The Incarnations

23. Ah Qin and the Sea

Qing Dynasty, 1836

I

SLUMBERING BEAST. YELLOW slit of eye. Slobbering on the cobbles of Hog Lane, as though gnashed up in the jaws of the Sea Daemon and spewed out. Hairy-knuckled hand, sleep-scratching the crotch-rot between his legs. Yellow matted hair like trampled straw. He should have been set ablaze, he was so crawling with filth and disease.

It was the hour of the ram and Hog Lane was empty. No pole-carrying porters, tinkers, or rat-catchers, or peep-show men. Only toothless Ah Ling under the bamboo awning of his junk shop, whose sly grin said, ‘Go on, boy, fleece the barbarian!’ Jack’s Ale Tavern was rowdy with the beast’s shipmates, who’d swagger out later with bladders full of firewater, looking for a whorehouse or a brawl. But first, the drinking had to be done.

I was a young boy then, and scared out of my wits. I crept over to the slobbering beast and whispered in Ghost People tongue, ‘Mister? How do you do, old boy?’ The beast slumbered on. His breath stank of firewater — alcohol and tobacco juice, with a dash of arsenic, and something viler, as though a rat from the ship’s hold had crawled into his guts to die. My hand shook as I reached for the coin purse in the barbarian’s pocket. Blood crashed in my ears, and I was so intent on my thieving I didn’t see one of his shipmates staggering out of the tavern.

‘Oi!’

He shackled my wrist with his hairy hand and hauled me up so I was staring right into his snarling face, breath of firewater stinging my eyes. Coins jingled out of the stolen purse on to the ground as he walloped my backside like he was beating dust out of a rug. Whack! Whack! Whack! More beasts spilled out of the tavern to cheer as I howled. Down the lane, Ah Ling sniggered on his stool.

‘Mister! Let me go!’ I begged in Ghost People tongue.

I wriggled and kicked out backwards like a donkey with its hind leg, and struck something soft. The beast squeaked, let go of my wrist, and I ran off.

I ran up Hog Lane, past the dens of opium smoke and sinful deeds. I ran past the shophouses of Old China street, and the factories of Thirteen Hong Lane, where flags of other lands fluttered from the flag staffs. I ran past the warehouses of tea and silk, porcelain and furs, and past a foreign devil squinting through a monocle, inspecting a pocket watch on a chain. Some of the drunken beasts gave chase, but I outran them.

I was running down a narrow alley leading out of Fanqui Town when I looked back at the herd lumbering behind. The next thing I knew I’d barrelled straight into one of the sailors. He grabbed me and twisted my arms behind my back, as the rest of the beasts, furnace red and out of breath from the chase, caught up. The one I’d kicked between the legs came over. Out of his pocket he took a knife, and flicked out the blade.

‘Mister!’ I pleaded. ‘Old boy, please!’

I was done for. A Tanka boy losing his life for kicking a white man — that was fairness in the barbarian’s eyes. He leant in close, grabbed a fistful of my hair and brought the blade to my neck. The other beasts crowded round, and their calm was more chilling than the cheers in Hog Lane. I thought of poor Ma Qin in her wash boat, about to lose her only son.

But fate wasn’t to have it that way. Fate had you waving your walking cane in the air and shouting at them instead. The sailors looked over at you, limping up the alley. You were odd-looking, even by barbarian standards, with your ship’s prow of a nose and orange hair and freckles on pale skin. One of those gweilos who even on the hottest days wore a waistcoat over a stiff-collared shirt, long breeches and shiny leather shoes. You hobbled over to us, your cane tapping, lame foot dragging. The sailors, not having much respect for cripples, sneered.

A drunken sailor’s a barrel of gunpowder that can explode at the slightest spark, and so you spoke to them carefully. The barbarian with the knife yelled and stabbed the blade at you, but you stood your ground. Though thin and weedy as he was barrel-chested and burly, you had the cleverer tongue. The beast soon flipped the blade away and backed off. One last kick to my backside and they staggered back to the ale taverns of Hog Lane. You watched them go, leaning on your cane and dabbing your brow with a handkerchief.

Though you’d saved my thieving neck, I turned to run as far from Fanqui Town as my legs would carry me, without a word of thanks.

‘Wait!’ Cantonese, with a strong barbarian accent. ‘Are you hurt?’

I stared at you. Who knew foreign devils could speak? Most sail all the way to the Celestial Kingdom without even knowing how to say hello.

‘Stealing is wrong,’ you scolded. ‘You shouldn’t steal.’

Ah, a Jesus Preacher, I thought, edging away. But the sermon ended there. I wanted to run, but something in your green-coloured eyes held me in the alley. You stroked your beard and side-whiskers and looked at me.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Ah Qin.’

‘I am Ah Tom,’ you said. Another dab of your brow with the linen in your pale, freckled hand. ‘You’re a Tanka, aren’t you? Want to make some honest money? Come with me.’

II

‘This is the British factory.’ You pointed your bamboo cane to the sagging flag on the flagpole. ‘That is the British flag.’

Your cane tapping the wooden floor, you led me through the factory, down the hall to the rear. Through one doorway I saw a dining room with silver candlesticks on a long cloth-covered table, and a portrait of the She-Emperor of England on the wall. I saw the Chinese servants, polishing silver things that I knew were called ‘forks and spoons’, though I didn’t know which were which. The servants frowned at me, the Tanka boatboy in rags, tagging after Master Tom. They frowned as though they’d seen the glint of thievery in my eyes.

You led me to a chamber of leather-bound books and sat at the desk behind the abacus, ink pot and quills and stuffed the bowl of a long-stemmed pipe with tobacco. A servant boy poured us tea and, puffing on your pipe, you told me you were a book-keeper for the British factory.

‘I am a writer too,’ you said, ‘writing a book about the people of China.’

In the leather chair by the desk, I was ready to bolt. I hadn’t seen a Red-haired Devil up close before, and I stared at the red bristling from your head and chin. Were those orange freckles a skin disease? Could I catch them? What a hiding Ma Qin would give me if I went back to the wash boat with orange freckles caught off a gweilo. You cleared your throat.

‘I want to write about the Tanka,’ you said, ‘but, as foreigners aren’t allowed in the floating city, I can’t find out much. Can you tell me about your people, Ah Qin? What are your customs? How do you marry, for instance? How do you bury your dead?’

