The Concubine's Daughter (20 page)

C
aptain Benjamin Jean-Paul Devereaux
was entering figures into the cargo log when he heard the commotion. It ebbed and flowed like a turning tide underlying the voices of his deck crew as
Golden Sky
made ready to dock at the loading wharf of the Ten Willows silk farm. This was a lucrative new port of call for
Golden Sky
; he had bought his first shipment of raw silk from the merchant Ming-Chou and sold it at a handsome profit to the factories in Shantung.

The silk farm had seemed peaceful enough, almost enchanted, on his first journey, when he had glimpsed the vision of a young girl bathing at the edge of the river. A vision so lovely, he could not be sure he had really seen her; the overhanging willows reflected in the river shadows played many tricks when disturbed by the bow wave of
Golden Sky
. He found that this fleeting image had stayed with him; when he had looked again, there had been nothing but a yellow cloud of settled water and the trickery of dancing sunlight.

Ben Devereaux would not be considered a big man on his forefathers’ island of Brittany and the rugged coast of Cornwall, but in Southern China, where a man was tall at five and a half feet, he was seen as a giant. His face was weathered by a lifetime at sea in all seasons and latitudes; his mother’s Manchu blood gave his complexion a sallow cast, finely lined as scrimshaw on a whale’s tooth. His thick bronze hair, streaked with veins of gold, was tied back with a thong of leather. His beard showed signs of the same sun-bleached gold, kept clipped but far from
neat. His eyes, gray as uncertain skies, were changeable as the restless oceans he had made his own.

The babble grew louder and more compelling as he closed the logbook with a sigh: another argument, no doubt, between his crew and the dockers, or with the passing junk crews who hated to see a foreign ship taking their business. Going on deck to stop the trouble, he found his men lining the handrails and hanging from the rigging. They were watching a chaotic gathering on the riverbank. Priests fed a bonfire with bundles of paper, as numerous black-clad women crowded around some object on the ground. They prodded and struck it with sticks, cheered on by a gang of unclean louts with emaciated dogs yelping at their feet.

He had seen such women before, the amahs of his own house and those of his friends, but never in a group of fifty or more like this. They looked, he thought in an instant, like a flock of ravens squabbling over a corpse As the women half dragged the object toward the river’s edge just astern of
Golden Sky
, he saw that it was a common pig basket, woven of willow twigs and rushes, known for its strength when restraining the struggles of a full-grown boar. But why would they be trying to drown their own pig? Even to the hardened sensibilities of a lifetime at sea, much of it on China’s coast and its far-flung rivers, there was something decidedly sinister in the whole rowdy procession. Ben’s partner and sailing master, Indie Da Silva, a native of Macao, was watching from the rail and turned to him, his usual Burmese cheroot jammed between dazzling teeth made mainly of pure gold. “I was about to call you, Skipper. This is a sight not meant for our eyes.” Indie was grinning widely beneath a wide-brimmed hat of light sisal hemp.

“Who are they? What in God’s teeth are they doing?” Ben asked.

“They are
sau-hai
—women without men.” Indie laughed, turning back, not wanting to miss a moment of the eerie spectacle.

“In the basket is one who has disgraced or insulted them in some way. If she has offended the code of
sau-hai
, they will drown her. She is no longer
mui-mui
, little sister, but
hah-dung-gai
—low-class whore. The priests have been brought to contain the demon until it is drowned. That is hell money they are burning, to appease the evil spirits who
might interfere on her behalf.” Indie shook his head. “They are very unforgiving, these grim sisters. But I warn you, this is none of our business.” Ben watched in silence as the grotesque bundle was hauled down the muddy riverbank, almost under the swoop of
Golden Sky
’s stern.

No sound came from the pig basket, and he wondered if the victim was already dead. He frowned; he did not share his partner’s casual interest in the scene before them, nor could he approve of the excitement of his crew … but he knew better than to show his disapproval. Indie had spent his life in the China trade and taught Ben all he knew. His father, so he proudly claimed, was a Chinese pirate and his mother a Portuguese barmaid from Macao. The sailing master spoke a half-dozen dialects and was more China Seas than Mediterranean. “Confounded heathens … is there no law against this kind of thing?”

Ben knew the emptiness of his question before Indie could answer. “How much justice was there in the ducking stool and the drowning of witches in your own country and half of Europe, not that long ago? None, I think.” Indie Da Silva expertly rolled his cheroot from one side of his wide-jawed mouth to the other. “Many a twelve-year-old was set alight because some landlord’s prize bull couldn’t get it up or his cows ran dry … or just for the damned fun of it. Out here in the backwaters they are a little slow in changing such things. If there is no warlord to lay down laws, they are free to make their own. This puffed-up merchant, Ming-Chou, answers to no one but Lu-Hsing, the god of affluence. I don’t think such gods have a conscience.”

As they came closer to the water’s edge, the hissings and mutterings of the
sau-hai
sisters grew quieter, then stopped. In eerie silence, a large rock was fastened to one end of the bundle before it was rolled down the last stretch of riverbank, where it splashed into the shallows with a billowing of yellow mud. It bobbed grotesquely in the whirling current, to slowly sink in a welter of murky bubbles. As if he read his partner’s mind, Indie spoke, his tone becoming more urgent.

