The Spring Festival

I was supposed to finish the novel last summer. The summer wound up being much shorter than expected, somehow, but I did at least write some of the bridge scenes that seem to be the hardest part for me. And towards the end of the summer, knowing that I had to get to know Hu Tien a lot better, I started sort of talking to her.

I know you were at that spring festival when you were about five years old. You were probably holding your mother's hand so she wouldn't lose you in the crowds as you watched the performer talking with those officials, promising to fetch them a peach even though it was too early in the season, and then throwing that piece of rope up into the air and telling his son to climb to the heavens and fetch one of the peaches of the Gods. I imagine she covered your eyes when the dismembered pieces of the boy began falling from the sky. You would have picked up on the shocked and horrified mood of the audience, but now your mother has you up in her arms and is swaying back and forth, holding your head facing away from the spectacle and maybe singing you a lullaby to distract you. Only at the end, when the chest was opened and the boy emerged whole and smiling did she let you turn and watch again. You laughed and clapped your hands, not understanding what had just happened but sharing in the pleasure of the crowds. You would have heard the story afterwards of the part of the show you missed, and wondered at the magic of it, and wondered also how much of it you had actually seen and how much had been real.

That turned into her own description in the book.

"Look at him," I said.

Tien followed my gaze to where Sir Isaac was packing up his scales. "He is like a child with a new toy."

"Can't blame him," I said. "I remember the first time I saw a flying ship. My jaw fell to my navel."

"I wonder," said Tien, "if he will ever travel as far as China. And if anyone there still practices Dao Jhi."

"Was it just the one monastery where it was done? The levitation, I mean."

Tien was silent for long enough that I thought she hadn't heard me, but then she said, "I do not know. I think..."

I heard a line snapping against one of the masts. The natural breezes were picking up again, now that Tien and I were done with our weatherwork.

"I think I saw it done when I was very little. At a spring festival in Guangdong. I was there with my parents. There were people, so many people, and my mother held my hand so that I would not get lost. There was a performer, a conjurer, doing small tricks with his hands to amuse us. We came... There were some officials. Maybe a lord mayor or... I do not know. But they were wearing red robes, very fine, very expensive. And they asked this man for a trick. They asked him to bring them a peach. It was early spring; there were no peaches yet. The man had his son with him, older than me but still a child, and he turned to his son and said 'What are we to do? There are no peaches yet, but the officials have asked for one.' He made a game of this-of thinking very hard what to do. Finally he said, 'We must go to Heaven and obtain one of the peaches of the Gods.' Then he took a rope and he threw it into the air."

Tien paused, staring at a coil of line on the deck. "I do not know how he did it, if it was real or just another trick. The rope stayed, and seemed to hang down from the sky. Down to just this far above the ground." She held out her hand. "And he said he was an old man and no good at climbing, so his son must climb and get the peach. I watched the boy climb. He went very high. And then my mother covered my eyes. She turned around so that we faced away from the man and his rope. I did not know why, but the people watching, they became upset, as if something bad happened. I started to cry, and my mother rocked me and sang to me to quiet me. And then everyone smiled again and laughed and we turned back. The boy... my mother told me that when the boy was high up in the sky, he had cried out in fear and then his body-pieces of his body began to fall to Earth. His arm, and then a leg and his head, and as the bits fell, his father wept, and he picked up all the pieces and put them in a chest, and then he closed the lid. He asked the officials to forgive him for having no peaches, because he grieved for his son. And the officials forgave him. And then he opened the chest again, and the boy stood up and smiled. Everyone laughed. I laughed too, and clapped my hands, but I did not know why. Just, all the people were happy again."

"The boy was all right? After being dismembered?"

Tien nodded. "That is what my mother told me later. But she did not let me look."

"But you saw the rope?"

"I was very little," she said. "People do tricks. Maybe some of them are real."

There is more. Tien was raised in a time of rebellion and anarchy in rural China, and either orphaned or abandoned at an early age and left in the care of a Taoist monastery. But this is enough for today.

(C) 2009 Peter E. Bishop