The Dungeon. Lynne Banks Reid

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      The soldiers whispered in surprise. The woman stared at him as if she couldn’t take it in. ‘Which one do you want?’

      ‘That one,’ he said, pointing to the little girl who was peeping from behind the screen.

      ‘No,’ said the woman firmly. ‘Not that one.’

      McLennan felt balked. He already knew that in poorer parts of this country the selling of daughters by poor families or widows was a common way to fight starvation – he had been offered girl-children before by wretched parents who detained him with desperate cries of ‘Good slave! Work hard!’ about children younger than this one.

      He half-glanced at the other men for guidance. Kai-fung, the closest he had to a friend among them – the one whose sword he had picked up, that first day – was grinning knowingly.

      ‘You want a servant? Pick another,’ he said. ‘For that one, she’ll want too much.’ He eked out his words with signs till McLennan understood.

      The woman was clearly agitated. She went to the screen, pushed the little one out of sight and dragged out two or three more. They were older, and had stolid looks that promised stamina and cow-like obedience, but somehow McLennan didn’t even want to glance at them. What was special about the little one? Denied her, his impulse hardened into determination.

      He brought out a packet of the strange paper money they used here, which he had been using for small purchases. The woman shook her head. Reluctantly, he fished out a gold half-sovereign.

      When the widow saw the gleam of gold in the man’s big hand, her need overcame her reluctance. With tears in her eyes, she shooed the bigger girls out of sight and led the youngest out. Now the men laughed. They seldom laughed, and McLennan at once suspected he was being made a fool of.

      ‘Why laugh?’ he asked angrily.

      They exchanged looks. Then Kai-fung pointed to her feet.

      Until that moment, McLennan had never satisfied his wish to see a woman with small feet. He had almost forgotten the tales he had heard. But now he saw something that made him start upright, staring down.

      Because she was still small, the smallness of her feet was not very noticeable, but still he could see that there was something peculiar about them. They looked not only smaller than one would expect, but strangely shaped.

      He scowled down at them for a long time. The teahouse fell silent. The widow stood tensed, torn between desperate need for the gold and agonised reluctance to part with her youngest child. McLennan was thinking. He wanted her for a servant. She would accompany him wherever he went. If she was of the small-foot breed, why did she walk badly?

      He glanced at Kai-fung. He nodded. Buy her, she is worth it. He knew something McLennan did not.

      He looked at the child. She was tiny – doll-like, in her drab trousers and padded jacket frog-buttoned down one side. She had the usual straight black hair, cut across her brow and tied back, a round face, a mouth like a squashed berry. Her almond-shaped eyes were lowered. There was nothing, absolutely nothing about her that set her apart from thousands of other poor little Mi-Ki girls.

      Yet, as he stared at her, trying to decide, she dared a glance up at him. There was a flashing moment when their eyes met. There was something – something that reminded him – but no. That was unthinkable. It must be something else that drew him. In any case, this was not a look that claimed kinship, but like that of a little animal in a trap.

      In a second, without any more thought, his mind was made up. He straightened, slapped the gold coin on the table, and took the child by the arm. Some days before, he had pulled a water lily out of a pond in an idle moment to see how it grew. Her wrist felt like its stem. He led her out of the teahouse.

      She had no time to say goodbye. She took nothing – almost nothing. At the last moment, one of her sisters, tears streaming down her face, rushed out from behind the kitchen screen and thrust into a fold in the child’s jacket – a pathetic parting gift – a pair of eating sticks. That apart, all the little girl carried with her were her mother’s last words, whispered to her as she almost pushed her on her way – pushed her lest she clutch her back.

      ‘Remember who you are.’

      Whatever she had been before, now she was Bruce McLennan’s tea-slave.

       Chapter Four

      The child’s name was Mudan, which, translated, is Peony, the name of a flower. But McLennan never knew this. He didn’t need a name for her. He called her ‘You’ or ‘Girl’, in English or the new tongue. She had to hold tightly to her name in her memory or she would have forgotten it – forgotten who she was.

      ‘Wo shi mudan – I am Peony,’ she said solemnly over and over again in her head like a mantra – a sacred, continual prayer to the Buddha.

      To be snatched from her life so suddenly was a shock. But she had been brought up to the understanding that as a girl-child, she was destined to be some man’s possession. She hadn’t expected it to happen yet – that was all. Nor, of course, had she ever dreamed she would become the common chattel of a foreign giant, and be taken away into a man’s world of roughness and war. It was very frightening, and for the first hours, her mind was a blank, except for the repetition of her name.

      That night, when the soldiers were in their billet, McLennan threw some straw on to the floor beside his own pallet-bed and pointed to it. Peony, worn out, lay down on it obediently, drawing her knees up to her chest for warmth. Her feet again caught the Scotsman’s attention. The toes seemed to come to a point under her cloth shoes and the insteps were high – they really did look like pears. He beckoned to Kai-fung.

      ‘Why feet thus?’ he asked stiltedly, using the new words.

      ‘They are bound.’

      ‘What’s that?’

      The other man knelt down and took the child’s cloth shoes off. McLennan saw her shrink and wince.

      Under the shoes were strips of dirty cloth that wrapped each foot. They were tied very tight. McLennan scowled. ‘Who do this – her mother?’ Kai-fung nodded. ‘But why?’

      With signs and simple words, Kai-fung tried to explain. The feet of some girls were bound tight to keep them small, to stop their growth. This made the girls, when they grew up, more desirable to men.

      At last, McLennan understood, or rather, guessed. The woman in the teahouse, having many daughters, had bound the feet of the youngest in the hope that she would be worth a high bride price when she grew up.

      He stared down at this deformed creature he had paid a gold coin for and felt anger burn inside him. He would not allow himself to feel pity for her – or to feel anything for her. She was spoiled goods. The mother, who had kept her other daughters natural and uncrippled so they could work, had sold him one that was only meant for decoration – who would be lame and good for nothing.

      ‘I don’t want her!’ he shouted suddenly.

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