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Tag: Mow Fung

  • Miasma

    Miasma

    The sweet smoke bathed everything in a black light, turned even the sun black, which cast down its inky rays upon an ashen desert dotted with blasted stumps and the remains of unidentifiable beings. And it was as though a miasma arose from the earth to meet the ghastly light, some dark cloud arising. Finally his senses would numb and the faint vestigial flicker of luminous bone dim along with the remnants of wakefulness. What relief it brought, fleeting alas, this bleak corpse-like state.

    Herein unendurable day-lit regrets and cravings subside, assimilated by whichever skeletal self donned them as slabs of weightier stuff, like rag-doll stuffing, marionette trunks chiseled from wood and covered in miniature clothing, so as to impart a compelling illusion of life. First, the fleshing-out of a penny existence, soul without hope; and now the reverse, as in the erasure of a sketch, spiriting away first hatching and shade with light strokes of the rubber, and then the substantive lines with razor blade and spittle.

    Whose awareness was it of the grinning skull within, yet containing him, strangely? A drooling grin spread across his own sticky face; more than an expression, an extension of his embodied grotesqueness, a germ of lasciviousness for its own sake, abjuring any particular object. Some kind of perversion implicit in the skull. Memento mori. Never forget that you must die as well. Well, if that’s all, that’s naught: neither death nor life makes much difference to me. Why should I dread my approaching dissolution? Life is a borrowed thing, and the living frame thus borrowed is like so much dust. Life and death are day and night. He observed such thoughts pass through the skull over and again.

    A shadowed figure peers into a smoky opium den filled with drifting haze and dimly seen occupants.

    Echoing his uneven, scuffing footfalls and stumbles, a passage had led him here, but which? Or which wasn’t it? The one with the ante-room? On the one side a deserted gambling table and on the other the same. Both deserted, for luck had forsaken the place. A hallway led down through the building, from which a number of small rooms opened off, half of each occupied with a staging spread with gaudy carpet. He pushed open a closed door, to peer in through the beckoning smoke, almost sickly sweet as it was. Two … what do they call them … orientals, celestials … pigtailed, reclined on the staging, curled either side of an oil lamp, the wisps of black smoke spiraling up. To look into their eyes was to find no spark beyond faint reflections of the lamplight. Beyond those unseeing orbs, no, orbs revolved inward, no sign was granted the interloper, no sign of life, nor any of the myriad fluorescent blossoms and gems of the transcendent realms, the dreams that held them in thrall.

    Further back, in the shadowier corner, another lay, grotesque grin on his unshaven face, hugely magnified, as though mirrored on the convex surface of the observing eye that had somehow passed by the other two unseen.

    From time to time, one or another stirred in order to reload his cane pipe, about a foot long, on the end of which was affixed a bell-like covered bowl, with a round hole the diameter of a pea, to admit the opium. Using a long steel needle he took up a portion of treacle and heated it above the lamp until it attained the plastic consistency of dental gutta-percha, whereupon it was ready then to be inserted into the hole. He put the end of the cane tube to his lips, applied a light, drew in the smoke and released it out through his nostrils.

    The third awakened, reenacted the ritual, then lay back and drifted again into a fleeting paradise, his head resting on a firm-cushioned stool about six inches high. Once again, and again, further confounding the befuddled mind, which beheld as one continuous action what was in truth a composite of disparate moments. And what if not merely the mind but the spirit as well was so disorientated by this freezing of time’s components that it became dispersed among them? Not knowing where or when it existed in any segment of the action. Not to say that the self was concerned about such contingencies as time and place, so close was it to its dark and eternal home, so close, merely a membrane separate. Bearing in mind that the self itself – note the impersonal pronoun – could not be said to know or think, being merely an effect or illusory thing.

    Immediately he recognized his own face in the contorted smirk, the gesture itself took control, such that he, the mirror image, must only obey. Which was this dark passage through which he had arrived, from a course traced through so many forked paths? Might he rejoin his mother and intimates, Pu-erh, Ugly Toad, Yongyan, and Wang via this corridor, with rooms coming off to the right and left, multifarious false paradises? Places of dreams, ante-chambers of the grave, which remind us of our lost ones, since the walls are hung with their portraits and decorated with their busts, as though designed to relieve our desolation, we who must remain a while longer.

    Whence the guilt, the miasma, the dark cloud arising?

    • • •

    Ugly Toad rose to a position of great respect in the temple, successfully wooed one of the most beautiful women in the village below, and took her for his concubine.

    “I would prefer to be next to him,” she said, “than married to any other man in the province, unattractive as he is.”

    Her given name was Ling, which is like the sound of a bell or a tinkling piece of jade. Jokingly, he called her his Concubine Ling, which was the title the Empress Xiaoyichun had borne a century before, when she rose to fifth-rank consort of the Qianlong Emperor.

    “Concubine Ling,” he said, “your name carries within it the sound of the sweetest chime, but surely you must realize that such a chime will sound muffled and confused when hung between two old earthenware pots like your father and me.”

    How could she answer other than with a smile?

    “You are getting these chestnuts out of some old Taoist rascal in those books, I’m sure. I think you’re spending far too much time pondering in the library these days and not enough planting in the garden.”

    “Yes indeed, Concubine Ling, I noticed just today that the new bamboo shoots are coming up; it may be time for somebody to harvest a few, for they will soon be growing up in front of our eyes.”

    “I disagree,” she replied. “The watermelon radishes are more advanced, and if we don’t pick them, they will turn. And what is more,” she added with a come-hither smile, “they are called ‘beauty in the heart,’ so it is auspicious if you are the one to harvest them, emperor of my heart.”

    “Of course, my dear, you are right. The bamboo shoots can wait a little longer. It is yet quite cool, after all.” And he never failed to do exactly as she wished.

    Similarly, he never expressed any opinion contrary to those of his neighbours. Consequently they grew to love him nearly as much as did his wife and father-in-law, who moved in with the couple and would never be separated from his son-in-law, such was the fondness he developed for him.

    “I wonder why you always seem to agree with everyone’s opinions?” his father-in-law said to him with a faintly critical overtone, one quiet evening when they sat relaxing by the cliff-top, enjoying the moon over a cup of hot toddy mixed from rice wine, sugar, and spices. “I’ve noticed that, even when they are quite contrary to each other, you always manage to concur with all of them and don’t adopt a particular one of your own.”

    “Well, you know,” Ugly Toad said, “it must be because here in this temple I have grown to prefer appealing to the infinite, rather than be disturbed by everyone’s conflicting ideas. Now I think of it, though, listening to what you say, perhaps I should make an effort to have an opinion of my own one day …”

    Lao Tzu’s disciple Zhuangzi says that if an ugly man has a child born to him at midnight, he hurries to it carrying a light to examine it most eagerly, afraid that it may look like him. When their daughter arrived, Ugly Toad did just that, but the baby turned out to be even more beautiful than Ling, and he wept tears of a greater joy than that of most new fathers, as joyful as they are in their own right.

    Endowed as she was with a phenomenal wisdom and depth of knowledge in Confucian law, among her wealth of other attributes, Pu-erh had her pick of administrative roles in the district, for a succession of emperors had come and gone, and the Imperial Court had by now forgotten all about her, sunk from notice in such a far-flung place, leagues upon leagues from the Forbidden City. And anyway, anyone who came across any mention of her in the records would have assumed, naturally enough, that she had passed away many years ago.

    She employed Yongyan and Wang as assistants-in-training, instructing them in the “Ten Wings,” Confucius’ own commentaries on the Yi Jing, and in his principles of law and social harmony, while at the same time guiding their education in Taoist philosophy. A far cry from their activities as less than competent ginseng poachers and bandits, their lives now became devoted to self-improvement and to becoming citizens whom all the villagers would admire for their virtues and upon whom model themselves. Pu-erh’s aim was to form a supremely harmonious society in the mountains – to transform this rough clay into the finest porcelain. Corporeally honed by a fervent idealism, Yongyan the Hungry became thin as a reed and came to be known as “the Sated,” while Wang the Eviscerator became “the Meek.” Wang kept his head and face shaved and packed away his beloved goose-wing sabre, having learned that sharp weapons are instruments of evil omen, not of the cultivated person, who uses them only when compelled by necessity. The regional government instituted Pu-erh as travelling magistrate, and she and her two subordinates successfully undertook many charitable projects. Together, the three engineered drainage and irrigation projects, set up soup kitchens and winter shelters for the poor, and eliminated the widespread practice of infanticide carried out by families who had too many children to feed, known euphemistically as “marrying her off” or “transmigrating him to the body of another.” Mostly girls, but sometimes boys; mostly the poor, but the rich as well.

    Then one day, his eyes reflecting the heaviness of his heart, Wang the Meek came up to Yongyan the Sated where he was working in a vegetable patch, lowered a pack to the ground, and leaned on his walking stick.

    Two weathered monks tend a small garden in a misty, rugged landscape.

    “The life of the do-gooder has been great for what it’s worth,” he said, “and I’ve learned all sorts of new things, but enough is enough and I’ve come to the end of my tether. It’s tired me out, as much good as I know we’ve done. My heart weeps and all this is starting to give me the shits. Before we met up with Pu-erh and Mow Fung, I had a hankering after adventure. Remember after the bear got me up there at Changbai, I said to you, Enough of the mountain life, let’s go down to the Pearl River Delta and work as pirates shipping opium for the Heaven and Earth Society? There are all sorts of openings down there with secret societies starting up all over the place, all wanting to get rid of the Emperor and all the other Manchus.”

    He spat down onto the dirt.

    “And how about Ugly Toad? I can’t talk to him any more, he just agrees with me all the time. How can you communicate with someone like that? I used to like him much more when he was disagreeable. I’ve loved Pu-erh since I first set eyes on her, but there’s no denying she’s too good for me and always will be, no matter how hard I work at it. She doesn’t even see me; it’s as though her eyes look right through me. I love Mow Fung too, like the son I never had, but I never see him any more. Last time we met he raved on about the Jade Volume and all it was teaching him, over and over. He sits up in those caves in the cliffs above the Jagged Rocks. He’s going loco with all that fasting and chanting, and too much reading that old stuff isn’t good for you in this day and age. He’s been acting even weirder than usual, and he’s got even the monks talking, let alone the village folk. How would you like to come with me, back to our good old life of fun and adventure?”

    “Too much still to accomplish,” Yongyan said, resting on his hoe. “When you do a job well, you should do it thoroughly, and when you start something, you ought to finish it.”

    “You don’t say. Really? Did you make that up by yourself?” Wang said, realizing how utterly he had relapsed, but preferring things that way.

    “It is a wise teaching of the ancient sages, a rule that we all should follow.”

    “See what I mean?” Wang said almost to himself, sighed, shook his head and spat again.

