Master Wu has eclectic taste in curtains. The window immediately beyond Elisabeth’s blonde head has drapes of white cotton with cherries on them. They are not lined, so the Moon (the actual one, not the butter dish) is visible in the sky beyond. The window behind Master Wu possesses thick, green velour things, winterish and warm, with a pattern of gold coins woven in. I turn my head. The window over by the desk has brown curtains. They are made of rough silk, and probably were at one time quite expensive, although they are strikingly dull.
Something else, however, has now attracted my attention. On each window, there is a run of bells. They are small, but not so small as to produce a little tinkling noise. These bells would make a shrill, sharp clanging. Each bell hangs suspended on a separate length of thread, and each thread is fastened at the top to a thicker line, which in turn falls from a slender shelf tacked to the frame. Knocking one bell would cause it to ring, but might not disturb the others. Removing one bell, conversely, would almost certainly set off the whole lot. Opening the window even a little bit would sound like the percussion section’s after-show party. I turn round and look at the door. The bells there are set up slightly differently. There is also a cat’s cradle arrangement on the fire guard. In fact, when Master Wu goes to bed, putting the guard in front of the coals, he will be surrounded by a low-tech burglar alarm. I realise that I have looked at the bells and the windows any number of times without actually seeing them. How odd.
Master Wu and Elisabeth are still discussing the planetary question, but Master Wu, at least, has lost interest—or rather, he has found something more interesting. My discovery has woken me up. I was sort of cow-like, placid and digesting (or, in fact, ruminating). At some point during my examination of the bells, as I became more intent and focused, the impact of my presence in the room changed. Master Wu clocked this immediately, and is now watching me while he explains that even if the Moon were low in the sky, the Chinese would still have to go up to it, while the Americans could simply drop on it, and Elisabeth has noticed her teacher’s divided attention and followed it back to me, and so they both put cosmology on the back burner on hold, and Master Wu asks me what is wrong.
“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing’s wrong. I just noticed the bells. On the windows.”
“Oh, yes!” Master Wu nods. “Very important. I am the Master of the Voiceless Dragon, you see. Many enemies.”
“Enemies?”
“Oh, yes.” He smiles genially. “Of course.”
“What kind?”
“Oh,” says Master Wu, matter-of-factly, “you know. Ninjas.”
And he shrugs. He takes a bite of his cake, and waits for one of us to say “But.” He knows that sooner or later, one of us has to. Elisabeth and I know it, too. Just hearing Master Wu say “ninja” is like hearing a concert cellist play “Mama Mia” on the ukulele. Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate. They can jump higher than a house, and burrow through the ground. They know how to turn invisible. They have mastered those elusive Secret Teachings (like the one we now know and no one else does) and can do things which are like magic. And that, surely, is Master Wu’s point. He is making with the funny.
Before I can feel the wash of embarrassment which is rising up my spine, Elisabeth says “But.” I love her for ever.
“But . . .”
“Ninjas are silly?” asks Master Wu.
We nod.
“Yes,” he says. “Very silly. Black pyjamas and dodging bullets. I know. But the word is not the thing. And the word is wrong, anyway.” He stops and leans back. His voice deepens, losing the cheery crackle and the old man’s roughness, and he looks bleaker and much older.
“The night I was born, my mother hid in a well, under the stone cap. I was born in lamplight. The first thing I smelled was mud and soot and blood. My father and a cattle man attended my birth, because we had no doctor. My uncles beat a pig to death in the square of the village we were resting in. They made it scream for seven hours, until the morning came, so that no one would know a woman was giving birth, so that my mother did not have to stifle her cries. For four days, my uncles carried her on a stretcher, and told everyone their friend Feihong was sick. They’d been pretending she was a man, a fat man, for three months. She carried a sack of stones on her belly, and as I grew, she threw them away, one by one, so that people who looked at her would just see Fat Feihong, with his funny arms and bandy legs, and his small feet. My mother had unfashionable feet. Too large for a woman. Still tiny for a man. But after four days, they couldn’t carry her any more, or people would notice, would ask whether maybe Feihong had something serious, whether maybe they should leave him behind. Then she got out of the stretcher and she walked, and she carried me in her sling, the way she’d carried the rocks. I learned to be a quiet baby. I hardly ever cried. When I did, she sang, very loud, very squeaky, like a man trying to sing like a lady, and they called her Squeaky Feihong, and my uncles and my father sang along with her. Catscream Wu and Monkey Wu and Goatbleat Wu, you could hear them coming for miles, and the farmers claimed we turned milk. We were hiding, always. Last of the Voiceless Dragon, running and hiding, by being as loud as possible.
