The Hand, the Eye and the Heart Read online

  Table of Contents

  Author’s note

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Epilogue

  Organizations offering support

  Copyright

  To all those who generously offered up their

  time, experience, expertise and brilliance

  to help bring this story into the world.

  With deepest love and gratitude.

  Author’s note

  his book was inspired by several versions of the traditional Chinese story of Mulan. But while the fictional “Red Empire” depicted within its pages is inspired by Chinese history and culture (in much the same way that Tolkien’s Middle Earth draws on Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Europe), The Hand, the Eye and the Heart is not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of real world China or its people during any point in that country’s long, noble history. The Red Empire is a fairy-tale land that never was – except perhaps in dreams. Likewise, though some of the poetry depicted here owes a debt to the work of legendary poet Li Bai, it makes no claim to his genius.

  The author would like to thank Alice Fanchiang, Kuo Fanchiang, Kao-Han Fan, Jenni Nock, Si Jialing, Joy Chuah and Dr Pauline Park for their support and invaluable advice. A special thank you is due to Randolf M. for his brilliant personal insights. Particular gratitude is owed to my dear friends Fox Benwell and Dr Susan Ang, and to the talented and wonderful Jay Hulme, for being willing to read this huge manuscript, and for helping me to improve it in a thousand ways, large and small. Any mistakes or any liberties taken in service of the story are my own responsibility.

  And finally, thank you to Arts Council England and the Royal Literary Fund for believing in this project and buying me the time and space to deliver it.

  CONTENT WARNING: the author would like readers to be aware that this book contains depictions of deadnaming and misgendering. Please use your own best judgement as to whether you will find this content triggering. The book also contains depictions of chest-binding which, while inspired by real practices within certain periods of Chinese history, are entirely unsafe and should not be adopted by any reader under any circumstances.

  “All warfare is based on deception …

  Know yourself as you know your enemy …

  and you need not fear a hundred battles.”

  Sun Tzu, The Art of War

  One

  should have died when I was seven. Any ordinary child would have. But it was many years before I would realize how far from ordinary I truly was. You’ve heard the saying that no one is entirely what they seem, yes?

  What few people ever have the courage to admit is that this includes ourselves.

  To begin with, it was the brilliance of the full moon that saved me. Or, to be more accurate, gave me a chance to save us all.

  When I stirred from my sleep that night, surfacing reluctantly from dreams of soaring through ragged clouds above the mountaintop that sheltered our small town, I found pale, bright light shining in my eyes and the pillow hot and damp under my cheek. It was enough to bring me fully awake.

  And so I heard the assassin speak.

  “Leave Hua Zhou for last.”

  The unfamiliar voice was close enough to make the pink and gold embroidered peonies of the silk window screen shiver. I jumped, then blinked sleepily. Who was that? What … what had he said? There was only silence now. Had it been another dream? It must have been a dream…

  I closed my eyes again.

  Then another voice came – not speaking, only a muffled, questioning sound. And in answer, the first man spoke once more: “Old Zhangsun wants him to see his family dead first. Then we can finish him off.”

  My eyelids snapped wide, my entire body going stiff and heavy with shock. I opened my mouth to cry out – and on a sharply indrawn breath, clenched my teeth together instead. I couldn’t scream for help. I wasn’t safe. They would hear me.

  The intruders passed between my window and the moonlight, their shadows trailing stealthily across the silk: one, two, three, four. My breathing was ragged, deafening in my own ears. Too loud. I trapped the panicked wheeze behind my closed teeth, holding my breath. Another shadow passed silently by. Mother and Father would never hear them coming.

  My chest ached as if my ribs would crack, but I did not dare to make a sound. Not yet. My eyes followed the assassins’ shapes like the deer at bay watches the tiger. One man came close to the window … and paused. The shadow’s head tilted as if listening.

  He had heard me; sensed me.

  He would draw his blade, slice through the thin silk screen and then—

  The man’s shadow seemed to shake its head before slithering swiftly from sight.

  I waited, but no more shadows passed.

  And then, then, when I could finally breathe, finally move … I found that I could not.

  Fear had seized hold of me, turning my limbs dense and numb, like rock. My familiar moonlit room swam and blurred before my eyes, and then disappeared as I squeezed the burning lids shut so hard that white sparks bloomed across my sight. I wanted to go back to sleep, to pretend I hadn’t heard any of it. I wanted this to be a dream. A nightmare.

  Father’s voice seemed to speak in my mind, calm and yet challenging: Are you a coward, daughter?

  The first breath seemed to claw my throat as I forced it in.

  No, I told my father. I am of the House of Hua.

  My knuckles popped with strain as they unclamped from the bed covers. I knew I should spring up from the bed, strong and swift – but my fumbling hands could hardly find the strength to push the covers back. I wobbled as I stood, the soft rugs next to my bed seeming to dip and sway beneath my weight, as if the floor had become the deck of a boat.

  I swallowed, a dry and painful gulp, and then squared my shoulders.

