Deep as the sky red as t.., p.28
Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, page 28
Pak Ling laughed. “Of course not. It is no simple feat to subjugate someone the likes of you, as my men have discovered! Yet it seems to me you are in a quandary. After the battle at Tiger Gate, a good portion of your men are either gone or in my thrall. My informants tell me your ship sustained heavy damage. Cooperation, generally speaking, entails a sharing of resources, and right now, you don’t have much to share. That is, except for—”
“Information,” she said, completing his train of thought. “And expertise. You want our help hunting down all remaining pirates.” Next to her, Cheung Po tensed.
“You did not earn your epithet as the Scourge of the South China Sea for nothing, Mrs. Cheung. Indeed, the endeavor of tracking down and bringing to justice the many pirates still out there is more time-consuming than I would like. Doable, but frustrating. I would sooner return to Peking and aid the emperor with more important tasks.”
He signaled for his attendant, who brought out more tea for Pak Ling to waste through his elaborate rituals. What kind of tasks did a man like this consider “more important”? To Shek Yeung, this negotiation was a matter of life and death, not only for her but also for countless others. Was it possible that, to Pak Ling, this negotiation was already an afterthought, just another page in his long and continuing chronicle of victories?
“What’s going to happen to the captured pirates?” Cheung Po asked quietly.
“Naturally, they will face justice.”
“You mean death.”
“I do not write the laws.”
“But you’re meeting with us, talking about cooperation, which means you can at least bend them.”
“What he means,” Shek Yeung said, “is that we are not comfortable with this proposal, though we remain hopeful that we can devise a proposal that will preserve face all around.”
“I fail to see how. Men who fail to follow the rules must face punishment, lest they inspire others to transgress. As the Master says, ‘When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot.’ ”
“Why should we follow your rules when your rules weren’t made with us in mind?” Cheung Po said, his voice reverberating in the courtyard. “What did the emperor think was going to happen when he left his own people to starve?”
“The emperor is saddened by the plight of his people.”
“Wonderful, we’ll feast on his sadness.”
She resisted the urge to intervene as she normally did whenever Cheung Po lost his temper. Besides, even if she could get him to calm down, their current negotiation strategy wasn’t working. Men like Pak Ling valued the idea of law, regardless of whether said laws were equitable. The tea ritual alone had told her as much, the slavish devotion to form. The many quotes from Confucius and his ilk—men who’d tried to infer order from an inherently orderless world—were just confirmation.
She nudged Cheung Po with her foot. When Cheung Po glanced over, she indicated with what she hoped was an inconspicuous nod that he should continue with his show of rage. His expression didn’t change, but he nudged her foot back. She hoped he understood her meaning.
“The solution I am offering is already far kinder than what any other in my position would,” Pak Ling said to Cheung Po. “In exchange for cooperation, you and your wife are being pardoned for the countless atrocities you have committed. Do you realize the extent of cruelty you have shown?”
“No more than what you’ve shown,” Cheung Po spat with, in Shek Yeung’s mind, a touch more theatricality than usual.
“It is not cruelty but law and order. Without law and order, the people lose confidence in their rulers. As the Master says, confidence in the ruling state is more important than food. Death is the lot of man, but a state cannot stand without the confidence of its subjects.”
“Without living, healthy subjects, a state is just an idea. Ideas can be replaced, but lives cannot.” Cheung Po stood abruptly, clattering the tableware in the process, and said to Shek Yeung, “We’re leaving. There’s no negotiating with villains who believe themselves heroes.”
This was her chance. She smiled apologetically at Pak Ling and called for more tea. Cheung Po sat. She took the clay pot from the attendant before Pak Ling could and then proceeded to replicate the ritual she’d observed. “Dignified conduct can be learned,” she said, “if people are given the opportunity.”
Pak Ling drank the tea, looking mildly impressed.
