The Mandate of Heaven by Tim Murgatroyd Read Free Book Online Page B

stopped them at the gate. ‘Do not come in here,’ he warned the soldiers. ‘Hide in the woods and hope they do not find you.’
    The officer was a little older than himself and had a bleeding gash on one cheek.
    ‘Sir! Prefect Deng sent me to protect you all!’
    Again Deng Nan-shi held up his hand.
    ‘Save yourselves! It is too late.’
    The officer pushed past him. The sight within the compound forced the soldier to halt. Some Dengs huddled and embraced each other, sobbing or wailing. A great crowd of concubines and other women, over two hundred strong, were being led towards the cliff by Prefect Deng’s First Wife.
    ‘No!’ shouted Deng Nan-shi, running forward. ‘Hide in the woods. Anywhere!’
    The women were screaming, crying, chanting prayers for a favourable rebirth, holding hands or embracing a friend. He only had time to extract his wife before they reached the cliff edge and began to leap off the precipice like crazed birds without wings.
    He stood in the now deserted courtyard and found the officer beside him. His men had fled.
    ‘Is there nowhere for you to hide, sir?’ demanded the soldier.
    Then young Deng Nan-shi remembered a place. ‘This way!’ he cried.
    As they hurried from the courtyard the first Mongols entered with bloody swords and axe blades. Deng Nan-shi, his wife and the officer rushed out to the artificial Holy Mount Chang at the rear of the compound then climbed up the mound – Prefect Deng’s pride and joy – into the moon-gazing pavilion.
    ‘There is a gap between the domed roof and those wooden boards,’ said Deng Nan-shi. ‘If we could somehow reach so high …’
    The officer looked up doubtfully. Fresh screams reached them from the house. The Mongols had discovered those without the decency to jump to their deaths.
    ‘How?’ he began. His eye fell on a wooden bench. Seizing it, he held it up like a ramp, his arms high above his head.
    ‘Climb!’ cried the officer. ‘Quickly, before they see.’
    Deng Nan-shi went first, scrambling up, shoved from behind by his wife. The officer roared at the strain of bearing their weight. Pushing aside the loose boards the scholar climbed into the moon-gazing pavilion’s dome: a small space, barely enough room for two. His wife nimbly followed, climbing in beside him. Yet when the hunchbacked scholar reached down for the officer, he found the bench back in its place and the soldier gone. At that very moment the first Mongols emerged from the house, dragging out women to violate on top of Prefect Deng’s prize orchid beds before casting them semi-naked over the cliff. As the air filled with despair, Deng Nan-shi had pulled the roof boards tight …
    ‘So that is how you survived,’ said the boy, dully. ‘By hiding.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And after the massacre you and Mother climbed down from the pavilion.’
    ‘Yes.’
    Teng realised he was tearful.
    ‘Did you … have to bury them all?’
    ‘One or two. Remember, Prince Arslan had decreed the people of Hou-ming were to form his brother’s grave mound. Most bodies were carted away in wagons dragged by prisoners who were themselves later added to the mound.’
    ‘How many died, Father? How many died that day?’
    Deng Nan-shi laid a hand on his son’s arm.
    ‘When the next census was taken a few years later, only one in twenty of those who had lived in Hou-ming survived. And yet, as you know, the buildings were undamaged. Such were Prince Arslan’s commands. Looted and emptied of valuables, yes, but undamaged. A city of ghosts.’
    Teng pictured twenty eggs laid out on the ground. Someone stamping until the ground was sticky with yoke and egg white and shell. Until a single egg remained.
    ‘There is more you want to tell me, Father,’ he said, ‘isn’t there?’
    Deng Nan-shi nodded, rubbing his eyes. ‘Another day. Not today.’
    The hunchbacked scholar left the pavilion, leaving his son to stare up at the roof boards of the wooden dome.
    ‘It’s about Hsiung, isn’t