Текст книги "The Luminaries"

Автор книги: Eleanor Catton

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Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

When Francis Carver had first made his introduction to the Sook family he had been but one-and-twenty, and Ah Sook, as a boy of twelve, had very naturally looked up to him. Carver was a terse and brooding young man, born in Hong Kong to a British merchant trader, and raised at sea. He was fluent in Cantonese, though he cherished no love for China, and meant to leave that place as soon as he acquired a ship of his own—an ambition he referenced very frequently. He worked for the Kwangchow branch of the merchant firm Dent & Co., of which his father was a high-ranking official, and he was responsible for overseeing the transfer of Chinese wares to and from the export warehouses along the Pearl River. One of these warehouses was owned by Sook Yongsheng’s father, Sook Chun-Yuen.

Sook Yongsheng understood very little about the financial operations of his father’s business. He knew that the Sook warehouse served as a liaison point for buyers, the majority of which were British merchant firms. He knew that Dent & Co. was by far the most illustrious and well connected of these firms, and that his father was very proud of this association. He knew that his father’s clients all paid for their wares in silver ore, and that this was a further point of pride for Sook Chun-Yuen; he knew also that his father hated opium, and that he held the imperial commissioner, Lin Tse-Hsu, in very high esteem. Ah Sook did not know the significance of any of these particulars; but he was a loyal son, and he accepted his father’s beliefs without comment, trusting them to be both virtuous and wise.

In February 1839, the Sook warehouse was targeted for an imperial investigation—a fairly routine procedure, but a dangerous one, for under Commissioner Lin’s decree, any Chinese merchants harbouring opium faced the penalty of death. Sook Chun-Yuen welcomed the imperial forces into his warehouse cordially—where they discovered, hidden amongst the tea, some thirty or forty crates of opium resin, each weighing roughly fifty pounds. Sook Chun-Yuen’s protestations came to nothing. He was executed without trial, and at once.

Ah Sook did not know what to believe. His natural trust in his father’s honesty prompted him to believe that the man had been framed, and his natural trust in his father’s acumen made him doubt that the man could have been framed. He was in two minds—but he had no time to contemplate the matter, for within a week of the execution, war broke out in Kwangchow. Fearing for his own safety, and for the safety of his mother, who had been driven near to madness with grief, Ah Sook turned to the only man he knew to trust: the young delegate from Dent & Co., Francis Carver.

It transpired that Mr. Carver was more than happy to take on the Sook family business as a holding, and to accept all burdens of organisation and management upon himself—at least, he said, until Ah Sook’s grief had run its course, and the civil wars had quieted, or resolved themselves. In a show of kindness to the boy, Carver suggested that he might like to continue working in the export trade, in order to honour the memory of his late father, disgraced though that memory now was. If Ah Sook wished it, Carver could find work for him packing merchandise—a decent, honourable job, if menial, which would see him through the war. This proposition gratified Ah Sook extremely. Within hours of this conversation he had become Francis Carver’s employee.

For the next fifteen years Ah Sook packed chaff around specimens of porcelain and china, wrapped bolts of printed silk in paper, stacked caddies of tea into boxes, loaded and unloaded packages, hammered the lids of shipping crates, pasted labels onto cartons, and itemised those finely wrought and purposeless objects that were termed, upon the merchandise inventories, Chinoiserie. He saw Carver only infrequently over this period, for the latter was often at sea, but their interactions, when they happened, were always cordial: it was their custom to sit upon the wharf together and share a bottle of liquor, gazing out over the estuary as the water turned from brown to blue to silver, and finally to black, whereupon Carver would rise, clap his hand upon Ah Sook’s shoulder, toss the empty bottle into the river, and depart.

In the summer of 1854 Carver returned to Kwangchow after several months’ absence, and informed Ah Sook—now a man of nearly thirty years—that their agreement was finally to come to an end. His lifelong ambition to one day command a trade vessel had at last been realised: Dent & Co. was to establish a trade run to Sydney and the Victorian goldfields, and his father had chartered a handsome clipper ship, the Palmerston, on his behalf. It was a fine promotion, and one that Carver could not ignore. He had come, he said, to bid the Sook family, and this era of his life, goodbye.

