Susan Barker - The Incarnations

‘Oh, the Lord Buddha have mercy on his soul!’ he cries.

Stone-carver Peng has some tragic news. The slave is Puppetmaker Xia, and he is not sleeping. He has been strangled and he is dead.

The Singing Dunes

Around noon we enter an ocean of sand, the waves not lapping at a distant shore but frozen into luminous peaks and shadowy troughs. No scorpions scuttle in the dunes, and the carrion-eating birds that stalked us all the way from Zhongdu are no longer circling and swooping overhead. Here and there rocks jut out of the sand, like the tombstones of mass graves.

The dunes slow the Mongol caravan down. The wheels of the ox-carts get trapped in the sand and the Mongols put us slaves to work pushing the carts from the rear, as the oxen, hooves slipping, pull with ropes in front. We slaves are not very strong. Wasted by starvation and charred by the sun, we are hardly worth calling men. We are gristle and bone. We are the parts the Mongol juggernaut has spat out, the parts not good to eat.

Onwards the Mongols and Jurchen slaves creep. The sand dunes are long and narrow, stretching for a journey of many days to the west and one day to the north. But as we toil, knee-deep in the ever-shifting sands, I fear that there’s no end in sight.

The landscape fades in the gathering dusk, and our weary bones creak and sigh as we sink down upon the supple bed of sand. We keep apart from the herd, who glare at you, their breath fouling the air as they mutter, ‘Murderer!’ ‘Strangled the puppetmaker!’ ‘Better watch no one throttles him in the night!’ The threats make me nervous, but you aren’t scared. You turn your back on them and drift off to sleep.

The stars are brighter in the Singing Dunes. The silvery glow of the moon is iridescent upon the waves of sand. As you sleep you become a young boy again, and your iron-branded scars no longer seem menacing, but the marks of brutality and suffering. As you sleep, I vow to protect you, and I watch the craftsmen until every last one of them is out cold. During the famine of Zhongdu they slaughtered and ate their servants. They are cannibals. They are evil through and through.

I am drifting off to sleep when the spectral lullaby begins, nudging me back to consciousness. I sit up in the moonlight and stare about me. The singing is eerie and ethereal, and not in any language of humans but that of some other species of being. Where is the singing coming from? I listen and listen until it becomes apparent. The singing is coming from within the sand. I shake you awake.

‘What is it, Turnip?’ you say groggily.

‘Listen, Tiger! The sand is singing!’

You listen.

‘I don’t hear a thing,’ you say, and go back to sleep.

I look around the dunes. The herds of Jurchen slaves are dead to the world, starved limbs as white as bones under the pale moonlight. The Mongols watching over the herds, huddled under the skins of wolves and swigging koumiss from leather flasks, show no sign of hearing the strange, otherworldly song.

I shiver in the cold night. I lie down and shut my eyes to sleep. But sleep is impossible. I can no more sleep on the dunes than on a bed of knives. I lie awake and listen to the spectral singing. I watch the sand.

On the second day in the dunes our progress is once more sabotaged by sand, as the wheels of the ox-carts and wagons are brought to a staggering halt and the Mongols force us to toil under the broiling sun, pushing the carts up slopes and lowering them with ropes down the other side. Around noon we pass some tall and craggy rocks called the Three Wise Men. A landmark we passed the day before. Orienteers consult maps and compass needles in dismay. We are straggling in circles. Lost in the foreverness of sand.

Tempers are frayed in the blistering heat. At water-drinking time Stone-carver Peng drops the flask as he passes it to you, spilling precious water. You curse him for dropping it. He curses you for murdering Puppetmaker Xia. He shoves you, and you shove him back. Master Peng glares at you, his nostrils spurting rage.

Master Peng is old and wizened and would lose if he fought you on his own. But Master Peng is not on his own. The herd of shuffling, elderly slaves surrounds you. ‘Shame on you!’ they cry. ‘Shame on you for murdering Puppetmaker Xia!’ Ogre is standing with his brethren by a snorting camel, swigging water from a leather flask. Whip them, Ogre! I think. But Ogre watches with a lazy smirk as his herd turns on one of their own. Though the craftsmen are weak from marching to the brink of death, mob outrage lends them strength. They close in on you, stabbing you with their gnarled old men’s fingers. ‘Shame on you!’ ‘Brute!’ ‘We’ll beat you till there’s nothing left to bury!’ You laugh at first, at the stabbing fingers and threats of the white-haired old men. Then your face darkens as they begin to strike you. Thud. Thud. Thud . You struggle to fend off their blows

My heart beating wildly, I run into the fray. ‘Leave him be!’ I shout, as I am beaten by their fists. ‘Leave him be!’ I drag you out of the scrum of old men. I drag you away with all my strength, and we tumble on to the sand. Your teeth are clenched and bared, and you are glaring, keen to go back and fight. I heave myself on top of you, holding you down.

‘Sixteen against one,’ I say. ‘You will lose. They will beat you to death, and the Mongols won’t stop them.’

The will to fight drains out of you, but you glower at the old men.

‘I’d rather die fighting,’ you hiss, ‘than let those fiends push me around.’

Sunset. The sky is blood-coloured, as though bleeding from the Death by a Thousand Cuts. We stare at the massacre in the sky and you say, ‘The sun needs a tourniquet.’

The Mongols are spooked. The haemorrhaging of the sky is a portent of something bad. At dusk, they gather around fires of camel dung, praying to their animistic gods for protection and tossing in handfuls of sacred dust. When the shamanistic rituals are over and the fires die out, they go into their yurts.

The moon hangs low in the sky, casting its phosphorescence upon the dunes. I lie down, but I can’t sleep. When the spectral song of the sand begins, I am desolate. Though surrounded by a thousand men, loneliness wells up in me and spills out as tears. A sob, primal and deep, shudders in my chest as I suddenly understand why the souls under the sand are singing, and what they want me to do. Sobbing, I dig at the dunes with my hands. I dig and dig, like a dog burrowing for a bone, until you are shaking my shoulders and saying, ‘Turnip. Stop. This is madness.’

You pull me down. You hold me tight, binding my arms against my sides.

‘Shut your eyes,’ you command. ‘Go to sleep.’

But how can I sleep? I listen to the spectral melody. I watch the sand.

In the morning Stone-carver Peng is dead. Strangled. A choking gasp is his death mask, and his tongue is thrust out from the root. Ogre wrinkles his axe-battered nose at the corpse, as though it’s a dead cockroach or rat. He kicks sand into Master Peng’s staring eyes, before the Mongol caravan moves on, through the Singing Dunes.

Around midday the camels start behaving strangely. They gaze to the sky and moan. They bellow and snarl their lips back over their teeth. They sink to their knees and refuse to walk another step. One camel, possessed by terror, overturns a cart as he breaks out of his leather harness and gallops wildly across the dunes.

At first we are mystified. Then we see it, the dark and ominous cloud on the horizon, like a plague of insects swarming towards us. There is a roaring in our ears, growing louder and louder, as though the dark cloud is wrenching the heavens apart as it approaches. The Mongols have no time to put up yurts. They shelter behind the kneeling camels or under rugs of animal skins. The slaves huddle in groups. Outcasts from the herd, you and I crouch together, staring with foreboding as the turbulence draws near.