Back then, I was ten years old. What did I know about ‘customs’? What did I know about marrying, or burying the dead? But you dipped your quill in an ink pot and gazed at me, feather poised over the blank page. So I opened my ten-year-old mouth, and this is what came out.

‘The Tanka come from the sea,’ I said. ‘We were fish people long ago and lived in the ocean. Then we learnt to breathe the air, and walk on legs, and came out of the sea to live on boats. .’

You nodded and wrote this down.

‘Some Tanka are born with fish scales,’ I went on. ‘When a Tanka baby is born more fish than Tanka, it is thrown into the Pearl River and swims away to live in the sea.’

‘Born with fish scales. .’ you murmured, your feather spilling ink on the page. ‘Swims to live in the sea. .’

Where had I heard such strange things? Pa Qin had told me before he died, back when I was small and waddled about the boat with a wooden float strapped to my back. Whether Pa Qin’s tales were true or not, I had no idea. But you asked more questions about the Tanka people, and for another hour or so I told you what I could remember of my father’s tales. And you listened, and wrote everything down with a seriousness that made me feel very important in that leather chair.

‘What about Mazu, Goddess of the Sea, and rescuer of ships in distress?’ you asked. ‘Does your boat have a shrine to Mazu? Do you burn joss sticks for her?’

‘I know Mazu,’ I said. ‘She came to our boat when I was little. She came with her two guards, Ears that Hear the Wind and Eyes that See across the Waves. She came in the night and the ship was bright as day. Ma and Pa didn’t wake up.’

‘Did the Sea Goddess speak to you?’ you asked.

I nodded. ‘She said that one day I would go to sea. Then she went away.’

This was no Pa Qin story, but the truth. Ever since I was little, Mazu has been coming to tell me I will go to sea. That the sea is my destiny. You wrote this down, but had no more questions about Mazu. Then the British factory clock chimed five times, and you asked, ‘Do you have any questions for me, Ah Qin?’

There were many things I wondered about the gweilo. Was it true that your land was ruled by a little girl called Victoria? Were you barbarians bunged up from all the roast beef you eat? Could you smell as well as a dog, with that large nose? But I came over very stump-tongued and shy. On your desk was a photo frame. Silver ovals with black and white photographs of two foreign she-devils. Seeing what had caught my gaze you smiled. ‘My wife and daughter.’

The she-devils looked like barbarian men in wigs and dresses, but you looked at them fondly. Then you smiled at me. ‘Ah Qin, can you come back tomorrow and tell me more tales? Hour of the monkey?’

You handed me some coins, and I nodded. Then I ran home from Fanqui Town, my head jangling with the strange happenings of the day.

III

Ma Qin was sat in our sampan, tangled up in the briny, seaweedy nets the fishermen brought her to fix. Her nimble fingers picked through the knotted string, fish-scaly and slimy from the day’s catch, finding and mending holes. First and Second Daughters were hard at work too, scrubbing up to their elbows in the wash tubs. Every morning the Qin family washerwomen rowed up and down the Pearl River, calling up to the crew of junks for clothing to be washed, and by afternoon the bamboo airing racks were spread with cotton for the sun and wind to dry. My ma and sisters hardly ever set foot on the shore. The wash boat was where they did their living, cooking meals on a stove at the back and sleeping under the rattan shelter at night. Ma Qin walked splay-footed on land, she was so used to the wobbliness of the waves.

‘Ma,’ I said, ‘I earned four coppers today.’

She squinted up from her fishing nets. ‘Whose pocket did you pick?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘I didn’t steal it.’ I scowled. ‘A Red-haired Devil called Ah Tom gave it to me. He wanted to know about the Tanka. He says I can go back tomorrow. He’ll pay me again.’

The boat swayed as Ma threw down her nets and stood up. Tanka womenfolk aren’t the bound-footed, painted dolls that Han women are. Tanka women are tough as men, with the strength to row far out to sea and steer a boat through stormy, choppy waters. Ma Qin was a handsome and sturdy woman with braids thick as rope. She was twenty-four, but her knuckles, knobbly from the wash tubs, looked more than a hundred years old.

‘Give me those coins.’

I handed them over, and watched miserably as she threw them overboard, so they splashed and sank to the muddy riverbed. The boat then lurched from side to side as Ma Qin threw me over her knee for a spanking. My sisters giggled in the suds.

‘Idiot!’ she panted. ‘The foreign devils are our enemies! Pa Qin would be alive today if it weren’t for the gweilo and their foreign mud. Now, go over there and don’t speak. Betray your family again, and you are off this boat.’

She cuffed me one last time, then got back to repairing the fishing nets, muttering, ‘Aya! Why has Heaven cursed me with such a fool for a son? What did I do to offend thee, Lord Buddha? Barrenness is what I wish for in my next life. Barrenness and blessed childlessness. .’

IV

I lived with Ma Qin and my sisters in a city of ten thousand boats, swaying at anchor, to and fro. A city that every sweep of tide, or gust of wind, jiggled about. A city so crowded, if you saw it from dry land you’d be tricked into thinking it a forest of rigging and masts.

Those who lived in the walled city of Canton looked down on us low-caste Tanka people, but there was nothing on land that we lacked for on the water. Hawkers of every kind rowed up and down the Pearl River, banging drums and gongs and trading their wares, bone-setters and tooth-pullers, cobblers and ironmongers, and sellers of pigs and geese. There were school boats and theatre boats, opium barges and floating whorehouses. Up and down the Pearl River they rowed.

The law forbade us Tankas from building a home on the land, but that was no hardship in my mind. Being stuck on the same plot of land day after day, now that’s hardship. When we wanted a change of scenery we’d thrust a barge pole into the riverbed and glide our boat to somewhere new. We may have been dirt poor and infested with water lice, but any time we wanted we could weigh anchor and sail away.

V

Pa Qin had lived with us on the wash boat before he died. When I was a baby, he worked as a porter in Canton harbour. Then he saved enough for a duck boat and a hundred ducks and became Duck-breeder Qin. Every morning he rowed the ducks out to a mudflat island in the Pearl River Bay so they could waddle and peck at the grass. Then every evening he herded the ducks up again and rowed them back to the floating city. Duck-breeder Qin spent several years in this way, in the restful, mindless company of quacking ducks, earning a living from selling the eggs. He was fond of the ducks, and liked to stroke their feathery down, but he wasn’t too fond to wring their necks for the cooking pot when his children’s bellies growled.