    “Even now as we speak,” Yongyan said, “the villages in the valley below the eastern flank of Tranquil Mount are engaged in a controversy about the watercourses over there. Some of the villages noticed unused water flowing down the canal to the Eight-Mile River, you see, and they decided to tap it with unauthorised irrigation ditches. But the village of Great-Water thought this was wrong and appealed to Pu-erh as magistrate; and on going down to investigate the river system and seeing abundant water running down from Dog-Head River – which used to be known as South Ditch, the lower stream of Dog-Head Spring, but hasn’t been called that since the sluice gate was put in and the ditch dredged in spring and summer … But that’s by-the-by. Where was I? Ah yes, noticing that the South Ditch has quite a deep bottom, thus letting more water through than the forty per cent she had allotted to the eight villages along the circulation ditch, she ordered stones be placed on the bottom and sides, thus decreasing the amount they can siphon off. You see, that restores the forty-sixty ratio between the two main groups of villages. As well, she’s placed a five-wen fee on water usage for one day and one night, and limited the amount of water that each person can take during a given cycle of twenty days. Now, listen closely, because here it gets complicated –”

    “Enough,” Wang pleaded. “That’s exactly what I mean. You’ve changed too. I understood you better when you used to let your belly do the talking. I can’t bear any more of these convoluted issues. They have brought both my brain and spirit to the point of collapse. These are exciting times in the world, you know, what with the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom toppling Nanjing and chasing the Emperor out; and you’ve still got the Miao kicking up a stink in Guizhou province, and the Red Turbans look like they may take over Canton. And I’m missing it all for what? The chance to play sluice monitor for a gaggle of rustics.”

    “Wang!”

    “Alright, I apologize, I take that back.” He gave a snort. “Well, there’s little more to say but fare-thee-well. My destiny is out there somewhere waiting for me. Always remember that I love you like a brother, and it is my joy to have gotten us out of some sticky situations in the old days. Pass on my fond regards to Pu-erh and Mow Fung, will you? I hate long goodbyes and don’t think I’d be able to get away without making a fool of myself.”

    With that, disguised in the clothes of a peasant, best to avoid the attention of rebel and Qing soldiers alike, who, when they were not engaged head-to-head in one deadly battle or another, seemed to spend their time searching out and terrorizing Buddhists and Taoists, and defacing their temples, he shouldered his pack and set off for the forking paths in the bamboo grove. His heart was heavy but his tread light, in the understanding that “the skilful traveller leaves no trace of his footsteps.” The last Yongyan heard was a few snatches of a sad old song that Wang used to whistle once in a while in the old days:

    Breaking willow twigs –

    a hundred birds cry in the garden grove.

    • • •

    Mow Fung dreamed of a giant fish that turned itself into a bird and flew across the Southern Ocean, known also as the Heavenly Pond. When he awoke, the heart of the bird remained inside him, and he found himself consumed with its yearning for the south. Impenetrable darkness enclosed him as though he were a fossil caught in a piece of coal, and he recalled that in his dream, before he became the fish, he had found himself in a dark house of multiple paradises where he lost his way as well as his friends. He sat up and reached forward gingerly in the dark until his palm came to rest on a vertical granite plane. He began to crawl, groping his way along the wall. At the next turning, he halted. This was further than he had come on his past excursions in answer to the call of the thousand-mile-long black dragon Zhu Long, believed by the ancients to be the creator of the world, who usually lived deep beneath Zhong Mountain, fasting and holding his breath, but had evidently come here to pay a visit. It was through the light shed from the candle it held in its mouth that, roaming deep inside those caverns, Mow Fung gained his first views of the Nether World.

    The call had become an increasingly powerful roar during recent weeks. He did not hear it through his ears exactly, like a normal earthly noise, but rather through various parts of his body. At first, his heart, stomach and lung cavity vibrated annoyingly, a symptom that would become so pronounced and painful in one or another of them that he feared he might keel over dead any second. As for his ears, first they numbed, then began to burn and feel as though they bled inside. The channels that led from his ears into his brain fed in waves of pressure, synchronized to the pulsing of the blood. Having come so far inside the granite labyrinth, so near the dragon, the fluctuating pressure assaulted his ears, not from the outside but from within himself. Squeezed by the pressure, his eyeballs warped and perceived false, luminescent ghosts.

    He had the subterranean system memorized perfectly up to his present location and found his way back outside without difficulty, though assaulted all along by the voice. The mouth of the tunnel opened from a sheer cliff high above the rocks. As soon as he emerged, four peals of thunder sounded and a bluish-green light flashed six or seven times in the sky like thunderbolts. Clouds of dark vapour arose from the foot of the adjacent mountain and from the depths beneath him. From behind, mice scurried out between his limbs and along the narrow track carved into the cliff face. A silence descended, but for a whistling breeze carrying a scent of rotten eggs. The breath of Zhu Long! He knew immediately what it was the dragon had been trying to tell him all these long weeks.

    As frantic as was his effort to hasten, progress was nauseatingly slow, inching along the track, back pressed against the cliff, heels guided by a carved groove. Then into the forest he went, stumbling over boulders, splashing through streams as he staggered down the eastern shoulder. He came to the crossroads, deep in the forest, the place the monks called the “ineffable centre,” meaning the centre which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. The temple or the high village? There was only time to warn the one, but not the other. He must decide. Behind him, the east, the Black Dragon; to his left, Rosefinch; straight ahead, White Tiger; to his right, the Tortoise. Out of nowhere, a streak of crimson, a pause, then a ringing, slowly rising trill, Weeja-wu-weeja! Next, the alarm: Chay-eeee! And away.

    A dishevelled monk runs toward villagers, who stop their work and stare at him in a mountain village scene.

    At the outskirts of the high village, peasants tended vegetables, led an ox, wove a basket, braided leather thongs, repaired a gate. They all stopped what they were doing at the sight of the mad young monk in rags come staggering into their midst, unable to speak. Moved his mouth, but no words came – either from the effect of some narcotic or from his months of confinement in the caves. They started to laugh at him and continued until the moment the first tremor struck and threw them all off balance. The earth shuddered and their hovels shook and creaked, but none collapsed. A massive clap of thunder sounded from the direction of White Tiger peak, and an overpowering crash and rumble rent the air, as gargantuan slabs of rock and earth slid and vanished into the abyss before their eyes. The Taoist temple and everything within its grounds and its walls disappeared along with the entire mountain peak, everything mangled and disintegrated as one, like a shovelful of gravel. When the peasants arrived running, there was only an abyss of nothingness where the temple had stood minutes before, much as if it were a chalk drawing wiped from a slate. A vision of it was still there in the memory, as tenuous as a retinal image. Yet, much as they rubbed their eyes and shook their heads, the building itself would not reappear.

    From the draft novel Stawell Bardo © Michael Guest 2026

  • Dust of the Dragon’s Tail

    Dust of the Dragon’s Tail

    The fleeting glimpse he had gained of a young fair-haired woman through the half-opened doorway to the inner sanctum of the Jade Phoenix had nagged at the detective. Of late, Chinese camps were acquiring a reputation among certain of the Wimmera youth for the unwholesome diversions they afforded. Alluring as these places may have appeared to some of tender years, especially to the wayward and unchristian among them, they were commonly reckoned iniquitous dens.

    One sixteen-year-old girl undertook a week-long, hundred-and-forty-mile journey from her home at Ballan, only fifty miles out of Melbourne, in quest, so she said, of a situation at Horsham. Playing upon the compassion of publicans she visited along the way, she obtained overnight board and a shilling here and there to buy meals on the road. Her real destination turned out, after a circuitous detour, to be the house of a suspect European woman at the Deep Lead Chinese camp, where she took up quarters.

    Hearing news of her arrival, Constable Hillard went out to interview her and, disbelieving her story, gave her notice to quit. When she spun him more yarns, attempting to fob him off and contrive to remain, he brought her up on vagrancy before the Stawell bench. The magistrate discharged her after a sound admonition, and the next thing you know, off she went to live with a Chinese gardener at Doctor’s Creek. Not a week later, Hillard ferreted out a second one, not even sixteen, who deserted her family home for the camp, because, she explained, of her father’s cruelty and the lack of comforts at home.

    This same girl was already known to the police, having recently preferred a rather serious charge against a young man from Stawell, which he was to answer at the next General Sessions. There was something wrong in the state of Denmark, the magistrate informed Forster in writing, when girls such as these sought the association of a Chinese camp, proposing that if an example were made of those who harboured them there, it might prove a deterrent.

    Dark-eyed Miss Chan – Forster addressed her as such, for the woman’s unassailable poise checked in him any impulse he may have felt to assume the familiarity of ‘Lili’ – acknowledged, when he called on her the next day, that she had indeed engaged a young white woman as a waitress and housekeeper, and he was welcome to meet her; she was just now in the back garden feeding the chickens. This he did. No ragamuffin, but a strapping, jocular red-haired Irish colleen of nineteen she was, radiating goodwill and health, and obviously unsoiled by the demons of opium and rum.

    Perhaps, Forster reflected, the growing distaste for the Chinese immigrant as ignorant pagan and filthy barbarian had little basis beyond plain bigotry and the biased reporting of the newspapers. There was the old enmity of rival gold-miners, resulting in thuggery and atrocity at Buckland River, Lambing Flats, and as close by as Ararat itself, less than twenty years ago.

    Detective Forster sits alone at his desk in a modest 1880s bush office, leaning over papers in a dark coat and brimmed hat. An oil lamp and scattered documents rest on the desk, and the scene has a sombre, reflective mood.

    Disgruntled unionists were, he presumed, at the root of the more recent political pressure to exclude Chinese sailors and stokers from working on steamers trading to and about the Australian ports. Invariably cheerful and obliging Chinese fishmongers and hawkers of all sorts of useful wares had now become the targets of insult and violence from many working-class Australians, owing to a general animus against the Australian Steam Navigation Company, which had been hiring Chinese. Most unworthy of a great, free people. And what did this rabble know of China, a country they so despised? Most likely little, if anything, more than he did.

    If Lili Chan and his other new acquaintance, the mysterious Mow Fung – full of surprises he was, publican-cum-priest of some sort, evidently – were a measure, the Chinese had much to contribute to this country, and especially to a far-flung region like this. In idle moments, he found his thoughts wandering in their direction – and in Lili Chan’s, he cautioned himself, rather too often. He could entertain not the slightest likelihood that such a woman might have any possible interest in a crusty, ill-oiled bachelor such as he, even despite her situation, which was a morally tenuous one in the eyes of most. He could only wonder at what had brought her here, to the middle of nowhere, when clearly her talents and charms – that trace of a cultured American accent – would have fitted her for a rewarding position in Melbourne, at least. Enigma indeed. Her skin was of such a subdued olive hue, her features of such subtlety, that she might well pass for white, given the right circumstances and Western attire. Now, there he went, off again on mad imaginings …

    It was in the midst of reflecting on her features that he recalled having paused, some months earlier, on an item in the weekly Victorian Police Gazette – one that had caught his eye by departing from the usual notices concerning people wanted for questioning, prisoners discharged from gaol and the like. He retrieved the number from the bottom of a tea chest packed with old copies of the journal in a corner of the storeroom by the stables.

    “The whereabouts of a missing heiress are sought. The Cantonese woman, of Anglo-Chinese descent, has been traced from the United States, where she spent several years after leaving China, to the Colony. Information has come to light concerning her entitlement to a handsome fortune, of which she is not likely to be aware. Contact should be made with Chief Commissioner Chomley.”

    The memory of the notice clung to him. The next day he rode to the Jade Phoenix, and presently laid the gazette before Miss Chan. The proprietress looked up from the page and bathed the detective in the cool liquid of her unblinking gaze.

    “I was not aware, Sergeant, that you took such an interest in the minutiae of my appearance and background. Your detective’s training, no doubt. The innocent Miss Finnegan discovered in the employ of this humble if disreputable establishment – that speaks well for your skill. Are you ever able to separate yourself from your duties as a … copper?”

