The Rose Crossing by Nicholas Jose

Author:Nicholas Jose [JOSE, NICHOLAS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC014000, FIC047000
ISBN: 9781468302004
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2012-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

VII

… the wise Chinese in the fertile wombe

Of Earth doth a more precious clay entombe …

Andrew Marvel,

An Elegy upon the Death of

my Lord Francis Villiers

(1648?)

The unknown was a gamble, a throw of the sticks informed by interpretation. The only avoiding of encounter lay in flight, to turn their backs on help that might be proferred and information gleaned, to sail again across the empty sea. Contact was better. If they were near to Rome, as seemed likely, how unwise to leave without asking the way. Lord Lou shrewdly followed each chain of transactions to conclusion with a perspicacity deeper than the most devoted chess player’s, with foresight more probing and calculations more predictive, after a lifetime of dealing in human affairs. Ignorance was their vulnerability. They knew neither the nature of the terrain nor its social constituency, and nothing of the status of the inhabitants they had met. All was projection and guesswork. Yet their ignorance should allow immediate and undetermined responsiveness to whatever situation they found. The largest practical matter was the power of the other party. If the power were great, being weak in contrast they posed no threat. If the power were limited, it would respond with hostility to potential danger. The trick lay in powerlessness, along with independence that asked nothing and intelligence that offered prospects of gain.

Lord Lou went to meet the strangers unarmed and unaccompanied except for Captain Huang, and Jia, the boatman who had made the first encounter. The shallow boat followed the shoreline, the sailor poled with a single oar while Huang kept watch, the travel slow and stately. His gown gathered around his bent knees, his back straight, his head covered, concealing his gaze as it played over the expanse of lagoon, glassy and glittering, Lou Lu sat low to the surface of the water. He read the signs with authority to confer his own meanings, and found them favourable, as if to justify the curiosity that drew them on, and a deeper impulse of kinship in that lonely place, of hope checked only by the webbed layers of caution, prudence, timidity, wariness, and passivity in the sage’s mind.

So low was the boat, the bamboo hat so large that it dwarfed the wearer, his face lost in its cone of shadow. Lord Lou might have been a prisoner to be delivered over to a foreign shore, or an elder of the tribe to be cast out in sacrifice, his usefulness outlived, as the load came into clarity. Outside the hut, Popple stood sentinel to watch their approach. Proud apprehension rippled through his guts as he perceived the elevation and dignity of the hatted old man who was sent to him.

‘Hail!’ he shouted, raising his arm in the antique gesture that he took for universal. ‘Ave!’

Popple strode down the grassy mound like a priest greeting the stragglers of his congregation, paces long, straight, purposive, brows raised in a parody of welcome, arms helplessly outstretched. He recognized in the slowness of these visitors a degree of civility.

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