How might Luo Binwang have tried to repay her for her generous hospitality?

  In the great Tang Empire, Judge Dee knew that well-known poets enjoyed a high social status, and it was a matter of course for young girls to fall head over heels for them. The civil service examination included poetry as an integral part of it, so an excellent poem could make a huge difference to the final mark.

  But this was probably not the case for Little Swallow. She could not read. Luo had not given her his name, and even if he had, she did not know that he was such a popular poet. It was understandable, though, for her to feel warmth towards someone who, out of the blue, claimed to be the author of her beloved goose poem, and, in turn, her innocent reaction to his poem could have rendered her even more attractive in his mind.

  ‘Make another guess. Do you know why I came to find you here, Little Swallow?’

  ‘No, I have no idea at all.’

  ‘It’s because of a romantic poem Luo wrote for you.’

  Judge Dee then produced a piece of paper out of his long gown. The poem copied on it was the one that Jiong had ferreted out for him at the start of his investigation, when he was still in the capital. ‘It is called “Remembering a Beautiful Girl in Shu”,’ he said, and he read the poem out loud.

  East and West, Wu and Shu, so far away

  with passes and mountains standing

  in the way. Alas, it is too far

  for the letter-carrying fish to reach you,

  or for the message-bearing wild goose.

  Little wonder about the long streaks

  of tears on your face, as you recall

  the moment that the passionate clouds

  turned into hot rain, circling,

  caressing in the deep mountains.

  Obviously, she did not understand much of the poem. Her face registered only puzzlement.

  ‘Is this poem written for me? Fish … but how could a fish have carried a letter for me? And for that matter, why the message-bearing wild goose?’

  ‘Those are frequently used allusions in classic Chinese poetry,’ Judge Dee explained. ‘For those people far, far away from their dear ones, it was not easy for them to send letters or messages when mountains and rivers were standing in the way. In ancient myths, consequently, a fish or a wild goose came to serve for the imagined postal purpose.’

  ‘But why does the ending of the poem talk about the clouds and rain in the deep mountains?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, the most famous sexual love scene in classic poetry takes place in a rhapsody composed by Song Yu in the Spring and Autumn period. It is a fantastic piece about the romantic rendezvous between King Xiang of the Chu State and the Wu Mountain Goddess. The climax of their encounter is described as a white cloud – soft, insubstantial – then as a hot rain – passionate, piercing, pounding … So here the poet, Luo Binwang, uses this classic allusion to sexual love in his evocation of the clouds in the mountains toward the end of the poem.’

  ‘But we did not …’

  She did not have to explain further. Though uneducated, Little Swallow was not stupid. And it was possibly true that nothing like that had happened between the two of them. As an impoverished poet, Luo could not have been the one for her, in any case. Their relationship had lasted for just a couple of nights on the boat, presumably.

  Little Swallow was a realistic girl, fighting her own hard battles for survival. On the other hand, as a fishing girl working in a potentially disreputable business, she could only be a hindrance to Luo in his own battle to reach the top. That’s probably why Luo had not even told her his real name.

  But, as if it were an afterthought, Little Swallow turned around and headed to the tiny cabin. After two or three minutes, she returned to him on the deck, holding something in her hand.

  ‘That down-and-out bookworm left me something, which I saved in my cabin. I can’t read, I’m ashamed to admit, so I still have no clue what it is,’ Little Swallow said, producing a piece of parchment and handing it to Judge Dee.

  After just a glance, Judge Dee saw that it appeared to be another poem composed by Luo Binwang. It did not read, however, like one, as it was not in Luo’s usual style. It was actually more like free verse or rhapsody, stylistically reminiscent of the ‘Romantic Rendezvous in the Wu Mountains’ or ‘Ode to Luo Goddess’.

  Still, it was provocative in its subject matter, and surrealistic too. Judge Dee could not help wondering – emitting a low whistle as he read on – whether some of the graphic details could indeed have been the product of a despondent poet giving free rein to his wild, drunken imagination, while in the company of a young pretty fishing girl on a drifting sampan. The poem read:

  To a Fishing Girl

  A drunk traveler, lone, wet, cold,

  boarded a sampan on a stormy night,

  hungry like a wolf, where a young, pretty

  fishing girl welcomed him, kneeling,

  wearing a wet dudou-like corset

  hugging the rise of her breasts,

  her feet bare, silver bangles jingling,

  lighting up the bamboo boat wall

  behind her. She was making a vivid introduction

  to the celebrated chef’s special

  of her sampan, waving the menu

  in her hand, explaining the secret recipe

  for frying a live mandarin fish.

  A large one, with its head and tail sticking

  out of the sizzling oil, was frying

  in the wok, still turning, trembling.

  A small smudge stuck on the arch

  of her bare, shapely foot struck his imagination

  and he experienced the hallucination

  of her turning into a struggling fish

  being scooped out of the net.

  ‘Fry just for one minute,

  better with an ice cube in its mouth.’