“Why? Because of ninjas. Not ninjas like in Hong Kong movies. Couldn’t fly. Dodge bullets hardly at all. But . . . strike from the shadows? Kill in the darkness. These things they did very well indeed. And sometime, long time ago, someone paid them or ordered them to kill everyone in my family, and make my father’s father’s father’s gong fu disappear. They never quit. They just keep trying. It’s what they are. War—for ever. My father’s oldest brother. His children. Their mother. All gone before I was born.”
Master Wu sighs.
“Lots of people were at war in China then. Chiang Kai-shek was chasing Mao all over the country. We hid with Mao’s people on the Long March. Thousands of miles, mountains and lakes. Our war just disappeared into theirs. And when they died—when maybe ninjas killed them instead of us—that just disappeared too. Everybody was dying then.” He shrugs at the wall, the weapons in their racks. I had assumed he was proud of them. Now I think maybe they are there to remind him. I think he is prouder of the extremely ugly ducks.
“Their war,” Master Wu goes on, “was about who was in control. Ours was about staying alive, of course, but it was also about choice. Very much the same thing. We teach gong fu so that you have a choice. Otherwise . . . the man in charge has all the power. Yes? And . . . what if he is not a man? A hundred people all bowing down to a child who does anything he pleases. No responsibility. Just power. No wisdom. Just actions. As if the throne were empty. China had too many child-emperors already.
“Whoever paid the ninjas believed we are wrong. Power belongs in one place. Nothing should disturb the way things work. No alternatives. Or maybe it was just them: the Clockwork Hand Society, ninjas, call them what you like. And us: Voiceless Dragon. Them and Us. For ever. So my mother carried me to Yenan on a bed of rocks. My father taught me my gong fu when I was three. I learned in Yenan, which is a hard place. But I learned about silence before then. My first teachers were ninjas.”
If Master Wu were a grizzled, elderly trucker, or a veteran of more familiar wars, he would light up a cigarette or grab our hands and tell us we were lucky kids. He does not. He just sighs again, and somehow when he does this, the regret which ripples out from him is a physical thing. I have heard of people who fought with their anger, who made rage into a physical force. I have never heard of anyone doing it with sorrow.
I look around. The night has drawn in while he was talking. The window onto the veranda is open, and I am listening for stealthy feet on the boards outside. In the brush at the bottom of Master Wu’s garden, something snuffles. I do not know whether ninjas snuffle. It seems to me that a very subtle sort of ninja might snuffle so as to make you think he was a neighbourhood dog, or just to let you know he was there and yet leave you guessing. On the other hand, maybe a ninja would regard this kind of trick as amateuris
h.
I try to relax my shoulders so as not to be caught tense by the attack which might be coming. This is extremely difficult in a big soft chair, and I feel like an idiot for choosing the lounger. Elisabeth is sitting on a more upright thing with hard cushions, and consequently need only roll forward or leap up to be ready for anything. Master Wu’s chair is a rocker, although he has stopped the motion with his cane. The opportunities for fast deployment from a rocking chair are many. Only I will be caught double-weighted (stolidly caught between one foot and another, and therefore immobile), or worse, on my fat arse. I have not been mindful. On the other hand, if I am honest, the two better fighters in the room are well-placed by virtue of my choice. Perhaps I am subconsciously a master tactician.
“When I was five,” Master Wu goes on, “I built a ninja trap.” The sorrow recedes and something warm fills him: a weathered pride held close across the years.
“I had been out in the forest collecting game from snares. Rabbits. In the mud, there were footprints. The ninjas came out of the forest and watched us in the night. They liked us to know they were watching, all the time, so that anything you did after dark, you were afraid. It was daytime now. And I thought if I made a big snare, a strong one, and laid it on the path, I might catch a ninja, and make my mother less afraid. I might see approval in my father’s face, like when I worked well in his tannery, or when I practised my forms one more time after he had told me I could stop. He might grunt. My father laughed when he thought something was funny, and he smiled when he was happy, but he only grunted when he was impressed. I made him grunt very seldom. So I borrowed some tools, and I made a big, wide snare out of wet leather, and covered it in mud leaves and attached it to a big old log so that when the snare was touched the log would haul the ninja up in the air, and left it there.”