Then one day the ducks caught a bird sickness and started dying. Pa Qin spent the last of his savings on herbal medicine he forced down their beaks, but he couldn’t stop the duck boat becoming a graveyard of corpses with webbed feet. Pa Qin had lost his living. Grieving over this, he went on to an opium barge to drown his sorrows with wine and ended up having his first ever puff on an opium hookah. And it was that first puff, that first clack of teeth on the ivory mouthpiece, and burbling of opium smoke through water and into his lungs, that marked the death of my father, and the birth of Three Pipes Qin.

I’ve never had any foreign mud before, so don’t know it first-hand. But once, when he’d had a few pipes, Pa Qin told me what it was like.

‘She’s like a lover,’ he murmured, ‘cradling you in her arms. . Or a mother. . protecting you in her womb. .’

Well, if opium’s a lover or a mother, she’s the kind hell-bent on destroying you; on tricking you into thinking you’ve gone to heaven, while your body withers away. The fate of most opium smokers is the fate of drowning, and Three Pipes Qin was no exception to this. Every puff of the opium pipe brought him closer to death. But still he wouldn’t quit.

Three Pipes Qin made promises, of course, but couldn’t bear the fever and chills for more than a day before scurrying back to the opium barges. He stole Ma Qin’s earnings from washing and mending. He sold the few sticks of furniture we had on the wash boat, and our cooking pots and stove. Three Pipes Qin wasn’t ever sorry, not even when Ma Qin wept and raged. Eventually, at her wits’ end, Ma Qin went at him with a boat oar. She chased him off the boat and shouted that he was banned until he was sober. He staggered ashore that night and never returned.

The last time I saw Three Pipes Qin was on Noise of the Tide Street. Scrag and bone, he was shaking his begging bowl at the Manchu-queued commoners. I stooped my head, but he saw me and limped over, rattling his wooden bowl.

‘First-born son,’ he said, ‘spare your old pa some change?’

I handed over what I had. Three Pipes Qin grinned at me and looked so much like a grinning skull I turned and fled.

‘Tell your ma that I’m on the mend,’ he called after me, ‘and I’ll be back on the wash boat soon.’

Three Pipes Qin had no pride. He cared for nothing but opium. That night he’d go to one of the floating opium dens and exchange his beggings for the blackened, once-smoked scrapings from a rich man’s pipe. Just enough to ease Three Pipe Qin’s cravings and allow him a few winks of sleep.

Pa Qin hadn’t been lying about coming back to Ma Qin’s wash boat, though. The day after I saw him on Noise of the Tide Street, two servants from one of the opium barges brought him in a wheelbarrow to the Qin family boat. They’d dragged him out of the Pearl River after he’d fallen in. Ma Qin checked to make sure the drowned man was the father of her three children. Then she told the servants to take Three Pipes Qin away again.

‘Do what you like with him,’ she said. ‘He’s no husband of mine.’

VI

Though Ma Qin had spanked me and warned me not to ‘betray our family’, I still planned to go back to the British factory to see you the next day. You’d saved my throat from being slashed, and I didn’t want to break my word. And, anyway, how would Ma Qin find out? Like most Tanka washerwomen, she never left the Pearl River.

But returning to Fanqui Town wasn’t to be my fate. That night as Ma Qin and my sisters were sleeping, the Goddess of the Sea came and the boat became bright as day. Behind Mazu stood her guards, Ears that Hear the Wind and Eyes that See across the Waves, protecting her from any threat.

‘Ah Qin,’ Mazu said, ‘your fate is to be at sea, not on land. You will meet that gweilo Ah Tom again one day, but first you must go to sea. The sea, remember, is your destiny.’

Then the goddess vanished and the wash boat was in darkness once more. I lay awake for a while, thinking on what the Sea Goddess had said, then drifted back to sleep. Early the next morning I was woken by the sun-and-wind-grizzled Fisherman Po, who’d come by our wash boat. He was in need of a fisherboy, and would Ma Qin offer up her young lad for the job?

So off I went in Fisherman Po’s leaky, two-masted fishing boat, to plough the waters and harvest our crop of fish. Just as Mazu had said.

VII

For the next five years I worked as a fisherboy, sailing out to sea at daybreak and sailing back at sundown. Out on the waves, Fisherman Po handed down to me the wisdom of his thirty years of sea fishing. He taught me how to steer the boat on stormy waters, and where to cast the nets out and trawl for the finest catch. He taught me how to spot a pirate junk from far away, and how to pray to the Gods of wind and rain to ward off typhoons. I soon became a skilled seafarer, sculling and manning the boat, my sea-legs used to the pitch and roll of the roughest waves.

I grew taller, stronger and broader, and had my head shaved and plaited in the Manchu style. I became fond of a cheeky dimpled Tanka girl called Ah Moun, who rowed a sampan up and down the river, selling baskets of fruit. She’d smile and toss me an orange or banana when she passed us by, or splash me with her oar, and when I asked her to marry me she laughed and said, ‘About time, Ah Qin. I thought I’d be throwing oranges at you until we were old and grey.’ We soon had our own boat and within a year her belly swelled with our first child. We had enough money to live on from our fishing and fruit selling, and were happy. By then I was coming up to sixteen years old.

It was around then that war broke out over the foreign mud, and iron-clad British warships, propelled by cartwheels and steam, charged into the Pearl River Bay. Our Emperor’s fleet of ‘avenging dragons’ had colourful streamers flying from the masts, and noisy gongs and bells, but lacking proper guns didn’t stand a chance. The thundering of cannons shook the hills surrounding the Pearl River Bay as the British warships blew our Emperor’s fleet to bits. Smoky blazes poured forth into the sullen darkness of night, and panicking survivors trod water and clung to the shattered fragments of their blown-up junks.

I prayed to Mazu to protect our men and wreck the British men-o’-war. But I didn’t join the Anti-barbarian Army with their pitchforks, scythes and rusty farming tools — useless against the double-barrelled guns of the red-coated barbarians. Why should we low-caste Tankas fight to defend the land we’re forbidden to live on? I was soon to be a father, and wasn’t going to risk my life.

The cannons were booming when Ah Moun got the pains of labour. Ma Qin came to our boat to help with the delivery (snapping at Ah Moun to ‘Stop your hollering. You aren’t the first to push a baby Tanka out of your muckhole.’). The labour was very short, and the baby slipped right out. I could tell by Ma Qin’s eyes that it hadn’t been born right. Ma Qin weren’t the sort to take fright easy, but she turned pale, covered her mouth and said, ‘Oh, you poor thing.’ My heart shrinking, I went round to look at my first-born child, and what I saw sickened me. Our baby had the eyes of a fish, and its legs were welded together like a tail. Our baby son gasped but, like a fish out of water, could not breathe and died.