  Served under the bamboo awning

  of the boat, it tastes so tender, juicy,

  melting on the tongue, its eyes goggling

  once or twice – or was that something

  he imagined in his intoxication?

  The fish is turning back into the girl,

  bleeding, struggling and thrashing, he

  fell to suckling hard at her delicious, delicate toe

  like a dainty ball of the fish-cheek meat.

  It was a poem imbued with complex, passionate intensity. Judge Dee read it again, even more closely, under the light of a new candle Little Swallow placed on the table, tapping his fingers on its edge.

  More likely than not, it could have been a wild sexual fantasy on Luo’s part, imagined as Little Swallow prepared the meal on the deck in front of him. A number of details did appear to be real, like her bangles twinkling, jingling over her bare ankles, or like the mandarin fish in her secret recipe, with its still-goggling eyes.

  Judge Dee stole another glance at the mandarin fish, thrashing about in the pail full of water. Could the poem contain the secret recipe for Little Swallow’s eyes-still-googling delicacy? It was a poem that Luo might never have shown to other people. Paradoxically, Little Swallow did not count, since she could not read.

  From the perspective of a poetry collector – a role Judge Dee had once so passionately played in the murder case concerning the celebrated poetess Xuanji – the present poem could be very valuable, particularly as it was written in Luo’s own calligraphy, on expensive parchment, and it contained a plausible recipe too—

  Out of the growing darkness, however, a flash suddenly swished through the air, sweeping over in a glaring curve. Possibly it was another jumping fish, he thought—

  But no! It was—

  Next to him in the quivering sampan, Little Swallow was swaying, stumbling and finally falling with a thump on the deck, knocking over a pail, the platter in her hand breaking into thousands of pieces, before Judge Dee could have said or done anything to help her.

  There was a knife trembling in her throat, and a thin red line immediately started spreading around her body. Little Swallow was lying in a grotesque position at his feet, blood oozing down her barely covered breasts. Her corset string, Judge Dee realized, had been severed by the sharp flying knife.

  Gingerly, he bent over her body and reached out to feel her wrist, which was already getting cold, though still wet. He failed to feel a pulse. It was beyond his power to do anything for her, he thought, the realization stabbing him hard.

  A breeze rustled through the weeping willows that lined the bank, like a sad, soft elegy. The white goose reemerged out of nowhere, like an apparition, pedaling over as if eager to join in the mourning on the river. Judge Dee was still wondering at the goose’s mysterious return, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, when it began swimming once again out of sight into the dark—

  Another flash of light cut through the approaching eventide toward them. Judge Dee jerked and jumped up in panic, not at all like his usual self; undisturbed composure was more characteristic of the celebrated Judge Dee.

  It was indeed another flying knife, attached with hooks and a long rope, aiming at the parchment with Luo’s fish fantasy poem written on it. The knife stabbed the parchment with amazing accuracy and was then violently pulled back, carrying the parchment along with it.

  The realization sent another chill down Judge Dee’s spine. The flying knife must have been thrown from another sampan, one with a black-colored hardtop, which had been floating, Judge Dee recalled, almost in parallel with Little Swallow’s. As far as he remembered, there were no other boats sailing on the river at the time. That boat with the black hardtop was, however, spinning around at this moment, and speeding off into the darkness like a specter.

  Almost at the same instant, there was another splash in the water, and Judge Dee saw Yang jump headlong into the river from the pier, striking out his arms forcefully, swimming vigorously toward the drifting sampan containing Judge Dee and Little Swallow.

  It would prove to be too late, Judge Dee knew, his mouth full of bitterness.

  In the ensuing silence, a paragraph he had once read in the Diamond Sutra flashed through his mind. At the conclusion of another investigation he’d made, into the murder of a young, beautiful poetess, he recalled that he’d felt inconsolable about her tragic fate, and the celebrated monk poet Han Shan had given Dee a copy of the Sutra to comfort him in his grief.

  According to the Buddhist classic, everything is nothing but appearance. If a man clings to the appearance of things, he will never be able to see through the vanities of the world of red dust.

  The language of the Sutra had exercised an inexplicable calming effect on Judge Dee. Murmuring the text on the sampan now, he burst into incontrollable sobs, feeling helpless, yet still unable to see through the appearance of the situation to the truth of things like Han Shan would.

  ‘All the appearances of causalities in this world, therefore, are to be seen like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, or a flash of lightning.’

  It was conventional for Buddhist monks to keep on chanting Buddhist scripture for the deceased, pressing the palms, counting beads and kowtowing to the ground, but it would be much too dramatic for Judge Dee to do anything along those lines at the present moment.

  Under the black shroud of the night, he could hear the bubbling froth created by the surviving crabs, moistening them as they squeezed against each other in the sesame-covered pail. And then the mandarin fish slipped out of the overturned pail beside Little Swallow’s feet, jumping back into the Shu River in the dark.

