son,” the maid interrupted, “let me take you back to bed. The doctor told you to rest.”

  “I’ll have plenty of time to rest where I’m going,” Lan said, as waspish as ever. “Precious, let me say something to you, while I still can. Come here, girl, sit down. That’s better. Now listen to me. For the most part, you’ve looked after me over the years. You’ve followed my instructions and only pilfered small items. You thought I never missed that ivory brush and comb. Remember, the ones you intentionally mislaid? I know about that and the phial of perfume of mine that you like to use. Oh, don’t look so aggrieved. Don’t spoil it now I’m near the end. I’ve said my piece to you, now let me talk to my son. Leave us alone, but first bring us some tea.”

  Precious blushed and scampered out of the room. “Don’t talk so candidly to the servants, mother,” Feng said to her.

  “Why not?” Lan’s voice croaked with exhaustion. “When I’m about to embark on the final journey, I can talk how I please.”

  He returned his mother’s frown. She fixed him with staring eyes like he was a common thief in the night, then her features relaxed. She was inscrutable, or was that merely because she was a woman? Was that why he had not yet found a wife? He was only twenty, so there was still time. With the inheritance from Park, he would be rich and have his pick of the local heiresses. Precious returned with hot tea and ghosted out of the room, leaving them alone with the moths, the lantern and the night.

  “What’s this about?” he asked. This must be serious. Her frown returned.

  “It concerns your father.”

  “You mean his funeral arrangements? Mother, everything’s in hand; I have spoken to Abbot Dong at the Taoist temple as well as the Buddhist monks.”

  “No, I don’t mean about that. I mean about this.” She handed him a scroll.

  “What is it?”

  “Read it and you’ll find out,” she snapped. Her breath was shallow and laboured.

  He broke the seal and read, ‘Deathbed Instructions and Confessions of Magistrate Park. Being with the Tao in strength and harmony, I hereby bequeath my worldly goods, including chattels, servants and estate, as well as my library of legal books and manuscripts, to Xu Yingxu, the son of General Xu Da, courtesy name Tiande. During a dreadful purge in the eleventh year of the reign of the Hongwu Emperor, Tiande secreted his youngest son, Xu Yingxu, to Shanhaiguan. We loved him as our own son and called him Feng. Written and sealed in this, the first day of the first month of the 30th year of the reign of the Hongwu Emperor.’

  Feng’s world stopped spinning. He could hear its gears grind to a sudden halt. He tried to start it again, by peering at the document. He prayed it would disappear, like an apparition, or if not, that he had misread its meaning. Was there a lacuna? There often were in legal documents. Not this time. Park had written it. His father’s assiduous brevity was all over it. Feng read it again. The words were the same.

  He had to be certain. “Who is this Xu Yingxu?”

  “Feng, you are.”

  “N-no,” he stammered. “This isn’t true. This can’t be true. You’re my mother, aren’t you?”

  Lan’s face was stern and unflinching. Her expression was like a fist, smashing every word to pieces. None of it was true. All these years he had lived a gigantic lie. Something fractured in him, splintering into a thousand small pieces. It was the familial connections to the people he knew and loved. So fragile, it had dissipated in an instant. He felt hollow and empty, as if the Tao had sucked out his ch’i. He imagined this was how beggars and orphans felt, homeless, helpless. This morning, he belonged. Now he didn’t.

  “I wanted you to read this while I was here to answer your inevitable questions,” Lan said, then coughed into her ’kerchief.

  “Tiande. My father? I can’t believe it,” was all he could say.

  “Yes, it’s true. Every word of it.”

  “Why did the General give me to you?”

  “Park referred to the Emperor’s purge in his letter, but I’ll tell you more. Tiande helped Zhu Yuanzhang eradicate the scourge of the barbarian Mongol from the Zhongguo. When Zhu became the Hongwu Emperor, he ordered your father to strengthen our northern defences against the Mongol hoard. With the help of Dragon Master Wing, Tiande chose this site, the neck of land between the Yanshan Mountains and the Bohai Sea, to build the Shanhaiguan fortifications.

