70
Tai-Peng wore only a garment of irontree leaves and vine blossoms. A cup of wine in his left hand, he paced back and forth, extemporizing poems with the ease of water flowing down a hill. A poem would tumble out in the court speech of the Tang dynasty, sounding to non-Chinese like dice clicking in a cup. Then he would translate it into the local Esperanto dialect.
Much of the sublety and reference were lost in the mutation, but enough was retained to move his listeners to laughter and tears.
Tai-Peng’s woman, Wen-Chun, softly played on a bamboo flute. Though his voice was usually loud and screeching, it was subdued for the occasion. In Esperanto it was almost as melodious as the flute. He wore only a garment made for the occasion, red-green-striped leaves and red-white-blue-striped blossoms. These fluttered as he walked back and forth like a great cat in a cage.
He was tall for a man of his race and time, the eighth century a.d. , lithe yet broad shouldered and heavily muscled. His long hair shone in the late noon sun; it glittered like a dark jade mirror. His eyes were large and pale green, blazing, a hungry-but wounded- tiger’s.
Though he was a descendant of an emperor by a concubine, he was nine generations removed. His immediate family had been thieves and murderers. Some of his grandparents were of the hill tribes, and it was these wild people who had bequeathed him the fierce green eyes.
He and his audience were on a high hill from which the plain, The River, and the land and the mountain wall beyond could be seen. His listeners, even drunker than he, though none had drunk so much, formed a crescent. This left an opening for him to stride into and out of. Tai-Peng did not like barriers of any kind. Walls made him uneasy; prison bars, frenzied.
Though half of the audience was Chinese of the sixteenth century a.d., the others were from here and there, now and then.
Now Tai-Peng stopped composing, and he recited a poem by Chen Tzu-Ang. First, he stated that Chen had died a few years before he, Tai-Peng, was born. Though Chen was wealthy, he had died in a prison at the age of forty-two. A magistrate had put him there so he could cheat him out of his father’s inheritance.
“Men of affairs are proud of their cunning and skill, But in the Tao they still have much to learn. They are proud of their exploitations, But they do not know what happens to the body. Why do they not learn from the Master of Dark Truth, Who saw the whole world in a little jade bottle? Whose bright soul was free of Earth and Heaven, For riding on Change he entered into Freedom.”
Tai-Peng paused to empty his cup and hold it out for a refill.
One of the group, a black man named Tom Turpin, said, “Ain’t no more wine. What about some alky?”
“No more drink of the gods? I don’t want your barbarians’ juice! It stupifies where wine enlivens!”
He looked around, smiled like a tiger in mating season, and he lifted Wen-Chun and strode off to his hut with her in his arms.
“When the wine stops, it’s time to begin with women!”
The brightly colored leaves and blossoms fluttered to the ground as Wen-Chun mock-struggled with him. He looked like a being from ancient myth, a plant man carrying off a human female.
The others laughed, and the group began to break up before Tai-Peng had shut the door of his hut. One of them walked around the hill to his own hut. After entering, he barred the door and drew down bamboo-and-skin blinds over the windows. In the twilight he sat down on a stool. He opened the lid of his grail and sat for a while staring at it.
A man and a woman passed near his door. They were talking of the mysterious event that had taken place less than a month ago down-River. A great noisy monster had flown from over the western mountain at night and had landed on The River. The braver, or more foolish, locals had boated out toward it. But it had sunk into the waters before they could get close to it, and it had not come up again.