The Fire Flowers of Canton

Chapter One: The Shed Where No One Wears Iron

The tide went out of Sai Lung an hour before dawn, and Tam Yulan woke with it, the way she had woken all her life.

She lay a moment listening. Water drawing off the oyster banks made a sound like rice being poured from one basket into another, thousands of small shells clicking as they came clear. Beyond that, the channel; beyond that, four more channels, and mudbanks, and reed islands that were there in spring and gone by autumn, and somewhere past all of it the open sea, which she had never seen.

She got up, tied back her hair, and left her sandals by the door.

The shed stood at the northern end of the sandbank, apart from the houses, because that was the law of the village and the law of common sense. It was built of bamboo and matting with a roof that would lift off cleanly instead of coming down on your head. There was no iron in it anywhere. No nail, no hinge, no knife, no buckle. Her father had once sent a man home for wearing a brass-studded belt, and brass will not even spark.

Everyone went barefoot inside. Yulan had gone barefoot in that shed since she was four years old.

She lit the small oil lamp in its horn lantern outside the door, hung it from the peg at the window where its light fell in but its flame stayed out, and went to the paste pot.

Quickmatch first. Quickmatch always first, because it wanted a whole day of drying and the sun did not wait.

She worked the way her grandmother had taught her, which was the way her grandmother's husband had taught her, and back and back. Cotton wick, three strands loosely spun, laid in the trough. Meal powder — the fine stuff, ground until it felt like nothing at all between finger and thumb — stirred into rice paste and a little spirit until it was the thickness of congee left overnight. Draw the wick through. Not too fast; the paste had to fill the twist of the cotton and not just coat it. Then out, and along the bamboo frame, and pegged, and left in the wind.

When it dried, that string of cotton would carry fire eighty feet in the time it took to draw a breath. Roll it in a paper tube and it went faster still, so fast that men who had never seen it swore it was witchcraft. It was not witchcraft. It was cotton, and paste, and patience.

By the time the sky over the eastern reeds turned the colour of weak tea, she had forty feet of it on the frames and her forearms were grey to the elbow.

"You're drawing it too quick."

Her grandmother stood in the doorway with her sandals in her hand. Tsang Mui was seventy-one years old and shrinking, so that every year her jacket seemed to have been made for a slightly larger woman, but her eyes had not shrunk at all.

"I'm drawing it the same as always."

"You're drawing it quick because you're thinking about the rite." Granny Mui came in, set her sandals down, and put a finger into the paste pot. She rubbed the paste between finger and thumb, then touched it to her tongue, made a face, and spat neatly out of the window. "Too much spirit. It'll dry brittle and crack in the middle where you can't see it, and then some poor fisherman out at the Nine Pins lights his rocket and stands there holding a stick."

Yulan added paste and stirred. She did not argue, because in eleven years of arguing she had never once won on a question of powder.

Her grandmother could not read a single character. She had never held a brush. But she carried in her head the full working of the Tam fire-works — every proportion, every grinding time, every trick of drying and damping — and she had a lacquered case of scrolls, water-stained and mouse-nibbled, that she guarded like the deed to a house. The scrolls were in her son's hand and his father's before him. Granny Mui knew them by their shapes: this one long and close-written is the green; this one with the blot is the mortars; this short one is the tiered flower that killed him.

Yulan could read them, slowly, moving her lips. Her father had taught her the characters that mattered — the numbers, the names of the ingredients, the words for grind, dry, damp, wait — sitting on the step in the evenings with a stick and a patch of wet sand.

He had taught her the rest of it too. To time a fuse against a burning incense stick, so that you learned the length of a breath and the length of a heartbeat and could tell one from the other in the dark. To judge saltpetre by how it beaded on the tongue, sharp and cold and clean, and to throw out any that tasted of the sea. To tell copper filings from iron by dropping a pinch into a candle flame: copper gave you a green so pure it did not seem to belong to this world, and iron gave you nothing but gold sparks and disappointment.

He had been dead two years. A mortar tube had burst under him at the autumn rite at Tai Mo village, and he had lived four hours after, long enough to be angry about it.

The village had said, afterwards, in the gentle way villages say terrible things, that the fire-works had died with him.

"Forty signal rockets for the Wong boats," said Granny Mui, going along the drying frames, touching each length of match, "and they want them by the eighth. And the Leungs want a string of crackers for the boy's month-old feast, and they'll pay in fish, and we'll take it, because fish is food."

"We could do forty by the sixth."

