Single Petal , livre ebook

Andrews UK - Oliver Eade

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125 pages

English

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Winner of the Local Legend Spiritual Writing Competition,this is unique among MBS books, a genuinely exciting page-turner.It is at once a murder mystery, a political thriller and a passionate love story, with truly human characters - complex, courageous and flawed. Beautifully written with acute attention to historical and cultural detail, this narrative is relevant to every one of us today, exploring the strength and the fallibility of the human spirit.

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Historical fiction

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	12 décembre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781907203480
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Title Page
A SINGLE PETAL
Murder, politics and passionate love in ancient China
by
Oliver Eade

Publisher Information
First Published in 2012 by Local Legend
www.local-legend.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed in 2012 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2012 Oliver Eade
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without the prior permission of the publisher.
Cover design by Titanium Design Ltd
www.titaniumdesign.co.uk
Cover images by Oliver Eade and Nigel Peace

Dedication
For Yvonne Weilun
I am grateful to my father-in-law Dr Chen Yaosheng, to my half sisters-in-law, Huilian and Ronglian and their husbands, Liuping and Furong, as well as to Yvonne’s extended family in China, for opening doors on an amazing culture that extends back over five thousand years. I also thank our Chinese friends, guides and the many hospitable people we’ve met on our several trips to Zhongguo, as China calls herself. Their warmth and generosity, and my desire to know more about the land of Yvonne’s ancestors, have encouraged me to write this book.
I am also indebted to Nigel Peace of Local Legend for his helpful editorial advice.