    Mincing by their armchairs just as her name was mentioned, the lusty Molly Finnegan, playing at saucy Irish soubrette, flourished her feather duster and made her exit.

    “Have you ever thought of entering the gambling line? Your attention to detail and, I suspect, your talent for handling disturbances would be invaluable,” Lili Chan said.

    “I dare say the references would prove difficult.”

    “On the contrary, Sergeant. In certain establishments, a good blow and a discreet silence recommend a man admirably.”

    “I suspect I should make a very poor ornament to such a profession.”

    “A poor ornament may still have his uses,” Lili said.

    She lowered her eyes to the gazette again. “In some houses, usefulness is the rarer quality.”

    He watched her a moment. “Miss Chan, does this notice mean anything to you?”

    “My origins are too humble, I fear, to promise any inheritance beyond poverty and woe; but if it will put your mind at ease, you may enquire with the Chief Commissioner on my behalf.” What harm, she reflected, could come of agreeing to so much, when to refuse would only raise suspicion.

    • • •

    “Where were we?” said the voice of Huish-Huish, accompanied by the gentle jangle of a consecrated shamanic rattle, amid the light aroma of incense.

    “I recall, the zither.”

    After Fang Jing Dock’s tong began putting some serious pressure on Ah Toy, unassailable though she had been for the past twenty years, she sold up and moved to an undisclosed destination. With no choice in the matter, Chan Lee Lung became his mistress, and he moved in with her. It had been clear for some time that despite his dandyish affectations he was an enforcer – a so-called highbinder or hatchetman – for the Hing San Fong Tong, passing publicly under the name Society of the Mind Abiding in Tranquility and Freedom. Whenever he went out to conduct business of a certain kind, he would don chain mail beneath his dress shirt, tightly bind his queue up underneath his derby, to keep it from being seized in any rough stuff, and conceal his butterfly swords beneath the back of his jacket, all the while preening himself before his ornate mirror.

    One evening he and a henchman returned to the house with another Chinese man unknown to her. The three repaired to a room that Fang had commandeered as his music studio, where he also kept a small vault containing the most precious valuables of his tong: a handful of flawless diamonds of inestimable value. Before long the sound of Fang’s Viennese zither could be heard filtering out, a fantasia on Il Trovatore. She went to her bed and fell into a deep sleep, to be shaken awake by Fang.

    The highbinder Fang wearing suit, derby, and barely concealed chainmail vest, preens himself in an ornate mirror, adjusting his appearance with deliberate care. The image is rendered in a watery, near-monochrome wash with a subtle red highlight, the reflected figure contained within the frame and the edges fading into abstraction.

    “Go and see what you think of the new centrepiece in the studio and tidy up a bit in there. Fat Louis and I have some business to discuss, then we’ll get things back in order.”

    The third man sat slumped sideways in a wicker chair, his sightless eyes bulging wide, his tongue lolling from the contorted blue face. Around the throat, biting deep into the flesh, was a garrote fashioned from a metal contrabass string, carving what looked like a raspberry-jam-filled rut. She sank silently onto a chair and took stock of her future, which was clearly what Fang had intended.

    When she entered the sitting room, Fang and Fat Louis were sipping pink champagne, and nibbling on Roquefort.

    “Nice tang,” Fat Louis said. “King of cheeses.”

    “Butyric acid caused by the fungus Penicillium roqueforti,” Fang said. “Legend has it that the cheese was discovered when a youth herding his sheep on Combalou Mountain, partook of his lunch of bread and ewes’ milk curds. Seeing a beautiful girl in the distance, he ran off vainly in pursuit of her, leaving behind his flock and his lunch. When he revisited the spot a few months later, the mold had transformed his plain peasant repast into this delectable bonne bouche.”

    Then looking up at Chan Lee, “That was quick. Did he have anything to say?”

    “He thought the end was the best part,” she said in a measured tone.

    “The critics be damned, I say!”

    The two men fell about.

    Chan Lee looked at Fang steadily.

    “There is no medicine for vulgarity,” she said, taking up the champagne flute on the table for Fat Louis to fill. No way out of this but forward; she must watch for an opportunity out of the corner of her eye. 

    “I told you she would have what it takes,” Fang said. “You can tell a woman of breeding. And she knows as well,” lending a malevolent emphasis, “that the song of a dead bird is a sad one.”

    One thing was certain: to run to the police, if the chance arose, would be a waste of time and might well invite a fatal reprisal from Fang’s cohorts, were he to be put away, which in fact was unlikely, since the law tended to stay out of Chinese matters when they did not directly affect anyone else. For the time being she played the dutiful concubine to Fang. As he wished, she took on the mantle of his wife, at least in the view of the public, though the union was not sanctioned by either a Chinese or American ceremony. As an enforced confidante of the highbinder, who often boasted to her of his crimes, she was ever more ensnared in the strands of his fate, becoming, in the parlance of the courts, an accessory after the fact, and thus acquiring the guilt of his felonies.

    • • •

    In the Deep Lead Joss House, Chan Lee sorted through fifty yarrow stalks as Huish-Huish had taught her, occasionally raising them to her nose to savour the herb’s unique aroma. Huish-Huish counted off the number of stalks remaining between Chan Lee’s fingers at each stage, and the procedure was repeated six times to determine the lines of the session’s hexagram: Biting Through – judgement, punishment, discernment. None of the lines signifies guilt, though a little harm may be done. On the whole, an optimistic sign: though there may be trouble at the beginning, one bite’s through. Justice is administered, punishments exacted. If you lose your teeth, you lose your grip.

    Black on gold image of the Yi Jing (I Ching) hexagram 21 Biting Through. Bottom to top, the lines are Yang (solid), Yin (broken), Yin, Yang, Yin, Yang.

    “Cutting … gnawing … chewing …” Huish-Huish said. “A picture of the mouth. You bite through, get your teeth into something.”

    “Cutting.” Chan Lee intoned the word, the eye of flesh closing, the inward gaze of the eye of her contemplation floating back in time. “If you chew dried salt meat, you’ll find yourself poisoned.”

    Knowing not whether for good or ill, she decided that her best move would be to gratify him by seeming to take pleasure in what he did – deeds she found appalling and sickening, lacking as she did the same innate relish for inflicting misery that she now knew to be his. She did not stop to ask whether repeated exposure would inure her to his evils; whether, by touching black paint, her fingers too might be blackened. One thing was sure: there was no iota of love in her heart for the man who had become her ostensible protector. Fang was a man in whose arid heart love for any other creature had never taken root. As time went by, familiarity became contempt, and instead of any initial ardour, the possession of one so desired by others only fed in him a seething sadistic scorn that grew stronger by the day. This scorn he expressed in a ritual of cruelty, a proxy for the conjugal act, with strangulation and cutting for caresses. Sometimes his fervent passions quite got the better of him, and it was on the cards that he would murder her before too much longer.

    Deadened by morphia, a living ghost of herself, she faded from the view of her admirers, most of them so addled that, appeased by a surfeit of available substitutes, they forgot her before long – or rather, recalled only the myth of that bewitching peony of the Barbary Coast, and not the flesh-and-blood woman. Most. An up-and-coming stage magician, Chee Ling Qua, formerly of the ‘Court of Peking’ troupe, was presently engaged at the Bella Union – fire-breathing, sword-swallowing, linking rings, disappearing rabbits and chickens, the works. He could materialize a great big glass bowl full of goldfish out of thin air. A gentle soul, meek and mild, far from a hero come to save the day, but she credited his avowals of undying love and knew that he possessed, if not great means, at least some paste gems of amazing fire and brilliance for use in his performances.

    He was also on close terms with the most highly skilled and secretive Celestial apothecary in the city, whom he commissioned to create incendiaries and other chemical substances necessary for his stage effects. Chan Lee contrived to steal some time alone with the magician in his dressing room one evening when Fang was occupied with business; though he despised her he was as possessive of her as ever. He was much preoccupied these days, his gang embroiled in a war with a rival tong over the exclusive right to operate fan tan games and lotteries in the Barbary Coast. As it happened, Ling Qua was on the verge of pulling up stakes and setting off abroad with his own small troupe. Chan Lee should come with them at any cost, he begged, as she rearranged his robes. She could work as his magician’s assistant, peppering up the act with an arabesque here and a shimmy there … she’d pack them in.

    A month later, the Australasian and American Mail Steamship Company’s City of Melbourne headed towards the Golden Gate, its passenger list including a modest troupe of performers, a mixture of Chinese and Europeans, among them the sylphlike Suzon Chabrier formerly of the Folies Bergère, an inconspicuous brunette who, on closer inspection, as the customs official who processed her had remarked to his colleague, had a charming and subtle nuance of face that could almost pass as oriental. While her fellow passengers lined the decks for their last glimpses of Angel Island, Yerba Buena, and Alcatraz, Miss Chabrier reclined on a deckchair in a discreet black velvet dress, her chapeau decorated with simple field blossoms and pushed forward over her head, perusing the Daily Alta California. She was particularly attentive to an article on page two, which reported on the sudden death of a despised highbinder for the Hing San Fong Tong, one Fang Jing Dock. A photograph of the victim’s corpse had sunk into grainy shadow, which was perhaps for the best, the report ran, since readers would have found the contorted face and twisted limbs most distressing. Suzon applied her reading magnifier to the image, then read on. A note found on the corpse showed that he had expected death by rival hatchetmen.

    Chan Lee, later known as Lily Chan, sits in a deckchair aboard a steamship leaving San Francisco, having assumed the identity of Suzon Chabrier of the Folies Bergère.

    The note read: ‘Soon I must go to my fathers. Whether by the broad bladed axe or by dust of the dragon’s tail, it matters not. This I know. I go. I commend my spirit to Buddha, the all-wise and merciful.’

    “A searching examination of the body,” the reporter continued, “failed to reveal any marks of violence. It is believed that by ‘dust of the dragon’s tail,’ Fang referred to some potent oriental poison. From his expression of agony, it appeared he had been administered sufficient of the substance, whatever it was, to kill an hundred men. Police arrested another highbinder named Fat Louis, who is well-known to have been an associate of the dead man; but it has come out that he was employed surreptitiously by the rival tong in question, the See Yups. The dead man, who will not be missed, was under suspicion for a number of murders of fellow Chinese. A woman with whom he cohabited, once well-known around the gambling dens and houses of ill-repute, has not been seen for several months, and is now added to a long list of the presumed victims of the deceased ne’er-do-well.”

    From the draft novel Stawell Bardo © Michael Guest 2026

  • Hessian Sack

    Hessian Sack

    Some weeks passed. Detective Forster, in his modest office at the Stawell Police Barracks, untied the hessian sack and spread its contents across his desk before Mow Fung. The coat and waistcoat had both been slit cleanly down the back, likely to ease their removal from the body; a white twilled shirt with blue spots, an undershirt, and a fragment of a wideawake hat lay beside them, all stiffened and blackened with blood.

    “These were recovered near where the corpse was found,” he said. “I’m showing them around the district, starting with the publicans, to see whether anyone can put a name to them. Ever clap eyes on them?”

    “Not easy to say. Clothes are clothes,” Mow Fung said.

    “The spotted shirt? Pale hat?”

    Mow Fung drew an exaggerated grimace of doubt.

    “Not so unusual. Could belong to anyone. You are going down to the Chinese camp after this, I suppose?”

    As it happened, that was precisely Forster’s intention.

    “What makes you say that?”