  My journey through the narrow black corridors was clumsy and halting. Every tiny night sound echoing through the house froze me in place with dread. The squeaking of my own feet on the floorboards terrified me. The men might already be inside. They would hear. They might be lurking in the shadows, ahead, right now, waiting for me. What if they caught me – got me before I reached my parents?

  By the time I stumbled to a halt outside my father’s chambers, I was crying, soft whimpers escaping despite my best efforts. I did not know what I would find in my father’s rooms. What if I was too late – what if – what if—

  The carved wooden screen that separated Father’s bedchamber from the corridor was still closed. No sounds came from within. Torn between fear and overwhelming desperation to know, I shoved the screen back too swiftly, cringing from the squeak of wood sliding against wood.

  There was a soft snort from within and then my mother’s voice: “Zhilan? What are you doing out of bed?”

  Not too late.

  Tingling all over with relief, I rushed into the room. “Mother, wake up! There are men in the house!”

  I heard her sigh. The moonlight did not reach as far
as their bed, and so I only just made out her shape, the pale smudge of her face, as she began to sit up. “Child, it was only a bad dream—”

  My father’s voice broke in, intent and alert, even though moments before he must have been asleep: “Speak again, daughter.”

  “They were in the courtyard, Father! They said Zhangsun wanted us dead, but they were to save you for last.”

  And then, from the other side of the compound, the frantic jangle of a bell and the sound of Xu Guo Liang – my father’s oldest and most faithful retainer – shouting: “’Ware! ’Ware! Thieves! Murderers! Raise the house! Wake the master!”

  There was a flurry of movement which I could not follow in the shadows. My father stepped into the pale shaft of light from the open screen door, his face grim and composed. In his hand was a sheathed sword – a bright, glittering thing that I had never seen before. A quicksilver flash of moonlight almost blinded me as he drew it from the scabbard. He stretched, the movements halting and awkward at first, slowly loosening. His stance changed, settled, became more balanced somehow, became … dangerous.

  “It’s already too late to get you out,” he said quietly, not looking back at us. “They most likely have men waiting outside for anyone who tries to flee; it’s what I would have done. How many men did you see, Zhilan? Think carefully.”

  I swallowed. “Six, Father.”

  “Good girl.”

  “Zhilan, come to me,” my mother said, her voice urgent. “Come here.”

  I darted towards her on eager feet and flung myself into her arms where she sat on the edge of the bed. The swollen roundness of her belly kept me from pressing as close as I wanted, but I was still able to bury my face in her sweet-smelling, tumbled hair. I felt the trapped-bee hum of her heartbeat against my cheek and the rough, quick rasp of her breath washing over my neck.

  There was a terrible sound outside – a panicked wailing that I recognized as coming from one of the young serving girls, but which sounded like the screams of a trapped rabbit in a snare. Xu Guo Liang shouted my father’s name again, and then there were thuds and crashes. Windows and doors flying open, or being slammed shut? Running footsteps moved closer and closer. The men were coming.

  “I can’t risk leaving you alone. I must meet them here. Jia Mei, get down in the corner. As low as you can. Don’t move, don’t make a sound.” Father seemed to hesitate. “Don’t … let her see.”

  Wordlessly, my mother obeyed, rising with a groan of discomfort and urging me into the furthest and darkest cranny of the room. She pushed me down to the floor, following with another pained noise as she drew her legs up, and then embraced me again, clutching me painfully tight.

  “Father will look after us,” she whispered. “All will be well. Father will keep us safe. Nothing bad is going to happen.”

  For the first time in my life, I knew that my mother was lying to me. I trembled, hiding my face in her hair again.

  There was a thunder of hasty footsteps right outside the open door. Father’s blade flashed up – and then lowered as Xu Guo Liang stumbled into view. There was a large knife, a kitchen knife, clutched awkwardly in the old man’s fist. His lined face was chalky-grey behind his white beard, and his clothes were rucked and dishevelled, but his eyes were alight with fury.

  “I am here, Master,” he said breathlessly.

  “Get behind me,” Father ordered with a jerk of his head in our direction. “Protect them.”

  The elderly servant slipped past him, bowed to my mother with his usual grave politeness, and then took up a position before us with both hands – visibly trembling – clenched around the long handle of the knife. My eyes were drawn irresistibly to the white, skinny ankles that poked out of the bottom of his rumpled robes. His bare feet were as thin and fragile as a bird’s.

  “Zhou…” my mother spoke Father’s name hastily, her voice cracking on the word.

  “I’m sorry,” my father said, glancing back over his shoulder. His voice did not tremble, but I felt as if a wave of sorrow had washed over me at the sound of it. “I am so sorry, my love.”

  A flicker in the darkness. Some change in the quality of the shadows. My mother stiffened. Father’s sword lifted once more.

  The first assassin entered the room. Without hesitation, he attacked my father.

  These men knew who Hua Zhou was. They knew that the wounds he had taken had almost killed him, and had ended his military career. They believed he would be easy prey.