  “During that time,” the Lady Lan continued, “rebels mounted insurrections against the Emperor. To quell them, the Emperor culled tens of thousands of officials up to the ninth administration grade. He was jealous of anyone exhibiting success in the imperial court which meant that Tiande, his most celebrated general, was exposed and vulnerable. When your real mother, the Lady Xie, conceived, they hid her pregnancy from the court. You were born during the time Tiande was supervising the construction of the Shanhaiguan fortress. He brought you here and approached Magistrate Park and me.”

  Feng puffed out his cheeks. Thoughts battled for space in his already over-crowded mind. The Lady Lan continued, “Park worked in the Imperial legal department, where he befriended your father. That’s why they asked us – Park and I.”

  “Oh,” Feng said, scratching his head. “That makes a little more sense.” Not that it eased his burden. If he couldn’t trust his mother and father, who could he trust?

  “I realise this must be hard for you,” Lan said, coughing into her ’kerchief. “Heaven never blessed us with children. We’ve cared for you and loved you as our own.”

  He felt like he was walking on quicksand. “Does Qitong know? Precious? Strange? Granny Dandan? The Yamen staff?”

  Lan shook her head. With a shaky hand, she sipped her tea and wiped a dribble from her dry lips.

  On most days, all the objects in the room – the ornamental table, the fine chairs, the porcelain vase of flowers, the marble statues, the bronze artefacts – wore a kind, friendly face. But today they were frowning, hard and out of reach. They had lost their sheen, their soul. They had disappeared, along with his parents, his identity, his place in society.

  Nothing had changed, yet everything had changed.

  “What must I do?” he asked.

  “Try and fulfil Park’s deathbed instructions,” his mother said.

  “Try?”

  “Yes, your father thought they might be contested.”

  “How?” This was deteriorating by the moment. In the space of as many days, he had lost his father, not once, but twice, and his inheritance was heading the same way.

  “Your father had a brother in Beiping, who’s passed on now. When his children hear of Park’s death, your cousins might want to claim the estate.”

  “Might? Will, more like. Legally, it’s theirs. I have no claim.”

  “You have a legal training. You can fight the case and win. You’re our son.”

  “In all but name! And that’s what matters in the courts.”

  Lan lowered her head, pained by the sharp rebuke, which he instantly regretted. His mother, or rather his adoptive mother, was dying and he was acting like spoilt child. He had lost a father, but she had lost a husband and a ‘son’. This conversation could not be easy for her. For him, it was a test of his character, of his life, of his integrity. The first he’d ever had to undergo.

  “What happened to Tiande?” It was odd to say his name as his father.

  “He died, poisoned some fifteen years ago.”

  “The Emperor got him in the end, then,” he said, more a statement than a question.

  She nodded and replied, “Your father – Park, I mean – was so proud of your
acumen. He saw you as nothing less than a legal dragon scaling the heights of the profession.”

  “Thank you, Mo—,” he stammered and couldn’t say the whole word. What should he call her? She wasn’t his mother, not anymore.

  “There’s one more thing,” she added. “Tiande left you some letters.”

  “Where? Can I see them?”

  “I don’t have them. Luli does. When she visited earlier, she confirmed she still held them.”

  “Luli? But she only keeps letters from soul donors for their soul successors – those who later inherit their soul.”

  “She does, but she keeps other kinds of letters too. Tiande left them with her for a reason, so go and retrieve them.”

  “And what about… my new family?” he blurted out.

  “You are high born and connected to royalty. One of your sisters, Xu Yihua, is married to Zhu Di, our own Prince of Yan.”

  “So… the prince is my brother in law?” he stammered.

  “Yes, he is,” Lan said. Her shoulders slumped and she added, “I’m exhausted. I’m going back to my bed.” This interview had sucked as much out of her as it had from him. But she had less to give.

  “Precious,” he called out.