Ah Sook received Carver’s farewell with sadness. By this time his mother was dead, and the opium wars had given way to a new rebellion in Kwangchow—one that was bloody, and incensed: it promised war, and perhaps even the end of empire. Change was in the air. Once Carver was gone, the warehouse sold, and the relationship with Dent & Co. dissolved, Ah Sook would be severed from his former life completely. On impulse, he begged to be taken along. He could try his hand on the Victoria goldfields, to which place many of his countrymen had already sailed; perhaps, he said, he could forge a new life for himself there, as they had done. There was nothing left for him in China.

Carver acquiesced to his suggestion without enthusiasm. He supposed that Ah Sook could come along, though he would be required to pay for his own ticket, and keep well out of the way. The Palmerston was scheduled to break her journey in Sydney, spending two weeks loading and unloading cargo at Port Jackson before continuing on to Melbourne in the south; during these two weeks, Ah Sook must keep to himself, and not bother Carver—henceforth styled ‘Captain’—in any way. When the Palmerston landed at Port Phillip, they would part as amicable strangers, owing nothing, expecting nothing; thenceforth, they would never see each other again. Ah Sook agreed. In a frenzy of sudden excitement, he relinquished his few possessions, changed his meagre savings into pounds, and purchased a standard ticket in the highest class of berth that Carver would permit him to occupy (third). He was, he soon discovered, the ship’s only passenger.

The journey to Sydney passed without incident; looking back, Ah Sook remembered it only as a static, nauseated haze, slowly brightening, like the onset of a migraine. As the craft made her long approach into the wide, low throat of the harbour, Ah Sook, weak and malnourished after many weeks at sea, struggled from his berth at last, and ventured topside. The quality of the light seemed very strange to him; he felt that in China the light was thinner, whiter, cleaner. The Australian light was very yellow, and there was a thickened quality to its brightness, as though the sun were always on the point of setting, even in the morning, or at noon.

Upon reaching the mooring at Darling Harbour, the ship’s captain hardly paused to exchange his sea legs for a steadier gait: he walked down the Palmerston’s gangway, along the quay, and into a dockside brothel, without so much as a backward glance. His crew was fast upon his heels; in no time at all, therefore, Ah Sook found himself alone. He left the ship, committing the location of its mooring to memory, and promptly set off inland—resolving, somewhat naïvely, to get a measure of the country in which he was to live.

Ah Sook’s English was very poor, simply for the reason that he and Carver had always conducted their conversations in Cantonese, and he was not acquainted with any other English-speaking men. He looked for Chinese faces on the docks, in vain; venturing further inland, he walked the streets for hours, looking for a painted sign—even a single character—that he could understand. He found nothing. Presently he ventured to the customhouse, where he produced one of the banknotes that he had folded inside the band of his hat, and held it up: perhaps the money could speak where he could not. The customhouse official raised his eyebrows—but before he said a word, Ah Sook’s hat was wrenched from his hand. He wheeled about and saw a boy, barefoot, running at speed away from him. Outraged, Ah Sook yelled, and gave chase, but the boy was fast, and knew the warren of the docks familiarly; within minutes, he was gone.

Ah Sook searched for the boy until well after nightfall. When finally he gave up and returned to the customhouse, the customs officials only shook their heads and spread their hands. They pointed inland, and spoke a volley of words. Ah Sook did not know what they were pointing at, or what they were saying. He felt a sob rising in his throat. His hatband had contained all the money he owned, save for the single banknote that he had been holding in his other hand: he was now all but destitute. Distraught, he removed his boot, placed this last banknote in the worn hollow beneath his heel, replaced his boot, and returned to the Palmerston. At least, he thought, there was one man in Sydney who could speak Cantonese.

Ah Sook approached the brothel cautiously. From within he could hear the sound of a piano—the timbre unfamiliar to him: he felt that it had a squarish, comfortable sound. He was lingering on the threshold, wondering whether he should knock, when the door was wrenched open, and a man appeared in the doorway.

