The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure Read Free Page A

centres of railway-building activity. Nestled in a bowl of hills, it is one of the few readily defensible areas in the otherwise flat plain. I am told that a well-armed force in the Black Hills could hold off an army, which is probably why, historically, Shishan was a garrison town and a safe stopover point for caravans.
    He described Shishan briefly, its population, its market economy. He added a biography (as far as he knew it) of the Mandarin. He described the foreigners living in the city: the railway engineers at the camp, the chemical merchant from Babbit and Brenner, and the eccentric medical missionary, Dr Airton, in whom he had such high hopes. Was he right to place such confidence? He recalled the strange dinner that the head of Chancellery had given Airton on one of his trips to Peking. Sir Claude made it a matter of principle never to dine with missionaries so the chore had been delegated and he had been asked along to make up numbers. He had been surprised by how much he liked the man. The common sense and dry humour. The strange obsession with penny dreadfuls and cowboy stories. An unmissionarylike missionary. Should he recommend him? Well, for the moment there was nobody else. He took the plunge: ‘Airton’s friendship with the Mandarin, with whom he meets regularly to discuss philosophy and politics, could be the introduction we need.’
    And then he was finished, or nearly so. He could hardly keep his eyes from closing. At least the noise outside was abating a little and there had been no more strange sounds from the corridor. What on earth had he been thinking? Fox fairies! He had been warned of the danger before he left London. ‘For all their apparent cultivation,’ he had been told, ‘these are primitive types like anybody else we have to deal with in the empire. They’ve lots of weird and generally nasty beliefs behind their pretty tea ceremonies. You are to investigate the cults and the black societies along with your political work because we think they’re dangerous, but you’re not to go native, do you hear?’ And there had been much laughter over the port while he had smiled politely, thinking he knew better than his masters because of his doctorate in Oriental languages.
    I hope that your lordship will agree with what I have proposed. I am becoming more and more convinced that the Mandarin of Shishan could become the power broker of this region and our agent to stave off Russian influence. He has many qualities to recommend him: a distinguished military past, a record as a strong, independent administrator; he is ruthless and cruel, and very corrupt. And he is ambitious. He has made attempts recently to train his small garrison in modern methods of warfare. With your lordship’s approval, and with the assistance of the Imperial Japanese Army and their guns, I believe that we may easily bolster his position. In which case we may discover that in His Excellency the Mandarin Liu Daguang we have the makings of our very own warlord …
    His head dropped onto his arms and soon he was asleep. Before he lost consciousness he had an image of flowing robes, soft hair and beautiful brown eyes, red lips opening, sharp little teeth, the slow sinuous curl of a tail, and claws, fangs …
    But a ray of sunshine was already reddening the wooden walls. The sandstorm had died with the dawn. Lady MacDonald’s courtyards recovered their tranquillity. The creatures of the night—if they had ever existed—returned to the realm of the imagination from which they had been conjured. The interpreter stirred in his sleep, and the long letter—which in its way was equally fantastical, a conjuring of schemes and conspiracies from that other imagined world of the Great Game and Realpolitik—dropped, page by page, to the floor.

Part One

One
    Bandits came in the night and stole our mule.
    How will we transport the crops at harvest?
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    Dr Airton was