  The door opened and the maid emerged into the room. Had she been eavesdropping? Ah, what did it matter? The truth would come out in the end. It always did.

  Precious took his adoptive mother by the arm and helped her back to her room. If Lan was in a bad way, what about him? Talk about an upheaval. He was no longer the person he thought he was. In the time it took him to read the script on a scroll of paper, he’d changed from being the son of the local Shanhaiguan magistrate to the son of the most feared army general in recent memory.

  His situation was more than ambiguous.

  On the one hand, his ‘father’ had been poisoned. His ‘mother’ was dying. He was likely to lose his inheritance and he had definitely lost the magistrate’s post. On the other, he had acquired a new ‘family’, an elder sister and princely brother-in-law. The irony didn’t escape him. Tiande had placed him in the care of Park and Lan to protect him from an Emperor terrified of rebels, yet Feng now found himself an unwitting member of a rebel family. Was he always to be a rebel?

  CHAPTER 12

  The Temple of the Eight Immortals

  God of Thunder, clear out and kill the ghosts and send down purity.

  Behead the demons, expel the evil and keep us eternally safe.

  Let this command from the great Lao Tzu,

  Be executed with all due haste.

  TAO EXORCIST CHARM

  Bolin awoke in a sweat. He sat upright in bed, staring at the cold dawn rays sneaking under the lattice. As he dressed, a voice whispered in his soul, ‘Help me.’

  It was the same voice that had plagued his dreams all night.

  He felt like someone gripped his throat and was trying to throttle him, except there was no one in the room. Not a soul. He would not survive another night of hearing such plaintive cries. Nor could he face another day of endurance on the Laolongtou. He had reached the end of his tether. He needed help – from someone well versed in matters of the spirit worlds, of yin and yang, of mortals and immortals. Dong, the Abbot and Tao Celestial Master, would save him.

  Walking across the muddy field from the village to the temple, the cold wind gusted from the north, blasting his skin. His life felt chaotic, careering towards the edge of a precipice. He had lost track of himself. He felt the urgent need to clear the way and re-discover that fine balance of the Tao in himself.

  Two huge stone statues – one of a crouching tiger, the other a flying dragon, the yin and the yang – stood guard outside the Temple of the Eight Immortals. The human guard was Jin, the master stonemason who’d sculptured the Stone Guardian of Laolongtou. Even now, his hands were busy whittling a piece of pine wood.

  “What are you making?” Bolin asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jin said with a broad grin. Then, as inscrutable as ever, he added, “I’ll follow the way the grain falls and see what’s hidden inside the wood.”

  Bolin nodded. That was the natural way of the Tao.

  Jin led him across the path to the main temple. Every time Bolin stepped on its hallowed ground, a tingle of spiritual ch’i snaked up and down his spine and today was no exception. Built long before the Shanhaiguan section of the Great Wall, the temple was located according to the most harmonious Feng Shui alignments, at the conjunction of lines of spiritual ch’i in the land. The legend was that the locale would one day attract and host a powerful and benevolent Heavenly influence, encapsulated in the famous phrase set above the Zhendong Gate, The First Pass under Heaven. In the distance, the Great Pagoda, tall and elegant, nestled in the shadows of the Yanshan Mountains. A Taoist grotto was set behind it in the caves of the foothills.

  Bolin followed Jin through the gardens, whose only colour was provided by those three friends of winter – the plum, the bamboo and the pine. Jin led him to a stone courtyard, where the monks were praying by the cloister wall and invited him to sit cross-legged on a rush mat.

  Dong greeted him with typical warmth. Bolin explained what had happened to him, from the dream-visions of Heng falling to his death on the Great Wall and of General Shimei’s phantom, to the voices crying to him for help and the suffocating dreams. The Abbot spent a long time reflecting before he said, “It seems you are possessed of an errant spirit that wants release.”

  “Can you help?” Bolin asked.

  “I can. You need an exorcism,” Dong replied. “Do you want me to perform one?”