Ah Sook bowed. He attempted to explain, as courteously as he was able, that he wished to speak to a man named Carver, captain of the Palmerston. The man in the doorway responded with a string of unintelligible sounds. Ah Sook persisted, repeating Carver’s name very slowly and carefully. He received the same response. Next he tried to indicate with the flat of his hand that he wished to step around the man, and venture inside, so that he might speak to Carver himself. This was a mistake. The man grabbed Ah Sook’s shirt collar with one enormous hand, picked him up, and threw him bodily into the street. Ah Sook fell painfully, jarring his wrist and his hip. The man pushed up his shirtsleeves and advanced down the stairs. He took one final drag of his cigar before throwing it, with a flick of his wrist, sideways into the quay. Then, grinning, he put up his fists. Ah Sook became very anxious. He put up his hands also, to indicate that he did not wish to fight, and begged for mercy. The man called something over his shoulder—perhaps an instruction—and within moments a second man, his face much thinner, his nose more hooked, had appeared at the doorway of the brothel. This second man darted around behind Ah Sook, hauled him to his feet, and pinned his hands behind his back—a pose that left his face and torso undefended. The pair exchanged words. Ah Sook struggled, but he could not wrench his wrists free. The first man, raising his forearms in front of his face, shifted his weight lightly from foot to foot. He approached and then retreated several times, stepping very lightly, and then darted forward and began to batter Ah Sook’s face and stomach with his fists. The man behind him crowed something. The first grunted in return and fell back, only to advance again in the same style, and release a second flurry of blows. Soon the revellers inside the brothel were roused. They spilled into the street, bringing the noise of their party with them.

Francis Carver appeared in the doorway of the brothel. He had removed his jacket; he was in ruffled shirtsleeves and a blue necktie, tied with a sloppy four-in-hand knot. His placed his hands loosely upon his hips and surveyed the fight with an irritated look. Ah Sook met his eyes.

‘Mh goi bong ngoh,’ he cried through a mouthful of blood. ‘Mh goi bong ngoh!’

Francis Carver seemed to look right through him. He made no sign that he could understand Ah Sook at all. One of the other revellers said something, and Carver responded in English, shifting his gaze away.

‘Pang yao! Ho pang yao!’

But Carver did not look at him again. A copper-haired woman appeared next to him in the doorway, snaking beneath his arm; he caught her around the waist, and pulled her body close to his own. He murmured something into her hair. She laughed, and they went back inside.

Soon the second man could not support the dead weight of Ah Sook’s body; he dropped him, complaining, evidently, of the blood that had spattered on his jacket and his cuffs. The first man began to kick Ah Sook where he lay, but evidently this was not as entertaining as his former sport, and soon the crowd lost interest and dispersed. The first man gave Ah Sook a final kick in the ribs with the toe of his boot, and then returned inside also. When he re-entered the brothel there was a rising wave of laughter, and then the piano struck up a new tune.

Using his elbows and his knees, Ah Sook dragged his broken body to the alley, out of sight. He lay in the shadow, feeling a sharp pain each time he drew a breath. He watched the masts of the ships move back and forth. The sun went down. After a time he heard the lamplighter’s tread upon the quay, and near him, the hiss and thump as the gas lamp was ignited. The darkness turned grey. He feared that all his ribs were broken. He could feel a sticky wetness, like a sponge, above his hairline. His left eye had closed. He did not know if he had strength enough to stand.

Presently the rear door of the brothel opened, spilling yellow light onto the stones. Quick steps padded into the alley. Ah Sook heard the clink of a tin bowl being set down upon the cobbles, and then felt a cool touch of a hand upon his brow. He opened his right eye. A young woman with a thinly pointed face and buck-teeth was kneeling before him. Murmuring phrases he did not understand, she dipped a square of cloth in warm water, and began to daub the blood from his face. He let her voice wash over him. She was wearing a starched apron, in the manner of a barmaid: she must work inside, he thought. This guess was confirmed when, after a moment, there came a shouted summons from within, and, muttering, she put the cloth down and darted away.

Several hours passed. The piano player ceased, and the noises from within began to dwindle. Ah Sook slept a while, and awoke to find that all was very quiet, and the barmaid had returned. This time she was carrying a caddy under one arm, several implements rolled in cloth, and a spirit lantern. She knelt beside him, placing the lantern carefully upon the cobbles, and twisting the dial so the globe flared white. Ah Sook turned his head, as gently as he was able, and saw, with some surprise, that the caddy she was carrying bore his own family name, stamped in Chinese. He gave a start, which the woman interpreted strangely; she smiled and nodded, and placed her finger against her lips, to signify a secret. She then opened the caddy, fished around amongst the tea leaves, and withdrew from the interior a small square package, wrapped in paper. She smiled at him. Ah Sook was confused. He turned his head painfully to the right, so as to see the implements the woman had unrolled from her bundle—and saw a short, inelegant pipe, laid out next to a needle, a knife, and a tin bowl. He turned back to her, questioningly, but she was busy adjusting the wick of the lamp, assembling the pipe, and preparing the resin. When at last the opium was bubbling, and a tendril of white smoke escaped the thin aperture of the bowl, she pressed the mouthpiece of the pipe to Ah Sook’s lips. He was too exhausted to decline. He took the vapour into his mouth, and held it there.

