The Silk Road Saga: Part I - Silkworm

30 - Erhi's Story (I)

During the first weeks of her convalescence, Erhi was only conscious for a few hours a day. While her wounds slowly healed as she slept, Yue used his spare time to gather food, following Erhi instructions on how to use her bow and stalk game through the snowy wilderness. Although her bow was small and compact, Yue struggled to draw it back to its full length. His bow fingers became chafed raw from pulling on the string. After the passage of two armies and the deprivations of winter, the land around them was barren. Yue had a hard time finding food, grubbing for berries and the occasional old and stringy rabbit. He ate little himself, saving what he could for Erhi, determined that she should get better. As a result of his diet and the ardour of hunting, Yue found his body changing. He became leaner, almost lithe, and his muscles grew hard and compact. He was no longer recognisable as the pudgy boy who had emerged from the portal all those weeks ago.

He chopped down firewood with a small hand axe and learnt how to build a fire from scratch and start it without matches or firelighters. From the embers of the fire Yue always kept aside a burnt stick or two, a rough charcoal pencil that he would use to draw on the side of their tent when Erhi was asleep. He drew whatever came into his head. Sometimes the landscape around them, sometimes birds that flew overhead, but mostly he drew Erhi. He drew her face a dozen times, filling up the inside of the tent and blackening his hands with charcoal. Over time he became more and more familiar with her features, the lines of her cheeks and the shadow of her eyes. He had never drawn the same subject as many times as he had drawn Erhi. He came to feel that he understood her better as she slept than from what she told him while she was awake. Sometimes his hand shook as he drew, not with tiredness, but with emotion. His pencil said what his mouth could not, but he always took care to wipe his canvas clean before Erhi woke up.

And when Erhi woke up, after she had eaten and analysed Yue's description of his hunting technique, given him tips and scalded him for his carelessness, she told him her story, as promised.

"I wasn't born a Mongol. My mother is Han Chinese, like you. She was a beautiful woman, once upon a time. She grew up in the royal household of the southlands. A Song dynasty princess who was gifted at an early age to the rulers of the north lands, the Jurchen Jin, in a bid to avoid war. She never got used to the coarse food and cold winters of Zhongdu and pined for her home in Lin'an. My father was a Jin nobleman. As a girl I aroused little interest from him, he was more of a stranger to me than a father. The Jin were like the Mongols once, barbarians from north of the Great Wall, but after they crowned themselves emperors, they gradually became civilised. While they lost their rough edges, they never lost their distinctive looks. To the Song, the Jin look primitive. That's why I can pass as Mongol. I'm half Jin, half Song, a bastard hybrid of the two sides of China, part barbarian and part civilised.

If history hadn't intervened, then my mother's life would have been a boring one. Just another noblewoman in the imperial capital. Mine would have been much the same. But Tengri had other plans. I was ten years old when the Mongols came. We had heard whispers of them for years, ravaging and pillaging the far flung reaches of the empire. But they never seemed real to us. To the children of the court they were a fairy tale, a ghoul to scare each other with before bedtime. Bu then fairy tale turned to rumour, and rumour became reality. One morning there was smoke on the horizon, by evening the walls of Zhongdu were encircled by a hundred thousand horsemen braying for blood. Food became scarce and even the women of the court stooped to begging for their supper. It was then that I learnt how to survive, stealing food where I could and guarding it jealously for myself and my mother. I kept us both alive through the bitterest months of the siege. One by one I watched my friends succumb to hunger, unable or unwilling to help themselves. Throughout the entire length siege, I never once saw my father. He was called away on matters of state, explained my mother, but what should have mattered most to him is that his own flesh and blood, his daughter, was daily risking her life to feed the woman he had sworn to love and protect.

Then one morning the braying of a hundred thousand men ceased. Arrows were no longer flung down from the walls of Zhongdu, rocks were no longer lobbed back in return. The only sound was vapour escaping from the corpses littering the streets. It was at that point, during that uncertain silence, that my father appeared for the first time in months. The first thing I noticed was that he was well fed. His fingers were still as plump as before the siege and his face was powdered. He bowed when he saw my mother, which was unlike him, and acknowledged my presence, which he had never done before. I knew then that something was wrong.

And so it turned out to be. The silence that reigned over Zhongdu was not the silence of victory, but the silence of betrayal. The Mongols had been paid off by the Emperor in women and gold. The treasury was to be raided and the court emptied of women. The Mongols didn't want just any women, no, the Great Khan desired only women of noble birth. The finest daughters, wives and concubines of Zhongdu. The Jin men, my father included, were only too happy to oblige in order to save their own skin. Of course, no Jin women would be given up if it could be avoided, so only those of foreign birth were selected: Koreans; Tanguts; Tibetans; and of course Han Chinese, my mother among them. As only half Jin, I was fair game. And at ten, I was old enough to be promised in marriage. My mother didn't weep, not then, not in front of my father. She accepted her fate just as she had accepted being sent to Zhongdu when she was younger.

That night, my mother committed the greatest act of love a mother could undertake for her daughter. Once in Mongol hands we would be split up, traded to different clans as spoils of war. The only way my mother could keep me by her side was if she could somehow persuade our captors that I wasn't her daughter, but her servant, her personal attendant, someone of such low birth that not even a shepherd would want to marry me. But even if she dirtied my hair and rubbed me with manure the Mongols would see through it. Such tricks were tried and tested and easily foiled by a quick dip in the nearest river. Nobility shone through in smooth hands and pale skin. A lifetime of leisure was hard to disguise. But my mother had an idea. A cold, hard, merciless idea.

She went to the royal stables, which had been emptied of horses long ago, butchered for their meat, and came back with a horse whip. I removed my silk shirt and stood with my hands against the wall. My mother's hand was unflinching in its love for me and I tried not to cry out to spare her anymore pain. In between the blows I heard my mother sobbing. Under her breath she kept repeating my father's name over and over again, cursing him and what he had made her do. At some point I fainted and when I came to, I was wearing a drab servants robe. My back was bandaged. It ached every time I tried to move but move I must. The time had come to leave Zhongdu.

The gold left first, then the women. A long procession of mothers and daughters filed out of the city gates, heads held high, sacrificing themselves to save the city that their husbands could not defend. I followed my mother at a respectful distance suitable for a servant. The whipping hadn't just scarred my back, it lined my face with pain. I no longer passed as a daughter of the court. I was a commoner. I was nothing. I was safe, for now."