“Do not think of interfering in this, Ben. The crew will lose face if they see their captain stooping to help one of the
mui-mui
by defying a priest. They will see you as a fool. The ship cursed and themselves with
it for serving such a madman.” He laughed easily, to make light of it. “Especially a known baby-eater such as Di-Fo-Lo, the mad
gwai-lo
of the mudflats. I know how you feel about injustice and cruelty, Ben, but it’s like spitting in the eye of one of their gods… . Best go below if it bothers you. We’re here to buy silk, not play god, remember?”

Indie’s voice took on a note of alarm as Ben stripped off his shirt and kicked off his boots, unsheathing the deck knife from his belt and jamming it between his teeth. “For pity’s sake—think, man! If you save the life of one condemned by the
sau-hai
, you pay for her sins as they see them. That life belongs to you and becomes your responsibility for eternity; your ancestors are her ancestors. If you discard her, you are cursed to perdition by the elders and forever hounded by her ghost. Is this what we want?”

Indie would never be sure if Ben heard him before he dived from the stern of
Golden Sky
. He entered the water cleanly, swimming down the slope of the bank, sheering steeply into green depths thick with dense beds of drifting weed. Following the mud trail left by the weighted basket bumping its way to the bottom, he saw the awful bulk of it rolling in the current, a chain of bubbles belching from inside.

The large stone roped to its bottom allowed it to rise and stand upright among clinging blades of leathery weed. His knife ripped away at the binding; the sodden casing came apart in his powerful hands. A howl of fury from the shore greeted him as he surfaced with the girl’s inert body in his arms, quickly joined by a babble of protest from the crew. Their nattering voices no longer controlled, the
sau-hai
sisters waded into the water to meet him as he lifted the unconscious figure from the river, falling upon him from all sides as he tried to rise and carry her clear of the shallows. Some clawed at him, while others tried to force him back, to drag the limp body from his arms and into the swiftly moving current. The women backed off only when Ben made wide sweeps with the knife, calling for Indie to bring help.

The ugly spectacle was over but the crew still jabbered angrily at the sight of their captain, legendary dock fighter Di-Fo-Lo, fending off a horde of hysterical women and a pack of skinny yellow dogs. Indie took
the companionway in a stride or two, entering the water, cursing the thick yellow mud and his white doeskin breeches, herding the vicious gang of women back up the riverbank and into the mill compound with a string of ferocious threats of his own.

Ben laid the unconscious girl on the bank, pumped the river water from her lungs, and breathed life into her from his own powerful chest. His anger had been made the blacker when he found the body in the pig basket to be that of a child, her feet badly disfigured, her mud-caked body smothered with wheals and cuts, half choked from the sodden rag stuffed in her mouth.

“She’s still alive,” he said aloud as Indie waded over to help him. “She must have put up one hell of a fight.”

“It would have been easier if she hadn’t.” Indie sighed ruefully. “Better for you, better for me, and a damn sight better for her. Now we need to face old Ming and his hoodlums. The old man won’t be too happy about your blasted gallantry, and I don’t blame him.” Indie spat the soggy stub of his cheroot into the water.

“This is bad joss. Foreigners are not exactly popular at the moment, or haven’t you noticed? I mean it, Ben; this is no time for heroics. We may be a long way from Shanghai, but the warlords are already in Canton; we can’t hide under the double dragon forever.” He retrieved the bedraggled remains of his hat, then helped Ben lift and carry the unconscious girl up the gangway and aboard
Golden Sky.
From the window of her quarters, Ah-Jeh had watched the proceedings with mounting fury, calling down bitter curses upon the head of this interfering foreign devil and all his kind.

Although Ben was no stranger to haggling over the price of anything from a sack of rice to a Ming vase, he was amazed at how little he had to pay for the life of a human being. He guessed the girl to be in her early teens, and she cost him less than he would pay for a good pair of boots. Ming-Chou and his comprador showed little interest in the fate of the girl in the pig basket, being more concerned with the time that was lost
in the weaving sheds. Since Ben had chosen to pull her out and to cause much annoyance and great loss of face among his people, the girl was his for the price asked plus additional costs for the trouble caused.

The sum was paid and the
sung-tip
and all her meager belongings handed to Captain Devereaux with a minimum of ceremony. He was told her name—“Lee Sheeah,” to his ear—and that she was thought to be thirteen years old. Now that she was his legal property, more dead than alive, reeking of river mud and swathed in weed, it was clear that Ming-Chou and his fat superintendent were anxious to be rid of her.

Beside him, Indie Da Silva tried to keep the impatience from his voice. “Well done, Ben; you are a hero, the owner of a half-dead Chinese chippie, probably riddled with disease. By the look of her, she may never walk normally again. Good for nothing but feeding silkworms and stealing the gold from your back teeth while you are sleeping”—he bowed with a sweep of his panama hat—“yours to do with what you will.”

The river was still with her as consciousness slowly returned to Li. Aware of movement, a lazy rise and fall to a gently creaking rhythm, she was afraid to open her eyes. Light had been cut off so suddenly, replaced by increasing darkness and cold in a silent world of yellows and greens, columns of rising bubbles, that she had thought the muddy taste of river water would take her final breath—until the foreign devil suddenly appeared before her, a silver-hilted knife between his teeth.

Her eyes flickered open, afraid of what she would see. The searing pain of her feet told her she was alive, but the stink that had been so much a part of her was gone completely. Everything around her was pleasing to the eye and soothing to the heart: a large table covered with maps and papers, a spoke-backed swivel chair, a polished brass lamp, shelves full of books, and pictures of ships. Portholes opened to a warm salty breeze, throwing moving circles of sunlight onto richly colored wooden paneling and showing glimpses of pale blue sky.