The Dungeon Read online

  ‘Take what’s yours, my manny,’ he said. ‘I’ll no’ want to be fighting the lot of ye.’

  The swordless man was taken aback. But when McLennan continued to offer him his sword, he reached out from as far away as he could and snatched it. As he drew it quickly across McLennan’s arm, the sharp blade sliced through his sleeve and cut his skin.

  There was a gasp from the men standing menacing McLennan. Clearly they thought the sight of his own blood would send him into a rage. But McLennan merely laughed and parted the cloth to expose the wound.

  ‘First blood to you!’ he said. ‘Come, let’s be friends!’ And he smeared some blood on his right hand, to show his wound was nothing, and offered it to the other man.

  They stiffened, crouched, held their swords at the ready. But the man he faced relaxed a little, and a faint smile crossed his face. It was probably mere nervousness, but McLennan, himself smiling as broadly as he could through his red whiskers, boomed, ‘So, smiling is something we share! Let’s see what else we have in common.’

  He dropped his bundle and held up both hands to show he was unarmed. Then he gestured to his mouth as a sign he wanted to eat and drink. He folded his arms across his tattered plaid and waited.

  After exchanging talk in undertones, they formed up again and marched away from him. He followed, marching in step with them.

  Chapter Three

  He attached himself to the troop of armoured men.

  At first they were very suspicious, even afraid of him, and despite his gold, they tried many tricks to shake him off, but he would not be shaken. They were soldiers, as he soon discovered when they joined with others, who had left the city in marching order under an officer and, eventually, after some days of travel away from the city, they fought their first battle.

  By this time McLennan had realised these were not the dreaded Mongols with their horseback charges and unbeatable tactics; nor were they a regular army, fighting the invaders. They were a rough sort of private troop belonging to some warlord, fighting random skirmishes against others of the same kind.

  These people mostly fought hand-to-hand with spears and swords, using tactics to surprise the enemy. At first McLennan fought the way he always had. When the officer gave the signal, he would throw up his kilt to show he wore nothing under it and was completely unafraid, and charge towards the enemy uttering blood-curdling war cries. His main weapon was a heavy club which he swung around his head in circles as he ran. His comrades were, at first, more startled and shocked than the enemy. But after a couple of these forays, they began to see the use of him.

  When the opposing soldiers saw this foreign giant with his fiery hair and beard, running at them showing his nakedness and screaming in a foreign tongue, they often turned and fled. If he caught up with them, they wished they had run away faster. This delighted McLennan, who would rejoin his new companions roaring with laughter, even when he was covered with blood, some of which was his own.

  His fellow soldiers began to take care of him. They taught him some of their language, gave him the best sleeping places and the best food – such as it was.

  In general, he relished the fighting, and didn’t mind the rough life; it suited him quite well. But he disliked being on a level with the other men, whom he felt himself far above, and never got used to the food, which, when the sauces were too full of the tongue-burn, made him ill. The only thing he liked to swallow – and which calmed his indigestion – was a hot brown drink made of small, dried-up green leaves. It didn’t compare to rye whiskey, mead or ale, but it cheered him and put warmth into his belly. This, he learned, was the ‘tea’ Afonso had mentioned. To his surprise, McLennan became quite addicted to it.

  All the time, he kept his eyes open for new things – new ideas. These Mi-Kis had some very clever devices with which to attack forts or, on one occasion, a walled town. One was a construction of timber, bamboo and twisted rope, on wheels so it could be moved, which could hurl enormous stones against walls or even over them with tremendous force. McLennan had heard of clumsy, hard-to-move siege-engines, with unpronounceable French names, that threw rocks or even fireballs, but he had never actually seen one. He called this Mi-Ki machine a catapult-on-wheels and made a detailed sketch of it.

  One day, in a lull in the fighting, McLennan and his comrades were in a town belonging to their particular warlord, where they were part of the garrison, and they visited a poor teahouse. It had a straw roof and an earth floor, but unlike many such places, it had tables and stools. McLennan stamped up the wooden steps and sat down.

