Lynne Banks - The Dungeon

Usually she dodged his hand, but occasionally a blow landed. She accepted this so meekly that he felt an unaccustomed sense of shame, but he soon shook it off. She must learn to obey and do her work properly, to make up for her shortcoming.

Her main task was to brew tea for him. He liked tea in the morning, and with his meals. She noticed he didn’t enjoy his food. This was good for her, because she ate what he left. She was given no meals of her own. It didn’t occur to McLennan that a body so small needed more than scraps. But the other men fed her titbits when McLennan’s back was turned, so she had enough, and her feet began to uncurl and grow again. She still walked badly – her feet could never completely recover – but she could walk, and with far less pain than before.

Because she had had a hard life with nothing but bare necessities, none of this seemed very terrible to her. The worst thing – when the pain in her feet got less – was all the noise and the fighting, the blood and the raucous voices of the men, especially when they’d been drinking, all of which frightened her.

Of course she was terribly homesick for her sisters, and for the safe, simple life she’d known, but when she thought of her mother she had conflicting feelings. Her mother had been merciless about the foot-binding, telling her that she must bear the pain so that one day, when she had tiny, enchanting feet like lotus-buds, she could live the life of a rich man’s wife, and help them all.

In any case, as the small army moved farther away, she sensed that she was never going to see them again. In the nights, when she curled up in some corner on a pile of hay or even the bare ground, the tears would come. But now she didn’t let her master see them.

As for Bruce McLennan, sometimes as the weeks went by he caught himself glancing at her and wondering, ‘Why did I buy her?’ The only answer he allowed himself was, ‘At home I have servants. A laird should have someone to attend him.’ He had obeyed an impulse, the random, greedy impulse that makes a man buy something just because he can.

But why this one, why not some strong, big-foot girl or young lad who would be of more practical use? Deep down he sensed a dark mystery in it. Deep down, where his feelings lay as twisted and out of shape as the girl’s feet, was a connection between this little Mi-Ki and his children’s voices, cut short long ago. Now, instead of his own children, he owned the child of some other man, some dead foreigner whose children had, however wretchedly, survived. McLennan owned her and he could do as he liked with her. It was a warped way of expressing what could not otherwise be expressed – the fundamental loss that can never be made up, and so must be compared to something small and contemptible, not a loss at all. The fact that she was damaged goods somehow locked into that need.

There was one old soldier who tried to get to know the foreign devil with the round eyes and hair the colour of fire. His name was Li-wu and he was different from the others. He was something of a philosopher, both more learned and more curious than the other men. They just saw the foreigner as a sort of tame monster, a useful fighter. Li-wu wanted to know about him. And he was drawn through pity, but later fondness, to the little girl who attended him.

So he sat near them in the evenings and tried to teach the foreigner more words so they could talk. He even taught him some writing. Bruce McLennan found this interesting because he liked to draw, and Mi-Ki writing was like drawing pictures. He thought the characters were intriguing, but faintly absurd – why so many? Why did each ‘picture’ stand for an object or concept? Though scarcely literate in his own language, he knew his alphabet and that seemed to him a better system. But he learned, in order to save himself from idleness and boredom.

Peony watched this from her place at her master’s side. Sometimes she would copy the characters, drawing them with a pointed stick in the hard earth. When McLennan saw her doing this, he thought, ‘She’s not stupid,’ and felt better about his bargain. At times, when Li-wu praised her gently, he felt a sort of satisfaction. ‘I own her,’ he thought, ‘so I take some pride in her. That’s all.’ That made him feel at ease. It wasn’t as if he took any serious interest in her. But it disturbed him when he saw that Li-wu and the child had something like a friendship. He disliked it when she would smile up at the Chi-na man, and he would talk to her seriously in their own language and pat her shoulder.

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