‘It’s you... Don’t do that to me.’
Jiang looked thoughtful and relaxed. Cheng didn’t like this at all. Anything Jiang liked was usually only good for Jiang, and equally often bad for someone else.
‘Who is this abbot? Jiang asked.
Cheng stopped concentrating on his breathing and tried to resist the prickling that took hold of his skull under the scalp. ‘I don’t know.’
Jiang’s moustache turned up at the ends as he smiled.
‘You were terrified when you saw him. There must be a reason for that. You have met him before, haven’t you?’
The junk tried to judder round in Cheng’s vision, though it never actually moved. ‘I saw him once, yes. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know his name, or where he comes from, or what he wants.’
‘What do you know about him?’
Cheng’s gut tightened, though he couldn’t tell whether this was simply from remembered terror or from fear that Jiang would think he was lying and be offended. ‘I used to be a bandit.’
‘I know.’
‘The last robbery I did, a group of us attacked a caravan and looted it. There was myself, Pang, some others. We took shelter in a cave on a hillside, and there... there these three monks found us. They attacked, we fought. We got away.’
‘That doesn’t sound like something that would leave my friend Cheng in mortal terror.’
Cheng looked around for a way out and found none. There was an open door on the deck, but even if he went through it Jiang or someone else would ask him about the monks later.
They’d ask again and again until he told them, and if he just ran away the whole issue would resurface at every opportunity. There was no escape.
He went into the junk’s galley to pilfer a bottle of rice wine, and brought it back to the deck. Gathering his thoughts, he sat on a thick coil of rope, unstopped the bottle, and drank from it. The wine burnt pleasantly, chasing away the prickles from under his skin.
‘We didn’t win that fight,’ he admitted. ‘These three monks were good enough to join the Tigers, and more. They were the best that Shaolin training has to offer. So they beat us, and they bound us. Then something happened.’
‘Something?’
Cheng spread his hands and looked helplessly heavenwards, in search of the right words. ‘The cave wasn’t just a cave, it was man-made. A great hall, maybe, with jewels and quicksilver for stars in the ceiling. That night, it was
yuelaan jit
and the full moon. And the ghosts came.’
‘Ghosts?’ Jiang echoed, and a couple of men swabbing the deck behind him looked at each other with varying degrees of disbelief.
‘I saw lights in the ceiling, flying through the room like reflections on water. Then that abbot changed and his eyes glowed like lanterns.’
‘He froze like a corpse waiting for a spell to command it.
That’s when we escaped. The ghosts took that abbot and maybe the other monks as well. And I came as far away from that cave as it was possible to get while still being in China.’
Jiang looked back at the doorway to below decks. And now he’s here.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Are you going to run away again?’
Cheng let out the kind of laugh that desperately wants to be a tearful wail. It felt like it was slashing at his stomach as it came out. ‘Where else could I go?’
There was a quiet call from below. The ferryman had arrived, and Cheng was only too happy to get off the junk.
Jiang watched him go then went back below decks.
The evening was peaceful and calm, with birdsong fading.
Vicki was quite enjoying the peace of it - the coolness of the air, the quiet, the smell of plants and trees. She had almost managed to dismiss that strange flicker as a figment of her imagination.
She wasn’t as emotionally attached to Ian as Barbara was, but she did care about both of them and could feel worry about them within her. She thought if her worry was making her vision falter like that, she wouldn’t like to experience whatever Barbara must be going through. She supposed that must be a hundred times worse, or even a thousand. Finally, she decided that maybe she couldn’t actually imagine how bad Barbara must be feeling.
Barbara was trying to behave normally, of course, but Vicki could tell the difference.
As the three of them walked under the waxing moon Fei-Hung dropped back into step with Vicki. The venom she had seen in his face when they were looking at the tower had gone, and he now looked at Barbara with reluctant concern.
‘Miss...?’
‘Everyone calls me Vicki.’
‘Vicki... Is Chesterton Miss Wright’s husband?’
‘No. At least not formally.’ She thought about it for a moment. ‘Actually, I think maybe they are sort of married, but they just don’t know it yet.’
Fei-Hung smiled faintly. ‘I think I know what you mean.
Sometimes it is just meant to be.’
‘I suppose so.’ She looked at him. He was barely older than herself, but there was a wisdom in his eyes that was almost as palpable as the wiry muscles that covered his body.
‘You’re nothing like I imagined...’
Fei-Hung looked puzzled for a moment, then quickly covered this with an expression Vicki could only think of as being on guard. ‘You imagined me? You mean you’ve heard of me?’
‘Oh yes. I’ve seen -’ She caught herself at last. Cars and telephones weren’t around yet, so she wasn’t sure that moving pictures had been invented either. ‘I’ve read about you.’
‘The
gwailos
- sorry, no offence - the Europeans know my name? They’ve been writing reports?’
‘Well, not exactly.’
Vicki wondered how the Doctor, Ian and Barbara coped with not being able to talk about things that were common knowledge to a time traveller, but a secret of the future to anyone they met. She doubted she would ever get used to it.
‘You said something about there being a festival on now,’
she said, more to make conversation and relieve the boredom of walking than actually to learn anything.
‘Yes,’ Fei-Hung nodded. He seemed unsure whether he should say any more, but finally continued. ‘In the seventh moon of the year the gates of hell are opened so that the ghosts of the dead can come and look for food, and take revenge on people who wronged them. So we make offerings, and offer prayers, to dissuade the ghosts from harming us. At the full moon there will be feasts and operas to pacify the ghosts and bring good luck for the harvest season.’
‘How did this festival start?’ Barbara had joined them. ‘I mean, there must be a reason why the ghosts would be let out,’ she said.