  But the assassins had not reckoned with Hua Zhou’s iron will. My father might be unable to run any more – but he could stand, and that meant he could fight. And when a man fought as he did, what need was there to run?

  One by one, the would-be killers seemed to fling themselves on to his blade, eager to meet death at his hands. Mother tried to press my face into her shoulder and cover my eyes, but her hands were shaking too hard to hold me against my struggles. And I did struggle. Somehow I knew that I had to see.

  In moments, Father single-handedly slew four of our attackers. They fell before him, and their blood was black in the half-light. But as he battled with the fifth – faster or more cunning than the others, perhaps – the last one slipped past him. Slipped past him, and came for us.

  Xu Guo Liang let out a cry of defiance, slashing wildly at the air with the cook’s knife. His great spirit was like a flame in the darkness. With a high-pitched squeal of metal, he caught the assassin’s blade on his own, trying to force him back.

  There was a meaty sound, followed by a wet, bubbling gasp. I saw the kitchen knife fall, unbloodied, from the servant’s grip, and Xu Guo Liang crumpled to the floor before us. His outstretched hand slapped limply against my bare foot. I jerked backwards with a choked cry. There was nowhere to go – my mother was behind me. Long pale fingers twitched against my skin, but his open eyes stared past me. He wasn’t moving. His chest did not rise or fall. He … he…

  Mother screamed as the assassin carelessly kicked the old man’s body away. A droplet of blood landed on the side of my face. I still remember how warm it was.

  Fast as a striking snake, my father wrenched his sword from the fifth assassin’s chest, whirled towards the threat that loomed above us – and faltered, his bad leg going out from under him. With a yell of anguish, he fell. He fell.

  It was like watching a mountain topple.

  Everything up to that moment is as clear as the slow, serene drift of clouds moving over still water. But what happened next, I barely recall. I can only believe it happened because my father gravely described it to me, so that I could understand what I had done, and accept it. My mother always refused to speak of it.

  The assassin stooped over me and my mother. His shadow enveloped us, blocking Father from sight. The blade in his hand was black and wet – it slashed through the air towards my mother’s throat.

  And I, the seven-year-old daughter of the house, with arms as small and thin as twigs, who had never even seen a weapon before, let alone held one, ripped free of my mother’s desperate grasp and seized the fallen kitchen knife from the floor.

  I stabbed the murderer with it.

  You might question how my tiny hands had the strength – how I even knew where to aim the blade – but somehow I managed to drive the knife into the assassin’s gut hard enough that it wrenched from my fingers as he flailed back. He fell with a howl of surprise and fury, and landed in range of my father’s sword.

  It only took a single stroke of that great blade to finish him. Panting, Father staggered to his feet and turned to stare at me in disbelief.

  “Don’t you dare go near my mother!” I snarled, my bloodstained hands curled into fists – shaking not with fear, my father swore later, but with fury. “I hope it hurts, you coward!”

  Two

  single lantern lit my parents’ faces with wavering orange light. The servants huddled in the other half of the kitchen, warming themselves by the vast, smoking cavern of the hearth fire, whispering and casting us worried looks. T
he doors of the dim, low-roofed chamber were barred and barricaded, the windows shuttered and bolted; we were waiting for dawn, and for our hastily dispatched groom to return with the town guard.

  In the meantime, with patient, steady hands, and a piece of rag, Father cleaned the drying blood from my small fingers.

  “Why now?” my mother asked, hushed. “After all these years… I thought the empress had forgotten us. How can anyone carry a grudge for so long?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Whatever her reasons for acting, she is finished. I found a note – written in her own hand – ordering our deaths! The emperor will never forgive her for this. She won’t have the power to hurt us again. What matters is…” He lowered his voice, whispering above my head. “What matters is Zhilan. No ordinary girl could have done what she did. No ordinary child. This can only be a sign.”

  “A sign of what?” my mother demanded sharply. Her tone made me flinch. She had never spoken to him in such a way before, not in my hearing. “A sign that she was born under a death curse? That she should never have been born at all?”

  I bowed my head, tears prickling at my eyes. The fear and twisted excitement of the night’s events were swiftly transmuting into that vague, terrible child’s guilt of having transgressed without knowing precisely how. Kind old Xu Guo Liang, who had gravely guided my first steps and called me “young mistress”, was … gone. I had made my mother sorrowful and disappointed. I wanted to take it back. Even if I didn’t really understand what “it” was. I was certain I had protected my mother – so surely that must be all right. But I could not … exactly … remember how. Lingering over it too much made me feel rather sick, with swooping feelings in my stomach and cold, clammy sweat springing up on the back of my neck.

  Mother reached out as if to touch my hair, and I yearned towards the contact – but her fingers clenched, and her hand fell to cup her swollen stomach protectively instead. “No normal little girl could act as she did.”

  Father’s fingers did not stop their gentle work. He dipped the cloth into the red-stained water in the chipped dish and turned over my left hand to scrub at my palm. “Zhilan is better than normal. She must have a great destiny. The heavens themselves intervened to spare her.”