“I see your perspective, Your Excellency, but this quarrel between you and my husband puts me in a terribly difficult situation,” she continued. “As you probably know, the fleet is half mine, half his. Even if I were to agree to your proposal, he would still be free to do with his half as he will. Not that I would leave him to face this alone. After all, I am his wife, and as disciples of Confucius would say”—she scoured her memory for something she could use—“the relationship between husband and wife should be as ruler and subject.”
“You are familiar with the works of the Master and the Second Sage?” Pak Ling said, now looking genuinely surprised.
“I would not presume to use the word familiar, but I know wise words when I hear them, and I recognize a wise man when I see one. The fact is, the emperor has declared there would be no mercy for captured pirates, which means every pirate has a strong incentive to fight to the death. If my husband rejects your proposal, then we will have no choice but to go back to war. Our fleet, while weakened, is by no means toothless. Moreover, we will regain our numbers as soon as there is another famine, and there will be another soon, given how much of the land the emperor has reassigned for commercial crops.
“True, you may win in the end, but at what cost? Even if you survive it all, the emperor will consider you to have lost if you use up too much of his money dealing with his pirate problem. How certain are you that you can bring an end to this quickly? How certain are you that Ma-Zou favors you over me?
“There is no other way. We can both win today, or we can both lose.” She sat back in her chair and folded her hands on the table.
Pak Ling sat there in thought for a long time. “So you are asking for …”
“A full pardon for everyone in my fleet.”
“You are asking too much.”
“I am not, and Your Excellency knows this. Most of my crew are not heartless criminals but family men. Without them, their families will starve, and in starving, many of them will turn to crime. Now imagine the praises they will sing of the emperor, of you, if you allow them to return to their families. Imagine all of their children growing up with respect for the Qing. By forgiving these men’s crimes, you make it possible for the next generation to follow the rule of law.”
“I cannot extend the pardon to those who were not in your fleet, nor to those who refuse to give up piracy,” Pak Ling said.
“I would not expect you to.”
This time Pak Ling signaled his attendant to bring over some liquor, and the three of them toasted to this agreement. “You know,” Pak Ling said, sighing, “the Master offers insight about these very circumstances in the Analects. ‘The man who is bold and dissatisfied with poverty will rebel.’ He is right, of course. And who can be satisfied with poverty? With hunger? I was not wholly lying to you that day in the tavern, Mrs. Cheung. There are those of us in Peking who feel for these fishermen who turned to piracy to feed their families. Still, a crime is a crime.”
“Will you be turning your attention to the remaining fleets after this?” Shek Yeung asked.
“Yours was the last for which I was responsible. Kwok Po-Tai surrendered to me a month ago.”
So that was why the bastard had failed to appear. “I take it he is still alive?” Shek Yeung said.
“He is.”
“What about his men?” Cheung Po asked.
“His men were not a part of the agreement he made with me,” Pak Ling said, “though if he had made as convincing and impassioned an argument as your wife just made, their lives might have been spared. It is what one would expect from a mother.”
After a couple more drinks, Shek Yeung signaled to Cheung Po that the two of them should leave. A sleeping tiger was still a tiger. On their way out of the estate, Shek Yeung decided to voice the concern that had been on her mind for months. “Now that we are allies, may I ask a question? The Europeans at the Tiger Gate, how did they come to partner with the Qing? Did you approach them?”
“Actually, they approached the court in Peking,” Pak Ling said. “They were, as the emperor also was, deeply vexed by the successes of your fleet. You might be pleased to hear they deemed you to be the biggest threat to their enterprises in China. The emperor thought there would be no harm in forging a temporary partnership.”
“And you?”
“Is there something you wish to say, Mrs. Cheung?”
She shook her head. “I mean no criticism. I simply wish to pass along a warning. There’s a lot of talk in my network that these Europeans are growing increasingly restless, hungry. They want far more out of China. If you think that they’ll be satisfied going back to the usual arrangement after the elimination of piracy, I’m afraid you’re mistaken.”