    “Police always look there first. I hear talk – they say the murder was done in the camp, and the body carried east to where the head was taken off. That ground lies midway between the camp and Stawell – four miles. Convenient.”

    He gave a wry smile. “Naturally, it must be the Chinese camp. Many more men live in Stawell – but they are good white men.”

    “No call to get prickly, is there? There have been disturbances in the camp. It draws the rougher element, that much is certain. I can’t say I blame a man for drifting there. There’s precious little diversion in the bush.” Forster, Melburnian by origin, retained something of the city’s broader tolerance.

    “Who is to say the owner is the same?” Mow Fung said. “Blood on shirt and vest – but none on trousers. They were not discovered together, correct?”

    “I believe I am the one paid to ask questions,” Forster said mildly, “but there is no harm in your knowing that they were not found in the exact same place. I recovered the trousers roughly four hundred yards from the body and the other items.”

    “The blood on the coat is faint. There has been little rain of late. It may be animal blood, or human. We shall never know. Anything is possible. But if the murder were done in the Chinese camp, why take the body east toward Stawell to dispose of it, when there are many deep mines much closer to the west?”

    “A reasonable observation. Still, someone in the camp may have seen these garments before, when their unfortunate owner was still walking about in them. If you are heading home, I wonder whether you might accompany me to one or two establishments there – since you were good enough to lodge the deceased on behalf of the Victoria Police. That is, if your good lady would not object to your being away from business a little longer.”

    “Why do you want me to come?”

    “Only that you’ve got more English than many of the men down at the camp, and some of them are apt to clam up – or go to ground – when a policeman turns up. Despite what you say, there may be one or two uneasy consciences there.”

    “Perhaps some understand English better than you suppose, but prefer not to speak to policemen.” He glanced at Forster’s plain clothes. “It is wise not to wear the uniform – it softens the impression. My wife will manage the pub. I had intended to return as I came – on Shank’s mare, as they say.”

    • • •

    Forster drove them out of the township in a trap, along the track, through the dust and glare beneath the blazing sun. The landscape grew strange once the town fell behind them and its ordered shapes yielded to the scrub. Each, sooner or later, noticed the black mat of flies on the other’s back, where they pressed and jostled to feed on sweat and the salt of human skin, in their obscene communion. Best to leave them; disturb them and they rose in a thick, droning swarm.

    The dull thud of the horse’s hooves, the creak of the trap, and the rattle of the harness were swallowed by the silent bush, as though sound itself were absorbed into the vast, listening earth. Holes appeared in patches of bare orange soil already surrendering to growth – the signs of earlier incursions. Here and there, mounds of excavated dirt lay heaped about deepening shafts, like oversized crab-castings along a shore. The human crustaceans who dug here twenty or thirty years ago were gone, many returned to the earth whence they came, having taken what was of value and left their detritus here. Thus history ends where it begins. Or only in these parts?

    Rear view of Forster and Mow Fung riding in a trap across an abandoned goldfield, their backs dark with swarming flies as the dusty track threads through pockmarked earth.

    The two continued along in a silence punctuated by the discordant cry of a single bird.

    “Did he say ‘Ballarat’?” Mow Fung said with a delighted start.

    “Not too far from home, enjoying his day-trip like us, maybe.” Forster chuckled. Grey butcherbird, probably. He had read that places were sometimes named for the cries heard there. “They say that Ballarat means ‘resting place.’”

    “Those shafts are Chinese ones,” Mow Fung said. “Round holes with no corners for evil spirits to hide in. Also, round is better than square, because the sides won’t fall in so easy, and you don’t need much timber. A European does not have to worry about ghosts and spirits, does he? Too rational for them, so they cannot harm him,” he added with a small laugh.

    The camp’s heyday lay twenty years past, when gold gravel was struck midway between Stawell and Deep Lead, one of the richest alluvial fields in Victoria. Before long most of the gold was taken, leaving only enough to sustain a dwindling community of oriental fossickers. Of late, the diamond drill had kindled hopes of renewal, and the New Comet Company had even set up in Deep Lead; yet a recent regulation barred Chinese from employment on non-Chinese leases.

    “A rough, strongly built man – there are many such men working on the railway these days,” Mow Fung mused. “If he is not known in Stawell, then he must have come from elsewhere, perhaps to work on the new line.”

    “They are indeed a transient breed.”

    Shops and dwellings huddled together, walls and a variety of roofs clad in boards all askew, yet which somehow in their chaos attained a harmony all their own; frail but sound constructions lining a street not wider than a cart track.

    To Forster, this time too, everything seemed Chinese, from curious fabrics and wares in the windows to the cats and dogs yawning and scratching in patches of shade. Mow Fung exchanged a few words in his own tongue with a plump, amiable woman shaking a mat as Forster pulled up the rig. Her two infants played with a top in the dust at her feet and squealed in high, lilting tones, miniature editions of their mother. The newcomers stirred a hubbub in the nearby buildings, and within a minute a dozen Celestials had poured out and gathered around the trap to inspect the garments Forster had displayed on the seat, while he fended off the more enthusiastic who reached to handle them.

    “Nobody recognizes these things,” Mow Fung said.

    They proceeded down the street, Forster leading the horse and trap.

    “What a pong. For God’s sake, that’s a great patch of human dung beside that place!”

    “Dried out, it makes good fertiliser,” said Mow Fung. “We Chinese have had to learn that practice, because Chinatowns are usually built below the main town, at the bottom of a hill where sewage and rubbish wash down. Very smelly, though. The newspaper editor often worries that diphtheria will not kill us here, but will drift over to Stawell instead.”

    They stopped before the joss house, a low timber building with a sloping roof. A faint scent of incense drifted from within. Mow Fung went over to pay his respects, bowing and disappearing through the open door.

    “No good,” he said when he came back out, holding a paper lantern. “Somebody knocked off some ritual ornaments. Terrible omen.”

    “What’s that you’ve got?”

    “Kongming. Sky lantern.”

    Forster made a noncommittal grunt. “Right. Say no more.”

    Mow Fung shrugged. “My mother used to say, ‘If you want to become full, admit the emptiness.’ Lao Tzu said the same. It means don’t think too much – listen once in a while.”

    “Steady on. It’s too hot for philosophy.”

    At the far end of the street, a group of men loitered smoking in front of a building.

    “Miss Lili Chan’s Jade Phoenix,” Forster said. “Its reputation precedes it, and not in a good way. Sly grog and opium. Fantan croupier of prodigious luck – or suspect dexterity.”

    “Good friend. Lady of fine quality,” Mow Fung said.

    Heavy curtains enclosed the parlour, parted here and there to admit thin slivers of light. As Forster looked about to gain his bearings, portions of the room surfaced briefly before retreating again into shadow. He had been expected; nothing illicit met the eye. A girl seated on the end of a couch plucked on an instrument resembling a pear-shaped lute, producing a languid, elusive strain. Beside her a man leaned with his head slumped insensibly against the shoulder of a young female, who smoked a long pipe and fanned herself with a bored look. Some men sat around a table playing pai-gow with black dominoes marked in red and white, wagering from little heaps of matchsticks.

    Lili Chan herself emerged from a curtained doorway in a loose-fitting, mercerised cotton changpao. The matte black fabric gave a restrained rustle as she crossed the room. For an instant Forster thought he saw a light-coloured shock of hair before the curtain slipped back into place. She took a cheroot from a lacquered box on the mantel shelf, inserted it into a cigarette holder and signalled to a brawny attendant to light it for her, before at last addressing the two men.

    Lily Chang in a loose black thick-cotton changpao stands in the Jade Phoenix parlour before a curtained window, half-lit in shadow.

    “Detective Forster,” she said. “I assumed our paths would cross again. I take it this is not a social visit.” With a smile, she nodded to Mow Fung.

    “Business has a way of intruding,” Forster said. “Even in agreeable surroundings.” He tapped the hessian at his side.

    “Intriguing. Even so, perhaps you will still allow me to extend some hospitality.”

    She gestured to a young woman, who brought a small tray with porcelain cups and set it on the low table. Lili Chan took a seat without hurry. After a brief hesitation, Forster and Mow Fung did the same.

    Tea was poured from a pot painted with blossoms and winding script. Forster sipped from courtesy; the brew proved lighter than he expected. The murmur of Chinese between Lili and Mow Fung faded into the notes of the lute. Her garment fell in precise folds from her shoulders; the high Mandarin collar framed her face and lent her bearing a formal gravity. A diagonal opening crossed her chest, secured with subtle braided knots. Though the room held the day’s heat, she inhabited a cooler plane altogether. She offered him neither word nor glance, yet he was aware of being measured.

    Then the voices were quiet and he heard only the sparse notes of the lute. She drew on the cheroot, inclined her face and, exhaling the smoke through her mouth and nostrils, looked at him fully for the first time.

    Forster opened the sack and laid the clothing on the table. “You have seen these before?”

    Her eyes moved once across the cloth. “No.”

    “You are quite certain. Perhaps someone else present?”

    “I do not recognize these things,” she repeated. “Nor do my employees, for I do not.”

    At the door, Forster offered her a smile and nod.

    “I understand there was some trouble in the camp last week,” he said. “You see much in this street, Miss Chan. If any part of it bears upon my inquiry, I would be obliged to hear of it.”

    “The temple was robbed by a vagrant from Stawell, a European. I explained to the priest, Mow Fung, that there was no need for the law. The stolen goods were recovered, and mercy shown. Too much to drink. He returned everything when he sobered up and regretted his deed.”

    Outside, Forster turned to his companion. “Priest?”

    Mow Fung looked bashful. “I only consecrate a few things here and there, make rain, tell fortunes, guide the dead, heal boils, such matters…”

    • • •

    Forster found John Campbell, publican of the Royal Hotel at Glenorchy, in his back office. He placed the sack on the table and took out the clothes, one by one. Campbell watched without moving, then gave a short, humourless snort.

    “I know these,” he said. “I’ve seen them worn.”

    Forster waited.

    “Two railway hands, December – navvies off the Dimboola works. Twelfth to the fourteenth, in the one room. Burns was one – smooth-tongued. His mate called himself Charley Forbes. Big red-bearded fellow. ‘Scotty,’ they called him, though he said he was Irish.”

    Campbell touched the coat, as if confirming a weight.

    “He wore this. Coat and hat – same sort. Burns did the talking. Held the money. Kept him close.”

    Forster wrote.

    “They came down by train?”

    “From Horsham, they said.”

    Campbell’s mouth tightened.

    “They ran out of money here. Lost it at cards and drank what was left. When it came time to pay for the room, Burns left a watch with my barman as security – said once the debt was met it was to go on to Stawell, care of Phelan, the storekeeper.”

    Forster noted the name.

    Campbell reflected for a second and added, “I saw Burns at the Stawell races a few days after Christmas. I asked after Forbes. Burns said he’d gone up to New South Wales with an old mate.”

    Forster gathered the clothes together.

    “That’ll do,” he said. “And if you’re pouring, I’ll take that whisky now.”

    • • •

    A few days later, Forster reached the railway camp outside Dimboola, closing in on his phantoms.

    “Painter and his son?” Forster said.

    “Ain’t here …” the foreman began.

    The discharge came with a dull whomp! – sudden and overwhelming, as loud as a cannon, yet muffled by the tons of dirt and rock. The vibration struck the stomach as quickly, if not quicker, than the eardrums. Forster jumped and got through the “Holy–” before tons of dislodged rock thundered down out of sight around the bend.