Ah Moun changed after that, and her dimples went away because she no longer smiled. One day I came home from fishing and she wasn’t there. She didn’t return to our boat the next night or the next, and I heard from my mother-in-law that she’d gone off to work in a laundry in Macao. Fisherman Po offered to sail us over to Macao so I could ‘knock some sense into her, and see she behaves like a proper wife’. But it didn’t seem right to sail to Macao to fetch her back. Ah Moun wasn’t the only one who’d had a change of heart.

VIII

Not long after Ah Moun had left, Old Fisherman Po and I were casting our nets out at sea when the sky turned the colour of bruises and a squally wind whipped the waves up to an unruly height. Out of nowhere a pirate junk appeared, and a scrambling dragon of sea bandits came towards us with scurrying oars. As we struggled to sail our boat against the fierce wind and back to Canton, Fisherman Po shouted up to the Heavens, ‘How have we offended thee, Sea Goddess, for you to visit such calamity upon our boat?’ Fishermen Po never failed to burn a joss stick or two at her shrine before setting sail each morning. Truly, it was a mystery.

A boat hook caught the side of us, and the bandits leapt aboard, weaselly-eyed and waving cutlasses about. All we had was our basket of wriggling catch, and feeling wronged for having chased us across the waves for such little reward, the sea robbers set fire to our sails. If the bandits had left us then, Fisherman Po and I could have put out the blaze and rowed back to Canton. But they stayed aboard to beat me up. Fiery sails gusting in the wind, they kicked me to the bottom of the boat. Fearing that they’d beat me to death, Fisherman Po shouted, ‘Leave the boy! There ain’t no fairness in six against one.’

‘Life ain’t fair, old man,’ growled one of sea robbers.

Then he jerked Fisherman Po’s head back by his queue, opened his throat from ear to ear with his blade and shoved him overboard without even looking to see how he fell. Then the sea robber came for me, and I thought, Now I’m done for. I thought of Fishwife Po and Ma Qin. Who’d tell our womenfolk what had become of us?

But the sea robbers didn’t kill me. They took me aboard the pirate junk instead.

IX

Sixty men lived aboard the Scourge of the Celestial Seas, Tankas who’d turned to banditry after their property had been shipwrecked, fugitive Hakkas who’d withdrawn into the world of pirates to flee punishment for crimes on land, and captives from hijacked fishing boats, like me. Chief Yang was the head of the Scourge, and then there were the bandits, who drank grog and puffed on opium pipes, threw knives at squealing rats and bet on sparring quails they tormented in cages (so they charged at each other, beaks stabbing to the blood-spattered death when set free). The kidnapped fisherboys were deck hands or galley slaves, hoisting the sails, sculling and manning the fast boats and obeying the bandits’ orders. The sea bandits were a barbarous lot and the Scourge was rowdy with thrashing fists and spillages of tooth and blood. At night I slept on deck, preferring the wind and rain to the violence of the quarters below. But there were nights I was ordered down to Captain Yang’s cabin, and had no choice but to go.

I crawled up to the deck after the first time, torn and bleeding inside and out. I leant over the deck rail and heaved my guts up, down the side of the Scourge. I wasn’t Ah Qin any more. I was a battered piece of meat, skewered by Yang and his gang. I leant over the railing and stared out at the dark waves roaring and crashing over the depths, as the Scourge tilted this way and that, days from land. I cursed the Goddess of the Sea for luring me away from Canton to this leaky vessel of brutes.

‘My destiny is to be at sea, is it, Mazu? To be prisoner on this ship of thugs? To be raped by Chief Yang and his gang?’

The sea was silent, and I cursed Mazu again. Then I stared out over the dark, tumbling waves, tormented by the urge to leap. Thoughts of Ma Qin and my sisters were the only things that kept me on board. It was my duty as first-born son to get back to the wash boat, and there was no going back as a drowned man. So I curled up behind a coil of rope, and the waves lapped at the broadside, swaying the filthy cradle of the Scourge and sending me into a fitful sleep.

There’s a saying about Tanka sea bandits, ‘A dragon on the water, a maggot on land.’ Well, Captain Yang was a maggot on the land and water. He even looked like a maggot, with his shrunken head and weak, receded chin.

Yang was the grandson of the legendary Cheng I, who had ruled the waves fifty years back with his Red Flag Fleet and amassed a vast fortune from the vessels that trespassed upon ‘his’ waters. In the days of Cheng I, the Red Flag Fleet had over forty ships armed by cannons and guns, and a thousand-strong crew. Half a century later, all that was left of the ‘fleet’ was one ill-rigged, three-masted leaky junk, and Captain Yang had no vast fortune, because he was too scared to chase the merchant clippers for the cargoes of opium and gunpowder casks. Far from conquering the waves, the good ship Scourge had conquered only a few defenceless fishing boats.

Chief Yang was nothing but a barnacle clinging to his grandfather’s reputation, but he swaggered about in his turban and robes like Emperor of the Sea.

‘Come here, slave,’ he’d order. ‘On your knees. Open your mouth.’

If you were the ‘slave’ he was speaking to, you had better obey him. You had better go down on your knees and open your maw — or else. If you were lucky, he’d just spit in you, and have you swallow the gob of nastiness down. If you were not so lucky, he and his men would have a pissing contest, shooting streams of yellow down your throat. The Scourge was a black-hearted ship, and evil the stuff of everyday. Upon sighting a kidnapped Hakka hanging from the mast one early dawn, a noose choking his neck, Turtle Li had smirked, ‘He’d had too much of a good thing.’ They’d raped him with a broom handle the night before.

And so a year of my life went by on the Scourge of the Celestial Seas. We captives weren’t fed much, and I became thin as bones, the strength and bulk of my days of sailing with Fisherman Po wasting away. My teeth loosened and my eyesight dimmed, as though the wickedness I saw on the Scourge was slowly turning me blind. Night after night I slept up on the deck, where the sea tempted me with her dark, crashing waves.

‘Come to me, Ah Qin,’ she murmured, slapping the side of the Scourge. ‘Come swim in my depths. All of your suffering will be over in a few watery breaths. .’