Bamboo Death
To bow three times before the Buddha felt wrong. With his faith destroyed because of what happened, it seemed as if he were trying to seek enlightenment from a lotus flower that has no strength, no spirit - a flower whose petals fall apart when opened. Such imperfection could lead nowhere. But a single petal? Surely a single, undamaged petal could achieve perfection.
At the very least, that should have happened, thought Teacher Feng, but it was his only consolation.
Empty of prayer, he turned from the effigy and from the smoke and the sickly smell of incense, whilst his mind lingered over the petals of a flower, travelling back to the day his daughter Feier came running in from the courtyard of their home in a village in what is now called Hunan Province, screaming at the top of her voice:
“Baba! Come quickly! Beside the path near the lotus lake. On the way to the Miao village! Hurry!”
Feng felt angered. He was preparing a lesson for the village children in the schoolroom, the only reasonably-sized room in their single-storey house built around an untidy courtyard littered with ‘useful’ junk.
Although he’d been the obvious choice, he still felt an immense pride at having been given the job of local teacher, albeit poorly-paid, by the Governor’s prefectural magistrate. His pride helped him overcome the shame of never having sat the civil service examination, about which all other local scholars were delighted. He simply hadn’t appeared for the examination on the day, but there was one thing the other candidates were all agreed upon: that Feng would not only have been successful but would have excelled himself, rapidly rising in rank to become a mandarin or even advisor to the emperor himself in the capital, Chang’an.
The emperor lived in a different world to his forty-odd million subjects. Although trained in matters of war, his true passion was for poetry, painting and calligraphy. He would spend days on end, brush in hand, recreating on yellowed paper a separated life in flowing characters and colourful images, unreceptive to the eunuchs who impatiently rubbed their delicate hands and fussed around in the imperial ante-chambers worrying about the state of the nation. War, he left to his generals, each of whom had his own military agenda. Their rivalry, a trivial annoyance for the emperor, had caused waves of unease to spread throughout China. Her enemies were beginning to cast greedy glances over uncertain boundaries at the growing frailty of a country whose name was synonymous with the centre of the civilised world.
The emperor needed men of Feng’s ability at court - men with brains - and the other young scholars knew this, but envy and jealousy are more natural companions to the human spirit than patriotism and humility. Even those who had failed the civil service examinations, or who couldn’t afford to bribe the examiners (the majority), rejoiced in consoling Feng with the thought that there could be no greater act of faith in the throne than to pass wisdom down to the emperor’s youngest subjects in the remote countryside. With Feng tucked away in a remote little village, his existence would no longer threaten to block their career paths.
Feng had good reason for not appearing before the examination board, one which the officials thankfully accepted, thereby saving him fifty blows with a thick rod. His wife, Meili, had died the day before he was due to leave for Houzicheng. She and Feier, their only child, had been stricken with the flux which spread like Yellow River flood waters across the prov-ince. Not he, the local doctor, nor prayers to the Boddhitsava, had been able to save the mother as her sick body, drained of all fluid, rapidly shrank to dried skin and bone. But, Buddha be praised, the girl survived. Now, eight years later, she was strong, healthy and would soon be fifteen and a child no longer. She’d inherited her mother’s gentleness together with Feng’s wit and desire for learning. In his early years as a teacher he’d practised his skills on little Feier, teaching her a hundred new characters between each passing of the full moon, educating her in the art of calligra-phy and in the great Tang poems, explaining the works of the newer, radical poets, like Su Dongpo, of whom he possessed a valuable calligraphic scroll. He also instructed the child in the complexities of the glorious history of China, the central kingdom, and had read to her transcriptions of the enlightened master from Shandong, Kong Fuzi [1] .
Ironically, moments before Feier had rushed screaming into the schoolroom, Feng’s mind had wandered from the characters on the page in front of him as he sat squatting low before the teacher’s table with its curved painted animal legs and scratched, pocked surface. He’d been thinking about the child... about his dread of losing her to the family of an unknown would-be groom. When she reached fifteen he’d have to ap-proach the marriage maker, an old lady who’d always looked askance at his modern ways, his desire to include girls in his classes, his wish to bring knowledge to all the people regardless of sex, religion or status. Her disgust was so apparent she would cross the street to avoid rather than acknowledge him. She hated his eagerness for reform, his love of the villagers. his genius. Without wishing to, he had made her feel unimportant, for before he arrived with his daughter she’d been highly respected in the village, second only to the sun wu kong [2] at the temple. Now they often questioned her authority and wisdom and fewer gifts came her way. The idea that this old hag would, out of sheer spite, marry the girl off to a spineless groom with a gorgon of a mother had plagued him for months. There were even women who beat their young daughters-in-law and nothing could have been more painful to Feng than the thought of anyone harming his child.
When Feier had rushed into the schoolroom that day it wasn’t with her he felt angry. It was with himself. Her sudden presence reminded him that he loved her more than anything else in the world and yet had failed to come up with a solution to his dilemma. The pitifully small dowry he’d be able to offer meant other approaches to find a husband for the girl - sons of important officials, skilled trades-people, even merchants - were out of the question.
He’d even discussed it with his good friend, Li Yueloong, in the nearby Miao ethnic minority village. He’d have preferred a Miao son-in-law with a heart of gold and no prospects to a man with money and a mother-in-law from hell, but until recently there’d been more girls than boys in the Miao village. Resilience of girl babies and the endless drain on marriageable young men to the emperor’s army throughout the prefecture meant that girls from families with little means, like Feier, would be left with the scrapings from the bottom of the rice pot: either witless young men, little more than puppets of devil mothers, or widowed old men seeking breeding machines to give them sons before their ghosts slipped away to face uncertain approval from ancestors.
If only I could have another few moons, Feng had been thinking when his daughter burst into the room, his calligraphy brush hovering over the paper.
“Baba [3] ? What’s the matter?” asked Feier as her father turned his wor-ry-drawn face towards her.
“Nothing that should concern you, dear child.” Stupid man! Everything concerns Feier! And everything about Feier concerns me. “But why the interruption? Can’t you see I’m preparing for my class?” he added, trying without success to appear stern.
“Baba. there’s a man on the path. On the way to the Miao village. He’s lying there. I think he’s...”
The child stopped mid-sentence, and Feng knew why. She didn’t have to use the word that frightened her so much. Ever since her mother’s death eight years back, the very mention of the dead would cause the girl’s beautiful deer eyes to darken.
“Where?” she’d once asked her father when he tried to reassure her that her mother, a good woman, would have been reincarnated into a higher existence, maybe as a princess or the daughter of one of the emper-or’s favourite concubines. “But she’ll not know me,” the child had cried. “She’ll never want to hold me to her again, tell me stories, brush my hair and pin it up when I become of age to marry.”
Somehow the thought of seeing her reincarnated mother again and not being recognised by the woman had terrified the young Feier. If