There came a dawn in his chest, a liquid light. A perfect calm flooded through his body. The pain in his head and chest drained out of him, as simply and suddenly as water seeping through a piece of silk. Opium, he thought, dully. Opium. It was extraordinary. The drug was extraordinary. It was a miracle, a cure. She passed him the pipe again and he supped from its end greedily, like a beggar supping from a spoon. He did not remember passing out of consciousness, but when he next opened his eyes it was daylight, and the barmaid was gone. He was lying propped between two slop-crates at the back of the building, with a blanket spread over his body, and another folded beneath his cheek. Someone—the barmaid, perhaps?—must have dragged him there. Or had he come here of his own accord? Ah Sook could not remember. He had a terrible headache, and the pain in his ribcage had returned. From within the building he could hear splashing water and the sound of knives.

Then he remembered the can of opium, buried in the middle of the box of tea. Dent & Co. had been paying for their wares in opium—for Britain had no more silver, and China had no need for gold. How could he have been so stupid? Francis Carver had been smuggling the drug into China, using the Sook family warehouse as a liaison point. Francis Carver had betrayed his father. Francis Carver had turned away from him, and pretended not to understand his cry. Ah Sook lay on his side in the alley without moving. A deadly conviction was swelling in his chest.

Over the course of the next week the buck-toothed woman kept him fed, watered and sedated. She checked upon him several times daily, always under the pretence of feeding the pig, emptying the dishwater, or taking the laundry to the buckled line; after nightfall, she came with the pipe, and fed him smoke until the pain lessened, and he fell asleep. She conducted these ministrations in silence, and Ah Sook, as he watched her, was quiet too. He wondered about her. One night she came out with her own eye blackened. He raised his hand to touch it, but she frowned, and turned away.

Within a few days Ah Sook could stand, though it was painful to do so, and within the week he could walk slowly around the yard. He knew that the Palmerston had only scheduled a fortnight’s stopover in Sydney; soon it would be departing for the Victorian goldfields, in the south. Ah Sook no longer cared whether he continued on to Melbourne. He wanted only to confront Carver before the clipper sailed.

Since the Palmerston had reached her mooring Carver had not spent a single night aboard: he spent his nights at the dockside brothel, in the company of the woman with copper-coloured hair. Ah Sook saw him approaching every evening, striding along the quay with his arms swinging and his coat-tails flared. He did not leave the brothel until the early hours of the afternoon, and very often the copper-haired woman accompanied him to the alley doorway to bid him a private goodbye. Ah Sook had twice glimpsed the pair walking along the docks together, well after sundown. They spoke as intimates. Each leaned in close to listen when the other spoke, and the woman’s hand was always in the crook of Carver’s elbow, pressing close.

The eighth night after Ah Sook’s assault was a Sunday, and the carousing at the brothel quit well before midnight, in accordance with curfew. Ah Sook crept around to the front of the place and saw Carver silhouetted in the central window of the upper floor, leaning his forearm against the lintel and looking down into the dark. As Ah Sook watched the red-haired woman came up behind him, caught his sleeve in her hand, and pulled him back out of sight, into the depths of the room. Keeping to the shadows, Ah Sook crept back to the sash window above the kitchen cutting-board, and slid it open. He climbed inside. The room was deserted. He looked around for a weapon, selecting, finally, a bone-handled cleaver from the rack above the board. He had never wielded a weapon of any kind against another man, but it gave him confidence, to feel the thing heavy in his hand. He moved to find the staircase in the gloom.