    “… Jesus!” He blanched and stepped quickly into the cover of the embankment, underneath which a line of navvies was gathered in loose formation, with some standing and others seated in the dust or on rails and stacked sleepers. A drizzle of stones pattered beyond the shelter of the embankment and a cloud of dust surged round the bend. A few seconds of silence followed, the men watching the detective regain his bearings.

    “Who’s opened his bloody tucker bag?” one of them drawled, earning a chortle or two. Forster looked over and was met by steely, sullen faces and a few grins bordering on sneers.

    “Should’ve mentioned that,” said the poker-faced foreman. “Bit of blasting this morning.”

    Evident the copper was put out. Didn’t much enjoy being the butt of a joke.

    “The detective is lookin’ for the Painters?” he called. “Where are they?”

    “Morning off,” came a reply. “Doubler yesterday.”

    A whistle-blast came from around the bend.

    “You men get back to work now,” the foreman said.

    He showed Forster to one of the tents at the workers’ campsite some hundred yards off. Two men dressed identically in grimy singlets and shorts, Richard and John Painter, father and son, sat on stools drinking tea, either side of an upended wooden fruit box that served as a table.

    At Forster’s direction, they examined the clothing, identical smokes drooping from the corners of nearly identical mouths. Coat in two pieces, almost the same colour as the grass in which it had been found. Waistcoat also in two halves, the buckle and strap suggesting it had been quite new before lying exposed for a month or more. The blue twilled shirt, comparatively new, a button torn out – that button found in the vicinity. Relics of the wideawake hat. All the garments except the wideawake more or less saturated with what looked like blood. He had not brought the trousers, which were found down a mine shaft some distance from the body; he reckoned they were probably the dead man’s too. Less distinctive, though; harder to identify positively.

     The Painters hummed and harred, seeming to communicate to each other in their own language of undecipherable mutters and growls, scratching their beards and shaking their heads deep in thought. The detective waited. Just as his nerves began to wear thin, the two men sucked in a breath as one, glanced at each other over their cups of tea, and shook their heads.

    “Yep,” said the elder.

    He opened his mouth to continue.

    Painter the elder sits in a canvas tent beside an upturned fruit-box table, tea and battered cups among cards and ash.

    “Teeth, Father. Company. Manners.”

    Painter the elder fumbled for his dentures on top of the fruit box between them, alongside some grimy playing cards, three battered tin cups – two half-filled with tea – an overflowing ashtray, and half a browning apple.

    “Reckon we know this bloke,” the father said. “Or knew him, you might say.”

    “The feller who owns these here clothes,” the son said. “Know him pretty bloody well. Knew him.”

    “Worked with him, God rest his soul,” the father said. “Nice chappie, broth of a boy. Bit slow. Addicted to the drink.”

    “Never once saw him drunk, Father.”

    “Never seen him drunk? You must be jokin’.”

    “Who said he’s dead?” Forster said.

    “Been reading the papers, that’s all. The body at Four Posts,” said the son. “Terrible thing, shocking. Must’ve been him.”

    “What was his name, then?” Forster said.

    “Scotty, they called him,” the son said. “But Charley Forbes was the proper name.”

    “Charley Forbes,” the father agreed. “Charley Forbes.” Tutted.

    “You’re certain these belonged to Charles Forbes?”

    “We know this coat by where it’s mended,” the father said. “This bit of stitching on the breast here.” He pointed a finger, the hand had a slight tremor in it now.

    “This here stitching on the breast,” the son said. “Charley burnt a hole in it with his pipe, so he stitched it up like this. Couldn’t be more certain it’s the very coat. I never saw him burn it, but I saw it stitched.”

    “Not a bad piece of stitching, really,” the father said, bending closer. “Quite sure as to the identity of this coat. No question.”

    “No question,” said the son. “Ain’t seen him since him and Burnsey took off together, a bit before Christmas.”

    “What’d he look like?”

    “Broad-shouldered, stout fellow. Large, flowing beard.”

    “Sandy coloured.”

    “Well, light sandy coloured, I’d say. Beard was lighter than the hair on his head, which was a dark sandy colour.”

    “Yeah, I s’pose you’re right there, Father. Light sandy coloured beard. Dark sandy coloured hair on his head.”

    “Sandy complexion, wouldn’t you say, Son?”

    “That’s right, Father, very sandy.”

    “And this other character, his mate?”

    “Robert Burns,” said the son. “Like the Scottish poet.”

    “That Man to Man, the world o’er, Shall brothers be for a’ that,” quoth the father, and lapsed into vacant thought, his head nodding involuntarily.

    “Old Jake seen him over at Murtoa the other day, getting off the train,” the son said.

    “Burnsey?” Forster said. “Where’s this Jake?”

    “Shot through.”

    “Where to?”

    “Goodness bloody knows. Just cleared out the other night.”

    From the draft novel Stawell Bardo © Michael Guest 2026

  • Errand on Cemetery Road

    Errand on Cemetery Road

    This universe grants the deceased a period of forty-nine days to cross through the boundary zone, a number that unites the tiny and the vast. The shaman – was that him? – did not want to disturb the soul’s awareness, for in this state, newly released from corporeality, swept into the perceptual and spiritual turmoil of the afterlife, it may be just as vulnerable to the perception of a benevolent spirit as it would be to a zombie or ghoul. Often, the soul does not even know it is dead. It drifts in a tenuous form, a molecule in a maelstrom.

    Judgment halls materialise and dissolve. The Hall of Unfelt Regrets, for those who failed to grieve as prescribed: sorrows issued retroactively: wrong order, not transferable. Griefs spooned from repurposed billy cans. Gallery of the Unlived Life. Corridors of one’s could-have-beens: concert cellist version; loving version; not-quite-so-cruel version. “Hey you over there! No touching the dioramas,” warns one of the sullen docents. Dropping to his knees, Forbes notes that beneath the dust, there is an old rolled-out mat from a public school in Nhill, for percussion band time. Depot of Ungiven Names. Filing cabinets disappear in the smoke of raging bushfires. A clever-man with pencil and ochre offers to look up his name, charging three truths and the last sound he heard. Canteen of karmic simulacra selling one’s true desires: pies that are warm but hollow; love that tastes of copper. Waiting Room of the Second Chance That Will Not Be Offered Again. You are told your name is next, and then that it’s not. You were never meant to be here.

    I Ching Hexagram 20 – Kuan (Contemplation), symbolizing observation and insight.

    And on and on. The so-called guide – our Mow Fung? – surely not – regains his composure. In a flash of inspiration, he traces in the red dust the trigrams: penetrating wind above, receptive earth below, summons in his heart the image of a single willy-willy, spiralling upward. Two unbroken yang lines above, four broken yin lines beneath: making the Yi Jing hexagram Kuan, whose power lies in observing and contemplating. When the wind blows over the earth, it stirs everything up, compelling us to observe.

    He envisaged the breeze sending ripples across the surface of a pool, and the soul was drawn to it. Upon that trembling mirror, a flickering image began to congeal. A voice, at first muted and reverberant, gathered itself into clarity …

    • • •

    “Kids’ll be real happy to see you after all this time. I reckon I’d like to see their faces, I’d get a kick out of that. I keep forgettin’ their names. What was it – Thomas you said, yer eldest? Thomas, that’s it, wasn’it? Sounds like a right little wag, that Tom, bright little bugger. I reckon I remember you saying something about him, something you said once, can’t recall now. What was it again, mate? He loves cricket, don’t he? I read up on the Australian Eleven playing over there in England, you know, how they’re doing and all that. I reckon I could tell him all about that, and learn him a few shots, like, keep a straight bat and everything.”

    Forbes tilted his head. “Me uncle learned me real good, but I was better at bowlin’ than battin’ in my day, mate. I’m tall, see, like you, only a bit taller even, so I’m a good fasty, and I can spin a bit too. Here, hold on a bit, let me catch me breath and light up me pipe,” he said.

    “Just bloody do it and catch up. We ain’t got all day for twaddle,” Burns said, thinking, You’ll not call my kid bugger again, you swine.

    The prattle of a halfwit grates no end out here in the Christmas heat. If a man had a gun, he’d be tempted to pull it out and blow the imbecile’s head off, or else his own, just to put a stop to it, let the cicadas have their go, unspoiled by jabbering gibberish that’s meant to mean something but is, in truth, no more than babble.

    The cicadas sing their soaring song beyond words; they sing of the heat, of their deaths not far off, of nothing: of an instant that deafens, and is, to them, filled with serenity and quiet.

    Going by Phelan the produce merchant’s in Patrick Street, Burns stuck his head in the door and called out, “G’day Jim, back later to sort it through with ye, mate!”

    Real hail-feller stuff. Could’ve been a right good salesman or a writer in one of them rags. Got the gab for it. Better still, something in the line of politics, probably. Manly grin like that, he thought, pausing to nod at his reflection, shoulders squaring, who wouldn’t vote for you? Noble – well, masculine – profile, intelligent forehead, its own mould of nobleness. He had that swaggerin’ way with him that the sheilas fall over for while other blokes can’t do nothing else but only stand by and admire. Well, he never got that far, but not through any fault of his own, and in his own way, everything he touches, he leaves his mark there. Walks into a room and they all know who’s the real man here, the stallion, all them pissing little geldings, them sheep and goats. It’s all got to do with knowing yer the number one, tougher and smarter than the next man.

    Up to the corner, and there was the pub on the main street, Fergus’s European. Across the intersection he strode, Forbes trailing in the wide, empty expanse, generous enough for a dozen willy-willies of dust and fine horse-dung. A three-dimensional cruciform emptiness rose into a vaulted silence. High above, at a faraway level past reason, a single white veil of cirrus cloud cut a lilac-tinged rupture in the pale blue surface of the sky.

    Aerial view of a street intersection in Stawell, Victoria, with a historic pub on the corner and surrounding buildings under bright daylight.

    He left Charley out on the front veranda blathering to Ben Wellington, a rum-looking old codger with one good eye and one sightless milky-blue, and his mate on the bench. The better to work his magic, to go in alone.

    The sawdust on the pub floor had darkened to a fine grey grit. Burns scuffed it without thinking, left a faint swirl behind him.

    “No, Burns, I know you.” Fergus the publican: a stout man with lambchop side-whiskers, brawny arms under rolled-up sleeves. Choleric, a real Admiral of the Red. The pressure of his blood thrust forth the veins and squeezed beads of perspiration from the pores of his fleshy red phizog.

    “Oh, come on, George, do a cove a favour for once. Just for a night or two. I always give you what I owed you, y’know that.”

    “That’ll be the day. Look, where is he, anyway?”

    “Just out the front, jawing with some old bastards. You should be paying him to stay here to babysit ’em. They thrive on that rot he goes on with. Good entertainment for ’em. Works out well for everyone around, you and all. Pulling his leg keeps them from fightin’ and breakin’ your place up.”

    “Look here, I don’t mind if they all get the hell out altogether. More strife than they’re worth.”

    “Do us a favour, mate, for old times. What about that trench I dug you the other month?”

    “Other year. You know full well I’ve paid you back ten times over. Favours. What rot. Well, where’d he stay last night, anyhow?”

    “Hunter’s Ball and Mouth.”

    Forbes wandered in with a “G’day squire,” and stood grinning at Fergus over the bar.

