Eric van Lustbader - China Maroc 01 by Jian

Author:Jian
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

As they had done almost all his life, it was the Japanese who finally undid him. Because of them, because of Sheng Li’s secret, he could have no one in the house with her.

Liqiu—Sheng Li had insisted on calling the child Beginning of Autumn because he had been born on Wednesday, the day of the August demarkation—had, with difficulty, recovered from his infant’s jaundice and gained in weight. But he remained a sickly child, and Sheng Li or Zilin was always feeding him some medicine or other.

On a night when Zilin was with neither woman, Liqiu became ill. His temperature rose alarmingly until at the Hour of the Dog, near eleven o’clock at night, he seemed to Sheng Li to be burning up from inside. His skin was hot to the touch and dry, pulled so tightly across his flesh that she could see the veins pulsing and distended just beneath the surface.

She used cold water, then alcohol to rub him down, but nothing seemed to help. She began to panic. She had no friends to whom she could turn, and with her mind clouded with fear and a mounting dread for her son’s safety, she wrapped him in blankets and fled with him into the night. Now all the shapes and configurations of streetcorners, shop façades that had once been so comforting, to her seemed menacing.

From open doorways and windows through which pale, flickering light splashed, she heard the hard, brittle click-click-click of abaci totaling the week’s take, or mah-jongg tiles boldly slapped down on baize tabletops. Tonight these sounds, so integral to this city’s rhythm, took on a sinister quality, like the snapping of giant insects’ mandibles.

The sounds made her bolt all the faster down the twisting streets, past dark, dank alleyways thick with the breath of the poppy, past the locked and bolted faces of Shanghai’s greatest businesses: Mattias, King & Company, the Asiatic Petroleum Company, the Hong Kong Bank, Sawyer & Sons, Ewo Brewery, the British-American Tobacco Company, Gibb, Livingston & Company, and Standard Oil’s Mei Foohong subsidiary, which nightly lit most of the lamps of China.

Sheng Li’s mind was filled with terror for the safety of her Liqiu. She did not think of herself or of the consequences of her headlong flight. She thought only of getting her child to safety.

Only dimly did Athena hear the pounding. She did not stir out of bed until the amah came in to wake her. Scrubbing the sleep from her eyes, she drew on a silk gown and dutifully padded behind the old woman through the darkened house.

Sheng Li stood shivering with cold and fear just inside the front door. The amah wrung her hands and chattered like a monkey in a dialect that Athena had never been able to penetrate.

Sheng Li, even more terrified now at having to confront this gwai loh who, she knew, was mistress of the house, tried to kowtow. But the baby bawling in her arms would not permit her to.

“My lady,” she whispered.

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