Sweet Li Jie

CHAPTER TWO

The Time Before - The Dreams of Wang Changling

Wang Changling, when still only shakily confident in his skill in reading and writing, had tried his hand at composing his own stories. The books he had bought were mostly about battles, and these provoked him to imitation, but at first he couldn't get beyond a sentence or two, and these were concerned with setting the scene, describing landscape, easier to write. After many trials, fist thumping of the desk, pens broken in two, inkpots shattered against the wall, and other melodramatic acts (according to Baoyu, who witnessed his master's agony from a safe distance, wondering what all the fuss was about), ideas were birthed. To begin with, Wang Changling plotted a version of himself as a foot soldier in Emperor Wu's army, grooming horses, tightening bowstrings, sharpening swords. Then, overconfident, he went to the other extreme, promoting himself to a general, his verse boasting of his bellicose appearance. He added glamour to his image. He wore a kerchief around his neck made of mulberry silk. He gave himself a certain pathos by being wounded in the arm, and being hurried off to a field hospital to be attended to by the Emperor's favourite concubine, Ying Ying. Her peach-blossomed cheeks, high forehead and dusky arched eyebrows - which, happily, were joined - captured his eyes. When she leant over him to apply plasters, he breathed in her scent of musk and orchid. He would woo her each day with a fresh bouquet of poesy composed in her honour. He was on the brink of tasting Ying Ying's lips when the jealous Emperor sent her to a distant province and ordered his execution. Wang Changling plotted his escape on the page. The night before his demise, he absconded with a trusty servant (whom he named Baoyu) to a faraway hamlet (which he named The Domain of Wang Qian) and remade his life as a landlord.

Real-life Baoyu interrupted his reverie with a bowl of onion broth. "You write, you write, but you rarely eat," Baoyu chided him affectionately. "You write in sunlight, you write by wicker torch, your eyes will blur and go blind. Your neck and shoulders will become fixed in a curve. Your peasants will start laughing at you as a hunchback, instead of at me. Come, let me rub oil into your fingers to give them life."

"How are they behaving?" Wang Changling asked, dismissing Baoyu's offer.

"Badly, as usual. They know you are distracted, don't care at all about the quality of the harvest."

"Well, beat them. I pay you for such. Who have you punished today? And yesterday? And before that?"

"Only the baker, a youngster, but brazen as a bull. He is the voice of malcontent. I lash him but next day he is as surly as ever. I tell him I will chop off his fingers so he cannot massage dough, but he faces down my threat. I don't know what to do. Should I tie him up and toss him for a few hours into the cesspit? I'll prepare my knife, I will chop off one finger to start with."

Wang Changling didn't respond, too busy reading what he had written, knowing it was barely competent, no flamboyant descriptions had come from his mind. Still, he would persist. He struggled hard to continue his story, but nothing came. He chewed studiously on dried fungus and pickled bracken, hunched over his desk writing lines, then crossing them out. Night came and he was still gripping his pen as if to defend it against thieves (which he knew himself to be, having quietly stolen sentences from books, to help his story along).

He knew he had to do more reading, more preparation, for a new assault on the page. But that was exactly his predicament. All his books were about assaults, small wars and large wars, and he was growing more uneasy over all the killings, though his own father had been a (petty) warlord. Still, reading of the deeds of some of the Emperors overwhelmed him, their cruelties so stupendous that he turned page after page in disbelief, almost against his will, a slave to the act of reading. The story of Yang Lun, a rebellious peasant boy who aspired to be a prince, obsessed Wang Changling, and strangely, for one in his position as a wealthy landowner, his sympathies were with the peasant, not with the Emperor who tortured him.

He had paused when he reached a passage about the failure of the Yang Lun Rebellion, the capture and torture of Yang Lun. He breathed in so deeply that it was as if he was suddenly released from a stranglehold. He was scared of the ability of writers to slit throats and conduct slaughter on the page. He was scared of the potential of his fancy. He called out to Baoyu for water.

"What has befallen you, master?" Baoyu asked as Wang Changling lifted the cup to his lips, hands unsteady.