"We could do forty by the fifth if you slept less." Her grandmother reached the end of the frames and stood looking out at the water. "There's a boat coming. Lo Kuen's boat."

Yulan wiped her hands.

The salt broker came ashore in dry shoes. That was the thing about Lo Kuen; other men of Sai Lung waded the last ten feet, and Lo Kuen had a boy who put a plank down. He was a wide, soft-faced man of fifty with a good jacket and the headman's brass seal in his sleeve, and he had grown rich in the way delta men grew rich, by standing between people and the government, and charging both.

He stopped ten paces from the shed door, as everyone did.

"Auntie," he said to Granny Mui, respectfully. "Yulan."

"Uncle Kuen."

"I've come about the rite." He looked at the drying frames, at the grey paste on Yulan's arms, and something in his face tightened, the way a man's face tightens at a smell he can't place. "The Wongs and the Chans and the Leungs are putting up teams for the ring. Tai Mo village is sending twelve men. Sai Lung will send nine, and eight of them are still boys."

"That's the Wongs' business," said Granny Mui.

"It's the village's business." Lo Kuen put his hands behind his back. "And there's the matter of the charge. Someone has to make the charge that throws the ring. It's always been this house."

"Then it will be this house."

"Auntie." He said it kindly, which was worse. "There is no man in this house."

The wind came off the water and moved the drying quickmatch on its frames, all forty feet of it swaying together like a beaded curtain.

"There's a Tam in this house," said Granny Mui.

"There's an old woman and a girl of nineteen. Auntie, I say this with respect for your son. He was a great craftsman and I have said so at his grave. But a mortar burst under him, and he knew more about powder than any man in the delta. What do you think it will do under her?" He turned to Yulan then, and his voice softened to something almost fatherly, and she found she preferred him rude. "Child. I'll buy the shed. I'll buy the stores, the frames, all of it, at a fair figure, and you and your grandmother will have money in the house, and you can be married by autumn, and no one in Sai Lung will lie awake in a south wind wondering if the north end of the island is going to go up."

Yulan looked at her feet, bare and grey with powder on the swept earth floor.

"Uncle Kuen," she said. "Do you know why we sweep the floor twice a day?"

"I do not."

"Because powder that gets trodden into a plank floor stays there. It gets into the grain, and then one dry day a man drags a box across it and there's your spark." She raised her eyes. "There are no planks in here. There's no iron in here. My father swept this floor twice a day for thirty years and the shed never once caught. He died in another man's mortar pit at Tai Mo, with another man's tube, because they begged him to come and fire their rite and he was too soft to say no."

Lo Kuen's mouth thinned. "Nevertheless."

"We'll make your charge," said Granny Mui. "We'll make it on the sixth and you'll have it on the seventh and it'll throw your ring higher than Tai Mo ever threw one. Go home, Uncle Kuen. The tide's turning and you'll get your shoes wet."

He went. The plank went down for him, and the boy took it up again, and the boat pulled out into the channel.

Granny Mui watched it go a long time.

"He's not wrong to be afraid," she said at last. "He's only wrong about what to do with it."

Yulan went back to the trough and drew the next length of wick. Her hands were steady. They were always steady; it was the only gift she was certain of.

At noon she climbed the ladder into the loft where the finished goods went, and where, in the corner under a mat, in a shallow crate lined with paper, lay the thing her father had been building the winter before he died.

It did not look like anything. That was the first surprise, always. A ball of pasted paper the size of a child's head, heavy, seamed, with a fuse socket at the crown. Inside it, packed in tiers she had helped him pack, were the stars: little pellets of composition rolled by hand, the outermost ring dosed with verdigris and camphor for green, the next with copper for a blue that leaned toward green, and inside those, a bursting charge, and a second shell, and inside that a third.

A flower that opened, and opened again, and again.

He had never fired it. He had never finished it — the timing fuses between the tiers were cut but not proved, and the crown fuse was missing altogether, and on the paper beside it in the crate was a column of his writing, four attempts at the same calculation, three of them crossed out.

Yulan sat in the loft with the shell in her lap and the dust turning in the light from the gable vent, and thought about Lo Kuen saying there is no man in this house, in the voice of a man stating the weather.

The spring rite was in eleven days.

She would make his charge. She would make it beautifully, and it would throw the ring so high the Tai Mo men would still be running when it came down.

And then, she thought, with her thumb resting in the empty fuse socket, she would fire her father's flower off the mudflat where nobody could stop her, and the whole delta could decide for itself whether the Tam works had died.