    “Jeez, ’at one-eyed feller out there knows about the nags. Blue-eyed Dick in the fourth, he reckons.” Chortled madly for who knows why? – unwritten prerogative of a simple mind.

    “Why doesn’t he stay there again, then?”

    “Truth is, I want to get him off the grog. I brought him here for the purpose of having him sober.”

    “What are you going to do?”

    “We are going to Dunkeld to dig some dams.”

    “Bloody Carter Brothers,” Forbes said. “Got three running in the Horsham Cup next week. Lion, Silvis or sompthin, and – what the hell was it? Rosebunch or summit, shit –” He slouched back to the front door. “Was that Rosebunch, Mr. Wellington, was it? Oh, my stars, that’s right. An’ who was that one you tipped me for the Cup? Ah, that’s it, that’s the one!”

    Slouched back to the bar.

    “What are you standing there looking at us like a putty-brain for, yer great galoot? Here, give us a couple of mugs of yer best tangle-foot, thanks mate.”

    Fergus looked at Burns, who shrugged and coughed up two deaners, which rang light on the bar and came to rest together with a clink. Fergus poured out three pots of ale and listened impassively to Burns’s account of their affairs. They would have gone today but were waiting for a watch to come down from Glenorchy, which was being kept for a debt they owed. They sent a telegram yesterday to release it.

    “Rosebud it was,” Forbes said, wiping the moisture from his top lip onto the back of his hand. “Rosebud, that Carters’ nag, but he reckons put a quid on Lady Emily. Lady Emily for the Cup by two lengths, he reckons. Four-year-old. Five? No, four it was, he said. I believe I’ll catch the train up there next week and have a quid or two on her.”

    Burns turned back to Fergus.

    “We got money and more to come. We have ordered thirty quid worth of goods from Mister Phelan and are waiting for them to take them to the station. Else we’d have already gone. Now, I’m at home for a few more days with the missus and kids, and I want him –” sideways thumb at Forbes – “to stay here where I can keep an eye on him.”

    “Yeah, but remember,” Forbes reminded his mate, “I have to come down and meet the missus and young Tom and play cricket and all that.”

    Poor bloody woman, Fergus thought. Burns kept quiet about the appointment, praying it might go away.

    “So I only need a cheque for thirty quid to pay Phelan, temporary like, I’ll get it back to you in no time flat. I just sold a farm for six-hundred quid, and we’re off to acquire another.”

    “There’s land open for selection between Stawell and Glenorchy, didn’t you even know that?” Forbes stared at Phelan, incredulous.

    “There’s an idea!” Burns said. “We take enough for ourselves and leave a portion for you.”

    “Beauty!” Forbes said. “Not bad interest on a thirty quid loan, eh?”

    A low animal urge stirred in Burns’s gut and surfaced as a long, lascivious moan.

    “Real fetchin’, Eliza,” he said. “Looking real fetchin’ today.”

    The young woman behind the bar with a tray full of glasses for the sink, flashed a smile and slipped past behind her father.

    “Gotta love them freckled bushfire blondes, George. Lost the baby fat, though. Don’t work her too hard, mate.”

    Fergus, fidgeting, took a gulp.

    “If her husband hears you, you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face.”

    Ben Wellington limped in and sat down further up the bar. Forbes sidled over – “You don’t want to be a Jimmy Woodser, mate, up north that’s what they call a chap what breasts a public bar and tips the finger alone” – and got him started again on the horses.

    “Vandermoulin and Tallyho the four-year-olds didn’t do no good at Ararat, but McSweeney’s five-year-old Too Late, he’ll be a goer in the handicap hurdles. Paul McGidden has been training him over at Longerenong Pastoral Run. Bloody good trainer, had a runner in the Melbourne Cup, couple years back.”

    “What about Blue-eyed Dick, Mister Wellington, what you reckon there?”

     “I reckon I ain’t heard of him.”

    “You know, Blue-eyed Dick out of Little Nell and Off His Kadoova, you know.”

    “No, I reckon I ain’t heard of ’im, not around the Wimmera I ain’t.”

    • • •

    “Life is strange,” mused he who was once called Mow Fung – the not-shaman. Not easy to hold onto your identity in hell. “We live it forwards but understand it backwards. To develop through the gua, Kuan needs alert observation with clarity. You must restore the eternal while residing in the temporal, both of which move in opposite directions. You must observe closely, in order to tell the real from the false. Hold on to the real and get rid of the false. It is like the shrine ritual. First you wash the dust off your hands, before you make your offering. You have a little shrine made of dust.”

    Dust enveloped the wandering shade, who withdrew into a groan, but as though anticipating a truth in what was to come, forced its awareness back into the play of shadow puppets before them.

    • • •

    Burns rented the place from Phelan the merchant, for whose business his wife took on laundry and sewing. It was a fair-sized block along from the police station, with a parched backyard, tired dwelling, and fence nigh on splintering to ruins; most of its palings were askew or off their rails.

    Forbes arrived mid-morning and introduced himself to Florence, who told him Burns had gone down the street to fix up some business or other with Phelan the merchant. Burns had mentioned nothing to her about Forbes, but she absorbed his sudden existence with the same anaesthetised calm that filtered the world for her, a symptom of a weariness deeper than the heavy years he’d burdened her with. Once, she’d indulged his fancies of a grand future shaped by his quality and wisdom, and once she used to pine for his return, until even that became a sham and vanished not long after the last echoes of his pretended love fell silent.

    The children grew accustomed to his increasingly lengthy absences, but continued to anticipate his returns. He was always going to bring them a present next time, and they learned to believe there was commitment beneath the promise, initially. They were not lies exactly, but a seductive flicker – something like love or care – that expires without sufficient fuel. They would whisper and giggle to each other in their beds at the bedspring squeaks and concupiscent slurps that ornamented the darkness after he showed up, until soon it would be still again, as usual.

    Forbes made himself useful picking up the abundant dog droppings with the short-handled shovel, disposing of them near the coal heap in the back corner away from the shed, where she told him. The dog was off with the kids and their mates, down to the creek to swim and pick blackberries. She sat darning on the veranda, watching the visitor. When the wind blows over the earth, it stirs everything up, compelling us to observe. Some took her for slow, because of how she never rushed to reply, on the occasions she deigned to. Her needle moved as though with a will of its own; her gaze was like a still pool. Ah, a receptive surface.

    She still had her, the tiny wooden thing. The Dew Doll. She sensed that, tucked away in the dresser, nestled under old muslin and petticoat lace, among the few precious things she kept, the doll had stirred – as it did only once in a blue moon. It came back to her now, from years ago, the one time she’d wandered over to Deep Lead. The man who ran the curious shop in the Chinese camp had given it to her laughing, when she showed an interest, stroking it, for some reason not wanting to let it go. He couldn’t tell her much, only that it was old. Later the doll started to put ideas straight into her head, and she knew they were right. Things she should do, or say, or leave unsaid. What would go missing. Who to beware. The slip stuck to the back with mulberry paste bore the date some poor baby had died. Between the coiled silk buns of its hair, there was a hole with paper pushed deep inside, which the doll said she shouldn’t try to take out. The doll knew when the dew was going to gather – a rare thing in this country – and would let Florence know, so she could carry her out beside the shed, to feed on it. She’d wake up knowing. The doll had stirred. There’d be dew.

    A handmade Dew Doll in the back of Florence’s drawer, partially hidden among folded cloth; its eyes are faintly red, and its body is bound with twine.

    Forbes found a tin of rusty nails in the shed and set out to mend the fence, a task that drew more curses from him than it would from an average man. After each outburst, he’d flash her a wide, bashful grin and a demonstrative shrug. She’d nod back to him with her tranquil, closed-mouth smile. She was struck by the thought: There is something odd about this childish, well-meaning man. I know! He does not realize he is already dead. But there are others close by who do.

    He liked her drawl and what he took to be her patient attitude, which tended to suppress his frantic exuberance and draw out his contemplative side. When he finished, by a miracle the fence was still standing, and he joined her on the veranda, sitting on the step near her feet in the dog’s spot. Imagining she had an interest in his history with her husband, or more accurate to say, play-acting that she had, he traced through an idealised version of their shared narrative over the past months, since they’d started working together on the line at Naracoorte, on the South Australian border, where he’d stayed at Bridget Enright’s boarding house. Seven bob a week, he got.

    “A well and respected place it was, no drink of any sort sold, not like them what the bloody shanty-keepers run, which sells the vilest, horrible adulterations of all kinds, hideous compounds, they are, made only of chemicals, some sort of blend which costs about sixpence. Full of navvies, mostly slopers only there for a skinful – that’s blokes who’ll get fleeced and then decamp without fulfilling their dues, like. Mugs game to take a hiding and then pay for it, of course.”

    Better be careful what he says there, Bridget took a bit of a shine to Burnsie. Of course, when he detoured, Florence immediately knew the truth, but nothing could have been of less significance to her, it had all been sour for so long. Pretty, pretty doll …

    Then they’d headed back over this way to Dimboola. He told her about his mates the Painter brothers and Johnson. Burnsie’s – Robert’s – mates too, of course, though he had a bit of a run-in once or twice with the older one. Told her about his old sweetheart Hessie Hesslitt, who lives over at Mandurang now, but last saw her four or five years ago at Hamilton. As nice as could be, but ran off with some slicker, of course. Florence only tutted, nodded and made gentle wordless sounds as she worked, which warmed the pit of Forbes’s stomach, though there was no such intention.

    He was afflicted by a loss of words, so he took a folded-up newspaper page from his pocket, with the aim of entertaining her further.

    “Robert helps me with these sometimes – explains, you know, helps me read. You get some real informative stuff out of them. This one’s what’s called ‘Answers to Correspondents’ – that’s these jokers who send in questions for things they don’t know about, see …”

    She made one of her pleasant sounds, high-pitched and undulating, but smooth-like, to show she was interested.

    “… so you pick up a lot of good stuff. Take this, for instance, I’ve already read it once or twice, it’s from someone calls ’emself Cornstalk – they’ve got all sorts of names: In writing to the Queen, what form do you use, and to where do you address your letter? What do you reckon, Florence? Well, here’s the answer. We presume you want to write a petition. The form is ‘To Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of Indias: May it please your Majesty,’ and end, ‘And your petitioner will ever pray.’ Address through the Secretary of State for the Colonies.’ I reckon the Queen’ll be hearing from old Cornstalk before long, eh?”

    A placid smile on Florence’s face, shaking her head tutting, her eyes cast down on her darning. Pretty, pretty …

    “Here you go. Kiara asks the distance from Echuca to Sydney, and the cheapest route, and the cost. Answer: The cheapest route is via Melbourne. Train fare, seventeen shillings; steamer, thirty shillings to Sydney – Shit! – Distance overland, five hundred and forty miles. Echuca … That’d be, um, up there near bloody er –”

    A cattle dog mix heralded the arrival of four of Florence’s offspring, trotting around the corner to greet the woman and sniff at the man, before inspecting changes to its scent-map of the backyard and urinating at the door of the shed. The three boys and a girl stared at Forbes dumbly, and he similarly back, turning suddenly shy. Hearing one referred to as ‘Tom,’ he summoned some bravado and forced a grin.

    “G’day young’un. I know all about you from yer old man, mate. Bloody good little cricketer he said you was, tyke,” but the boy drew himself up and stared wordlessly back, before spitting on the ground and strutting after his siblings into the house.