  The owner, a woman, ran and hid behind the kitchen screen, but the other soldiers shouted after her, ‘He’s all right! The foreign giant is with us!’ So she emerged and edged up to him cautiously.

  ‘Give me tea,’ McLennan said in his new language, and slapped the tabletop.

  The woman went behind the screen. After a short time, a little girl came out with tea in a clay teapot as big as her head, and the usual unglazed cup with no handle. She walked to his table with a strange, hobbling gait and put them in front of him. She was trembling.

  ‘Pour!’ he said gruffly.

  He glanced up at her under his eyebrows. She was only six or seven years old and he could see she was very frightened of him, but she did as she was told and didn’t run away, or flinch at his growl. McLennan swigged back the tea. It was very good tea indeed. He said, ‘More!’ She poured again, her thin, fragile arms trembling with the weight of the big teapot. The other men were watching. An idea – no, an impulse – was forming in McLennan’s mind. He looked at the child and saw that she was sturdy despite her small size, brave in her fear, and very obedient.

  ‘Fetch your mother,’ he grunted.

  The little girl shuffled behind the screen, and soon the woman came out.

  ‘How many daughters you have?’ he said in the foreign tongue.

  She seemed to have to count them. At last she held up nine fingers.

  ‘Sell me one,’ said McLennan.

  The soldiers whispered in surprise. The woman stared at him as if she couldn’t take it in. ‘Which one do you want?’

  ‘That one,’ he said, pointing to the little girl who was peeping from behind the screen.

  ‘No,’ said the woman firmly. ‘Not that one.’

  McLennan felt balked. He already knew that in poorer parts of this country the selling of daughters by poor families or widows was a common way to fight starvation – he had been offered girl-children before by wretched parents who detained him with desperate cries of ‘Good slave! Work hard!’ about children younger than this one.

  He half-glanced at the other men for guidance. Kai-fung, the closest he had to a friend among them – the one whose sword he had picked up, that first day – was grinning knowingly.

  ‘You want a servant? Pick another,’ he said. ‘For that one, she’ll want too much.’ He eked out his words with signs till McLennan understood.

  The woman was clearly agitated. She went to the screen, pushed the little one out of sight and dragged out two or three more. They were older, and had stolid looks that promised stamina and cow-like obedience, but somehow McLennan didn’t even want to glance at them. What was special about the little one? Denied her, his impulse hardened into determination.

  He brought out a packet of the strange paper money they used here, which he had been using for small purchases. The woman shook her head. Reluctantly, he fished out a gold half-sovereign.

  When the widow saw the gleam of gold in the man’s big hand, her need overcame her reluctance. With tears in her eyes, she shooed the bigger girls out of sight and led the youngest out. Now the men laughed. They seldom laughed, and McLennan at once suspected he was being made a fool of.

  ‘Why laugh?’ he asked angrily.

  They exchanged looks. Then Kai-fung pointed to her feet.

  Until that moment, McLennan had never satisfied his wish to see a woman with small feet. He had almost forgotten the tales he had heard. But
now he saw something that made him start upright, staring down.

  Because she was still small, the smallness of her feet was not very noticeable, but still he could see that there was something peculiar about them. They looked not only smaller than one would expect, but strangely shaped.

  He scowled down at them for a long time. The teahouse fell silent. The widow stood tensed, torn between desperate need for the gold and agonised reluctance to part with her youngest child. McLennan was thinking. He wanted her for a servant. She would accompany him wherever he went. If she was of the small-foot breed, why did she walk badly?

  He glanced at Kai-fung. He nodded. Buy her, she is worth it. He knew something McLennan did not.

  He looked at the child. She was tiny – doll-like, in her drab trousers and padded jacket frog-buttoned down one side. She had the usual straight black hair, cut across her brow and tied back, a round face, a mouth like a squashed berry. Her almond-shaped eyes were lowered. There was nothing, absolutely nothing about her that set her apart from thousands of other poor little Mi-Ki girls.

