to pick up what is only a rhythm. When the white horse stops, you know you have arrived, Where there was a screen there stands the old Chinese doctor. You are on top of a great cliff. The horse has disappeared to the plain below. Together, you and the old doctor watch the white warrior mount his horse.
Ah, father, he wears no armour. Just a white Chinese robe, edged on the shoulders with black fur. His hair is tied in a high ponytail, and it is black like midnight. The warrior is crippled, and can swing his sword only in an arc below his shoulders. He cannot raise it above his shoulders. So he reaps with his sword as if it were a scythe. When he rides forth, cancer dies at his feet, is trodden under the hooves of the horse. Your soldiers follow behind and the white warrior drives cancer back to its encampments.
Amid the tumult, for this is bloody business now, you will hear the doctor sigh. You must not ask him about the white warrior. The warrior is his son whom he has not seen for years, and there is greatsadness between them.
Father, the battleground will be a bloodied mess. Each struggle reduces your liver. But each struggle also drives back one more time the forces of cancer. When you are in pain, and your forces cannot hold, call out for the warrior. The warrior will always come. The army of cancer cannot touch him, for he comes from outside. Only when your last own soldier is killed, and the warrior stands alone, will he have to leave you, for then the time has come, and the good fight fought as well as humans can fight it. Until then, he will come across the bridge of the world. He is the best I can send – no helmet, no shield, no armour. This is love that fights for you, as naked as when I was born.
My Dear Son,
Even before your letter, I knew of the white warrior. One morning, after several mornings of not being able to enter, after several nights when I thought I would die from the pain, I finally managed to enter. I talked to my general, Cornelius, and he had been badly wounded. Almost all the officers of the high command had been wounded, and there were dead soldiers all around. But Cornelius said they had, at the most critical moment, received help. No one knew where he had come from, or how anyone could fight as well as the stranger.
I stood on the clifftop with the doctor, I had to look hard to see. My son, the white warrior looks just like you. But so very pale. Son, we have not the training, but we know what this is. Your mother wants to know that you are not crippling your soul in sending the white warrior.
7: The Empress Wu
Years ago, the spirit of Empress Wu rode back to Guangdung with Kwok Meil Wah. Faded now by centuries in which only historiansremembered her, she had revived spectacularly but briefly with the Shaw Brothers’ filmed epic of her life – a Hong Kong attempt to produce an equivalent to Cleopatra, with the beauteous Lin Dai as Elizabeth Taylor. But that was two decades ago and her star had waned until Meil Wah had called on it during that tear-soaked ride from White Stone. Calling out for thunderbolts, Meil Wah exhumed from heaven the single queen who had ruined the Tang. Even in the twentieth century, Chinese called themselves Tang People – not just iron statues of galloping horses, but a dynasty of such verve-ridden accomplishment that it could only end, in the politically-incorrect Chinese mind, with the extravagant pogroms of history’s most beautiful woman. The Shaw Brothers had ensured, on the widest possible screen, that all could appreciate the burning of the stage sets stretched across three sound lots. The end of the Tang was as spectacular as any array of iron horse artefacts galloping across the dividing fires of time.
Meil Wah imagined the snarl of breath and steam from the white horses, saw briefly the empress in her gold chariot, then saw her materialise in the hotel suite, in the shape of Teresa but ordering cocktails to reduce the pain of her next
Ah, father, he wears no armour. Just a white Chinese robe, edged on the shoulders with black fur. His hair is tied in a high ponytail, and it is black like midnight. The warrior is crippled, and can swing his sword only in an arc below his shoulders. He cannot raise it above his shoulders. So he reaps with his sword as if it were a scythe. When he rides forth, cancer dies at his feet, is trodden under the hooves of the horse. Your soldiers follow behind and the white warrior drives cancer back to its encampments.
Amid the tumult, for this is bloody business now, you will hear the doctor sigh. You must not ask him about the white warrior. The warrior is his son whom he has not seen for years, and there is greatsadness between them.
Father, the battleground will be a bloodied mess. Each struggle reduces your liver. But each struggle also drives back one more time the forces of cancer. When you are in pain, and your forces cannot hold, call out for the warrior. The warrior will always come. The army of cancer cannot touch him, for he comes from outside. Only when your last own soldier is killed, and the warrior stands alone, will he have to leave you, for then the time has come, and the good fight fought as well as humans can fight it. Until then, he will come across the bridge of the world. He is the best I can send – no helmet, no shield, no armour. This is love that fights for you, as naked as when I was born.
My Dear Son,
Even before your letter, I knew of the white warrior. One morning, after several mornings of not being able to enter, after several nights when I thought I would die from the pain, I finally managed to enter. I talked to my general, Cornelius, and he had been badly wounded. Almost all the officers of the high command had been wounded, and there were dead soldiers all around. But Cornelius said they had, at the most critical moment, received help. No one knew where he had come from, or how anyone could fight as well as the stranger.
I stood on the clifftop with the doctor, I had to look hard to see. My son, the white warrior looks just like you. But so very pale. Son, we have not the training, but we know what this is. Your mother wants to know that you are not crippling your soul in sending the white warrior.
7: The Empress Wu
Years ago, the spirit of Empress Wu rode back to Guangdung with Kwok Meil Wah. Faded now by centuries in which only historiansremembered her, she had revived spectacularly but briefly with the Shaw Brothers’ filmed epic of her life – a Hong Kong attempt to produce an equivalent to Cleopatra, with the beauteous Lin Dai as Elizabeth Taylor. But that was two decades ago and her star had waned until Meil Wah had called on it during that tear-soaked ride from White Stone. Calling out for thunderbolts, Meil Wah exhumed from heaven the single queen who had ruined the Tang. Even in the twentieth century, Chinese called themselves Tang People – not just iron statues of galloping horses, but a dynasty of such verve-ridden accomplishment that it could only end, in the politically-incorrect Chinese mind, with the extravagant pogroms of history’s most beautiful woman. The Shaw Brothers had ensured, on the widest possible screen, that all could appreciate the burning of the stage sets stretched across three sound lots. The end of the Tang was as spectacular as any array of iron horse artefacts galloping across the dividing fires of time.
Meil Wah imagined the snarl of breath and steam from the white horses, saw briefly the empress in her gold chariot, then saw her materialise in the hotel suite, in the shape of Teresa but ordering cocktails to reduce the pain of her next
Similar Books