There were three doors at the top of the staircase, all of them closed. He listened at the first (only silence) and then the second (muted scuffling) and then the third, behind which he could hear the rumble of a man’s voice, the creak of a chair, and then a woman’s low reply. Ah Sook tried to estimate the distance from the edge of the house to the upper window at which he had seen Carver standing moments before. Could this third door lead to that central room—did it square? Yes: for he was ten feet from the edge of the landing, and if he imagined the brothel’s frontage in his mind, the window was easily twelve feet from the building’s edge. Unless the second door led to a larger room, of course, and this third door led to a small one. Ah Sook put his ear to the door. He heard the man raise his voice and speak several words in English—sharply, and with a terse accent, as though he were very displeased. It must be Carver, Ah Sook thought. It could only be Carver. Full of sudden fury, he wrenched the door open—but it was not Carver. It was the man who had beaten him, little more than a week earlier. He had the buck-toothed woman on his lap, one hand encircling her throat, the other spread flat across her breast. Ah Sook stepped back in surprise—and the man, roaring his displeasure, threw the woman from his lap, and leaped to his feet.

He uttered a string of syllables that Ah Sook did not understand, and reached for his revolver, which was lying on a nightstand next to the bed. In the same instant, the buck-toothed woman reached into her bosom and withdrew a muff pistol. The man levelled his gun and pulled the hammer—Ah Sook flinched—but the mechanism jammed; there was a spent casing in the breech. By the time the man had tipped his revolver up to release the spent casing, the woman had rushed upon him and shoved the muzzle of her pistol into his temple. Distracted, he tried to push her away—and there was a clap—and the man crumpled. His revolver fell from his hand, and thudded upon the floor. Ah Sook had not moved. The buck-toothed woman darted forward, removed the revolver from the dead man’s hand, and fitted her own muff pistol in place of it. She then thrust the heavy revolver upon Ah Sook, closed his fingers over the barrel, and motioned for him to leave, and leave quickly. Bewildered, he turned on his heel, revolver in one hand, cleaver in the other. She grabbed his shoulders, yanked him back, and directed him, instead, to the servants’ stairwell on the other side of the hall—down which he vanished, hearing footsteps, and clamour, on the main stair.

Outside Ah Sook tossed both weapons into the water and watched them sink rapidly out of view. There came screaming from inside, and muffled shouts. He turned and began to run. Before he reached the end of the quay he heard footsteps behind him. Then something struck him on the back, and he fell face-first upon the ground. He gave a grunt of pain—his ribs were still very tender—and felt his hands being cuffed, roughly, behind him. He did not protest as he was hoisted to his feet, marched to the horse post, and shoved against it; his captor then cuffed him, with a second pair of handcuffs, to the iron ring, where he remained until the policeman’s wagon arrived to take him to gaol.

Ah Sook could not make head or tail of the questions that were put to him in English, and at length his interrogators despaired of him. He was not afforded the courtesy of a translator, and when he said the name ‘Carver’ the policemen only shook their heads. He was placed in cramped custody with five other men. In due course the case was heard, and judged to warrant a trial, which was scheduled to take place some six weeks later. By this time the Palmerston must have long since departed; Carver, in all likelihood, was gone for good. Ah Sook passed the next six weeks in a state of great anxiety and dejection, and awoke on the morning of his trial as if upon the day of his very execution. How could he hope to defend himself? He would be convicted, and hanged before the month was out.

The case was heard in English, and Ah Sook, from the dock, understood virtually none of it. He was surprised when, after several hours of speeches and swearings-in, Francis Carver was brought to the stand in handcuffs. Ah Sook wondered why this witness was the only one to have been restrained. He stood up as Carver approached the stand, and called out to him in Cantonese. Their gaze met—and in the sudden stillness, Ah Sook, speaking calmly and distinctly, promised to avenge his father’s death. Carver, to his dishonour, was the first to look away.

It was only much later that Ah Sook learned the nature of what transpired during the trial. The name of the man he was accused of having murdered, as he later discovered, was Jeremy Shepard, and the buck-toothed woman who had nursed Ah Sook back to health was his wife, Margaret. The copper-haired woman was Lydia Greenway; she was the proprietrix of the Darling Harbour brothel, which was known as the White Horse Saloon. At the time of his trial, Ah Sook knew no names at all; it was not until the morning after his acquittal that he found a copy of the Sydney Herald and was able to pay a Cantonese trader to translate the account given in the courthouse pages—which, owing to its sensational nature, ran over three columns, nearly filling an entire page.