Pak Ling waved dismissively. “We are aware of the Europeans’ designs. There is no need for you to concern yourself.”
“With respect, I don’t believe you know the full extent. You’ve seen their new ships, yes? Their stockpile of black powder? On whom do you think they’ll be using that stockpile after the pirates are gone?”
“With respect,” Pak Ling said, parroting her, “your fleet alone must have used up most of their stockpile.”
“What about their smuggling of opium? Surely you’ve heard about their plan to flood China with opium.”
“Opium is indeed a vice of many of our countrymen,” Pak Ling said, sounding a bit irritated, “and unfortunately the Europeans seek to profit off this, but you can hardly call their scheme unexpected. Instead of attempting to control their behavior, we must control our people so that they do not succumb to this mind-numbing, body-weakening evil. Once we succeed, these foreigners will have no recourse.”
If only people were as easy to control as Pak Ling seemed to believe. The Europeans’ plan, or at least its general shape, slowly became clear to her. They wanted the pirate alliance destroyed because they perceived the pirates, not the emperor’s forces, as their biggest barrier to dominance in the South China Sea. With the pirates out of the way, they could smuggle and control the price of opium with greater ease, perhaps use it to weaken the populace enough to somehow secure leverage over Peking. How exactly they intended to accomplish that last part, she didn’t know, but if she understood anything about humanity, the method would be bloody.
“And what if you don’t succeed in controlling our people?” Shek Yeung asked. “What will happen to them? What will these foreign powers do? The emperor needs to quickly realize that whatever cooperation they’ve promised him will reach only as far as the tethers of their patience.”
Pak Ling just shook his head. “China’s glory is forever.”
She could have contradicted him then. She could have tried to convince him to see things her way. Yet a strange calm had settled over her. Her fight was finished. Whatever happened to the people of China in the future, happened on the head of the emperor and the heads of all the sycophants in his court who could not see beyond their own ambitions to the truth of the world.
She allowed herself to relax only after she and Cheung Po had put a good distance between themselves and Pak Ling’s estate. Her instincts told her he would uphold his end of the agreement, but almost two decades of living among base men had woven into her a spider-silk sensitivity to ill will that also inadvertently shuddered at many other human foibles, those little petals of vanity or burs of pride. How well would this sensitivity serve her in civilian life?
“We should get back to the ship, tell everyone the news,” Cheung Po said.
“You go ahead. I have business to handle.”
“Do you need help?”
“It’s personal.”
“Oh.”
“See you.” Then as he turned to walk away, she touched his elbow and added, “Thank you.” She could not have explained to him in even a thousand years the many feelings behind those simple words.
But maybe she didn’t have to. He nodded in a way that suggested he knew.
What the future held for the two of them was anyone’s guess. She hoped Cheung Po would one day get that large family he wanted, even though she probably wouldn’t be the one to give it to him. He would leave her when he finally came to that realization. They’d come together to stay alive, which was different from staying together to live. Or maybe he truly cared for her and their marriage would weather this transition. She’d be okay either way, though, cutlass to her neck, she’d tell you that she would prefer it if he stayed.
She wanted so badly to talk to someone about all this that she soon found herself near the sam-hop-yuen. You won’t believe what has happened, she thought she might start by saying, or You can’t understand the strain I was under, or simply, I’m sorry. By the time she’d arrived in front of the gate, each option sounded more ridiculous than the last. Rather than banging on the door, she pressed her ear to it. It seemed to her, or maybe this was just what she wanted to believe, that she heard laughter coming from the courtyard, along with the patter of tiny feet and the clunk-swoosh of food-filled bowls being set on and then slid around a table.