    “Rough nut, eh?” Forbes mumbled, but Florence was bent away from him, gathering up her work.

    Forbes was smoking his pipe in the falling light when Burns showed up with Phelan and a gallon of brandy, which Phelan had sold Burns and been invited to come along and help drink it. The three set to and lasted into the small hours.

    “Rotten coppers down the street got it in for me,” said Burns towards the end, “so I snapped a couple of their saplings they were trying to grow out the front. Here’s what I’m gunna do, Flo heard it from a Chinese witchdoctor. You go to the cemetery and scrape up a handful of dirt next to a grave. Then you take that and spread it in front of someone’s door, where they won’t see it, so they tramp it all through the house. Brings them real bad luck that won’t never go away unless you get a witchdoctor to come and fix it up.”

    • • •

    The not-shaman says, “We must watch closely. Sometimes, the last thought a person has before dying, if it is a strong, clear, and pure one, will open up an aperture from this dark place, through which he may escape this suffering and chaos by going straight into the spirit world. If not … well, we will just have to wait and see and do our best.“

    He detected a resigned sigh, interpreting it as a constructive sign.

    • • •

    About noon the next day, humping their swags and thirty quid worth of supplies, the two men left to make their selection of the land off the old Glenorchy Road and then head for Dunkeld to do the dam. The kids had taken off at sparrow’s twit somewhere with the dog. Florence had watched Burns go to fetch Forbes from the pub that morning, then turned back to go through the stuff Phelan brought her.

    “Fergus ain’t here, we must wait and give him his twenty-seven bob for the room,” Forbes said.

    “Too right,” Burns said. “No, we’ll just slope, do the disappearing trick. He’s a mug, old George – ripe for rolling over.”

    “Do the old Jerry Diddler, eh? I’m up for it, mate.”

    They skirted Main Street and went along Cemetery Road. Burns thought he may as well duck into the cemetery reserve to take care of his little errand, while Forbes stood cockatoo out front under a tree, smoking his pipe. The shadows cast by the headstones were short and sharp in the sun, like a grinful of broken teeth. When he came out, Burns patted his trouser pocket and nodded at Forbes.

    Burns walks away into the cemetery, his back to the viewer; Forbes leans against a tree in the foreground, smoking a pipe.

    Who should they see fifty yards away, down Mary Street, but George bloody Fergus; he only chucked them a wave, as they turned back into Main Street. Burns had his sly piece of business to see to at the police barracks – in and out. Then they made for the old Glenorchy Road cutting a shortcut through some timbered bushland and struck out for Deep Lead.

    Burns, in no mood for conversation, tolerated Forbes’s whistling, fatuous comments, and laughter inspired by the few birds who had braved the heat to fly or call out. Some Headache Birds had lobbed in to mate and sang out heedless of the two.

    Sleep Didi, sleep. Sleep Didi, sleep. Sleep Didi, sleep, one carried on monotonously.

    Forbes laughed carelessly.

    “Sleep maybe!” he called back in imitation as they tramped. Burns bent over to do up the lace on his boot, then hung back as they went along.

    A flock of Sulphur-crested Cockatoos burst through the dry grey-green treetops in front of them. Raucous, chattering screeches, sharp squawks and whistles, then quieter murmurings as they settled on their branches.

    Abruptly, a lone, hidden Jacky Winter said his piece, as he watched the two turn down a track towards the Four Post Diggings in ironbark country.

    Plicky-plicky-plicky … Plicky-plicky-plicky …

    “Peter, Peter, Peter!” Forbes called, to be answered by the pretty, lilting ditty of a Scarlet Robin –

    Wee-cheedallee-dalee – then quiet, then tick, tick, tick, and a rapid burst of scolding chatter.

    From the draft novel Stawell Bardo © Michael Guest 2025

  • Ginseng Poachers

    Ginseng Poachers

    Once the blackened remains of his aerostatic globe were retrieved, Dinwiddie took to his bunk, afflicted with a profound dread usually reserved for the condemned. He shook, perspired, quivered, and palpitated; so much so that Pu-erh, apprehensive of her own fate, having been placed in charge of the Scot by the Qianlong Emperor himself, summoned a team of imperial physicians and acupuncturists. Their examination of his tongue revealed flaws in the state of his kidneys, bladder, intestines, stomach, spleen, lungs, heart, gall bladder, and liver. Moreover, its shape and colour pointed to a severe deficiency in Qi; red dots suggested heat or inflammation in his blood; and the thick coating was indicative of an allergic disorder compounded by digestive imbalance. He was dosed, moxibusted with mugwort, and cupped, scraped, tickled and pricked to the point of tears and bellows.

    He may as well have reclined sunning himself in the Imperial Garden, for Lord Macartney’s overtures to the Emperor had crashed and burned as completely as the globe, with tangible repercussions for the delegation. Macartney, preoccupied with weightier matters, had never much cared for Dinwiddie’s pet project in any case, and failed to notice its absence from the exhibition.

    Dinwiddie resurrected himself and managed to prepare for the official event. The Emperor was contemptuous, tarrying for less than five minutes before repairing to the quarters of his latest concubine. After his disdainful exit, Pu-erh conveyed his comments to the scowling Lord Macartney and deflated Dinwiddie:

    “Your air pump is of little interest, though the telescope might amuse children. He finds your planetarium infantile too – not unlike the sing-song clocks hawked in the Canton marketplaces,” she said. “The Emperor already owns a superior model, anyway, presented as a personal gift by a German delegation. It is true your giant lens can melt a copper coin, but will it melt his enemy’s city? He believes not.”

    The next day, she was summoned to the Dragon Throne. She kowtowed three times as she approached. The imperial ministers, secretaries, and scribes were in attendance, assisting the Emperor draft a reply to King George’s letter. Her attendants delivered the sketches and notes she and her agents had compiled regarding the scientific instruments.

    The Qing Emperor, in his Bright Yellow court robes.

    “You have performed your duties exemplarily, our flower,” the Emperor said. “Our indulgence of the foreign delegation, exasperating though it was, has nonetheless proved edifying in certain significant respects. Their ships are capable and well-armoured, their weapons powerful beyond our anticipation. It is useful to glean these odds and ends regarding the abilities of their scientists and craftsmen. Oh, that fellow, that worm …”

    “Lord Macartney,” prompted an advisor at his side.

    “That’s it – Macartney. I will never forget that spotted mulberry suit of his – the enormous diamond star, medals festooning his chest, and that hat – that ridiculous plume of feathers! The very image of presumption and self-importance. What a … peacock! But bumbling as a poacher setting snares in the Imperial Garden!” He let out a hearty laugh, provoking a ripple of hilarity among the ministers.

    “Insufferable dunce and fop. Humming and hawing about the significance of rituals and this and that, how he should bow and the rest of it. Disdains kowtowing to our Throne indeed, but performed some silly sort of jig instead. And they wouldn’t leave! They would like to have remained in Jehol the whole summer long! Those English have incurred my great displeasure – no more favours for them. Mark that, a ministerial edict for you: No more favours. Allow them two days to gather their paraphernalia, then escort them from the capital forthwith. The nonsense of this king, his wild ideas and hopes. Ah, that is apt! make a note. Come, take this down,” he said, flicking his fingers at the nearest scribe. “We shall draft the edict:

    “Your England is not the only nation trading at Canton. If other nations, following your bad example, wrongfully importune my ear with further impossible requests, how will it be possible for me to treat them with easy indulgence? Yes, good, and while I think of it, that point about letting in their proselytizers … Regarding your nation’s worship of the Lord of Heaven … Ever since the beginning of history, sage Emperors and wise rulers have bestowed on China a moral system and inculcated the code of Confucius, which from time immemorial has been religiously observed by the myriads of my subjects. There has been no hankering after heterodox doctrines.

    “Well and good,” he said, looking down at Pu-erh and granting her a broad, warm smile. It was the first smile of any sort, indeed, that she had ever received from him. “Foreign ideas and fancies can breed serious disharmony, can they not, our petal? The last thing we need is exposure to them. What was it that my father used to say? ‘Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow into your ruin,’ or something to that effect. By the way, how is your beloved Bright Yang? Has he returned with the tiny elephant and soldiers?”

    She averted her eyes and slowly shook her head.

    “You see, I know more than I let on,” he said. “I even heard scraps of a crazy rumour that the barbarians can fly! The nonsense that gets around. Never mind, he was unworthy of you, that Bright Yang. Yet fear not, a woman as intelligent as yourself must be much sought after. Is such a brilliant flower, however plain, worth more than the prettiest concubine? No, she is worth ten of them, and not just for lacking their vacant minds. Stupidity makes a concubine restful. But you, dear petal, you keep us guessing. Oh, that is not quite well put, is it? Naturally a pretty concubine is all the better when graced with an astute mind, is she not? How old are you, our petal? When were you born?”

    She told him, and he slowly shook his head.

    “That is what I have heard tell, but would you truly have me believe in the gold elixir of immortality? Have no qualms, our enlightened one, you need not seduce me with the fairy tales of your sect. Despite my patronage of Tibetan Buddhism and my abiding friendship with the Dalai Lama, I do not entertain the slightest aversion to your affections for the Tao, though its religion and philosophy I neither believe nor understand. Alas, there are far too few of you left in the upper echelons, though I’m told that some of your rural cults are regaining popularity amongst the poorer, lower-class folk. No matter, you have earned our fond indulgence, and may rely upon it to the end of your span under Heaven.”

    Again he shed the glow of his smile upon her, or so it seemed, enhaloed as it was in the golden rays reflected from the Dragon Throne.

    If Pu-erh had never doubted the Emperor’s enduring patronage, she did now. Another warm smile deepened her unease. He dismissed her and returned to work on his epistle to the British.

    “The beginning and middle are good,” he said, “but the end needs attention. Where were we? Ah yes … I do not forget the lonely remoteness of your island, cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea, nor do I overlook your excusable ignorance of the usages of our Celestial Empire. I have consequently commanded my Ministers to enlighten your Ambassador on the subject, and have ordered the departure of the mission. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera … Now for a firm conclusion: Should your vessels touch the shore, your merchants will assuredly never be permitted to land or to reside there, but will be subject to instant expulsion. In that event your barbarian merchants will have had a long journey for nothing. Do not say that you were not warned in due time! Tremblingly obey and show no negligence! Yes, that should do it! Inscribe this missive on yellow silk of the finest quality, deliver it to the mulberry peacock and impose my edict upon him to begone in two days’ time, at the risk of your heads!” He uttered the final phrase in an ominous tone that echoed in the hall, then smiled broadly.

    Lord Macartney received the yellow silk epistle, mercifully unreadable to him, and departed China ignominiously, his retinue and exhibition articles hastily boxed. Aboard the Lion as she set sail from Macao, he stood on deck with her captain.

    “Are they ignorant that a couple of our English frigates would outmatch his entire antiquated fleet?” Macartney said bitterly.

    “From what I have seen,” the captain said, “it would take no more than half a summer. Half a dozen broadsides would block the so-called Tiger’s Mouth, which guards the waterway into Canton.”

    “The population would be condemned to starvation. The Empire of China is much overrated. He is a crazy old man of war, kept barely afloat these past hundred and fifty years, which through its impression of bulk has managed to overawe its neighbours. Ah, he’s rotten at the timbers …”

    “Through and through, m’lud. It won’t be long. He’ll drift as a wreck and surely be dashed asunder on the rocky shore.”