‘You don’t believe this stuff, do you?’ Vicki murmured, low enough, hopefully, for Fei-Hung not to hear her.
‘No,’ Barbara whispered back. ‘But a culture’s folklore is very much a part of its history, and understanding it helps you to understand the history.’
‘It’s a very old legend.’ Fei-Hung answered Barbara, showing no sign of having heard their doubts. ‘Long ago, before even the First Emperor, there was a greedy, selfish woman. She never thought of anyone but herself. When the poor begged for her help in the street, she would laugh in their faces and push them away.’
‘She sounds perfectly awful.’ Vicki said.
She also had a son, but he was virtuous and kind. Exactly the opposite of his mother in every way. He had a great deal of compassion for everyone, and one day he decided he could best help his fellow people by becoming a monk.
‘This rich woman was very angry with him for that, and thought he was a fool. Worse, she saw it as a betrayal as she thought he should be a professional craftsman, who would earn money and give it to her.’
‘Wasn’t she proud of her son?’
Fei-Hung shook his head. ‘She saw him only as a source of money. She didn’t love him for himself, as family, but only loved money and the things she could buy with it. When she realised he would not change his mind, and would not earn money for her, she wanted revenge.’
‘On the monks?’ Vicki asked. ‘Did she attack them?’
‘People offered food to them because they had little other means of supporting themselves…’
‘These monks would be vegetarian?’ Barbara supposed.
‘Exactly. And this woman secretly put meat into her offerings before giving them to the monks. In this way, she forced them - however unwittingly - to break their vow that they would be responsible for no harm coming to other beings.’
‘Didn’t they know that plants are living beings?’ Vicki asked.
‘Vicki!’
Barbara turned back to the baffled-looking Fei-Hung.
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s all right. Anyway, this woman was eventually punished by being sent to a hell where she sat on a bed of spikes, clinging to a basin of blood. Her son, of course, had compassion for her as well as for everyone else, and so he travelled into the hells to find her and try to relieve her suffering.
‘When he found her he tried to feed her, but the food he offered would burn to ashes, and water or wine would turn to blood. So he did the only other thing he could think of - pray for her. The Buddha heard and was moved by the monk’s compassion, and decided to intervene. He decreed that once a year the gates of hell were to be opened for a month, so that the souls of the damned could return to earth for relief from their sufferings.’
‘And that’s now?’ Vicki looked sidelong at the shadows that were falling across the road from trees and bushes.
Superstitions of this sort had disappeared centuries ago, as far as she was concerned, and yet the darkness seemed more alive than it had before Fei-Hung told the story. More alive and, by extension, more intriguing. Vicki couldn’t help but wonder what animals - or anything else - might be hidden in the deepening black that was closing in around the road.
She felt a thrill run up her back. It was easy to imagine all manner of strange creatures - ghosts and dragons, perhaps -
lurking in the shadows, awaiting careless travellers. She knew such things were just from children’s stories, but it was kind of exciting to think about running into them.
She wanted to laugh, and to skip along the road the way she had skipped through the roof-top gardens of her childhood home, and through the corridors of the Ship she had been on before she met the Doctor, Ian and Barbara.
Then she remembered the crash, and the deaths, and she didn’t want to laugh or skip any more. She decided it was silly to want to seek out monsters and danger - those were the things that sought you out and killed the ones you loved when you least expected it.
But she was enjoying the sense of freshness that being in a new place and time brought her, and wondered if China still had pandas in 1865. Seeing one of those would probably be more pleasant than seeing a ghost.
It began to rain and Vicki wished she was wearing clothes that were more waterproof. And the jacket of Barbara’s trouser suit wouldn’t react well to the wet if it was as woollen as it looked.
Fei-Hung put up an umbrella, and both women came closer to him to shelter under it, though it wasn’t really large enough to cover three people. ‘How fortunate I am,’ he said.
‘The ladies flock to me like birds to a tree.’
Lei-Fang was gone when Jiang returned to his lord’s cabin.
Whether the militiaman had been taken away for treatment or tossed overboard, Jiang didn’t know. He didn’t even know whether Lei-Fang still lived, or whether he had succumbed to the diabolical wounds that had been inflicted on him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, either.
Jiang opened a shutter set into the wall and looked across the river to shore. Only the dying lanterns that the junk passed showed that the vessel was moving at all. Jiang could scarcely believe that such a smooth journey was possible.
Ahead, a jetty jutted out from a small promontory. It was half-hidden by bushes and reeds, and the buildings beyond it were equally well camouflaged by trees.
Jiang watched a column of men march along the riverside.
The smell of burning wood, brick and flesh came before them, and the low clouds behind them glowed with reflected firelight. Glints of infernal light caressed the rain-spattered steel the men wore and carried, giving the column a glistening, serpentine appearance.
‘Magnificent, are they not?’ The abbot looked out, his features relaxed. Apart from the armed men, there had been nothing much to see during the short voyage. Just rice fields and the occasional village, but the abbot wore the look of an art connoisseur enjoying his collection.
The sights had bored Jiang. He saw no brothels, or arenas, or wine shops. The abbot looked as if he was being inspired, but Jiang couldn’t imagine what could be inspiring him. He closed his eyes, inspired only to sleep.
‘Men of learning,’ the abbot said suddenly, and Jiang snapped into wakefulness as best he could, trying not to look irritated at his master’s timing. ‘Those are the most important of your targets.’
‘But the foreigners -’
‘- are a symptom of the ill health of my empire’s body under the Manchu, not the cause of it. To cure the empire, we must deal with the cause.’
‘Yes, my Lord,’ Jiang acknowledged.
The abbot put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Where your militia find astrologers, scholars of alchemy, powerful priests, they will find the empire’s medicine. Those men you will bring before me. In chains if you have to.’