  Yet, as he stared at her, trying to decide, she dared a glance up at him. There was a flashing moment when their eyes met. There was something – something that reminded him – but no. That was unthinkable. It must be something else that drew him. In any case, this was not a look that claimed kinship, but like that of a little animal in a trap.

  In a second, without any more thought, his mind was made up. He straightened, slapped the gold coin on the table, and took the child by the arm. Some days before, he had pulled a water lily out of a pond in an idle moment to see how it grew. Her wrist felt like its stem. He led her out of the teahouse.

  She had no time to say goodbye. She took nothing – almost nothing. At the last moment, one of her sisters, tears streaming down her face, rushed out from behind the kitchen screen and thrust into a fold in the child’s jacket – a pathetic parting gift – a pair of eating sticks. That apart, all the little girl carried with her were her mother’s last words, whispered to her as she almost pushed her on her way – pushed her lest she clutch her back.

  ‘Remember who you are.’

  Whatever she had been before, now she was Bruce McLennan’s tea-slave.

  Chapter Four

  The child’s name was Mudan, which, translated, is Peony, the name of a flower. But McLennan never knew this. He didn’t need a name for her. He called her ‘You’ or ‘Girl’, in English or the new tongue. She had to hold tightly to her name in her memory or she would have forgotten it – forgotten who she was.

  ‘Wo shi mudan – I am Peony,’ she said solemnly over and over again in her head like a mantra – a sacred, continual prayer to the Buddha.

  To be snatched from her life so suddenly was a shock. But she had been brought up to the understanding that as a girl-child, she was destined to be some man’s possession. She hadn’t expected it to happen yet – that was all. Nor, of course, had she ever dreamed she would become the common chattel of a foreign giant, and be taken away into a man’s world of roughness and war. It was very frightening, and for the first hours, her mind was a blank, except for the repetition of her name.

  That night, when the soldiers were in their billet, McLennan threw some straw on to the floor beside his own pallet-bed and pointed to it. Peony, worn out, lay down on it obediently, drawing her knees up to her chest for warmth. Her feet again caught the Scotsman’s attention. The toes seemed to come to a point under her cloth shoes and the insteps were high – they really did look like pears. He beckoned to Kai-fung.

  ‘Why feet thus?’ he asked stiltedly, using the new words.

  ‘They are bound.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  The other man knelt down and took the child’s cloth shoes off. McLennan saw her shrink and wince.

  Under the shoes were strips of dirty cloth that wrapped each foot. They were tied very tight. McLennan scowled. ‘Who do this – her mother?’ Kai-fung nodded. ‘But why?’

  With signs and simple words, Kai-fung tried to explain. The feet of some girls were bound tight to keep them small, to stop their growth. This made the girls, when they grew up, more desirable to men.

  At last, McLennan understood, or rather, guessed. The woman in the teahouse, having many daughters, had bound the feet of the youngest in the hope that she would be worth a high bride price when she grew up.

  He stared down at this deformed creature he had paid a gold coin for and felt anger burn inside him. He would not allow himself to feel pity for her – or to feel anything for her. She was spoiled goods. The mother, who had kept her other daughters natural and uncrippled so they could work, had sold him one that was only meant for decoration – who would be lame and good for nothing.

  ‘I don’t want her!’ he shouted suddenly.

  ‘You can’t take her back.’

  ‘She’s no good like this!’

  ‘In a few years you can marry her.’

  ‘What? WHAT?’ roared McLennan in a fury.

  Kai-fung, seeing he had given offence, was silent.

  ‘Take them off,’ McLennan said. ‘Take those rags off her feet! Maybe they’ll grow if you unbind her!’ He said most of it in English. Kai-fung shook his head, stood up and went back to his pallet.

  ‘Then I will!’ roared McLennan.

  He knelt down and started to unfasten the bandages.