I thought of Ma Qin and my sisters, and that life’s a blessing you shouldn’t throw away. But the lure of those roaring waves was harder and harder to resist. I prayed to Mazu for strength, but the Sea Goddess had deafened her ears. The Sea Goddess had turned her back on me. So I turned my back on her and became a godless man.

Toughen up or be gnashed up in the jaws of the Sea Daemon. That was my choice. So I hardened my heart into a callus. When other kidnapped fisherboys were beaten and abused, I stopped worrying for them, and thought, Better them than me. When hostages from hijacked fishing boats were brought aboard the Scourge, I stood in the crowd and heckled as Yang’s men set on them like snarling dogs. I got into the habit of spitting on and slapping about boys younger and weaker than myself. The honest and decent Ah Qin, who’d sailed with Fisherman Po, would have been ashamed of my bullying streak. But that Ah Qin had died a long time ago, leaving only the nasty dregs of me behind. Soon my viciousness was earning approving nods from Captain Yang, and I knew that I’d soon be one of his gang.

But then something happened that proved fate had other things in mind. Something that made me wonder if Mazu hadn’t been watching over the Scourge all along.

X

‘Foreign devils!’ Turtle Li hollered. ‘Foreign devils lost at sea!’

The sea was smooth under a windless sky, unmarred by a ripple or a wave. The clouds hung low, and the air was hazy with saltwater. The sea gypsies on deck rushed to look where Turtle Li was pointing his spyglass. A rowboat was drifting on the water, carrying two gweilo without oars or guns or any means of defence, both slumped as though sleeping. Seven years had gone by since you’d saved my throat from being slashed, but I recognized you at once. One of them’s Ah Tom! I thought, Ah Tom of Fanqui Town! What other gweilo had such fiery hair? That large and crooked nose? You and the other barbarian were woken by the racket of the sea bandits, lowering the fast boat into the sea, and you sat up and watched as the scrambling dragon rowed towards you, unable to protect yourselves or row away.

Terror leapt about your face as you were forced at knifepoint aboard the Scourge. You had more wrinkles now, and more baldness than hair, but there was no denying you were Ah Tom of Fanqui Town. You were crutchless and limped supported by the other barbarian, who was staring in fright at the seething horde of sea bandits, grinning and making throat-cutting gestures with their cutlasses. Too exhausted to stand, both of you sank to your knees at the stern. What a pitiful sight you were. The sun had blistered your nose and your skin was raw and peeling. Your beard was straggly, and your shirt stiffened with sea spray and sweat. The days out at sea had reduced you to a beggar in rags.

Chief Maggot, swaggering about in his turban and robe, ordered cups of water, stagnant and spawning mosquito eggs, to be brought to you from the rain barrels. You and the other barbarian fell on that water, spilling it down your chins as you drank it. Some of the jackals went over and turned out your pockets and pouches on to the deck. Ink quills, a pocket watch, letters bound in red ribbon, a leather Jesus book and barbarian coins. Chief Yang bit one of the coins between his teeth.

‘That’s a British devil coin!’ one of the sea gypsies called.

A loud hissing like water thrown on hot coals went through the crowd. Even the lawless men of the Scourge hated the British devils. ‘Kill ’em! Kill ’em dead!’ some of the rabble shouted, and under your sunburn you turned pale. My bowels loosened out of nervousness for you as you spoke: ‘Thank you for rescuing us, Captain.’

Chief Yang nearly leapt out of his skin. ‘Did that foreign devil just speak?’ Chief Maggot cried. He stabbed his finger at you. ‘Did you just speak?’

‘I have lived here for eight years, Captain. I can speak your language.’

‘What about him? Can he speak too?’ Captain Maggot asked, pointing at your friend.

You said that he could not, then went on desperately, ‘My name is Ah Tom, and my friend is Ah Jack. We are merchants. Three days ago we were rowing to shore from our merchant vessel when we got caught in the storm. We lost our oars in the sea and need help to get back to Wangpo. We will pay you, Captain. We will give you as much money as you want.’

Captain Maggot slashed his hand to silence you, then he muttered to one of his jackals, who went down the trapdoor to the galley. As I crouched in the crowd, I wanted to catch your eye, to let you know you had an ally on the Scourge. But your gaze skimmed over me, unable to tell me apart from the rest of the nasty, foul-stinking horde. Ah Jack, a handsome man with dark curls, about a decade younger than you, was speaking to you under his breath. Though the sun had scalded you red, he was brown as an Indian.

The jackal came back up through the trapdoor and handed Captain Maggot some papers. ‘Who can read?’ Maggot yelled, and a galley slave came forward and said he’d had lessons on a school boat. Captain Maggot handed him the papers, and the boy read them out:

Reward for the capture of barbarians: Those who seize a barbarian steam vessel shall be rewarded six thousand dollars. . Those who seize an ordinary man-o’-war will receive one thousand dollars per mast. . Those who seize alive a native-born Englishman shall be rewarded two hundred dollars. . Those who bring us the cut-off head of an Englishman will receive one hundred dollars.

Under his turban, Chief Yang frowned. ‘Two hundred dollars?’ he muttered. ‘What miserly bastards the Manchu government are! I ought to ransom them to the British devils.’

But to ransom you to the British was to risk one of the She-Emperor’s warships coming after the Scourge, and, lacking his grandfather’s bravery or guns, Captain Maggot turned to his helmsman and asked him to steer towards Canton. You panicked at this. Prison, interrogation and torture. This was the fate of British devils in Canton.

‘Captain, if you row us to Wangpo I promise you will be paid twice as much as they will pay you in Canton!’ you begged on your knees. ‘Eight hundred dollars! One thousand dollars! Captain, name your amount, and you shall have it. .’

Captain Maggot threw a punch at your head, knocking you sideways on the splintery deck. ‘I don’t like speaking gweilos,’ he told us, shaking out his hand. ‘If he speaks again, put out his eyes.’

XI

Quail cages were brought to the foredeck, the bamboo bars smeared with quail shit and bloody feathers. You and Ah Jack were forced into a cage each, and the doors were latched and knotted with twine. The cages weren’t meant for men, and you both sat hunched, your heads crooked and your knees to chests. Captain Yang then went down to his opium-fogged cabin, revelling in the prestige of barbarian captives for the Red Flag Fleet.

As the Scourge sailed to Canton under the overcast sky, the sea gypsies crowded around the cages and pestered you. ‘Ah Tom, you ever done it with a Tanka girl before?’ ‘Ah Tom, you ever been captured by bandits before?’ ‘Ah Tom, you ever heard of the “Red Flag Fleet”?’ The Tankas who’d picked up broken English from labouring in the port of Canton called out, ‘One! Two! Three! How you do, old boy?’ then fell about laughing. They didn’t get bored of teasing you and, stuck in your cages, you and Ah Jack just had to put up with it.

