An Inch of Ashes (Chung Kuo)(49)

She looked up again, suddenly determined. Fuck him! If that was what he thought of her  –  if that was how he was prepared to treat her  –  then she would have no more of it. Let it be an end between them.

She swallowed, the warmth in her throat deceptive, the tears threatening to come despite her determination not to cry. She sniffed, then raised her glass, offering a toast to the silent doorway.

‘Go fuck yourself, Sergey Novacek! May you rot in hell!'


Sergey stood there at the top of the steps, looking down into the huge, dimly lit gaming room of The Jade Peony. Lights above the tables picked out where games were in progress, while at the far end a bar ran from left to right, backlit and curved like a crescent moon. The floor below was busy. Crowds gathered about several of the tables, the excited murmur of their voices carrying to where he stood.

There was a sweet, almost peppery scent in the air, like cinnamon mixed with plum and jasmine, strangely feminine, yet much too strong to be pleasant. It was the smell of them  –  of the sons of the Minor Families and their friends. The distinguishing mark of this Han elite; like a pheremonal dye. Sergey smiled. In theory The Jade Peony was a mixed club, membership determined not by race but by recommendation and election, but in practice the only Hung Mao here were guests, like himself.

Yang kuei tzu, they called his kindut okeder lub. ‘Ocean devils'. Barbarians.

Even the Han at the door had looked down on him. He had seen the contempt that lay behind that superficial mask of politeness. Had heard him turn, after he had gone, and mutter a word or two of his own tongue to the other doorman. Had heard them laugh and knew it was about himself.

Well, he'd wipe a few smiles from their faces tonight. And Heng? His smile broadened momentarily. He would make sure Heng would not be smiling for some time.

He went down the plushly carpeted stairway, past the great dragon-head sculpture that stood to one side, making his way to the bar.

As he passed they stared at him openly, their hostility unmasked.

Heng Chian-ye was where he said he would be, at a table on the far left, close to the bar. A big, hexagonal table covered in a bright red silk. Representations of the wu fu, the five gods of good luck, formed a patterned border around its edge, the tiny silhouettes picked out in green.

He smiled and bowed. ‘Heng Chian-ye... You received my message, I hope.'

Heng Chian-ye was seated on the far side of the table, a glass and a wine bottle in front of him. To either side of him sat his friends, four in all, young, fresh-faced Han in their early twenties, their long fingernails and elaborately embroidered silks the calling card of their kind. They stared back at Sergey coldly, as if at a stranger, while Heng leaned forward, a faint smile playing on his lips.

‘Welcome, Shih Novacek. I got your message. Even so, I did wonder whether you would make an appearance tonight.' His smile broadened momentarily, as if to emphasize the jest. ‘Anyway, you're here now, neh? So... please, take a seat. I'll ask the waiter to bring you a drink.'

‘Just wine,' he said, answering the unspoken query, then sat, smiling a greeting at the others at the table; inwardly contemptuous.

He smiled, then, taking the silken pouch from his jacket pocket, threw it across the table so that it landed just in front of Heng Chian-ye. It was deliberately done; not so much an insult as an act of gaucheness. In the circles in which Heng mixed it was not necessary to provide proof of means before you began to play. It was assumed that if you sat at a gaming table you could meet your debts. So it was among the ch'un tzu. Only hsiao jen  –  little men  –  acted as Sergey was acting now.

Sergey saw the looks that passed amongst Heng and his friends and smiled inwardly. Their arrogance, their ready assumption of superiority  –  these were weaknesses. And the more he could feed that arrogance, the weaker they would become. The weaker they, the stronger he.

‘What's this?' Heng said, fingering the string of the pouch as if it were unclean.

‘My stake,' Sergey said, sitting forward slightly, as if discomfited. ‘Look and see. I think you'll find it's enough.'

Heng laughed and shook his head. ‘Really, Shih Novacek. That's not how we do things here.'

Sergey raised his eyebrows, as if puzzled. ‘You do not wish to play, then? But I thought...'

Heng was smiling tightly. His English was tightly clipped, polite. ‘It isn't what I meant.' He lifted the pouch with two fingers and threw it back across the table. ‘You would not be here if I... doubted your ability to pay.'

Sergey smiled. ‘Forgive me,' he said, looking about him as he picked up the pouch and returned it to his pocket. ‘I did not mean to offend.'