What kind of stories about Shek Yeung would Yan-Yan tell her child? What kind of stories would she grow up to hear from others? That Shek Yeung was a villainess, drunk on power and greed, or that she was a witless whore who’d gone along with whatever Cheng Yat and Cheung Po had suggested? Alternatively, people might one day tell of her courage (because courage made for a more appealing heroine than desperation), this lone woman who stood against the corrupt Qing court. It was all fine. In the end, stories were not reality, could not be reality. The storyteller decided where to start the story and where to end it, which parts to sink into and which to skim over.
She set off toward the Ma-Zou temple but changed her mind about halfway there. Instead she walked along the shore until she found a relatively secluded spot. To her left a couple of old men were chatting with each other while waiting for fish to bite. To her right several children, no older than eight years old, were playing. Neither group paid her any mind.
This would do. The temple of Ma-Zou was as much at sea as in lacquered, lantern-haunted halls, perhaps even more so. Shek Yeung crouched, picked out a handful of the most beautiful seashells, and skittered them out toward the horizon.
“Ma-Zou, Ma-Zou,” she said, “I brought a gift for you.”
There was one poem Shek Yeung knew fairly well, by the poet Meng Haoran. She didn’t know where she first heard it, and she definitely never tried to learn it, but somehow it found a way to nest in her memories:
The provinces of Jing and Wu meet each other on the water.
You depart in the spring when the river is wide.
At sunset, where will this ship moor?
Gazing at sky’s end can rend your heart.
True enough, but one needed to gaze at the horizon to use a sextant and to quell seasickness. For poets, heartbreak was something to marvel at under a lens. For seafarers, heartbreak was something to ignore because once one stopped ignoring it, one could never not feel it again. How else could she have kept moving, how else could she have killed all those people, how else could she have kept all those people alive?
She didn’t even realize she was crying at first. Loud sobs followed, and it was such an unfamiliar sensation—she hadn’t cried like this since she was a child—that for a moment she worried she might die from this burning in her chest and throat, from her breath whooshing and whooshing from her body like an ebb tide.
Was this what Ma-Zou had intended for her all along? Was fate always driving her in this direction, or did she bumble her way here, surviving by her stubbornness, wits, and refusal to dwell too deeply on the cost of survival? By the belief that fate wanted more for her than the unnoticed death of a prostitute or the violent death of a criminal? Maybe Heaven had no will, just as the sea had no desires, and none of it, not the prophecies, not the prayers and offerings, had been real. Maybe all along she’d had only herself.
In one of the stories about Ma-Zou, she was just a mortal girl named Lam Mak-Neung who grew up in a small fishing village. She lived, she made the kinds of mistakes that all mortals did, and then she died. It was only after her death that people began to tell stories about her, writing her in their minds as girls were often written: delicately, bravely, profanely, sacredly.
If Ma-Zou had been just a girl, then she was long gone, like the girl Shek Yeung had been before all of this. That girl’s ghost still came around now and then, flitting in and out of her dreams, asking Shek Yeung questions for which she lacked the answers, these particular questions as of late: What now? Who will you be now that there is no need for you anymore? How will you reckon with everything you’ve done?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Michelle Brower, who read the weird little stories I sent and for some reason thought it a good idea to take me on as a client anyway (and then for representing my even weirder pirate novel). There is a reason why your clients stick with you for years and years.
To Grace McNamee, who for some reason decided to buy the even weirder pirate novel. Thank you for being the most insightful and attentive editor out there—I could not have asked for a better experience.
To the Bloomsbury and Macmillan teams, past and present: Jon Lee, Callie Garnett, Valentina Rice, Rosie Mahorter, Marie Coolman, Lauren Moseley, Kenli Young, Phoebe Dyer, Nicole Jarvis, Akshaya Iyer, and everyone else who worked on the book. Thank you Yuko Shimizu for this astonishing cover.
To my NYU professors Sasha Hemon, Myla Goldberg, Hari Kunzru, and John Freeman for kicking my ass but, like, kindly. My writing improved tremendously under your guidance. I apologize for what you had to read from me at the beginning.