Around the hour of the ram, some galley slaves came up with bowls of rice, which you ate with your fingers, spitting out the tooth-cracking stones. Then Pockmark Wan let you out of the cages to stretch your legs and empty your bladders, as Turtle Li aimed a rusty flintlock at your head. Dusk came and the muggy closeness of the day was gusted away by wind. Cramped in his quail cage, Ah Jack bowed his handsome head over his clasped hands and moved his lips in prayer. You did not pray with him, but gazed seaward and skyward at the coming rain.

The night was cold, moonless and dark. Squalls of chilly wind whipped around the deck, and the timbers and mast heads creaked and groaned. Rain pattered down, dimpling the waves, and drummed on the rattan mats thrown over the quail cages. The Gods of wind and rain were on our side that night, chasing most of the sea bandits down to the underbelly of the ship. Up on deck the men on watchman’s duty shivered around the feeble light of a spluttering oil lamp, huddling under hemp sacks and necking grog vile as bilge water to keep warm. In the quail cages, you and Ah Jack hugged your knees, shivering in your cotton shirts. I watched the watchmen from behind a rain barrel, my teeth chattering in the drizzle. A lazy ship of fools was the Scourge, and it wasn’t long before the opium-spiked grog knocked them out.

When the last of them, Stinky Fu, was snoring, I sneaked out from behind the barrel. The last waking soul on deck.

The oil lamp had gone out, and the waves lapped the broadside in pitch black. Like a scurrying rat, I went over the deck to your cage and the dark, hunched shape of you.

‘Ah Tom,’ I whispered. ‘Shuush. Quiet. Don’t speak.’

You woke from your shallow sleep at once. Your eyes opened and your neck bones cricked as you turned to look through the bars of bamboo, crooked hump of nose and straggly beard standing out in the shadows.

‘Ah Tom,’ I whispered, ‘it’s me, Ah Qin. Do you remember me?’

Your night-blind gaze flailed through the dark at me. ‘Who?’

‘Ah Qin. You saved me from the sailors who wanted to cut my throat. Remember?’

I could smell the days lost at sea on you. Barbarian sweat, wrung out of you by the sun and blown stale by the breeze.

‘No,’ you said, ‘I don’t. .’

But I knew the thieving ten-year-old Ah Qin was somewhere in that head of yours. Your memory needed a prod, that was all.

‘I went with you to the British factory,’ I said, ‘to your room with the books. I told you about the Tanka people, and Mazu the Sea Goddess. .’

You stared at me, your eyes straining through the dark. Then remembering crept into your voice.

‘I waited for you the next day,’ you said, ‘but you didn’t come. You were younger then. A child. Now you are. . older. .’

Older. Uglier. Stinkier. Thin as bones. Not much better than Three Pipes Qin before he drowned. But I had no time to waste grieving for the Ah Qin I used to be.

‘I wanted to go back to you,’ I said, ‘but Mazu came to say I had to go to sea. So I went to sea with Fisherman Po and was a fisherboy for six years. Then Captain Yang’s gang came on our fishing boat, murdered Old Po and brought me aboard the Scourge. I’m not a sea robber, but a prisoner like you.’

In his cage, Ah Jack whimpered like a dog having a bad dream.

‘I’m sorry, Ah Qin,’ you said.

But not that sorry, I could tell. A Tanka ends up on the Scourge — well, that’s a pity. British devils like you and Ah Jack end up here, it’s a tragedy. But, to tell you the truth, I was sadder for you and Ah Jack too. It cracked the callus of my heart to see you cramped in that cage.

Stinky Fu cursed and coughed in his sleep, and the Scourge tilted, the timbers and mast creaking as the Sea Goddess breathed on the back of my neck.

‘Listen, Ah Tom,’ I said. ‘Mazu put your rowboat in the path of the Scourge for a reason.’

‘And what is that, Ah Qin?’

‘You saved my life once before. Now it’s my turn to save yours. Mazu has fated it.’

There was a long pause from you.

‘And how will you do that, Ah Qin?’

‘Mazu will tell me when the time comes.’

Another pause.

‘I see.’

Though you hadn’t much faith in me, knowing you had an ally on the Scourge must’ve put some ease into your mind, for you leant your head against the bamboo bars and dozed off. I stayed by your cage for a while, worrying over you as you slept, until the Sea Goddess blew on the back of my neck, telling me what to do next.

Down the trapdoor to the galley I went, into the dank, stinking pit of Yang’s cabin. Treading carefully so as not to creak the wooden boards, I stepped over Yang and his gang, snoring on rattan mats, my heart going berserk with fear. But the ruffians sleep deepest in the hour before dawn, and they slumbered on as I stole what Mazu told me to and slipped out.

Back on the deck of the Scourge I hid what I’d stolen in my robes, and prayed to Mazu to be long gone from the junk before they knew what was missing.

XII

The sun was midway in the sky when you and Ah Jack were let out of the quail cages. The galley slaves brought you bowls of rice, and the sea ruffians crowded round to stare at the gweilo at feeding time. Captain Yang came up in his turban and robes, and spoke to Pockmark Wan. The plan was to row you and Ah Jack to Hermit Crab Cove, then walk you across the mudflats to the authorities in Canton. The patrol boats on the Pearl River were as bad as sea bandits, and would steal the British devils from the Red Flag Fleet and reap the reward for themselves. The four hundred dollars was Captain Maggot’s alone.

They needed men to row the scrambling dragon to Hermit Crab Cove, and Pockmark Wan chose oarsmen, pointing at chests. You. You. You. I rushed to the fore, and thrust my chest in the path of his grime-blackened forefinger. You. Though I was not one of the gang, I had been chosen. The Sea Goddess’s intervention, no doubt.

When this was settled, Captain Maggot strutted up to you, puffing his chest out to make up for the fact he was several heads shorter, waving his dagger about. He rubbed the cotton of your shirt between his grubby fingers, as though to check it was up to his high standards, then, gesturing with his dagger, said, ‘Take off your shirts!’ You and Ah Jack looked at each other with panicking eyes. But Yang had a dagger, and not wanting to be stabbed, you unbuttoned your shirts and handed them over to the outstretched hands of his lackeys. Then you stood there, bare-chested before the leering crowd.