  The child curled up and began to utter sharp yelps of pain. McLennan ignored this. He was not gentle. He almost tore off the bindings that had made his bargain so bitter. But when he got the first foot free of them, he stopped cold, and his stomach turned over. He barely stumbled outside the billet before he vomited. Then, very slowly, he came back and continued. Hard as he was, and used to terrible sights, those little, tortured feet somehow froze his anger, though what replaced it in his heart would be hard to describe, for normal pity had been crushed there. He only knew it sickened him.

  When he had bared her feet and made himself look at them, he spoke directly to her for the first time.

  ‘Ye’ll no’ be wearing those rags,’he said. ‘Your feet must heal and grow and that’s all about it.’

  Of course she understood not a word of this. McLennan went on staring at her feet, curled under, the toes beginning to sink into the soles. They stank like something rotten. No wonder she had given him that look of something wounded and in a trap. Her own mother—!It had crossed his mind, seeing the beautiful things these people made, that they might be more scientific and civilised than his own, but now he changed his mind. He wondered if it was too late for the feet to right themselves, or if he had better not simply cut his losses and leave her here.

  Half a sovereign! No. She belonged to him now.

  He called the billet-woman who had brought them food earlier. He gave her paper money to wash Peony’s feet, rub them with ointment and wrap them loosely in clean strips.

  He couldn’t sleep that night for the child sobbing in agony as the blood in the bound feet began to feel its freedom. At last he became distraught, for her cries awoke other cries he still struggled to forget, and he roused the whole inn by shouting at her like a madman, ‘Be quiet! I canna endure your mewling!’ She froze in terror and her sobs stopped.

  Now Peony began to share with McLennan the life of a wandering soldier.

  At first her feet hurt more unbound than bound, and she couldn’t walk at all. Grumbling fiercely, he had to carry her on his back, or pay another to carry her. Her feet had to be dressed and wrapped afresh each evening. The pain was so terrible that sometimes she tried to bind them again to stifle it, but her master wouldn’t let her.

  ‘They must mend,’ he kept saying. And as if obeying his will, little by little, they began to. After a few months she could walk again and he bought her new shoes and some new clothes, for her old ones were threadbare and she was growing out of them.

  She became a kind of mascot to the other men. They at least were not dead to pity, and they were far from their own families,
so they made a pet of her; but McLennan treated her as what he felt her to be – a slave, bought and paid for.

  Even before she could walk again, he put her to work. She had to rub his leather shoes with pig-grease. When his clothes got too filthy or stained with blood, she had to wash them, kneeling beside the tub. When his beard grew too long, she had to cut it with the sharp knife he called a dhu. If she didn’t do this very carefully, he would roar at her and even try to strike her.

  Usually she dodged his hand, but occasionally a blow landed. She accepted this so meekly that he felt an unaccustomed sense of shame, but he soon shook it off. She must learn to obey and do her work properly, to make up for her shortcoming.

  Her main task was to brew tea for him. He liked tea in the morning, and with his meals. She noticed he didn’t enjoy his food. This was good for her, because she ate what he left. She was given no meals of her own. It didn’t occur to McLennan that a body so small needed more than scraps. But the other men fed her titbits when McLennan’s back was turned, so she had enough, and her feet began to uncurl and grow again. She still walked badly – her feet could never completely recover – but she could walk, and with far less pain than before.

  Because she had had a hard life with nothing but bare necessities, none of this seemed very terrible to her. The worst thing – when the pain in her feet got less – was all the noise and the fighting, the blood and the raucous voices of the men, especially when they’d been drinking, all of which frightened her.

  Of course she was terribly homesick for her sisters, and for the safe, simple life she’d known, but when she thought of her mother she had conflicting feelings. Her mother had been merciless about the foot-binding, telling her that she must bear the pain so that one day, when she had tiny, enchanting feet like lotus-buds, she could live the life of a rich man’s wife, and help them all.

  In any case, as the small army moved farther away, she sensed that she was never going to see them again. In the nights, when she curled up in some corner on a pile of hay or even the bare ground, the tears would come. But now she didn’t let her master see them.