  It might be just as well.

  Eight

  ‘You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.’

  – Friedrich Nietzsche

  ‘Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.’

  – Matthew Arnold

  ‘Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.’

  – Immanuel Kant

  Judge Dee woke up with another violent start, his palms sweaty and clammy from his unsuccessful effort to chase off an insistent black bat that had been fizzing in and out of his bad dream.

  He shook his head, trying to prevent himself from being engulfed in the most miserable angst. It was still the first gray of the morning. Once again, he felt lost in the midst of the juxtaposition of unbelievable appearance and equally unbelievable reality.

  Not too long ago, Judge Dee had murmured to himself, ‘I did not kill Hua, but Hua died because of me.’ When he’d said it, it had just been a plausible scenario in his mind, not fact.

  Now, as he said repeatedly to himself, ‘I did not kill Little Swallow, but she died because of me,’ he knew, without any doubt in his mind, that it was true.

  She had died as collateral damage, at the very least, of the investigation, her death ordered and orchestrated by the empress from her throne in the capital of Chang’an. Perhaps he could choose to say neither death had anything to do with him, to make himself feel a little better, but there was no denying the role he’d played, unwittingly or not, in bringing about both fatal tragedies.

  He had interviewed Dr Hua and Little Swallow in the course of his investigation – and both had died. And that was to say nothing of Ning, the former Empress Wang’s maid, whose suspicious death had occurred before he’d even left the capital.

  Judge Dee was suddenly angry. While he was not certain whether the death of Ning was connected to his investigation, he was pretty sure about the causality of Dr Hua’s death, and he had now witnessed Little Swallow’s death with his own eyes, and felt her young, vibrant body getting cold, rigid, her life flowing away in his arms. But far more than that, Little Swallow was not involved in the gruesome politics at the top – not at all – and yet she’d still died in his company.

  So the investigation now became something personal to Judge Dee. He had to do something for Little Swallow. Although she had perished, he still had to push the investigation to the bitter end.

  After breakfast in the hostel canteen, Yang placed a shallow fire basin in front of the hostel. He lit the fire and insisted on Judge Dee stepping over it no fewer than three times. That was another popular superstitious practice. It supposedly helped to fight off bad luck and any evil spirits that had gathered after a recent death. It was turning out to be an ill-starred investigation indeed, with three innocent people already having bitten the red dust in the course of it.

  Before the fire had even burned out in the basin, Mayor Qian arrived at the hostel, hurrying over in an unpainted bamboo sedan chair and stepping over the fire basin after Judge Dee.

  ‘I’m so sorry for what happened on the boat yesterday, Your Honor,’ Mayor Qian said miserably. ‘It must have been a devastating shock to you, I know, and I take full responsibility for it. This is my jurisdiction. And I give you my word: a thorough investigation into the fishing girl’s death is the order of the day for me today.’

  ‘I’m fine, Mayor Qian,’ Judge Dee said, having decided not to go into details about his suspicions over who committed the murder in the sampan. ‘It might have been an assassination attempt aimed at me; unfortunately, it killed Little Swallow instead. But for the important assignment from Her Majesty, I should have stayed here to further investigate Little Swallow’s death alongside you. I am so sorry and feel so responsible for it.

  ‘So leave no stone unturned in your investigation into her death. She died beside me, her body gradually getting cold on the deck of the drifting sampan. Alas, I did not kill Little Swallow, but she died because of me.’

  Judge Dee debated whether he should ask Mayor Qian some straightforward questions. He then thought better of it. The judge was not too sure about the mayor. In the empire’s powerful net of surveillance, whatever he chose to say could be reported to the empress. At this critical juncture, Judge Dee felt he had better not ask too many questions about those deaths.

  ‘It’s so noble of you to say that, but you really don’t have to feel like that about her death,’ Mayor Qian replied. ‘I will definitely exert my utmost, Your Honor.’

  It never rains but it pours.

  The unpainted sedan chair containing Mayor Qian had barely moved out of sight when Judge Dee heard a clatter of horse hooves galloping over toward the hostel in haste.

  The panting rider handed Judge Dee a letter from Mayor Zhuang near the Wuding River area. An investigation report regarding the murder of Dr Hua. According to the letter, the scenario that his murder had been caused by neighborhood squabble had been ruled out by the mayor, as an eyewitness claimed that he saw a couple of mysterious black-attired men sneaking into the backyard of Hua’s hut not long before the horrible tragedy.

  Judge Dee was furious.

  ‘Where are we going today, Master?’ Yang said, the moment Judge Dee finished reading the letter from Mayor Zhuang, his hands still shaking a little.

  ‘To the Dingguo Temple.’

  ‘The Dingguo Temple? Is that the one in that mountainous province?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. Do you know the way?’

  ‘It’s quite a long trip from here. More than a day’s travel, I’m afraid. I happen to know its location because one of my uncles used to live in the temple’s neighborhood.’