Free Jade Dragon Mountain by Elsa Hart Page B

shivering crowds of students waiting in the darkness before sunrise for the examination hall to open. He could almost feel the ink stone he had gripped, so cold he had to switch it from hand to hand to relieve his fingers from the marble’s freezing weight.
    In the exam room, the sleet had dripped through the ceiling tiles as he wrote, and he shielded his paper from the drops, knowing that an examiner in an unkind mood might fail a student rather than spend time deciphering a smudged character. Li Du’s eyes became so tired that his eyelids swelled and stung, and he relied on the proctors calling out topics because he could no longer read the questions in the book.
    And then, emerging from the hall of examinations still clutching his blanket around his shoulders, going over in his mind what he had written, miserably regretting answers, he heard the mourning bells sound from the Drum Tower. The tower itself was hidden in the mist, and the hollow, echoing strikes seemed to come from the very clouds that hung low over the Forbidden City. They went on, solemnly, and he lost count of their number. Someone important had died. Who could it have been? A concubine, perhaps, or a wife of the Emperor’s father?
    Word spread quickly that it was the Emperor’s Jesuit friend, Father Verbiest, who had died that morning, and that he was to receive the greatest funeral honors that had ever been bestowed on a foreigner in China. The Emperor himself would write his eulogy, and had withdrawn from the public world to meditate on how best to express his grief. In the days that followed, it was rumored that the Emperor ventured out alone at night to the astronomical observatory where Father Verbiest had taught him to read the stars. They said that he stayed there, among the sextants and armillary spheres, mourning the loss of his confidant. That was a time when Jesuits were more secure in their place among the Kangxi’s advisors.
    Li Du’s own education had taken place at the height of Jesuit influence in the Forbidden City. As a boy, he, and the other children of nobles, were tutored by a succession of the foreigners. Most of them were as old and white-bearded as Brother Pieter. A few were younger, and Li Du had always found them the more disconcerting. Their faces showed the sombre intensity of men devoted to a cause. The expressions of their elders were kinder, their eyes more understanding of the world and of the compromises that had to be made within it.
    The Jesuits were most often to be seen in the library of the Forbidden City, poring over scrolls and calibrating bronze and iron instruments, lighting candles to continue their work long after the evening shadows had silenced the palace. As Li Du grew older and spent more and more time in the library, he had found ample opportunity to converse with the Jesuits, practicing his Latin and assisting them in their translations. Some were adept at Chinese, others not. Some devoted themselves to bringing converts to their religion. Others put all their energy into their intellectual pursuits. Some had concubines, some had wives, and some adhered to their vows of celibacy. Some were outspoken, others reticent. They were as strange in their individual proclivities as they were in the oddities they had in common.
    Li Du had reached the guesthouse again. The hanging lanterns had been extinguished. The door to Pieter’s room was open, and Brother Martin was silhouetted at the desk, hunched over his open book, supporting his head in his hands.
    â€œ He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away …”
    Li Du climbed the four steps up to the porch and went into his own room. He lit a candle. Then he picked up his teapot and the thick cloth folded beside it, and retraced his steps across the courtyard to the brazier. As he passed between the eerie, hulking figures