He shrugs.
“It was a very bad ninja trap. Possibly an old, fat, stupid ninja might have tripped over and fallen on his stomach because he was laughing so much at this trap, and injured himself. If he fell in the right direction, he might have put one foot in the snare at the same time and been caught in it. But when he had finally caught his breath and finished laughing, he would just have cut himself down and gone away. Ninjas are not like rabbits.
“But that night, I woke up, and there was a ninja in my room. He was staring down at me. And he said:
“‘My name is Hong. You may call me Master Hong. What is your name?’
“So I told him my name. And he said:
“‘Do you know who I am?’
“And I told him he was xiong shou, an assassin, because I had never heard of ninjas, then. And he laughed.
“‘I am Sifu Hong of the Clockwork Hand Society. We are the sons of tigers. We are the hope of China—of the world. We are order. And you—you are the little boy who sets traps for us.’
“I didn’t say anything, because I was afraid. And he said: ‘Children don’t hunt tigers, boy. Tigers hunt children.’ Which is actually not fair to tigers. It’s only ninjas which hunt children. I didn’t say anything. I was too scared to move, or cry out, or even to pee, which was something I very much wanted to do. He said:
“‘So now we have come for you, because of your pride. Because we always come, in the end. You are lucky. We have not made you wait. Because we always come, in the end.’
“And he drew out a knife, suitable for hiding under clothes at a very expensive banquet, or for opening the veins of a small boy. I prepared myself to feel the grating of that blade against my bones, the swift warm rush of my life, and then to find out what was the fate of children in the world beyond. And then—you understand, I was very surprised, and I thought for a moment this was part of his preparation to kill me—his left foot flew up in the air and he flew out into the hall, and the knife fell on the floor in my bedroom. There was a terrible cry, and silence. And my father came into my room, and carried me out into the hall, and there was my ninja, hanging by his foot, with a huge leather-working awl buried in his chest. He was hanging by the twine from a ninja trap just like mine. And my father held me by the shoulders and he made me look, and he said: ‘What did you do wrong?’
“I thought about it, and I thought about saying I had been foolish to involve myself in grown-up things, that I should have asked him before trying to catch a ninja, or that I had not considered the nature of my prey and should have made the trap to kill rather than to capture, or maybe just weeping because I was so relieved. My father asked again. And finally I said I had made a functional trap, but I had put it in the wrong place. And my father thought about this, and he thought long and hard, for he said nothing while we cut the ninja down and dragged his body into the main square. And then we walked home, and finally he looked back at the square and down at me. And he grunted.”
Master Wu smiles, and raises his hands like Bruce Lee, and says “Heeyayayay-HAI!” and throws his paper napkin at Elisabeth. She deflects it with the flat of her hand, and says “Pffft!” which is the noise hands-like-lethal-weapons make in movies, and she rolls off her chair and throws a pillow at me. I decide to let it hit me, and fling my arms wide to indicate that I have expired. Master Wu grins.
“He is faking! His dead-appearing gong fu skill is weak!”
And after that, it’s a merry evening, and much fun is had by all before we must wash up the teapot and go on our way. And by then we have just about persuaded ourselves that, like the mango sun and the Chinese space effort, Master Wu’s ninjas are one of his goofy jokes.
I AM so engrossed in my small world that I entirely neglect the bigger one, with the consequence that, when it comes time to look for a job or a place to continue my studies, I am utterly unprepared. The rest of the world is facing graduation and university. I am, again, tail-end Charlie. I do not know the language and I seem to have missed the deadlines and there’s no space for me on the forms. Elisabeth is going to a place upcountry called Alembic, having quite naturally sorted everything out last year, and it is she who galvanises me, sets me on course again, stamps her foot until I pay attention.
“No!” she says.
“I’ll—”
“No, you won’t!”
“But—”
“No!”