    “The tyranny of a handful of Manchu tartars over three hundred millions of Chinese, who will not endure their condition for much longer. Still, we must forbear while a ray of hope remains for the success of gentle measures. At any rate, left to its own devices, I believe the dissolution of this imperial yoke will precede my own.”

    Two British ships, the Lion and another, leaving China under full sail.

    The captain watched the lord’s back as he paced away, then turned discreetly from the breeze, to shake his head, light his pipe, and allow himself a wry face at the tales of his superior’s disastrous mission, which were attaining satirical proportions amongst members of the envoy and crew.

    • • •

    Approaching twilight, two unexceptional sojourners tramped down the dusty track that skirted the flank of Timeless Mount – a poised woman and a mustachioed youth – both clad in plain, weather-worn robes, the modest dress of those who have forsaken rank. Though travel-marked, they bore the composed, abstracted air of those returned from beyond time’s keeping.

    As they neared a fork in the path, one arm climbing higher, the other tracing a ridge eastward before dipping into dense forest, three grizzled bandits in big boots and hats came up behind them.

    “Oi! What’s your hurry, peasants?” one of the bandits growled and the two turned to face them, bowing low and repeatedly, out of old acquaintance with peril.

    The one who had spoken snorted his satisfaction at what he perceived as their humility, blind as he was to the absence of fear in it. “You can chuck down all that stuff,” he said, jerking a thumb, the other hand gripping the hilt of his goose-wing sabre, as he limped toward them. The pilgrims eased their carry-poles from their shoulders to the ground. “Toady, have a look-see what we got ’ere.”

    One of his henchmen, distinguished by the angry boils covering one side of his face, did immediately as ordered, dropping to his knees before the packages and opening them up. Periodically, he scratched at his face, his boils themselves seeming to have boils.

    “Clothes and stuff, pretty nice, silk even!” he said, holding up a deep blue scarf patterned with peonies. “Now, what have we got ’ere in this box? All this writing-stuff and little statues and books and bells and little pots, and all sorts of other useless rubbish.”

    “What about food?” said the third bandit, urgently, his eyes wide.

    “Hold on, Yongyan, give me a minute. We got some carrots, rice, and beans. Not much chop.”

    “Better than nothing,” said the third bandit, a man more corpulent than hardened. “We got more back at camp, anyway.”

    “Pack it all up, you two, and let’s be off.”

    Down from the track they stumbled with their prisoners, pushing through the bamboo until they came to a small cleared area with a fire-pit and the rough wherewithal of a bandit’s trade: a meagre stack of weapons – spear, pike, sword, and a musket – and a dismal pile of loot, which they may as well have obtained by begging: a modest heap of bronze coins, a studded leather belt, an old bamboo flute, an abacus, a compass, a wooden figurine of the Buddha, a drawstring burlap pouch, and other odds and ends.

    Pu-erh and her son sat in silence, loosely restrained by a rope, observing the men as they cooked up the food, ate, and passed around a flagon of rice-whisky. She was adorned with not one extra wrinkle since we last saw her, all that indeterminate period before, though her little boy Mow Fung was matured into an adolescent fellow of lean frame and quiet grace.

    “Better give them a bit,” the leader said through a mouthful. “Might be the last meal they ever have before getting all sliced up into bits and pieces and their heads chopped off.” His guffaws dwindled when she fixed him in her level gaze.

    “Your name, sir?” Pu-erh said politely to the one with boils, who leaned over to them with two wooden plates of beans. She and her son had already freed themselves from their restraints without any fuss. The bandit had removed his headwear, and even in the dim light one could see that the boils continued up from the side of his face and across half his cranium.

    “He’s called Ugly Toad,” the leader said. “The other one goes by Yongyan the Hungry. And me? Wang the Eviscerator.” He lifted his sabre from the ground beside him and waved it in the air. “And this ’ere’s what does the evisceratin’. So you better watch your p’s and q’s, got it? Are you from around hereabouts? We’re new ourselves, lookin’ for a good place to set up a proper hideout and all that. Heard there’s treasure up on that next mountain, Time’s Heavenly Sanctuary Blah-Blah-Something-or-Other, so we figured we might head up there a ways.”

    “That would seem an unfavourable location for those of your profession,” she said.

    “Oh it would, would it?”

    “Certainly, unless you would enter the lair to look for the tiger.”

    “Allow me to be the best judge of that,” he said. “But go on, proceed, tell us a bit about it, since you seem to know so much about everything. What is it you do around this neck of the woods, scratch the dirt, I suppose?”

    “Simple hermits. We study and improve ourselves; distill the gold elixir; wander from village to village; tend the hidden temple; heal boils; make rain; exorcise ghosts; give blessings; heal boils (it’s a recurring problem); prophesy destinies; interpret the countryside; create and burn talismans for good or ill fortune …”

    “Ar, got it,” said the leader and guzzled from the flask. “Quacks. What a coincidence. You know, before this we worked as ginseng poachers in Fusong County up at Changbai Mountain. Not much fun, I can tell you. You get those Manchus after you, because it’s their sacred place, you see; and then you get the black bears too. If it’s the Manchu, you run like the wind, for your head’s at stake. If it’s the bear, you don’t run or fight, whatever you do, but play dead and freeze, and be good at it, too, because they’ll push and prod you around to see if you’re faking, and if you are, they’ll more than likely take your head off before they gobble you up. Here, I’ll show you one of my gut-wounds, still septic it is after all that time. Pretty nice, eh? Well, I never made a peep, you better believe it, though he licked all over my face and blew his rank breath up my nostrils. The ginseng takes a lot of poaching indeed – but if you know what you’re doin’ it’s worth more’n silver. Sometimes, if you’re lucky you’ll hear a special little birdie singing, what’s telling you the ginseng is there; and if it is, it’s so fiddly to get it out you might as well not even try. The root can disappear or run away, too, because it’s magic. It’s just the exact shape of a human and it’s got the mountain spirit in it, so you have to lasso it by the sprouts with red cotton thread with the ends weighed down with two bronze coins. Then you tie it up to a sort of special trap until you dig it out without breaking any of it, which is next to impossible anyways. We’ve saved two in that little sack, which is about all we got out of the exercise. To tell the truth, we haven’t been much chop at working as bandits, either, but that’s another story.”

    “Gold elixir …” said Yongyan the Hungry. “Any alcohol in it?”

    “In the modern day, it’s generally understood as a potion of immortality formed within,” Pu-erh said. “Hence the term inner alchemy. The gold elixir is the innate knowledge and power of the mind – a fusion of vitality, energy, and spirit: the forces of creativity, motion, and consciousness – refined through rigorous observance of the Tao. By contrast, external alchemy follows the example of one of the Eight Immortals, Iron-Crutch Li. Its goal is to concoct a pill of immortality by combining ingredients like lead, mercury, cinnabar, and sulphates, then firing them in a furnace. Unfortunately, the ingestion of such pills often results in death. Some lesser practitioners attempt to raise their consciousness through crude experiments with plant extracts.”

    “Deviant practices,” Mow Fung said, with the shadow of a smile, closing his eyes. The bandits stared, then glanced at one another, slack-jawed.

    “He don’t say too much, do he?” said Wang the Eviscerator at last.

    “Those days are gone,” Pu-erh sighed, “when condemned prisoners were made available as subjects for such experiments. As for these mountains, they are favourable to our alchemical purpose: the pursuit of the elixir. For here, tucked in a valley that time forgot, lies a village where months pass as years and the people scarcely age.”

    “Heal boils, do you say?” said Ugly Toad.

    None of the bandits paid any attention as Mow Fung retrieved the bamboo flute and moved to the edge of the clearing without a word, where he sat down cross-legged again and began to play.

    The campfire crackled. He ad-libbed lento through melodic variations once taught to him by the Imperial Music Master, as a favour to Pu-erh. In theory, they formed a transcendent framework based on the King Wen sequence of I Ching hexagrams from the late Shang Dynasty, embodying a microcosm of the universe.

    Mow Fung playing his flute in the dark bamboo grove, with Pu-Erh and the poachers in the background

    Without effort, the young man lent the intrinsically dry exercise a style idiomatic to the flute, evoking in everyone present an impression of a lonely moon suspended in a frosty autumn night sky, though not one of them made mention of it.

    As he played, he reflected on dim memories of his infancy in the Forbidden City, and on the blurry period that followed, living their lives in hiding and reclusion among caves and forests, and in the infinite seclusion of the mountain. How the years had flown since they fled, when one looked back, while seeming, minute to minute, to progress in ordinary time – so that he, an apparent “youth” – had lived the span of perhaps two lifetimes for one of his corporeal age.

    “You might as well keep that thing,” Yongyan said. “None of us could get a note out of it.”

    “What was that you were saying about boils a while earlier?” Ugly Toad asked quietly. “I’ve been having trouble with these for years. Getting worse rather than better, I’m afraid.”

    “Those little blemishes?” Pu-erh said. “Why, you can hardly notice them. They’re really not worth bothering about too much, do you think?”

    He gave her a meek and appreciative grin. “I’ve tried all sorts of remedies from quacks all over the countryside, but they’ve only made things worse.”

    She took a dab of unguent from one of several minuscule clay pots stacked into her carry-sack and told him to apply it. Though scarcely more than a smear, it seemed to warm in his fingers and swell slightly as he rubbed it in – not diminishing, but softly renewing itself. After a long while, she told him to save what remained for daily use. There would always be enough, she said, so long as he didn’t try to measure it.

    “Feels better already,” Ugly Toad said to Wang the Eviscerator. “You should try it, you know, for your belly.”

    “Well, you do realize I was only kidding about cutting you up into bits…” Wang said to her through his toothless grin.

    “I knew your capabilities the moment we met,” she said, “and I was doubtful they include the eviscerating of unarmed victims. Unfortunately, the unguent is only a salve, a stop-gap measure. Cures for both your complaints will require substantial time and involved procedures. Take heed that if you leave your bear-wound as it is to heal, you will assuredly die. Moreover, if you lead your party to seek treasure on the upper mount as you implied was your plan, the three of you will surely perish all the sooner.”

    The following morning the five took the lower path, hiking along the ridge and descending into thick forest. They entered a narrow trail that soon forked into a dozen offshoots, each of which branched again and again into near-identical tracks, until they found themselves in a bewilderment of forks and false turnings. Only Pu-erh and Mow Fung seemed to know the way. At last, near midday, they emerged before a dilapidated temple, half-lost in the undergrowth.

    “Rest now,” said Pu-erh. “We will return before nightfall.”

    The temple and its crumbling attendant building sat on a ledge where the land dropped away into a mist-filled void. Behind it, cliffs fell sheer to silence, visited only by haughty eagles who wheeled and nested in the inaccessible crags.

    The three bandits felt a rush of exhilaration at the sight – a sensation unlike any they had ever known. They settled in to await the return of their two guides or perhaps some wandering monk. An overwhelming solemnity fell over them, as though from this high place one might commune with the Eight Immortals – whoever they were.

    “We were looking for a hideout, and we have found one,” said Wang.

    “Without knowing the way, no one could ever get in,” said Toad.

    The void was an immense auditorium of silence, from whose depths came the thin cry of a hawk.

    “… or out, for that matter, you might say,” said Yongyan.

    “You don’t think …”

    The three cast glances at each other, before settling down for a smoke.

    “How could you suggest such a thing?”

    From the draft novel Stawell Bardo © Michael Guest 2025