  At last! Real help. Bolin felt like a man, marooned for years on a desert island, who had spotted a boat on the horizon. “Yes,” he replied. “I’d like that very much.”

  “Wait there and we will prepare for the ceremony.” Dong said.

  When Dong returned, he wore an imperious-looking black gauze hat and a red and yellow silk Robe of Descent, the centre of which was decorated with images of the crane, the sacred bird on which Taoist Immortals ascended to Heaven. The border of the robe was edged with the embroidered images of the Eight Trigrams of the Book of Change, the I Ching, which made up the famous Bagua symbol.

  Dong prowled around the courtyard like a mountain lion with a pine needle snared in its paw. With meticulous care, Jin arranged various items on the silken altar cloth – an ivory spirit tablet, an image depicting the Eight Immortals, a blue and white porcelain vase of holy water, a mortar and pestle and a lit candle. Behind him, a temple servant swirled an incense burner, filling the courtyard with clouds of pungent, sweet-smelling smoke. Another monk beat a cymbal with great vigour. On the other side of the altar, a third monk chanted a mantra in a high, screeching voice.

  Dong’s movements were now like those of a giant tortoise. With a vacant gaze, the Celestial Master placed a blank scroll on the altar. With both hands, he then grasped the spirit tablet, an ancient symbol of wisdom and authority. Every action seemed to take an age to complete.

  Bolin watched this with an air of intense curiosity, not that he had any idea what to expect.

  Dong rocked from side to side, mouthing some sacred text. The presence of Heavenly ch’i aggregated in the courtyard. As the atmosphere thickened and intensified, Bolin struggled to keep his eyes open and his wits alert.

  Jin planted a quill pen in Dong’s hand, which he seemed to move over the blank scroll as if guided by a Heavenly presence. Dong seemed to drift in and out of a trance, writing a stroke here and there. Bolin was certain the Abbot was unaware of what he was writing, but writing he was.

  When he came out of the trance, Dong peered at the characters he’d written and nodded, apparently satisfied with the outcome of the spell. The incense fumes dispersed. The monks stopped beating the cymbals and intoning the mantra. In a silent moment, Dong pointed to the writing on the scroll and said, “This Taoi
st Charm will exorcise your demons.”

  Bolin grinned. How he had yearned to hear those words.

  The Tao Celestial Master cried,

  “God of Thunder, clear out and kill the ghosts and send down purity.

  Behead the demons, expel the evil and keep us eternally safe.

  Let this command from the great Lao Tzu,

  Be executed with all due haste.”

  Dong placed the scroll in the mortar and touched the candle flame to it. The red and yellow flames kissed the paper. In moments, the fire had consumed it to thin, blackened ashes. Then he ground the pestle into the ashes, poured them into a beaker of water.

  “Drink this,” he said and handed Bolin the beaker of grey-black, swirling ash.

  Bolin felt a surge of relief. Finally, he would be rid of this deviant spirit. He downed the last dregs and prodded his finger into the mortar to extract the residue. The ashes tasted bitter and some lodged in his mouth. What did he care? He was going to be free. He was going to get his life back.

  “How do you feel?” Dong asked.

  “Err, no different,” he said, darkening his brow.

  “Wait a little longer. An exorcism can take a while,” Dong suggested.

  The charm worked its magic through every part of his body and soul. His limbs started shaking and Bolin sat down again on the rush matting. Jin packed away the paraphernalia from the altar. After a while, Dong gathered the trail of his Robe of Descent and announced with a sour grimace, “The ceremony is over.”

  “What’s the matter? What’s happened?”

  “Nothing happened,” Dong said, in a curt way.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I completed the exorcism,” Dong insisted.

  “Good, so the spell is working and the malign spirit is leaving me.”

  “Well, yes and no,” Dong hissed.

  “I’m confused,” Bolin said.

  “Don’t be,” Dong replied. “It’s quite simple. I’m afraid the exorcism didn’t work.”

  “What do you mean, didn’t work? I thought you said you’d completed it.”