‘Look how hairy these barbarians are!’ Captain Yang smirked. ‘More like beasts than men!’

Ah Jack’s chest was broad and muscular, with whorls of dark hair. You were narrower, pale and freckled, with an overhang of belly. Both of you had more meat on you than any of us Hakkas and Tankas, and you couldn’t count your ribs like ours. ‘Cow’s milk bulks them up,’ one of the sea ruffians noted.

Chief Yang gestured again with his dagger. Off with your belts. Off with your trousers. Off with your boots. He wanted them all. I lowered my head in shame as you unbuckled your belt and slid your trousers down your hairy legs. The sea bandits grinned at the sight of you stripped to your underwear.

‘Hairy down to their toes!’ they laughed. ‘Like beasts! Like beasts!’

The sun beat down on the Scourge and waves slapped on the broadside, tilting the deck. You stooped and lowered your head, but Ah Jack stood with his chin up, refusing to part with his dignity. Captain Yang grinned at this, then reached to stroke Ah Jack’s brown curls. The lecherous look in Maggot’s eyes made my guts writhe, for now there was no denying what he wanted. Ah Jack looked murderous, but looks can’t defend a man the way weapons can, and there was nothing he could do as Yang stroked his neck.

‘Down on your knees,’ Captain Yang said.

Ah Jack had no understanding of what was being said to him, but you did.

‘How much money do you want, Captain?’ you cried out desperately. ‘I swear we will give you any amount you want if you leave him be!’

Chief Yang didn’t even look at you. One of Yang’s men jerked your head back by your hair to shut you up.

‘On your knees,’ Chief Yang repeated. ‘Down!’

Yang then slapped Ah Jack and stabbed his blade at the wooden boards. Ah Jack reeled from the slap, but stayed on his feet. His stubbornness had the jackals baying for his blood.

‘Knock him down! Knock him down! Teach him respect for the Red Flag Fleet!’

Yang’s henchmen went over to make Ah Jack kneel. They went to grab him, but Ah Jack shouted and thrashed out his arms, fending them off. ‘Don’t!’ you shouted. But Ah Jack kept throwing punches at Yang’s men, until Chief Maggot moved into the fray and Ah Jack’s knuckles struck his jaw, sending him lurching back. It was the first time anyone on the Scourge had seen the head of the Red Flag Fleet assaulted, and the sea ruffians’ jaws dropped. The deck tilted, as though the Scourge itself was reeling in shock, and Chief Maggot roared and stuck his dagger in Ah Jack’s guts.

He withdrew the blade and at last Ah Jack obeyed the order to get down, thudding to his knees and slumping on the splintery deck. Your mouth went round, as though you were saying ‘Oh!’, and you clutched your sides as though you had been knifed too. The blood of Ah Jack’s wound puddled around him, and parts of him twitched and he blinked as though he had dust in his eyes. Stabbing Ah Jack had lessened Maggot’s rage none whatsoever. He touched the swelling at his jaw and yelled, ‘Get this British devil, bleeding his stinking barbarian blood everywhere, off my ship!’ He nodded to the oarsmen chosen to row to Hermit Crab Cove, and waved his bloodstained blade at the taffrail. ‘Throw him over! Drown him in the sea!’

There’s no disobeying orders on the Scourge, so we all went over to Ah Jack. He’s dying anyway, I told myself. At least drowning will end his agony. We each grabbed one of Ah Jack’s limbs and, as we heaved him up, he screamed. Then Turtle Li shouted, ‘Wait! Don’t throw him yet! The head of an Englishman is worth a hundred dollars!’

Chief Yang looked startled. He had forgotten about the reward for an Englishman’s head. ‘Boy! Come here!’ he said.

The ‘boy’ Yang was beckoning to was me. His bloodshot eyes pierced into mine as he put the sweaty handle of the cutlass into my hand. ‘Take off his head first, before you throw him in.’

I turned back to Ah Jack. The oarsmen had lowered him back on the deck, where he lay bleeding, for his heart had not yet stopped beating. Ah Jack looked up as I went over to him, heavy and slow, as though my conscience was dragging in my feet. Ah Jack saw the dagger in my hand and shook his head and mumbled, ‘No no no.’ His eyes begged me for mercy as I knelt on the blood-soaked boards besides him. But there was no mercy on the Scourge. No mercy for him, and no mercy for those who don’t obey orders.

‘Sorry,’ I whispered in Ghost People tongue. ‘Sorry, Ah Jack.’

Ah Jack moaned and beat his hand against my chest, and two of the oarsmen came and held his wrists down against the deck. Ah Jack turned his head this way and that, with terror in his eyes. So I grabbed his dark curls to hold him steady, and brought the blade to his throat.

‘No!’ you shouted somewhere behind me. ‘No!’

But what choice did I have?

XIII

We rowed you away from the Scourge of the Celestial Seas, the flag of the Red Flag Fleet wilting from the mizzenmast. Oars splashed through the waves and seabirds swooped and soared in the clouded sky above, and we rowed as though the rhythm of our strokes, our heaving chests, had sent us into a trance. My arms were loose and shaking as I pulled the oars. Though I had rinsed my hands, they still looked drenched in Ah Jack’s blood.

Now in the robes of a galley slave, you were nothing like the scholar I had met in Fanqui Town. Bound up with rope and dumped in the bottom of the boat, you glared above your gag, your eyes deranged. Ah Jack’s head was in the burlap sack beside you, stained where the severed part had bled. The seawater that leaked into the boat, sloshing around our feet, had his blood in it too. Turtle Li sat on the bench above you, smoking his pipe, his flintlock aimed at your head. ‘Behave,’ he warned, ‘or your head’s going in that bag with your friend’s.’

We rowed up the Pearl River Bay to Hermit Crab Cove, then pulled the boat through the shoals and up the shore. We hid the boat and untied your ropes, and lent you a broken, splintery oar for a staff. We of the Scourge were wobbly at first on dry land; we were so used to pitching our weight to counter the up and down of waves. Mud squelched and splattered our staggery legs as we trudged over the mudflats. The rickety shacks of fisherfolk and pagodas stood out on hilltops in the distance, and further inland the scenery changed to lush green paddy fields, watered by streams of the Pearl River and tended to by crouching farmers in rice-planting hats. ‘Hurry up, cripple,’ growled Turtle Li, the muzzle of his gun prodding your back as you limped. Stinky Fu and Ah Xi had our rice and water, and Ah Chen and Scabby Rui each had a flintlock to ward off other bandits. Turtle Li had ordered me to carry Ah Jack’s head in the sack and, as we trudged on, the memory of those eyes of his, begging for his life, haunted my mind.

