Shanghai by David Rotenberg

cannons is the explosive stuff of change.
    â€œSo it has begun at last—the prophecy, the Ivory Compact, is finally in motion. The Age of White Birds on Water is upon us.” He took his brush and made an entry in the secret journal that had been passed down to him by the previous Confucians of the Ivory Compact.
    The cries of birds drew his eyes from his writing.
    Below him, in the hundreds of flooded rice paddies that separated him from the river, peasants were attaching long reeds to the feet of hundreds of tiny starlings. The birds screamed in protest. On a signal the starlings would all be released to fly skyward with their reeds clattering beneath them, in order to frighten away devils that could hurt the tender newly planted rice plants.
    The Confucian wanted to laugh. There are more serious devils approaching than those that would destroy your rice, he thought. “And these devils will not be frightened away by the silly clatter of reeds beneath tiny birds.” This last he said aloud.
    In response, an ancient voice sang in his head, and he knew that his ancestors were calling in a debt made all those years ago on a far-off holy mountain. And the paying of that debt would change everything.
    J IANG, THE C ONCUBINE
    Jiang carefully disentangled herself from the fat salt merchant and slipped on a silken robe. The scent of opium lingered in the hot air of the stuffy bedchamber. She flung open the wooden shutters of the third-storey room and for a moment thought the opium was still alive in herblood, causing her to hallucinate. But that moment quickly passed. She had seen what she had seen. A great warship, draped all in white, entering the Huangpo River.
    She picked up her leather pouch of silk ropes and her two-stringed arhu from the table, then quickly made her way down the stairs.
    Outside, the morning streets were already alive. The men from the night-soil wagons were quickly collecting the round, red honeypots from each house, then emptying the contents into the wagons. A second set of men gave the night-soil pots a quick rinse and returned them to the appropriate homes. Jiang knew that although night-soil collection was the lowliest of professions, it also paid the highest financial rewards. Because of that, Jiang’s family always married their first daughter into the Zhong clan that controlled this lucrative business. In the meantime, she was happy that she was upwind of the night-soil cart.
    She turned a sharp corner and a five-spice egg seller fish-eyed her, then put one nasty finger to a nostril and blew hard. Green snot splatted to the ground inches from the pot. “Missed,” the egg seller chortled. “Was his spear big?” she asked Jiang with feigned innocence.
    â€œHe would have split you in half, old lady,” Jiang quipped.
    â€œOnly if he entered the dark passage. In the sacred lotus I can take a stallion.” She laughed at her own joke and again blew her nose. This time some of the green mass went in the pot.
    â€œAh!” Jiang shouted.
    â€œSpecial ingredient,” the five-spice egg seller chimed back.
    All around Jiang the morning smell of porridge escaped from coal-fired braziers. She usually didn’tcare to eat at this hour, but the subtle smell of a steamed pork bun drew her down an alley on her way toward the water. The gentle woman selling the buns allowed her hand to linger just a moment too long on Jiang’s smooth skin before she took Jiang’s half- tael piece.
    The first bite of the bun filled Jiang with an old joy. When I get old I can have as many of these as I want. Fat. Fat. Ah, to be free enough and old enough to be fat, she thought.
    She avoided the accusatory looks of the women in the streets as she ran out of the alley, past the fish sellers and the wooden tables thick with wriggling eels ready to be sliced. For a moment she paused in front of the snake seller. Did she need more man in her now? she wondered.
    â€œCobra?”