The case of the prosecutor, according to the Sydney Herald, rested upon three points: firstly, that Ah Sook had a very good reason to bear a grudge against Jeremy Shepard, given that the latter had beaten him senseless the week before; secondly, that Ah Sook had been apprehended fleeing the White Horse Saloon in the moments after the shot was fired, which naturally made him the most likely suspect; and thirdly, that Chinese men, in general, could not be trusted, and indeed bore an inherent malice against all white men.

The defence, in the face of these charges, was lackadaisical. The lawyer reasoned that it was unlikely that Ah Sook, being but a fraction of Shepard’s height and weight, could have got close enough to place the muzzle of the pistol against the other man’s temple; for this reason, the possibility of suicide ought not to be ruled out. When the prosecutor interjected to assert that the act of suicide was, by the testimony of his friends, vehemently against Jeremy Shepard’s nature, the defence ventured the opinion that no man on earth was wholly incapable of suicide—a surmise that received a sharp reprimand from the judge. Begging the judge’s pardon, the lawyer concluded his argument by suggesting, as a kind of general summation, that perhaps Sook Yongsheng had only fled the White Horse in alarm: a shot had just been fired, after all. When he sat down the prosecutor made no effort to hide his smirk, and the judge sighed very audibly.

At last the prosecutor called for the testimony of Margaret Shepard, Jeremy Shepard’s widow—and it was here that the trial took a startling turn. Upon the stand, Margaret Shepard flatly refused to corroborate with the prosecutor’s line of questioning. She insisted that Sook Yongsheng had not murdered her husband. She knew this to be true for a very simple reason: she had witnessed his suicide herself.

This startling confession gave rise to such an uproar in the court that the judge was obliged to call for order. Ah Sook, to whom these events would only be translated long after the fact, never dreamed that the woman was risking her own safety in order to save his life. When Margaret Shepard’s questioning was allowed to continue, the prosecutor inquired as to why she had hitherto concealed this very vital information, to which Margaret Shepard replied that she had lived in great fear of her husband, for he abused her daily, as more than one witness could attest. Her spirit was all but broken; she had only just mustered the courage to speak of the incident aloud. After this poignant testimony, the trial dissolved. The judge had no choice but to acquit Ah Sook of the crime of murder, and to release him. Jeremy Shepard, it was decreed, had committed suicide, may God rest his soul—though that prospect was, theologically speaking, very unlikely.

Ah Sook’s first action, upon his release from gaol, was to seek news of Francis Carver. He learned, to his surprise, that in fact the Palmerston had been apprehended in the Sydney Harbour some weeks ago, following a routine search. Francis Carver had been found in breach of the law on charges of smuggling, breach of customs, and evasion of duty: according to the report given to the maritime police, there were sixteen young women from Kwangchow in the ship’s hold, all of them severely malnourished, and frightened in the extreme. The Palmerston had been seized, the women had been sent back to China, Carver had been remanded in gaol, and Carver’s relationship with Dent & Co. had been formally dissolved. He had been sentenced to ten years of penal servitude at the penitentiary upon Cockatoo Island, effective instant.

There was nothing to do but wait for Carver’s sentence to elapse. Ah Sook sailed to Victoria, and began to dig the ground; he acquired some facility in English, apprenticed himself to various trades, and dreamed, with increasing lucidity, of avenging his father’s murder by taking Carver’s life. In July 1864 he sent a written inquiry to Cockatoo Island requesting to know where Carver had gone upon his liberation. He received an answer three months later, informing him that Carver had sailed to Dunedin, New Zealand, upon the steamer Sparta. Ah Sook bought a ticket there also—and in Dunedin, the trail suddenly went cold. He searched and searched—and found nothing. At last, defeated, Ah Sook gave up the case as lost. He bought a miner’s right and a one-way ticket to the West Coast—where, eight months later, he chanced upon him: standing in the street, his face newly scarred, his chest newly thickened, counting coins into Te Rau Tauwhare’s hand.

Ah Sook found Ah Quee sitting cross-legged on a shelf of gravel, some few feet from the boundary peg that marked the Aurora’s southeast corner. The goldsmith held a prospector’s dish in both hands, and he was shaking the dish rhythmically, flicking out his wrists in the confident motion of a man long-practised in a single skill. There was a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth, but he did not appear to be smoking it: the ash shredded finely down his tunic as he moved. Before him was a wooden trough of water, and beside him, an iron crucible with a flattened spout.