‘Of course,' Heng answered, smiling, yet the way he glanced at his friends revealed what he uo;quo;et ickwas really thinking. ‘I understand, Shih Novacek. Our ways differ. But the game...'

Sergey lowered his head slightly, as if acknowledging the wisdom of what Heng Chian-ye had said. ‘The game is itself. The same for Han and Hung Mao alike.'

Heng gave the barest nod. ‘So it is. Well... shall we play?'

‘Just you and I, Heng Chian-ye? Or will the ch'un tzu join us?'

Heng looked to either side of him. ‘Chan Wen-fu? Tsang Yi? Will you play?'

Two of the Han nodded; the other two  –  as if on cue  –  stood, letting the others spread out round the table.

‘You will be West, Shih Novacek, I East. My friends here will be North and South.'

Sergey sat back, taking the wine from the waiter who had appeared at his side. ‘That's fine with me. You have new cards?'

Heng lifted his chin, as if in signal to the waiter. A moment later the man returned with a sealed pack, offering them to Sergey. He took them and hefted them a moment, then set them down on the table.

‘Bring another.'

Heng smiled tightly. ‘Is there something wrong with them, Shih Novacek?'

‘Not at all, Heng Chian-ye. Please, bear with me. It is a foible of mine. A... superstition.' He spoke the last word quietly, as if ashamed of such a weakness, and saw the movement in Heng's eyes; the way he looked to North and South, as if to reinforce the point to his two friends.

‘You have many superstitions, Shih Novacek?'

‘Not many. But this...' He shrugged, then turned, taking the new pack from the waiter and setting it down beside the other. Then, to Heng's surprise, he picked up the first and broke the seal.

‘But I thought...'

Sergey looked down, ignoring Heng's query, fanning the huge cards out on the table in front of him. There were one hundred and sixty cards in a pack of Chou, or ‘State', arranged into nine levels, or groupings. At the head of all was the Emperor, enthroned in golden robes. Beneath him were his seven Ministers, these greybeards plainly dressed, as if in contrast. At the third level were the Family Heads  –  the twenty-nine cards richly decorated, each one quite different from the others. At the next level down the four Generals seemed at first glance quite uniform; yet the staunch Hung Mao faces of the old men differed considerably. Beneath them came the four wives of the Emperor, ranked in their household order, and beneath them  –  at the sixth level  –  came the two concubines, their scantily dressed figures making them the most attractive of the cards. Next were the eight sons, their resemblance to their respective mothers suggested by their facial features and cleverly underlined by use of colour and decoration. Then, at the eighth level of this complex hierarchy came the eighty-one officials, ranked in nine levels of nine, their great chi ling patches displayed on the chests of their powder-blue gowns. And finally, at the ninth level  –  last in the great pecking order of State  –  were the twenty-four Company Heads, their corporate symbols  –  some long forgotten, some just as familiar now as when the game was first played one hundred and twenty years before  –  emblazoned on the copy of the Edict scroll each held.

He turned one of the cards a moment, studying the reverse carefully for special markings, then compared it with a second. The backs of the cards were a bright, silken red, broken in the centre by a pattern of three concentric circles, three rings of dragons: twenty-nine black dragons in the outer circle, seven larger dragons in tierh; t thmpahe second, and, at the very centre, a single golden dragon, larger than all the others, its great jaws closing on its tail.

Sergey smiled and looked up. ‘These are beautiful cards, Heng Chian-ye. The faces... they look almost as if they were drawn from life.'

Heng laughed. ‘So they were, my friend. These are copies of the very first Chou pack, hand drawn by Tung Men-tiao.'

Sergey looked down at the cards with a new respect. Then these were tiny portraits of the actual people who had filled those roles. Men and women whom the great artist and satirist Tung Men-tiao had known in life. He smiled. Somehow it gave the game an added bite.

‘Shall we start?' Heng asked. ‘If you'll stack the cards, we'll cut to see who deals.'

For the first few hours he had tried to keep things fairly even, attributing his victories to good fortune, his defeats to his own stupidity. And all the while he had studied their play  –  had seen how the other two played to Heng, even while making it seem that they had only their own interests at heart. It was clever but transparent, and he could see how it would have fooled another, but he was not just any player. At Chou he excelled. He had mastered this as a child, playing his father and uncles for his pocket money.