She stares at me. At eighteen she is not pale or albino or that weird Scandinavian superblonde, but close on translucent, like something living in the dark of the sea. Almost, she is drawn in black and white, and this colouration is so strange that it distracts you from her face, which is strong, perhaps a little too broad, with features which lack the perfect symmetry of the beautiful or the mediocrity of pretty, so that she is striking, maybe attractive, but definitely unique. Until this moment, we have never had a conversation about anything which wasn’t part of life in the Voiceless Dragon, and we are both confused and a little alarmed by this sudden shift. She frowns.
“Right. Go and see my mother.”
“I—”
She holds up one finger like a dagger.
“Don’t make me stamp!”
At which point I have to confess that I have no idea who her mother is. Elisabeth looks at me as if I have grown an extra head.
“I’m Elisabeth Soames. I’m Assumption Soames’s daughter.”
And now I know who she looks like, although it’s too weird to think about it because Elisabeth is my own age and not a lunatic, and her mother is my headmistress, the Evangelist. I gargle at her.
She stares at me fiercely until I concede that I will talk to Gonzo’s parents and ask them for advice, and if that fails go and talk to “Assumption,” and then she kisses me once, on the right cheek, and flees, to say her au revoir to Master Wu. I feel a curious lurch as she closes the door, and set myself firmly on track for the Lubitsch residence to talk about Embarkation.
Students at the Soames School do not merely graduate; the school’s founders were secular men of rationalist bent, and they considered that the young persons entrusted to them for broadening and preparation were not going on to some hig
her realm of adulthood or finishing their studies, but merely changing venues in their search for truth. For this reason, and also because the Evangelist holds anything old as a natural good, as if a practice could acquire holiness with repetition—in which case certain sins she has forbidden in strident tones must surely by now qualify as redeemed and even redemptive—those leaving the school each year are said to be Embarking, and they are referred to not as Embarkees, which carries some stain of steerage class about it, but as Embarkands, which is both suitably academic and ineffably superior.
I do not feel like an Embarkand. I feel more like a castaway. Around me, young men and women are preparing for places at exalted colleges and working part-time or sponging to pay for them. They buy new clothes and pack suitcases and talk in a strange code about bunking and halls, freshers, gyps, mats and frats, about Noughth Week and courts and moots. When questioned, they fall silent and look embarrassed, which I take to mean that if you don’t know already, there’s no hope you’ll be going. It is like a midnight feast to which only the cake-bearing elite will be invited, and I have no cake, no cake tin, and no book of recipes. Even if I did I lack means to purchase flour. Gonzo has naturally secured a scholarship to study Land Management and Agricultural Economics at a university called Jarndice; “naturally” because while it is absolutely forbidden to offer scholarships on grounds of sporting prowess alone, fortuitously LMAE seems to require a certain cast of mind whose academic virtues are not readily subject to conventional testing, but which is strangely and happily consonant with that required to grasp instinctively the tactics and strategy of a number of competitive field enterprises. Some students of LMAE, regrettably, become so immersed in this alternative use for their talents that they never, in fact, obtain a degree at all, choosing instead to enter the arena of professional sports. Jarndice University’s horror at this waste of young minds is somewhat offset by the fact that these same sad failures often provide the best captains and star players for the university, and honour the Dear Old Place with small thanks such as libraries, pavilions, and (in one case) a painting by Van Gogh. Gonzo was interviewed for the scholarship in the LMAE admissions office, just off the rugby pitch, and after they’d talked about cows (Gonzo displayed a detailed knowledge of their digestive processes and expressed a hope that he might, working with a particularly comely member of the vet school, be able to discover a cure for the plague of flatulence and burping which had afflicted the university herd since his arrival on Thursday) and loams (Gonzo averred that he had no outstanding debts) and crop rotation (“My mother told me never to play with my food,” at which Professor Dollan nearly swallowed his pen lid and had to be carried out), the interviewees were invited to pop out onto the field for a friendly, informal, entirely optional Interviewees vs 1st XV match, in which the interviewees were thrashed 73–14, the visitors’ points coming exclusively through the efforts of G. William Lubitsch. A post-match tally of incidents and accidents also revealed that Gonzo had legally but savagely incapacitated two members of the home team and taken significant hurts to his person without noticeable diminution of his ability, viz. a minor concussion, a briefly dislocated shoulder, three stitches over the left eye, two cracked ribs, and assorted bruises and impact marks which, on removal of his shirt, caused the physiotherapist to insist that he accompany her instantly to her office, where she could tend to his hurts more thoroughly.