At dusk the sky began to spit down on our heads, and Turtle Li cursed and spat back at the sky. Though the plan had been to hike overnight, the outlaws of the Red Flag Fleet weren’t the sort for a gruelling slog through the cold and rain, and we detoured to a rocky outcrop Turtle Li knew from his time as a land bandit, where there was a cave.

We built a fire in the cave, under a hole like a chimney, borrowing driftwood left by those who’d sheltered there before. Scabby Rui bound you up with ropes again, and dumped you in the shadows at the back of the cave, with the creatures that scuttle and bite. Though the stench of rotting meat was coming from the burlap sack, Ah Jack’s head was thrown back there too. ‘So Ah Tom won’t be lonesome,’ grinned Turtle Li. Back in the shadows you glared above the gag, looking keen to rip out his throat.

Stinky Fu heated some rice over the fire and we dug in with grubby hands. When our supper was eaten, they passed round a flask of grog, grimacing as they swigged. The time had come for me to reveal what I’d stolen from Chief Maggot. So I brought the wooden box out of my robes and opened the lid. I spoke for the first time since the Scourge: ‘Look what I got.’

Turtle Li’s eyes went round, and he choked on his liquor. ‘How did you come by that?’ he spluttered.

‘I found it on the deck.’

‘You don’t find foreign mud lying about,’ said Turtle Li. ‘You stole it.’

‘That’s Chief Yang’s,’ added Ah Chen. ‘He’ll flay you alive.’

I said nothing and shrank back, leaving the opium out for the taking. They were opium-fiends, every last one, and the opium was here and Yang and his jackals were not. There’s no harm in smoking a pinch, they all soon agreed. Turtle Li stabbed his stubby finger at my chest.

‘Anyone gets done for this, it’s you, Tanka boy. Got that?’ Then he pounced on the opium and stuffed some in his pipe.

And so they smoked and spent an hour or so bragging about the merchant ships they’d sailed on, and the faraway lands they’d been to, and guffawing about the sinner’s boils they’d caught off the whores they’d poked. Smoke fogged the cave as they puffed on pipe after pipe and I had to crawl to the opening to clear my head.

The opium stole away their brains, or what they had of them, right before my eyes. They smoked themselves into a stupor, then stared into the fire, hypnotized by the leap of flames. When they spoke it was the same foolishness Three Pipes Qin used to come out with after a pipe or two:

‘I remember this cave from before I was born,’ said Ah Xi. ‘This cave’s where all humans come from before they are born. .’

‘When we’re back on the Scourge, I’ll challenge Chief Yang to a duel and win,’ boasted Turtle Li. ‘Then I’ll be head of the Red Flag Fleet. ’Tis the prophecy of the seagull with the ruby eyes!’

What a relief it was when one by one they lay down their opiummuddled heads and slept. Turtle Li was the last to go.

‘Anyone’s getting done for this,’ he slurred as he stabbed his finger at me, ‘it’s you, Tanka boy. .’

Then he was out cold, gone from the here and now.

In the gloom at the back of the cave, your eyes blinked in the dark.

XIV

I watched them by the light of the dying fire. Though they were strewn lifeless as bodies from a shipwreck, I watched to make sure they were properly out. Then, shuddering at the risk I was taking, I tugged Turtle Li’s dagger out of the scabbard on his belt. At the back of the cave, you were wriggling on your side. Nervous you would wake the bandits, I crawled over and hacked through your bindings with Turtle Li’s cutlass, breathing deeply to steady my shaking hands. You ripped off your gag and gasped. Then you grabbed Ah Jack’s head in the sack and hobbled over to the sleeping bandits. You reached for Ah Chen’s flintlock and limped out of the cave.

Silently we hobbled through the mud up the Pearl River Bay. You were using the broken, splintery oar as a staff and had thrown the flintlock in with Ah Jack’s head and slung the sack over your shoulder. Under the cloudy and drizzly night sky we went as fast as our legs could go, Tanka fisherboy and Red-haired Devil, knowing the more distance between us and the cave of sea bandits the better.

Grieving over Ah Jack, you didn’t say a word as I led the way over the mudflats to the other British devils in Wangpo. But fleeing from the Scourge had lifted my spirits, and my heart had quickened with the eagerness to go back to Ma Qin’s wash boat and show them I was alive. First and Second Sisters would shed some tears to see me again, and Ma Qin would tell me off for getting captured by sea bandits. ‘How was I cursed with such a fool for a son!’ she’d scold. ‘No more seafaring for you, Ah Qin!’ Then I would work as a porter in Canton harbour and forget the Scourge and lose my sea-ruffian ways. I’d do my duty as first-born son and look after Ma Qin and my sisters, and never leave the Pearl River again. I’d had enough of the sea for this life, no matter what the Sea Goddess had foreseen.

We hiked through the mud of the Pearl River Bay until sunrise, when we stopped to catch our breath. We could see Wangpo in the distance and, though you were soon to be with your British-devil kin again, you looked miserably at the sun rising over the sea and shimmering on the waves. ‘Are you thirsty, Ah Tom?’ I asked, wondering where we might find some drinking water. You did not respond but dropped the sack you’d been carrying on the muddy ground, reached in and pulled out the flintlock. Then you spun around, and pain cracked in my skull as you hit me with the butt. You cocked the gun and upped the barrel level with my chest.

‘Get back,’ you hissed. Your eyes were possessed by fury, your finger on the trigger. Clutching my head, nearly blinded with pain, I stumbled back a step.

‘What is it, Ah Tom?’ I asked. ‘What have I done?’

You glared and nodded at Ah Jack’s head in the burlap sack. ‘Jack was a good man. Now I have to tell his wife and children that he is dead. That his head was cut off on a pirate ship and his remains are in the South China Sea.’

‘Chief Yang ordered me to,’ I cried. ‘I didn’t want to. I had no choice.’

You shook your head in disgust, and I saw no trace of the kind and decent Ah Tom I’d met seven years ago in Fanqui Town. Not much difference between a civilized man and a savage. A few days at sea and a skirmish with bandits can turn the former into the latter. Even the likes of you.

‘Get back,’ you sneered. ‘You Chinamen are all the same.’ Then you pulled the trigger of the gun.