"This reading, I have to foresake it," Wang Changling said. "Take these pages to the fire, rid me of them. No, rid them of me."

Baoyu would have grinned but for the condition of his jaw. "I told you so, I told you that reading and writing would be the death of you! You don't eat, you don't sleep, your eyes fret by day and by torchlight."

"Get out of my sight!" Wang Changling cried, but then relented, summoning him back. Wang Changling was fearful of being left alone in case his fancy conjured up dreadful and bloodstained scenes all on its own, and forced his hand to take up pen and create mayhem.

It was still daylight, so he had made Baoyu saddle the horses and the two of them rode to the fields to watch over the peasants. Baoyu, emboldened by his master's presence, and wanting to impress him, dismounted, took up a stone to pelt at one of the women who was resting against a tree.

"Stop your stupidness!" Wang Changling shouted, gesticulating at Baoyu, and Baoyu let the stone drop, surprised by the urgency of his master's voice. Wang Changling was surprised by his command. Normally he would have let Baoyu ill-treat the peasants with his whip. Now, such cruelty made him feel faint. He had to tighten his grip on the reins to steady both his body and his mind. Baoyu looked morosely at the stone, then looked up at his master. Wang Changling was distracted, gazing into the distance, which was within. The compassion he felt for the sleeping woman was unfamiliar. He was becoming a stranger to himself. That night he was restless, wondering what had become of him, and whether he could cure himself of his obsessive urge to read and write, which was making him in its way as disfigured as Baoyu. He resolved to become his normal self. Tomorrow and thereafter he would personally supervise Baoyu's punishment of the peasants.

Though he drank rice wine for distraction, and ate little so he would long only for food, Wang Changling still could not rid himself of the desire to read more about the Yang Lun Rebellion. He was hypnotised by the strong light of the white page before him. Baoyu had done his best to prepare more dumplings to beguile his tongue, but Wang Changling ordered him instead to shave more bamboo nibs and mix powders and liquids into ink, in preparation for his next composition. In the meantime he continued to read the fable of the Emperor and Rebel Yang Lun. a fable because its descriptions of abuse and executions were unreal, beyond belief, yet factual.

Halfway through the 'fable', Wang Changling had pledged once more to abandon books, abandon writing, abandon thoughts of merciless cruelty, abandon Concubine Ying Ying. In the following days and weeks he was too disconsolate to do anything. He stayed in bed, not bothering to wash himself or eat more than a few mouthfuls of corn. His room stank. Baoyu, devoted as ever, pleaded with him to at least trim his moustache and beard which had grown so unruly that his mouth was becoming invisible. Wang Changling took to drink instead, and, late at night, when song seized him, he had bellowed out the words his mother had taught him - childhood songs remembered scrappily, but which evoked images of his mother spooning sugared porridge into his mouth or swinging him in the air until he was dizzy with happiness. He had sought out her breast while his father snored. She gave her milk readily and when he was sated, he looked up to meet her eyes. She smiled on him and he struggled for breath because she was so beautiful. Now, he sang, between gulps of rice wine, in honour of his mother. To him his voice sounded measured, but Baoyu, sleeping on a mat by the doorway, stuffed his ears with straw to temper the noise. Wang Changling sang, imagining that his words were drifting through a meadow of poppies, gathering scent and soaring to meet the night sky where they would beguile the stars. Baoyu pressed more straws to his ears.

*

"I will be unwed all my life," Wang Changling had announced one morning as Baoyu returned from the fields. He had drunk much wine the night before and dreamed of the Emperor killing some of his concubines during the Yang Lun Rebellion. He had woken in a sweat and had this sudden thought, calling out his mother's name, remembering the lute she played, whose melody used to ease him into sleep.

"I will be unwed all my life," he told Baoyu. "My mother is not here to guide me." He paused to remember how his mother used to tell him that one day he would be blessed with a bride whom he would dote upon. His mother had said that every day he and his bride would take a leisurely walk to the river, through poppy fields,...